Based on the following reports, all in Mandarin:

One dated 2009:

http://www.chinamil.com.cn/jfjbmap/content/2011-01/07/content_47810.htm

In which it outlined the need to build a network consist of three (3) deep space tracking stations, to prepare China's up and coming space missions, including Chang-e 5, and beyond. Two (2) of the stations have been built, they are inside China. The third one will be build in Argentina, at the cost of $80 Million, and will be completed by 2016. This page, from a state-owned construction company in China, Second Engineering Company Limited of CCC Fourth Highway Engineering Company Limited, gave the location of the 3rd Chinese deep space tracking station:

http://www.ccfourth.com/004/level3.jsp?id=381

This page, dated 25th October 2013, stated that the building of the 3rd Chinese deep space tracking station has begun. The deep space tracking station will be build on a high plateau in between 800 meter to 900 meter above the sea level.

Back in 2003, the city of Los Angeles demanded that manufacturers, suppliers and contractors stopped using the terms "master" and "slave" on computer equipment, saying such terms were unacceptable and offensive.

http://edition.cnn.com/2003/TECH/ptech/11/26/master.term.reut/

From 2003 to 2013, many more such absurdities came into being, from Obama's wish to revamp NASA into an organization to please the Muslims

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/7875584/Barack-Obama-Nasa-must-try-to-make-Muslims-feel-good.html

to Obamacare website fiasco originated from the a no-bid $93 Million contract to Mitchelle Obama's ex classmate.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2477403/Michelle-Os-Princeton-classmate-exec-company-built-Obamacare-website.html

When I signed on to become an American I never imagine that my new country would become the buttjoke of the world, but unfortunately, it is.

Sigh !!

I was one of the early investors in google, naturally, when others were still using altavista or yahoo I put my homepage as google.com

Google has always have that "I'm Feeling Lucky" button, and will send visitors to random sites (from a pre-chosen, pre-approved bunch, of course, don't want to send children to porn sites) ...

That was the google I knew

Nowadays, everything change

No matter if you start with google.rw or google.com.au or plain google.com, and click on that "I'm Feeling Lucky" button you will end up in the "doodle" page

What kind of fucking crap is that ?

The person who said the above is Mr. Wu Ji, the director of China's National Space Science Center ( http://cssar.cas.cn/ ), English version @ http://english.cssar.cas.cn/ .

As an American, the above quote left a very bitter taste in my mouth.

What the fuck has gone wrong with my country ?

First, it was revealed that America cracked the email of the Brazilian President.

Then, it was Mexico's turn, closely followed by revelation of NSA tapping on France' telecommunication network

Now, it's Germany's chancellor which got the unwelcome tap.

Would you still trust the United States of America as your ally ?

The drill! You may know it from my last journals. Ask questions and I'll be happy to help. Feel free to answer any questions you have ideas about yourself, too.

Okay, so there's this quote that never seems to die. It's often attributed to Morgan Freeman, although I believe it actually comes from Henry Rollins; in any case, it doesn't much matter who said it. It just gets posted and reposted as a bit of snarky wisdom. Snarky it certainly is, but wise it's not.

First, the quote: "I hate the word homophobia. It's not a phobia. You are not scared. You are an asshole." There it is. Read it, enjoy it, revel in the snark.

Now, here's what's wrong with it. First, "phobia" is widely understood to mean "aversion" as well as "fear." Spare me the etymological arguments, please. Language evolves, and this is one of the ways in which it's evolved.

Second, yes, homophobes are afraid. Pretty much any time one large group of people hates another large group of people, fear is at the root of it. They're afraid, in some ill-defined but vehement way, that if gay people are allowed to be gay the way straight people are allowed to be straight, everything will fall apart. The foundations of their world will crack. The earth itself will turn to quicksand beneath their feet. Things Will Not Be As They Have Been, And Should Always Be. In the case of male homophobes who have a particular aversion to male homosexuality, they're afraid--in the words of another meme that is both snarky and wise--that gay men will treat them the way they treat women. And they're afraid, in a startlingly large number of cases, of the way they just can't ... stop ... thinking ... about ... gay ... sex ... and ... how ... terrible ... it ... is ... can't ... stop ...

Third, and perhaps most important, homophobes themselves deny they're afraid, and run away from the word "homophobia" at every opportunity. Try it: identify a homophobe as such, and there's a good bet you'll get an invective-laced tirade about how it's not about fear but about the disgust that every decent person should feel when thinking about such acts (... can't ... stop ...) and how it is the patriotic duty of every red-blooded patriot who knows right from wrong to stand up against the Gay Agenda ... etc. This is particularly acute, again, when male homophobes who have a particular aversion to male homosexuality (sorry, I can't come up with a good acronym here) are confronted with their homophobia, because, you see, fear is for girls. And fags, who might as well be girls. Because girls are icky. Not like us big, strong, healthy, muscular men with our strong arms and bulging pecs and ... can't ... stop ... where was I? Oh, right. Fear is unmanly.

So yeah. No one hates (and fears!) the word "homophobia" more than homophobes do, and for that reason if no other, it needs to stay in the language. Never stop shaming them. Never stop reminding them what cowards they are. Know their fears and exploit them mercilessly, crush them and see them driven before you, chase them back under their rocks where they belong.

Opposition to Obama has nothing to do with race. ÂNope, nothing at all.

</sarcasm>

Okay, Republicans. ÂLook, I believe that most of you are not racist. ÂYou oppose Obama because you disagree with his policies, not his skin color. ÂYou'd rather have a Republican President because you're Republicans, and you're Republicans because you largely agree with Republican Party policies rather than out of a sense of tribal identity (I extend you that courtesy; please do the same) and you don't care what color this hypothetical Republican President, with whom you would agree far more than you do with Obama, might be.

I believe that, not least because the alternative -- that a majority of members of a political party that represents about a third of the American electorate is actively, maliciously racist -- is too grotesque to contemplate.

But there is, at the least, a substantial minority of your party that is actively, maliciously racist, that puts its racism on display as proudly as ever did the KKK wing of the Democratic Party of old. ÂFrom where I'm sitting, and where many Democrats are sitting, it looks an awful lot like this minority (I have to keep believing that) is steering the agenda of your entire party. ÂYou have to deal with these people. ÂYou have to exile them, shame them, chase them back under their rocks where they belong. ÂWe can't do it. ÂThey won't listen to us. ÂThey're your people, and that makes them your problem.

Or we can all keep going down the path we're on. ÂBecause, you know, that's working so well.

Those are some powerful words. "Hi there." Two of the most powerful words I've learned. It means, "I'm here." It means "I'm here with you." It means, "We're together in this moment." It doesn't mean anything more than that. Lovers use those words. Enemies use those words right before one of them kills the other. Still, though, there it is: "Hi there."

I meant to message a user called Lisa Lynx. She's a Google+ user. I feel like I'm an old man, like Gandalf or Dumbledore. At work, they keep comparing me to young men like Harry Potter. Actually, I got a scar on my forehead errily similar to Potter's, and I've regretted it ever since. Maybe I am young. Maybe I am old. I'm just here, in this moment, writing this, then I'll be gone.

Hi there.

I finally found a very rare Sailor Moon wallscroll. Actually, I don't know if it's rare at all. All I know is I've had trouble finding it. So, it's rare from my frame of reference, even if it's rather common and worthless from another frame of reference. Now. every night, the Shitennou watch over me as I sleep. Those folks, Kunzite, Malachite, Jeadite, Zoicite. and Nephryte (there were four of them so there must have been an error at some point, but that's how these things go). use to work for Mamoru, a spirit who was associate with this planet. The rest is apochrypha. The point is that people often get wallscrolls of characters they admire or are attracted to. For me, the Shitennou are both.

Whoever you are, Lisa Lynx... well, a sidenode. I'm not a man! I tried it once. It didn't work out. I much prefer being a woman. So please don't judge me by the gender they assigned me at birth.

Of course, I could never know what the other is like. I was drunk on IRC last morning (night, but I think it was morning). I've been taking sleeping pills for too long, and I decided to stop. It's been difficult. There was this person named Sacha, and she was of the XX type. I said something, then she said something, then both of us got frustrated at each other. So, I said, completely out of frustration, knowing that it couldn't happen, secretly wishing in my heart it /would/ happen only because it would harm her and be advantageous to me, that I'd take all her periods. So she, out of pure frustration (again, there was a a lot of frustration. often, when we use the words "hi there" and experience a moment with another, we can often meet based on our frustration, sometimes to hate each other, sometimes to solve the problem), so Sacha says, "You can have them!"

It was just as simple as that. At least, I've read a lot of stories where it was as simple as that.

It didn't happen at first, so I added a complication to it when I saw her later that morning. Since I'm quitting sleeping pills, I told her that I couldn't take her periods until I had natural, unaided sleep.

Well, I've had that. Unfortunately, I was unable to take her periods. I remain physiologically, except for the organ between my ears, male. I won't be having a period this month. Instead she will. I wonder if she was as hopeful as I was that I would be having a period next month intead of her.

The point is, Lisa Lynx, please help me. Your response to my comment was encouraging, but the discussion's been closed. Perhaps tomorrow I'll figure out this Google+ thing and find a way to contact you. I just wanted some record that what you had written me was encouraging. Thank you!

Well, it's time for me to conclude this. I don't know how to contact you or that you might even want me to contact you. Perhaps I'm another "all men" to an "all women." Who knows who those too idiots are, "all men" and "all women" always fighting, eh? I sure as hell don't. I'm sorry.

Well, blessed be. Until next time.

If you think TOR (The Onion Router) is safe, if you think that you can get away from the prying eyes of the BIG BROTHER you could not be more wrong.

TOR originated from a research project of the U.S. Naval Research Lab, and currently still receive funding from the states department of the US government, the Swedish government, and others.

And there already have been several cases of the fed successfully cracking the myriad layers of TOR and some people have already been apprehended.

This link outlined how FBI has successfully cracked TOR

http://www.crikey.com.au/2013/08/13/crikey-clarifier-how-the-fbi-cracked-tor-the-secret-internet/

The following link outlined the background of TOR

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(anonymity_network)

So this cartoon has been going around my Facebook friends list ... I'm going to try to explain what's wrong with it, and I'll try to be succint, but I don't know how good a job I'll do, so bear with me. The short and snarky version is found in my Slashdot sig line, "The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using 'correlation is not causation' as an argument is close to 1," but that's kind of unfair and certainly isn't all the discussion this subject deserves.

First of all, yes, "correlation is not causation" is strictly true. That is, they are not the same thing. If events A and B tend to occur together, this does not mean that A causes B, or that B causes A. There may be a third, unobserved event C that causes both, or the observed correlation may simply be a coincidence. Bear this in mind.

But if you observe the correlation frequently enough to establish significance, you can be reasonably sure (arbitrarily sure, depending on how many times you make the observation) that it's not coincidence. So now you're back to one of three explanations: A causes B, B causes A, or there exists some C that causes both A and B. (Two caveats: whatever the causal relationships are, they may be very indirect, proceeding through events D, E, F, and G; and the word "significance" has a very precise meaning in this context, so check with your local statistician before using it.) An easy way to check for A-causes-B vs. B-causes-A is by looking at temporal relationships. If you are already wearing your seatbelt when you get in a car crash, you are far more likely to survive than if you aren't, but you have to have made the decision to put the seatbelt on before the crash occurs--it's the fact of you wearing your seatbelt that causes you to get through the crash okay, not the fact that you get through the crash okay that causes you to have been wearing your seatbelt. Unfortunately, the temporal relationships aren't always clear, and even if you can rule out B-causes-A on this basis, it still leaves you to choose between A-causes-B and C-causes-(A,B).

An awful lot of what science does is figuring out what C is, or even if it exists at all. This is where mechanistic knowledge of the universe comes into play. Suppose that emergency departments in particular city start seeing a whole bunch of patients with acute-onset fever and diarrhea. Shortly thereafter, ED's in nearby cities start seeing the same thing, and then the same in cities connected by air travel routes. Patient histories reveal that the diarrhea tends to start about six hours after the onset of fever. Does this mean the fever is causing the diarrhea? Probably not, because these days we know enough about the mechanisms of infectious disease to know that there are lots of pathogens that cause fever, then diarrhea. The epidemiologists' and physicians' job is then to figure out what the pathogen is, how it spreads, and hopefully how best to treat it; while they're doing that, the "correlation is not causation" fanatics will be sticking their fingers in their ears and chanting "la la la I can't hear you," and hoping desperately they don't end their days as dehydrated husks lying on a feces-soaked hospital bed.

The point here is that in most cases, correlation is all we can observe. (Some philosophers of science, a la David Hume, would argue that we never observe causation, but I'm willing to accept "cause of death: gunshot wound to head" and similar extreme cases as direct observation of causal relationships.) Not every patient exposed to the pathogen will get infected. Of those who do, not all will show symptoms. Some symptomatic patients will just get the fever, some will just get the diarrhea. Some will get them at the same time, or the diarrhea first. Medical ethics boards tend to frown on doing controlled experiments with infectious diseases on human subjects, so you have to make what inferences you can with the data you have.

Even with all these limitations, correlation--in this case between exposure and symptoms--is still a powerful tool for uncovering the causal relationships. Most of what we know about human health comes from exactly this kind of analysis, and the same is true for the observational sciences generally. Astronomy, geology, paleontology, large chunks of physics and biology ... they're all built on observations of correlation, and smart inference from those observations. So if you want to know how the universe works, don't rely on any one-liners, no matter how satisfying, to guide your understanding.

Privacy and the Internet: Is Facebook Evil?

He's right that privacy in the modern sense is a new development--for most of human history, people lived with what we would now consider a near-total lack of privacy--but wrong, I think, to dismiss it on that basis. There are many, many modern ideas, such as democracy and equality before the law, that would have made no sense whatsoever to our ancestors; does that mean they're any less worth prizing?

Obviously I'm not particularly concerned about giving up my privacy by maintaining an online presence, else I wouldn't be posting this. But the combination of a traditional "village" level of everyone knowing everyone else's business with the speed and ubiquity of modern communications represents a third phase in humanity's development as far as privacy is concerned--the first having been the intensely linked small communities of nomads and peasants, the second having been the mass anonymity of the industrial age--and I don't think we have any idea how that's going to shake out yet.

My essay 2001: A Space Odyssey - Discerning Themes Through Score and Imagery has been front paged at Long Form, a site sponsored by Pitt Writers of the University of Pittsburgh Creative Writing Department. I'm both flabbergasted and incredibly pleased.

2001: A Space Odyssey is one of my favorite films. Recently, I wrote a ~25,000 word analysis, with image stills and video clips, discussing Nietzsche's philosophical themes of Ascent of Man and Eternal Recurrence implied therein. Comparing HAL's murder of the Discovery One's crew in contrast to Moonwatcher's killing of a competing ape tribe leader over a water hole, I note that both gain sentience through violence. Another argument proposes that the apes are as maladapted to their savana environment as is modern man by his tools and socialization, leading to dehumanization by technology rather than triumph. I list several motifs in imagery, contrapuntal use of musical score that evokes emotion in opposition to visual narrative, analyze actor micro-expressions used to imply character intent, and end with subsequent impact of the film on depictions of artificial intelligence. There are numerous citations from Bizony, Freud, Kracaeur, Nietzsche, Zizek, and more. Perhaps some /. members who also love the film might be interested in the read.

I thought it was already pretty well understood that "Celtic" is only meaningful as a linguistic grouping, but it seems the old idea of a separate "Celtic race" or "Irish race" is pretty strongly embedded, even now:

DNA shows Irish people have more complex origins than previously thought

This makes me think about wider issues. I don't know how many online discussions I've been in recently in which I've been solemnly assured that humanity is divided into three races. (Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out.) And people will go on believing this, even when genetic evidence makes it perfectly plain that there's no such thing as race, never has been and never will be. There are heritable phenotypes, some of which are clustered together as a result of geographical or historical accident, none of which are set in stone and almost all of which are continuous rather than discrete states. The weight we assign them is entirely cultural.

As always, Darwin puts it elegantly: "Man has been studied more carefully than any other animal, and yet there is the greatest possible diversity amongst capable judges whether he should be classed as a single species or race, or as two (Virey), as three (Jacquinot), as four (Kant), five (Blumenbach), six (Buffon), seven (Hunter), eight (Agassiz), eleven (Pickering), fifteen (Bory St. Vincent), sixteen (Desmoulins), twenty-two (Morton), sixty (Crawfurd), or as sixty-three, according to Burke. This diversity of judgment does not prove that the races ought not to be ranked as species, but it shews that they graduate into each other, and that it is hardly possible to discover clear distinctive characters between them."