More snow in Malden

I decided to take a hike to look around, up a hill:

to a park and up another hill

to the summit of Waitts Mountain (all of 213 feet tall, not high but high enough that it was really quite windy as you can tell by the lack of snow)

to get views of Malden

and Boston off in the distance

There were actually a couple other people there so I’m not the only bored person in Malden.

Snow in Malden

A couple more pictures from this morning. As you can see, it’s still snowing.

I found Nemo

It’s a bit early, but the wind is picking up here in Malden:

A few hours later:

The Black Power Mixtape

Over the weekend I watched the Black Power Mixtape. I found it interesting for a couple reasons:

• we don’t hear about most of the people in the movie even though many of them play important parts in our history–Stokely Carmichael, Angela Davis, Eldridge Cleaver, Shirley Chisholm, …–and here we actually see interviews with them. We also see extended pieces about the Black Panthers, much of it from their perspective.
• the reports and interviews are from an outside perspective and so we see the US from a different perspective. The clips were from news reports by Swedish reporters and, during this period, the US and Sweden did not have very good relations (the US recalled its ambassador in 1968 and left the position vacant until 1970, then froze relations in 1972–both times because of comments by the Swedish Prime Minister). And you can tell, the reports make it seem like parts of the US were similar to a third world country with a terrible system of justice. It was certainly true that many or most blacks did live in third world conditions and didn’t receive fairness in the justice system, but you wouldn’t have seen this shown quite so starkly on US TV.

In some ways, I liked the extras more than the actual movie. In the extras there are extended pieces on Carmichael, Davis, Chisholm, and Louis Farrakhan and all of them are fascinating. You should watch it.

DNSChanger

Here’s a public service announcement:

DNSChanger was a malware program that changed the DNS settings of computers that were infected, sending them to a rogue DNS server (when you then type in the name of a web site it is sent to your DNS server to be changes into the number settings the computer uses, the rogue DNS server would sometimes direct you to a different site). Up to 4 million computers were believed to be infected when the FBI disabled the network. The FBI set up a system of DNS servers to take the place of the ones put up by the rogue DNS servers, but only for four months. As of July 9 these are being taken down, so any computer that hasn’t been fixed yet will lose service (go here or here for more information).

To check to see if your computer is infected, you want to check your DNS server. For a Windows computer:

1. Start the Run command or get a command prompt (in Windows 7, this is in the accessories folder after clicking the Windows Start button on the bottom left–it’s Command Prompt)
2. at the prompt, type:  ipconfig/all
3. Scroll up to find DNS Servers and find yours–it’s in the from a.b.c.d where a, b, c, and d are numbers between 1 and 255–so something like 112.45.1.1
4. Go here and type in your DNS Server or there’s a list here (on page 5) or go here
5. If you are infected go here to find tools to get a fix

Fifth Anniversary

So, I’ve now been doing this for five years. I think I’m destined to pick up my farm share today (including garlic scapes) which means there are going to be many a stir-fry in my near future. Anyways, stats:

Year 1: 888 posts, 10910 hits

Year 2: 362 posts, 39835 hits

Year 3: 194 posts, 38291 hits

Year 4: 176 posts, 51295 hits

Year 5: 257 posts, 31030 hits

Total: 1877 posts, 171361 hits

Averages: 1.03 posts per day, 93.79 hits per day, 91.3 hits per post in total;

.7 posts per day, 85 hits per day in the last year.

And here’s the annual link to Concrete Blonde:

Fish Story

I just watched the movie Fish Story (here’s the trailer) and I really liked it. I also liked the music such as this song which is central to the movie:

 

Happy New Year

Happy New Year. I’m off to South Carolina for a bit.

Thanksgiving

It’s that time of the year to give thanks. For example, give thanks that the US hasn’t been invaded by another country and all our land taken away. Happy Thanksgiving.

Meow

I’m not sure why I was thinking about it, but I went looking for the different ways that people say different animal’s sounds. It’s been done:

I actually was looking for the ways that other languages gave a cat’s ‘meow’. The words for those are here (a dog’s bark is here).

A math museum

Hey, there’s going to be a math museum and here it is–ok, it doesn’t open until next year, but hey … a math museum.

 

Fourth Anniversary

And another year has gone by, this time I’m a week late in noticing. Anyways, here are the statistics up until June 15:

Year 1: 888 posts, 10910 hits

Year 2: 362 posts, 39835 hits

Year 3: 194 posts, 38291 hits

Year 4: 176 posts, 51295 hits

Total: 1620 posts, 140331 hits

Averages: 1.11 posts per day, 96.05 hits per day, 86.62 hits per post in total;

.48 posts per day, 140.53 hits per day in the last year.

And here’s the annual link to Concrete Blonde singing for me:

Star forming

It ended up being a very busy week for me, hence the lack of posts. Of course, not as busy as a star forming region, such as the Rho Ophiuchi  (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA):

Abortion waiting periods

I like this:

A new South Dakota law requires women to wait three days and attend counseling before having an abortion. What do you think?

Will Pozner Cadmium Burner: “It’s not as bad as it sounds. You can easily sidestep the three-day waiting period by just going to an abortion show.”

I would add that the problem with new abortion laws is that women stock up on abortions if they think the laws will pass.

xkcd frustates me

Here’s today’s xkcd:

This is all well and good, but the extra is: Goldilock’s discovery of Newton’s method for approximation required surprisingly few changes. Now I need to know which method was too soft (perhaps too small? with too big an error?), which too hard (too lengthy a calculation?) and which just right (is it Newton’s method or one of the many variations).

Germs control us

This is kind of fun (via here):

Now it seems the immune system, and infections that stimulate it, can influence our moods, memory and ability to learn. Some strange behaviours, such as obsessive compulsive disorder, may be triggered by infections, and the immune system may even shape our basic personalities, such as how anxious or impulsive we are.

For example:

It was meant to be a new way to fight cancer. The idea was that injecting a certain bacterium into people would stimulate their immune systems to destroy tumours. Unfortunately, the treatment had little effect on the survival of the terminally ill lung cancer patients in the first trial. It did have one unexpected effect, though: those injected with the bacterium experienced a radical improvement in their mood and quality of life.

I can’t get the article online (it is online through NU but it’s delayed), so I’m going to have to go read it. It really is interesting to see how evolving science can radically change how we see ourselves–if your attitudes can partially depend on infections, then what exactly are we? Could someone become succesful (or not) because of an infection which changes their way of thinking? This is a question that cries out for a philosophical discussion, but not by me.

Impossible motions

Kokichi Sugihara makes videos that seem to show impossible motions. What makes this interesting to a math guy is that it’s not done with video tricks (such as stop motion) but with the knowledge of perspective. He builds ramps that go down but look like they’re going up from one direction.

Here’s the video (the video shows the balls seeming to go uphill and then moves the camera to show they’re really going downhill). Fun stuff.

Snow in Malden

Since there’s a snow day today, I decided to go for a walk to the cemetery down the road

then walked up the path in the hill behind it

and walked all the way up to the top (ok, it’s not a big hill but the snow was rather deep)

It was good exercise, so now I’m just sitting around listening to some KT Tunstall

Myrtle Beach

I drove down and then stayed in the Myrtle Beach area for awhile, which is why I haven’t had posts recently. And I took pictures. The first are from Gardencity ( a bit south of Myrtle Beach):

these next are from Myrtle Beach:

and the last is one where the sun is peaking through the clouds over the ocean:

Happy New Year

Another year end is here and soon another will begin. I hope you all have a great transition. Here’s some music to help you on your way (I really wanted Rockin in a Christmas/New Year by the Fools but couldn’t find it):