An Exercise In Futility

Bush was just on TV, some live conference… a reporter asked a fairly good question about the president’s opinions on fertility treatments that produce embryos that may not get used (this is a question on the topic of stem-cell research and Bush’s claim that he is not going to endorse a practice that “destroys human life”). Bush’s response? To paraphrase, he said “that isn’t the issue”, and proceeded to not answer the question. Also in the news today, the US gov’t is suggesting that NPR and PBS are too left-wing and biased, so they’ve appointed some right-wing officials to help institute change. This will help the government skirt more issues by making sure that they have final approval on anything any media outlets report on. *sigh*

This afternoon, the doggo, the turkey-oven, and I, were minding our own business, when the new zeno suddenly powered on by itself. It did not wake-on-LAN: there is no network cable plugged in, and i’m pretty sure it doesn’t even have that feature. We were all within 6 feet of it at the time and know for a fact that none of us were touching it. (Well, yes, doggo doesn’t know, but we can vouch for him). I think the computer may have been making an attempt to tell me it wants to get online, asap! I’ve decided to forget about trying to get SCSI working on it with kernel 2.6; i’m going to just disable the SCSI interfaces until linux stops being stupid about it.

Was reminded of something that had bugged me for a long time (way back then i read slashdot and it must have come up a lot): The plural form of the word ‘virus’. Here is part of a corrective mailing list post i made: What i really wanted to comment on, is the use of the word ‘virii’, which is not the correct plural form of ‘virus’, yet gets used a lot these days, it would seem… In latin, the plural of virus would be viri. However, this was rarely used (according to the Oxford Latin Dictionary) for 2 reasons: 1) there was little use for the plural form, and 2) the plural of man (vir) is also ‘viri’. ‘Virii’ would be an incorrect LATIN plural form, if anything. Of course, we speak english, not latin, and the plural of virus is very simply ‘viruses’. This is similar to the incorrect plural form of the word ‘octopus’, which some people expect to be ‘octopi’ - when in reality it is simply ‘octopuses’. Were one speaking Latin, the plural would still not be “octopi”, since octopus is not a simple Latin word of the second declension - it is a Latinized form of the Greek word oktopous; the plural form would logically be ‘octopodes’.

I have changed my stance. When i first learned of STV, i was all for it. However, what i did not realize was that BC-STV is broken. It does not use a proportional representation system to elect one single candidate in a riding, it instead uses a ballot sharing system to elect multiplecandidates within a riding! What they’re proposing is an amalgamation of existing smaller ridings into larger ridings which each have more seats. This is the wrong way to do it: If you have three seats available in a riding, and you have 3 candidates running, it doesn’t matter how people vote, since all 3 candidates must get elected! If you have multiple candidates from the same party running for these seats (i can’t tell if that’s allowed or not), it also wouldn’t matter, since anyone voting liberal would rank al the liberals highest, anyone voting NDP would rank all the NDPs highest, and so on. The bottom line is this: After amalgamation, old rural ridings will have less representation than they used to. The STV idea is a good one, but BC-STV as prsented for this referendum just doesn’t seem to work. (Maybe i will switch back, maybe i won’t, i still have a couple of days to analyse this a little more).

Edit (May 08 , 2009): After doing more research I have changed my stance on this issue. Read my post about it here.

Just got back from a nice long walk. It was great to get out in the cool fresh evening air. I love the smells that eminate from the suburb; pavement, cedars, curry, and citronella to name a few. Also, walking the dog is a good way to be inconspicuous about taking a snoop of the neighbourhood, hehe.