Archives January 2007

Porn in Afghanistan

According to
the Scotsman,
people in Afghanistan have developed quite a taste for teh pr0n:

The heaviest fighting in five years has slowed reconstruction to a crawl in the deserts and oases of Kandahar, where the strict Taleban movement began in 1994, but pornography, opium and illegal alcohol are flourishing, officials say.
…

“Pornography is a problem,” admits new provincial police chief General Asmatullah Alizai. “According to our Islamic rules and beliefs, people cannot accept this kind of thing. I don’t want people to see this kind of film.”

Can you say “forbidden fruit, boys and girls? I knew you could.

Also, from the comments:

If they are going to be issued with a bevy of virgins
in their next life, I see nothing wrong with them veiwing a few training manuals. You wouldn’t want to look stupid on the big night if it was you.

(HT Plan 8 from Doubter Space.)

Removing Accents in Strings

I’ve been ripping and encoding a bunch of music. Since I’m a hacker, naturally I have scripts that take a file with artist, album title, and track titles, and finds the corresponding .wav or .aiff source files, encodes them as MP3 and tags them.

A lot of the music I have is in French or German (and some Spanish and Russian), so there are accented letters in names and titles. My input files are in UTF-8 format, so that’s cool. But one problem is that of generating a filename for the MP3 files: if I want to play the song “Diogène série 87” by H.F. Thiéfaine on his album “Météo für nada”, I don’t want to have to figure out how to type those accents in the file and directory names. I want the script to pick filenames that use only ASCII characters.

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Stock Scams and Pascal’s Triangle

There’s a stock market scam that goes something like this: make a
list of 1024 people, and send them an “investment newsletter”. The
copy sent to the first 512 people says that a particular stock will go
up; the other 512 get a copy that says that that stock will go down.
Let’s say it goes down. You throw away the list of people whom you
told the stock would go up, divide the remaining 512 in two, and send
them another “investment newsletter”. You tell the first 256 that some
other stock will go up, and tell the other 256 that that stock will go
down. Eliminate those to whom you gave a false prediction, divide the
remaining ones in two, and send them another tip, as before. Do this
ten times, and you’ll wind up with one person to whom, by sheer
numbers, you’ve given ten good predictions in a row. You then tell
that person that he’ll have to pay you to receive further stock
tips.

One problem with this scam (from the scammer’s point of view) is
that there’s a lot of waste: you have to start with over a thousand
names and whittle them down to just one sucker. But what if you
lowered your standards a bit? After all, if someone gets nine good
predictions and one bad one, you can still say you have a 90% success
rate, and that should help sell your nonexistent Wall Street wisdom.
What about 80%? Or 70%? If you start with 1024 names, how many
potential suckers will you have if you consider the ones to whom you
sent seven or more correct predictions, and not just the one where you
got all ten right?

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Let’s Hire A Grizzly as a Babysitter, While We’re at It

Brad Blog reports that someone managed to make a key that opens Diebold voting machines… by copying it off of an image on Diebold’s web site.

Can you imagine what would happen if an individual, rather than a company, had screwed up this way? If you answered “that person would be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom”, pat yourself on the back. Unfortunately, we can’t give medals to corporations, but this comes close:

NORTH CANTON, Ohio– Diebold, Incorporated, one of the nation’s largest security integrators with expertise in the government, commercial, financial and retail markets, has solidified its homeland security presence. The company recently earned certification from the General Services Administration (GSA) to deliver security integration services that meet the requirements of the Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12 (HSPD-12).

I tried to come up with a better subject line. Really, I did. But all I could come up with was “It’s like letting Bush & Co. run the country” or “Like letting Halliburton handle the post-Katrina reconstruction”.

Irrational Scientists

Overcoming Bias has a good article about scientists holding unscientific beliefs outside the lab. The gist of it is, if a scientist throws out science when he leaves work, does he really understand what it’s for and how it works?

Why? Well, suppose that an apprentice shepherd is laboriously trained to count sheep, as they pass in and out of a fold. Thus the shepherd knows when all the sheep have left, and when all the sheep have returned. Then you give the shepherd a few apples, and say: “How many apples?” But the shepherd stares at you blankly, because they weren’t trained to count apples – just sheep. You would probably suspect that the shepherd didn’t understand counting very well.

(HT Pharyngula.)

More on Hovind

Jennifer Epstein has a sympathetic account of Kent Hovind’s sentencing. Interesting if you want to know more about what happened aside from the actual sentencing.

And the Pensacola News Journal has a delightfully snarky editorial entitled “Earth to ‘Dr. Dino’: Please pay your taxes and start facing reality”:

In court, Hovind offers the judge a deal: Release him and he will stop suing the government.

Hovind blames his problems on lawyers, another pastor, the Internal Revenue Service. His own sins are minor.

“I forgot to dot some i’s and cross some t’s,” he said.

And apparently he really is as stupid as all that:

He talked tough in telephone conversations from Escambia County Jail, where he was held while waiting to be sentenced Friday on 58 charges.

Although phones include warnings that conversations are recorded, he didn’t mince words as he ran up eight hours of calls per week.

He vowed to “make life miserable” for the IRS, keep suing the government and promote his cockamamie theory that he’s tax-exempt.

This call will be monitored, and not just for quality assurance purposes. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say may be used against you.

Why Are Fundies Illiterate?

I seem to have attracted a number of fundies and creationists, most likely due to the fact that I’ve been talking about Kent Hovind. [info]curvemudgeon has pointed out that for some reason, they can’t seem to go four sentences without committing crimes against the English language (so it’s not just me). Why is that?

Aside from the obvious, I mean. That they’re uneducated rednecks who’ve tragically never been taught to think or how to learn, otherwise they wouldn’t be creationists?

I know that there are smart and educated people who can’t spell or compose a sentence, but still, I think we have a large enough sample to draw some conclusions.

Hovind Sentencing: Whiny Git Update

The Pensacola News Journal has
another article
about Kent Hovind’s sentencing. This one points out the contrast between Hovind’s behavior before the trial:

In a recording of one of the telephone conversations played in court Friday, Hovind said the Internal Revenue Service, presiding judge and prosecutor broke the law by going after him, and there were things he could do “to make their lives miserable.”

Comparing himself to a buffalo in a lion fight, Hovind’s voice was heard saying “As long as I have some horns, I’m going to swing. As long as I have some hoofs, I’m going to kick. As long as I have some teeth, I’m going to fight. The lion’s going to know he’s been in a fight.”

and after spending two months in jail:

Before his sentencing, a tearful Kent Hovind compared his situation to that of the lion and the mouse in Aesop’s Fables.

“I feel like the mouse,” Hovind told U.S. District Judge Casey Rodgers. “I stand here in great fear of the power of this court. Your decision can destroy my life, my ministry and my grandchildren.”

Note, also, the subtle difference between Hovindland and the real world:

“I am not a tax protester and never have been,” Kent Hovind told Rodgers. “The laws are just fine. It is just that some are enforcing laws that are not there.”

The recordings, compiled by the IRS from phone conversations from jail, showed Kent Hovind was trying to hide assets from the government, Assistant U.S. Attorney Michelle Heldmyer said.

See? Just because he hid money from the government and didn’t pay payroll taxes, doesn’t mean he’s a tax protester. And besides, he’s a fine upright moral citizen:

“My father is not a man who is in love with money. He’s in love with God,” son Eric Hovind said. “He is a man who loves this country and loves others.”

Hovind’s supporters don’t get it either. Apparently a man is either 100% good or 100% evil. They can’t imagine that Hovind might be a liar and a crook, and also be kind to puppy dogs.

Oh, and the judge didn’t let the bit about loving his country slip by:

When handing down the sentence, Rodgers admonished those present the trial “is not and has never been about religion.”
…

Furthermore, Rodgers contended Kent Hovind had failed his fellow citizens and the men and women of the military — who fight to defend his freedoms — by refusing to pay taxes.

So let’s not have too much bogus sympathy for Hovind. He brought this on himself. He had every chance in the world to comply with the law, to make restitution before the matter came to trial, to plea-bargain. Heck, he didn’t even mount a defense, and tried to play tough throughout. Well, it looks like he picked a fight with the wrong federal agency. Maybe he’ll learn something in Federal PMITA Prison, but I wouldn’t count on it.

Hovind Sentenced to 10 Years

The Pensacola News Journal finally has the story:

U.S. District Judge Casey Rodgers ordered Hovind also:
— Pay $640,000 in restitution to the Internal Revenue Service.
— Pay the prosecution’s court costs of $7,078.
— Serve three years parole once he is released from prison.

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Gonzales to Judges: Don’t Worry Your Pretty Little Heads About the Law

From the Associated Press:

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales says federal judges are unqualified to make rulings affecting national security policy, ramping up his criticism of how they handle terrorism cases.

In remarks prepared for delivery Wednesday, Gonzales says judges generally should defer to the will of the president and Congress when deciding national security cases.

People have been saying for years that someone needs to give Bush a blow job so he can be impeached. I think we’ve just found the man to do it.