—Thanksgiving…Really!

We are now officially living in “interesting times”.  Everything seems to be in a state of collapse—government, law, morals, ethics, personal judgement, democracy, religion, public trust, and just about anything else people ever placed their faith in, except the one thing which people can put their faith in.  The more we explore with our science and technology, the less sense the Universe makes.  The more we legislate and adjudicate with our “common sense” and “wisdom”, the fouler and more despicable our public institutions become.   The whole world economy is on the precipice of an abyss, at a time when the most powerful government in history is in the hands of people who apparently think its destruction is a good idea—a prelude to some witless notion of a “revolution” which has already failed miserably everywhere else it’s been tried.

It not just that everything humanity depends on is falling apart—-nothing humans depend on ever worked in the first place.   It just that now even our collective delusions of civilization are disintegrating.

And so, I am thankful beyond adequate words that God in His mercy has provided something we can depend on, and hope for, and look forward to, and which we can be joyful in even as we speak:

Romans 8:37-39 (New International Version)

³⁷No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. ³⁸For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons,^[a] neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, ³⁹neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

–Car DVRs for Driving Safety?

Gizmodo:  Specialized DVR For Cars Could Make Teens Better Drivers

Spy-in-the-cab could improve teenage driving – tech – 08 November 2009 – New Scientist

Some of us had this discussion recently.  I posted a suggestion about something similar some time ago.  Looks like others are thinking about it, too.  But why only teens?  Cars will need full black boxes with 360° video coverage for delinquents of all ages to stop the psychopathic butchery of tens of thousands on U.S. roads annually.  We have become so desensitized to this staggering loss of life that people will probably stall any corrections with squabbling about “privacy”, and so on, but something has to be done.

Or we could start driving sanely, with greater concern for the welfare of others than for our own convenience and egotistical dominance. 

Try an experiment:  The next time you’re in the grocery store, and you’re ready to check out, don’t wait in line—just force your way to the front, and push any elderly people or preoccupied moms with coupons out of your way.  It’s your line, no waiting!  Who gave them the right to be in front of you?!

What would you say if you saw such behavior in public—stupid, inexcusable, should be arrested, or maybe you think nobody would actually act like that?  So why do you drive that way?

—ARES 1-X Test Flight

Ares I-X launches – managers claim successful test flight | NASASpaceFlight.com

The main ascent components seemed to work, although no telemetry results have been revealed yet.  As the dummy upper stage/spacecraft/abort system separated, it tumbled violently instead of coasting along the flight path, as if unguided.  As it appeared certain to swing around and impact the coasting booster, they froze the NASA-TV feed.  According to NASASpaceflight.com, only two parachutes on the booster deployed.  There was no live coverage of the descending booster, and controllers appeared to have lost all live communication with the flight systems.

[nm about the ascent plume business---I suspect it was a view as the nozzle gimballed away, then they switched flight cameras.]

Mostly successful in that it didn’t hit the tower and fly sideways into Atlantis on the other pad, or shake itself to bits on ascent.  But since it was essentially a Shuttle SRB in a manned spacecraft costume, the relevance to future development will be a matter of marketing rather than actual engineering.

—Champions Online(TM): Quick Review

I spent the first three days of my 14-day trial trying to figure out why I could log in to the account, but not the game.  Three days without a meaningful response to  a trouble ticket or forum posts.  I—myself—finally figured out that my password was being copied, then pasted, with a stray trailing space.  The account login properly disposed of it, while the game login did not.  Customer service is the basis of successful MMO efforts, guys, not something you add on after you get cool effects and snappy patter installed. 

Anyway,  I finally made it into the tutorial, which seems to be effective in teaching game mechanics, at least.  The game has a very comic-book, flat-shaded feel, which is an artistic decision to be sure.  Whether it compares favorably to other efforts such as City of Heroes is something others will decide in time.  

The gameplay interface is very rough.  It was nearly impossible to control the character from the keyboard—I have to use the right-mouse-button to control facing to get anywhere. 

There is a lot of humor in the game which is, frankly, juvenile at best—accidentally turning your enemies into teddy bears, and so on.   The artifacts one picks up are often silly, and I have yet to see an explanation of what you do with them other than bind and absorb attribute boosts from them.  There is something mentioned about “trading” which hasn’t been explained anywhere I’ve looked.

Some of the humor is, however, pretty good, if a little “self-referential”:

—The Cray 1 Supercomputer: Computing in the Good Old Days

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray_1

The photo is of a Cray-1 from the Smithsonian Air&Space Museum in Washington, D.C. [Maybe I'll get around to posting some of the aircraft later] They used to call these “supercomputers”.  This one, use for early weather modeling and atmospheric research, was a 64-bit machine, and had a mind-boggling 1 megabyte of memory! The memory, and the liquid freon cooling system it required to operate are no longer with it.  The rat’s nest in the middle of the trademark cylindrical shape of the Cray is what we old people used to call “wire wrap” connections (I still have two of the tools used to make wrapped connections on little square posts).  Another display says that because of the circular shape, although there are “over 60 miles of wire in the Cray”, no connection is more than 2 feet long. 

If the Cray-1’s processor was fully “hard-wired”, as opposed to the micro-coded CPU’s we use now, this thing is even more mind-boggling.  Try to imagine the patience needed to hand-wire all those connections, squinting at some telephone-book-sized wiring diagram.  Then try to imagine how one would correct a mistake later.  One of Cray’s earlier machines was so complex that it basically couldn’t be kept running. 

Granted that many peripherals probably have this much computing power today, and air cooling generally suffices unless you’re a die-hard FPS’er, but it’s good to consider how we got to the incredible little boxes of computing power under our desks.  Our personal computers represent a lot of very expensive lessons, many learned the hard way. 

I think Texas A&M still has the horrible old Amdahl in the basement of its engineering building that I had to punch cards for in 1979.  The past isn’t as distant as you may think.

—Warning! Incoming PC Game Demo Review: Batman: Arkham Asylum

[Ok, maybe the Reboot stuff is getting a little dated]

 Batman: Arkham Asylum PC Demo

This appears to be a sort of merging of fighting game and RPG.  The HTH combat has a lot of potential, with very natural and fluid flow between available attacks, take-downs, and combinations.  It would probably be really great as a multiplayer game.  Unfortunately, it appears that no support will be provided for any of the popular PC controllers, except for the MS XBox PC Controller, whatever that is. 

My video card is already too old to support the latest physics engine used in the game.  It didn’t really seem to matter much. 

RockSteady has gone to great lengths to produce a gritty, depressing environment and extremely detailed characters—some maybe a little too detailed.  Batman’s exposed facial features look like he was in the tub too long.  He is able to do a wide range of acrobatic moves, grapple and climb on wall features, glide, and crouch, but for some reason cannot jump onto the top of a desk.  Only a very small sample of objects in the environment were interactive.  The Detective Mode allows inspection of critical elements in the space, warns of enemies, and can be used to understand the wiring of gates and shock fields, and so on.  This also has a lot of entertainment potential, which may not have been very thoroughly exploited, at least in the demo.

The battles I tried seemed far too easy.  I just walked around and set off a series of punches and kicks until the target fell down.  This never really got any harder even with a large number of inmates attacking at once.  It was sort of the martial-arts-movie thing where the bad guys politely wait for their turn to attack one at a time [better be sure I spell "martial" right---don't need that misunderstanding again].  The scary psycho-murdering monster in the first major combat succumbed to 3-4 simple punches and collapsed in a convenient heap.  It was never clear whether I was taking significant damage, except for  a few grunts, and cheering by the inmates.

I can remember making game demos by carving out a limited subset of the released game, but I really think the extraction was done with more forethought than was apparently used here.  After the first major combat I wasted at least an hour wandering around the room prying and breaking things to no avail, only to learn that the particular device needed to solve the puzzle simply isn’t activated in the game.  No documents tell you this, nor is there any indication that the demo is over.  You are simply left with no way to continue.  I hope this isn’t a preview of customer support for the game.

There were forum comments about the use of a draconian anti-piracy system with the full distribution, which will only allow the game to be reloaded three times before the disk must be repurchased.  The publisher would only say that the rumor will only be addressed closer to release for the PC version.

This could be a very interesting development in the evolution of fighter-shooter-RPG computer games, if fully exploited.  Many of these possibilities seem to have been underachieved in the demo.   I will probably check back on the title sometime next year, after the inevitable post-release quality assurance has been performed by other customers.  Multiplayer?

—The Whole Glen Beck Thing

8-25-09 video

Parts of the presentation are maybe a bit melodramatic, but the implications are clear:  the Obama administration and powerful lawmakers are surrounded by, immersed in, and apparently often consist of radical extremists, Marxist-Leninist ideologues, and purveyors of social theories that would have exceeded the suspension of disbelief of an average audience had it appeared in any of the standard 20th Century dystopian fiction.  If there is a rational counter-argument, or a plausible demonstration that this is all being blown out of proportion somehow, let’s hear it.  But it is the reasonable responsibility of the citizens of a Republic to require answers to these questions. 

I have been advocating an open, mature discussion of health care reform and other issues facing the Nation, free of partisan bickering, cheerleading, boycotts, tirades [by the President of the United States!] against average citizens as paid-off flunkies, and 3rd-grade-level ad hominem taunting. There are ways for the grown-ups to talk about these matters constructively on Twitter and in other places on the Internet.  Even if consensus isn’t possible, at least we could return to a basic respect for the requirements of a free society.  The alternative may very well be National extinction. 

—Surfside, Texas Half Marathon ‘09

[Yes, I am sort of late getting this together.  It was only last February.  I just can't keep up with this newfangled technology.]

This has become a favorite event for us, since it is scenic, casual, and very friendly to walking participation.  I was not as conditioned this year as I had hoped, since there was some fragmentation of the fitness clubs in ‘08. 

I got a Polar heart monitor watch for Christmas last year, and it showed a surprising result as soon as I started using it while walking.  At my best walking pace, my heart rate averaged about 105 bpm, even over 12-13 miles.  The minimum estimated rate for aerobic exercise at my age is about 116.  Unless I run, which I can’t do for any extended time, I’m not really getting the workout I need from the road work.  It isn’t clear why my heart rate is so relaxed about all this effort, but I have since started using elliptical machines at the gym to improve my aerobic workout without the impact problems of running.

The Surfside event had some serious problems last year, especially with their first use of electronic timing.  They corrected all of that this year, and the event was very well organized throughout.  There were just two annoyances worth mentioning, both related to weather. 

Surfside was hit hard last year by Hurricane Ike, which caused severe damage along the Texas coast all the way to the Louisiana border and beyond.  The pavilion at the park which served as the operational base for the event in prior years was critically damaged and structurally unsound :

Remains of Stahlman Park Pavilion, damaged by Ike

The event was based in a large tent this year.  The ground from the parking lot to the tent had been torn up by bulldozers, and was very difficult to cross—especially in darkness the night before at packet pickup.  It was kind of rough after the event, too.

The fog we experienced in ‘08 was back (This, for some inexplicable reason, was when I decided to leave my high-tech rain poncho in the van):

Poor visibility on approach to event

Most of our walking group decided to take the early non-competitive start.  I decided to take the regular start, partly because of my fascination with chip timing, and partly because it was an hour-and-a-half later.  This would turn out to be a bad choice.

The starting line was bustling with a large crowd of participants and onlookers:

The downwind leg of the course was deceptively easy.  More hurricane damage was evident, such as the remains of a beach house which straddled the course due to beach erosion (about half its piers were in the water):

 

After the downwind turn, things got much more interesting than I usually prefer.  By about mile 4, the wind was howling straight down the beach into our faces.  By mile 7, I started to hear thunder, and ominous clouds approached the beach from the Gulf of Mexico:

Within about half a mile, I was soaked completely by a wind-driven rain, with lightning in the distance.  For some reason, I mostly worried that they would come out and make us stop—which would have been the sensible thing to do.  I was cold, due to the wind and wet clothing, and eventually stopped trying to keep a schedule.   The turnaround for the miserable upwind leg was at mile 9, which helped some (no pictures, since I had to put the camera away).  The rain finally stopped around mile 11.

There was a carcass of a porpoise at about mile 12, which had probably been washed ashore in the storm months before.  I don’t understand why it hadn’t been removed (There were reports of another porpoise carcass on the full marathon section of the course).  I decided not to post the photograph, which is pretty unpleasant.

I finally approached the finish, about 17 minutes behind the worst-case target time:

Mile 13 of 13.1

The event was mostly entertaining, at least.  The finishers’ medals were very artistic again this year:

I survived the Surfside Half Marathon ‘09!

The premiums for participants included a wind jacket (the yellow jacket pictured above) and the trademark travertine coaster, along with post-race barbeque.  The organizers worked out everything very well (except the weather), and took care of everyone through the duration of the event.  If I continue road walking next Fall, I’ll probably target the 2010 event.

—White House Blog Calls for Informants

I Swear I’m Not Making This Up:   http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/Facts-Are-Stubborn-Things/

From someone named Macon Philips on the White House weblog:

There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care.  These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation.  Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov.

I have been trying—since well before the American people voted the last vestige of civil common sense off the island—to get somebody to recognize that an Obama administration would be the end of the era of representative  democracy as we have known it—and even I didn’t expect it to come this soon.  Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the Obama administration has asked U.S. citizens to inform on others who have non-compliant views about the administration’s policies.  Robert Gibbs can backpedal and newspeak as long as he sees fit—but that’s what it says.    The post even references “casual conversation” as something they need to “keep track of”.

Oh, and in a matter of hours, “#fishy” will probably be a “trending topic” on Twitter. 

—APA: No Choice for Homosexuals

 1 Corinthians 6:9-11 (NIV)

⁹Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders ¹⁰nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. ¹¹And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.  [my emphasis]

Psychologists Reject Gay-to-Straight ‘Therapy’ – Health News | Current Health News | Medical News – FOXNews.com

The APA, of course, is speaking from political expedience rather than any sort of scientific or professional rigor.  Like “justice” in America, “science” is whatever makes important people feel more important—almost always at the expense of making some other group feel less important.   

How do you know you’re dealing with charlatans?  It’s the oldest trick in the quack’s little black bag;  the “science cannot prove” dodge:— “There’s no evidence… ” a proponent of the APA report says, that remedial therapy is of any use for those whose homosexual tendencies conflict with their religious beliefs. 

The report advises “…therapies that do not attempt to change sexual orientation, but rather involve acceptance, support and identity exploration and development “.  

When advocates of various sorts of sexual “diversity” first began to co-opt the momentum of the Civil Rights movement of the ’60’s and ’70’s (I first heard these sorts of arguments at the U. of Texas, in around ‘73), they steered public consciousness down a dark alley.   As far back as the early ’80’s, we were already seeing attempts by advocates of pedophilia to construe themselves as a disadvantaged “lifestyle”.  The collective decision of politically influential people and groups to go in this direction will have—actually already have had— consequences—what sorts of other behavior will receive public acclaim and advocacy next?  There are, in fact, studies which almost reasonably argue that murderers and other criminals are genetically predisposed—have a “natural tendency” —to their “lifestyle”.  I mean, why not? 

Of course, Paul’s list in 1 Corinthians (the Biblical letter, not the South American soccer club) includes all sorts of behaviors, in addition to homosexuality, which are destructive to the Church and society in general;  thieves, swindlers, and even malicious gossipers are included.  Paul also makes no distinction of the degree of evil these behaviors represent, and they all have the same outcome.  Those practicing these things will destroy themselves, unless they repent and pursue God’s way (see also Phillipians 3:12-14 ).  Paul makes it clear that people in the Church at Corinth had been guilty of the behaviors listed, but that faith in Christ had brought them out of those things.  Now they are new people (2 Corinthians 5:17), and the old, destructive ways no longer enslave them. 

Political and social expedience has had its say in the matter, and has proved to be a complete waste of time and peoples’ lives for centuries—”maybe it will work this time”, but it’s not a good bet. 

Jesus gave us a way to set aside behaviors and ways of thinking that can only destroy us, and move toward rescue and rebirth, hope and a new life, safely guided by His Spirit toward an eternal home.   Ignore what the “important people” say—we have a choice!