DESTROY ALL MONSTERS

Evil!

2009-12-10T03:23:52Z

You will most likely find no joy in this game.

spendocrat @ 2009-12-07T12:27:00

2009-12-07T18:27:21Z

Article mostly unrelated, but:

In the first quarter of 2009, Twilight novels composed 16 percent of all book sales -- four out of every 25 books sold were part of the series.

Holy crap!

The Association of American Publishers says that US book sales are about $24 billion per year. Take 16 percent of about a quarter of that (probably a bit less, considering the impact of Christmas), and that's a heck of a lot of money.

--

While searching for numbers on book sales I can across this interesting bit about the AAP hiring a PR firm to agitate against open-access academic journals. I'm not sure how they think they can defeat Knuth.

Inappropriate, unacceptable

2009-11-25T19:55:39Z

When you hear them, you feel that you are being tied up with little pieces of soft string.

spendocrat @ 2009-10-26T12:21:00

2009-10-26T17:25:19Z

I don't know why I'm surprise by this, but PGP has mananger- and employee-written blogs on their site, and have had for quite a while. They seem fairly interesting.

Also, one of the fellows looks a lot like Freddy Mercury.

spendocrat @ 2009-09-13T19:02:00

2009-09-14T00:04:08Z

I think there was almost a fire in my building just now!

The firetruck showed up and the guys came around to the side with one of tenants, but I guess the tenant had already put water on the thing. The firemen told her she did a good job, put a few more gallons of water on the thing and then left.

Exciting!

Later: In looking at the spot where the fire was I noticed it was right under the gas line. Scary.

spendocrat @ 2009-09-12T03:59:00

2009-09-12T09:06:10Z

Now that I'm not working there I can say: I spent the summer working for Agriculture Canada (at the U of M campus) doing genetic sequencing. It was pretty rad.

We grew our own crops, infected them with fungus, scored how infected they got, then harvested the seeds for subsequent planting and some DNA extraction (though most of the DNA we work with is from the plant tissue, not the seeds).

I spent most of my lab time sequencing a 12kbp region of 16 genomes. This worked out pretty well but I didn't have a complete sequence by the end of summer (in at least once place I think there is a sequence that sticks to itself). I also did some microsatellite work, which lets you see which allele a plant has of a certain gene/gene cassette or if it's heterozygous.

All in all a good summer job, and probably still relevant to the new career path.

spendocrat @ 2009-09-01T23:55:00

2009-09-02T04:56:45Z

I've been laughing at this all week.

Alumni House

2009-08-21T04:21:50Z

At work today we watched a backhoe tear down Alumni House over the course of the day. (Building 11 on this map http://www.umanitoba.ca/about/map/).

From the University of Manitoba web page:

Alumni House

This Georgian-style residence was designed in 1938 by Ralph Ham for the Department of Home Economics. The House was completed in 1939 for use in the Department's home management and child-care programs. Known as the "Practice House," it was immortalized in the book Republic of Love, published in 1992 by Pulitzer Prize winning author and University of Manitoba professor Carol Shields.

In 1957 the House became a private residence for university vice-presidents and administrative personnel. Then in 1970 it was converted into an office facility for the university's Employee Relations Division. Another renovation was completed in 1980 when it became the permanent home of the Alumni Association.

It was amazingly cool to watch, but having read about the building I'm sad to see it go. Especially sad because it will probably get replaced with some hideous box of glass and steel. We know the new building will be 5 stories tall, but don't know what it's going to be for.

The U of M is apparently short on space. Instead of pulling down cool buildings it would be nice if they converted some of their many acres of surface parking into multi-level parking. They're even tearing down some of the Ag research buildings (the numberless building directly to the right of building 11 on the map) to make a new surface lot. Brutal.

spendocrat @ 2009-08-17T19:24:00

2009-08-18T00:25:41Z

Oh my, hits close to home.

spendocrat @ 2009-08-13T02:26:00

2009-08-13T07:28:41Z

The kind of people that are captioning lolcats these days are the kind that were making Tim "The Tool Man" Taylor grunts in the 90's.

spendocrat @ 2009-07-20T20:31:00

2009-07-21T01:36:00Z

Software I would like to have:

A note-pad type item for Windows where a single file contains multiple tabs in the same way that Excel can have multiple worksheets in one whatever-it's-called.

Any of you on the old friends list know of such an item? Legitimately free/open source is preferable.

I've spent a bit of time looking for something like this, and all I seem to find is a lot of software with tree views.

Gravy would be an option to encrypt to file, but this is handle-able outside of the app with little pain.

spendocrat @ 2009-07-15T17:43:00

2009-07-15T22:49:55Z

I forgot to mention that I saw a guy jump off the Osborne Street bridge on Canada Day.

I was heading south into the village, and this guy was up on the east wall of the bridge holding onto the life preserver sign and talking to his girlfriend (who was on the sidewalk below). "That doesn't look like a good idea" I thought to myself, and I think pretty much everyone else on the bridge had the same idea. So we were all walking along looking at him, looking at where we were walking, looking at him, etc. Then all of a sudden he turned towards the river, put his hands up and "oop", right over the edge. Big collective gasp from everyone watching, then I ran across the street to take a look, but by the time I made it people were already shouting "He's fine!".

I guess with the water so high this year there was more to worry about from the current than from hitting the bottom. Still can't shake that brief moment of "Holy shit I think I just saw a guy kill himself."

spendocrat @ 2009-07-14T18:44:00

2009-07-14T23:45:55Z

I was at my folks' yesterday flipping through channels and ended up watching some ST:TNG.

Which reminded me of this, which I still find absolutely hilarious:

Sorry in advance for putting an animation on your friends page.

Plato's Cave

2009-07-12T22:52:10Z

Some acquaintances of mine recently bought bookstore on Taché and renamed it "Plato's Cave". Previously the bookstore was mystery/romance/self-help heavy, but they seem to be doing a good job at getting their hands on a lot of classics, history, and philosophy-type books. (http://caveofplato.com/)

Running a used bookstore seems mildly insane to me, but I hope they do well.

On a completely unrelated note I picked up yesterday two of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, Ring World, Vonnegut's Hocus Pocus, and good copies of Othello and King Lear.

I also visited McNally and got Shake Hands with the Devil (finally), Spook Country, the remaining Foundation novel, and Best Science Writing 2007.

I've been participating in reading groups with some friends and people from school. I've not really done this in the past, but it's quite interesting. I'm finding that reading with other people provides a good motivation to think carefully about everything in a work, not just the parts that jump out at you.

spendocrat @ 2009-06-27T16:38:00

2009-06-27T21:38:45Z

Looks like I'm going to U of M next year.

Hi, we're the Mixed Nuts

2009-06-22T07:01:43Z

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QiI0ydrw_QU#

One of the best videos of all time.

I'd embed, but figuring out how took more than 10 minutes of fooling around.

spendocrat @ 2009-06-08T18:20:00

2009-06-09T00:20:54Z

spendocrat @ 2009-04-28T21:47:00

2009-04-29T03:26:03Z

Atheism is a pretty common thing among the people I talk to at school. For an intelligent bunch, I find they make a lot of the same mistakes:

There is no way to prove that God exists.

This one often stems from the assumption that the only way to prove things is with science.

I read this proof that God exists, and it was stupid, therefore there must not be any proof that God exists

I will now prove that Pythagoras's theorem is true by pointing out that it works for right triangles with sides 3 and 4, and hypotenuse 5. This proof sucks. Due to this, I can conclude that there is no way to prove Pythagoras's theorem.

If there was a proof that God existed, wouldn't I hear about it all over the place?

There are 2 parts to this: Education about religion has been purposefully omitted from public schools. Your teachers and parents went to these public schools. Who around you would even know about it? -- especially if you didn't go to church, but even if you did. The job of ministers and priests isn't to prove that God exists, just as the job of a high-school calculus teacher is not to derive or demonstrate the foundations of mathematics (Whitehead and Russell). Second, to prove the existence of God might be fairly difficult -- people don't tend to spend a lot of time teaching other people things they themselves don't understand.

The Bible is full of contradictions and/or is stupid.

Proving that some kind of creator God exists is a far cry from concluding that one religion or another is correct in everything it says. Proving that God exists would be a necessary first step in showing one of those religions is right, but doesn't depend in any way on the further claims any particular religion may make. Proving that God doesn't exist would also effectively discredit all religions, so even without any of the trappings of a particular religion, the question of a "bare-bones" God is still important.

Proving that God exists is just the same as proving that some kind of magical fairy is in this room right now, but we can't see it, touch it, or anything

There is a false analogy here between something that has no effect on the Universe in any way, and something that at the very minimum had an effect on the Universe in creating it.

I talked to this religious guy/priest/minister/etc. about this, and he didn't know anything about any proof's of God's existence!

Do you believe in genetics/evolution? Do you know the detailed arguments and experiments that support it? How about gravity, can you show the arguments for it? How about special relativity? How about the existence of human rights? That some person, or even some millions of people, don't know something has nothing to do with its correctness (or lack of).

OK. Cue people asking me which church I'm part of....

spendocrat @ 2009-04-28T21:36:00

2009-04-29T02:46:14Z

Despite spraining my ankle, Campstravaganza 4 was good. I arrived late Thursday, set up my tent, and sat up with the fire for a few hours. I had a bit of a cold night but nothing like last year.

Friday morning we got in a good round of frisbee golf, then it was "do stupid things near the lake" time. In the afternoon we split a lot of wood, played with a boomerang and walked around the camp. Friday evening we started up frisbee golf again but I sprained my ankle on the second hole, running around without looking at my footing (there is no actual running in frisbee golf, I was just fooling around). I received first aid, was relegated to the campfire for the rest of the evening, had an OK night, then packed up in the morning and came back to town. I was sad to miss the nature walk and playing grounders.

The locals are starting to recognize us. Even with the gate closed we got some drive-bys and one guy talked to us for a while.

This is the second year the lake has been frozen solid (except for 3-4 feet around the edge, and a big patch at the point). Two years ago we had open water but with big icebergs, and three years ago we had completely open water. I think the first year was an anomaly, and spoiled us a bit.

spendocrat @ 2009-04-09T16:59:00

2009-04-09T21:55:10Z

The power supply for my computer went (dramatically) last week. Since then I've been using my older machine, an Windows 2000 machines from January of 2003. I've decided to get a quiet power supply for the broken computer, but I've had to order the one I want from out of town. Most likely I won't even bother installing it until exams are over.

Anyhow, the upshot of this is that Firefox 3 runs noticeably faster on this computer than the Firefox 1.5 it was running before today. I was dubious about their claims but the difference is dramatic, both for page loads and editing in text boxes.

Lysenko

2009-04-08T02:22:17Z

I read The Lysenko Effect: The Politics of Science over the weekend. The Soviets assumed that science should be informed by Marxism (because Marxism is truth) and ended up screwing over their agricultural and biological sciences from about the 1920's to the 1960's. Very interesting. Also sadly showed my ignorance about the Soviets, I kept having to look up stuff about Stalin and the revolution(s). Animal Farm is not enough, it turns out.

I have had a few people tell me that science is an inherently political enterprise over the past couple years. I still don't buy this. The results you get from exeriments aren't political, they're just facts. That the interpretation of those results and the decision on what experiments to do *can* be political is reasonable, but I still don't see how they are inherently political. I don't count most of psychology and sociology as sciences , so that affects things. I think maybe these people meant that the direction and interpretation of science was political and weren't clear about it, but it's also possible they're the kind of people who believe that there's no such thing as objective truth, which is very odd.

No more shopping at Chapters

2009-04-07T09:20:41Z

Somehow, eight years ago, I missed that Chapter's and Indigo decided to longer sell Hitler's Mein Kampf (and some googling informs me they also stopped selling shooting-related magazines at some point as well).

If I'd known then I wouldn't have shopped there all this time. I guess now's as good a time to stop as any.

Don't let me down, McNally!

An update about some things

2009-02-15T01:57:33Z

I don't visit LJ very much these days. I generally only go on the Internet at school, which has its good and bad points. Remote access to a couple of OpenBSD machines makes this a lot less inconvenient than it could be.

School is humming along as per usual. Three labs and four lectures border on overwhelming with work mixed in, but I am managing. High marks from last term indicate that I'm doing something right.

History of Educational ideas is the third philosophy course I've taken, and is great. A discussion of the logical framework of education, the historical figures who've shaped how education is conducted and thought of, and lots of discussion about why both teachers and the general populace are ignorant of this information. A side-effect of theses kinds of courses is that I find religion a lot more interesting now than I did when I was an atheist. A bad side-effect is that talking to almost anyone about "issues" now can get pretty frustrating (*especially* religious people and atheists).

I have collected a number of 2-liter pop bottles and gallon milk jugs for the first rifle shoot after the snow melts a bit. My interest in making things go "boom!" remains high. This year we're going to try freezing some of the targets.

I've been playing in a co-ed sponge hockey league. This is a great workout and a ton of fun, even when we don't have enough people to sub off.

spendocrat @ 2009-01-19T19:55:00

2009-01-20T01:55:22Z

Of interest to nerds?

https://www.grc.com/ppp.htm

One-time passwords with libraries in various languages. Equivalent to s/key, though I only glanced at the site in a cursory fashion.

spendocrat @ 2008-12-14T16:18:00

2008-12-14T22:18:59Z

I finished my exams. It feels pretty good. Now to a work a bunch and enjoy the holidays!