I think Bush does this kind of shit on purpose.

The word “challenges” — a main theme of a two-day White House economic conference that ended on Thursday — was misspelled on a large television monitor that stood in front of Bush during a panel discussion.

“Financial Challanges for Today and Tomorrow,” the message proclaimed in dark blue capital letters against a bright yellow background.

Now the news cycle will be occupied with deriding Bush’s many ‘challanges,’ rather than demonstrating that his policies are bankrupting the government, and losing people their jobs.

In response to my rant about the intelligent design news thing on TV, Brendaclews said this: “I don’t know what ‘logic’ is, but it’s pretty much been used to justify everything imaginable, including ‘scientific metaphors’ for existence.  I like the idea of a middle position that accepts aspects at least of both positions, not one that mixes it all up into some grey heap.”

I understand this position. The middle position seems to be a reasonable guiding principle in a lot of things. You don’t want to put too much butter on your toast, but you also don’t want too little. If the violin string is too tight, it will make the wrong note, and if it’s too lose you can’t even play it. It’s perfectly reasonable to say that the yin and the yang of something should be in balance. Balance is good.

However, there are some times when that sort of balance doesn’t make sense at all. Like, if you’re reasoning with a kidnapper, do you tell the kidnapper it’ll be OK if they merely maim the victim, instead of killing them? This is an extreme example, but it points out the logical fallacy I was talking about: The fallacy of middle ground.

In some discussion there *is no* valid middle ground. If I say black is black, and you say white is black, then neither of us will be right if we split the difference and agree that grey is black. We’d be comitting the fallacy of the middle ground.

This isn’t to argue that intelligent design is or isn’t valid, just to give a more level-headed description of the fallacy.

As for scientific metaphors for existence, they’re pretty hard to ignore. But science is open-ended, and can accept a lot of things, like 13-dimensional reality and matter made up of vibrating strings. So when scientists come up with anything new, like for instance the theory of intelligent design, other scientists examine it, kick the tires, drive it around the block, and then buy it. Or pronounce it a lemon, and leave it in the guy’s driveway dripping oil on the cement.

And, apropos of nothing, here’s what a Meyer-Optik Gorlitz Domiplan 50/2.8 lens looks like when you take it apart:

I had to unstick the aperture. It had too much oil, which caused the leaves to stick together. In the picture, the leaves are the little L-shaped things in the middle. You have to carefully place them on a tiny metal ring, with another tiny metal ring that rotates underneath them. Once you’ve done that, you have a…. sphincter.

It’s all back together now, humming along happily.

Oh yeah… I finally got my test rolls developed for the Pentax. Just fine, no light leaks. Maybe a little overexposed, but that could be the cheap-ass film I was using. At the camera store where I got this stuff developed, they had my camera used, no lens, for ~$80. That puts me ahead by $68. Granted, their specimen was in much better cosmetic shape, but I like the dings and wear on mine.

On one of the rolls is an image that has this story attached: I was driving around taking pictures of nothing. Like, the car in front of me at the stop light. A tree in the median. Even a gas station.

So these guys pull out of the gas station, squealing tires. They shoot me the bird, and one guy yells, “Take a picture of this!!” I had already put the camera away, so I didn’t get the pic. They zoom down and end up at the stop light. And when I’m at the stop light, I’m sitting right next to them. They’re not quite sure what to do, being 20-something nerdy geeks (this being Bellvue/Redmond, home of Microsoft). They fidget around, and I pick up my camera. Roll down the window. “Hey, could you guys do that again? I didn’t get it last time.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah.”

So they do. And here it is:

Someone call me at 11am (Pacific!) and let it ring until I wake up, OK? I want to be the inverse of Glenn Gould. He was a famous pianist who’s been retroactively diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome so that there are AS role models to cite. Anyway, he’d call people and just talk to them for hours and hours and hours, completely non-stop. Mostly his friends and family, but also random people from the phone book sometimes.

Thinking about Glenn Gould always makes me think about a quote from Temple Grandin: “Genius is an abnormality.”

So is insomnia.

Oh, and I’ve decided I want one of these. My dad used to have one (might still), and I wish I’d asked him to borrow it from time to time. ~$50 on ebay… Maybe after Xmastime. Or not. Whatever.

I just watched the most amazing thing on TV.

I had just turned it on, and there was a discussion of the ‘intelligent design theory’ on a morning TV pseudo-news show. The show is news lite, pure fluff. This was my local UPN station, but the show is the nationally-syndicated Daily Buzz.

There’s a graphic on the screen behind the desk, and it has the words ‘Intelligent Design’ on it. There’s a guy and a young woman sitting at the desk. So the guy says… And he’s got to be in his early 30s, and is acting like a frat boy on crystal meth… And what he says is something like this: “And there are renouned scientists… I mean, many scientists, myself included, that believe in the existence of God…”

And this is where the bubbly blonde next to him nods her head, and looks kinda worried, maybe, like she’s not sure whether it’s OK to be talking about God on TV when you’re behind a desk on a set delivering the news and latest Hollywood gossip, but the show is suppsed to be laid back and anything-goes, so….

But the guy goes on: “…believe in the existence of God, and believe that there’s no way, if you look at the complexity of the universe, that it could not have been designed by a higher power.” He goes on to quote some scientist who says that DNA is too complex to be the product of evolution. So I just GUESS THAT SETTLES IT, HUH?

Now, I’m OK with this. The guy has his opinion, and that’s fine. And he can talk about it if he wants to, but he’s also betraying the tattered threads of respectibility of the show he’s on. The show isn’t about responsibility. It ceased to be about responsibility or news when he came down on any side of this issue. Of course, it’s not really a news show, it’s news lite, because it’s BuzzTV or whatever. So I can give him some leeway here, for not clearly marking his editorial as an editorial. Boy’s got a meth problem, after all, and we all know how hard that can be. But what happened next was what truly amazed me:

The bubbly blonde chimed in. She made the classic fallacy of middle ground: “Well, it seems to me that on one end you’ve got evolution, and on the other end you’ve got creationism, and this theory goes right in the middle, and balances everything nicely.”

My neighbors had to have heard me scream at the TV… “FALLACY OF THE MIDDLE GROUND!! FALLACY OF THE MIDDLE GROUND!!” I went to the show’s web site, and it turns out this woman has a degree in political science. I guess logic and politics don’t mix. And if dude’s a scientist, he should have spotted it immediately and said, “Uh, actually, you just comitted a fallacy, Andrea. See, the two theories aren’t exactly exclusive, but they do present different positions. Offering what looks like a compromise between them won’t necessarily reveal the truth, especially since they could both be wrong. But you knew that because our web site says you have a degree in political science.” And then she should have said, “Well, our web site says you have a degree in biology, so you must be right, John! I was just keeping you on your toes, Mr. Science! I’m so glad we have these science stories, so that we can illustrate logical fallacies.”

But what he actually said was: “Mitch, what’s the weather looking like?”

What can I say. I’m sleep deprived.

Crap.

Crap crap crap.

I’m still up.

Crappity crap crap crap.

Sometimes even chamomile and valerian tea won’t do it. I’ll have to get some valerian root to chew on. Before long I’ll be mainlining it. The inverse of crank.

I really hate going to bed just as the sun’s coming up. I really hate the prospect of staying up an extra 18 hours in order to try and set the sleep cycle. I really hate going to bed at 2am and not being able to sleep because my body wants to be up for another four hours and my mind is racing.

And I really hate chamomile and valerian tea. And not drinking coffee.

When browsing around on ebay, you might find some food for thought if you search on ‘m42 lens.’

M42 was the Pentax/Praktica screw-mount standard which predated Pentax’ K-mount system. M42 was widely copied all over the world, because it’s a good system. Screw the lens in, and the camera mechanism will poke at a little button on the inside of the lens which closes the aperture to the right setting during exposure. That’s all there is to it.

As an American, one might think that cameras only come from Kodak, Polaroid, and the Pacific rim, but there are all kinds of strange and interesting things to be seen in terms of Soviet-era M42 lenses. And cameras, too, but I’m concentrating on lenses here.

The reason I’m writing this whole thing is because I came across this lens that looks like a pipe fitting. It’s currently residing in Krasnodar, Kudan in the Russian Federation. The ad has fractured English like this:

MIR-1 is wide-angle coated lens for Soviet SLR ZENIT cameras, it was introduced in 50-th years and had a Gran Prix at Brussels in 1958. Same lenses still produce for a present time and a lot of photo-shooters still buy it.
In the main, most all Soviet lenses are exceptionally good and this one is no exception!
…But there is exist opinion that lenses signed “GRAND PRIX” is more better than latest…

Nothing like truth in advertising! And of course Soviet lenses are exceptional.

But what really caught my attention was this:

GAMMA RADIATION CONTROL SUCCESSFULLY PASSED!
Every item was tested with high-quality Soviet ANRI-01-02 radiometer, gamma-radiation was in limits from 4 up to 16 micro-Roentgen per hour.
No any Chernobyl’s souvenir will received with this item!

Yikes! Is there a gray market in technology gleaned illegally from Chernobyl?

Reading through some of these ads, I want to go to eastern Europe and buy cameras and lenses at flea markets. I’d need a new suitcase to fill with the things. I’d get them just because they looked like Sputnik. Or a prop from ‘Stalker.’ I might need to pick up a Geiger counter, too.

A little while ago I posted about a guy who had taken large-format photographs of all the US national parks. I’ve been browsing through them every now and then, and I was checking out the Smokies today.

Which reminded me of the Nantahala River, which runs near the Smokies. It’s a popular whitewater rafting and canoeing destination for folks on that side of the country, including my uncle Bill. And thinking about my uncle Bill reminded me of a picture I have of him here on xanga, so here it is:

Update: Cordelia asks if this pic is from Nantahala Village. It’s not. It’s Echo Lodge.

Geekery:

Installing mysql on my Mac.

I used fink, which contains apt-get. ‘sudo apt-get install mysql’ did the trick. The package created a mysql user and a mysql group.

I had a less than easy time learning that I can’t follow the instructions and launch mysqld as myself on my machine. That is, I had to sudo launch it. So I’m thinking to myself, it sure would be nice if I could have this thing autolaunch at bootup, wouldn’t it? A little googling leads me here: ‘Start MySQL at startup (revisited),’ which I haven’t completely done yet, for a few reasons.

The first reason is that I couldn’t simply create the directories and text files necessary to perform all those steps. And the reason for that: the fink installer set all the mysql-related directories to be accessible only to user ‘mysql.’ Since ‘sudo cd’ doesn’t work (and a good thing, too), I had a choice: Either change all the permissions to let me get access, or learn how to add the mysql group to my user permissions (and change all the permissions anyway, since they didn’t allow access to the group, either).

I decided on the latter, since it meant I got to learn something. So I scoured the internet, with searches like ‘add group to user’ and ‘gid groups passwd.’ There’s a suite of linux utilities with names like chgrp and addgrp which seemed like they might help me out, but no luck; they’re not part of Darwin.

I was moaning about the seeming lack of a how-to anywhere out there on the internet about this topic. Then I finally looked at /etc/passwd, only to find that my username isn’t even in it! That’s when I remembered: NetInfo. netinfo is Apple’s kinda-funky kinda-cool replacement for just about everything that would be in /etc in a linux installation. It’s a database you consult and modify. It’s very complicated, and as one commenter on a message board says: ‘It’s not rocket science, but it IS brain surgery.’

A few googles later, and I was here, learning such commands as ‘sudo niload group / <groups.txt’.

Now I can navigate /sw/var/mysql with impunity! Muaahahahaha!!! (Small accomplishments seem so much more important when it takes you way too much effort to acheive them.)

Looking around on craigslist for a place to live, I found this ad which led eventually to this web site.

That’s Free Ride Cabs. The premise: If you’ve got a Checker cab, you might as well drive people around for fun. I like it.

Also, according to tribe.net, I’m four degrees of separation away from the guy. Marco, you are my social nexus!

And, in my secret heart of hearts, I’m hoping, nay, praying that this one decides to change their gender requirements. Especially after reading the email I sent them. This is pretty much exactly the house I’ve always visualized as the place I live.