It’s amazing how music and a wee change in editing can invert the tone of a movie preview:

Sleepless in Seattle as you’ve never seen it before…

Technorati Tags: humor

I don’t have the time tonight for a long essay, so I’ll have to limit things to links I’ve had in my browser for a few days.

Whatever happened to “small government” conservatives? aTypical Joe suggests an answer.

Where is the right-wing outrage over the taking of hostages? David at In Search of Utopia wonders whatever happened to the “good guys”.

At Fruits and Votes, Professor Matthew Shugart questions the usefulness of the state of the union address.

At NPR an audio-article points out how opinions are confused with facts because of a “design flaw” in the human brain. So, perhaps the intelligent designer wasn’t so intelligent?

Technorati Tags: patterns in the white noise

It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree.
   -Charles Baudelaire

Technorati Tags: quotes

Here are a few photos of the kinds of things I work with (although I do NOT work for Intel):

Photos: Intel’s 45-nanometer process

The first photo is of a wafer, the size of this one is 300mm, or the same as that of an LP record (for those old enough to remember them), 12 inches across.

The second photo is of what we refer to as a “test chip” which is a set of special structures we use to develop the technology needed to make true integrated circuit chips on an industrial scale cheaply enough and with sufficient performance for us to sell them and make money (that is the point behind all of this, to make money for the company, you know…)

It appears to me that the third photo is of what we call an “SRAM bitcell” which is part of the cache memory in a CPU like a Pentium or PowerPC. The bitcell holds one bit, in other words, a one or a zero, used in the memory. The area required for one bitcell is a measure of how effecient a technology is in using space on a chip, and it is the reduction of space on a chip which is one of many factors that has played a role to increase performance of electronics in the past two decades.

There is no scale marker on the third photo, but my guess based upon a true 45nm technology would imply that the size of the horizontal bars you see is about 35 to 38nm from top to bottom. This is smaller than the average virus, and far smaller than a bacterium. A human hair is thousands of times larger. To give additional perspective, the average distance between atoms in some of the materials we use to make the chips, like silicon dioxide (also known as “glass”) is about 0.05nm.

In other words, a 35nm line is about 700 or so atoms across.

We are now making structures small enough that they measure less than a thousand atoms across, and even more startlingly, some are less than 6 atoms thick!

If that ain’t “geek cool” I don’t know what is…

Technorati Tags: technology, geek cool, science and technology, science & technology

It appears that the object of many a radical-right-winger nutjob’s wet dreams is just as intemperate and ill-mannered as many a radical-left-wing moonbat:

Coulter Jokes About Poisoning Justice

Fri Jan 27, 12:00 PM ET, Associated Press

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. - Conservative commentator Ann Coulter, speaking at a traditionally black college, joked that Justice
John Paul Stevens should be poisoned.

Coulter had told the Philander Smith College audience Thursday that more conservative justices were needed on the Supreme Court to change the current law on abortion. Stevens is one of the court’s most liberal members.

“We need somebody to put rat poisoning in Justice Stevens’ creme brulee,” Coulter said. “That’s just a joke, for you in the media.”

Coulter has made a career of writing and lecturing on her strongly conservative views.

At one point during her address, which was part of a lecture series, some audience members booed when she cut off two questioners. “I’m not going to be lectured to,” Coulter told one man in a raised voice.

She drew more boos when she said the crack cocaine problem “has pretty much gone away.”

I hear the cries now, “But the moonbats are worse!”

Face it, boys and girls, you need to clean your own house first before you tar everyone who “don’t think right” with the brush wetted by the loonies, otherwise you subject yourself to the same type of judgement.

Or, perhaps, you could stop engaging in mindless labelling of everyone who “don’t think right” and actually listen to what is being said and engage in a real discussion.

Nahhhh…

That’ll never happen, it’s too much fucking work, and people are too damn lazy to do their own thinking, much less actually discuss and defend their positions.

Technorati Tags: commentary, right-wing, right wing

One month ago today I stood in a hospital room at the end of an overnight vigil, watching as a nurse administered morphine that ultimately stopped the beating of my father’s heart. As the display showing the heart rate descended to zero and the last breath left his body my family in the room began to cry.

At that moment of profound grief, however, my feeling was one of relief.

Why not sadness? In part because my Dad had been brain-dead for hours because his blood pressure was not high enough to deliver the vital oxygen needed to sustain that organ, but also because the outcome of our personal tragedy had been obvious for months. The end was inevitable whether it was December 26th or some day a few months later after much suffering of my Dad, a preview of which I had been witness to first-hand in the three days before we called the ambulance to take him to the hospital.

For those who need it spelled out explicitly, a group far larger than even my cynical, pessimistic mind often comprehends, the relief I felt was for my Dad, not for me.

I now have the clothes and bathrobes I had bought for him on that last day before he entered the hospital; things I had chosen in a shopping spree ignited by concern, decisions made with his infirmity in mind of things that were easily donned and shed, especially after I had to help him disrobe upon his request, assistance given in full knowledge that he would never ask for help unless it was not only absolutely needed but even beyond that state, purchases made with my hope beyond reason that his condition would improve to the point where he could receive the chemotherapy that might prolong his life.

A repeat of the treatment that had brought him to the lowest point in his life, something that I learned after his death was an experience he revealed to one of his best friends that he would never have wanted to repeat.

What is the cost of suffering for a few months of life versus dying, cutting short that pain?

How do you rationalize that cost/benefit analysis, even if solely for yourself without consideration of the feelings of others who would be devastated by your death?

Yet those analyses must be made given our current state of medical technology where the body can be kept alive long after the brain has died.

The deep scrutiny of cost versus benefit leads down paths that come to conclusions that are not comfortable when compared to initial, emotional reactions but cannot and should not be denied. Conclusions that imply larger principles than currently recognized because of fears overriding thought.

Fear is the mind-killer because the same ancient organ, the medulla, that keeps our body functioning long after the part of our brain we use to think has died also responds to the primal urges of fight or flight stimulated by fear.

Humanity earned its success among all species through the use of the brain beyond the fight or flight response of the medulla.

We now choose to abandon principles because of our fear.

—

Part II to be posted soon.

Technorati Tags: commentary

…as of today, Tuesday, 24 January 2006:

Regular readers of Random Fate have doubtless noticed I tend not to link to many other weblogs. This is not because I find little that is thought provoking out in blogworld. When I get past the usual suspects with their usually suspect opinions, there is an amazing number of posts that can provoke and fertilize thought.

Unfortunately, after an hour of reading the various opinions and thinking about the ramifications, I lose track of the 20 or 30 plus weblogs that prompt me to examine a topic and stimulate my thoughts upon it.

Also, a list of 20 or 30 links makes for unexciting reading at best.

In addition, often my thoughts are directed by music I happen to be listening to at the time I am reading and thinking. In this case, the U2 song The Hands That Built America,written for the movie “Gangs of New York”,caused me to consider many different topics, some that were themes of that movie and others related but only indirectly addressed in the film.

It is difficult to write upon the topic of America as an idea and an ideal without creating something that is book-length that would be read by few if any, despite the importance the subject deserves. I am forced to appeal to artists who condense a wealth of feelings into short phrases underscored by music that convey feelings so much more than volumes of mere words could ever deliver, musicians who are not even from our nation, but who illustrate what America meant to the world at large until recently:

Oh my love, it’s a long way we’ve come
From the freckled hills, to the steel and glass canyons
From the stony fields, to hanging steel from the sky
From digging in our pockets for a reason not to say goodbye

These are the hands that built America
(Russian, Sioux, Dutch, Hindu)
Oh, oh oh, America
(Polish, Irish, German, Italian)

Last saw your face in a watercolour sky
As sea birds argue, a long goodbye
I took your kiss, on the spray of the new land star
You gotta live with your dreams, don’t make them so hard

And these are the hands, that built America
(The Irish, the Blacks, the Chinese, the Jews)
Ah, ah ah, America
(Korean, Hispanic, Muslim, Indian)

Of all of the promises, is this one we could keep
Of all of the dreams, is this one still out of reach

Halle, ole
(Dream-oh-yeah)
(Oh oh-dream, oh love)

It’s early fall, there’s a cloud on the New York skyline
Innocence, dragged across a yellow line

These are the hands that built America
These are the hands that built America
Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah America

Is there any doubt that the lines, “It’s early fall, there’s a cloud on the New York skyline, Innocence, dragged across a yellow line,” refer to September 11, 2001?

Yet those are not the most important lyrics; there is far more to this song just as there is far more to America than the simplistic jingoism we have been presented with in the past half-decade by those who claim to be “leaders”.

Before that terrible day of September 11, 2001, America represented freedom and liberty both as ideas and ideals to the world, and our reactions to that day have revealed to the world the feet of clay that ideals inevitably show, yet the ideas underlying the ideals have not yet been destroyed and will not be if we choose to stand up for those ideas.

There are few things in this world in which I firmly believe, and even fewer that I am willing to stand up for. The ideas of freedom and democracy are among those precious few.

There is a critical difference between ideals and ideas.

The ideal of America has been murdered in the past five years by the actions of the government of the United States, but the ideas underlying America have not yet been destroyed.

The ideas of freedom and democracy are what I believe in. What are the gravest threats to these ideas, an external threat of terrorist organizations who kill people to get headlines, or those who claim the world changed on September 11, 2001 and say that to protect our “freedom” we must push aside the ideas of civil liberties in order to provide safety against terrorist threats?

In other words, there are those who say that we must kill the patient in order to “cure” the disease. This is a solution that appeals to the simple-minded, but not to those who truly understand the fundamentals underlying our Constitution.

What is clear to me is that which is the true threat, and that threat is NOT the one commonly perceived.

It is often quoted, by me as much as by others, something that was written by one of my heroes, Benjamin Franklin, “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

Those who proclaim “the world changed on 9/11″ as an argument towards undermining the freedoms we had against government surveillance of our lives understand neither the nature of the world before September 11, 2001, nor do they understand the foundations underlying our Constitution.

These misunderstandings are so basic that I must question whether either these people did not have the Civics class that was required of all 9th-graders when I went to school, or they deliberately choose to ignore our fundamental ideals in a quest to claim and proclaim approval for the actions of the current administration, which are questionable at best on Constitutional grounds, even if supposed good intentions are included in the calculus.

What are the fundamentals?

The Founders had recently overcome, at the time they wrote our Constitution, through actions that included secret meetings and covert actions against the legitimate government of their lands, a government that claimed to have the power to inspect any private home or other property without any restraint. Abuse of this power was the rationale behind the requirement to have judicial review and approval of search warrants.

Yet, somehow, after more than 200 years of survival, the actions of a few fanatics on September 11, 2001, are a justification to many, not solely members of the current Bush administration but apparently including many in America as a whole if comments are to be relied upon, that the philosophy that has survived 200-plus years should be cast aside because “the world changed on 9/11.”

As I have written before, many times, the world did not change on 9/11/2001, only our perception of the world changed.

We, the United States, had been attacked several times before 9/11/2001, but we didn’t notice because either the attacks did not succeed (the earlier attempts to bring down the World Trade Center in New York by truck-bombs in the parking garage), or only foreigners were killed (the car-bomb attacks on embassies in Africa).

We only panicked when the deaths were those in the United States itself. Now in the “land of the free and the home of the brave” as we so proudly proclaim in our national anthem we shit in our pants and give up yet another essential liberty every time the administration cries “terrorist” or bin Laden issues another taped proclamation.

Do your own math, but it easily comes out to this: So much for being brave OR free…

Actions speak louder than words.

Through our actions we show who we really are, regardless of any ideas we claim to follow.

One could easily cry “hypocrisy” when we have no care for those who die in our attacks on al-Qaida targets in other nations such as Pakistan where foreigners are killed, because we can ease our conscience by saying “they must have been supporters of the terrorists because they were nearby,” neglecting the truth that we have no idea what our own next-door neighbors do (the “he was such an ordinary person” comments of the neighbors of serial killers should give us SOME kind of clue you would think…).

America was once the ideal of the world when it came to freedom. As a result of the actions of the government of the United States in the past five years, we have shown our feet of clay, whether in “extraordinary rendition” or the scandals of Abu Ghirab and Guantanamo or the warrantless wiretaps recently come to light.

Apologists of the current administration like to claim that the views of the world outside America do not matter.

They are wrong.

Once is happenstance.

Twice is coincidence.

Three times…

…perhaps a closer look is required.

The United States of America won the Cold War mainly because it stood as an ideal to the rest of the world for freedom and democracy.

Our reaction to the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the ephemeral, non-existential threat they pose illustrate in no uncertain terms how hollow that ideal is, showing the feet of clay that any hero ultimately reveals.

However, America still represents the idea of freedom, unless we squander that legacy as well.

It is up to us to see whether we keep alive the idea after, through our actions, we have destroyed the image of America as the ideal.

In a comparison of dual core chips (in other words: essentially two discrete CPUs in one package) for PCs, CNet has declared a winner in all categories, including the most vital, price for performance.

As an insider, I am not surprised, even though I do not work for either company in question. I have been exposed directly or indirectly to both the designs and the process technology of both companies, and the results follow the trends I saw five years ago.

Start from the first page of the article if you want to see all the results.

Technorati Tags: technology, dual core benchmarks, dual-core benchmarks

OK, so I buy a brand-spanking new PC laptop from HP, not the bottom end of line model, no, one that is on the upper end of their product list, and what do I get?

A laptop that functions only intermittently, with the keyboard for some odd reason going into permanent caps-lock mode and the number keypad (yes a BIG laptop with a keypad) getting stuck in non-number-lock mode, no matter what I try to change by pushing the “caps lock” or “num lock” keys.

My Mac laptop seems to be suffering from the aftereffects of whatever caused the memory failure, with extended time in standby creating a situation where it will not awake unless I open and close the laptop at least twice.

Given that all of my other computer resources are in my house, which is still occupied by the person who was watching it while I was in France, I am beginning to get seriously irritated.

So in the interests of trying to maintain a standard of reason and moderation, since I am irritated beyond all reason or moderation I will not post tonight after my struggles with computer issues, other than to say this:

ARGH!

So much for modern technology and the supposed benefits…

Protection of intellectual property has been recognized as key to both encouraging innovation along with stimulating the economic development of the nation for over 200 years. Now, in the name of protecting intellectual property, Congress is getting ready to expand the stifling of innovation that was expanded by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Note that yet again, industry lobbyists are exerting undue influence that will result in the passage of laws that remove rights that the public at large have enjoyed for over two centuries to preserve obsolete business models.

Technorati Tags: commentary

Ronald Reagan, upon the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. said that it was just the sort of “great tragedy that began when we began compromising with law and order, and people started choosing which laws they’d break.”

Now, the current holder of the office of President of the United States is issuing “signing statements” of Congressional bills passed that he knows would be over-ridden and made into law if he used his veto, but his “signing statements” essentially gut the laws and promise non-enforcement at best, if not totally ignoring the intent of the Congress in the typical case, along with an arrogant presumption that defies rationality.

So much for “law and order” if the contempt is coming from the President.

Do your own math.

Technorati Tags: commentary

Once they notice you, they never completely close the file.
   -Philip K. Dick

Technorati Tags: quotes

This is not kid-safe, nor is it appropriate for work, and you do need to have the volume up enough to hear, but this is one of the funniest movies I’ve seen in a while:

   The Internet is for…

Technorati Tags: humor

For every human problem, there is a neat, simple solution; and it is always wrong.
   -H. L. Mencken

From James Joyner at Outside the Beltway:

The problem with a pre-emptive war to avoid a possible war at the time of the enemy’s choosing is that you definitely get a war at the time of your own choosing. I’m not yet convinced that’s a worthwhile exchange.

From Thomas Holsinger at Winds Of Change.NET:

America has come to another turning point - whether our inaction will again engulf the world and us in a nightmare comparable to World War Two. This will entail loss of our freedom as the price of domestic security measures against terrorist weapons of mass destruction, though we might suffer nuclear attack before implementing those measures. The only effective alternative is American use of pre-emptive military force against an imminent threat - Iranian nuclear weapons, which requires that we invade Iran and overthrow its mullah regime as we did to Iraq’s Baathist regime.

All the reasons for invading Iraq apply doubly to Iran, and with far greater urgency. Iran right now poses the imminent threat to America which Iraq did not in 2003. Iran may already have some nuclear weapons, purchased from North Korea or made with materials acquired from North Korea, which would increase its threat to us from imminent to direct and immediate.

Now, note the reaction of the White House as voiced by spokesman Scott McClellan to the recent release of a taped message from Osama bin Laden, “We do not negotiate with terrorists, we put them out of business… The terrorists started this war and the president made it clear that we will end it at a time and place of our choosing.” I’m not advocating negotiation, but if we could end this at “at time an place of our own choosing” why the Hell haven’t we chosen to end it yet? Making arrogant posturing statements that are obviously beyond our capabilities, this is helping our cause?

So, after tying up our military strength against a “threat” that was ambiguous at best even before it became clear that there was no “there” there, we are presented with a real threat of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a state that is known to have direct links to multiple terrorist groups.

Now what do we do?

How about instead of reacting with typical partisan idiocies, we search for a solution?

What a concept…

Technorati Tags: commentary

…you, too, can be a quantum mechanic:

Technorati Tags: humor

Today is three weeks after I held my father’s hand as the life left his body when the nurse pushed in the morphine to stop his strong heart which kept beating long after his brain was dead.

Today is three hundred years after the birth of Benjamin Franklin, the founding father of the United States with whom I most identify, a man both idealistic and earthy.

Today I strive to continue to tread the narrow path between rage and despair that is illuminated by both of my heroes.

A good friend who will remain anonymous unless they tell me differently recently wrote to me that grief is not a simple, linear process of “stages” as is so commonly expressed but instead a whirlpool where the different emotions that are incorrectly labeled as “stages” are swirled together in a maelstrom that while it defies the conventional wisdom of a “process” can indeed be overcome in the same way a hurricane is survived, by experiencing the feelings instead of rejecting them and bending to the storm instead of trying to stand straight and risk breaking.

Given my personality, I doubt I’ll experience the “bargaining” emotions that many feel after a deep loss, for whom do I have to “bargain” with in my scientific, practical mindset?

However, I do feel the rage and the despair that accompany a deep grief, emotions I first felt as a teenager when I recognized that I both understood many concepts and comprehended interactions between people far more deeply than the rednecks and druggies and bible-thumpers with whom I attended high school in northern Mississippi.

At the time I did not have the wisdom of experience to understand the origins of the rage and despair I felt, and I often wonder now after 25 years if I really have gained the wisdom of experience to truly understand the refusal by others to understand, to me an incomprehensible refusal that prompted my rage and despair.

The rage and despair I feel now is a mixture of the emotions prompted by a loss so deep that it is almost impossible to comprehend, much less to describe, along with what I see as the willful ignorance of others who stake out their partisan positions, repeating the talking points instead of thinking for themselves, choosing to reject the ideals and concepts they claim to believe in, regardless of if they are self-labeled as on the “left” or the “right” because they are all so frightened they are sacrificing freedoms on the altar of expediency.

I have refrained from posting my writings that I know are arising from the rage and the despair I have felt, and I am trying very hard now not to express in the most vulgar, vile terms the disgust I feel when reading what passes for “commentary” in blogworld, whether in posts or in the “hallelujah” comments I read from the worshiping acolytes that accumulate around the most damaged personality types that write weblogs, hate-brigades that spew vile vituperation upon anyone who has the temerity to disagree with the object of worship, the damaged personality that does the thinking for the self-selected minions since they have chosen to not think for themselves.

This tendency to prefer others to think instead of doing the hard work themselves existed long before the Internet, note that President Lyndon Johnson once said, “If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking.” Unfortunately for us all, the Internet has allowed many thoughts not worth even the glucose molecules to power them to flourish and take hold among the many who are too lazy to think and prefer to have others think FOR them.

My rage and despair may be accentuated by recent events in my life, but the fundamental origins have not changed in the quarter of a century since I first felt them.

We humans are cursed with memories that fade, and often those we wish to keep retreat faster than we wish. The veils of memory fall down over the images in our mind, slowly obscuring them into a sfumato that preserves the rough outlines while softening the details that were so sharp before.

In a cruel twist, memories that we do not want haunt us with a clarity that becomes more harshly edged as we seek the solace granted by forgetting.

Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.
   -Michel de Montaigne

Memory of details, eidetic but not the “photographic” of legend, has served me well, a legacy of my father who also apparently had this talent according to what I have learned from his good friends.

Yet it can be as much a curse as a blessing if the veils of memory do not completely cover the pain.

At times, the veils of memory have rents that show clearly isolated details, the white walls, the labels on the electrical outlets “do not use for critical equipment” with the associated thought of what equipment in Intensive Care is not critical, the contour seen of a face familiar yet foreign because of the gauntness, the susurration heard as fluids are pumped out of a chest cavity, the harsh red-on-black numbers on a screen showing the blood pressure too low to sustain the brain, the face of my father, so familiar yet so unknown because I had so rarely seen him even sleeping before, much less unconscious and dying, a vigil on a Christmas night that I would not wish upon anyone.

These tears in the veils of my memory will not be covered by time, and there are other rips in the shroud equally enduring that prevent me from forgetting details, graven images that I will never reveal to anyone, no matter how close they are to me.

These tears in the veils of my memory prompt tears in my eyes that I cannot seem to shed.

I have deliberately turned my mind from these images so that I can take care of the business necessary to ensure my Mom has the financial security my Dad wished and planned for her to have, a plan that he did not have time to complete because of the sudden return of the cancer that plagued him.

I grieved for my Dad in early November when I was in France and was first told that they had found a recurrence of his cancer because I knew I would have to hold things together when the inevitable occurred. The inevitable occurred far sooner than I expected, although later than I feared, allowing me an all too brief three days with my Dad before we called the ambulance to take him to the hospital over his objections, after a third collapse in one day, a day when I tried to help him as much as I could while recognizing that no help any mortal source could give would have been sufficient.

Although I grieved for a month before I returned to the US and knew what was coming, and although I have forced myself to stay focused on what needs to be done to take care of my Mom, my Dad’s wife and the woman he loved for so many years, I have not yet finished grieving for my Dad and the time measured in years that I had hoped for us to have together in his retirement that he earned and so well deserved to have but never received.

Life is cruel sometimes.

For me, the veils of memory are not obscuring with seemingly comforting forgetfulness the images, sounds, and feelings of the last five days of my father’s life which I witnessed a full year after I had last visited, when he seemed healthy.

I do not know if this sharp remembrance is a blessing or a curse.

Joe Gandelman at The Moderate Voice has written a post that discusses spin versus reporting from his perspective as a former reporter who knows personally someone involved in a case of a spin-attack on actual reporting where a political group linked a reporter/editorialist to editorials he did not write.

Hmmm, am I the only one who does the math on this one?

One of the key sections (including a quote from a Knight Ridder article) to entice you to reading the entire post:

On the radio, on the Internet, on cable television and in print, partisans on both sides attack any news reporting that fails to advance their agendas or confirm their biases. Zealous partisans in both major parties have adopted a “with us or against us” attitude. It’s not only unhealthy but also, I believe, dangerous.

Our job is to be neither with them nor against them. It’s to find out the facts, as best we can, and to report them as fully, fairly and accurately as we can.

Yes, that’s what a reporter is supposed to do. And, yes, it is not a perfect world. But imperfection - an error here and there - is different from people who want to make sure that only spin reaches the uppermost consciousness of the American public and anything detrimental to “their team” must be immediately discredited…partly by going after whomever dares to write an unflattering piece or portrayal.

If you want to be more than another member of the herd that those in power are trying to manipulate, I suggest you read his entire post and take the time and spend the effort to think about it.

Technorati Tags: recommended reading, spin, politics, reporting, the press