My five fans can attest, yo

A few interesting things in today's readings:

A *real* science controversy: The K-T Extinction debate.

Aren't you sad that Ron Paul didn't get the GOP nomination for President? That would have made for some very entertaining debates. Instead they had to go for some guy that was 'electable' and 'sane' and all that nonsense.

Why Chinese people have English names.

Bill Maher on a guy who got dumped

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I see you shiver with anticipation

As always I await a new album with anticipation and fear. Will it suck? Will it be as good as their last one (or whatever one of theirs is my favorite if the last one sucked)? And such it is with the imminent Journal For Plague Lovers. The presence of Steve Albini at the helm bodes well, and Edwards' lyrics are always complex enough to spend a lot of time thinking about. James and Sean write cracking music and I've no concerns on that front particularly in light of the fresh and powerful work they turned in with Send Away the Tigers.

I am a bit concerned about it being cast as The Holy Bible 2, as much as I love that album. I disagree with Uncut's contention that they've done nothing good since then. There have been ebbs and flows, but some of their greatest songs come from the post-Richey era. You Stole the Sun From My Heart, Solitude Sometimes Is, most of the Know Your Enemy and Send Away the Tigers albums all are right up there with Motorcycle Emptiness and Faster in my opinion. I except Everything Must Go as he was heavily involved in the writing and demo stages of that album.

And of course there's no way to preorder it on iTunes in the U.S. nor will it be available on iTunes in the U.S. in the forseeable future I'm sure. And it probably won't be released in the U.S. for 6 months to a year. And ordering it from a UK store would cost about $40 including shipping. And yet the record labels wonder why people download music from unlicensed sites.

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We write graf in ascii files

Because I can't leave well enough alone, and because I was tired of being stuck on 10.5.4 (mostly because I wanted to check out the Faces feature in iPhoto 09 and the new GarageBand), I threw caution to the wind* and installed iPC XDR-VL Exxxtreme Celebrity Edition Extended Remix of a B-Side or something like that. The install is considerably faster than Kalyway 10.5.2 was, as in about 40 minutes total instead of close to two hours.

The instructions on why you would choose one kext over another (and there are a LOT of them) aren't as clear, but I went in assuming I'll do 3-4 installs before I get it right. Also, I've got the backup of the last known good system and can easily pull the drivers from there if necessary or revert to it entirely. Backups are good.

Install went smooth, reboot. Hmmm, doesn't recognize the keyboard or touchpad on the laptop. This could be a problem. I'm not particularly interested in hauling around an external keyboard with my laptop.

A quick check of forums found the very basic mistake I made, but it does involve reinstalling. Sigh. So this time I pay a bit more attention to the drivers I'm choosing. But not close enough attention to make notes. This might be part of my problem...

Well, that was much easier than I expected. Everything, including audio, that was working before is working now with no particular hoops to jump through. The only thing left to check is networking, which I can't check on until I get home (cannot connect non-government equipment to the government network) but it claims to recognize the card and has the correct MAC address.

[later]The networking fix is the same as it was with Kalyway (edit the preferences file, save, repair permissions, restart). Damn that was easy. And now updates from Apple work as well with no hoops or anything. My one issue is it doesn't wake up properly from sleep (the screen doesn't light up to a usable level). Minor hassle that I thus far (a month in) haven't cared enough about to even research.

*Not all caution, I did full backups first

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Music is life

Six musical questions from Chad Orzel.

Who Need the Peace Corps? - Frank Zappa: Zappa was famously unimpressed with the hippy scene and mocks them in this second single from the brilliant We're Only In It For The Money.

Where Did Your Heart Go? - Was (Not Was). Some of the best R & B workouts of the 80's came from these guys. The WHAM! version is a poor cover of the original.

What I Say? - Miles Davis. Sublime, this version is fromt The Cellar Door Sessions.

How U Feelin? - Peeping Tom. One of Mike Patton's current bands. He described this album as his take on what he thinks popular music should sound like.

Why Do You Bother? - Faith No More. From the Chuck Mosley era, he was really a strong lyricist but lacked the consistency of Patton both in writing and performance.

When Will We B Paid? - Prince. Good gospel influenced lament on the history of African Americans.

The artist distribution is no surprise, generating a random playlist from my collection is highly likely to include Prince, Zappa, and some variation of Mike Patton as between the three they comprise 30% of my library.

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Haven't you always wanted a monkey?

Monkey milking goat. My work here is done.

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I don't need your advice

Just saw a tip from macOSXHints come in on Google Reader and I thought "Well, gee I just *did* that a few weeks ago, would've been more timely to have run across this back then." Then I realized that I'm the one that submitted the tip. So yay me.

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You're running csh and my shell is bash

If for some reason you want your applications to reside somewhere other than /Applications for some reason (space in my case) you will still want to have links to them in /Applications. For Apple applications, updates are likely to fail if the applications aren't located there, and tools like AppFresh only search that location. Creating a bunch of aliases is tedious, so here's a quick terminal trick (which I didn't think would work, as it doesn't under Linux): cd /Applications ln -s /path/to/apps/* . That's it.

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Liar liar, pants on fire now

Inspired by xkcd, I've begun noting and cultivating some of my quirky observations into full on hobbies. I've mentioned adding semi-plausible notes to whiteboards.

Tonight I was struck by an article in Seed: the Prophetic Brain by Karl Friston. The article largely revolves around the idea that part of the way our brain works to deal with reality is to limit the range of possible situations it has to be ready to cope with (e.g. you don't expend energy on being prepared to suddenly find yourself transported to the bottom of the sea). I ran across the quote

All quantities associated with an agent will change to minimize free-energy

And I thought "Heh, it would be funny to start blogging on science topics and wildly misinterpret out of context quotes, like take this snippet and start ranting that big science and the oil/auto industry are conspiring to keep energy expensive by covering up the existence of free energy."

It was funny for about half a second until I realized that's exactly what the anti-science nutjobs and cranks do, only they are dead serious. The anti-vaxers, young earth creationists, global warming denialists, 9-11 truthers, HIV denialists, new age woo-meisters of all variety, and yes the free energy/perpetual motion/cold fusion cranks all actively and often intentionally misquote real science or misrepresent studies to promote their ideology which is usually diametrically opposed to both the science they are abusing and reality itself.

• Effect Measure on Vaccines
• A critical analysis of claims that earth is only 6,000 years old Note that along with biology the Biblical Literalists are aggressively opposed to teaching earth sciences and physics.
• Real Climate deconstructs Hearland Institute report
• How the skeptic community challenged the 9-11 conspiracy theorists
• Tara Smith and Steven Novella provide an excellent overview of the HIV Denial movement
• Skepdic has concise entries on New Age beliefs from alphabiotics to Wicca
• A classic investigation of a free energy scheme. Note that all free energy schemes have turned out to be run by either the willfully dishonest or genuinely inept.

Not that I feel strongly on the topic or anything. I'd intended this to be a light hearted post about misunderstanding things, but then I got angry and it went a whole different way.

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Clean it up, take out the trash now

On the importance of maintaining your tools. I was whipping together a quick little project for better organizing some electronics and was getting frustrated by my inability to get a straight cut on the table saw. Double and triple checked square on the mitre and finally came to the determination that a) I need a better mitre and 2) the blade needs to be changed. I dealt with the last item first because it's easier and desperately needed. I began to think back to when I last changed it. Hmmm. That would be never. So I've been running the saw for 8 years without changing the blade or cleaning out the housing.

Whenever I get time to work in the garage, I jump into a project because I don't get enough time to do everything I want so I bypass general cleaning and tool maintenance. My poor shop vac got one hell of a workout. I managed to fill up half of a thirteen gallon trash can with the sawdust from the saw housing. New blade installed, still to be adjusted for true to the fence and mitre, but that's progress and the whole setup looks almost new.

My workbench, on the other hand, is a total disaster.

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Clowns run every record company that ever said we're bad

Derek the Abstinence Clown. Does that really need any comment? Stacie Murphy has a nice column about how to become one yourself. h/t to Ed Brayton

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