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"We started to record meteorology at the coldest point in the last 10,000 years."

https://vimeo.com/14366077

        This has been an exciting time for us, and not just the scientists, everyone on board is really excited. Even me, and you know me, nothing gets me excited. We found another stellar system harboring life in this galaxy, and this one is really, really weird. It’s unbelievably, unimaginably weird. It may be the weirdest planet in the universe.
        Yes, we’ve already found fifty three living worlds in this galaxy, and that in itself is pretty exciting, since we’ve only found seventy eight planets with life on them in our own galaxy in all the time we’ve been exploring it, and here we’ve found fifty three on our first expedition to this galaxy on our first visit here. But this weird world...
        Like our galaxy, most of the planets and moons with life have only microbial life. We (well, the scientists, but they know what they’re talking about) are certain that at least one of the many species on the planet is a tool-using species that has even constructed space vessels. We’ve never run across anything close to being like that, ever, in all the time our species has been exploring space.
        I feel really honored to be the pilot of the first intergalactic vessel, even though we’re visiting G2, the closest galaxy to our own. They’re so close the two galaxies will eventually start to merge within our great grandchildren’s lifetimes. But still, I’m the first one to pilot a craft out of the galaxy and into another one.
        The really weird planet we found was the third planet from CXG-947. Okay, G2-CXG-947, but when I say CXG-947 you can assume the G2. Actually, you can assume all of them are G2 because that’s where we were and all the stars are G2, just like our galaxy is G1.
        Its surface is mostly dihydrogen monoxide like our planet, and unlike ours its atmosphere is mostly nitrogen. Most of the biologists were absolutely certain that life was impossible there, since there is so little free oxygen and carbon dioxide, but there it was. And not only life, but an incredible diversity of life, far more diverse than we’ve seen in any other life-bearing planet, in that galaxy or our own.
        Ironically, the biologists weren’t interested in the CXG-947 stellar system at all at first, as I said. They thought none of the planets’ atmospheres or other environmental variables were fit for life.
        The first planet from CXG-947 was small, hot, had no atmosphere, and one hemisphere always faced the star. The second had an atmosphere that was almost all carbon dioxide, and as a result was way too hot for life, as close as it was to the star. It would have been a perfect candidate for life if its orbit and the fourth planet’s orbits were switched. The third had all that nitrogen, the fourth with almost no atmosphere at all, and all the other bodies were either too large or too small as well as being too far from the star.
        It was the physicists who became interested in this star system first. They became curious when there was a short period where there were a number of flashes on XGC-947-3’s surface that emitted radiation in a very wide spectrum, as if a miniature star had appeared and died on the planet’s surface in an instant. This all happened on the planet’s northern hemisphere thousands of times within a short ten lokfars, then stopped.
        They wouldn’t have even seen it were it not for luck. We were passing between XGC-947 and XGC-948 on our way to ODX-102 when the flashes went off. We were really close, and they wouldn’t have seen them if we weren’t. It was only by accident that we found this strange place.
        More study revealed that the flashes were only semi-natural, that one of the planet’s species had actually engineered them. They were the result of uncontrolled fission and fusion reactions on the planet’s surface. The scientists have no idea why they did it, perhaps to test a scientific theory, or testing a means of harnessing those reactions’ power and an accident happened, over and over. But they can only guess, and tell me they don’t really know.
        Life on this planet was unlike anything the biologists had imagined, starting with being able to live in all that nitrogen. Yes, nitrogen Is inert, and that’s the problem. Life needs oxygen or some other such highly reactive nonmetallic element, even if it’s bound in a molecule like carbon dioxide, and so far oxygen and carbon dioxide were the only such gasses on planets that had anything actually living on them. However, the biologists tell me that perhaps there’s a planet with an atmosphere of chlorine or some other highly reactive gas bearing life that we have yet to find. I’m only the pilot so I don’t fully understand it like the biologists and chemists do, but that’s what they told me.
        Unlike any other life-bearing planet we’ve found, in our own galaxy or this one, some of its species are bipedal. Most of the bipedal animals the biologists studied were avian, but the intelligent species is also bipedal. I have no idea how anything could walk on only two legs, and the biologists are especially excited about it. Just try walking on two legs, it’s impossible. Heck, just try standing on two legs without holding on to something! That would be worthy of a circus sideshow. It makes me chuckle just thinking about it.
        But what fascinated the biologists the most was that none of the species were omnisexual. In every other planet we’ve seen all species are, and any member of any species can impregnate any other member of the species, including herself. These strange animals only had one set of genitals each. Yes, it happens. Even in our own species there’s an occasional child born with only one set of genitals, or worse and more rare two genitals of the same kind. But a planet where none of any of its animals have more than one set of genitals is unbelievably weird.
        They’re still trying to figure out how the intelligent species communicates, since so very few of the species there are bioluminescent, and the intelligent species isn’t. The leading theory is some sort of telepathy. This theory seems to hold up because the physicists have detected minute amounts of electromagnetic radiation that seems to be mechanically produced transmitted in certain patterns. They’re still trying to decipher the patterns, but so far haven’t had any luck doing so.
        Also, many species had strange projections from their... what the biologists call “heads”. They think these projections, which biologists call “ears” have something to do with their telepathy. Still others suggest that a projection they’ve named a “nose” may have something to do with it.
          Others have suggested that perhaps they are bioluminescent, only in a part of the spectrum we can’t see. There are some species on that weird place that change color, and perhaps a tiny change of color is how the intelligent animals communicate.
        The biologists wanted to land and do some up-close observations, but I vetoed that at once. The planet is simply too dangerous. There are violent animals, even the intelligent species, which sometimes cause huge explosions, and there are very often really nastily violent natural occurrences, such as high energy sparks hitting the ground from giant clouds of charged dihydrogen monoxide vapors, volcanoes, tornadoes, ground-quakes, tsunamis, and perhaps even scarier, more perilous things we hadn’t yet witnessed. It’s a very dangerous world, far too dangerous to land on. I had to explain to the biologists that landing there would be way outside the rule book, and if they kept pestering me I’d have to report them.
        When the mini-stars were flashing on the planet’s surface, the physicists sent a drone down for closer investigation, and it crashed. Those things never crash! And these mad scientists wanted to go down there? If they want to land they’re going to have to find a crazier pilot than me.
        There’s so much to learn about this amazing planet. The biologists are especially excited. They keep eschewing the violence, saying we would be inedible to any life form there, but that’s not enough for me. Not after that drone. And I wondered what “inedible” meant, but I didn’t ask.
        But we did fly really low sometimes. A few times, some machines tried to chase us. One seemed to shoot a rocket at us, but the rocket was really slow compared to us. That was another reason I refused to land, we simply didn’t understand these creatures. The intelligent species had sent objects into the planet’s orbit, and I kept our distance from those, too.
        The biologists finally convinced me to allow a couple of drones to pick up a few species of one of the planet’s life forms for study, all quadrupeds because the bipedal species were just too weird, and the hexapedals and octopeds were too small to handle easily or to study in any detail.
        My veto of bringing up bipeds really upset the biologists, because they wanted to study these strange species badly. Strange? Lorg, they’re downright weird. This whole gorflak planet is weird. Even the quadrupeds are weird; none of the quadrupeds have actimar limbs, although a few species sometimes use locomotive limbs for what animals on our planet would use actimars for, like picking stuff up. The intelligent bipeds and a few other species of bipeds do seem to have some sort of actimars, although they’re nothing like any life on our planet’s actimars.
        A few weird species that seem to be related to, or at least similar to the intelligent species that live in large stationary life forms don’t seem to have locomotive limbs at all, but four of those weird actimars that they use for locomotion. Great Gargoth, but the animals on that planet are unimaginably weird.
        The biologists think that since they can live in all that nitrogen, maybe something can live in the liquid dihydrogen monoxide. I don’t know, I’m no biologist but that makes absolutely no sense to me. How could anything breathe underwater? It’s a crazy notion, if you ask me.
        It seems that half or more of all of the species on the planet live by consuming other species. What horror! And what’s even weirder and more disgusting than that, some species propagate their young by having some of their parts actually consumed by other species of organism, who excrete the young elsewhere. There are species living inside other species. This planet is beyond imagination weird. It gives a whole new meaning to the word “alien”.
        The periculumologists, who study security, said that the obviously sentient species should be exterminated, and perhaps other similar, semi-bipedal species that had actimars as well. They moved so quickly and seemed to advance their technology so rapidly that sooner or later they could reach our galaxy and would be a great threat to us.
        The biologists nixed that idea, saying they posed no threat at all.
        First, our planet is five times as massive as that one, and they could never land on our planet, or withstand the acceleration necessary for intergalactic travel in the first place. But more important was the seemingly short life span of the mobile species. They would never leave their galaxy and could pose no threat, violent as they were. They simply don’t live long enough to ever reach us, even if they could stand the acceleration.
        There were a few species that lived almost as long as your pet gorflag, and you know those don’t live long, ten iglaps if you’re lucky, but some stationary species that grew very large lived that long and are still alive. But no other species there comes close.
          ODX-102 was supposed to be our last stop before returning, but they canceled that so they could study the wierdo planet more. I’m sure when the next expedition comes to G2 they’ll be back to this crazy place. The other planets are similar to our galaxy’s, but this crazy place was nothing like anything anyone had ever imagined.
        Excitingly interesting as this weird planet is, I’m anxious to get home. It was a very long trip here and the trip back will probably seem even longer than it is. We leave in a single lokfar, and I should be home in about fifteen iglaps.
        I don’t know why I’m writing this, the messenger drone will only get there an iglap or two before I do, but I’m excited to be on this mission and I miss you all.
        I managed to get a souvenir from the planet’s satellite, which the sentient species visited a few times and apparently gave up on. The souvenir is about as weird as that whole planet.
        Well, I have to start preparations for the journey back. I’ll see you when I get there!

It's that time of year again. The time of year when everyone and their dog waxes nostalgic about all the shit nobody cares about from the year past, and stupidly predicts the next year in the grim knowledge that when the next New Year comes along nobody will remember that the dumbass predicted a bunch of foolish shit that turned out to be complete and utter balderdash. I might as well, too. Just like I did last year (yes, a lot of this was pasted from last year's final chapter).

Some of these links go to S/N since they don't have slashdot's patented text mangler. Stories and articles meant to ultimately be published in a printed book have smart quotes, and slashdot isn't smart enough for smart quotes.

As usual, first: the yearly index:

Journals:
the Paxil Diaries
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014

2015 articles:
Where's my damned tablet? (somehow didn't post this one to soylent)
Are printed books' days numbered?
A suggestion to mobile browser makers and the W3C
Futurists...
"My God! It's full of fail!" -David Bowman
Where's my fridge??
1950s TV

Sci-Fi:
Nobots
Mars, Ho!
Yesterday's Tomorrows
Dumb Tourist!
Amnesia
Stealth
Voyage to Earth
Plutus' Revenge
Note: Soylent is changing URLs of Mars, Ho! and Yesterday's Tomorrows so that they lead to a 404

There are six more stories finished and one started, but I'm giving the magazines first crack at them. They are:

Dewey's War
The Exhibit
Sentience
Martian Murder
Cornodium
Weird Planet
The Prisoner

Last years' stupid predictions:
I got one wrong; Random Scribblings didn't come out. I could have published it this year, but since the subtitle is "Junk I've Littered the Internet With for Two Decades" I decided to add this years scribblings and a little of next year's to it.

This year's predictions: same as last year's. I'm not going to predict publication of Voyage to Earth and Other Stories because chances are it won't be done. As I write this the stories finished so far make up 36,000 words, which is halfway there at least. But I will predict:

Someone will die. Not necessarily anybody I know...
SETI will find no sign of intelligent life. Not even on Earth.
The Pirate Party won't make inroads in the US. I hope I'm wrong about that one.
US politicians will continue to be wholly owned by the corporations.
I'll still be a nerd.
You'll still be a nerd.
technophobic fashionista jocks will troll slashdot.
Slashdot will be rife with dupes.
Many Slashdot FPs will be poorly edited.
Slashdot still won't have fixed its patented text mangler.
...and a new one: microsoft will continue sucking

Happy New Year! Ready for another trip around the sun?

Well - I struggle to manage RAID arrays and LVM's. I needed to create a new volume tonight, and I set out to refresh my memory, and spent at least an hour going over the finer points of doing it all. Stumbled over this, installed, and created, formatted, and mounted my new volume in about a quarter hour.

For Arch users, it is in the AUR. For CentOS and Ubuntu users, instructions complete with images are available at the link:

http://www.howtogeek.com/127246/linux-sysadmin-how-to-manage-lvms-with-a-gui/?PageSpeed=noscript

Introduction

The Logical Volume Manager or LVM, has already been covered on HTG as well as why you should use it. As LVM is becoming more and more mainstream, where some of the major distribution players like CentOS and Ubuntu with their latest 12.10 release, now installing on LVM by default, you may come across it sooner then you might think. With the above it will probably won’t be long before the time that you would want to administrate an LVM, to increase the space available on the volume for example… with that said, what could be more pleasant then having a nice graphical interface to do the job? Nothing, so lets install one.

____________________________________

Note that the poor grammar was copy/pasted from the original. Administrate? WTF? Ehhh - I probably shouldn't make fun of someone who has helped me out, but, geez Louise!

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm199900/cmselect/cmhaff/95/95ap25.htm

This is fascinating reading. Virtually all the "studies" that supported gun control in the UK are discredited. Statistics are exposed as either outright lies, or extremely flawed. The methods by which different nations define and account for homicides, violent crime, and gun law violations are explained in some cases, and the impossibility of comparing those statistics is exposed. Basically, if you take the time to read this wall of text, you cannot help realizing that the entire gun control lobby has intentionally misled the masses.

I am still absorbing it. Need an example to whet your appetite?

" 52. To further its own claim of a correlation between gun ownership levels and homicide rates, the Home Office paper cites a comparison between Seattle and Vancouver which showed that the homicide rate in the US city was two thirds higher than that of the Canadian city, all the difference being attributable to gun homicide. That study was somewhat discredited when other researchers showed that the entire difference could be accounted for by demographic factors. Both cities have similar white populations and large ethnic minorities. In Vancouver, the ethnic minority is largely Chinese and Japanese whose homicide rate is far lower than that of the white majority. In Seattle the ethnic minority is black and their homicide rate is 10 times higher than that of the white population. Virtually all the difference between the two cities could be accounted for in that way."

58. Their published results raise some important questions. The supposed direct comparison of gun and non gun homicides fails even to attempt to control for any variables, and in particular for levels of existing gun control. It is known, for example, that the homicide rates in some US cities where guns are effectively banned is extremely high, with Washington DC showing a rate of about 80 per 100,000. In less populous areas, the homicide rates are entirely comparable with European and British levels. Centerwall notes that in Vermont where there is effectively no control on firearms, the mean annual rate of criminal homicide over a four year period was 0.4 per 100,000 whilst North Dakota levels were even lower. Had the comparative figures used Britain, instead of England and Wales, we would find that these US States were lower than those in this country, for Scotland has a homicide rate considerably higher than that of England and Wales.

65. The authors of the UN Report draw a series of conclusions which are not justified by their own evidence. The only conclusion which can safely be drawn in that there is no casual relationship between the number of firearms in a State and the levels of death through homicide, suicide or accident.

  84. The debate seems to assume that the United States is a homogenous unit, but that does not seem to be the case. Homicide rates vary from the extraordinarily high level of about 80 per hundred thousand in Washington DC which has a total ban on the ownership of most firearms, to rates less than those in the UK and Europe in States like Vermont which does not allow any restrictions on firearms ownership.

86. In the United States the distribution of homicide and particularly firearms homicide varies very widely between racial groups, as it does in other countries. The large and well established Japanese population in the San Francisco area has the same access to firearms as any other group, but their rate of homicide has been shown to be slightly lower than the homicide rate in Japan and very much lower than other groups in the same area.

I was watching the morning news the other day, and opened the computer to record KSHE's "Lone Klassic"... and it was in Linux. What the hell? Apparently I should have shut it off the night before, because Microsoft had apparently installed an update and then rudely and maliciously rebooted the computer. It was in Linux because kubuntu is the default OS in GRUB. So I rebooted again, selected Windows, and the little thing came up and... just sat there. Ten minutes later I still had a black screen.

I pulled the battery and tried again. Ten minutes later and I still had a black screen. So when I'd yanked the battery again and restarted it, I selected "Windows Recovery" from GRUB. An Acer screen came up with selections for reinstalling Windows. The first wiped the hard drive, the second kept your files. I picked that one; there was data on the hard drive I hadn't backed up in a few days, including a new story I'd started the night before and was on a roll with.

Twenty minutes later the first progress bar said "1%".

I'd decided a long time ago to get a DVD burner for the old Dell, until about three weeks ago when I'd taken it apart to install the video card and hard drive from the old HP that had computed its last. There were no slots that would fit the card (older computer than I thought, I guess) and the drive ribbon was a single drive ribbon. I probably have a spare double drive ribbon in the basement, but since the card wouldn't work in the Dell, there really wasn't any point. I'd decided then to get an old laptop that already had a DVD burner. So this was the time, because I had writing to do and the install was going to take all day and half the night.

I drove to the pawn shop and bought an HP laptop with Windows 7 and a DVD burner. It's a lot bigger than I like a laptop to be, but the smaller, cheaper one with a DVD burner ran Window 8, and I didn't want to deal with that garbage. Windows 7 is still the least annoying and least problematic of all of MS's OSes.

Of course I had to download Windows Defender and Firefox with IE, install Firefox, uninstall Norton and McAfee and Bing Bar and all the other effluent that comes with a new computer, reconfigure everything, and download and install Open Office and all the other programs I need.

Meanwhile, the Windows reinstall on the Acer had hung. Damn, I was going to lose everything I'd written the day before, since Windows had surely overwritten GRUB. I got lucky; it hadn't. So I went into Linux to copy everything to thumb drives, since I still can't get it on my network (time to try a new distro). I even found some movies I thought I'd permanently deleted by mistake months ago!

After I saved the data on thumb drives I rebooted again, went back into Windows restore and let it wipe the drive. That was the next morning, and it took all day. By then I had the new laptop running pretty smoothly and was writing again. The next day was mostly spent getting the old Acer back to normal. I was amazed and pleased that it had destroyed neither Grub nor Linux.

I'd lost a few passwords and haven't yet reset them all, and lost all my bookmarks.

That new computer is too big, but it's a lot faster than the Acer.

So I turn the TV on this morning and it wouldn't pick up channel 49. Flipped through the stations, and all of them had really screwy colors. I have my fingers crossed that it's the converter and not the TV, since the converter had fallen off the shelf last night. I hope it is, because they're not expensive and TVs are. I'll find out when I play a DVD.

Continue discussion here:

https://www.rt.com/news/324486-rt10-obama-snowden-promo/

Ever wonder who the top trolls are around these parts? Yeah, me too. So I wrote up a quick script to find out. Now keep in mind our moderatorlog table only goes back so far; it gets the tail end trimmed off every so often by one of our slashd jobs. Without further ado, here are our top ten finalists, excluding Anonymous Coward and counting only Troll moderations:

1. Ethanol-fueled: 430
2. Runaway1956: 187
3. The Mighty Buzzard: 157
4. Hairyfeet: 129
5. jmorris: 114
6. frojack: 105
7. aristarchus: 98
8. zugedneb: 60
9. MichaelDavidCrawford: 59
10. VLM: 55

If you didn't make it this time, keep trying! If you want to have a gander at the whole list to see how close you got, here it is.

A year or so ago, an executive from an electronics company (Apple, if I remember correctly) spoke of the lack of innovation in television sets since the 1950s, and my reaction was “He’s either stupid or thinks I am.”
        In the 1950s televisions had knobs on the set for changing channels. Remote controls were brand new, expensive, limited in capability, and used ultrasound rather than infra-red.
        The screens were vacuum tubes, and most were monochrome. Color television was brand new, and it was nearly 1960 before any stations started broadcasting in color. Rather than being rectangular, color sets were almost round; even black and white sets weren’t true rectangles.
        They had no transistors, let alone integrated circuits; the IC had yet to be invented, and transistors were only used by the military. They were a brand-new invention. TVs didn’t have the “no user-servicable parts” warning on the back. When the TV wouldn’t come on, as happened every year or three, the problem was almost always a burned out vacuum tube. One would open the back of the set and turn it on. Any tubes that weren’t lit were pulled, taken to the drug store or dime store for replacement. If that didn’t fix the problem you called an expert TV repairman.
        The signal was analog, and often or usually suffered from static in the sound, and ghosts and snow in the picture.
        There was no cable, and of course no satellite television since nothing built by humans had ever gone into space.
        However, there is one thing about television that hasn’t changed a single iota: daytime TV programming.
        In the 1950s most folks were well paid, and a single paycheck could easily pay for a family’s expenses. Most women, especially mothers, stayed home. As a result, daytime TV was filled with female-centric programming like soap operas, game shows, and the like. Usually there were cartoons in the late afternoon for the kids.
        Today the rich have managed to get wages down so low that everyone has to have a job. The demographics of daytime television have radically changed as a result. Now, rather than housewives (of which few are left, and we now have house husbands), who can watch daytime TV? Folks home from work sick, both men and women, folks in the hospital, the unemployed, and retired people.
        Yet daytime TV is still as female centered as it was when I was five. Soap operas, talk shows with female hosts and female guests discussing topics that would only appeal to women, and game shows.
        What’s wrong with the idiots running our corporations these days?