General

Via Brian’s Blog:

It looks like Wil Wheaton is a Soul Coughing fan. BTW, I discovered that Mike Doughty has a weblog.

“Superman” actor Christopher Reeve has died of heart failure during treatment for an infection Sunday. Reeve has been confined to a wheelchair since his horseback riding accident in 1995 and has used his visibility to raise funds and promote research into the treatment of spinal cord injuries. Reeve has also been a strong proponent of stem cell research, which has shown great promise for potential treatments for paralysis.

One of his most important accomplishments is the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation which funds research that develops treatments and cures for paralysis caused by spinal cord injury and other central nervous system disorders. The Foundation also vigorously works to improve the quality of life for people living with disabilities through its grants program, paralysis resource center and advocacy efforts. Christopher’s family has requested that donations be made in his honor to the foundation.

Here’s an interesting article I found. There was actually a language in China written & spoken only by women.

Yang Huanyi, the last surviving writer and speaker of an enigmatic language invented and used only by women in a small pocket of central China, has died. She was believed to be in her late 90s.

Mrs. Yang died Sept. 20 at her home in Jiangyong, a bucolic county in Hunan province, the official New China News Agency reported.

For years, Mrs. Yang was the lone survivor of a generation of women in Jiangyong whose mothers and grandmothers had passed down the art of nushu, a secret script they developed to share their joys and sorrows, hopes and fears, away from the prying eyes of men.

Confined to home, the women of Jiangyong traded gossip, spread news, and lamented their lot in letters, poems, and songs that they collected in books, embroidered into handkerchiefs, or painted on fans. At a time in China when most women and girls were illiterate and considered the property of husbands and fathers, these women turned objects of domestic life into avenues of escape and found solace among “sworn sisters” with whom they communicated in their own language.

“When I learned nushu, it was to meet with friends and sisters to exchange our thoughts and letters,” Mrs. Yang told the Los Angeles Times in an interview two years ago. “We wrote what was in our hearts, our feelings.”

The existence of nushu remained largely unnoticed until 20 years ago, when local scholars began to take interest in preserving it and the texts written by women in decades past. The language’s origins are mysterious: Various legends say that it had antecedents in a tribal tongue more than 2,000 years old or that it was created by a clever girl from Jiangyong who was forced to become an imperial concubine and wanted to find a way to write home in code.

Whatever its origin, scholars say nushu dates at least to the mid-19th century, because a coin was discovered from that era bearing nushu characters.

Nushu, which means “women’s script” in Chinese, was mostly a written language and consisted of up to 2,000 characters. By contrast, Mandarin Chinese boasts at least 50,000 characters. Nushu characters are curvy, wispy, and relatively simple, more akin to the ancient scratchings on Chinese oracle bones than to their complicated modern, boxy Chinese counterparts.

From Morons Dot Org: There are 1,000 of these machines, the so-called central tabulators, each of which can handle up to 2 million votes at a time. They are used in more than 30 states, tabulating something
like 50% of the vote. And they can be manipulated.

Basically the way it works is this. These machines store the votes in a ledger based on Microsoft Access. The problem begins with each machine having three seperate sets, only one of which is viewable. All it takes is the entering of a two-digit code (in a so-called “secret location”, which is nowhere near security enough) to uncouple these three books, and then one can easily be edited. Spot-checks will not show anything unusual; the system used one set of data for the detailed reports viewable by election officials, and another for the official election results.

The program itself is all-but unprotected. Passwords are spread pell-mell among elections workers, city or county database people, Diebold employees, temps, and Diebold subcontractors. The audit log is all but useless, as the only way to change log-ins is to restart the program, and with votes pouring in from all over, few people are going to be willing to do that. So, the audit log shows a whole lot of transactions by “admin”, and no one else.

“We found that you can melt down an election in six seconds, simply by using the menu items in GEMS. You can destroy all data with two mouse clicks, and with four mouse clicks, you can destroy the configuration of the election making it very difficult to reload the original data.”

Apparently the database structure that Diebold created becomes unstable at high volume, which (and this is according to Diebold) resulted in thousands of votes being given to the wrong candidate in San Diego County in March of this year.

Read the Black Box Voting Report

I’m back home now. They left a bit of a mess – a picture frame fell & there was lots of broken glass.

I’m now at the Marriott Courtyard while my home is being tented. My room has a fast connection with my own DSL modem rather than the usual shared connection. Tomorrow I plan to buy an Airport Express so I don’t have to be tied to the desk.

I was able to get both cats to the vet easily and I prepared my home before I left.

My building is being tented for termites tomorrow, so I’ll be out for a few days. I’ve already boarded both cats and I’m now getting ready to leave. I have to bag any remaining food in special gas-proof bags provided by the exterminator & leave a set of keys with them.