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I have a new .sig; Wikileaks, no DNS.

More details at Cryptome.

Although I think that for Ron Paul to win would be the most interesting result, and that I have problems with some of his policies (notably on abortion), I am simply astounded by just how much the mainstream media appear to believe that it is their right to pretty much exclude a popular candidate who isn't extolling hate from their coverage.

In legal terms, it is probably their right, but to deny the voting public the ability to make an informed decision is surely traitorous. If I lived in the US, I'd have seen a lot more evidence by now, but check out this graphic. The NYT are playing the same game (RP certainly has more support than Rudy, for example). Why is this even seen as acceptable by journalists? It isn't even bias; it's unprofessionalism.


Edit: NYT have updated their results since I write this article yesterday; Rudy had around 3% of the vote IIRC.

Something has been on my mind - on and off - for the last few weeks - in the light of James Watson's pressured resignation as Chancellor of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

That thing is the possibility of scientific views that are at odds with society's real or perceived interests, and the effects of the clashes between those views upon science. This is a difficult topic, for I'm sure that we're generally happy (in principle) with our moral views impinging upon the progress of medicine, even though we might differ upon specifics.

The case of James Watson's utterances that led to his pressured resignation is interesting not because of what he said, but because Steven J. Gould said something equivelent in his book "The Mismeasure of Man"; a book criticising the IQ test.

Moving onto specifics, Watson said "All our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really" , whereas Gould said that IQ tests are biased towards skills that are exercised, and valued in Western culture. Neither authour specifies cultural or genetic causes.

I am not competent to comment upon the validity of their respective statements, but I find it notable that whereas Watson was condemned, Gould was lionised for his comments. What concerns me is that this episode reveals how non-science influences acceptable spoken or published scientific views, and so risks crippling science itself, since recorded science is the sum total of scientific publications. Within NASA, a manager attempted to suppress views that were contrary to "young earth" creationism, and inconvenient views on climate change - of all hues - are suppressed differently in different contexts, making a bit of a political football of it.

More and more, we expect people in respected positions to resign for expressing unpopular views. Does this risk accumulating to the point where it harms science? Publishing an unpopular paper could harm the "standing" of a well-respected journal. There are of course other journals, but there's a point where you can only publish in a poisonous rag which has no peer review.

It isn't only a matter of political correctness, but also modern, manipulative neo-Straussian* moves to control speech that is perceived as being harmful to society by undermining the myths that bind us. The best that we can do at this stage is to remain clear-eyed as to what is going on, and those of us who are batting for one political side or another should see that truth is harmed as we persist in tit-for-tat political censorship.

At the root of this is the growing feeling that reality is known and individual, rather than unknown but shared. Either we cannot accept that we might be wrong, or else, we don't want anyone to be wrong. But apart from being non-sense, we open ourselves up to manipulation, risking eventual tyranny born of solipsism.

*I don't personally believe that Leo Strauss holds the views that some of his "followers" have read into his works. The problem with being subtle is that subtlety can be read as cunning.

Andy Upgrove reports that the SC 34 committee that just failed to approve OOXML as a standard has ground to a halt as the new members who joined for this one vote have since neglected their duties, failing to even hand in abstentions, and therefore preventing progress on even procedural issues.

Because of this failure to make progress, together with the original subversion of the standards-making process, reform of the standards process is now on the agenda. Is it possible that this reform will be complete before the third (and final) "technical" vote on the approval of OOXML as a standard? Will the committee be able to stave off future attempts to subvert the process by interested parties?

First, an entertaining story.

The night before last, I was attempting to get a game compiled to run in 64 bits on my Opteron. It was a ridiculous hour, but I was going to get it working before I went to bed, dammit!

Well, okay, not a good start. I found that SDL_GL_SWAP_CONTROL wasn't recogised, and that I needed to upgrade my SDL libraries to at least version 1.2.10. So I fired up the trusty Yum Extender widget on my Fedora 5 box, and found that I couldn't get it... Unless I pulled from the development repository, which I did.

SDL-1.2.11-2 was to be had, but required at updated glibc. So, without much thought, I grabbed the latest one, and set the game compiling again, and indeed it got a lot further, until the compile got to this line:

/usr/lib64/libSDL.so: file not recognized: File format not recognized

I had grabbed a glibc that was too advanced. Version 2.6.3; well, I had no intension of running cutting edge code anyway, so I erased the files.

rpm -e glibc.2.6.3.x86_64 glibc.2.6.3.i386

Which turned out to be pretty dumb. I had managed to strip the basic subsystem out of my machine. Applications that were running would keep running; no new apps would start.

So (I was tired, remember), I rebooted. Naturally, the boot baulked at the first opportunity. I reset the machine to an install disk to "upgrade" the system to the Fedora 5 base system, but /dev/md1 (the boot sector) wasn't clean, and I was instructed to boot up my system and sort out the problem before attempting an upgrade (sensible advice, but frustrating).

I finally solved this problem after a very short night's sleep (3 hours) by using my Fedora rescue CD, not chrooting (doh!) and fscking the /boot partition. The rescue CD wouldn't let me unmount /dev/md2 (AKA /, the root partition), so I just hoped that all would be well... And it was! Reinstalling the base system happened pretty quickly.

Well, I had been running kernel 2.6.18, which ran all my hardware (including the memory card reader), and generally did the job. But fedora 5 begins with kernel 2.6.15, which means that unless I upgrade, I can't read in an artist friend of mine's photos to use on his website.

Can you get kernel 2.6.18 (Fedora, x86_64) for love or money? Well, I tried for a little too long, but eventually gave up. If I try to upgrade to 2.6.20, this happens; I remember something similar happening last time that I attempted this.

Well, my mission to you, should you choose to accept it, is to locate for me kernel-1.2.6.18_1.2257.fc5 for the x86_64, or else to help me get my SATA RAID 5 partition detected on boot by kernel 2.6.20; Am I missing important kernel options, say?

Thanks in advance!
~Tim (Morosoph)