bone in sub

i think my antithesis just added me to facebook:

tons of spelling problems, nickelback, switchfoot, family guy, wow. i would bet money she’s never read a jane austen book and is actually a fan of the movies.

i feel that i responded justifiably:

why did i stop writing for a while? no reason. in a couple hours i’m flying down to richmond to visit my folks for christmas…i’ve never flown during a holiday (except once when i flew to arizona during some bowl game OSU played in. that was a lot of moms & dads) so i’m excited to see what it’s like. hoping to see huge drama at some point

when i was in first year, someone very involved in municipal politics told me in no unclear terms that it’s basically impossible to keep a bike in the downtown core for two years…”it will be stolen”, they told me. my bike just turned 3! i have a sweet lock, pinheads, i don’t lock it to stupid places (pretty much post-and-rings only, preferably double ones), and it’s not a sweet-looking racing bike or whatever. one time i left my apartment way early in the morning, something like 4, to get a snack and saw a homeless-looking guy checking out my bike and playing with the lock. i started walking towards him and he ran away. yorkville cyclists are not very hardy – during the summer, it was regularly hard to find an open post-and-ring, and lately my bike has been the only one on my block.

freelance work slowed down a LOT between the second half of november until now, not good timing for christmas shopping. it picked back up this week and i have a bunch of gigs in january. it’s going to be very nice to pay off my credit card and be able to put some in savings. and order sushi.

some advertising firm offered me money to put a bunch of horrible flash ads and games on this site a little while ago. even though i should have because it would have been free money, i was too proud or something and kept demanding to see the code before agreeing to a contract. they stopped emailing after i asked a couple times, which makes me think it was phishing or malware anyway. who knows why they came to me, it’s not like i have any kind of serious pagerank.

i’m going to watch the hurt locker on the plane, which i am very excited about.

remember this monster post from last month, and how all the crazies somehow came out of the woodwork to defend their imagined afflictions? i suppose they could realistically say “you’re a 22-year-old with a music degree and you like to read, what makes you an expert on things like ionizing radiation and human anatomy?” while i will vehemently defend all of the facts i presented (they’re well-accepted tenets), i would have accepted this attack on my credibility. however, look what was in this month’s issue of the skeptical inquirer!

the concise and easy to understand article runs down the scientific impossibility of EHS and sums up the pathetic state of the general public’s knowledge on the subject in a much less angry way than i did. i know the space background and planet icons make it look a little like a star trek fan website, but the skeptical inquirer is the periodical of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, a group of scientists that – in short – set pseudoscientific nonsense straight. its founding members include carl sagan (my favorite person), isaac asimov (come on), glenn seaborg (he has an element named after him), and james randi (the guy with the million dollar challenge to anyone who can prove supernatural ‘powers’ that has been unclaimed for over 10 years). unless you’re in the same group of utterly illogical new-agers as the conspiracy theorists that replied en relative masse to my last post on the matter, their credibility is unsurpassed.

a couple weeks ago i was doing some tech work for an intelligent, successful older woman. her laptop had a keyboard plugged into it, and when i had to unplug it to access a USB port, i casually asked why she uses a keyboard with her (obviously already equipped) laptop. she responded “to keep the computer farther away from me, you know, for the radiation.” i asked what she meant by the radiation. “well, it’ll give you cancer, of course! this isn’t something you worry about with all the computer work you do?”
that was an interesting situation – normally if someone had said that to me, i would quickly judge them as ignorant and uneducated, but this was obviously not the case. i guess dozens of years of mainstream media (news and otherwise) had drilled “ELECTRICITY WILL EVENTUALLY GIVE YOU CANCER, AND THE MORE, THE SOONER” into her head, and that ‘knowledge’ pushed the high school science out the other side.

i wish i had had this article to reference, because i definitely don’t want to give a paying client a link to my post where they would find themselves lumped in with “morons”, “crazies”, and “insane [people]” (my words). don’t get me wrong, i love aggressive science-related namecalling when people firmly decry cell phones or microwaves, and harsh judgement against anybody who believes in astrology, but there ARE people that i would like to correct in a civil, non-condescending way. so long story short, if you know anybody who thinks that cell phones can give you brain cancer or that you shouldn’t have computers near your bed, send them the article linked at the top. or this one. or buy them a subscription to skeptical inquirer. or lovingly give them a high school science textbook with a bookmark in the chapter on electromagnetic fields.

related to the above, i’m reading the demon-haunted world by carl sagan, and it’s already one of my favorite nonfiction books. it covers some middle-school basics like the scientific method and double-blind studies, but all with extremely interesting anecdotes and i totally love it. i somehow didn’t know that carl sagan wrote books NOT directly focused on space.

this happened already something like 8 months ago, but someone hates me enough to post a fake craigslist ad with a too-good-to-be-true deal and my phone number. last time it was a free laptop, this time a netbook for $110, i’m already getting texts about it. the best part about this (besides how i’ve somehow gotten someone this mad) is that all these people that want to buy a laptop from me are also furious at “me”, because i don’t answer their calls or texts. rock and roll

i got one of my awesome private message threads on the hit website “lamebook”. sean john rocafella (yes, that’s his name) gets the recognition he deserves. what a poet!

i laid out scambaiting pretty well in my last post about it. it’s been going amazingly, i have some of the same lads going that i had in early june, and a bunch of new guys that are going even better now that i’ve had a lot of practice. this week has been my masterpiece.

ramirez emailed me about his gold dust business last week, asking if i wanted to split his business down the middle. of course i accepted, and he immediately asks me to fly to ghana to meet with him. i reply that maybe i could, but could we do it another way? he tells me no, i must fly to ghana as soon as possible. this is new to me, usually they ask you to fly there, knowing 95% of people they reach won’t be able to drop $2k on a flight AND be gullible enough to fall for it. i run with it, and book fake flights and a hotel stay, and let him know when i’ll be flying in. he asks me to bring gifts of laptops and suits and mobile phones, as well as as much cash as i can to buy gold dust from him. i respond that i can bring all those gifts as well as 40 grand in cash, which excites him greatly.

it’s clear that he wants me to pack as many valuables as i can, fly to a third world country, and steal everything and potentially kill me for profit. yeah, this is a special scambait, i have to cause as much damage as possible.

the time comes for me to ‘fly’ to accra, ghana with a layover through amsterdam. when i’m supposedly in amsterdam, i send him an email letting him know the flight to accra was overbooked, and i took a voucher in exchange for opting to take a flight to lomé, togo. he obviously didn’t get this email, because i get a call asking me “where are you now, i am at the arrival hall at the accra airport”. i explain my situation until he understands (it takes a couple tries), and i get “wow…wow….ok, get yourself a hotel in lomé, we will come to get you.”

he calls again, telling me he and his “entourage” – his word – will leave for lomé, togo early the next morning. sweet, he’s bringing a bunch of other lads with him.

putting it in perspective: government officials, teachers, and police officers make the equivalent of $30-$40 USD a month in ghana. things like food and lodging are equally inexpensive, so those people live relatively well for, you know, africa. conversely, telecommunications (the calling cards these jerks use to call me every day), and gas (five hour drive from accra to lomé) are the same price (after exchange rate) as first world countries. considering these criminals sit in incredibly inexpensive web cafes all day and email people, essentially equivalent to the ‘high-end’ homeless people who make up stories about how they just need to get a bus back to hamilton, i am to them an incredibly expensive haul, or to anyone else pretty good at scamming scammers.

i ask ramirez to call me when he’s leaving – i was busy and didn’t answer, and soon received this message of him and his crew getting in a car. he called back 4 hours later while someone else was driving, telling me he would soon be crossing the border into togo and that he would be in lomé within an hour. i arranged where we would meet up and when, and asked him to call again after he crossed the border. he called half an hour later (it’s now 5am EST) telling me they’ve crossed the border, and to check out of my hotel and wait in the lobby. so i went to sleep.

woke up later to find this message: “i am here in lomé, togo [...] i need to see you so i can leave this place.“. amazing. he left that at 5:45am EST (9:45am togo time). in the time between that message and my waking up, i had 63 missed calls and three more messages. they made the five hour drive back to accra at around 4pm his time, after waiting for me there for six hours. those poor guys.

ramirez called me a few times and sent some emails, and he initially expressed interest in coming back to lomé to pick me up, but eventually decided against it and gave up on me. total cost is unknown, but i estimate in the hundreds, USD. potential car rental, cost of gas, border bribes, total time on phone at least two hours over the whole bait, and waking up at 3am to pick me up in a different country. burned, ramirez, burned.

i’ve gotten more ‘trophies’ since then, i’ll post with them later.

hot dang i have a lot of hard drives connected right now:

that’s:
(my computer)
(its internal drive)
my 1tb external, for important files like audio, virtual machines, photoshop things. name is from its brand name, “simpledrive”.
my 500gb external, for raw dv files ripped from tape. also stores the backups of the four hard drives that were in my old computer.
my 200gb external, for use as a time machine back up. get it.
my other 200gb external, btb is a mysterious acronym that relates to downloading. . . .
my 4gb flash drive. the brand is “DIESEL”, it’s for bringing movies and tv shows to the living room. sneakernet
my 8gb flash drive, which i made into a fake Snow Leopard dvd. it took like 2 hours to ‘burn’ it, yikes.

i bought a PATA (“IDE”) enclosure so i could get all the stuff off my old hard drives. it was actually insanely hard to find one in real life (not ordering it online), i mean i know standards are always moving along, but i built that computer 6 years ago. 6 years for a format to go from the de facto standard to unsupported!

this is the worst thing i’ve seen in a while. an “initiative to stop wireless, electric, and electromagnetic pollution”. i stumbled upon this letter from google looking for something completely unrelated, and the more i read, the more disgusted i was. the (let me get this out of the way: insane) author of the letter claims she has MCS as well as an allergy to electromagnetic fields (“electrohypersensitivity”, or EHS).

this is the most reprehensible, backwards pseudoscience i’ve ever encountered. i’ve known about the claimed existence of EHS for a long time, but for some reason the presence of a canadian initiative against it bothered me enough to get my thoughts out coherently. let’s compare to something like astrology. there are a whole bunch of people that believe the locations and alignments of planets and stars – millions of miles away – affect humans’ psyches (and ‘fate’) in profound ways, especially relating to where they were on the day you were born. seriously? it’s laughable to any sane person who understands science at an 8th grade level. that’s the difference: something like astrology (or psychics, or scientology, or 2012, or wicca) will never be a possibility in a rational, educated person’s mind.

on the other hand, EHS is kind of plausible if you don’t know much about human bodies and electromagnetic radiation. just the phrase “electromagnetic radiation” is scary to the layman. so, here we go, a concise explanation of radiation and how it’s impossible to become ill from computers and cell phones.

the term ‘radiation’ applies to any form of emitted energy: light that you see, light that gives you a sunburn, all sound, the waves that make your microwave cook, the heat in your toaster, and the topic of these idiots’ moaning, waves from cell phones/computers/radio towers etc. radiation is either ionizing (can strip electrons from atoms and damage cells) or non-ionizing (the vast majority of the electromagnetic spectrum). everything with a wavelength longer than visible light is non-ionizing, which includes infrared, microwave, and radio. ionizing EMF (electromagnetic fields) are the small end of the spectrum, wavelengths shorter than visible light. this includes ultraviolet light, x-rays, and gamma rays. notice how those all sound dangerous? it’s because they are – for real. you might be familiar with ultraviolet light…it gives you sunburns. or x-rays, why you have to wear a lead sheet over your torso when you get an x-ray at the dentist. or gamma rays, a large part of what makes nuclear fallout dangerous. however, since cell phones and computers and satellites and radio towers don’t emit at any of these wavelengths, they’re not important to this discussion.

the other form of ionizing radiation is particles, rather than EMF. alpha particles (helium nuclei), beta particles (protons), and neutrons are all hazardous, and something humans aren’t exposed to in any significant way, barring nuclear accidents.

what about microwave ovens, you say? they’re in the non-ionizing part of the spectrum and they’re dangerous. just because something’s non-ionizing doesn’t make it safe – anything can have enough energy, even at a normally innocuous wavelength, to cause damage. your microwave, your cordless phones, and your laptop all emit at around 2.45GHz, but the laptop (or a wireless access point) will at the very most emit 100mW (one tenth of a watt) and microwaves hang out around a kW (one thousand watts). when you consider the inverse square law that applies to all EMF, the sum of all forms of normal radiation exposure is orders of magnitude lower than a microwave at cooking level.

to put a nail in their lead-lined gold-coated colloidal silver coffin, electromagnetic hypersensitivity has never been detectable in any blind test. i like to believe that this test was only done because science wanted to shut these idiots up, not to actually test for the existence of EHS. to summarize, put people in a room with a cell phone base station and an empty box with a LED on it, the whiny hypochondriacs will say they get a headache when you turn either of them on.

check this self-diagnostic-promoting diagram out, courtesy of the weep initiative:

i think that covers about 95% of all symptoms of everything. no wonder the most gullible attention-seeking hippies choose this as their cause. you could play bingo with episodes of medical dramas using that chart.

the really unfortunate part about trying to sensibly discuss these crazies’ “condition” is their counterarguments. in every experience i’ve had, they predictably respond with something along the lines of “well, i’m just gifted with special senses” or “there are other forms of energy science hasn’t accounted for yet” or “i’m clairvoyant”. they appear to be happy in ignorance and hypocrisy. the hypocrisy is especially entertaining – they preach against technology with no scientific basis, yet use computers and the internet to communicate their misery. it’s like the (topical!) earth liberation front’s recent vandalism of radio towers on the west coast, because “AM radio waves cause adverse health affects including a higher rate of cancer, harm to wildlife, and that the signals have been interfering with home phone and intercom lines.”. why do they even mention the last two items? that undermines their entire argument. the ELF has a whole boatload of propaganda websites – i thought technology was your enemy? off-topic, i love that the ELF spraypaints their messages all around their acts. do you even understand how toxic and polluting spraypaint is.

why do these people invent this condition? they love being victims and crave the associated attention. they’re the same people that go on disability because their back hurts, the same people whose physicians “fire” them after too many home research-related visits, the same people that sense ‘energy’ when they walk into a room or meet someone because they were cursed with supernormal sensitivity. multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS) is another favorite of the environmental hypochondriac. in the letter linked in the first paragraph, the woman requests that she discuss a potential technician’s product and clothing usage via email before he’s allowed to enter the house. MCS isn’t a valid or recognized medical condition – it’s a less-serious version of EHS. yes, people can be allergic to obscure ingredients in makeup or perfume, but MCS is just a psychosomatic condition (mental illness?) that makes people think they’re going to die because they can smell the vinyl in your shoes.

you can see how strongly i feel about this and all forms of pseudoscience. as stated it’s pretty tough to change the (un)affected’s minds, but aside from the basic benefits of understand how our universe works, it would be very nice to see the “sufferers” get less empathy.

also i went to texas for a week and it was fun and relaxing. except when my plane was leaking hydraulic fluid and we had to divert to nashville.

another wikipedia delight:

Seawater Air Conditioning features an interesting illustration:

check it out: it’s clearly done with colored pencils and (cursive) ballpoint pen. a refreshing change from technical illustration hobbyists’ 4-color SVGs on every other scientific wikipedia article.

me, to a group of scientologists in front of their building last night: “excuse me, i’m lost, do you know how to get to……xenu?” yeowza

here’s a wikipedia delight:

a kids’ train in finland. why is it driven by a normal-looking middle aged man and ridden by nice scandinavian families, but plastered with ’666′?