All posts by Rand Simberg

Administrative, Technology and Society

More Fedora Fun

9 Comments

Because my life was too care free, and being a glutton for punishment, I decided to upgrade from Fedora Core 7 to 8.

Unfortunately, the latest distribution doesn’t fit on CDs any more, and I don’t have a DVD reader in the machine to be upgraded. So I decided to build a boot disk on a cd, and do it from the network. So I build the CD, for x86_64 (the machine is running on an Athlon 64), boot with it, and everything is going fine until it’s about ready to start checking for dependencies. It gives me a message (from memory): “You are about to upgrade to x86_64, but your previous installation is i386. It is likely that this upgrade will fail. Do you want to continue?”

I scratch my head. I’m pretty sure that the last install was a 64 bit one. Maybe they mean that it will fail if I don’t have a 64-bit processor, but I do, so I tell it to go ahead. It starts checking dependencies, and the bar starts to move slowly to the right. Until it’s a quarter of the way, at which point it quits moving. I go away and come back in an hour. Still no motion. I go away and come back after a couple hours. Still stuck. I go to bed. I get up in the morning. No more progress. It finally exits with an error.

I try it from a different FTP site. No joy.

OK, if it thinks that it’s an i386 installation, I’ll just update that, and worry about making it 64 bit later. Burn the disk. Boot.

This time, when I get to the same place, I get the following message: “You are about to upgrade to i386, but your previous installation is x86_64. It is likely that this upgrade will fail. Do you want to continue?”

Note the subtle difference from the previous error message.

OK, the installer is schizo. When I try to install i386, it thinks it’s replacing x86_64, and when I try to install x86_64, it thinks it’s replacing i386. I tell it to go ahead. I get the same result–it hangs during the dependency check, at exactly the same place.

Any Fedora gurus out there with any suggestions? (Pete Zaitcev, I’m looking at you…)

Weird

Are You Happy To See Me?

4 Comments

…or is that just a snake in your pants?

The video is a little difficult to see, but shop owner Rick Preuss say it’s clear she’s reaching into the cage and stuffing the snake down her pants. He says the woman had been in the store for some time, staking out the cage.

“In some ways, I wish it were this really big snake going down her pants [so you could see it better]. Instead what you see is a quick view from the camera” of the snake pattern, he says.

Well, if he were still around, Freud would say that she has trouser-snake envy.

General Science, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Getting Better All The Time

9 Comments

Men no longer have go through the drudgery of determining whether or not chix are hawt. We can now have the computers do it for us:

“The computer produced impressive results — its rankings were very similar to the rankings people gave.” This is considered a remarkable achievement, believes Kagian, because it’s as though the computer “learned” implicitly how to interpret beauty through processing previous data it had received.

I wonder what units it used to judge? Millihelens (that amount of female beauty required to launch a single ship)?

Of course, that was the easy part:

Kagian, who studied under the Adi Lautman multidisciplinary program for outstanding students at Tel Aviv University, says that a possible next step is to teach computers how to recognize “beauty” in men. This may be more difficult. Psychological research has shown that there is less agreement as to what defines “male beauty” among human subjects.

No kidding. I’ve sure never been able to figure it out. Maybe it can just check his bank balance.

Which brings up an interesting (and potentially politically incorrect) point. I think that women are clearly much better at determining whether other women are attractive to men than men are at figuring out whether or not other men are attractive to women (at least physically). I suspect that this is because physical attributes are (for evolutionary reasons, unfortunately) where women primarily compete, so they have to be more attuned to it. I also think that this is why women tend to be more receptive to same-sex relations than men, even nominally heterosexual women (hence the concept of the LUG–lesbian until graduation). In order to be a judge of feminine pulchritude, it helps a lot to appreciate it, and it’s a shorter step from there to wanting to experience it up closer and personal than it is for a guy. Particularly a guy like me, who finds men disgusting, and is eternally grateful that not all women do.

Political Commentary

Count Me As A 9/11 American

61 Comments

I’m sure as hell not an Abu Ghraib American. Obama seems to be, though.

[Update early Friday evening]

Here are more thoughts from Jennifer Rubin:

One might argue, as many of us here have, that his association with Wright was more than a failure to anticipate public reaction: it was a moral and intellectual failing. (Juan Williams, as he has before, explains this in today’s Wall Street Journal with searing clarity.) Yet she has a point: does Obama lack a “feel” for ordinary voters’ sensibilities?

Well, of course. His life experience is utterly unlike the average voter’s. On his journey from Hawaii to Indonesia to Hawaii to Harvard, he probably ran into a lot of critiques of American culture and not very much bowling. He hasn’t, it looks like, developed an internal compass that warns him when something may be offensive or off-putting to ordinary Americans.

Yup. Like some of my commenters, who will thus be quite shocked when he gets blown out this fall by those same “ordinary Americans.” It’s actually quite amusing how the supposed “party of the people” has become so elitist, and gotten so out of touch.

General Science, Science And Society

Can Animals Think?

17 Comments

It’s always been obvious to me that they do, at various levels. I’ve always found bizarre the notion of some scientists that only humans are capable of cognition. As this long but interesting article points out, it makes no sense in evolutionary terms. The cognitive traits that we have had to have their origins somewhere, though what’s even more interesting is that it seems to be a parallel development (that is, like the eye, intelligence has evolved more than once). And it’s not anthropomorphizing to recognize clear thoughtful and volitional behavior in cats and dogs. I don’t understand the thinking of these modern-day Descartes (he didn’t believe that animals were capable of feeling pain) who believe that animals are simply automatons. But then, some of these loons didn’t believe that newborns were capable of feeling pain, either, and used to (and perhaps still do) perform major surgery sans anesthesia, ignoring the screaming.

[Via Geek Press]

Business, Space

More Propellant Depot Thoughts

8 Comments

Jon Goff has a wrap up of the issues (mostly technical) that came up in the panel discussion last Friday in Phoenix.

As he notes, there was little discussion of what other markets we can find than DoD and NASA. The problem is that until the capability is demonstrated, it’s going to be very hard to sell it to the conservative comsat industry. The nearest-term plausible private market that I can conceive of is Bigelow, if he still wants to do his lunar cruises. It would be interesting to put together a business model using Genesis modules swinging around the moon, and see if it’s greater or less than projected NASA Constellation needs.

Administrative

Back To FL

2 Comments

I’ve got an afternoon flight out of LAX that gets in late tonight. Things should start to get back to blogging normal tomorrow.

[Update about 3 PM PDT]

Well, tomorrow got here faster than I thought. No, I’m not blogging from the air. I (barely) missed my flight. I could have made it but it would have been sans luggage. I’m staying with my webmaster for the afternoon and evening, and going out on the redeye tonight. Fortunately, I wangled an upgrade.

[Wednesday afternoon update]

Got in about 7 AM EDT. Still catching up on sleep (and not just because of the red eye). Back a little later, perhaps with a (slight) site upgrade.