This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter).
Posts here are rare these days. For current stuff, follow me on Mastodon
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There is a steady stream of these sorts of things almost every day it seems. More and more restrictions, more and more rules, more and more barriers… all these kinds of things just hamstring all the benefits that can come from a fully wired world. (Not that they don’t mess around with too much with the unwired world too.) Sigh. And most of these things happen with almost no resistance too, that is the sad part.
New bill: Cyber Safety For KidsAct of 2006
(Xeni Jardin, Boing Boing)
Senators Mark Pryor (D-AR), and Max Baucus, (D-MT) have proposed a bill that would require all commercial websites with material “harmful to minors” (in other words, sexually explicit content) to move to a .xxx domain within 6 months of this bill becoming law — or face civil penalties. Under the terms of the proposed law, the US Commerce Department secretary would be required to develop a domain name for adult sites (presumably .xxx) with ICANN.
Europe seeking to make open mapping impossible – help!
(Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing)
The EU’s INSPIRE directive is supposed to harmonize the way that European mapping agencies share their geo-data, but the process has been hijacked. Now it looks more like a proprietary, restrictive, monopoly pricing policy that guts open access.
Geographic data is a key to unlocking information collected by government on behalf of the public – census, voting, planning, utilities, environmental, transport information. Google Maps/Earth mashups are just starting to show us what can be done by overlaying different kinds of environmental and social information over freely available base maps.
The Environment, Public Health and Food Safety Committee of the European Parliament gets the chance to roll back some of these changes next Tuesday (21st March).
Thanks for Chad to pointing out to me that my cousin Jake’s TV appearence on the World Poker Tour (see here) is actually on this week. It aired for the first time earlier this week at 16 Mar 2006 02:00 UTC on the Travel Channel. Chad says it will be repeated several times before the next new episode airs next week. I couldn’t find that information on the online schedule, but according to the Travel Channel schedule it definately will be on again at 25 Mar 2006 23:00 UTC.
Or, there is always the torrent.
I haven’t actually watched the whole thing yet, but I probably will tomorrow.
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And there is an air mattress (two actually) as well!
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When Amy and Brandy were here they decided I should not sit on the floor.
 Authors: Neil A. Weiss and Matthew J. Hassett
Started: 16 Jan 2006
Finished: 7 Mar 2006
940p / 51d
18 p/d
After starting my new job, I decided a review of statistics might be in order, just to make sure I remembered all the relevant terminology and such and had the concepts fresh in my mind. I don’t actually have to DO that kind of analysis for work right now, but I certainly have to understand it. So review is good. It has been a long time since I’ve had to do this kind of stuff.
Now, I dug this particular book up from college days. Specifically the one summer between undergrad and my one abortive year of grad school. Even though I had a Physics degree, the Heinz schoiol required an actual stats class as a pre-requisite. I had used lots of stats, but never taken an actual stats class. So I signed up at the community college over the summer. There was all kinds of confusion about if I was an in state student or not and what the price was and all kinds of other things. Anyway, as it ended, although I attended all the classes, I never was officially enrolled in the class, never paid, and never got any official credit for it, and Heinz did not care and I started anyway. The class was also painfully simple. I was very bored.
In any case… the book… like the class, the whole first half of the book is painfully slow. There are chapters spent on what Means and Medians are, which arer topics Amy covered in the first half of 5th grade… I know it started at the beginning, but… so anyway it slowly gathered steam. Only the first few chapters were truly trivial. Then there were many chapters of stuff I remembered once I read it, but would have been challenged to describe cold if asked before I read the book. Then maybe the last half of the book was actually stuff I didn’t remember at all.
It frustrated me though. Not because the material was hard, but because it was all being done as a cookbook approach. “Have this kind of problem, use this procedure.” There was no derivation from first principals, and in many cases they avoided actual equations whenever possible. And there were bunches of places where if they had used calculus it would have been a lot nicer, but they were doing this at a level where algebra was enough. Now, I understand, this is the kind of bpook this is. This is a stats literacy book, not a book for math majors. So no proofs. No derivations. No detailed analysis of WHY something is done the way it is… it is just given as fact. Which has its purposes, but that always tends to frustrate me. I don’t like just being told something is some way because it is, I like to understand why.
But that would be a different textbook entirely. (And I’m not so interested that I’m going to go order one now.)
This one did its job. It refreshed my memory of various sorts of statistical analysis that I might bump into or need. Enough so I can speak about such things without being a complete idiot, and enough so I know where to look for more info if I need it.
Which is good.
But after 51 days and 940 pages of a statistics textbook, I am now quite glad the book I am now reading is a nice quick read novel…
I have been meaning to post something about the whole DP World blow up thing ever since it started, but just never got around to it. Noticing as I eat lunch here today that Phatback has commented I thought this would be a good time…
Here is my thought… I disagree with W on almost everything he does, and think is not only wrong but dangerous in most things… but, as much as I hate to say it, W (and Al) are completely right on this one.
Were there some problems with the process in terms of it following the procedure it probably should have followed? Yes. Definately. And that is bad. Do I have an issue with the fact that DPW is not just a foreign company, but is actually completely owned by a foreign GOVERNMENT… yes… But… while both of those things were mentioned in the debate a decent bit, it was not the focus, the focus was that DPW was Arab and the risk was higher because of that. Looking at all that has come out I think that in the end the conclusion the administration seems to have been completely sound. And the orgy of xenophobia and proivincialism from both parties that erupted over this was absolutely shameful.
Are there security issues at the ports? Yes. Damn right there are. People have been pointing out how vunerable they are since well before 9/11, and certainly ever since. But do they have to do with the ownership of the companies that run the ports? Not at all. They are completely independant issues. Why was it OK that the Brits were runniing things, but suddenly when it is another ally of ours that happens to be Arab it is not OK? Come on…
And some people have even been pushing the idea that NO foreign company should be involved in these sorts of things AT ALL. Now, at least that idea is a bit more self-consistant, but it is so isolationist and backwards… Get with it… it is a global economy… national borders will mean less and less as the decades progress. International ownership is not an apriori bad thing. In fact often it can be very positive. And if we are going to decide it is bad across the board, get ready to say goodbye to many things we take for granted….
Anyway…. for the past several weeks while this depate flared up I just kept shaking my head every time I heard the talking heads… taking something which should be a non-issue, and flaring it up to a major thing… with the only end result being that in the end we further decrease trust in the world about us (already at an all time low), discourage foreign investment in the US and give some port business to a US company (as Al says, probably Halliburton)… and do absolutely nothing at all to improve the security at our ports.
Thank you to the raving irrational xenophobic hordes in both parties for that one.
(These same bipartisan folks are also working on such fun things together as making internet gambling illegal even when using overseas sites and on extending bad campaign finance laws so they extend to internet postings thus perhaps making the 1st amendment meaningless for thousands of bloggers… thanks for that too…. Urgh!)
I just went to Google to look something up for work and instead of the normal Google home I got this:
Please no. Please stop. Please don’t ruin Google like Yahoo was ruined years ago. I don’t want a damn portal. I want to search. I have never really liked portal sites. They try to do too much for too many and just end up sucking. Even if you use the personilization features. Just too much crap.
Perhaps Google would do better, but this screen shows no evidence of that. I think you have been able to get this page before, but this is the first time it ever came up as the default for me when I just typed in google.com, and I’m not happy about that at all.
Yes, they have a link to the “Classic Home” on the page, and I’ll try to make sure that on the rare times I actually go to google.com instead of using the Google search box in Safari or Firefox, I’ll go there and not this awful “Personalized Page”. But still…
Google is doing more and more stuff that dilutes what gave them their power and made them THE place to go to find stuff. Some of it clicks and is cool. Others just… no. Please don’t.
And while we’re on google… time to reverse that China policy as well as the similar ones in various places in Europe and say screw you, we won’t censor results at all, and if you want to block us, go right ahead, people will find their way around it. And keep fighting the disclosure the DOJ is trying to do in the US, and if you are forced to submit in the end, deliver it in hard copy!
OK. Thanks.
Why GarageBand is dangerous and should be outlawed in any state where I am present. Press play on the above at your own risk. I can not take responsibility for any long term damage to your ears or brain which may occur.
The Physics of Friendship
(Lisa Zyga, Physorg.com)
By modeling people’s interactions based on how particles bounce off each other in an enclosed area, physicists Marta Gonzalez, Pedro Lind and Hans Herrmann found that the characteristics of social networks emerge “in a very natural way.†In a study recently published in Physical Review Letters, the scientists compared their model to empirical data taken from a survey of more than 90,000 U.S. students regarding friendships, and found similarities indicating that this model may serve as a novel approach for understanding social networks.
“The idea behind our model, though simple, is different from the usual paradigmatic approaches,†Gonzalez told PhysOrg.com. “We consider a system of mobile agents (students), which at the beginning have no acquaintances; by moving in a continuous space they collide with each other, forming their friendships.â€
After a collision, a particle moves in a different direction with an updated velocity, just as how an individual’s chance of meeting a new person depends on their most recent acquaintances.
At a critical point, the system reaches a quasi-stationary state, for the first time allowing the scientists to reproduce several features of social networks in a single model and in a natural way. Specifically, this technique accurately describes social clustering, the way friendships evolve over time, the shortest path length in a large group, and some features related to group structure.
(via SlashDot)
 While Brandy Amy and I were together, we took the opportunity to watch another Doctor Who. We started in Florida and finished in Washington. A 3rd Doctor episode from spring of 1971. Still before I was born, but not by much. This time it was the turn of The Claws of Axos. It has the Master in it, which is always fun. And some gold people. And some big orange blobby things that look like someone with a blanket over their heads… oh yes, because it IS people with blankets over their heads!
This is an OK Doctor Who I guess, but not outstanding. They seem to be waiting longer to release on DVD the ones that are real classics. Taking longer to restore them and such I guess. And of course we have yet to reach the 4th Doctor, who was my favorite, although I kinda liked the 5th and 7th too.
But this had some good stuff. When the Doctor decided it was time to escape, even if it mean going with the Master. Good stuff. Lets see, better than Spearhead from Space, the last one we watched. And I think better than the Mind Robber, the one before that. But The Seeds of Death, from before that, was better than this. I think the whole trapped on Earth thing they did with the first few seasons of the 3rd Doctor never really worked. The next DVD we’ll watch is the one where he finally gets to leave though.
We need to pick up the pace on the Doctor Who episodes. I want to make sure Amy sees some of the original Sarah Jane Smith episodes and K9 before we hit the new Sarah Jane and K9 episode that’s coming up for the 10th Doctor… I’m sure they’ll make it so you don’t NEED the background, but it will be more fun with I am sure. The whole being in different states though makes it tough though.
Oh, and for those of you who didn’t see it when it was new, it starts up this Friday on the SciFi Channel here in the US. Of course, they’ll add commercials to it and probably mess up some editing to make it fit right in the time slot, but OK. Also, I’m sure it will not do as well in ratings as it would have, because I’m sure most folks who were die-hard and really wanted to see it already have. So after they show last year’s episodes I won’t be holding my breath for this year’s episodes to be promptly available or anything. But it will be there. I won’t pretend it is not an acquired taste though, especially for Americans. This new version is quite the hit right now over in the UK though and is doing quite well in the ratings. So who knows, but…
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