Steve Dutch is a professor of Natural and Applied Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay.
He has a quite a few interesting pages on his web site.
Let us start off with the page where I got the title to this entry: Science, Pseudoscience, and Irrationalism.
Then let us read about Self-Appointed Experts (quite a nice rant I think, and he makes some very good points.)
Then I’ll close with Dutch’s Laws of Just About Everything.
There is plenty more to read there, so go check it out!
I think I might have to buy the War on Terror board game!
BoardGameGeek even gave it a good review.
After six years without any oversite Congress is finally going to start investigating the White House.
Evidence continues to mount that the new Democratic majority plans to investigate the war, energy policy, and other Bush policies, as key committees have begun hiring lawyer-investigators whose job will be to probe the administration. In the House, for example, the Appropriations Committee under Rep. John Murtha’s direction is hiring investigators who will be charged with looking into the administration’s war policies and spending in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Hallelujah!
Why do I not know about Gogol Bordello? Gyspy Punk is da bomb!
It would appear they were at First Avenue on December 14th! Why am I always the last to know? 🙁
Hat Tip to Amanda at Pandagon for this whackyness!
The Celebrity Atheist List is an interesting site that lists celebrities who have spoken out proclaiming their atheism.
It is full of quotes and snippets about many atheist celebrities.
Some fun reading there.
As the snow finally begins to fall, I start jonesing to ride my motorcycle again. I could be riding the hack, but it has a flat front tire and I don’t have time during this holiday season to figure out what is causing it. I did look at it a while ago and could find nothing wrong with it. My fear is that the stress from towing a sidecar has cracked the rim.
Anyway, today Sev sent along this wonderful essay by Dave Karlotski about riding. It pretty well sums up the way I feel.
There is cold, and there is cold on a motorcycle. Cold on a motorcycle is like being beaten with coldhammers while being kicked with cold boots, a bone bruising cold. The wind’s big hands squeeze the heat out of my body and whisk it away; caught in a cold October rain, the drops don’t even feel like water. They feel like shards of bone fallen from the skies of Hell to pock my face. I expect to arrive with my cheeks and forehead streaked with blood, but that’s just an illusion, just the misery of nerves not designed for highway speeds.
Despite this, it’s hard to give up my motorcycle in the fall and I rush to get it on the road again in the spring; lapses of sanity like this are common among motorcyclists. When you let a motorcycle into your life you’re changed forever. The letters “MC” are stamped on your driver’s license right next to your sex and height as if “motorcycle” was just another of your physical characteristics, or maybe a mental condition.
But when warm weather finally does come around all those cold snaps and rainstorms are paid in full because a motorcycle summer is worth any price. A motorcycle is not just a two-wheeled car; the difference between driving a car and climbing onto a motorcycle is the difference between watching TV and actually living your life. We spend all our time sealed in boxes and cars are just the rolling boxes that shuffle us languidly from home-box to work-box to store-box and back, the whole time entombed in stale air, temperature regulated, sound insulated, and smelling of carpets.
Go read all of it.
No sugar coating here. Henry Rollins is refreshingly frank.
Warning: Plenty of F-Bombs.
(And here is a link to the video at a different host in case YouTube takes it down.)
The motherboard is an X5DPE-G2, so it has four PCI busses on it.
Nate brought me a Promise Ultra100 TX2 dual channel IDE controller (thanks Nate!) today, and I think I’ll try and get three to put in the box, so I’m bidding on two more on eBay right now.
Then I’ll have eight IDE channels in the box and I should get some pretty good performance out if it. I’ll have to think about where to put which drives for maximum performance, but I think it will be nice and fast.
I’m thinking about putting the five RAID 5 drives on the Promise cards – one drive per channel, and the mirrored pair for the OS on the on-board controllers. I can hang the CD-ROM drive off one of the on-boards as I don’t need to worry too much about that drive’s performance.
Or does it make more sense to have the five RAID 5 drives on the three Promise cards and the two on-boards? Then they are on three different PCI busses and the on-board controllers. Would that be faster?
And where do I hang the OS drives? What can I boot from?
I guess I can build it and benchmark it both ways. No reason not to mess about and try different configurations.
I can’t wait for all the parts to get here! This will be fun!
Finally!
I have five 250GB IDE hard drives that I bought from Nate (thanks Nate!) a while ago. I also have some old gear that I picked up with a Xeon motherboard and CPU.
But the motherboard is in a 1RU case. It’s hard to shoe horn five hard drives into a 1RU case. (Yes, with the right case you can do it, but with an EATX motherboard that is 12″ x 13″, it’s not likely.)
I finally got enough spare cash together and bought a new 4RU case. It looks like a nice case, it’s got six 5-1/4″ bays and two 3-1/2″ bays. So I can get my five 250GB drives in there as a RAID 5 array, a pair of 40GB drives mirrored for the OS and a CD ROM drive for installation. (I hope the 550W power supply can drive it all.)
Then I’m going to install the latest release of OpenFiler on it.
I’m also going to borrow a pair of dual-channel IDE crontroller cards from Nate (thanks again Nate!) and build up the RAID arrays using the software RAID in the OpenFiler distro (rPath Linux.) I’ll have six IDE channels and if the motherboard has multiple PCI busses I should be okay for performance. I have to find the specs for the motherboard still. It’s a SuperMicro something or other. (Judging from the pictures and the specs, I think it’s a X5DPE-G – but I’ll look at the board tonight and find out for sure.)
Then I’ll run some performance tests on it. I want to know if it’s worth the trouble of backing up my existing filer (with about 200GB on it) to something (don’t know what yet) so that I can use the MegaRAID i4 card that I have in my existing OpenFiler.
My gut feeling is that the software RAID will be plenty fast, but I don’t know for sure.
Then after I get my new OpenFiler built I can redirect all the Windows users My Documents folders to it and start doing real backups to my DLT drive! How awesome will that be?
I figured out how to do the redirection with a group policy so no matter which machine you log into you get your My Documents folder. It’s a pretty cool Windows hack, plus the end user doesn’t even have to know it’s happening, so they don’t have to be told to ‘save your data to the H drive’ or anything. It just happens!
And how geeky will it be to be able to state that I have One Terabyte in my basement? (Remember when a terabyte was an unimaginable amount of space?)
The third (and last for now) photo from our trip to the Holidazzle parade.
