Informational purposes only, indeed.

Finally, a professional society I actually want to join: The Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists™.  I just have to find the right picture “in which the luxuriant, flowing hair is CLEARLY evident” and I’ll be ready to sign up.

This is very cool. Despite my misgivings about the one-laptop-per-child initiative, the machine and software are starting to get me excited. It is apparently too late for the give one/get one program, but maybe there will be another chance soon. But what’s really cool is quantum cryptography (key distribution) between two of these machines. This news came to me via the slashdot firehose, lwn.net and the source OLPC Austria. Check it out.

I do like that (from the pictures) it appears that Alice and Bob’s computers are right next to each other.  I guess that’s still better than when CHB and I did it, where Alice and Bob actually shared a computer.

I’m back from India, where I was for QIP2008. (click on the picture to see the full width until I figure out a wordpress setup that is wider)

Aram Harrow had a good bad idea when we were discussing the preference for boy children and the abortion of girls. We had just seen a sign advertising ultrasound imaging, and someone said they thought that had been made illegal in order to prevent such sex-based abortions. This doesn’t make much sense as the procedure is important for many other diagnostic reasons and I don’t think it’s true, based on a quick googling. Though it may be illegal for the doctor to tell you the sex of the fetus, something which is true in Korea anyway, coincidentally coming up in a New York Times article just today on how things are starting to balance out there.

Aram’s idea is to adapt technology used to blur out the naughty bits in airport screening X-rays which can see though your clothes to prenatal ultrasounds. Silly as it sounds, it might actually be a good idea. Though I doubt this could work–any blurring of the image would risk missing important diagnostic information. Of course, it is claimed that the airport security screeners won’t miss any concealed weapons compared to the unblurred images. This also seems unlikely. A penis shaped gun doesn’t seem like much of a stretch.

Go into the httpdocs directory as root and run: chgrp -R psaserv *

This will fix the permissions so apache can write to my files. The right way is to create a new wordpress group and put both me and apache in it but I need Russell to do it and he isn’t. Note to all and sundry: This is for kangry.com only, don’t take it is a way to fix things for you.

Last tuesday night the guy came by with a bank check for the balance of the $8000 sale price of my Civic. The next day he was planning to register it and get plates, then take it away. While I was in the city getting my visa for India (at the not-at-all-ironically-named Indian visa outsourcing agency), he called and said there was a problem. The DMVneeded my signature on their official bill of sale rather than just the note I had written. I was sort of willing to come back to Westchester rather than hang around the city all day waiting for my visa to be ready, but he said he would drive to another DMV and see if they were more reasonable. Later I got a message saying that “he got it taken care of, don’t ask how.” Probably he just forged my signature. Though I may have suggested that myself, I intend to take him at his word and not ask.

It’s strange to come home and not see the car in my driveway. I hope his son enjoys it as much as I did.

The confirmation of Michael Mukasey as attorney general gave me an idea. I propose that waterboarding be used as a regular part of the senate confirmation process. Mukasey hardly answered any questions and waterboarding should remedy this situation in the future. Surely if it’s important to get information out of people who may be plotting to take over or destroy our country, it is just as important to get it out of those who already have are plotting to run it.

I just listed my first ever item on Craigslist, my old Honda Civic Si. Check it out.

Update 4:43PM November 16: Tuesday evening a guy and his son came to look at the car. The kid took it for a drive while I shot the breeze with John and his business partner for a while. Yesterday they gave me a $500 check as a deposit on an $8000 offer. I should have tried Craigslist a full year ago.

So after three weeks this blog still isn’t showing up when you google for “John A. Smolin blog.” If you search for that in quotes you get nothing. Without the quotes the top three links are http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2007/02/this_weeks_finds_in_mathematic_7.html, http://www.stevens.edu/csw/cgi-bin/blogs/scientific_curmudgeon/ and http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=68, which are all blogs about Lee Smolin’s book, and which happen to mention someone named “John.”

So let’s see if adding links to those makes this site even harder to find or if it might accidentally show up despite Google’s best efforts to find those other blogs.

Update 10:47AM November 6: Now searching for the quoted string finds me. Does anybody know how to get WordPress to automatically date updates without making a whole new post?

The BE-2350 CPU turned out to be fine. I bought a new CPU which the MSI tech support guy said ought to work even with the oldest BIOS (AMD Ahlon 64 3200+ Orleans 2000 MHZ $46) and still nothing worked. Finally, I was going to try booting off the old IDE hard drive I had in an old computer (which I think is 9GB and has Windows 95 on it) and just listen to see if the drive spins or quits. I had the bright idea to test that machine first, which would also serve to retest the monitor. Sure enough, same strange clicking sound and no display. I tested the monitor with the thinkpad again and it still worked.

So I brought the old computer into the lab and plugged it into a different monitor. Booted up fine, displayed fine. Who knew a multisync monitor could work with some VGA cards and not others? In my garage I had Jim’s old computer and monitor dated 1999. I was sure it couldn’t be a VGA monitor, looked more like the machine was a 286 perhaps EGA era. But it was a VGA. Coincidentally, Jim came by yesterday (after four and a half years) to take all his stuff that was stored here. He ended up leaving the computer (Russell and I are charged with saving the data from it or chucking it, at our discretion). So today I tried the old monitor and the new machine boots up fine.

It happened that the new CPU was in the motherboard when I began today, so I updated the BIOS on the board without bothering to see if it would have worked with the BE-2350 and the old BIOS. The only other trouble I had was that the machine wouldn’t boot with both memory slots full (with either set of RAM) until I put back the 3200+ CPU, then switched them again. I don’t know why that worked, perhaps I just got lucky reseating the RAM enough times.