Category: General

Trees rarely inspire hatred, but on the campus of the University of Iowa, everyone hates ginko trees. In the center of the Pentacrest, right in front of the entrance of the Registrar’s office, some idiot planted a female ginko tree. Every winter, all winter long, the tree drops its seed pods all over the sidewalk. The seeds produce an incredibly foul, persistent stench, which is very difficult to get off your shoes. Everyone that trods upon the seeds tracks the stench everywhere they go. Students and faculty have campaigned for years to get rid of the trees, and today in the Des Moines Register, this story appeared:






When I was a student, I had to walk past these trees every day, and I often fantasized about pouring a gallon of herbicide on their roots, which goes completely against my nature. I used to do landscaping every summer, I’ve planted thousands of trees, so I’m very protective of trees in general, but these ginkos are a special case. Every landscaper and nurseryman knows that you just don’t plant female ginkos. Most nurseries will kill off the females before they ever grow to maturity, there’s just no market for female ginkos. And you have to kill them before they mature, when the trees are sold in the spring, there’s no way to tell if they’re female, the sex of the trees can only be determined in autumn.

There’s a preposterous legend about how these trees came to be planted on the Pentacrest. I heard a story about a group of itinerant buddhist monks came and secretly planted little ginko twigs, sat around the twigs in a circle, chanting their sutras, and in 24 hours the trees grew to full size. What a load of rubbish. There just isn’t any group of Johnny Ginkoseed monks, and besides, these trees were planted right in front of the entrance of one of the main buildings on campus, you couldn’t have planted anything there without drawing attention, and a circle of orange-robed monks would have drawn quite a bit of attention back in the 1950s.

Another annoying piece of idiocy about ginkos is that nobody can agree on how to spell the name. Properly it is “ginko” since the tree is from asia and the name is written with kanji that are transliterated as “gin” and “ko.” So it’s most properly “ginko” and not “gingko” or “ginkgo.”

There is so much to loathe about ginko trees, I can hardly contain my joy at the announcement of their removal.

Guitar players usually have a specific preference, they like one brand of guitar above all others. I’m a Gibson man, they just feel right to me, and if you hand me a Fender I just can’t play it right. My favorite guitar is a 1961 Gibson L-2 three-quarter size guitar, it was a hand-me-down from my sister, my parents bought it for her to take guitar lessons when she was about 8 or 9 years old. I especially like it because I have an unnaturally short pinky, and the 3/4 size fretboard makes it easy for me to hit the notes. I’ve looked around for many years for another suitable 3/4 size guitar, but nobody makes a decent model because 3/4 size guitars are designed for little kids, and nobody spends serious money on guitars for kids.

But today I was astonished to learn that Gibson reissued the L-2 3/4. It’s a serious guitar, it retails for $2995 but sells for around $1600. Ouch! Here’s a picture of the reissue, it’s only made with an ugly finish they call “vintage sunburst” but is more commonly known as “tobacco.” Mine is a real sunburst, which is a reddish color, and much more attractive.





The story behind the reissue is rather interesting. The L-2 3/4 is part of a set called “The Father and Son Guitars” after Woody and Arlo Guthrie. Gibson reissued a copy of Woody Guthrie’s favorite Gibson Southern Jumbo guitar and also Arlo’s first guitar, an L-2 3/4 given to him by his father. There’s a rather heart-wrenching tale about how Arlo acquired the guitar, and how he lamented to Gibson about how the guitar had deteriorated over the years, so they made a new one and gave it to him, and repaired his original. I had no idea my little beat up guitar was a Guitar Of Legend.

There are a few problems with 3/4 size guitars. A full-size guitar fretboard is designed with “tempered tuning,” every fret is mistuned a tiny bit, but overall it has good tuning. Unfortunately, at 3/4 size, the tempering is off, so it’s really hard to get the strings in tune, the intonation is a bit off. The body of the guitar isn’t very large, so it doesn’t produce a big sound. But that could be an advantage if you just use it for practice and don’t want to annoy the neighbors. For me the big advantage is that the frets are 1/4 easier to reach with my short finger, and the strings don’t have as much tension so they’re easier to press down than a full size guitar.

I’d sure like to own a new L-2 3/4, but since I already have a vintage model, that doesn’t make much sense. So I decided to get my old axe repaired and put back into shape, it needs a little adjustment, and it wouldn’t hurt to have the dent in the side fixed. But there’s a limit to how much money I should sink into this guitar. To estimate its value, I searched around the web and found a 1950 L-2 3/4 for sale in a guitar shop in Tokyo, selling for almost $2500US. Mine’s in better shape but not as collectible since it’s not as old, so I guarantee it’s not going to be worth anything like $2500, I’d be surprised if it was worth more than $250. The last time I took it into a shop for repairs, they laughed at me for liking such a junky old guitar and told me to be glad it’s even playable at all.

The temperature here is -9°F and still dropping, so I thought it might be an appropriate time to post a picture of this odd little circular slide rule.






This slide rule belonged to my grandfather, who was a meat inspector for the US Department of Agriculture. The slide rule was used to calculate how much dry ice was needed to fill a railroad car to keep a load of beef frozen until it reached its destination. The back side bears the date 1954.

How can you tell if a geologist is a crackpot? If he makes a specific prediction like this:

Keilis-Borok’s team now predicts an earthquake of at least magnitude 6.4 by Sept. 5, 2004, in a region that includes the southeastern portion of the Mojave Desert, and an area south of it.

I’ve archived this UCLA press release as a downloadable PDF file since it is likely to be removed. But let’s not get ahead of the story here.

Let me make it absolutely clear: there is no way to predict an earthquake. The science of seismology is advancing by leaps and bounds, but as of today, there is no known technology to predict earthquakes. The best that can be done with today’s technology is a vague forecast, giving probabilities of quakes within a time period of years or decades. Anyone who claims to have the ability to predict a quake on a specific date is a crackpot.

This press release doesn’t even pass the smell test, it reeks of pseudo-science. Let’s enumerate a few of the obvious tipoffs that this is completely bogus:



1. The so-called seismologist, Vladimir Keilis-Borok, is not affiliated with the UCLA Department of Seismology, he is a visiting lecturer in Earth and Space Sciences. Keilis-Borok’s expertise is mathematics, not geology.


2. Real authorities in seismology don’t do their work at schools like UCLA, they work prestigious seismology laboratories at places like Caltech or UC Berkeley.


3. The easiest way to detect a crackpot is to notice how they issue a press release announcing a successful prediction, but they omit any mention of unsuccessful predictions, or their success rate. There is no way to tell if this “accurate” prediction is merely one of thousands of predictions, which would be a pretty poor success rate. I could easily make a year’s worth of predictions that a quake will occur in an active zone, one for each day of the year, and if an earthquake occurs in that year, I could claim I have successfully predicted it. But obviously I merely committed an obvious fraud.



4. Theories behind the predictions are described as too mathematically complex to be understood by the general public, comprehensible only to scientists studying with the “experts.” Theories are explained with colorful, illogical, unscientific metaphors like “the tail wags the dog.”


5. The person making the prediction is not a licensed geologist or geophysicist.


While researching the crackpot Keilis-Borok, I discovered something very interesting. California has strict licensing requirements for anyone making earthquake predictions to the public. Licensing is enforced by the California Board for Geologists and Geophysicists. I phoned the CBGG, and Keilis-Borok is not licensed, he is not even eligible for a license. The CBGG is known for taking swift action against unlicensed geologists who make earthquake predictions for California, they are considered a threat to public safety and likely to cause more damage from panic about ridiculous imaginary threats than from a real earthquake. The penalty for practicing geology without a license in California is a misdemeanor under provisions of the California Geologist and Geophysicist Act, punishable by up to a $2500 fine and 3 months imprisonment. The CBGG loves to take on quake-predicting crackpots even more than I do, and are now actively investigating Vladimir Keilis-Borok and UCLA.

The UCLA press office will certainly take swift action to retract their press release, remove any offending web pages, and disassociate themselves from these illegal, reckless, and dangerous earthquake predictions. But I have archived it so UCLA will not escape the historical record.



Update Sept 24 2004:
Of course, the prediction is long past, there was no earthquake. Keilis-Borok is a fool.

Now that the first winter snowstorm has arrived, and temperatures have reached -5F, I would like to offer these two simple tips for the usual idiots.


1. Put your bicycle away. Bicycles are unsuitable for winter driving. In case you have not noticed, your vehicle only has two wheels, and unlike 4 wheeled vehicles, your bike requires good traction to stay upright. Snow and ice are incompatible with bicycling.


2. In Iowa, it is illegal to leave your vehicle unattended with the engine running. You do not need to leave the engine idling while you run into the convenience store for 30 seconds.

I wish a Happy New Year to everyone, and offer my prayers that this new year will be better than the last.

As a non-christian, I am able to see more clearly than others what the Christmas season truly represents. It is a time of selfishness, of greed and avarice, it is a time for families to gather together and inflict old and savage hatreds upon each other, it is a time of rudeness, stress, and general unpleasantness to everyone. I have never seen anyone express the hypocrisy of Christmas better than a performance I saw live on TV in 1991.

A Holiday Wish, by Steve Martin


If I had one wish that I could wish this holiday season, it would be that all the children of the world join hands and sing together in the spirit of harmony and peace.


If I had two wishes I could make this holiday season, the first would be for all the children of the world to join hands and sing in the spirit of harmony and peace. And the second would be for 30 million dollars a month to be given to me, tax-free, in a Swiss bank account.


You know, if I had three wishes I could make this holiday season, the first, of course, would be for all the children of the world to get together and sing, the second would be for the 30 million dollars every month to me, and the third would be for encompassing power over every living being in the entire universe.


And if I had four wishes that I could make this holiday season, the first would be the crap about the kids definitely, the second would be for the 30 million, the third would be for all the power, and the fourth would be to set aside one month each year to have an extended 31-day orgasm, to be brought about slowly by Rosanna Arquette and that model Paulina-somebody, I can’t think of her name. Of course my lovely wife can come too and she’s behind me one hundred percent here, I guarantee it. Wait a minute, maybe the sex thing should be the first wish, so if I made that the first wish, because it could all go boom tomorrow, then what do you got, y’know? No, no, the kids, the kids singing would be great, that would be nice. But wait a minute, who am I kidding? They’re not going to be able to get all those kids together. I mean, the logistics of the thing is impossible, more trouble than it’s worth! So — we reorganize! Here we go.


First, the sex thing. We go with that. Second, the money. No, we got with the power second, then the money. And then the kids. Oh wait, oh jeez, I forgot about revenge against my enemies! Okay, I need revenge against all my enemies, they should die like pigs in hell! That would be my fourth wish. And, of course, my fifth wish would be for all the children of the world to join hands and sing together in the spirit of harmony and peace. Thank you everybody and Merry Christmas.

I have completed the server migration to MacOS X 10.3 and Darwin Streaming Server 5. I apologize for the delays but I have a lot of projects happening all at once. All server features seem to be operating properly at this time. Comments are still disabled until I can implement a system to prevent comment spam and abuse. If you have any problems accessing any content on the site, or if you have any general comments, please feel free to contact me via Email.

I’ve made the transition to QWest, but there is still much work to do. The video server isn’t responding at the multihomed IP, SSH keys have to be reinstalled, remote monitoring tools have to be reconfigured for the new addresses, etc. Since multihoming is hosed, I think I’ll take this opportunity to do a complete backup and clean install of MacOS X 10.3, so it might be a while before full services are restored. We Apologize For The Inconvenience.

Update: I installed Panther, Movable Type seems to run OK in the new MacOS X 10.3/Perl environment. Videos are still broken, I’ll get that running shortly.

Apparently my ISP, Internet Navigator, declared bankruptcy, closed the doors, and walked away. This wasn’t a problem until my connection failed, and there was nobody to reset their routers. I managed to locate a former INAV consultant, he successfully restored my service only 15 hours after the initial failure, but I’ve already placed an order to switch. So things may be a bit unstable over the next few days, as I transition to the new ISP.

I was INAV’s first customer, and I’ve stuck with them through all sorts of reorganizations and restructuring. If I’d known they would come to such an ignominious end, I would have switched ISPs a long time ago.

My INAV.net email address should remain valid since they sold these accounts to mwaccess.com. But I will soon be discontinuing that address as well. I am rather irritated to lose an email address I’ve had for more than 10 years, but on a more positive note, that old address is well known to spammers after all that time, so maybe I’ll cut down on incoming spam at the new address. I don’t know what my new email address will be, but I will make a prominent announcement on this blog when I get the details.