Author: matthew

Early today (as I’m writing), Air America Radio launched. Apparently, it was a day of mixed results, as I caught Jeanine Garafalo and Al Franken harping a bit on how cool they are to be starting this liberal network.

I’ll tell you in a nutshell why I think it won’t be very successful. But it may not be the reason you suspect!

Conservative radio is extremely popular. I was a devoted “Dittohead”, listening to Rush Limbaugh on a daily basis for years (whenever I could). Recently, I’ve enjoyed disagreeing with Michael Savage on my evening ride home. But I think liberal radio is going to run into a roadblock.

You see, conservatism is about upholding tradition, and traditional values. Conservatives wisely believe that tradition deserves respect because it is an established method of pursuing human discourse that has been proven to work. Perhaps, not work well, but work. Without compelling evidence, it’s unwise to alter tradition. And compelling evidence is hard to come by when trying something untested. We’re often forced into the position of conducting experiments on live populations, much to our detriment later.

But sometimes, these liberal experiments improve quality of life. The successes are few, but dramatic: Equal rights for women. Equal rights regardless of race. Abolition of slavery in the U.S. Establishment of the United Nations, rather than every nation for itself. Mostly good things, with some occasional difficult ramifications.

The problem with “liberal radio”, is that people tune into the radio to be entertained. They also tune in to talk radio for affirmation and information. Although liberal talk radio may be helpful in the information department, what about affirmation? The view of progressive liberals are all over the map. There are generally few “traditional values” to defend when you are liberal; instead, individual positions must be decided based on their merits and rationality. Of course, in reality there are many sheeple who just want their opinions handed to them; I’ve been one of them before, and it’s a hard habit to avoid.

Demagoguery is the part and parcel of conservative radio: appeal to the emotions of your listeners. Get them mad enough about something, and maybe they’ll do something they usually wouldn’t, like call into your show to complain.

So my question is: Can liberal radio be demagogic enough to be entertaining and retain listeners? Based on the little I heard today (due to technical problems with Real Audio that were largely corrected by the time I was able to tune in again tonight — it’s not syndicated in Utah. Duh.), it sure doesn’t seem that way. Instead of emotional tirades against progressive opionion, I heard interviews with popular figures and self-congratulatory chatting about how weird and fun it is to have a radio show. I didn’t hear any stirring monologues, but instead felt like I was listening to a radio version of a daytime television talk show. Yes, people got on one another’s cases, but about things irrelevant to me.

Obviously, there are going to be some growing pains, and I’m eager to see what happens once they’ve outgrown them. Conservative commentators are entrenched in the airspace, though, and I suspect that misunderstanding the medium will be a repeated theme throughout the next year.

I’m eager to hear more tomorrow to see if they shake off the newness a bit, get past the “let’s interview people to fill time” phase, and start working on being entertaining themselves. Since the network is syndicated over Real Audio as well as radio, unlike any conservative talk show I’ve seen, I can stream over the Internet and be able to listen at work. But I’m not entirely enthusiastic about the prospects of liberal talk radio. It just seems to be too little, too late for a medium dominated by conservatives disappointed with the liberal slant of other major media.

Note: this is not an April Fool’s joke. Someone else needs to cook one up 🙂

The principle of Evolution has had a long and conflicted history since Darwin’s day. To those who understand it well, Darwin’s basic theories have long since been scrapped for better understanding of Macro and Micro-evolution, artificial vs. natural selection, and more.

To scientists, biological evolution, particularly Mendelian Inheritance is no theory, but fact. It is what shapes our environment every day. We can see it at work as bacteria evolve into ever-more resistant strains; the children of earlier bacteria which survived our strongest antibiotics are, in turn, similarly resistant to those strong antibiotics. We see genetics at work in population distribution, and in the traits passed from one generation to the next. I, personally, am interested in knowing what effect “neutral drift”, or changes that are totally neutral in nature as far as survival, will have on our population. Too bad I can only observe, at most, a generation or three before I pass away.

Yet Evolution is under fire in our schools. Despite the simple fact that evolutionary principles are responsible for daily changes all around us, the related concept of abiogenesis, or life deriving from non-life, is unnerving to many. Indeed, even in the scientific community, the question of the exact origin of life is largely unknown (though frequently theorized about and debated). If mankind, in fact, abiogenerated from some primordial soup, the fact is that simple molecular structures and bacteria tend to leave very poor, if any, fossil record. Therefore, we may never know the exact origin of life on this planet, outside the realm of faith, or unsubstantiated theory.

That said, however, what is known is that inheritance, natural selection, and artificial selection are at work every day, slightly modifying the food we eat, the plants we grow, the animals we call pets, and the bacteria we ingest and attempt to fight off. It’s a bit of an ever-escalating war, particularly against microbes, and it’s vital we be well-informed so that we can make smart decisions as short-lived bacteria and virusses gain ground against slower-evolving humans.

It’s curious to me that, due to the religious furor aroused by mere mention of the word “evolution” in a school’s curriculum, Georgia is preparing to ban the use of the word “evolution” in school textbooks and supplementary materials. I have to wonder about the long-term ramifications of refusing to use a word because its mere mention is controversial. We’ve long done this with “objectionable” words, such as George Carlin’s Seven Dirty Words, yet this is the first I’ve heard of official state objection to the use of a scientific term in reference works.

Proponents of science have long tussled over the use of words such as “natural” or “logical”, particularly when confronted by anti-scientists. To the scientist, it is vital that supernatural causes cannot be considered in attempting to understand natural phenomena. This is for a very simple reason: it’s cheating. It’s not that scientists are necessarily anti-religion, it is that faith in supernatural things is out-of-bounds for scientific explanation. Resorting to a supernatural explanation for a natural phenomena is a bit like playing Monopoly and cutting out one’s own card that says “EVERYTHING” on it, claiming that this card represents all other properties on the board, and therefore declaring victory. To do so renders the game pointless, and shenanigans such as these, generally pulled by the losing side, ended many a game prematurely when I was a child.

In scientific endeavors, we simply cannot resort to an explanation that a given thing is unexplainable. To do so is to give up and give in. To resort to supernatural explanations of biology is also disrespectful to those who worship Deity, by relegating such a being to becoming a “God of the Gaps”, a personage or force that can only operate in those areas of the darkness where science has failed to provide illumination. The act of giving birth, for instance, is no less beautiful or meaningful for the fact that we understand the process in excruciating detail. And, similarly, the faith of a devoted Christian is no less for understanding and accepting that the Biblical account of Creation is more allegorical and spiritual than factual.

Instead, by requiring evidence, much as a court of law does, science progresses little by little towards understanding how things work. I don’t think science is much closer to explaining why they work, though; such an explanation as to why the order of the universe exists still lies in the realm of the metaphysical, I think.

But anyway, the point of my post is that Berkeley University put up a resource for teachers who wish to teach evolution correctly, and to have answers for common questions. It’s available at evolution.berkeley.edu, and I found it a fascinating trip tonight. I’ve learned much about the evolution of evolutionary thought itself! I recently read “Darwin’s Black Box”, by Michael Behe, and it’s interesting to note that the problems of irreducible complexity or simple anatomic similarity have already been solved in the late twentieth century, and that today some of Darwin’s core concepts seem as antiquated as the hand-cranked phonograph. Yet we respect his place in history as a scientist who, using deduction and observation, came up with a powerful idea that serves, with great modification, as the basis of modern biology and genetics.

The nice thing about science is that, when it’s wrong, it can be proven so. And, barring such disproof, though many may dislike the ramifications of scientific progress, a hypothesis will progress to being a good working model, and that good working model will eventually become law, as much as we can understand it. Yet even those scientific “laws”, such as Kepler’s laws, will come to be understood in time as useful constructs to attempt to figure something out in rough form, but actually inaccurate in the real-life universe. And being able to change one’s mind is a really, really good thing.

From Ananova:

Picking your nose and eating it is one of the best ways to stay healthy, according to a top Austrian doctor.

Innsbruck-based lung specialist Prof Dr Friedrich Bischinger said people who pick their noses with their fingers were healthy, happier and probably better in tune with their bodies.

He says society should adopt a new approach to nose-picking and encourage children to take it up.

Dr Bischinger said: “With the finger you can get to places you just can’t reach with a handkerchief, keeping your nose far cleaner.

“And eating the dry remains of what you pull out is a great way of strengthening the body’s immune system.

“Medically it makes great sense and is a perfectly natural thing to do. In terms of the immune system the nose is a filter in which a great deal of bacteria are collected, and when this mixture arrives in the intestines it works just like a medicine.

“Modern medicine is constantly trying to do the same thing through far more complicated methods, people who pick their nose and eat it get a natural boost to their immune system for free.”

He pointed out that children happily pick their noses, yet by the time they have become adults they have stopped under pressure from a society that has branded it disgusting and anti social.

He said: “I would recommend a new approach where children are encouraged to pick their nose. It is a completely natural response and medically a good idea as well.”

And he pointed out that if anyone was really worried about what their neighbour was thinking, they could still enjoy picking their nose in private if they still wanted to get the benefits it offered.

12:55 Friday 26th March 2004

At my work, I’m required to use Microsoft Outlook for exchanging email with my co-workers. At home, I use Mutt on FreeBSD, and have grown to really love the lightning-fast responsiveness, immunity to virusses, and easy scriptability of this tiny text-based mail reader.

I’m going to tell you one solution, just so I can tell you another one 🙂

It’s possible to use Mutt with Microsoft Exchange:

• Set up IMAP on your Exchange server. This was already done here.
• Install a copy of Cygwin, including Python.
• Either set up Mutt to access IMAP on Exchange directly, or do what I prefer to do: download and set up offlineimap. This IMAP-to-Maildir synchronization utility is excellent.
1. First, you need to run the “rebaseall” utility so that Python doesn’t dump with traceback when you try to run offlineimap. You can’t rebaseall if you’re trying to do it from an rxvt window — you need to be using the cmd-based Cygwin shell for it to finish without an error.
2. Then you need make sure your .offlineimaprc file specifies “Curses.Blinkenlights” as the first available interface — the TK interface, on Win32, just hangs.
• You can’t use offlineimap on a non-managed Cygwin mount. The reason is that the Maildir specification uses the “:” character, which is a big no-no in Windows-land. The solution is to use this command:

   $ mount -f -s -b -o managed "d:/tmp/mail" "/home/of/mail" 

  substituting the windows-path directory you wish to use for mail for the “d:/tmp/mail” above, and the mount point you wish to put it on instead of “/home/of/mail”.

• Once you have IMAP-to-Maildir synchronization going to your local PC, then you’re good to go with offline IMAP stuff and Mutt. Follow the usual directions for configuring Mutt to use the Maildir you’ve set up, paying particular attention to choice of outbound mailer (probably ssmtp).

Obviously, though I’m a big fan of Mutt, that seemed like a lot of work. Lucky me, I chanced across a script that, with minor modifications, gave me the primary thing I loved about using Mutt: being able to use vim as my text editor. I’m just much faster using that than any other editor, and it’s ubiquitous on UNIX systems, either in a more-primitive incarnation of “vi”, or in some version.

So I installed Python and the Win32 extensions for Python, then linked this script on my quickbar in Windows, conveniently right next to Outlook:

 #!/bin/env python ''' outlook.pyw (OutLook editor launcher) -- allows one to edit an open e-mail  mesg from Outlook using Emacs or *Vi* rather than "Notepad--". :-)  NOTE: requires Python 1.6 and newer (use of string methods)

created by John Klassa (klassa at employees.org) on 2001 May 29 updated by Wesley Chun (cyberweb at rocketmail.com) on 2002 Feb 28

$Id: outlook.pyw,v 0.2 2002/08/28 18:04:06 wesc Exp wesc $ '''

from os import spawnv, P_WAIT, unlink from tempfile import mktemp from Tkinter import Tk, Button, Frame, Label from Tkconstants import * from win32com.client import Dispatch

def launch(): '''launch() spawns your favorite editor to edit the Outlook compose   window (either new or reply), then returns that data to Outlook...  change the 'ed' variable to switch editors.'''

# Get a handle to Outlook. o = Dispatch("Outlook.Application")

# Work our way down to the reply (a "MailItem"). insp = o.ActiveInspector() if insp == None: return item = insp.CurrentItem if item == None: return

# Grab the message body in the reply. body = item.Body

# Write the body... need to "encode" the string because Outlook uses # Unicode with bunch of unprintables (ASCII chars > 128). Also, since # we are going from DOS2UNIX2DOS, we have the \r\n vs \n issue, re- # sulting in those fabulous ^M characters. A persistent, bound-to-a- # key Emacs macro takes care of that nicely, but the solution imple- # mented here is to just wipe the '\r's now, then add them back when # we reread this file back before returning the body to Outlook. tmp = mktemp() # generate a unique tmp filename fh = open(tmp, "w") fh.write(body.encode('ascii', 'ignore').replace('\r\n', '\n')) fh.close()

# Launch editor to edit the file (should make this configurable). #ed = r"d:\emacs-20.7\bin\emacs" # emacs editor binary ed = r"c:\vim\vim62\gvim.exe" # *vi* editor binary spawnv(P_WAIT, ed, [ed, tmp])

# Read edited file back into memory, restore '\r's, and kill tmp file. fh = open(tmp) body = fh.read().replace('\n', '\r\n') fh.close() unlink(tmp)

# Store it as the body of the reply. Note that we are merely # sending this data back to Outlook -- it does not prevent MS from # mucking with your message. For example, it may add your signature # again, or it may remove newlines. MS software... what can you do? item.Body = body

# Create the Tk(inter) GUI app with the appropriate label and buttons. if __name__=='__main__': tk = Tk() f = Frame(tk, relief=RIDGE, borderwidth=2).pack() Label(f, text="Outlook Edit Launcher v0.2").pack() Button(f, text="Edit", fg='blue', command=launch).pack(fill=BOTH) Button(f, text="Quit", fg='red', command=tk.quit).pack(fill=BOTH) tk.mainloop()

I now click Outlook, then click my outlook.py script. I minimize the annoying black cmd window that comes up (anybody know how to get rid of this?), and I now have a little Python/TK window with a convenient “edit” button on it. When I compose a message in LookOut, I click this “edit” button, and up pops gvim 6.2, ready for me to type the message. When I’m done typing it, I just write-quit out of gvim, and the text pops up in my Outlook compose window.

Convenient! Well, for a UNIX-geek at least.

Anyway, I’m still torn. Do I really need to use Outlook here? Realistically, I have maybe one meeting a week that I need to keep track of, and that’s easily done in my Palm. Maybe I should just use Mutt in Cygwin on a managed mount? Who knows, but both are valid choices. And in a world where MS wants you to only use MS products, and those products are funkily generic and slow, it’s nice to have choices.

What do you think about the Pledge of Allegiance case the Supreme Court is due to hear today? Here’s the quick background on the case:

Michael Newdow, a non-religious California father, lawyer, and doctor, objected to his daughter reciting the words “Under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance. He took the school to court and won, but the district appealed. It is due to be heard before the Supreme Court today.

Until 1954, the phrase “Under God” was not in the Pledge of Allegiance. It was added by Congress due to lobbying by the “Knights of Columbus”, a religious organization. Additionally, in 1940, the Court decided that it was unconstitutional to require any citizen to recite the pledge.

There are a few interesting facets to the case that, in my opinion, may cause the Supremes to ignore it:

• Newdow is not the custodial parent
• Justice Antonin Scalia, noted conservative Supreme Court Justice, bowed out of hearing this case due to his outspoken opposition to Newdow’s arguments at a religious rally last year
• The girl’s mother is a Born-Again Christian, opposed to the case — and so is the daughter
• Bringing this case to bear may cause him to lose his California Bar Certification. Several religious organizations have begun a petition for him to lose his license to practice law.

As for me, this morning I heard arch-conservative Bob Lonsberry refer to Newdow as “this evil man” and his offspring the result of a “hippy-dippy fling”. Although I don’t think the phrase “under God” does any harm in the Pledge, at the same time, I think ad hominem attacks against Newdow due to him following his conscience are simply wrong.

The interesting thing for me here is the question: is the act of putting into law that the Pledge of Allegiance contains the phrase “Under God” a violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States? And will striking the same from the Pledge be an abridgement of the free speech of those for whom the public prayer aspect of the Pledge makes patriotism more palatable? What I mean is, does prohibiting religious speech in government oaths impinge the freedom of speech of those who wish to express their religious convictions in those oaths?

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

The small addition by Congress of “under God” turns the Pledge into both a patriotic oath, and a public prayer. People are free not to say it when reciting the Pledge, but the removal of it from the official Pledge will deny religious people the opportunity of saying it.

Don’t know how it’s going to turn out, but my gut reaction is that if the court does anything but refuse to hear the case, or rule in favor of the school district, there is going to be a great deal of civil uproar over, really, what seems to be an inconsequential thing. Throughout Elementary School, I recited the Pledge daily. Throughout Middle and High schools, I recited it once a week. Since then, I’ve only said it a handful of times. Seems like a bit of a tempest in a teapot to me, yet the long-term ramifications of the decision are both unknown, and probably far-reaching.

Update: More details now available on CNN about Newdow’s appeal.

TODAYonline brings us this little tidbit:

“A CURIOUS, anti-brassiere advertising campaign begins today. Printed against a light blue background, the print advertisement has no pictures and tells readers to “stop wearing bras”.

The striking caption is accompanied by research findings about how wearing bras can cause cancer.”

Read the article: Stop Wearing Bras

Interesting statistics for your viewing pleasure:

• Most popular search term that leads people to barnson.org: Rice Pudding“
• Second-most popular term: “Cream Cheese Frosting“
• Most commented-on article ever: “Where do you really stand on politics?“. (closed to further discussion)
• Second-most commented on: “Autism or Demonic Possession?“(closed to further discussion)
• Average requests per month: roughly 100,000
• Percentage of bandwidth used by serving mp3’s: 43.39%
• Post that has gotten me more hate mail than any other: “Garageband, Reviews, and my take (I think because of my fairly high google ranking for some bizarre reason is why)
• Most registered users ever online at one time: 5
• Most unregistered users ever online at one time: 33
• Most mystifyingly-popular post: “Back by popular demand: The art of tying shoes“.

Hope you enjoyed the list!

I’ve relaxed restrictions on avatars to accept 110×110 .jpg or .gif images. Uploaded a pic of Sam as a demo.

Go wild.

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I finally uploaded The Floogie. Mucho thanks to Justin and Teresa for resurrecting this old dog, and sending me an mp3 of this first Wayward Sun tune.

You can also stream the song using this link. Requires WinAmp or (for UNIX-like platforms), XMMS, and a high-bandwidth connection, because the song’s encoded at 160kbits/sec (a little fast for some streaming connections).

I apologize for the bad chunks of the song… it was on a well-worn tape.

Oh, Justin also threw me an original demo of us singing the Wayward Sun Theme Song; you can stream Wayward Sun’s theme song.