Daynotes 1999 week 32

Daynotes: Week of 9 - 15 August, 1999

Daily notes and commentary -- Week 32

* Link to: last modified 22:30 GMT+2 on 15.08.1999

Hi, welcome to this week's daybook page.

himself See the update-link (above) that points where I last added some text, which should simplify your keeping up to speed. Of course, you may still have to scroll back a bit and see if I've updated more than once since you last visited, but that is easily done.

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Write me at: bo@leuf.com -- if private, mark it as such!
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Monday 9 August

Waves of showers come marching in, sometimes with short spells of lightning and thunder. Not unpleasant, and much fresher air.

I started the day by examining log files and Xenu reports of any link problems. As usual there are a few to correct, and a couple of mysteriously vanished pages in one subweb. Possible that I could have made an ftp mistake and forgotten them, but I would have expected 404-reports in the server logs before now... Oh well, that's why we check links periodically...

Again, as usual, there were a few cases of mismatched case, because of the difference in how unix and win32 handle mixed case. I decided early to use lowercase folders and filenames for public webs and force lowercase on ftp-upload of files. This has overall saved me considerable problems. During my restore of the local copies data when I upgraded the harddisk, however, the local copies were "randomly" uppercased, and this can slip into the occasional link selected by browsing.

Tuesday 10 August

The rest of Monday was somehow lost in a succession of small and intrusive details and interruptions. Much of today has already suffered the same fate, and I clearly see that it does not end anytime soon.

My major mystery of the week, perhaps a follow-up to last week's mystery memory eating run-away process, is just how the swapfile settings can be shifted about without your own manual intervention. Yesterday, I had noted significant slowdowns and somewhat erratic behavior, and this morning I decided to increase the swapfile size. To my complete and utter astonishment, I had a single swapfile placed on a full data partition, maxing this out at 59 Mb swapfile size. This was nowhere near my dedicated swap partition, carefully optimized with large clusters. Wtf? Oh well, reassign and reboot...

Yuk, what a distracted shambles of a day, but I forged on notwithstanding with reviewing book text. In effect I tried to make the distractions an asset, reasoning that our typical reader would probably be stressed and surounded by distractions, have a burning how-to-do question right now, and if the text wasn't clear enough for such a situation, then I had better find out while it can still be changed.

Looking in passing at the news this evening suggests that most people are having a not-so-very-good day.

Reincarnation is nature's way of rebooting.

Wednesday 11 August

Shifted focus last night and today, and worked up the core pages for another wiki, this one intended as an OutlookForum, an open discussion forum for all issues relating to Outlook. As yet it is sort of empty, but there is a a backlog of some material that we can put up in due time. Bookmark the main wiki index page at http://www.leuf.net/wiki/ where I maintain an updated list of all currently active wikis. I have swapped in a new version of the script where the search form (FindPage) now works as intended.

Another new addition is LeufBookLists. Show me a man's bookshelf and I will show you the man's character... I am completing an inventory of my books, and the author lists there will complement the Science Fiction pages at LeufOrg.

Crazy kittens... The past few days they have been zooming about at ever more breakneck speeds, and jumping straight up a foot or more as they pounce on each other. Given the slick floors that humans prefer, it is quite a sight to see them attempt daredevil evasive maneuvers -- and fail. (Slip, sli-i-ide, scrabblescrabble, meow, ker-plunk!)

Today, the female surpassed everything to date. She zoomed into the livingroom, chased by our son to get her out, and she kept right on zooming... straight up the balcony door curtain, right up to the ceiling. I'm not sure who was more surprised.

The solar eclipse was a resounding success (let's hear it for celestial mechanics!), and viewed by millions across Europe and the Middle East. We had clouds during the critical hours, and the 82% totality we got may sound like much, but it is a mere fading, easily lost amid passing clouds.

Given the increasing level of unease in some news items, I sense a beginning of a psychological slide towards the "doomsday" year 2000 as we now are in the last half year. It's crazy season extended into months, I fear, as the gullible and misguided start to rave and rant. Actually, I hope that not much of this will come to pass, but humanity's track record concerning previous pseudo-dates of cosmic proportions is not promising.

The much talked about "summer of 99" commencement of WWIII according to the interpreters of Nostradamus has not come to pass, though some would say summer is not over yet. Looking back over some 70 years of major/minor conflicts, and then eyeing the current India/Pakistan and Russia/Chechnya scuffles, suggests that things are actually pretty much "as usual" somehow. For such a depressing perspective, it is odd to find comfort in that assessment.

Then again, we may simply be writing and reading this in the timeline that did not experience all the prophetic gloom&doom -- our survivalist focus of consciousness unerringly keeping our experience of life on the longest lifeline, however more probable the catastrophic options were. Some older timetravel sf suggests something similar, where intrepid time patrol agents find eons of blasted and devastated timelines on either side of "the main" one.

Again, a look at this century's history, especially details of the most recent 50 years only lately come to light, strongly suggests that evading a nuclear war during this time was sometimes little more than clusters of improbable events going one way rather than another. (Let's hear it for those all those overworked and underappreciated guardian angels out there!)

Virtues, n pl. Certain abstentions. - tDD Bierce

Thursday 12 August

From the news...

The Kansas Board of Education rejected evolution as a scientific principle Wednesday, dealing a victory to religious conservatives who are increasingly challenging science education in U.S. schools.

Given that what many, if not most schools (textbooks) teach about "evolution" and "darwinism" as bottom-line fact, that may not be as big a loss as one might think. The textbook definition of evolution is "gradual development, especially from a simple to a more complex form", but there is plenty of evidence about that evolution tends to be be much more a question of sudden and discontinuous leaps (sometimes helped along by the odd meteor or comet). The other traditional saw about evolution is that it is "the survival of the form best suited to its surroundings". Again, the evidence tend to contradict this, for it is precisely the most adapted forms that are the most sensitive to change and die out rapidly when the environment does (inevitably) change.

Darwin did propose that the evolutionary mechanism is "natural diversification" and "natural selection" of the resulting forms, which is valid enough. What the "neo-Darwinists" and "neo-neo-Darwinists" (not to mention the Creationists) would have us accept as "Darwinism" is a form of scientific mythmaking. The evolutionary concept itself is at least as old as the ancient Greeks, and seeing as much of what we get from them turns out to have other more ancient sources, one has to wonder just how old the concept really is. (I like to think of the Greeks in that context as the Roman version of the portable computer <g>, a kind of prepackaged knowledge base with an interface that the Roman engineers could understand....)

Apropos "education". Helping one's children with their (science) homework has its tricky side. On the one hand, one would like them to have open minds and be aware of the cutting edge of the subject, and the blatant flaws in their textbooks (even in respect to the relatively simple level they are learning about it). On the other hand, this puts them at odds with their teacher (and classmates), which can have very unpleasant consequences.

Abatis, n. Rubbish in front of a fort, to prevent the rubbish outside from molesting the rubbish inside. -- tDD, Bierce

Friday 13 August

I should perhaps add to yesterday's posting that I am in not in any way an "anti-evolutionarist". Still, what the proponents mean when they call evolution a "scientific principle" sounds a lot like saying it is a verified and demonstratable fact. For obvious reasons, evolution cannot be that, however good a theory of biological development it may seem to be. I will dignify evolution as a theory, rather than just a hypothesis. However, I do see numerous conflicts between the theory as usually presented and known fossil records.

Interestingly, not that long ago, an "evolutionary" model was the reigning and very detailed theory about the development of galaxys, where the spiral forms were thought to be mature, evolved versions of what had originally been elliptic clusters. These days, the accepted model is quite the reverse, where the amorphous clusters are seen as the most mature ones, and spiral forms the early immature ones.

We also see a sort of "contamination" of linear evolutionary thought in many other fields, despite clear evidence to the contrary. And "survival of the fittest" is used as an excuse for many less desirable things.

A comment was wiki-posted to this education thing, so further discussions on the subject will be kept there.

Although I deplore legal decisions like the one above, I have to wonder what they were teaching, and what they will teach from now on. "Teaching theory" is sort of an oxymoron to begin with, but then so is much of contemporary schooling. My guess is that the entire "evolution" segment of the science course will be sidestepped, but the worst part is that either way the kids probably don't get the tools or attitude to find and critically evaluate information for themselves.

Half a loaf is better than a whole one if there is much else. - tDD Bierce

Saturday 14 August

Day lost due to illness.

Traffic is particles with motive. -- Chris Barrett, Los Alamos research scientist

A pretty decent search engine, new to me at least, is found at FAST Search (Norwegian). The random (known) sites I tested came up with many up-to-date hits. Scored high relevancy on some more obscure searches. Worth bookmarking. And it is fast in returning the results.

Sunday 15 August

* Following a recommended link got me to the Dumbentia site. Check it out for some very good parodies (pdf format files).

Day rained away, with enough thunder to dissuade me from spending much time at the computer.

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