Month: June 2006

mea culpa

I had a letter published in the Times and in my haste (and to be frank, heightened irritation) I misread a chart about the one of the local schools. I skipped to the last column — where the district totals are displayed — and used those numbers.

How do I know this? The education theorist who wrote the OpEd I was replying to called me at home to complain about how I called him a liar. It would never occur to me to call someone at home in response to something I saw in the paper, unless I knew them: it just sounds creepy.

His claim “When Manhas removed Sacajawea Elementary School from the closure list, with its 61-percent white student population, he intensified the racist character of his proposal” makes a link between the ethnicity of the students and the disposition of the school (see more below). I think that’s a serious accusation to make and my anger at seeing that made me hasty.

I have sent a letter to the Times, taking responsibility for the error: we’ll see what they do.

Continue reading “mea culpa”

The Omnivore’s Dilemma: an appreciation

I just finished reading this and recommend it wholeheartedly. Books about food are always interesting to me: I’m curious about the basic stuff like prep and combinations or additions I hadn’t considered, as well as history. But this book is an examination of the cultural history of food, specifically in America, but with references to the human history of eating.

Continue reading “The Omnivore’s Dilemma: an appreciation”

omnibus

Took today off from any small screen activities, until now: I’m watching/listening to a sick child, so I have broken my self-imposed embargo. I have been working late nights on a yearbook for school (who decided elementary school kids need a yearbook?). 52 pages, plus cover, all color, tons of pictures, put together with a staff of not enough: call it 4. A bit weary of screen-based interactions . . .

A couple of links/excerpts below the fold, stuff I found in my catch-up reading.

Got a video camera for Father’s Day (two days early, but only so I would have it in hand to videotape the Nine-Year Old’s little league baseball championship game: they won, 4-0, good performances by all, including the aforementioned’s two scoreless innings in his final start). Pretty fun. I’ll be editing a small movie to give to the coaches, if I can get it done in time for the post-season dinner.
Three more days of school, then the inmates are released. If prior summers are any indication, mine’ll be ready to got back in a month. I think I would prefer to see school run year-round with longer breaks — a month at a time: take May, August and December off.
Continue reading “omnibus”

Paul Allen, call your office

The Seattle Times: Local News: Move it or lose it, city says of historic ship:

Move it by Sept. 30, or we’ll have it demolished.

That’s the ultimatum from the city of Seattle to owners of the historic schooner Wawona, long a fixture at South Lake Union Park.

Northwest Seaport, the nonprofit organization that owns the 165-foot ship, was notified of the city’s plans in a letter from Deputy Mayor Tim Ceis earlier this month. For Wawona supporters, who are used to working long hours to raise scarce funds and clean and fix the dilapidated vessel, it was one more setback in trying to save history.

Since the whole redevelopment of south Lake Union is driven by Paul Allen’s biotech ambitions, perhaps he could help preserve this bit of local — very local — history. Of course, he’d probably want his name on it . . .

so switch already

When someone like Mark Pilgrim broadcasts his reasons for switching after he switches, it’s to start an argument that he can only win. He has switched, so there’s no talking him out of it. And given his personality, it’s not great leap to think this is his agenda. (I haven’t read his piece and am not really interested. I don’t care what anyone uses, unless they are making work for me as a result. Can you tell I have been working on a project with Windows as a component?)

Then there’s Tim Bray. He wants to be talked out of it, specifically by Apple.

Time to Switch?:

Will I Switch?

Yes. For Mark’s reasons, and because I’m pretty darn sure that either Ubuntu or some other distro will eventually get the key things right.

Alternatively, Apple could open-source a few of their apps so we could all fix the pain points, and they could start having an actual conversation with the world. Nothing less is acceptable.

As John Gruber points out, neither Mark nor I are exactly typical. But you know what? I think that if the GNU/Linux/Solaris community can sustain its current level of energy and progress, and if Apple maintains its dysfunctional communications culture, there are going to be better choices just not for me, but for a lot of other people too.

He’s right: they are not typical. If he can make it work, he’s welcome to. Linux is still linux, I expect: a name shared by a bajillion slightly different collections of userland apps, packaging systems, and window managers, most of which are crummy, none of which are designed, but instead simply collected.

Good luck to both of them.

we write letters (and sometimes they get published)

To the Weekday program at KUOW-FM:

Your guest’s romantic view of meat, as a lovingly nurtured part of an integrated farm and home culture, doesn’t jibe with the American agricultural-industrial complex, with its feedlots, manure lagoons, and antibiotic-enhanced meats. As a vegetarian for 14 years, my answer to the question “why don’t you eat meat” has been “I don’t like the way they make it.” Shoveling cereal grains into grass-eating ruminants in order to increases the quantity of meat doesn’t make a lot of sense, especially if your guest is as concerned as he claims about quality and authenticity.

If I were to travel in the central Vietnamese highlands, I would not imagine I could bring my attitudes about industrial food production to the dining experience I would be exposed to. To think otherwise is to be no less doctrinaire than the vegans and other activists your guest complains about.

Continue reading “we write letters (and sometimes they get published)”

disk disasters, resolved

With a little help from Data Rescue, I was able to recover one of the two drives that went south yesterday. On both drives, it looks like the catalog got corrupted. How this happens on a journalling file system eludes me: I thought there was some security associated with that technology.

I have read around this topic and it sounds like Spotlight might be a contributing factor, either through it’s penchant for exercising the disk or through some associated data volatility.

The restored disk is where I keep a lot of backups and my online music collection, so that saves me some heartache. The lost disk might have a mechanical issue: it seems to spin up and down with an audible clicking noise, so I am going to test it out before I rely on it.

For search query purposes, the error -9972 is fixable. I couldn’t find anything but Data Rescue that would do it though. Frustrating that Apple’s own Disk Utility is unable to recover data from a corrupted disk.

Stephen Hawking not as smart as claimed

Who the hell does Stephen Hawking think he is anyway?:

So famous physicist Stephen Hawking is in the news these days advocating more shooting of humans into space:

“Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of.”

said Hawking in Hong Kong this week in a notable passive construction;

“It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the survival of the species.”

OK, let alone for the moment the sheer hubris-laden assumption that within twenty years we’ll be able to build artificial ecosystems, sustainable over the very long term, that can support human life at population levels necessary to preserve a worthwhile percentage of human genetic, intellectual, and cultural diversity. Seems to me we tried doing that a few years back on Earth, where we had an entire planet full of tools at our disposal, and it worked rather more poorly than its planners expected. A description of the failure of the “self-sufficient ecosystem” Biosphere experiment, from that last link:

Throughout the experiment, oxygen levels steadily dropped, until the members barely were able to maintain consciousness. The rules of self-sufficiency were changed yet again as oxygen was pumped in to prevent brain damage. In the meantime, all the pollinators died, so that none of the plants could reproduce. Finally, all the birds and animals brought in for food also died.

For the humans, Biosphere quickly became a desperate exercise in fighting off starvation. The eight members, split into two factions of four — which to this day do not talk to each other — were reduced to hording [sic] and counting peanuts. Biosphere ended as an almost comical failure.

And that was on this planet, where the designers could just have a thousand yards of specialized concrete and a million square feet of tempered glass driven up to the site on flatbed trucks. I suspect an attempt to replicate the Biosphere experiment in the Valle Marineris would be a bit more difficult. The construction crew here could actually breathe without tanks, for one thing, and what happens when the New Martians realize they have the wrong gauge turnbuckles for the shadecloth awning, and all the lettuce plants get UV poisoning? We’re talking about an agency that forgot to do a English-Metric conversion for an unmanned Mars probe here. Would you really trust them to buy compatible plumbing fixtures from 400 million miles away?

But forget that for now. And forget that Hawking is saying this in a year in which NASA is re-emphasizing humans in space and — for consequent budgetary reasons — pulling the plug on unmanned missions to monitor, and perhaps thus help mitigate, the dangers he cites.

What pisses me off is this. I’m looking at the list of dangers Hawking cites: genetic engineering turning the biosphere into gray goo, climate change from burning of fossil fuels, nuclear war… and a certain commonality among them strikes me. I mean, we’re not talking the sun going nova, which is far enough in the future that a dollar a year budget devoted to extrasolar mass migration research would likely be more than adequate to get us there. And we’re not talking comet impact or flood basalt here. Every threat, every looming disaster Hawking’s talking about here is human generated.

There are two reasons why Hawking’s brainstorm is thus just utterly, unbelievably stupid.

You really should read the rest. If you can’t get your mind around the past 15,000 years of human history, the Biosphere II experiment should be fresh enough to understand.

Who are the they to which you refer?

BBC NEWS | Americas | Guantanamo suicides ‘acts of war’:

Rear Adm Harris said he did not believe the men had killed themselves out of despair.

“They are smart. They are creative, they are committed,” he said.

“They have no regard for life, either ours or their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.”

I wish I could link to the clip from Hearts and Minds [amazon | netflix](how many times have I referenced that movie?) where Gen Westmoreland is being interviewed and expresses how the Vietnamese place no value on human life, interspersed with footage of a Vietnamese mother’s anguish at her son’s military funeral, as she tries to jump into the grave.

Of course, fafblog has the best take on this:

Run for your lives – America is under attack! Just days ago three prisoners at Guantanamo Bay committed suicide in a savage assault on America’s freedom to not care about prisoner suicides! Oh sure, the “Blame Atrocities First” crowd will tell you these prisoners were “driven to despair,” that they “had no rights,” that they were “held and tortured without due process or judicial oversight in a nightmarish mockery of justice.” But what they won’t tell you is that they only committed suicide as part of a diabolical ruse to trick the world into thinking our secret torture camp is the kind of secret torture camp that drives its prisoners to commit suicide!

disaster strikes, not once but twice

I lost two hard drives today on the same machine, a 120 Gb and an 80 Gb, both mounted externally in FireWire enclosures.

I was in the middle of a big InDesign project and, for reasons I can’t fathom, I backed up all the linked graphic files and the InDesign document to removable media last night. Timely? You bet.

Of course, I lost a bunch of other stuff — applications and the like — and some un-backed-up files. They represent some investment of time more than anything, but still annoying.

So now I am interested in building out a small RAID, perhaps 200 Gb worth. My backup strategy has been haphazard at best: our financial data is backed up offsite as well as internally, so we’re safe there. But backing up Gb of music files, scanned hi-res images, is too expensive to ship to StrongSpace, for example. Disks are cheap enough: 250 Gb for $70 seems like a deal.

Later today, I will look for a primer on the subject: if you know of one, let me know.