NHS Induction

I have been inducted into the National Honor Society because I am honorable, and it is proved I am honorable by the fact that I am in an honor society.

Relevant. (Source: xkcd #703)

But anyway, infinite tautological recursion aside, the NHS is an organization that promotes the virtues of scholarship, service, character, and leadership. They apparently liked my essay, which made much of my work on Abiathar, which is a legitimately amazing thing, if you ask me. You can learn more about NHS at their website.

There were 9 inductees for NHS in my school's ceremony this year.

Dramatically lighting my candle

An Open Letter to Bundleware Installers

This might belong better at Fleex's Lab, but whatever; maybe I'll put it in both places. Anyway, it's an open letter to the people who make installers that bundle badware.

Just a few minutes ago I got infected by the Conduit bundleware/adware browser hijacker. It changed my default page in all my browsers and tried to register a bunch of useless extensions. I never would have gotten it out without the help of MalwareBytes Anti-Malware, which is by far the most amazing piece of software ever (made by some really awesome people too). This has happened to me before and is not really a big deal. The problem is that this kind of thing is bundled with some legitimately useful programs.

Why? Why is it necessary to annoy users with exceedingly awful programs that aren't even related to what's being installed? I want to use your software, I really do. But when you start putting in things like Conduit or the Ask Toolbar, you significantly damage my opinion of you. I don't really mind it so much if you give me and easy way to turn it off - yes, you get money probably maybe - but putting this stuff in no matter what I do is just despicable. How would you like every tool you every try to use installing ten toolbars and constantly injecting ads into your browser?

Just stop. Allowing users to be spied on and made vulnerable should end your career as a software developer. When I write a programmer's equivalent of the Hippocratic oath, I will be sure to include a promise to never compromise user's security for a little referral royalty money. I very much regret not consulting the Installer Hall of Shame before using these installers. (I'm not going to name the installers because I used two recently and I'm not entirely sure which one did it. I have a pretty good idea, but I don't want to needlessly damage anyone's public image.)

From now on, I will refuse to support in any way any application whose installer makes it needlessly difficult to avoid getting badware in the computer. I will make do without your services. I will find somebody else who gives me a shred of respect by not wrecking my UX. I call upon every citizen of the Internet to pester the companies who bundle things like Conduit until they remove it or make it clear what will happen.

:(

Brighter Dawns

A speaker from the Brighter Dawns volunteering organization gave a short speech at my school today. Before today, I hadn't heard of them, but they seem to be a good organization. Brighter Dawns establishes water wells, sanitation infrastructure, and some education to a focused region in Bangladesh (which has a high percentage of people without access to good water). Their mission is to help set up the necessary infrastructure, teach the people how to use it, and then let the people maintain it. As I've said, it seems to be A Good Thing.

Learn more about Brighter Dawns at their web site.

Third ACT Score

The official letter from ACT hasn't come in the mail yet, but NUMATS helpfully sent my new act score via e-mail!

35

Wow. That is - to be honest - better than I expected, even though I got a 34 last time. The day of the test, I was extremely tired (from performing the play the previous night). As usual, it seems Reading was my (relatively) weak area.

The Disadvantage of Hand Sanitizers

This is something that makes me a little upset. Throughout schools, public buildings, and most houses can be found an inordinate quantity of hand sanitizing stations, which spritz some strong-smelling stuff onto your hands that allegedly kill some number of germs that has a lot of nines.

Well, killing germs is great - who wants to be sick? But what happens to the 1% or 0.1% that survive and why did they survive? Answer: because they're tougher than the others that got killed. Without the flood of the Hand Sanitizer of Accelerated Natural Selection, the germs would compete for existence in a way that did not involve resistance to antibiotics - probably for space or access to unsuspecting cells.

Also, the human immune system, like the rest of the body, needs to be kept in shape. If I was to sit in my chair all day, my muscles would lose mass because I wasn't using them; the body regulates nutrients to the parts of the body that require them. Similarly, living in a perfectly sterile environment will cause the immune system - which takes a lot of resources - to be shut off. This is why farm kids playing in the dirt all the time tend to be healthier than those who walk through apartment buildings all the time; they're exposed to light attacks that can be easily dealt with, but keep the immune system necessary.

Hand "sanitization" is no substitute for hand washing. Washing the hands with soap and water kills germs and gets them off the body. Quick sanitizers have their place, but they should probably not be nearly as commonplace as they are.

Thanks to my father for first teaching me how things like this work.

Wolfram|Alpha

I spent a few minutes today messing around with Wolfram|Alpha, the well-known computational/knowledge engine. It can tell you more about or calculate interesting things based on almost any input that corresponds to an objective fact (like "birth rate Miami" or "sin x = 2cos x", not "most beautiful painting"). It can do almost computation and has access to insane amounts of information.

From just some English-like text, it puts together a query, the visual structure of which it displays conveniently under the search box. Then, in a matter of seconds, it produces all kinds of information about your query, and of course the solution if it was mathematical.

The Random button produces, well, a random query, presumably that somebody somewhere entered recently. I've received all kinds of interesting things from it, from math to maps to DNS. I could probably spend hours just trying to learn things Wolfram can do.

Relax

With the play over and a large biology project done (all the day before it's due, of course), my life has suddenly become significantly less busy. There's still all the normal classes and a speech coming up in a couple weeks, but for the first time in six months, I can come home from school when classes dismiss instead of being at some meeting for an hour and a half.

The result? Abiathar development will resume and I might get back to doing the YouTube thing. I recently had a really awesome and original idea for an LP series. First, though, I should finish up the LP of the Commander Keen mod I started a few weeks back. Free time is nice though, I don't really have to do any of that. We shall see.

Lights Down

Well, tonight was the second and final performance of the Radium Girls play (by D. W. Gregory). The entire cast, including the non-acting crew, has worked really hard. This performance was probably better than last night's, at least from my perspective. Fewer blocking points were missed, but there were some more issues with enunciation. Overall, though, costume changes were smoother and scene transitions might have been a little faster.

After the performance, much of the cast - including myself - went to a nearby Village Inn for some amazing food. I was intending to get only some dessert, but somehow ended up ordering a very hearty dinner plate involving chicken, mashed potatoes, corn, and a Caesar salad.

Despite the smallness of this post, today was a very eventful day - I even took the ACT (for the third time) in the morning.

"Now, now, Mrs. MacNeil. I'm sure that's not necessary."

Discussing lawsuits with company president & VP

"How can you say that you did not know?"

"Your Honor, we have yet to present our defense!"

Cast & crew group photo

Opening Night

It's the night we've been anticipating for three months: the opening night of the Radium Girls play at my school. As I've mentioned before, I play five roles, three named, two major:

• Edward Markley - lawyer for the US Radium Corporation
• Dr. Von Sochocky - scientist and founder of the radium company
• Dr. Harrison Martland - chief medical examiner of the county
• Store owner
• Salesman

The dress rehearsals last week rushed in big elements like props and costumes, which miraculously worked without a hitch in tonight's production. There were only a few minor slip-ups, essentially all of which were easily dealt with.

Talking about settlements with Raymond Berry (opposing lawyer, center) and Katherine Wiley (spokesperson, left)

Selling Venecine

Looking on in a board room

It was a great success. Tomorrow's performance should be even better!

Common Origins is not Common Ancestry

We're finishing up the evolution unit in biology right now, and of course I'm thinking about the creation versus evolution debate. A PowerPoint presentation displayed the striking genetic similarities between humans and chimpanzees (in addition to a few other related species), and later loudly proclaimed how it conflicted with "traditional views".

Note: this PowerPoint was not created by the teacher; it was borrowed from a teachers' resource collection.

The slides talked about how the genetic similarities - like similar bullet casing grooves at a crime scene - indicate common origins. I'll say right now that I don't take an issue with that. In just a few short words, it equated that with common ancestry. That's a very subtle equivocation; those concepts are quite different.

To have a common origin is to have been produced by the same process or agent. To have common ancestry (in this context) is to have evolved from the same older species back in time. I think the common origins of the similar-looking species do not harm the creationist viewpoint; in fact, they may strengthen it. A God creating all this life on Earth, and later humanity in His image, will keep a consistent "style".

Take, for example, some compiled applications which have inlined their dependency DLLs. If two applications depended on the same class library, they will share that code or at least most of it, depending on things like inheritance. Does that mean the executable files evolved through random chance? No! They were put together by an intelligent agent, in this case the programmer, wanting to re-use code to manage complexity.

Similar analogies could be made to (again programming) classes. If you override some of the methods of a class, you will get a new class with much the same behavior as the old, with some key differences - the changed and added methods.

This doesn't prove the creationist case, but it does correct a fallacy used to apply data to something it may not represent. Watch your wording.

Dress Rehearsal Time

The play Radium Girls will be presented this Friday and Saturday: just four days from now. Therefore, we have started doing extra-long dress rehearsals this week. They are seriously pretty long, going for four hours after school normally ends. A short dinner break is taken a little more than halfway in.

Fortunately, everybody is pretty solid on lines. The costume changes necessary from here on out are going to require some getting used to. I have five characters and therefore a nontrivial amount of changes, two of which can hold up the show if not done quickly. I also need to have accents to help the audience differentiate the characters I play, so there's that complexity as well.

Overall, it looks to be a great show. Technical aspects (lighting and sound) were almost fully worked out today, lines and character development are fairly solid, and we just need to get the props and costumes figured out the rest of this week.

Chess Variants

I just got home from a less-than-formal bughouse tournament at the local chess club. Bughouse is a very unusual variation of chess in which four players are split into two "teams" and one member from each team plays a member of the other team on a board. Pieces cycle through the boards and can be placed (almost) anywhere on the board in lieu of a normal move.

Strategy in bughouse is extremely different from that in normal chess, and though the games are played with the same pieces, chess and bughouse are totally different things. I feel that playing bughouse and other variants too often will corrupt my skill in real chess by subconsciously using tactics from the wrong game to internally generate possible moves.

Perhaps it would be better for everyone's chess skills if different-colored or -sized boards were used for playing bughouse. I suspect there could be some at-least-semi-valid psychological support for such a thing. That way, mental associations would treat the games more differently.