View 406 March 20 - 26, 2006 (original) (raw)
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Tuesday, March 21, 2006
Equinox, Sort of
Equinox doesn't mean what you think it does, and doesn't happen when you think it should, but this is still the first day of Spring. For more on this, see
http://www.usatoday.com/weather/resources/
askjack/2005-02-22-equninox-equal_x.htm
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Tunguska and Global Warming
In case you didn't see this, regarding the Tunguska event and global warming:
http://www.physorg.com/news11710.html gives the theory.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=271 presents the standard response.
Note, though, that the standard response does not respond to the data on late 19th Century cooling Shaidurov presents. I have no way of verifying his measures, but if they are true, and if that trend changed in the early part of the 20th Century, this requires comment. One possible comment is that his data are just plain incorrect, with some argument to that effect. What is not acceptable is dismissing the data.
Long ago I did an essay onThe Voodoo Sciences, which is worth your attention if you have not seen it before. There is asmall discussion of this in an earlier view. The important principle here is that real science covers all the data.
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I am out of time so I won't get to the essay I intended today. I was going to begin by saying that nearly everything I learned in clinical psychology classes in graduate school in the early 1950's was the bunk, although I was fortunate to have one class in which the textbook was Henderson and Gillespie, A Textbook of Psychiatry, 7th Edition; this was largely because the emphasis in my graduate school was on physiological science rather than Freudian voodoo. In those days Freud was still very much respected. In those days I could see there was as much evidence for the truth of Hubbard's Dianetics as for Freud. This was before the transmogrification into Scientology, when Hubbard's book was held up as science, and indeed made as much sense as Freud. Freud postulated non-existent mental structures, just as Hubbard did. Jung added collective unconscious, as Hubbard did. None of this was science, but that wasn't clear at the time. Well, it was clear, but it was a bit difficult for one graduate student to oppose the entire intellectual and scientific establishment of the country, and while it was easy to ridicule Hubbard's Dianetics -- Martin Gardiner did that well in Fads and Fallacies -- when you pointed out that the same arguments could be applied to Uncle Ziggy you would find yourself in real trouble.
In other words, psychology in those days was Voodoo science.
Apparently it still is, and apparently the psychiatrists are in on it. In particular we have a local case of a man diagnosed with adult ADD; the drugs he is given have made him find himself. Finding himself consists of quitting his job, living at his parents' home, suing his working wife for spousal support and making her sell the house so he can have his share, not paying child support, and in general using his 'disability' so he can stay on drugs. Legal drugs. He has found himself, with the help of the physicians.
Apparently this is science. Telling a man he is no longer a man, and has no responsibilities, is old wives tale stuff. Modern science lets you find yourself even if what you find is being a moral monster, and modern science supports, apparently, the notion of "equality" so that a woman with two kids has to sell her house to support the legal drug habit of the man who found himself.
So I do have this request: I don't want speculation, but some of you are in or were very recently in graduate school in psychology or psychiatry. What are the standard textbooks today? What do graduate students in clinical psychology learn now? And what do psychiatrists learn that makes it a reasonable thing to let a man find himself with drugs that allow him to feel good about quitting his job and beggaring his wife and children? What are the textbooks that teach this?
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There is a story in the LA Times today about Winny, a file sharing program, and a virus pumping files out to the world.
It seemed a bit confused so I asked Mr. Hellewell for his interpretation, which is:
From various news reports, the confidential data leakage looks like more of a user-enabled problem that happened to be on a virus-infected computer.
The person was preparing a report for the nuclear site company, and copied files to his laptop (or perhaps a USB drive; the reports are varied on this) to take them home to work on. He also had the Winny P2P program installed, and had probably configured it to share the same folder that he put the nuclear files in. So when he connected at home, the Winny P2P program shared all the files in that folder, and someone found them and got them.
Although the Japanese nuclear agency has a policy about copying confidential information, it's apparently not well-enforced.
There is a virus called "Antinny" which uses the Winny P2P network spread itself.The Winny user has to manually download/open a file to install the virus. When installed, then "shares" itself to other Winny users. It's a Japanese language worm; Winny is also a Japanese language program. The various descriptions of this virus are not clear as to it's function, other than to spread to others via the Winny P2P program.
I don't think that it is clear that the Winny virus is the cause of the leak of the confidential data. I think that the user put the confidential files in a Winny-shared folder, and that's how those files were spread.
So it's another example of the danger of P2P programs, and the need to have current anti-virus. Along with the problem of confidential data leaking out via the improper actions of users. From a security standpoint, USB drives are a big source of leaks .... and most companies are hiding their heads in the sand about the security issues with USB drives.
Regards, Rick Hellewell
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A reader asked me about LCD monitors and color balance. I advised him to read David Em on the subject.
Wow, I am embarrassed to say that I have never read David's columns before. I looked him up
and you are right, he does do a good job covering the topic. Thanks for the pointer.
Matt
Precisely. And those who have any interest in visual display and editing and are not reading David Em are missing a lot.
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