I hope y’all will excuse any irrational, unpredictable, or downright annoying behavior on my part over the next couple weeks. All this medical crap plus a lot of work stress are making me something something.

We’re entering the Kreplach Nebula!

I am now down 10 lbs of the 50 I need to lose. This pleases me.

On the minus side, my reading in science! shows that it’s very likely that I’m actually diabetic and not “insulin resistance syndrome”. The chance that I have a reversible syndrome appears low. Assuming that I really have Type 2 diabetes mellitus, it’s likely to get worse throughout my life, and eventually kill me. I can’t say this is good news in any way. It’s just bad news. Barring a miracle, things are probably going to get more difficult over the years and not less.

However that is in general the Human Condition. I just know one of the things that’s going to kill me now.

Had good conversations at D’s today, first with “D.Z.” who is one of the guys who rebuilds classic cars, and then with Nick. Nick claims that Zardoz is actually a good movie, but I suspect a crush on Charlotte Rampling is the source of this idea.

Tomorrow I mostly have a day off, including a haircut and my second course on how to be sick.

Had dinner with the_silent_one last night at Garduno’s on 17th. The food was ok, although we both agreed that it was too American and not Italian enough. I had spaghetti carbonara and a glass of Pinot Grigio. I managed to spill half a glass of her chianti on her and she was really nice about it.

Then a long blab session at D’s with genericus. Red Faced Bible Mike was once again there. He has now died his hair dark and is cultivating a goatee, in what appears to be an attempt to become a youth pastor.

At Garduno’s there was an old gent with a t-shirt that said “Taxation Equals Slavery” on the front and a series of quotes from Ayn Rand and the Founding Fathers against taxation on the back.

genericus told us about a friend of his who liked getting high but was way too busy in law school to do so. He therefore got high on nitrous because it was a quick cooldown. This gave me yet another brilliant marketing idea: alcoholic beverages that are chemically engineered to eliminate quickly, for about a 30 minute buzz. Possible names for them are: Jack Daniels Thoroughbred; Absolut Rush; Captain Morgan’s Clipper Ship; and Zippybrau.

It was nice to see bruisedhips at D’s, if only briefly.

A short essay on the brown years of my childhood, at http://www.contentgoeshere.com/ or syndicated on LJ as contentgoeshere

http://www.savebrian.org/

Write a story, get a felony rap?

Boy, considering the stuff I wrote in High School, I would have ended up in Guantanamo Bay.

Here’s another great pathological liar story.

Maybe some other time I should tell the story about “Mel Gibson’s nephew”, too.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt2.html

You got through college using EVIL! EVIL!

Something tells you that you’ve got to get away from it.

“Usually, we see very petty stuff, like drinking on the beach, parking violations and kids getting out of hand,” Danielson said. “We’ve never seen anything like this.”

I wonder if they have a lot of trouble with great white sharks parking improperly?

if it requires a user, genital/genital

He said it better than I can. From the latest RISKS digest, syndicated here on LJ as risks_digest

The Road to Vulnerability
Patrick Lincoln
Fri, 15 Aug 2003 17:09:33 -0700

One lesson that can be drawn from incidents like the recent massive power outage is that decreasing margins in all our infrastructures place critical societal functions at greater and greater risk of significant disruptions from rare accidental and malicious acts. Redefining acceptable levels of risks and protections as the world changes is hard work, but need to be done.

Cost pressures and tight engineering under benign assumptions lead to thin margins. Optimized engineering leads to most events being of small consequence (we’ve engineered systems to tolerate them), but some rare events can cause massive disruption. It would be ‘bad engineering’ to overdesign a system to tolerate very rare events, if that tolerance costs more than the failures it would prevent (in expected value to customer terms). Fragility to extremely rare events can be seen as good business. It would be surprising if there weren’t rare disruptions (like massive power outages) in highly optimized infrastructures.

But the invisible hand of economics and good engineering leave systems designed and optimized under assumptions of relatively benign environments at great risk if new or unexpected threats arise.

Computer systems change very rapidly, and new threats arise with disturbing speed. The current hardware manufacture, software development, and people practices of our cyber infrastructure are obviously subject to the same economic motivations as described above. So they are already (and will become even more) fragile to rare or unexpected accidental or malicious events. That’s ‘good business’ paving the road to vulnerabilities.

Post 9/11, we can point out how previously almost unthinkable scenarios are more thinkable now, and thus engineered defenses against potential attacks are more strongly motivated. Govt procurement practices, corporate and individual liability, government mandates, and other mechanisms could have a profound impact on the reliability and cost of cyber infrastructure, but also on large-scale economic concerns, so it may be imprudent to act without defining the threats. To define and quantify cyber threats and their impact, particularly in combination with coordinated physical and psychological attacks and effects, requires deep (read: expensive) contemplative research, development, large experimentation, etc. Once new threats and defenses are defined, all the costs associated with deployment of those mechanisms can be at least partially quantified, and then well-reasoned decisions can be made about appropriate levels of protection against various risks. The pace of technology change and societal reliance on these systems amplify the uncertainty, urgency, and magnitude of risk here. It is almost unthinkable that western societies would not put very large resources against a problem of this grave potential.