Into the Void

Deadly Force Policy

Posted by Void on 12/11/2005

Fretful Passenger, Turmoil on Jet and Fatal Shots – New York Times

Even non-bipolars sometimes act in an erratic manner. In this case, the patient’s prescription had run out while he was out of the country visiting relatives. Rigoberto Alpizar and his wife were on their way home from vacation. There he was, stuck in a small tin-can full of people elbow-to-elbow. All he wanted was to step out into the airport and get some air.

The air marshals obviously weren’t very well-trained to recognize and deal with mental illness. They are trained to quickly and brutally take charge if things don’t go smoothly. It’s called DFP – “Deadly Force Policy.” There are far more mentally ill people on planes than terrorists. The FBI was investigating fewer than 700 suspected terrorists as of November according to the Washington Post, but there are well over 3,000,000 Americans with bipolar type I. Have a clue.

Don’t even get me started on the newspeople who are suggesting that I wear some kind of bipolar judenfleck when I travel. That is just plain wrong.

If you want to get really creepy about this, people from different cultures – and even different subcultures in the U.S. – may have trouble understanding each others’ body language. Bear in mind that most people aren’t aware of non-verbal communication. They can’t just wander around wasting everyone who is “different.” If you are carrying a gun in an international airport you had best be able tell Hispanics from Arabs without stopping to consult a training manual.

I believe that this all boils down to the fact that the American people have surrendered to the terrorists, whoever they may be. We had years of time to prepare for 9-11. There was even a previous attack on one of the towers. Almost 3,000 innocent people, and not just Americans, died that day. In the following months another 300,000,000 threw themselves into the grave alongside them. I just don’t get it.

Think about how you act every day. Maybe you gesticulate and talk loudly, or maybe you avoid eye contact and don’t talk to anybody at all. These are suspicious behaviors. Maybe you have a hearing impairment so you won’t know that there is a man standing behind you waving a gun and shouting. Maybe your arthritis makes it difficult to get out of the way quickly. Are you quite sure that you won’t accidentally invite an air marshal to murder you?

Categories: Politics, War. Tags: 9/11, Deadly Force, FBI, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Judenfleck, Mental disorder, National security, Rigoberto Aipizar, Sky marshal, Washington Post.

Koko the Gorilla

Posted by Void on 12/11/2005

Refer back to a previous posting.

http://koko.org/world/
Koko has a tested IQ of between 70 and 95 on a human scale, where 100 is considered “normal.”

One wag has suggested that we use gorillas as sky marshals.

I would like to point out that the wording on Koko’s site was that a 100 IQ is “normal.” What it really is, is average. 78% of the human population is in the range of 80 to 120 points.
But how does IQ work? Another way to look at it is that with a 70 IQ Koko might get through the 6th grade and hold a job doing simple tasks in a supervised environment. In reality, of course, her language limitations might make this difficult.
With an IQ of 80, she might be able to complete the 7th grade and work unsupervised in an unskilled job – washing dishes, say.
With an IQ of 90 she might graduate high school and be capable of working a semi-skilled job.

I used the bottom of the ability ranges here. With a 95 IQ, Koko might be able to earn a college degree if she were motivated. I hope this puts it into perspective.

“Fine Animal Person Gorilla have Liberal Arts degree. Welcome to Wal-Mart.”

Purchases through the ad above benefit The Gorilla Foundation. I am not in any way affiliated with The Gorilla Foundation.

References:
Definition of IQ
American Scientist
hiqnews.megafoundation.org
APA Journal

Categories: Knowledge. Tags: Evolution, Gorilla Foundation, Wal-Mart.

Eater of Futures

Posted by Void on 12/09/2005

In tens of thousands of years, plate tectonics will have turned the entire face of the planet under, and some new species will walk in the world. We will likely be reduced to an archetype – the Eater of Futures, perhaps? The best we can hope for is that when we become a vague racial memory, it is a pleasant memory.

Categories: Knowledge. Tags: Archetypes, Eater of Futures, Plate tectonics, racial memory.

Log Jam

Posted by Void on 12/08/2005

Ever since I started my first web page back in 1995, I have been fascinated with the server logfiles. Laughing Squid provides access to my logs through the Plesk interface, so I get to scan them occasionally. It’s good for a laugh.
Huh? She laughs over server logs? What a geekess!
Well, duh! They’re, like, sooooo awesome!
Yahoo!’s crawler doesn’t sip, it slurps:

68.142.251.21 – – [23/Nov/2005:04:35:30 -0800] “GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0” 200 440 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)”

But what does that jumble mean? It’s easy when you break it down and look at each part.
68.142.251.21 is the Internet Protocol (IP) address of the bot. This address traces the access to the bot’s Internet Service Provider (ISP), and sometimes even to the exact computer. One way to get more information is to use a traceroute program. If you don’t have one, try the online form at http://www.nwtools.com/. Cut and paste the IP address into the form, select “Lookup”, and there’s the host name, lj2411.inktomisearch.com. Try again, only select XWhois to find out who owns lj2411.
[23/Nov/2005:04:35:30 -0800] is the time and date of the access. Laughing Squid is in San Francisco, so the time is given in Pacific time or GMT-0800.
“GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0” is the command string the bot sent to my server and the protocol it is using.
200 440 is a “200” status code that the server sent to Yahoo! Slurp to tell it that the GET command was successful and the file size was 440 bytes.
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp) is the identifying info sent by the bot. In this case, Yahoo! Slurp is crawling using a browser that looks to the server like a Mozilla-compatible program. Yahoo! Slurp is polite enough to give me a URL I can go to if I have questions.
msnbot seems to be crawling the site almost every day. I should take a half hour and calculate what percentage of my traffic is msnbot. In the meantime, I’ve set a time delay between requests, plus disallowed msnbot from large sections of the site for now. MSN has a separate bot that crawls the net looking for images, and since I’m not an artiste I’ll block that one altogether.
Googlebot isn’t so bad, in part because Google has webmasters post sitemaps that tell the bot exactly what’s on the site, and how often to check back. The details are on Google.
I also like to see who reads robots.txt before crawling. Polite bots read and obey the robots.txt file. There’s not much you can do at the user level if a bot ignores robots.txt.

Categories: Humor. Tags: Internet Protocol, Internet Service Provider, IP, ISP, Yahoo!.

Linear vs. Global

Posted by Void on 12/08/2005

Linear-sequential means like a mathematical proof. We know “A”. So “B”. Then “C”. Which demonstrates “D”. Linear-sequential can be manipulated to prove “E” if it behoves you to ignore “D.” Exercise: Create a Venn Diagram.

I mean that a perfectly logical progression can take you to an incorrect conclusion if you ignore some of the facts. If you over-simplify. That happens a lot in the White House. And in our criminal justice system.

Combine that with the “A” – “not A”, black and white thinking of a lawyer. Manipulate the grey areas so that they seem to support your point of view.

Global thinking is different. We know “A”. We also know “5”. Plus we know “banana.” These are related by some non-obvious factor, like a fruit stand at 5th and A. Something else only has two of the factors, maybe a fruit stand at 7th and A. But maybe the question we want to answer might be “What color is the roof?”

LOL!!! Are you confused yet? When the global thinker comes up with the correct answer, the linear-sequential people ask if it was intuition. Intuition???? I don’t fucking think so! You call it intuitive because you can’t see the connections. By the same token, if you tried to take me through a linear proof, I’d be frustrated to tears when you wouldn’t tell me additional information that isn’t in the path you took. Especially if it’s quite clear that you haven’t considered an important factor that will rule out your carefully manipulated primrose path. As a child I learned to hate the words, “Don’t get ahead of yourself. Do you understand that *X*?” Another one was, “We’ll discuss that next week.”

Of course, once you have a usable answer, you can go back and Prove it in a linear-sequential manner. In fact, scientists often unconsciously influence the outcome of their experiments, then devise a linear-sequential justification. You expect that from lawyers and fundys, but not from folks who claim to be objective.

Inductive vs. deductive… means theoretical vs. empirical. Using theory to predict the specifics vs. generalizing based on observation. Not quite the same axis as linear vs global.

Linear-sequential is necessary during new tasks. When you’ve learned several procedures pertaining the the task, you start to see how to solve problems that aren’t handled in your procedures. That’s global thinking.

School was just fun. I often took classes out of sequence to keep from being bored. I’d go back and take the more basic courses on “down” semesters.

“It is intuitively obvious that…” That is how math and physics teachers skip a few steps to fit the info into an hour. It means you go to the library and find someplace where they tell you the whole thing because you *know* it will be on the test.

I had a calculus textbook at GWU that had me howling with laughter. At one point the author wrote, “The proof is left as an exercise for the astute reader.” The author was referring to a theorem that required diff-eq to prove, so publishing the proof would have been irrelevant.

I guess you had to be there.

Categories: Science. Tags: Evolution, White House.

On Madness and Identity

Posted by Void on 12/03/2005

“I am interested in madness. I believe it is the biggest thing in the human race, and the most constant. How do you take away from a man his madness without also taking away his identity?”
— William Saroyan (American writer, 1908-1981)

Categories: Knowledge. Tags: Evolution, Human Interest, Identity, Madness, Self-awareness, sense of self, William Saroyan.

Why didn’t I think of this?

Posted by Void on 11/29/2005

And in the “Why didn’t I think of this?” category:
UPS CIO: Driving cost savings by eliminating left-hand turns | CNET News.com

Categories: Automobiles, Economics, Technology. Tags: Internet, United Parcel Service Inc..

No, It’s Not!

Posted by Void on 11/28/2005

This Staples printer cartridge, clearly labeled “compatible with Epson T027201 color” didn’t work in my Epson Photo 820. Staples ink cartridges are not compatible. The printer couldn’t detect any ink in it. Not only didn’t the cartridge work, but it also hosed the printer. When I switched to a new Epson cartridge, it still couldn’t detect any ink. Oh, I did the obvious things: I cleaned the contacts, I even bought Epson’s special use-this-and-no-other cleaning solution to soak the inkjets. No good. “‘E’s kicked the bucket, ‘e’s shuffled off ‘is mortal coil, run down the curtain, and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible!! THIS IS AN EX-PRINTER!”
I should have known better. The electronics and the jet mechanicals are all designed for ink with a specific viscosity, the right amount of surface tension and with precise electrical characteristics. All so that the right size drop of ink will hit the paper at the right speed and splatter on the paper just the right way. It’s pretty amazing.
What you can’t read in this picture is the fine print to the effect that Staples is not responsible for any damage to my printer caused by their cartridge.
Thanks, Staples.
I’m not likely to buy Staples brand anything after this. Whether I switch to Office Max is still up in the air.