noise

Mkay... some ex-convict, who also happens to be famous, is denied entry in the UK. The UK rules, I love the UK. I fully agree with the British Border Agency: "we continue to oppose the entry to the UK of individuals where we believe their presence in the UK is not conducive to the public good". (In one way or another.)
Mkay... stupid mascot causes floods, or maybe it's just that Chinese symbolism is dumb and outdated. Also, those mascots are hideous. While we're at it, why don't we just shift all those eights a little bit? (pausing for a few moments) Aha! so that's how one transmutes prosperity to death and darkness to light etcetera. Interesting, I've learned something today.
Mkay... A lot of time has passed and people are still discussing Pluto. It's still amazing to see how much time and energy people invest in such irrelevant matters. Gravity Probe B canceled on the home stretch? Anyone? Bah! Pluto! You know what? Fuck Pluto and fuck the Hubble telescope for not being able to snap a photo of Pluto that's more than six pixels wide. We have pictures of Neptune, both from deep-space probes and from that orbiting piece of scrap that's been launched in space without being properly tested first, but we have great difficulty in obtaining pictures of Pluto. We also know there are bodies larger than Pluto beyond it and we don't call them planets, but we're still giving a shit about that piece of crap that can't even hold it's own orbit. We've failed as a race.
Mkay... crazy fanatic preacher admits to inscribing "an X, not a cross" on students' arms. A-ha! So not all terrorists are Muslim! We've learned something today, haven't we? The interesting thing is that he used "a science tool known as a high-frequency generator" to do what he did. This warrants further comments:
1. On the one hand, what he did is obviously wrong on many levels, but why the hell did he have to use an RF generator? I said this before in a previous post, concerning laser pointers: a knife can be used to prepare food, to heal people through surgery, or to kill people. Are you ready to ban knifes just because they can be used to kill people? I don't want to live in a world where I'm not allowed to use an RF generator because it can be used to burn people or cause interference. I know the article isn't about this, but I feel the problem needs to be raised. There also remains the question: why the hell use an RF generator, which is intrinsically evil and satanic as per the Bible, when there are matches and cigars and stuff available?
2. On the other hand, the guy might actually earn some bonus points for his technique. I mean, that's being inventive. It has hack value. For instance, if I had an RF generator and wanted to draw stuff on my skin, I'd certainly consider using it for that purpose, but maybe I wouldn't be thinking about this, had it not been for this guy's misdeeds.
Mkay... I was simulating some low-power wireless network and it wasn't working. No packets would get from one node to another. After countless hours of digging through the sources (I was lucky I had the sources), I found out that the simulated noise what at a constant level of plus 127 dBm. Sadly I can't give a fancy link to Google Calculator because it doesn't seem to know dBm, but I can tell you that's huge. I mean just look: Wikipedia has tables that speculate on how a hundred yottameters look like, but its dBm-to-watts table stops at 80. To get 127 dBm of noise power, or 5 gigawatts, you'd have to be inside a fusion reactor, or better yet, a hydrogen bomb. Well, the radio simulator would detect a collision at anything above -70dBm (like the physical chip does), which, as the Wikipedia table states, is quite a reasonable value. Anyway, fuck that, and fuck the fact that the interface for specifying noise in the radio simulation changed from TinyOS 2.0.0 to 2.0.1, breaking compatibility and silently failing (at least in the code I was working on, which I admit is... particular). You know what? Fuck bad programming, and fuck such a lousy sense of physics. This however raises the question: If I wrote a simulator from scratch, would I give debug warnings when parameters go haywire? Of course not, if only because there is no clear threshold after which a value can be safely identified as being totally insane. Maybe I should submit a patch that simulates the RF chip instantly vaporising into a greenish puff of smoke, so hot that even all the magic's gone away. I mean, if they simulate noise and attenuation and collisions and bit errors, why not?

analog

A few days ago I was out with my girlfriend to have a beer and watch the soccer game between Romania and Italy, which ended with a 1-1 draw. There were two places side by side where you could drink beer and watch the game. One had a huge wide-screen TV and was full when we got there, and the other had a small black&white TV that's probably older than me, with a small antenna. Of course we settled for the small TV and watched the game with the few people that were around. Every time something interesting happened, we would lay down the beer glasses and turn our heads towards the TV, occasionally cheering and applauding. About 2 to 3 seconds later, the crowd in the other bar would do the same. Of course, being a digital TV it probably had some amount of processing lag. I don't know how much, so I'll cautiously add the delay from the cable provider who also does some processing and might suffer from additional satellite delay, as opposed to the analog TV which was about... 4 miles from the TV station. So there goes the live. Having sorted out the intriguing relative delay between the small crowd and the large one, I am only left to wonder what the absolute delay was between Zürich and that old real-time analog black&white TV.

misc.

Sorry, but I just couldn't refrain:

1. Couple has sex in church confession box

"Oh my God! They killed Kenny!"
"He had sins that he didn't confess!"
"And he didn't take communion!"
"He's doooooomed."
"Better go and confess before WE die!"
"Come on, hurry up!"
"Oh no, it's locked!"
"Oh no! It can't be locked! Nooo!!!11 We have to confess before we die!"
"There's that window in the back that's usually open."
"Come on, hurry up!"
"Look, the confession box is over there!"
"I'm first, I'm first!"
"Oohhh!"
"What the?!"
"Oh, son of a bitch!"
"You're a sinner! You're doing unnatural things in the House of God!"
"Oh, forgive me Father, for I have sinned!" etcetera etcetera.

2. Manholes

"Like WTF, there were only ten people killed! Sheesh, quit making such a fuss!"
Hypocrites.

voting

This weekend is, er, was voting day. We're supposedly electing mayors, local councils and the other things that come with them. Therefore, last night I dreamt I was voting :D It was an interesting experience, akin to a trip into a future world and its voting ways.
So without further ado, I give you

Voting: 2084.

It was a cold April morning and the dew on the grass was frozen like tiny beads of glass.
I turn off the artificial landscape and open the window to smell the warm, polluted air.
Aaah, nitric dioxide, so sweet. Sulphur trioxide, yummy. Etcetera. (We still didn't find a cheap, pervasive way to command our windows to open and our lights to turn on in 2084, although computers students are still studying "Evolved Interfaces", but based on Web 4.0) First there was the Web, then pr0n, then the Social Web 2.0, then the Semantic Web 3.0 which failed to deliver, then there was Web 4.0, the EmoWeb, where people would use galvanic skin response, blood pressure, rectal probes and other sensors to upload their feelings online. Then of course marketoids were talking about Web 5.0, where you could blog by thought alone, but that wouldn't happen until 2337.
Alas, I reluctantly get up, take a shower, put some clothes on (dumb clothes, mind you, no electronics or anything) and walk out the door. I reach the voting room, sign on a sheet of paper, the supervisor hands me two booklets (where I am to stamp the desired candidates) and some advertising leaflets. There was absolutely no other person in that room. It was big, empty and quiet. Therefore I take my time and slowly walk towards the voting booth, which is a small, improvised box with dark blue drapes obscuring my secret choice. As usual, I might say.
I start analyzing the advertising materials and going through the list of candidates. Oddly enough, most are well-known TV stars. I finally decide on a sexy female TV presenter. After all, no mayor has done anything of note for the city in the last half-century, at least we'll have a sexy, charismatic mayor. But I'm not yet ready to cast my vote. I take a peek outside the small voting booth, and there are still no people around. Even the supervising authority has gone out for a smoke, leaving only a low-resolution security camera to keep watch. I calmly walk out of the booth, go into the next room, take out my 2-kg laptop, connect to the nearest wireless access point, and start searching for data on the few candidates I like most. After half an hour of searching, I think: Oh shit, I left the voting booth occupied! Think of the queue! Heck, what queue. There was no queue.
The End.

outlawing

Some British chef wants to outlaw out-of-season vegetables. Besides this being extremmely funny, it's of course stupid. Let's compare this to some hypothetical situations, in order to better understand just why is this so stupid.
First, let's assume some "celebrity" fashion designer decides they want to outlaw out-of-season or out-of-fashion clothes. I guess nobody is going to pass such a law (in a serious country in this timeframe), but just the idea of lobbying for something like this is preposterous. Imagine stores being unable to sell ... t-shirts in winter. Imagine yourself not being allowed to... I don't know, wear a blue hat because it's unfashionable and thus illegal.
Let's imagine then, that some "celebrity" "deejay" decides to lobby for a law banning songs and records that are more than 3 years old. So then I go to the usual rock bars and I'm not able to listen to 80's rock because some idiot passed a law that some other idiot lobbied for.
Then, let's imagine that some "celebrity" porn star bans you from having sex in other ways than the missionary position (a real law in some USA state).
Finally, let's imagine that some celebrity electonic circuit designer bans electrolytic capacitors, which they should actually do, as electrolytic capacitors currently suck balls and are a main cause of appliance failure. That would be extremmely stupid, because electrolytic capacitors, though unreliable, are very small and cannot be replaced with some other type without ending up with for example a mobile phone the size of a bucket.

kloks

This is about the 5th time in the last two weeks when I look at the clock and it shows 13:37.

transformation

1. Yesterday police have turned decorative Christmas lights back on in major cities around the country under the slogan "drinking alters reality" or something like that, in an effort to reduce drunk driving.

2. Hypermiling (what?) can supposedly save gas and cash. Tune your car to use up less fuel, and drive less aggressively. Yeah, right. One problem is, in the U.S. at least, that a certain percentage of people feel that driving an efficient car is {lame, gay, laughable, whatever}. Who the hell cares about fuel. $3.61 per gallon? What the fuck is a gallon anyway? I drink water out of 2L bottles and don't know how much that is in gallons. I have no fucking feel for how much a gallon is, even though I know roughly how much a mile or an inch or a pound is. Anyway, Google knows, almost 3.8L. So what, $3.61 for that much petrol is expensive? Bullshit, here it's over one €vro per litre.

3. Fish eat, they digest, they crap, and other fish eat their crap and do the same. ("Dirty Jobs" on Discovery). Then the second group of fish are fished out after having fattened up, and sold as human food.

3. Hyperprogramming. Processors read programs and execute them over data, chomping it up according to the programs. They crap out new data and heat. Scientists are looking for new computing models and paradigms to help decrease energy consumption.

4. Pain. As years pass, pain settles down on the bottom of a lake, where it decays into mud. From that mud, beautiful water lilies grow and shine under a crescent moon.