Barnson.org

Matt Barnson just had his wisdom teeth out.

That much I remember. It was summer 1992, and we were rounding the bend of the summer.

The day started out early, after one of the many nights I spent up in gaithersburg at the home of Mr. Barnson.. and we had planned a trip to the Montgomery County fair. It was a real surprise indeed, that Matt would have had me there at all, considering that morning he was to have his wisdom teeth out.

The night before, we had enjoyed all sorts of fun, at a small party at the house of Bryan gregg, just down the street, where I got to hang out with all the older kids who had just come back from college. Once back at Matt’s we enjoyed a night of licking marshmallows and throwing them at the ceiling to make them stick (a trick I learned from my Steve Sulouff back in Williamsburg). Matt’s stepsister Crystal had come to visit that week as well.

As Matt went to undergo major oral surgery, I visited my then-girlfriend who lived just down the street, but got back in time to attend a viewing of Batman Returns, which surprisingly, matt felt up to attending as well.

Once finished, the Matt, Bryan, Crystal, and more of us went to the Montgomery County fair to enjoy the sticky, sugary fatty foods, and the death defying rides.

While choosing to forego the foods on account of his surgery, I was surprised to find Matt sitting beside me on the “Zipper”, which is the closest one can be to tumbling out a 20 story building without accidentally doing so.

Matt, still numb with Novocaine and painkillers, was laughing and barely noticing the weird taste in his mouth.

It was only on the “Ring of Fire”, 10 minutes later, that Matt started to express to me that he was feeling sick. Not surprising, considering the blood dripping from his mouth. He looked at me with a look of mixed horror and glee as the ride began, and said “Yup.. looks like I’m gonna die”, as he flashed his cheshire grin, red oozing from between his teeth.

Why am I telling you this?

Well, partly because its a favorite Matt memory.. that greusome, funny picture, and partly because I like remembering what it was like to feel invulnerable, like we all did.. and now I get sick on the Zipper.

Mostly, I think we are defined by moments like these, when in one day, you experience so many things that are indicitave of your teenage life, so many people, most of which you never see again, and that dirty, sickly sweet cotton candy and haybail smell of the fair.. that once you are older, never seems to smell as good.

At our house we have an Easter tradition that’s a bit different from the usual. The Easter bunny visits our house a day early. We chose to do this over the years so that the children can enjoy the Easter treats, be excited about the bunny and then on Easter Sunday we can focus on the Spiritual side of Easter.

So last night my six year old, Zach, asked if he could help the Easter bunny prepare the baskets. Then of course Sara, 8, wanted to join in the fun. The older two then prepared the baskets and filled the eggs with candy and then we sent them off to bed so we could hide the baskets and the eggs for our hunt this morning.

This morning came way too soon. Once some chores were done the hunt began….and the hunt will continue for who knows how long, since we have a couple eggs yet to be found. With this in mind there are a couple things I’m greatful for. One is that they are candy eggs and not hard boiled eggs! The second is that we’re moving, so in the cleaning, they’re bound to turn up sometime within the next couple weeks.

Then come the usual concerns from the children. “How come my chocolate bunny is hollow? That’s not fair!” As if any child needs a two pound solid chocolate bunny. Of course two year old Elijah is thrilled at the concept of being given a huge chocolate bunny. Also, “How come we don’t get Easter grass this year?” Well, I’m so tired of finding plastic grass across the house for months afterwards, so this year their Easter outfit went in the bottom of the basket to take up space! Meanwhile, the sugar is kicking in and I’m going to have three children bouncing off the walls as we leave the house to go to our family birthday party today.

For those of you that believe, be sure to take time to ponder the Savior and his Atoning Sacrifice He made for each of us. From the LDS perspective, believing in eternal life, ponder this: I know many religions don’t believe in an after life, but what is the purpose of a Redeemer if there is no after life? Christ sacrificed His life and was Resurrected that we, too, might live again.

Happy Easter!

In the ‘applying-old-ideas-to-new-stuff’ category, I present to you: Mohammed Bah Abba. He invented the “Pot-in-Pot”. Haven’t heard of this revolutionary device? Read on…

Bah Abba, child of a long line of potters in rural northern Nigeria, struck upon the idea while hunting for a solution to the problem of refrigeration in hot, dry, impoverished rural areas of Nigeria. For millenia, people have been storing water in un-glazed earthenware pots. This allows the water to “wick” through the pottery, evaporating on the outside, and thus allowing the water to remain cool inside.

By creating a glazed pot within an unglazed pot, Bah Abba realized he could use the same idea to keep produce and other foods cool. The inner pot is filled with produce. The area between the outer pot and inner pot is filled with sand or mud, and kept wet. In this extremely hot climate, the Pot-in-Pot has extended edible lifetimes of produce, in some cases, from only three days to three weeks.

This has freed many young girls from the daily task of taking fresh produce to market before it spoils.

Thus they can go to school and gain an education.

With education, they can improve their lot, and that of their immediate family.

And Bah Abba has seeded much of southern Nigeria with his pots for free, at his own expense.

Although this is actually old news, first publicized in 2000 when he won the Rolex $100,000 award, I applaud his efforts. It may seem but a small thing, but improving the quality of life in an area that lacks the essentials of life is critical to advancing the cause of humanity, life expectancies, health and welfare, and helping humankind achieve greatness.

Another notch in the belt of “Bad Technology Decisions in action”…

Air America Radio was dead in the water up through 11 AM yesterday. They went from people being able to visit the home page, click a link, and listen, to requiring “registration” in order for people to get to the stream. Around 11 AM Mountain Daylight Time, they went back to their “old” setup (heh, the network is only a few days old) because their servers crashed and burned.

Consequently, my link to their stream was broken as they went to a “private” URI that you had to log in to see. I registered for an account (or tried to) in hopes I could see the stream URI and be able to update it on my block on the right-hand side of this page, but with everything totally borked, that was just out of the question.

But the biggest mistake is this: they made, IMHO, some poor technology choices for what appears to be an incredibly high-demand site. They are using Cold Fusion running on Microsoft Internet Information Server for their content management system. While these are nominally fine choices for small-to-mid-scale configurations, you have to throw a lot of hardware at the problem in order to handle the massive loads they appeared to be experiencing. You’d need to hefty back-end to drive it regardless of operating system and Content Management, and Cold Fusion is definitely no lightweight. There’s obviously either a few programmatic issues or else a severe lack of capacity at work there.

Bandwidth isn’t their problem: systems management is. They didn’t provide any informative message to users that the system was experiencing high load and unable to service requests, and their registration system was borked (probably) due to load during this big downtime window. My suggestion would by some dynamic offloading of registration through the use of a proxy-caching front-end: figure out the maximum load the system can sustain, track that using a reverse-proxy-caching front-end, and when load exceeds some arbitrary threshold at a point where the designers know it can handle it, throw up a message saying “unable to process your request at this time”, rather than allowing the system to try to process requests until everything’s timing out and nothing is happening.

* Sizeable farm of servers able to handle multiple millions of hits using dynamic content and proprietary technology like Cold Fusion, Oracle, and Microsoft Windows: $2,000,000+.

* Radio personalities to populate your new radio network: $$unknown millions$$/year

* Watching your web servers and streaming audio crash and burn due to poor technology decisions:

Priceless.

Kenny Hess, a student at Spanaway Lake High School in Tacoma, Washington, has been barred from producing any more videos in his broadcasting class. He failed to recite the phrase “under God” during the school’s Pledge of Allegiance, which is seen by all students and faculty on classroom TV.

He has been restricted to reading books during his broadcasting class, rather than learning broadcasting, for the rest of his high-school career.

Of course, he’s a senior, and it’s April, so that’s not too long 🙂

State law in Washington is aligned with judicial review in the 1945 case where the Court ruled that no person can be required to say the Pledge. In that case, pledge recitation took a back seat to freedom of religion, because Jehovah’s Witnesses cannot pledge fealty to any nation. School administrators suggest the 18-year-old should have written an editorial or prepared a televised opinion piece, rather than disrupt recitation of the pledge in its current form throughout the school.

“Our interpretation as a school district is that the law says we say the pledge,” said Greg Eisnaugle, Spanaway Lake principal. “‘Under God’ is still in it. If the court says it comes out, that’s what we’ll do.”

What do you think? Did the school administrators do the right thing? Did Kenny do the right thing?

(Side note: if Kenny’s an atheist, would he dislike the traditional epithet used in South Park when Kenny dies in each episode?)

My thoughts: Although I sympathize with Kenny, at the moment the law and school policy are not on his side. Acts of in-school civil disobedience are extremely disruptive, and I think, the wrong forum for them. He’s entitled to vote (since he’s 18), and it will be his responsibility to vote for candidates sympathetic to his cause. He’s also old enough to bring suit against the school district over the issue if he chooses, and were he younger, his parents could bring suit on his behalf.
On the other hand, he’s already apologized and agreed not to perform a similar stunt in the future. Prohibiting him from participation in his class for the rest of the semester seems an unusually harsh punishment. I’d think a day of in-school suspension would suffice.

This week is a week of trepidation for me, and about an issue I usually care nothing about… television.

Now, let me say.. I’m not a big fan of most TV

But don’t we all have our favorite shows.. and haven’t we.. and don’t we all have to see the end of our favorite characters and their fictional lives we somehow have come to value?

Sometimes we get robbed, like when Sam never returned home in the anticlimactic end of Quantum Leap. Sometimes we get surprised, like when there is no “final episode”.. and sometimes we get to see the lives of characters move on in TV (like Frasier, and next year’s Friends spinoff “Joey”), or even in the movies (Highlander, Trek, and soon, X-Files).

I remember when STAR TREK:TNG used to be #1 for the week in the ratings, and now.. fourteen years after that 3 week stint, I still faithfully watch Star Trek: Enterprise, knowing they are on the verge of cancellation because thier numbers are less than a third of #1 for wednesday nights.

An announcement will be coming in the next 14 days.

For all this time.. and for some.. even longer than that.. we’ve always known we could have some kind of Trek to tune into.. and now, if it doesn’t die this season, it will probably at the end of next.. and no more movies are coming.

Such is true for the “Buffy” fans this year, as “Angel” comes to a close, and for “Cheers” fans, as Frasier ends.

I’m lucky enough to be confident that Trek will probably come back some day in one way. but I marvel at the whole idea.. that we start to like these imaginary little worlds so much.. and when they go away, its a little sad.

The real fear is that with the new advent of reality TV, in a few years, people will look back at this whole phenomenon and not understand why we got sucked in..

90% of whats on TV sucks, no doubt.. but man.. that other 10%.

I know I usually wait till sunday to post, but I thought this bit of news would be hot, so, yes, you heard it here first..

JOHN KERRY HAS CHOSEN TV AND RADIO COMMENTATOR BILL O’REILLY TO BE HIS RUNNING MATE IN 2004.

From Reuters: “In an effort to secure the swing vote and the votes of dissatisfied republican voters, John kerry has added the host of Fox News’s “O’Reilly factor” to the presidential ticket”

I’ve put a link to the rest of article on my website..

www.timpane.com/kerry

EDIT by matthew: Fixed the link.

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.

For those with no children – this is totally hysterical! For those who already have children past this age – this is hilarious. For those who have children this age – this is not funny. For those who have children nearing this age – this is a warning. For those who have not yet had children – this is birth control! —————————————-

The following came from an anonymous mother in Austin, Texas:

Things I’ve learned from my children (honest – no kidding):

1. A king size waterbed holds enough water to fill a 2000 sq. ft. house 4 inches deep.

2. If you spray hair spray on dust bunnies and run over them with roller blades, they can ignite.

3. A 3-year old’s voice is louder than 200 adults in a crowded restaurant.

4. If you hook a dog leash over a ceiling fan, the motor is not strong enough to rotate a 42 pound boy wearing Batman underwear and a Superman cape. It is strong enough, however, if tied to a paint can, to spread paint on all four walls of a 20×20 ft. room.

5. You should not throw baseballs up when the ceiling fan is on. When using a ceiling fan as a bat, you have to throw the ball up a few times before you get a hit. A ceiling fan can hit a baseball a long way.

6. The glass in windows (even double-pane) doesn’t stop a baseball hit by a ceiling fan.

7. When you hear the toilet flush and the words “uh oh,” it’s already too late.

8. Brake fluid mixed with Clorox makes smoke, and lots of it.

9. A 6-year old can start a fire with a flint rock even though a 36-year old man says they can only do it in the movies.

10. Certain Lego’s will pass through the digestive tract of a 4-year old.

11. Play dough and microwave should not be used in the same sentence.

12. Super glue is forever.

13. No matter how much Jell-O you put in a swimming pool you still can’t walk on water.

14. Pool filters do not like Jell-O.

15. VCR’s do not eject PB&J sandwiches even though TV commercials show they do.

16. Garbage bags do not make good parachutes.

17. Marbles in gas tanks make lots of noise when driving.

18. You probably do not want to know what that odour is.

19. Always look in the oven before you turn it on. Plastic toys do not like ovens.

20. The fire department in Austin, TX has a 5-minute response time.

21. The spin cycle on the washing machine does not make earthworms dizzy.

22. It will, however, make cats dizzy.

23. Cats throw up twice their body weight when dizzy.

24. The mind of a 6 year old is wonderful.

First grade…true story: One day the first grade teacher was reading the story of the Three Little Pigs to her class. She came to the part of the story where the first pig was trying to accumulate the building materials for his home. She read,” …and so the pig went up to the man with the wheelbarrow full of straw and said, “Pardon me sir, but may I have some of that straw to build my house?'”

The teacher paused then asked the class, “And what do you think that man said?”

One little boy raised his hand and said, “I think he said…’Holy crap! A talking pig!'” The teacher was unable to teach for the next 10 minutes.

25. 60% of men who read this will try mixing the Clorox and brake fluid.