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WEEK 50 2004
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Saturday 11
December
2004
Saturday - a bit busy today and tomorrow. Here is a belated Friday Cat Blogging picture:
Riley, looking somewhat cross at being woken for a picture
Friday 10 December
2004
Friday - down
consulting and working with some people. Not a lot to say about that,
except that MSI motherboards have some issues.
A little more fun with Doorways. I know, I know, but I've been busy and
and relating ancient books to current events is easier than coming up
with original material. Jonathan Hoag's unpleasant profession has it's
benefits. Onwards.
So, at one point in the book the protagonist, Fred, is convinced to
jump through a machines that reverses everything on the
molecular level. ( It seems that the machines first prototypes actually
reversed things on the atomic level...which turns you into antimatter).
Not wanting to be turned inside-out (another unpleasant possible reversal), he carefully picks the correct entrance to the machine and passes through.
He is indeed reversed, and while unharmed the entire world is reversed
to him. Letters and sentences, the direction of car travel in the
street, and so on. And food tastes odd. He stops into a bar for a drink
and gets a shot of bourbon.
It had a rich smoky taste, unlike
anything I had ever had out of a bottle bearing that label. Or any
other label, for that matter.
The some recollections from Organic
Chem I and II were suddenly with me. All of my amino acids, with the
exception of glycine, had been left-handed, accounting for the
handedness of my protein helices. Ditto for the nucleotides, giving
that twisting to the coils of nucleic acid. But that was before my
reversal. I thought madly about stereoisomers and nutrition. It seemed
that the body sometimes accepted substances of one handedness and
rejected the reversed version of the same thing. Then, in other cases,
it would accept both, though digestion would take longer in the one
case than the other.
Life imitates art.
A few years ago a company brought forth a sugar substitute, consisting
of reversed stuff. The idea was that it would taste like sugar but not
be metabolized like sugar. Apparently it worked, but the results were,
well, gassy. A lot of flatulence... Maybe they should have tried
bourbon.
Though a bunch of flatulent drunks isn't that attractive of an image.
Thursday 9
December 2004
Thursday
- working away. Had a dentist appointment in the morning. Made some progress on the primary coding endeavor, which is cool.
The company buying the IBM laptop division is Lenovo,
apparently a mainland China company. Which raises an interesting
question - if one returns a laptop for service overseas, what are the
odds that a Chinese intelligence agency is going to copy the hard drive
contents? If it's a laptop containing technical or programmatic
information, from a government agency, or a government contractor, or
even a university - probably near certain. But whether it be a senior
executive or just a school kid's computer - the odds of it having credit card numbers or passwords
that could be of great use to any intelligence agency running agents in
the laptop's originating company would seem to be very high.
Let alone personal information that might be used for that old favorite, blackmail.
Note that this isn't "evil red menace" type supposition. The history of
the various communist east block intelligence agencies is full of
activity of this type. In fact one could make a good argument that American intelligence agencies could do the same for laptops sent here from abroad. In fact, they may well be. They should.
It would be good sensible tradecraft, and as far as I know the US has
no particular legal obligation to respect other countries data. But,
given the CIA's apparent ineptness, I suspect they don't.
I should point out that, to my knowledge, some goverment agencies that
'surplus' old equipment do indeed try to 'wipe' disks. But stuff sent
for repair? I just don't know.
A friend came in today, so that we can tomorrow go over a paper we are presenting at the 43rd AIAA Aerospace Sciences Meeting and Exhibition.
Wednesday 8 December 2004
Wednesday - Doorways in the Sand
also had a bit of plot ( spoiler alert ) dealing with an alien being
that insinuated itself into the interstices and bloodstream of a human.
Sound familiar? I have talked in this blog about the book that hooked
me on science fiction long ago, Hal Clement's 'Needle'. I even have a picture of that cover.
A little bit of election stuff, and a mystery. Someone started a web site,
"Sorry", to allow people to apologize to the world for electing George
Bush President; said apology to be accomplished by people in a picture holding a sign with an apology on it.
Which in turned spawned a "We're not Sorry" web site, and a "Apology
Accepted" website and, probably, an "Apology not Accepted" site.
But it seems that aside from the general assinity of apologizing for the results of a democratic
election, there was a little problem with pranksters. People who were
only pretending to be sorry. That is, a photoshopped Cheney holding a
sign, or Osama Bin Laden, or secret messages in the capitalized
characters of the sign, and so on.
Then, there are those pictures that are really hard to decide about. Is this for real? [via Jim Treacher] ( Go ahead, click, you'll thank yourself later.)
I just can't decide - one day I think "yes", the next "no way". Short of hiring a private detective to hunt down the perpetrator I suppose I'll never know.
Tuesday 7 December
2004
Tuesday - my inbox was filled with emails this morning, complaining that there was no picture of the cover of 1976's Doorways in the Sand at Amazon.com. So I reproduce the Science Fiction Book Club cover below:
Yes, that's my carpet underneath. 'Desert Rose' they call that color...
It wasn't that great a book, but it was interesting in the way that
Zelazny played with time, jumping about and then backtracking to
explain the predicament the protagonist (Cassidy) would find himself in
at the beginning of each chapters.
Beaten, bound and staked out to die in the Australian outback Cassidy recalls another school advisor:
I reflected upon the words of my onetime adviser, Doctor Merimee: "You are a living example of the absurdity of things."
Needless to
say, his specialty was the novel, French, mid-twentieth century. Yet,
yet do those lens-distored eyes touch like spikes to the extremities of
my condition. Despite his departure from the university long ago under
the cloud of a scandal involving a girl, a dwarf and a donkey - or
perhaps because of this - Merimee has, over the years, come to occupy
something of an oracular position in my private cosmos, and his words
often return to me in contexts other than that of the preregistration
interview.
A girl, a dwarf and an donkey. Why didn't I ever get an adviser like that?
And why "Needless to say" ?
In other news...not much happening. Grey and overcast, but not much rain.
I was watching 'Mythbusters' on teevee the other night ( no link as the
page doesn't come up right for me), and finally realized: the much abused show mannequin is known as "Buster" because they are the Mythbusters. Geez I'm slow.
I see they've added some more cast and crew - including women - to the
show. I'm not sure it makes it better, but possibly the syndication and
number of episodes requires more help. There were a couple of
moderately interesting episodes recently; one where they tried to fool
a radar gun (and lidar) and another where they tried to replicate
Archimedes setting of a greek trireme afire with mirrors. They "busted"
both as myths, but I'm not sure I can agree with their conclusions.
Sure, the dorky methods - disco balls and holding up a bundle of keys didn't work for the radar gun. But even a modest amount of research
would have let Jamie and Adam realize that they needed some sort of
"iron ball" paint, and that the interior of the vehicle - and
particularly the light sockets, grill, and engine fan must be masked to
provide some degree of stealth. And the detection was, as far as I
know, simply of speed - there was no info presented as to whether the
'radar cross section' of the old Cadillac had been reduced.
As for the trireme - they managed to raise it's temperature to 200F+, but not ignite it. That just means they didn't have enough mirrors! Remember, Archimede's would have had the entire inner
harbor walls of Syracuse to line with mirrors. And they (Uh, the
present day Mythbusters, not the ancient Syracusan's)
apparently sunk the trireme a couple of times before getting it to
float correctly, so it was damp.
Monday 6 December 2004
Monday - I see that IBM is selling off
its personal computer unit. Too bad. Their laptops were about the best
made. I doubt that the buyer will keep up the design excellence and
build quality control.
"Quest for the Spear" was on last night, a made for teevee TNT movie.
The hero-to-be, Flynn Carsen - a nerdy perpetual student, has been graduated against his
will by one Dr. Harris. He turns to the great books, Aristotle, Jung,
for consolation, but, as he tells his mother, they don't speak to him
any more. Her reply:
"Speak to you? If the voices tell you to light fires - don't listen. Or if they tell you to hurt small animals."
My favorite line in the movie:
"Well, well, Dr. Harris. I always knew he was evil - he gave me an A-"
But the theme of the perpetual student seemed familiar. Then I remembered Roger Zelazny's Doorways in the Sand,
published in the 1970's. The hero is the perpetual student, Fred
Cassidy, and the book opens with an advisor, Dr. Wexroth, trying to graduate Fred,
much against Fred's will:
"This year we've got you on a mandatory graduation," he said, "under the departmental rule."
"But you haven't even seen my preregistration card."
"It doesn't matter. I've had
every choice you could make, every possible combination of courses you
might select to retain your full-time status worked out by one of the
computer people. I had all of these matched up with your rather
extensive record, and each instance I've come up with a way of getting
rid of you. No matter what you select, you are going to complete a
departmental major in something."
"Sounds as if you've been pretty thorough."
"I have."
"Mind if I ask why you are so eager to get rid of me?"
"Not at all," he replied, "The fact of the matter is, you are a drone."
"A drone?"
"A drone. You don't do anything but hang around."
"What's wrong with that?"
Sunday 5 December
2004
Sunday - It did indeed rain a bit
overnight, so it's good that I got those leaves up. It was also raining
this morning, not a downpour but more of a drizzle. The
weather reports come from Los Angeles, and the San Gabriel mountains
between lancaster and the LA basin mean that the forecasts are often in
error. Well, we can stand a little bit of moisture.
It does upset the cats. There must be more smells in the air - they
wander around meowing pitifully, constantly demanding to be let in and
out.
I'm trying to watch football, but it is Fox Sports. They have
possibly the worst commentary I have ever heard. I actually have the
sound OFF. Which means that I lose track of the game as they cut away
to the TWO HOURS of commercials every couple of minutes, and since I've
no audible alert as to when the game has resumed I miss a lot of the
game. I wonder if their advertisers realize just how bad it has gotten
- that people are turning off the game they are paying big bucks to advertise in?
