Hmmm.

So if I edit the blog template I could post a static link to another webpage/resource onto this page.

I’m sure I found a little windows based micro-music-server that streamed off into the ether any music you happened to be playing on your system.

dyndns.org has a service wherein they link your IP address to a specific URL name for free (ie. emptyroom.dyndns.org)

there is a utility available to automatically and periodically check your current IP and sync it with dyndns.org

So… I should be able to throw together a little system to create a live stream of the music I am listening to on my computer, and make it accessible from my blog page by creating a link to the dyndns provided host name.

Interesting. Now let’s see if I get around to doing it.

The Beastie Boys have prereleased to the web a track from their new CD. It’s an anti-war song they thought should get out while it was still topical.

A for effort guys.

On the down side, it provides a little evidence for ye old saying ‘practice makes perfect’. The Boys haven’t got a lot of practice with war songs, and it comes off a little like a saturday-morning-kid’s-show-host-rap.

Now don’t get us wrong because we love america
But thats no reason to get hysterica

In a world gone mad it’s hard to think right
So much violence hate and spite

Come on guys, you’re pissed off and you write nasty rap songs. Let’s have a little pointed nastiness here. It would do us all some good. The track is not so much “cutting” or “biting” as “explaining”. But hey. It is appreciated.

Harley Davidson is celebrating it’s 100th year of making motorcycles. That is impressive. I’m more of a sport-touring guy myself, and my official line is that Harleys are for fashion victims. So this is a bit of a confession: I do like Harley motorcycles. I do appreciate the people who ride them.

I stand fast on some points of objection to “Classic Milwaukee Iron”. The whole Harley market is a parallel motorcycle universe in which Harley Davidson Motor Company functions as a monopoly to it’s captivated market, and is free to sell good or bad bikes at it’s whim and people will always buy them and buy them and buy so many of them in fact that even when the factories are turning out questionable models demand outstrips supply. The culture too is a bit suspicous. All that shiny chrome and fringy leather and lick n’ stick “conchos” frankly strikes as a wee bit pretentious. And yes, the largest part of the modern Harley market are well-off men in their waning years with money and unfufilled dreams looking to buy back a piece of their childhood. Granted, I am more impressed by waning males who actually go out and spend the money rather than rubbing it up against their virtual bank accounts for the rest of their limited lives, but an influx of such citizens into a culture built around the idea of the the resourceless vagabond striving for unknown greatness through shear freedom is, well, problematic. There’s only so many balding dentists you can put in a circle of desperate leathery toughs before it’s really desperate leathery toughs in a circle of balding dentists. Additionally, Harleys are what they are: laid back cruisers, ergonomically suited best to short rides that don’t put too much stress on the lower back, ideally in grid-fashioned city streets or agricultural backroads or American style highways where the only turns are made right after you’ve come to a complete stop. I mean, how are you supposed to really lean a bike through a self-respecting switchback when your centre of gravity is in line with your knees?

And there is this: I have heard that because of the lopsided supply/demand curve and the obsession with “authenticity”, almost all Harleys actually gain in value as they age. Buy low, sell high. Any motorbike that serves as a good financial investment immeadiatley deserves suspicion.

But. I like Harleys. And the people who ride them.

First of all, if you strip off all the flashy bits that appeal to crows and folk who have never really ridden a horse, I dig the basic, naked silhouette. It is primally lodged in the old brain. It does look good.

(As an aside: that sounds like fun. Getting some bolt cutters and repairing the self respect of a accessorized Harley by stripping off all the flashy bits. The chrome would be more difficult. Sand blasting?)

Secondly, they are union made. That counts

Thirdly, the company does have a rich history. Not that it justifies uncertainly engineered bikes, but if all other things could be equal, I wouldn’t mind buying from a company that maintained it’s status as family owned for so many decades, then after going public in desperation actually bought itself back out. It’s a shame it had to once again go public, by some accounts if they had held on a couple more years in the late 80’s they would have been able to maintain privateness until now. But that’s second guessing and 20/20 hindsight. I also dig that they got their start marketing serious daily machines for serious daily people. The early “silent grey fellow” models were advertised for their quietness. Cool.

Fourthly, the new one. The V-Rod. Someone down in Milwaukee must have woken up one morning with a plan. I would ride that bike.

Finally and most importantly. Two times I have been stuck on the side of the road. Once it was just because I’d launched onto the highway without putting my glasses on and had to stop on the precarious shoulder. The other time I was being chased along the shoulder by my downed, sliding motorcycle after misjudging a turn. Both times a truck stopped and almost instantly some dude in a harley cap was checking in on me. No attitude, no condescencion, just a hand and a wave. That really counts. And I clearly wasn’t riding no Harley.

For that I can forgive the company all the loud grey fellows who are swelling the old Harley people’s ranks. I think it will be good for the newcomers. And I can forgive the dangly things they staple on, and the studdy do-nothings all over their undersized saddle bags, and the racket-tuned mufflers, and the “my other car is a Harley” plates on the backs of I-class Beemers. Fine, be that way. The world is not perfect, and somewhere in the heart of Harleydom, there is a real heart. Good enough for me.

Here in northern california, the first subathers are appearing on campus and there is plenty of talk about spring ‘finally’ being here.

For comparison, in the great white bloody north they are still waking up to sub-negative 10 degrees (celsius) temps in the morning. And now the great lakes have officialy frozen over:

http://cbc.ca/stories/2003/03/11/ice_water030311

Somebody really should tell them that spring is finally here, because they just don’t seem to be getting it.

p.s. I have no intention of making this blogging space into a canadiana tribute. It just seems to work out that way.

— Alec Guinness, Bridge On the River Kwai

Just completed a call with a crewboss from E.L.F. Reforestation. I seem to have just signed on for another summer of planting trees in clearcuts. I should regret this decision. Why don’t I?

I wouldn’t be as interested in this previous to my life being inundated with geographers but…

Someone has started a project to develop easy tools to let people collabaratively create textual “maps” of the places they live. Like MUDs or choose-your-own-adventure novels. But of actual places. Producing I suppose, virtual worlds that mirror real landscapes but are subtley, or not-so-subtley modified by the perceptions of the people who live there.

There is a paper here for some cloistered academic interested in social perception. Or something. In any case, there are probably some interesting implications of this which I can’t think of right now.

And it has a text-messaging interface!

Still in it’s infancy, but apparently there is a substantial map of London, which I haven’t been able to figure out how to view:

space.frot.org

Witmer chased from teachers’ meeting

“As Witmer attempted to get on an escalator, shouting protesters, some with their heads covered with brown paper bags, rushed after her. “

It’s like the Ents have really finally had it. 8 (?) years of hard line conservative rule have finally pushed the whole lot of them over the edge I suppose.

Well, I don’t advocate violence but I do advocate getting right pissed off when it’s in order. Anybody associated with the education “industry” in Ontario has plenty of reason to want to chase down Elizabeth Witmer and throw water on her head. They really shouldn’t do it, but I understand why they want to.

Covering their heads with paper bags suggests a certain degree of premeditation. Some sort of “Lord of the Flies” scenario emerging up there maybe. Pigs head on a stick!

“Monday’s events suggested teachers are still angry at the ruling Tories.”

Ah… understatement.

“The Honest Thief” is a Dutch company that grabbed attention in the limited circles of the file-sharing world a couple of weeks ago by publicly announcing their presence as for-profit, anti-music-industry do-gooders. Dismissed at the time as hype and vaporware, they have now released some details of their strategy. Which may or may not be vaporware, but is definitley kind of interesting and mostly weird.

The plan as far as I can make out: produce a peer-to-peer filesharing application – that is to say, a napster replacement, for those of you who haven’t been following the terminology – which would have a twist. The twist is that by using the app for filesharing, you would also be agreeing to allow Honest Thief to use your computer as part of a distributed computing network. Similar I imagine to seti@home or Compute Against Cancer. When you aren’t using your computer, the Honest Theif would be, as one node among many to complete heavy processing tasks. This distributed processing capacity would then be leased to research institutes for whatever task they wish. The money thus raised in leases would (I’m not making this up folks, they are) then be used to pay the artists. I assume this means specifically the artists whose work is being distributed.

So that’s

artists—> you—> research institutes—> artists.

Via “the honest theif” in each case.

Forbes article:

www.forbes.com/business/newswire/2003/03/06/rtr899959.html

In his article “The Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science”, which is pretty good, Robert L. Park identifies 7 things which, if encountered, indicate a scientific claim is probably pseudo-science.

In reponse:

1. The discoverer pitches the claim directly to the media.

One of the reasons this guide to spotting bogus science is useful is because the scientific community generally does a lousy job of communicating with the larger community. Consequently, when the two do come into contact, it’s usually an uneasy and uncertain experience for both sides. More direct publication from scientists to others should happen, and hopefully will in the future. If someone pitches their claim to the media *in exclusion* of presenting it to the peer-review process, that probably is a good sign of sketchiness.

2. The discoverer says that a powerful establishment is trying to suppress his or her work.

Unfortunatley, that does happen. Scientists do occasionally reject good work that opposes the general paradigm. Such work is rare but not nonexistent. More significantly, with the substantial growth of private funding for science, much good work either never happens because it can’t get sympathetic rich groups to back it financially, or more rarely (think Nancy Olivieri) gets suppressed outright when the findings are against the interests of the funders. If a scientist claims a powerful establishment is trying to suppress their work, it doesn’t mean it’s good work but it doesn’t necessarily mean they are charlatans.

3. The scientific effect involved is always at the very limit of detection.

Agree.

4. Evidence for a discovery is anecdotal.

If someone is claiming that something should be generally accepted on anectodal evidence, that’s probably bunk, but I frequently here people dismissing an idea outright just because it’s based on such evidence. Anecdotal evidence doesn’t make a claim wrong, it suggests it should be investigated rigorously

5. The discoverer says a belief is credible because it has endured for centuries.

“Ancient folk wisdom, rediscovered or repackaged, is unlikely to match the output of modern scientific laboratories.”

Bullshit. A lot of ancient folk wisdom is superstitious crap, but it seems that often the reason people were willing to accept the crap as genuine is that they are lured into it by the results obtained by some of the none-crap elements. More than half of modern medicines are still synthetic copies of plant-based molecules. Many of those were dug up by “ethnobotanists” who interview groups who have been living in plant-rich areas for centuries.

Summary: much ‘alternative medicine’ is low-effect baloney. Much for-profit pharmacuetical stuff is medium-effect, side-effect laden baloney.

6. The discoverer has worked in isolation.

Probably true.

7. The discoverer must propose new laws of nature to explain an observation.

99.9999% true.

“A new law of nature, invoked to explain some extraordinary result, must not conflict with what is already known.” (emphasis added) is stretching it a bit.

The thing I find most interesting is that Delta indicates here what information they are planning to provide through the program. As I understand it, they have previously not been releasing these details.

“Dear Mr. Stimson:

Thank you for your inquiry regarding the Computer Assisted Passenger
Pre-Screening System II (CAPPS II). Your concerns about privacy are
certainly understandable.

CAPPS II is a federal program administered by the Transportation
Security Administration (TSA) as a result of the heightened threat of
terrorism to our country. Delta’s role in the CAPPS II pilot program
will be limited to providing data to the TSA that Delta already
collects from passengers as part of our normal reservations and
ticketing process. The security of Delta’s passengers and
safeguarding passenger information remains a top priority.

Although we cannot comment further, you may direct your questions to
the TSA by calling their Consumer Response Center at 1-866-289-9673.

We regret your disappointment in this instance, and we will always
welcome the opportunity to be of service.

Sincerely,

Kayan A. Rose
Manager
Customer Care”

It will be interesting to watch this unfold. The Delta characterization of what information they will be sharing and with who is widely different than other reports. What about the suggestion that your credit rating will somehow be involved? Are they suggesting that the TSA will be responsible for assiging the “red/yellow/green” code that has been rumoured? Exactly what information that they collect through the “normal reservations and ticketing process” will they be forwarding to the TSA? If it is as simple as that, how is this intended to prevent terrorism? Personally, I will reserve some judgement, but I’m still not flying with them.