Geek Drivel

Getting kind of desperate, Microsoft?

Interesting… I’d heard the story of the QWERTY keyboard arrangement before, but I didn’t realize that it was developed in the 1800s.

I fully support experimenting with the keyboard layout. I’d gladly adopt a different keyboard — but only if I could be sure that it would be available on all the systems I need to use. That’s why I never moved to a Dvorak keyboard, even though it’s demonstrably better.

If, in the early nineties, the governments of the world had realized just how much power the Internet would offer their citizens, I have little doubt that it would have been quietly strangled in its cradle. Since they missed that opportunity, they’re trying to censor it instead — even in democratic countries that should know better, like Britain and Australia. Fortunately, enough people are resisting their efforts that I doubt many of them will go through.

Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.
— Justice Louis Brandeis, Other People’s Money, and How the Bankers Use It, 1933.

Ever since I gave GoddessJ a Wii for her birthday last month, I’ve been amused and amazed at all the different add-ons for the controllers: plastic implements that make them look like tennis rackets, swords, pistols, even faux cooking utensils. But in my opinion, this one takes the cake.

(For the record, we don’t have any of these, and don’t plan on buying any.)

(Via BoingBoing)

There are so many nuggets of gold in this article that I don’t know where to start. For example:

What allows people to work, and love, as they grow old? By the time the Grant Study men had entered retirement, Vaillant, who had then been following them for a quarter century, had identified seven major factors that predict healthy aging, both physically and psychologically.

Employing mature adaptations [better known as "defense mechanisms," and described in detail earlier in the article] was one. The others were education, stable marriage, not smoking, not abusing alcohol, some exercise, and healthy weight. Of the 106 Harvard men who had five or six of these factors in their favor at age 50, half ended up at 80 as what Vaillant called “happy-well” and only 7.5 percent as “sad-sick.” Meanwhile, of the men who had three or fewer of the health factors at age 50, none ended up “happy-well” at 80. Even if they had been in adequate physical shape at 50, the men who had three or fewer protective factors were three times as likely to be dead at 80 as those with four or more factors.

Here’s another one, which suggests (to me) that our political leanings might be something we’re born with:

[...] He also found that personality traits assigned by the psychiatrists in the initial interviews largely predicted who would become Democrats (descriptions included “sensitive,” “cultural,” and “introspective”) and Republicans (“pragmatic” and “organized”).

Sponsoring this kind of “longitudinal study” sounds like a really good way to employ obscene amounts of wealth.

I can see this annoying, rather than helping, several of my acquaintances (such as a girl who prefers Lego sets rather than dolls). And I’m sure there are some people for whom it would always choose the wrong gender.

On the plus side, it means guys might not be subjected to quite so many ads for chick-flicks or cosmetics. As a guy, I consider this a very good thing.

I’ve talked about ThunderBayes (the Thunderbird front-end for the SpamBayes anti-spam engine) here before, several times. It’s great. Unfortunately it’s no longer supported, and I don’t have the time to properly learn Javascript so I can fix it myself. So when an SSL update broke my customized version of it a couple days ago, I decided to scrap it entirely.

I wasn’t willing to scrap the SpamBayes engine though, so after getting my Thunderbird setup working again, I dug into the instructions on how to install the 1.04 version manually (the 1.1 alpha version is the one that the SSL update broke). It wasn’t all that difficult, but I don’t recommend it for anyone who isn’t at least a power-user… I had to install an older version of Python to get it working properly (it only partially works with the 2.6 version that Ubuntu comes with), and chain it through stunnel to get SSL support (that’s why I wanted the 1.1 alpha in the first place, it supports SSL without stunnel). And without ThunderBayes, you have to go through a web interface to train it, which is a pain in the tail. But eventually I got it all working properly.

Some day I hope to have the time to learn JavaScript properly, so I can fix ThunderBayes and maybe write some other useful extensions for Thunderbird and Firefox. But for now, this will suffice.

Um… if, as this article suggests, hair goes gray because the body is “forcing the [damaged stem cells in hair follicles] to mature” in preference to killing them off, why would the same scientists suggest that “we may soon have anti-graying creams for aging populations”? Wouldn’t you want those cells to mature, rather than continue growing with damaged DNA?

The periodic table was hard enough to memorize twenty years ago, but they keep adding more elements. It’s almost as bad as having to memorize the list of presidents. Our children will curse the names of these scientists for their entire seventh-grade science course.

Maybe the scientists can redeem themselves by naming the thing after a popular children’s television show or something.

It looks like science is further along on this than I thought.