Skeptic's Corner

Been to the scooter shop.

Fri, 01 Jan 2010 09:23:31 GMT

No, they didn't accept me. The guy who does welding jobs is not working today (all Russians take January 1st off), and anyway they are only accepting vital fixes. That's the importer's central shop. So I tried a smaller shop near home. They tried to help, but they don't keep parts on location, the main supplier is doing an inventory count, and two minor suppliers don't have a stand in stock. "Come on Sunday, we'll see".

I got an appointment at the central shop for Monday. I'll have to settle for leaning the scooter against something in the meantime, or using the small kickstand and praying to the god of scooters that nobody bumps into the scooter, because the kickstand is barely sufficient to hold its weight.

The broken stand hangs a bit too close to the back wheel for me to feel comfortable riding around anyway, so I just went straight to the non-kosher supermarket and bought some essentials, riding through the streets instead of the freeway, just so that if anything happens, I'd be thrown off the scooter at 50km/h rather than 90km/h. :-S

Nothing happened, and I'm back home safe, and I'm not going to ride anywhere this weekend - though I was hoping to go watch "Avatar". It'll have to wait.

Blech, Mercury must be in retrograde again.

Thu, 31 Dec 2009 09:25:29 GMT

As I went down from the office to go home and released my scooter from its stand, something went bad in the stand, and the scooter sort of collapsed into my hands (luckily I was holding it firmly). I can't see exactly what's wrong with it, but it's misaligned and doesn't hold the thing anymore. I had it parked overnight leaning against a tree, and planned to go to the shop first thing in the morning today to get it fixed.

Only... I needed to go past breakfast for that. And so I put my usual two eggs on the stove to boil, and sat down to have my tea. After a while I went to the kitchen to check on my eggs, and saw that the flame went off. Darn, the gas can is empty. Wore a fleece thingy over my pajamas, and went down to close the can and open the other one[*]. So I try to twist the valve on the full can to open it, and the cheap plastic thing, which was in the sun for I don't know how many year, crumbles in my fingers. Yay. I try again using the edge of my fleece coat to hold the broken remains of the valve, to no avail. And it's better like that - because if it opened, I probably wouldn't be able to close it again, and that's not safe.

Grrr. One empty can, and one full one with a broken valve. No gas. I called the gas company, and the clerk promised me they will come fix it as soon as possible today. But that basically means I'm stuck here at home waiting for them to come, and I can't get my scooter fixed.

Now I'm trying to see if I can get the eggs boiled in the toaster oven. I don't think it will work, though.

Edit: the eggs cooked nicely, to my surprise. The gas technician came at about 1 pm and fixed the valve handle by the simple expedient of stealing a similar one off a neighbor's empty can (belonging to the same company). Ugh. He would have lifted the one on my empty can but they had incompatible valves. I just hope that it was really an empty can so the neighbor doesn't get stuck when he tries to exchange the cans. I suppose the technician is within his rights, because technically, all the cans belong to the gas company, and you only buy the gas inside them, but it's still not nice.

And I did get to the scooter shop only to find that this being December 31st, they are closed for an inventory count. I hope they open tomorrow morning or I'm screwed.

*I don't know how gas works in other countries. In Israel, where you don't have a central gas connection, you have two canisters connected in a T. You have one open and one closed. When one empties, you close it, open the other one, and call the gas company to replace the empty one. So you always have enough gas to get you going and they come in at their leisure and replace your canister, leaving you the receipt under the hood.

Well...

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 18:08:21 GMT

Writing and sending Christmas/New Year cards to all my remaining pen-friends - check!
Replacing the ink in my CD/DVD printer - check!
Burning mandriva 2010.0 for both 64bit and 32bit (for work) including printing on the DVD - check!
Upgrading my home Linux to Mandriva 2010.0, including backing up and restoring my personal database, and setting up everything anew - check!
Paying for driver's license renewal - check! But I still need to have my photo taken. They are using a different method or something, and everybody has to have a new digital photo.

On another note altogether: I feel sorry for Illiad. And I'll miss UserFriendly. I'm not going to hang around and wait for an occasional cartoon, and I'm pretty sure he won't be back full time - he'll drift away from the whole thing and get used to not having UserFriendly in his life.

That last storyline was really painful to follow and I was quite relieved that he kept Sid alive. I'd have probably dropped out if Sid was to go through the final stages of cancer with all the pain and loss of autonomy involved. I'm sure Illiad felt the same. And now I have to drop out because he is abandoning UserFriendly. Too bad.

Good grief...

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 21:23:33 GMT

War Is Peace
Freedom Is Slavery
Ignorance Is Strength
And Israel is going to have a central, mandatory biometric database.

This in a country whose central population registry database is already being sold around the Internet to whoever needs it, as they can't seem to be able to secure it properly.

They are getting younger and younger....

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 15:38:57 GMT

So you all know that I've been studying Japanese for several years now. I can read about 1400 kanji more or less. One day, my co-worker (who reads this journal... Hi there!) approaches me with his cellphone. "Can you tell me what this says?" he asks me, showing me a photo of a piece of fabric printed with the kanji 私変態. I take a look, and reply "It's not grammatical, but it basically says "I'm a pervert".

"What?!"

"'I'm a pervert'. The first character means 'I', the other two mean 'pervert'", where did you get that from, anyway?

"It's on my 1.5 years old daughter's shirt!"

After LOLing for about 15 minutes straight, I kind of demanded that he get me a photo of the complete shirt so I can send it to Hanzi Smatter. And here is the shirt, complete with the cute, luckless 1.5 years old "hentai" herself. I did send it to Hanzi Smatter, but I'm not sure they'll publish.

I mean, yes, I have seen intentionally-made "hentai" shirts around the web. Adults buy them and wear them for the laughs. I have something of the sort with a yaoi joke on it. But who in his right mind would put this on a toddler's shirt, and sell it in a children's clothing store rather than a joke shop? I can't imagine.

Edit: It has been published!

I read the following in Scientific American

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 09:57:53 GMT

A new theory to reconcile relativity with quantum mechanics.

I nearly fell off my chair. I am not a scientist, but the long standing inability to reconcile two successful theories describing the world has been bugging me, as I'm sure it has bugged both scientists and science fans like me. Things like string theory just didn't seem to cut it.

What I really loved about it is that if it's true (or at least if its final rendition is sufficiently supported... you know what science is like) then we can do away with the concepts of "dark matter" and "dark energy". I really didn't like these two, and I was gnashing my teeth every time I saw them mentioned in astronomy articles as fact. They smelled to me from the beginning like modern-day ether, phlogiston, or caloric. Of course, I'm the layperson so I can't argue with respectable scientists that say there is much more dark matter in the universe than there is everyday matter. But dark matter, like God, is not very explanatory (if it exists, how does it fit into the standard model of particle physics? What other properties does it have? Why don't we run into it around Earth?).

So if they find a robust theory that does away with these pair of mysterious entities, I'll be a happy kitten. Not that I'll ever be able to understand the maths of phase change which are used in the aforementioned theory. But at least it seems to fit in better with Occam's razor.

In the reconciliation of the theory of relativity and quantum theory, it was pretty certain that one of them would have to give. My candidate was relativity, because Einstein has been wrong several times in his arguments with quantum theory, and most of his arguments were based on things that he didn't like - action at a distance, non-determinism, etc. Seems like in this new theory it is, indeed, relativity that has to give way, just as Newtonian mechanics did before it. Poor Einstein. His relativity was his masterpiece, and yet he got his Nobel prize for quantum physics, which he disdained for the rest of his life because he considered it merely a mathematical approximation - his own phlogiston - and that the truth will out eventually. If this new theory is true, then it turns out that relativity was the approximation.

(And now some real physicist will drop me a comment to tell me that I understood this all backwards and I have no idea what I'm talking about. Which may well be true...)

A thread from the "Little Question" forum in Tapuz

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 14:51:51 GMT

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:

Q: A puddle question.
I was wondering how all those colors appear in a puddle where there is oil or fuel.

Skeptic: Rainbow colors?
A thin film of oil is created on the water. It's the same sort of phenomena as rainbow colors reflecting in soap bubbles. Light beams that hit the film are part reflected, and part is reflected from the underside of the film. Some are even reflected again and again. The reflections create an interference, and since the different wave lengths create different interference patterns, stripes of colors are created on the film.

DS: Can I get a few explanations for technical terms in your answer?
Please explain the following in simple words:
Film,
Interference,
Different wavelengths,
Interference pattern,
Rainbow colors,
Rainbow colors reflecting in soap bubbles.
Thank you.

Skeptic: Only some of these are technical terms
And I do believe you are familiar with all of them.

DS: And so, what is the connection between them and what the top poster asked?
If I asked, why do you assume I know the answer? And anyway, how do all the films and interferences combine into an answer to the poster's question?

Skeptic: I assume you know the answer
...because from past replies you made in the forum I deduce that you know your way around science.
And the original poster's question was about the origin of the colors in a puddle with oil or fuel. To which I answered, that if she means the rainbow colors rather than a pigment resulting from the oil or fuel, then the answer is so-and-so.

DS: And therefore I wonder why those who don't know, reply.
I do know a bit about science and I have a few degrees in various subjects including physics. And yet I do not presume to answer every question on every subject like some people on this forum. Some people know everything about everything (in their own opinion), and it's a pity that they should mislead innocent people who post questions.
You can find answers on anything on the Internet (simplified answers) but most of them are in English, so a forum like this is important, where people can ask and answer.
My recommendation - let those who know their stuff answer, not those who got their education from Wikipedia.
Regarding the colors in water, the whole story is in the wonderful complexity of the rays of the sun, the source of Life on Earth. The rays of the sun are electromagnetic waves that contain the whole spectrum of colors including those visible to the human eye. There are two principles that create the rainbow [wikipedia link] that we see - Refraction [wikipedia link] and Reflection [wikipedia link].
In simple words, the ray of sun that hits various materials is refracted and changes its angle, and then reflected, and since every color wave is refracted at a different angle, it is also reflected in a different angle. So we see the colors ordered one by one.
When there are spots of oil or fuel, they float on the water (because they are lighter than water) they create a smooth surface which is a great medium for refracting and reflecting the sun's rays.

Skeptic: Excuse me, you are wrong.
The principles that determine the creation of rainbow colors in an oil film on water are reflection - as you said - and interference.
[link to a relevant page on some university's site]
The description you gave, of rays of the sun refracting and reflecting at different angles, are true for a true rainbow (refracted in distant rain drops), not for the oil-on-water phenomenon.
And I do not appreciate your attempt to entrap me with leading questions. You think me wrong? Come right out and say so. And write your evidence, instead of creating a whole thread with the intention of getting me to "confess my error" - especially given that I did not err.

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.

If there's any time I hate being alone, it's when I'm sick.

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 21:16:35 GMT

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).

Strange dream

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 08:35:46 GMT

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.

The interconnectedness of all things

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 15:42:14 GMT

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.

I can't believe it's raining on New Years'!

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 05:49:14 GMT

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.

Sad.

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 05:11:41 GMT

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.

I knew there were many pirates in Israel

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 12:23:26 GMT

...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.

Free entrance to universities.

Sat, 29 Aug 2009 10:36:14 GMT

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?

A funny picture I picked up in one of the forums.

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 19:34:04 GMT

Sign spotted in Stockholm:

Meme stolen from OZDragonLady

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 15:50:30 GMT

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.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (X)
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (X)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (X)
4 Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling (X)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee ()
6 The Bible (X) - The Jewish version, except the parts in Aramaic.
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte ()
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (X)
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman ()
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens ()

Total so far: 6/10

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (X)
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy ()
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller ()
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare ()
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier ()
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (X)
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk ()
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger ()
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger ( )
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot ()

Total so far: 8/20

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (X)
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald ()
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens ()
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy ()
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (X)
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (X) - Mostly high school punishment.
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck ()
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (X)
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame ()

Total so far: 12/30

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy ()
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens (X)
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (X)
34 Emma - Jane Austen (X)
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen (X)
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (X)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini ()
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres ()
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden ()
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne (X)

Total so far: 18/40

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell (X)
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown ()
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez ()
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving ()
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins ()
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery () - though I read "Anne of Avonlea"
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy ()
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood ()
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding (X) - Another high school punishment
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan ()

Total so far: 20/50

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel ()
52 Dune - Frank Herbert (X)
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons ()
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen (X)
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth ()
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon ()
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens ()
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley ()
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime - Mark Haddon ()
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez ()

Total so far: 21/60

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck ()
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (X)
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt ()
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold ()
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (X)
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac ()
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy ()
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding ()
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie ()
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville ()

Total so far: 22/70

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens ()
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker ()
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (X)
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson ()
75 Ulysses - James Joyce ()
76 The Inferno – Dante Alighieri ()
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome ()
78 Germinal - Emile Zola ()
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray ()
80 Possession - AS Byatt ()

Total so far: 23/80

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens ()
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell ()
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker ()
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro ()
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert ()
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry ()
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White (X)
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom ()
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (X)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton ()

Total so far: 25/90

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad ()
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (X)
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks ()
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams (X)
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole ()
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute ()
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas (X)
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare ()
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl ()
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (X)

Total 29/100

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.

Sit around the fire while I tell you a ghost story...

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 11:34:25 GMT

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.

At the time, we had one taxi driver in my town, call him ZH, who served those who needed to go places in a hurry and could afford the privilege of a taxi - which wasn't trivial in that small town and in those days. If you needed to go to hospital, 35km away in Beer-Sheva, but the emergency didn't mandate an ambulance - ZH was your man. I sort of knew him personally. My mom signed me up to learn playing the recorder a bit late. So in order to catch up, she asked one of her pupils, a 10 years old (I was 8 at the time) girl named A, to teach me the recorder. A was ZH's daughter, and so I got to visit her home, and even saw him there once or twice - though we tried to stay out of his way. She seemed a bit scared of him, and said he tended to be angry. I could understand that - my dad was also a threatening figure.

Later I joined the class my mom was teaching (when she left it) so we became classmates as well.

Well, when we were in middle school, one day I was told the following story by a breathless classmate:

"Did you hear what happened to ZH a few days ago? He was driving his taxi on the Beer-Sheva road during the night, when he saw this woman at the side of the road. He stopped and saw that she was stark naked. So he gave her his jacket, and although she didn't have any money on her, offered to drive her home. She was a Beduine girl. So she told him where to go, and when they saw the tents of her family near the road, he stopped and she thanked him and left. The next day he decided to go there and see if she is alright, besides, she had his jacket, you know. He asked about her by name - and told the story - but they were very upset and said that their daughter, by that name, died many years ago. He couldn't believe it so he asked them to take him to her grave, and so they did. And you know what they found on the tombstone? The jacket!"

I was 10 years old, so I was still apt to believe in ghosts or at least "weird inexplicable phenomena". Nevertheless I asked what A is saying about it. I was told that she was denying it. I tried to ask her myself, but she got very upset and told me not to ask her about that story. So I marked it in my brain as a "Well, maybe".

I only learned that this was a common ghost story (in fact, it was given to me as an example for the term "urban legend") years later. Poor ZH, being the only taxi driver in town, had the dubious honor which is usually spared the hero of an urban legend - to be specifically named and pointed as the "taxi driver" of the story.

In the Japanese version I read yesterday the woman was a young girl, she wasn't naked and there was no jacket, but the taxi driver brought her home, and waited for her to get the cab fare from her mom. When she didn't, he asked the lady of the house for it, only to find out that her daughter died a few days previously, at the spot where he picked her up. The part with the jacket, but without a taxi driver, seems also to be popular around the Interwebs.

And what has become of ZH? Last that I saw him was couple of years after my parents divorced. He drove me to my mom's place and sadly talked about his daughter A, who has become religious and distanced herself from the family. Shortly afterward, ZH was murdered by his son. It turned out that there were years of domestic violence hidden in the house where I learned my first recorder lessons, and eventually the son broke and murdered the violent father.

One version of the story was that ZH had an argument about money with his son, and that's why the son murdered him, but that afterward the family united to help the son and sell the court the story about domestic violence, so that they don't lose both a husband and a son (a father and a brother) at the same time. ZH was always cheerful and not very threatening when I saw him in his capacity as a taxi driver. And he seemed to be genuinely sorry about his daughter's rift with the family. But then, I remember how scared A was of him during those recorder lessons, and how she told me to watch out for the creak of his artificial joint that would tell us that he is arriving. I don't know the truth of the matter. The son turned psychotic for a while after the murder. The court psychiatrist said he was "controlled by the 'device'" (the artificial joint, I think - the family members referred to it as the "device" in their testimony).

So there is a totally different ghost story for you.

Hehe...

Sun, 09 Aug 2009 14:18:23 GMT

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.

Just came back from the rally.

Sat, 08 Aug 2009 20:56:26 GMT

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.

Two days gone...

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 17:20:15 GMT

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.

Much awaited vacation starts

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 20:06:00 GMT

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.

Attack on gay community center in Tel-Aviv

Sun, 02 Aug 2009 12:44:05 GMT

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.

It took hours, but I did it.

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 20:02:37 GMT

It all started when I innocently added something to this colorful spreadsheet, and printed it out. The title line there is supposed to be bright orange. It came out a dull peach. This is the second time this has happened. So I decided to get to the bottom of this, and after printing various test pages, I came to the conclusion that magenta was faded. It was faded mostly about a quarter of the page on the left, and a quarter on the right, with better results in the middle. Running all sorts of cleaning and stuff didn't work.

We are talking about a color laser printer here - HP 2600n. These are economy printers - but they are not as cheap as inkjets. Anyway, the problem didn't seem to be in the toners, which were 67% full. So I started to look for a solution on the 'net.

Turns out, that this line of printers suffers from a design defect. A fan located near the laser assembly causes dust to blow inside it, and the mirrors that face upward collect dust - especially the bottom one, which - you guessed it - controls mostly the magenta part of the image.

And apparently, the way to solve it doesn't appear even in the service manuals. But a dude on the HP forums suggested that it was just a matter of removing the back panels, getting at the laser assembly, and cleaning up the mirrors.

So I started doing that. There are 9 screws that hold the back sheet metal cover on the printer. There are 11 screws that hold the metal mount behind it, where two circuits sit, with lots of wiring and stuff. By this time I was not so sure of myself, so I consulted the same thread again, only to realize that someone actually posted a PDF guide on the required disassembly. And I missed a couple of steps and removed wiring which I shouldn't have. Anyway, after about 2 hours I managed to get at the laser assembly. Those mirrors are beautiful little copper-colored strips - and sure enough, two of them were covered in dust. I cleaned, and then I had to close everything up.

By this time I had missed my lunch, and my usual ride to the non-kosher supermarket for my meat. I was tired and hungry. So I wasn't paying attention too well. I closed everything up... and I had an extra screw left, which is never a good sign. I hooked up the printer. Quite surprisingly, as far as the electronics went, everything was working. No error messages, everything was normal...

Only, now it printed only a bit of faded black and yellow, mostly on the right side of the page. No magenta, no cyan, and no left half of the pag. I contemplated suicide. Then I contemplated buying a new printer - and found that ones without net connection and very slow to print costs about $200. Blah.

So I decided to take a look at the same thread again, to see if I'm the only one who got screwed following the procedure. And sure enough, there were other people complaining of the same, to various degrees. The one who gave the advice said "I don't know - you must have done something wrong, do it again". And in fact, they did, and it worked.

At this point I decided that ~~lunch~~supper was in order, and made myself one before I dropped. After lunch I felt better, so I decided to go for it again, and this time follow the instructions in the guide very carefully. It didn't take as long this time (especially since I already knew what to disconnect and what not etc.) Turns out I didn't make sure the laser assembly was seated properly. I put one of the screws in the wrong hole, and the whole thing was rattling a bit, when it should be totally immobile. So this time I carefully seated it, supported it and screwed it in, and indeed it wasn't moving anywhere. 25 screws later, and I was ready to test again. Oh, and this time I was left without any spare screws. :)

And it worked! It worked! The printer now prints beautiful, rich magentas and reds, anywhere on the page, along with all the other colors. And the spreadsheet now has its nice orange title.

But oops, it's 23:00. :-O

My PC is trying to drive me crazy.

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 07:28:32 GMT

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.

On the fringes of a fraud case

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 08:18:50 GMT

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...".