East of the Sun, West of the Moon

Obviously some people find that pretty difficult:

Abstinence-only programs like those promoted by the Bush administration don’t seem to be working on teenagers in the president’s home state, according to a state-sponsored study by Texas A&M University researchers.

Or is this a case of people walking around blindfolded, hoping that if they can’t see the rest of the world, the rest of the world won’t see how naive they are? Face it, lots of teenagers will have sex, whether their parents like or know it or not. So the question is not of yes or no, but of how. Please, let someone out there wake up and smell the coffee and give these kids a proper education before the number of teenager mothers start growing again. At least, last I remember the number was going down.

Digging around for some statistics, I find an article with the following quote:

Teenage women’s contraceptive use at first intercourse rose from 48% to 65% during the 1980s, almost entirely because of a doubling in condom use. By 1995, use at first intercourse reached 78%, with 2/3 of it condom use.

Further down it reads:

Steep decreases in the pregnancy rate among sexually experienced teenagers accounted for most of the drop in the overall teenage pregnancy rate in the early-to-mid 1990s. While 20% of the decline is because of decreased sexual activity, 80% is due to more effective contraceptive practice.

Also in there:

Teen pregnancy rates are much higher in the United States than in many other developed countries–twice as high as in England and Wales or Canada, and nine times as high as in the Netherlands or Japan

Which could go a long way to explain why this phenomenon seems so alien to my born and raised in the Netherlands self.

Of course, who am I kidding, I’m probably preaching to the choir here anyway.

Articles or webpages that caught my eye recently:

• Definitely a case of oops for Michelin, here.
  

  For the first time in its 105-year history, Michelin is recalling an edition of its famous food guide after it recommended a restaurant whose rating was determined before it served customers.

• A row over a tsunami warning system:
  

  Thailand proposed that the centre should be in its capital, Bangkok, but was opposed by India and Indonesia.

  This sounds very much like what Cringely talked about:

  Here’s the problem with big multi-government warning systems. First, we have a disaster. Then, we have a conference on the disaster, then plans are proposed, money is appropriated, and three to five years later, a test system is ready. It isn’t the final system, of course, but it still involves vast sensor arrays both above and below the surface of the ocean, satellite communication, and a big honking computer down in the bowels of the Department of Commerce or maybe at NASA. That’s just the detection part. The warning part involves multilateral discussions with a dozen nations, a treaty, more satellite communication, several computer networks, several television and radio networks, and possibly a system of emergency transmitters. Ten years, a few million dollars and we’re ready.

  Le sigh…

• Another case of oops
  

  At least 75 pages of highly classified information about human traffickers from the Dutch Royal Marechaussee - a service of the Dutch armed forces that is responsible for guarding the Dutch borders - have been leaked to the controversial weblog Geen Stijl (No Style).

  The documents, which contain phone numbers and tapped conversations, were found unencrypted on Kazaa, the public file sharing service. The likeliest explanation for their appearance is that a member Dutch Royal Marechaussee worked on the documents from home and unintentionally shared his entire hard drive with the rest of the world, through Kazaa.

Enough for now.

I added a Google News Alert for the keyword Nederland the other day, without first checking what kind of results I’d get with that. Seeing the first actual results this afternoon I wish I had, though, because 99% of what it turned up was references to Nederland, TX and Nederland, CO. Those Americans just couldn’t leave well enough alone and had to name a place or two after my country of birth! And not particularly impressive places either, one has a population of under 1,500 and the other of under 20,000. The latter you might be able to call a town, or a city, by its official definition, but the other really isn’t worth the name town even if the Gazetteer calls it that. It’s more like a village, sheesh.

So… I’ll be keeping an eye on that News Alert but I’ll either need to explicitely exclude those two places somehow, or give up on it.

Interesting LJ entry by a fellow IgorMUD player:

Anyway, Dunbar did some research and concluded that our brains have enough cognitive processing power to keep tabs on a maximum about 150 individuals. That’s everyone, from your family, to neighbours, work/school colleagues, friends, friends of friends, family of friends, your postman, local shopkeepers… it also explains why people in big cities are so impersonal. You could run into 150 people on your way to work - very possibly on a tube train carriage (the way they’re crowded during rush hour, it wouldn’t surprise me).

Now have a look at your own circle of friends, your list of email addresses, etc, and figure out with how many of those people you are really keeping in touch?

Two days ago a new 17″ monitor that I had ordered arrived, to replace the 14 or 15″ monitor that was starting to age a bit. This was the monitor that was used by the PC running Win98, so no long-term damage was being done but it was time to replace that one (which could only do 800×600 barely and was most comfortable with 640×480) with the new one. The new monitor now does a comfortable 1280×768 with 32 bit colour at a smooth 85Hz refresh rate. Bliss! The old monitor hasn’t been thrown away, though. Yesterday evening I hooked it up to a KVM switch in the server-room where, combined with an old keyboard, it can rest peacefully and if the past is any indication, be used once or twice per year, during hardware upgrades for the firewall PC or the fileserver PC. That will also make my back happier, not having to lug it up and down the stairs when something goes wrong and I’m already irritated and rushed anyway!

Ah, yes. Thank you, Pär, for dropping my rank back to where it was halfway through December (roughly 13.5 kyu).

This Ars Technica article looks like a handy reference page to keep up in a browser when the hardware arrives in a few weeks. The article mentions that it won’t have much in the way of manuals itself, so I should probably start collecting more bookmarks in the meantime.

It helps to connect the USB-to-PS/2 adapter to the mouse’s USB instead of to the USB-hub where the mouse is plugged in.

In other news, I now have a mouse plugged into my KVM switch using the abovementioned adapter and have the KVM switch plugged into my computer using a dual-PS/2-to-USB adapter. Am I the only one who finds that mildly amusing? I had to do it that way so I could share the mouse as the mouse PS/2 slot in my PC is fried (which is why I was using a USB mouse in the first place).

Thanks to Adam Curry for pointing this out:

Bicycle Mark just sent me a link to his SoundSeeing tour of the Albert Cuyp market in Amsterdam. By itsself a great piece of art, but even better when you click through his flickr slideshow each time you hear the cue sound. Awesome! mp3

And a little later he posts a feed for Soundseeing Podcasts. Probably not entirely unrelated.

So back in November (sheesh, time flies) I bought a new scanner/printer/copier, a nice and shiny Epson Stylus CX 5400.

The copy function was of course no trouble at all, since it does not require anything other than the thing itself to be powered up. The scanning also didn’t take much effort, as I’d used SANE before and had a reasonably good idea of where to start modifying its configuration and where to start with adjusting the (Linux) kernel configuration so it would recognise the USB device for what it was. After that, 2 months of procrastinating started because I was distracted by other projects (work and playing Go being two major ones), plus I had never worked with either CUPS or Gimp-print before, so was wondering where to start, what to expect, etc, and finally I actually had to redo some of the scanner software configuration because I moved it to a different computer that isn’t my workstation, in an attempt to sanitise the dependencies between the various machines a bit.

But today I finally got A Round Tuit ™ and installed the lot, then started digging in and for documentation. Thankfully there is quite a bit of it around, even if not all of it is non-geek-friendly, but as I am a geek, it worked out ok. Now there are two things left to do:

1. Make sure the output ends up in the middle of the page.
2. Install CUPS on the two Linux workstations so that we can start testing printing remotely.

I don’t think either one of those are going to be a problem though. *happy*