Occasional Roundup of Smart Stuff

Dinosaur Feathers in Canadian Amber

Our friends north of the border have been kind enough to dig up some amber and notice that it had a bunch of what appeared to be feathers embedded.  Research suggests that they're dinosaur feathers showing quite a bit of evolution. Turns out there was a broad array of color as well.

"These specimens represent distinct stages of feather evolution, from early-stage, single filament protofeathers to much more complex structures associated with modern diving birds . . . They can't determine which feathers belonged to birds or dinosaurs yet, but they did observe filament structures that are similar to those seen in other non-avian dinosaur fossils."
http://io9.com/5840854/dinosaur-feathers-discovered-in-canadian-amber

Is Our Universe Really Part of the Membrane of a Collapsing 4-Dimensional Star?

"If a “big bang” event had created the universe, then according to some explanations, there hasn’t been enough time between then and now for it to have reached that temperature equilibrium."

That seems to be a pretty big problem.  One possible solution:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/physics/collapsing-4-d-star-could-have-spawned-universe/

Vomitorium: It Doesn't Mean What You Think it Means:

http://www.woot.com/forums/viewpost.aspx?postid=5557717

Linux: It Was Good While It Lasted.  Is This Better?

"At CloudOpen in New Orleans, KVM veterans Avi Kivity and Dor Laor revealed their latest venture, a new open-source (BSD license) operating system named OSv. OSv can run existing Linux programs and runtime environments such as a JVM, but unlike Linux, OSv was designed from the ground up to run efficiently on virtual machines. For example, OSv avoids the traditional (but slow) userspace-kernel isolation, as on the cloud VMs normally run a single application. OSv is also much smaller than Linux, and breaks away from tradition by being written in C++11 (the language choice is explained in in this post)." -- http://linux.slashdot.org/story/13/09/17/2113211/new-operating-system-seeks-to-replace-linux-in-the-cloud

http://www.osv.io/

Fun With Compounding Interest

A friend recently wondered on Facebook when she could retire. Somebody joked that the only way to retire before age 65.5 is to win the lottery. While it can certainly feel that way, aggressive investing can provide a faster path to retirement. This spreadsheet shows one possible scenario: take 20% of your earnings and invest it in instruments yielding 20%/yr. If you compound that monthly, you can replace the rest of your income within 10 years.  Of course, that's a hyper-aggressive strategy which takes on quite a bit of risk, but there you go.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AvlYQa0ZmrjldDI4M0lfNWZlTmhoVE5aRGNHeVJYMEE#gid=0

Don't Look Now, But Capitalism Has Saved Another Species

A common misconception is that capitalist greed is wrecking the environment. In reality, of course, capitalism is all about efficiency, and it is often in a capitalist's best interest to find less ecologically harmful ways of doing business. Why spew by-products into the nearby river when you can pipe them into some new machinery which converts them into something useful? Anyway, here's one concrete example of where capitalism not only didn't destroy the environment, but it actually saved a species from extinction:

http://perc.org/articles/bisonomics

I'm Man Enough To Admit When I've Been Beaten

A couple of years ago, I built a fairly large fire breathing dragon as a Halloween decoration.  The budget was essentially nil, but the effect was something to be proud of.  Our neighborhood goes kinda nuts for Halloween, with visitors from all over, and this item stood out quite a bit.  But that build pales in comparison to what Zollner Elektronik AG in Germany has done.  They've made a radio-controlled, walking, bleeding, fire-breathing robotic dragon. Weighing in at 11 tons, powered by a 2 liter turbo-diesel engine, Tradinno was made to star in a 500 year old folk play named "Drachenstich."

http://makezine.com/projects/20ft-tall-40ft-long-fire-breathing-dragon/

http://www.ibtimes.com/worlds-largest-walking-robot-fire-breathing-dragon-tradinno-stars-500-year-old-german-play-video

To Atheism and Back.

When I was a kid, the priest at our church was involved in smuggling Cubans into the US.  Not Cuban cigars, but Cuban humans.  My father and another priest were called to testify against him in the ensuing legal battles.  I don't know all of the details, and my Dad doesn't talk about it much; it still upsets him when I ask for details.

But I do remember coming home after school and having to leave the house because of a bomb threat.  Apparently, other parishioners didn't appreciate my father's testimony.

This was my first experience with organized religion's deleterious effects.  I was perhaps 10 years old.

As I watched the trial unfold, from a child's eyes, it seemed to me that the talk of love and forgiveness that I had heard at and around the Church was not something that was practiced by the religious.  Eventually, I came to the conclusion that this was because there was no God.

When I later went to De La Salle High School in New Orleans, a Catholic school, it did nothing to help me shift towards being a believer.  The arguments that the Catholics made in favor of their faith tended to be circular in nature (believe in God because He exists), appeals to authority (Einstein was a deist.  Who are you to disagree with Einstein?), and occasionally they were morality based (without God, there is no reason to be a "good" person).

Fast forward about a decade: my son was about to be born, and my brother and I were about to embark on starting a company.  I had taken a job with a Chicago dotcom startup's branch in Austin, TX.  The company was called Xqsite, and I took the job in the hopes that the stock options would explode and I would be able to fund the new company I was starting with my brother with the wealth from that.  The startup was being funded by a company incubator from Chicago that claimed it was an "Internet Zaibatsu," which was really just a marketing ploy for "invest in us, because we came up with a fancy buzzword."  Xqsite was supposed to be a web consulting company, dealing in MS web services, SOAP, ASP, B2B, all those great late 1990's buzzwords.

Xqsite had a phenomenal (-ly bad) business model for their Austin branch: hire two managers and a programmer, and no sales staff, and hope that sales would pour in.  Oddly, that did not materialize.  The result for me was that I got a huge raise for taking the job, and then did basically nothing for the next six months.

My son, Early Jr, was born on August 12, 2000, and Jeania and I were ecstatic.  But very soon after, we became concerned because he would not keep any food down and was extremely colicky.  Around this same time, I admitted that Xqsite was a dead-end, and decided to move to Huntsville, AL to pursue my new company.

About a week before the move, XQsite finally got a consulting gig that involved me showing up somewhere, and Jeania decided that she should take Early Jr to the pediatrician to find out why he was throwing up so much and why he was so colicky.  The doctor told her something along the lines of, "you're probably just being an over-protective parent; most babies show colic around this age.  However, there is a rare condition called pyloric stenosis that it's conceivable this could be.  Basically, it would mean that the pyloris, the valve at the bottom of his stomach isn't opening, and that his stomach over-fills when he eats.  This would cause him to throw up, and would probably hurt, causing the colic.  Why don't you head on down to Texas Children's Hospital and get a test?  Here's your referral."

Jeania picked me up at work, and we went to TCH to get the ultrasound to check on his pyloris. They came back to us, and said something to the effect of: "Well, that test was negative, so his pyloris is fine.  But I tell you what; your insurance is pretty kick ass, so let's test him for this other thing." I can't recall what the other thing was - obviously in the context of this story, it wasn't the cause.  When that test came back negative, the tester said something to the effect of: "Well, that test was negative, so he doesn't have that 'other thing.' Your insurance is pretty kick ass, so let's get him under a video x-ray, give him some barium, and see if we can induce the vomiting to see what's going on."

We went upstairs to Texas Children's Hospital to give Early Jr a barium drink, spiked with grape flavor, if I recall.  The radiologist started with still x-rays, and actually caught some pictures while Jr was throwing up.  She came back and said she wanted to try again because his stomach was near the edge of the film and there was some "parallax" causing some distortion.  This was my first clue that something was terribly bad. Why? Well, parallax is what causes you to see in 3D. It's the difference between what you see from your left eye and your right eye. Your brain matches objects in its field of view and does a quick calculation of the parallax to determine distance. In other words, parallax does not occur if you have a single point of view, and this was not a 3D x-ray. So she was trying to get extra pictures without making us worried, and using jargon to cover it up.

After several more attempts, she managed to catch it on video x-ray and grabbed a surgeon.  As the four of us watched my son vomit on the video x-ray, the surgeon said one word:

"Interesting."

He then turned to me,  and said something like, "In case you didn't know, 'interesting' is doctor-speak for 'really really bad.'"

My heart pounded, and my wife looked terrified.  The doctor walked over to the x-ray, which he had paused mid-vomit.  He pointed to my son's throat, and said, "yeah, here's his esophagus - it's full of barium.  Here's where it connects to his stomach, the little white blob to its right here." I said, "yeah, okay.  Makes sense." He then said, "so here's the problem: the esophagus is going into the stomach from the bottom, which means that side of his stomach is upside-down.  The barium ought to be filling his whole stomach, but it's not, meaning his stomach is twisted around itself, like a leather pouch. He's got gastric volvulus."

He explained that this condition is exceedingly rare in humans, and that our son would probably be something like the 64th reported case in human history. The prognosis was really bad, too: if the stomach was allowed to flop around in his abdomen willy-nilly, that twisting would kill his stomach. And as he said, "as the stomach goes, so goes the child."

The surgery he suggested was miraculous: using a laparoscope, they would go in through a small incision in his abdomen and apply two stitches to fix the stomach to the abdomenal wall.

We brought him home for some fasting so he would be prepared for his surgery at 6:00 am the next morning.

On our way home, we called my parents and filled them in. They expressed shock, support, disbelief.  All the things one would expect.  Later that evening, my dad called back and told me that he had been talking to some friends who were doctors.  Their indication was that it was extremely fortunate that Jeania and I were living in Austin, because Texas Children's Hospital was one of the top three places in the country to bring a child with a rare condition like this. Every one of them said they probably would've stopped after the negative pyloric stenosis test and told the parents they were being overprotective. He mentioned to me that he had thought that my taking my job at XQsite was a mistake, but that it placed us in Austin and gave us a level of support, insurance-wise, which made it much easier to quickly discover the problem.  He called the string of coincidences there miraculous.

During the surgery the next day, I had to go to work, which of course I couldn't do very effectively.  I ended up spending most of my time trying to find case histories for gastric volvulus. I found maybe one story about an old homeless man who had presented with severe bloating and ultimately died due to his stomach turning necrotic. That was of course not encouraging. I learned that gastric volvulus is actually quite common in dogs. It tends to give them a bloated stomach and tends to kill them when they are not treated, as well.

His surgery ended up being successful.  Early Jr has a small scar just below his solar plexus, and recently turned 13 years old.

My dad's description resonated with me: there was really a long chain of coincidences which put us in the right place, with the right insurance, the right pediatrician, the right hospital, the right radiologists, the right surgeon.  This entire chain started with a company called XQsite which was part of an "Internet Zaibatsu," a cheesy marketing term coined by a Chicago Startup with an unlikely name:

Divine Interventures

As a rational man, I recognize that this could be — and possibly is — just that: a series of coincidences. There is no way to prove that it isn't just random chance which happened to go in our favor. But that's an awful lot of random chance for me.

I'm still not a religious person. Religion still does quite a bit of harm in this world. I watch religious people act out against members of their own churches, and against people of different faiths. I watch supposedly non-religious people, members of "the cult of atheism," do the same. It seems to me that too many of us spend our time trying to convert everybody around us to our religion: "How can you believe in God? Are you stupid?" "How can you not believe in God? Are you stupid?" I try (and fail, and try again) not to allow religion consume so much of me that I become bigoted. Belief on the other hand... That is something I choose to hold on to, despite the rational part of me noting the lack of clear proof. The romantic part of me looks at the small anecdotal sample and says simply, "wow."

---

Thanks to James Altucher for inspiring me to complete this post after letting it simmer for a year or two. Or thirteen.

John Deere 400 Frankentractor

On May 3, 2013, I was fortunate (sic) enough to come across a John Deere 400 Lawn Tractor with a Brantly Front End Loader and road leveler.  Its engine has been upgraded to a newer model year's "Onan" engine.  I'm not sure of the specific model engine at this time, and need to look at its stamp, assuming it hasn't been painted over.  This tractor is theoretically a very good thing for me, because I have a lot of dirt to move due to the ongoing Castle Project.  Because it doesn't have the original engine, and lots of it is sort of just "plopped together," I figure the nickname Frankentractor seems reasonable.

The tractor has brought with it some more good fortune (sic), in the form of many learning opportunities for me.  The first involved learning how to change a PTO belt.  Not terribly difficult, but having never changed a belt on any vehicle, it was new to me.  Frustration of working in tight quarters aside, this was actually quite fun.  I subsequently learned how to troubleshoot hydraulics well enough to know that the PTO couples to the hydraulic pump by way of a chain coupler (which I'd never heard of) and finally a sheer pin.  Said sheer pin is not the way the system was designed (the manual shows a slot in the edge of the input shaft and the coupler, into which a metal key is supposed to go), but using 16 penny nails to manufacture replacements is nice and cheap, so I don't think I'll go back to the designed approach.

Speaking of the design, finding an owner's manual on this thing has proved to be a royal PITA.  The previous owner painted the front end loader John Deere green, and in the process painted right over the label, so I didn't even know the manufacturer's name until I came across this video on YouTube. Armed with the knowledge that the loader was made by Brantly, I set out to find manuals.  A little while later, I found this PDF.

According to the PDF, and assuming I've found the correct manual, which may or may not be accurate, I now believe the loader is a Brantly model 420A.  The hydraulic pump appears to be an H25AA2B, by Parker.  Parker appears to be "Parker Hannifin China" these days - not sure if it was a Chinese-manufactured pump back in 1976 (when John Deere made the 400) or not...

The pump has a slight leak that I need to fix.  This is another learning opportunity for me, since I've never rebuilt a hydraulic pump.  Based on the Brantly manual, it looks fairly straightforward; disassemble, replace gaskets and O-rings, reassemble, and Bob's Yer Uncle.  First I need to find replacement gaskets and O-rings, and decide if I want to take that on or simply replace the pump - finding a 2500 PSI, 500-4000 RPM, clockwise pump with 1" input, 0.5" output shouldn't be a huge hassle, and it looks like pumps are in the $200 range.  I might buy a new pump and then rebuild this one at my leisure, perhaps to use in building a backhoe.  We'll see.

Useful links/info on the tractor and the Brantly:

• John Deere 400 Lawn Tractor
• Manual at Scripd
• Technical Manual at Scribd
• Engine: Onan P220G (I Think - the model number and serial number are worn off the label and barely legible. Why the label isn't stamped is beyond me. Did they think their ink wouldn't suffer the ravages of time?)
•  Manual at Cummins-Onan's site
• Brantly
• Brantly Manual
• H25AA2B Page on Parker's website
• Specs from their site

  DESCRIPTION	ATTRIBUTE VALUE
  PRODUCT TYPE	HYDRAULIC PUMP GEAR, FIXED DISPLACEMENT
  TYPE	H25
  PRESSURE RATING	UP TO 2500 PSI
  SPEED	FROM 500 RPM TO 4000 RPM
  BODY MATERIAL	ALUMINUM
  SEAL MATERIAL	BUNA-N
  INLET SIZE/CONNECTION	1" O.D. TUBE - REAR
  OUTLET SIZE/CONNECTION	PRIMARY - 0.50 O.D.TUBE -BOTTOM / SECONDARY - 0.62 O.D. TUBE - SIDE
  SHAFT SIZE	0.75 DIAMETER KEYED
  SHAFT TYPE	code A
  TEMPERATURE RATING	FROM -40§ F TO 185§ F
  ROTATION	CW
  MOUNTING FLANGE	code A - SAE 2-BOLT A
  TRADE/BRAND NAME	ALUMINUM HOUSINGS SLEEVE BEARINGS

• These fields were empty on their site: DISPLACEMENT, MEDIA, SEAL TYPE, CONFIGURATION, CONTROL, ADDITIONAL DETAIL

Bucking the trend...

Well, a few posts back, I promised I would try to fight the ongoing trend in our culture of creeping stupidity, by praising and striving for intellect.  Here you go:

• http://thelibertarianrepublic.com/watch-a-man-shoot-an-ak-47-underwater/
  

  Destin over at Smarter Every Day has a new video out showing the slow motion physics of firing an AK-47 under water. His Youtube channel is dedicated to exploring the realm of science through exciting videos educating people about things like how cats flip to their feet and how to identify and handle a brown recluse spider. In this video, he uses slow motion photography to demonstrate to viewers the blast radius of the rifle in his own backyard pool. Enjoy!

  A couple of interesting things here.  First, he had previously tried just plopping an AK-47 into an aquarium, with some — ahem — unfortunate results for the aquarium. So he steps up his game this time: he builds a half-underwater periscope so that the high-speed camera can sit on the pool's deck while he shoots the gun underwater.  Next we're treated to some amazing shots of cavitation, gas flows, details of how an AK-47 works, and finally some interesting explanation as to why the gas cloud's volume oscillates several times before completely collapsing.
  
  Another awesome aspect to this video: Dustin makes these videos in Alabama. The common stereotype for people from Alabama does not match what you see in this video, nor what I am familiar with from having lived there myself.  Just a little something to consider the next time you're about to make a joke about people in the deep south being their own uncles.
  
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBTy5CNWIHA
  
  Jamie Mantzel is a crazy guy who lives on a mountain and in his spare time has been building a giant robot for no reason other than that he believes the world will be more awesome with it than without. He's also incredibly smart and his videos are oddly fun to watch. In this installment, he and his friends install a ram pump at his mountain home, and then explain how ram pumps work. He says he gets about a gallon of water per hour delivered to his house, approximately 75 feet above the pump, with no energy source other than a roughly 5 foot drop from his water source.
  
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vroaQjGCkc
  
  I only learned of this guy the other day - he's got a series of homesteading videos including some interesting bits about grafting apple trees. In this one, he explains how to charge your vehicle's battery by hooking up a chainsaw to the alternator.  Not the most likely of scenarios, but still kinda neat.

Hydraulics...

On Saturday morning, the power take-off (PTO) belt on my John Deere 400 with Front End Loader broke.  I was trying to use the bucket to move some dirt, and all of a sudden the bucket wouldn't lift any longer.  Bummer.

So I climbed off the tractor, and took a look at the engine.  Sure enough, there was a belt hanging out of the side of the engine compartment.  So I pulled the belt out and went over to AutoZone to buy a replacement.

After some cajoling, I managed to get my son to spend some time with me on Sunday morning replacing that belt.  That turned out to be, well, not complex, but surprisingly difficult due to placement and general griminess of all of the bolts in question.  Here was the process:

1. Unbolt the hydraulic pump, set it on the ground.
2. Unbolt and remove the hydraulic pump mounting bracket.
3. Unbolt the lower PTO pulley cover.
4. Wrap belt around lower PTO pulley and the crankshaft pully
5. Replace lower PTO pulley cover.
6. Replace hydraulic pump mounting bracket, but leave bolts a little loosey-goosey
7. Replace hydraulic pump.
8. Tighten hydraulic pump mounting bracket bolts.

Sadly, after doing all of this, and exhausting probably a half gallon of Fast Orange in a futile attempt to keep my hands clean, the hydraulic system still doesn't work.  I'm not sure why.  So now I get the unbridled joy of troubleshooting a system for which I have no documentation and little understanding. Time for learning - yay :-/

UPDATE: it turns out the PTO couples to the hydraulic pump by way of a sheer pin, which was apparently broken at the same time as the PTO belt. I've become quite accustomed to manufacturing replacement sheer pins from 16 penny nails, and even more accustomed to knowing how much throttle to give the engine to avoid breaking said nails.

PHP Log files that don't suck.

From here:

sudo tail -f {path-to-log-file} | perl -pe 's/\[error\]\s+\[client.*?\]\s+//; s/, referer:.*//'

You're too smart!

Today I learned of a story dating from 2000, where Robert Jordan was rejected in his bid to become a police officer in New London, CT.  Why was he rejected? It wasn't because he couldn't complete the physical.  Nor was it because he couldn't master police procedure, learn the laws.  It wasn't because he was black, white, asian, or hispanic.  No - it was because his IQ is too high.

That's right.  He's too damned smart to be a cop.

Because if there's one thing you want in your police force, it's a healthy level of stupidity.  What could possibly account for a policy this — stupid?

"But New London police interviewed only candidates who scored 20 to 27, on the theory that those who scored too high could get bored with police work and leave soon after undergoing costly training."

Ah - so smart people can't maintain interest in police work. They couldn't possibly want to grow into a role like, say, detective, where having the ability to piece together clues and solve puzzles might come in handy.  No - they'll just get bored and move on.

All of this reminds me of the short story Examination Day, wherein a young boy takes a standardized test and performs too well for bureaucratic comfort. Unlike Mr Jordan, he didn't merely lose a job opportunity; he was simply killed.

Our culture is sick right now.  We are exposed more to crappy tabloid plots than to smart, amazing people.  I'm not sure how to reverse the trend, other than to point it out and to contribute to the alternative trend of praising and striving for intellect.  I pledge to try.  Please join me.

Examination Day by Henry Slesar

source

Examination Day

The Jordans never spoke of the exam, not until their son, Dickie, was twelve years old. It was on his birthday that Mrs Jordan first mentioned the subject in his presence, and the anxious manner of her speech caused her husband to answer sharply.
‘Forget about it,’ he said. ‘He’ll do all right.’
They were at breakfast table, and the boy looked up from his plate curiously. He was an alert-eyed youngster with flat blond hair and a quick, nervous manner. He didn’t understand what the sudden tension was about, but he did know that today was his birthday, and he wanted harmony above all. Somewhere in the little apartment there were wrapped, beribboned packages waiting to be opened, and in the tiny wall-kitchen something warm and sweet was being prepared in the automatic stove. He wanted the day to be happy, and the moistness of his mother’s eyes, the scowl on his father’s face, spoiled the mood of fluttering expectation with which he had greeted the morning.
‘What exam?’ he asked.
His mother looked at the tablecloth. ‘It’s just a sort of Government Intelligence test they give children at the age of twelve. You’ll be taking it next week. It’s nothing to worry about.’
‘You mean a test like in school?’
‘Something like that,’ his father said, getting up from the table. ‘Go and read your comics, Dickie.’ The boy rose and wandered towards that part of the living room which had been ‘his’ corner since infancy. He fingered the topmost comic of the stack, but seemed uninterested in the colour­ful squares of fast-paced action. He wandered towards the window, and peered gloomily at the veil of mist that shrouded the glass.
‘Why did it have to rain today?’ he said. ‘Why couldn’t it rain tomorrow?’
His father, now slumped into an armchair with the Gov­ernment newspaper rattled the sheets in vexation. ‘Because it just did, that’s all. Rain makes the grass grow.’
‘Why, Dad?’
‘Because it does, that’s all.’
Dickie puckered his brow. ‘What makes it green, though? The grass?’
‘Nobody knows,’ his father snapped, then immediately regretted his abruptness.
Later in the day, it was birthday time again. His mother beamed as she handed over the gaily-coloured packages, and even his father managed a grin and a rumple-of-the-­hair. He kissed his mother and shook hands gravely with his father. Then the birthday cake was brought forth, and the ceremonies concluded.
An hour later, seated by the window, he watched the sun force its way between the clouds.
‘Dad,’ he said, ‘how far away is the sun?’
‘Five thousand miles,’ his father said.

Dickie sat at the breakfast table and again saw moisture in his mother’s eyes. He didn’t connect her tears with the exam until his father suddenly brought the subject to light again.
‘Well, Dickie,’ he said, with a manly frown, ‘you’ve got an appointment today.’
‘I know Dad. I hope –’
‘Now, it’s nothing to worry about. Thousands of children take this test every day. The Government wants to know how smart you are, Dickie. That’s all there is to it.’
‘I get good marks in school,’ he said hesitantly.
‘This is different. This is a – special kind of test. They give you this stuff to drink, you see, and then you go into a room where there’s a sort of machine –‘
‘What stuff to drink?’ Dickie said.
‘It’s nothing. It tastes like peppermint. It’s just to make sure you answer the questions truthfully. Not that the Gov­ernment thinks you won’t tell the truth, but it makes sure.’
Dickie’s face showed puzzlement, and a touch of fright. He looked at his mother, and she composed her face into a misty smile.
‘Everything will be all right,’ she said.
‘Of course it will,’ his father agreed. ‘You’re a good boy, Dickie; you’ll make out fine. Then we’ll come home and celebrate. All right?’
‘Yes sir,’ Dickie said.

They entered the Government Educational Building fifteen minutes before the appointed hour. They crossed the mar­ble floors of the great pillared lobby, passed beneath an archway and entered an automatic lift that brought them to the fourth floor.
There was a young man wearing an insignia-less tunic, seated at a polished desk in front of Room 404. He held a clipboard in his hand, and he checked the list down to the Js and permitted the Jordans to enter.
The room was as cold and official as a courtroom, with long benches flanking metal tables. There were several fathers and sons already there, and a thin-lipped woman with cropped black hair was passing out sheets of paper.
Mr Jordan filled out the form, and returned it to the clerk. Then he told Dickie: ‘It won’t be long now. When they call your name, you just go through the doorway at the end of the room.’ He indicated the portal with his finger.
A concealed loudspeaker crackled and called off the first name. Dickie saw a boy leave his father’s side reluctantly and walk slowly towards the door.
At five minutes to eleven, they called the name of Jordan.
‘Good luck, son,’ his father said, without looking at him. ‘I’ll call for you when the test is over.’
Dickie walked to the door and turned the knob. The room inside was dim, and he could barely make out the features of the grey-tunicked attendant who greeted him.
‘Sit down,’ the man said softly. He indicated a high stool beside his desk. ‘Your name’s Richard Jordan?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Your classification number is 600-115. Drink this, Richard.’
He lifted a plastic cup from the desk and handed it to the boy. The liquid inside had the consistency of buttermilk, tasted only vaguely of the promised peppermint. Dickie downed it, and handed the man the empty cup.
He sat in silence, feeling drowsy, while the man wrote busily on a sheet of paper. Then the attendant looked at his watch, and rose to stand only inches from Dickie’s face. He unclipped a penlike object from the pocket of his tunic, and flashed a tiny light into the boy’s eyes.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘Come with me, Richard.’
He led Dickie to the end of the room, where a single wooden armchair faced a multi-dialled computing machine. There was a microphone on the left arm of the chair, and when the boy sat down, he found its pinpoint head conve­niently at his mouth.
‘Now just relax, Richard. You’ll be asked some ques­tions, and you think them over carefully. Then give your answers into the microphone. The machine will take care of the rest.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I’ll leave you alone now. Whenever you want to start, just say “ready” into the microphone.’
‘Yes, sir.’
The man squeezed his shoulder, and left.
Dickie said, ‘Ready.’
Lights appeared on the machine, and a mechanism whirred. A voice said: ‘Complete this sequence. One, four, seven, ten . .

Mr and Mrs Jordan were in the living room, not speaking, not even speculating.
It was almost four o’clock when the telephone rang. The woman tried to reach it first, but her husband was quicker.
‘Mr Jordan?’
The voice was clipped: a brisk, official voice.
‘Yes, speaking.’
‘This is the Government Educational Service. Your son, Richard M Jordan, Classification 600-115 has completed the Government examination. We regret to inform you that his intelligence quotient is above the Government regula­tion, according to Rule 84 Section 5 of the New Code.’
Across the room, the woman cried out, knowing nothing except the emotion she read on her husband’s face.
‘You may specify by telephone,’ the voice droned on, ‘whether you wish his body interred by the Government, or would you prefer a private burial place? The fee for Gov­ernment burial is ten dollars.’

Understanding df and LVM in Linux

df is a utility that tells you available space on mounted filesystems.  If you use the "-h" option, it will format the numbers in human readable format.
 
# df -h
Filesystem               Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/fedora-root   50G  1.4G   46G   3% /
devtmpfs                 1.9G     0  1.9G   0% /dev
tmpfs                    1.9G     0  1.9G   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs                    1.9G  636K  1.9G   1% /run
tmpfs                    1.9G     0  1.9G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs                    1.9G  1.9G     0 100% /tmp
/dev/sda1                477M   78M  374M  18% /boot
/dev/mapper/fedora-home  864G   72M  820G   1% /home


So what we have here is a list of filesystem volumes, how much space they have, and where they're mounted.

The /dev/mapper/ prefix indicates that the specified filesystem is an LVM volume. In this case, there are two: /dev/mapper/fedora-root and /dev/mapper/fedora-home. Since this computer has a single hard drive, these are likely sliced out of /dev/sda2. Linux does this so that you can, in theory at least, expand /dev/mapper/fedora-root or /dev/mapper/fedora-home, at will.

/dev/sda1 is the boot partition - that's where you GRUB is located - that's the thing that the BIOS boots and which in turn boots Linux (or other OS's in a multi-boot configuration).

/dev/sda2 is not mounted at all, because it is formatted to be part of a LVM set.  In theory, when you want to expand /dev/mapper/*, you add another hard drive, put it into the LVM set, and expand /dev/mapper/*.

Set Fedora 18 to boot to text console rather than X

From here:

ln -sf /lib/systemd/system/multi-user.target /etc/systemd/system/default.target 

Set up password-free ssh

From here:

ssh-keygen -t rsa (No passphrase or whatnot - just enter your way through)

ssh {user}@{remote-host} mkdir -p .ssh 

cat .ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh {user}@{remote-host} 'cat >> .ssh/authorized_keys'

ssh {user}@{remote-host} hostname (should work now)

Set hostname in Fedora 18

From here:

hostnamectl set-hostname {name}

hostnamectl status 

Install NFS on Fedora 18

From here:

yum -y install nfs-utils

edit /etc/exports

systemctl start rpcbind.service
systemctl start nfs-server.service
systemctl start nfs-lock.service
systemctl start nfs-idmap.service
systemctl enable rpcbind.service
systemctl enable nfs-server.service
systemctl enable nfs-lock.service
systemctl enable nfs-idmap.service


Additional crap:

Firewall (from here):

# Enable NFS server

systemctl enable nfs-lock.service
systemctl enable nfs-server.service

systemctl start  nfs-lock.service
systemctl start  nfs-server.service

cat >/etc/firewalld/services/mountd.xml <<EOD<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<service>
  <short>mountd</short>
  <description>Mount Lock Daemon</description>
  <port protocol="tcp" port="20048"/>
  <port protocol="udp" port="20048"/>
</service>
EOD

cat >/etc/firewalld/services/rpc-bind.xml <<EOD<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<service>
  <short>rpc-bind</short>
  <description>Remote Procedure Call Bind</description>
  <port protocol="tcp" port="111"/>
  <port protocol="udp" port="111"/>
</service>
EOD

restorecon /etc/firewalld/services

firewall-cmd --permanent --zone public --add-service mountd
firewall-cmd --permanent --zone public --add-service rpc-bind
firewall-cmd --permanent --zone public --add-service nfs
firewall-cmd --reload
firewall-cmd --list-all

Disable Fedora 18 Power Saving.

Temporary fix:

setterm -blank 0 -powersave off -powerdown 0

Edit /etc/default/grub
Add consoleblank=0 to GRUB_CMD_LINUX

Then:

sudo grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg
sudo grep ^menuentry /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

Sources:

• http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/linux-disable-screen-blanking-screen-going-blank.html
• http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1366354

The 2nd Amendment: It's not about rampage killers.

I wrote this as a Facebook note a while back and felt it warranted copy & paste here:

It's not about hunting. It's not about target practice or trick shots. It's not about being able to defend yourself against a rapist, a robber, or even a rampage killer. Sure, those are all nice side-effects of the 2nd Amendment, but they're not the point.

Let's take a look at "successful" rampage killings in the US in 2012:

• Holmes, James Eagan, 24 July 20 2012 Aurora, CO  USA 12 killed 58 injured
• Lanza, Adam Peter, 20 Dec. 14 2012 Newtown, CT U.S. 27 killed 2 injured 
• Page, Wade Michael, 40 Aug. 5 2012 Oak Creek, WI U.S. 6 killed 3 injured
• Goh, One L., 43 April 2 2012 Oakland, CA U.S. 7 killed 3 inured
• Wilkins, Nathan Van, 44 July 16/17 2012 Tuscaloosa, AL U.S. 0 killed 12-18 injured

Total: 52 killed, 84 injured

Appalling, to be sure. Despicable, vile and evil. Still, not what the 2nd Amendment is about.

Let's take another look at 2012, a year in which Law Enforcement killed 531 individuals. 10x the number killed by rampage shooters. Yes, many (hopefully most — no, hopefully, ALL) of these were in self defense or to protect another innocent. But the fact remains that per-capita, in the United States in 2012, a citizen was more than 10x more likely to be killed by an agent of their government than by a rampage killer. I tried to find a convenient list of wrong-door raids in 2012, but my google-fu failed me, and I have to get to work. Suffice to say that there were at least as many wrong-door raids as spree killing incidents, and in every one of those cases, completely innocent people were injured by their government. In an alarming number of those cases, their dogs were killed, even if they were not attacking the officers.

I'm pretty sure you can see where I'm going with this, but the 2nd Amendment is not about defending oneself against run-of-the mill criminals, not even against spree killers.  Sure, being able to defend oneself against that sort of thing is important, and is also covered by the 2nd Amendment, but that isn't why the founders sought to recognize your inherent right to self-defense by way of weaponry with the 2nd Amendment.  It's not about the sporting uses of guns, either.  Here is the reason: 

"Just one final statement, I've been sitting here getting more and more fed up with all of this talk about these pieces of machinery having no legitimate sporting purpose; no legitimate hunting purpose. People, that is not the point of the Second Amendment. The Second Amendment is not about duck hunting. And I know I'm not going to make very many friends saying this, but it's about our rights, all of our rights to be able to protect ourselves from all of you guys up there," Dr. Suzanna Gratia-Hupp, speaking to the Senate.

• Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgrIsuO5PLc#t=4m40s (If this link doesn't take you straight to the quote above, jump to 4:40. When you've seen that bit, please watch the whole thing - it's well worth your time, and discusses the other legitimate uses of guns quite effectively.)
• Transcript: http://www.rightsofthepeople.com/guns/gun_facts/a_daughters_regret_how_a_gun_could_have_saved_my_parents.php

Other Sources:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rampage_killers
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rampage_killers:_Americas
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rampage_killers:_School_massacres
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_familicides_in_the_United_States
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_postal_killings#United_States
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_events_named_massacres
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforcement_officers_in_the_United_States_2012

The Almost Liberator : To protect you from the second amendment, we must eliminate the first.

... or print a 3d gun.

Last week, Cody Wilson of Defense Distributed posted the files one would need to print a 3d pistol. All of the components, except for the firing pin, are 3d printable.

... and predictably, the Obama administration would hear nothing about the right to keep and bear arms (which necessarily includes the right to manufacture them).



Clearly the first amendment means as little to these men as the second amendment does.  And neither do property rights.  That information is Wilson's property - there is no right for the Feds to claim control of it.  Of course, we knew the Obama administration has no concern for property rights for the past 4.5 years, so that's not particularly surprising.  Hopefully Wilson sues and wins.

In the meantime, ask yourself this question: what sort of person would deny you the right to a gun, while surrounding himself with an army of armed men?

UPDATE: Oddly, Google+ is having trouble posting this entry. C'mon, Google! You believe in freedom, right?