BeigeJournal

Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics, a must-see web site.

“Ever notice how cars in movies always burst into flames the instant they collide with anything? Our favorite is when a car falling from a high place explodes the instant before it hits the ground. It’s as though its gas tank gets panicky and detonates at the mere thought of striking Earth.”

“Cliches flew like machine gun bullets as we endured barrage after barrage of emotional mush flung trebuchet-like from a script which seemed to be put together by marketing researchers.”

“This was a scene which shall live forever in movie physics infamy.”

“Multi-beamed laser security systems are a frequent Hollywood plot device. Again and again movies feature tension-filled scenes in which characters snake their way through mazes of laserbeams artistically arranged in random patterns by professional security fools to entertain us by making would-be thieves do contortions.”

“It has everything: common physics misconceptions, blatant misrepresentations of physical laws, a complete range of stereotypes, ridiculous feats of engineering, and pure fabrication of scientific ‘facts’.”

“The scene plays as though it came from the memory of a ninth grade physical science student who mostly slept through class.”

“We were dumbstruck. Its hard to poke fun at a movie which unintentionally trashes itself.”

Is there someone who can explain why we get offers for things like this

in our credit card bills? Are there lots of stupid people with credit cards? I suppose so, considering the statistics on credit card debt. It’s always the tackiest, stupidest, stuff they hope we’ll buy. First they try to convince you that you must be a really high-class individual to have a “platinum” card, then they send you ads for hair dryer stands with your statement. Go figure.

The International Atomic Energy Agency maintains an extensive web site, with many of their publications available for download. It is not always easy to find things on the site, however. I’m sure it’s clear enough for IAEA experts who know the difference between an INFOCIRC and a TECHDOC, but it can be a bit hit-or-miss for the rest of us. The publications page is probably a good starting point. I myself find the Accident Response documents to be of particular interest. If you want quite detailed descriptions of the more notable (that is, fatal) irradiator accidents or missing/stolen big sources that got found when the sick people started turning up, this is the place.

The irradiator accidents are remarkable. As the reports say, “A feature of all fatal accidents at irradiators has been ignorance or negligence on the part of the operators of the consequences of not following the procedures.” I’m sure the designers of the facilities never imagined that operators would do the things that operators do, casually defeating the interlocks that control entry into the irradiation room. Some of the control panel and interlock designs are nothing to be proud of, either. It is clear that operators can become very complacent about the dangers of entering the irradiation chamber, something surely made worse by having to enter frequently to unjam the conveyor system. Still, if the radiation alarm is sounding one would think that extreme caution would be used. There are clearly some radiation safety training issues.

The paddle swim seems remarkably awkward the first time you try it, but after just two short practice sessions I am able to make decent progress through the water without screwing up constantly, and I’m sure after some more practice I’ll be semi-good at it. It is rather tricky at first with a feathered paddle. The value of being able to swim with the paddle is mentioned in Deep Trouble, and it is certainly something you’ll want to practice before you need it.

Hidden Worlds: Hunting for Quarks in Ordinary Matter, by Timothy Paul Smith. Princeton University Press, 2002.

I thought this was a fantastic book, very interesting and fun to read. It’s about the familiar nucleons, the ordinary up and down quarks that they are made from, and the historical as well as current efforts to understand them. Although the frontiers of high-energy physics have moved on beyond the nucleons, there is much left to learn about them, and, since nucleons are what stuff is made of, they are of special interest.

The book contains quite a bit about the interplay between theory and experiment. It gives moderately detailed overviews of a few particular experiments and their accelerators and detectors, rather than trying to touch on everything. It is a largely math-free book and is obviously meant for the curious non-physicist, but does assume some knowledge of physics.

For some reason, Title Nine Sports sends me catalogs, even though I’m not exactly in their target demographic, being male.

It’s a nice enough catalog. The models are pleasant to look at. The best part, though, are the names for the colors of the clothes. I’m used to male-style color names. Black, white, blue, red, that sort of thing. A really adventurous name would be something like navy or olive. You don’t want to confuse men. Women, apparently, go for fancier colors. Blue moon, plum, granite, celery, parsley, stone, ink (which seems rather vague to me), patina, celestial, rhino, lemonade, glow, hydraulic (which I imagine is some sort of blue, though red is what pops into my mind), oatmeal, putty, desert, cadet, and herb are all real examples.

If you have a computer that is attached, even sporadically, to the Internet, you probably ought to be keeping the clock set accurately by Network Time Protocol, and if you use Unix Chrony is probably the program you want to use. It is a lot smaller and easier to configure than the full reference ntpd implementation, and is specifically designed to work well with intermittent network connections, like those of us still using dialup ppp access have, and which I suppose also applies in this new-fangled world of notebook computers and wireless networking.

I should note that Linux users upgrading to a 2.6 kernel from 2.4 need chrony 1.20. My old 1.19 stopped working, with a helpful error message in /var/log/messages, when I did the kernel upgrade.

Network time protocol (NTP) is a very carefully designed protocol for synchronizing computer clocks over a network. The idea is that time servers equipped with accurate time inputs, perhaps from WWVB or GPS receivers, provide NTP services to keep other computers synchronized. Your ISP ought to be running an NTP server, although, like many things ISPs ought to do, they may not be doing so.

Computer clocks are notoriously inaccurate. Although the cheap oscillators they use drift about in frequency with changes in temperature or lunar phase or whatever to a fairly large degree, the biggest error is the offset between the nominal frequency and the actual range of frequencies your particular oscillator runs at. The timekeeping error, thus, can be greatly reduced by measuring the actual frequency and using that in the timekeeping calculations. Chrony will use the time data it gathers to do so automatically. In principle, you can make clock error measurements by hand and manually tweak the kernel timekeeping parameters, but no one is a big enough geek to do that. I thought about doing it once, but decided it wasn’t worth the effort.

Chrony works well with dialup Internet access. The chronyc program controls the chronyd daemon, and something like this:

/usr/local/bin/chronyc << EOF
password password
online
EOF

in a script run when the connection is brought up (RedHat users, and probably others, should be thinking /etc/ppp/ip-up.local), and an “offline” command when the connection is dropped, will start and stop network accesses by chronyd.

Since Saturday was a bit cool and cloudy and I was feeling a bit tired, perhaps from the three days of bicycle commuting plus a few hours of kayaking an Friday, I somehow decided to mess with a perfectly functional computer. I have RedHat 9 on a Pentium 3, and I upgraded from 2.4.whatever to the 2.6.5 kernel.

I got some very good advice from web pages by Gil Thomer, as well as Nick Warne and Jeremy. Make all the many minor changes to the startup files that they recommend.

The new “make xconfig” is nice. You use “make bzImage” to build the kernel, and you apparently need to use “make modules” to build any modules, which no one seems to have mentioned. “make modules_install” will install the modules, but you then need to use “depmod” in your /var/modules/version directory manually, apparently.

The ALSA sound stuff has changed a bit, so you need to run MAKEDEV.snd in the kernel sources “scripts” directory to update the device links.

I’m used to LILO, but RedHat uses GRUB, which is even easier since you don’t have to run anything after editing /etc/grub.conf, which is hard for us old LILO people to get used to.

If you want to use the new ide-cd interface for CD burners with cdrecord you’ll need the latest version of cdrecord. “cdrecord -dev=ATAPI -scanbus” will find the device using the ATAPI interface scheme. I ended up with a /etc/defaults/cdrecord with the line “CDR_DEVICE=ATAPI:0,0” in it to specify the device as a default. It does seem to work. Note that cdrtools wants to put everything in /opt/schily, which might not be what you expected. Edit DEFAULTS/Defaults.linux to change that.

I’m sure I’ll find other things that broke, but I think most everything is working now. It wasn’t too hard.

Update: Chrony had to be updated to 1.20. Also, something related to PAM broke, so the xlock functionality of xscreensaver screws up X.

I just returned from the grocery store, where I noticed “Green Apple” and “Orange Blossom” Electrasol machine dish washing detergent. I am not making this up. Remember when detergent was just lemon and pine? I can hardly wait to see what “flavors” are next. Remember, this is a detergent for dis washing machines. You put the solid tab in the machine, turn it on, go away to escape the noise, and, eventually, come back to clean, rinsed, semi-dry dishes. Was there really a demand for Green Apple detergent? Is your kitchen going to smell like orange blossom detergent while the machine runs and you are away? Do you care?

I just discovered Topix.net. (I know, I’m behind the times.) I believe the term to describe things like it is “insanely great.” They acquire information from thousands of news sites and government sites and sort it into bazillions (150,000, they say) of categories, so you can get links to current news stories on a vast array of topics or involving a vast number of places. It is just fascinating. Local TV station web sites and small newspapers may not make the most fascinating reading in general, but some interesting gems are hidden out there that Topix can find for you. It also provides easy access to stories of interest in the better-known outlets of general news, and will bring to your attention more specialized and less well-known sites. It will also, of course, produce RSS feeds of your favorite topics.

The always-interesting Boing-Boing pointed me to this PC Magazine article listing the top 100 web sites. It sounds interesting, but there is just no way I can imagine going through 100 entries, one paragraph for each, on 100 separate pages, each page roughly one-eighth content and seven-eights blinking ads and offers to send me e-mail and non-blinking ads and additional ads. Nor can I imagine anyone else doing so. If each of the twelve categories had one page with all of its entries on it this would be an interesting resource, but even with broadband Internet it is just too painful to contemplate looking at more than a randomly selected few.

I understand advertising. Advertising is OK. But this is just too much. I know that their printed magazine has lots of ads, but it does not (last time I looked) have one paragraph per two page spread, the remainder brightly colored advertisements, and yet that would be less painful to flip through than waiting for the browser to redraw the screen with different blinking ads over and over again, once per paragraph.

They do offer a “convenient” download of links to the recommended sites, but it is an EXE file, which you have to register to download, and which I wouldn’t dare run even if I was able to. An HTML file that anyone could use without fear just wouldn’t do.

What were they thinking? Other parts of their web site are readable. I’ve always hated that theory of web design that insists on breaking something that, printed on paper in the usual way, would be perhaps four or five pages long into a minimum of four or five separate web pages. Sure, if you have a book, break out the chapters into separate files, but don’t put each page in a separate file. Which is easier, hitting the space bar, or finding the link to the next page and clicking on it? Right, space bar. Even worse are the people who will rigidly follow a template and break a tiny document into separate Synopsis, Description, Author, See Also, Bugs, etc. pages, some of them one line long (“This section deliberately left blank”). This PC Magazine article is just amazing, though. It looks like a parody of bad web design.

As I mentioned earlier, I have a new Logitech Cordless optical Click“!” mouse. I’m really happy with it, finding it a much bigger improvement over my old mechanical, corded, three-button mouse than I expected.

The optical sensor works great, on almost any surface. Searching for some surface it won’t work on, I found that it is unreliable on a clean mirror. That’s about it. The range of the radio link is at least as big as the room I have my computer in. I have not yet tried it with the HF ham radio transmitting. It can connect to the computer by PS/2 port or USB. I’m currently using PS/2, though I suppose I’ll switch to USB next time I’m installing a new OS kernel.

I have gotten X11 to recognize the extra button, and imwheel will map it, but imwheel tends to die often for reasons unknown. I’ve mapped it to page down. Years ago, when I read a lot of Usenet news using nn, I had an old serial mouse connected to my multiport board and a program I hacked together (open source is wonderful, providing me with mouse driver guts to use) to map clicks to X keypress events, so I could hit space, n, and a few others from a second mouse in my lap rather than having to keep my hands up on the keyboard. People thought I was strange, but I really liked it, and a wireless mouse with a wheel and maybe a few extra buttons could do similar things, particularly an optical mouse that works on your leg. Sit back, relax, and read.

A wireless optical is also nice when the usual operating position is blocked.

I sometimes sing and play guitar with spectrum analysis software running for practice purposes, and with the music stand and mikes in the way it is rather hard to reach around to use the mouse to tweak the software. Now I can just grab the mouse and use it anywhere.

I can also toss it over to the other side of the keyboard and use it left handed to give my right hand a rest. Cordless opticals ought to be symmetrical, since it is so easy to use them on either side, and this one is.

Highly recommended.

This Lockergnome article alerted me to this by Joshua Allen about making RSS more RSS-beginner friendly.

I was seeing those RSS buttons all over, and even had a blog that (by default, essentially) provided an RSS feed, for quite some time before figuring out why I’d want to use RSS. I’d even installed a few RSS readers (some Firefox plugins), but couldn’t see what they were useful for.

My user experience, without the aggregator, was to select the bookmark for the site, and then read it. With the aggregator, first, of course, I had to install the thing and figure out how to do anything with it. Then add RSS URLs. Then I could click on the site name and see it in plain text, sometimes just the summaries/excerpts/the first n bytes. Hmmm, why was I doing this?

More recently I tried Bloglines, and I finally understand. Bloglines has feed auto discovery, so I can just paste in the main URL and not have to find the feed URL manually. Bloglines does a nice job of displaying the feed. Most of all, bloglines is really, really good at letting me know which sites have been updated since I last looked, and how many new entries each has. This is what the aggregator is useful for. I agree with Nathan Wallace’s comment on Roy Osherove’s thoughts on the RSS user experience that aggregators are most useful for infrequently updated sites. I don’t need fancy software to know if Boing Boing has been updated. It gets updated roughly continuously. What this is really useful for are sites that get updated a few times a month. You don’t want to check them manually every day, but you don’t want to forget all about them, either. Better to have software alert you to updates.

From a new-to-feed-aggregators, not-sure-why-I’d-want-one user’s perspective, the fact that Bloglines informs the user of updated sites automatically, without the user having to do anything, is important. I had spent some time installing and fooling around with aggregators before without ever realizing that that was nearly the whole reason for using them.

Bloglines, as a web-based service, also has the advantage of solving, rather than creating, synchronization issues if you use more than one computer, and being usable from any computer with a web browser and Internet access without software installation. I have found this more useful than I had thought it would be. I wouldn’t want to use anything that doesn’t make it easy to keep several computers synchronized.

Why do I like Pearls before Swine? This is why.

I finally gave in to modernity and bought a Logitech Cordless optical Click“!” mouse to replace my old Logitech OEM mouseman that came with my computer. I’m still getting used to it, but I like it. This is a wheel mouse with just one extra button and a symmetrical design. Being ambidextrous, I do occasionally want to mouse left handed, which the wireless thing will make even more convenient. It is also pretty cheap, which I figure is important, since it is, after all, just a mouse. I paid $40 plus tax, which I guess is reasonable. I’m not paying $100 for a mouse.

I did have to crank my X11 mouse sensitivity setting way down. I also haven’t figured out yet how to get X11 to recognize the extra button, nor am I sure what I’d want to use it for. I have no idea what one would do with the half-dozen extra buttons some mice have. The wheel works, after a small XF86Config change, and I do think the wheel is handy. I’ve gotten used to a wheel on the mechanical mouse on a Win NT 4 box at work and it’s nice to have one at home. I’ve been going nuts trying to clean the crud out of the mechanical mice at work, so I think I’m going to like an optical mouse a lot. The cordless thing is nice, too. Mouse wires are not only annoying, they’re stiff and move the mouse on you.

Via Boing Boing I found this hilarious video from ZeFrank, consisting of a man griping about online social communities. It contains such priceless lines as:

“Friendster is like the LA of online communities. It’s like the requirements for friendship have been stripped to the fucking very very bare minimums.”

“When you’re filling out your friendster profile it says, ‘give other people a chance to find out how you’re unique,’ and the second question on that list is, ‘what’s your favorite television program?’”

“They had to change the book of Esther to the book of Est, in which a woman uses aggressive group therapy to petition the king to save her father. The king eventually dies of a bladder infection because he’s not allowed to go to the bathroom for two hours.”

“…German and British soldiers took time out to celebrate Christmas together and then the next day bombarded each other with munitions and machine gun fire.”