Forward Biased (Less-than-current Events)

Sorry about that, chief...

No, I'm not posting about the late, great Don Adams.  Would you believe I'm just making an excuse for why I haven't posted much lately?

Commenters have been keeping me busy responding to comments, especially here—there are twenty-two comments already, and we're nowhere near done.  I've been writing several times as much there as on the front page.  Sorry about that, folks.

I have to say, Rob's doing an excellent job of debating with me.  He's definitely making me think a lot, and work even more.  I've decided that in order to win any debate, I'll have to somehow work in the Schwarzchild radius (so that my opponent collapses under the sheer weight of my argument) and quantum superposition—no, wait; that would mean that I'd both win and lose the debate at the same time.  Dang.  Ok, I'll use the Planck constant instead.  That always works, right?

Anyway, if you want more of that good ol' Forward Biased reading, check out the recent comments threads.

Do we need a new award?

It would doubtless be cruel to have a "World's Dumbest Scam Victim" award, which helps to explain why there isn't one.  But if there were, these folks would doubtless qualify.  But there isn't an award like that, so it doesn't matter.  Just sayin' is all.

In the alleged scam, con men posing as civil engineers tell a landowner their instruments indicate a hidden treasure somewhere on the property.

They tell the landowner they need to put surety money on the spot of the buried treasure to be blessed before the treasure can be recovered.

In the Springdale case, the resident placed $30,000 on the spot, as did the phony civil engineers.

The money was left on the spot overnight. After waiting several days for the men to return, the Springdale resident discovered fake money had been substituted for the real cash and the resident's $30,000 was missing, police said.

'Nuff said, folks.

(Hat tip to Ralph Bristol.)

A new milestone!

Just one more little administrative thing.

I've passed yet another Great Milestone in my Blogging Career, namely, that the comment spammers have now discovered Forward Biased.  Yay, rah.

The funny thing is that they spammed some very old threads that nobody is going to read.  Sheesh.  And since I'm notified of all comments by email, it's easy for me to delete them.  And Typepad has a few ways to keep them from filling up the thread.

Anyway, I don't yet know if there's an easy way to close off all comments on all my old threads except by doing it manually, one at a time.  I'll try to find out.

Anyway, from now on I guess I'll need to close comments after, oh, a couple of weeks or so.  We'll see.

The 2005 Weblog Awards

Well, folks, I guess I'm going to have to address this issue, since two readers have now informed me that I've been nominated for a 2005 Weblog Award (do we call these the "Bloggies?") in the category Best New Blog.

I'm obviously quite honored and grateful.  Also humbled.  Many thanks.  I didn't even know there were weblog awards until then.  (Since Wizbang linked to them, I suppose everyone but me knew about it.  Yeah, sure I read Wizbang, but not every day.)

There's just one little problem.  Michael Yon is also nominated in the same category, and I obviously cannot, in good conscience, compete with him.  There's just no comparison to be made.

There's also the fact that, of all the weblogs nominated, there will be only 15 or so selected as finalists in each category to be voted on after Dec. first.  I probably won't make the cut, but even if I do, I plan to vote for Michael, and I encourage everyone who reads this to consider doing the same thing.

There is, however...(ahem)...one other thing.

Just to make sure that some of the lesser-read weblogs get to participate, there are a few "throwaway" categories based on the (perhaps infamous) "Ecosystem," and in the category of Best of the Top 1751-2500 Blogs, I was nominated there, too.  (I had recently made it up to about #1470, but these were based on standings as of last Nov. 18, and there have recently been some changes to how the Ecosystem works.  I've been considerably "demoted" in the last week, as have thousands of others.)

Looking over the other nominees, there are some great blogs there, but I don't suppose I'd mind a vote or two in that category—IF I make the finalist cut, of course.  I suppose we'll know tomorrow.

Thanks again to whoever nominated me.

"Get over it."

Dan Melson's Sunday post up at Searchlight Crusade has several interesting items that are worthy of your attention, but its leading item really got me to thinking.  A lot.

Here's the website: http://evolution.berkeley.edu/

Here's the news story: Couple Sues Operators of Evolution Site

Three words: Get. Over. It.

Evolution may not be scientific fact, but it is a scientific theory supported by as much evidence as relativity or quantum mechanics. It was formulated based upon observed evidence. It can be debunked at any time by facts which actually contradict it. We just don't know of any. It is true that it is only the best idea we have so far and that it is possible that we'll come up with something better some day. But thus far subsequent discoveries (in multiple disciplines, yet! Engineering. Mathematics. Physics. Genetics.) have strengthened and reinforced evolutionary theory and our understanding of it. The fershluggin' Catholic Church, of all the world famous stick in the mud institutions, accepts evolutionary theory as the explanation which best fits observed facts.

Get. Over. It.

(The fourth sentence, "Evolution may not be scientific fact," even understates Dan's case.  Actually, there is an aspect of evolution that is a fact.  Evolutionary changes occur in nature.  Period.  What the Theory of Evolution does is put together how these changes have worked together over the ages to produce what we see today, and this theory cannot yet explain every observation that is made.  But there aren't a lot of such "holes" in the theory, and anyway, "holes" hardly invalidate a theory.  Falsification does, and we know of no observed facts which contradict this Theory.)

Now, this is the sort of thing that I hesitate to say, because I have some very good friends who disagree with me, but I call 'em as I see 'em, and if I didn't, you'd have no respect for me at all.  Creationists and I.D. ("In Denial") proponents remind me, in two important ways, of political leftists:  they interpret facts and observations in such a way as to promote their beliefs, to the point of ignoring and attempting to hide facts which are difficult to fit into their worldview, and they (amongst themselves) repeat the same untruths over and over, long past the point where these untruths were disproved, until they are believed to be fact by most adherents and even convince some outsiders.  Examples:  "Bush lied us into war," and "the Second Law of Thermodynamics contradicts evolution."

I am beginning to think that the Second Law of Thermodynamics (pseudo) argument will never be let go by some people.  Ever.  It matters not that their own argument would prove (if it were true) that reproduction would be impossible, even life itself.  I guess they just don't think that far—they go as far as is necessary to make the point they want to make and seem to stop there.  William A. Dembski, in his "law of conservation of information," basically recasts this old argument in new "information age" terms in support of I.D. 

I.D.ers will claim, as they have for years, that evolution is "only a theory," that "random chance" could never have produced what we see today, that there is precious little real oberved evidence that supports evolution, that no, or at most very few, "transitional" fossils exist, that speciation has never been observed, that evolution is not falsifiable, that it is an "atheistic" belief system or philosophy that is corrupting our society, and that non-evolutionists have been given "short shrift" in scientific journals through a system of prejudicial discrimination.  It's easy to debunk these statements, but they keep coming right back to them over and over again, recycling these until some new "scientific" discovery is made which they then co-opt as their newest rallying cry.

Rob and I have had some terrific debates over this issue, but I never have to make any point that others haven't made over and over again.

Now, please note carefully:  I said that Creation/I.D. proponents remind me of leftists in two ways only, not that they are similar to leftists, or that they are in any way leftists.  Actually, if I'm honest with myself, I could find instances where I've fallen into the same traps, if only because they're easy ones to fall into.  But there are people who occasionally fall into a trap, and then there are people who seem to live there. 

Also, I have a great deal of sympathy (or something like that) for Creationists/I.D.ers, because I was one of them until recently, and I hardly morphed from an "ignorant moron" into a "paragon of intelligence and reason" overnight.  This is why I don't really believe that all, or even most, supporters of Creation/I.D. are merely ignorant fools.  But that's another post.

Just what is a war, anyway?

Steel doesn't often up and write whole essays himself, but he just wrote two good ones.  I would be proud to have written either one.

Here's part of one of them.

WAR is when everybody is rooting for you to win.

A war is something that happens and everybody wishes it would just go away.

WAR is fought to survive.

A war is waged for some reason nobody is quite sure of.

...WAR unites. A war divides.

WAR results in a win or you lose.

A war has no winners and we all lose.

...WAR is seldom fought, lasts long and is never forgotten.

A war is 'conducted', budgeted', 'discussed' and 'recriminated'.

WAR is what anyone would do.

A war is something no one should try.

Pogo was right. 

We have met the enemy, and he is us.

(Now go read the other one.)

Gone phishin'

I just received a very professional-looking, well written email, purporting to be from Bank of America, advising me that I have "a message from customer service available in [my] Online Banking Mailbox," and that I should follow the conveniently-provided link to see it.

There were no misspelled words or obvious errors to be seen.  It was certainly well-faked, but faked nonetheless, which is obvious for three reasons:

1. I don't have a BoA account.  Duh.
2. Mousing over the links I'm supposed to follow (since I don't use Internet Exploder), then reading the status bar, it's obvious they don't lead to BoA's domain or a subdomain thereof, although they do cleverly contain the words "Bank of America.com."
3. This is the biggie that everyone needs to know:  because of this very threat (called "phishing"), legitimate companies such as Bank of America never ask users to follow links contained in an email, just as they never ask users to open an email attachment.  They would, rather, have suggested you simply login to your BoA account and assume that you already know how to do that.  PayPal users are often targets of this sort of scam, too.  And it used to be that such emails were nearly always poorly-constructed and clearly faked, but obviously thats no longer always the case.

Of course I'm doubtless preaching to the choir here, since Forward Biased readers are way too savvy to fall for something so obvious.

Again, this is a case where simply knowing basic internet common sense would prevent these scammers from being able to con anyone, but they're so successful at it that they keep doing it, and people keep falling for it.

I took a screen capture of the email so you could see it.  Click on the image to see the full-size version.

UPDATE:  Rob adds, in a comment:

One important thing to know is the concept of subdomains. I can't go out and register bankone.com cause bankone ownes that. I can however, register something like techsupport.com or something like that and THEN register a subdomain bankone in it to make the URL bankone.techsupport.com. Most users would just see the bankone part and assume it's valid. I've gotten several Phish messages like that recently that _I_ was just barly able to prove they were bogus, and I'm in network security. Now, if it was techsupport.bankone.com then it's a bankone domain. Big difference the order can make.

But, the big detail to point out here is that no bank or financial company will EVER ask you to confirm account details like that. SSL is not unhackable but it's close enough. The effort to hack SSL wouln't be worth the time when you can call someone up and trick them into giving you their credit card number (called Social Engineering). Kevin Mitnik's book "The Art of Deception" should be required reading for all companies. (he was the guy that was jailed for the first big internet worm).

Yet another reason...

...to maintain some degree of anonymity on the internet.

Via Bill Quick, we find that blogger Hossein Derakhshan was googled by customs officers as he tried to enter the US at the Buffalo border.

I've literally become homeless. My new home is now hoder.com and I'm not joking.

You might have seen a small change in my little biography on the right hand side. I had said that I was in New York and that's what had actually changed my life. But I'm now out of the states and can't go back at least for six months.

It was actually my blog that got me into trouble after a month of staying in my friend's flat in lower-Manhattan, NYC. It's a sad but real story.

...When I wanted to come back to NYC, I was obviously stopped and interviewed by US Customs and Border Security people at the Buffalo border, like everyone else on the bus.

But when they realized I was going to the States to speak at a blog-related conference (ConvergeSouth) they googled my name right in front of me. Two of them, actually.

They carefully scanned the results and found this English blog. One of them, a very sharp guy in fact, started to read every single post on my blog. And it didn't take long until he shocked me: "So you live in New York, right? That's what you've written in your on blog."

...He was ecstatic. My blog made his day, or in this case, his night. He kept reading my posts and asking questions about a lot of them: Why did I go to Iran, what are my feelings about Bush administration, why I separated from my wife, what did think about Iranian politics, etc.

The guy was so in love with his job he wanted to get me into deep trouble so ultimately I could never go back to his lovely country, apparently. So he started to look for evidence that I'd also worked in the States and were paid by them. Until he found, in my archive, a post I'd written before leaving for Iran, to ask for the blogging community's attention and support, especially if something happened to me in Iran and about how they could help in that case.

Now, if you follow the link, you'll see that this guy's words and behavior weren't exactly smart under the circumstances.  Discretion would have been advisable.  But the point remains:  anything you and I write that makes it onto the web, even indirectly, is available to be used against us by any idiotic customs officer—or anyone else who is in a position of authority and can use a computer.

I don't exactly enjoy using a pseudonym online.  Some have even called those who blog under an assumed name "cowards."  Although my real name is, well, pretty lame-sounding with no "zing" or any other kind of phonetic desirability, it is my name, after all, and I'd much rather be posting as myself than some obviously fictitious character.  (Actually, if you tried just a bit, you could probably find out what my real name is.)  And I admire those who openly use their real names online all the more because of the courage required to do so.

But this is the sort of thing that keeps me behind a "protective curtain" of at least partial anonymity for now, even in these "free" United States.

Searchlight Crusade linked with Links and Minifeatures 11 27 Sunday

UPDATE:  After reading Searchlight Crusade's comments on this post, I need to reemphasize what was and what was not my point, because Dan Melson is mostly right about this.

It was not my point to say that anyone had been prevented from entering this country wrongly.  Melson argues that Derakhshan was correctly kept out of the country, being an illegal resident.

It was my point to emphasize that anything we write that ends up on the internet may well come back to bite us in ways we did not foresee, not, as Dan inferred, only the illegal things.   If I believed I could trust all customs officers, police with an axe to grind, etc., then I wouldn't have written this simply because "I don't want to be bothered."  That's all, and yes, I should have been clearer about that.

Those crazy Canadians

Well, at least we aren't the only country that has problems with former leaders that shoot their mouths off in embarrassing ways.  (Via a commenter on Daily Pundit.)

A former Canadian Minister of Defence and Deputy Prime Minister under Pierre Trudeau has joined forces with three Non-governmental organizations to ask the Parliament of Canada to hold public hearings on Exopolitics -- relations with “ETs.”

If we ever do meet extraterrestrials, the last thing we need is to drag politics into our relationship.  Whatever that relationship is.

By “ETs,” Mr. Hellyer and these organizations mean ethical, advanced extraterrestrial civilizations that may now be visiting Earth.

They're ethical?  I'm sure glad he knows this, although one wonders just what little green men may have been whispering in his ear to tell him so.  Will Smith, call your office...

Actually, any ETs we may one day meet no doubt are ethical.  It's just that their idea of ethical behavior and ours may not be exactly similar.  Maybe invasion and conquest is the highest moral guidepost in their society.  I guess they could be Vulcans, but what if they're Romulans?  Maybe they're on a mission from their god, they're the Israelites, Earth is the Promised Land, and we're the evil Canaanites, to be killed down to the last man, woman, and child.

No, this isn't satire, although it should be.

On September 25, 2005, in a startling speech...

I'll bet.

...at the University of Toronto that caught the attention of mainstream newspapers and magazines, Paul Hellyer, Canada’s Defence Minister from 1963-67 under Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Prime Minister Lester Pearson, publicly stated: "UFOs, are as real as the airplanes that fly over your head."

Although this doubtless wasn't what he meant, that statement is actually undeniably true.  UFOs are real.   UFO stands for "Unidentified Flying Object," and whenever we see an object that is flying and we don't know for sure what it is, it's a UFO by definition.  That doesn't mean that it's extraterrestrial in origin.

Mr. Hellyer went on to say, "I'm so concerned about what the consequences might be of starting an intergalactic war, that I just think I had to say something."

He evidently didn't learn the difference between "inter-" and "intra-" in high school.  Either that, or he seriously thinks that some UFOs are extra-galactic in origin, too.

Hellyer revealed, "The secrecy involved in all matters pertaining to the Roswell incident was unparalled. The classification was, from the outset, above top secret, so the vast majority of U.S. officials and politicians, let alone a mere allied minister of defence, were never in-the-loop."

Hellyer warned, "The United States military are preparing weapons which could be used against the aliens, and they could get us into an intergalactic war without us ever having any warning. He stated, "The Bush administration has finally agreed to let the military build a forward base on the moon, which will put them in a better position to keep track of the goings and comings of the visitors from space, and to shoot at them, if they so decide."

You were just waiting to find out the real purpose of this speech, weren't you?  Well, here it is:  those warmongering Americans are not only spreading destruction and ill-will around Earth, they're planning to turn their weapons on E.T. as well!  Shoot first, ask those pesky questions later!  Kill, kill, kill!

I keep having to remind myself that this guy was serious.  Really.  And it wasn't just him, since "Hellyer’s speech ended with a standing ovation."  At the University of Toronto.

Steel Turman linked with The Real Illegal Alien Problem

UPDATE:  Via Steel, here's the original PRWeb story.

Warp drive patented

Courtesy of Paul Hsieh I've "discovered" what seems to be a pretty good blog by someone who understands physics and its associated math better than I do, called rdv live from tokyo.

I saw several good posts illustrating his grasp of the current state-of-the-art concerning quantum computing (and QM in general), as well as one amusing anecdote from his youth, when he attempted to build his first perpetual motion machine.

But this was pretty fascinating, too:

Topic of patent #6,960,975? "Space Vehicle Propelled by the Pressure of Inflationary Vacuum State". A warp drive. Use 10,000 Tesla magnets and a 5meter shell of superconducting material, and you, too, can warp space and time, and travel at "a speed possibly approaching a local light-speed, the local light-speed which may be substantially higher than the light-speed in the ambient space"!

Every time I think I understand what is and isn't patentable something comes along that challenges my thinking.  I was under the impression that, in order to be eligible for a patent, any technology used must be demonstrable.  Evidently not.  It seems that I could patent a Star-Trek-style transporter using whatever esoteric technology I can dream up, if I wanted to.

When evaluating new blogs for possible inclusion on my blogroll, one of the things I do is look over the new blog's blogroll.  It can be quite revealing to see who he thinks is worth linking to.  Interestingly, rdv live doesn't have a blogroll at all.

GeekPress linked with "Has someone patented the warp drive?"