| Sunday,
October 22, 2000 Hurrying along. There seems to be more to
do every day.
Roland sends this link on Zinni's explanation of his decision on
sending the Cole into Yemen:
http://www.washtimes.com/national/default-20001020221429.htm
I leave conclusions to you.
I have been trying to buy a slocket for a week. Fry's doesn't have
them. Outpost doesn't list them. The web outfit I found one on took my
money but hasn't sent it; I ordered it a week ago. What in the world
is going on? TC Computers isn't a place I intend to do a lot more
business with. At $18 for the part and $8 more for shipping you would
think that something ordered on October 13 would be HERE now, would you
not?
I have got to learn more about what I am doing with some of this stuff.
Ah well.
I have had one more port fail on the Netgear DS-108. On the other
hand I bought a new one and put it in the Cable Room for the servers and
it works fine.
I removed the ICS-124 KMV Data Switch and replaced it with a Belkin
OmniView Pro 8 Port KVM Switch. That solved the problem with the
Microsoft Terminal Server: unchanged this came up fine when it would show
no video through the ICS.
Here at least is a situation where the more expensive equipment worked
first time. The ICS-124 is all right, but Belkin seems to have a better
video bandwidth.
Here is what TCCOMPUTERS.com tells me about my order:
ORDER IS IN PROCESS. Isn't that splendid? Informative? This was
supposed to ship on the 18 -- a fact they did not tell me when I ordered
it on the 13th -- and now it is "in process" on the 22nd.
I do not think I will recommend TCCOMPTERS ( www.tccomputers.com
) to many people I like.
I am no particular fan of "freethought" particularly
organized freethought, but one appeal they distribute is worth paying
attention to. Note that this is the Year of Our Lord the Two Thousandth:
CAN YOU HELP SAVE DR. SHAIKH?
Dr. Younus Shaikh is founder-President of
Enlightenment, a Pakistan-based organization which is a member of the
International Humanist and Ethical Union (www.iheu.org). Dr. Shaikh is a
doctor and a teacher at a medical college in Islamabad. He lived and
worked in the UK before returning to Pakistan.
On October 4 2000, Dr. Shaikh was arrested by
the Islamabad police and booked under the dreaded Section 295-C
(Blasphemy) of the Pakistan Penal Code. The police First Information
Report was not readily available, but in it he is alleged to have defiled
Mohammad, the Prophet of Islam, by pointing out that the Prophet did not
become a Muslim till the age of 40 (i.e. until he received the first
message of God), and that the Prophet's parents were non-Muslims because
they died before Islam was proposed by the Prophet. It is for stating
these facts that Dr. Shaikh will be killed by the State, if he is found
guilty.
There is considerably more, of course. See www.iheu.org
if you are interested. one suspects that Dr. Shaikh may have said more
than what is reported there. But perhaps not. Of course in this
world many scholars are persecuted. Christians have been routinely killed
in Iran, as were Bahá'í and other "heretics". One cannot
crusade for everyone.
I have just read a very long academic article on The Bell Curve. I
cannot better the commentary of one of the scholars in a discussion group
I belong to:
I've just read the ("long,
tedious") Reifman article and find that those descriptors are not a
bad fit, although it is indeed not repetitious. On the other hand, it is
useful. It is an account of what has come out of a half-decade of first,
hysterical denunciation of TBC as outright fraud, vicious incompetence,
simple racism, etc.; and then intense effort by large parts of the
offended academic enclaves actually to demonstrate the truth of those
denunciations. What this article shows, in embarrassingly
heart-on-its-sleeve, objectivity-only (for a change in the social
sciences) style, is in fact this: that the best the denouncers have been
able to do is to argue that Herrnstein and Murray may have exaggerated
(rather than overestimated) the simple heritability of IQ. There has been,
obviously, nothing that even begins to be a serious refutation of the
general empirical argument of TBC. (We leave aside for now all the social
and theoretical ones.)
After hearing the wild hysterical denunciations of The Bell Curve at
AAAS and other respectable conventions of science, this denouement would
be amusing if there were not so many elements of tragedy. One might
wish that IQ were not inherited, and that The Bell Curve was nonsense, but
in fact that turns out not to be the case. One may ignore facts of
course; but they are stubborn things that return to affect outcomes
whether we will or no.
Moreover, reading the long and tedious article shows one other thing:
many geneticists do not apparently know as much about uterine factors as
the average diary cow breeder. Sad. Very sad.
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