Day: December 10, 2008

Just How Vital Is God to Homeland Security?

The American Atheists are suing the state of Kentucky over a provision that a fundamentalist Christian legislator managed to slip into the state’s law governing the state Office of Homeland Security,

(2) The executive director shall:
(a) Publicize the findings of the General Assembly stressing the dependence on Almighty God as being vital to the security of the Commonwealth by including the provisions of KRS 39A.285(3) in its agency training and educational materials. The executive director shall also be responsible for prominently displaying a permanent plaque at the entrance to the state’s Emergency Operations Center stating the text of KRS 39A.285(3);

In this case I think the American Atheists’ lawsuit is fully warranted (and a slam dunk at that), but please can’t they find someone to write press releases that don’t sound like rants,

Can’t we let this alone?

No, we can’t.  It is our patriotic duty to protect our Constitution from threats.  The injection of religion into government offices, if left alone, would set a precedent and lead to more infringements, which would then become precedents themselves.  We have seen, first hand and in this case alone, that religion can never be satisfied — they will always want more.  The  [sic] Seaparation of Church and state is a doctrine we proudly and unapologetically defend.

Beyond that, the whole concept that the state and the country is powerless against other religious zealots without this specific god to help us screams of the same religious zealotry that got us into this war in the first place. “my god can beat up your god” is what they say before a war begins — or escalates.

Really? See, I’d have taken a different tack. If Homeland Security is dependent on ‘Almighty God’, I want to know where the hell he/she/it was on September 11, 2001? Taking a day off? (Come one, we already took God out of public schools — he can’t have much else left to do, can he?) Too busy downing some donuts to stop a few planes?

Along with the lawsuit, perhaps we should subpoena this Almighty God character and find out exactly what its role in terrorism is. If Almighty God is truly the lynchpin of anti-terrorism, it sounds like we might have grounds for a class action lawsuit here.

Nature Commentary Piece on Cognitive-Enhancing Drugs

Nature has an interesting commentary piece about the use of cognitive-enhancing drugs like Adderall, Ritalin, and Provigil and that are currently being used for their cognitive-enhancing properties by otherwise healthy people, along with drugs on the horizon that are likely to be “abused” in this way.

The piece by Henry Greely et al starts by recognizing that even though the use of drugs like ritalin without a prescription is illegal in the United States, it is becoming fairly routine and common on college campuses in this country,

Yet one survey estimated that almost 7% of students in US universities have used prescription stimulants in this way, and that on some campuses, up to 25% of students had used them in the past year. These students are early adopters of a trend that is likely to grow, and indications suggest that they’re not alone.

The commentary generally comes down in favor of sensible regulation of cognitive-enhancing drugs, arguing that “based on our considerations, we call for a presumption that mentally competent adults should be able to engage in cognitive enhancement using drugs.”

Hell yes, they should.

The authors call for ensuring that cognitive-enhancing drugs are safe, but that we don’t go too far and demand that such drugs meet higher standards of safety than other types of drugs.

An evidence-based approach is required to evaluate the risks and benefits of cognitive enhancement. At a minimum, an adequate policy should include mechanisms for the assessment of both risks and benefits for enhancement uses of drugs and devices, with special attention to long-term effects on development and to the possibility of new types of side effects unique to enhancement. But such considerations should not lead to an insistence on higher thresholds than those applied to medications.

We call for an evidence-based approach to the evaluation of the risks and benefits of cognitive enhancement.

This, of course, makes far too much sense to ever actually become policy in the United States, but it is at least a useful exercise in outlining an alternative to the inevitable war on smart drugs.

DVD+-R Life Expectancy

David Pogue apparently had some problems recovering data from some DVDs he burned a few years ago and is all up in arms at the apparently short life span of DVD+Rs and DVD-Rs,

Jeez Louise. A conference organizer asked if I could put together a DVD loop of my funniest Web videos, to play in the registration area while attendees stand in line. No problem, I thought: I’ve got all of the original iMovie projects backed up on DVD, in clear cases, neatly arrayed in a drawer next to my desk. (My hard drive wasn’t big enough to hold those 50 videos a year.)

Guess what? On the Mac I use for video editing, most of the DVD’s were unreadable. They’re less than four years old!

Tried them on another machine. About half of them were readable.

Tried them on a MacBook that I’d been sent to review. Incredibly, mercifully, they all came through fine. I was able to rescue all those original iMovie projects and copy them onto new, bigger, cheaper hard drives.

Pogue concludes from this that burnable DVDs are excessively fragile, but based on what he describes it sounds like either a) the problem was with the DVD burner(s) or b) he’s not storing them properly.

Let me provide a different perspective. In my basement I have about 8,000 DVDs burned over the last 5-6 years. For media, I’ve always picked up whatever was on sale at Best Buy or Office Depot. I file the DVDs into soft cases designed to hold 100 CDs/DVDs, put those cases in large plastic bins, and then file the bins on some shelves in the basement I bought for just that purpose.

After reading Pogue’s piece I grabbed a couple dozen DVDs at random from across projects and times and copied the contents back to a hard drive on PC I borrowed. I didn’t have a single problem copying data from any of the DVDs.

Which is not to say I trust DVD as the only or even primary solution for long term backup. In fact, the issue that is quickly approaching with DVD burning is that the cost of magnetic media is quickly falling to the point where it will soon be cheaper to store data on a hard drive than on a DVD.

Today, Amazon.Com will sell you a 1.5 terabyte hard drive for $130 or less than 9 cents per gigabyte. At that price, optical media is close to not being cost effective when you factor in the inconvenience of burning, storing and managing all of those DVDs.

Gallery 3 Development Begins

After releasing Gallery 2.3 back in October, the folks behind the “your photos on your website” software have decided to free the 2.x version and begin work on Gallery 3 which will include an rewrite of the software.

Those of you that have been paying attention know that something is going on! At the Gallery Sprint a few weeks ago, we made a lot of decisions and got the ball rolling on a complete rewrite which we’ve decided to call Gallery 3. Development of new features on Gallery 2 has been frozen, Gallery 1 is now a completely separate project “Jallery“, and the Gallery team is now busy at work on Gallery 3. It’s definitely not ready to run on your website yet but we’ve set the ambitious goal of having a 3.0 release by February 1, 2009 and are on track to meet that goal. Read on for details of why we’re doing this and what you can expect.

In the comments to the announcement, one of the developers emphasizes increasing the performance of Gallery as one of the goals of the rewrite. As awesome as Gallery is, I’ve noticed that now that I’ve got more than 22,000 photos online using it that it has seriously slowed down in a number of areas, especially in adding new photos.

If they can achieve significant performance increases, the rewrite will more than justify the inconvenience it will create among people who have modified the code or written plugins for 2.x that will almost certainly have to be rewritten for 3.x.