Wikipedia: Liberal Arts

From this article:

So did Larry think Wikipedia's fate was an inevitable consequence of an open model? He put more emphasis on the sociological composition of the editors. "It's really that the skills to marshal an argument, and represent the facts correctly are all skills encouraged by a solid liberal arts education. It's a problem associated more with a lack of training in the liberal arts." It's true, he agrees, that Wikipedia articles "shift back and forth between an entry someone crafted, and a stitched together Frankenstein's monster."

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easter weekend

spending Easter weekend with the fam was wonderful, as i hadn't seen my sibs in a while nor been able to spend time with my mom or dad. since SLO (San Luis Obispo) is a good five hours from Orange County, it was a great time up with my mom on the way up there and back (no, i don't visit home a lot).

we got into Shell Beach at around 6ish (damn that LA traffic) after leaving from Orange at 1pm. my brother has bought a house to fix it up and sell it, and has already worked on it quite a bit. the day after we got to SLO (i.e., Saturday), my dad and i helped him install his dishwasher in his brand spankin' new kitchen. we had pizza frite for breakfast (yum, yum!), and walked downtown to do some book shopping. (in the meantime, my sister and mom were doing their own shopping elsewhere.) my dad is a surveyor, and he likes to collect old surveying books, so we first went to Leon's Used Bookstore. He found one book he wanted, and I found two: Semantics (Volume 1) by Lyons, and Language in Thought and Action by Hayakawa. we then went to barnes & noble, and perused some titles there. he didn't get anything, but i ended up buying The Big Book of National Insults by Julian L'Estrange and Wuthering Heights by Emily Bront?, and almost bought (but didn't) Between You and I: A Little Book of Bad English.

Sunday morning, i went to a Easter celebration at my brother and sister's church, Calvary Chapel SLO. it was a nice service, and whenever i have visited their church, i have enjoyed Bryan Stupar's (the pastor) talks. this time, he had three reasons to follow Christ: 1) history; 2) the human heart; 3) the Bible. his first point was that history has shown us that nothing satisfies us on this earth ( he used the example of Alexander the Great's conquest, and how Alex felt bummed in the aftermath because there were no more worlds to conquer). his second point was that the human heart, throughout all humanity, yearns for immortality. his last point was that the Bible explains what has happened to the human condition and how the the letdown of Alex (and all others in history) is healed by following Christ, and that the heart's desire for eternity is satisfied by following Christ.

anyway, the point for bringing up Bryan's points is that it seems similar to the authoritative statements many make about language and the concepts (or desires of concepts) of every human on this planet. I think Bryan's main assumption is that every person desires eternity. this does not seem to be compatible with Pirah?, which shows "the absence of any individual or collective memory of more than two generations past". if this is how Pirah? is, then what are the speakers' conception of eternity, age, etc.? do they agree with Bryan's statement? it just seems omniscient of Bryan to know this kind of information. anyway, Pirah? is also reported as having "the absence of numbers of any kind or a concept of counting", but Mark Liberman wrote recently that the "absence of numbers" statement is not exactly true, so the "individual or collective memory" claim might be wrong too, and perhaps Bryan isn't wrong. it just seemed like a huge, unsubstantiated generalization, and that's why i first questioned it. anyway, that's all i coud think about when Bryan was talking. hopefully others thought about what assumptions he was making as well. alright, off to a meeting!

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light my way

BBC News has an article about a new discovery by researchers from University of Southern California, University of Michigan, and Princeton. Apparently researchers have developed a way to create OLEDs (Organic Light Emitting Diodes) that are very energy efficient and long lasting. Not only that, but these OLEDs emit that good, clean, appealing (to me, at least) white light. The only drawback appears to be the fragility of the OLEDs themselves. The OLEDs are sensitive to moisture, and so a moisture protector would have to be created for them. Yet despite their fragility to moisture, OLEDs appear to be able to be slapped on to anything: glass, walls, tables, chairs (altho' I don't think I'd want the last one: electric chair, haha) because they're paper thin. If they are properly protected, I don't see why I wouldn't want to use them to provide more natural, white light to where I live.

ELECTRIC CHAIR! Oh Dave, you’re so punny. I just found your blog. I didn’t know you had one. Whee!

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Two hearts, beat as one
I just finished reading a story on the BBC website about the first successful "reverse heart transplant". For about ten years, Hannah Clark had two hearts pumping blood for her. Just thought I'd mention it because I love to hear about what science has done and how it has impacted humanity in a good way. *If you don't know, the title is a line from a u2 song.

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Installing Lighttpd with Ruby on Tiger

I just got finished following the instructions for Building Ruby, Rails, LightTPD, and MySQL on Tiger (except the MySQL part because I already had that set up), and decided to move my play server to my mini instead of my laptop. Since my laptop is running Ubuntu at the moment, it wasn't a simple matter of just mirroring my directories on my laptop to my mini, but it still was quite simple.

I first had to install php with fcgi support (the default on os x is the command line interface). So I mozied on over to php.net and downloaded the source, and configured it with the following flags (taken mostly from here):

./configure --prefix=/usr/local/php5-fcgi --enable-fastcgi \\
--enable-force-cgi-redirect --disable-cli --enable-memory-limit \\
--with-layout=GNU --with-regex=php

Afterwards, I tweaked a bit here and a bit there the lighttpd.conf (which I put in the directory /etc/lighttpd), and fired up the lighttpd server with the -D option to make sure everything went okay. Well, fortunately it had, except for moving the database connection for WP. So I just backed up my database and installed it on my mini, re-configured phpMyAdmin, and I was set. Oh, and I had to add a new service to the firewall to allow port 80 thru...

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Checking Sources

I read some interesting news linked from Claude Mariottini's blog, the most interesting to me being scientific viability of Red Sea crossing. After some googling, I came to find out that it was old news from the beginning of 2004 (link to mentioned Moscow Times article, and unmentioned Washington Times article). Other than blogs and online articles here and there, I can't find anything else about the two supposed primary researchers, Alexei Androsov and Naum Volzinger, which makes me even more suspicious. This all reminds of my Language of Politics and Advertising, since it highlights the importance of primary sources (i.e., the article from the Russian Academy of Sciences, which so far has come up empty), without which it is really hard to even evaluate a claim.

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