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Showing posts from September, 2008

A diversion before the rollout...

My brother in law asked me to spec. out a multimedia pc for him, I sat down with him and we put together a relatively modern dual core machine, the last of the parts for the rig came in 2 days ago so I decided to build it as recreation before getting back to the business of installing my web framework on my production servers for my pending site launch. I had a late night doing just that on one of my servers and elated that I have the first production node of my cluster up and running decided to chronicle the media center build with some photos...because well, I like photos and some readers might be interested in building their own low cost machine. It is amazing how far pc's have come in the last 10 years let alone the last 20. I remember fondly thinking the 64kb of RAM that came with my Atari 800xl back in 1984 was an ocean of data, little did I know what the futuer lay in store. Later upon graduating from college I decided to purchase a computer to use for learning and also to f

Fallacies in the idea of a Cambrian Explosion.

A common mistake made by people describing the Cambrian era of 545 mya is to assume that the incredible diversity of forms found in the shale strata that dates to this period is some how unique to the period. This mistake falls from the assumption that because we don't see the same level of diversity in later rock strata that it means there was less diversity in general over all possible living environments , but this doesn't follow. In the roughly 540 million years since the Cambrian age , the Earth's geology has changed significantly along with the animal forms, they did this while radiating into new habitats that were different from those in which the Cambrian creatures thrived. The homogeneity of the limited living environment of these early forms bares a contribution to the apparent diversity of animal forms found in the strata. We know that the early seas were incredibly homogeneous and it makes sense that as animal forms proliferated that they would team across

more proof that Sarah Palin is a complete basketcase.

http://www.richarddawkins.net/articleComments,3121,YouTube-Removes-Viral-Video-on-Palins-Churches-For-Inappropriate-Content,Crooks-and-Liars,page1#comments It is a shock to me as an American citizen that the country seems so close to having this woman a heart beat away from the highest office in the land. Those who support her do so at the peril of our countries secular foundations. Can the republicans pick another vp candidate or is this choice set in stone? They are asking to lose once all this information comes out.

the rebuild is going....

I anticipated before starting the new development box build that I would run into driver issues with the current installation of windows 2003. The radical change of motherboard, video card , memory and processor underneath the existing system was sure to make the OS go nuts upon the first boot up. I have done hundreds of pc builds and the process proceeded with clock work regularity, I got everything looking nice and tidy and ready to go, set the pc open boxed on top of one of its twins and plugged it in and pushed the power button and it hummed silently to life with the one single beep that is the motherboard call for "ok". Within seconds though the screen flashed a BSOD indicating a stop error, the worst kind that windows throws about...not so surprising...but this is when the fun starts... SATA and IDE drives, the newer mother boards are being shipped with the serial ATA port specification taking over the older PATA IDE spec. The difference in size of the connectors allows

will the internet make more languages obsolete?

A parallel to human evolution exists in the social activities that our species has evolved in order to ensure our robust ability to survive under rapidly changing and adverse environmental conditions. A key such evolved trait is our singular ability to communicate using complex languages. The human vocal tract under went changes that allowed our vocal apparatus to simulate a much larger range of tones than any other animal, as a result we can combine and modulate these tones with clever use of our lips, tongues and teeth to produce the amazing variety of languages that exist in the world today. However, though paleontological theory has given us good evidence to explain the how behind our ability to develop and use language it doesn't tell us why distinct languages have formed or how those languages evolved over time. For these answers we must enter other areas of scientific endeavor, components of applied linguistics. We must also step outside the box of linguistics entirely in o