Voder-Vocoder

With the newer releases of linux distributions, things have become extraordinarily user-friendly. This is the only bug I’ve discovered so far and it’s a minor problem with an easy work-around.

Of course, to do things RIGHT, you do need to know what you are doing. I still want to be able to partition my own drives, write my own firewall scripts, and change a lot of the other configurations; and I can still do all of those things.

From my personal diary, 2004-09-12 Sunday 23:24:02:

“What is science?” This question is my answer to the questions posed to me recently and independently by two people. They mention “supernatural” things and dare me to refute them. I will not.

Science is a methodology.

• Repeatability.
• Mathematical Modeling.
• Least Hypothesis.
• More?

What if there are aspects of nature that are not tractable by the methods of science? Would science be able to say anything at all about them?

What we do know is that the vast majority of nature is aproachable with the methods of science. I would have to invoke “least hypothesis” to say that all of nature is like that. Bit of a liar’s paradox, there?

“You’re thinking of this place all wrong. As if I had the money back in a safe. The money’s not here. Your money’s in Joe’s house . . .(to one of the men) . . . right next to yours. And in the Kennedy house, and Mrs. Macklin’s house, and a hundred others. Why, you’re lending them the money to build, and then, they’re going to pay it back to you as best they can.”

Christmas season is “It’s a Wonderful Life” season, and anyone who has seen that movie — which ought to be pretty much everyone by now — will remember Jimmy Stewart’s plain-spoken explanation of banking, delivered to angry customers who have begun a run on the bank where he works.

Today it’s the Bush administration that’s started a run on the institution of Social Security. And so far no one in Washington has had the gumption or the forthrightness to get up, like Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey, and tell the American people what’s really going on.

—Scott Rosenberg ( source)

UPDATE 2004-12-04

Here’s the deal about social security reform. Suppose in any year the workers put $X into social security and the beneficiaries (grandma) take out that same $X. This is approximately how it works now.

Now, instead, through “GWB Social Security reform”, the workers pay $(X-Y) to SocSec and $Y to their personal retirement savings account. Now the gov sill owes $X to the beneficiaries. So the Treasury borrows $Y. This should help the economy because it spurs investment, right? We have $Y more investment in the economy, right? Wrong. Because the government is borrowing $Y, there is $Y less money available for businesses to borrow. It’s a zero-sum game.

Then the stock market crashes. Sorry, you get to go to debtor’s prison when you die!

I’ve got an old 30G HDD I won’t be using shortly. Anyone have any suggestions on what to do with it? I’m thinking of getting an external enclosure for it. Anyone have experience with those?

How we know we are living in the 21st century: you can buy harddrives at $0.70/gigabyte.

CDRs are still cheaper at about $0.20/gigabyte

I bought a new hard drive this week. It arrived with minimal
packaging.
I like that.
The instructions are a sheet of paper 3 inches square.
The HDD is in a form-fitting plastic box, wrapped in bubble wrap
and styrofoam popcorn. That’s all.

I saw Zhang Yimou’s House of Flying Daggers on Saturday. If you liked Hero, then you will probably like this one a little better. Ther story is a bit more tight. If you hated Hero, then I don’t know what you would think of this one.

Again, it has beautiful cinimatography. Again, the plot has twists and turns. I liked Ziyi Zhang’s performace in this one a lot.