Tag: Anti complaint

Its about time

Security Of Electronic Voting Is Condemned – washingtonpost.com

The recommendations endorse “optical-scan” systems in which voters mark paper ballots that are read by a computer and electronic systems that print a paper summary of each ballot, which voters review and elections officials save for recounts.

It’s amazing that the electronic voting systems have lasted this long. We all know that computers have problems. I mean, I’m a software engineer. I know better than most how buggy software can be. But still, we let the computer count the votes with no way to check the results? That’s insane.

Instead, we really should be using the system that this study recommends. You use a touch screen to cast your vote, then it prints out a piece of paper with your vote on it, which is both easily readable by you, and by the machine. You then stick that piece of paper into the counting machine, and you’re done. Yes, election officials have to make sure you don’t take the paper home with you. If that’s a big deal for your election officials, you need new election officials. This way, everything is quick because it’s done by a machine. But if you have any questions (Like the county in Florida that seems to have lost 10,000 votes or something in this most recent election), you can count the ballots by hand.

This system combines the best qualities of both paper ballots and electronic voting, and it makes it very hard to interfere with an election. At least, to interfere by messing with the votes. Messing with voters is a different story, but it can’t be helped if people are dumb.

Edited to add: A coworker mentions the problem here, that it’s difficult to change a vote. Let’s say you vote, and the card that prints out is wrong. What do you do? We don’t really want poll workers to be able to change the vote, or to be able to throw votes away and make new ones.

Maybe the machine will accept your old ballot, destroy it, and allow you to make a new one. If you destroy one without replacing it, the machine sounds an alarm that can be heard from space.

_NB: Any comments about Bush stealing an election will be marked as spam and deleted. _

OMG two baseball posts in one day!

ESPN.com – MLB – Pen collection: O’s to add Williamson, Bradford

The Baltimore Sun reported that Bradford, who pitched for the Mets last season, will receive a three-year contract from the Orioles.

Chad Bradford, hero of a chapter in Moneyball, is going to be an Oriole!  This is cool.  Of course, they’ll probably pay him way too much, as they usually do.  But at least they didn’t blow $100 million on Carlos Lee.  And the Orioles generally don’t run into money problems.

Just like every other year, I get excited about the Orioles in the off-season.  They’re finally addressing a real need (the bullpen), and the young rotation could be on the verge of greatness (Or it could be on the verge of going back to the minors).  I guess we’ll see.  The Yankees and Red Sox were very beatable last season, so maybe next year we can actually compete.

This is probably all happening because I mentioned to some people that I was seriously considering abandoning the Orioles for the A’s because the Orioles haven’t been making a sincere effort to get better for years.

Cool DIY site

instructables : Conjoined Twin Mice

Warning: dead mice in decorative form. If you disapprove of this concept on principle, please peruse some of the other new Instructables instead.

Instructables is a collection of HowTo guides from people on all sorts of things.  I found it through Lifehacker, telling you how to make a solar powered light in a jar, but this dead mouse art is obviously the pinnacle of the site.  Some of the stuff here just sucks, but some of it is pretty cool.

Google is changing the world

Today at work, and I don’t even remember how it came up, we were talking about a movie that one of my coworkers saw.  It’s about some guys who use a time machine to go back and hunt dinosaurs.  One of them accidentally kills a butterfly, and this has profound effects on the time in the future that they then return to.  He couldn’t remember the name of the movie.

So I type “dinosaur butterfly movie” into my handy little Firefox Google search bar.  The second hit takes me to a page that currently isn’t coming up (Although Google has a cache) that gives the plot of the movie, “A Sound of Thunder”, based on a Ray Bradbury story.  The page came up this afternoon when I first looked for it, though. What did we do before Google?  I don’t even know.  But I’ve gotten used to this instant location of whatever I need using only a vague idea of what it is to find it.

For reference, the first Yahoo result that refers to the movie is the fourth, and it’s for a Boston Globe review trashing the movie.  MSN returns as the first hit the Wikipedia page for the Bradbury story, which references the movie.  But I don’t use their searches, because they suck.  Although Yahoo hasn’t killed Flickr yet.  I do give them credit for that.

199.6

199.6 was my weight today, in pounds (That’s 90.5 kg, for those of you who use that crazy system), after the gym, with shoes on.  Today is the first day since I don’t even know when that I was under 200 pounds fully clothed.  I suspect it may have more to do with two weeks off from the gym and losing muscle rather than losing fat, but I choose not to dwell on that.

Genetic eating habits

I always thought I was weird because, no matter what, I want lunch at 11:30.  People always yell at me at work because I want lunch early (partly that may be because I get in at 7-730, and many of them get in after 10).  But I found out yesterday that my sister is exactly the same way.  Even if I eat breakfast at 8, a snack at 9, and another snack at 10, I’m still hungry.  And it’s not that I eat bad snacks, because my sister is the same way, and she’s a health nut.  So while I may sometimes eat bad snacks, that is not the root of my problem. It’s comforting to know that it’s not me being weird, it’s something genetic.  I don’t get hungry like that in the afternoon and evening.  It’s just the morning.  I wonder if that’s related to the fact that I’m more of a morning person, and generally more productive in the morning.  It probably is.

Combining a few of my favorite things

Treehugger: What Can Robots Learn From Rats?

The project seeks to create the “Inspirat”, a prototype climbing robot. Yes, in case you were wondering, the name does come from “inspiration” and “rat”.

Come on, tell me you can’t get excited about a project that combines robots, saving the world, and awesome moving rat x-rays.  You have no choice.  if you don’t think this is cool, then there’s just something wrong with you.

Apparently some scientists are more or less making movies of rats climbing things, except the movies are series of x-rays.  They hope to use the rat climbing technique to make robots that can climb.  Treehugger is interested because “a robot capable of performing inspection or maintenance activities in previously unreachable locations could extend the lifespan of buildings and structures, perhaps even enable new green construction materials to be developed.”  That seems like an awfully optimistic outlook to me, but they’re the treehuggers, and I’m just a complainer.

It’s funny – you occasionally see these experiments where we take some natural organism that’s really good at something, and try and mimic the technique it uses with a machine.  This seems like common sense to me.  A few hundred thousand years of evolution probably got a few things right – we might try at least starting with all that prior knowledge.

Halfway point

I just hit the 25,000 word mark in my novel.  It’s going well, although I’m currently suffering from a small case of writer’s block.  I ended a chapter without an idea for the next one, and I’m a little stuck.  But I should be okay.

In more exciting news, my mom is not only trying Nano this year, but is really enjoying it and looking forward to next year.  She doesn’t think she’ll hit 50,000 this year, which is fine, but it sounds like she’s all set to try again in 2007.

I’m not sure what it is about human beings that drives us to recruit friends and family to join us in the weird and sometimes crazy things we do, but it’s pretty universal, so it must have its root in some basic part of humanity.  “Misery loves company” doesn’t quite cover it all.  As much as Nano can be frustrating and take up all your time and make you want to scream, I find that the good far outweighs the bad.  So it’s not misery (Except when you get stuck).

I encourage you all to try Nano, too.  There was an article about it in the Washington Post this past Saturday, and the number of people trying it goes up every year.  You’re running out of time to join up before it hits the tipping point and EVERYONE is doing it.  You don’t want to get on the bandwagon late, do you?