20081115
NASA, you have a problem! - Click!
Years ago, NASA was once the pride of the American science community. But since the goverment has put money into other programs (many of them "Faith-based initiatives" that discriminate against science projects because of the entire "creation vs. evolution" argument), NASA has been runing out of funds and it take a long time for them to make simple repairs like fix the toilet on the International Space Station.Now NASA has bigger problems to worry about than the Russians: The Chinese and The Indians.
It has been a long overdue thing that NASA has put off. And thanks to partisian politics, a broken patent-trademark-copyright office, the outsourcing of science jobs, and of course the pissing contest between Creationists and Evolutionists (pardon my french), America is in big trouble again.
Hopefully under the Obama adminstration, we can find some reason for the Government to get excited about NASA again.
Labels: government, NASA, news, science
posted by Bushido Hacks 11/15/2008 06:23:00 PM (0) comments top
20081027
The coming tsunami of Change
With just nine days to go until the election, the forces of status quo are in panic mode. They are trying to find some way to enact martial law so that the election on November 4th does not happen.A couple of months ago, it was the crisis in the former Soviet repbublic of Georgia. The past couple of month, it has been the crashing economy. (Burn baby burn!) And this afternoon, the provoking of Syria.
It appears that whatever is going on in Washington right now seems to be about as logical as using a baseball bat to smack a hornet's nest in an attempt to not go to work it seems.
What I am waiting for at this point is for Miss Alaska to do something really stupid and support an organization that she probably should not support. Apparently, someone went to Plaza Frontenac recently and splurged $150,000 at Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus on a wardrobe and a spa treatment. (I went down to Plaza Frontenac to check out the Neiman Marcus. They wanted $100 for a tie! Expensive!) For someone who claims to be a hockey mom rooting for the Walmart crowd, Sarah Palin definitely did NOT shop at Walmart for her attire.
Reguarless of what this poser is doing, the fact is there are alot of scared white people out there right now. I am not one of them. And it is of no shame that BushidoHacks.com endorses Barack Obama as the next president of the United States. However, I would like to remind the many minority supporters that Barack Obama is not Jesus Christ reincarnated. While he does have a great and positive influence, this "he's a cadidate for 'our' (black) people" is slightly off the mark and not to metion adds to the hostility that many white people have against him as president.
When you run for president, you don't run for one particular race or party. Barack Obama sees that. But if both Black voter and White voters, and Democractic supporters and Republican supporters see him in polar opposite points of view, that also doesn't help.
Remember, vice president is just a heart beat away from being president. So if you don't like McCain or Obama, you have to keep in mind that you are actually voting for Palin or Biden.
Palin want to continue funding the failing IDEA program which is very partial and does not work but she wants Congress to stop funding an effective research project that has helped identify many autism spectrum disorders using fruit flies. If this was a program to help resolve Colony Collapse Disorder and it had democratic support, she would probably support killing that project too.
As a person with disabilities, Palin does not have the best interset of the disabled at heart. If anything, her support is emotionally and politically driven. She is basically tossing her own newborn son with Downs Syndrome under the Straight Talk Express bus.
Palin seems to think that there is a one-size-fits-all approch to people with disabilites when the truth is that people with High Functioning Autism (HFA) and people with Downs Sydrome are NOT at all alike. While these are disabilites, many people with HFA (espeically people with a form of HFA called Aspergers' Syndrome) can function and support themselves in life, where as many people with Downs Syndrome need constant care and monitoring. By putting the constrains of a program like Down Syndrome on people with HFA, the HFA individuals feel constrained as they have to prove to employeers that their disability shouldn't really have too much of an effect on their work aside from probably needing an extension on some deadlines.
But programs like the ones Palin supports assume that the person with HFA should work as a Walmart greeter. As a person who has spent six years at a private university to aquire a computer science degree, I sure as hell am not working at Walmart, not even as a manager!
So why is there all this hate agains Barack Obama? Recently, a guy name Sirkowski (kind of NSFW) pointed out that racial hatred continues to be pumped into this campaign. (Protip: Puting a Barack Obama sticker on a Curious George doll and calling it "Barack Obama" DOES make you a racist.)
It is my personal belief that racists, much like the current adminstration, are in panic mode. Right now, I see them as the people who go out onto a beach just before a massive tsunami is about to strike. The momentum of the Obama campaign has become so large that the breakers can not stop it at this point. And on November 4th, the massive wave will crash into the shore, changing the lives of the people living near the coast. Some will fight in vain to stop the wave and in their defense may try to drown themselves. Others will be on the high ground, watching in horror the people who will kill themselves because of the fear.
But on November 5, 2008, the world will be a much different place, and the countdown to January 20, 2009 will begin. The fight to stop a lame duck president and his corporate constituants from unravalling a 232 year old instition that during the past eight years has been abused and taken advantage of by the people who lulled us into believing that what they were doing was right.
Now comes the age of democracy restored.
Labels: disabilities, government, honeybees, politics, science
posted by Bushido Hacks 10/27/2008 12:19:00 AM (0) comments top
20080517
CCD killing the bees, but cellphones are not the cause, oil is!
Cellphones seem to be the lupus of diagnosis, and as Dr. Gregory House would tell you "It's never lupus."Unless you are a beekeeper who is beekeeping directly next to a cellphone tower, it is not cellphones. But if it concerns you that much, feel free to contact your local congressman or senator and persuade him or her to pass some sort of legislation that will change the frequencies of telephone communication towers or file a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission or the National Telecommunications & Information Adminstration.
On the other hand, consider the other factors that are going on. The Environmental factors. Between Global Warming, the increase of poisonous Carbon Dioxide emissions due to vehicles with poor gas mileage (the CO2 argument should be a no brainer given that smoke is used commonly in beekeeping), unstable weather patterns (i.e. droughts and floods), the short-sighted "genius" experts at the major chemical companies (who obviously aren't geniuses), the environmental policies in nations such as the United States, China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia, the invasion of forgein species, diseases, and viruses, and the MSM (mainstream media) and their advertizers selling us this "Going Green" campaign by telling us to buy things that are not very environmentally friendly or that you won't find at the local hardware store or that are not in your budget (clearly you are not going to find an affordable solar panel to prop up on your roof without it being avaiable in only a few locations (like two states over), costing you an arm and a leg, while living in an apartment or rental property that has a no "home improvement" policy), we are living a a "perfect storm" of problems right now.
It's not fair, really. You can't "go green" and save the bees if you use cellphones as a straw man while at the same time you don't have the supplies, income, or availabity (especially if you live in a "fly-over state") to make the changes you want to make but can't make because of a few people who live on the coast and think that they can solve environmental problems with their bachlors degree in liberal arts or marketing.
A serious problem demands serious solutions not just for the short term but for the long term as well.
Cellphones are off the hook as far as we know, and most beekeeping organizations and websites will agree. If radio devices were at fault, we would ban the use of Shortwave, HAM radio, or CB radios for police and fire departments. But not just radio with those frequencies. AM, FM, Weather Radio, satilite, and low-power stations would also be banned. Why not blame television--not just for the bogus content to get you to buy stuff you don't need--but for the use of electronic components that use radio for broadcast? Lets not forget WIFI, Bluetooth, Infrared TV remotes, UV black lightbulbs, even THE SUN which emits all sorts of rays at various frequencies.
We need to consider that if electromagnetic fields (though vital to speicies such as bees, birds, and other migratory life forms) are at fault, they would have all died when Guglielmo Marconi created the radio sometime around 1900, the EM fields are not at fault. In fact, the magnetic poles are moving, but we have no control over that as this is a natural process that occurs about every few thousand years. Man and bees both survived the last magnetic pole reversal the last time and their is a good chance we will survive it the next time it happens.
I still wake up in the morning to the sound of songbirds, and the birds aren't dying. In fact many species are on the rise again.
Bees on the other hand are in trouble, and the problem for that is simply in the air we breathe. Pollution, chemicals, diseases, viruses, greenhouse gasses like Carbon Dioxide.
I have a friend who was telling me about this problem the other day about how the atmosphere's oxygen supply is depleating due to the reduction of plants and trees and the increase of poorly efficent vehicles. It is like that scene from the movie Apollo 13 when the astronauts need to build an air scrubber to create more oxygen or they will die from the CO2 in the ship. Plants are the air scrubbers. They create oxygen and they also act as windbreakers. Too much wind can strip away top soil that smaller plants need to grow and that bees need to pollenate.
If you live in an urban area, you know doubt have seen the "stellar" tree trimming that power companies like Ameren (in Missouri and Illionois) for example have done to preserve the power grid. IT SUCKS! The trees look lopsided, the trees get sick because the man in the cherry picker is not Edward Scissorhands, and eventually the tree dies and has to be cut down. This is what should be known as Urban Deforestation. As much as the rainforest is a big deal with environmentalists, for the rest of us who are more concerned about the trees in our own backyard, this is a disaster equivalent to those loggers in Brazil who are chopping away at the Amazon.
But when your carbon dioxide output is greater than your oxygen production, you end out with more severe thunderstorms than knock out the power grid. I don't see the electric company putting down another tree somewhere to replace the one that was cut down, and we still get brownouts and blackouts due to weather and poor energy conservation. And the temperatures are still rising in the summer so more fans need to be used to keep people cool or worse from dying.
The root of this problem has one traceable source. Oil Consumption.
With the MSM telling people to go buy Hummers and Jeeps to go on that offroading excursion that they will never do at $4 per gallon and 16 MPG City, it should be pretty obvious what causes the most problems. Now I'm not saying that factories and chemical companies are off the hook, not by a long shot. But not everyone owns a large factory or a greenhouse full of genentically engineered mutants. But everyone who needs to go to work and get food and supplies uses a car and a car needs gas to go places and gas is made of light sweet crude oil.
At $120+ per barrel, and since no one in Saudi Arabi owns a Toyota Prius since gas is under a dollar there, the #1 cause must be is certainly and with no contest of argument has to be OIL!
But big companies such as Exxon-Mobile are not doing anything, even though they have NO environmental policy and after nearly 20 years have not cleaned up so much as a drop of oil from the 1989 Exxon-Vadez Oil Spill. The government has leaveyed bill fines against the oil conglomorate to this day, but Exxon, despite making $400 BILLION in profits last year has not paid it off as they have continued to weasil their way out of paying for this disaster. They've paid only about $5 million in damages, when they own more than $250 million plus interest not just to the State of Alaska, but to all the fishermen, environmental organizations, and other people who where effected by this disaster.
If you had a friend that broke something that was of great value who never paid back the damages ever, would you still want to be friends with them? Then why buy gas from Exxon-Mobile or any other major company that makes promises about environmental stewardship but does not keep it?
The automobile industry can also take some blame for this. America could have had cars as efficent as Toyota or Honda ten years ago, but the upper management at Ford, GM, Chrystler still look at making effecent cars as exciting as getting teeth pulled. SUVs are popular because the trucking industry has big trucks that can crush little car. This intimidated people. The auto execs, who have stock in the oil industry, and their shareholders (mostly people from the oil industry in a quid pro quo relationship) took advantage of our fears, and sold us these big-ass SUVs and encouraged others to do so with marketing towards celebrities and advertisements. And we bought it hook, line, and sinker. And now it is the little things, in this case bees, that are suffering.
Now we are talking about switching to ethanol, of which is TOXIC to bees and can drive up the cost of food for human consumption.
So what do we do? Everyone who is living in confort who does not have to worry about losing their jobs, the price of gas and food increasing, who can afford the efficent cars but buy the gas guzzlers instead, who pretty much run the goverment, the big corporations, and have a silver spoon in their mouth while offering alot of bad advice or advice that we can't implement because the resources that should be available are not available in our domestic marketing area continues to be indifferent of the environment. They're in their safehaven bubble blind to the life outside of the coastal cities. The only reason they care about Global Warming is that their favorite golf course will be underwater.
But what about the rest of us? The government has about as much knowledge about farming as they do technology. NONE. And since the people at Monsanto, Dow, DuPont, Shell, BP, Citgo, and ExxonMobile are not Jerry Baker and sure as hell are not Mr. Wizard, we're in deep trouble.
Sure you have people like Al Gore telling us that we are in trouble. It's like having your next door neighbor telling you that your house being on fire is a bad thing. No sh*t, Sherlock!
Why don't we spend less time telling people they are in trouble and spend more time FIXING THE DAMN PROBLEM!
The government, the big companies, and especially Al Gore are not going to fix this problem. WE HAVE TO! No more of this "Can't someone else do it?" mindset. We're in serious trouble all those big shots are giving us is a small water gun to put out a six alarm fire.
We need to get back to basics. We need to kick the oil habit completely. The bees are suffercating, soon the humans will too, unless we can find a solution.
Labels: Cars, diy, energy, environment, gardening, manbearpig, scary, science
posted by Bushido Hacks 5/17/2008 03:32:00 PM (0) comments top
20070424
GNU Radio - Click!
I really wanted to come up with a clever title that was a play on Wall of Voodoo's "Mexican Radio", but I just didn't have it in me.With 2007 nearing the midpoint, my self-made computer is nearly complete. All I need now is the memory, a backup power source, a little bit of thermal grease for the processor, and something to patch up that hole in the back where a TV or Graphics card goes.
But since I'm not interested in television, and because I don't play alot of video games to justify shelling $300 for a graphics card, I want to develop an interest in software defined radio (SDR).
It turns out this project will be more challenging that I thought, but I am still eager to find some way to do this project without breaking the budget.
I recently learned that many of the projects I want to do require an industrial level of supplies or components, be it a SDR or an electric generator. An eBay search does not return any results that satisfy my requests.
I spend alot of time working on my computer, but I also want to listen to the radio. Nearly every result returned some form of mediocre FM radio reciever that was part of a TV card. But I want something that listens to AM so I can hear Cardinal games and picks up the FM radio stations that don't play some rap station or top-40/emo crap on five other radio frequencies where my favorite stations are located. I want a radio card that can block out that crap and pick up my Red Birds and Industrial Rock as clear as a bell. Unfortunately, the consumer market appeals to the Lowest Common Denominator. So it looks like I will need to build what I want.
Despite the fact that I did not learn about things like Verlog when I took a computer logic course, I still have the textbook from that class and would like to put it to use. I may need to review my knowledge of assembly language which may be of no use since my new computer is a 64-bit dual-core machine. I'm starting to think that maybe I should have majored in computer engineering rather than computer science considering I have a very limited knowledge about programmable logic arrays (PLAs), but I am willing and open to learn.
Reading the requirement list provided by the GNU Radio website, I really did not want to pay $850 for a hardware device that with the right components can be made for far less. Who ever is running the GNU Radio project obviously is not thinking like a broke college student. Do I really need that many Logic Elements (LEs) for this project? A child can build a radio for a science fair project out of a couple of circuit and a paper clip. These guys are thinking in terms of the most expensive products out there. Altera does have some appealing products that are quite afordable and simple to program. But to place the project cost at $850?! Who's running this project? Kaz Hirai?!
As much as this is an important project, the requirements are full of oversight. I know I can do better at a fraction of the cost!
Labels: diy, hack, hardware, linux, mod, music, radio, science, SDR, software, tech
posted by Bushido Hacks 4/24/2007 09:49:00 PM (0) comments top
20070420
Respect your teachers
I'm not sure if I should keep yesterday's entry online or not. Even though I added a watermark stating that the photo I hacked was meant for satire and should not be used as canon, I'm having second thoughts about posting the photo, in a general context. I mean, I don't want their to be any mix up or belief that I support such random acts of violence, because I certainly do not condone it.My intent of that photo was to point out how stupid school shooters try to make themselves look. His behavior was NOT because people picked on him or because of some mental disability. People like the VT killer are nothing but copy cats and frauds.
Since Monday, nearly every large school or school district community in the country reported some sort of threat. The ones I find most concerning are the ones made by people against teachers.
When I was young, I understood that there were certain people you should respect no matter what. Your parents or guardians obviously. Some kids who show no respect for their authority are kicked out of their house because they didn't respect their authority.
Another group of people that deserve some respect are teachers. Yeah, you may think that "science class is boaring" or "math who needs it". But eventually, you come across atleast one instructor who inspires you to learn about a subject you felt would have no purpose in your life.
Recently, I learned that one of those kind of teachers who I liked passed away much too soon. He was a professor with a doctorial degree in Astrophysics and Cosmology who taught College Physics and Astronomy at my school.
On Monday of last week, I wrote him a letter saying how much I appreciated his class and how I liked listening to his lectures about physics. Last fall I hung out after school and listend to him give a lecture with a few other science professors about cosmology and theories about the universe. I wish I could have stayed for the entire lecture, but I understood most of his theory. The only reason I could not stay to hear the rest of it was because the ride to take me home that I was waiting for had arrived.
I never took a cosmology course, but I did understand astronomy from what I had learned in the Boy Scouts.
I was shocked and saddened that just a few days after I wrote my letter of appreciation that he had passed away over the weekend. He was a chain smoker, but never appeared to be in grave health. While everyone was mourning the tragedy in Virginia, I was somber about the death that happened in our school's community. Proximity won over casuality. What happened at VT was terrible. They lost several professors. I was busy grieving for the one who passed away a couple days before that terrible incident.
What really upset me was that several Physical Therapy, Occupational Therapy, and Nursing students found out about the somber news before I did and in a email between their own group of people. Most of them who recieved the email had no respect for him in the first place, as they would talk amongst themselves, obnoxiously pop bubble gum loudly, and pay no attention to him while he lectured in class. I mean, here they are just a week before he past away showing no sign of respect for this man who has a degree in one of the many fields of physical science and saying things like "he doesn't know what he's talking about", and a few days later passes away but they are the first to know about it. What the heck?! They get an email a couple days before the University sends everyone this somber anouncement, and now they say things like "I liked him".
Why should people only be liked after they are dead? Why can't we show appreciation for the people who try to teach us to be better people after they died? Why must death or tragedy unite us when we can do these things while people are still around to return their gratitude?
The recently late former Senator Thomas F. Eagleton of whom the Eagleton Federal Courthouse is named after and erected while he was still alive, once commented to fellow former Senator Dick Gephardt durring the courthouse's dedication cerimony "Buildings are named in honor of dead people. I'm not dead yet." Though this was Eagleton's sharp sense of humor, it does bring up a good observation.
It is better to honor someone while they are still with us than to honor them when they can not thank you in return.
Let us remember to honor our friends while they are still with us. Let us show them respect and gratitude while they can still say "Thank you, that means alot to me."
Labels: physics, science, stlouis, writing
posted by Bushido Hacks 4/20/2007 09:32:00 AM (0) comments top
20070407
Three weeks of Daylight Saving Time all for nothing
Two year ago, Daylight Saving Time (DST) was extended by six weeks as of this year. This week's weather has proven that it was all for not.DST was created to save energy. Until Tuesday, the weather was in the upper 70s to mid 80s. Now it is an unseasonably cold 20s and 30s.
Crops are devistated. Fuel costs are still skyrocketing. It's not even a week into April and already paychecks have evaporated. The money is being spent on gasoline and utility bills.
Global warming has NOTHING to do with this. There are reports that the moon can effect the earth's sustanablity. Physics tells us that the moon is slowly escaping from the earth's gravity. Perhaps this may be the cause.
We should go back there. Shut up those jerks who say that it was all a hoax.
I know that sounds kooky, but it is something to think about. A little nudge might save the earth from melting, freezing, soaking, or drying out.
Labels: energy, physics, science, weather
posted by Bushido Hacks 4/07/2007 09:05:00 PM (1) comments top
