Is this how time normally passes? Really slowly, in the right order?

Dear Microsoft IE Team

Fire, die in a, likewise.

Update: Okay, I'll withdraw that.  You can just get unpleasant blisters in your sensitive parts.

Two things in your favour: While zoom mode breaks automatic reflow, turning off zoom makes it work again.  Second, the doctype HTML PUBLIC "IE-IS-A-COW" works to turn off quirks mode.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:51 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 54 words, total size 1 kb.

To Expand Slightly

The great strength of CSS is that it separates layout from content.

The great weakness of CSS is that it does nothing of the fucking sort.

To get complex layouts to work, you have to either (a) create your content so that it is aware of the layout, using relative positioning and appropriately ordered divs, or (b) create your layout so that is aware of the content, using absolute positioning and either fixed content sizes or Javascript to calculate stuff.

In short, CSS brings the rich layout of print to the web...  Along with the dynamism and flexibility of print.

(I wouldn't be so cross except that I promised to demo the layout module to my business partner tomorrow, after postponing several times, and the layouts refuse to lay out. Grrr! )

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:42 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 135 words, total size 1 kb.

Dear W3C CSS Committee

Die in a fire.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:35 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 8 words, total size 1 kb.

NFS Burpage

NFS has been up and down all day; this is causing problems all over mee.nu.  I have Softlayer tech support looking at it, and in the meantime I'm setting things up to run without NFS.

Update: De-nfstrated.  Which means we can only run on one of the servers, but right now that's less of a problem than the NFS going bloop every couple of hours.

Update: Tweaked some settings that shouldn't have needed tweaking, and left a test running.  We're still running on the local disk for now.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:16 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 90 words, total size 1 kb.

Grrr

NFS.

Grrr.

Update: GRRRRR!!!!!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:26 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 5 words, total size 1 kb.

Microsoft, You Suck

Trying out some new AJAXy stuff here on my blog.

Works perfectly in Firefox.
Works perfectly in Opera.
Works perfectly in Safari.
Burns down, falls over, and sinks into the swamp in IE7.

It's not a simple matter of the page being misformatted.  IE bleeps, throws up an error telling you the server can't be reached, blanks out what it's shown of the page so far, and locks up.

Now I'll admit that I'm running the latest versions of Firefox, Opera and Safari, and my IE7 is a bit out of date.  But there's a damn good reason for that.  Firefox, Opera and Safari are quick and painless to update.  To update IE7, I first had to spend 15 minutes updating the updater.  Now I'm waiting for 287MB of patches to install.  And given what Automatic Update has done to me in the past, there's no way in hell I'm going to turn it back on.

If you're using IE, really, get a better browser.  Firefox.  Opera.  Safari.  Seamonkey.  Netscape 3.  Anything.  Think of the web designers.  Won't someone please think of the web designers?

Update: AHA!  Known bug.  No patch.

But the workaround works, which is a lot better than forcing every mee.nu user to update their browser.

Still, everyone but Microsoft gets this right.  Bleh.

Update: Here's a post about the same freakin' problem... From 2003.  Way to go, Team Microsoft.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:55 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 237 words, total size 2 kb.

Poopy Poopheads From Pooptown

Sci Fi Channel have cancelled The Dresden Files.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:34 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 12 words, total size 1 kb.

Grr. Argh.

It's been a very tiring and frustrating week, for reasons I'm not going into right now, but which started with the bandwidth and server problems I mentioned earlier.

This is just the latest example of the herds of bleating nuisancery that flock to my inbox every day:

Effective immediately, .NU Domain has modified its policies and now permits the registration of .nu domain names using only one or two characters, including numeric characters - such as aj.nu, 92.nu or mu.nu - under our new Premium Names Service.

Hey, nice example there, given that I registered it in 1997.

The cost to register a two-character .nu Premium Name is 250 EURO (2 500 SEK) per year.

Crapsprockets.  It was 60 Euros for two years.  And yes, they've upped the renewal fee for existing domains.

Fortunately I'm already paid through to November 2011.

Update: The president of the .nu registry just apologised for that.  Seems like a nice guy, apart from the bit where he increased my renewal fees by 700%...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:42 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 167 words, total size 1 kb.

Neurophysics For People Who Don't Like Neurology... Or Physics

Or objective evidence.  Or so-called "logic":

Stuart Hameroff, an anesthesiologist who has spent many years studying brain functions, has collaborated with renowned Oxford University polymath Roger Penrose on a model that explains consciousness as the result of quantum processes occurring in tiny structures called microtubules in brain cells. “I think consciousness under normal circumstances occurs at the level of space-time geometry in the brain, in the microtubules,” Hameroff says. “But the fluctuations extend down to the Planck scale [far smaller than an atom] because the microtubules are driven bioenergetically to be in a coherent state. When the blood supply and the oxygen stops, things go bad and the coherence stops, but quantum information at the Plank scale isn’t lost. It may dissipate into the universe but remain somehow entangled in some kind of functional unit, maybe indefinitely. If the patient is revived, the information gets picked back up again.”

To be kind, it is not immediately obvious to the average layman that this is a complete load of bullpucky.

Penrose's (and by extension, Hameroff's) hypothesis fails on three fronts: First, it does not accurately describe what we know the brain does; Second, it does not accurately describe what we know consciousness does; Third, it is physically impossible.*

It is important to note that when Hameroff says "microtubules are driven bioenergetically to be in a coherent state", that this is a hypothesis, and there is no evidence that any such thing occurs, and considerable evidence that it cannot occur.

Where did the Planck-scale processes that cause it come from? Penrose’s answer: They came from the Big Bang. In this view, consciousness - all consciousness - was created at the same moment when the universe was created. If the soul exists, it, too, might be anchored to our moment of cosmic origin. This is what Italian astrophysicist Paola Zizzi terms the “Big Wow,” shorthand for her description of the connection between “the very early quantum computing universe and our mind.”

Again, this is the most astounding nonsense.  We know how quantum processes behave: Quantum mechanics is perhaps the most successful theory of physics, ever.  Even if Penrose's ideas were correct, there would be no informational connection between a human mind today and the formation of the universe.  Complex quantum states simply don't hang around that way; it is, again, physically impossible.  And simple quantum states don't possess any attributes that can carry information like that.  Like black holes, subatomic particles have no hair. When Hameroff says:

When the blood supply and the oxygen stops, things go bad and the coherence stops, but quantum information at the Plank scale isn’t lost. It may dissipate into the universe but remain somehow entangled in some kind of functional unit, maybe indefinitely.

He is flying in the face of all of quantum mechanics and modern neuroscience.  Complex entangled states do not survive like that; do not carry information of the sort he is implying; are not in evidence anywhere in the physical brain or in its function; and do not share any significant characteristics with the way the human mind actually behaves.  Quantum information at the Planck scale is not lost, that is true, but what that information tells us is that this particle is an electron; this particle is a neutron. 

And that's all. 

Persistent quantum information of that sort is very specific and very limited.  It is impossible to tell, from observing an electron, anything of its past.  All electrons are identical except for position and momentum.  This one may have been part of an atom of lead a second ago; this one in an atom of gold.  There is no way, not even theoretically - indeed, particularly not theoretically - to tell, unless you have continuously observed the two electrons over that period (a process that has its own quantum mechanical difficulties).

Penrose surely knows better, at least on the physics side, so I assume that something he has said has been misunderstood.  On the other hand, I have seen nothing to suggest that he knows anything of modern neuroscience.

Because modern neuroscience shows quite clearly that consciousness is brain function, that aspects of consciousness can be tied to very specific brain functions, and that neither the mind nor the brain exhibit any quantum properties except in the bulk, statistical sense that they share with prosaic objects such as frozen fish and pocket calculators.

The best layman's introduction to modern neuroscience I know of is MIT's 9.00 Introduction to Psychology as taught by Jeremy Wolfe.  You can download the lectures, and I can't recommend them highly enough to anyone interested in the subject (and it is a subject I think everyone should be interested in).

(Wishful thinking by Brendan Loy found via Insty.)

* Why is it that some of the smartest people have some of the ugliest websites?  Okay, the answer is that they have better things to do, I know that.  But still...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:34 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 820 words, total size 6 kb.

Soylent Green Is People!!!

I was at TownHall.com just now following a link from Instapundit about the Lileks debacle (the Minneapolis Star-Tribune newspaper has reassigned its best writer as a local-stories reporter) when I ran across this link: Why ATHEISTS are 1000% percent out to lunch...

And yes, it's the usual drivel.  Kevin McCullough criticizes Christopher Hitchens for making "consistent strawman arguments" against religion, then comes up with this:

In Hitchens' own life, he wants it both ways.  He wants to acknowledge the evil of Islamic radicalism; he wants to fight a war against Jihad; but he's not willing to say that evil has a source.  He wants to say that we should be outraged and fight for the protection of our future, but if there is no good and there is no evil - and if there is no God there is neither of those - then there can't be any rationale for saying that their way of believing is any different than ours, therefore if they want to murder us, they should be allowed to.

(My transcription.)

How about a rational rationale?  How about the concept that we'd rather not be murdered?  Does that make no headway with you, Mr McCullough?  Are you really unable to distinguish between the ethical and moral values of Islamic extremism and Western civilization without reference to your personal religious beliefs?

Sheesh. more...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:51 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 292 words, total size 3 kb.