If "democracy" is President Bush's answer to terrorism, doesn't the advent of democratically-elected terrorists suggest that answer isn't good enough ?

A study finds that Democrats and Republicans are both adept at Ignoring Facts. Not only that, they get a mental rush while they do it.

The test subjects on both sides of the political aisle reached totally biased conclusions by ignoring information that could not rationally be discounted, Westen and his colleagues say.
Then, with their minds made up, brain activity ceased in the areas that deal with negative emotions such as disgust. But activity spiked in the circuits involved in reward, a response similar to what addicts experience when they get a fix, Westen explained.
The study points to a total lack of reason in political decision-making.

Heh.

via /.

That fits nicely with a study (pdf), linked-to by a Slashdot poster, which notes:

1. Your brain uncritically accepts the first information it gets in any new
   subject area as correct, whether it is or not.

2. Subsequent information that is in keeping with the information already
   present in your brain is uncritically accepted as correct, whether it is or
   not.

3. A new item that is contradictory to the information present in your brain is
   automatically rejected as incorrect, whether it is or not.

4. Your brain considers every item that is compatible with the majority of its
   information in a given subject area to be correct and every item that is
   contradictory to its information to be incorrect. As a result, the brain has no
   internal way to know which items of its information are correct
   representations of the real world and which are not.

5. Your brain has no way to know whether or not it has all the information
   required to respond appropriately to a given stimulus.

6. Unless your brain has additional information to the contrary, it interprets
   similar items as being identical.

7. Your brain cannot measure anything directly. All measurements must be
   made by comparison against an appropriate standard, which is often done
   incorrectly.

8. Your brain continues to interpret the external world as it was when the last
   sensory signal about a given subject area was received. As a result, the
   brain is not aware that some of its formerly correct information is now
   incorrect.

Stupid brains.

So, I'm trying to install some new forum software to handle user questions for my software company (my fun job, not the one I hate), because the one I am currently using is giving me some problems.

The new stuff installs OK, and then I try to import the old forum posts into the new forum setup. There's a utility that comes with the new stuff that's supposed to handle this, and it does, mostly. All the posts and all the users and accounts and everything gets imported nicely, with not too much hassle. I'm impressed. But, all the dates on all the posts show up as Jan 1, 1970. Now, all you programmers will recognize that date as a timestamp of 0 - the beginning of time for Unix systems (and all that copied the Unix time system), so I sadly realized that the forum importer was just failing to get a valid time, and as default, was setting all timestamps to zero. Oh well.

I thought I'd re-import the old posts, with some different settings, to try to fix this date issue. But, I couldn't find a way in the new system, to erase all the stuff I had just imported first. So, I went for a re-install. I started the installer, and it said "Hey, you already did this. Do you want to write over the existing stuff (possible problems ahead!) or do you want to delete the old stuff and create from scratch (warning! you'll lose all your old stuff!) ?" Well, of course I went with the "from scratch" option - I wanted to lose the old stuff, it was wrong.

But, if I had read a little more carefully, I would've seen that the warning about the "from scratch" option was warning me that it wasn't going to just delete the database tables associated with the forum software... No, it was going to delete all the tables in the database. What? You mean even tables that the forum software shouldn't even be looking at? Yup.

So, kaboom. And it's gone. Goodbye database! Goodbye new forum. Goodbye existing forum. Goodbye website back-end. Goodbye customer registration data. Goodbye ability to add new customers. Hello tech ISP support - got any recent backups? Yeah, we have one from 4 days ago. That'll be $75, please.

Again, if I had read carefully, this wouldn't have happened. But then again, software really shouldn't do things that are both unexpected and calamitous.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Not what I wanted to do tonight.

--

Update:
After twelve hours of panic (and even a few scary dreams about data-eating viruses destroying my home PC), it's all back to normal. They restored my db file, with only 3 days of data missing; and I can fix that by hand. Now I'll run a full backup of my own, create a new db for the new forum to live in and try it all again.

So, grab your Wienerwhistle™ and learn the toot!

Take the MENSA Intelligence Test! It's fun.

I got a 27. Would've been 28 if I thought to make the J's plural on #6.

The people who write that kind of stuff never fight; possibly they believe that to write it is a substitute for fighting. It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda-tours. Sometimes it is a comfort to me to think that the aeroplane is altering the conditions of war. Perhaps when the next great war comes we may see that sight unprecedented in all history, a jingo with a bullet-hole in him.

-- George Orwell
Homage to Catalonia

Via The Poor Man Institute.

I did some drywall patching this past weekend. One morning, I found this little guy was stuck to the wall.

I'm not sure why, but this picture scares me a little.