I've been using Google Helpouts for a week, now. I haven't done much, only two clients, but I was supposed to be paid. I was under the impression that I didn't need a bank account to use Google Wallet. The wording on their site is 'Recommended.'

Well, my customers have had money taken from them, and not delivered to me. In order to get this money, I *HAVE* to have a bank account because I am now a service provider. None of this is mentioned when I went to update and verify my Google Wallet information. I've been on the phone with Google, they've been unable to do anything, so they say. Google, acting as the middleman, has essentially taken my money and says they can't do anything about it until I get a bank account. That's not possible until I correct an outstanding balance. I was hoping to use Google Wallet to be able to save up that money and then pay off the balance then and there. Nope.

So I've given out services and Google essentially refuses to pay me what I'm owed until I go through a third party.

Help me spread awareness, if you can, by giving me a +1 at https://plus.google.com/110351126148578351575/posts/h7QmWoRrtYA

Maybe Google will take notice and fix what logically is a violation of the anti-tying provisions of the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act.

http://www.rabled.com/

Just go look. You can get one free sample of any of those lights, but you can only pick ONE.

Dunno about you guys, but I picked the Bay Light.

It might help more to work in a lighting company. I am unsure if they have a choosing criteria for this.

In preparation for Blizzcon, a friend has been wanting to do some upgraded cosplay, spell effects. Well, a set of glowing wings works, since Avenging Wrath gives you a temporary set of wings.

Here's some HD video (but dark) of them in action, on their difficult-to-make harness.

A few days ago, I went for a walk down the local riverbed. To my surprise, I wandered upon a large cluster of grape vine, bearing wild grapes, tons of tiny ones.

Well, they're about 70/30 seed/fruit. Go figure. A little sample, and the flavor was a mix of tart and sweet. These would make a good wine, I figured.

I decided I'd go ahead and make a slightly more refined version of what the Romans and Greeks might have had. After the grapes were washed with a light bleach/water solution, rinsed thoroughly, and mashed, I had about 1.5 gallons of juice, to which another 1.25 gallons of water was added, plus 3 pounds of raw cane sugar, and 2 teaspoons of proofed bread yeast. All of this was put into a 3 gallon carboy with a rubber stopper and typical airlock. Right now, I'm getting a bubble roughly every 2 seconds from the airlock.

I'm expecting a wine with not a whole lot of alcohol, and a bit of sediment. There's not much point in doing a bunch of fermentations and filtrations on my first go-around. The smell right now is very light and quite pleasant. Almost like a perfected Boones Farm wine.

Have some HD video.

This should be ready in about 4 weeks, I'm not expecting a huge return on alcohol content given the yeast is past the best by date

Well, for a very, very short time, I had a gig as an LCD panel repair tech. Until I learned that I was not going to get paid. So I quit, and straight to the labor board I went.

Looks like I stand to get about $3,200 max from them for their illegal practices.

I bet ChiMei, the company contracting A&D to do their panel repair, would *LOVE* to know one of their chosen repair depots isn't paying workers.

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.

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.

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."

Not so well, huh? India is usually cited as one of the Green Revolution's successes, but it's easy to watch the ongoing failure.

I've spent the last month testing and demolishing a bunch of new-design thermal PCBs from SinkPAD, and have come to the conclusion that this is a solid solution versus traditional dielectric PCBs commonly used for mounting LEDs. There are many pros, and a few cons, and I will address these in my review of their product, written below.

We will start with the good stuff first, the Pros. The SinkPAD Direct Thermal Pathway PCB is made from solid aluminum or copper (as of the time of this writing I had yet to test any copper PCB), so it's very good at thermal transfer. This helps make it easy to solder; versus a traditional dielectric board, the solder took to the SinkPAD in roughly half the time. This also comes in handy for reflow work and rework, as mounting and un-mounting an LED from the board is quick thanks to the PCB being constructed out of high-conductivity aluminum and copper. Repairing any mistakes takes minimal time and effort, a must for any prototype designer or hobbyist. The solder resist is also very solid, during my reflow cycling test I never once saw a solder bridge form, nor had any shorts. The same solder resist is quite durable against thermal shock as well. I torched it until it was smoking and crackling, near-black, and with no problems I was able to mount an LED to it and light it right up, and the remainder of the pad transferred heat exactly as it should. This durability is exactly what the military and police forces could use for LED-assisted weapons solutions, such as barrel or grip-mounted lights, or IR night-vision equipment. The aluminum boards are light-weight and stiff, very difficult to bend, even with a pair of clamps and pliers and my full weight applied.

Now for the cons. Due to how the thermal pathway is manufactured, there's an indentation on the back of the board. This means you need to use more thermal paste/epoxy, and you need to be more careful not to introduce air bubbles and gaps. On the aluminum boards, there is no solder pad on the back side, which would help greatly since solders tend to be more conductive than thermal pastes and adhesives. The copper board likely wouldn't need it, since copper is easy to solder. Speaking of copper, there are a distinct lack of copper options for many of their PCB choices. While this is understandable (many of these LEDs simply don't need it) the ability to have broader choice in materials would be nice. My final bad note is the difference between prototype boards I have versus some of the production boards. An older X-Lamp XR-E board had four screw holes for improved mounting, and they were placed so that most screws that could fit those holes would not have the heads short out on the contact pads. These holes are nonexistent on the star and disc boards. The star have their electrical contact points too close to the indents at the outside to allow screws to be attached there, but the circular boards look like they might have a better chance.

Overall, this is a solid piece of thermal management tech for LEDs. The ease of use and durability should appeal to a wide variety of LED consumers, from hobbyists, designers, and engineers to police, military, and even more groups of people and industries. Most of the cons are personal nitpicks and aren't exactly game-breaking important, and the pros certainly outweigh any con I've been able to notice. Highly recommended.

I decided to try out nosupportlinuxhosting but they appear to have suspended hyperlogos.org without notice or explanation. I sure hope I don't have to issue a chargeback, that would be stupid. I'm already waiting for Amazon to process two returns that have been sitting around at their facilities for weeks.

Dear Internet:

Some aspects of your style of argumentation have recently caused me some concern, and I thought it would be best to address them now, before they get out of hand.

If I insult you, I am not necessarily using an "ad hominem" argument. This phrase (literally, "to the man") refers to a specific logical fallacy, that of assuming that when someone you dislike or consider beneath you makes an argument, it follows that the argument is wrong. "You're a moron, so I don't have to listen to anything you say" is an example. "Only a complete idiot would say what you just said, so you must be only slightly smarter than the average flatworm" is not.

In fact, it's probably best to stay away from Philosophy 101 lists of common logical fallacies all together. Just as not all insults are ad hominems, not all citations of experts are "arguments from authority." Not all "slippery slope" scenarios are fallacious. And for the sake of all you hold holy, if you don't understand in gory mathematical detail what correlation and causality actually mean, and the different uses of the verb "to imply" in different contexts, please stay away from any version of A Maxim I Will Not Utter Here, But Which You Can Probably Guess.

All that being said, there is one fallacy to which you fall prey on an alarmingly regular basis. If you disagree with what I say, you have the right--in some cases, the duty--to voice your disagreement. Free speech is a wonderful thing, and it is easier to exercise in the modern world than it has ever been before. By all means, speak up.

However, please make sure that when you're voicing your disagreement, you are disagreeing with what I said. Replying instead to what someone else said, or what you think I'm "actually" saying, or what you think I or someone else might say in the future, are examples of the "straw man" fallacy, and although I have not performed the analysis necessary to test this hypothesis, I strongly suspect that this poor overworked scarecrow is to be found in greater numbers in online discussions than any other type of fallacy ... which, now that I think about it, is a pretty impressive accomplishment.

Thanks for your attention to these matters. Hopefully now that I've explained the error of your ways, we can move on from here and enjoy friendly, well-reasoned discourse on a wide variety of topics.

Sincerely,
That Guy Who's Always Right On The Internet

I finally put the MK-R to its first official use (and quite possibly its only use!)

Both now serve as the lighting for my freebie fish tank I acquired earlier today.

HD video of it in action.

36w, 18w per diode. Overdriven and still going strong.