Horrors!

Omaha and I went up to Capitol Hill yesterday to get haircuts and to run her over to the Metro office to get her annual pass renewed. Since the Metro office is near Uwajimaya and Kinokinuya, I decided to run over there and see if I could find my beloved Kyokuto notebooks.

They don't carry them anymore. I was terribly bummed. They do have another brand, Maruman, which looks very pretty and has some field notebooks with lovely paper, but I decided not to spend any money.

On the way out, I walked through Uwajimaya looking for a decent brand of horseradish, since the crap they sell at the local grocery store barely burns and simply does not reach my "the hair on the top of my head is seeking refugee status elsewhere" standard of horseradish pain.

They didn't have anything quite like that. There's a German deli near my house, maybe they have what I'm looking for. In the meantime, though I did see that Uwajimaya sells Baconnaise.

Baconnaise!

So, there is a Linux zombie network...

As it turns out, there is a Linux zombie network. It's called Psyb0t. It infects cable modems and home routers, which you never turn off, and gives whatever nefarious person running the network the capability to hack into your home network, monitor all traffic going through it, and exploit any passwords you send. Nefarious, stealthy, and evil. There's a reason I run a small, home-based, home-made router with my own monitoring software. A layer of security through defensive obsolescence.

Almost all home-based routers from Linksys and Netgear are based on an old distro of Linux with a weak password that makes it easy to hack. Sad, but true. Updates are available on Netgear and Linksys's websites, and the latest versions have patched the hole.

Here's what annoys me: every report I could find on Psyb0t mentions that it's a "Linux zombie network". Yet nobody calls MyDoom, the five year old virus that makes up the current denial-of-service attack, a "Windows zombie network". Why not?

Keith Olbermann is an idiot...

As you know, I'm no fan of the Intelligent Design idiocies and the associated anti-evolutionary thinking. Every child in every classroom infested with those memes is one child fewer that might go on to be a scientist and produce the next great breakthrough in medicine agriculture. To date, not a single meaningful technological advance has been made using intelligent design as the premise. It has been as useful to us as Aristotelian physics.

So I wasn't surprised when Olbermann chose Arizona State Senator Silvia Allen's little comment, while defending a local uranium mine's lax environmental post-processing policies, "The Earth has been here 6,000 years, long before anyone had environmental laws, and somehow it hasn't been done away with."

But I was disgusted when Olbermann proceeded to make fun of the fact that Allen's comment about the age of the Earth came in the context of a discussion about uranium mining. Olbermann asserted, "The way we can know the Earth is billions of years old is because of the decay of uranium. Carbon dating!"

Sigh.

Someone tell Keith that uranium is only a mediocre dating choice because of its uniformity. It's hard to tell how much uranium a sample started with, therefore it's hard to date. Much better choices are rubidium, potassium, and strontium, all of which have multiple decay products that can be measured in ratio to one another to produce accurate results.

As for "carbon dating," carbon is an entirely different element from uranium, and is used for the dating of recently dead things, as it is only accurate out to about 50,000 years, and is only good for dating organics. (Living things have a regular flow of carbon in and out as they eat and breath; it's only after fossilization that carbon transference stops and we can reliably date the organism's age from the decay of carbon left.).

So Keith is an idiot. He should consult with a geek before he goes off, again, with an idiotic rant of that flavor. Apparently, an MSNBC peer, Ed Schultz, made a similar mistake, claiming that the Earth is only a billion years old. It's about 4.5 billion.