JustAsItSounds

Vaccines

2009-11-14T22:59:02.473-05:00

Some people will have you believe that some vaccines can cause health problems.

Some people will tell you that the combined Measles, Mumps and Rubella (MMR) vaccine in particular is to blame for the apparent increase in the number of Autism diagnoses in the last two decades, with little regard for the fact that after 15 years of searching, no link has ever been found. They may fail to mention that the original study was carried out with no control group, studied a population of 12, pre-selected individuals who were known to have neurological problems and that even with all of this bad study design he still had to fake the results or that the man who carried out the study, did so at the behest of lawyers who were seeking a crank to back up their a priori assumption that vaccines caused their clients' developmental problems. They commonly also fail to mention that 9 months before he published his research, the researcher, Andrew Wakefield, applied for a string of patents for medical products that could only be commercially succesful if the MMR vaccine was shown to be not-safe. Andrew Wakefield is now living in America and charging parents of autistic children a lot of money to give them unproven and in some cases dangerous quack treatments to 'cure' them.

Some will tell you that vaccines are a moral issue, and that refusing to vaccinate your daughter against a virus that is the cause of 90% of all cases of cervical cancer is a good and moral act. They will tell you it is a good thing to leave your daughter at risk of HPV infection because she shouldn't be having sex anyway and playing russian roulette with her life makes you a good person.

With these people in mind, I present the following images:

Polio

Smallpox

Creepy, crappy yoga teacher for kids

2009-11-11T04:15:34.981-05:00

I've been trying to figure out why EXACTLY this is so creepy. Is it the overacting by the little kids involved, who are trying bravely to contain their excitement about the wonderful world of yoga, and succeeding. Or is it "Okie-dokie, the yoga yogi's" stupid name? Or his crazily wrinkled fizzog? Or the stultifying pauses in the stupid dialog as his awful sidekicks ('Rasta the Rooster', seriously?) try and remember their lines and how to make them sound like they are being uttered by people who aren't permanently stoned out of their minds.

Sadly, I think it is mostly down to my creep meter beind pegged in the red-zone as Okie-dokie gingerly adjusting the poses of his charges and his visible wincing as he realises his great idea to teach kids about the wonders of yoga (which he obviously loves) leaves absolutely no way for him not be mistaken as a child molester with a TV show.

Limits to Growth

2008-11-26T19:13:47.296-05:00

As Buy Nothing Day (28th Nov US, 29th Nov the rest) rolls around again its message will no doubt polarise opinion more than ever in these times of impending economic crisis.

Should we not be doing our part by being Good Consumers? Fuelling the growth of economies - this is a good thing, isn't it? Or is it time to re-evaluate what really is valuable in our lives? Embracing steady-state economics, breaking out of the work-to-shop, shop-to-work cycle? If we saw this coming in 1972, is it too late to take action now?

The Yak is back

2008-04-07T21:28:29.109-04:00

Yow. Nearly a year since my last entry. Got an email reminder form my hosts reminding me that I was still paying for this domain name and webspace and that's spurred me on to upgrade my DasBlog install (now fortified with .Net 2.0 framework) and start blogging again.

Started a new job in January at VioCorp. Some exciting projects on the go there: foremost is the Viostream portal which has been so well received that we've already got 3 clients (rabbitohs, dragons and ivy.tv) using our alpha version.

Features include:

Ajax based UI that allows video to keep playing as users 'navigate' around the site.
Leverages the YUI (Yahoo User Interface) Library for cross-platform DHTML effects and other UI goodness - most notably the Browser History Manager library, allowing users to use their browser history functions (back and forward buttons) to navigate via Ajax.
Playlist functionality: users create/edit playlists of videos (on the fly) that can be shared.
(semi-)Modular approach (yet to be implemented as self-contained asp.net user controls) that allows for quick configuration of sites to enable/disable the following functions:

A branded Poll (with nice DHTML results animation if I say so myself)
User registration/login/password reminder (nicely animated too)
Commenting on videos (anonymous/registered/confirmed users) + moderation via user flagging
User rating of videos (anonymous/registered/confirmed users)
Separate/integrated picture album support - using M.I Jackson's excellent Shadowbox.js media-viewer. I've added in an inline gallery thumbnail viewer as well. When I'm satisfied that it's robust enough I'll release my 'extension' to it under the GNU licence as per the terms of use.

I am becoming a big fan of YUI and have lost some of my disdain for JS. It's still a tricky and pretty arcane subject, but using a cross-browser library like YUI really simplifies the process - knowing that you can rely on some really smart people to have sorted out most of the cross-browser quirks for you already.

Jetpack Idiot you say? I say: Jetpack genius

2007-06-14T21:05:45.989-04:00

Stumbled across this video on google video

I've played with compressed air/water bottle rockets before, but it never occurred to me that I could use a rack of these to actually FLY!

This guy deserves some sort of medal, and possibly a new pair of board-shorts - preferrably brown coloured

Electric Sheep

2007-06-13T08:58:00.927-04:00

Found ElectricSheep the other day. It's fantastic. It's a distrbuted computing app that uses your PC's ( or mac's) idle CPU cycles to render frames of stunning algorithmically generated animations, called for some odd reason, sheep. The upshot for you is that you get a stunning screensaver that keeps evolving and changing and that you have helped create.

Actually, the name is odd for a good reason, it's inspired by Philip K Dick's novella - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep:

Electric Sheep is a free, open source screen saver run by thousands of people all over the world. It can be installed on any ordinary PC or Mac. When these computers "sleep", the screen saver comes on and the computers communicate with each other by the internet to share the work of creating morphing abstract animations known as "sheep". The result is a collective "android dream", an homage to Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.

Paint.Net - a welcome replacement for MS Paint

2007-06-02T05:34:03-04:00

Pro's

It works on Vista
It's free
It's actually pretty good
Familiar Interface
Small-ish footprint
Healthy plugin development community

Con's

It only runs on Windows*
It's no Photoshop
It's not open source

_{*runs on .NET framework. No mono support}

Paint.Net is a photograph editing and drawing app that was originally developed "as an undergraduate college senior design project mentored by Microsoft, and is currently being maintained by some of the alumni that originally worked on it"

It's written in the .NET framework using C# and was intended as a replacement for MS Paint.

It far surpasses MS Paint, although to be honest, I've never been able to stick with MS Paint for more than 10 minutes. It falls somewhat short of Photoshop though and even given the large community of plug-in developers it will be a long time before this app comes close to PhotoShop standards.

A notable shortcoming, straight off the bat, is the lack of paths and I found the bezier line drawing tool very hard to use. There is no Select > feather tool in the default installation, there is a feather pixel blur plug-in that can be used in a very oblique way to recreate some of the functions of a feather pixel selection, but it just doesn't work in some cases.

Comparisons are inevitably made with Photoshop because Paint.Net not only tries to do effectively the same things as phoptoshop, but also the tools and much of the workflow is very similar too. Unfortunately on most fronts Paint.Net loses out to it's US$649 rival.

Of course, one important comparison is price and here Paint.Net wins hands-down over PotatoChop. Another being it's relatively light hard-drive footprint and economic use of system resources. It's a pretty good avdert for the .Net framework in this regard, especially as this is an amateur project. The only thing that stops this being a REALLY good advert for .Net is that it's not open source. This is slightly mitigated by the presence of the effects API, which is apparently documented somewhere but, at the time of writing, I couldn't find

I WANT DRUGS!

2007-06-02T01:07:18.935-04:00

Now, I am well aware that aspirin comes from willow bark and indeed nearly all of our pharmocopia is derived from plants. Friends who know me know that I have no trouble with self-medication with certain plant materials. But when I have flu I don't want to have to pay $25 for some pills that contain nothing stronger than 'garlic oil'.

I almost bought a pack of these quack-pills because they came in Day and Night forms, leaving me with the impression that the Day ones would give me some energy to get through the day and the Night ones would allow me to escape the nausea and aches and knock me out for 10 hours or so. Closer inspection revealed that these pills (which come in 'Cold and flu', 'acute flu', 'cold and congestion' and just plain 'flu' varieties) contain nothing but Zinc, echinacea, valerian, garlic oil(!) and pixie dust. The difference between Day and Night formulations? The Day ones didn't have valerian in them. As far as I know these ingredients have not been subjected to proper double blind trials and rigorous scientific study as to their beneficial effects, unlike say paracetemol. But the hand-waving yoghurt-weavers will bore you to tears about how echinacea is SOOO effective at 'boosting' the immune system and their granny took them for years and could bench press a cow well into her seventies. To which I would reply:"What exactly do you mean by 'boosting the immune system' - show me some evidence of increased antibody count or an increase in average neutrophil and eosinophil count in a controlled study. Oh and by the way, the plural of anecdote is NOT data"

I am sick, I do not want the ingredients to a rather bland curry, in the form of a pill to make me feel better. I do not want twigs and berries. I WANT DRUGS!!1!

The hole left by the Christian Dark Ages

2007-06-01T21:28:49.935-04:00

If a grown adult fervently believes in the tooth fairy or Santa Claus then he or she would rightly be perceived as mad, ignorant or both by most people. Yet the belief in an invisible man in the sky who will torture you for eternity if you don't 'believe' in him is somehow afforded protection from such ridicule. Indeed, I would argue that belief in the tooth fairy or Santa Claus is more rational than belief in any of the major world religions because, at least to the unsuspecting child, both the tooth fairy and Santa leave evidence that they have actually been to your house and left money or presents.

I have a friend who is a Muslim. He is by no means a tee-totaler and I've never seen him pray, but get him started on the subject of religious belief and atheism and there is literally no stopping him as he talks and even shouts over any arguments against religious belief. On one occasion I was talking to my Muslim friend(N_) and another friend of mine(P_) who, through more than one family tragedy, despises religion more than I ever could. Somehow, regrettably, the subject of conversation came round to religious belief and atheism. N_ and P_ got more and more heated as they laid into each other, P_ eventually backed down because more and more onlookers were looking on (this was at a wedding after all). N_ was very pleased with himself for having shouted the loudest and longest. What stung me most was his assertion that scientists were arrogant because they presumed to know everything about the Universe. As far as I am concerned, the unfounded belief that all the answers to the biggest questions in this life lie between the pages of one book (and try to get religionists to agree on which book) is the height of arrogance.

Science does not claim to have all the answers, it is merely our current best explanation for how we think the universe works using the tools of logic and reason. Our scientific understanding of the universe is ever-changing (dare I say, evolving) as we accumulate more and more empirical evidence. People put forth theories that explain our current evidence, predictions are then made from these theories and then evidence to support these predictions is sought. If no evidence is found, or if the evidence indicates that the theory is wrong, the theory is adapted to accommodate the new evidence, or it is thrown out to be replaced by an alternative theory. Science evolves by people challenging the current paradigm and finding evidence to change it.

Most religions say the opposite. They state that the answers are revealed to us by gods and angels and we are to believe, without question, the answers that we are given. This is Dogma, unquestioning belief in revealed 'facts'. God gave you a brain, but obviously he didn't intend for you to use it. The world-view of the three Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) probably made sense to the bronze-age goat-herders who first made it all up, but in todays world, where we know the world is not flat, the stars are not holes in the sky where the rain comes in, that life is billions of years old and the Universe itself is billions of years older still - frankly it's embarrassing.

Back to the diagram. In a nutshell - Christian dogma during the Dark ages in Europe effectively stifled scientific inquiry for over a thousand years. Perhaps the greatest 'sin' carried out by the church was the ban on the dissection of cadavers that held back medicine and biology for a millenium. The power of the church even led to a regression in our scientific understanding of the world and in our use of technology. It was only with the coming of the enlightenment and the rediscovery of 'heretical' Greek and Roman texts that Europeans could claim they had surpassed the Roman's, who's civilisation had collapsed a thousand years previously.

The New Story

2007-05-22T08:06:40.183-04:00

My first reaction was admiration for the format of the movie. A simple blue-screened narrator with a slowly changing backdrop of sound and image

The ambition of these films is to communicate the current answers to three of the most often asked, and hardest to answer questions: Where am I? How did I get here? and ~~what's for lunch?~~ Who am I?

...

Just checked out the website http://www.global-mindshift.org. I am afraid that this site really appeals to the geek in me. I've only given it a cursory glance but the title of the site says: Global MindShift promotes an expanded view of what it means to be human based on knowledge of our evolutionary journey.

I'm finding the front-page promo movie a bit annoying and there's a faint whiff of woo woo spiritualism in the New Story movie, but the aims of the site seem noble enough

The Brendan Voyage

2007-05-08T09:55:37.734-04:00

Imagine trying to sail from one side of the Atlantic to the other, in some of the roughest seas known to man in an open boat, in sub-zero tempartures, contending with pack ice, icebergs, whales and massive tidal races in a keel-less contraption that has more in common with a good pair of shoes (albeit shoes that are held together by flax fiber and rubbed liberally with pungent wool grease) than a yacht. All driven by his determination to prove that it was possible for early Irish navigators to reach the coast of North America and that they may well indeed have done so.

They named the boat The Brendan - which seems a bit strange when you read Severin referring to The Brendan as 'she' all the time, but that's sailors for you I guess.

You may know more of the tale of St Brendan than you think. I certainly recall hearing a tale of sailors landing on a small wooded island and setting a campfire, only to discover to their alarm that they have alighted on the back of a whale. There are lots of other, obviously mythical parts to the tale, involving griffons and talking birds but as Severin and their crew make their way via the Stepping-Stone route: from Ireland to the Faroes, from there to Iceland, from there to Greenland and finally to Newfoundland they encounter phenomena and places that are strongly reminiscent of the tale:

For example, The mythical Lands of sheep and birds at the beginning of the tale seem to correlate very well with the Faroe islands. The crew's encounters with pack ice and icebergs mirror Brendan's crew's encounter with a huge cyrstal pillar that floated through the sea. The formation of spindle ice, when the water seems to grew sticky and ponderous with growing ice-crystals that is similar to the account in the Navigatio of the sea become coagulated at one stage.

Sadly, I doubt Severin and crew would have seen half as many whales as they saw the first time if they undertook the voyage now, 30 years after the original Brendan Voyage. By his account multitudes whales of all species (including a potentially nasty confrontation with a pack of Orca) seem to accompany The Brendan wherever they went.

I had previously read The Sindbad Voyage by Tim Severin where he describes how he got a lot of rich Omani sheiks to fund a project where he built a traditional, all wood trading dhow to sail the original Arabian spice route to what is now Malaysia. Seems like this Archeo-mucking-about-in-boats thing is a bit of a hobby of his. Sounds like a great idea to me.

E3 53 57 E8 AB 05 D2 9A 67 0C 73 76 A2 5B 15 40 - MINE!

2007-05-08T08:57:50.516-04:00

A few days ago, some publicly spirited people posted the 128 bit encryption key that encodes all HD-DVD roms published by the AACS LA consortium (Disney, Intel, Microsoft, Matsushita (Panasonic), Warner Brothers, IBM, Toshiba and Sony) and prevents them being copied

Lot's of other people decided they'd write about it and published the key on their websites.
The AACS LA consortium decided to issue legal threats under the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) against the owners of every single webpage that mentions this number (1,960,000 so far, and counting).

so, there you have it. The AACS LA own a number - one that requires 128-bits to represent as a hexadecimal. You cannot use it yourself, because according to the DMCA, THE AACS LA OWNS IT!

Luckily for us mere individuals we can take claim our own numbers before they're all gone. Thanks to Ed Felton and his recently developed VirtualLandGrab technology, you too can get in on the action and claim your own slice of the 128-bit number pie. Visit his page and you will get your own 128-bit key that has been used to encrypt a copyrighted haiku of Ed's own invention and voila. you have the same legal rights to your number as the AACS LA.

I love it how the AACS LA's moto is 'Share the Vision' - I think they should add a little asterisk and footnote to it: * sharing in no way implies dissemination of information. May cause loss of freedom

PS. I also own C3 BF BC 97 3C E3 0C CF E7 24 D4 9E 7F 45 9E 87, so don't you get any ideas about using or even printing that one either!!!