tintedpane.com

I hate to be such an Ars tail wagger, bet they just give me news that others are unwilling to dig up. It seems the e-voting thing is rearing it’s ugly head again, with lack of transparency and audit mechanisms being a very serious and unacceptable design flaw. According to ars, the burden of providing and proving a fair election should rest on the state/government officials and should not need public outrage to bring about evidence for an audit. And that’s probably the extent of my knowledge on this matter for now, but it’s something I feel is very important to our democratic process.

RealID is being shoved down our throats by the DHS who still feel that they can determine who a “terrorist” is by whether or not the yet to be produced “tamper-proof” ID is valid or if they’re in a nationally query’able database. Has history shown most of the attackers of 9/11 to have any criminal history? Isn’t this why the de-facto way of screening is now by skin color? Or am I totally off base here? Why is our government so paranoid? Is the DHS even necessary? Have people forgotten about that P.A.T.R.I.O.T. act?

In other news, the TSA (which I still feel has no positive effect on making me safer when flying) still sucks at keeping our personal information safe. Persons who were seeking redress and trying to have their names taken off “terrorist lists” had their data exposed for over four months before any action was taken.

And what is up with all these damn no-bid government contracts? More mercenary groups like Blackwater? Maybe this was before my days of listening to NPR, but I just found out their right to operate in Iraq was revoked by the national government there.

After months of intermittent web searching, I’ve finally found some evidence as to the efficacy of using suspended bags of water to ward off insects. I’ve always been curious as to why one of Austin’s most popular BBQ gas stations, Rudy’s, hangs these strange contraptions in their patio sections. It seems that they do work pretty well as I’ve never seen any flies or been bitten by a mosquito while consuming there. Well, I found out today after changing my search tokens around for the 3rd time that a group of elementary kids at the Fuqua School in Virginia did an experiment on this alternative method of insect control. Turns out the bags resemble spider webs:

The class worked in groups to implement their research project. They designed their experiment, offered a hypothesis, collected data and experimental variables, and presented a conclusion. After two weeks, the class finished their experiment and concluded that the reflection of the sun through the clear plastic bags resembles a spider web to insects with compound eyes, such as flies.

One student stated, “We determined that the bags hanging from the trees do in fact repel insects. Our groups learned that sight through compound eyes detects rapid movement. As a result, insects with compound eyes cannot focus on one object effectively, and since spiders are natural predators of flying insects, then flying insects would sense that the bag of water hanging in a tree would resemble a spider’s web.”

It’s good to see that science is still alive and thriving in this country. They certainly confirmed my observations.

And speaking of efficacy and effectiveness, here’s an excerpt from wikipedia:

The word effective is sometimes used in a quantitative way, “being very or not much effective”. However it does not inform on the direction (positive or negative) and the comparison to a standard of the given effect. Efficacy, on the other hand, is the ability to produce a desired amount of the desired effect, or success in achieving a given goal. Contrary to efficiency, the focus of efficacy is the achievement as such, not the resources spent in achieving the desired effect. Therefore, what is effective is not necessarily efficacious, and what is efficacious is not necessarily efficient.

I like in particular that last sentence.