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Whenever I have discussions with conservatives about social programs and safety nets, our difference in philosophy tends to come down to one major argument: conservatives feel that, given the opportunity, people will exploit welfare so that they don’t have to work as hard; whereas liberals think that the majority of people will who need welfare benefit from it rightly and many of them will use it to better themselves. This, I think, is a key difference.

Granted, I agree that there are people that abuse welfare. I also agree that our social programs could do better to help the working poor, who are sometimes worse off than people who qualify for the programs. I don’t think the solution is to make welfare and other benefits harder to get, and thereby hurt more people.

That aside, what I really don’t understand is why people who assume the worst in people who take welfare don’t assume the same thing about those in leadership positions. Conservatives commonly argue for more powerful government policing capabilities, saying that we’re not at risk for the government to use those provisions excessively. There are two problems with this. First, it ignores years of history that shows that people will abuse power if too much is given to them. Second, it sets a double standard: assuming poor people will do worse than rich people. Whatever happened to “the meek shall inherit the earth”?

This double standard amazes me. If anything, we should be more scared of rich people. If a poor person lives off welfare, abuses the system, and becomes a slob who doesn’t try to better him or herself, we haven’t lost all that much. If a rich and/or powerful person abuses their position, there’s a lot more money to be lost and a lot more potential for damage.

Conservatives argue eloquently for limited government power. Yet they’re always ready to give the policing elements of our government more of that power. In a free society, however, greater police power is the greatest danger to freedom. Welfare and other social programs aren’t going to limit our freedom, except to take some of our money. Hell, they might even help some people. A police state, however, is by definition contrary to a free society. I think we should accept the fact that we live in a free society and because of that, we’re not always going to be 100% secure. We can change the attitude in which we live to make that more likely. I also think that as a free society, we should take the moral high ground and help those in need and assume they will use it wisely, and accept as the cost of living in that society that some people will abuse government services. After all, I’m sure Halliburton has cost me more in taxes than welfare abusers.

Did you know you could patent discovered genes? Not engineered genes, but discovered ones. Maybe I’m misunderstanding the situation, but this just seems crazy.

According to a study published in Science, 20% of all human genes are patented. Granted, according to the article in National Geographic, the patent doesn’t exactly cover the gene, but instead covers anything you do using the gene, such as creating a drug. However, what this amounts to in my mind is that if someone finds out what gene causes Alzheimer’s, they can patent it and be the only ones to create a genetic cure.

Now, I understand the idea behind patents. By allowing one to patent an invention, we promote the publishing of the information (as a patent) while still guaranteeing that the inventor can reap some profit from his or her work. This is especially important in fields where the R&D costs are astronomical, as is the case in the health industry. These patents promote expensive research with the understanding that people will earn back the money they spent.

However, genes are not inventions, they are discoveries. While I can understand the ‘high cost v. reward’ question, it seems to me that the patenting of a gene creates a chilling effect. It’s not like another company can just invent another gene that does the same thing differently — genes do very specific things. The patent essentially prevents anyone else from curing that genetic disease. As the article mentions, it even raises the cost of research. Why can you patent the whole gene (and thus a whole class of inventions) instead of just that specific drug or process that results? The article discusses many of these questions.

The bleeding heart liberal in me thinks that since there’s a lot of federal money already going into this research, the public shouldn’t so easily give up the knowledge that money reaps. Hell, why not just move the realm of the research completely into the public arena–say at universities and federal research institutions. Conservatives would go crazy, but there are some benefits. First, the pharmaceutical industries won’t have to take the kinds of R&D risks they are now. They probably won’t rake in the crazy profits, but risk would go down, and drug costs would shoot through the floor. The public wins because of drug costs and the fact that the knowledge is then in the public domain. Pharma companies can then focus on creating the new Viagra.

I doubt the drug companies would be ready to give up their status, because such a plan would turn them from high-powered research conglomerates into simple manufacturers, in some senses. But why should they get federal money and then keep all the profit? That’s really the big issue for me: they try to go both ways on this one.

Well, that was just rambling and pie-in-the-sky. I agree that the situation is a lot more complicated than I let on. But hey, I’m interested in hearing what other people have to say about these issues.

So you have a long PDF that you want to read, but you don’t want to read it on your computer, and you can’t really afford to print the thing. Check out Print(fu). Upload your PDF to their website, or give them a link and they’ll format, print, bind, and ship you the PDF in book form! It’s cheap too. I’m sure for smaller orders, the shipping and the binding takes up most of the costs. Your 250 page book will cost $11.25, and 500 pages will only set you back $17.50 (that’s the final cost, including shipping).

It’s a pretty neat idea, and it seems rather cost effective — assuming all the dead trees don’t bother you.

For those of you that use RSS in Safari, you’re probably as annoyed as I am that you can’t scroll by hitting space, because the search field is automatically selected. Well, macosxhints.com has a fix for this little bug.

Also, there are some really good plugins for Safari over at pimpmysafari.com.

And while I’m on the subject of computers, did you know shift-space scrolls up on OS X?

A lot of people have yet to discover RSS, which I think is a travesty. These are usually the same people that complain that my blog isn’t on LiveJournal, and so they can’t just read my entries on their “Friends page”.

Enter RSS, or Really Simple Syndication. This is a format (or really, a bunch of different formats) for publishing data that updates on a timely basis, like blogs, news, podcasting, announcements, or what have you. This means the meat of the website is published. No glitz or prettiness, just the data.

The great thing about this is that because feeds are published in standardized formats, they are machine readable. This means that you can get software to read RSS, or aggregate all the feeds that you want to read. An RSS reader will poll all the websites that you tell it to subscribe to, and it will let you know when there’s something new. That means that you don’t have to visit 15 different websites to see if they’ve updated anything, your reader can keep track of it for you. That means you aren’t tied to LiveJournal or any other site.

You can do a lot of neat things with RSS, too. For example, Craigslist does RSS, so you can read classifieds as they update. In fact, they let you get an RSS feed of a search! Search for what you want to buy, toss it into your RSS reader, and just wait for something to pop up. Most news sites do RSS feeds, not just of the front page, but of different columns. If you really like someone’s column, subscribe to that specific RSS feed. Many of the commercial comics don’t have RSS feeds, unfortunately, but a lot of the lesser-known ones do. Subscribe to that and you’ll have all the comics waiting for you in one place in the morning. Flickr does RSS feeds, so you can subscribe to all your friends Flickr accounts and see what pictures people are posting. My photo gallery will soon do the same. The list goes on.

The only drawback I see is that it makes it a lot harder to happen upon the comments that people leave on blog entries. There are comment feeds to many sites (including this one), but I don’t like how they work.

So what RSS reader should you use? Well, Firefox supports RSS, but it’s not done in such a way that it’s easy to use. What it does is lets you add the RSS feed to your bookmarks, so new posts will show up in your bookmark menu. That’s not too great for most things, I think. However, Firefox will give you a nice little orange icon in the bottom bar when you’re on any site that support RSS, so at least you’ll know.

On the Mac, the Safari browser also supports RSS. Their support is a lot nicer, in my opinion. It will load a page that displays the RSS feed, so you can read. It also lets you aggregate multiple feeds into one page, kind of like the LiveJournal friends page. Like Firefox, it does auto-discovery of RSS. What I do is put my RSS feeds into categories on my bookmarks bar, then set it up so you can click on the category. The bar will let you know how many new posts there are in each category, too.

Also on the Mac, NetNewsWire Lite is a dedicated RSS reader program (scroll to the bottom of that page to see the Lite version, which is free). A lot of people really like this. I’ll let Martin describe what he likes about it, since he’s a big user.

On Windows, there doesn’t seem to be any really good dedicated feed reader. Luckily, there a many online aggregators that work very well. One such site is Bloglines which is recommended by people I know who use it. Melanie did a writeup about Bloglines, as well.

As for my site, the RSS feeds are available at the bottom of the page. Enjoy!

In the digital age, party invitations usually come out in the form of a big mass email. Invariably, when a crowd gets to any decent size, some people are left off of this list. The only way to solve this problem is to create a giant list that everyone, even those who don’t care or can’t in any way attend, is included. Three of my friends created a party list for this purpose that had 150 people at it’s heyday. Anyway, whenever I get a mass email announcing a party, I am reminded of a time my freshman or sophomore year in college, when one of my friends tried to break this mass email mold.

Chethan and his roommates held big parties every once in a while. They were pretty laid back, and just a good way to see a lot of people. They also tended to stay small enough to be manageable, but still big enough to have that “big party feel”. So this one time, I get an email from Chethan:

Alex-
We’re having a party this Saturday at 9, and I think you should come.
-C

“That’s nice of him to write a personal email,” I thought, “especially after missing me on the mass email.” Saturday rolls around and I’m at the party. I had a couple conversations with people and I had a couple that went something like this:

“Good party”
“Yeah. Chethan forgot to put me on the mass email list, though.”
“Oh yeah? Me too! Weird.”

Apparently, Chethan had this conversation a few times, too. At some point during the night, he stood up on a table and got everyone’s attention. “Listen up everyone! Thanks for coming to this party. I just wanted to point out that none of you bastards were left off the mass email. I sent EACH AND EVERY ONE of you a personal email inviting you to this party! And it took a long time. So stop complaining!”

Poor guy. That’ll teach him to do extra work. I still grin everytime I remember that story.

One topic that’s been in my mind for a couple years now has been that of systems, or more specifically, complex systems (though I would adhere to a definition that falls kind of in between a plain and a complex system, I suppose). I won’t bother defining what systems are, since Wikipedia does a good enough job of it.

My favorite engineering courses at NCSU were those that involved systems: linear systems, linear algebra, control, and so on. The general properties of systems have always astounded me. Unpredicted organization and effects seem to fall out of systems. Unconnected parts fall into a rhythm. Changes in one part of a system cause effects in completely unrelated areas.

You can’t get away from them. At work, I feel like our project, OpenSeminar has some systematic features to it. Martin and I will make changes, and invariably, there will be uncharted effects in all kinds of places. Those of you who have worked with complex software know what I mean when I say that sometimes, you just can’t tell why a bug appeared where it didn’t exist days ago, or why one change in an unconnected spot makes those things go away. Our network, as we noted today among many, seems to have a life of itself — it’s even more finnicky and more unpredictable than our software. Just another complex system at play.

The political world is another system that really interests me. It relies on so many inputs and outputs. The great thing about trying to understand politics is that you also have to study the underlying population and culture. It becomes a giant anthropological study — more systems to look at.

All the people who worked on senior design with me know that our device took on a life of its own. Our board had 8 variable resistors hooked up to four separate circuits, and changing one resistor made the whole system react differently. It took a long time to get a hang of how that worked.

I could go on forever, I suppose. There are so many neat systems out there. What’s my point? I guess it’s just to point out how cool systems are. I think that research into how unrelated systems work in similar ways needs to continue. I think that we’ll break a lot of ground in the next 10-15 years, and I’m curious to see where it will lead us.

I just got back from a backpacking trip across the mountains in Colorado with a group from the University Scholars Program. It was an amazing trip, with a lot of fun people. We hiked (by my estimate) nearly 35 miles. We managed to play in the snow, hike over the continental divide, swim in a 45 degree lake, camp above the tree line in a thunderstorm, and climb a 14000-foot peak (Huron Peak), among other things. Bengt, from the Scholars office, led the trip, along with his brother Granger. His parents were nice enough to open up their place for us for a night.

I took a lot of pictures, until my camera’s battery gave out about halfway through the week. Click the picture to go to the album. I tried to get shots that showed the natural beauty of the Colorado mountains, as well as ones that stayed true to how we felt and acted at the time.

/2005/Colorado/

Though he pictures are plentiful, they don’t cover everything. There really isn’t a good way to explain how awesome the trip was, or all the things we did. The things I mentioned in the first paragraph are just highlights of accomplishments. There was so much more. Elbert the Elk Skull, Neal’s biff temples, lots of ramen eating and various power slamming, private reflection, stinky tents, evening conversations, plane flights, “No no no no no” . . . the list just goes on.

There was a lot of toil, too. I actually got altitude sickness the first day we hiked up which took me out for most of that afternoon and night. I just got a throbbing headache that made me feel nauseous everytime I moved. The climbs and the hiking we did were really hard, leaving me sore and tired. In all though, I felt that the suffering we had to go through made all the successes even better. When we reached to top of Huron Peak, we were all elated, not so much in spite of the cold and hellacious hike up, but because of it.

All in all, a great trip. Some of my favorite shots:

/2005/Colorado/IMG_4927.JPG /2005/Colorado/IMG_4981.JPG /2005/Colorado/IMG_5000.JPG

Hey hey. After lots of moaning and complaining from many, as well as an attempt from someone to impersonate me, I’ve finally decided to rejoin the world of the blog. Not that anyone cares. For those of you who actually do plan to read, I’ve made sure to have an RSS feed, along with one for comments. For those of you who read nothing but LiveJournal, you’re out of luck.

The website is still in a state of flux, so things might break from time to time. Feel free to point out any mistakes and suggestions. The photo gallery, especially, needs more work. I haven’t tested with Internet Explorer, either.

I probably won’t be updating too often. I’ve pretty much set this up to write every once in a while about things I consider important or noteworthy, as well as to showcase my pictures. It’s not going to be an online journal. If you came looking for my France travel journal, that’s archived here.

Cheers.

Hello hello. Seasons Greetings. It’s been well over a month since I’ve written – I’ve kind of disappeared off the face of the Earth to some people. What a time it’s been — the past few weeks of school were pretty hectic with me tying up all the loose ends and finishing up all my exams before everyone else in the final week (I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it, but the semester here ends in late January, so I had to take exams early). Of course, I’ve still managed to experience an enomous amount of things outside of school, and I can’t even begin to tell about all the cool things that can happen. I’ll wait until the pictures go up and I can describe some of the things I’ve photographed.

About those pictures…. I’ve taken well over 2500 snapshots since I left the US. That’s easily more photos than I’ve taken the rest of my life. Digital is very liberating — it lets you experiment like only someone with a lot of money to spend on film could before. I have lots of sessions where I’ve taken 10 shots of the same mundane thing just so I could see what would come out. None of the photos are up on the Internet yet, at least none since before my fall vacation. I have excuses, though. Firstly, my website broke for a while and I couldn’t upload photos — I think that’s fixed now. Secondly, I just don’t have the time to upload and catalog all the photos. Computer time here in the labs is precious enough that I used it for schoolwork, mostly. I will, however, get the pictures up when I get back. And for the sake of those of you who probably don’t want to wade through the thousand shots that actually do make it up, I’ll put up some of the best ones on their own.

So what have I been up to these past few weeks? Lots. It’s been so long that I can’t even begin to write about it all. Some of the highlights? Well, Thanksgiving dinner was fun — we went to a restaurant and had a French-style meal, but made with things like turkey, pumpkin, and yes, even cranberries. I went up to Paris a couple times and also over to Strasbourg with about 50 people on another Esperanto trip.

This last week though, was the busiest of all the weeks. Of course, school was a big culprit, besides all the little things one needs to take care of when leaving a country for good. The worst part, however, was that from Wednesday on, people started leaving school for break. While everyone else was going to be coming back, I wouldn’t be seeing any of these people again, and many people had become pretty close friends of mine over the past four months. We all said our goodbyes and promised to make the attempt to keep in touch, but everyone knows that gets harder and harder as time passes.

I’d say that, overall, I had a blast here in France. I learned a great many things about culture and life, and I can even speak French pretty well now. However, four months flies by, and I can’t help thinking that it wasn’t enough to really immerse myself.

On the other hand, I’m really really looking forward to being back in the US again. I miss a great many little things. I also miss the big things — I’m really ready to see my family and my friends again after this long hiatus. I arrive back in the US before New Year’s, on the 29th — coming in at 3:35 to RDU, actually (from London). I’ll see you all soon.