Uncomfortably True
Posted 8:38 AM

Humor is often what's "uncomfortably true". In that vein, when is McCain his "funniest"? When he jokes about killing other people. In fact, aside from speaking derogatorily about USC (well, there are a lot of rich kids there), that's about the only time he gets a laugh. When he joked about putting an IED under John Stewart's desk, what was funny was ... John Stewart felt, for a moment, threatened. Despite what McCain has said in his campaign, on numerous occasions he has sung jokes and intimated that he believes we will be swiftly going to war with Iran.

If going to war with Iran is something that you think would be in America's best interest (even if you don't say it out loud), then vote McCain. He's your best bet.

Labels: politics

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Coral Reefs Better off Being Bombed
Posted 12:07 AM

On the heels of the study titled "One-Third of Reef-Building Corals Face Elevated Extinction Risk from Climate Change and Local Impacts" comes another study showing that the coral reef off Vieques is doing better than expected... after 60 years of live-fire military training.

The lesson here... tourism is far, far worse for indigenous species than constant military bombing.

I wonder if the neo-colonialists and the U.S. Military could learn a lesson here. They might be better off taking over oil rich countries and wiping out native cultures with Disney theme parks and strip malls ... rather than missiles and bombs.
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Solar Water Purifier
Posted 10:35 PM

Some sort of kludged robot from a science project gone overboard - it pumps and filter pure drinking water without electricity. I was at a music festival where some guy was pumping water from a river with one of these and people were filling up their Siggs from it. Fun.
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Organic Solar
Posted 8:03 AM

I continue to read this with utter disbelief ... apparently some people over at MIT invented a thin film of organic material than can improve the efficiencies of PVC cells by an order of magnitude. This would make electrical generation by solar energy *far less expensive than coal*.

The timeline on this is only 3 years, and they claim they'll only need 1-2 million dollars to launch. You don't have to be a scientist to realize the ramifications of this. The research is published, and seems well presented.
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Natural Security
Posted 10:00 AM

"The diversity of biological life and biological interactions across 3.5 billion years of history offers a vast array of solutions for defense against a wide range of threats, from terrorism to natural disasters." - from Darwinian Security, a think tank of biologists who are developing national security guidelines and recommendations based on their understanding of biological defenses.

One of the interesting lessons from the book is the extreme importance of a stable and supportive environment for children. After puberty, it seems, it is extremely hard for a person's social opinions to shift. IE: if someone's decided by age 15 to consider car bombing as a future career choice, it's going to be hard to change their mind. "Get them young" is the mantra of religious and political organizations worldwide, and in the book we see illustrated some of the biological bases of *why* this is so.

Certainly, it is possible for nations, companies (even families) to learn from the techniques evidenced in nature to improve not just their "sense" of security, but their overall ability to create more cohesive and stable social structure.

(I'm a fan of these guys. If any would-be presidential candidate (hint, hint) decided to quote from Sagarin & Taylor's book, it would definitely make my day.)
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ASP for Linux
Posted 5:09 AM

Whew! I wanted a version of ASP for linux.

Chili!soft's version was the "expensive brand name" - it's incredibly profitable product line was bought out by Sun and is apparently "no longer for sale" directly. You have to use Sun's even more incredibly expensive "development platform" instead of just licensing an Apache ASP plugin from them.

Halcyon's version had better reviews, but the company was apparently gone. I found out it was bought out by Stryon. Researching Stryon, I found that it went out of business in a fraud investigation. The CEO had apparently suicided, his assets seized by the government. They even sold off his wine collection. Researching this has been weirder than a television drama, with rumors of links to the Chinese government, and more. But who bought the code?

After all that craziness I found a beta version of a product called arrowhead asp.

Is it possible that owning a solution to "getting off Microsoft" is somehow inherently dangerous? I wonder if I should warn the developer about what he's getting into. Or maybe he's safe, since he's using Java as the source base, tying him to Sun's protection base.

Well, at least my blog article will help aimless people (such as myself) searching for Stryon, Chilisoft and Halcyon find the available Arrow ASP solution.

The thing is ... I could write a better parser and apache module - in nice portable ANSI-C - with 90% compatiblity for ASP in about 3 weeks. Should I? Dare I? Although I like coding, and it seems fun.... it actually seems scary to me after reading all that.

ADDENDUM: I found that mono-project provides real support for ASP under linux, or at least VB.NET web apps running under apache, which is close enough.

Labels: programming

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