The new drummer was incredibly talented (TMV drummers have to be) but he failed to impress me. A lot of my enjoyment of TMV stems from the interestingness of the drumming. You’re always finding a golden nugget in there somewhere –the kick drum hits when you expect a snare. But last night it was apparent as he played over some of the more intricate passages that he was more interested in showing off than impressing us. Oh well, as they say, “If you don’t like the drummer for The Mars Volta, wait a couple weeks.”. They go through more drummers than Spinal Tap.

Still there were high points, Viscera Eyes is probably the most rocking song written in recent memory, and it made attending the concert worthwhile. Also, the song choice was impeccable –they played everything I wanted to hear, though with a slight bias to their latest album, Amputecture.

I even liked their backdrops –one had a very nifty 3D effect, and another evoked one of my favorite childhood books, a wind in the door. No doubt that last backdrop would look exceptionally creepy to those not acquainted with Madeline L’Engle.

So, unfortunately, it was a bit of a mixed bag, so I’ll wait before I label The Mars Volta “better on CD than live”.

P.S. I miss Phish.

Upon receipt of the gift, I proceeded to break the dot finder within five minutes, so finding things turned out to be difficult. Imagine trying to find a face in a crowd by looking through a tiny straw. Now imagine that the image you see is backwards and upside-down –that’s what it’s like looking through my telescope.

Astronomy is difficult.

Ghostly Moon

Originally uploaded by scohen.

But I persevered. The broken sight made it impossible to use the auto-tracking features of my telescope and the cords were getting in the way, so I removed them completely. This allowed me to roam the cosmos without the aid of any computer –a difficult task. At first, even finding the moon in the scope was challenging. I’d try to use the telescope itself as a sight, aligning it with the moon, yet when I looked through the eyepiece all I saw was black sky.

This improved somewhat after a couple evenings out. I found that if I removed the eyepiece and looked at down the tube, finding the moon was much easier. This in turn helped me get a feel for how to sight things without the help of a spotter scope. My primary mistake was overestimating how high an object was. I’d point the telescope well above the actual object. Furthermore, the higher an object was in the sky, the more difficult it would be to find it. The sky, after all is a big place.

I found that by first finding a terrestrial landmark below what I wanted to observe, I could fairly easily slew the telescope ‘up’ and find my quarry with relative ease. In order to find Orion, I’d use one of the bathroom vents of my house to find Sirius, then jump over to Rigel and up into the constellation. It was in Orion where I discovered one of my favorite sights, The nebula in Orion. Just below Orion’s belt is a fabulous nebula lit by a cluster of stars. It’s a breathtaking sight and having found it myself, without even looking, came as a huge surprise.

But my true quest was Saturn.

Saturn is high in the sky right now, frustrating my attempts to find it. However, one night, after about 45 minutes of searching, a bright speck filled the field. When I focused, I gasped. There was Saturn, and though it was tiny, it was breathtaking. As I got better at finding things, Saturn became easier and easier to find, though it still took about ten minutes at worst. It’s clear –I needed a spotting scope.

So I picked one up from telescopes.com, and while I was ordering something, dropped another $80 on a green laser pointer. I felt that could be useful in pointing out stars and nebulae. When the scope finally arrived, it was clear that though it was manufactured by the same company, the mounting bracket would not fit my telescope.

A trip to Home Depot and some backyard engineering were required.

I fashioned a telescope mount out of a seven inch hose clamp, two machine screws, and some minicell foam I had lying around for my kayak. After realizing the futility of trying to drill though stainless steel with titanium bits, I went back to the depot and bought a cobalt bit. The steel had no chance. Everything bolted together without much fuss, and I went outside and calibrated the spotter scope.

Now it’s almost too easy. All I have to do is use the spotter scope to point at a star, and it’s already centered in the main scope. Last night, for instance, finding Saturn took about fifteen seconds. After viewing Saturn, the Orion nebula, Pleiades, Sirius and everything else I knew, I decided to try and take some shots of the nearly full moon. You can see the results here. I’m especially proud of the shot above which utilizes a modified Orton effect to highlight the surface detail. Alas, due to the style of my telescope mount, serious astrophotography is off limits for now, but I’m having such a great time, I can’t imagine that this will be a problem for long.

Don’t you hate those presents that end up costing you more money? I don’t either.

And then I see this –a polemical, fact-challenged tug-at-your-heartstrings opinion piece that, while light on facts, will undoubtedly make inroads with the “sportbikes are evil” set. While I admit that the accident was tragic, a responsible author would have checked the facts before putting pen to paper. How fast was the motorcycle going? A cop estimates it was going 80 –what’s that worth? Was the estimate based on data from the crash or did he just make it up? For reference, one CHP officer estimated I was going 50mph in my 25mph accident The other thought I was telling the truth and that my speed was ‘reasonable’. What was the speed limit? The article states it was 25, but Motorcyclist magazine indicates it was 40. Why the discrepancy? What does the author gain by making the motorcyclist’s speed seem more unlawful? Oh yeah, your sympathy.

Most egregious is this: Even if the motorcyclist was speeding, the accident wasn’t his fault. The driver turned left in front of him. Again, the automobile made a left hand turn in front of the motorcycle and caused the accident. He may have ‘taken off like a rocket’ but had she seen him and not made the turn, he would have rocketed by like a jerk, and they’d both be alive. The hurt report’s sixth and seventh conclusions illustrate that this is the most common form of a multi-vehicle collision.

6. In multiple vehicle accidents, the driver of the other vehicle violated the motorcycle right-of-way and caused the accident in two-thirds of those accidents.
7. The failure of motorists to detect and recognize motorcycles in traffic is the predominating cause of motorcycle accidents. The driver of the other vehicle involved in collision with the motorcycle did not see the motorcycle before the collision, or did not see the motorcycle until too late to avoid the collision.
from here

Kind of sounds like what happened here, no? But the article continues on, talking about the increase in motorcycle accidents in the past ten years and lays the blame at the feet of sportbikes.

Over the last decade, the fatality rate per motorcycle mile has jumped 76%. That reflects an emerging motorcycle culture that embraces every possible danger factor: extreme speed, reckless behavior, alcohol impairment and many older riders past their prime

Anyone who has been paying any attention during the last ten years of motorcycling knows what the cause of the increase in accidents is, and it has nothing to do with horsepower and has more to do with the last reason cited. Baby boomers have been returning to motorcycling after a hiatus of several decades. Flush with a high amount of disposable income, they buy pretty, shiny, overweight, difficult to control behemoths. And then they crash them.

Some die.

Are cruisers bristling with race-ready hardware? Are they laden with horsepower? Is there a cry for their elimination or restriction of their top speed? Had the author of this hatchet-job been more concerned with saving lives, he might have called for an end to the cruiser culture where drinking and riding is viewed as a normal activity. How many bars have you passed with a row of nice, shiny harleys out front? Or how about these cruiser oriented nut-jobs who actively lobby against helmets? While I don’t have the stats handy, anecdotal evidence accumulated over the past ten years indicates that riders of sportbikes are more likely to wear helmets and protective gear than riders of harleys. When I lived in Ohio, sportbike riders were the only riders who whore helmets at all. When I moved to California, I remember my surprise when I saw the first Harley rider go by with a full-face helmet. He might as well have been a Martian.

Furthermore, where is the evidence that horsepower caused this accident? Even my modest VFR is capable of reaching 80mph in a very short time (between three and four seconds after I twist the grip). Heck, Nikki’s Ninja 250 can best most cars in acceleration, and it’s the smallest freeway-legal bike you can buy in this country. It’s time to face facts –motorcycles are fast, dangerous things that require extreme skill to pilot. A small mistake can have disastrous consequences, and when coupled by a massive mistake by a car, can yield tragic results.

It’s time to place the blame where it belongs. The motorcyclist was clearly speeding, but his biggest mistake was relinquishing responsibility of his safety to the driver of a car –and both paid dearly for that error.

Step 2. Have the new flight take off almost an hour late, nullifying your hour-long layover.

Step 3. Land in a blizzard. Make sure the drive to your sister’s house takes longer than the flight (2.5 hours)

Step 4. Get sick the second day. Really work at it, don’t go with a cold –go full bore with a 102 degree fever, chills and aches. That’s the way the pros do it.

Step 5. Fly sick. Imagine the pain, hassle and discomfort of flying, and add the fun of doing it from under the crushing haze of a flu.

Step 6. Have the airlines lose your luggage. That’s really the icing on the cake and a complete ‘must’ for a truly great vacation. Imagine being terribly sick, getting off the plane and being *this* close to your beckoning warm bed only to have to wait an additional half hour waiting in vain for your bag to show up. Also, dealing with airlines is among the most fun things a human can do. Imagine going to the DMV, but without any of that annoying compassion that your DMV has. What, your DMV doesn’t have compassion? Either does mine, yet America West’s customer service dickhead seems to have even less. I’m so impressed at his lack of humanity that I’m starting to think that America West has perfected androids like Commander Data. Except America West’s android doesn’t know anything. And won’t help you. And blames the other airline. And is a dick. Maybe it’s not so much like Commander Data as that useless fucking robot that Mr. Wizard had that he never used. Man I hated that thing. It is nice to see it gainfully employed though. Go Bush Economy!

Step 7. There is no step 7.

At least it was nice to see my sister.
…and Jaynes.

You know you’ve received a great present when you realize that it’s something that you’ve wanted for years but never really knew that you wanted it. I have just received such a present.

Nikki was very excited to give it to me, and when I came home on Thursday, I was greeted with a very large box that gave almost nothing away. I looked at the box itself and the only clue was the label: Meade Scientific equipment.

The word ’scientific’ narrowed it down to two things, either I was getting an oscilloscope or a telescope. Since I have no practical use for an oscilloscope, it was apparent. I was getting a telescope!

Being the huge astrophysics nerd that I am, the prospect of seeing some small part of the universe really excites me. The possibility that I could see a nebula, a pulsar (not likely) or a couple of galaxies is absolutely intriguing, but Nikki went the extra mile. This telescope has a built-in computer that automatically positions the telescope at over 30,000 interesting phenomena. Furthermore, she got me a great filter set, two eyepieces and a camera mount.

What you see here is the first acceptable image taken with that mount. I’m still figuring out how to take pictures with the telescope (heck, even finding the moon was a challenge at first), but the views that I saw were breathtaking. You really get a sense of depth and weight that’s missing when you see the moon with the naked eye. Also, the immense blackness of space is both awe inspiring and downright scary. What’s more, you really start to understand the physics of it all. You can actually see the earth turn in real time –and you have to compensate for it or the moon veers off your field of view.

What a great present. Nikki got me the Universe.

I chose a fresh installation and resigned myself to re-configuring the computer. The installation was uneventful, though I did burn a few coasters. I highly recommend that you use the disc testing program to make sure your discs will work. It would really suck to get halfway through an install and not be able to continue due to a bad installation media. My installation used all six discs, so unfortunately you’ll need to burn them all.

The installation went smoothly, with just about everything except my monitor detected properly. I have a very strange monitor which is actually for an MRI machine, so this was expected. Changing the monitor to generic LCD 1800×1600 seemed to do the trick.

I also had a couple of problems: Firefox didn’t have flash, sound didn’t work and the screensaver was just a blank screen.
I have the AMD64 version installed, and apparently the default installation included *both* the AMD64 and i386 versions of firefox. I uninstalled the AMD64 version of firefox, and everything worked.

Then I went to work on fixing sound. It turns out that whenever you install fedora and have a SoundBlaster Audigy it mutes the sound. So after a trip to alsamixer, sound worked.

Fixing the screensaver was easy enough,
yum remove gnome-screensaver
yum install xscreensaver-base xscreensaver-extras xscreensaver-gl-extras


seemed to do the trick.

It took a little fiddling, but now that all of those issues have been resolved, it looks like a very solid and pretty distribution. I especially like the desktop effects with wobbly windows which look like goo when dragged. Far from mere eye candy, these effects help usability as well. Throwing the mouse into the top-right corner smoothly shows every window which you can then select –much like expose does on OSX. I find this feature is one of the most innovative usability features I’ve seen in any OS. I’m not aware of any OS that utilizes one of the five easiest points to hit with the mouse (the four corners of the screen and the pixel directly under the cursor) to do something useful. Hopefully, the other three corners will soon be utilized.

I’ve also noticed things seem much snappier than under FC4. Windows pop up and appear with alacrity and disappear with a graceful fade-out. Very nice.

While it’s not a giant leap from my old FC4 install, I feel that this upgrade has been well worth the minor hassles.

If anyone wants to know the definition of a Strawman argument is, Timmy just provided a working example. Notice how much easier it is to argue with Strawman scohen, who said that he values the lives of terrorists more than his family. Did I say that? No, I didn’t, but that doesn’t stop our “Christian” friend from saying I did. Didn’t the bible have something in it about bearing false witness against your neighbor? Nah, couldn’t have been that.

Some people might call this behavior lying. I’m inclined to agree with them.

Torture for information is never wrong, especially when that information saves life.

So, aside from torturing people for the sheer sadistic elation you feel as you strap electrodes to their testicles, it’s perfectly fine for the US government to torture people as long as they do it to obtain information. What I think Tim is forgetting in this equation is a little document written around 230 years ago, that has this little tidbit:

Amendment VIII

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

So, torturing people for information isn’t just illegal, it’s in direct conflict with American values.

Tim likes to chide me for being a liberal, but I have to say that I haven’t compromised my values in the face of 9/11. You see, Tim, the terrorists main weapon is terror. They want you to be afraid, and in his case, they’ve succeeded. He is so scared that he’ll compromise his core American values in order to feel more secure. Tim might call himself a conservative, but what is displayed here is not conservation –it’s weakness.

In America, torture is always wrong, and our founding fathers went through great lengths to make that explicitly clear to us. If you disagree, let’s have that debate –I’d love to have the chance to be against torture while Tim –a self described Christian– will be making the case that tearing out someone’s fingernails is never wrong as long as you merely want information.

It’s a shame we’re not both running for office.

How to treat terrorist detainees in light of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions is being debated in the Senate. Democrats and 3 Republicans (John McCain, John Warner and Lindsey Graham) oppose the President’s plan to provide protection to detainees from torture while allowing military and other personnel to maximize the terrorists’ interrogation experience.

Yeah, we’re not torturing people, we’re merely maximizing their interrogation experience. That kind of double-talk really sets my head spinning, but I’m still against torturing people.
Even terrorists.
Being an American means that we’re going to afford our enemies the same rights we have. We know that they don’t abide by the Geneva Conventions, but we do. Why? Because we have laws that tell us that torture is immoral. It’s written into the document that created this little social experiment of ours. The founders of our country thought it wise to expressly forbid ‘cruel and unusual punishment’, and a case for trashing this hasn’t been made yet. Because of this, we respect human rights –and that those rights apply to everyone, even the slime of the earth.

We’re Americans, dammit, we’re supposed to be the good guys in this, and torturing people makes us not-so-good.

So, Amy, call a spade a spade, it’s torture not “maximizing their interrogation experience” it’s a cruel, degrading and most likely fruitless process, and surprisingly, you’re for it.