Rondam Ramblings

Preaching the gospel of evidence, experiment and reason since 2003.

Thursday, September 30, 2010

Open Mic Night

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I wrote this in 1992. (It was originally entitled "The Reader.") Maybe should have posted it instead of the "Thud" pos...

Behind the scenes of the Kobayashi Maru

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Thought I'd tell a little about the reality that motivated me to write my philosophical Kobayashi Maru scenario. I've been doing a...
12 comments:

Thud

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I've been writing Rondam Ramblings for over seven years now, which probably makes it one of the longer-lived continuously maintained blo...
8 comments:
Wednesday, September 29, 2010

What would you do?

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Imagine one evening you meet a stranger at a bar. You exchange the usual social pleasantries and begin to establish a rapport, until the st...
13 comments:
Saturday, September 11, 2010

Mourning the many victims of 9-11

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On this the ninth anniversary of the most traumatic event in recent memory I mourn the loss of 2996 of my fellow human beings (because not a...
3 comments:
Saturday, August 28, 2010

Two pieces of code someone really ought to write

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Gripe mode on: If you think about it, sockets are the elephant in the unix living room. Everything in unix is supposed to be a file. ...
16 comments:
Friday, August 27, 2010

Blogger has added a spam filter!

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Hooray! It seems to be working too. I'm seeing a lot of spam attempts, but nothing is getting through. Thanks, Google!
Friday, August 06, 2010

I will no longer support Susan G. Komen

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I don't want my money to be used for bullshit like this .
9 comments:
Monday, August 02, 2010

The AT&T 3G Microcell: YMMV

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The AT&T 3G microcell is like a little personal cell tower that uses your internet connection to provide cell service in places where t...
3 comments:
Saturday, July 31, 2010

A singular plug

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I don't normally do endorsements on Rondam Ramblings, but I'm going to make a rare exception for the Singularity Summit (August 14-...
Monday, July 26, 2010

A rare win for freedom

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The EFF has achieved a rare victory for individual liberty by convincing the U.S. copyright office to officially declare that circumventing...
Thursday, July 22, 2010

These Chinese spammers are getting pretty annoying

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Lately everything I post collects at least one piece of Chinese comment spam. I've been manually deleting them, but I don't know ho...
8 comments:
Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Why can't we all just get along? Because the laws of physics forbid it.

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The Boston Globe recently published an interesting story about how facts backfire : It’s one of the great assumptions underlying modern dem...
8 comments:
Monday, July 12, 2010

Loki is apparently not done with us

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It wasn't just the escrow from hell that has made our lives stressful over the last few months, but we've also had a fair amount of ...
Sunday, July 11, 2010

The escrow from hell - abridged version

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I was in the process of writing up the story of the Escrow from Hell. It was up to six or seven chapters and I was only about half way thro...
1 comment:
Friday, July 09, 2010

Light at the end of the tunnel

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Rondam Ramblings has been quiet lately because we have been in the midst of the Escrow From Hell (and its companion feature, the Move From P...
Monday, June 28, 2010

Nothing could possibly go wrong with this

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This sneak peek at Windows 8 would be funny if it weren't so sad. "There appears to be considerable planning taking place as to ho...
Sunday, June 13, 2010

Variable3.com: Design. Print. Web. Steal.

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You know you've made it to the big time as a blogger when people start stealing your material. Variable3.com has ripped off my top t...
Thursday, June 10, 2010

AT&T takes suckage to a whole new level

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I've known for a while that AT&T sucks but they just took suckage to a whole new level. We recently moved to the Bay Area from Los...
4 comments:
Monday, May 31, 2010

Neutrinos have mass!

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Scientists the INFN1’s Gran Sasso laboratory in Italy announced today that they have detected a muon neutrino spontaneously changing into a ...
3 comments:

Best Fan Fiction Ever

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I wasn't planning on blogging about this until later, but since Miles pointed out that I'm being pretty gloomy lately I decided to ...
1 comment:

I would have given long odds against

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It appears that there may be some actual benefits from acupuncture .
2 comments:

And we wonder why they hate us

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As usual Glenn Greenwald gets to the heart of the matter: Late last night, Israel attacked a flotilla of ships in international waters carr...
6 comments:
Sunday, May 23, 2010

My sentiments exactly

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Heather Havrilesky asks How can the Lost finale not suck? [UPDATE:] Yep, pretty much every bit as bad as I was expecting it to be. God, I...
4 comments:
Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Another step towards totalitarianism

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A Pennsylvania man faces eight years in prison on what are almost certainly trumped up charges of assaulting a federal agent. The alleged ...

The right to be wrong

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Slate has a fascinating interview with Diane Ravitch , former member of the Bush I administration, about her changing her position on the v...
Tuesday, May 04, 2010

Facebook goes towards the dark side

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Facebook seems to be getting more and more evil . I have an FB account. I hardly ever use it, but I'm seriously considering shutting i...
2 comments:
Saturday, May 01, 2010

More CSS vindication

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Finding examples of things that CSS can't do seems suddenly to be all the rage. Here is my favorite example of something that is imposs...
4 comments:
Friday, April 30, 2010

CSS vindication

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Jeff Atwood agrees with me that CSS should not be used for layout . ...even if you have extreme HTML hygiene and Austrian levels of disci...
6 comments:

The email cold-call HOWTO

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(I wrote this many years ago as a web page but decided to repost it here so people can comment on it.) The Email Cold-Call HOWTO A "co...
1 comment:

Why I hate LinkedIn

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It's because I regularly get email messages that look like this: Joe Shmoe requested to add you as a connection on LinkedIn: Ron, I'...
10 comments:

Rosie Jetson, eat your heart out

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Japanese researchers have built a robot that balances on a ball . It's wicked cool , like a Segway taken to the next level. It is real...
Saturday, April 24, 2010

It's a miracle!

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The image of Jesus has shown up on Google Maps.
Thursday, April 22, 2010

Set phasers to stun

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The inventor of Tickle Me Elmo (and no, I am not making this up) has invented a new gun -- as in weapon -- that can be adjusted to fire both...
1 comment:
Thursday, April 08, 2010

Biggest robotics breakthrough since... well maybe ever

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Researchers at U.C. Berkeley have built a robot that can fold towels . Veeeeeeerrrrrryyyyyy sssslllloooowwwwllllyyyyy. But it actually wor...
1 comment:
Wednesday, April 07, 2010

Oabama orders a hit

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Barack Obama has apparently ordered the assassination of a U.S. citizen without a trial in the name of fighting terrorism. This is an even...
2 comments:
Tuesday, April 06, 2010

My very own koan

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I haven't been writing much because I've been too busy dealing with getting ready to move. Buying and selling houses is a nice prob...
Monday, March 22, 2010

Ron prognosticates: The Supreme Court will overturn health care reform

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Before the ink even had time to dry, the state of Virginia filed suit to challenge the health care reform bill as unconstitutional. And I ...
6 comments:
Thursday, March 18, 2010

We're doomed!

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An orange dwarf star is going to collide with our solar system in about a million years, more or less. That's million, with an M. Tha...
Saturday, March 13, 2010

Whoever writes the history books

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Winston Churchill once observed that the history books are written by the victors in a conflict, but I sometimes wonder if even he appreciat...
9 comments:

Runaway Prius was (almost certainly) a hoax

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Forbes has a thorough debunking .
1 comment:
Friday, March 12, 2010

Danger Will Robinson! Rackspace cloud stores your password in the clear.

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I just had a very disturbing conversation with a Rackspace Cloud CSR. It went something like this: CSR: Can I have your account user name a...
34 comments:

I'm going to run out of ways to say "fishy"

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Theodore H. Frank observes that Toyota vehicles apparently engage in age discrimination . Not Toyota the company mind you, the vehicles th...

Freakishly accurate Toyota simulator

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Allen Hartwig created this freakishly accurate Toyota simulator . It's even better if you have sound turned on.
Thursday, March 11, 2010

More from the Toyota files

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James Sikes, the driver of the runaway Prius in San Diego the other day may have had ulterior motives . Are we about to see a repeat of ba...
Wednesday, March 10, 2010

"Everything looks like it was designed... but of course that isn't true"

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Just stumbled across this amazing video of an ant colony that was pumped full of cement and then excavated. I can hardly imagine a more st...
12 comments:
Friday, March 05, 2010

Ed Wallace steps up for Toyota

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He calls the uncontrolled acceleration hysteria (ambiguity intended) a witch hunt .
Wednesday, March 03, 2010

Six down, 45 to go

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Washington DC has become the sixth "state" to legalize same-sex marriage , joining Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshir...
Friday, February 26, 2010

More fishy Toyota horror stories

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It seems the Toyota hysteria has spread to Australia : A former recreational rally car driver says she experienced sudden unintended acceler...
2 comments:
Thursday, February 25, 2010

Xoogler for rent

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Ever since I was a geeky kid lusting after a 48k Apple ][+ I've dreamed of moving to the Silicon Valley and making it big there. That ...
2 comments:
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Ron
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