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I finally finished the second book of Edmund Morris's Theodore Roosevelt trilogy. So far it has been an excellent series, and I look forward to finishing the life and career of the most interesting president in American history (some might argue this, but hey, the man was shot point blank and went on to finish the speech).

The president of Oregon State University just informed us that the Corvallis campus will shortly ban smoking on school property. I am not a smoker, and like the idea of never walking behind a smoker again, but this edict seems a bit hypocritical to me. President Ray gives two reasons for the ban, 1. smoking is polluting the campus air, and 2. people should not smoke anyway.

In part one of a two part series on premium video streaming services, I review the quality of the movie offerings from NetFlix and Hulu Plus. I checked each of the top 100 movies of all time (from the Internet Movie Database) for streaming access. The clear winner is NetFlix, with just 20 percent of the top 100 to Hulu's 0(!) percent. It is clear that Hulu is not trying to get any of the premiere movie properties, even though Hulu is owned by content companies.

I just migrated my site to Drupal 7 (Drupal is a Content Management System)! It was relatively painless even though D7 is not in its final version. In the coming months I will restore the lost features, then start experimenting. Less than three weeks until the Worldwide Party: http://www.drupal7releaseparty.org/

Part of my research responsibilities is building and maintaining a fire simulation program for an area of Eastern Oregon. The idea is to simulate fire and growth under different suppression and fire treatment policies so we can generate an optimal policy. Everything was proceeding smoothly until the closed-source fire spread model refused to simulate any landscape past 40 years. To make things worse, any of 1 million pixels could cause the error, and each pixel could reach its error state via any combination of annual growth and fire transitions.

Most people know that reusing passwords for multiple services is a major security hole. If you don't know, XKCD can explain it to you:


Now, assuming you aren't going to memorize a unique password for every service requiring one, there are a few ways you can protect yourself from programmatic identity theft.

Every time I drive into Oregon I get accosted by some guy wearing a safety bib asking for money. To residents of the 48 states without a self-serve prohibition, OR/NJ's gas law makes about as much sense as a pitcher named "Tomorrow":

With the 23rd census date behind us, it is time to reflect on the greatest US electoral injustice outside the District (No Taxation Without Representation!). I am of course speaking of the "Great" Compromise of the Philadelphia Convention.

GROSS SIMPLIFICATION WARNING!!! \/
The biggest non-slavery problem facing the Constitutional Convention was legislative representation of states. Large states wanted representation in proportion to their population, whereas small states wanted all states to have equal representation.

Today's Supreme Court decision (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/us/politics/22scotus.html) overturning a century of campaign finance law makes me wonder how the 5 justices in the majority are considered the "conservative wing," but more than that, I wonder where we go from here. I find the prospect of a corporation having full rights as an individual insulting and troubling. How can an entity designed not for life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness be afforded the same rights as a citizen?

Today I was reading a NY Times article on my laptop when a pop-up forced me into a fake virus scan page. Despite the sophistication of the prompts and animations on the site, the "infected" Windows Explorer screen (see capture below) could not trick anyone into installing MalWare on a Mac. In case you end up at one of these pages while on a Windows machine, WP's blog has some sensible advice.