Author: dev7

one of the known effects of certain pollutants is to emulate the effects of estrogen. you could easily track this if certain data about the epidemiology of cancer were more widely available. its amazing in this era of the internet and instant information, how hard it is to find a fucking map showing the distribution of cancer by type and location. all the sites that once had such maps have been shut down most forcefully and/or been redirected to sites with a .gov domain. very peculiar. international sites with such maps give mysterious 404 errors. how odd. try a google search for “cancer maps” or “cancer epidemiology” and after you’re done scratching your head, give me a call.
in any case, one of the inferred consequences of this effect is to induce an increased incidence of breast cancer and possibly also cervical and uterine cancers in women. one of my own suspicions is that its also a lurking variable in the increased incidence of homosexuality among men in certain areas. you have to look not so much at the adult homosexual communities, that is, not where these people wound up, but rather where they grew up. I suspect that if you did, you’d find clusters that mapped very well with the corresponding maps for breast cancer in women. that is, if you could find such maps, which you can’t. most peculiar.

cities on I-40 (with intersecting and overlapping us highways…)
wilmington
raleigh
greensboro, nc 74
knoxville
nashville
memphis 412
little rock 412
norman, ok. (412 veers north to tulsa)
amarillo 70, 34
albequerque 84, 54
flagstaff 191
bakersfield 95, 93
I-40 doesn’t quite make coast to coast, at least as defined by I-95 and I-5.
it starts in a nowhere’s ville called wrightsville beach, goes through fine n.c. towns like watha, magnolia and newton grove, before it gets to raleigh. why is there an interstate going through there, anyway? have you ever been there? it largely follows the route of the old american and north carolina railroad, carrying slave cotton and tobacco to northern markets, but nevermind that
at an indeterminate point west of grensboro, and it dies nowhere east of california city.
doesn’t even make it all the way to bakersfield… kind of symbolic?

today’s thought is that bach’s art of fugue was unfinished at his death, but was a massive bomb to future generations of musicians and even some philosophers. to me, one of its most interesting aspects, is that like many of his greatest works it was conceieved and executed in his spare time. he was an essential middle class individual, with a job and a wife and a family to support, but although his profession allowed him certain lattitude, he carved out enough time from his limited spare time (he had thirteen children, for christ’s sake), to produce works, lacking patronage or even any real hope of remuneration, but just because that was what he did. and one of those works has the ability to make you think about things in a new way, maybe 250 years later. isn’t that what its all about? God bless him for that, if nothing else.

I think bruce springsteen is a great songwriter.
but I always got the feeling he wanted to be more than he actually was. like he was always itchy and climbing, always a little uncomfortable in his own skin.
if you look, in his earlier stuff, there’s not so much of him as the story, and there’s a lot of that that’s good: rosalita, blinded by the light, spirits in the night, growing up, and of course thunder road and born to run. but later on, something happened, and like his center moved, and his really powerful songs came from a different place, and they were all about him: darkness on the edge of town, adam raised a gain, stolen car, one step up, brilliant disguise and stuff like that.
then there’s a lot of derivative stuff, but every now and then he comes out with something that is really good, like ‘ghost of tom joad’ or ‘devils and dust.’
and all that.

just like everything else they’ve ever done, microsoft reverse engineered java, broke their contract with sun, threw them out of the house, renamed everything, and claimed they invented it.
windows nt is clearly was an unholy comingling of windows, ibm os2, dec vms and unix, sans attribution, thank you very much, but I remember the days, not so long ago, we were working with them then, when microsoft actually considered not using sockets for network communication. the only question was, if they could get away with it, and isolate unix, but that was a non-starter, so they glommed on their networking software, I don’t know if you remember the nt days, when it was a weird hodgepodge of netware, netbeui, tcp/ip, and so on. maybe it really wasn’t so clear to them, I remember debates about token-ring versus ethernet, like who really cares at that level?
but the point is that for microsoft, it was never about the technology, it was about how far can they go, very carefully thinking it out, very consciously, boxing you into a corner, so from your point of view, you start out easy, and every choice is made for you down the road, leading you to give more and more of your money to *guess who*
(you being the non-tech-savvy-but-with-money-to-spend victim, for whom the profile is pasted to a bulletin board…)
its no accident they’re so successful, you know.
but the thing that kills me, and it happed (yet again) just the other day, when engineers, who should know better, are brainwashed, and they don’t even know it.
I was talking to a co-worker, and I pointed out how .net was a ripoff of java (and just try to tell me it wasn’t!), and someone overheard me, and said, “well, not so much” or something to that effect. I apologized, since I hadn’t even been talking to him, and said I didn’t mean to be confrontational, and he just kind of trailed off, and mumbled not to anyone in particular, “I think they did it better, anyway…”
putting aside some disturbing aspects of that personal interaction, I would expect more from a technical expert. I suspect he doesn’t really know what he’s talking about. maybe inside the .net box, he has a certain level of mastery, but outside the box,… well, what I would say is that one should have the courage to just come out and say, “yes, they reverse engineered java, and they made it their own, and they made it better,” but not deny it but spouting the half-truth that is microsoft’s corporate position.
all that proved to me is that a certain party may be smart, but nonetheless is capable of being brainwashed.

on this day in 1611, explorer henry hudson, his son john and seven others were cast adrift in a small open boat, abandoned by mutineers in the bay that would later bear hudson’s name.

like many other countries in western asia and eastern europe, saudi arabia was formed from a province of the former ottoman empire after world war I. its outlines were drawn by the western powers at versailles on the same map tables as those of iraq and yugoslavia. and like iraq it functioned as a british mandate until 1924 when ibn Saud of Najd, overran the Hedjaz including Mecca and Medina, and declared himself king in 1926. ibn Saud had 45 sons and 50 daughters, and died in 1953 at the age of 71.
one of these sons, Saud bin Abdul Aziz was King of Saudi Arabia from 1953 to November 2, 1964.
after driving Saudi Arabia into bankruptcy, Saud was deposed by his half brother Faisal, and abdicated in 1964.
Saud’s name was erased from many institutions and histories
ibn Saud’s second son Mohammed bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud was next in line to succeed, but Saud was followed by Faisal instead.
the third son of Ibn Saud, Faisal ibn Abdel Aziz al-Saud King of Saudi Arabia from 1964 to 1975.
descended from Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab through his mother, he was dedicated to what he saw as fundamental Islamic principles and against the influence of modern western values, while simultaneously encouraging the adoption of certain modern technologies, with the notable exception of information technologies such as radio and television.
On October 17, 1973, Faisal withdrew Saudi oil from world markets, causing the price to quadruple overnight. Faisal’s action was the primary force behind the 1973 energy crisis.
Faisal ibn Abdel Aziz al-Saud was assassinated by his nephew, Faisal bin Musad on March 25, 1975.
Weeks later, Faisal bin Musad was beheaded in the public square in Riyadh.
Khalid bin Abdul Aziz King of Saudi Arabia from the assassination of King Faisal in 1975 until his own death in 1982.
full brother of Muhammad bin Abdul Aziz who declined succession in 1965 after Saud was deposed and again in 1982 after Khalid’s death.
King Fahd bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud King of Saudi Arabia 1982-2005
Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud king of Saudi Arabia since 2005
half brother of Fahd.

you want to hear something funny? well, I guess you’re not actually going to “hear” it, but anyway…
when I’m at work, sometimes I’m working alright, but I go down these side tracks and wind up working on my tools, not exactly what they’re paying me to do. I once read an email from a japanese fellow who used the perhaps unlikely word “burnish” with respect to enhancing his software beyond that which was necessary, out of a kind of pride, and a sense of craftsmanship. I couldn’t help but think of a samurai swordsmith or the like.
so that’s me with regard to my programming tools, which I’ve been burnishing for a solid 20 years now.
the funny thing is, with all the companies I’ve worked at, and all the stuff I’ve done, all the projects and software shipped, none of it really matters now, not only to me, but really to anyone, since some of the companies are out of business, the projects dead and gone, even the successful projects for the most part obsolete at this point; with a very few exceptions, nothing of all that matters to anyone at all, except that is, my tools matter, at least to me.
I’m still using this stuff, sometimes on a daily basis, and often to great or at least good effect.
so, cool.