Rich Seymour’s stochastic statements.

Aww, he’s almost cute when he’s not so painfully censoring himself.

Also, Top 25 Iraq war profiteers, rather interesting; companies from necessary to evil got on this list.

Made it bike in to work without getting hit with a drop of Dolly. I bought a translucent coleman $10 rain suit at target yesterday just in case. Also Chevron just gave me a car… a little toy Riley Roadster, I must admit I love these things!

Riley truly enjoys being such a radical roadster: “People are always checking me out. Most folks love my style, but everybody is amazed by my power. I love the attention!”

Heheh.

[edit]
It seems that Western Civilization is crashing down in a spurt of Epic LULZ:
Gordon Brown gets loose in London:
Protester glues himself to British PM (CNN)

I caught the video on the ever present CNN news feed at my girlfriend’s mom’s house. But let’s hear it from the inimitable Harper’s Weekly:

President George W. Bush announced that he would now agree to a withdrawal inside “a general time horizon,” rescinded a 1990 ban on offshore drilling on the Outer Continental Shelf that had been imposed by his father*, and tried to give a little Kentucky girl named Emily, who had played in the White House T-ball game, a presidential baseball. The child ran away crying.

The kid literally ran completely off the field when approached by the president.

*It should be noted that G HW Bush started an offshore oil drilling company, Zapata Oil.

Tonight I was looking at the Public Knowledge Project and it’s Open Journals Initiative software platform (note see the end for the more comprehensive list at DOAJ). Besides the a bit navel gazing but well known and well written First Monday (e-journal about the internet), the best ones I found most interesting and readable of quite a few were Discrete Mathematics & Theoretical Computer Science, Culture Machine and Journal of the Chinese Institute of Engineers.

After looking through there for a specifically Materials Science journal (in English, my only real language) along the lines of Philosophical Magazine (arguably the oldest scientific publication ever… 200 years of research folks, yeah… now focusing on condensed matter… philosophize on that!!!), or Materials Science and Engineering A, I gave up. Oh well. There will be one, New Journal of Physics is open access.

And here’s where the story gets funny. A couple of years ago, Nature (the big British weekly science rag err ahem Journal, younger than Phil Mag though *smirk*), started making mini Natures. Science (the journal) did the same thing. Many of the major publishers grew and/or merged and becoming part of multinational publishing houses (like Reed-Elsevier, Nature Publishing Group (owned by Macmillan, in turn owned by a German Company), etc. etc.) So, now we have many of the world’s most well known journals owned by for profit publishing houses. Sure, they are for profit when they publish Hemmingway or science articles, but the whole profit model of magazine subscriptions in Science is… absurd.

Take for example the every other monthly publication TapeOp. In the United States, a subscription to TapeOp is free because it is supported by advertisers. The authors, publisher, editors, everyone involved do it for little to no profit. It’s not a charity, but it’s a labor of love.

Now take for example the aforementioned Nature Materials. A one year subscription costs: $199. A little over $10 an issue… with ads. They haven’t figured out the economics of it. Something is off. Who knows, perhaps they spend too much on glue, or the mathematical typesetting is too hard, the color printing too difficult. I don’t know, and I’m beginning not to care. I must admit one great reason for an inquisitive mind to stay in the .edu or large .com world is that those organizations have journal subscriptions (which cost 10x the personal rate), so you can read what you want, whenever.

So, I grew up in a bookstore that my parents owned, named the Bookshop in Jamestown, NY. I could read any book I could reach and I grew to be pretty tall, even before they went out of business in the mid-nineties. Around that time I got an epix.net account and finally got access to the computer nets beyond the one between two 8086s in my parents store, the BBS’s, AOL, and Prodigy. I got to see what the heck the internet was. lynx? Mosaic? ZOMG!

And now, I have to laugh when I hit an article I can’t read at the start of Nature Materials July 2008 issue, some approx 15 years later:

Nature Materials 7, 512 - 514 (2008)
doi:10.1038/nmat2215

Print and perish?

Joerg Heber1

1. Joerg Heber is at Nature Materials, 4 Crinan Street, London N1 9XW, UK.
e-mail: j.heber@nature.com

Abstract

Although the Internet has fundamentally changed the way we communicate, science publishing is remarkably hesitant in making full use of the potential offered by new technology.

You could read the article for $18, if you don’t have a subscription. Chances are if you want to read about Zeolite characterisation or Nanoparticle assembly you are associated with some institution with a subscription like I am. But… you know, if you’re in your teens, and maybe you’re growing up in a small town without any big-name resources in it, know that there are a lot of great science journals online that you can read and try to grasp for free. Right Now.

Start your journey here:
Directory of Open Access Journals (currently over 3000 journals in the directory)

File under comic relief.

Background: I have perhaps bought 2 or 3 pairs of shoes for myself from the 70% off section of Designer Shoe Warehouse in my life. They at some point cajoled me to sign up with an email address. I signed up with myemailaddress+dsw@gmail.com. Specifically so I could filter them out, with the +dsw appended, legally, to my email. It’s something you can do to email, try emailing yourself at youremail+SeeIToldYouSo@example.com and you will get the email. This is generally speaking, some use a minus sign, it’s all explained on Wikipedia’s Email entry. So… fast forward to today. I just can’t stand that they still email me… but when I click unsubscribe at the bottom of the email, I get the following from DSW.com:

Could not match subscriber ID to the e-mail.

Kudos on supporting plus addressing DSW, but quintuple anti-kudos for not supporting unsubscribing with plus addressing. Classic web/db design pitfalls, but since I worked in teh interweb business in ‘99-’03, I feel I can vent about this with some authority. Written in all-caps into DSW’s woefully ill-designed web form:

PLEASE UNSUBSCRIBE [redacted]+DSW@GMAIL.COM FROM YOUR EMAIL LIST. WHATEVER ILL EDUCATED WEB PROGRAMMER YOU HAVE CAN’T SEEM TO RECOGNIZE THAT BLAH+BLAH@EXAMPLE.COM EMAIL ADDRESSES ARE VALID PER THE RESPECTIVE IEEE RFCS. UNSUBSCRIBE IT NOW. YOU’VE NEVER EVEN GOT THE FACT THAT I’M A MALE AND NOT INTERESTED IN WOMEN’S SHOE OFFERINGS. MY GIRLFRIEND TELLS ME ENOUGH ABOUT WOMEN’S SHOES. I DO NOT NEED YOUR EMAIL. BEST, RICH

This is how I blow off steam on occasion. Now back to figure out how to do data pumping(TM) in this multi-threaded application I’m working on.

PS Obviously, I can just filter the emails from them to Trash based on this, but… yeah… I just find the whole conundrum hilarious. Me and no doubt… one to two other people.

Well, in 1999 or so, I was probably trying to get PGP working with Gnus in Emacs. In 2000/2001 I was probably trying to get gnupg (GPG) working with Mutt. Somewhere between then and now I probably had it working with Thunderbird. Now I’ve got it working with Gmail, GnuPG, FireGPG and Firefox. Yay for progress?

(I will link this up later so it makes some sense to non-techies) For now, check out this tutorial:
GMail email encryption supported in Firefox via FireGPG

Note that this was inspired by seeing a baby pic from a Linux ubernerd in Germany with a GPG-generated PGP key at the end of it. Yay for babies!!!

More info here Public-key cryptography.

Taking North Korea off the axis of evil was pretty great news this past week… but check this breaking story:
ATF raids Blackwater armory, seizes automatic weapons

Perhaps a sign that the Feds will start to reign in the beast they’ve created in the soldier of fortune corporations. In case you don’t know, when you leave the marines they come on like campus recruiters to universities, offering great pay and benefits which are hard to pass up. I know a guy who did pass it up, and he still isn’t sure he made the right choice for his future, especially financially.

For those of you wishing to sync Microsoft Outlook and iCal with Google Calendar I wish this were a complete how-to, but it’s more like a yes you can. Plus Jott… Basically this post is a big post on how to get your life organized around some sort of schedule. In as far as scheduling goes, I tend to follow the anti-schedule/no-schedule ideas espoused in the self-help classic The Now Habit. Written by some paratrooper psych-grad or something… It’s a bit wacky, but good. He comes up with the idea to reverse schedule things that you need to do working back from the deadline with a set of mini-deadlines.

But I digress.

The main idea here is that I have one Google Calendar that is my main Calendar for all things. That calendar can be seen by the public here. I can make any item on there private as I see fit. Google Calendar is great because it can actually TXT message my phone with a reminder about a given appointment. This has saved my butt a couple times.

So, face that you want Google Calendar to be your master calendar. Yes it would be nicer if Google was a 501(c)(3) in some cases instead of a public international corporation, but we have to make compromises sometimes.

Once making peace with that decision, sign up for Google calendar account at calendar.google.com, which should be easy if you already have a gmail account.

If you have an Outlook Calendar that you’d like to sync up, it’s relatively easy, just use the Outlook/Google Calendar sync that google has written.

If you have an iCal calendar (Mac OS X), you have 2 options
costly: Spanning Sync $25 one year subscription $65 license

or techie: GCalDaemon Free!

I chose free, but it took some doing to make it work.

Finally, let me introduce you to my new favorite web 2.0 pal: Jott. Jott lets you call their number and leave yourself reminders. It also plugs right into Google Calendar so you can tell your Google Calendar that you have an appointment and it will show up. And if you’ve done all the stuff I’ve done, it will automagically show up in your iCal and Outlook calendar too. Also you can txt Jott too! Also look into 1800 Goog 411 and TellMe for more cool apps you can call toll free.

Fantabulous.

Also, finally, since this is one of the longest posts ever, I should point out that Google Calendar still doesn’t work with Google Gears. Google Gears looks to make a lot of this somewhat obsolete in the future. That is, it would allow you to edit your Google Calendar offline from your PC within your browser. Google Docs does work with Google Gears for sure though.

And you all thought I gave up geeking out.

Just don’t get me started on trying to install the IBM Cell SDK 3.0 on a PS3 without a direct internet connection.

Every person I’ve told that I moved from LA to Houston for the summer has said the same thing. You’re gonna hate it.

What the heck?

I mean seriously. This place ain’t bad, you just have to look around a bit. Admittedly I haven’t tasted the nightlife or the worst of the heat, but I know there’s stuff going on. I just got a great single speed bike for riding around.

A lot of sad/bad things have happened as a consequence of my moving out here, but oh well such is life. My girlfriend Heather is doing well in the SFV.

Let’s see… where else have I been on the internet… I finally got Twitter:
http://twitter.com/rseymour

I’ve also been using Jott a lot to make notes to myself.

I may try to update this blog to have my twitter feed into it somehow.

I’m working at Chevron doing research into speed optimization for the latest chips.

That’s about it.

Oh yes, clark 8 is obviously kind of on hiatus, but I’m writing new stuff and we have 8 new songs needing just vocals and mixing “in the can”. So, hopefully this summer I can record the vox and guitar overdubs here in Houston and send them back to producer/engineer Kasey for mixing.

Final note, all my old tags busted… oh well. It’s hard to maintain a blog with non-default plugins.

For an article about antisocial punishment… here… if you have access.

For more on Banksy… go here: banksy.co.uk

I think this is a good blog title for this from Gawker:
‘Science’ Embraces Hipster Artist, Confuses Scientists

I for one was not confused, just surprised.

Will he make the rest of the country jealous.

Now in news of Governors having sex with their spouses.

Alaska’s Governor Sarah Palin Announces Family Addition.

Isn’t that nice.

[update]
What is up with snarky linguistic music criticism from NYT reporters:::

On the Web page is a recording of what she describes as her latest track, “What We Want,” a hip-hop-inflected rhythm-and-blues tune that asks, “Can you handle me, boy?” and uses some dated slang, calling someone her “boo.”

from here…

Some dated slang… like… huh? It’s language, it’s part of old songs and new current songs… Chris Brown’s #2 on the billboard hot 100 last week “With You” currently at #3 rhymes you with boo… it’s not gonna stop… it’s not dated, it’s just a word, stemming apparently from the french Beaux -> Caribbean languages transmogrified into boo.

The gray lady is dated. That’s a fact.

Here’s her myspace so you can hear the song. It’s OK… not great by any means. But no need to attack her use of the word boo as dated.