A good laugh

For some reason, my sister hasn’t learnt to set her own watch yet, so she asked me to set it for her. She just happened to be next to a computer at the time, so I bumped it back one hour. She looks at it and looks at the computer and tells me not to be funny and insists I turn the watch back an hour. I shrug and get it into the settings mode again and ask her what she’d like the time to be. Since she was so insistant on turning her watch two hours back, I set it for her. Figuring, I’d get to have a good laugh soon, I decided to leave the other clocks in the house as they were.
About an hour and a half later, I went around and changed all the clocks and started chuckling at how long it would take for her to figure it out. Four hours pass, I tell some of my friends and they laugh about it. Then I leave to go shopping and come back, we have dinner. All seemed normal. About 7 hours later, she knocks on my door with her watch, laughing hysterically and then I crack up laughing and finally set her watch correctly for her.

Other Side of the Coin

I just had to laugh when I saw this in the paper today. People refusing to deliver mail that they felt was offensive and hateful, what will happen next? There’s all sorts of talk about how we need to protect the rights of people who are against homosexuality so that they can express their opinions by refusing services. Will postal employees get the same protection to voice their views through the refusal of services? I’m sure someone can find good religious grounds for not wanting to contribute to something that they feel promotes hatred if it really needs to be religious based.
I’m most curious as to what will happen next. Surely some people will say that this is a free speach issue and they would be correct in saying so. However, one of the examples that religious groups are using to allow people to deny services supporting same-sex marriage is a printer who doesn’t want to print wedding invitations. That is also a free speach issue based around someone wanting to say something but being denied the chance at expression because it disagrees with the beliefs of the person with the means of conveying the message. This cannot be a one way street.
Strangely enough my mail happened to be misdelivered today, though I’m not in Vancouver. One of these couldn’t have been destined for my address, can it?

Haunted Houses

I just went to my first big haunted house thing. It was most facinating. There were four haunted houses there with different themes, each of them the size of two trailers. The first one wasn’t really that good. It had the potential to be, but other factors kept it from really being good. It was a dark sort of thing that you were supposed to feel your way through. There were bumps on the wall, hands, and spikes along the floor. There were also sudden noises, puffs of air and people jumping out. The bad part about it was that there was essentially a congo line of people going through the whole thing. We couldn’t really go anywhere without running into people and everything was essentially triggered before we got there.
The second haunted house we went to was a bit better. There weren’t quite as many people, but the people behind me kept bugging me to hurry up and the people in there didn’t do anything for our group, just the one behind us. Can’t really please everyone with these things.
The third haunted house that we went to was full of all sorts of interesting 3d effects. There were also much fewer people. There was a really nice part at the end, which was a very nice finish to our visit. The last person waited for our whole party to get in their little area, which had a pair of thick curtains to block it off form the rest of it. Then this car came at us and stopped just short of our hallway. There was the noise, and you could see it coming closer quickly. It was cool.
The last one was a sort of alien thing. Very interesting visuals in there. Somehow, I like the visual ones more than the touch and feel ones. My brother really liked the alien at the end. It was one of those small greys and had a cut in the stomach. Someone reached out from it and really scared his girlfriend.
Over all, it was a decent first experience. A tad pricy though, I don’t think I’ll go to another one of these things for a few years.

James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus, Real or Fake?

I’m watching a documentry on forged artifacts right now. One of the hot items of discussion is the James Ossuary. I personally got a chance to stare at the box and scratch my head about the inscription.
This is a rather interesting object, the inscription on it passes two and a half out of three tests. The test that half fails is an isotope test and it says the brother of Jesus part is authentic and the James son of Joseph part is a fake. It’s also strange in the sense that no other ossuaries say who the brother is.
I don’t really want to debate the authenticity of the thing. Something like that definately has a lot of historical significance. Most people accept that there’s a historical person called Jesus and there isn’t really a religion that denies the existance of Jesus. Of course, they say different things about Jesus. This only really proves the existance of the individual, and not really anything about which of the various views of him are correct. Strangely, the political impact seems rather minimal for the historical significance.

Growing Frustration

This has been angering me for quite some time now and it seems to be an increasing practice amoungst people who run websites. What is the point of a script that brings up a dialog box when a mouse button other than the left mouse button is pressed? These are more commonly known as no-right click scripts, but lets face it, if you use the middle button to scroll, the vast majority stop that as well. Most of these also feature some sort of rude accusation or something that tells you not to steal images or something to that effect. I’m just innocently trying to navigate and I’d like that to be respected. If I wanted to steal the images off a site with lots of images, I’d simply go file, save page as, and tell it to save the complete website. I also have a plethora of buttons on my keyboard that I can use like print screen, the context menu button or the control+c short cut key. None of these are blocked. There’s also turning off scripting and offline browsers.
Let’s face it there’s no way view something without a copy in front of you and putting something online for viewing means copies are created. There’s no stopping that. Accusing everyone of theft isn’t really a good way of getting people to respect you or your copyright.

More spam than posts

I’ve posted a lot of mumbo jumbo on this blog and well, it takes a while for a blog to get attention. Now that people look at it, a bunch of umm, automated programs have found it and tried posting spam. Basically all but the first messages was caught by the spam filter here. They’re all pretty random. Most of them seem to want to sell drugs. Lately, there’s also been a fair number looking to sell halloween costumes.
I kind of wish someone who isn’t looking to sell things would post a reply to some of the things I’ve said.

Understanding the Greenhouse Effect

I saw a most facinating letter in the Calary Herald today. It basically stated that green house gasses should block a large portion of energy coming from the sun and preventing it from reaching the earth, thus cooling it. A casual observer might shrug and say, “Yeah, that makes sense.” A slightly less concieted observer might wonder what’s wrong with his or her own understanding of the green house effect. Of course, there’s also the observer who would claim that scientists are just lieing.
Someone with more physics background would note that the sun is very hot so it radiates a bunch of radiation along the higher energy end of the spectrum. It only becomes lower energy radiation after it hits the earth’s surface and the energy gets absorbed. Air is then warmed by direct contact with the surface and energy is radiated out again. Of course, the earth’s surface is at a lower temperature than the sun’s surface and so the radiation is mainly in the lower end of the spectrum.
We know that things absorb and scatter different wave lengths of light. It’s the reason the sky is blue. It seems pretty clear that green house gasses probably shouldn’t reflect energy radiated from the sun and the earth equally. If someone has to ask how gasses discriminate between the two and imply that it’s impossible to back up their conclusion, when I know they’re two different areas of the spectrum. I get the feeling that no research has been done and feel inclined not to believe the conclusion. Whereas if someone who’s spent years studying this and probably knows which gasses are better at reflecting what parts of the spectrum tells me that increasing the amounts of certain chemicals will cause the earth to heat up, I can feel assured that this is probably a sound conclusion.

Dreaming of Tesla

I had a strange dream last night. For some reason, I was doing a second high school diploma and I kind of blame Bruce Power for this because they ask their job applicants if they’ve completed high school no matter what degree the position acually wants. Anyway, I was kind of drifting through classes again and decided that this was highly pointless. I remember a bit of course content from my dream. One of them was acid base theory and another was a tribute to Tesla.
Maybe this is a good sign since I just applied for a bunch of power plant jobs and Tesla is probably known for AC power. History books don’t quite give him the credit he deserves.
I’m also reminded of a question asked by a creationist. DNA contains an increadible amount of information, almost like a vast and complex library. The suggestion was that this suggested that it was created by some kind of higher intelligence. Anyway, that’s the basis for the question and the sort of mentality that the question is designed to produce. The actual question is if a complex signal was recieved from space, would we assume that it was a natural random signal or created by a higher intelligence?
Of course, the qquestion assume the person you’re asking doesn’t know the history of radio astronomy. Tesla was the first person to do any radio astronomy and when he started recieving radio signals from space, the initial reaction was that Tesla was a kook and we should try to get him to say something amusing for our ratings. Nobody assumed that the radio signals were coming from an intelligent source, we just thought that the guy talking about wirelessly transmitting industrial levels of power, running electricity through his body, making increadible lightening displays and talking of particle weapons was crazy. To a certain extent, he did have a large number of eccentric personality traits.
There was also an instance where we got a complex signal and actually trusted that we were getting a signal from something that isn’t of this solar system. With some study, we decided that the signal didn’t come from intelligent life, we decided that it was a naturally occuring phenomenon which we decided to call a pulsar for the regular pulses of radio waves that it sends out.
The next time it happens, I don’t know what we might conclude. Maybe we’ll find that the data was fabricated, or perhaps we’ll decide that it’s a reflection of something sent from earth.

Is bullying in school really that bad?

I’m listening to a radio discussion about bullying in schools. Does it really get bad? Well, what makes up bullying? Harassment, robbery, assault, slander, blackmail, destruction of property, vandalism, all illegal acts. Why doesn’t anyone doing anything about it? We’ve aknowledged that these acts are bad and cross the line between expressing one’s own freedom and violating another’s. Why are we telling people that bullying will end if we stop reacting or paying attention to it? Telling people doesn’t stop it either. Something has to happen to stop it.
There’s all sorts of comericals on TV from concerned groups telling kids to talk to their parents about bullies. Then in lovely land of reality, parents complain to the school, school staff talk to the victim, maybe approach the criminal, usually not. Usually the focus is on the victim. Sometimes the school staff says that teachers will keep a closer eye on things. Ultimately nothing unusual is found. Things persist.
I guess I’ve also got a bit of a personal memory to rant about too. In grade 9 health class I was in a class discussion about how to make the school safer. It just so happened that the grade 8 class went before us and they listed off a small number of people that they wanted removed. They were all bullies, plenty of victims, plenty of documented incidences and did anything happen to the people they listed? I graduated with them. They got detentions for being late, but never for actually harming anyone. The behavior didn’t stop though. Everyone just kind of accepted that they were going to do stuff like that.
Of all the concerns that were raised, only one thing happened. There was a room that was split in two and they shared a single window. A third of it was in each room and a third was blocked off by the partition. If one exit was blocked, the original fire plan was to push the partition back and leave through the other room. Both sides now have a full window now as well as a direct route to the outside.

New month, new hopes

A lot of power companies seem to be hiring new grads at the moment. Hopes are high. I really hope to have a job by the end of the month.