Religion

The Pew Forum Religion Survey

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

This was in the Star Tribune on Monday and there was also a story on NPR about it yesterday.

The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life has released a survey of The Religious Landscape of the United States.

They have some good tools there for drilling down into the data, but I question their findings in regards to atheism.

16.1% of respondents claim no religious affiliation, yet only 1.6% claim to be atheists.

I know many, many people who are atheists.

I think we are under-represented, and I’m not sure if it’s due to the survey sample, the survey questions or the reticence of atheists to stand up and be counted.

Maybe I think there is a higher incidence of atheists because I prefer to associate with atheists?

But it does make me wonder something: If people feel religions are so interchangeable, why are there so many?

Of course PZ Myers has some things to say about it:

16.1% is still a minority, but keep in mind that Catholics are 24% of the population — we could pass them by in a few years. Look at that table on the right. We’re huge (but not at all organized or unified, of course) and growing fast. It’s worth looking at past assesments: in 1990, the nonreligious were about 7.5% of the population; in 2001, 13.2%; now, 16.1%.

The Pew people break down the “unaffiliateds” a bit more, and it looks like a significant number of them do still have considerable affection or perhaps dependency on religion — they just don’t seem to like the existing sects. I suspect we can blame that not on the attraction of atheism, but the repulsion from overreaching, grasping American religion.

Thank you PZ for giving me hope.

Computers

Untangle – An Open Source Application Filtering Firewall

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

While I was adding some QoS Traffic Shaping to my IPCop firewall, I saw an ad for an open source Application Filtering Firewall project called Untangle.

They say:

Untangle delivers an integrated family of applications that help you simplify and consolidate the network and security products you need, in one place at the network gateway. The most popular applications let businesses block spam, spyware, viruses, and phish, filter out inappropriate web content, control unwanted protocols like instant messaging, and provide remote access and support options to their employees. Every downloadable application is pre-configured and guaranteed to work together.

  • All applications run on one off-the-shelf server
  • Pre-configured on-demand downloads
  • Integrated administration and reporting

It looks pretty promising and appears to be an all-in-one package that includes a firewall, email virus scanner and web proxy.

Sadly, looking in the forums for Untangle showed me that they don’t have any QoS or Traffic Shaping support yet. They are talking about adding it, but that’s the feature I am looking for right now.

So I installed the QoS_NG addon into my IPCop firewall and now I have to figure out what kind of shaping I really want and how to set it up.

Playing around with it last night I proved to myself that it was really working. I was changing the default class upload and download limits and then running one of the DSL speed tests. It was limiting my speed, so what I need to do now is figure out what classes I want to setup and then figure out how to apply the rules.

The end goal is to allow my web and mail server to have a fixed minimum in both directions, and to give my desktop a fixed minimum in both directions.

Then when my kids are watching YouTube videos I can still play TF2 without suffering from massive latency. 🙂

Look at the traffic graph and guess when the kids get home and hop onto YouTube:

I do have to say that so far I am very happy with my IPCop firewall. I will probably checkout Untangle at some point in the future, but IPCop is doing what I need it to do at the moment.

Politics

The youth? They give me hope for the future.

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

From Amanda at Pandagon:

Early voting in Texas started on Tuesday. The genius of early voting is that it’s convenient. You can usually vote at any polling place in your county, instead of having to make sure you’re going to the right one. Which makes it simple to vote during your lunch hour or at the grocery store on the way home from work, etc. Great idea, right? I think so. I’ve always enjoyed it.

Unfortunately, it appears that the system is rigged so that convenient polling places are only available to some people, which changes the demographics of who actually votes. Surprise surprise, one of the targets of such abuse is a historically black university outside of Houston called Prairie View A&M. Their county is only providing two voting machines, and they are located away from the university, so voting is convenient for townies, but not the students. The students, who have been victimized by this sort of disenfranchisement tactic before, decided to stage a protest.

The rest of the story gives me great hope for this country.

Go read it.

Computers

Clan {ib}

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

For fun I convinced most of the coworkers that play TF2 to put an “{ib}” clan tag on their TF2 player name. (So my name is “{ib}Timmay!”)

Several times while playing this way I have been asked “what does IB stand for?” (With the guess usually being “International Baccalaureate”.)

Today I sent around an email asking for suggestions for what we could tell people – just to mess with them a bit.

One of the suggestions (okay, one of mine – sue me) was “Itchy Ballsack” – pretty bad, I know. But for some reason I then morphed it into “Itchy Balzac” and thought “Hey!”

So I checked and then registered the domain itchybalzac.com.

Another email and a few minutes later we have a site!

Clan Itchy Balzac has been launched!

Now we just need some better content….

Life

Robot Shipped and more Photos!

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

The robot that I have been helping the Southwest High School Robotics Team build shipped today. This means that we are all done building it. Right. Actually there is very little that we will need to do once we arrive at the regional competition in Milwaukee.

(In case you don’t have any idea what I’m talking about, check this out: Robots!)

This was a very busy week and weekend. We met every night except Wednesday during the week to work on the robot and we got a lot done (photos here).

On Saturday morning, we loaded up the robot into my pickup truck and drove it to Simley High School in Inver Grove Heights where they had a mockup of the arena in their lunchroom and they invited other teams to come have a practice competition. I think they had almost a dozen teams show up – including the team from Brainerd!

It was a really nice setup – the only thing that was missing was carpeting on the floor. Other than that it was a wonderful opportunity to test our robot.

It passed with flying colors!

We already knew we could pick up the ball, but could we do the other things we needed to do? So we put the robot in the arena and proceeded to do the four things we need to do. We knocked the ball off the overpass. We captured the ball and carried it around the track, we lifted the ball up and hurdled it over the overpass and we placed it on the overpass.

Man there were a bunch of happy kids after we did that!

The practice competition was a great idea. It gave all the teams a chance to practice their driving, debug their robots, and get a feel for what the other teams were doing. They actually staged a few sessions with six robots on the field so that it was like a real competition. It gets pretty crowded with six robots out there.

See photos of the practice competition at Simley High Schools here.

Sunday we rested. Actually I worked on my Mom’s house and did the grocery shopping. The kids met and worked on the robot from Noon until around 9:30.

On Monday morning we loaded the robot up again and went to another practice competition. This time it was at Egan High School. They also had a full arena setup but they had carpet on the floor, so it was more like the real arena.

We already knew we could do what we needed to, so we used this time to do more driver selection and practicing and also to debug the robot some more. We found a couple of weak areas and fixed them up.

Photos from the practice competition at Egan High School here.

After the practice session ended (they kicked us out at 7:00 – otherwise we would have stayed all night) we went to Mark’s house and tweaked the robot some more. Finally I called it quits around 9:30 and made the kids crate the robot up for shipping so we could go home.

The robot is now out of our hands until the regional competition in Milwaukee on March 13th-15th. When we arrive there will be stuff for us to do to it, but I think we are in pretty good shape.