Sinabro

I’m finally Google-free.

I spent a better part of this weekend transferring all my email from GMail to local storage, and I just finished reading (read: skimming headlines) all the items on the Google Reader, and I will be using offline RSS readers (at the moment, I’m trying out Liferea) only.

For the moment, I don’t see anything in my life (er… other than searching, maybe) that depends on Google, and given the recent privacy issues that has come up regarding some of Google’s services, that’s a good thing.

P.S. No, I am not a pedophile (and if I were, I would be smarter than storing incriminating information on anything but local, encrypted storage), but as the saying goes, “It’s first the pedophiles, criminals, and the rest of us,” as government encroachment on our civil rights goes.

Call me a crack pot, but why does it sound like to me, that Hawking radiation is a way to get around the second law of thermodynamics?

This is the scenario I’m thinking of: if you have a moderately sized black hole, if Hawking radiation does exist, it will radiate its mass (hence energy) away in the form of that radiation. So, if we did have a black hole, we can, periodically drop a cold, room-temperature object (i.e. things with no more free energy) into that black hole, which, like furnace, will provide a high-temperature radiation. But unlike a furnace, this is a total mass-to-energy conversion.

This sounds too good to be true. What am I missing here?

I don’t *want* to be caustic and biting.

I don’t want to fight. And I don’t want to make other people angry—no more than I would like to be angry myself.

But some issues (e.g. improper conduct by Microsoft re: OOXML ISO certification, and people sidestepping these issues in apparent support of Microsoft) get me so riled up that I can’t help but interject an acerbic comment.

Perhaps this is a good sign that I should close my eyes and plug my ears on this subject. It’s not like what I do (or say) matters in the grand scheme of things.

So, I tracked down the problem with plotting. It turns out it’s my configuration file, or rather, more precisely, one of my custom functions.

The problem persisted even when I compiled GNU Octave by hand (and the gnuplot, to be sure), but when I removed .octaverc, everything worked fine.

Working backward from that fact, all I know is that some script in my ~/octave must be clobbering a system function, possibly used by plot command.

I suppose the most mysterious thing is … I have another computer that has nearly identical setup (even the same ~/octave!) and everything works fine there, too! Figures …

I think I’ll be switching to Python for scientific computing anyways. I think I finally found a way to do least-squares fit in Python (http://linuxgazette.net/115/andreasen.html) relatively quickly (no, the version in ScientificPython is way too slow, compared to, e.g. GNU Octave). In a way, the main limitation I see for GNU Octave is its MATLAB compatibility, because MATLAB compatibility means both the lack of object-oriented programming and its brain-dead syntax.