| Tuesday, March
21, 2006
Equinox, Sort of
Equinox doesn't mean what you think it does, and doesn't happen when you
think it should, but this is still the first day of Spring. For more on
this, see
http://www.usatoday.com/weather/resources/
askjack/2005-02-22-equninox-equal_x.htm
See mail ============ Tunguska
and Global Warming In case you didn't see this, regarding the
Tunguska event and global warming:
http://www.physorg.com/news11710.html gives the theory.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=271
presents the standard response. Note, though, that the
standard response does not respond to the data on late 19th Century cooling
Shaidurov presents. I have no way of verifying his measures, but if they are
true, and if that trend changed in the early part of the 20th Century, this
requires comment. One possible comment is that his data are just plain
incorrect, with some argument to that effect. What is not acceptable is
dismissing the data. Long ago I did an essay on
The Voodoo Sciences, which is worth
your attention if you have not seen it before. There is a
small discussion of
this in an earlier view. The important principle here is that real
science covers all the data. ===================
I am out of time so I won't get to the essay I
intended today. I was going to begin by saying that nearly everything I
learned in clinical psychology classes in graduate school in the early
1950's was the bunk, although I was fortunate to have one class in which the
textbook was Henderson and Gillespie, A Textbook of Psychiatry, 7th Edition;
this was largely because the emphasis in my graduate school was on
physiological science rather than Freudian voodoo. In those days Freud was
still very much respected. In those days I could see there was as much
evidence for the truth of Hubbard's Dianetics as for Freud. This was before
the transmogrification into Scientology, when Hubbard's book was held up as
science, and indeed made as much sense as Freud. Freud postulated
non-existent mental structures, just as Hubbard did. Jung added collective
unconscious, as Hubbard did. None of this was science, but that wasn't clear
at the time. Well, it was clear, but it was a bit difficult for one graduate
student to oppose the entire intellectual and scientific establishment of
the country, and while it was easy to ridicule Hubbard's Dianetics -- Martin
Gardiner did that well in Fads and Fallacies -- when you pointed out that
the same arguments could be applied to Uncle Ziggy you would find yourself
in real trouble. In other words, psychology in those days was
Voodoo science. Apparently it still is, and apparently the
psychiatrists are in on it. In particular we have a local case of a man
diagnosed with adult ADD; the drugs he is given have made him find himself.
Finding himself consists of quitting his job, living at his parents' home,
suing his working wife for spousal support and making her sell the house so
he can have his share, not paying child support, and in general using his
'disability' so he can stay on drugs. Legal drugs. He has found himself,
with the help of the physicians. Apparently this is science.
Telling a man he is no longer a man, and has no responsibilities, is old
wives tale stuff. Modern science lets you find yourself even if what you
find is being a moral monster, and modern science supports, apparently, the
notion of "equality" so that a woman with two kids has to sell her house to
support the legal drug habit of the man who found himself.
So I do have this request: I don't want speculation, but
some of you are in or were very recently in graduate school in psychology or
psychiatry. What are the standard textbooks today? What do graduate students
in clinical psychology learn now? And what do psychiatrists learn that makes
it a reasonable thing to let a man find himself with drugs that allow him to
feel good about quitting his job and beggaring his wife and children? What
are the textbooks that teach this?
======================= There is a story in
the LA Times today about Winny, a file sharing program, and a virus pumping
files out to the world. It seemed a bit confused so I asked
Mr. Hellewell for his interpretation, which is:From
various news reports, the confidential data leakage looks like more of a
user-enabled problem that happened to be on a virus-infected computer.
The person was preparing a report for the nuclear site
company, and copied files to his laptop (or perhaps a USB drive; the reports
are varied on this) to take them home to work on. He also had the Winny P2P
program installed, and had probably configured it to share the same folder
that he put the nuclear files in. So when he connected at home, the Winny
P2P program shared all the files in that folder, and someone found them and
got them.
Although the Japanese nuclear agency has a policy
about copying confidential information, it's apparently not well-enforced.
There is a virus called "Antinny" which uses the Winny
P2P network spread itself.The Winny user has to manually download/open a
file to install the virus. When installed, then "shares" itself to other
Winny users. It's a Japanese language worm; Winny is also a Japanese
language program. The various descriptions of this virus are not clear as to
it's function, other than to spread to others via the Winny P2P program.
I don't think that it is clear that the Winny virus is
the cause of the leak of the confidential data. I think that the user put
the confidential files in a Winny-shared folder, and that's how those files
were spread.
So it's another example of the danger of P2P programs,
and the need to have current anti-virus. Along with the problem of
confidential data leaking out via the improper actions of users. From a
security standpoint, USB drives are a big source of leaks .... and most
companies are hiding their heads in the sand about the security issues with
USB drives.
Regards, Rick Hellewell
========= A reader asked me about LCD
monitors and color balance. I advised him to read David Em on the subject.
Wow, I am embarrassed to
say that I have never read David's columns before. I looked him up
and you are right, he does do a good job
covering the topic. Thanks for the pointer.
Matt
Precisely. And those who have any interest in visual display
and editing and are not reading David Em are missing a lot.
=============
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