This is my general discussion / rant / whatever blog. You probably won't like it if you are a religious fundamentalist, extremely devout in a non-fundamentalist sect, extremely right or left wing, a believer in conspiracy theories, a believer in quackery alternative medicine (especially homeopathy, and chiropractic), or are cephalopodophobic (afraid of nautilus, squid, octopus and cuttlefish). However, if you can handle rational discussion, you're welcome.
This is a link to my amateur radio blog. The blog contains links to Google Earth plots of my QSOs, and articles and opinion relating to amateur radio. As much as possible, I keep politics, religion, and non-amateur radio discussion off my amateur radio blog.
The Super Bowl... I don't get it. Maybe if I post this, someone can explain it to me.
There aren't a lot of football fans in Canada, especially NFL fans. Yes there are some, I even know a few, but compared to hockey and international soccer, there aren't many. This is especially true as you move away from the US border.
So what's the big deal about watching a bunch of Americans play an American game in the USA while being inundated during the ubiquitous breaks in play (the clock never runs more than a few seconds at a time in American football) with ridiculous amounts of advertising? Are people really that desperate to see commercials? I simply don't understand. I never have. Maybe I never will.
Sure, I can see having the lads over for a beer and pretzels piss-up, but I don't need the TV on for that, and I certainly don't need a football game in February. This is Canada - surely there's hockey if a sport must be a part of such a gathering. At least then we can watch Canadians play a Canadian game, possibly even in Canada.
What's funnier still is that the Super Bowl touts itself as THE premier sports event in the world, but it doesn't command the audience of a FIFA championship... it's only watched in the US and Canada, for the most part and that means mostly in the USA. Outside of that little bubble, nobody cares about US football.
Sometime on 1 Feb, 2010, this blog passed 100,000 total hits. I hope I have been entertaining and I appreciate the traffic. My thanks to all who have visited!
If you're a Facebook user, you've probably seen this meme circulating, somewhat virally, among the various status files of people you know:
WARNING!!!!! Go in to your PRIVACY settings and click block list, type in AUTOMATIC BLOCK, there's 3 names there DELETE them they're apparantly taking pictures of our kids off our fb and there meant to be peadophiles, They were on mine and prob on yours too. 3 FOREIGN NAMES block them 1 at a time. PUT THIS ON YOUR STATUS TELL YOUR FAMILY AND FRIENDS
Now, aside from the general idea that anything that tells you to display it publicly and tell all your family and friends is almost assuredly bollocks, I'd like to look at the general claim that it makes: That there are perverts on Facebook looking for pictures of your kids.
There are really two parts to the claim. The easier part is that there are people you don't know looking for pictures of your kids. That's probably true, but only in the general sense. There are over 350 million Facebook users (according to Facebook itself). The odds of any one random user specifically targetting YOU for pictures of YOUR kids is vanishingly small. Generally, people may stumble across pictures of your kids (and I'll deal with that in a minute), but the specific risk to you or your children is very, very, very, very small.
So the bigger question is how many perverts there are on Facebook. Given that the population of Facebook is 14% greater than the population of the entire United States of America, it's fair to say that the number of pedophiles on Facebook is likely to be about 14% greater than the entire number of pedophiles in the United States of America. Statistically speaking, pedophilia has a background level where not specifically encouraged by culture (like ancient Greece), so that's a reasoned guess. Unfortunately, there are not good statistics on what that level is. So let's give it the benefit of the doubt and say that 1 person in 10000 is a pedophile. Pedophiles are overwhelmingly men, but there are women and we've seen a few get arrested in the news lately (usually female teachers boffing male students), so let's put the gender split at 95% men.
What does that mean? With about 175 million women on Facebook, and using these estimated numbers, we can expect that there are 875 female pedophiles on Facebook right now, and over 16000 male pedophiles on Facebook right now. Sounds scary doesn't it?
But... like any population, there are other "undesirables" too. For example, this site suggests that in the USA there are 25-50 active serial killers in the USA at any given time. ACTIVE... that's not counting the ones whose crimes haven't been noticed/collated into being called a serial killer, and the ones who haven't quite flipped out yet. It's very likely, therefore, that Facebook's similar sized population harbours 25-50 active serial killers at any given time, plus serial-killers-to-be!
So really, does the existence of these people on Facebook matter to you, the friendly Facebook user? Personally, I don't worry about them. You're no more likely to be targetted on Facebook by some pervert or nutjob than you are likely to be targetted by someone picking your name out of a huge phone book. It's possible, sure, but very unlikely. And best of all, Facebook gives you some options to help reduce the likelihood of these people targetting you.
First and foremost, don't accept every friend request you get. If you don't know the person, don't friend them. If some random person walks up to your house and bangs on the door, you don't let them in to poke around your stuff do you? Why would you friend someone you have no clue about? Seriously, this simple, best way to increase your Facebook security actually requires that you NOT do something. It's so easy to ignore friend requests from people you don't know.
Second... pictures. I've talked about keeping your stuff visible to your friends only, and I'll reiterate it here. Hit the photos tab and click "Album privacy", then set your photos to "Friends only". You'll not only immediately prevent any pervert, non-friends from seeing your stuff, you'll also block people from your work from seeing your drunken, bra-on-head photos from last Friday's piss-up too (even though you should never post crap like that on the internet because The Internet Never Forgets... Ever).
Third, once you've set all your photos to "friends only" or something more appropriate, visit the Settings link and select Privacy. Go through all the little bits of information and make sure you have them set the way you really want them... Do you really want your Contact Information, for example, visible to everyone? how about friends of friends? friends only? Go through these settings and make sure they reflect your desires.
If you do this, you aren't going to have to worry about random weirdos trolling through your stuff, nor will you have to worry about Google picking up your info and blasting it to the world. And more importantly, it's a lot easier than trying to find out who the current list of pedophiles contains and manually adding them to your blocked list every day.
On 16 January, I was listening to the SATERN emergency net on 20 meters. This is a formal amateur radio emergency network sponsored by the Salvation Army and it is handling traffic into and out of Haiti during this time of disaster. From what I heard, the net is very well run. As an added bonus, propagation conditions have been decent as well. This is one of the things that amateur radio does for the good of everyone.
So all is well and good, right?
Wrong.
All day Saturday, some jackass was making every effort to jam the net... music, dogs barking, whistling, you name it. From my point of view, the person was likely located in the south-eastern quarter of the USA.
Now, jamming is one thing. I don't condone it, but there's a little rebel streak in some people and if annoying some informal chat net is what does it for them once in a while, well, there's little harm done. Sure, it's aggravating, but in the end nobody gets hurt.
However, jamming an emergency net, that's a different story. I certainly figured that even the worst tobacco-chewin', gun-totin', banjo-playin', rebel-flags-for-curtains, redneck KKK member has enough smarts to say "No, I'm not going interfere with an emergency service because I'd look like a complete and utter tool"... but apparently I was wrong. Somewhere there's at least one complete tool with access to amateur radio gear and enough free time on his hands to spend more than 6 hours attempting to jam an emergency net.
If I find out who it is, I'll be using the internet to publicize his details fully. Whoever it is/was deserves to be famous, if you catch my meaning. That person is certainly an embarrassment to amateur radio.
This is one of the most popular articles on my blog, based on the referral hits I get: Picking Lottery Numbers. The topic is very popular with users of nearly every search engine. Because of this, I thought I would take the opportunity to expand a bit on the original article.
If you don't want to hit the link and read the article from 14 Jan, 2009, I'll summarize here: A lottery is a random drawing, and it doesn't matter which numbers you pick. In fact, the "patterns" that people see are assigned solely by one's own brain. If they took the numbers off the balls and just put random pictures of granite from a quarry, so there was no discernable mathematical pattern to the figures on the balls (or lots, or whatever they use to make the draw), people would probably not waste so much brain power trying to figure out the "best" pattern.
In fact, picking 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 as your numbers for a pick-7 style of lottery is just as good as any other set of numbers, and that other article shows this by way of the chart for the old Super-7 lottery here in Canada.
Because people keep searching and hitting that article, I have had the opportunity to look at the search terms people use and have come up with a series of informational bulletins that, I hope, will impart a bit of knowledge about lotteries in general and how to pick the best numbers.
Lottery Fact 1:The only way to win, is not to play the game
WOPR realized that in Wargames and the world was saved from nuclear destruction. It's a fact, that the best bet you can make on a lottery is not to play at all. If you look at the chart of Super-7 winnings from the previous article, you can see that the numbers selected would have won a cash prize of $10 a few times (the match-4 and match 3+bonus), and a stack of free tickets. If we assume that a player saves his money and only plays the free ticket, the maximum win for the entire life of the chart is $710 over a bit more than 13 years.
Statistically, that's about what you can expect from such a lottery. Yes, you could win the jackpot, but your odds are vanishingly small. Still, there's a chance (about 1:75000 over the time in the example), so let's add 1/75000 of a typical jackpot of 25 million to the pile just so that the lottery is presented in the best statistical light. Your total expectation of winnings would therefore be $710 plus $333.33, or $1043.33... let's call it $1100 for a round number. That's the simple reality... over 13 years you can EXPECT to pocket somewhere around $1100 on a pick-7 lottery.
For that, you will have paid $2 per week for 13 years: $1352, a net loss of somewhere between $250 and $640. Not a good investment. In fact, if you invested $2 a week at a mere 2% over that whole time, it would mature at about $1500 over the same time... and that's at a pathetic rate of return.
Lottery Fact 2:But somebody has to win!
You might think that, but you'd be wrong. That's why most lotteries have a progressive jackpot - nobody must win, and they often don't give away the jackpot each draw. It (or a portion of it) gets lumped in the next week. That makes the next jackpot bigger causing people to buy more tickets in the deluded hope that they can win. Of course, with more tickets sold, the odds that someone will win increase, but since the jackpot is also split, so too do the odds increase that the jackpot will be split and thus be less to each winner.
A lottery is not like a school-yard raffle or a bingo game. Nobody must win, but the vast majority absolutely must lose.
Lottery Fact 3:I saw a thing on the web about a math student/psychic/software user who wins big
The technical term for what you saw is bullshit, although I'll qualify that a little.
There have been lotteries that have come out with mathematical problems. It is possible, if you have the math skills and the financial backing, to score those lotteries. However, once flawed lotteries are discovered, they are shut down immediately. Thus, your window of opportunity is VERY small, and it only applies to new lotteries. It's fair to say that any established lottery very likely does not have such a flaw. At the end of the day, any lottery is a business and if the business is flawed it dies. A flawed lottery would simply go bankrupt very quickly, especially once word got around. So if you have the mathematical chops, feel free to try and beat the system on new lotteries, but odds are you'd be wasting your time.
Psychics and astrologers don't win big in lotteries. If they did, the richest people in the would would not be the Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, they'd be Sylvia Browne and Uri Geller. If it comes out of the mouth of a psychic or astrologer, you can bank on it being bullshit. Enough said on that.
Now, many lotteries use a system of numbered balls that are bounced about in a machine and allowed to drop, forming the draw. There are many software programs out there that will analyze the drops and look for trends. The information is typically available from the lottery web site anyway, so the software really just downloads the info and saves you the trouble of learning the math to do the analysis yourself. But does this analysis work? Certainly you can find plenty of marketing claims that it does... but if it works so well, where are the lottery quadrillionaires topping the list of the world's richest people? The truth is, analyzing past draws to predict future outcome doesn't work. If it did, the game would be flawed and would go bankrupt quickly.
The ball-based lotteries replace the balls regularly. Thus, even if there are tiny variations in weight or shape that might affect the outcome over a large number of draws, any given ball doesn't stay in play long enough to affect the outcome in any serious way. Similarly, the balls have no "memory" so any given number is just as likely to come up next week as it is this week as it was last week. Past results do not affect future outcome... this should be every gambler's mantra, and if you can't or won't understand that, just mail me your money because it will be the same net result for you and at least you'll have the pleasure of knowing SOMEONE will be made happy.
OK smart guy, I know you play lotteries and I know you win
It's true, I play 'em, and it seems like I win. Of course, you don't see me lose... because I don't mention it when I lose. I win no more than anyone else, but when I win there might be a coffee for my friends or maybe a beer if that's more appropriate to the size of the winning.
I consider lottery playing to be entertainment and nothing more. It comes out of my entertainment budget, from discretionary spending. Winnings go back into the entertainment budget. On the balance, all my lottery playing has been a net loss by a long shot. I consider playing the lottery to be "stupid spending" like playing the games at a carnival... mildly fun, but I know I'm getting it in the rear just by putting my money in.
Whatever... How do you pick your numbers?
Well, I often pick the first n-numbers required (1,2,3,4,5,6,7 on a pick-7; 1,2,3,4,5,6 on a pick-6 and so forth). If I am feeling creative, I try to draw a little picture on the fill-in-the-squares slip, although it's hard with only 5-7 "pixels". Sometimes I start at one corner of the pick-box and make little
knight's-moves (up 2, over 1; or up 1, over 2) moving around the
chessboard of the pick sheet. If I'm feeling lazy, I just get a quick-pick. It makes absolutely no difference whatsoever.
Summary:How to pick your lottery numbers
The best bet - Don't pick any numbers. Don't buy a ticket. Save your money.
Going to play anyway - It doesn't matter how you pick them. Wing it... picking is part of the fun of playing. Definitely don't pay anyone else money for software, psychic reading or any of that crap. Playing a lottery is a waste of money, but paying some nimrod money to pick numbers for you is something even Forrest Gump would be ashamed of...
This post is related to the previous one regarding email-o-phobes. Many of them will say they don't want to become a slave to their email, or some similar argument. That's a lame argument because becoming a slave to your email is a choice, not a requirement. Only you can make you a slave to your email.
However, you don't have to look very far to find email slaves. Often they carry Blackberries. They could be stemming arterial bleeding from a cut to the throat, but if their Blackberry buzzes they'll let go because they just got an email, and that email has got to be more important than a little blood from the carotid.
Email is the modern version of postal mail. Nobody ever sent a postal mail expecting a prompt reply. Anyone who sends an email expecting a prompt reply is simply a lost puppy. Anyone who has to drop what they're doing to reply to an email is an even more lost puppy who is also an enabler for the former.
There are a zillion ways to get someone's attention if you have an important message. One of the most effective for the last 130 or so years has been the telephone. It may seem odd in today's technological menagery of phones that can send email and text messages, and play movies, and music, and take pictures, and make videos, and surf the web, and play games, etc., that the actual purpose of a telephone is for talking to other people - hence the name "telephone" from the Greek tele (meaning "far off" or "distant") and phono (meaning "voice" or "sound").
If it's really important, the best you can do is to phone them and hope they answer. Unless they're telephone slaves, they're probably not going to drop what they're doing to answer, but for most people, I think, the telephone is given a relatively high priority in their lives.
Email simply doesn't, and shouldn't have that kind of priority. It's mail. Like postal mail, it's notoriously unreliable as well. Just because you sent a mail doesn't mean the other person receives it in a timely manner. Sure, they usually do, as they usually do when you post a letter... but there's no guarantee they will. If you're expecting some immediate response, you're setting yourself up for failure.
And even if they do get it... unless they're some kind of Blackberry drone, they're probably not going to check it in the few seconds after it arrives. Maybe they read their mail today and they won't see it until tomorrow. Oh well.
The harsh reality is that email does NOT make up for all the other ways of communicating with people. It's merely a modern evolution of ye olde post. If you treat it as anything more than that, you're going to be disappointed time and time again.
And just so this is absolutely clear... if you're in a meeting, a gathering of friends, a presentation, a restaurant, whatever... any place where your attention is supposed to be on what is happening around you, and you answer an email, send some texts and take a phone call, please recognize that what you're telling your business associates (meeting), your friends (gathering), the lecturer (presentation), the people you're dining with and the patrons around you (restaurant) or whoever is there that they don't mean shit because you have more important ways to spend your time. It's an insult, and a lot of people will think less of you for doing it.
It being 2010, I was immediately reminded of this:
Yes, sometime in the past, at least one forward thinker figured we'd have workable artificial intelligence by 1997 (1992 in the movies), have manned missions to Jupiter by nine years ago, and further exploration this year.
Position 1: "I don't do email." or "I check email maybe once a week, if I think someone sent me something."
I can't understand how it is that there are people, and seemingly plenty of them (mostly older people but not exclusively) who cannot or will not check email on a regular basis.
First, I should define "regular basis". By this I mean daily, much like most people check their post box. I do not mean "every 5 minutes" and I certainly don't mean "live to the buzz of my Blackberry"... those latter two are activities for the chronically insecure and folks likely needing of professional psychiatric help.
It's 2010, and email has technically been around for about 35ish years for computer nerds, and within the grasp of regular folks for at least 15 years. Email is not new technology. Email is not some weird communication form. Email isn't (or shouldn't be) considered less formal or worthy than any other form of written communication.**
Beyond technical limitations - "I live in Ungabungaland and there is no electricity, no computers, and certainly no email, but there's no postal mail either" - I have yet to hear a reasoned argument for why email shouldn't be checked daily. The closest anyone has come is "well, I don't check my postal mail daily"... ok, fine, but you have to live with the results. In the absence of a speakable reason, the position "I don't do email" is simply irrational and unreasonable. The sub-argument that "I only get crap in email" is also specious. If you look at all the material that has hit your (postal) mailbox, the vast majority was also crap. Somehow, you survived. And just like you didn't read the postal crap, you can skip the email crap too... and best of all you don't have to even get off your behind to move it to the trash like you do with regular junk mail!
It is not a burden to check mail. Never has been, never will be. You can make it a burden, of course (like Blackberry slaves), but it doesn't have to be. It's mail. Many more people in the western world use it than don't, so
you're only hobbling yourself (and annoying your more savvy friends and
associates) by choosing to avoid it.
Position 2: "I don't want to read the web site, I want it mailed/emailed to me."
Yeah, I like reading a paper newspaper too, but the fact is that written mass communications are moving to the web and people aren't going to accommodate your backwards ways forever. You might want a personal mailing but like that billion dollars and a Lamborghini that you also want, it ain't going to happen.
It's time to join the 21st century, and that means learning to operate a web browser, learning to look things up, reading things on the web, and setting up your own notifications. Unless you have some disability that makes this impossible, there's just no excuse for the position of not wanting to visit web sites to get the information you need. It's the way things work now, it's they way they've worked for a decade. It's time to get over yourself. Sure, many of us remember a time when other people provided personal service... but those days are gone, move on. Today, everyone gets to customize their own service through web interfaces and email.
Again, with this one, I have yet to hear a reason why people avoid doing things on the web. It's usually, but not always, older people. Ok, you're old, and maybe a bit set in your ways, but times change. You had to give up your horse and buggy for a car, now you can give up your old paper-based newsletters for reading a web site.
What I'd like to see in the new year is that people give up these ridiculous pretenses that email and the web are too hard, too useless, too informal, too impersonal. They're no different than the paper ways that went before them, but they are less wasteful. It's 2010, people... the future is here, and it's time to start living in it. Join the 21st century or be left behind.
Summary: It's your choice, of course... but I believe that if you ignore/resist email, you do so at your own expense. There's no obvious advantage to avoiding it, and I feel there are some serious disadvantages. Deliberately disadvantaging yourself does not give you any kind of moral high ground, it just makes you out of touch.
I found this today over at Night Sky Girl's blog and it is very cool. A new star has been discovered in the Big Dipper (aka, Ursa Major).
The Big Dipper is an easy constellation for star gazers... it's probably the first one we learn since the two stars that form the front of the "bowl" of the Dipper (Dubhe and Merak) are often referred to as "the pointers" since they lead the eye to Polaris, the North Star in the tip of the handle of the Little Dipper. Ursa Major has been observed for milennia.
More correctly, the Big and Little Dippers are, respectively, the hind quarters of Ursa Major (the great bear) and Ursa Minor (the little bear). Yes, the dippers are bear butts. They are well observed constellations and all their stars have names. In the Big Dipper the stars are:
Mizar, located second from the left is an interesting star. To the naked eye (of most people), it appears as a single magnitude 1 star. If you have very good eyes, Mizar separates into two stars - the brighter Mizar and the somewhat dimmer Alcor, separated by 12 arcminutes. These stars orbit each other and are part of the same system.
But it gets better... After the invention of the telescope, we learned that Mizar is itself a double star. A small telescope reveals the companion, Mizar B, about 14 arcseconds away. In a small telescope you can see these three stars easily as the dimmest is still magnitude 4 and would be visible to the naked eye if it wasn't so close to Mizar.
Recent discoveries have shown that both Mizar A and Mizar B are, in fact, double stars, but you'd need a big telescope to see that. The two stars of Mizar A orbit each other as do the two stars of Mizar B. The two pairs orbit each other, and Alcor orbits the whole thing in a grand celestial dance.
New observations, taken in March by astronomers at the Palomar Observatory in California, have discovered that Alcor is more than it seems. A tiny red dwarf companion has been found orbiting Alcor, bringing the total number of stars in that system to 6.
You can see, in that picture, the black dot that is the shield blocking the bright light of Alcor, and the little glow of Alcor B in the lower right. Alcor B has about 1/4 the mass of our sun and would be too dim to see with instruments accessible to hobbyists. A new star (well, new to us, it's probably not that new in the grand scheme of things).
The Palomar Observatory has released information about this discovery. Read about it here.
I love finding this stuff on the web. If you click on the picture you'll be shuffled off to Animal Planet. Watch the video.
It's a vid of a diver breaking what I understand is the cardinal rule of diving: don't poke into holes with anything you can't afford to lose (like your hand, or your face).
It's interesting that the octopus goes for the mask. Although attacks by large cephalopods are quite rare, a common theme is that they go for the mask and regulator. I think that denotes a level of cunning that is rather scary.
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