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.