June 16, 2004
Truth Is More Ironic Than Satire
There's a reason that this blog is called Ambient Irony. Take a look at this*
Reporters at three news organizations are resisting subpoenas issued in the trial of a lawyer charged with conspiring to support terrorists. Prosecutors issued subpoenas to four reporters at Reuters, The New York Times and Newsday, saying they want the reporters to testify that lawyer Lynne Stewart said what they quoted her as saying in their articles.So the question is, are the quotes accurate, or did the reporters edit them to suit?
Lawyers for the reporters have argued that making the reporters testify would compromise their neutrality by forcing them to side with prosecutors.So, that means you made the quotes up? Or is it just that being legally required to tell the truth compromises your principles?
In a motion filed Monday, a lawyer for Newsday argued that its subpoenaed reporter, Patricia Hurtado, might have to stop covering the trial if she is required to testify.Well, yes, I think that would follow. My suggestion: Look for the little ... markers. They're a dead giveaway.** * Of course, since it's linked from Instapundit, you probably already have.
** I wouldn't be at all surprised if the quotes were edited. A while back my brother was interviewed by The Australian (Australia's Least Worst Newspaper&trade
for an article on PocketPCs. They had him speaking in marketese ("maximise the product synergies" sort of thing), and I asked him if he really said that. He replied "Well... Not exactly." And they didn't even use the ... markers!
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:30 PM | Comments (18) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Pixy Misa's Guide To Detecting Journalistic Bias
Step 1. Pick up a newspaper.Note: This may not work with The Wall Street Journal or similar papers. It's not that they're not biased; it's just that their bias boils down to Money good. More money better. Unless you live in Berkeley, California, you are unlikely to score any points by protesting this.
Step 2. Pick any article from the first four pages.Anything after page four is what is known in the business as "filler": material that is there just so there aren't embarassing blank areas between the ads. Also, picking on the OpEd pages is a task reserved for our grade school classes. (Well, and Tim Blair. But that's only because we can't get him to stop.)
Step 3. Pick a paragraph at random.Check to see if it is an unedited quote with attribution; this sometimes happens. (Look for the little ... markers; these indicate that the quote has been changed so as to reverse its original meaning. Sometimes these markers are left out, this is covered in our Advanced Course.) If so, pick the following paragraph instead. Under no circumstances follow the story beyond the "jump" - the point where it says, Continued on page Q-37. Paragraphs after the jump are often written by underpaid assistants or "stringers" and rarely exhibit the quality and quantity of bias we are seeking.
Step 4. Publish the paragraph on your blog as an example of the treachery of the MSM (mainstream media).You may want to disable comments at this point too.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:15 AM | Comments (16) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Ah! My Brain!
[A] movie promo for "The Stepford Wives" ... depicted Condoleezza Rice as a topless hottie and Hillary Clinton as a bosomy housewife holding a baking sheet. "Henry Kissinger was national security adviser 30 years ago, and if he had been used in this way at the time, I don't think it would have been tolerated."I don't think it would have been tolerated either. (Words of wisdom from the Washington Post)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:32 AM | Comments (20) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
June 15, 2004
Down But Not Out In The Empire Of Rust
Okay, now that I have that off my chest...
I was reading the latest catalogue from Software Warehouse on the way home tonight, and I noticed that they are selling some new tape drives, including the Sony SAIT. Now, I'd never heard of SAIT before, so I thought I'd do a quick Google to find some details, only I ended up at Google News instead and it took me half an hour to finally stop cursing and pry myself loose. Anyway, one downside of the 12-month doubling period for hard disk densities I mentioned in the previous episode was that the capacity of backup tapes wasn't growing nearly as fast, so instead of (as it was in the old days) one tape backing up multiple disks, it took multiple tapes to back up one disk. Which was rather less convenient than the other way round. Sony have come up with an interesting solution to the problem with SAIT: They cheated.* Check out the physical specifications of the drive:5.25" Full Height Extended (5.8"W x 3.3" H x 12" D)I haven't seen a full height 5¼-inch drive for years, and 12 inches deep?! Okay, so it can store 500GB compared to AIT-4's 200GB, but AIT-4 would actually fit inside a normal computer! AIT drives are usually half-height 3½-inch devices, about 4" by 6" by 1.6"... So about one sixth the size of the SAIT. Bring back 9-track tapes, I say. At least you could watch them spin while the blinkenlights blinked... * By the way, Sony guys and girls, your website lists "Desktops Computers" as a destination in the menu. Either they're awfully big or you've got a typo.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:58 PM | Comments (20) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Just On The Other Side
From The Globe and Mail:
Iraqis dance around victim's bodyOf course, having Arabs dancing around the bodies of their victims is nothing new, but it never seems to get reported unless it can somehow be spun into a broader defeat for America and her allies. Think I'm reading too much into it? Read a little further:
'Down with USA' Baghdad bomb another blow to reconstruction By ORLY HALPERN
Special to The Globe and Mail
Tuesday, June 15, 2004 - Page A1 BAGHDAD -- Baghdad's second major car bombing in 24 hours killed at least 13 people yesterday, including five foreigners working to rebuild critical power plants -- the latest blow to U.S. reconstruction efforts just two weeks before sovereignty is handed back to Iraqis.
While the insurgent attacks set back reconstruction efforts, Iraqis hold the Americans responsible for the lack of improvement.Not "some Iraqis". Not even "many Iraqis". All twenty-some million of them, one assumes. And here's the Arizona Republic:
Arizona Republic - 10 minutes agoAh, the good old firestorm of rage! Nothing quite like it for cleaning up after the party. Google News is a wonderful tool for finding examples of outrageous bias in the media. Of course, all it's doing is throwing up articles at random from a broad spectrum of the media - but that's all it takes. For example:
BAGHDAD - Iraqi insurgents struck at the heart of downtown Baghdad on Monday, setting off a huge bomb as a Western convoy passed, an attack that killed at least 13 people, wounded dozens and triggered a firestorm of rage against America's presence.
President Mohammad Khatami has warned Europe's three big powers [Three big powers? That would be, uh, Britain, okay, I guess they can be counted as part of Europe, and then there's... Um....] that Iran's future cooperation with UN nuclear inspectors may be at risk if criticism of Tehran's nuclear program persists, newspapers said on Tuesday.You can tell it's Reuters, because they said that with a straight face.
Iran: If you don't stop criticising us, we'll stop co-operating!Reuters, Tuesday: Terrorists around the world walked off the job today in a protest against unfair treatment, demanding better working conditions and free dental care. (Though there remains the question of why Reuters is reporting what the newspapers reported. Slow day down the salt mines?) Heck, even Xinhua is less biased, and they're a mouthpiece of the Evil Chicoms™:
World: But you aren't co-operating now.
Iran: Right, that's it! Down tools! Everybody out!!
Car bomb explodes near Jewish settlement in Gaza GAZA, June 15 (Xinhuanet) -- A car bomb exploded on Tuesday near the Jewish settlement of Netzarim in the Gaza Strip as a Palestinian militant drove his explosive-laden car and tried to approach one of the lookout posts, Palestinian witnesses and sources said. The militant, whose identity was not known, was killed after his car was showered by the gunfire of the Israeli troops stationed on the outskirts of the settlement, Palestinian security sources said. Palestinian witnesses said that as soon as the car approached the post, soldiers rained the explosive-laden car with gunshots until it blew up. The militant in the car was killed as flames and black smoke were seen coming out from the vehicle, they said.Well, apart from the near-universal use of the euphemism "militant" and the "showers" and "rain" of gunfire from the Israelis, it's pretty straightforward: Terrorist tries to blow up checkpoint; IDF, not being stupid, fire on car; bomb blows up killing zero infidels, no virgins for you. Mind you, The Australian - possibly Australia's least worst paper - actually manages to report the news on the same incident:
Car explodes near Israeli troopsLight on detail, perhaps, but pretty light on the bias too. Is it so hard? Really, is it so hard? You report the facts. If all you have is statements from opposing parties, you report the statements with attribution. He said. She said. This is third-grade composition class stuff; surely at least some journalism graduates know how to do this. Or maybe their writing skills were all consumed by the firestorm of rage.
From correspondents in Gaza
June 15, 2004 A VEHICLE blew up near Israeli troops in the Gaza Strip today after soldiers fired on it, the army said. There were no reports of Israeli or Palestinian casualties. The vehicle apparently was rigged with explosives, the army said. Palestinian witnesses said no one was inside when it blew up. The blast went off on a road closed to Palestinian traffic. Black smoke was seen in the area, and Palestinian witnesses said they heard gunfire.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:17 PM | Comments (16) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
June 14, 2004
Aishiteruze Baby
I barely made it through the opening them (one of those incredibly dreary Suzanne Vega type things, only in Japanese) but it's worth it for the sandpit politics and the moment when five-year-old Marika turns to her mother and demands that she produce an older brother for her.
And the observation of the five-year-old's mind - the logic of why, if Yuzuyu loses her crayons or has to change her school uniform, her world comes apart - is spot on. (Though if you're hiring a voice actress to play a little girl, you should make sure she can cry properly. Otherwise you get the tired-and-upset whine when you should be getting the heart-broken choked sobs.) (More information here)Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:12 PM | Comments (14) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Meanwhile, In The Empire Of Rust
Things aren't looking that great either. From the invention of the hard disk, up until about 1998, storage densities had been doubling roughly every 18 months. Then for a little while things kicked into high gear, with densities doubling every year.
However, since the introduction of the 80GB 3½-inch platter late in 2002, things haven't moved at all. We're now not just behind the fast 12-month curve, but behind the older 18-month curve as well. Seagate have just announced a new range of drives, including one with a capacity of 400GB across 3 platters. However, it's taken 18 months to bring about an increase of just 66%, which makes the doubling time more than two years. (Hitachi already has a 400GB drive available, but it uses 5 80GB platters, so it doesn't represent any new technology. Also, the last desktop drive to use 5 platters was IBM's ill-fated GXP75, which was so unreliable that it landed IBM with a class-action suit, leading the company to sell off its disk-drive division... To Hitachi.)Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:24 PM | Comments (17) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Methinks They Doth Protest Too Much
Ice cream vendors had hoped to cash in selling cool scoops to hot demonstrators, but estimates are that only 50 of the 5,000 expected protesters materialized.(FOXNews)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:15 PM | Comments (15) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
June 13, 2004
And The Little Dog You Rode In On
There's a protest being held here in Sydney on the 30th of June calling for an end to the War and for our soldiers to be brought home.
I have a few difficulties with this. First, the 30th of June is a Wednesday. You know, in the middle of the week? When people who have actual jobs have to work? Second, the war is already over. If you have been following the news on TV or in the papers, you may have missed this, but we won. Third, the 30th of June is the day that Iraqi sovereignty is to be officially handed back to the Iraqis. Of course, this has already happened, but we'll let that slide for now. So I assume the date was chosen to make some sort of point, but I can't work out quite what. Fourth, the Australian troops in Iraq are involved in the training of the new Iraqi Army and Police Force. You know, so Iraq will actually have an Army and a Police Force (as opposed to undifferentiated uniformed thugs) and won't, you know, need foreign soldiers to protect Iraqi citizens from attack. So you want them brought back... Why, exactly? Go on, tell me it's all about the oil. For old times' sake.Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:42 AM | Comments (20) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
June 12, 2004
Ecchi is as Ecchi Does
As a change of pace from all the cerebration, here's a little video I found. It's called Ecchi* Boys of Anime and it's by Maria of Choco Fansubs**.
The music, by the way, the Don't touch Junky Boy song, is the closing theme from Maze***. I always liked it, and I'm glad to see it being put to such good use. * The term ecchi comes from the Japanese pronounciation of the first letter of the romanisation of the Japanese word hentai, which means pervert or perverted. Clear? Anyway, ecchi is a softer term, and its meaning is closer to, say, naughty - though the context is still sexual. The video clip is work-safe, anyway. ** If you like this one, follow the link and you can download a file containing this and another 31 other clips by the same group. They're called Anime Music Videos, or AMVs, and they consist of, well, anime videos set to music. *** Maze himherself appears in the clip a couple of times too. He's**** the guy who doesn't get clobbered by the girl he tries to kiss. The first time, anyway. **** Technically speaking, the previous footnote should have read as follows:Maze herhimself appears in the clip a couple of times too. Shehe's the girlguy who...However, referring to big sisterbrother that way rapidly becomes tiring.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:16 PM | Comments (18) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
The Decline and Fall of the Silicon Empire
[I wrote most of this last weekend, but didn't post it then because it clearly needs an edit. I don't know when that's going to happen, though, so I decided that I'd post it anyway. This is a blog, after all, not Communications of the ACM — Pixy]
I've written recently on the untimely death of Moore's Law and on one of the first side-effects of the faltering and failure of that law. But, being somewhat dead myself, I didn't have the time or energy to go into any detail, and probably left my less-geeky readers saying something along the lines of Huh? But this is important, so I'm going to give it another try. Way back in 1965, just four years after the first integrated circuit was built, Gordon Moore, then working at Fairchild, made an observation and a prediction. His observation was that the number of components in an integrated circuit was increasing, while the cost of each component was decreasing; his prediction was that this trend would continue. Intel has made his original paper available for you to read. It's a little bit complicated; Moore is talking about trends in the number of elements in a integrated circuit required to achieve the minimum cost per component - efficiencies of scale, in other words.Reduced cost is one of the big attractions of integratedWhat he's saying is that by 1975, it would be cheaper to build a single integrated circuit with 65,000 components than to build two 32,500-component circuits - and, by comparison, a 130,000-component circuit (if such a thing could be built) would cost more than twice as much. Events since then have proved him right (and happily he is still around to enjoy it). And more right than he imagined because not only have the components been getting smaller and cheaper, but at the same time they have been getting faster and using less power. And this has been going on, following a curve where (to take the most widely noted example) processing power has been doubling every 18 months. For my entire life processing power has been doubling roughly every 18 months. My first computer, which I bought as a teenager, saving pocket money every week until the day of the Big! Christmas! Sale! was a Tandy (Radio Shack to many) Colour Computer. It had 16k of ROM (which contained the BASIC interpreter; there was no operating system as such) and 16k of RAM. It was powered by a Motorola 6809 processor and a 6847 video chip. It had a maximum resolution of 256 by 192 - in black and white - or 16 lines of 32 columns in text mode. It ran at 895kHz. Yes, boys and girls, kiloherz. It was an 8 bit chip (with a few 16-bit tricks up its sleeve, admittedly); it could execute, at most, one instruction each cycle, and it ran at less than a megahertz. (Also, it had no disk drives at all; everything was stored on cassette tape, which fact is directly responsible for the irretrievable loss of my version of Star Trek and the completely original game Cheese Mites.) Not quite twenty years on, I'm typing this on a system with a 2.6 gigahertz 32-bit processor than can execute as many as three instructions per cycle, some of which can perform multiple operations like doing 4 16-bit multiply-accumulates all at once. It has more level-one cache than my Colour Computer had total memory. Its front-side bus is eight times as wide and nearly a thousand times as fast. My display is running at 1792 by 1344 in glorious 24-bit colour. And it has six hundred and fifty gigabytes of disk.* It cost a bit more, it's true. My 1984 Colour Computer cost me $199.95, and Kei, my 2003 Windows XP box, cost me around $2000. The best I can do today for $199.95 (ignoring for the moment two decades of inflation and the fact that this now represents a morning's earnings rather than a year's) is a Nintendo Gamecube. The Gamecube only runs at 485MHz (achieving a measly 1125 MIPS); it only has 40MB of memory; it only has 1.5GB of storage. Its peak floating-point performance is a mere 10.5 GFLOPS, compared to the Colour Computer's... I don't know, exactly, since the CoCo had no floating-point hardware at all, and I doubt that the software emulation achieved so much as 10.5 kiloFLOPS. So, depending on exactly what you wish to measure, 20 years of innovation has given us somewhere between a thousand and a million times better value for money. And here it is again: This has been going on for my entire life. Every year, tick tick tick, new and better and faster and cheaper. You buy the latest and greatest and it's obsolete before you get home from the mall. It's so much a part of our lives that it's a joke, a cliche. And it just died. [That last link goes to an IBM presentation, the first 13 pages of which are just general marketing material, but pages 14 to 24 go right to the heart of the problem.] The death of Moore's Law has been predicted many times, not least by Moore himself, but when you get IBM's Chief Technology Officer saying
electronics, and the cost advantage continues to increase as
the technology evolves toward the production of larger and
larger circuit functions on a single semiconductor substrate.
For simple circuits, the cost per component is nearly inversely
proportional to the number of components, the result of the
equivalent piece of semiconductor in the equivalent package
containing more components. But as components are added,
decreased yields more than compensate for the increased
complexity, tending to raise the cost per component. Thus
there is a minimum cost at any given time in the evolution of
the technology. At present, it is reached when 50 components
are used per circuit. But the minimum is rising rapidly
while the entire cost curve is falling (see graph below). If we
look ahead five years, a plot of costs suggests that the minimum
cost per component might be expected in circuits with
about 1,000 components per circuit (providing such circuit
functions can be produced in moderate quantities.) In 1970,
the manufacturing cost per component can be expected to be
only a tenth of the present cost. The complexity for minimum component costs has increased
at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year (see
graph on next page). Certainly over the short term this rate
can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the
longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although
there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly
constant for at least 10 years. That means by 1975, the number
of components per integrated circuit for minimum cost
will be 65,000. I believe that such a large circuit can be built on a single
wafer.
Scaling is already dead but nobody noticed it had stopped breathing and its lips had turned blue.you know something's up. Particularly when he's not making a prediction, but talking about what's happening right now. And everything was planned so neatly too. 90 nanometres was to come on line late '03, ramping up this year; 65 nanometres was to be the big thing of '05, followed by 45 nanometres in '07. Now, beyond that, at 30 nanometres and 20 nanometres, things were less clear, and beyond 20 nanometres not clear at all, but at least the path was marked out from the old 130 nanometre stuff down to 45, giving us 9 times the transistors and 3 times the speed. Only someone forgot to check with the laws of physics.
Wired: How long will Moore's Law hold? Moore: It'll go for at least a few more generations of technology. Then, in about a decade, we're going to see a distinct slowing in the rate at which the doubling occurs. I haven't tried to estimate what the rate will be, but it might be half as fast - three years instead of eighteen months. What will cause the slowdown? We're running into a barrier that we've run up against several times before: the limits of optical lithography. We use light to print the patterns of circuits, and we're reaching a point where the wavelengths are getting into a range where you can't build lenses anymore. You have to switch to something like X rays.So, what exactly is the problem? It's not, as Moore and others predicted, a question of actually building the circuits - that's still working fine. IBM, Intel, AMD and others have all produced working chips at 90 nanometres. The problem is leakage. Each of the millions of transistors in a chip is a tiny switch, turning on and off and incredible speeds. Each time you turn the transistor on, or off, you need to use a little bit of electricity to do so. That's okay, and it's expected, because you don't get anything for free. The problem is that the transistors are now so small, and the layers of insulation - the dielectric - so thin, that they leak. There's a partial short-circuit, and so instead of only using power when the switch switches, it's using power all the time. So what? Electricity is cheap. Well, the so what is heat. Modern microprocessors use as much electricity as a light bulb, and that means they produce just as much heat. If they didn't have huge heat sinks and fans bolted onto them, they'd very quickly overheat and fail - a fact that some people have inadvertantly discovered. Until now, each new generation of scaling, each new node, has brought smaller, faster, cheaper and cooler transistors. At 90 nanometres, transistors are smaller, cheaper, probably faster again - but they run hotter. And the competition in the processor market has already driven power consumption (and heat generation) about as high as it can go. So when the new generation was discovered to increase the heat rather than decrease it, the whole forty-year process of accelerating change ran head-first into a wall. Back at the end of 2002, I made the following set of predictions for the coming year. I felt pretty comfortable in all of them, the first no less than any of the others:
My predictions for 2003: 1. Microprocessors will hit 4GHz by the end of the year. Marketers will try and largely fail to convince the public to buy them.But not only did we not see 4GHz processors in 2003, it's doubtful that we'll see them in 2004 either. (I was wrong about number 3, too. No-one resigned, and the media moved onto the next scandal. Rinse, repeat.) Now, assuming you're not a hard-core computer gamer, hanging out for the release of Doom 3 and Half-Life 2, why should you care? Well if you have broadband internet, or a mobile phone, or a DVD player, or a PDA, or a notebook computer, or a digital camera (or a digital video camera), or you use GPS on your camping trips, or you enjoy the low cost of long-distance phone calls these days, if you download anime or the latest episode of Angel off the net, if take your iPod with you everywhere you go, if your job or your hobby involves using e-mail or looking things up on the Web, you can thank Moore's Law for it. Modern communications depend critically on advanced signal processing techniques, performed by specialised chips called Digital Signal Processors, or DSPs. These things are everywhere - every modem, every mobile or cordless phone, every digital camera, every TV or VCR or DVD player, every stereo, every disk drive. It's the relentless advance of Moore's Law that has made DSPs fast enough and cheap enough to do all this, and made them efficient enough to run on batteries so well that your mobile phone might last a week between charging. (My first mobile was lucky to make it through the day.) Disk drives demand high-speed DSPs to sort out the signals coming from the magnetic patterns on the disk and turn them back into the original data. DVD players need them to turn the tiny pits pressed into the aluminium surface into a picture. The entire global telephone network, mobile and fixed, depends on DSPs. And any advances in any of these areas will require more and faster and cheaper DSPs and - uh-oh. And there's more: The advances in computers and communications over the past four decades have been the primary driver of the global economy. The economy has been growing all that time, even though we have made no fundamental breakthroughs in finding new resources or new materials. If you're better off than your parents, you can thank Moore's Law for a big chunk of that - if not the effort you put in, then the new opportunities it opened up. And it just died. I don't think the financial markets have a clue yet what's going on, but in any case it's going to be a soft landing. All of the processor manufacturers have been in a mad rush over the last decade to produce faster chips at the expense of pretty much anything else. The funny thing is that they've been pushing so hard, they've left a lot of things behind. Take a look at this chart:
2. A major scientific breakthrough will lead to a new and deeper understanding of something.
3. A major political scandal will result in a huge media kerfuffle and only die down when someone resigns.
4. There will be a war.
5. Bad weather will affect the lives of millions of people.
6. There will not be any major, civilisation-destroying meteor impacts.
7. Astronomers will find new and interesting things in the sky.
8. Spam, pop-ups and viruses will continue to plague us. The Internet will fail to collapse under the strain. Pundits will predict that this will now happen in 2004.
9. A rocket will explode either on the launch pad or early in its flight, destroying its expensive payload - which will turn out to be uninsured.
10. Cod populations in European waters will continue to fall, and the European parliament will fail to act to prevent this.
11. A new species of mammal will be discovered.
12. A species of reptile or amphibian will be reported as extinct.
int fp
base base
1076 763 Pentium M 1.6GHz
805 635 Pentium M 1.1GHz
237 148 C3 1.0GHz (C5XL)
398 239 Celeron 1.2GHz (FSB100)
543 481 Athlon XP Barton 1.1GHz (FSB100 DDR)
581 513 Athlon XP Thoroughbred-B 1.35GHz (FSB100 DDR)
1040 909 Athlon XP 3200+ (Barton 2.2GHz, FSB200 DDR)
1276 1382 Pentium 4 3.0E GHz Prescott (FSB800), numbers from spec.org
1329 1349 Pentium 4 3.2E GHz Prescott (FSB800)
560 585 Athlon 64 3200+ 0.8GHz 1MB L2
1257 1146 Athlon 64 3200+ 2GHz 1MB L2** And the Geode NX is a full Athlon core too, so you're not losing anything: It's still packed with 3-issue out-of-order-execution goodness.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:12 PM | Comments (24) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
June 11, 2004
Carnival Late Final Extra
Whoops and whoops again. These posts somehow got lost in my scramble to put up the tents and get the show underway; I've since added them to the regular schedule, but just in case you missed them the first time, here they are in their own little mini-Carnival:
Laughing Wolf, Laughing Wolf, where have you been?
Trapped in my spam filter? Languished unseen?
Sprung free from the trap, he sinks his jaws -
Not into me, but the Old Media, of course.
Alas, poor Helen,
I know her well.
What happened to her entry
Only Mozilla can tell. And whatever her name is,
And who she might be,
Is for her to decide -
Not the phone company. (And from 2:01 to 2:03
She can call Malaysia for a pound a minute.
Sounds like a good deal to me
I doubt there's any money in it.)
At the bottom of the garden, down behind the rusty shed,
Is a spamtrap made entirely out of glass.
It mostly does its job and leaves the spam completely dead,
But every now and then it bites me in the arse. The Watcher of Weasels was stuck in the trap,
Whence I'd already pulled Laughing Wolf out,
His post takes on people with minds full of nonsense,
Who ought to be slapped with a large fish.
King of Fools brings us the sad story
Of a marine, two reporters, and 7% diversity.
Dissecting Leftism takes on a difficult word,
Greenie Watch says 7 billion will now go unheard,
And PC Watch reports something yet more absurd.
Northstar reports on a maritime disaster...
Only he slept through the whole thing and didn't find out about it until after.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:07 PM | Comments (19) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
I Blog, Therefore I Is
Steven Den Beste has been hitting the hard stuff again. Anime, that is. In this case, Masamune Shirow's classic Ghost in the Shell.
Now, I'm a shallow sort of guy, and I read Shirow's work mainly for the hot anime chicks, but in GitS (as it is known) he does raise some important questions. In a not so distant future where people are often part machine and part computer, what does it mean to be human? And beyond that, what does it mean to be a thinking being, and what does it mean to be alive? As a mechanistic atheist engineer, Den Beste finds these questions important, and difficult, and troubling. I'm also a mechanistic atheist engineer* and I also find these questions important - but not difficult or troubling. That's because I've worked out what the answers are. And that's because I've argued the point with a number of people who aren't mechanistic atheist engineers. Of course, they think I'm wrong, and I think they're crazy, but that's not the main point here. Den Beste asks, Is a virus alive?, and confesses he doesn't know. To me there is one obvious, clear, simple, and comprehensive answer, and it is sort of. A virus is sort of alive. For any useful definition of life, salt, for example, pure sodium chloride, or, say, hydrogen gas in its ground state, are not alive. For any useful definition of life, people, cows, cats** and fish are alive. I'm quite comfortable with saying that amoebas are alive, and bacteria too. Individual isolated proteins aren't alive, not really. And viruses are sort of alive. It's the argument from utility really; as Den Beste himself has put it, It is what it does. Does a virus act like life? Well, it does, sort of. So it is sort of alive. Some people don't like this; they want a yes/no answer, a knife-edge division between life and unlife. To them, I say: Tough. Neither life nor the Universe owes you an easy answer. Why should life be a binary property, any more than, for example, intelligence, or complexity? The same argument also solves*** the even trickier questions of the conscious mind. Is there actually an identifiable self with continuity of existence which is typing these words? asks the engineer. Well, yes, there is. In the same sense that the surface of this table is solid, Steven Den Beste is a real, identifiable, continuous entity. Of course, at an atomic and subatomic scale the table is mostly empty space. And at a low enough level, consciousness is just Physics. But that doesn't matter, because it still works. This keyboard is not going to fall through the table, and the fact that it is a big blob of atoms doing the thinking in my head does not contradict Descartes' Cogito ergo sum. * Well, more or less. I'm a computer programmer, so I have aspirations towards engineering, and try to apply the principles of engineering to my craft.** Most cats. Not Schroedinger's, and not dead ones.
*** For a sufficiently small value of "solves".
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:39 PM | Comments (18) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
There Are Some Magazines Man Is Not Meant To Buy
I've mentioned here before that New Scientist is the only magazine I still buy (or indeed, read) regularly. Back in the 80s and early 90s I bought and saved three magazines every month: Byte, Dragon, and Scientific American. I still have boxes full of each at home.
I still buy New Scientist because, although the information is available online, I'd have to spend a great deal of time digging it out. It's worth the few dollars I spend to have the staff of New Scientist to seek out the latest news and compile the magazine for me. I pay them to be editors, really, rather than writers. Which is why it's particularly galling when their editors run off the rails. They're generally pretty good with science, a little weaker on environmental matters - there's a clear bias there that assumes that bad news is intrinsically more reliable than good news, and pretty much hopeless on politics, being a bunch of unreconstructed lefties. But I still don't expect them to be pushing the hokey old line from Frankenstein that there are some things Man is not meant to know. And yet, this weeks editorial on choosing the gender of your baby, titled Boy or girl? Best leave it to chance, sums up as follows:Increasingly, reproductive science is taking us beyond the limits of nature. On the grounds of safetey and the unknown societal impact such novel technologies could have, governments surely have a responsibility to regulate. Needless meddling is never good, but in this case drawing the line as to who can use the technology might be the least intrusive move of all.So, when exactly did the secular European left align themselves with the reactionary Christian right? These people make the old Count Vorkosigan look enlightened.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:10 PM | Comments (21) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Carnival The Next
The next Carnival of the Vanities will be appearing at Jessica's Well where the team will be presenting your finest posts as interpretive dance.
The place to send your submissions is carnival@jessicaswell.com. Neatest correct entry wins a prize! Well, and all the other entries too.Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:18 AM | Comments (18) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
June 10, 2004
Carnival Of The Vanities
Overture, candlelight...
And welcome to the Carnival!
What we present to you tonight
Is something quite remarkable:
We've gathered here for your delight
A most astounding spectacle
And now before your very sight,
The unlikeliest of animals -
The finest work we've deftly pluck'd;
(While we left for the Bonfire here
The posts that we thought, frankly, were not quite good enough to be worthy of bringing to your attention.)
The words are music to your ear;
(The ones that weren't, you'll note, we chucked.)
We hunted far, we hunted near,
A finer showcase to construct. These shining jewels we bring to you;
The Web we scoured for rarities -
Despite a dose of Martian Flu
And RAID-5's failing parities.
Here's unicorns! And mermaids too!
No donkeys now, nor manatees.
So let's begin; without ado
The Carnival of the Vanities!
We start with Nikita Demosthenes,
Who has a serious question to ask:
Who most could harm the Land of the Free
And he takes standard wisdom to task. Jeff Doolittle (dot com)
Seeks ubiquitous high speed connection;
With a little spectral freedom
He sees a positive economic inflection. Ann is at the Fuse Box
Studying labour statistics,
She looks at the numbers (as does Fox)
And reports on Kerry's poor twist tricks.1 My favourite Canadian ethereal insect
Would have to be Ghost of a Flea;
When I visit his blog I never know quite what to expect
Which is exactly how it should be. Today he offers us maxims
For surviving converse on the 'Net;
Built from undeniable axioms,
I'm sure they'll be proved, but not yet. Kevin at the Smallest Minority
Asks are we headed for Civil War?
I sure hope not, but I2
Think some people have a lot to answer for. Answerman remembers Ronald Reagan
Actor, governor, president;
Anyone but a hippy neo-pagan
Should admire what the man represents. Karol of Spot On (yes I know the URL says Alarming News)
Talks to us of Girls, Girls, Girls.
Now pay attention to her views -
Because sometimes blogging is like casting swine before pearls. And over at Patriot Paradox
Nick comes out of the starting box,
With a post comparing Liberals and Conservatives.
I personally prefer Liberals because they contain only natural ingredients and no preservatives. Quibbles-N-Bits! Quibbles-N-Bits!
Alas, it's a blog not a cereal;
Reports that Harvey has cashed in his chits3
But I somehow suspect it's not real. Jon of QandO has a report
That the wedding party was nothing of the sort.
No bride? No dancing? No Hava Nagila?
No half-empty bottles of cut-price tequila? Susie, Susie, a lithium smoothie
Has never tasted sweeter;
She's just so groovy, she can screen us a movie
Using nothing more than a flashlight, an old bedsheet, two pie plates, half a dozen coathangers, and a broken egg-beater.
She tells us her woes, makes Harvey propose
With her wicked sense of humour.
Then nails Evil Glenn, yet again, yet again,
With the latest scurrilous rumour. Linda talks of separation
And how painful it can be,
And how there's two sides to every situation
And sometimes even three. CD isn't semi-intelligent -
That's just the name of his blog
This is satire at its most relevant:
ACLU's 'bout as smart as a log. A change of pace, to fill some space,
Madfish Willie presents his Ultimate Salsa
Don't eat it all at once, it makes 15 gallons, you dunce!
And with five pounds of Jalapeno Poppers4 you'd probably end up with an ulcer. Wally from Irreconcilable Musings
Is back from California,
Where he has been visiting his grandmother
And for some reason my electronic rhyming dictionary seems to have crashed.5 Bussorah Merchant
Has a Wicked Thought
About a government
Cat what don't behave as it ought. Pietro of The Smarter
Notes that others seriously need to grow up. Sorge, a new blogger, at Total War
Explains to us what freedom's for. By night the Cheesemistress of Chaos
But by day she's the Candyfloss Fairy.
Her cow-orkers don't know Lesotho from Laos,
And they couldn't spell "irony" with the help of a Webster's Unabridged Dictionary. Jennifer, Jennifer, trolls should beware of her,
How does your history grow?
With notable quotes and the choicest bon motes
And dead presidents all in a row. Bill Adams comes from Idler Yet
With a detailed and enlightened post
On links between the Saudi set
And those people whom we count on most. Peaktalk too bids sad farewell
To Ronald Reagan, 93,
Where e'er he's gone, we wish him well;
A finer man you rarely see. Jim comes to us from Snoozebutton Dreams
Where nothing whatever is quite what it seems.
The Bestofme Symphony strains at the seams -
Don't touch it lest you end up covered in memes! At Zero Intelligence
School Knows Best
You'd think before they became teachers
These people would have to pass some kind of test. Chicken is as chicken does
Cranial Cavity takes off the gloves.
(After all, you can't lick your fingers if you're wearing gloves.) Last but not least, from DCGI
Thoughts on life without electricity
No computer! No modem! No internet too!
I'll just save this post before something goes p
And what's all this?
There's three I missed!
Best add them to my list -
Because otherwise someone might get annoyed with me. At Quantico, Virginia,
Is another National Cemetary
Ted from Rocket Jones reports to us,
Our cultural emissary. John Moore of Useful Fools
Shows us some dangerous political operatives
Dangerous at least to those far-left tools,
Who really could do with a sedative. And Simon returns from his travels,
With a review of the movie Cold Mountain,
Not so bad that his brain quite unravels,
But I'll stick with Three Coins in the Fountain.
Laughing Wolf, Laughing Wolf, where have you been?
Trapped in my spam filter? Languished unseen?
Sprung free from the trap, he sinks his jaws -
Not into me, but the Old Media, of course.
Alas, poor Helen,
I know her well.
What happened to her entry
Only Mozilla can tell.6 And whatever her name is,
And who she might be,
Is for her to decide -
Not the phone company. (And from 2:01 to 2:03
She can call Malaysia for a pound a minute.
Sounds like a good deal to me
I doubt there's any money in it.7)
At the bottom of the garden, down behind the rusty shed,
Is a spamtrap made entirely out of glass.
It mostly does its job and leaves the spam completely dead,
But every now and then it bites me in the arse. The Watcher of Weasels was stuck in the trap,
Whence I'd already pulled Laughing Wolf out,
His post takes on people with minds full of nonsense,
And who ought to be slapped with a large fish.
King of Fools brings us the sad story
Of a marine, two reporters, and 7% diversity. Dissecting Leftism takes on a difficult word,
Greenie Watch says 7 billion will now go unheard,
And PC Watch reports something yet more absurd. Northstar reports on a maritime disaster...
Only he slept through the whole thing and didn't find out about it until after.
1 CityRail apologises for any invonvenience caused.
2 Okay, you try to find a workable rhyme for Kevin, or indeed Minority.
3 Frankly, I don't think this makes any less sense than the more conventional phrasing.
4 Sorry, little MuNu in-joke there.
5 Even Shakespeare didn't rhyme all the time. Help me out here!
6 And it's not talking.
7 My day job just happens to be implementing exactly that sort of inane marketing ploy. My all-time favourite (at a previous place of employment) was a plan where if you spent more than $X in a month, your call rates were reduced retroactively - so the calls which you had made that brought you to the $X mark now cost less and no longer brought you to that mark, meaning that you weren't in fact eligible for the cheaper rates...
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:46 PM | Comments (28) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
June 09, 2004
The Carnival is Coming!
I'm working on it right now... Or after my nap, anyway. But you still have a chance to get your last minute entries in - just email your best recent post to carnival@pixymisa.com and we'll do the rest!
Update: Still working on it. Darn you Tiger, it's your fault for setting such a high standard!Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:10 PM | Comments (18) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Just Checking
Darn security patches...
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:23 PM | Comments (20) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
June 08, 2004
FPEG!
The ticket machine at the station this morning had an unusual problem: On the display, all the Os were turned into Fs, and all the Ns were turned into Es. I couldn't work out how this could happen; certainly no single-bit error (a broken pin in a connector, say) could do that. Not if it's ASCII, at least.
A niggling suspicion and a quick Google gave me the answer: The machines are using EBCDIC. EBCDIC! In 2004! Anyway, this handy chart shows that an O in EBCDIC is binary 11010110, whereas an F is 11000110. So if that fourth line is broken, Os turn into Fs. Now, the display normally alternates between OPEN and NO CONCESSIONS when it's not actually in use, so instead this morning it read FPEG and FG CGFCESSIGFS. This brightened my day immeasurably.Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:16 PM | Comments (23) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
June 07, 2004
It's Nearly Carnival Time!
Carnival of the Vanities is coming to Ambient Irony this week, so the time to get your entries in is now!
Send them to carnival@pixymisa.com and I'll make sure that something good happens to them.Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:47 AM | Comments (18) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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