Weather in Toronto has recently taken a cold turn. Given the recent release of the First Working Group / Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC, the joke du jour has become "What's all this fuss about global warming?" This bothers me for two reasons.

First, I feel it's heedless to joke about what is, by general consensus of the scientific community, a serious problem. It betrays a simplistic, "out-of-sight out-of-mind" naïveté. By analogy (here I corroborate Godwin's Law), consider how foolish they felt in 1945 who said, in 1940, "Holocaust? What Holocaust?"

Secondly—humour me for a moment while I indulge …

For the LazyWeb: After wasting over half an hour searching for a free, simple Windows utility to clone a CD for my mother, I gave up and used Ubuntu. With the disc in my recorder, I opened a terminal and typed:

cdrdao copy --device /dev/cdrw

CDRDAO prompted me to insert a new disk but otherwise ran unattended.

I subscribe to Harper's Magazine, which comes monthly and is always a good read. Wikipedia describes it as

a monthly general-interest magazine covering literature, politics, culture, finance, and the arts from a progressive, moderate left perspective in a fashion often not found in the ordinary news-media. It is the second oldest continuously-published monthly magazine (the oldest magazine being Scientific American) in the United States…

In the December 2006 issue, there's an interesting piece on thousands of scavengers living on an enormous garbage dump in Manilla, the Philippines. The phrase "economic Darwinism" is used, and the whole thing strikes me as …

Each month and year, I become a more rabid cheerleader for public transit. Where once I was simply delighted by the cheap, eco-friendly idea of having one person drive scores of others around, I'm now enraged by the attachment of the average Torontonian to his or her automobile. I'm even more incensed by quixotic city-dwellers who aspire to saving for and buying a car as a mark of adulthood. Such a waste of money!

I allow that using Mississauga Transit or its 905 equivalents is a horrendous experience. Even more horrendous is getting anywhere by bicycle—a tiring, if not …

The ball is 3 cm in diameter, held either magnetically so all but a small polar area is exposed. In addition to rotating smoothly, the ball registers (but does not yield to) pressure; "clicking" is emulated by squeezing or pinching the ball with some combination of fingers. An LED blinks or a sound is played to indicate a click is registered.

An internal gyroscope allows smooth scrolling by flicking the ball in any direction. The gyroscope restricts the rotation of the ball to that axis until deactivated by another tactile signal.

With a suction cup or other attachment on the …

William Gibson's fiction is full of unique, near-future predictions about how society and culture respond to technology. The recent LonleyGirl15/YouTube story, closely mirroring the plot of his 2003 novel Pattern Recognition, invites serious consideration of some of his other concepts.

A theme carried by both the dialogue and narrative of his novels is the comparison of large corporations with biological entities. Hapless families and individuals of incredible wealth are cocooned inside corporate apparatus that has accrued with their fortunes.

This is a compelling idea, and not necessarily a new one. Economists and financial analysts have long recognized that any …

I'd initially planned to delay publishing anything new until I'd imported all my old blog posts, updated the code behind my books page, got some work done for skule.ca, and so on. I'm starting to realize those are all long term processes that shouldn't stand in the way of another attempt to blog regularly.

Another feature I've always had in mind was a page for all the links with which Dave and others keep spamming me, or which I dig up myself. Yesterday I realized that it would make more sense to use a service like del.icio.us …

This is my new website. The old one is at khaerukama-o.geodave.net, but won't be updated anymore.

I also have a new e-mail address: mail@paul.kishimoto.name. Please update your address books.

Stay tuned for unbelievably exciting (vis not exciting) things.

This will be the first in a number of articles meant to express my opinion on common topics. Often I find I can’t explain my view concisely without feeling I’m cheating someone out of part of the story. Referrals to this page should obviate the need to make editorial decisions that deny people information - decisions I justifiably hate making.

Today’s topic: the attacks of 11 September 2001.

The September 11 attacks were not faked or perpetrated by individuals under the direction of the White House, George W. Bush or his staff, the CIA, the FBI or any …

A few ideas have crystallized for me as I've read about the ongoing furor over the Danish and other European newspapers publishing offensive cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed. Without repeating too much common knowledge, certain Islamic scriptures forbid realistic depictions of the prophets, but depictions of that sort have been made for centuries. Various newspapers are reprinting the cartoons, citing freedom of the press, and the images are not only in violation of this particular scripture, but also offensive (see the above link).

I've also read this opinion by a 'Muslim dissident', which says, amongst other things:

A democracy cannot …

I make frequent attempts at humour. Often they fail, because most of my jokes are referential. I depend on lateral thinking to insert the unexpected or (seemingly) unrelated into a situation or a conversation. The humour is created either by the juxtapositon of the two items, or, more commonly, poached outright from the thing I'm referencing.

Either way I rely on a whole lexicon of stock phrases, quotations, tidbits and so on to execute this sort of joke. What follows is an informal guide to the most common of these. For the most part the humour isn't explained -- because any …

That's right. Nothing original is said in this post, but a post it is. The following are PDF versions of the MIE374 lecture notes:

• [Chapter 1](http://khaerukama-o.geodave.net/data/mie374/MIE_374_CH_01_Slides.pdf)
• [Chapter 2](http://khaerukama-o.geodave.net/data/mie374/MIE_374_CH_02_Slides.pdf)
• [Chapter 3](http://khaerukama-o.geodave.net/data/mie374/MIE_374_CH_03_Slides.pdf)
• [Chapter 4](http://khaerukama-o.geodave.net/data/mie374/MIE_374_CH_04_Slides.pdf)
• [Chapter 5](http://khaerukama-o.geodave.net/data/mie374/MIE_374_CH_05_Slides.pdf)
• [Chapter 7](http://khaerukama-o.geodave.net/data/mie374/MIE_374_CH_07_Slides.pdf)
• [Chapter 13](http://khaerukama-o.geodave.net/data/mie374/MIE_374_CH_13_Slides.pdf)
• [Chapter 14](http://khaerukama-o.geodave.net …

Computers make us more productive. Yeah, right. Lifehacker recommends the downloads, web sites and shortcuts that actually save time. **Don't live to geek; geek to live.** [Lifehacker.com](http://www.lifehacker.com)

I'm not sure why I haven't read this site before, but it's definitely on my reading list now. It's an admirable message that I sympathize with. Computers, the Internet and the software and data on them are wonderfully powerful tools; but they're just that: tools. There's no point owning a massive industrial lathe when all you need is a Dremel tool.

I'll use Lifehacker for suggestions from here …

Well, well. A New Year! I got wildly and inexcusably drunk on New Year's Eve at Konrad's place (Lil's blog has photos). Moreover, I did it intentionally, which is a rare and awesome thing. Today was the annual Kishimoto Family New Year's Day Open House (KFNYDOH, sounds like a martial art) at my uncle's place in Weston. For the uninitiated, this involves a lot of pre-cooking during Boxing Week, and about 125 guests (mostly adult friends of the family) coming by between 3 and 10 PM. The amount and variety of food defies description, but I'll try and find a …

I'm so emo - I've been listening to a lot of music by Stars. They're great:

God that was strange to see you again
Introduced by a friend of a friend
Smiled and said "yes I think we've met before"
In that instant it started to pour

Captured a taxi despite all the rain
We drove in silence across Pont Champlain
And all of that time you thought I was sad
I was trying to remember your name

This scar is a fleck on my porcelain skin
You tried to reach deep but you couldn't get in
And now you're outside …

This is why I love the Canada Research Chair program, the Ontario postsecondary education system, and Michael Geist. His observations on the Internet are always legally informative, politically neutral, and rhetoric-free; at the same time they embody the sort of values, enshrined in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, that Canada's laws are designed to protect.

His work is the exact antithesis of the partisan committee-authored 'think tank' reports that a lot of American lawmaking and lobbying seem to be based on, a direct effect of the mandate of the CRC. I find it very refreshing.

Now Playing: Badly Drawn …

Woo! I should be studying.

Now Playing: Led Zeppelin - Led Zeppelin III - 06 - Gallows Pole

I'm 21! I wish I could say I had more to show for it, but other events have overshadowed it.

I had the flu from roughly 26-29 November. While I was under I exacerbated my headache by redoing the layout of this site; it's a lot simpler and cleaner now. Some notable changes:

• The blurbs have been moved to the front Media page.
• I added a list of the anime I have burned to DVD; let me know if you want to borrow anything.
• Some books added as to-reads; I've got some spoken-word and lyrics to go into the poetry …

Instead of going off on extensive tangents the way I usually do, I'm just going to quote a lot of really good or striking lyrics and let you make what you will of them.

Call me over and I trust We lay here 'til we must Make our break to our star bodies go

There's a shake with the shock And a gift off with them They carry the dust of the failing wisdom For you there's not any warning And love is 5 in the morning

'Til we skip through the towns to the bright sweet past on And …

The above photo is of a test of the LG-118A Peacekeeper ICBM, which carries up to ten 300 KT MIRV warheads. Little Boy (the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima) rated about 13 KT. What these measurements mean is that detonating 300,000 tons of TNT (a common explosive) or one of these warheads releases equal energy. That TNT would form a solid cube about 20 storeys high. The test warheads were inert (obviously), and dropped on an uninhabited atoll in the Pacific. The bright lines result from the heat created by their reentry into the atmosphere at over five times …