Here.

By websearch, this is the Addams family motto, "We gladly feast upon those who would subdue us."

I have been on Slashdot [hereafter "/."] nearly every day since 2002, roughly 16 years. My last journal entry was 2008. So it is time for the every-decade update.

I find /. useful in occasionally bringing to my attention things of interest that I otherwise would not discover through other sources. I also value the insights I gain from /. posters who have more expertise in some given field than I have. Despite its drawbacks, reading /. is a significant part of my daily activities and helps me keep up with what is going on in the world Out There. I probably look at the comments on 15% of stories posted, and I'm following only a half dozen of /.'s sections.

Over the last decade, the only major drawback I have found with /. is the amount of dross posted by youngsters who haven't yet outgrown the stupid years. Some of these are precocious grade school kids, many are college age (and living proof of the meaning of "sophomoric"), unfortunately there are some who have extended their stupid years well beyond their 20th birthday. So I find many comments are TL;DR. Even some that are only a couple of lines long--- I can skim a post without really reading it. I usually use the zero or plus 1 filter level, since I don't want to miss any insights from an AC or a brand new member, so yeah I do a lot of skimming.

The /. moderation scheme is bizarre and byzantine, but perhaps the best that can be done. In the next few months I will be launching a website with a significant forum component and I'm hoping to find an adaptation of the karma and filtering that /. uses that will scale down to a few dozen users.

In other news, I have been using Ubuntu exclusively for the last 10 years. As a desktop machine it is without peer. It has enabled me to explore computer graphics and animation, video production, and other advanced uses without much expense and very easily. Recently I have been trying to use it as a localhost web server, without much luck so far. However I think most of that is not an Ubuntu/LAMP problem, but due to me being a babe in the sys-admin woods--- I don't have the vocabulary to understand the instructions. Hell, I don't even have the vocabulary to ask meaningful questions.

Summary: Slashdot is good, and perhaps as good as it can possibly be, considering that its primary limitations are attributes of its audience. Ubuntu is wonderful. LAMP servers require study.

I'm trying to not let this turn into an obsession, or to dstract from my work on the Wow! Signal, but so far it kind of is. The new podcast is the Unseen Podcast, and it is an uneditted, uncensored, open participation approach. Each episode features a panel, with the panelists drawn from a pool of people who just raise their hands by joining a G+ community. So far, we've done 4 episodes with 5 unique panelists, hoping to hit 30 panelists by Episode 26.

I dreamed I bought a REALLY big computer monitor, but I didn't notice the brand until I opened the box and saw "Arrivals" printed on the bezel.

Daniel Cartin updates us with his latest paper modeling interstellar colonization in the local solar neighborhood, on the Wow! Signal. Given that "Fact A" of the Fermi Paradox is true (no alien colonization of our solar system), does that mean that there are no aliens out there? Maybe not.

Tim Jones talks to Tom Barbabet about his ALife platform, Naked Ape on the Wow! Signal.

I spoke to scientists David Grinspoon and Geoff Landis about Venus exploration: why, when and how.

http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=6635389&cid=48739641

http://www.latin-dictionary.org/Si_hoc_legere_scis_nimium_eruditionis_habes
http://www.archives.nd.edu/cgi-bin/wordz.pl?keyword=Si+hoc+legere+nimium+eruditionis+habes
If this to read too much learning you have.

Maybe.

The Wow! Signal podcast finally covers the August 1977 event it is named after, with guest Bob Dixon, who was instrumental in bringing the Ohio State Big Ear radio telescope to bear on SETI. We also learn about Argus, which if built full scale could potentially detect many such signals.

From many, blood

So 104 people were killed by police in the USA during August, 2014. To my eyes, that's an absolutely enormous figure. As a Brit, I compare it to the 1 person killed over 3 years by the UK police. Yes, they're two different countries, yes there's a lot more people in the US, yes they have different cultures, yadda yadda yadda; people are dying here.

Let's do some maths:

• Population of the USA: 319 million (source: http://tinyurl.com/bpotuf9)
• Percentage chance for a person to be shot in August is then: (104 x 100%) / 319,000,000 = 0.000033%

That's a scarily huge percentage, given that it's normalised by population. Bear in mind that police in the USA are not ... shy ... at shooting at suspects, and neither are they 100% accurate. Some of the casualties are in fact bystanders.

Now let's consider extrapolating for the period of time that most shootings occur (i.e.: suspect between the ages of 15 and 40), and see how that changes things:

• Chance to be shot over 25 year period = (104 x 12 x 25 x 100%) / 319,000,000 = 0.0097%
• Rounding that, since this is an extrapolation, we get 0.01%

Now that's an amazingly large percentage chance of being shot dead by a policeman. Let's do the same thing for the UK:

• Population of the UK: 65 million (source: http://tinyurl.com/kzsalbe)
• Percentage chance for a person to be shot over last 3 years is then: (1 x 100%) / 65,000,000 = 0.0000015%
• Therefore percentage chance for a person to be shot in August 2014 is 0.0000015 / 12 / 3 = 0.0000000427%
• Therefore percentage chance to be shot over 25 year period is 0.0000000427 x 12 x 25 = 0.0000128%

Compare 0.01% and 0.00001% and remember these are normalised by population. Yeah.

Then-PFC, now-SGT Bergdahl may in fact have deserted his post. There are certainly credible accusations to that effect, and if so, then he should be tried and convicted for the crime. But it's a whole lot easier to investigate those charges with him here, and we don't let the Taliban mete out justice for us.

The military idea of "taking care of your own" has a lot of different aspects. Holding the line and leaving no one behind are obvious; less obvious, perhaps, is that our people are ours. Loon or no, deserter or no, even traitor or no, whatever else Bowe Bergdahl may be he is someone who raised his right hand and took the oath, and that means that whatever reward or punishment he receives is ours and ours alone to give.

It astonishes me sometimes, having at this point been out of the service several more years than I was in it, how strong and pure those ideas still are in my head: how much "us" the profession of arms still is to me, and I suppose always will be. I'm a civilian and happy to be one now, but both the infantryman and the medic are still very close to the surface. The latter is concerned mainly with bringing back the wounded--and the former is ready, willing, and perhaps even eager to kill anyone who stands in the way of that mission.

Whatever else we did, whatever else we may do, we had to bring him home.