JF's Blog

Lin Yutang

2005-07-03T11:47:00-05:00:00

"Too many policemen, no liberty; Too many soldiers, no peace; Too many lawyers, no justice."

Lin Yutang (1895-1976)

BrowserCaps XML for ASP.Net -- accurately detect Mozilla/Firefox, Netscape, Opera, Safari, Konqueror

2005-06-28T21:44:00-05:00:00

browserCaps

A quick fix for rendering ASP.NET properly in firefox for example...

Talking to God...

2005-06-13T13:22:00-05:00:00

One of the most interesting articles you will find if you love philosophy...

Medullary Bone in Tyrannosaurids?

2005-06-03T11:38:00-05:00:00

“Well, remember how recently Schweitzer and Horner found some interesting bone matter pertaining to tyrannosaurids?

Well, they held back a bit because there was something REALLY weird in there they wanted to go over.

Do you know what it was?

It was a special layer inside the femural bone, a calcium-rich layer that lines the marrow and is tied into the egg laying process.

It's called the medullary bone.

But guess what?

Only birds have medullary bone. No other animal group that lays eggs (or doesn't lay eggs, for that matter) has medullary bone. It's *specifically* avian, and not seen in any other reptiles.

So, place your bets on how creationist bodies are going to react to this.

I'm guessing it'll be another Ziuyo-Maru corpse all over - "elastoidin *could* have been in plesiosaurs, you can't prove it wasn't - other than no other living animals having it, and it only being found in one specific group of vertebrates.."”

- Viashino

Discussion with Chotacabras

2005-05-09T22:47:00-05:00:00

pman, believe me, it's a can of worms. I've been thinking about it for years and gotten to succesive explanations, only to reject each as incomplete and sustitute for the next one.
Lift is generated by your speed RELATIVE to the wind. Not by your ground speed. You're flying supported by the wind that surrounds you and move with it and inside it. Imagine a fly flying inside a railroad coach, it´s going perhaps a hundred MPH relative to ground but quite slow relative to wind. So the lift doesn't depends on how fast the train is going. OK?. But in ridge lift, wind goes up forced by the ridge in the windward side, so if you fly there you can stay aloft while the wind goes up relative to ground faster than you go down relative to wind. Your wind speed indicator is relative to wind,
while your altimeter is relative to ground, and anyway you can see the vultures flying next to you. As you fly away from the ridge, the ridge lift diminishes, so if you keep your flying speed constant, your sink ratio is constant and you must go down proportionally to the ridge lift loss. When circling on ridge lift, just the opposite happens. Away fron the ridge you go up, towards it you go down. Of course speed relative to ground changes, being lower while going away from the ridge. Now is when it starts getting rough. If you're interested enough, email me, my address is in my profile. Perhaps we can figure it out. Strange things start happening when you leave the ground...same as when you drink too much CruzCampo.

- Chotacabras

Why do Fundamentalists shun what's not written in (their) scripture?

2005-05-06T14:55:00-05:00:00

“I can answer with an andecote.

During my undergraduate years I was in an honors program at a certain college in the middle of Arkansas. This honors program, by its very design, was intended to challenge the fundamental belief system of its students. It exposed students to a variety of new religious philosophies, explored the abortion debate, and took on a variety of other issues that most of the students had never been exposed to before.

The results where.. shocking. About 80% of the incoming freshman in my class had some attachment to religion (more often than not 'fundamentalist' in nature). I remember my first week there we tore into the evolution debate. I had spent the first 18 years of my life assuming that everyone had simply moved past creationism, and to my shock a large group of honors students where arguing for the 'science' of creationism. I came to realize just how blind I had been to the problem.

Over the next two years the fundamentalists went in one two directions. Some simply refused to accept what they heard, and went into a sort of isolationist denial. For the most part these kids didn't finish the program.

For the rest (most?) the classes challenged their belief system. They began to realize that the reality of the world they live in was far different from the one their preacher had laid out for them. While very few turned on their religion completely, they did begin to abandon the literal bible ideas that they had began with. Most became some sort of 'liberal' christians.

The most interesting part was the backlash from the parents of these newly enlightened students. As the change really took effect the parents literally paraded in and yelled and screamed at the programs director. For these people, simply exposing new ideas to their kids (and thus challenging their belief systems) was more or less the same as turning their kids into satanists.

I finally came to realize that these parents FEARED knowledge. Religion, to them, is a form of security. Having a convienent belief system that takes all of the complexity out of the world is so comforting and so comfortable that operating outside of that scares the living hell out of them. When you have something like that, you become almost irrational in defending it. That means that secular ideas must be avoided at all costs.. because it is those IDEAS that break down their religous beliefs. That's why there are so many Christian book stores, music stores, craft stores, restuarants, and everything else. These people NEED to be immersed in a mono-culture because without it they may find out that life isn't as convienently explained as they NEED to beleive it is.

Ignorance is truly bliss. “

enjo13 on Slashdot.org

How to add japanese in a table

2005-05-06T14:09:00-05:00:00

Ever wonder what the difference between varchar and nvarchar was? Well I'm still not sure what it is but one thing I discovered today was that to add japanese characters in a database, you have to use the nxxx version datatype.

For example, I have to develop a japanese version of a website I created at work and ended up with a bunch of ??????? instead of the japanese characters in the table I store the content.

To my surprise, the only thing I was missing was the letter 'N'. I changed the datatype of the column containing the content from text to ntext and did something similar to the following:

insert into CMS_MYTABLE (LOCATION, LANGID, REGION, CONTENT)
values ('About', 4, 'Main', N'??????????????????????????????');

Now, when ever I need to add some japanese characters, I just use the 'N' prefix in the string I am inserting.

Simple as 'N'.

Black and White

2005-05-06T14:45:00-05:00:00

"Many people today only understand these nebulous dual concepts of negative and positive. You can imagine a little scorechart in their heads, and them tallying whatever people say to them, whatever they read, into either one of those lists.

If you were to say to an American nationalist example of one of these people that "America is a great nation!" their positive side lights up. If you were to say "America" has issues with their large prison population. Their negative side lights up and a tick goes into the negative column for you.

Depending on how strongly they feel, going above a threshold ratio of negative ticks to positive ticks will make them hate you. And depending on how energetic they are, they will lash out with just whatever negative comments come to mind. Doesn't matter what, because, hey, who cares what people are actually saying, it just matters that you give negativity back to counter "negativity." All that matters are these general concepts of negative and positive. Love and hate. Good and evil if you will. Always easy symbolism, always the most banal ideas. Thought of anything in between these two concepts is just "self-defeating," "moral relativism," "nihilism," whatever word they latched onto that some "really smart and witty" Coulter-type character said. Criticism is always interpreted as hate, and so emotionally abusive attacks are always returned. Support is always interpreted as love, and so the most fellatio-like praises are always given back.

This almost definitely scores me a negative tick on their scorechart. And if this is all they know of me, they now hate me."

Some person from McGill University