Don’t mind all the crazy World of Warcraft machinima.
Well, actually, WoW or not, that was a pretty good video. And the song is great.
Month: June 2009
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Not So Silent
Stephanie Zvan links me, I link her back — not just for reciprocation, but to direct people at the slew of links she put up, pointing us to some excellent reads in the Silence is the Enemy campaign.
Go read. If you aren’t doing anything else actively, devoting some brain-share to the topic is a start. I highly recommend the music post by ScienceWoman, which I will not directly link, because I’m trying to get you to visit Stephanie’s site. Get it yet? Go now!
Good news everyone!
Futurama just got renewed and is making 26 more episodes. That’s not just good news, that’s excellent news! I lost my remote though, so I’ll have to get out the Finglonger to turn on the television.
Wednesday’s announcement that Comedy Central is bringing Futurama back for another 26 episodes, to begin airing in 2010, was both fortuitous and entirely expected.
Futurama never really went away, the show’s brain trust backed four straight-to-DVD movies, with the express intention of keeping the tale alive.
I can’t wait. There’s only one show out there that can make a joke about quantum physics that’s actually funny. Or maybe two, I’ve never seen Big Bang Theory.
Think of the children eh?
You’ve got to be kidding me. Apparently Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan has put forth a bill allowing police vast snooping powers on the internet, forcing ISPs to implement hefty snooping equipment and allowing for warrantless retrieval of information on any person they claim to suspect as being part of organized crime, terrorism or child pornography.
All you have to do is imply that this will help stop any of the three, and you’ll get some asshat more than willing to give up privacy and other essential human rights in the name of Teh Childrens. And Mark and other PC leaners, I’m sorry to say, it’s most often the Conservatives that fall into this particular category — this was Stockwell Day’s whipping horse for years!
The worst part is, nobody’s actually implying that any current investigation is being impeded by a lack of ability to warrantlessly internet-tap any citizen. If this passes, expect vast dragnets along the same lines as the snooping that’s already taken place in America in the name of preventing terrorism, while they only really snooped on reporters’ and liberals’ e-mails.
Makes me sad that Ignatieff and Harper have hashed out a deal to avoid a Federal election this summer. With the NDP riding high in NS presently, who knows, maybe sentiment has swung leftward in other, less backwater provinces.
PulseAudio and I have a strained relationship
Ever since the Ubuntu folks switched their underlying sound architecture from ALSA to PulseAudio, I’ve had some manner of issue or another. At first, it was certain applications (e.g. Audacity) not running, due to never having been coded to use Pulse instead of its default, needing hours to hack around. Then after PulseAudio sorted out its own ALSA backward compatibility, it was the server crashing every time I opened an RDP connection using RDesktop (a recent version thankfully fixed that issue).
Today, I did some manual updates for my Jaunty installation, the first I’d done in about a week. I have automatic updates disabled on my work laptop for a number of reasons. One of the packages that came down was evidently PulseAudio, because after a reboot, sound wasn’t working. Nothing was showing as out of the ordinary on dmesg (the Linux command line based system event viewer — like in Windows going to My Computer > Manage > Event Viewer > System, or under Ubuntu you can go to System > Administration > Log File Viewer), and when I installed the PulseAudio Device Chooser applet to get access to the default device configuration, it was showing my sound card was functioning perfectly and was even outputting sound properly according to its internal diagnostics. My system volume was turned up, the laptop’s mute function was not active, and as far as I could see, everything else was working just fine, so I Googled the problem, and found this.
I wasn’t having the shutdown problem described in the bug report, but I’d had problems with ALSA disabling its own PCM in the past, so I opened my volume control via the sound icon and found that the PCM slider was all the way at the bottom, and the Mute button for it was ticked. PCM is the equivalent of the “Wave” slider under the Windows volume control — it’s the slider that handles most of the sound output aside from the “master” volume control, so basically anything that’s playing and isn’t a CD in the CD-Rom would be affected by it. I increased the volume on PCM and un-muted it, and magically sound started working again.
Now that I know this can happen because of a PulseAudio upgrade, I’ll think to look at this first, the next time this happens. But ultimately, why did it have to happen? I can’t think of a reason to ever change the PCM volume in the process of an upgrade — and if you have to default it to anything because the settings get wiped, it should default to 80% or something like that, something reasonable that doesn’t give a person the impression that something got broken over the course of an upgrade.
Don’t get me wrong. PulseAudio was a necessary and in fact laudable step toward unifying the Linux sound architecture world, where it can not only mix multiple sound streams, but can output to different sound devices or all sorts of devices simultaneously, including over the network. I will one day build a media centre that we can tune into from any computer in the house (probably including my Wii using Mplayer on the Homebrew Channel). But until that day, it’d be nice if they get the little things right before uploading their new versions.
Or maybe one day I’ll get around to learning C and step in myself…
Fox News – still professional!
Pay yer bills, or switch to a free AV. Or a free OS. Or a decent IT staff. Whatever.
Magnetar found 15kly from here!
Via Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy:
Astronomers have announced they found a new magnetar, named SGR 0501+4516, and it’s only 15,000 light years away. It turns out to be dark most of the time, emitting very little energy, which is how it escaped detection. But it had an outburst last year that lasted four months, allowing scientists time detect it and to get a good long look at it.
This is shocking, because magnetars are neutron stars with a crust, that produce insanely strong magnetic fields; they also produce insane amounts of x-ray radiation whenever they undergo a “star-quake” and the crust breaks causing some extremely violent subatomic reactions. At 15kly away, we’re safe. But a giant burst from a magnetar at 50kly away actually caused effects that were measurable on our atmosphere, so if this (admittedly smaller and darker) one were to undergo a similar event (at 32 on the Richter scale apparently!), it could very well do some real damage. Not, like, blowing the atmosphere off our planet, but it could fry some satellites and maybe damage the atmosphere somewhat.
Homeopathy is pants
Seriously. There’s only two modes of homeopathy in this world, and both of them are patently ridiculous. In the first, you’re looking at your symptoms, finding a chemical that also produces those symptoms, then diluting that chemical in pure water to the point where there’s likely not even a single atom of the original chemical in your dilution. In the second, you’re taking natural herbs or minerals and bypassing the whole “testing” and “science” thing, and applying them liberally to situations where they may or may not just end up hurting you, thinking it’s perfectly okay just because the stuff is “natural”. How many people that you know who take megadoses of St. John’s Wart or Echinecea were actually prescribed their use by a doctor? And how much of a death cap mushroom would you personally prescribe for a case of diarrhea? Or, let’s say, as per a comic I once heard, an angry bear. “He’s all-natural!”
Frankly, I’ll stick with science, where you take the natural herbs and such, find out what they’re good for, do clinical trials to make sure there are no unintended side-effects, then see if you can extract the good chemicals and keep them from the bad ones. Like how we figured out that the bark of the willow tree had salicin, something very nearly like aspirin, in it, then modified it slightly to eliminate some of the side effects that willow bark had.
Because homeopathy has gained so much public sympathy over the years, thanks to idiots pushing it as safer and better than actual scientifically derived medical knowledge, the laws for homeopathic preparations in the States is decidedly not where it should be. As a result, drugs like Zicam nasal gel get onto the store shelves with little vetting, marketed as a way to alleviate cold symptoms, and due to their heavy zinc content, could very likely be causing permanent anosmia — permanent loss of smell. Per Steve Novella at the above link:
Correlation does not prove causation, but there is reason to think that the anosmia in some of these cases may have been caused by the zinc in these Zicam products. As the FDA reports, viral upper airway infections can also cause anosmia, but the anosmia that results from zinc is associated with burning and is much more rapid in onset. Apparently some of these cases had features suggestive of zinc-caused anosmia.
Further, it has already been described in the literature that decreased smell (hyposmia) or loss of smell (anosmia) can result from the intranasal use of zinc.
All because it’s homeopathic, and therefore not necessary to regulate as stringently.
Orac as usual does this topic more justice than I could ever manage.
Fuck you, homeopathic practitioners, for trying to bypass proper science.
Trolling as psychological rape
I want to make one thing perfectly clear, before I even begin to write this post — I do so not to stir the already muddy waters about what constitutes rape (or rather, what SHOULD — remember, “no means no” is an instruction, not a slogan or a rule). Nor do I write this to diminish the psychological and physical trauma that rape victims suffer. Rather, I write this because I’ve just been not only a witness but also a victim of the very real psychological damage that can be done by something as simple, and as common, as your average internet troll.
And the troll in this particular case is a troll par excellence, much as it aggrieves me to have to admit anything he might misconstrue as a compliment..
Asus used to be supporters of Linux, now not so much
I had allowed myself to be convinced that the campaign to push Windows on consumers looking to buy an Asus Eee PC was a hoax, but it turns out it’s real. For a time, by offering low-cost netbook Eee PCs with embedded Linux and consumers realizing that it works just as well, Linux was actually getting some adoption by the consumer-end of the spectrum.
Then Microsoft realized their “biggest competitor” was gaining a foothold in the netbook market and quickly moved to crush it by allying themselves with Asus. Boy, it sure is sad that Microsoft is so afraid of a little legitimate competition that they have to fight Linux just like they would a company with a large installation base and a large amount of money to invest.
Ah well, at least there’s still Google Android. And the Nokia internet tablet series. And the PS3, if you ask for it with Linux pre-installed. And, well, everything on this list.