Aren Cambre's Blog

The inaugural instrumental quartet, that included Yo-Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman, was faked. They were “hand-synching” to canned music.

This is unsurprising: I was shocked they were in such good tune at 27° F. In my marching band days, my euphonium went way sharp in cold weather.

Per Carole Florman, spokeswoman for the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies:

I think this is a whole lot of nothin’. These are world-class performers who are playing in 19 degree weather [editor: NOAA said 27 degrees at that time] and the technical requirements of their instruments made it impossible for them to have their music amplified and know that it would be in tune. So they made, what I think, was probably a difficult decision to play to tape. (source)

Oh, come on. Nothing suggested it wasn’t real. You shouldn’t have waited several days to reveal this.

Look at the new presidential limo:

(source)

Look at the Secret Service agents next to it. The window bottoms are almost to his shoulder!

(source)

The tire is taller than that Secre Service guy’s belt line!

(source)

The limo roof is taller than the agents! When’s the last time you’ve seen a car that’s taller than a full grown man?

The car is so huge, it’s almost groteqeuly proportioned.

My local public radio, KERA 90.1 FM, does a two hour weekly music program called 90.1 At Night.

It’s awesome.

Host J. Paul Slavens dishes up a truly eclectic mix, including many Texas and local pieces. And it has little crap in the smooth jazz, Celtic, or “mood music” (tonal study?) genres.

My wife complains that I wouldn’t normally listen to many of the songs. She’s right, but it’s just different when juxtaposed so eclectically. (Is that a word?)

90.1 At Night runs every Sunday, 8 PM to 10 PM on KERA 90.1 FM in the Dallas/Ft. Worth market.

It’s been a while since I posted here. Too keep you entertained, I categorized all 184 of my Facebook friends by primary relationship type.

Wikipedia logo

Last night, I finally gave up Wikipedia editing. It’s not worth it.

Wikipeida is a bona fide nonprofit, and work on it is charitable. But what makes charitable work “worth it”? Here’s a few reasons:

1. Have a connection. Charity work with a group of friends counts, as does charity work for an organization in which I have a relationship.
2. Get value out of it. I like my volunteering with Boy Scouts and my neighborhood association because it’s as much an education for me as it is a benefit for them. Also fulfilling a religious calling is a value.
3. Some kind of permanence. My charitable effort must make a lasting difference in someone’s life.

Wikipedia does none of these.

I have no connection. I only know two editors, and I have met netiher in person. I value relationships, but I only have “so much time” to develop them. I’m not interested in spending that scarce resource on people whose connection is only editing an encyclopeda.

I get little value out of it. I see no religious merit. Sure, maybe a little entertainment on the debates, maybe a little pride in knowing I affected some articles. But whatever value I get is totally offset by the lack of permanence described below.

Among Wikipedia’s largest flaws is the lack of authority. Any clown can destroy your changes. Content that is both not part of common sense of laymen and not easily verifiable will be destroyed by successive edits.

I think it was Science magazine that found that Wikipedia is remarkably accurate for scientific articles. Maybe so, but it’s only because the facts are so easily verifiable. The accuracy and verifiability of other articles are debatable. I’ve especially noticed this in articles with a political slant; way too often they conform to how political authorities market things in ways they aren’t.

Good bye Wikipedia. It was interesting, but you’re not worth my time.

A huge error is in many articles discussing ICANN nascent TLD rules. Here’s a quote from PC Magazine, which should know better:

The additional domains will also probably accelerate the shift to IPv6, an expanded IP addressing scheme that will provide roughly 3.4×10E38 IP addresses, or ten billion billion billion times more than those provided by IPv4, the current scheme. (source)

In fact, there is no relationship between IP addresses, abstract numbers, and domain names, usually human-friendly, text-based names.

IP is the addressing system of the internet. Every internet-enabled device talks from its own unique IP address to the unique IP address of another machine. It’s just like when you send a postal letter, you sent it “from” your house’s own unique address, the return address on the letter, to the unique address of the recipient.

When you type a web site name in a web browser, such as www.smu.edu, the browser looks up the web site’s IP address. The browser then “talks” to that IP address.

It’s similar to correlating a person to his cell phone number. If I want to call John Smith, I can’t dial “John Smith” in my phone. I have to look up and dial his phone number instead. During the call, I know I’m talking to John Smith, but the phone is simply communicating with an abstract phone number.

IPv4 is the current IP addressing scheme. The is, under the most dire predictions, all available IPv4 addresses will be used up in a few years. In that event, no new devices can use the internet.

An analogy: Suppose a road is very long, and road’s houses have three digit addresses: 001 to 999. With that scheme, only 999 houses can be on the road. If the address changes to 6 digits, the road could allow 999,999 houses because addresses range from 000,001 to 999,999.

IPv6 addresses are like adding those additional digits. In fact, it has so many digits that each person could have fifty octillion (50,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) IP addresses before that system becomes exhausted.

(Truth be told, the predictions of IPv4’s collapse are grossly exaggerated. Simple workarounds are already available that could allow IPv4 to work fine for a long time. And because of the way it assigns IP addresses, IPv6 in fact cannot deliver nearly the number of addresses advertised; as is the case with IPv4, but for different reasons, there will be significant numbers of unusable addresses. But it is true that IPv6 really does have several orders of magnitude more addresses than IPv4, and IPv6 also has several convincing technological advantages that justify its use.)

Back to the point of this article: the IP systems’s current address space crunch is a technical artifact of the IP system. It has no relationship whatsoever to the domain name system. Domain names are merely pointers to certain IP addresses. Nothing more, nothing less.

Dallas City Council members have traded entertaining barbs over a recent poll about renaming Industrial Boulevard. The winning choice was Cesar Chavez.

The problem is the poll is complete bunk. In no way could it accurately represent the voice of Dallas citizens.

The poll allowed people to vote over fax, email, and phone. How do you ensure that voters only vote once, and how do you ensure that voters are actual Dallas citizens? You can’t!

The Dallas Morning News says that city staff attempted to “weed out vote-stacking” by eliminating “more than one vote … from the same computer” Also, “a three-vote maximum was allowed per phone…” (link)

First, there is no way to accurately enforce one vote per computer on this poll. Since the site did not let users log in (and reference some kind of credential), there are only two ways to ensure uniqueness:

• One vote per IP address. I doubt they chose that; it would effectively block most users of ISPs that proxy users behind few IP addresses, such as AOL.
• Set a cookie. The cookie can easily be discarded. As soon as that is done, the vote server would have no idea it was the same old browser!

Second, there is nothing preventing someone from calling, faxing, and computer voting (several times). It’s impossible to accurately cross-reference computer votes to phone calls!

Third, without some kind of pervasive, city-issued ID system, it is utterly impossible to validate that votes came from Dallas residents. Without advanced techniques well beyond the scope of this survey, it is utterly impossible to link computers to specific cities. And even if phone numbers were validated, how do you know the person on the other end of the line isn’t a commuter from the ‘burbs?

City council: please stop. You’re making yourself look like idiots.

With way it was conducted, this poll is only good for entertainment value. Nothing else!

The Dallas Symphony Orchestra gives us a treat every Memorial Day. As part of its Community Concerts series, the DSO does a concert at Dallas’s Flagpole Hill, a part of White Rock Lake Park. The audience sits on a gradually sloping hill facing a small band shell that contains the orchestra.

The orchestra sweats through several patriotic or traditional songs, and it’s capped off by a nice, small fireworks show.

Halfway through my 8th grade year, I switched from trumpet to euphonium. I stuck with it through my junior year at SMU.

Even though they have too much firewood string instruments and no euphoniums, I really enjoy when they do Sousa marches. I still remember most of the fingerings and “play along,” sometimes getting the 4th valve fingering right for the lower D and D flat.

The program never indicates the fireworks show. What always happens is they do one last surprise song kind of like an encore, and the fireworks go off during then. The fireworks are shot off across Northwest Highway (6 lane surface road) from Flagpole Hill. The cops block off traffic during the fireworks, possibly because of the smoke and distraction.

A nearby gas station called the Green Spot recently opened. The prior owners (when it was a Mobil) had gas prices far well above market, so I appreciate that the new owners charge the same for gas as everyone else.

But I had to suspend my gag reflex after reading greenwashing in my local community magazine (pages 24 and 25 of this 19MB PDF–yikes!). According to a quote they got from co-owner Alvaro Garza, “our mission is to reduce our carbon footprint by offering an alternative lifestyle…”

Specific examples of where carbon footprints aren’t being lowered:

• They sell biodiesel gas, which has several critical flaws. Even if you could argue that these flaws could someday be resolved, the fact remains that current consumption of biofuels almost certainly causes more harm than good. For example:
  • Several studies show that production and use of biofuels produces more carbon emissions than just burning plain gas. (link)
  • It takes more energy to produce biofuels than they save, which in turn increases carbon emissions, oil importation, and our trade deficit. (link)
  • Biofuel production increases prices of food, starving the poor. (link)
• They sell organic goods, production of which require more energy (carbon!) and land than conventional foods. (link)
• The article’s feature picture depicts a Jeep Liberty SUV. In addition to being an iconic member of a gas guzzling class of vehicles, it has the worst or 2nd worst fuel economy in recent Consumer Reports small SUV comparisons. (The diesel raised it from worst to 2nd worst; several gas-engined SUVs with higher overall ratings got better mileage.)
  
  (This image stolen from Advocate Publishing.)

And it sounds like a lot of what they sell are carb-loaded snacky foods. Ladies and gentlemen, refined carbs are refined carbs. The refined carbs from organic sugar cane and fresh fruit juices make you just as fat and unhealthy (and ultimately requiring more carbon-intensive health care services) as the corn syrup in Coke.

You may think I hate the Green Spot. I don’t. It’s convenient, gas prices are finally fair at that location, and they have neat stuff inside. I want them to succeed.

However, I was brought up in a home where the breadwinner toiled for and was employed by a nonprofit. I work with a couple of nonprofits. I value nonprofits. They deserve our charity; supporting them achieves a higher moral purpose.

I resent when for-profits steal altruism for their own personal gain, and I feel that’s what’s going on here with greenwashing the Green Spot. Support the Green Spot where they provide a value to you, but don’t do it because you naively think you’re supporting some environmental moral good.

Yesterday, I read an Associated Press article about how Picher, Oklahoma is clearing out due to presence of massive contamination from nearby abandoned lead mines. Most of the town already accepted federal buyouts, but a few refuse to leave.

Today I read how Picher, OK got blasted by a tornado. The residential section was hit hard, and a few people died.

How ironic: one day I read why the town needs to be shut down, the next day I read how the town almost got destroyed.