samuraipanda.com

The great thing about the Internet is how fast the world can collectivly check facts. This became very apparent at the end of the 2004 presidential election when CBS used (intentionally or not) fake documents about Bush’s servive. People from around the world dissected it almost instantly, revealing it’s origin as a fake.

Jump to today and you have people running for Congress (Kaloogian) posting pictures (on the right) of “Iraq” and how calm it is. Problem is that the image may not be of Iraq. Instead, people from around the world have decended on this picture to point out the flaws and problems, ending with a well documents image like the one on the left. The research may or not be valid, but the important concept is that research is being done. Our “facts” are being checked. That’s why things like wikipedia.org are so useful. People check the facts.

Now if I can just get CSPAN to do a pop-video version of the next Presidential debate with tape delayed speakers having their facts check by a bi-partasian group of people.

Update (3/29): Apparently, Kaloogian’s webmaster posted the wrong picture.  Intentional or not, it shows how quickly the Internet, the collective fact checking of the world, can quickly root out the truth.

I don’t do much photo-blogging.  I just haven’t been a big photo person.  But I recognize the potential and fun of the entire concept.  Flickr really pioneered the entire community concept of photo-blogging.  They opened it up to the masses with the free service.  It’s still one of the most popular sites on the net.

But there’s a new challenger vying for it’s place.  Called Riya, it offers a all the same features as Flickr, but with an interesting addition: face recognition.  It makes perfect sense.  Most people’s pictures are of people, normally friends and family.  My parents literally have thousands of pictures of friends and family sitting in a box with no idea who’s in how many of them.  Imagine how face recognition could help with sorting the files.  I could type in “Mom” and have it return all the pictures of my mom.  It makes it so much more intuitive to handle pictures.

Of course there are privacy concerns.  If I have a face recognition pattern for me on my pictures, will that also recognize my face in other peoples photos?  What about those of us who don’t want to be “recognized”?  Will we have the option to block our face from the recognition software?

In the end though, this type technology will open up unexplored areas of application.  People will be able to do and share things previously unavailable.  It’s an amazing time to play.

Apparently the executive branch is above the law. The President is capable, under constitutional power, to ignore the laws of the land. At least that’s how the Bush administration feels.

I’m all for a decisive executive branch. The President is there to make quick decisions in emergency situations. But the founders of this country were afraid of an overly strong executive branch. Having freed themselves from an oppressive monarchy (King George), they didn’t want to duplicate the environment that fostered a monarchy. Believing in a government for the people, they established three branches of government: the Executive (President), Legislative (Congress), and Judicial (the Supreme Court). There goal was to develop a government that was capable of functioning without giving any one group ultimate power. These checks and balances led to an effective (albeit slow) government without the threat of any one group of people easily gaining unchecked power.

What the founders didn’t or couldn’t anticipate was the wholesale collusion of the three branches to defeat those checks and balances. When the Republicans garnered power in all three branches, they were able to act as a unified group to disrupt the checks put into place by giving the President unfettered power. This disruption of balance in the government has resulted in a society that is deeply divided and the vast majority of America being unhappy with its government.

So, then the President steps up and says “I will sign any law, but I reserve the right to ignore them”. I said I was for a decisive executive and I am, as long as that executive is held responsible for its decisions. More importantly the people need to be aware of those decisions, otherwise there is no accountability in government.

I was listening to Penn Jilletts’ podcast the other day. He had a great line about religion filling in the margins. His point was that in a science text, in any text really, there are things that are not explained. Maybe they aren’t known or maybe they are just missed, but it’s this gaps that religion lives for, filling the margins of the book with magic and mystery to explain the gaps. Of course, as science evolves, it fills these gaps with reality, forcing religion to move on to other gaps. It’s in these margins that religion lives, giving people “answers” to mysteries that are yet to be solved.

and he went on one of his obnoxious, “I’m smarter then you” rants about religion.

One of the things I like most about science is that fundamental tenets can be revisited and, ultimately, abandoned if a better alternative is found. Case in point, the Black Hole. Long an exotic element in the science (and fictional) world, scientists have proposed that they might, in fact, not exist at all. Instead a process called “quantum critical phase transition” creates effects similar to those predicted with black holes. But more importantly, something so embedded in societies collective conscious is being challenged by the very types of people that postulated it’s existence in the first place. Science it willing to change.

The exact opposite of that willingness is religious text. The divinely inspired word of God can’t be challenged, can’t be questioned because by definition, God can’t be wrong. If a text was effectively written by God, then that text must be correct. While this would be true if the text were written by God, most, and most likely all, of the “divinely” inspired text was written by man. The followers just assumed that it has to be handed down by God.

So science, unlike religion, changes over time. It takes what we observe in the world and creates theories. If someone else comes up with a better theory, then it is evaluated, and if truly better fit, it is adopted. Religion, on the other hand tries to remain static, and that’s what ultimately leads to any religions downfall.

My external firewire died on my Mac the other day. Died as in dead. Well, it’s in a zombie like state in which the Mac won’t recognize it and a PC tells me it only has a 130GB of space even though it’s a 200GB drive. Fortunately all of my data is backed up every night thanks to Deja Vu (a great little backup app). So for the last couple of days I have been getting my Mini back up to speed. Of course, I didn’t back up my applications folder, so it’s been a process of collecting all those little apps that make my Mac a little easier to use. But that aside, I’ve also been restoring my data into the appropriate apps. I use iCal, Address Book, and iTunes with local data (I keep my email on the server), so I was a little afraid that I would lose any context my data had with those apps. Surprisingly it’s been an easy process of putting the data back once I figured out the (not-so) secret voodoo steps of restoring data into the apps.

There are two things that I copied to get the apps working with my data. The first were any directories in ~/Library/Application Support that matched the app in question (in my case iCal and Address Book). Once those were copied, I then went to ~/Library/Preferences and copied the com.apple.* files that matched the apps (in my case iCal, Address Book, iPhoto, and iTunes). Finally, with iPhoto and iTunes I had to copy the actual music and images to the appropriate directory (~/iPhoto Library and ~/Music, respectively). Once that was done the apps just found the data.

Sometimes Macs do “just work”.

Apparently, in addition to receiving a call from outside the country, paying off your debts is cause for a Homeland Security investigation. The culture of fear that pervades the United States reminds me of USSR in the 80′s. If you did anything “outside the norm” you were under suspicion and open for an investigation. It’s kind of like visas today. In the 80′s it was a joke that you had to leap through hoops to get a visa to visit an Eastern Block country. You’d be questioned about why you were going, who you were visiting, where you were staying. Today, the exact same thing is happening in the USA. People from other countries are routinely denied access to this country because of where they were born. It’s a scary thing that we’ve given up so much of what we once considered important in the name of security.

Missouri wants to adopt a state religion.  I can hear the protests now.  More importantly I can hear the supporters.