Mike Godwin's hypothesis holds true (IMHO)

I have to firmly subscribe to Mike Godwin's hypothesis, which is "as an online discussion/debate grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."

And then it all goes downhill from there.

Beware of simple questions

Simple questions (simple to state, that is) can be the most difficult.

Gertrude Stein once asked "What is poetry and if you know what poetry is what is prose?".

They also tend to make you look like a stupid when you stop and ponder about them where the asking party probably wants a simple-minded answer.

Winter of Code (Part 2)

Let me focus in this post on one of the big motivators to write a file explorer: speed. I find it appalling that explorer sometime just 'hangs' for several seconds at a time when browsing folders with a lot of items. For example I have a folder that has 6000 folders inside, if by mistake I open it with explorer it hoses my machine for several seconds.

Here is the CPU usage when I do this, even after explorer has cached the folder contents, the graph goes from 0 to 100% CPU use:


Each tick mark is about 5 seconds, so I count about 30 seconds with the CPU clamped, where I don't even get the hourglass pointer. What is it doing? well, I guess a lot of useful things to somebody out there but to me this is not the case.

I am glad the 6000 folders do not contain pictures because it would take a very long time while explorer opens each folder finds a few images reads them, re-sizes them and composes them into these cute (but to me useless) folders:

Do you know what I mean? it tries to be a help to people that have pictures, but if you really have a lots of pictures you better not use explorer.

I have lots of files, and I want something that does less but better.

Winter of Code (Part 1)

So this year's resolution is to write a cool, useful, standalone windows program. Something that others can find useful too. Something that I can be proud of. It should be a relatively simple program to begin with. The time frame is 6 months, so by June it should be released.

So what do I have in mind? a file explorer, one that addresses the things that explorer does poorly. I been wanting one of these for a long time now and last time I looked around I did not like anything out there.

I won't go into a deep analysis of explorer here; I think you can find plenty of complaints in newsgroups and the like. To me, the most troubling issue is that explorer is trying to be all things to all people and it does not seem to do anything particularly well.

I have played with the vista version and it certainly addresses some issues but others have gotten worse, way worse.

Anyhow, I am rambling now so let's leave the rest for other posts where I would focus on specific items.

The posts in these series will be very technical. Enjoy.

Did you know

That apparently USA has 16 spy agencies, or as the official reports call them "intelligence components". I don't know about you but I only know of about 6 of them, that assuming that the one Oscar Goldman works for is real.

I have to wonder when you have already 14 of them who and how do you decide that there is room for a couple more. I would love to have been present in such a meeting.

Of course, in recent years a new entity named DNI was created to coordinate the communication of all of them. I wonder if that means that is easier now for a man-in-the-middle attack?

Predators or not?

I read an interesting comment from some blog where the poster said:

"Primates have binocular vision so they can judge the distance between branches, not so they can judge distance to prey"

I am not sure if this is true but it does have a ring of common sense. I mean, besides frontal eyes we lack all the equipment that predators have. However it seems that early humans hunted and the real edge was that we have a lot of endurance; we could not outrun most of the prey but we can exhaust it (basically the animal overheats and stops running) and then while it tries to recover kill it. This of course requires group hunting, good strategy and a lot of team coordination.

Also it seems that our digestive system (and our teeth) is better suited for a vegetarian diet as you can see in many primate species.

So now I have taken the stance that we are vegetarian by construction/legacy but hunters by relative recent evolutionary pressure (by having the required intelligence, almost no body hair and sophisticated vocal tract).

I guess I have found myself back into the middle-school definition of humans as omnivores, but at least I have now the distint feeling that we should eat meat in moderation, that is, very little of it.

Who are you?

Simple, you are a proud member of our biosphere, neatly boxed into an evolution folder that currently is:

Eukaryota -> Metazoa -> Chordata -> Craniata -> Vertebrata -> Euteleostomi -> Mammalia -> Eutheria -> Euarchontoglires -> Primates -> Haplorrhini -> Catarrhini -> Hominidae -> Homo -> Homo sapiens -> You

At the topmost level, Eukaryota includes all animals and plants, where the only other topmost branch is Prokaryota, which has only simple, single cell organisms with no nucleus, asexual reproduction only, but with DNA. The concensus is that they where the oldest lifeforms known so far (3.5 billion years the oldest found) while the Eukaryota are "newer" and thus more advanced (1.7 billion years the oldest found).

I don't have a point per se except to remind us that evolutionary theory permeate and support to the whole structure of bio sciences.

Can't remove it without taking the whole building down.

Stopping Global Terrorism

Here is some food for thought from the Dilbert.com DNRC newsletter, it is old (2004) but as relevant today as it would be in a hundred years:

As you know, the best way to solve a problem is to identify the core belief that causes the problem; then mock that belief until the people who hold it insist that you heard them wrong.

The core belief that drives terrorism is the notion of a "holy place,"
along with the idea that some people belong there and other people don't. That's why the only solution to terrorism is for religious scholars to hold a global summit to agree on the definition of "holy place." Once they agree on a definition, it will be easier to mock it into submission.

At some point during the summit, probably after a week or so, the scholars would tire of saying to each other, "Nice hat" and asking, "What setting do you use to trim your ratty beard?" Then they'd get down to the business of defining what makes a place holy. Someone would suggest that the key things are the location and the fact that something holy happened there. Eventually, someone with a second-grade understanding of space, possibly the busboy, would point out that everything in the universe has moved a gazillion miles since the holy event, and the concept of location is meaningless unless all the reference points stay put. The best-case scenario is that the "holy place" is now a billion miles away, floating in empty space.

After some embarrassed mumbling, the scholars would insist that they knew all along that location wasn't important. One of them would break the awkwardness by suggesting that a holy place must be defined by the "stuff" that comprises it. That's good news, because the Middle East is made entirely of dirt. The wise King Solomon probably would have advised people to help themselves to as much holy dirt as they wanted. He might have gone so far as to suggest that people put holy dirt in their socks so they can enjoy walking on it wherever they go. But first he would have invented socks and patented the idea, because in addition to being wise, he had a good head for business.

Religious scholars should also help the rest of us understand the question of holy depth. Is it just the top layer of soil that's holy, or does the holiness continue lower into the ground? It's important because if there's no bottom limit, then whatever is on the exact opposite side of the earth is also holy, only upside down. The residents would have to stand on their heads to get the full benefit of the holy rays, but it would be worth it.

I find this argument as compelling as it is funny. If you don't find it funny I am willing to bet that you don't find it logical or compelling either.