06.18.07
Posted in Politics, Random thoughts, Technology trends at 9:23 pm by ducky
Yay!! Wired Magazine tells me that the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Ohio has overturned the Stored Communications Act!
Basically, the Stored Communications Act made it possible for the government to seize your email records directly from your ISP, without a warrant, and without ever telling you. While I understand that many people are all in favor of violating civil rights of guilty people, I am really really against violating the rights of innocent people, and any time you make it easy to violate the civil rights of guilty people, you pretty much guarantee that some innocent people’s rights will be violated as well.
I thus see this verdict as a Good Thing. Go EFF! Go ACLU!
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06.09.07
Posted in Art, Hacking, Random thoughts at 11:44 pm by ducky
I stumbled across this old post by Anil Dash where he mentioned that almost all of his geeky friends have at some point made an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of something really obsessive:
Perhaps the ultimate example of this sort of dorkiness is the fact that almost every one of my friends has, at one point or another, made at least one Excel spreadsheet to document some arcane aspect of their lives. The number of consecutive sunny days, the types and prices of the cups of coffee they drink, or just straightforward charts about their boss’s mood. There’s no end to the ways one can misuse desktop applications in one’s personal life.
I read that and thought, “Huh. I certainly haven’t done anything like that.”
Um. But then I remembered that I had generated a list of the world’s writing systems, with the likeliest start/stop usage dates, the lat/long of where it was first used, how many people currently use it, who created it (if known), and samples of characters in that system (if I could find them, and I usually could). Oh.
And then my husband pointed out that I also have enumerated various California prisons, their lat/long, the type of facility (state pen, federal pen, county jail, etc.), and how many inmates it has. Oh.
But I can honestly say that I have never used Excel to keep track of these obsessions.
I used gnumeric and oocalc.
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06.07.07
Posted in Random thoughts at 8:14 pm by ducky
I mentioned that vitamin D is really, really good for you. Folate — vitamin B9 — is also really, really good for you.
Taking folate significantly reduces the risk of bearing a child with neural tube defects (including anencephaly and spinal bifidia). It is so dramatic that many countries have started adding folate to grain products (in much the same way that vitamin D is commonly added to milk). In the U.S.A., for example, breads, cereals, flours, corn meals, pastas, rice, and other grain products have had folate added since 1996. Neural tube defects have dropped by 25% in the U.S.A. since fortification started.
Higher levels of folate intake also have been found to correlate with reduced risk of getting Alzheimer’s, reduced risk of stroke, and there is even some correlation (though not as strong) with reduced risk of cancer.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we got lower rates of Alzheimer’s, stroke, and cancer as a result of fortifying grains? Supplement that with a bit of vitamin D, and we just might get a lot healthier!
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Posted in Random thoughts at 6:08 pm by ducky
[Note: a later study says that vitamin D, while good for colon cancer, isn’t the miracle that the study I report on here says it is. Drat.]
Vitamin D — sunlight — turns out to be really really good for your health. “The one-fifth of premenopausal women who consumed the highest levels of vitamin D and calcium […] had a one-third reduced risk of developing breast cancer compared with those who consumed the least.” One third! That’s significant! Update: 60 to 70 percent lower!
There have been a number of other studies recently that have connected low vitamin D in heart disease, multiple sclerosis, and diabetes.
The easiest way to get vitamin D is from sunlight, but that doesn’t help people in northern climes like Canada and Scotland in the winter. There is vitamin D in milk, but if you don’t get any from sun (like in northern winters) you’d have to drink three litres per day to get enough. (I drink an unusually large quantity of milk, but even I only drink about a litre per day.)
Yes, it is true that more sun exposure increases the risk of skin cancer, but it turns out that skin cancer is much easier to notice, diagnose, and treat (being on the surface and all). It’s just not as big a problem “Fifteen hundred Americans die every year from [skin cancers]. Fifteen hundred Americans die every day from the serious cancers.”
Unfortunately, it’s impossible to give a blanket recommendation of how much vitamin D supplement you should take. It depends on the latitude, the time of year, how much you are outside, and how dark your skin is. The lighter your skin, the more vitamin D you can absorb from sunlight. Also, vitamin D is fat-soluable, so it is possible to get too much.
So lay off that sunblock!
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Posted in Random thoughts at 5:44 pm by ducky
The hormone vasopressin appears to regulate nurturing behaviour in males — at least in some voles. Prairie voles are monogamous; mountain voles are wildly polygamous. If you give prairie voles vasopressin, that triggers nurturing. In mountain voles, it doesn’t — but it turns out that mountain voles are missing a receptor for vasopressin that the prairie voles have. If you give the mountain voles the receptor, they become nurturing. See the story.
Meanwhile, it has long been known that oxytocin makes females more nurturing.
(There is nothing particularly new about this, I just decided to start making links to things that I think are really interesting that other people don’t seem to know about.)
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05.25.07
Posted in Random thoughts at 6:48 pm by ducky
I have been a bit surprised at something that I can do that apparently most people can’t. I can listen to somebody speaking and repeat everything they say in realtime, with only the briefest of delays between when it comes out of their mouth and when it comes out of mine. From what I hear from others, most people can’t do this.
This is not a skill I’ve practiced. To the best of my knowledge, I have always been able to do this. It never occurred to me that anybody would not be able to do this. (Maybe I can simply because I assumed that I could?)
But if I’m going to have some secret power, couldn’t it be something useful? Like curing cancer? Diagnosing cancer? Or at least being able to cure canker sores?
Or, alternatively, is there any value at all in being able to simultaneously translate from English to English?
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04.17.07
Posted in Canadian life, Random thoughts, Technology trends at 9:59 pm by ducky
Maps are quirky things. The Web is amazing.
I was looking at Canadian province boundaries for a hobby project of mine, and found a strange divot in the border between Nunavut and Northwest Territories. Google maps shows the border running happily due east along the 70th parallel, then suddenly dropping down about seven miles, going over about five miles, back up to the 70th parallel, and continuing east as if nothing had happened.
I was stumped as to what it might be. I looked at the area at the highest zoom, and I could see absolutely nothing interesting there: no roads, no lakes, no nothing.. I speculated that maybe there was a Minister of Parliment who had a summer cottage there, because nothing else made sense.
I asked the geography types here, and one asked a friend, who posted it on MetaFiler, and I got an answer! The short answer is that there was a prior land claim that the government just didn’t want to open up again.
It turns out that the reason that I couldn’t see anything interesting on the sat images was because Google had the divot in the wrong place. It’s supposed to be over to the right a bit. I drew a line on the map over where the Nunavut Act says it is supposed to be. There is in fact a lake there.
Now think about this. Fifteen years ago, I would have never had access to a map that showed that level of detail. (Or maybe I could get access, but it would take enough effort that it wouldn’t be something I did casually.) Fifteen years ago, if I wondered about the divot, I wouldn’t have even known how to start finding out what that divot was. And, if I found an error in the map, I wouldn’t have known who to contact about fixing the map in the next printing. Now, thanks to the Web, I can do all those things.
It’s been thirteen years since I discovered the Web, and I still think it is pretty amazing.
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02.27.07
Posted in Random thoughts at 1:21 pm by ducky
As I was walking across campus today, I saw a bald eagle soar past — closely followed by five or six seagulls that harassed the eagle a bit.
After I got home, I saw two bald eagles land on a tree outside my window and sit in the top branches. Again, I saw some smaller birds appear and harass the eagles.
I presume that the smaller birds hassle the eagles because they don’t want the eagles to prey on their chicks. Maybe also the eagles prey on seagulls and smaller birds, but can only succeed if they have the element of surprise. Maybe eagles have to grab the other birds from behind, snapping the smaller birds’ neck. By harassing the eagles when the eagles are not at an advantage, maybe the smaller birds can convince the eagles to move on to the next forest over.
I don’t think there are analogous situations in the terrestrial world. I’m trying to imagine a gang of rabbit thugs harassing a mountain lion, and the image — while amusing — just is not working for me.
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02.23.07
Posted in Random thoughts, Technology trends at 10:11 am by ducky
Interesting article on how datamining for terrorists doesn’t work.
From the article: “Finding terrorism plots is not a problem that lends itself to data mining. It’s a needle-in-a-haystack problem, and throwing more hay on the pile doesn’t make that problem any easier.”
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02.16.07
Posted in Random thoughts, University life at 10:16 am by ducky
Today, my alma mater, the University of Illinois, announced that Chief Illiniwek would no longer perform at athletic events.
The Chief’s performances had been hugely divisive, with one side contending that the Chief was offensive to Native Americans and the other insisting that his portrayal demonstrated respect for Native Americans. Both sides were correct, which made it so very difficult.
The Chief was not a mascot. He didn’t stand on the sidelines and lead cheers, he didn’t clown around, he didn’t mug for the cameras, or throw t-shirts into the audience. He came out at halftime, danced, and left. He comported himself with dignity and gravity at all times. The dance was physically very challenging. The students respected and honored the Chief. It was very respectful, compared to what it could have been.
On the other hand, the Chief was not authentic. The dance, while containing some elements of Native dances, was not totally authentic. In particular, the last thing the Chief did before leaving the field was mid-air splits — jumping up, spreading his legs up and out in a V, and touching his toes. The costume was Lakota, not Illiniwek. (The Illinois Natives were pretty efficiently disposed of, so there aren’t a lot of records of what they wore or how they danced.) Furthermore, it is a strange borrowing to put Native culture into this context.
What pushed me over to the anti-Chief side was to think about how I would feel on seeing a bad adaptation of important Western culture out of context. Imagine that you’re at a soccer game in Japan, and at halftime, they announce that it’s time for The Pope. Imagine the crowd going wild as a guy in Greek Orthodox regalia solemnly runs out onto the field, and does something sort of like an Irish jig, ending with mid-air splits. Even as a non-Catholic, that would make me highly uncomfortable and perhaps a bit angry. If I were Catholic, I’d be furious.
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