A Voice of Reason and Skepticism in Europe

In my hometown newspaper’s online edition opinions page, there are any number of topics of interest to a small town.  One that has showed up a few times in recent weeks is about attempts to ban smoking in  bars and restaurants in Wisconsin.  I can’t seem to find any actual proposed legislation, though.

There are a few tired arguments that always, always, always rear their ugly heads.  1.  The guv’mint can’t tell us what to do on our private property.  2.  We have a “right to smoke”.  3.  If you don’t like the smoke, don’t go to bars.

I wonder if I’m wrong, but here are my answers to those three arguments.

1.  Of course the guv’mint can, and does, tell you what you can and can’t do on your own private property.  Try building without a permit, or not following building codes.  See how far you get draining wetlands on your own property.  The list goes on and on…

2.  I don’t think so.  This seems to be in the same boat as alcohol or heroin for that matter.  Do you have a “right” to use cocaine?  Maybe, maybe not.  I think probably not.

3.  Since when do these tiny minded smokers seem to think they get to name the genre of establishments they choose to infest to make this argument?  What’s to stop the smokers from deciding to hang out in bowling alleys instead of bars, then tell the rest of us “If you don’t like the smoke, don’t go bowling!”  Bullshit.

I read one of the best defenses for smoking I’ve heard so far recently.  One of the local dumbasses actually said he used to smoke because of his “persuit of happiness”.  What a load of shit.  What better way to show your agreement and support of the Declaration of Independence than to take up smoking?

I quit smoking ten years ago.  I started by experimenting with it with friends, then in the usual VERY short amount of time, was addicted.  I quit seriously three times.  The first two times, I “un”quit by just having one here and there after not touching one for over a year.  It takes even less time to become addicted again at that point.  No, I am quite certain the only way to stay smoke free is to really not have one again.  Ever.

Pity.  I sure enjoyed a good cigar.  And in Europe, I can get the good ones. But, they’re more expensive than drugs.

Anyone else fool around with tobacco and finally quit?  How many times did you try?

One more question.  Can anyone think of a single socially beneficial thing to come from tobacco and its use?

Sorry I’ve been gone so long.  But, it seems no one yet knows I’m here, so no great loss to the community, I think.

While on holiday for a couple weeks in April, something happened to my web server, as it became unreachable.  I was using it as a sort of heartbeat to tell me all was well with my house while we were gone.

Of course, the main worry I had was that someone had broken into my empty house and made off with my computer and everything else in the house.  The disappearance of my webserver coincided with an SMS on my mobile phone telling me I had 16 messages on my voicemail.  This was almost certainly my alarm system trying to call me until the alarm was silenced. 

Unfortunately for me, there is no roaming agreement between any mobile network in northern New York and Proximus in Belgium, so I couldn’t actually check my voicemail to hear what the alarm was.  We had left our landline contact number with our neighbor, and we got no calls from them.  I had to use Occam’s razor to arrive at the most likely conclusion of a power failure instead of a break in.  If it had been a break in, the external alarm would have sounded (for sixteen five minute periods).  My neighbor (a gendarme, fortunately) would have had to have been the one to silence it to stop the alarm system’s calls to my voicemail.  They would have certainly notified me on the landline, and they did not.

Most likely was a power failure, which will not cause an audible alarm, but will cause the system to call my mobile.  Also, a power failure alarm will self-reset when power is restored.

We worried about it anyway because we were out of position to do anything.  But it was only a power outage.  The notice from the power company of the scheduled outage was in our mailbox when we got home.

Occam was right.

The reason my web server disappeared is because I do not (yet) have a fixed IP address.  My dynamic DNS client (updatedd) for my domain registrar doesn’t work well using Mac’s launchd, and it seems that cron is finally dead in OS X.  So, I’ve been starting updatedd manually.  Of course, I wasn’t there to start updatedd, so the world soon couldn’t match my domain name to my ever changing IP address.  There’s got to be a better way.

Last week, I walked by my ISP’s office and saw no one in line.  I popped in and asked how much it would cost me to add a fixed IP address to my existing internet package.  Ten euro a month.  I spend more than that on a good bottle of wine.  Soon, this dynamic DNS problem will be behind me.  Now, all I really need is a good UPS for my server and my VDSL modem…  But I wonder, how much redundancy do I need when no one appears to be reading?

I was cleaning out my home directory and forgot I had this stuff.  It’s a collection of Java based slide rules (Java code by Eric Ross and Stefan Vorkoetter, used by permission).  I also have a decent collection of slide rules and not so long ago used my flagship rule, a Kueffel and Esser Decilon, to do two years of differential and integral calculus.

I haven’t had to use the calculus for three years, though.  I couldn’t integrate a problem today if my life depended on it.  That concerns me.  It cost a lot of time and effort to get that knowledge into my head.

I can’t be the only one to experience this.  What did you do about it?

A Romanian colleague at work brought a little microscope in to show it to me.  I offered to clean it up and overhaul it.

The cleanup operation went smoothly.  I was able to disassemble the eyepiece cell and clean the lens very well.  It is about the size of a split pea.  How someone can make a proper lens that small is a mystery to me.  There was no way to disassemble the objectives without destroying them, so I just cleaned them in place.  They came out pretty well.

The body and hardware was pretty easy to clean and re-lubricate.  It works very smoothly now.  I had no slides to actually try out the optics, but I was able to look through a cleaning paper and see the microfibers very well at 100x using only the reflected light from an open window next to the table.

I couldn’t find this exact scope on the internet, so this is the first one (probably not).  I return it to it’s owner on Monday, so I thought I’d get some pictures of it before I gave it back.  I hope she enjoys it.

Update (March 4):  With more people searching, we are getting very confident this is the only example of this exact Eikow model on the internet.  Also, the owner is very pleased with the results of my overhaul, both cosmetically and functionally.  I am glad it will be put to use.

Now, I have to get one of my own.  I’m finding all sorts of small stuff I’d like to examine and have no microscope to do it.  I also want one for my two boys’ education over the next 17 years.  Any suggestions?

We took Tom Flynn’s advice and completely gave christmas a miss this year.  It was great!  Thanks, Tom!

Our annual big day was Darwin Day, February 12.  For our Darwin Day equivalent of the christmas feast, we had spaghetti and meatballs in a tip of the hat to the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

The big gift for my five year old boy was a stereo microscope.  10X and 30X, with a set of 15X eyepieces as well.  I didn’t buy a cheap toy scope, but a proper dissection microscope.  It will serve us for years, I’m sure.  I also got him a box of insects cast in resin.  The cast quality isn’t that great, but they are adequate.

Something I noticed about all the bugs is the two hooks they all have on the ends of their feet.  Wasp, cricket, locust, spider, housefly, flower bug, scorpion, and ant.  All have those nice two hooks on the end of each foot.  Seems like the common bug ancestor must have worked out that two hooks pretty much get it on our planet and the design seems to have stuck.  Obviously, my tiny collection isn’t enough to draw too many conclusions, but that sure seems like a positive correlation to me.

Today, my boy proudly told us he wants to poo on a plate so he can put some under the microscope to look at it.  I guess I better get some slide making materials.

I wonder if anyone else celebrates Darwin Day as their big annual christmas replacement therapy day.

I wanted to mention I got the inspiration for my site name from the Skepbitch.  Also, from the Skepchick and Skepdude calendars.  I always thought the Skepdude calendars should have been titled “Skepdick” calendars.  Rhymes with Skepchick, you know.

The Skepbitch gets first place in my links sidebar.  Thanks for the inspiration, Dr!

What did we do?  Nothing.

My boy ate another couple bits of sweets from school.

That I love my wife has nothing to do with praying to some saint for it.  I ran into a news article yesterday telling that apparently Valentine is the wrong saint for lovelorn singles.  Sorry, I can’t remember the correct saint or where I read it.

There is a package out there to “install” MySQL v 5.1 onto my 10.5.6 Mac.  Big mistake.  It wouldn’t start.  It destroyed my old MySQL data (with some help from me).  After fighting with it for the evening, I did a system restore using Time Machine (WAY cool).  I didn’t go back far enough and the next morning (the system restore takes a LONG time), I had the same problem.  Did another system restore.  Then, Apache wouldn’t start.  Time Machine didn’t restore the /var/apache2/ directory for log files.  Add the directory.  Installed the latest big update from Apple.  Re-loaded this blog.

Here we are again.  Now to start working on content.