I heard something extremely strange on NPR the other day. Lisa See is the author of Dragon Bones, a thriller/mystery/intrigue novel about thrilling mysterious intrigue set around the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, on the Yangtze. She was reading a commentary (which can be listened to here) about how the recent completion of the dam is the fulfillment of a dream that has been held by Chinese leaders for thousands of years. It was a pretty good listen, as she talked about how the Great Wall is not necessarily the symbol of national Chinese pride that many assume it is. The emperor who built it killed a bunch of people and ground up their bones to put in the bricks and mortar with which the wall was constructed, so many Chinese have mixed feelings about it. Anyway, she was discussing how the Yangtze likes to flood and kill people, and always has. She said that one of the first "mythical" emperors of China, over 4000 years ago, was "charged with the task of draining the land of a massive flood." And then she said the following:

[This flood was] one that many scholars believe was just a portion of the worldwide flood that Noah survived.

Excuse me? Scholars? What scholars are these? Perhaps Henry Morris and his compatriots at ICR? Or maybe the guys referenced in the camp classic In Search of Noah's Ark? (Whoops, same set of people.) What in the world is she talking about? I wonder if she means mythologists who study how explanatory myths and stories relate from culture to culture, and how they are often influenced by one another. I don't even know if that's true, but it sounds good. I just want to give See the benefit of the doubt, and assume that she's talking about something other than "scholars" who "agree" that "Noah's flood" was an "objective historical event", the evidence for which is "found in cultures all over the world". But I'm not sure what to think. She did use the word "mythical" to describe the ancient emperor, and she even mentioned that he used "magical dirt" and enlisted the aid of "dragons" in draining the water. So how can she turn around and talk so matter-of-factly about "scholars" and the Noachian flood? "Just a portion" of Noah's flood? What does that mean? So everybody wasn't killed in the biblical deluge? A bunch of Chinese people lived? Why? Were they good pre-Christ-myth Christians? How did that happen? Some historians conjecture that the Noah's flood story was based on an actual flood that might have occurred at roughly the right time, which, to those affected, would have seemed like a worldwide flood. Even if this were true, how could this have possibly affected people in China? And See clearly uses the word "worldwide". I'm not here to change the minds of creationists, but there is a veritable dearth of evidence to support the hypothesis that the entire earth was suddenly covered in water somewhere in the last three to ten thousand years, just like there is a surprising lack of evidence to support the theory that the sun turned into a potted bromeliad for a few days in the year 249 B.C.E. There just wasn't a worldwide flood. So what, exactly, is See talking about?

Catholics make the strangest fundamentalists [link].

Why do people have liberal opinions? Dennis Prager has a theory: "naivete and narcissism" [TownHall.com]. Prager writes, "Very few people wake up in the morning planning to harm society... How, then, can decent and often very smart people hold liberal positions?" Prager is clearly an honest man. He confesses up front that his article is going to be a rediculous straw man: "most people who call themselves liberal do not hold most contemporary liberal positions." Great! So his theory doesn't refer to any actual liberals, and doesn't specify any actual liberal positions. This is kind of a neat approach to writing arguments. I think I'll give it a try:

Why do people hold conservative ideas? I mean, very few people wake up in the morning and say, "I'm going to rape small children." And, mind you, I'm referring to conservative ideas, not conservatives. Most conservatives today don't hold most conservative ideas. Yet conservative ideas have been wreaking havoc on our society. So why do people hold conservative ideas? There are many reasons, but the two greatest may be racial hatred and a desire to molest small children. At the heart of conservatism is the racist belief that the races must not be integrated. As a result of this belief, conservatives rarely give a black man a break. Instead, they organize lynch mobs, the KKK, corrupt police forces, G. Gordon Liddy and the national guard, and anything else that might help dispose of colored trouble makers. A second racist conservative belief is that because ragheads are brown, we shouldn't worry about shooting them or their children. Starting wars is always more fun than accounting for the loss of lives of innocent (non-white) bystanders. "Send in the troops!" "Nuke 'em!" "Four more years!" -- the conservative mind is full of jingoistic slogans and non sequitors about foreigners and darkies. Indeed, the very thought of "foreign non-white civilians" greatly disturbs conservatives. It shakes up their child-like views of the world, that every person is either "one of us" or "our mortal enemy," with no in-between. "Child-like" is operative. The further right you go, the less you like growing up. That is one reason so many child molestors are on the right. Never looking beyond school-children for sexual partners enables one to avoid becoming a mature adult. It is no wonder a conservative molester has recently argued that children should have the right to consent to sex with an adult. He knows in his heart that he is not really an adult, so why should he and not a chronologic child be allowed to consent to intercourse?

What a useful technique! I can just say anything I want about conservatives, as long as I don't specify which conservatives or which conservative ideas I'm talking about!

Hear me, infidels!!! Convert ye now to Linux, or suffer ye great torture at the hands of thy Micro$oft shitware! I am a Linux devotee by far. I am compelled, however, to use Windows for some of my chip design software. Last night I was at home typing some email messages, when my machine suddenly announced that it was shutting down due to some RPC (Remote Procedure Call) nonsense. I yelled at it repeatedly, but it shut down anyway. Then it did it again as soon as I booted up. I didn't know it yet, but I had been hit by the DCOM worm. I'm not used to worrying about that stuff because I always used to be behind a Linux firewall which protected Windows from itself. I called James and told him about my computer mysteriously shutting down. While I was on the phone with him, he got hit by the worm too. His machine shut down as we spoke. Naturally this worm wouldn't exist if Microsoft software engineers had ever attended a goddamn day of class in college. Basically, newer versions of Windows implement a variety of features which allow remote access. One of the most annoying of these is the Windows Messenger Service, which allows any outsider to immediately create a popup on your screen. GREAT FUCKING FEATURE MICROSOFT! The DCOM problem is much much worse. The RPC functionality in Windows is designed to allow multiple machines to collaborate on computing tasks. Evidently we all get this feature, whether we need it or not. It allows any outsider to hack into a Windows system and run programs on it as if they owned it. The DCOM (Distributed Component Object Model) is part of the RPC system. It was recently discovered that you can confuse the RPC system by sending a nonsense DCOM request. This results in a "buffer overflow" which inadvertently allows the hacker to log into your machine and do all sorts of things. It is one of the easiest exploits ever. Written in the very worm itself is a valid question: "billy gates why do you make this possible? Stop making money and fix your software!" I'm no fan of this worm but I can agree with this. After my Windows system was rendered useless by the worm, I rebooted into Linux, my refuge. Within an hour of my being infected, the worm showed up on CNN. More information, with links to patches, is on ZDNet, which notes that patches were made available on July 17. The worm was nervously anticipated by security analysts during the past week [Symantec]. I'm just now discussing the Windows Update patches with Aussie Dave. Both of us have experienced "update patches" which totally wreck the machine, so we don't normally install them. Like I said, it isn't really an issue for typical use behind a firewall. C source code for the original DCOM exploit is here. (This program is just a demo, not a worm). D-Shield tracks valuable information about this and other exploits. A "fix" for the worm is supposedly available here, but I haven't tried it yet.

Can Jack van Impy possibly be for real? This is from JvIm's web site:

I am not sure whether [Bush] knows all of the prophecies and how deep of a student he has been in God's Word, but I was contacted a few weeks ago by the Office of Public Liaison for the White House and by the National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice to make an outline. And I’ve spent hours preparing it. I will release this information to the public in September, but it’s in his hands. He will know exactly what is going to happen in the Middle East and what part he will have under the leading of the Holy Spirit of God. So, it's a tremendous time to be alive. It is great to have a President who believes in God — a President who's living a godly life and not playing with sin, for the Bible says in Proverbs 14:34, "Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people." [jvim.com]

This can't be real.... can it? Watching American politics is more and more like watching a particularly odd segment of "Liquid Television" while high.

I was just browsing some of the material at MathWorld, following James' earlier post. I was reading about some classic unsolved problems and some classic solved problems. The Kepler Conjecture really caught my attention:

In 1611, Kepler proposed that close packing (either cubic or hexagonal close packing, both of which have maximum densities of ~74.048%) is the densest possible sphere packing, and this assertion is known as the Kepler conjecture. Finding the densest (not necessarily periodic) packing of spheres is known as the Kepler problem... Soon thereafter, Hales (1997a) published a detailed plan describing how the Kepler conjecture might be proved using a significantly different approach from earlier attempts and making extensive use of computer calculations. Hales subsequently completed a full proof, which appears in a series of papers totaling more than 250 pages (Cipra 1998) The proof relies extensively on methods from the theory of global optimization, linear programming, and interval arithmetic. The computer files containing the computer code and data files for combinatorics, interval arithmetic, and linear programs require more than 3 gigabytes of space for storage.

I'm fascinated by the emergence of computer proofs in mathematics since the 50's. A lot of mathematicians have found this unsettling: something is proved by appeal to a machine -- to the results of an algorithm. The proof is not (and cannot be) fully contained in the mind of any mathematician. It is produced by a computational oracle. As an engineer, the computational approach doesn't bother me too much. I appreciate the beauty of a rigorous, elegant mathematical proof. But a result is a result.

Researchers in Ireland have performed an odd study to see how life expectancy relates to one's major in college [CompuServe]. As expected, medical students live the longest and law students are most likely to smoke. Liberal arts and social science students die earliest. But this was the strangest result:

Theology scholars were the most likely of all to succumb to a fatal accident, suicide, or violent death.

Perhaps that shouldn't be surprising...