Entries in Life

Scammers easily fool people most of the time when it comes to financial sites. A few tips for “safe hex” that most people evidently don’t know about or don’t care about.

• Check the lock on your browser — if its busted, don’t trust the site.
• Check the link before you click it — if you see “http://www.paypal.com/” in the text of the email, but the status bar shows “http;//paypalrewards.com/”, then don’t click the link. The email is a scam.
• If you get a popup when going to a financial site, read it. Most likely its telling you something is wrong. If it asks you if you want to trust the site, say “no!” and get out of there.
• Don’t be an idiot. Just because your login works on the site doesn’t mean the site is legit. One woman in the study above typed her username and password into the site to see if it was real.
• Just because the site or email looks real doesn’t mean that it is.

Mandarin Chinese is already the most popular first language on the planet, beating out English by 500 million speakers. And it’s the second-most-common language on the Internet. Now, just as China requires students to learn English, Beijing wants to make Chinese the must-take language for English speakers – and everyone else.
— The Mandarin Offensive

Ten years ago, in college, I briefly got involved in a conversation with a hispanic woman about which language was the most valuble to learn. She insisted that Spanish was. I said Chinese. Of course, most of those sorts of conversations go nowhere and that one was no exception. But I thought at the time that it was obvious. China was flexing its muscles as an economic power and they had over a billion people. Further, the extant Spanish-speaking population doesn’t seem to have the economic power of China. Of course, I’m a poor one to talk about language. I got a C in Spanish and a matching grade in French. And I don’t speak a lick of Mandarin Chinese.

I finally got enough tuits to implement email-posting to weblogs on OpenWeblog.com — the LiveJournal codebase had the ability, I just needed to enable it. I’ll be posting a howto soon.

I make about $10/month from Google Adsense from 4-5 pages on some documentation I’ve written. Which ain’t bad, considering I wrote those articles a couple of years ago and do just a little work now and then to keep them updated. But, I began thinking that maybe if I updated a little more often with posts about the spread of the Avian flu (a relatively hot topic for google), I could increase my Adsense revenue. So, after a year of inactivity, I went looking for information on the spread of H5N1. Man, did I surprise myself! I’m not easily scared. In fact, I’m usually oblivious. But after reading up just a bit on the flu, I’ve begun to see that it is a real and increasing danger. Go read the latest post to see what I’m talking about. There’s even a tie-in with earlier conversations about suffering and population control:

Society just can’t accept the idea that 50 percent of the population could die. And I think we have to face that possibility…

Technological and medicinal advances have crippled us in a sense. In Stalker the stalker says that technology is just so many crutches. But those crutches can harm us if we rely on them too much. If you grow up using crutches, you won’t learn to walk properly. The past hundred years have given us a great pair of crutches. We don’t expect to suffer at all to a large extent. And when suffering does happen, we’re not prepared for it. We don’t know what do do with suffering and it shocks our system. We’ve built our paradigm around the idea that God doesn’t want us to suffer. But that is just completely wrong. A while back I had a signature on my email that said something like “Life is full of pain, misery, and dispair. May as well enjoy it.” Suffering is unavoidable. We may be able to put it off for a few months or a few years, but in the end, the Tsunami will come, the Hurricane will strike, the Earthquake will shake us, Fire will destroy everything we own, and Cancer will eat away at our body. We should expect suffering. Not just the suffering of others, but our own suffering. I’m not suggesting that we welcome suffering. No one wants to suffer. But we need to know that suffering will happen. We must expect it. I think we don’t know how to suffer. We’re caught off guard by it. We think we have everything under control and then — BAM! — something happens that shakes us to our core. Our complacency is disrupted.

In Return of the Parents, I wondered if “we could be witnessing the beginnings of a long term shift back towards larger families.” Both and said they didn’t think so. Now, I skimmed a few academic papers in my reply and put a couple a way to read more thoroughly and Attitudes and Low Fertility (PDF) should interest you guys especially. Even would be interested in some of what it says.

While Barber & Axinn acknowledge that changes in attitudes towards childbearing have contributed to the fertility decline in the U.S. in recent decades, they perceive changes in attitudes less unidirectional. Future trends may see a reversal of ideational change to more traditional value orientations (see also Lesthaeghe & Moors, 1995) as well as movements that discourage behaviors, such a premarital sexual activity, that are frequently seen as defining features of “modern” demographic behavior (e.g., Bearman & Brückner, 2002 [PDF]).

That is, don’t assume that society’s attitudes about childbearing can’t or won’t change.

Thursday morning, around 4AM, I showed up at the hospital with a bloody face, looking generally disheveled. They ended up admitting me to the already full hospital, which meant I had to lay around ER until almost 2PM. It was a particularly icy morning, so I got to see a some of people come in with broken hips and some bad cases of whiplash. It all started Wednesday afternoon. I felt a growing pain in my back, and it only seemed to get worse as the day went on. I put it down to some exercises I had done, evidently incorrectly. I didn’t eat much that day, not because I wasn’t hungry, but because I was overwhelmed by the number of calories in Dunkin’ Donuts’ Glazed Cake Donut (350!). I went to bed feeling vaguely uneasy, but put it down to the (slight) hunger and back pain.I woke up around 3:30AM and went to the bathroom. A little nausea set in as I started to make my way back to my bedroom and … BOOM! … the next thing I remember is laying in the doorway of my five-year-old’s bedroom yelling about some pain while my daughter screamed “Daddy! Are you okay?!?” I can’t figure out how I got there except that I must have fallen on the banister when I fainted and fallen away from my doorway and the stairway down. Did you know your blood pressure drops dramatically with the onset of nausea? I didn’t till yesterday. There wasn’t much danger of me vomiting, but lack of food and perhaps a little dehydration caused me to faint when the nausea set in. Anyway, that’s where I’ve been and why I haven’t replied to any of the great comments half of the people reading this weblog left on that post I made a few hours before The Fall. tells me I need to stop obsessing about food. The kids are starting to count calories!

After reading this plea for python evangelism because of Ruby’s booming popularity, I’m amused because Python did the same thing to Perl a few years back. It reminds me a google video I saw: Yellow Fever (the joke is at the end).

WASHINGTON (AP) — The same Bush administration review panel that approved a ports deal involving the United Arab Emirates has notified a leading Israeli software company that it faces a rare, full-blown investigation over its plans to buy a smaller rival.

What has the administration so upset? A “specialized intrusion detection software” used to protect some classified computers. The name of the software? Snort. Some people will understand right away why this is silly, but for the rest of you, Snort is open source software. This means that, generally speaking, there are no secrets about what the software does, so any foreign company that acquired it wouldn’t gain any government secrets because Snort’s source code is available to everyone. Now, admittedly, Sourcefire could have done some consulting for the government and crafted some custom rules for the government. And perhaps that’s what they’re concerned about. But they aren’t saying that. They seem to be claiming that the software itself is what they’re worried about.

In the “culture wars,” one of the battle grounds is between parents and the Childless by Choice crowd. I think I’ve seen someone mention over on flutterby.com (though, not apparently on that thread) that the unintended result of this is that “breeders” will be passing their values on to the next generation while the “childless by choice” crowd won’t. It is interesting that Foreign Policy has an article on this very subject: The Return of Patriarchy.

Patriarchy does not simply mean that men rule. Indeed, it is a particular value system that not only requires men to marry but to marry a woman of proper station. It competes with many other male visions of the good life, and for that reason alone is prone to come in cycles. Yet before it degenerates, it is a cultural regime that serves to keep birthrates high among the affluent, while also maximizing parents’ investments in their children. No advanced civilization has yet learned how to endure without it. … As the United States is discovering today in Iraq, population is still power. Smart bombs, laser-guided missiles, and unmanned drones may vastly extend the violent reach of a hegemonic power. But ultimately, it is often the number of boots on the ground that changes history. … The greatly expanded childless segment of contemporary society, whose members are drawn disproportionately from the feminist and countercultural movements of the 1960s and 70s, will leave no genetic legacy. Nor will their emotional or psychological influence on the next generation compare with that of their parents. … By contrast, nearly a quarter of the children of baby boomers descend from the mere 11 percent of baby boomer women who had four or more children. … This dynamic helps explain, for example, the gradual drift of American culture away from secular individualism and toward religious fundamentalism.

(emphasis all mine) Wow! I’m definitely a “breeder” (four children puts me squarly in that category!) and I’m assuradly more conservative than most people in the “childless by choice” crowd, but I’m still a little uneasy with many of the conservative, fundamentalist crowd. But this article makes me wonder if, in fact, we could be witnessing a the beginnings of a long term shift back towards larger families.