chattr +a -V

One part of Fascism's definition is 'rigidly controlling most industrial and economic activities', though a distinction needs to be made between Socialist-Communist control, where ownership is held by the State, and Fascism, where ownership remains in 'private' hands, and the controls are exercised through cartels. The National Industrial Recovery Act (a very early New Deal program, passed in June, 1933, three months after Roosevelt took office) imposed business and labor cartels on the American economy, down to the level of individually-owned tailors:

New Jersey tailor Jack Magid was jailed for "charging 35 cents for pressing a suit," in violation of the NRA code that mandated a 40-cent charge.

From Cutthroat Competition and Dead Chickens.

The Act established the National Recovery Administration, and Congress attempted to delegate to the President unfettered total control, without any governing standards, over wages, hours, working conditions, and collective bargaining. The Brookings Institution described some of the Act's provisions thusly:

A further expansion of the president's powers ... authorizes him, whenever he shall find that activities which he believes are contrary to the purpose of the law are being practiced in any trade or industry, to license business enterprises if he shall deem it essential to make effective a code of fair competition or agreement. No person shall, after a date which shall have been fixed in an announcement that licensing is required in an industry, engage in any business specified in such announcement unless he shall first have obtained a license pursuant to the regulations prescribed....

Carrying on of business without a license where a license is required is made a criminal offense. The penalty is a fine not to exceed $500 or imprisonment not to exceed six months or both.

From Cutthroat Competition and Dead Chickens.

The Supreme Court unanimously declared the Act unconstitutional in the 1935 case A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corporation v. United States:

To summarize and conclude upon this point: Section 3 of the Recovery Act (15 USCA 703) is without precedent. It supplies no standards for any trade, industry, or activity. It does not undertake to prescribe rules of conduct to be applied to particular states of fact determined by appropriate administrative procedure. Instead of prescribing rules of conduct, it authorizes the making of codes to prescribe them. For that legislative undertaking, section 3 sets up no standards, aside from the statement of the general aims of rehabilitation, correction, and expansion described in section 1. In view of the scope of that broad declaration and of the [295 U.S. 495, 542] nature of the few restrictions that are imposed, the discretion of the President in approving or prescribing codes, and thus enacting laws for the government of trade and industry throughout the country, is virtually unfettered. We think that the code-making authority thus conferred is an unconstitutional delegation of legislative power.

Chief Justice Hughes, writing for the Court. Thus the United States avoided a dictatorial, complete control of the entire economy.

Ole Eichorn, on his Critical Section blog, at Cremona revisited - the science of violin making points to a pdf article from Caltech on the science and technology of the art of violin making (Cremona Revisited - the Science of Violin Making).

It's not the varnish secret recipe, or 'stewing' the wood: Joseph Nagyvary, a biochemistry professor at Texas A&M University, suggests that

Stradivari and Guarneri stored their wood in mineral-rich brackish water for years before beginning to dry it out. This storage allowed minerals to seep in and fill the empty space left as microbes digested hemicellulose in the wood. Nagyvary even suggests that 18th-century treatises calling for dry storage with no additional treatment may have been a deliberate deception aimed at obscuring the practices of the masters. The acoustical effect of embedded minerals is not yet well understood, but Nagyvary' experiments suggest that microscopic mineral crystals may modify resonant modes by stiffening wood in some directions and adding flexibility in others.

Following up on my posting Ubuntu 5.04 Hoary Hedgehog on an hpze4800, I've ftp'd my .xinitrc and .fvwm2rc (X window startup and fvwm configuration files, respectively) from my desktop, stopped the gnome display manager from starting on boot by removing the /etc/rc2.d/S13gdm symlink (runlevel 2 being Debian's default runlevel as opposed to 3 in other Linux distros), giving me a text login.

I used apt-get for some additional packages, such as

• kjots,
• Midnight Commander file manager,
• rxvt (for xclock: though the xbase-clients package is supposed to include xclock, `which xclock` didn't return anything -- remember to use the -norender switch if you want colored hands or highlights),
• qiv (for displaying a jpg as the root window background),
• multi-gnome-terminal (tabbed terms, yay),
• and because the fonts in use on my desktop look crappy on the laptop, dfontmgr to get the X-Fontname for registered fonts (for whatever reason, xfontsel from xbase-clients didn't pick up the installed urw foundry fonts)
• and xosview, which displays some of the same system info which gkrellm handles, but differently (plus I'm used to it and because I'm familiar with it, I can immediately spot conditions).

So, the laptop running X looks like this now:



gkrellm, xosview, the Toolbox SGI-ish button bar, the IRIX-like pager for multiple desktops and the window list are all 'sticky' (displaying in every desktop).

Eurasianet has a very brief article, Kazakhstan's Spaceship Junkyard with a slideshow.

The Baikonur Cosmodrome (actually near Tyuratam, 400 km to the southwest of Baikonur) was the Soviet Union's and Russia's main launch facility for 'all manned and man-related (e.g., space stations and resupply ships), lunar, interplanetary, high-altitude navigation, and GEO missions'.

Since it is landlocked, the boosters and fuel/oxidizer tanks fall back on former Soviet territory, and the missions must be planned to avoid the stages from falling near populations or in China.

Military launches will be soon made only from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome, about 400 miles northeast of St. Petersburg. Like Baikonur, Plesetsk is landlocked, but it is not near any international boundaries, though launches still must be planned to avoid populated areas.

Saturday the kids were up in Raleigh, and I got to plan activities. It's strawberry time 'round here and the weather was going to be real nice, so I checked out pick your own strawberry farms in Wake County. Hunt's Strawberries, at 4505 Watkins Road, Raleigh (well, I wouldn't call it Raleigh, but maybe you can see it from there) is easy to get to, and was a great place to go.

Before heading out to Hunt's, we got some lunch at Cheeburger Cheeburger on Spring Lake near Six Forks, a 1950s style hamburger place. Kids meals come not on a plate or in a basket, but in a box looking like one of the convertibles from the 50s. The little one's came in a Ford Fairlane. The burgers are hand made (not machine shaped), with a big selection of toppings, and you have a choice of a couple of dozen shakes.

Then we drove out to Hunt's and picked for about an hour, got maybe four or five gallons of fresh, ripe strawberries, and quit when the sun broke through the clouds and it started getting a little warm.









After that, we drove over to Falls Lake (that's the Federal site, the North Carolina tourism site is here).



Get:Outdoors was having a demo day at their location on Falls of Neuse: you could try out different canoes and kayaks for free on the Neuse River until 4 pm. The demo days are once a month. I forgot to take photos. Sorry.

We had planned on seeing the Durham Bulls game that evening, but I had the time wrong, and instead of arriving before the first pitch at 5 pm, we got there around 7, just before the game ended. So, we headed back to Raleigh and had sandwiches, coffee and sodas at Coffee Katie's on Leesville just off 540.

A wonderful day.

John Ford's 1942 documentary, The Battle of Midway, filmed as it happened, is available for free download from the Wayback Machine. File sizes from 29 MB to 1.1 GB, or you can stream it.

Blind Wal-Mart shoppers at the North Logan, Utah, store will be testing a robot guide soon, maybe even as we speak, since the machines arrived on Thursday, May 5, 2005: choosing from a Braille products listing on the robot's handle, the machine uses RFID tags and sonar to navigate around the store to the items the shopper wants.

'There are RFID sensors placed on the shelves in the store. The robot has the RFID antennae and detects the presence of those tags,' [Vladimir] Kulyukin [assistant professor of computer science at Utah State University and the director of the university's Computer Science Assistive Technology Laboratory] said. 'That's how it knows it's reached the Colgate section of the toothpaste shelf and it then announces, "You have reached the Colgate toothpaste section, on your right."'

The RFID tags haven't gotten to item-level tagging yet, only to the level where the part of the shelf where the product is supposed to be is tagged. So if the shelf area is empty or a different product is in the spot, the robot and RFID tags don't pick that up. The Computer Science Assistive Technology Laboratory team is working on a feature where the robot scans the item's bar code and announces what product is going into the shopping cart.

HT to Wal-Mart Tests Robots for Blind Shoppers at Rich Burridge's Weblog, which links to the eWeek article, which itself links to the full article at CIOInsight.com: Wal-Mart Tests Robots for Blind Shoppers.

A legally blind computer book author posted a comment to the eWeek article here.

James Khoo Chen Shiang (Cool Boy's weblog), another Sun blog from Planet Sun: [FireFox Tips]: Edit and Preview CSS on the fly describes the Web Developer extension for Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla, which adds a menu and a toolbar to the browser with various web developer tools.

A helpful css cheat sheet at I Love Jack Daniels, one of those things I print out and then lose in desk clutter. He's got two other cheat sheets as well.

HT to Tor Norbye's Weblog, one of the Planet Sun blogs I read.

Today I begin what's in effect 24 hours continuous work, until Tues May 10 around 3 pm, so in all likelihood no blogging from 2:30 pm today until Wed May 11.

This weekend, on Saturday, I'm hoping to pick strawberries at one of the local farms (Wake County strawberry farms) and in the evening, get up to the Durham Bulls game with the Ottawa Lynx, the Orioles' farm club.

London's Sunday Telegraph reports that there is a secret network operating in Britain which will finance flights, hotels, cremation and doctors' fees, along with helping with an escort, to a Zurich suicide center. The paper's undercover reporter quotes Michael Irwin, M.D. and head of the British secret society

So far, TLC has received pledges totalling £5,000. A bank account is being opened outside Britain. ...

If it's a question of an escort then we can help on that if there's no one [to go with the terminally ill person to Switzerland]. We have some people who have no relatives left - you know, they are quite elderly. ...

The contribution from TLC would partially cover the costs - £2,000 is the maximum usually. What we do is we have various people who have pledged to help. We don't have the cash floating around, but we can quickly call in those pledges.

So, now we've got 'charitable-assisted suicide' to go with 'doctor-assisted suicide'.

Following up on the last post: I successfully installed Ubuntu 5.04 from the live CD: it detected all my Linux partitions, gave me the options to use reiserfs on all of them, allowed me to specify where /var /tmp /usr and /boot mount (I probably could have also specified where /usr/local gets mounted, but I would have needed another partition and didn't want to shrink existing ones to get disk space for the new one), and properly configured GRUB to choose between the various Ubuntu boots (kernel 2.6.10-5-386, same kernel in single user mode, memtest86+) and MS XP Home. I didn't put /var and /tmp in the /root partition, because if for some reason /var or /tmp get too large, I didn't want to fill /root up.

Booting the live CD with the option not to use dhcp gave me screens to set up a static IP, broadcast IP, gateway IP and nameservers IP (using my desktop which runs squid).

Poking around, I found the Unofficial Ubuntu 5.04 Starter Guide, which gives instructions on how to add unsupported apt repositories, and after following the easy to follow steps, I installed gmemusage, gkrellm, ncftp and fvwm. Later, I'll grab my .fvwm2rc file (fvwm's configuration file; I use the White Magic Desktop), from my desktop and maybe the background I use.

After that, I'll see about setting up my wireless card.

This is one of my laptops, which has MS-Windows XP Home edition on /dev/hda1, and until recently, had Red Hat's Fedora Core 2 in other partitions. For a few reasons, including my preference for apt-based (i.e., Debian) distros), rather than rpm-based distros, I decided to get rid of Fedora and try an apt-based distro. When I bought it last Summer, it had 256 MB of memory, but I upgraded that to its maximum of 1 GB with a couple of 512 MB sticks.

The last few days, I blew away the Fedora install and put Ubuntu's latest release, Hoary Hedgehog 5.04 on it, but I want apps which don't come with Ubuntu, including gmemusage, gkrellm, ncftp and fvwm. I do not want to run gnome or KDE; gnome or KDE apps, yes, but I do not want their cluttered desktops.

The Ubuntu install went well, no gotchas, nothing puzzling which I remember. I used Ubuntu's version of synaptic to browse available packages and those which I selected installed without a hitch.

So, now I'm live-blogging a Mepis install. (For the following, it's important to realize that I put Ubuntu's /boot mount point on /dev/hda2, and didn't touch /dev/hda2 in the Mepis installation attempts.)

Booting from the iso image on a CD shows familiar booting output (apache is running???!!! along with spamd, samba), and it puts me into a display manager, so X was running by default (this is a desktop-centered distro, after all), and logging in as 'root' passwd 'root' brought up an ugly KDE desktop (redundancy; gripe) with a red background. Existing hard drive partitions became icons, and kmix launched.

My ethernet interface gets configured automatically, grabbing an IP address from my router, and I've got nameservers and a default route, so I can connect to the 'net without any tweaking. With Ubuntu, I had to configure eth0 with a static IP and put in my nameservers, so Mepis is simpler. /var/log/messages shows some attempt to configure my wireless ethernet device, but /sbin/ifconfig show only eth0 and lo.

On the desktop, there's an icon of a claw hammer and open-ended wrench, also, titled 'INSTALL ME' (yes, upper-case), so let's launch that.

Build an fstab (that's what it does, not the title or description displayed) is what comes up after the copyright notice and clicking on 'Next'. With selecting 'Custom install on existing partitions', I can select / swap and /home partitions, but no option for assigning /usr /var /tmp or any other mount points. Maybe if I blew away all partitions, I could choose those others, but I'll see whether after everything's done, I can vi the /etc/fstab to put them where I want. 'Filesystem type' grants ext2, ext3 or reiserfs, and I chose reiserfs. Then the filesystems get created (called 'formatting') once I agree to destroy / swap and /home filesystem contents.

Well, here's a bug: if I complete the filesystems creation, and click on 'Back' to go to previous screens, then go forward again and select the same choices as before, the installer tries to create filesystems on / swap and /home, and it stalls or locks up at 3% of /. There's no hard disk activity showing on the laptop, and the iinstaller doesn't detect that the filesystems have already been created. My mouse cursor is the standard X windows clock, so I can't select 'Abort'. I wonder if grub is still on the MBR.

Logged out of the X windows session, logged in again as root and tried to install again, but the install locks up at the same point. Let's try running QTParted to modify my partitions: the splash screen comes up, 'getting devices', then ... nothing. About 15 minutes later, and all there is is the splash screen. I had to kill -9 it.

Logged out of X, logged back in, restarted the installer and selected ext3 for the filesystem type, and I get an error 'Failed to prepare chosen partitions. Returning to Step 1.' Nothing helpful in /var/log/messages or /var/log/syslog. Restarted the installer and selected different partitions for / and /home, and ext3 filesystem type, and it's proceeding to create the filesystems and copy the distro. Lesson: don't click 'Back' after the distro is installed.

Now I'm back to the 'Select Boot Method' and 'Select Kernel(s) to Use' screen, where I had previously clicked on 'Back', so this time I accepts the defaults (put GRUB in the MBR and select both kernels). No option displayed for booting into MS Windows XP, and I click on 'Next', and there's a disturbingly long delay in any disk activity. Checking the newly created /boot/grub/ directory, there's no menu.lst, only menu.lst.example, so I copy that to menu.lst. The install again seems to have locked up: it's now about 15 minutes since I clicked on 'Next', and I kill the installer. Restart and this time go to 'Repair Installation Reinstall GRUB Bootloader', keep what it default detected, and the progress slider bar just keeps going, and going and going, and GRUB should not take more than a minute or so to install. Nothing helpful in /var/log/messages or /var/log/syslog, and those are the youngest files in /var/log, so I kill this and restart the laptop.

As I expected, because I didn't touch /dev/hda2 when I tried installing Mepis, GRUB is still in the MBR and I can boot into MS XP, once chkdsk ran. I've got about an hour and a half before heading out to work, and I'll try to reinstall Ubuntu so I at least have a Linux distro on the laptop. Disappointing. I'll brew a pot of coffee and see about Ubuntu.

They had retinitis pigmentosa, and the researchers from the University of Southern California hope that '[u]ltimately, however, the device is likely to be used for the millions of people suffering from age-related macular degeneration, or AMD, as well.'

The device is 'a 4-by-4 grid of platinum electrodes embedded in silicone rubber' with electricity flowing through.

Six previously blind patients detect light, motion, identify objects with retinal prostheses via Gizmodo's 'Blind See With Prosthetic Retina'.

Today in 1802, Heinrich Gustav Magnus was born, a German chemist and physicist who discovered the 'Magnus effect'.

Why do curve balls curve, and more generally, why do knuckle balls move in more than one direction in their trip to the plate?

Simplified Diagram of the Magnus Effect

Source: Physics of a Home Run by Scott Teresi.

Since the Bernoulli effect tells us that the air pressure on the side spinning into the wind will be greater than the air pressure on the side spinning away from the wind (the direction of travel), and this creates a force pushing the ball sideways. (It's more complicated than that, but it works as a first approximation, as in 'First we approximate the Cow as a sphere of radius r.) Depending on the axis of spin, the ball might drop, slide or hop (or in the case of a knuckler, all three). The Science of Pitching by Edward Willett. Unless you're on Mars, where Curveballs become Screwballs.

I've had a full schedule the past eight days, hence the break in posting here, though I have done some blogging at my other site, in illo tempore. I do have some things more suited for here, and will resume today.