The World According To PTK

Beautiful day today, and the Sox play their first game of the 2014 season against the Yankees tonight in the Bronx. Birds are chirping outside, and I can hear the last touches being put on a new bridge over the creek down the hill. An excellent day indeed.

Science is not designed to support your opinion. Instead, it is designed to reveal facts derived from empirical evidence. It is not the responsibility of facts to agree with what you might think. If you have placed yourself in a position to be bereft of them, facts do not care. They have no ability to care. They are only facts. If facts make you uncomfortable, try to figure out why this is so. This may not be your fault. Indeed, it is most likely that you have been misled about the illuminating qualities of facts. Perhaps your father did not embrace reason. That would be discouraging. Perhaps your mother didn't know how to show that she loved you. She did. It's okay. You can do better. You can start to learn about the way things work in the actual universe. There is much data available. And if you can read, you need only start reading. I wish you the best of luck.

If you want access to Java tools like jar and javac, install the development version of the JDK. # yum install java-1.7.0-openjdk-devel Add the bin directory to your PATH so you can run the Java programs from anywhere. # PATH=$PATH:/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.7.0-openjdk-1.7.0.25.x86_64/bin View the classes in a jar file. # jar tvf dt.jar      0 Mon Jul 01 09:51:04 EDT 2013 META-INF/     71 Mon Jul 01 09:51:04 EDT 2013 META-INF/MANIFEST.MF      0 Mon Jul 01 09:51:00 EDT 2013 javax/      0 Mon Jul 01 09:51:04 EDT 2013 javax/swing/   4486 Mon Jul 01 09:51:04 EDT 2013 javax/swing/JSliderBeanInfo.class   3342 Mon Jul 01 09:51:04 EDT 2013 javax/swing/JFormattedTextFieldBeanInfo.class   3025 Mon Jul 01 09:51:04 EDT 2013 javax/swing/JMenuBarBeanInfo.class

James Fallows, who is an excellent veteran writer for The Atlantic , published a post today about "climate-gate" scientist Michael Mann being cleared of all wrongdoing yet again, this time by the National Science Foundation. As is often the case, Mr. Fallows raises a lot of good points using a small number of words, and provides some nice links. One of the points is the amazing and disturbing rejection of well-established science by nearly the entire Republican party. As I once heard Chris Matthews say to Pat Buchanan, these guys "would have been great in the Dark Ages." What would Abe Lincoln be thinking right now if he could see this?

After months of fighting to end Qaddafi's forty years of lunatic despotic rule in Libya, rebel fighters now control most of Tripoli, the capitol city, and today breached the walls of the presidential compound, where thousands celebrated and carried off booty and weapons. And on the same day, I felt my tenth floor cubicle in South Boston begin to sway at around two this afternoon, the result of a 5.8 earthquake all the way down in Virginia.

I just heard Orioles Hall of Famer Cal Ripken mispronounce the word "peripheral" as "periphial" on the MLB Network. This is one of the most commonly bungled English words, in my experience. A small way to stimulate the economy while improving English usage would be to create signs that teach proper spelling, pronunciation and usage of commonly botched words, and place them in public spaces.

This 2008 performance of "While You Wait For The Others," by the band Grizzly Bear, is mellow and trippy, with a muddy, popping guitar sound, a pleasing melody, sweet harmonies, and a rhythm section featuring nice snare work, quiet organ, interesting bass fills, and I say that this is a doggone pretty song. Recorded live for the show Morning Becomes Eclectic in the studios of KCRW, my old beloved Santa Monica Community College radio station. I drove many a mile around Southern California soaking up the musical and spoken sounds of this fine outlet. Long live KCRW.

Check out this video by Kevin Slavin at a recent TED talk.

I'm mighty impressed by this explanation of what ails the field of economics. It's not what you expect, whatever it is that you expect. This is very good: http://www.amazon.com/review/R1FRA5LD2PG6HT/ So now I'm going to read this at his blog: http://markbc.wordpress.com/thermodynamics-for-economists/ Do what I did and read the first thing first, though. It's well worth it.

Last night the Red Sox returned to first place in the standings, when they beat the Yankees on a tenth-inning walk-off single by rookie right fielder Josh Reddick, after they had tied it in the ninth against the great Mariano Rivera. That gives Rivera fourteen blown saves against the Red Sox in his career. No other team in baseball has gotten to him more than eight times. Tonight Tim Wakefield will start the first game of a three-game set in Minnesota. This will be his third try at  career win number 200.

Who thinks the US will experience economic growth sufficient to lower the unemployment rate below 6% any time in the next eight to ten years in the absence of major government stimulus?

Clive Owen points out in the Atlantic that the S&P downgrade of the US debt rating should not have a significant market impact; that the ratings agencies have very little credibility; and that, at the same time, America deserves a downgrade, due, more than anything, to political dysfunction.

In keeping with my goal to publish a blog post at least once every eight months, without fail, here goes, on the sixth of August, exactly eight months since the last entry. Sox Pound Yanks, Tie for First After falling out of first place for the first time in a month last night, the Red Sox beat the Yankees, 10-4, at Fenway Park this afternoon, to move back into a tie for the top spot in the AL East. Red Sox center fielder Jacoby Ellsbury drove in a career-high six runs, including a three-run bomb to right, his nineteenth of the season, to cap a five-run outburst in the bottom of the fourth and give the hometown nine a 7-2 lead, after the Yanks had tied it at two in the top of the inning. In a shining example of a reverse lock, Red Sox starter John Lackey, he of the $17 million yearly salary and the second worst ERA in the game in 2011, easily out-dueled CC Sabathia, who came into the game with a league-leading 16 wins, but fell to 0-4 against the Sox on the season, giving up sev...

Here's an example of how expensive obscure albums can be. I suppose if you had the ability to guess right, you could outperform any stock market index by purchasing selected indie rock albums. The supply tends to be relatively low, so if the thing goes out of print, a little demand can go a long way. I heard a track tonight off my latest pickup (thanks to the U.S. Postal Service for another musical delivery), a 1999 Matador Records comp (Everything Is Nice), by a low-fi punk rock band from Japan called Guitar Wolf, liked it, went to Amazon to check the price and some reviews, and found that I can have a used copy for a mere $152.80. Hmmm. I think I'll wait for a re-release -- which raises the point, of course: what happens to the value of the out-of-print original when and if the re-release comes out? Amazon link for reference: http://www.amazon.com/Planet-Wolves-Guitar-Wolf/dp/B0000036XO/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1294362983&sr=8-1

It just occurred to me that my CD collection, having reached 1,011 recordings, is not duplicated anywhere else on Earth. I have no proof of this, but it is entirely logical to assume that in no other place are these particular recordings together. There are too many of them. Samples from today's haul, via USPS to my door: King Crimson: Starless and Bible Black (1974, EG) Dengue Fever: Venus on Earth (2008, M80) Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan: Ballad of the Broken Seas (2006, V2)

In his article in Foreign Policy , Robert A. Pape discusses the results of research which shows that "occupations in the Muslim world don't make Americans any safer -- in fact, they are at the heart of the problem ."

In a very nice photo essay on the Foreign Policy web site titled the "2010 Global Cities Index," Boston ranks 19th. New York, London, and Tokyo comprise the top three cities.

First of all, change the permissions of the htdocs folder so users can write to it. That way you can edit files there. Also, when using Apache 2.2, in httpd.conf, paste this in at the bottom of the file: LoadModule php5_module "c:/php/php5apache2_2.dll" AddType application/x-httpd-php .php PHPIniDir "C:/php" Notice that it's php5apache2_2.dll, not php5apache2.dll. php5apache2.dll will make Apache fail to start.

It's time to learn how to type, so I'm doing that with the help of these lessons by Dave Bartlett. He points out something interesting that I never knew on the second lesson page : The keys of early typewriters were, sensibly enough, laid out in alphabetical order. The impetus for change was not exactly the yearning for blistering speed that has brought us together here today, but rather necessity. Early typewriters were mechanical and prone to jamming. The QWERTY layout solved that problem by spreading the popular keys across the board, inadvertently creating an ideal layout for distributing the effort of typing to all ten fingers rather than the traditional hunt and peck method.

My cat, Elwood, one of four who roam around this house, just came into the office to visit. I had the door closed, so he sat outside it and explained, repeatedly, that he'd like to come in and join me. When he got in he jumped up on the desk and found a small pile of pistachios. Elwood wondered, with a great amount of excitement, initially, whether or not he could derive any pleasure or nutritional value from these strange items. He decided against the concept, after various sniffs and licks, and has settled for making it hard for me to type by lying across a forearm and purring contentedly. Good boy!