Category Archives: Uncategorized

Okay, so I’m a geek.

Posted on by
18

But still: “Nano” does not mean “small,” guys!

Shelly’s working on a speech for her speech class about nanotechnology. For the speech, she’s trying to get across the idea about just how small nanoscale objects really are.

So I’ve put together an image of what one might expect from a real iPod nano:

Life imitates computer games

Posted on by
28

So unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past year or so, you’ve at least heard of “World of Warcraft,” the Blizzard game where players create characters on a Blizzard server and play simultaneously with other people–LOTS of other people–in real-time. At any given moment in time, thee are over 200,000 people logged on to the World of Warcraft servers playing the game; Blizzard has over two million subscribers total, making WoW the most popular computergame…well, ever.

I play myself; I have five characters, including a level 60 warrior named Ragnarokkr on the Medivh server.

Recently, Blizzard released a new WoW patch. They do this from time to time, often to add new content–new quests, new areas to explore, new dungeons for groups of characters to adventure in. The last patch, which was released about a week ago, introduced a new elite dungeon designed to be played by groups of 20 high-level, powerful characters.

The main adversary in this new high-level dungeon has an ability to infect a player with a disease called “Corruption of Blood.” It kills the payer rather quickly and it can be spread to other, nearby players. Blizzard didn’t think a player infected with this disease would have the opportunity to leave the dungeon before dying of it. (Death in the game is a minor nuisance; if your character dies, you become a ghost, and you can reincarnate by returning to the place where you died or by having a priest or shaman player ressurect you.)

They were wrong.

Last Thursday, someone infected with this disease and playing on the Eonar server, where two of my characters live, managed to make it to one of the capital cities in the game world, a place called Ironforge. At any given time of the day or night, you can reasonably expect to see about a thousand players running around in Ironforge, meaning that this virtual non-existant city has a larger population than almost every real city in the world through three-quarters of human history.

Anyway, the capital cities have a very high population density, and the disease can be transmitted from character to character. You can tell where this is going, right?

My character died almost immediately when I entered the city. The entire place was littered with corpses. People would die, resurrect their characters, and then promptly die again–or worse yet, become infected just as they were leaving the city. It took hours before it was safe to move in Ironforge.

Well, it turns out that the problem has totally run away from Blizzard. On some servers, it’s impossible to go to ANY city without becoming “infected.” It’s bad enough that there’s an article about it on The Register:

It’s said that attempts have been made to quarantine the infected, but the efforts of what might be called the World of Warcraft Health Organisation (WWHO) appear to be ineffective. Plague-carrying players escape the curfew to lug the lurgey out into the wider WoW world.

The Corrupted Blood disease is, in short, out of control and rapidly taking on epidemic status.

Of some interest is the fact that when I read the article, Google Ads paced an ad for a site which sells online game currency for genuine real-world currency. There are many such sites, and they have become big business. How big? People make six figures a year doing nothing but generating online currency and then selling it for real money. That big.

It really is a World of Warcraft world.

Whew!

Posted on by
10

Just finished uploading a major update to my BDSM Web site, which includes an entirely new page on So You Want to Be a Dom and a major update to the BDSM Glossary that nearly doubles(!) its size. The entire Glossary is now 12,995 words long(!!).

Planned over the next few days: at least one new page in the BDSM section, a new addition to the Polyamory section, and a whole new wing on my Web site containing more information and a list of resources on transhumanism and extropianism.

Weekend stuff, computer peripherals as a metaphor for relationships, and an olive branch

Posted on by
16

Saturday evening, Shelly and I went out to the Castle to do some danng,a nd hooked up with S, her other boyfriend, nekidsteve, nihilus, phyrra, and their friend and housemate. (Tried to shoot you an IM, johnnymoon, but you weren’t online and it was a really spur-of-the-moment, last-minute thing…)

The main DJ sucked. The alternate DJ ruled. There’s a life lesson in there somewhere, that I’m too lazy to dig out. Anyway, the alternate DJ played the Second Best Song to Dance To Ever Written1, which I’ve heard before but didn’t know the name of. Shelly talked to him after. Turns out the song is by a band called Wumpscut, and the song is called Wreath of Barbs. (Note: direct MP3 download; 6.3 megabytes.)

datan0de, if you aren’t familiar with this song, you should be. 🙂

In old-school computer hackerspeak, a situation can arise between a computer and a peripheral which is called “deadlock” (or, for those of you who hail from MIT, “deadly embrace”). Modern computer protocols have largely done away with it, but generally speaking it’s a situation where a computer and a peripheral stop talking to one another because each is waiting for some sort of response from the other.

There are two basic varieties of deadlock: “starvation,” in which the computer and the peripheral are each waiting for data from the other, and “constipation,” where the computer’s buffer is full and it’s waiting for a signal from the peripheral to receive the data, and the peripheral’s buffer is full and it’s waiting for a signal from the computer to receive ITS data.

It seems the same sort of thing can happen between two people, especially if some kind of problem has existed between them. ach ends up feeling marginalized by the other, and each ends up feeling that the other wants nothing to do with him–so each ends up not reaching out to the other.

Computers can be rebooted, and there’s no hard feelings. With people, it’s a bit more tricky.

So. We had a blast at the club, except for tension etween phyrra and I. I can tell she doesn’t feel comfortable around me, so I don’t try to impose on her, so she feels like I’m avoiding her, so she feels uncomfortable around me, so… starvation deadlock.

And there’s no reason it should be this way. phyrra is a warm and wonderful person who I like very much. Just so y’all know. 🙂

And, just as a bonus, I bring you, courtesy of felisdemens, English As She Is Spoke, the worse English dictionary and phrasebook ever written. From the site:

This 1883 book is without question the worst phrasebook ever written. The writer, Pedro Carolino, who was Portuguese, did not particularly speak English, nor did he have a Portuguese-English dictionary available. Instead, he worked with a French-English phrasebook and a Portuguese-French dictionary. The results, I’m sure you’ll agree, are staggering.

This text is that of a book of excerpts compiled a few years after the book was first published. Anything that looks like an error is, in fact, the way it actually appears in the book. I’ve transcribed the complete text of that book; I do not, unfortunately, have a copy of the original. I’m sure you’ll notice bits that look like typos. They’re not; that’s all part of the fun.

The phrasebook contains such useful gems as a handy list of common English colours (White, Gridelin, Cray, Musk, and Red), popular English games (Foot-ball, Pile, Bar, Mall, Gleek, Even or non even, Carousal, and Keel), handy English phrases (“Give me some good milk newly get out,” “He burns one’s self the brains”), and English idiotisms and proverbs (“He has fond the knuckle of the business,” “So much go the jar to spring that at last it break there”). This stuff predates Engrish by a good century, and is, if anything, even more bizarre. Great stuff!

1All decent, God-fearing people know, of course, that in the great cosmology of Songs to Dance To, nothing can compare to the pinnacle of human achievement, Front 242’s Headhunter v1.0.

A bit of merriment in my email this morning…

Posted on by
24

Headers included.

Return-Path:
Received: from rly-yb04.mx.aol.com (rly-yb04.mail.aol.com [172.18.205.136]) by air-yb03.mail.aol.com (v107.10) with ESMTP id MAILINYB33-196432511b32a; Mon, 12 Sep 2005 01:27:23 -0400
Received: from telekom.net.sb (vortex.telekom.net.sb [202.139.42.11]) by rly-yb04.mx.aol.com (v107.10) with ESMTP id MAILRELAYINYB46-196432511b32a; Mon, 12 Sep 2005 01:27:20 -0400
Received: from olketa.solomon.com.sb ([202.139.42.4] verified)
by telekom.net.sb (CommuniGate Pro SMTP 4.2.7)
with ESMTP id 16348329 for tacitr@aol.com; Mon, 12 Sep 2005 16:41:18 +1100
Received: from spectrumnmk8hd (hon-adsl-164-211.telekom.net.sb [202.1.164.211])
by olketa.solomon.com.sb (8.12.11/8.12.11) with SMTP id j8C5R9Uw001114
for ; Mon, 12 Sep 2005 16:27:10 +1100
(envelope-from lo@dcam.gov.sb)
Message-ID: <016b01c5b7f2$4d068a10$0701a8c0@spectrumnmk8hd>
From: “lo”
To:
Subject: TURN FROM SIN FOLKS
Date: Mon, 12 Sep 2005 16:32:53 -0700
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
boundary=”—-=_NextPart_000_0168_01C5B7B7.9FCEB730″

DO NOT WASTE YOUR TIME IN THE SIN BUSINESS
THE WAGES OF SIN IS DEATH
GOD IS HOLY
HE WANTS YOU TO REPENT
GOD CAN SEE YOU RIGHT THIS VERY MOMENT
HE CAN SEE RIGHT INTO YOUR HEART
YOU HAVE A WICKED AND EVIL HEART
TURN TO GOD
AND ASK FOR HIS FORGIVENESS

JUDGEMENT IS COMING AHEAD
HOW SAD IF IT FALLS ON YOU

I have a wicked and evil heart. Is there a support group for that? 🙂

Sex and math, and sex

Posted on by
26

Ugol’s Law states that no sexual fetish is unique–that is, if something turns you on, then someone else, somewhere, is turned on by the same thing.

Shelly is currently in school, pursuing a degree in chemical engineering with an eye toward using it to get a doctorate in biomedical nanotechnology. More and more universities are offering graduate-level degrees in nanotechnology, mostly interdisciplinary degrees that bring together people from medical, physics, and chemical engineering backgrounds.

As you might imagine, her coursework involves rather a lot of math. And, as it turns out, Shelly is uncontrollably aroused by math. No, there isn’t a word for it (I looked), but math gets her hot. Really hot.

And she’s started doing her homework on my body, using a fine-point marker pen to work out problems on my back. Which is beyond hot. By the time she’s finished with her homework, she’s usually uncontrollably aroused and very aggressive. I won’t bore you with what happens afterward, except that it involves numerous implements, floggers, and other things which might offend those with delicate sensibilities. In fact, I went in to the office today with a complex problem in analytical geometry written on my back.

So it should come as no surprise, then, that the Intellectual Sexiness Test meme that’s been making the rounds these days says:

Blasphemy

Posted on by
54

I hate Linux.

There. I said it. Linux is rubbish; the emperor has no clothes.

Okay, it’s got some things going for it. As a server operating system, it’s very useful. It’s so much more secure than Windows that comparing the two is like comparing Fort Knox to a child’s piggy bank. For high-volume Internet server applications, it can’t be beat for the price.

But as a general desktop operating system? It’s bunk. Want to know why? Because there’s a dirty little secret about open source software…it’s made by amateurs!!!

And until those amateurs get their shit straight when it comes to installers, it will never beat Windows regardless of how many problems Windows has and how many security holes Windows suffers from.

So last night I tried installing Fedora Core 4 on one of Shelly’s computers. Fedora core 4 uses a graphical installer called anaconda, which is the worst pile of crap ever to disgrace a computr screen. Want to know why? It’s the user interface, stupid!

I’ve had problems with various Linux installers before–they’re all pretty and friendly and turnkey until the slightest unexpected thing happens, and then you find out that they’re poorly debugged and as fragile as a soap bubble, and when they crash, man, it ain’t pretty. See, writing installers isn’t all sexy and doesn’t give you street cred the way writing kernel software does, so nobody really wants to do it. It’s the castor oil of programming; people have this vaguue notion that installers are good, somehow, but nobody wants to get near them. And you get things like anaconda, which crash into exception traces and stack backtraces when they don’t like a particular brand of network card, or which don’t have even basic error checking and recovery.

Take the problems I had last night (please!). It took four tries to get the damn thing to install, even from media that had been verified and was known to be good.

The first problem was my fault, kinda. See, FC4 fits on four CDs. You run the installer, and when it’s done with a CD it pops out and asks for the next CD. You put the next CD in, click OK, and off it goes, and so on.

Well, when the installer asked for the third CD, I popped it in, and then (stupidly) clicked the OK button right away, before the CD finished spinnig up. Now, any other program I’ve ever used for any other operating system waits for the CD to finish spinning up, then does its thing. Not anaconda, oh my, no. Instead, if the operator foolishly hits the OK button before the CD finishes spinning up, he instantly gets an error message ‘The CD can not be read. Sorry, this error is fatal. Click here to reboot.” No “click here to try again”–no, that’d be too robust, and we don’t want Linux to be robust, do we?

The next three attempts to install met with similar fates. Even though I carefully waited until each CD finished spinning up before I hit OK, at three random times during the install, I got a message “A file could not be read or written. This may indicate a problem with the media, with the hard drive, or with your hardware. Sorry, this error is fatal. Click here to reboot.”

Yeah, it may indicate a problem with the media, or with the hard drive, or it may indicate that the goddamn installer is crap, with poor error checking and no error recovery.

Now, the Linux users of the world pride themselves on the overall robustness of their operating-system-cum-religion, yet write crap installers that fall down if the wind blows from the wrong direction.

I once had a problem with a Windows CD. The CD-ROM was defective from the factory; it had a scratch on it that caused some of the sectors to be unreadable. Want to know what happened when the installer hit that spot? Listen up, Linux boys, there’s a lesson in here for you. Ignore this lesson at your peril:

It displayed an error message saying “The CD could not be read. Click here to try again, or click here to cancel the install.”

“Click here to try again.” My goodness. What will those satanic Redmond monsters think of next? Retrying an operation that failed is just…it’s just…well, diabolical!

I finally got it to install, by holding my breath and making the proper incantations, but lordy, I have yet to be impressed.

Goddamn LiveJournal, anyway.

Posted on by
8

So, over the past couple of months, I haven’t been getting all the email notifications of replies to my entries and comments, and it’s steadily been getting worse. Right now, i seem to be getting email notifications for perhaps one out of six replies, and the notifications I’m getting, I’m getting multiple times seven copies of one reply, for example, over a five-day period).

If there’s anything I’ve missed that really needs a reply…um. I’d say “post a comment about it here,” but I might not get a notification of that. Hmm.

Whoa!

Posted on by
18

Courtesy of purplespark: Scientists create mice able to regenerate lost limbs and regrow damaged organs.

The experimental animals are unique among mammals in their ability to regrow their heart, toes, joints and tail.

And when cells from the test mouse are injected into ordinary mice, they too acquire the ability to regenerate, the US-based researchers say.

Their discoveries raise the prospect that humans could one day be given the ability to regenerate lost or damaged organs, opening up a new era in medicine…

“We have experimented with amputating or damaging several different organs, such as the heart, toes, tail and ears, and just watched them regrow,” she said.

Now, this kind of stuff has always been within the laws of physics, but development of new techniques in genetic engineering and nanomedicine are both progressing faster than even the most optimistic of us transhumanists had expected. And speaking of biomedical nanotech, I bring you another article, Research scientists at Georgia Tech have built nano-scale detectors so sensitive that they will be capable of spotting individual cancer cells.

The detectors are based on a new kind of quasi-one dimensional nano material, dubbed nanobelts or nanoribbons, which can be made from a variety of materials, like zinc or tin oxides. They are typically between 30nm and 300nm wide, and can be a few millimetres long.

The semiconducting nanobelts, first synthesised in 2001, can be tuned to exhibit certain behaviours. Introducing oxygen vacancies can affect their conductivity, surface and optical properties…

These nanostructures are ideal objects for building sensors with biomedical applications, Professor Wang said, ahead of a presentation at the EMAG-Nano 2005 conference in Leeds yesterday, such as force sensors, blood flow sensors and cancer detectors.

I think a lot of people who aren’t really paying attention now are going to be very surprised when these things start hitting the market. I also suspect that people fifty or seventy-five years from now are going to look back on this as the Age of Barbarism: “Someone had a heart attack and you savages thought the best solution was to SLICE HIM OPEN??!!”