Tech notes from all over. To be perfectly honest, we pay very little attention to our server logs. Not, of course, because it would be too depressing to contemplate the meager trickle of visitors, but because we are simply too insouciant to care about such petty things. Really. It's fine. Don't visit. See if we care!.... Hey! Come back!

Anyway, on those extremely rare occasions when I do peek at the logs, I notice that a fair number of Google-referred hits are the result of someone looking for some kind of SuSE or generic Linux information. Just to be of service to those lost, desperate souls, I suppose I should occasionally post something Linux-oriented. So here's this year's tip:

Say, for instance, that you use libgphoto2 and gphoto2 to allow your digital camera to interface with your computer, and also say that this set up usually just works, requiring no further mucking around on your part. Perhaps, after months of just working, the connection starts to fail, intermittently at first, but then regularly, to the point that every attempt to connect the camera to the computer results in the following plaint from gphoto2:

Error (-114: 'OS error in camera communication')

What will you do? I discovered, after a 60-minute period of debugging, logfile-combing, hair-pulling, and teeth-gnashing, that one possible cause of the problem is insufficient battery strength in the camera. The debug logs seemed to indicate that gphoto2 was asking the camera to initialize, and the camera never responded... I thought to myself, what would cause the camera to fail to respond, even though it worked before? while also pondering the camera manual's note that using the USB connector took a lot of juice. On a whim, I popped in some spare batteries.

Nothing.

I raged at the camera and computer some more, and popped in some brand new, just-bought-at-the-store-this-week batteries.... and all was happy again. O frabjous day! (Incidentally, the old batteries still had plenty of power to run the camera. Apparently, the USB connection has pretty major power requirements, relatively speaking.)

On a less happy note, I notice this week that Alcatel-Lucent is shutting down Bell Labs. Yes,
that Bell Labs. Now, that's depressing.

Let us join together in a glorious monochrome rainbow.

We now know that the appropriate compensation for each individual case of Anglo-Irish abuse is €20,000. The average annual population of Ireland has been, say, 5m, with many millions more abroad. If one multiples that over the last 600 years, then brings a class action on behalf of the entire Irish race for racial abuse at the hands of the English, I estimate that we are entitled to a compensation package of about €13 trillion.

Amusing, but to nitpick, the tort that the referenced compensation was to amend was actually for Irish-Anglo abuse, i.e., the abuse of Britons by Irishmen. No reason to assume that compensation for the reverse case (Anglo-Irish abuse) would be symmetrical. A further nit: the article recycles the hoary old No Irish Need Apply story, which seems to have very little there there.*

The most interesting feature of the piece from which the quote comes, at least to this U.S. reader, is the apparent subsumption of all ethnic, tribal, and national animosities under the blanket term "racism". As in, "Is it possible that we harbour such a deep-seated resentment against the English that we have become blind to our own racism?" This is apparently some Irish guy talking here, talking about the English. The few commenters seem to agree that yes, a pasty-white Irishman taking a piss on the pasty-white English is racist!

Just as "fascist" evolved from "proponent of a nationalistic, authoritarian political movement with populist overtones" to "any person I disagree with", "racist" seems to be moving from "proponent of legal, moral or ethical distinctions of people based on race" to "somebody who dislikes something based on any cultural distinction whatsoever." And in a few decades I guess it will get to "any person I disagree with" also.

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*Disclaimer: Yes, Irish in North America and England abused, treated poorly, etc. Not relevant.

And apropos of that last post, Mr. Fitzgerald helps keep a sense of proportion:

The Marxist, Marcusian and Sartrian dialectics that inspired the students in France, Germany, Britain and the USA in 1968 have been completely discredited as amoral, selfish posturing. The truly revolutionary idea of that year was the notion of human rights that inspired the captive peoples of the Soviet bloc to protest in public and risk imprisonment, exile or death.

At a time when the spoiled brats of 1968 are being romanced for their excesses, we should all make a vow that when the 50th anniversary of that seminal year comes around it is not the opponents of freedom who will be honoured, but its defenders. They faced down the tanks; they went to Siberia. They started a revolution that spread from Prague to Red Square and beyond. They were the real revolutionaries.

All your oppressive machinery is powerless against my tinfoil underpants. As someone who has always been intrigued by social uses for sound technology, I couldn't let this latest, ah, tidbit* pass by unnoticed. It seems that some of the professionally-aggrieved community got hold of an old urban legend (I remember it from my undergrad days) and have turned it into another Dastardly Plot by the Man:

Political activists planning protest rallies at the upcoming Democratic Convention in Denver have their stomachs in knots over a rumor about a crowd control weapon - known as the “crap cannon” - that might be unleashed against them.

Also called “Brown Note,” it is believed to be an infrasound frequency that debilitates a person by making them defecate involuntarily.

The rest of the article (Danger! Fox News!) comprises the moonbat ravings of eternal adolescents Mark Cohen and Glenn Spagnuolo (how dare they use this ficticious weapon on us!) and the bemused denials of just about, well, everybody.

Dr. Roger Schwenke - an expert acoustician who appeared on the Discovery Channel’s “Mythbusters” in 2004 to test the phenomenon - told FOXNews.com there is no scientific evidence that proves such frequencies cause involuntary defecation.

“When we conducted the low frequency experiment for the Brown Note episode of MythBusters, we tested a variety of low frequencies and no involuntary gastro-intestinal motility was caused,” he said.

But Schwenke acknowledged the low-frequency exposure did cause an adverse effect. Several people — including himself — reported “abdominal discomfort,” he said, “which was easily alleviated by moving a moderate distance away from the source.”

Mere reality can't compete with fantasies of persecution, though.

In addition to purely fictional weapons, the local tantrum-throwing community has decided to worry about real but esoteric and highly improbable ones, such as the Active Denial System, which emits a beam of microwave radiation that heats the surface of the skin sufficiently to cause a sensation of extreme heat, without burning or damaging tissues (at least, that's the idea). It's supposed to help deter potentially hostile people without injury at distances beyond the reach of small-arms fire. "Spagnuolo believes that Raytheon, the company that manufactures the [ADS], is planning to test a limited-range civilian version on protesters in Denver before approving its use in places like Iraq." Wait – wouldn't it be even more dastardly, more evil, to test it on little foreign people first, before unleashing it on the brave truth-to-power-speakers of Re-create 68? No accounting for the ways of the wicked, I guess.

Unlike the 'crap cannon', the ADS might make it to Iraq eventually, but it's still undergoing tests (presumably not on the streets of Denver). And not to worry, Mssrs. Cohen & Spagnuolo – it can be easily counteracted:

Countermeasures against the weapon could be quite straightforward — for example covering up the body with thick clothes or carrying a metallic sheet — or even a trash can lid — as a shield or reflector. Also unclear is how the active-denial technology would work in rainy, foggy or sea-spray conditions where the beam's energy could be absorbed by water in the atmosphere.

But just to be sure, I'd recommend a full-body tinfoil wrap.

UPDATE: Gitmo on the Platte! Will the oppression never stop? Where are your metallic undergarment friends now?

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*Via some commenter on an Ann Althouse thread; link lost in the mists of the Firefox cache.

Qoute of the day, mid-campaign edition.

Lots of "I'm shocked! shocked!" Nobody's really shocked. This is a fight to the death for power and the distribution of wealth. It is about ideology only to the extent that ideologies are masks for interests. Of course each contender is going to do whatever it takes to win, within the vague and shifting limits set by public revulsion... So, to put it as crudely as possible: the rich don't want to be taxed; the poor want more handouts; and everybody in between is trying to figure out whether life is better for them (us) under the frankly powerful or under those whose power derives from purporting to represent the interests of the powerless.

Too much truth in advertising, perhaps. Flipping through the channels on the treadmill yesterday, I chanced on CNBC right when a commercial for some entity named PowerShares came on. The ad was flogging their new ETF, which will specialize in "a global wind energy portfolio". The NASDAQ stock ticker symbol?
PWND.
Probably not a whole lot of leet-speakers over at PowerShares.

(Partial explanation of joke here; example here.)

Being one's own worst enemy. Rand Simberg links to a piece in Salon.com about the current antics of PZ Myers. I've been vaguely aware of Myers and his web site for some time; he seemed to be a compentent developmental biologist. He was pretty active in countering a lot of creationist nonsense back in the dawn epoch of the blogosphere, and helped to make Panda's Thumb a good site for evolution-related information.

Lately, however, Myers seems to have acquired a new mission; he decided that he was going to show all those stupid religious people just how stupid they are, and that this will cause the scales to fall from their eyes, and they will thenceforth no longer be stupid. (I admit I'm guessing about that last part. Really, it's not clear to me what the point of his cracker perforation stunt was. I'm tempted to believe that he is just reveling in his lately-found role of Big Bad Atheist – based on photos on his website, it apparently is allowing him to meet hot atheist chicks.)

Back in the early 90's, I happened to be eating dinner one night with a couple of fellow grad students as well as some of the faculty, and we got into a discussion about Richard Dawkins, whose "Blind Watchmaker" had come out a few years before. The general consensus, as I remember, was that Dawkins was a dogmatic asshole, but he might be a necessary dogmatic asshole to counteract the d.a.'s of the creationists. Without tireless haranguers like Dawkins around, the argument went, biologists would have no equivalent to the likes of Phillip Johnson or Michael Behe.

Over time, though, Dawkins switched over from defending and promoting the study of biological evolution to attacking theistic religion, which I'm sure he probably sees as consistent, logical, even necessary, but makes him sound like the lead debater for the local Junior High Atheist's Club. PZ Myers seems to be angling for the Dawkins mini-me spot with the cracker stunt, and glorying in all the vituperative e-mail showered upon him by dimwitted Catholics.

"Question everything. God is not great, Jesus is not your lord, you are not disciples of any charismatic prophet" Myers says, but I would guess the likelihood of anybody being jolted into the light of Reason by virtue of his stunt would hover somewhere around zero. More likely, Myers has reinforced the stereotype of the arrogant scientist in the minds of those he sought to antagonize, which doesn't seem like progress. "...people are so goddamned stupid. Petty and stupid. Hateful and stupid. Just plain stupid. And nothing makes them stupider than religion," says Myers. Ah, but there's the rub – where's Myers' proof that religion makes people stupid – or rather, stupider? Why does Myers think that taking taking religion away from the stupid would make them less stupid or harmful? Perhaps a world of stupid, irreligious people would be even nastier than a world of stupid religious people?

Which leads to another grad school culinary flashback, this time at a sidewalk teriyaki joint eating with a labmate and the labmate's mother, in town for a visit. The mother, a prim, petite woman, after giving me a short history of her life, told me in a charming German accent, "In the old days, the stupid people had religion. Now, they just have television." The truth of the comment didn't really hit me then, but since I have seen it in operation a hundred times.*

*Not television sensu stricto. "Politics" works as well, as would many other things.