Snow Day

...and also Groundhog Day today. It is also approximately a cross-quarter day, meaning we are at the half way point to an equinox or solstice (in this case the spring equinox in March).

And, it being Canada, there is snow. But the upside is that the groundhog didn't see his shadow today. And that means winter will last just as long as it was ever going to.

Oh Oh Oh...Trapped In A Bad Project

It's not just science researchers -- the rest of us understand this as well.

Twelve Days of Christmas

As the solstice passes (today at 18:38 ET) the Christmas rush is well upon us, judging by the parking lots in the malls. Here is a summary of the consequences of sending the gifts from the Twelve Days of Christmas:

The Queen's Christmas Message 2010

Caution -- not for the humour impaired. The words "bollocks" and "wankers" appear in this video*.



The presence of this video on this blog should not be construed to mean that the author is in any way frustrated with the political leadership of Canada.

* From the Operation Maple website.

Knocking on doors

Like the man in this video, I too am a tolerant guy. But let's be clear -- in any conflict between missionaries and natives, my sympathies are always with the natives. So when I get missionaries of whatever stripe at my door, I always feel compelled to strike a figurative blow for all those who encountered missionaries and were less fortunate than me. This may be why we have experienced such a steep fall-off of strangers come to share their faiths...


Door To Door Atheists Bother Mormons - Watch more Funny Videos

Funny videos

My SFContario plans for today took a sudden and radical change. Instead, I had an opportunity to do other things. I found these two very funny videos showing the darker side of child rearing:

I'll Get The Ice Creams


Boys' Night Out

Happy Creation Week!

Quite aside from any personally important anniversaries that might have occurred yesterday on October 23, it is important to mark the Judeo-Christian Day of Creation itself, as determined centuries ago by Archbishop James Ussher, a noted biblical scholar 350 years ago.

Although this chronology has fallen out of favour in any mainstream theological sense, and is totally irrelevant in any science-based view of the world, it (or its variations) remain popular with young-Earth creationists like convicted criminal and conspiracy theorist Kent Hovind, the anti-evolution Discovery Institute, or the biblical-literalism promoting Creation Museum. Ussher based his chronology on a synthesis of the most current scientific and historical scholarship available at the time; the explosion of knowledge since then has made science and history incompatible with a literal reading of any of the many versions of the Judeo-Christian bible. It is ironic that those who uphold young-Earth creation ideas can only do so by ignoring Ussher's approach of reconciling the most current science with Biblical scholarship.

For this week only, N1S has been redesignated "the only begotten son", and during the course of the week, there are various significant events to celebrate:

Yesterday on October 23: God creates light ("Let there be light!")[Gen 1:3] The light is divided from the darkness, and "day" and "night" are named. Although yesterday was a Saturday, 4004 BC October 23 fell on a Sunday.

Today, the second day: God creates a firmament ("Let a firmament be...!")[Gen 1:6–7] The firmament is named "skies".

Monday: God commands the waters below to be gathered together in one place, and dry land to appear [Gen 1:9–10]. "Earth" and "sea" are named. God commands the earth to bring forth grass, plants, and fruit-bearing trees. Botanists rejoice!

Tuesday: God creates lights in the firmament [Gen 1:14–15] to separate light from darkness and to mark days, seasons and years. Two great lights are made (most likely the Sun and Moon, but not named), and the stars (including the array of objects ranging from GRB090423 to Andromeda -- all of which in a young-Earth view would have been created with light and radiation already in transit because as we all know, God delights in confounding scientists and leading human thinkers to untruths.

Wednesday: God commands the sea to "teem with living creatures", and birds to fly across the heavens [Gen 1:20–21]. He creates birds and sea creatures, and commands them to be fruitful and multiply. Biologists (particularly marine biologists) should rejoice today. Suggested celebratory dinner to include shrimp. Or better yet, squid.

Thursday, Day 6: God commands the land to bring forth living creatures [Gen 1:24–25]. He makes wild beasts, livestock and reptiles. He then creates humanity in His "image" and "likeness" [Gen 1:26–28]. Humanity, or at least the first two individuals are told to "be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it." The totality of creation is described by God as "very good." Thursday night, we are having ribs! As noted previously, October 23 in 4004 BC fell on a Sunday, which would have placed Day 6 on the first Friday after Creation, causing the Sabbath to fall on Saturday, just as it does in the Jewish tradition.

Contest!

NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, through its podcast website called Blueshift, has a contest on this week. The prize is a beachball, which has been printed with the WMAP sky image, and signed by Nobel laureate John Mather. How cool is that??

I am a sucker for this sort of thing, so naturally, I entered. I only found out about this today, and the deadline is 5 o'clock ET today. If I win, I will hold the beach ball in my hand and cackle maniacally, something along the lines of "The universe! It's mine, all mine!"

Why spam blogs?

One of the blogs I follow has a recent article on spammers who target blogs: Don't mind me.: Paranoid much?. Becky's questions are similar to my own.

I've encountered blogspam myself a few times, so I sympathize with anyone who has had the experience of clearing out crap from comments. This is the main reason why comment moderation is turned on here.

As to the nature of spam, I sort of understand the premise behind e-mail spam -- at best, it is a sales pitch encouraging the recipient to go to a website for some legitimate product or service. At worse it is an enticement to click on something which will drop some malware on an unsuspecting user's computer, or worse. There are clear analogies between this and traditional junk mail of the sort printed on actual paper and delivered via the Post Office.

But aside from causing me to be enraged, and then sad, and then just puzzled, what was the point of posting a long, sense-free, block of text in the comments on my father's obituary, with no actual working links in it? I thought initially that it was pharma-spam -- some bot had noticed a significant key word (cancer) and this was going to culminate in a link to some dodgy website selling cancer nostrums to the credulous and the desperate. But with no link, there could be no possibility of a sale.

So I have three possible theories to explain this:

Explanation 1 - spammers are just idiots, and whatever bot created the comment spam was improperly written, so it just didn't create a valid link in the post. I'll discuss this further when I have more examples of comment spam to analyze.

Explanation 2 - some blogs, or some blog posts, talk about subjects which displease some agency or organization or individual, who responds by vandalizing the blog or blog post. I love conspiracy theories, so this line of thinking can be tweaked to be as over the top as desired.

Explanation 3 - an artificial intelligence has arisen as an emergent property of the internet. It is trying to communicate, using the most widespread form of internet communication (that being spam) as a model. I like this explanation the best, even though I also suspect it is the least likely.

Arr! We Be Talkin' Like Pirates...

...because today is International Talk Like A Pirate Day! Hope yer cutlass don't rust, and ye find lots 'o booty!

I blog like an old fuddy duddy. But a happy one...

The urlai website analyzes blog text and evaluates it according to gender, age, mood, and tonality. Here's the verdict on me:

luminosis.blogspot.com is probably written by a male somewhere between 66-100 years old. The writing style is personal and happy most of the time.

There isn't a heck of a lot of detail about how the evaluation is done, but presumably it is based on word usage analysis. Based on the words I use, this algorithm thinks I am mostly happy, but possibly because of the formality of my sentence construction, thinks I am between 66 to 100. Well, it got the gender right.

Turning this lens on some other examples -- Michael and Jill's Second Draft, as well as Madeline's Escaping The Trunk gets exactly the same evaluation as me, except for the gender -- the algorithm correctly identifies Madeline as female, and believes that the combination of Michael and Jill is also female. Maybe because Jill posts more? The analysis is dead on for Dave -- male, 26 to 50, mostly happy. But for Peter, it gets both the gender and age wrong -- female, 66 to 100, mostly upset. Looking further afield to the blog of a complete stranger -- the age problem and "mostly upset" rating also applies to Pharyngula. Maybe the "mostly upset" part is a marine biologist thing?

These results are dynamic over time, since the analysis is based on the latest articles in the blog. It is possible that I could change the tone and character of my blog and get a different result, so if you are reading this article years after it is written, and you run the same analysis on my blog, you might not get the same result.

You likely can derive information about an author from lexical analysis of their writing, including statistical frequency analysis of their word usage. But these (admittedly limited) results show this analysis needs to used in context with other information. In the meantime, I need to go find some kids so I can yell at them to get off my damn lawn. Because that's what us happy old fuddy duddy bloggers do.

Earthquake Aftermath

My back yard in Toronto after the earthquake (but before the G20 protests):

Somewhere behind the upended furniture is a bottle of beer that got partially spilled. Careful observers (at least ones who talked to the photographer) might notice that this shot was staged. Guess they aren't going to be sending me any earthquake relief money...

Weapons of Mass Distraction

Being a peaceful kind of guy, I am deeply concerned by yet another instance of weaponization, although in the spirit of scientific inquiry, I am closely following today's experiment.

Earlier this month, senior officials in the Middle East definitively identified an earthquake initiator (earlier reports here and here) which others were quick to exploit. This is the experiment which I noted earlier and which is scheduled for today, an experiment that proposes widespread attempts to induce earthquake events.

If the initial premise is correct, there is enough evidence to suggest that large portions of North America are in serious trouble, and a strong likelihood that Sydney, Australia may be swallowed by the Pacific Ocean in a seismic event that would be unprecedented in human recorded history.

In the past, similarly credible links have been made to hurricanes, although today's experiment is the first time that I am aware of where actual testing will be done. For the sake of science, I urge people to observe, and wait for the earth to move.

New Fad!

Beads are wonderful. They are these little bits of three dimensional reality, useless until you use your creative impulse to form them into something greater. I think of them as pixels in 3D.

Lady parts are wonderful, speaking from my perspective as a heterosexual male. I could go into more detail at length, but this isn't that kind of blog :-)

Superglue is wonderful. Who among us doesn't know someone obnoxious that we'd like to superglue to some public building?

Beads plus lady parts plus superglue equals the new body art fad called vajazzling. Explanatory video follows:



I missed out on the fads for tattoos and body piercings. I'm thinking this is a ground floor opportunity for me to extend my boudoir photography ambitions to vajazzler design!

Happy New Year!

We want to wish our family, friends, and colleagues a Happy New Year for 2010.

So it is finally 2010, and even though we are definitely living in the future, Dr. Heywood Floyd is not the ex-Chair of the National Council for Astronautics in the US, nor is he the Chancellor of the University of Hawaii. But there is no more Soviet Union, and no Chinese space station poised to become a manned Jupiter-bound spacecraft. Sadly, there is no derelict spaceship called Discovery parked at a Lagrange point in the orbit of Io around Jupiter, close to a vast black monolith of non-human origin. Even more sadly, there is no series of giant wheel-shaped space stations around the Earth, nor is there a regular Earth-Moon cargo and passenger service supporting a vast industrial complex at Clavius which doesn't exit, and an excavation site at Tycho which also doesn't exit.

What we do have is the beginning of an interplanetary internet, and a recession that is ending although for regular people rather than large, wealthy corporate entities, the reality of that ending will take longer to realize.

We also have two little rovers called Spirit and Opportunity on Mars. From Geoffrey A. Landis, science fiction author and NASA Rocket Scientist, here are

New Year's resolutions for the Opportunity rover:
1. I will get more exercise. In the new year, I will try to take a long walk every day!
2. I'll do some travelling this year. Visit new places, see new things!
3. I will stop making fun of my big sister Spirit for being a stick-in-the-mud. She says it isn't funny any more (even though it is).
4. I promise to call home every day, even if I don't have much to say.
5. And I will be an obedient rover and do everything my people tell me to, because I'm a nice rover, not like my sister who just lies around all day like a slug.
6. And I hope everybody in my family has a real real real good new year, too! (Even Spirit). Best ever!
--Love, Opportunity

C3PO's No-Good Roommate

Stated last night by our friend Mark Azevedo, and reported on Facebook:

"Doesn't H1N1 sound like it should be C3PO's no-good college roommate? Hey, dude, I'm not a proto-col droid, I'm a party-call droid!!"

I am starting the ball rolling here, to make this the next internet Star Wars meme.

Ghost Busters (1954)

A trailer, for the little known 1954 black and white movie that inspired the Ivan Reitman remake decades later :-)

On Youth

It is probably because I am an old fat curmudgeon that this rant of Craig Ferguson is so funny.

The Blank Verse of Sarah Palin

Years ago -- in fact, more than a decade ago -- when Jill and I attended a particular church in North York (the same one we were married in), the minister delivered sermons that sounded great. Whenever I woke up during the service, and focused on the last sentence I heard, it was always an interesting thought, that had been delivered with confidence and no hesitation whatsoever, in a fine public speaking voice. But there was a problem -- whenever I stayed awake enough to actually listen to more than one sentence, I concluded that the sermon was a series of more or less related thoughts, but there was little or no internal coherence at all between sentences. The sermon may have been intended to evoke images, but was certainly not a logically constructed argument, not an an essay on some aspect of faith or the human condition (or both!) delivered from the pulpit. That was a lack that I felt, because there wasn't any real content there for me.

Sarah Palin is sort of like that -- except that her internal coherence gets lost between clauses within each sentence.

However, if you suppress all your left brain processing, and think of my former minister's sermons and Sarah Palin's speeches as blank verse poetry, then it totally works. Conan O'Brien earlier this week on the Tonight Show had William Shatner read Sarah Palin's farewell speech as if it were blank verse.



Even if you thought it wasn't much of a speech, you'd have to agree that it was marginally more acceptable as poetry.

UPDATE (Aug 2, 2009) - The original link to the Conan O'Brien video on Youtube has been removed. Here is a replacement, which will hopefully last longer:

Batman and Sons - Webcomic

I posted earlier about a webcomic called Batman and Sons, done by fan artist the dark cat.

He (or perhaps she) has now finished the "Rivalry" story, and it is available on the dark cat's Blogspot blog:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3 - Conclusion

Clicking on individual thumbnails in each post will open up the page for reading.

Part 1, which was the only part available when I did my original post, was pretty funny, and so perhaps expectations may have been set too high for parts 2 and 3. It is hard to do "funny" consistently, but the entire story was well done and definitely worth taking the time to read. [1]

A couple of minor editorial quibbles -- I noticed that at least once, the word "manic" was used instead of the correct "maniac". These text problems didn't really detract from the story, because there weren't too many. They may have been due to the artist's understandable desire to finish the friggen thing.

My favourite bits were the ongoing gag of Dick's adolescent reaction to busty superheroines in skintight costumes (pages 4, 9, 17, 19, 35) and the reunion of the Batbaby with its mother (page 44).

My one question (which will undoubtedly cause me to lose all my comic book nerd street cred) is - who was Cassandra (page 11)?

The real reason why I like this story is the underlying warning against overcoming one's own inadequacies or solving one's own issues by passing these things down one generation and having one's son(s) bear the weight of expectation to do it properly. As the story illustrates, this not a good model of child-rearing at all.

Not a bad bit of insight from something meant to be funny and fluffy.

Notes
[1] The assumptions I make, of course, are that the prospective reader have a sense of humour and at least some affinity for and knowledge of the DC Comics universe, of which Batman and Sons in general and this story "Rivalry" specifically are a parody.