Veritas Curat

People often complain about how “bad things are getting,” and how much better life was when they were young.  Nostalgia is a seductive liar.  The reality is that life keeps getting better across all social indicators.  People are healthier and live longer than at any other time in history.  The Annual Report of the American Cancer Society confirms this.  Cancer rates have been declining for the last 20 years, and over 700,000 lives have been saved as a result (the data goes up to 2006; the statistics are even better today).

Interestingly, stomach cancer was the leading cancer in males many years ago.  Then lung cancer skyrocketed as smoking became popular, and now it’s on the decline:

This will hopefully be a series that I’ll update as I come up with things.  It will cover a variety of topics, but today it’s things that annoy me on the Internet:

Videos that start automatically on YouTube.  I’ll start watching your videos when I’m goddamn ready.

People who say, “Do you have a Facebook,” or “Do you have a Twitter?”  Everybody knows that you mean a profile, or an account, but you’re still intellectually lazy.

Pop ups.  Ads.  Automatic recurrent billing.

People who use their child’s picture instead of their own on a profile.

For that matter, people who post hundreds of pictures of their kids and not a single one of themselves.  Just make a separate profile for your kid already.  I don’t want to be friends with a 2-year-old.  I friended you because I want to know something about you.

Profile themes.  People have zero taste on the web — but that could be forgiven if their profiles were at least readable.  If I have to highlight the text on your profile to read it, you fail.

Also, intersecting two previous points, people who insist on auto-playing music on their profiles.  Your music sucks.

Web sites that splatter web 2.0 widgets all over their layouts to hide their lack of content.  I’m looking at you, HuffPo.

Web sites that integrate social bars, and social bars in general.  I’m looking at you, Meebo.

Web sites that automatically check off every email contact that you have and spam your entire contacts list if you click the giant CONTINUE button (which sounds innocuous enough), but only offer a way out of this “feature” if you can find the tiny Skip button.  I”m looking at you, everybody.

At least not physiologically.  Think about it.  Diabetics get much higher blood sugar spikes than normal kids who eat candy, but diabetics aren’t bouncing off the walls with energy.  When blood sugar levels reach 500 or 600 mg/dL, diabetics may get confused thoughts, act loopy, or even go unconscious, but they don’t start doing back flips.  More than likely, the energy that kids experience comes from the psychological excitement of getting something good to eat (like a kid going crazy in the grocery store because mom decides to buy him his favorite cereal — and this is before he takes a single bite).

The claim that sugar makes kids energetic doesn’t make sense biologically.  If you consume a lot of sugar, that sugar gets converted to ATP, but so what?  You eventually store excess ATP in fat (that is, the energy from ATP gets transferred to fat).  The presence of ATP alone won’t make you more energetic.  That requires activation of the sympathetic nervous system.  And that happens psychologically when kids get to eat their favorite candy.

I’m a big fan of Woot.com and the daily deals on electronics and other items that they offer.  I’ve purchased a variety of items from them over the years.  However, this one has to be the best (or at least most hilarious) product they’ve ever offered:

The official ShamWow web site offers four large and four mini ShamWows for $19.95 (and if you try to navigate away from the site, they immediately reduce the offer to $14.95).  However, today Woot is selling eight large and eight mini ShamWows for only $12.99.  How can you pass up that bargan?

You’ve probably heard by now that Wikileaks, the infamous whistle blower web site, published 92,000 documents written by soldiers and intelligence experts in Afghanistan.   The New York Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel were given the documents a month in advance and allowed to analyze them.

Immediately, people protested that the leak will put soldiers in harm’s way.  In this case, Wikileaks withheld 15,000 sensitive documents to protect soldiers and informants, so that argument is moot.  Isn’t it ironic though, that Wikileaks is protecting America’s informants?  I doubt the US government would extend the same benefit to the Wikileaks informant.

The whole intelligence game is crazy.  Leaking secret documents is illegal, but we actively cultivate informants and spies in other countries, so we actively promote the violation of other countries’ laws.  The reason that we sentenced the Russian spies to time served and whisked them off on an airplane is because we were trading them for our own spies.

So it’s hard to take the government seriously when it denounces informants and intelligence breaches.  After all, the government is a major offender in that game.

Of course, the United States government will protest vociferously about its own leaks, because it has plenty to be embarrassed about — and ultimately, that’s why we need Wikileaks.

Wikileaks creates a chilling effect on the systematic abuses that governments and corporations have promulgated throughout history.  Every politician and executive should know, and fear, that anything they say and do could become public knowledge.  That’s the transparent society that we are turning into.

There’s no going back.  Society will only become more transparent, and people in power should become less abusive as a result.  However, we need a way to systematize, analyze, and interpret the data that we receive, which is why I applaud Wikileaks for turning the Afghan War Diary documents over to major news media, who were able to put them into context for us (mainstream media is still good for something; the blogosphere could not have done that).  We still have access to the full, unedited compendium of documents (minus what is temporarily being withheld for safety reasons), but we get summaries and annotations, too.

It’s not unpatriotic to want better, more responsible government, and ultimately that’s what leaks like this promote.  It is unpatriotic never to question your government, because then you allow irresponsible, abusive government to thrive.

[BTW, you may have noticed that my blog is called Veritas Curat, which literally means The Truth Cures.]

I hate when people like this follow me on Twitter.  They serve no purpose.  They don’t engage in conversations.  They don’t read anybody that they follow.  They’re probably bots, and if they are real people, they have the brains of a toaster — mindless marketing automatons.

One of those links goes to his web site:

Would you really give your Twitter username and password to that site?  It looks like it was thrown together in 15 minutes, and no legitimate site would ask for your username and password directly.  They would use the standard Twitter API, which brings you to this  screen:

Boston.com has some amazing photos of the oil spill in China.

I configured my home server to automatically install updates, but I want it to email me whenever that happens.  That’s really the only reason that I set up a mail server.  However, I needed to test if the mail server is configured correctly, so I logged into my home server from the lab (via SSH), and sent an email by command line:

A few seconds later I got this in my inbox:

Looks like it works.

I built a home web, ftp, mail, SSH, and 2 terabyte file server for under $200. It runs Ubuntu Server 10.04 LTS.

How’d I do it? I picked up an old Dell Dimension with a Pentium 4 2.8 GHz processor, 512 MB of RAM, and a 250 GB hard drive for $80 off Craigslist.  Then I got a 2 TB external hard drive for $107 from a Woot.com deal.  Here’s a close up of the box and external drive:

Ubuntu Server was installed from that orange flash drive.  A CRT monitor came with the computer, but I can administer the whole thing from my laptop over SSH, so I don’t really need the monitor.

The box runs Apache web server.  To get around the problem of having a dynamic IP address, I registered a subdomain with DynDNS and set my router to update the IP address automatically (there’s also a Linux client called ddclient that can do this).  You can see my web server’s landing page at anodyne.ath.cx and the uptime here (yes, you are actually connecting to the computer pictured above, which is sitting in my house).

Old computers are great for home servers, because command line servers require few system resources, and turning an old computer into a home server is better than throwing it in a landfill.  Ubuntu Server 10.04 without a GUI uses ~175 MB of RAM at boot, and that’s with the web, ftp, mail, ssh, and file servers running.  Debian server uses only ~100 MB of RAM, so even a 10-year-old computer with 128 MB of RAM can be converted into a home server.  Even if you don’t need a web or file server, you could use it as an intrusion detection system or home automation system (for managing lights and other devices).

While searching the archives of the New York Times for something else, I found this gem from the “Scientific Gossip” column of February 8, 1885:

I don’t know who Dr. B. J. Jeffries was, but he correctly predicted that the primary colors were red, blue (violet), and green, and that color blindness almost always manifests as the inability to discriminate red from green, primarily because the genes for red and green opsin are arranged next to each other on the X chromosome — the result of an ancestral duplication followed by mutational divergence — so that crossover errors will remove one or the other gene, or splice them together.   The fact that they are located on the X chromosome also explains the much higher prevalence of red-green color blindness among males.  Although Dr. Jeffries fails to point this fact out, we shall forgive him, given his otherwise remarkable prescience on this matter.