Blog Archives 051016 to 050918

Old pointless chatter instead of new pointless chatter.

 

051016 Raleigh, NC, USA
Transience can be really annoying. The major reason I've been doing a blog is as a way of keeping in contact with friends and family. However, part of the reason I've been doing it has been (for my own interest) to capture experiences, thoughts, etc. which might otherwise be forgotten. Still, enshrining something in electronic format does not guarentee it will last. Back in grad school, for fun, I had a series of web pages I called my "Water Stupidity" site. I'd spent a lot of time gathering information about various forms of "magic water" that people were successfully selling to an unwitting public. There was "Aqua Resonance", "Vitamin O", "Biowater", and several others. I'd posted descriptions of what water is and is not, critiques and deconstructions of the pseudoscientific claims, and both sides of email debates I'd had with "true believers" who wrote me after taking offense at my critique of the various "magic" water formulations. Anyway, it was a significant time expenditure, but I thought it was sort of interesting and a public good, since my "Water Stupidity" site was getting a lot of hits by people looking for information on these water "cures". Unfortunately, it was hosted by Duke and Duke deleted the site when I graduated. I have not been able to find my copy of the web pages, so it is gone. Lots of hours of work gone kapoof.

Really, this makes it no different from thing in the physical world. The one constant is change. Things you've loved or worked hard on can disappear in the blink of an eye. You just have to accept impermanence as the nature of the world and move on.

Oh, yeah, my only news to report is a computer problem resulted in my losing all my web Bookmarks... Gee, could that have been the cause of today's sort of philosophical post?

051012 Raleigh, NC, USA
During the approximately 2.75 years of this world-roving rotation, I will need the use of a car for only the short posting here in North Carolina. The company here decided to give me the use of one of the fleet of cars they keep here for use by the sales and marketing people... It's nice. A nice car, with a company gas card and a company maintenance card. While my neighbors complain about the gas prices, I literally don't have to think about the price of gas at all. Still, since there are several coworkers who live along my route to work, I have joined in a carpool with three others and we carpool to and from work.

Hey, I may have no financial incentive, but I'm environmentalist enough to save energy when I can. Since I'm the one with the company gas card, I'm stuck driving all the time, but I thought the carpool would be a nice social way to start the day. Unfortunately, the other three are all in the same Fantasy Football league, so every morning it is a half hour of Football player statistics discussions and every evening it is a half hour of either work talk or more Football player statistics discussions. They are nice guys, but their unending enthusiasm for discussions of interceptions, injury lists, etc. ... Since I don't follow Football, it is sort of like listening to a bunch of birdwatchers enthusiastically discuss the majesty of seeing a frilled waxwing from 200 yards away: I understand they are excited and really into it and yet I can't help but be bored stupid. Hm. I'll have to keep tossing out other conversational gambits until I find something in which we'll all be interested. Wish me luck.

051010 Raleigh, NC, USA
Work has kept me hopping and I'm darn tired this Monday evening, despite having caught up on sleep this weekend. The only new bit on the site is the fact that, for the heck of it, I decided to post the Chinese verions of The Art of Reviling, "Ma ren di yi shu". There's some bonus information there, and comments at the top of the page if you feel like checking it out.

051009 Raleigh, NC, USA
There is a different pace to these entries when written versus typed. The slower speed of writing longhand leads to more introspection and observation, I think. You, my reader(s), probably can not tell, but I know what was written and what was typed.

Having a car to drive is nice, but needing a car to drive kinda sucks. I really liked the mass transit of København. I really liked the ability to just take a short wander and be able to chose from a dozen restaurants. Also, I liked being someplace where adults were treated like adults. By that last bit, I'm referring to the fact that North Carolina has laws restricting the sale of whiskey to ABC Package Stores. If the laws were put in place for the sake of public health, they'd be better off restricting Bojangle's Fried Chicken places. My apartment complex is bracketed by greasy fast food places and southern cuisine remains as lard-drenched as ever. So far, I think that life around here will make it hard to maintain healthy habits. It is really too bad that this area is so bike-unfriendly.
Current mood: restless and empty.

051008 Raleigh, NC, USA
For the first time since moving back to North Carolina, I went over to 9th street in Durham. 9th Street was the closest thing Duke has to the typically student hang-out street that Universities typically have near them. 9th Street is basically the same as always. There are two sports bars where there was once a failing hardware store and a failed Garage, and a pastry shop has shifted locations by about a block, but almost everything else is unchanged. Mr. Fields is still sitting in front of Fields' Laundry, chatting with passer-bys, the beefy ukulele player still plays on the sidewalk next to the Regulator bookstore, etc.

As I was driving over to 9th Street, I was musing to myself that I have never in my adult life (except perhaps during Grad School) lived somewhere long enough to grow with a place. Now I'm thinking that would take a really long time... 10-20 years perhaps. I have no idea how long it will take before I settle someplace for that long.

051006 Raleigh, NC, USA
Time is flying by and I am keeping myself quite busy still. For those of you who think I've been heavy-handed with my politics, you ain't seen nuthin'. Here are a few points of reference that I consider heavy-handed:

Go to the web site of A Perfect Circle. Hit the refresh button a few times and you will eventually see all 14 "patriotic" posters. Next, if the posters were too subtle and you want something more clearly anti-administration, click on music, then click on watch, then click on one of the links (low, medium, or high) to watch the video for "Counting Bodies Like Sheep To The Rhythm Of War Drums". For those of you without RealPlayer, the cartoon music video starts off with a crumbling peace sign, followed by blood-pumping oil rigs, followed by Bush riding a horse that craps out TVs that turns kids to sheep which Bush then slaughters later. All this to a funky industrial beat. Another band, Ministry, has similarly dispensed with subtlety in the messages in their songs.

If you look for the angry Left, they are out there in force, but they are just not in the media much. It seems that the anti-war movement only got coverage once the media could pitch it as a palatable one-woman campaign human-interest story. For a solid dose of the pissed-off undercurrent on the Left, you can take a look at an obscenity-encrusted little web page called www.fuckthesouth.com... If you can get past the language, there are some interesting points and links buried in there.

I think it is OK for the Left to be angry at this point. The Right has successfully been using very emotionally charged language to fire up their supporters, sway the undecided, and win in the polls. Failing to get or sound angry at this point is a form of granting the Right the emotional advantage. I'm all for being rational and centrist, but what the Democrats have been doing has been a losing strategy. If we want some sort of centrist policies to be coming out of Washington, then we need the two sides to be a bit more evenly supported. Either allow the supporters of the Right to become as demoralized as the supporters of the Left (which the Right is not planning on allowing to happen) or the Left needs to fire up their core hard-line supporters to let them face down the hard-liners amongst the Right. Unfortunately, I don't see the Democrats making this happen. Until the Democrats or some new party finds a way of really firing up and channeling a lot of left-leaning Americans, the farther reaches of the Right will be able to do pretty much whatever they want.

I think better policy comes out when each side is forced to fight for the issues and defend their points. When one side is able to ram through most whatever they want, the policies are often not as well thought out and not as well defined, constrained, or funded. This is true no matter who holds power.

051003 Raleigh, NC, USA
Only minor updates today. Verified that my personal cell phone service had been resumed once I got back to the US. Updated my contact information to show that the cell phone number I had in Utah is once again a working number useable for contacting me. I'm making decent progress in sorting through my things and putting them away... I have easily managed to peel away about one box worth of stuff to shift to storage instead of hauling around with me, but my target was to send to storage two boxes worth. It'll be harder to fill up that second box.

051002 Raleigh, NC, USA
Not much to report. I saw Serenity last night and rather liked it. Sadly, I fear that crap like "2 Fast 2 Furious" will be a commercial success and Serenity, like Firefly, will be good but relatively unwatched. So, everyone, go get the Firefly DVDs and go watch the Serenity movie. I won't promise it is high art, but it is better than 90% of the stuff Hollywood pumps out. Oh, if you have not seen the documentary film "Fog of War - Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert McNamara", it is definitely worth seeing.

In other news, I've still been working up some of the language-related stuff for the web site. I have updated the Danish page to add a word and phrase list at the bottom. Also, I think I figured out how to do tone markings for Chinese. Let's see if this works: maˉ (high held tone), maˊ (rising tone, like at the end of an English question), maˇ (falling then rising, i.e. "scooped"), maˋ (falling, like used for stress in English), ma˙ (short, uninflected). Hmm. According to the Unicode guides, those are supposed to be "combining" diacritical marks, i.e. they are supposed to be added to letter preceding them, rather than coming after them. Oh, well. I'm sure the browser implementation of Unicode guidelines will eventually put the marks in the right place. Until then the marks are clear enough to use anyway.

050929 Raleigh, NC, USA
Yea! I got my stuff tonight! Once it was worked out which company was responsible for taking the shipment through customs, it went very fast. Honestly, it was not the wait that was a problem; it was the not knowing what was wrong or when things would be settled. Anyway, the guy making the actual delivery was willing to deliver tonight at 9:30 PM instead of tomorrow at mid-morning. This lets me take care of things without interrupting work and (more importantly) it lets me wear a new shirt. Even though I'm planning on winnowing things down further (I'm thinking about 60% of what I'm currently traveling with will be the right amount), it is nice to have my things instead of knowing they are trapped in some sort of bureaucratic limbo.

I'm sure it says more about me than about modern society, but I have noticed something: each furnished apartment I have seen comes with a TV and cable service, but no bookshelves. To me, this is sort of a sad thing. Then again, I'm the sort of person who has favorite bookstores and one that I really liked was called "Books Do Furnish A Room". I'm still hauling around far more books than is sensible, so (to my regret and relief) I'll be giving away a few more books and shipping others to my parents for storage (thanks guys!). No book giveaway page updates; I'm just parting with a few, not dozens, so I'll just give them to people I know locally.

050928 Raleigh, NC, USA
Two things I ran across lately. The first thing is the number 69105. It is a dorky Infocom joke. Go ahead and look it up at wikipedia. It's math-rific.
The other thing was a couple of references to the Catholic Church's stance on evolution: 1) Pope John Paul II declared in 1996 that evolutionary theory is compatible with Catholic doctrine and 2) just last year the International Theological Commission, under the presidency of Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) issued a statement saying that they saw no conflict between Darwin's ideas and the teachings of the Church. If those, um, concerned citizens trying to rewrite the educational guidelines in states like Kansas won't listen to the vast majority of the scientific establishment, then I suppose they are not likely to listen to the Pope(s) either. Oh, well.

050927 Raleigh, NC, USA
My entry for today went a bit long, so I moved it to it's own page. It is my thoughts on those "Support Our Troops" bumper-stickers... I call it " Really support our troops". Don't worry; it is not a rant. Lemme know what you think.

050926 Raleigh, NC, USA
I ran across something kind of cool today; the Fischer-Tropsch process. Click on the link to be taken to the wikipedia entry for it. Anyway, I thought it was kind of cool because the process is a method of converting coal, municipal waste, or crop waste to fuel using an iron catalyst. Some energy industry leaders think this is the way of the future, others think fuel ethanol is the wave of the future. As with many things in life, the reality is probably neither completely one or the other, but both Fischer-Tropsch syngas and fuel ethanol will be used in the future, with the choice of fuel type depending on the requirements of different applications. Either way, it is nice to know that people are working on turning municipal waste and crop waste into alternate fuel sources.

Of course higher CO2 emissions almost always accompany higher energy use. Let's hope clever people are also working out what to do about all that extra CO2 we will be pumping out (with or without new fuel sources). That reminds me; people ought to be aware that organisms can put out emissions that affect the climate and result in them no longer being successful species... This may be why the ancient C3 grasses were replaced by the C4 grasses throughout most of the world. I'd hate for humanity to do something like that; I like to think we are smarter than grass.

050925 Raleigh, NC, USA
Today I'm thinking about insurance and stupidity. Here's an example. The bottom floor of the 1U building in Bagsværd is set into the ground a bit. Essentially, rather than being entirely above ground, it is half below ground with the windowsills at ground level. There are big drains around the building, but when the short heavy rains of spring and fall come, the drains are overloaded and rainwater can come in by the back storeroom door. The flooring is cement, with a fabric/fibre layer for padding, and then wood for the pretty finish. The rainwater that comes in can easily seep between the thin wood planks and soak into the fabric/fibre layer. With the cement not allowing the water anywhere else to go, and the fabric/fibre layer acting as a giant wick, even small spills spread out quite a bit. Now, you might think that this is not such a problem; it only affects the storeroom. Unfortunately, the layout of the floor is such that there are a few support walls, but most of the walls are not "real" walls; they are "floating" walls, where they rest upon the floor, rather than dividing the floor up. Therefore, water that gets into the storeroom spreads out under the wood into the conference room, the break room, several offices, etc. Worse yet, the layer of wood topping the wet fabric/fibre layer prevents evaporation, making a nice moist area for fungus and other such nastiness to grow. So, one heavy rain and the whole floor must be torn up and the underlying cement dried out. OK, so I have presented a case of really poor design, but where does insurance come into this equation?

Answer: Insurance will (of course) pay for the replacement of the current floor, but insurance will not pay for any upgrades or structural changes. The department can not leave the floors as bare cement, because the conference room is used whenever guests or potential customers want to take a look at the department and it's work. The smart thing would be to switch to a different floor type or at least seal the storeroom walls to the underlying concrete (preventing the water from spreading to other areas), but these are improvements for which insurance will not pay. The building is (as is true of most corporate space) leased rather than owned, so even if the department were willing to pay the money to alter the building, they would have to negotiate with the building owners, who of course prefer the flexibility the floating interior walls give. With the insurance being site-wide insurance (i.e. for lots of different buildings), the cost of replacing one cheap floor due to flood damage doesn't even affect the premiums.

Therefore, we are locked into the idiotic cycle of replacing the same stupid floor with the same stupid floor at least one time a year, if not twice a year. It is dumb and wasteful, but it is also the inevitable outcome of typical insurance rules.

Keep this in mind as people rebuild the same lethally foolish one-storey houses in the same below-sea-level neighborhoods in New Orleans. It is not that these people are that stupid; it is that they are given the choice between walking away with nothing or having insurance build them the same thing they had before.

I see a role for government here. I don't mean the usual bull-crap of giving massive hand-outs to the insurance companies to prevent them going bankrupt. That just helps perpetuate the cycle of stupidity and ensures the insurance companies continue to reap massive profits in good times and pass losses on to the tax-payer in bad times. What I mean is the fact that only the government can change the rules. For example, the government could require that housing in these areas meet the housing guidelines of (for example) the houses along the outer banks of North Carolina; the houses are all raised up, with just a garage or storage space on the first floor and living quarters on the second or higher floors. Any insurance-rebuild would need to meet these requirements. The government could also require that insurance offer a choice between rebuilding / replacing and receiving straight up cash, with the cash only being offered if people were willing to leave the more dangerous / flood-prone areas. That could be a very efficient buy-out program, reducing the population in high-risk areas. Unfortunately, I just can not picture the current administration doing any of these sorts of things. I think we are going to see more perpetuation of corporate handouts and insurance-rules-required stupidity.

050923 Raleigh, NC, USA
There has been a bit of a shipping snafu. I will apparently have to continue living out of my suitcase for some indeterminant amount of time more. Eh, at least I have what I need for work and my laptop for updating this thing from home. My wardrobe is becoming a bit repetitive, but I've never aspired to be a fashion plate.

050921 Raleigh, NC, USA
A while back, when I was still in Denmark, I was having a bad morning. You know, the sort of morning where you are just not pleased to be up and awake and you'd rather be in bed instead of in the middle of the commute to work. Anway, I was listening to my iPod on random play and when I was about 3-4 minutes away from the door to my building, the track that started to play was some sort of triumphal march. I don't remember what it was from, perhaps the soundtrack to "Gladiator" or something, but, man, walking into work with the strains of "the hero arrives" sort of music blaring through my headphones, with the final crescendo coming just as I reach the front door... Well, I was in a good mood all of that day.

A few weeks later, I was in kind of a peevish mood again while heading in to work. I thought about it and hunted up the Imperial March (Darth Vader's theme) from Star Wars to listen to for the final walk in. Also a good mood-adjuster. I'm not sure if it is because I found the implicit egomania (of having heroic music herald my arrival) funny or because the heroic music itself was a good mood adjuster, but either way, listening to heroic music as you are arriving at work seems to put you in a good mood. Give it a try some morning when you need a pick-me-up. Me, well, I have not yet put together a playlist of heroic music to use on "down" days, but I keep thinking about doing it.

In other news, I have still been working on putting together a Danish phrase listing page, but that has been held up by CSS problems; I'm having trouble getting the layout right while still allowing the page text to flow when the page size is made bigger or smaller by the user. At least I finally figured out the proper Unicode for the Elder Futhark (used for writing proto-Norse):
ᚠ [f], ᚢ [u], ᚦ [þ], ᚨ [a], ᚱ [r], ᚲ [k], ᚷ [g], ᚹ [w], ᚺ [h], ᚾ [n], ᛁ [i], ᛃ [j]; ᛇ [ï] ([ei]), ᛈ [p], ᛉ [R], ᛊ [s], ᛏ [t], ᛒ [b], ᛖ [e], ᛗ [m], ᛚ [l], ᛜ [ŋ], ᛞ [d], ᛟ [o].

I also want to eventually put together a Chinese phrase listing page. This is limited by two facts: first, I still have not figured out the Unicode to indicate the tone markings necessary for proper pronunciation, and second, I need to rewrite all my notes. What little I know was learned in Taiwan rather than mainland China. Instead of using the roman letter based phonetic transliteration used in mainland China (ex. "ma" "yu" "bo"), I used the traditional Chinese phonetic script still used in Taiwan, but not in mainland China (ex. "ㄇㄚ" "ㄧㄨ" "ㄅㄛ"). For any phrase list to be useful, I need to rewrite my notes to a transliteration that does not use this script (often called "bopomofo" or "ㄅㄛㄆㄛㄇㄛㄈㄛ"). These issues are in addition to the layout issues that are true for any attempt to create a phrase list in a flexible page size format. Wish me luck.

050919 Raleigh, NC, USA
Er, that bit I wrote yesterday about having more time at the start of a new posting? I ought to say that it may be true, after the first week or two. I am really tired. The start of a new posting is full of exhausting details and meetings. Getting the site, safety training, the site security training, the new ID badge, the new phone system, initial meetings with the new managers and all the new coworkers, piles of reports to take in to learn the new project, etc, etc. Today alone I had seven hours of meetings and training sessions. Also, I was given ten academic papers to read, two industry reports, and fifteen internal reports. Yikes. Of course, no one expects me to know it all this week, but it is also a the - sooner - the - better situation. I'm still handling the details of getting my things shipped over from Denmark and I still owe my old manager in Denmark a final report... Overload. Then again, this sort of overload and exhaustion is true for the start of each new posting and I suppose it should get easier with practice.

050918 Raleigh, NC, USA
I'm planning on spending some of my time here finally writing up some of my cultural observations of Danmark / the Danes. Right after a move, I have a lot of time in the evenings; I have not yet developed a network of friends or learned the area that well. Once I have been someplace for a while, I have more friends and activities to keep me busy. Anyway, I plan on using the time to finally mention some of the things I found interesting about Denmark. While I was there, I didn't write some things up because, when it came time to post something, it was far easier to dump out a rant on some topic I found annoying than to cogently write up a thoughtful discussion on a cultural observation. Yeah, I know it was a form of intellectual laziness to go for the rant, but at least I was posting regularly.

Page Last Modified: 2006 04 21, 08:25:44

 

 

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