Pirate Skipper and His Cursed Companion

Tagim [http://totalgood.com/tagim] surprised me this morning with a photo from our first ocean passage nearly 7 years ago. It was Larissa's first time to sail a boat over the horizon, and it was my first multi-day ocean passage. A few days out we found we weren't the only ones to be crossing the Gulf of Mexico for the first time. This seemingly naive purple martin stowed away onboard and often enjoyed lighting on our heads for warmth or companionship. Unfortunately, his gregariousness was his undoing. When I trod

Mosque Dome

The Sabah state mosque has a beautiful, opulent domed prayer room, with a scary suspension structure holding a massive chandellier. I'm not sure I'd want to stand (or kneel and bow) beneath it for very long.

Malaysia Power

Walking along the sidewalk near a resort golf course that borders a water village (sort-of a shanty town on stilts) in Kota Kinabalu, we noticed wires hanging out of a lamp post and running down into the open concrete sewer. Either the city is being industrious about supplying power to all it's lamp posts with accessible wiring running through the ditches, or the water villagers are siphoning off power from the city street lamps. Either way, it says a lot about Malaysian culture and government.

Malaysian Cutlure

Here is a photo of a boys choir from the local orphanage in Kota Kinabalu this past Christmas singing Christmas carols in reasonably intelligible English at the tree lighting in Sutera Habour Resort. They were adorable. I hope they are well-supported. The resort is owned by a Chinese-Singaporean and the Chinese are largely Christian in Malaysia, so resort management can get away with Christmas festivities, despite the Muslim government that dominates all other private life and culture in Malaysia. The Chinese tend to segregate themselves into gated subdivisions with modern homes. The gates are more than just for show and controlling vehicle traffic. The stone walls are often topped with sharp spikes or barbed wire to control pedestrians as well. Despite the fact that Malaysia is nominally a democracy, and the Chinese compose more than 50% of the population in Sabah, laws and enforcement are heavily skewed to muslims. Only muslims can hold government or oil-industry jobs. Chinese dominate nearly every other sector of the economy, including agriculture, commercial and residential real estate, banking, retail, and restaurants. I imagine the Chinese business and church community are the main benefactors for the local catholic orphanage where these boys came from.

The other two photos show how Malaysians and Filipinos dry fish in the sun covered with salt, to preserve them for selling at the market or eating at home. Ice doesn't last long in the tropics and most of the locals, especially in the water villages where the fishermen live, don't have a refrigerator or ice. And they tap into electrical power from street lights nearby without paying taxes or utility bills, since technically they live on the water (swamps, reefs, and ditches near the city) where you can't own the "land".

The End of Illness

I skimmed the The End of Illness (David B. Agus) while waiting at a Brisbane Queenstreet bookstore that has taken up the slack for the massive Borders Books that shuttered recently. I was looking for health wisdom. One statistic was quite new to me--that sitting at a desk all day after a strenuous morning workout can be as damaging to your health as smoking (statistically speaking). However, I had to put down the book and discount that tidbit of "insight" after I surveyed the chapter on "Rotten Eggs" which describes what Agus calls his egg theory. After explaining how subtle environmental factors for a chicken egg can profoundly affect it's state, Agus proceeds to exaggerate the link between embryonic environment and its affect on development of the human brain. Agus falls into the banal statistical trap of assuming correlation and causation are equivalent. According to Agus, a child born within 18 months of another child to the same mother develops autism with 3 fold greater likelihood. He assigns the cause to the change in the uterine environment for the embryo due to recent childbirth and the brother/sister recently living there. However, a much more plausible argument is that closely spaced births and the environmental effect of being a little brother/sister to a mother juggling two breast-feeding children have a much more profound influence on mental development. Subtle changes in a mother's behavior have been associated with autism since the 70's. And mothers of 2 children close in age may adjust their care for the second child, using what they learned with the first, and perhaps rationing breast milk in different ways than they would if they only had one child suckling every 2 hours. The manufactured nature of baby formula (perhaps with trace heavy metals and volatile organic chemicals) might also have an effect on neural development. Not to mention that the mother will likely be more confident with the second child, with so recent a memory of the birth and care of a child. And confidence can have unexpected affects on the actual development of a child, I'm sure. The parents may become more aloof, less responsive to familiar personality quirks of their baby. Tehy may even devalue those unique personality trates that make their second baby who he is, simply because they've seen something similar recently. The baby cuteness instincts may not work as well the second time around, if recent in parents' memory. Parental emotional connection to a child must certainly affect their brain development, much more strongly than the recent presence of another child in the womb. Just being the second child (younger brother/sister), close in age, surely has a profound impact on development due to the natural rivalry. Unfortunately, a younger brother is shackled with the jealousy and lack of power that an older brother might have -- like a prisoner and a gate keeper. The older sibling has physical and mental power but a lack of recognition (parents often go to great lengths to assure both children that they have equal "rank")--and power without status is the hallmark of a sociopath. That leads to another commonly accepted concept that should be debunked--autism and aspergers being a "spectrum" disorder separate from narcisism, sociopathology, etc. Spectrum really isn't the right term for a mental illness. Mental illness is multidimensional not a linear quantity or scale or spectrum--complex system metrics would be more applicable.

Building bitcoin-qt from source on Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric

These are the steps that worked for me on Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric to build
bitcoin-qt (the "official" bitcoin GUI).

git clone https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin
cd bitcoin
sudo aptitude install bitcoind qt4-qmake libqt4-dev build-essential
libboost-dev libboost-system-dev libboost-filesystem-dev
libboost-program-options-dev libboost-thread-dev libssl-dev
libdb4.8++-dev libminiupnpc-dev
qmake USE_DBUS=1 USE_UPNP=0
make
# then to run the executable gui
bitcoin-qt

Solar Panel "Breakthrough"

A friend forwarded a oil/energy investment/political article by "Dr." Kent Moors titled "A Trade War May Scuttle This Huge Solar Breakthrough".  Typical blogger hype, but I was intrigued to checked it out, reading the referenced NREL paper, "Peak External Photocurrent Quantum Efficiency Exceeding 100 percent via MEG in a Quantum Dot Solar Cell" and looking up quantum dots and excitons on wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_dot#Photovoltaic_devices
Conventional solar panels already acheive 100% MEG, so 114% represents a minor improvement in quantum efficiency. Only when it reaches 700% MEG (the theoretical maximum, according to wikipedia) will it make any real difference for solar panels. And even then it will only bring up the total efficiency of a panel from about 30% (where we are now) to about 35%, which would have a negligible impact on the total cost per kWhr of electricity. So this "doctor" that wrote the article is just hyping it because he's got nothing else to talk about in his newsletter today. Same for me, I guess...

A Trade War May Scuttle This Huge
Solar Breakthrough
by Dr. Kent Moors