Anti-Vaccination!

Oprah Winfrey is about to give a voice to the most dangerous health nut in the public eye today, Jenny McCarthy. Oprah has the potential to kill many more people than the swine flu by giving McCarthy a TV show to espouse her scientifically illiterate ramblings.

I tried to email this to the Oprah Winfrey show but the email widget only allows 2000 characters. I guess I’m too long-winded.

Oprah:

Please reconsider carefully giving your backing and support to the dangerous and wrong Jenny McCarthy. Anti-vaccinationist propaganda like that espoused by McCarthy has literally caused the death of children all around the world. Her refusal to understand the basic science around vaccination, and denial of numerous scientific studies proving that there is no link between autism and vaccines is responsible for the return of several deadly diseases previously eradicated in the civilized world.

This quote of hers clearly shows her complete misunderstanding of the situation:

“€œI do believe sadly it’s going to take some diseases coming back to realize that we need to change and develop vaccines that are safe. If the vaccine companies are not listening to us, it’s their f___ing fault that the diseases are coming back. They’re making a product that’s s___. If you give us a safe vaccine, we’ll use it. It shouldn’t be polio versus autism.”
Jenny McCarthy in Time Magazine, April 2009

The reason that the diseases are coming back is that people are not vaccinating their children with the EXISTING, WELL TESTED, SAFE vaccines. The reason people are not vaccinating is unscientific fear mongering, and that is the fault of ignorant, self-deluding fools like Jenny McCarthy. There is well founded science behind the safety of the vaccines. McCarthy’s claims about the problem have morphed with the science. First she blamed mercury in the vaccines. When that was disproven by science, she started blaming dead virus fragments. When that was disproven, she started blaming some mysterious “toxins” in vaccines for autism. She and her associates are scientifically illiterate, and giving her wrong ideas your implied support is dangerous.

Please please please have your own team of experts look into this situation. Talk to real doctors and epidemiologists. Don’t encourage your huge audience to look to celebrities with liberal arts educations for their medical advice. You have a huge influence over the general public, and with that influence comes a huge responsibility. You have the potential to kill people by supporting Jenny’s crank ideas. You don’t have believe me or others like me who contact you on this topic, just please do the due diligence and talk to the real experts.

Thanks for listening.

ZFS Borked

I have a Sun x4500 at work, with 48 500 GB disks in it, with 46 of those configured as a gigantic ZFS filesystem. A couple of weeks ago when I had to restart it, it wasn’t able to mount the ZFS filesystem. After bashing on it a bit to get it to boot up without mounting the ZFS filesystem, I was able to use Solaris’s format command to determine that I have two disks with bad blocks, but format was not able to repair them. Fortunately the two disks are in two different raidz groups, so the data is all still there.

I have been trying to disable the problem disks, so that I can mount the ZFS filesystems in degraded mode and at least get at my data. I use cfgadm -c unconfigure device to turn off the SATA port of the two problem disks, and then zpool import pool to import the pool. That takes forever, but during the import, I can manually mount some of the zfs filesystems and access the data for a while until the server locks up.

This is a real nuisance. I don’t know why disabling the bad disks doesn’t allow the system to work normally until my replacement disks arrive. Ok Internets, any ideas?

Das Keyboard vs IBM Model M

I just saw this article on techreport.com via reddit, reviewing a Das Keyboard and comparing it to an IBM Model M. I use a Das Keyboard every day, and I have loved it since I got it two years ago. Last weekend, I was taking a bunch of old electronics junk to the local recycle depot, and as I was unloading my van, I noticed perched on top of a pile of old junk, a pristine Model M keyboard. It was as if my attention was drawn to it by a stray sunbeam, illuminating just the keyboard.

Of course, I grabbed it and brought it to work, and tested it out. I couldn’t believe that I found a genuine Model M in excellent condition that was very clean and actually works! It was made with the 1984 design, but built in 1993, so it has a ps/2 connector instead of the old style big keyboard plug. What a find!

If you don’t know what is so special about an IBM Model M keyboard, you are not a typing snob or computer geek. If you do know what it is, writhe in envy.

What’s Shaw Doing to My Torrents?

I have Shaw Cablesystems as my ISP. I was downloading a few torrents today, a couple of which were using trackers hosted on thepiratebay.org. For some reason, the tracker announcements kept failing, which prevents my torrent client from finding any peers. I had no network connectivity problems, and I could ping the tracker servers.

I launched a command prompt, did a “dig vip.tracker.thepiratebay.org” and got a list of IP addresses. Then, in my torrent client, I went into the stuck torrent and added http://ip-address/announce as a user-added announce server, where I replaced ip-address with one of the addresses that my dig command produced, and restarted the torrent. Lo and behold, the torrent started downloading and instantly ramped up to a couple of hundred k per second of transfer rate. A few minutes later it finished.

I don’t know what’s going on there, but it seems like somehow Shaw is trying to block my access to torrent trackers. This seems to be an alternative method to reduce torrent traffic instead of doing traffic shaping, which they have been accused of in the past.

It still works, but if I always have to do that it’s going to be a nuisance.

Quick ZFS Trick

I just built a new big disk array for disk-to-disk backup, and I want to re-purpose the old disk, but not for a while. I already have applications set up to write to /data/ on this server, so I want to build a new zfs pool with all it’s zfs filesystems mounted at data, where the old pool is.

First I created a new zpool from the new disks called datanew. Then I used zfs send and zfs receive to replicate the old pool onto the new one. Then, I did this neat trick to remount the old pool on /dataold/, and remount the new one on /data/.

zpool export data
zpool import data dataold


zpool export datanew
zpool import datanew data

The end result was that the new pool is now mounted at /data/ and I didn’t have to reconfigure any of my applications, and the old data is still available at /dataold/ just in case.

Every time I have to do anything funky with zfs filesystems it turns out to be super-easy and I’m always impressed.

The coalition can’t work.

How can a government work when it is formed from three parties with mutually exclusive aims? There is no reconciling one party that wants to take money from people who earn it and give it to people who won’t earn it, another party that wants to take a successful country, strip it of it’s money and leave with most of it, and a third party that wants to take the money from everyone whether they have any or not, and give it to their families, friends and associates. I’ll leave you to guess which description summarizes my impression of the NDP, BQ and Liberals.

None of the parties that were unsuccessful in the last election are forming this coalition for the betterment of Canada. If they wanted that they would be trying to form a coalition government with the party that actually won the election. They are doing it to selfishly take power.

Dear Catholic Parents

Here’s a letter to the editor of our local paper that I wrote this week when I read that come of the parents in the local Catholic (public) school district were considering disallowing the planned immunization program against HPV (the Human papillomavirus) for school-age girls. HPV is responsible for as many as 70 percent of reported cases of cervical cancer.

Dear Catholic Parents

I was distressed to read in the St. City News about the clearly misguided people who want to prevent young girls from being immunized at school against a widespread virus which can have deadly effects, HPV. Some Catholic school parents apparently want to allow a certain percentage of young girls to contract genital warts some time in their lives, and some percentage of those girls will get cervical cancer and die early. The parents think that by doing this they will be making sure that their daughters understand that promiscuity and early sexual activity are bad choices.

Now call me crazy, but I think the best way to make my daughter understand that becoming sexually active too early can have unfortunate and even dire consequences is to just tell her that, repeatedly. There are enough dire consequences to early sexual activity, like teenage pregnancy, other STDs, and social stigma, without us having to add preventable ones like HPV and cervical cancer.

It is a fact of life that youths make bad choices sometimes, the same as anyone else. As parents, it is our responsibility to ensure as much as possible that the consequences of bad choices made by our children are not debilitating or fatal. Presently, almost ALL people who are sexually active get HPV at some time in their lives, according to the CDC. The CDC has peer-reviewed scientific studies that prove that the vaccine is safe, effective, and will prevent HPV infections that cause seventy percent of cervical cancer cases when administered to girls who have not yet been exposed to HPV through sexual activity.

I would have failed as a parent if I were to allow my daughter to get a preventable case of cervical cancer because she might make a poor decision in the future. How about you?

Scott,
St. Albert

My Blog’s Old Images are Broken

I was hosting images for this blog on cranky.ca. That server is down at the moment and I’m trying to figure out alternate hosting for it, but in the mean time the images that were in the older posts on my blog are missing. Sorry about that.

Where I Was When Obama Was Declared President

Everyone says this is a seminal moment in history and that people will remember where they were and what they were doing when Obama was declared president-elect of the USA, as the first ever black president, just like they remember where they were when Neil Armstrong took his small step, or when Challenger blew up or on 9/11.

Since my memory is like a steel seive, I’m making a note here to my future self: I was watching election coverage on TV, and McCain had a very early lead with only a tiny fraction of districts reporting. We went to the OSC fall general meeting, and I got home at 21:00 or so expecting to have to wait hours like the last election in the US to hear anything. I turned on the TV and was surprised to see them declare Obama the winner.

I was amazed it was over so fast, and pleased that hope and rationality had achieved such a resounding victory against fear mongering, ignorance, old-boy politics and the old guard.

It wasn’t until the next morning that I heard that Proposition 8 in California had passed. I’m not gay and in fact know very few gay people. Gayness makes me slightly uncomfortable, but mostly only in the way that you feel uncomfortable from anything you’re not around alot. What the hell, I’m from a redneck city. However, I think that California banning gay marriage was a gross injustice that amounts to legalized discrimination and nothing more, and I was very shocked to hear that somewhere that I consider fairly progressive (at least for Americans) would be so intolerant. Also disappointing but less surprising were ballots in Florida and Arizona banning gay marriage and one in Arkansas banning gay couples from adopting children. This stuff shows there is still a long way to go.

I was pleased to see though that Proposition 2 in Michigan to allow stem cell research was passed. Banning stem cell research was one of the more boneheaded moves instigated by religious right nuts in the US. Another positive result was the failure of Proposition 48 in Colorado defining human life as existing from conception. Washington even passed a ballot to allow doctor-assisted suicide for terminally ill patients. It’s about time society matured a bit down there and stopped listening to religious nuts trying to impose first century superstitions on people by law.

I guess if I was American you’d call me a libertarian.

At Least it’s a Buck Instead of 20

A couple of weeks ago I read about tire plugs on Kevin Kelley’s Cool Tools blog. I live in a newer neighborhood where people are still building houses, so there are a lot of screws and nails and other construction debris around. Since we moved into our new house in 2003 I’ve had about five flats fixed, and that gets expensive, so I was excited to find out about these tire plug things. I went to Canadian Tire (called for no good reason Pneu Canadien in our house) was pleased to find a kit with a rasp, a plug tool and five plugs for about five bucks. The way they work is that you remove the screw or whatever, use the rasp to roughen the inside of the hole, and then you jam the plug, which is basically a piece of string covered in sticky bad-smelling black goo, into the hole with a tool that looks a bit like a screwdriver handle with a giant sewing needle on it. Then you just cut off the bit of the string plug left sticking out of the hole, and voila!

The van had leaky tires on both sides on the rear. Jenn filled both up the day I bought the tire fixing kit. I examined the tires and found big screws stuck in both. I fixed the holes with the plug kit, and managed to only lose a couple of psi per tire in the process. It’s pretty slick. Supposedly you’re supposed to get an internal patch installed over the hole to consider the repair “permanent”, but the plugs I’ve used seem to be holding well for me so far.

Yesterday when we took Mack to water polo Jenn said the van was pulling to the right. When we stopped, I found, sure enough, a big bloody screw in the right front tire. Dammit!. When we got home I rolled the van into a position that allowed me to access the screw to get it out and fix the hole. I was sitting on the ground, wiggling the screw out with pliers while Mack watched, and he goes “Why is there one in that tire too?” Sure enough, there was another screw in the right rear tire again. I fixed both. That’s four punctures in one week. I’m starting to get paranoid.