Call -A.P.P.L.E.

Boy, this takes me back.

A friend of mine at work yesterday pointed me at an Apple II emulator called "Virtual II" and in the course of reading up about it, I found that the Apple Pugetsound Program Library Exchange -- an Apple user group -- is still around and they have a web site. This group used to publish a journal filled with totally interesting technical articles about the Apple II and programming. It was a major factor in my early programming hobby-turned-career. As a matter of fact, they still publish the journal, whose title "CALL -A.P.P.L.E" makes reference to an AppleSoft BASIC statement used to access machine-language subroutines in ROM or elsewhere in memory... a common practice in hackery of the day.

Ah, memories.

Surprise!

HowManyOfMe.com

There are: 0 people with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name?

Brett's Got a Blog

Seems that my old nemesis Brett g Porter has a blog. Brett's probably the smartest guy at Art & Logic, so that means he's really smart. (Actually even if he were the dumbest guy at A&L, then that correlation would still hold.)

Brett's attitude and sense of humor are similar enough to mine that I hated his guts for the first two years that I was at A&L. That situation was swiftly remedied when I finally met him in person and found that his smartass comments came from a place of goodness, not evil.

My favourite story about Brett is the time just before he went to Japan (China?). He had just done or said something that pissed me off, so I dropped him a note telling him to make sure to try the local delicacy "salted oranges" while he was there. I did this after numerous attempts to come up with a plausible but non-existant foodstuff were foiled by Google and the people who actually produce stuff like "salted radishes". [Note: Google's getting better. Apparently there is such a thing.] Anyway, I chuckled to think of Brett asking around Tokyo for salted oranges. "Nobody had ever heard of them," he said. Heh.

Election '06 Prediction

I've been watching the Senate and House races ever so casually for the past few weeks, and I'm ready to make a prediction: despite the polls tipping noticeably in the direction of the Blue Team, it's my gut feeling that the Red Team will "miraculously" pull ahead on election day, leaving us with a status-quo Red majority in the legislative branch.

Any bets?

The Supremacy of God

I'm getting interested in Humanism — a philosophical outlook based on science and human potential (as specifically opposed to religious dogma). I've been a humanist for probably about as long as I remember, although it wasn't until very recently that I discovered that there was a word for it or (gasp) groups of people who meet periodically because they have the same point of view about life. I haven't attended a meeting yet, but I plan to try and hook up with the BC Humanists, who meet monthly or so in Kitsilano, and see what's up.

From reading their web site, I note lots of things that I agree with, and one that I don't: the topic for the next meeting is "A Legal Challenge to Remove 'The Supremacy of God' from the Canadian Constitution.

Now, you can't really get more anti-religious than I am*, but I see this kind of legal challenge as a complete waste of effort and money. In the end, if they're successful, what will they have changed in the world? Who's life will be made tangibly better? This is the sort of thing that concerns me about joining a group like this: that it'll be filled with people who hate god and religion rather than love humanity and all that's good about it. I want no part of the former.

Perhaps this is an effort to raise the profile of the Humanist movement. Fair enough, but I believe there is such a thing as bad publicity. A while back the Canadian Humanists petitioned for just this sort of change, and got nowhere with it, apart from a lot of sour publicity that on the whole, made them look like whiners.

I'd approach this problem differently: Rather than try to get the reference to God in the constitution eliminated, I'd petition to get it clarified. Which God, specifically are we talking about? Certainly, if the country is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God, we'd all benefit from knowing who exactly is supreme so we can evaluate whether the rest of the constitution truly respects that supremacy. Certainly a country based on the Roman Catholic notion of God will be markedly different from one based on the holy writings of Islam.

Framing the issue in this way seems better to me, because we get to make all the same points but without setting up a "Humanists vs. Everyone Else" situation, where every religious organization can call humanists immoral and evil while ignoring the vast chasms between their own concepts of morality. It would be fantastic if we could start a real debate about this issue, and just maybe those in power might discover that because opinions on the matter differ wildly in our multicultural society, that it might be best if we just leave God out of it.


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* This is patently not true. People can be a lot more anti-religious than I am. I do think that the world would be a better place without religion, but I like my religious friends and family members and all I expect from the religious is that they don't try and impose their beliefs on me.

Energy on Mars

The September 9, 2006 episode of Quirks and Quarks had a segment called "Martian Gas Jets" that discussed an interesting feature of the Martian southern ice cap -- namely that it explodes with geyser-like eruptions now and then as it warms up. This is particularly interesting since the "ice" is frozen carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

This got me thinking -- would this be a good way to create energy on Mars? Would it be possible to build a power plant consisting of large chambers that you filled with dry ice mined from the ice cap, and then sealed up and heated to create high pressure gas, the release of which you'd use to turn a turbine or what have you. I wonder if this idea is practical. Interesting thought.

1.2 billion seconds

In a posting on my old blog just over three years ago, I chose my "death day" as June 14, 2043, based on the StatsCan life expectancy data. This evening as I was doing some very long term thinking about my life, I ran across the Death Clock web site, which does a similar calculation and tells you when you're going to die (good news for me! My death got moved back to May 26, 2045), then puts up a countdown of seconds until that date. I'm currently sitting at just over 1.2 billion seconds until I die, and to me that seems like a very big number. It gives me a little hope that I might actually be able to accomplish something in my life. On the other hand, I'm going to spend about 400 million of those seconds sleeping, so I guess I'd better get on with it.