Skeptic's Corner

Tapuz is a large Israeli forum site. There are tons of forums on all sorts of interests. I participate in one of the forums called "Little Question", where people can ask miscellaneous questions - from "Where do I buy pink shoelaces", through religious questions, to questions in physics - anything that is not covered by other forums. This is right up my alley as I love answering questions about whatever.

So yesterday there was this thread:

( A thread about the optical qualities of puddles )




What I wonder is - why does this still bother me so much? I'm still terribly annoyed with the guy, although I'm pretty sure that I did give the right answer.

I suspect I might have the [dreaded] swine flu.

This all began on Monday, with a dry feeling in my windpipe and a cough. That in itself was strange, because I usually start the common cold with a runny nose, and the cough only comes a week later.

When I got home from work, I took my temperature. It was around 37.4ºC, then 37.2ºC. I knew I had a lot to do the next day, and when I woke up with a normal temperature, I opted to go to work as usual. The cough continued.

By that evening (Tuesday) I was feeling worse. When I went home, my temperature started rising, reaching a peak of 38.1ºC, at which point I was thinking flu. But it dropped later on, and then my nose started to run, and I thought "well, just the common cold, then".

Wednesday morning, I had about 37.2ºC, so I opted not to go, and lazed in front of the TV. It rose a bit, then fell back, I wasn't feeling too bad. It dropped to 37ºC on Thursday and I was sure I'm on the mend. Did my shopping, practiced my calligraphy and my Japanese.

Then today I woke up, but I wasn't quite right. I had my breakfast, and felt even worse. That's when my tummy started acting up. A few rushes to the bathroom later, I checked the temperature. It was rising. During my Japanese online lesson, I started coughing uncontrollably. And the temperature continued climbing. I lost my appetite. I canceled my usual ride to the non-kosher supermarket. My temperature is rising and now it's 38.5ºC according to one of my thermometers, 38.2ºC according to the other. This is certainly flu range.

Symptoms, then: runny nose (though it seems to be on the mend, I can freely breath, without any drugs). High temperature. Dry coughs and irritated windpipe. Upset stomach. Loss of appetite.

Usual flu symptoms (for me) that I don't have: headache and muscle pains.

Now, it's the weekend. If it wasn't, I'd have called my doctor. I can call then visit the emergency center, but my general feeling is not too bad (no nausea, no faintness, no sleepiness, I can basically sit here and type this.) and I do not belong to one of the flu risk groups. So I don't want to clog them up and perhaps catch something worse unless I absolutely have to.

So, self diagnosis:

1. Could be a mixture of common cold + stomach bug. But since it didn't start normally, and since normally neither of these condition shoots me above the 38ºC line, I'm a bit doubtful about this possibility.

2. Seasonal flu - but I did get my flu shot on September 30th. Flu vaccinations are based on statistics so they could miss a particular virus - but the likelihood is low.

3. Swine flu. Same symptoms, no vaccination.

It's doing the rounds in Israel. Working in the same building as three infirmaries, I could catch it in the elevator (though I use every precaution possible). Last week I visited my best friend and he was recovering from some flu. His wife said he was not contagious anymore (his wife is a doctor) - but she started having symptoms herself while I was there. And there could be other sources.

OK, I'll go and start drugging myself now (something for the temperature, and a cough syrup before going to bed).

I dreamed that I was a student trying to get a masters degree in cinematography. There was a pair of mentors, and they told me that I needed to pick up the speed, and that I had to study from 4am to 8pm every day in order to make it in time. I refused, saying that my health comes first, and they gave me glaring looks and modified the schedule but were clearly unhappy to do so. Then they gave me a task, to go to the scene of some movie, look at the phrases written on the ceiling in one of the buildings, and select one of them as the title for the movie, along with the reasoning. The problem was that I didn't memorize all the titles, and as part of the action of the movie, the building was being burnt. I knew I could somehow go back in time and find out what was written there, but this would take too much time out of my busy schedule, so I was trying hard to recall at least the two phrases I thought were the most appropriate... And then I woke up.

Well, that dream is not too strange in its own right. Apart from the part about going back in time, it mostly followed the laws of physics. But you know what was odd about it?

After I woke up, I realized that in the dream, I was a man. A guy. A dude.

It's strange. I didn't do anything particularly masculine. I didn't put any "male parts" into use. It was like, you know who and what you are, and I was a dude. It's like playing a first-person game, using a character of the opposite sex, but actually being the character.

My sister sent me a short summary of the history of the Polish side of my family, which she prepared for her journey to Poland. My grandfather's and grandmother's families, all who remained in Poland, were exterminated by the Nazis. Three disappeared without a trace, the others could be traced to their deaths.

A little tidbit that I didn't know was that one of my mom's uncles - Abo - escaped Poland to avoid conscription into the Polish military, and went to Lithuania. There he actually got a visa to Japan, but he contracted an illness that prevented him from making use of it, and he died in Bialistok.

And this interconnects with something I learned as part of my Japan studies - the story of Chiune Sugihara, the Vice Consul of Japan in Lithuania, who granted thousands of Jews visas that allowed them to leave Lithuania for Japan, thereby saving them from the Nazis. He continued granting those visas despite being forbidden to by his superiors, and even as he left Lithuania he threw blank papers stamped with his seal and the consulate seal out the window of the train into the hands of people who begged him for their lives, so that they could, basically, forge their own visas to freedom.

So it turns out my great-uncle had one of those visas and could have been saved... what a bad break.

Last year I don't think we had any rain until the end of October. This is so nice. This being a holiday, 8:30 AM, the streets are nearly empty. It's quiet. All you can hear are birds calling, the sound of rain, and the occasional stray car, making the silent splashy sound as it goes by. And it's serious rain, too, not a drizzle.

Wow, that means I have to move my rain suit back into my scooter. This early! Wow! I hope, though, that I don't have to contend with rain when I ride to visit my mom on Yom Kippur next week.

Anyway, now it's a long weekend, and I've been very busy studying. I have made little progress in the past year or so. Now the calligraphy course is also on hold until after the holidays (mid-October), and I try to catch up as much as I can with my Japanese. I signed up with an online school. There are online web-cam/headset based lessons with native teachers. There are additional materials to read and learn vocabulary from. There is also the possibility of handing over essays, where one of the teachers will correct and explain your errors to you. I intend to hand one of those today to see how it goes.

There is a company vacation on Sukkot. Some people don't like it that the company dictates when they will have a vacation, but I don't mind. At least I don't get sour faces asking for a vacation. Nobody is working, so nobody depends on me. But I also extended it with two additional personal days, so I'm on vacation from September 24th trough October 10th! Yay for long vacations. There will be some ironing done, a lot of studying, and some shopping as well. An upgrade to my Linux, perhaps. And if I manage to squeeze it in, I also want to install ZF on my Linux, and play around converting my various web pages into it. Have to move with the times.

My sister tells me there is a government program to help young people get an apartment of their own with heavy subsidy. It's lottery-based. I'll have to look into that. The price range she mentioned is actually within what I can accomplish with mortgage, and she said they're brand-new apartments. The idea is that building companies get all sorts of benefits for allotting a certain number of apartments in each project to the government lottery.

OK, I guess the rain is over. My Gzip, who got herself a perfect vantage point off the old CRT monitor, to watch outside, has now deigned to descend from her lofty seat. That means the show is over. Ah, yes - the sun is out.

OK, I'm off to have some breakfast.

Remember the first Israeli astronaut, Ilan Ramon, who died in the last mission of Space Shuttle Columbia? He is one of our few peace-time heroes.

His son, Asaf, wanted to walk in his father's footsteps. He joined the Israeli Air Force and finished the pilots' training course with distinction. He wanted to become an astronaut in the future as well.

He died yesterday, crashing with his F-16. Early investigation points to a possible black-out due to high G-forces.

Poor Rona Ramon. Such a double tragedy.

...but I thought most of them belonged to the kind that downloads software from the Pirate Bay.

Israel blamed for hijacking of Russian cargo ship.

In all the universities I've ever visited, entrance to the campus was free. Here in Israel, of course, they always check your bag and wave a metal detector at you, but they don't ask you to show any ID that proves that you belong to the university in any way. I have always supposed that this is sort of symbolic of the fact that "knowledge is available to all".

Now my friends from Jerusalem have informed me that this is different in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. If you don't have a student/staff ID, you can't get inside. This seems strange to me, because normally universities also host conventions, debates, and public lectures.

In the Tel-Aviv university, Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, and Ben-Gurion university in Beer-Sheva, entrance to the campus is free. Access to libraries varies.

So I am wondering, how is it around the world? Any of you who has attended a university or just visited there for some reason, can you tell me whether you had to prove your connection to the place?

Sign spotted in Stockholm:
( Too large for friends page )

Book List meme

The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?
Instructions: Look at the list and put an X after those you have read. Tag other book nerds.

( The list )
Not much, I guess. But better than 6. The sad thing is that I read most of these when I was a girl - yes, including "Lolita" - except the Jane Austen ones.

Well, I recently bought a series of Japanese readers. Short, easy-to-read stories. I read one every day.

And yesterday I read one with the title "Taxi" (well, タクシー, but the majority of my readers here doesn't read Japanese. So I translate. :)

It only took a few pages for me to realize that I'm reading a version of a story I heard long ago, when I was 11 or so.

( The taxi driver's story )

So there is a totally different ghost story for you.

I peeled a few roots for a chicken soup a few minutes ago - coriander, parsley, celery, kohlrabi, carrots etc.

Now Proxy (one of the furries) has just gone nuts and tries to get her glands to overcome the smell from my hands - standing on her hind legs, paws in the air, she tries to wipe her face with my hand as thoroughly as possible.

It's nearly midnight and I'm aching all over. Here is the ynet coverage of the rally. Some of the guys that stood behind me were really amazed by the president's speech, as well as that of the Minister of Education and the Minister of Culture. There was a strange group of highly militant lesbians who started interrupting the rally and demanding more lesbians on stage. With a megaphone, no less. Odd.

There were some good singers, and a very touching speech by one of the guys who were wounded in the shooting, who was crying all the way through the speech.

The police estimate was 70,000 participants in the rally. A bit disappointing, I guess.

That upset stomach is annoying. I'm now on the second day of a strict diet of rusks, white rice, apples etc. trying to stop it. This is not nourishing at all. I hope I can have something more tomorrow.

Yesterday the cable guy came. Listened to my story, said he really can't do anything inside the house, and that he will escalate the issue to the infrastructure team, and he wonders why this hasn't been done already. He said it will take a few days - and yes, the disconnections continue in the meantime.

I went to the August Penguin Linux meeting. I'm not sure it was worth the travel. I only met two guys I know. The presentations were mostly uninformative:

• Israeli Internet Association presentation - turned out to be just a call for nominations for their funding project. I don't have any projects that need funding.
• Asterisk - turned out to be a plea for people to offer hosting of asterisk machine, in order to create a community-based network of servers as an alternative to Skype. I can't host.
• From Open Source to a Safe Check - a guy explained how he created a Drupal community in Israel and how it helped him build a viable business because people identify his name with Drupal.
• Thinking and Computing - A representative of the Ilan Ramon center for the advancement of science education explained a bit about the center and its goals, and then made a plea for an operating system that will be good for the netbooks the center is distributing to kids. Laudable, but again, a plea, not information.
• Presentation about technological legislation in Israel followed by a panel. This was actually interesting and alarming (Israel stands to be the first nation in the western world to have a biometric database of all its citizens, isn't it great? And that after a recent law that allows the police to more or less freely collect data about people's phone calls/net access as long as they don't "listen to the content"). Interesting - but too hasted. We were not given much of a background, and those who didn't follow the issues in the news would have been left in the dark.
• XBMC/Boxee - yet another guy showing how he made a successful business based on his previously established open source project.
• Kaltura - yes, another one of those
• Grid/Cloud - a couple of guys explaining a bit about grid computing and what can be the problems in it, and issues of openness. Not too deep - the clock was ticking. Basically it was all a background for a call to the audience to come and use their grid. Great.
• A guy from Mozilla Israel explaining the innovations in HTML5. OK.
• Presentation of awards. This was a real mess up. Except for one award winner who came with a personal photographer and so was given a photo-op, the presentation was rushed, and most people barely had their name called up - not the category in which they won or the achievement for which they won it.

I think with half the number of presentations, but longer ones which would have included true demonstration of technology and/or an explanation of how they arrived at their business plan and some numbers behind it would have been much better.

I was so tired when I came back home that I had a couple of rusks and crawled to bed for a schlafstunde, which I don't usually have. I got up not entirely myself (I always do when I sleep during the day), and had some lunch (white rice. With a few thyme leaves for taste). I'm still out of it.

August 6-15 inclusive. Yay for time away from work.

I intend to rest and study basically, but there are three meet-ups to go to. On Friday, the traditional Linux community meet-up, called August Penguin. Then next Thursday I'm hosting another Japanese conversation meeting. On the same day, there is also a Macintosh community meeting. I might be able to squeeze them both in - one's at 14:00, the other at 19:00. We'll see.

Tomorrow I have yet another guy from the cable company come to visit me. This time a "senior tech". We'll see how senior he is. I explained to the girl when I booked this meeting, that if the problem is not sorted out, I'll have no alternative but to switch to the competition. She, of course, assured me that they wish me to have the best Internet connection possible, etc. But what good does that do me? I already disconnected from their TV service, because of repeated malfunctions, which I thought were in the set-top box, but they said were in the line. So, if the line is bad, they'll have to lay another line, or I'll just go DSL.

Then I'll have to squeeze a haircut somewhere in there. And I wanted to make a doctor's appointment for tomorrow (the regular issue with my ears) but forgot. I'll have to see how soon I can book it then. And I want to go to the gay rights protest on Saturday Night. It's important to show that Tel-Aviv is still the pluralist city I have always been proud of. I wish they'd catch the perpetrator already.

Other than that - just catch my health again. I've been having both a cold and an upset stomach for the past few days, and I don't like it one bit. The cold has left me, as usual, with a nasty cough. And the other thing just prevents me from getting all the vitamins and proteins and minerals I need. So hopefully a bit of a rest will do the trick. And a mountain of rusks.

I never would have thought this could happen in Tel-Aviv.

I know this particular place. The Macintosh reseller from whom I bought my mac used to be right next door to it. It's in the basement of a residential building, not too many markers outside. Some news channels called it a "gay club" but that might conjure images of booze, music and dancing. It wasn't that - it was a community center and at the time of this incident they were apparently hosting a youth group meeting - kids playing Taki on rickety tables. A youth guide and one of the kids were killed. Others are seriously injured.

It could, in theory, still turn out to be a crime not related to the gay community in particular, but it's unlikely. A common terrorist would have probably targeted a denser and more accessible place - restaurant, hotel etc. - he would not have gone to a basement in a residential building.

Now our prime minister and the religious parties are doing damage control. The religious parties, and especially Shas, are being accused for inciting their voters to the level that they think murder is justifiable. I'm not sure this is not a hasty declaration on the part of the gay community. There was something similar that happened years back - a guy who murdered prostitutes because he thought they were sinners who were defiling the holy soil of the holy land. That was a personal misguided belief and not something instigated by the religious parties. They tend to talk about homosexuality in a lot worse terms than about practitioners of the world's oldest profession. Anyway, it could turn out to be just another seriously disturbed individual in this case as well.

The prime minister is doing damage control because Israel - especially Tel-Aviv - is trying to attract gay tourism. If it seems like the government is somehow promoting anti-gay policies, the damage may be severe and long-term.

( Adventure with a color laser printer. )

So the day before yesterday I bought an ATI graphics card - with a fan - and installed it.

Fiddling around with Mandriva to make it load the proprietary driver seems to have worked - but I can't make it work with Compiz. Which is rather a shame. The computer is strong enough to run eye candy so why not?

So while trying to make it work I sent it through a lot of reboots, and then all of a sudden my keyboard is starting to have trouble. The keyboard works with an old PS/2 connector. No, actually, something even older - but with a connector to PS/2. So anyway, when I start the computer it makes a noise as if I pressed several keys together. Then strings of repeated characters start appearing on screen. I tried restarting, then the bios started to complain (beeep,beep, beeep - which I can't find anywhere). I waited a while, opened the computer, made sure all the internal contacts work, restarted. It seemed to have worked nice - only the "YUIOP" section of the keyboard doesn't work. Tried disconnecting and connecting the keyboard - it now speaks in tongues.

I suppose I can by a cheapo USB keyboard and give up on this one. I just hope that this doesn't mean I have a motherboard issue that will crop up. Also, I'm very loath to give up my $200 ergonomic keyboard.

I don't need all this. I have a situation at work and I'm on the verge of being sacked because of something I can't really control. I don't want to be fighting with my computer as well.

Israel's business world is all agog about a recent announcement of an investment, that turned out to be a con, motives yet unknown.

I always love reading about frauds and cons, and so I read some of the articles published in Israeli media around this issue, and something not directly related caught my fancy.

The company in question is called "Safesky". One of the articles included comments from former potential investors who rejected the approaches that company made. Apparently, before the company was formed, representatives came up with a portfolio of over a hundred alleged patents, and offered to sell a significant part of that portfolio for a suspiciously low price. When asked to demonstrate some of the patented inventions, they dithered.

Now, why is the company called "Safesky"? Because one of its patents was supposed to be a rain shield, based on an electromagnetic field, that could potentially allow people to play sports in an open stadium on a rainy day and stay dry. Yoo-hoo! shields up, we're going to watch some football!

Now, let's suppose that setting up a force field that deflects rain drops is feasible. Of course, I seriously doubt that, but suppose. Why would this be better than your good old roof? I suppose the idea is that this will somehow hover right above the field and because it's transparent, spectators protected by the usual stadium roofing, which only covers the seating area, will be able to watch the game from above the "shield". That would be much better than panes of conventional transparent materials, which would distort the view...

But wait a moment, what happens when rain falls on such a force field? What does the shield do - pose a physical barrier or evaporate the water? If it is a physical barrier, you get the usual effect of rain on a windshield: Drops exploding on the barrier, becoming droplets, obscuring everything and eventually accumulating and streaming down. Result: not much visibility, right? And if evaporated - you get a nice fog cloud right in the middle of your stadium. Not much visibility either. So what you actually want is a shield that makes rain drops disappear entirely. And even then, it would be much better visibility if you simply had a roof over the stadium.

The investors in question, being sane business people, asked for a demonstration, and when they didn't get one, went away. Eventually someone believed the con man enough to actually name the company after this patent. Just thinking about the patent for two seconds - without getting into whether it's physically possible at all - should have caused them to go "eh...".

Symptoms: sudden freezes of X server. Well, not exactly freezes, as it grabs 100% CPU. More endless loop thingy.

I usually use the commercial Nvidia driver. With it, I can't even log in. Using the Linux free driver, I can log in and work for a while, but anytime I do anything heavy (like scroll aggressively or move a window quickly) it gets stuck.

I try the usual command (in Mandriva it's "service dm stop" for stopping the display manager using its rc script). That doesn't work. X remains alive. I try to kill it using the TERM or QUIT signals. It remains alive. With nvidia commercial driver - it keeps on stealing CPU. With linux driver, it doesn't.

Using kill -KILL indeed kills the process (at least under the free driver) but that doesn't help much - I can't start a new one as it can't find the device. I need to reboot for it to recognize the graphics card again. Other processes are not affected (e.g. apache, sshd).

I suspect that the card just can't take the heat. I suppose it heated up too much and is now beyond repair. I specifically bought a card without its own fan, in an attempt to have a quiet system. I guess the passive cooling is not sufficient when there are 32°C in the room for most of the day.

If all of this chain of "suspect" and "suppose" is correct, I'll have to go buy a new card. And I guess I'll buy one with a fan this time. I wonder whether to buy Nvidia or ATI (my Mandriva subscription includes easy installation of commercial drivers and matching kernels).