BunkBlog

I’m continually amazed at how frequently what “everyone knows” about an event is wrong. For instance, did you know that the Columbine shootings in 1999 were actually intended to be a massive bombing? Fortunately for the students there, the bombs didn’t actually go off, but they were placed in the cafeteria. Almost nobody knows that, but almost everyone “knows” that the two shooters were part of the Trench Coat Mafia; they weren’t. Everyone knows the two shooters were bullied by jocks; they weren’t. Two girls were shot because they were Christian; also not true – Cassie Bernall’s entire exchange with Harris was when he yelled “Peek a boo” before he shot her.

So, this week we have another shooting. First reports are that three men, including a U.S. Army Major (and psychiatrist, ironically) shot dozens of people with handguns and M-16 rifles, and the Major was reported as killed by a police officer who lay fatally injured himself. Turns out, the Major isn’t dead. Neither is the cop. There are, as of now, no other shooters identified by law enforcement and none are expected. ABC reported that Hasan was a convert to Islam; his brother says they were raised Muslims. He’s been rumored to be a sleeper agent; apparently sleeping since his birth in Virginia to Muslim parents.

At this point, so soon after the shootings and while the gunman is in custody to be questioned, could everyone just take a moment to stop and NOT speculate or repeat rumors?

When I awoke this morning, the internet was missing.  I was very sad, but figured it would be back up when I got home.  It’s not been dead for more than a few minutes in a couple years. I can’t get to many of my geek sites from work, and even if I could they block video and  I don’t have speakers and… SIGH

The home internet is still not up.  Good thing the coffee shop has free wifi.  Yay for free wifi.

And so it begins continues….

My lovely bride and I have completed our first year of wedded bliss. It’s been a great year. Well, the getting laid off and burning through all our savings and putting off home improvement projects for 10 months and the car accident and the repairs we didn’t expect on the truck…not so much great there. But, we muddled through all the minutiae and trivial nonsense everyone deals with in life, together.

Some people continue to claim that our lack of major disagreements and complete lack of yelling and fighting means that we are repressing something vitally important. We contend that we just get along well. It helps that we both have the same basic view of the universe and how important some things are and how unimportant most other things are.

We’ll see how outside forces conspire to deflect our plans, but hopefully we’ll actually stay on track to our great goals of vacationing out of state, getting the hot tub installed, painting the house a less-putrid shade, and saving up for an eventual move out of West Texas. Even if things don’t work out as we plan, we’re still happy and that’s something no outside force is going to change.

Love you, pumpkin.

Kat here!  Halloween will be our first anniversary.  Yep- Last year on October 31^st we were married in the courthouse, walked across the street and voted for Obama, and then had an amazing lunch at Peasant Village.  I tell people that if I hadn’t married Gary, he would have been my best friend and I would have been secretly in love with him.  I lucked out and became Mrs. Bunker.

There is a great cohesion between us.  Our former marriages had similar lengths and our foolish pride kept us hanging in way beyond our former unions’ expiration dates.  So we had the same wounds, the same concerns and the same longings.  I’m not saying it is formulaic, but I believe it helped that we stood on the same ground when we met.  Still no arguments, name-calling, raised voices or passive aggressive actions… just loads of affection, great conversation and always, always- missing each other terribly when we are apart.  In our future are vacation plans to California, another cruise and moving in the next couple of years (possibly out of state!).  We rock!  Love rocks!  Go Bearcat!

Remember that adapid fossil from back in May? Turns out, all that breathless excitement over this “missing link” was premature and erroneous. Of course, most scientists would have told you the same thing in May, since the research was published on the Discovery Channel before it was peer-reviewed, the adapid line is actually not considered an ancestral family from humans, and a few other reasons too no doubt.

This is exactly why I dislike the automatic “missing link” verbiage that gets attached to any story about any prehistoric primate or ape. First of all, it’s ridiculously misleading to think of evolution as a series of links in some sort of chain. And, secondly, when your missing link turns out to have been on a different tree branch, the less-informed just use it as another bludgeon to hit the “ain’t no monkeys in my family tree” drum. Darwinius Masillae remains an interesting fossil and a remarkably well-preserved 45 million-year old find, but it’s not a human ancestor. Take that, premature publication!

On the other hand, this is a great example of why science needs to be better respected in this country. Unlike any other method of dealing with the world throughout history, science is willing (sometimes eager) to admit mistakes, and is always self-correcting. Every scientist wants to make a name for him or herself; proving your peers are wrong in a big way is a great way to do that. That it also advances human knowledge is a great thing for those of us not in the research world. Where would any of us be if previous generations had decided that any evidence contrary to “electricity is magic” was heretical and would be ignored? I’m rather glad to have this here electronic typewritery thingy.

I was very heartened to see, when I went to the local grocery store yesterday, a massive crowd blocking my way to the frozen food. While normally I’d be much happier to see a virtually empty store, because people slow down my shopping, this week is different. The path to the freezers goes through the pharmacy. I’m happy to see so many people (mostly elderly from my quick glance, who are after all at greatest risk along with small children) lining up for their flu shots. Apparently, even here in the heart of wingnuttery, people still realize that vaccines have a long history of saving lives. Of course, it’s possible that the elderly are more likely to take vaccines because they remember the days before many of them were available. Telling someone whose elementary school was decimated by polio that vaccines are a hoax probably won’t fly. A person who is far too familiar with the iron lung won’t be swayed by some nutball hypothesis about ill-defined toxins and conspiracy theories surrounding doctors and pharmaceutical companies and government organizations.

Yay for common sense and actual facts.

Thinkgeek has a problem with their April Fool’s Day gags – some people actually want to buy them. In 2007, they posted the 8-bit tie as a gag. So many people wrote in, it’s now part of their catalog. This year, they invented the then-satirical Tauntaun Sleeping Bag. They’re gonna sell them in November. There ya go, Lys.  🙂

I hate the breathless and somewhat hyperbole-laden reporting of every new fossil find. This month, it’s Ardipithecus Ramidus, which the press is calling the “oldest pre-human” fossil. Um, wouldn’t the oldest pre-human fossil be the oldest fossil? This obsession with a “missing link” between humanity and the rest of the animal kingdom is a bit tiresome. There are jillions of links, and there are undoubtedly going to be jillions more found in the future. Every time someone finds something from the primate branch, the media goes into a veritable frenzy.

Of course, we find anything which casts any light on our own branch of the tree much more interesting than the spectacular specimens of pre-whale fossils back in February. But to claim that this Ardipithecus shows that we didn’t evolve from chimps is ridiculous. Nobody claims we did. Some biologists and anthropologists may use the shorthand of saying we evolved from something that looked something like a modern chimp, but nobody ever said that we evolved and chimps stopped. Evolution doesn’t work that way. Everything is just as “highly evolved” as everything else. Each species occupies a niche for which it has become adapted over eons. That doesn’t in any way mean that humans are the most evolved form of life – we’re just the only ones who write about it.

Oh, and scientists have been writing about Ardipithecus since at least 1999, and even pointed out that it was a hominid but not a common ancestor with modern chimps back in 2001.

Farewell to one of the great writers of our time. One more of the old guard, those with intellectual honesty and some hint of nuance in their beliefs and writing, has left the world.

Why are the same people who claimed two years ago that any disrespect toward the President was treasonous are now the loudest ones claiming the President is not even American himself? Intellectual consistency must be very difficult.

USGov removes 3.6mil funding from ACORN, which is about 52 seconds worth of the federal budget. This is what passes for big news.

Bob Bennett (R-Mars) is currently harping about how awful Czars are in the U.S. government – they undermine the Constitution. From Senator Bennett’s website, this is one of his proud accomplishments during his tenure:

I don’t think I can add anything to that.

For what seems the infinitiest time, another media industry honcho has said something which makes you wonder about his sanity. APN News & Media chief executive Brendan Hopkins said the following recently:

“To use an analogy, I see search engines as breaking into our homes, itemising the contents, walking out and listing everything for everyone to see. And they get money out of that process.”

Really? And when Jack Valenti told Congress, “I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone,” that didn’t turn out to be a bit over the top and perhaps even, dare I say it, completely wrong?

If search engines are showing the table of contents of news sites, then aren’t they driving more traffic to the site?  Isn’t Google News essentially giving the New York Times and other media sites free advertising?  You can’t read the whole article on Google – you have to go to the news site. How is that in any way equated to theft? For that matter, how does one steal a good which is intangible and effectively infinite anyway?

When the media companies get a little pinch of economic hard times, they claim that people are stealing from them, that the world will come to an end if they don’t get paid what they want (rather than what the market will bear), etc. And every time throughout history, they’ve been proven wrong. Sheet music didn’t kill singing. Piano rolls didn’t destroy piano bars. Radio didn’t raid the coffers of the record companies. VCRs did not cause the complete collapse of the movie industry. MP3 players have still, after 10 years, failed to completely annihilate the recording industry, despite the music executives best efforts to jump on a sword or two. In most cases, the new technology has actually been a boon for the existing industry eventually. Stop thinking that your business involves one particular format, and think about what people actually want to buy. People don’t want records or CDs; they want music. People don’t want newspapers or magazines; they want information and pictures. Give your customers what they want in a convenient form they want, and your industry will boom. Prevent them from accessing your media and you’ll soon find you have very little media left to sell. People will read the news online, just maybe not from your company, if you make it too hard to do. It’s possible you’re just making buggy whips and everyone has moved to cars.

This is all in the context of folks like Rupert Murdoch saying he’s going to lock up his news sites behind pay walls, so that people must pay to read his NY Post articles. Hmmm… The NY Times actually took down their pay wall a while back. Their presence online suddenly became much larger, they got more traffic and I’d assume higher advertising revenue. It must be said that the Times is actually talking about rebuilding their pay wall; I’m sure it will be much more successful the second time around. /snark

Nobody puts Baby in the corner.

Just one more example of why I avoid that place.

After 8 years, Apple finally adds an FM radio to one type (of several) of iPod. One more thing?

While there was originally some controversy about the feasability of the “liquid explosive” concept, the case has been decided this week. Three of the eight men linked to the plot have been convicted of plotting to bomb airliners; a fourth was convicted of conspiracy to murder.

These men were detected using intercepted communications under a FISA warrant. They were kept in a normal jail until they went to normal court to be sentenced by a normal judge in the UK. They will soon be placed into a regular prison, where they will expect to spend many years with their fellow British prisoners, whom they plotted to kill.  I don’t expect them to have a good time there.

Somehow, there are commentators who claim this is in some way a vindication of warrantless wiretaps, extraordinary rendition, secret prisons, or military tribunals. Um…no.  Every single step of this case followed existing laws, and once the men were in custody the case was in the public view. It seems this proves that our (and British) law enforcement and intelligence professionals are quite capable of catching bad guys within the law as it stands today. Good for us, bad for bad guys.

On August 25th, four hundred years ago, Galileo Galilei showed his telescopes to the Venetian lawmakers. With the Galileoscope the Boy and I assembled this weekend, we observed the four satellites of Jupiter that are called today the Galilean moons: Ganymede, Io, Europa and Callisto.  Then the clouds covered them up again.

Although a bit later in the year than I’d hoped we have received our two Galileoscopes (no, I don’t know why I bought two of them, other than they were cheap so why not?), and they’re very spiffy. We’re using the basic 25x magnification right now, although we may put together the 50x eyepiece to peer at Jupiter more closely tomorrow. We should be able to see the Great Red Spot about 10:30pm this week. Not sure about how that will go. The Boy can’t seem to avoid bumping the scope, making massive changes in view far too common. The Woman, of course, was much better and caused no problems when she looked at Jupiter and its four moons.  Very cool night.

Somehow, the Boy convinced me to get up at 6am on a non-work day, so we could peer at Venus and Mars. I’ll let you know how that goes.

Well, that sucks.

Remember the touching story of Roxanne Shante, former teen mother from the projects turned rap star, who got her evil record company (Warner Music) to pay for her doctorate? Not all that true. Like, pretty much none of it is true. OK, maybe it’s a bald-faced lie.

Shante, or Lolita Gooden as she’s legally named, claims to have an M.A. from Cornell, but Cornell says, “who’s that?”  She also calls herself “Dr. Shante” even though she freely admits she has no doctorate of any kind. Also, she never had a contract with Warner Music, and the companies she did have contracts with say they never put some education clause into any contract ever.

To make this more of a he said-she said thing, nobody can come up with a copy of any of these contracts. To muddy the waters further, she was listed on a page of notable Cornell alumni as of last week; her name is missing from that list now. Shante was mentioned as a Cornell alum in an article about a hiphop summit; that mention was excised this week. She still is listed as a PhD recipient in another Cornell article, as of this writing. That’s obviously in error, as she admits she never got a PhD.

Goes to show, you can’t trust anything you read.

Should I be concerned that the IT field services rep for my company (who has a long list of acronyms in his signature block) referenced “Duel booting” between Windows and lynx?  I’m not sure if I’d trust someone who wants a text-based browser fighting with an operating system…