End Game Near?

The idea that Iran's influence in Iraqi politics has been growing along with the amount of arms they have smuggled in is getting harder to ignore, despite the desperate desire of both the Executive and Legislative branches of our government to avoid dealing with it. The latest sign that we may have lost the political war is posted about at Heading Right. If this petition holds up, support for the ground war will evaporate completely in the United States in short order. There is no doubt in my mind that Iranian money and arms are heavily influencing this, as our Congress has given our enemies proof that we are a weak willed and cowardly society. This has encouraged the Iranians and foreign jihadists no end, despite the astounding losses they are suffering. The sad thing is that the political left and quite a few moderates have forgotten the lessons of childhood playgrounds. The psychology of a bully scales up and now that we've shown our weakness, the bully will never leave us alone. That scaled up bully is Islamic terrorism and he's going to be wanting our lunch money on a regular basis after we abandon Iraq. Expect a "fortress America" mentality setting in and then being rather loudly blown up, as we can't even secure our borders. We may see a future like Israel's current situation, with suicide bombings and attacks becoming common.

We as a society are telegraphing our weakness very loudly at the moment, with the behavior of the Democrats in Congress, and the constant anti-war beat of our mass media. The drift to the Left over the war is also making the socialist fringe feel like they have a mandate here, while socialism is starting to lose its luster in Europe due to its colossal economic failures. Amazing, given that even the French have realized that it doesn't work well. All of this points to very bad times for our country in the near future as political strife undercuts our achieving anything constructive at home or abroad. The Democrats have sold their soul and are now selling out their country for political power. Nothing good can come of it and I wonder how long it will take the American people to wake up and realize what they did this last November.

Confessions of a Bibliophile

Currently, I'm trying to read too many books and have been ill enough that it is difficult to read for extend amounts of time. In the Old Testament, I'm just about to start The Second Book of Chronicles and look forward to a little less listing of names. Taking a break from The Confessions of Saint Augustine, I'm reading Nico Machiavelli's The Prince and hope to finish that today or tomorrow. It is very edifying and grim to read, for much of what he wrote are unpleasant truths. I can see that some of his teachings are being used in the political arena (primarily by the left), but interestingly enough other lessons are being completely ignored. The lessons being ignored are fatal ones if old Nico is correct. At some point I'm going to have to get his other writings. For the moment, Machiavelli is my light reading, eventually I'll finish the Robert Heinlein juvenile novel Spaceman Jones as that is proper light reading material. The latest Harry Potter novel looms large in the near future, so I better be clearing some time for it.

The Easton Press made me an offer I couldn't refuse, which is the ability to receive books every two months instead of monthly from the 100 Greatest Books club. I adore the quality of the books and being a reader rather than a collector, I want longevity in my books. Too many of my old paperbacks have fallen apart and cheap book club editions don't hold up much better. The quality of writing is also high for this particular subscription and I've been well pleased with the books. The latest book ended up replacing my over one hundred year old copy of The Scarlet Letter by Hawthorne, so that was a nice bonus. Of course, the one flaw to the every two month plan is it will now take me twenty years to collect them all. Here's to hoping I can find a way to get a little more income and go back to monthly deliveries.

Of course, there are cheaper alternatives out there and one is finding books on eBay. I don't limit my hunting to Easton Press volumes, there are other lesser but still very good publishers out there. The Folio Society has published nice editions at lower prices for decades and I might have joined them but the upfront price is very steep with a requirement of four books purchased within four weeks of joining. That turns into a cost of at least $150 after all costs are totalled and I wasn't going for that. Instead I started hunting on eBay for their books and scored some great bargains. Another defunct publisher like the Folio Society was Heritage Press (or Heritage Club) and my copy of The Prince was printed by them. They went under in 1992 but the books seem to be readily available on eBay.

Thanks to the bargain of used books, I've acquired Folio Society editions of George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm, Robert Graves' The Greek Myths and The Siege and Fall of Troy, and J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Silmarillion. All are nicely illustrated and I only compromised on one set that was too cheap to pass up despite minor staining to the cover. While not leather bound or gilt edged, they are far beyond what you normally get in a hard cover.

One nice thing about paying more for books is that it slows down acquisition and makes it more likely I'll someday catch up on my reading. At least that's the theory I'm operating by at the moment. I will admit they make my book shelves look a great deal better!

Does This Thing Still Work?

Four score and seven years ago I last posted - or so it feels. Now I had to deal with the fact that Google has made users of Blogger use a Gmail address and that entailed some jumping through hoops to get started again. While little has changed in my personal life since the last post, a few things have changed here and there, such as the ending of the Help Defeat Cancer project at World Community Grid. I felt good about the project and it looks like it achieved what it set out to do, but I also admit a little melancholy crept in when it finished. I'd actually upgraded my dual core PC to 2 GB of RAM just to run it smoothly on both cores. Still, there are other good projects there and I keep crunching.

Meanwhile, the Chicago Cubs are finally above .500 and it only took them until May to do it! Yes, I'm damning them with faint praise and yet I hope to see them do a lot better with the rest of the season. The bright spots have been watching Rich Hill become the pitcher I thought he was going to be and Derek Lee's hitting doubles like a madman. While most people love the home run, I love the double. Why? Simply put, a team that hits a lot of doubles will score more runs than a team of sluggers, as I've noticed that doubles hitters tend to hit for average. Most sluggers are an all or nothing proposition and therefore are less reliable. I was spoiled by watching Bobby Dernier and Ryne Sandberg hit what Harry Carey called "the daily double". Dernier would double, then Sandberg - presto, instant run. Now if rookie Felix Pie could get into that frame of mind, this will be quite a season.

I think I shall end this post on that positive note and continue in another.

Sparing Time for Helping Humanity

PC time, that is. As I posted earlier, I've downloaded software from BOINC that allows distributed computing projects to use computer users spare time to do work on various projects for science. It all really got rolling with SETI at Home, the search for intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, and blossomed into the medical field with projects on smallpox vaccines, and human protein folding which applies to many illnesses from cancer to AIDS. Collectively, the thousands of home computers add up to a super computer for each of these projects, often doing thousands of days of computer time in hundreds of days.

Out of gratitude for getting BOINC rolling, I give SETI about 1% of my spare computing time and devote most of it between two other projects. Both Rosetta@home and World Community Grid serve as coordinators for various simulations for medical researchers. While I'm never sure exactly what I'm working on from Rosetta, they have been involved in AIDS treatment research as well as trying to map out how proteins in the brain work for patients who have Alzheimers Disease. World Community Grid is something IBM started and hosts multiple projects that you can pick and choose from by setting up your profile. Not all are available to BOINC users, as they are also using a different platform from Grid.org. Currently, WCG has Help Defeat Cancer, FightAIDS@Home, Genome Comparison, Human Proteome Folding Phase 2, and are starting up Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy. I've concentrated my time on Cancer and Genome Comparison while occasionally beta testing the new software for the various programs. Right now HPF2 isn't out for BOINC and I'm eager to crunch data for that.

The most important one to me is the cancer program, it requires quite a bit of PC power to do and is a project to automate the diagnosis of lethal fast moving cancers by running slides of biopsies through scanners. Eventually, the algorithyms being perfected for this will allow diagnoses in days rather than weeks, which is critical with fast moving cancers.

I also give time to two other projects at a much lower priority. One is Spinhenge@home which is a nanotech research project into how different nanocarbon molecules react magnetically under a wide range of temperatures. Getting switching to work in nanoparticles will be a big achievement and open the doors to ever smaller electronics. The other project is SIMAP, which is a project to database protein simularities for researchers to access. Instead of having to reinvent the wheel every time they want to do molecular medicine comparisons, it will be in a pre-existing database. This project is intermittent and just finished a limited batch of data this past week. Blink and you miss out on this one.

There are many other projects out there, including one's aimed at finding pulsars, breaking cryptography, predicting climate shifts, even rendering 3D computer animations. Check out this site for a full listing of them.

These are my current BOINC based stats, back in the past I also crunched numbers for the SETI@home Classic and for Grid.org's cancer and HPF1 programs.

2007 Begins

2007 has come around and I need to be posting more if I'm to improve my writing skills at all. Late November through the end of December was a manic period, with far too many things going on. The week leading into Christmas was an excellent one and I was more productive than I'd been in ages. But the one thing that stood out above all others was something that happened on Christmas Day while traveling to Indiana.

A stop at a filling station turned into an unusual chance to be of comfort to a young woman dying of cancer working the checkout. In order to make sure her two young daughters would have a Christmas to remember, she'd skipped two weeks of chemotherapy so that she could work to afford it and also have energy to make it all happen. Her doctor and some family were very angry about that decision, but it was clear the cancer was a fast mover and too far spread and she was being realistic about how long she had. Consequently, she wanted Christmas to be about family and we discussed that it is what life is about. I let her know that I thought she was doing the right thing and I hope it helped her in her ordeal. That night I prayed for at least an hour for her and her family while wishing there was more I could do. Strange how the real meaning of Christmas can be found in a filling station off of I-90 while so many buy into the commercialized distortion pushed so hard today.

Waxing Rhapsodic

A funny thing happened to me as I got older - instead of narrowing my music interests to when I was a teen like many do, I've found my interests broadening. Shockingly, even a little country music has wandered into my library. The outlaw branch to be specific, what they have on the radio isn't real country to me. I was always partial to Johnny Cash's early music and from there I've found some Waylon Jennings that I like. My music library (in the form of CD's and digital) has become very eclectic, with many genres represented: bebop, swing, old-time Norwegian, pop, rock, post-grunge, classic rock, new wave, experimental, classical, orchestral soundtracks, motown, funk, Sinatra, Dino, game soundtrack, and oddball.

It is growing thanks to finding a better music service than iTunes. Currently, I'm subscribing to Rhapsody from the folks at Real. It isn't without quirks or bugs, but no show stoppers for me like Apple's product. Once I learned to work around the IE7 problems and hack the registry to force subscription tracks to WMA format, I became a happy camper. The latter is a must do for people using subscription tracks on their compatible players, it saves a second downloading from Rhapsody and cuts down on disk space used. Hopefully, it will be a menu option with the next version. The tracks are better quality than iTunes, using a better bitrate and format as AAC loses its superiority over 128 kps even over MP3.

The best part of the subscription service is being able to listen to the entire tune before downloading it. Napster does the same thing and I think Apple is really missing the boat there since some tracks don't get good until a minute in. The option to buy and burn is there too, at 89 cents a track. I've gotten a few so far due to being impecunious and will buy others over the next year or so. The streaming "stations" and playlists are interesting and I'll get around to playing with them more, but with our ISP I can't count on reliable streaming.

At some point I'll get the code up to show what's playing on my PC. In the meantime, I've got thousands of tracks to rate...

Turkey Induced Thinking

Here it is, the day after Thanksgiving and I'm suffering turkey induced thoughts. They tend to be slow and ponderous thanks to the tryptophan - which is why playing Scrabble right after eating yesterday wasn't the brightest move on my part. I console myself with the fact I finished second, a mere 10 points behind. Not bad since it had been 30 years since I last played it. Well, not good since I only got 99 points and got shut out of every triple word play I had set up. Ah well.

It has been a long and hard year, so I had to work at counting my blessings, which all involve people I know. Or more accurately, it is the blessings of knowing them. I was told by someone that there are no good people, everyone is evil. That's haunted me, because I remember when I thought that way in my youth. It is a corrosive form of cynicism that eats at one's very soul and seeing that in someone else after getting away from that trap was sobering. There are a lot of good people out there and since they usually aren't trouble makers, it takes an effort to find them. Too many run in cynical and hip crowds, desperately searching for something to fill the hollow void in their lives. They accumulate material goods, money, fame, and party like they'll die if they stop moving. I have yet to see any good come from that lifestyle, only bitterness and resentment. I am very grateful that I learned not to be so bitter. I'm also grateful for my faith in Jesus Christ and Heavenly Father (you too, Holy Ghost), especially for the path that set me on, for it led me to most of the good people I know.

Look for the positive, there are silver, even platinum linings to many a cloud. It is how you deal with the negatives, with the tests and trials that determines how happy you will be. It certainly makes life easier to cope with.