Our baby girl (Kaija Elizabeth) was born at home yesterday afternoon, October 29, at 1:20 PM. She weighs 8 lbs. 5 oz. (3770 g) and is 21 inches (53 cm.) long. Mom and baby are doing well, but everyone’s sleep is disrupted … finally I have a good excuse for not posting!
Here’s a picture of me cleaning her just after she was born.
Popup Image (60k)
The first snow of the season fell on Wednesday. It was beautiful, even though I almost killed myself twice: once driving, once crossing the street. The next morning (yesterday) there was enough snow piled on the roofs to make a flurry effect when the wind picked it up and blew it around.
I broke out the winter jacket yesterday — I needed it while I was sweeping off my walk.
And another thing happened yesterday: our baby was born.
Another anti-smoker comes out of the closet: Damian Penny on the smoking ban in Newfoundland, and “how filthy cigarette smoke can be.”
I think spitting is a good analogy. Don’t think about the public health concerns– consider that for many years, cigarettes were expensive and tobacco-chewing was much more popular than it is now.
Your right to smoke in a restaurant, 2003 = a man’s right to spit a plug of tobacco on a barbershop floor, 1950.
The difference is that in years gone by, when the majority of citizens choose to limit tobacco users’ freedom to dirty up places of public assembly, the tobacco users took it like men. But now, after the “me decade” and the “sensitive 90’s kind of guy” movements, they’ve learned how to whine (and even how to cast smoking as a libertarian slippery slope/rights issue, and we’ll never hear the end of it.
Penny ends with this great quote:
You may think you need to smoke - but sometimes I need to piss, and I don’t have a right to do that in public.
which reminds me of the Steve Martin routine: “Do you mind if I smoke?”
“Do you mind if I puke on your shoes?”
Read the following two excerpts:
I don’t know of any member of the press who has taken notice yet of one particular guiding principle in the merger agreement, though I can assure you that many thousands of Western voters already have. The new Conservative Party is committed to seeking
A balance between fiscal accountability, progressive social policy and individual rights and responsibilities.
Fancy that! They took the “Progressivity” out of the Progressive Conservative name and installed it under the hood instead. I’m pretty progressive myself on social policy, but I never asked to have my views implemented by means of a swindle.
Now the other:
On the other other hand, the agreement-in-principle between the two parties confirms that the
Steven Den Beste writes, on the subject of random text in spam e-mail:
I don’t think [bypassing the filter is] what they’re trying to do when they include a lot of irrelevant prose from books or newspaper articles. I think they’re trying to attack the filter directly. The goal isn’t to increase the positive score for that particular message, it’s to try to poison the filter. By including a lot of relatively normal text in what gets classified as spam, they hope it will start tagging legitimate mail as also being spam. If the false-positive rate is too high, the user will stop using the tool no matter how good it is at rejecting spam.
I first noted these random-etext spams a couple of months ago. Since I’ve told my e-mail client to prefer the text over the HTML portion of the message, I usually see the random text instead of whatever message the spammer is trying to send.
My impression is that this text was included so that different spam messages would have different checksums. Some anti-spam methods make a blacklist of known spam by storing a message hash calculated on the body of the e-mail. An anti-spam filter can check an incoming message against this blacklist by computing the same message hash and asking the blacklist server if the server knows that hash. (Vipul’s Razor is such a system, which I use through SpamAssassin.)
The spammer’s countermeasure against checksumming is to make every message unique, so each message will have a different checksum. First they tried something which could be called “gratuitous uniqueness”, where random characters are added to each spam message to make it unique. I suspect this is why spam e-mail always has garbage characters at the end of the Subject: line. Similarly, a few garbage characters can be added to the beginning or the end of the message body to defeat a body-only checksum.
Vipul’s Razor employs (actually, employed) a fuzzy signature algorithm precisely to defeat small changes which create uniqueness. It also randomly samples a the message, hashing only a portion of it to compute the signature. This approach works around small changes to make the message unique.
I believe the the inclusion of large passages of English text (drawn from etext archives, articles, etc.) is in part a countermeasure against fuzzy and random signatures. I note that Vipul’s Razor has currently suspended the use of its fuzzy algorithm and is only sampling; a new algorithm is under development. Luckily for me, spamassassin also uses a Bayes filter like the one Den Beste describes.
In any case, good luck to Steven and his new toy.
I haven’t seen any mention of this at the blogs I usually read (not even Instapundit), but an El Al jet was diverted from Ontario twice in the last two days. On Thursday, westbound, routing Tel Aviv - Toronto - LAX, the jet was diverted to Montreal and then to Hamilton before continuing to LA; on the eastbound flight the next day, the plane stopped in Hamilton instead of Toronto before returning to Tel Aviv.
The reason in both cases was a security threat to El Al aircraft at Ontario’s Pearson airport. More information in Google News. The best article at this time was this one from the London (Ontario, Canada) Free Press.
The worst one has got to be this one from an outfit called Airwise News: Canada Assessing Future of El Al Toronto Flights
Canada said on Friday it was assessing the future of El Al flights to Toronto after one of the Israeli airline’s planes was diverted twice because of an unspecified security threat.
Assessing? What, Canada is going to disallow El Al to fly to Toronto because of a threat against the airline? Are we blaming the victim yet?
“This was a specific threat against El Al at Pearson Airport. I want to assure travelers that there is not a problem with traveling to Pearson, to Toronto.”
Unless the travelers are Jews. That’s the subtext of Transport Minister David Collenette’s remarks here — no specific threat, unless you’re a Jew or flying from Israel.
A spokesman at the Israeli embassy in Ottawa said Israel was fully co-operating with the investigation.
And this is news because… why? For some reason did Airwise News expect Israel to not cooperate? Maybe I’m missing the part where Israel has a long history of failing to take terrorist threats seriously.
Things like this drive me nuts.
In other news, no baby yet.
UPDATE: 2003/10/25
lgf has picked it up.
No baby yet.
But apparently I inhabit the same parallel universe as Colby, for I too have personally witnessed no anti-semitism in my adult life. Of course that may be a function of where I’ve lived: Palo Alto, CA; Santa Monica, CA; Edmonton, Alberta. Or maybe the circles I move in, though I did attend grad school at UC Berkeley (briefly!).
Perhaps there is an explanation, though. In a flip-side version of the “passing” stories Meryl Yourish mentions (where someone who is Jewish but doesn’t “look Jewish” might hear casual anti-semitic comments), it might be that I look Jewish and this discourages anti-semites from spouting off around me. I confess that I don’t really know what “jewish” looks like, but I do look Eastern European or Slavic, and it’s certainly possible that someone could mistake that for a semitic look.
Of course, these notional anti-semites would have to be exceedingly delicate and polite. I assume that belligerent, mouth-foaming anti-semites, if they suspected I was a Jew, would shout ethnic slurs at me or threaten me. Haven’t run into a lot of that, either.
I know that anti-semitism exists; it’s easy to find on the Internet, for one. I don’t know many Arabs or Muslims, and the few I do I don’t know well enough to talk politics with. Certainly I expect if the subject came up, it would lead to an argument.
But casual anti-semitism from North Americans of European ancestry, I don’t see. Phrases like “jew him down” or “shylock” — never heard them. The casual anti-Semitism of civil society described here is something I just don’t encounter.
No baby yet.
But I think Burke needs one of these.
Surely you’ve heard by now that researchers at the University of Alberta figured out how to turn water into electricity? No?
Lucky you — you haven’t been subjected to the barrage of science illiteracy flooding the news.
Here’s an article which actually explains the technology. It’s a new method of generating electric current from a pressure difference; or if you prefer, converting mechanical energy to electrical energy.
Obviously energy is not created nor destroyed. Just as obviously, you need to have more energy available from the pressure than you get in the generated current. This is a direct consequence of the laws of thermodynamics: energy is conserved, entropy is increasing.
As it turns out, the process is only 1% efficient, which is to say that 99% of the energy available is lost. Compare this with the traditional method of converting pressure to current — i.e., magnetic generators like those in dams — which are over 90% efficient. Clearly some effort needs to be made here: microfluidics-powered cell phone batteries are not coming soon to your pocket.
It’s still a cool technology, and it’s still exciting. The University’s press release actually has a pretty good perspective on it. It’s a new way of generating current that hasn’t been described in the literature before. But if you’re only getting 1-2 microamps from 3/100 of an atmosphere, even if it scales linearly, you’d need 10 atmospheres to get 6 milliamps. And if the efficiency went up from 1% to 90%, you’d be getting .5 amps — you could almost power my cell phone charger for that. Of course, you’ll have to keep that head pressure sustained while you’re drawing charge, so expect to take a pressure tank with you wherever you’re going… oh, did you want to fly on a plane?
Nor labor either. Baby without labor would probably be nice, but labor without baby — especially extended — is not so nice, I’ve heard.
In other news: I called my doctor’s office and asked if they wanted the stone I passed to analyze. They said they don’t usually do that (WTF?) but they’ll give me a call back when the doctor gets back into town. If they don’t want it to analyze, I think I’ll have it encased in lucite — or else stuffed and mounted over the fireplace.
Sunday evening I spent an hour turning my wife’s younger sister (my other sister-in-law) on to 80’s rock. She mostly listens to country, but she’s started to like country/rock crossover (Chris LeDoux), and so she wanted more stuff like that. She was nine, I guess, when Nevermind came out, so of course she has no memory of Bon Jovi, Van Halen, Def Leppard, and them all. I don’t really appreciate them as much as I should: at the time, I was listening to new wave and punk. Only since we moved here have I realized that I really like 80’s rock, and that’s because the only radio station I can listen to here has a rock/hard rock format.
I also got something out of it: she loaned me a Toby Keith CD, and I finally got to listen to the famous “Angry American” song.
Back to work.