Sam Carr’s Dog Speaks

Over at Jeff Atwood’s blog on the Coding Horror site, there is quick mention of a foible at Mensa’s web site. The problem he alludes to, and which many comments point out and discuss at great length, is the lack of security used with the site’s login credentials.

What I find quite humorous is that the Mensa site’s ‘forgotten password’ page appears to be located within the calendar section of the site as an event. Mensa membership is supposedly based upon processing power and not memory, so why make a calendar event out of a member’s lack of memory? :-P

Happy Albert ‘Cerebronaut’ Hawking Brain Fart Day!!!

Just testing the posting capabilities of my cellular phone. Alright, so I’m just checking my ability to post with my phone. Semantics. heh.

I happened upon a digg post about The Pirate Bay being interviewed by the BBC and it made me sad to see so much ignorance-by-choice lumped into one small page.

If a musician crafts a song and decides to share it with the world through album sales, and the first person to buy a copy makes it available to the rest of the world for free, that is piracy. If another person cruising the internet finds the song and grabs a copy without having first purchased it, that is piracy. If a third party knowingly and willingly makes arrangements for this transaction to be made, that is also piracy. It doesn’t matter that the captain of the pirate ship didn’t board the other vessel, rape any women or even see the loot or know what it was; the captain is a pirate. Of course, you can throw Photoshop or Office or whatever “created for profit” blob of 1s and 0s you want to in place of the song and the idea is just as valid.

I have to give an example of the inherent mentality of even the guys that run The Pirate Bay. Peter Sunde, one of the four main pirates running the site, said this:

Nobody is crying that people who used to go around selling ice to people do not have a job anymore because of the fridge…

zomgwtfbbq?!?! Do you think there is the possibility that just maybe it’s because nobody is stealing ice? People are making it themselves with a tool that was made for that purpose. Nobody is saying you can’t use the computer to make your own movies, music, software, etc. Nobody will go around crying about the people you put out of business by making your own property.

I do understand there should be limits to what can be considered property. Inevitable progressions of data manipulation processes should not be patentable. This includes, but is not limited to, turning 1 into 0 by subtracting 1 from itself. It may seem absurd to even consider patenting this process, but sillier patents have been approved.

It’s not that I never join the ranks of the eye patch wearing online horde, I’m just tired of constantly hearing people use ‘freedom of data’ or ‘freedom of information’ as a mantra for the rationalization of theft. I do realize that laws governing property are never going to be ‘right’. I also believe real estate should not be property, but that is a discussion for another time. In fact, the only thing that any laws can actually do is try to impinge upon people’s freedom and sometimes succeed for good or bad. In many cases, laws are used for horrific travesties of justice; in most cases, they are a necessary evil put into place to actually protect freedom.

Don’t get me wrong, I am a true anarchist at heart even if not always in actions, as the flip side of that coin is death; absolute peace is only possible, though not assured, in death. It’s late. I’m tired. Too many tangents roaming in out of he fog… you get my drift. respect:good::piracy:bad (and I still think piracy is the wrong word to be used for this type of theft)

…as we know it. I’m not so sure I feel fine, though. I just saw ‘An Inconvenient Truth‘ a couple of days ago. It stars Al Gore (he used to be the next president of the US). It’s actually a documentary style flick following his campaign against global warming. The facts he presents in his presentation are easily followed and show a dismal future for anyone living through and beyond the next 10 to 20 years.

The correlation between atmospheric CO₂ and temperatures are somewhat (slight understatement?) disheartening. Through natural processes, the CO₂ in the atmosphere has gone up in the past to the same approximate levels as we are seeing now, with the atmospheric temperatures following suit. However, this time it is our polluting of the atmosphere (primarily due to our dependence on fossil fuels) and deforestation of the land that is causing this escalation of atmospheric CO₂. While the amount of fossil fuel being used by the population will have to fall in the near future, we don’t seem to have that much time before the projected increase in our atmospheric CO₂ causes the temperatures to rise to levels never seen before in the history of life on Earth.

Oddly, and somewhat confusingly to the layman (me), this will actually cause another ice age (along with other weather related catastrophes). This is due to the way that the oceanic currents keep the temperatures moderated in the gaseous atmosphere. It is proven that temperatures rising in the past (at the end of the last ice age) caused the glacial ice on the north american continent to melt and rush into the North Atlantic. The desalinization caused the temperature regulating oceanic currents to change, which, in turn, caused a continuation of the ice age.

I know the Mesoamerican people’s calendar ends on December 21^st 2012 on the Winter Solstice. Maybe this destruction of the atmosphere, and thus our ability to survive in it, is the reason. I have heard other theories as to why their calendar ends at this time (alien contact, comet impact, etc.), but this seems to be a highly plausible explanation. Of course, ‘explanation’ doesn’t really work here, as there is so much that is currently unexplainable about future predictions by ourselves and our predecessors. I suppose only time will tell. While your waiting for this time to pass, I highly suggest that you go see ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ at a theater near you as soon as you get a chance. It just might change the way you live.

Alright; I just watched “How William Shatner Changed the World” (hereinafter referred to as “the show” <-- legaleze) on the History Channel earlier this evening last nite. As a result, my mind has begun to wander (big surprise) and this post opens with a big –>Trekkie Alert!<-- in bold red letters. I must also warn you, dear reader, that my opinions are not always ‘politically correct’ in their presentation. If you have deeply held insecurities or are easily offended by things that go against what you take to be fact without proof (faith), you might not want to go any further in your reading. With that out of the way and all the schmucks gone (why are you still here? hehe), this post will deal with the real life possibilities of the Star Trek teleportation device; physically, mentally, emotionally and quasi-spiritually (is that a word?).

First, the show mentions the physical impossibility of the transporter due to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Simply put, this principle states: in the Quantum Mechanical world, a particle’s position and momentum cannot be precisely measured. This would seem to throw a bit of a wrench in the works if you subscribe to the particle theory of matter. I will go with that assumption in this post, as it is the most widely believed opinion that particles do indeed exist. Maybe I’ll write another post at a later date with my own theories on this, but it’s a bit too deep to dwell upon right now and I’m trying to keep tangential thoughts from taking over right now. If you know me well, you realize this is not always an easy thing for me to do… hehe.

Back to the topic at hand: while ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’ took care of this seemingly insurmountable glitch in the current consensus of accepted logic with a mysterious little electronic component for the transporter called a Heisenberg compensator, an electronic device will intrinsically have macroscopic perception (as opposed to Quantum), which negates it’s ability to compensate for chaotic improbability. This stretch of possibilities did not deter from the Sci-Fi entertainment value of the show it aired in (episode 228 - Realm of Fear), but is one of the few technologies within the collection of Star Trek series which can be proved absolutely impossible with any degree of certainty.

With the impossibility of electronically breaking down and reassembling a human from one destination to another, I will try to introduce two more theoretically plausible ways to accomplish this task. In the first, the memory banks and DNA sequence would be sent as electronic impulses rather than breaking down and sending the entirety of the human. This would introduce a few new complications, but nothing I would consider insurmountable.

While it focuses more on mysticism and politics than any ‘real’ problem, several possible ‘complications’ could involve the duplication of the individual. The ‘departing’ individual would not actually depart. A duplicate individual, possibly minus physical defects born of their environment, would be produced. The removal of known harmful disease and viral organisms from incoming individuals was taken care of by the transporter biofilter in ‘ST: Next Gen’ (episode 133 - Unnatural Selection). This duplicate individual would have the same memory of life experiences previous to the transfer as the original along with the same physical cabilities. While the DNA could potentially be purposefully manipulated during transit to ‘improve’ the individual (removing defects such as amputation, obesity, etc, ad infinitum), that is a plot for another story… hehe. In effect, this would essentially be the same person; but, from the point of departure/arrival, their paths would diverge. One question is, where does the new individual’s soul come from? Alright, you must have known that was coming. I couldn’t help myself. Another potential problem based on duplication, which would easily be worked out with enough capital (as it is political), would be the legal identity of the new individual.

With this technology available, what’s to stop someone from creating a vast army of perfect soldiers for illicit purposes? I believe this topic has been covered enough in pop Sci-Fi, so I’ll leave it alone for now. I may bring it up again once the clone wars are instigated. You’ve been warned.

Of course, one potential problem pertains to certain organisms residing in the human body outside of our own DNA code that are required for some normal functions. Endosymbiant bacteria genomes were even found within the embryonic cell genomes of several different species of fruit fly by Michael B. Eisen, a UC Berkeley professor of molecular and cell biology and a faculty scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. In fact, humans have more bacterial cells within their bodies than they do human cells. The beneficial symbiotic organisms within the human body, while still not all accounted for, could be theoretically reintroduced at the destination.

Another form of instantaneous transportation, which has no foreseeable (by me) complications when used in this (instantaneous) manner, would be a very ’simple’ cryogenically suspended trip through a calculable space/time anomaly. The individual would enter the cryo/transpo unit, which would then suspend them cryogenically and either physically travel to the nearest worm hole or black hole or, hopefully with some semblance of control, temporarily form it’s own on the spot for utilization.

The trip to the anomaly would have to be accounted for, as would the trip to the ultimate destination, but this could (theoretically) get an individual to any destination instantaneously. The problems, as I see them without much thought invested, exist in the unforeseeable (of course), the use of this method to travel back in time, and in traffic regulation to/from the anomaly to prevent collisions. What happens if you set the device to bring you back to the same time/location from whence you departed? BOOM! hehe…

Of course, as the Mayans believed that ‘modern’ civilization will cease to exist in 2012, this all may have to wait another 15 to 30 millennia to come to fruition. Haven’t even one of the three info packets left by the Atlanteans been discovered and studied yet? It’s getting late and this may be enough mental masturbation for one day. I really need to get myself into a polyphasic sleep cycle so this (pushing myself past my nap time) won’t happen any more. Hibernation time. G’nite!

I think I just had a bit too much on my plate, so I decided to do something about it. I set the plate on the ground for the dog and decided to learn a foreign language. The main countries I want to visit some day are Belize, Australia and Japan. Belize is an English speaking country and I think I could fake my way through Australia… hehe. That leaves Japanese to learn.

Well, I’m a few days into my studies now, and I think I’m coming along nicely. I’ve got 30 of the basic 46 hiragana down pat. I’m using computer flash cards I built with html and writing the kana as far as I know it by hand constantly. Of course, I’m learning words like neko (cat), aka (red), and such as I learn the kana. I’ve also got a pretty good grasp of sentence structure, though I’m still a bit lost with particles. Give me a few more days and I’ll have hiragana and katakana down. I’ll keep studying vocabulary while learning the kana and be ready for 1st grade kanji within a week. Of course, in order to be considered literate, I’ll need to learn about 2000 kanji. That is the degree of literacy required of an elementary school graduate in Japan. I suppose I’m on my way, as I already know about 10… hehe.

Along side my lessons, I’m remodeling my kitchen. I’ve redone the cabinets in a glossy white and gave the doors a distressed white eggshell finish. I’ll be putting glossy black hardware on these soon. I put a white tile back-splash behind the stove, and I’m now putting white tile between the upper cabinets and countertops. I’ll continue the white tile around the room between upper chair rail and lower chair rail. I’m putting white wainscoting below the lower chair rail. The walls are now yellow (above the upper chair rail). I’ve installed new lighting in the ceiling, two sconces and a few under-cabinet lights. Soon, I will be installing the copper pot rack I’ve had for over a year. I’m installing a light natural stone tile on the floor. It should lead nicely to the hardwood floors I uncovered and refinished in the rest of the house.

Now, tell me. You think I’m not loosing my frig’nipplin’ mind?!? LOL! Actually, I did finish most of my projects before jumping into this past weekend with a change of pace. I’m down to just one studio project that isn’t wrapped up, though another will be starting in about a week. I’ve got most of my web design projects pretty much wrapped up except a little bit of pro bono work (I’m on it, Shannon!) and some of my personal sites. I don’t foresee anything keeping me from finishing my kitchen within a week or so and learning Japanese enough to speak with a bit of fluency within a month or so. OK, so maybe I’ll still sound like a struggling gaijin, but I should be able to at least carry on a conversation about the weather, music and web design by then.

Until next time… this is Marvin Zindler with EEEeeeeeyewitness News. I don’t think we’re in Houston anymore, Tico.

Alright, I’ve decided to try w.bloggar on my windoze pc. It seams to have everything I could need to keep my blog up to date without any hassles from what I’ve read about it online. We’ll see. It doesn’t take much. I’d like to be able to see my categories, different blogs, and all my existing posts and be able to modify any of them from here.

I used a carriage return before this paragraph. I’m not sure if w.bloggar automatically creates paragraphs when I use a carriage return or not. I’ll throw a couple of paragraphs in without paragraph tags to see. In fact, I’m gonna delete the paragraph tags I’ve already got here to see if it posts carriage returns as paragraphs. Then, I can check out it’s editing of existing posts once I know how it marks pages up (or not).

Well, judging from the preview window within w.bloggar, it throws break tags into the mix if I use a carriage return. I’ll just stick with using my own paragraph tags in the posts.

It would be really nice if this program would use ’strong’ tags instead of ‘bold’ tags when I use the included markup tools. Sadly, it uses ‘italics’ tags instead of the proper ‘emphasis’ tags as well. Heck, maybe I should just take the 15 seconds necessary to log into my blog using a browser and publish that way. At least then, I know I’m getting to use all of the features my blog has available (besides remote publishing… hehe).

By the way, I don’t see anywhere to input a heading in this thing. I did when I had it aiming at my b2evolution site, but not with my blogger site. Oh well, here goes everything.

I just added the Performancing extension to my Firefox. I just want to see how it does at adding posts to my blog.

I’m also typing this up in it’s ’source editing’ mode, so the page will come through the way I want it to (hopefully). I’ll have a look at what it does with technorati tags in a minute, but I already see it’s integration with del.icio.us is pretty minimal at best. It simply logs into your account so that you can manually add bookmarks and lets you see your tags.

Enough of this; I’m gonna send this through and see what happens. This paragraph should be styled as white text on a maroon background, by the way.