Patrick Draper

Thursday, 28 November, 2002. 08:25:40 PM

I've got photos of our deep fried turkey in the photo section. It was really easy to make, and the meat came out very moist and tasty.

Tuesday, 26 November, 2002. 01:41:20 PM

We're headed up to Minnesota today to visit Beth, Aaron, and Sara. Should be a lot of fun. Our poor little doggies are going to the kennel until Saturday morning.

Monday, 25 November, 2002. 09:46:33 PM

Groups search result 1 for "new scientist" switching back and forth myopia

From: Patrick Draper (pdrap@minister.com)
Subject: Correction to Re: Salon comes ever so close to unleashing the hordes on AFU
View: Complete Thread (6 articles)
Original Format
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban
Date: 2002-03-16 16:14:19 PST

I noticed this message in AFU and just had to post to correct it. I am
the person who wrote the original letter to New Scientist which they
published after making terrible editing mistakes. In particular, the
last line was entirely their fabrication. I did not write it. In fact,
that last line is entirely contrary to what I was writing to them. It
is NOT the switching back and forth that causes myopia, but the
average distance that the youngster focuses at.

Furthermore, they cut out all mention to the fact that my statements
were based ONLY on a single little blurb that I read somewhere
(Scientific American I think). That original blurb I read was the
untested hypothesis of someone who has studied the matter. He felt
that the eye developed according to a feedback mechanism so that when
development was done, the eye's lens was most relaxed at the position
that corresponded to an average of the things that people tended to
look at. If someone tended to read a lot, then that average would be
considerably closer, thus causing myopia. As far as I know, these
statements are still completely untested, and could very well be
wrong.

I'm not a scientist, but I can understand why scientists are so
reluctant to speak to the media. Journalists seem to think they can
edit important things in and out of statements without regard to the
original meaning. Needless to say, I am still furious at New Scientist
for changing the entire meaning of what I wrote.

Patrick Draper
------------original news article
below-----------------------------------

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From: "Chris W."
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Subject: Re: Salon comes ever so close to unleashing the hordes on AFU
References:
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Paul Blay wrote:
>
> Eskimos are supposed[1] to have better eyesight (lower occurrence of
> short-sightedness) which has been alledged to be because they don't
> damage their eyes reading / watching TV.
> [1] ie I read this in a New Scientist article some time.

Is this the "article" you saw?

http://www.newscientist.com/lastword/answers/432animals.jsp?tp=animals3
-----
In recent times, anthropologists have noted that Inuit had almost
universally perfect eyesight until significant numbers of them became
literate. It appears that literacy causes myopia.

The explanation is that as the eye matures throughout childhood, it is
constantly corrected so that the natural focus of the lens will be in
the position that produces the sharpest image on the retina. If one
looks at distant objects all the time, the focal length will form
properly to focus clearly on objects at long distances. If one spends
a
lot of time reading books, the eye will develop in an elongated way,
which means objects can be focused most easily at shorter distances.
The
constant switching between long and short distances appears to create
myopia.

Patrick draper
-----

If so, this seems to be more of an open forum rather than an article.
The Canadian National Incident for the blind says that Canadian First
Nations and Inuit populations have rates of blindness and
vision loss often four times the national average.[1] I doubt that
aboriginals are four times more literate or use more technology such
as
TVs or computers than their non-native peers, so that suggests that
factors other than reading (possibly such as fetal alcohol syndrome,
communicable disease, genetics, or poor health care) are to blame for
their poorer vision.

However, I did find this:

http://www.i-see.org/prevent_myopia.html
-----
Several studies have shown that for at least one population, the
natives
of the Arctic region, myopia does not come from the parents. Francis
Young et al. (1969) made a study in Barrow, Alaska, of 283 Eskimo
children (6 to 25 years) and 225 adults (26 to 88 years). The sample
contained family groups of parents and grandparents. The children had
all gone to school, while the parents had lived a traditional Eskimo
life. While less than 2% of the parents were myopic, approximately 58%
of the
children were myopic, and the severity of the myopia increased with
number of years in school. There was no significant correlation
between
the parents' refraction and the refraction of the children. Since the
percentage of myopes is very high, and the population sample had been
all volunteers, it seemed possible that "in the younger volunteers, at
any rate, there was a strong element of self-selection: they came
because they had visual trouble." (Sorsby 1970). To rule out this
possibility, the refractive status all children at the local school --
from age 5 to 16 -- was tested. "The results obtained on the remainder
of the school
population agree with the results obtained on the volunteer subjects."
(Young 1970). In addition to Young's experiment, other independent
surveys have been done, confirming beyond a doubt that throughout the
North American Arctic, the children of the natives, brought up
according
to the ways of the white man, are far more likely to develop myopia
than
their parents were (Cass 1966; Morgan et al. 1973; Alsbirk 1979).
-----

It appears to be proved that the Inuit children are more myopic than
their parents, but not that reading caused it.

[1] http://www.cnib.ca/news_media/stories/archive/annual_review.htm

Chris Webb

Saturday, 23 November, 2002. 01:35:39 AM

Oxygen - my shell, mail, and web server - has a new network card. The old one was a 16-bit 3C509 10BASE-T card made 10 years ago. The new one is a TRENDnet TE100-PCIWN card with a Realtek chipset. Realtek is known for making very cheap chipsets for network cards, and this one cost me $10 at Fry's. Installing it was very easy. My network server has all drivers compiled into the kernel. I disabled the 3COM driver, enabled the 8139 driver, built and installed the kernel. When the system came up with the new kernel, it worked the first time. My desktop machine (helium) is the only other one with a 100 Mbit card, so this will primarily speed up the connection between my desktop and the server.

Tuesday, 19 November, 2002. 02:15:08 PM

4.2

A novice asked the master: "I have a program that sometimes runs and
sometimes aborts. I have followed the rules of programming, yet I am
totally baffled. What is the reason for this?"

The master replied: "You are confused because you do not understand the
Tao. Only a fool expects rational behavior from his fellow humans. Why
do you expect it from a machine that humans have constructed? Computers
simulate determinism; only the Tao is perfect.

The rules of programming are transitory; only the Tao is eternal.
Therefore you must contemplate the Tao before you receive
enlightenment."

"But how will I know when I have received enlightenment?" asked the
novice.

"Your program will then run correctly," replied the master.

Tuesday, 19 November, 2002. 12:52:48 PM

For some reason, these people link to my bookmark page. This one is about raccoon repellant, and is probably because I link to the Contech Scarecrow that I use to keep deer out of my plants.

Tuesday, 19 November, 2002. 05:52:29 AM

I'm up watching the Leonid meteors. So far the rates aren't that great, but the weather is cooperating. It was partly overcast all night and right at 4:30 the clouds started moving out leaving a perfectly clear sky. The moon is interfering quite a bit though.

Sunday, 17 November, 2002. 09:17:54 PM

North Korea has nuclear weapons. South Korea will probably develop some of their own in response.

Friday, 15 November, 2002. 04:52:27 PM

Spamprobe seems to be working quite well, so I'm going to rebuild the spam statistic page to use the new filter. There will be graphical plots of the spam that I received generated by gnuplot.

Friday, 15 November, 2002. 01:56:02 AM

I made a stir fry tonight with a vegetable called a Mo Qua. It was light green on the outside, with a thin skin. It tasted like a slightly sweet cucumber, and about the same texture. I cubed it and put it into the stir fry. Much better than broccoli.

Tuesday, 12 November, 2002. 09:55:54 PM

Corporate Motherfucker

Tuesday, 12 November, 2002. 02:39:58 PM

1) Proprietary
2) Secure

Choose One.

Tuesday, 12 November, 2002. 09:45:53 AM

The power of positive thinking doesn't have an effect on cancer. Pressuring cancer patients to feel good when they naturally feel bad about having cancer might be counterproductive.

Researcher Mark Petticrew, PhD, and colleagues examined 26 studies assessing the role of psychological coping styles on cancer recurrence and survival, and concluded that none conclusively linked any one style to positive outcomes.

Writing in the latest issue of the British Medical Journal, the researchers concluded that "people with cancer should not feel pressured into adopting particular coping styles to improve survival or reduce the risk of recurrence."

Tuesday, 12 November, 2002. 09:35:18 AM

Harvard University to student editor Nick Will: "Shut your face! Know your Place!".

The student newspaper, Harbus, reacted by publishing a cartoon of a career services Web site overloaded with error messages, including one referring to "incompetent morons." In turn, the director of the MBA program reprimanded two student editors, and warned them to avoid "disrespectful" language.

Nick Will, the paper's editor in chief, resigned and cited "personal intimidation and threats" by Harvard officials, according to the Boston Globe. The exchange has prompted debates about free speech.

Monday, 11 November, 2002. 09:33:25 PM

Our dogs pee in one spot in their dog run, and that can sometimes develop a strong odor. The odor is due to urea, which is broken into ammonia and carbon dioxide by an enzyme called urease, secreted by some bacteria. There are things I can feed my dogs that are supposed to solve the problem, but I'm skeptical for a number of reasons. First, urea is produced by the breakdown of protein. It is collected by the liver and excreted by the kidneys. These products that address yellowing grass don't do anything for that particular process. Second, all the products claim that what kills the grass is a low pH. One product labels a pH value of 6.5 as "alkaline" which is completely laughable. It's acidic. What kills the grass is the high concentration of ammonia that is released when urea is broken down. Ammonia is very toxic due to it's reaction with ATP (adenosine tri-phosphate). Third, the components of these products seem to be various combinations of dried yeast, vitamins, and amino acids. None of these would have any affect on the amount of urea excreted.

I've been looking at reactions of both urea and ammonia to find a place to attack the problem. Getting rid of the ammonia probably wouldn't be useful, since it's already in gaseous form, being constantly produced from the urea. The bacteria that release urease aren't very efficient, so this reaction proceeds slowly. It seems to stop completely during the dry summer, but when the weather becomes rainier, like it is now, the reaction speeds up a bit and the odor is noticable. The urease catalysis happens faster when the pH increases, so I could spray some diluted vinegar over the spots to see if the reaction can consume all of the urea. Or, I could find a commercial supplier for urease and apply that directly to the soil. Urease is sometimes used in winemaking to remove urea from wine, and is not harmful to the dogs. Maybe I could keep the soil damp to optimize the natural production of urease.

Monday, 11 November, 2002. 07:26:01 PM

The experiment with the Bayesian spam filters seems to be a great success. I've trained it with about 20 spams and 500 good messages and it now seems to identify all the spam with perfect success. I'm going to make a script that can manage the spam count database and generate a Pareto plot of all the spam that I receive.

Saturday, 09 November, 2002. 10:54:00 PM

Today I worked on the access door to the stairs. I moved the water line that ran straight across the new door, and I started the framing for the little door that I'm going to install. I need to get some different nails. The ones that I have are not the right kind to drive through 2x4's.

We are going to start remodelling our master bathroom right away too. After Alex took her shower today we noticed a little spot of water in our kitchen underneath the shower. I fixed the tile last year for a water leak, but the problem is that the tile installation just isn't very good. So, I'm going to be tearing out the entire shower, and taking all the tile off the Jacuzzi. The floor, shower, and Jacuzzi will all be tiled with large floor tiles, and the whole thing will be solidly waterproof. And the rest of the bathroom is going to get the special treatment. I'm getting a table saw soon, and I've got lots of projects to use it for.

Friday, 08 November, 2002. 12:32:37 PM

Our newest toy at work is a loaded out Sequent NUMA machine with 3/4 of a terabyte of disk and 16 gigabytes of RAM. It's also got 16 processors. I worked on a similar machine almost two years ago at NASD, but this one is about 4 times larger. IBM bought Sequent and when their customers replace their old machines with AIX, IBM takes the old servers. They were going to cut this machine up into little pieces, but before they scrapped it they asked Sector7 if we wanted it for free. Of course we said yes.

Friday, 08 November, 2002. 11:38:36 AM

"To believe that consciousness can survive the wreck of the brain is like believing that 70 mph can survive the wreck of the car." - Frank Zindler

Tuesday, 05 November, 2002. 09:19:05 PM

In the two districts in Travis county, the Republicans were running creationists for the state board of education. They both won, unfortunately. This is undoubtedly part of the creationists' wedge strategy to introduce the teaching of religion in the classroom.

Tuesday, 05 November, 2002. 08:36:11 PM

LASER shoots down artillery shell in flight. Some think this will eventually be turned into a point defense effective against artillery and missiles.

Tuesday, 05 November, 2002. 04:30:04 PM

Almost 1/5 of voting today will take place on electronic voting machines. The software that tallies the votes is proprietary and not open to inspection. In the next few weeks I would not be surprised at all to hear reports of fraud surrounding these closed machines. Electronic voting is the bad idea of the century - and it's only the second year of the century.

Tuesday, 05 November, 2002. 01:00:41 PM

Last night I burned a CD with the Knoppix Live Linux image. I brought it to work and one of my co-workers booted it up. It detects and configures all the hardware and boots to a fully working Linux system right off the CD-ROM. Very nice!

Tuesday, 05 November, 2002. 12:02:04 PM

I got two spams today, and fed them right into my spam program. I'm using SpamProbe through a ProcMail hook. Exim has a transport that directs mail through the filter when it is received. Everything is marked as good, but if I get a spam that isn't marked I just pipe it through the command 'spamprobe spam' and it's marked as spam. Once I train the filter, then I can set mutt up to sort out the mail automatically. SpamProbe puts a header onto every mail that indicates spam or not spam, and mutt can sort the mail based on that header. Once I have the filter trained, then I'll reinstate my spam statistics page. It's not being updated right now. I've also got my other spam filters turned off.

Monday, 04 November, 2002. 09:17:33 PM

While I am testing the Bayesian spam filter, the spam statistics will not be updated.

Monday, 04 November, 2002. 04:38:38 PM

I'm going to start experimenting with Bayesian filters for spam. My system of giving everyone a different address and blocking the ones that attract spam works pretty well, but is a lot of work. I think that combining that with a Bayesian filter might stop that one or two spams that manage to get through my filters every week.

Friday, 01 November, 2002. 04:23:04 PM

The elections are coming up on Tuesday. Looks like the most interesting races are the ones for the State Board of Education. It's a contest between Republicans who are in favor of creationism and school prayer, and Democrats who are NOT in favor of destroying the thinking minds of young people. Easy choice for me.

Friday, 01 November, 2002. 11:55:16 AM

TV Public Service Announcement
Dan

Opens on a 20 something year old male sitting on a couch watching TV while playing with a basketball. There is nursery music playing in the background.

Voiceover: This is Dan.
Superimposed text: Dan
Voiceover: This is the joint that Dan bought.
Superimposed text: Dan's Marijuana
Voiceover: This is the dealer who sold the joint that Dan bought.
Superimposed text: Dan's Dealer
Voiceover: This is the smuggler that smuggled the pot to the dealer who sold the joint that Dan bought.
Superimposed text: Dan's Smuggler
Voiceover: This is the cartel that uses the smuggler that smuggled the pot to the dealer who sold the joint that Dan bought.
Superimposed text: Dan's Cartel
Superimposed text: Dan
Voiceover: And this is the family that was lined up by Dan's cartel and shot for getting in the way
Superimposed text: Drug money supports terrible things If you buy drugs, you might too. theantidrug.com

Sponsored by Office of National Drug Control Policy

--------------------------------------------------------

After watching that ad on TV, I started thinking about it. Then I came up with these other ideas for ads that might just get people thinking:

This is Suzy. (picture of Suzy smiling).
This is the Ford Excursion that Suzy bought. (Picture of Suzy next to her SUV).
This is the gas station that sells Suzy gasoline. (Picture of Suzy putting $50 of gas into her SUV).
This is Joe. (Photo of Joe in his Marine uniform).
This is Joe, dead on a battlefield in the Middle East because our dependence on oil from the region required us to protect our interests with military force.

Or, how about this one:

This is Billy. (picture of a school kid).
These are Billy's Nike shoes. (picture of Billy's shoes).
This is Wu Jingyu. (photo of a Chinese teenager).
Wu Jingyu made a dollar last week glueing together shoes so that he could buy rice to eat and his counterpart in America could look cool and make a rich corporation even richer.

One more:

This is George Bush and the Congress of the United States of America.
This is bill they passed last summer affirming that our Pledge of Allegiance would contain the words "under God".
This is Koorosh, a new American citizen.
This is Iran, Koorosh's home country, also a nation "under God", and brutally repressive to liberty which is the reason why Koorosh decided to sell everything he owned and start a new life in America.