This is non-tech, but I thought I'd share. :)

    I learned something at 2am the other morning. Driving at night, in an unfamiliar area, isn't always the best idea. I took a guy to his place from a bar, because he was absolutely hammered. File that under "no good deed goes unpunished".

    After leaving his place, I was heading home. I bumped over something at about 20mph. It wasn't much of a bump, but I immediately heard my tires go flat. Like, a dramatic wooshing sound from both tires on one side. I stopped and looked. Sure enough, both tires were flat, but I didn't see any damage to the rims. I assumed it just damaged the tires. Maybe it was some broken glass or something in the road. I was 10 miles from home, but it was cold out, and I wasn't going to wait for a tow truck. I could drive the car, but only at 10 miles per hour. Talk about a less than entertaining drive.

    I ordered tires the next morning, and they arrived today. I pulled the two flat wheels off, so I could get the new tires mounted. As soon as I did, I saw the bad news. The inside lip of the rim was seriously bent. Like, so much that I could put my finger between the rim and the tire. No wonder they went woosh dramatically.

    I went to a few shops to see if I could get the rims fixed or replaced. I already know it's virtually impossible to find OEM replacement wheels for my car. They were exclusive to my car, and only on 3 years, on a very specific submodel, in that style. I was in a little accident in February, and the other drivers insurance company had to cough up $1000/ea for the wheels from the only place they could find them. It took weeks to get them in.

    In talking to them about the damage, they said it was clear that I hit a pothole. If it had been a loose object in the road, both wheels would not have been bent exactly the same way. If it had been a curb, the outside lip of the wheel would have been damaged. So, dumb luck on a dark road in the middle of the night.

    So, that's my rant. I am carless until after the 1st, since no one locally stocks anything that could fit, and no one is doing shipments over the holiday. {sigh}

Anyone that knows me knows, I'm a died in the wool Linux fan. I use Windows as a tool to accomplish a task. That is, if I *need* to run a Windows application, that I can't do any other way, I use Windows.

      Someone was nice enough to donate a copy of Windows 7 Ultimate to me to try out. I had been using XP Professional for my Windows work. I tried, and didn't like Vista. I've retried it several times over, and have been annoyed with it when it does stupid things. I tried a few beta's, and worked with it in normal releases on others computers.

      I had low expectations for Windows 7. I expected a freshly skinned Vista.

      The hardware I'm working on is a AMD AM3 Athlon II x4 620 (2.6Ghz) overclocked to 3Ghz. Asus motherboard, with integrated ATI Radeon HD 3300, and 2Gb of DDR3 RAM. 512Mb is shared to the video card, which I will be fixing sometime soon. This Asus board was the only one that took DDR3 that CompUSA had in stock at the local store. I figured it's easier to stay with this video card for now, and upgrade it later. I also plan the same for the CPU. I'll be purchasing an actual Phenom II x4, as the pricing comes down. I did a little reading, and this CPU overclocked does as well or better than it's Phenom II x4 sister. Hey, can't argue with that, especially with the lowest price tag in the store.

      I have Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit in it's own partition. I can say, "well, it's not too bad." It's doesn't seem as resource hungry as Vista.

    The only things I've noticed are that there are no Vista nor 64-bit drivers for my old Linksys WUSB11. The fault there is with Linksys not making new drivers for their legacy hardware, not Microsoft It does manage my Belkin USB device well though. Well, it handles it better than XP did. I had intermittent service with it, and attributed that to the device. It works well with the 64-bit Vista drivers. The drivers don't just install themselves, like they're suppose to, so it takes a little loving to make it work. Not a big deal though, everything else went in fluidly.

    I've noticed that Win7 automatically schedules a defrag for 1am weekly. Nice touch. I changed the schedule to daily, and the time to later, when I'm less likely to be using the machine.

    Would I avoid a 64 bit version of Linux for Win7 64-bit? No.

    I noticed something funny. They keep two separate trees for x86(32) and x86(64) program files. Under Linux, with the proper libraries installed, this is unnecessary. I don't know the purpose of this. Maybe it's for organization. Maybe it's because it pays attention to the path. Maybe it just likes it that way. Either way, it seems odd.

    On a 64bit Linux (Slamd64 and now Slackware 64), I've always had almost everything compiled for 64 bit. The only glaring exception was Firefox, because there was no 64bit flash plugin. Since that was resolved months ago, I've used 64bit everything. I have run 32 bit applications, because I was testing something from a 32 bit machine. No big deal there, it just worked.

    For folks that like Windows (like most average home users), I won't scare them away from Win7 as an upgrade path. I warned people off of Vista, because I always ran into problems. It seems like they've done something mostly right this time. :) I still reserve the right to decide that it sucks, if I start running into serious problems. For now though, the install went smooth, and it's working pretty well.

    I just did another Win7 install on an older Athlon64 machine (3000+, 1Gb RAM), and performance wise it seems slightly better than XP.

    As a note, these measurements are "seat of the pants" measurements. They were not quantified with any benchmarks. Really, end users care about how good it feels, even if the benchmarks prove otherwise.

Here's a few insights that I've acquired since unemployment. I've been unemployed for about 3 months now, and technically homeless.

    1) Laundry is much easier to do, when all you wear is shorts and sandals. Here in Florida, it's hot, so wearing a shirt is an unnecessary evil, and just gets sweaty anyways. (and yes, I'm in shape enough to do it)

    2) Pants and socks feel funny. I actually dressed up one day and realized that all the extra clothes felt restricting. Well, and hot. I was much happier stripping down and putting just shorts back on. I'm not a nudist, I'm just practical. When it's 95 degrees out, anything you might be wearing is too much. I strongly encourage attractive women to do it too. :)

    3) People with jobs can't come out to play as often. I am job hunting, but since 20% of the population is doing the same thing, I'm not getting any positive feedback. When I want to hang out with someone who is working, I have to wait for them to get off work, and we have to stop drinking early on Sunday night. That slows down my drunken weekends, when they have to get to bed "to go to work."

    4) It can get really boring with nothing better to do. Some of you may have noticed an increase in my posting on here. Hey, I have time on my hands, in between sending off resumes, watching TV, and talking on the phone.

    5) The headhunters are desperate too. Like I said, I'm in Florida. No, I don't want my resume sent off with 100 others, for a 3 month minimum wage job as an entry level programmer in a language I don't know, that would require me moving 1,000 miles. They don't quite understand why either. I don't exactly have the budget to move anywhere. After taxes, I'll be lucky to come home with $1k/mo, and that's not going to cover rent, power, water, food, and gas. I'd also have to break my lease at the end of 3 months, which won't go over that well either.

    6) Picking up odd jobs can be fun. This month, I've:

  Worked on a dozen cars.
  Done plumbing work in a half dozen places,
  Cleaned countless computers of viruses, malware, and stupid things that slow the machine down (how many toolbars do you really need for your browsers?).
  Several days of "personal security" which consists of me owning a gun, which sat in the house, and me being there "just in case" something happened. At least they were good for conversations, or else I would have been bored out of my mind.

    In doing the odd jobs, I've found they're asking me to do them, because they can't afford a "professional" to do them. Either way, when I'm done, it's still done right. I've taken "payment" in food, cigarettes, gas, and places to sleep. I did get someone to buy me a GPS, so I won't get quite so lost in strange cities. It's neat. I no longer have to call and say "I'm at this intersection" just to find out I'm in the wrong city. :)

    All in all, I'd like to have a job again, and my own place to live. Since I haven't slept in the same place for more than about 3 days in a row, I'm getting to see a lot of places that I otherwise wouldn't have had time to. I have helped a lot of people out, and saved them a fortune. I usually tell them what the job would have cost by a "professional", and they "pay" me what they can afford, in the method that they can do it in. I've had some nice dinners in the comfort of someone elses home. :)

    It's been interesting. I'm left with $20 in my pocket and couple 2 liters of soda, and a tank full of gas.

    And as a side note, if you have work for me, I can be almost anywhere if you're paying gas, food, and a place to sleep. :) This is a long stretch from my old 6 figure job, but I am anything but stressed out these days. I have people lined up for the short term of doing things, so I won't go hungry anytime soon.

As any of you who read my journal know, I was laid off a couple months ago. Nope, no luck on the job front, and no unemployment to carry me through.

    I've been picking up the odd jobs here and there, but they rarely pay for much more than cigarettes and gas. Otherwise, I've been living by the good graces of friends. If I didn't have my friends, I would have starved to death over a month ago. Thanks to all of you.

    Now, on with my journal rant. :)

    My laptop died. Well, the power jack on the back died. No power means no laptop. A friend has loaned me his old Compaq TC1000. It's a 1Ghz Transmeta with 768Mb RAM. I put a 100Gb hard drive in that I had laying around.

    I thought it would be a brilliant plan to dual boot it. WinXP on one partition, and Slackware Linux on another. It's working pretty well, but I'd like to share some comparisons.

    Both OS's are completely up to date. In the Windows world, that means it's bloated beyond use. In the Linux world, it's nice and fast.

    With XP, I've removed absolutely everything that I could find that wasn't necessary to save CPU time and memory. I did every tweak I could.

    With Slackware, I haven't tweaked it yet. I did a full install, but only enabled the essential services. I currently have it running Gnome.

    With XP, it was an interesting exercise of copying drivers to a USB drive, and then copying them onto the tablet, so I could install them. After several rounds of that, I got online. It wasn't just the network driver that needed help. There was so much to do, it took me several days to get things working almost properly.

    With Linux, the wired ethernet adapter just worked. The wireless adapter wanted a firmware binary, which I found and dropped into place. I ran into some glitches with the video driver in Xorg, but nothing show stopping. I had Linux running in a matter of about an hour, and a few more hours tweaking Xorg.

    To browse the net, say for viewing here, it was an interesting exercise.

    MSIE on XP is so slow it's unusable. Even when I'm attached to someone's wireless at a good connection, it feels like I'm on a 9600 baud connection.

    Firefox on XP is tolerable for the first few minutes, but then it ends up sucking up too much memory and CPU time. I did several tweaks, but that hasn't helped much.

    Google Chrome on XP is my answer there. It actually behaves moderately well.

    So, now Slackware.

    Even with the limited resources, Firefox on Linux performs just about as I'd expect. It can be a little slow on occasion (as is normal for a Transmeta, from what I've read), but generally it's kicking along just like it should.

    There is no offical Chrome yet, so I haven't tried.

    I was going to try some of the other browser, but haven't bothered yet.

    I'm using this tablet as my GPS also. I had purchased Garmin's MobilePC software a while back. It works in Windows fine, as long as I shut everything else down first. In Linux, it works fine under Xorg, but since it was bundled with it's own GPS receiver, it wants to see that to activate all the functions. I'm still working on that part. I found that it should work, but I haven't made it work yet.

    I'm writing this right now from the tablet, using Firefox under Linux. I had noticed that using Firefox under XP, I could type out lines, and wait for them to display. I could get up to 2 lines ahead, which is very sad. With Firefox under Linux, it's hept right up with me the whole time. That's always nice to see, since I type over 100wpm. :)

    Ok, enough of my random ramblings. If you didn't want them, you wouldn't read my journal. :)

I've been reading Mindful Universe by Henry P Stapp, I think after someone mentioned it here on /.

Here's the review I just posted on Amazon (my first ever review):

I'm tempted to write more, but I wonder has anyone else read the book, and what do they think on these matter whether they have read it or not? I read a couple of other reviews and comments online and at least some people agree that Stapp is trying to push something that there is no scientific basis for.

It is strange that the book has enlightened me more on quantum theory in the first few chapters, but in doing so has let me see for myself that the rest of the book seems to be a load of bunk.. quantum theory has lost some of its mystical 'magic' to me because now I see that it doesn't actually say that "this is the way nature is". All the cool ideas I've read in the past (like the multiple universe theory) seem to have missed the point that quantum theory doesn't describe the nature of reality, it only describes what we can know about our reality. So while it is unknown to us exactly what path the universe could take at a quantum level, there is no reason to believe that there is any more than one path being followed - when you measure you find one state (and of course destroy it at the same time). There may be several probable states in our model, but only one actual state, whether you measure it or not? I think I have seen it explained otherwise in the past when reading about quantum computers, but I can't remember the details. I have enjoy the magic of all the crazy ideas that are apparently grounded in quantum theory, but some of them seem much more like religious or philosophical standpoints rather than saying anything about the actual nature of reality. Of course perhaps that is kind of the point in the end, there are some things we just can't know.

  I am setting up a new server, which has to be as fast as I can make it.  Quantifiable results are king here. Hopefully this will help others out, but I strongly recommend doing your own testing on your own configuration.

  I wrote a couple scripts.  One formats the array with a specific filesystem.  The second reads and writes.  Basically (in psuedocode)

echo 0 > a
while (i < 31)
cp a b
cat b > a
end

Here are the results, sorted by speed then RAID level.  My apologies for the layout on here.  I copy&pasted it from an OpenOffice spreadsheet.

fs    raid level    format (sec)    write 1g (sec)
xfs    0    2    20
jfs    0    n/a    20
ext2    0    60    20
ext4dev    0    48    22
ext3    0    62    22
reiser    0    n/a    25
ext4    5    77    32
ext4    0    49    32
ext4    1    61    33
xfs    5    9    48
jfs    5    n/a    50
ext4dev    5    74    50
ext2    5    93    55
reiser    5    n/a    58
ext3    5    94    61
jfs    1    n/a    66
xfs    1    2    68
reiser    1    n/a    69
ext4dev    1    59    70
ext2    1    63    70
ext3    1    68    72

The same list, ordered by filesystem and then raid level.

fs    raid level    format (sec)    write 1g (sec)
ext2    0    60    20
ext2    1    63    70
ext2    5    93    55
ext3    0    62    22
ext3    1    68    72
ext3    5    94    61
ext4    0    49    32
ext4    1    61    33
ext4    5    77    32
ext4dev    0    48    22
ext4dev    1    59    70
ext4dev    5    74    50
jfs    0    n/a    20
jfs    1    n/a    66
jfs    5    n/a    50
reiser    0    n/a    25
reiser    1    n/a    69
reiser    5    n/a    58
xfs    0    2    20
xfs    1    2    68
xfs    5    9    48

The machine for this test is a dual 4 core Opteron 2350 (8 cores total) with 64Gb RAM, 3 integrated nVidia MCP55 SATA controllers, and 4 500Gb Western Digital WD5001ABYS-0 SATA drives.  The OS is a plain installation of Slamd64 12.2 (Slackware for AMD64).  uname reports:
root @ vsql2 (/proc) uname -a
Linux vsql2 2.6.27.7 #1 SMP Sun Dec 7 22:31:27 GMT 2008 x86_64 Quad-Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 2350 AuthenticAMD GNU/Linux

I have not customized the kernel at all, which may lead to performance increases beyond this.  This wasn't a performance test, it was a filesystem and raid comparison.  For example, better SATA drivers should improve the performance, but that should directly scale.

The RAID configuration is as follows.  Each partition is a 100Gb partition, so they're each working with the same size space.

root @ vsql2 (/proc) cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [linear] [raid0] [raid1] [raid10] [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] [multipath]
md1 : active raid1 sdd2[2] sdc2[1] sdb2[0]
      104864192 blocks [3/3] [UUU]

md2 : active raid5 sdd3[2] sdc3[1] sdb3[0]
      209728384 blocks level 5, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [3/3] [UUU]

md0 : active raid0 sdd1[2] sdc1[1] sdb1[0]
      314592576 blocks 64k chunks

unused devices: <none>

I was entertained looking at "spud guns". That is, guns that shoot potatoes. My thoughts went from potatoes to more interesting, and regular sized objects.

    I found a site talking about piercing a solid wood door (by mistake) with a tennis ball. Oops. :) I was thinking more life golf balls.

    One site I found claimed that with propane and atmospheric air, they achieved double the speed of sound (680 m/s or 1522 mph). That sounded unrealistic.

    So I was wondering, what are the combustion expansion rates of various available gasses. I figured with the intelligent people on here, someone may know.

    Propane and atmospheric air doesn't seem ideal. Most of the information I read pointed out a problem. After a single shot, the had to vent the combustion chamber, or it wouldn't fire again (not enough oxygen).

    So, here's my theoretical ideas.

    Propane/Oxygen, like from a small torch set available at any hardware store.

    MAPP gas/Oxygen

    Hydrogen/Oxygen, electrolyzed from water.

    Atomized gasoline and atmospheric air.

    Atomized aviation fuel (110LL) and NOS. :) Ok, I'm going a little overboard, and would probably blow the combustion chamber.

    Any are easily accessible, and could have good results, without the need to vent the chamber after each shot.

    I guess the other obvious question would be about the volume of expansion of the gas before combustion is complete. I saw some pictures of people using hair spray with an 8' barrel. I can't imagine the combustion created enough expansion to utilize that space, so it would actually slow it down towards the end of the barrel. I know properly sized firearms use the right size barrel, so the combustion is just almost finished by the time the bullet leaves the end of the barrel. Too much flash means there was still fuel to burn. No flash means the barrel was too long.

    This is all theoretical. I live in a lovely deed restricted residential community. I know any will go "BOOM" really nicely, so the neighbors may just complain a little. I'm just bothered that I couldn't find the combustion expansion properties of the gases.

    But someday, it may be fun to make one. :) I liked model rocketry and miniature blackpowder cannons as a kid, so this is just an extension of that. How can I make something go fast. :)

I shall attempt to log achievements I figure out here.
Since I suck at stuff like that please post comments if you know what they are.

I took advantage of the fact that my VoIP provider makes the call log available, so I made a report of all the calls that are coming in. All of these had hits on whocalled.us .

    Of the 545 calls I got, 153 didn't provide any caller information (no number or caller id string). The 151 I list below are listed as telemarketers or bill collectors, even though when I do answer, I usually don't get anyone, or they're asking for someone other than me. I am on the DNC registry, but that doesn't help.

    So, 304 (55.7%) of the calls that are blatantly abusive and against FTC rules.

+++ Inst: 35 Num: 8663850277
+++ Inst: 30 Num: 6153152669
+++ Inst: 24 Num: 8668496441
+++ Inst: 16 Num: 8007523916
+++ Inst: 15 Num: 8016182068
+++ Inst: 10 Num: 8778859695
+++ Inst: 9 Num: 8774805110
+++ Inst: 5 Num: 8882031294
+++ Inst: 5 Num: 8132737802
+++ Inst: 3 Num: 8009558094
+++ Inst: 3 Num: 8002793480
+++ Inst: 2 Num: 8668972756
+++ Inst: 2 Num: 8012901042
+++ Inst: 1 Num: 8662097845
+++ Inst: 1 Num: 8007412183

    I've tried all kinds of tactics with them. I ask who they're calling from. They're usually amazingly vague. I ask for their name (first name is fine), and they'll refuse. I ask for their company address, and they refuse. I'll even ask the simple "in what is this in regards to", and they'll refuse. These are all questions the FTC wants answers to, to be able to file a complaint.

      I'm to the point where I won't admit nor deny my identity. They ask "Are you JW Smythe", and I won't say yes. I simply keep asking for who they are, and what it is in regards to. Usually that makes them hang up. But, when they calls come in from 6am until 11pm, I'm really stuck.

    At one point, I was really really rude. As soon as I recognized that it wasn't for me, I'd go off on a little pre-scripted (in my head) speech, that they are not authorized to call this phone number, and they are hereby notified that they are forbidden from ever calling me again. That doesn't help.

    I could hire a lawyer, if I could afford one. The research time itself would cost more than I'd ever want.

    I know the economy sucks, and companies are trying to recover every penny they can, but really, if it's not me, why keep calling me? And yes, I know the warranty ran out on my car. I bought it used, so I believe I had a 1 year warranty (it was years ago). Even if I had bought it new, it was out of factory warranty 3 years or 30,000 miles ago.

    I'm to the point of, if the number isn't stored in my phone (my VoIP forwards to my cell phone), I don't answer. Every day I have to clear out my voicemails because of them. I hope I haven't lost any work calls because of it, but really there isn't much I can do. I can't change my number, too many people have it, and last time I did that, I had people finally tracking me down after a year or two, who had work for me.

    People look at me like I'm nuts, because I'll glance down at the phone, hit the hangup button, and then put it back down. Sometimes I don't even look, because there's a better than 50% chance it's not a person who wants to talk to me.

    For a while, if I recognized the number as abusive, I would put the phone in the server room, so all they'd hear was static (fan noise), but that didn't slow them down at all.

    Ok, enough of my rant. I hope these numbers help others out too. Block them. Ignore them. Just don't answer them.

Here's a question that was posed to me, so I pose it to everyone else. :)

    A friend of mine was going to a small college. She recently received her degree, so all is fine and dandy. Well, the school also went out of business since she got her degree.

    From what I've understood from others, when a school has changed names or ownership, they still keep the records, and you can call the campus during normal working hours to confirm credentials. What if the school simply goes out of business?

    When she applies for a new job, with her well earned degree, how can a future employer confirm that degree, or is it now only worth the paper it's printed on?

I'm very disappointed that no one has cracked my encrypted tagline.

    For a while now, my tagline has been:

Encrypted Message Follows: dm2vjzMEuDLZep+TCPVPZ6dmqvdiD9p4nAJPnpgdbPlMlyLlFWR0yt8oOI1GU3/m http://cryptmsg.com

    That should be the beginning to a fun game. No one (or not enough someone's) saw it as a challenge, or maybe it just looked like garbage and was baiting a site. A few people asked, but no one sent me the encrypted string. {sigh} I thought I made it easy enough.

    Well, if you took the encrypted message, and went to cryptmsg.com, you could use the demo. Strip off the "Encrypted Message Follows: " part, and paste the message into the demo box. You can even leave the trailing URL on it. Since it isn't part of the valid encrypted data, it's ignored. :)

    Click the "Decrypt" button (since, like, that's what you're trying to do).

    Now, you have to figure out what algorithms and keys I used. Since I wanted it to be cracked, I only used one. I figured make it easy. I allow the use of 22 alogrithms up to 15 times with different keys.

    If I wanted someone to brute force something, but I still wanted to make it "strong enough", what would I do? Well, AES-256 is strong. That's also known as rijndael-256. What would I set the key to be. Well, a simple brute force would be a dictionary attack, but they would use some of the most common passwords first (hopefully). How about "password"

    So, Algorithm "rijndael-256" and Key "password" return:

"some things are better left unread"

    Which is oddly enough the same plaintext message as the RC5-64 challenge that was broken in 2002. :) Ya, I picked it on purpose.

    So, with that said, I've changed my tagline. Lets see who can break it this time. :)

    The new message is:

UevPaTEUUYNxhu2yiZa3R/r4UOFTuMYAXDsoMWtLpf4=

So I set my computer off on a quest. The quest was, calculate pi. I found a chunk of PHP code that would do it.

3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510582097494459230781640628620899862803482534211706798214808651328230664709384460955058223172535940812848111745028410270193852110555964462294895493038196442881097566593344612847564823378678316527120190914564856692346034861045432664821339360726024914127372458700660631558817488152092096282925409171536436789259036001133053054882046652138414695194151160943305727036575959195309218611738193261179310511854807446237996274956735188575272489122793818301194912983367336244065664308602139494639522473719070217986094370277053921717629317675238467481846766940513200056812714526356082778577134275778960917363717872146844090122495343014654958537105079227968925892354201995611212902196086403441815981362977477130996051870721134999999837297804995105973173281609631859502445945534690830264252230825334468503526193118817101000313783875288658753320838142061717766914730359825349042875546873115956286388235378759375195778185778053217122680661300192787661119590921642002

    I'm not sure the code is optimal. I'm also not sure I want to have it keep doing circles. :) Primes sounds like fun.

Being that Slashdot is the biggest audience of computer geeks that I know, this should be the right place to ask a question that stumps me. :)

    Some of you know that I am the owner/publisher/programmer of freeinternetpress.com. I was playing with the "tag cloud" idea, but it doesn't quite satisfy what I want.

    I wrote a script that looks at the 100 most recent news stories, pulls all of the words from the text and subject, splits it on spaces (and other delimiting characters), and gives me a nice list of words by frequency on the page. The rough equivalent from the command line would be:

cat story.txt | sed -e s/\ /\\\n/g | sort | uniq -c | sort -r -n -k 1 | head -20

    It then shows them in tag cloud format, sized for frequency. Each word is linked to a script that finds the most recent story with that word in it, and send you directly to that.

    Mine is all done with SQL queries and a little array magic in PHP, not shell commands, I swear.

    What I can't quite figure out is, how do I do the same thing for phrases? If John Smith made the news, there may be plenty of people with the first name "John" making the news, so John may show up frequently. Smith may also show up with some sort of frequency (in an obscure world where there are only 4 common last names). But, if John Smith goes on a shooting rampage, it would be reasonable to think that "John Smith kills" would show up in multiple news stories. They may say "John Smith kills 14 in mystery rampage" or "John Smith kills coworkers at super spook spy shack". You never know what will come up, but it would be amazingly advantageous to have that phrase.

    While I can't think that we'll cover every breaking news story, I can think that the hundreds of RSS feeds that we're aggregating would. If this was applied to the RSS feeds, we would then have a beautiful resource. Think Google News automated and unfiltered. Yes, Google News filters their news, and does adjust what is shown based on who it thinks are "good" sources, and some big news simply doesn't show up.

    In thinking about this, I thought about the brute force method. Find every word, go back and find the word before and check that against the database. go back and find the word after and check against the database. Continue this to up to 5 word phrases.

    On just our own 100 most recent stories, there are 19374 words. Of those, there are 6176 unique words. I run this against a "stopwords" table, so common words (like "and" "the" "or" "I" "he" "she", etc). We're using about 1000 stopwords. Even with this, there are 5676 unique words.

    Does anyone have any suggestions?

This rather long entry is the delivery of a promise I made to slashbart when he asked me to read a paper by Nir Shaviv in this thread. I invite slashbart (Bart), his collegue Bas van Geel (Professor of Paleo-Ecology of the University of Amsterdam), or anyone else to comment but I ask that the conversation be kept civil as was the case in the linked thread.

To use Bart's words, Bart and Bas are "completely unconvinced about CO2 being such an important factor [in climate change]". There are quite a few good links in the thread but the main thrust of this post is centered around the Shaviv paper and the cosmic ray theory which Bart believes supports his stance, I will also take Bart to task over some other bits and pieces mentioned in the thread. But first of all let's state a few points I belive we have agreed on, the majority of which are based on Bart's words in the original thread.

1.The three of us are all genuine skeptics who belive the philosphy and practice of science trumps all other "ways of knowing" such as religion, intuition, etc. We believe that questioning our own assumptions and assertions is a crucial ingredient of any self respecting skeptic. Without this understanding there is no basis for reasoned debate and thus no point in debating.
2. Sugar in the petrol tank does not harm one's engine...
3.Climatologists have (correctly) discounted the change of TSI as the cause of the warm late 20th century.
4.Clouds and solar forcing have a "very low LOSU" as defined in the IPCC reports.
5.There are awfully complicated feedback mechanisms (plant growth, albedo changes, clouds, aerosols,...) ie: there is a low-very low LOSU of these feedbacks.
6.It's an excellent idea to start living more energy efficient lives, but we don't need to get all panicky, and we really shouldn't begin geo-engineering efforts when we really don't know what we're messing with. I further assume this includes our current uncontrolled geo-engineering in the form of GHG emmissions and other nastier chemicals which are relesed as a result of burning fossil fuels, in particular coal.
7.Science is not in the business of "proof" and is never "settled".
8.We all have scientific training and a keen interest in climate but none of us are climatologists. Bart is a Physicist, Bas is a Proffesor of paleo-ecology and I have a BSc with majors in computer science and operations research.
9.There exists what I call psuedo-skeptics, people who deliberatly misinform and mislead the public for political or financial gain in much the same way as tabacco companies did prior to the 1990's and for pretty much the same reason. None of us are psuedo-skeptics, none of us are totally immune from their carefully constructed bullshit. Andrew Bolt from Australia and George Will from the US are two fine examples of what a psuedo-skeptic is under my definition.
10.A large part of the IPCC work has to do with collecting climate change data, and not with the causes of that change. I agree in fact it is more than a large part your statement nicely sums up it's stated goals, of course that data is peer-revived to a very stringent criteria and the cases and likely effects from those papers goes into the SPM.

Bart, Bas, please activate your bullshit detectors if you have not already done so and I will breifly describe my understanding of (and problems with) the Shaviv paper, the cosmic ray theory and some related topics, please don't take anything I say as personal criticisim I am simply trying to appeal to your skepticisim and capacity for introspection. Why? - Because I think it is important to my grandchildren that scientifically minded people understand the issue of climate change to the best of their abilities and communicate their knowledge and understanding to the public as both Bart and I have done here on slashdot.

I read the paper quite dillegently but I admit I skimmed over the maths, it's no use going down to that level of detail because in all likelihood it is correct as most papers are if you accept their assumptions. So let's examine the assumptions. They make quite a few explicitly stated assumptions there is one thay make repeatedly that is at the heart of the matter ie: "that the CRF is indeed a climate driver".

They state this assumption even more strongly as: "We will not dwell here on the actual mechanism responsible for CRF link with cloud behavior. We will simply assume henceforth that this link exists, as supported by empirical and experimental data, even though it is still an issue of debate. This point has to be kept in mind since the conclusions we shall reach, will only be valid if this assumption is correct." (My emphasis).

Now as you have pointed out this effect has been observed in the laboratory and I am not disputing that. However in our intial debate you state: "I know about the laboratory scale effect of CO2. However, what is far from [certain] is how far this effect is actually influencing climate, because of the awfully complicated feedback mechanisms (plant growth, albedo changes, clouds, aerosols,...) ". Correct me if I'm wrong but this statement seems to indicate that a lab result is not enough because you think that in the real world other (agreed) problems make it impossible to apply the results from the lab. I think you need to look at that argument with some self-skeptical introspection, ie: why are you so willing to apply the (observed in the lab) cosmic ray effect to the 'real world' but dismiss the much more robust (observed in the lab) greenhouse effect in the 'real world'?

Let's get back to the basic assumption that is: "CRF is linked with cloud behavior". I had a quick look around for some cites of Shaviv's paper, those that I found were brief and unflattering A recent paper in Nature serves as an exapmple (more complete free version here ). A much better paper that directly tests Shaviv's basic assumption is titled Testing the proposed causal link between cosmic rays and cloud cover.

Papers that actually do some testing of Shaviv's assumption seem to be quite rare, (note I only have access to free pubs and abstracts on the net). However there is a plethora of papers that attempt to test and quantify the CO2 causal link in the real world such as the one I linked to above or this simplistic search

Let's move out a bit from examining the trees and look at the cosmic ray idea in more general terms. As I understand it basically goes something like this: The debateable link between cloud cover and cosmic rays says that an increase in CRF will create more (longer lasting?) clouds, clouds reflect the Sun's rays ( ie: higher albido ) and thus the Earth cools, I belive it has been refered to as the Iris effect. I checked out your claim of increased CRF over the last decade and it seems my assertion of no trend was (slightly) out of date although I was speaking of the pre-2000 ground based observations I did not state that clearly, here is the evidence at NASA

It basically says the Ulysees spacecraft has recorded a drop in solar wind, it is now 13% cooler and 20% less dense than a decade ago, this in turn means that it's ability to deflect the CRF been reduced and therefore a higher CRF should be observed on Earth (as you have claimed). It also goes on to say a 30% drop in the Sun's magnetic field strength has also been observed and that this further enhances the CRF reaching the Earth. This certainly is very interesting but I don't think it means what you think it does...

First of all the reduced solar wind should have some cooling effect, secondly according to the CR theory increased CRF should add to that cooling. However as I stated in the original debate the hottest 10yrs on record have all occurred within the last 12yrs, the evidence for this is found at the Hadley Center and is backed by the WMO and NASA amoung others. Ignoring the CRF for the moment the expected cooling from the reduced solar wind should by itself have been observed as a cooler Earth but since this is not the case it's lends some credence to my claim that the IPCC reports err on the side of caution (ie: they are conservative estimates).

Now in the original debate you dismissed M. Mann as being an activist. You also accused him of intolerance of opposing views with the line "You will not find information that disagrees with Michael Mann [at realclimate], unless he has managed to really stomp the counter arguments into the ground". This is simply false as I demontrated in the original debate and can be seen by actually reading any of his posts. Personally I would have thought stomping on counter arguments as I am doing here would be a good trait for a scientist and skeptic provided the boots you use avoid ad-homs and are intellectually honest.

ALL the IPCC reports are written soley by scientists and are generally accepted to represent the "best science available" on the issue, ie: they analogous to a text book written by 2500 scienists representing the vast majority of the world's scientific bodies who review all the litrature over a four year cycle. Your stated reason for dimmising the IPCC out of hand was "Also the politicised nature of the IPCC where its chairman calls Svensmark 'irresponsible' because his ideas don't fit in the consensus is insane, and thoroughly discredits its summary for policymakers."

I tend to agree with the chairman but not with the words you put in his mouth, I cannot see calling Svensmark 'irresponsible' discredits the entire IPCC or anyone else, a thorough stomping of Svensmark's CR ideas can be found at physicsworld. It's interesting to note that Svensmark decided to use a ghost authour to write his book "The Chilling Stars" in which he praises himself heavily in the third person.

I do not know why you choose to believe Svensmark and Shaviv or why you choose to dismiss the mountain of evidence collected by the IPCC and the large body of work that preceded them that streaches all the way back to Fourier in the early 1800's. There is certainly no scientific reason for that attitude and again I think you need to look at that with a healthy dose self-skeptical introspection.

The last major beef I have with our debate was your off-hand dissmisal of models with this comment: "As far as the modelling goes. I have built too many models to trust them when the basic science is not understood in detail. It's dead easy to model something that models the past, just put in enough parameters." First of all it's is not "dead easy" to reconstruct climate since you first have to get yourself tens of millions of dollars to buy the hardware as a number of institutions around the world have done, not the least of these is Japan's Earth Simulator.

Your comment seem to indicate you believe that this is all about twiddling statistcal parameters until it looks good, this is not the case and if that is how you build your numerical models I can tell you with a great deal certainty you are doing it wrong. I pointed to what I consider an exceptional demonstration of the power of these models in the original debate, if you did look at the site the fact of the matter is the computer you used to do so would have been impossible to build without the use of computer models. Again I think you need to look at your reasons for dismissing models that have proved their worth time and again in a vast array of endevours with a healthy dose self-skeptical introspection. One last tip: "G'day mate" means hello not goodbye.

I love the moderation system here. It's funny to watch. This simple post went from -1 to 5 in a few hours. :) I posted a message to the Chinese web server story, trying to be a first post *AND* be on topic (I missed, only got 2nd post). When I looked from my phone, this post was one of the most informative. Viewing from a cell, it only shows 5 comments.

    Anyways, following the bouncing moderation.

Corrected Story Blurb, posted to The Chinese (Web Servers) Are Coming, has been moderated Troll (-1).

It is currently scored Troll (0).

Corrected Story Blurb, posted to The Chinese (Web Servers) Are Coming, has been moderated Troll (-1).

It is currently scored Troll (-1).

Corrected Story Blurb, posted to The Chinese (Web Servers) Are Coming, has been moderated Underrated (+1).

It is currently scored Troll (0).

Corrected Story Blurb, posted to The Chinese (Web Servers) Are Coming, has been moderated Informative (+1).

It is currently scored Troll (1).

Corrected Story Blurb, posted to The Chinese (Web Servers) Are Coming, has been moderated Funny (+1).

It is currently scored Funny (2).

Corrected Story Blurb, posted to The Chinese (Web Servers) Are Coming, has been moderated Underrated (+1).

It is currently scored Funny (3).

Corrected Story Blurb, posted to The Chinese (Web Servers) Are Coming, has been moderated Funny (+1).

It is currently scored Funny (4).

Corrected Story Blurb, posted to The Chinese (Web Servers) Are Coming, has been moderated Funny (+1).

It is currently scored Funny (5).