Ranting and Roaring

The Toronto Police’s “Widows and Orphans” fund phoned me up last night looking for me to “sponsor” an event they are having in September. When I refused, they started pushing me to give money for a different event in (what I perceived) to be in a much more aggressive voice. After several attempts to get them to go away, I simply hung up on them.

I guess I’m on my own if something happens at the house now.

Here’s why I only put my name, rank, and serial number on last year’s census (long form, at that). The Federal Government has released the 1901 census online. Sorry, my private information is my private information forever. While taking a census could possibly be justified “in a free and democratic society” for deciding social policy, there is absolutely no reason to archive the census results: the statistic aggregates are all the government needs for policy making.

The National Post has an article on this, but it’s not online yet. Fortunately, the 1901 information is simply image snaps of printed pages, so it’s really kind of useless for all but the most professional of busy bodies at this point.

Does anyone know if the decision to release this information was made by a parliamentary decision, or was it a backroom type of thing?

Here a recent article about Stephen Harper, leader of the Canadian Alliance:

Ignoring the political stupidity of this mark — what are you going to do Steve, whip us all into shape? — the basic premise of what Harper is saying is wrong. Under the current system of entitlements and handouts, rational self-interest makes most Atlantic Canadians act the way they do: the best and most risk-free way to get money is from the government, the easiest way to a comfortable life is through government assistance. This isn’t defeatism, this is just the system Canada has set up to buy our votes. BTW Steve: Alberta looks good because it sits on top of massive oil fields, not because of your cleverness or a superior work ethic. Take a trip up to Fort McMurry some time and look who’s taking the oil out of the ground for you, b’y.

Damain Penny on an anti-seal hunt petition, with the usual comparisons of Newfoundlanders to subhumans and monsters. One correction for DP though: there is no such thing as “baby seals” — seals have pups, humans have babies.

At home, I have been using 802.11b “WiFi” wireless for my laptop to communicate with my main systems. While it’s OK when I’m right next to the base station, when I’m on the far side of the house, the communication is flaky at best — I often finding myself holding the laptop at weird angles to get better reception. So, if you think this technology is going to solve your home networking needs, well, it may or it may not. I’d say your best bet is where you can get your base station put somewhere central. My next step is to try using a Pringles can antenna.

Ideally, I’d like to be able to wander around to the neighborhood Starbucks or my local pub and use my laptop to browse the web. While my house is near the local high point, I’d still have to elevate and aim the antenna, so I think 802.11b is not the technology to use here. In the meantime, there are new technologies coming down the pipe — Ultra Wide Band (UWB) has piqued my interest — that may change everything. We’ll see. Here’s some articles if you’re interested:

• The Spectrum as Commons; Digital Wireless Technologies and the Radio Policy “Ultra Wide Band (UWB) technology conceptualizes wireless communications in an entirely different way. In conventional wireless communications, the radio waves are carried by modulating a carrier (sine curve) with the baseband. But the carrier is not indispensable for communication because it is mixed with the baseband in the sender and filtered out in the receiver. UWB encodes the baseband into very short pulses (less than nanoseconds) called monocycles, so it is also called impulse radio or pulse position modulation. Bit sequences of 0 and 1 are modulated by the time shift of these pulses. Individual users are identified by the time-hopping pattern of pulses. This technology makes high-speed transmission (up to Gbps) possible by emitting those pulses in an ultra-wide band, over a frequency range of several GHz. Since their waveforms are completely different from those of conventional radio waves and are emitted at such a low power level, ordinary transmitters recognize them purely as background noise. Therefore, advocates of UWB claim, the system causes no interference even when its radio waves are transmitted in a frequency band that overlaps that of existing radio waves.“. Hopefully this technology will not be sunk because of political lobbying (because it destroys existing business models and infrastructure investment).
• Imagine: world with unlimited airwaves (Dan Gillmor): “Restrictions on speech have been justified under the idea that the spectrum is a public and limited resource. If that is not true, there’s no reason to regulate speech in this way. Maybe, someday, the First Amendment will mean something when people broadcast their views, not just when they put them on paper or on the Internet.” I read a neat quote a while back (which I cannot remember the source for) which compared selling spectrum to selling the rights to the color blue.

I’m sure you’ve heard of something called Bluetooth — the $150 replacement for a $5 wire. Maybe not? Either way, it’s going to go the way of the ISO/OSI protocol stack, ATM, X.400, and maybe IPv6. Pay no attention to it.

I guess this may be old news to many of you, but here’s the story of actor James Woods and the 9/11 terrorists doing their “dry run”.

This is what happens to the survivors.

Sorry, my mind is wandering all over the place these days. So…. If you need evidence that XML and it’s progeny are all useless, read this article on Slashdot. Somewhere a long time ago, someone forgot that syntax is not semantics, and it went all downhill from there.

Iceland, with its massive population the size of a medium-sized town in Ontario, has decided to combat global warming by switching to hydrogen in the next, oh, 40 years or so. Thanks, Iceland, you’re an example to us all!

Ice cubes means frozen solid cubes of H₂0, of fairly substantial heft. In particular, the surface area to volume ratio should be minimized. I prefer not to have watery drinks.

From this week’s Onion:

Cancer: (June 22—July 22)
You’re rapidly becoming known as the office peacemaker, thanks to your ownership of a long-barreled, .44 caliber Colt Peacemaker.

I find it very odd that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights only mentions Freedom of Speech in the preamble, and not in the articles themselves.

Apropos of nothing, the best way to make a rum and coke is 3 parts ice, 3 parts Coca Cola, and 1 part Mount Gay rum.

Salon has an article today on the latest idiocy to hit the computer world: Pair Programming, A/K/A “Extreme Programming”. Here’s everything you need to know about it: zero plus zero is zero.

According to this article, the pro-Palestinian position of Al-Toronto Star has driven Jewish business to The National Post.

The stupidist letter to the editor this week:

There’s probably few inventions that have pleased the protester-type as much as the video camera. Unfortunately for them, it’s a two edged sword…

On the 18th of May, Green”peace” anti-nuclear protesters attacked and substantially damaged the French challenger FRA 69 for the America’s Cup sailing event later this year. FRA 69 was rammed at high speed directly under the chainplates. This is the part of the boat that takes the massive loads from the mast into the hull of the boat and is the most vulnerable part of any sailing boat. In practical terms, I believe this attack was designed to destroy the integrity of the hull and possibly take down the mast of the boat [though in fairness, this not likely to happen while the boat is not sailing -- i.e. under load]. Green”peace” believes this action was justified because FRA 69 is sponsored by Areva, a French company dealing in nuclear power plants and materials. Damage to the boat was in the 10s of thousands of dollars to repair and has added 3 kms to the weight of the boat (at AC levels, this is a very big deal).

Green”peace” attempted to weasel out of responsibility, writing letters such as the following to sailors who were concerned about this type of violent and potentially life-threatening action:

Unfortunately for the Green”peace” liars, the incident was caught entirely on video tape, showing all the claims above to be nothing but bullshit. This video [sorry, works on Internet Explorer only] clearly shows what Green”peace” actually did:

1. Green”peace” kayaks are set up as “blockers” to limit possible countermeasures against their primary action.
2. the Green”peace” rib (i.e. Zodiak-type ridged-hulled inflatable) successfully avoiding the harbor patrol at high speed. (Note that the sailing team’s boats are not involved at all in the conflict).
3. the Green”peace” rib negotiating it’s way directly toward to FRA 69 (not toward the docks as per some Greenpeace claims).
4. the spotter on the front of the Green”peace” rib pointing directly at FRA 69. The boat then steers in that direction.
5. the Green”peace” rib accelerating to ramming speed at the last minute once the way is clear.

Remember, whenever Green”peace” beggars come to your door looking for your hard-earned cash, remember to tell them to get the hell off your property and never come back. I always do.

Follow from here backwards for more information about this incident.

Just to simplify my previous comment: are there any circumstances you can imagine whether 85% of the seats are awarded to men and 15% to women where Robbins wouldn’t have come to the conclusions she did? If not, why do a report at all?

This article in the National Post, in an oblique way, highlights my problems with the way the Canadian Constitution is becoming to be interpreted (I’m still trying to get my thoughts together in a coherent form on this larger issue). The Federal Government is spending $900 million dollars to create 2000 university “chairs” to “augment [Canada]‘s knowledge-based economy”. The “problem” is that only 15% of the chairs so far have been awarded to women. There is no evidence that this is because of discrimination happening against individual women, rather, 80% of the seats are reserved for the sciences, and the sciences in university tend to have a lot more men than women in them. A similar program for the humanities is awarding 61% of the seats to women. A suggested solution for this is “target numbers” (A/K/A “quotas”) for women. The problem with this is that as individuals men and women will now have to be treated unequally to make the quotas for their groups.

I will note that 85% of the spaces being awarded to men is a good reason to examine whether sexism (or “buddyism”) is a problem in awarding these chairs, but in and of itself, it is not evidence that such is happening.

The report was authored by a Dr. Wendy Roberts, who by doing a little googling, is very ideological about these matters. She’s a professor of Women’s Studies at UNB, and into rehashed Marxist nonsense such as Pay Equity, making sure O Canada refers to genders correctly, and whatnot. If you believe in “pay equity”, the results of this study were inevitable (one might also say: rigged) — society is to be governed by quota, not merit, work, and ambition. Roberts is also the co-founder of PAR-L, a feminist mailing list. Strangely, Robbins has no problem that 100% of the PAR-L team is female. Some animals are more equal than others, I suppose.

I also tend to think this statement by Robbins is inherently bigoted: ““This is a really important program, and women want our fair share. Women researchers ask different questions than men, and we need to make sure that way of looking at the world is protected“. This puts me far out of step with what appears to be the current opinion of society, that people should be assumed to think as per the group that they’ve be assigned to rather than to think as individuals.

If the government is going to spend $900 million on augmenting our “knowledge based economy”, it is key that we get the best people for our money: not the ones that please fringe ideologues. Otherwise, our money has just been wasted.

“I saw a baby that had half a regular face and half a face that was just blood and flesh“.

See this, and this afterwards (changing words as appropriate).

Just 30 seconds ago. Too bad the Leafs didn’t play the first couple of games like they did this one though, or maybe we would have gone to game 7.

This Lawrence Lessing interview in Reason is interesting. I especially liked the explicit differentiation of the word “property” as used by lawyers and as used by everyone else, especially with reference to Intellectual Property.

National Post plastic empty-headed “reporter” Rebecca Eckler gets a plastic empty-headed robotic baby for a week. In unrelated news, arguments are made in court for and against sterilizing mentally challenged adults lest they have real children.

If Barbie was a Leafs fan and was left in the microwave oven too long, she’d probably look something like this.