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We teachers have a bias against Wikipedia as reference material for students. While many entries are well written and accurate, there are many that are plain junk. It might be hard for a student to tell the good from the bad, so we typically advise either avoiding Wikipedia for formal research papers or supplementing it with more traditional sources.Enter Conservapedia, a so-called “trustworthy,” wiki-based encyclopedia. Founded by conservatives who believe Wikipedia has a liberal bias, Conservapedia endeavors to provide a more palatable online source to students, scholars and the idly curious.
Some of the science blogs I read have been dumping on Conservapedia lately, so I thought I would take a peek. I started with something I know pretty well, physics.
Now, Conservapedia is still being developed, so I was not expecting as an elaborate entry on physics as Wikipedia has. I was mortified, however, to read this entry, which I will reproduce here in its entirety to save you a click.
Physics is the study of nature, and is the science of studying the laws of God’s universe. Galileo was the first to discover and propose some of the fundamental laws of physics that we still realize today. He began by studying how a ball rolled down an incline and showed that its speed would be proportional to the height it started at. A scientist that studies physics is called a physicist.
This is a preview of If Wikipedia is bad, then Conservapedia is the utter pits. . Read the full post (1283 words, 1 image, estimated 5:08 mins reading time)Possibly related posts:
Spoiled as I am by Linux and Mac OS X, I figured that updating Windows and associated Microsoft products would be as easy as running a script or downloading an update.
As if.
The problem, of course, is that M$ provided such easy solutions for the most current versions of Exchange Server, Windows Server, Office and the desktop OS (aka XP and Vista). At my workplace, we are still using Exchange Server and Windows Server 2000, and most of the client machines run Office XP and Windows 2000 Pro. Silly of me as the tech guy not to spend craploads of money to get the latest versions of all.
So the update solution for those of us stuck in the Stone Age is to download a set of “tools” provided by M$. The process is, to say the least, not intuitively obvious. After some false starts, I managed to get it right, with the help of a very useful (third-party) step-by-step guide here and liberal applications of Google searches.
The complexity results from needing to update the time zone details on the network domain controllers (DCs), the mail server, and the client machines, and then updating the Exchange database on the mail server. This last tool requires either (a) a client machine running either XP SP2 or Vista and Office 2003 or higher or (b) a client machine capable of running Virtual PC 2004 or Virtual Server 2005 to emulate a more modern Windows Server/Exchange environment. This latter is a free download from Microsoft here, although the link is temporarily unavailable at this writing. A virtual-server solution requires a boatload of RAM, which my desktop PC (with 512 MB) did not have, so I used option a..
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Textbooks rarely discuss the physics of the phonograph anymore, since the CD and other digital formats have largely replaced the older format. To make up for that loss, here’s a very brief explanation of how sound comes out of a vinyl plastic disk. The reader is invited to look elsewhere for additional details.
First, the basics. Sound is a vibration in a medium such as air. These vibrations can make objects, like your eardrum, vibrate in sympathy. Thomas Edison in 1878 perfected a machine that could take the vibrations from someone talking VERY LOUDLY into a horn-shaped receiver, translate them to a vibrating needle, and finally onto a wax or tinfoil covered cylinder. The wiggles of the needle imitated the vibrations of the air. Playback used the s ame equipment. The vibrating needle would excite the airhorn, and sound could be heard coming from the horn. The process — captured by the classic corporate logo of the RCA Victor company (right) — was entirely mechanical.
[You can recreate the process today with a sewing needle taped to a homemade paper cone. Choose an album that won't break your heart if it gets scratched, place it on a turntable and start the platter going. Hold the wide end of the paper cone at one point and let the needle drag along the record. If you listen very carefully , you'll be able to hear the tracks.]
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Like most of my generation, I bought and listened to record albums. That is, until my apartment was burglarized in ’85, and I lost my amp and turntable. For these past 22 years, I have been yearning for a replacement system, but raising kids on a teacher’s salary leaves little room for quality stereo component systems.
My wait is finally over, thanks to the serendipitous gift of a Technics linear tracking turntable from a fellow high school chess coach. The subject came up because in my classroom sidelight I have Isaac Hayes’ album, “Black Moses,” which a former teacher had left me. We got to talking about albums and turntables, and how we missed listening to our old music. Sure, some of the old stuff is now digital, but a lot of the vinyl I have will probably never end up on CD.
Anyway he had just decided to divest himself of his 10,000-album collection, and his turntables, by giving the albums to his university and the turntables to any takers. On the last day of the chess season, he brought me a dusty, but very functional Technics SL-BL3, a nice linear tracking model I probably could never have afforded 20 years ago.
I had to buy a $40 phono preamp from Circuit City, so I could run the phono’s audio into my computer’s sound card. I have started the painstaking, but fun, process of converting fom analog vinyl to digital CD and mp3.
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Today’s favorite personal music device is the iPod, an engineering marvel that has made Apple a ton of money. Back in the day, though, the wonder device was the pocket transistor radio.
My father ran a TV-radio repair business, and for my 6th birthday (not sure really) I got a Toshiba transistor radio, similar to the one pictured here.
To a six-year-old, this item was The Coolest Thing, since I could now listen to the radio — my radio — pretty much wherever I liked. The design of the unit was futuristic (well, for 1962, anyway) and even now has a certain retro appeal. It was simple to operate. A dial to turn it on and adjust the volume. Another to tune it. The tuning dial had only the first digit of the AM frequencies, using a “font” strikingly similar to that used in my father’s ’51 Hudson’s speedometer and clock dials. Pinpointing any particular frequency was an art, requiring patience and a steady hand, but in the NYC area, signal strength was seldom an issue.
With the radio came a leather cover and an earphone. The earphone was too big for my child-sized ear, so I never used it. I’m not sure how long I had this radio, or how long I used it. Eventually, FM radio became more appealing, but I never acquired an FM set with the same size and panache of the Toshiba.
This is a preview of iPods are cool, but so was my first portable music device . Read the full post (566 words, 5 images, estimated 2:16 mins reading time)Possibly related posts:
So, here’s the sad tale of woe and lamentations — all because of accursed comment spam — and operator incompetence.
A little more than a week ago, this site was chugging along just fine. I wasn’t posting much, but I did check every once in a while to see if all was well. Then on Monday the 8th, my site had the dreaded “your account has been suspended” boilerplate from the web host.
I scurried around trying to figure why it was suspended. My bills were paid up, and as far as I knew all the scripts were kosher. My host’s support staff only said (initially) that their server was running near capacity and that my site was hogging about 30% of the CPU cycles. Without any prior notification, they just shut me down.
I was pissed, of course. I complained, and they set about tracking down the source of the problem. I also tried everything to clear up the problem. Deleted the directories, reloaded the files, upgraded WordPress to 2.0.6, tried different browsers — all to no avail. Finally, I reluctantly decided to move the blog elsewhere. I was both frustrated and ticked at my hosts, and I was ready to leave them behind.
Fate intervened, however, and for the best, I believe.
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Yesterday. I managed to render my new iPod Shuffle into an inert piece of plastic and metal. How? I have no idea, but probably because I pulled it out of the USB port before it was ready. It was so cooked that none of the computers in the house could peek inside it or even format it. iTunes said it was corrupt, but failed to repair it, and the Apple Updater also fell flat on its face.
I was resigned to taking the thing back to the store to get a new one, until I discovered after considerable searching online Apple’s own anti-nuke solution — the iPod shuffle Reset Utility 1.0.1. It saved my little iPod Shuffle from oblivion.
It was just released, so word of its arrival has not spread across the ‘net yet. I am adding a post about to help speed the news to other broken iPod Shuffle sufferers.
So, to avoid this problem, watch the blinking amber light on your Shuffle. Don’t remove the iPod from the USB port until the light stops blinking, or you risk corrupting the flash memory. In my case. the corruption was so bad that Windows and Linux could see the drive, but not recognize the data partition. Result: dead Shuffle.
I read online that many other “Shufflers” have had the same problem, to such an extent that Apple dealers don’t argue or attempt to fix the units. They just exchange them. I guess Apple corporate got tired of the piles of defunct Shuffles cluttering up the back room and asked the firmware programmers to whip up a solution. Thanks for the Christmas present, guys!
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