| Personal background |
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WTP, er,]D-av%id eM. R@z()l(short-e)r, (see thoughts for the messy spelling humans, but p'rhaps not machines can get through) of the NYC suburban area, OK, Long Island, NY. USA, is (as of 1/07) celebrating his second 25th Birthday.
I'm now Y.A. Winston Smith -It's bad when your ID is stolen, worse when it's by a crew of damned Militia "patriot" "Christian Identity" types who believe Jews are the 'spawn of Satan" and anyone with some skin-cancer-stoping melinin in his/her skin is a "mud person without a soul" who can be 'killed without sin, like vermin".
It's one thing to have your "name" (see thoughts on SETI) and another to have someone who wants to shoot you steal it. WTP Associates is now NP2RS Associates (that should be a sub-2) or the family initials in the room the eve we founded our attempt to be Bill and Dave (Hewlett/Packard for the non-techies)
- we haven't scored yet, but we still don't have even a garage
APOLOGIES to all Jews, Christians of all denominations except EXCEPT
Those misusers who break every great line he ever uttered or Pharetic (Rabbinic)Jewish statement attributed to yeshua ha-nazarini (Jesus the Nazarine) No Semetic language has an upper case, and members of the One Human Race with assorted paint-jobs. (for further info see splassociation.org) I've known THAT bunch of Klan/Nazi-watchers for 30, 35 years now and their info has always turned out 100% legit.
As for Yet{B]A[/b]nother Winston Smith, that'swaving a middle finger, and maybe getting a law passed by 'States/EU/UK against "info-thieves" led by Google since "do no evil" bought DoubleClick. They're the folks who start building their little files on you (and with disks at2TByte going for sign your name as Y.A.Winston Smith, and end your letter:
"Here comes a candle to send you to bed"
Oh, ME,. that's right: An active SETI@Home participant since the day the program started,(According to stats May 23-5, I forget) he has ordered all of his operating computers (a number between 1 and 12, on any given day) that can run SETI@Home*, to do so whenever they're not tied up by his investigations, reporting, photography, or involvement with several projects with the Society for Creative Anachronism.
[July 2008 addendum Noto Bene on funny name spelling, and a warning: Please read the TOP of the "thoughts on SETI" section, or how I got slammed for posting my name, but not giving a complete biography down to ss number and height& weight (5'8.5" down from 5'9 due to info immediately below, 150 lbs. now, race: HUMAN, the only one that, so far, sometimes shows signs of intelligence on this planet beyond simplified communication and basic toolmaking]
A reporter by nature, David was forced to give up his 25-year daily newspaper routine May 5, 1999, when he was hit in the head, repeatedly, by a falling TV fotog and his HEAVY pre-digital gear, causing damage to his spine and assorted other nerves.(That's David's not the camera's or its operator's)
He's working at getting 'back in the game' writing, has abandoned silver for digital photography and, as "Aleksandr, called the Traveller, by some," practicing Elizabethan-era fencing (none of this Olympic wire-blade stuff) though wearing plate armour to protect his injured nerves, brews the best ferrogallic ink in the known world, and knows his heraldry.
On 'good' days, when things aren't generating too much pain, and his two parrots, Prester John (an African Grey named after the greatest African king who existed only in the Medieval European mind) and Clawed Shannon (a green-cheek conure who has the minimum brainwidth needed to remember a word or two), and cat Feral Kitty Kat aka Mme. Fufnik (a now-15K female Tuxedo shorthair who adopted him as a kitten) have been satisfied, and all else is done, he works on rehabilitating old DEC computers, including his own Straight-8.**
[July 2009 ... and is still awaiting settlement of his Worker's Comp action filed in Feb. 2000 I expected to be caring for my parents at this point, not being helped out by them, living in the apartment added to my home for my late grandparents]]
*Anyone reading this who has developed a TCP/IP stack for the PDP-8 system and has a 4K total version of S@H - please post it - it will increase (very slightly) the amount of work that gets done and keep a couple of 1960s-vintage computers in shape.
**David has also owned and/or worked on restoring DEC PDP-5s,7s,8s,9s,10s,11s and assorted micros. contact him through S@H for more info. [W's FISCAL CRUNCH HAS FORCED ME TO PUT THE PDP8 ON SALE AT ORIGINAL COST, MINIMUM BID, spare boards and a couple of 32 Kword disks free] |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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[The Warning!! July 2008:
I discovered something fascinating during a bit of a flame dustup recently. Several folks who decided that my failure to mention *everything* about myself here and above, like my life-long support for equality for all human beings, and, specifically my anger and fury 'gainst those who commit crimes that society still thinks are about sex, but are about power, you know males usually attempting to or forcing sex on a woman, that this meant somehow I was a "pro-rape" kinda guy.
Now, nothing can be further from the truth (the dustup started when I attacked IN WRITING a reporter who did an Internet and One Phone Call story, got bad and manipulated data from a single-cause activist running said site, and multiplied her figure for rapes per student three years ago nationally (including a fudge factor for 'women who didn't think they were raped [but we say they were])
I challenged the reporter at my alma mater to do her homework and to learn something about both statistics and sadistics from many sources, and that the culture three years ago at the U. of Indiana, Bloomington, was not what it is now in a NY suburb.
The problem with these bios is that they aren't designed to be all-inclusive. Below I talk about my feelings about government funding of Seti and Big Science in general, not my height/weight / sign/party, having been a third-generation labor organizer where I worked, my party registration, or even father's mother's blood type (O+ if you must know).
I was most interested in being termed a wack job , discredited for spending *my* time "looking for little green men" rather than a hero for donating my COMPUTERS' off-hours to doing some work for the world, rather than just letting them waste energy and collect e-mail, so they can get me up if someone needs me NOW, generally due to urgent life/living-type alerts.
I am undecided about killing all this and just warning folks that if they wish to judge me, doing it with a google won't get you there. Maybe these should be limited to the program audience?]
2009 - I will not facebook or twitter or do any of that other nonsense I keep getting invites from friends and "friends" to do. Hey, I'm in the phone book! With address even. Is Facebook really a substitute for socializing?
Older stuff (between 2001 and 2005):
I run SETI@Home as my exclusive BOINC project, because it represents service to a significant scientific project of the kind "Proxmired"* out of too many nations' budgets.
Hardware 'wealthy', I will donate unneeded time from machines that would otherwise sit idle 18 hours of the day. Were I cash wealthy, though, I would NOT donate cash - I donate MY time writing letters to my local government representatives requesting money for Big and Little Science, but do the job of government, which ranges from protecting our most needy from the real dangers of poverty, more than the hypothetical dangers of "rogue states" and the real, but minor danger from the over-zealous and otherwise deranged who turn to violence, to funding an assortment of pure research programs and providing affordable education to any who desire it and can hack the work.
[New Note - my federal, state, county, town and village Reps know me on sight. I also work to preserve local wetlands and make sure the justice system works properly, or at least as best as it can]
I had a chance to interview the late Sen William Proxmire of Wisconsin, while he was on a speaking tour - and asked him how it felt to have his name become a verb - just like the name of the man he replaced in the Senate, Joseph "Tailgunner Joe" McCarthy.
Proxmire, who belittled and denounced research spending and scientists the way McCarthy denounced and destroyed alleged "Communists" (this in a nation where, allegedly anyone was free to hold any political opinion), said he enjoyed having his name become part of the language, though the word meant fool populist out to grab a headline at the cost of a scientific project neither he nor the public understood as explained."
This was before, of course, the two Space Shuttle tragedies, which can be laid directly at Proxmire's feet. It was his bill that mandated NASA design and build a reusable launch/space vehicle for half of what NASA needed to do the job safely.
Bushboy the Vietnam-era chickenhawk-draft dodger, spends billions of non-existent dollars, and very real lives every day in Iraq, (remember - NO involvement w/"9-11", No "weapons of mass destruction" NOTHING but a nation torn from stability under a petty tyrant to outright civil war, an oil-wealthy nation forced back to "third world" living for all ... (hey Hussein was an evil fuck, but so is the Chinese government, remember Tienamin Square) where people are longing for the "good old days", living up to Uncle Karl's old dictum on tyrants who hand out a minimum livable standard of living "Man does not live by bread alone,but bread he must have".
2009 - and look at all that accomplished - the end, rather than improvement, year by year of the Shuttle program, an economic Depression, and a plan to burn Hubble, rather than pack 'er away, return back to earth for refitting and relaunching.
Now the Iraqis have neither bread, nor freedom, nor in many cases, even life - and the plotters of the Sept. 11, 01 crimes in the US (not acts of war, but mass murder), the black sheep of the Royal House of Sa'ud, live fairly freely in Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden is rarely mentioned by the purveyors of fear. [damn, that's held true]
But for space, Bush Boy has ditched some good proposals for a manned lox-liftoff vehicle carrying a manned, high-capacity super orbiter for 1960s low-tech SOLID-fuel (not only dangerous and uncontrollable but very dirty) rockets to carry folks to Low-Orbit 1 and, from there to da moon and Mars, forgetting that our real station needs to sit at 23KMi to do any good, and that as crappy as the design is, the shuttle has proven a very reliable system - Shuttle II is what we need, along with LOTS of observatories on the geosynch and lunar platforms, watching for SETI traces among other things, and occasionally sending out our own "we are here" signal to the places promising nearby stars will be *when* the signal arrives. (remember, once lifted and in place, solar power for the transmitter is free).
In later years, nobody called Proxmire to the stand during the Challenger hearings, something which would have proven fascinating. [Too bad Fennyman didn't think beyond engineering when he called witnesses and asked for a bowl of icewater.
[Out there someone is trying to judge me now, by noting I did not use the late physics guru Richard Fennyman's full name, don't remember the Challenger hearings, let alone the icewater trick and still want to know who "played" McCarthy in "Good Night and Good Luck" - and why I haven't said who I'm voting for in November]
It is the Proxmire mentality which leads many a government to cut funding for a program like SETI in general, though, unless Einstein was wrong or there are ways around the speed of light, thrugh the 'brane or something nowhere near our sights, we may have to wait years upon years to engage in utterly important dialog.
Now we might even consider building a "grand tour" quasi-intelligent light-sail to bring word of ourselves to those decades to centuries away, but 4-50 years away by RF signal. Expensive. Better than War. |
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