Third image is snakebit

January 23rd, 2012

I have a third image but it is snakebit. It takes so longer to render that I get bored and start running other programs, and then the box overhears or something and crashes. This happened twice. So I decided, virtuously, I will start the render and then *go to bed* and let it run overnight.

I started the render, watched it for a couple of minutes to be sure it was going to run … and the power went off. This machine is not a laptop. It went off too. So, I’ll get the next image done when I can.

Sunset

January 22nd, 2012
Sunset over island

Sunset over island

Another image for anyone who might want to look at this blog.

Plains of Leng

January 22nd, 2012
Plains of Leng

Snowy mountains across the barren, windswept plain

Something to look at since I have nothing to say.

Lamar Smith, the SOPA dope

January 20th, 2012

The Hill reports that House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) continues to stay bought (well, perhaps those are not their exact words). He is determined to allow his paymasters in Hollywood the power to destroy the Internet using the U.S. government as their enforcer:

“Any time I challenge them [opponents] to come up with ways to reduce online piracy, I never hear any answers,” Smith said, noting that copyright holders must obtain a court order to go after rogue sites and that only “the worst of the worst” offenders would be targeted.

Oh, right. The same way the existing draconian laws were used only against the worst of the worst and not used by slimy lawyers to shake down cat-bloggers and people on disability who couldn’t afford to defend against obviously unjustified lawsuits.  Right.

I have a suggestion for Rep. Smith: this ghastly law should at least provide that anyone who brings an action under it must put up a cash bond sufficient to cover the opponents’ reasonable attorneys fees. Further, if the action is found to be in bad faith (e.g., the claimant didn’t own the copyright in the first place), then the Court *shall impose* personal liability and punitive damages on those human beings who caused it to be brought. Some human beings make the decision to proceed; they should not be allowed to hide behind LLCs. 

If the penalties for false claims are strong enough, perhaps the Internet will survive even this.

Anti-blacklist blackout

January 18th, 2012

Here is EFF’s comment on the Internet blackout in protest of SOPA and PIPA, which continue to wend their way through Congress since, of course, members of Congress (America’s own distinctive criminal class) vote as directed by their paymasters and not as directed by the People of the United States.

I think politicians are utter solipsists, and simply do not recognize that they are surrounded by real people who really look at their threats and actions and then take real actions in response.

These proposed laws, for example, might conceivably be defeated, but in that unlikely event, they will simply be reintroduced again and again and again, perhaps in a more modest form at first, in true camel’s-nose-under-the-tent fashion, but in the end Leviathan will seize the Internet and move to shut down all that unregulated political speech that has been so annoying to politicians the past few years. And, of course, in the process Leviathan will stomp all over everyone and everything else.

But, of course, anyone who’s been paying attention knows that now. To this point, the United States has controlled the main DNS servers on which everyone ultimately relies. People have complained, but there’s been no incentive to try to “wire around” them. Now there is. Now people all over the world are going to be looking at how to break chunks of the Internet away from U.S. control, which is good in terms of preventing Leviathan from destroying it outside the U.S. (inside it is doomed, of course), but which is bad in terms of producing an ever-more-fragmented set of Internets, all ripe for censorship within their own countries.

Oops

January 17th, 2012

I spoke too soon yesterday. The assault on the Internet continues apace.

As Instapundit says, “Say this much for Lamar Smith: When he’s bought, he stays bought.”

SOPA dopes on the ropes?

January 16th, 2012

Well, it’s too early to really feel safe, but the claim is that the House of Representatives have decided not to shut down the Internet. Of course, the Senate is still working on that with their equivalent of SOPA, PIPA.

So we’re not out of the woods, but there’s some hope the Internet will be allowed to exist for another year. I assume (and hope!) the boffins will continue to work on figuring out how to wire around American censorship just like they do around Chinese and Iranian censorship. It’s not like this threat will ever really go away.

Christian-bashing

January 16th, 2012

I sometimes visit The Panda’s Thumb because I like to read the science, but the comment sections usually degenerate into — if they don’t start as — Christian-bashing. 

Christian-bashing really annoys me. When I was eight or nine, I would have enthusiastically joined in, but I’m not eight or nine now and I don’t think the commenters are either, so I think they could knock it off.  Some Christians are jerks, ignorant, deranged — all kinds of bad things. Some atheists and agnostics are too. Some of any large group will be. But that doesn’t justify the vilification of all Christians (or atheists, agnostics, etc.).

One of the many things that annoys me about the Panda’s Thumb commenters is their version of the “No True Scotsman” fallacy. (The “No True Scotsman” goes like this.  A says, “A Scotsman wouldn’t do thus and such”. B says, “Well, C does and he’s a Scotsman”. A says, “No true Scotsman would do thus and such, and C isn’t a true Scotsman”.)

The way this comes up on The Panda’s Thumb is that someone will bash Christians because of some individual’s claims or actions and Christians will respond that his claims or actions were not Christian. The Panda’s Thumb commenters will then sneer, “No True Scotsman fallacy!” and “A Christian can only be identified by the fact that he says he’s a Christian, so that guy’s a Christian, nyahh, nyahh”. 

This offends me.  It pretends that there is no substance whatsoever to Christian belief; that Christianity is an empty vessel into which absolutely anything can be poured.  This simply isn’t true, and it’s a deliberate and completely unwarranted insult.

All Christians share certain identifiable core beliefs, even though they differ on the nuances. Christianity is a monotheistic religion; though there are arguments about how, exactly, Jesus Christ and the Holy Ghost fit in, there is no doubt in Christianity that there is one God who created the entire universe from nothing, and that this is the same God who presides over the Earth and to whom Christians pray.  The exact relationship between God and Satan differs in different sects, as I understand it, but there is no doubt that Satan is less powerful and is another created being, not an independent god.

So you really can identify certain people who claim to be Christians as not being Christians. For instance, someone who claims that human beings can kill God and get a new one if he doesn’t acquiesce to their demands, isn’t a Christian. In the Christian religion, it’s absurd to claim that human beings can kill the Creator of the universe, and human beings can’t get a new god, because there is only one God (and God is under no obligation to acquiesce to the demands of His creatures anyway, and if He doesn’t do what they pray, their obligation is to accept His mysterious ways).

In my opinion, anyone who says, “if God doesn’t do what we demand, we’ll kill Him and get new gods”, is not a Christian but rather is an atheist since he or she plainly believes that gods are created by human beings and are answerable to them — in other words, they are not gods at all.

The Children of Men

January 15th, 2012

Today I read The Children of Men by P. D. James.  This is fiction. It is, I think, mainstream fiction rather than science fiction.  I’ve read science fiction my whole life, so I read it thinking about the world-building and how it hung together.  I suspect that is not the way you’re supposed to read mainstream fiction.

The story is set in a world where the entire male half of the human race has been completely sterile for twenty-five years, starting in late 1995 with the book starting in early 2021.  Early on it describes the realization that not only were all human males sterile, but also all stored sperm in sperm banks had become nonviable as well.  This discovery cast the “pall of superstitious awe, of witchcraft, of divine intervention.”

Well, yeah. What else could it be but something supernatural that could cause about three billion males to simultaneously become sterile and *also* frozen sperm that were locked away from outside influence to likewise be affected?  This bothered me. 

I think that, as the sterility plague manifested itself insidiously, the sperm in sperm banks would have been slowly used up, the oldest being used first, or discarded because it was thought that it might become damaged by being kept frozen a long time (freezer burn, perhaps). But no one would have been worried because new deposits were being made.  It was only when the situation was already beyond retrieval that they realized that they’d used up all the old, viable sperm and none of the newer stuff was viable.  Thus, there need be nothing supernatural about the problem, even if people thought there was.

Oh, well, maybe that’s exactly what did happen, but the unreliable narrator doesn’t know it, so the situation seems supernatural to him. I decided that was what had really happened and I went on from there.

Then, all the relatively young men and women in England are required to come in for fertility tests every six months.  Not all of them, actually. Those less than physically perfect — a man who had a mild case of epilepsy in childhood, a woman with a deformed hand — were not required to submit to this.

First, this seems pretty pointless, particularly with respect to the women. Apparently there was no concern about their fertility; they were as fertile as ever. The problem was with the men, so I don’t see any point testing the women. I guess they were making an inventory of “acceptable” women so if any man did turn up fertile, all the acceptable women within a hundred miles could be dragged in and no sperm would be wasted on women who had possibly become infertile since last year.  I guess.

It seems a waste of effort to me, though. Were I in the shoes of the Warden (ruler of England), I’d have people working feverishly on human cloning, others working on inducing eggs to fuse with each other (hey, they’re both gametes, after all), and still others even working on crossbreeding humans and chimpanzees (if you can just get some fertile male offspring, you can try breeding back to human females).  Heck, i’d be trying to set up a colony on the Moon, Mars if we could reach it, and certainly underground. Maybe the problem is something on Earth and we can escape it on other spheres. Maybe it’s something in the sunlight. When you’re looking at human extinction, why would you hesitate at the longest shots?

And why on Earth would you exclude *anybody* from your testing?  Assuming you found a fertile male, no matter how unfortunate his genetic endowment, you’d have essentially half the human race with which to dilute it. You’d *want* him to breed with women of every race, the more the better, to get maximum genetic diversity. You’d want his sons to do the same, since there’d still be a lot of fertile women in their late 30s, early 40s, when his sons hit puberty.

Speaking of his sons, what about his daughters? There’d be no fertile males except their father and their half-brothers or, if they waited until their mid-20s, their half-nephews.  Even putting them aside, by the time his grandsons were old enough to breed — at age twelve — there’d be no one under the age of fifty who was not at least a first cousin to them.  You’re going to have genetic problems no matter what with only one male progenitor, so there’s no point trying to exclude the imperfect. That seems obviously dumb to me.  Instead of wasting time and effort testing women for fertility, just test all the men, perfect and imperfect alike.  If you find a fertile male, you can save the human race and *then* worry about the genetic issues.

Tomorrow I’ll write about my reaction to the story, not just the world-building.  

Oklahoma weather forecast

January 13th, 2012

It’s always fun to look at Oklahoma weather forecasts.  For Sunday, we have a high of 61°F and a low that night of 45°F.  Unusually warm, right?

Monday’s even warmer, with a high of 70°F and a low that night of … 22°F.  Did I read that right?

The high Tuesday is only 40°F, with Tuesday night down to 23°F, so I guess I did read it right. 

It ought to be interesting when that cold front comes through on Monday.