“In the 21st century, nations don’t invade other nations.” quipped the straight talking presidential hopeful John McCain referring to Russia’s recent aggressive move into Georgia. It sure sounded like stern talk coming from the guy who jokes about bombing Iran and suggests that we may be in Iraq for another hundred years but it was also pretty ridiculous given that the US is still occupying the two nations it invaded over 5 years ago. Of course we only “liberate” other nations in the 21st century (as Comedy Central pointed out). After 8 years of the current administration’s antics it’s really hard for us to take the high road on this one. I *want* to get up on my high horse about invading small economically important nations, but in the light of our own escapades I feel like maybe we owe them a pass on at least one

While many Americans still believe, against all the evidence to the contrary that the US move into Iraq was justified, I would wager that most Americans don’t have a clue why Russia felt it important to invade Georgia. Here’s what I think is going on: After the Soviet Union broke up, then president Clinton jumped on the opportunity to work with Georgia and to invest in that country to help make a pipeline possible from the oil rich Caspian Sea to the Black Sea (and thus, Europe) that would not pass through Russia. Russia (and Iran) would of course like to maintain as much of a strangle hold on the oil that reaches Europe from the east as possible, and this move into Georgia (which apparently has been planned for some time) is Russia’s way of saying to investors in the west that they had better rethink investment in this region. It puts the pipeline through Georgia in danger, and suggests that investors should take safer bets elsewhere (perhaps with Lukoil?)

You may have already seen this, but if not - Randy Pausch passed away yesterday so I thought it fitting to link to it today. Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch was diagnosed with terminal cancer and was given only a very short time to live. Pausch talked about his lessons learned and gave advice to students on how to achieve their own career and personal goals. It’s definitely worth a listen beyond the simple draw of morbid fascination.

We were out at the LI Irish Fest which was held at the Abbess Farm in Calverton from about 2 until 11 on Saturday, and I had been having such a good time I had forgotten to take any pictures at all. All I have are some crappy shots from a cell phone, though I think Sport had a camera with him. There were 7 tents of various sizes, all very impressive. I quipped that we should find out how much it costs to have one of these put up, so we wouldn’t need to set up any tents at all when we camp; We could just partition the huge thing into rooms! In fact, the only thing that wasn’t impressive about the fest was the turn out. I don’t know if it was a lack of advertising or what, but there were some awesome bands playing to nearly empty tents which was a shame. The lack of crowds was very welcome to me personally, however - I just hope they broke even at least. Those tents were probably not cheap.

Finn’s Fury did a bunch of tunes that we play, though they did them in a much more rocking fashion of course, though I missed much of their set as we left to eat some food under another tent that had a couple tables. We could still hear them, but not too well.

We followed Cate over to listen to Stone Cross which is an Irish Influenced folk/Americana duo. We sat in the back while the kids played in the dirt, and doing cat’s cradle games.

Then we watched the Inishfree School of Dance performance which was phenomenal. It was also phenomenally hot so I felt bad for the girls in their heavy dresses - but the tents gave lots of good shade, and luckily there was a lot of wind out on the farm.

My family drifted over to the Tommy Makem tent to take in Makem & Spain Brothers who, with their pedigree would find it difficult to avoid playing that distinctive Clancy Brothers hootin’ and hollarin’ Irish pub music I love so much. They didn’t disappoint, but their tent was nearly empty.

We cut loose from the brothers and headed back to where we saw the dancing in order to catch MacTalla Mor whose pipes we heard calling from across the field. You can’t keep Sport away from pipes, especially when he’s wearing his ‘Sport kilt’. The kids ran all over the dance floor for over an hour having a grand time.

I headed back to catch The Prodigals, a Manhattan band whose members are from Ireland. I’ve gotten more into them lately and really enjoyed their set. This seems not to have been a very popular opinion with most of my friends who mostly abandoned me for the show, though Tim did pop in for a bit at the end.

We cruised around a bit before we ran into 7s and 3s! We checked out their set for a bit, and as usual they were great. I said hi to Jack (the penny accordian player who I think is the band leader). I had met and played with these guys at Barney’s one weekend which was fun (for me). They were all very nice to me, and great musicians. I personally like traditional music though, so I may be a bit biased.

Then we caught Bangers & Mash, and they were a lot better than when Sport, Tim & I first caught them at a bar out in Moriches sans fiddle player a couple years back. I hadn’t seen their singer before either who put on a great show. The kids danced around again for another hour or so and sang a lot of the lyrics to The Night that Paddy Murphy Died which was pretty funny.

All in all, a great time was had. The only change I’d make next time is to force myself to drink a bottle of water in between beers. I was largely unproductive today as a result of the partying.

So for a while in 2006 I had a myspace page. I saved a bunch of the stories about myspace that I had posted there. I’ve since deleted my account, and I only realize now that I never took a screen shot of it (I like to keep stuff like that) so I can’t post that here, which is too bad really because I did a nice hack job on my page and wrestled it into shape nicely I think - which was no small accomplishment, and I do mean “wrestled” - it was a bigger pain in the ass to code than practically any site I’ve ever messed with. I went back to Myspace to read something today and got slapped again by their idiot layout.

I added the myspace version of “friends” (public acknowledgment of a relationship and each person’s relative status - ie: “who is your BEST friend and who is your SECOND BESTEST friend?”, and received the myspace equivalent of email called “blasts” (for the uninitiated, think junior high school and the stuff scribbled on the board in between classes. LOTS of my real friends still use Myspace and a couple post regular blog entries there. I can still read these, and as amazing as I found it coming from myspace they actually have a working RSS feed system so I can find out about and read new posts without actually having to go to myspace. But today I did anyway - and this particular post had a link in it to a website not owned by myspace. Now, a little bit of backstory - myspace had a problem with javascript worms running rampant on their site a year and a half ago stealing people’s login details and then defacing their pages. Even I fell victim to this, before deciding to install a script blocker in Firefox. IE doesn’t have a plugin architecture - if you want to block javascript in Windows/IE you have to turn off scripting in Internet Options which is so much of a pain you won’t do it. Correct me if I’m wrong - perhaps IE7 has a better way of doing this now? I admit I haven’t used it that much. With no-script the controls are right there in the browser with a right click on the icon. The way this works, I can allow a domain to run javascript anytime, or just this time, or just on a specific page - but of course, the point is I don’t want it to automatically run javascript at all unless I tell it to, and I don’t trust multi-user sites with lots of kids on them anymore so myspace is disallowed from running javascript by default. SO, I go to click on the link and I get this *helpful* note from my old friend Tom (really not my friend at all, but rather the myspace poster child for friendliness).

So, where’s the dang link? Do I pick Tom’s blog post about Phishing, a warning from Tommy me boy, or go back? If you operate myspace with kid gloves, you can’t leave! See, because I don’t allow javascript from Myspace by default, the link doesn’t appear! Oh sure, all the links back to Myspace work, just not the one that takes you away from myspace. So, if you don’t trust myspace for scripting anymore you can’t click on a link to leave. I’m pretty sure this violates some web-use doctrine but I don’t have desire to go look that up right now. It’s just tricky and stupid and just what I’d expect from the owners of FOX News. I will go back to reading the RSS feeds, thanks.

Since High School it’s been suggested that a good rule of thumb answer for American men is about 1 in 10 are gay. A friend at work today suggested that although we’ve been told that for a long time, he heard that it wasn’t actually true. This of course spurred me on to do some quick internet research on the topic.

But first, some wisdom from People like Us in Singapore:
http://www.plu.sg/main/facts_05.htm

What is the purpose of asking how many people in a population is gay? Certainly, it is a minority, however one defines it, but does it matter whether it is x% or y%? Is respect for a minority, their liberties and rights, to be calibrated based on numbers? Do people become less equal in law and in our conscience, the fewer they are?

The most vocal denials that I could find of the 10% estimate for gay males in the US were on Christian right wing sites like family research council et al (I won’t provide any links to their site folks, sorry). I consider sources like these obviously biased.
I couldn’t find any studies that raised serious doubts about the original findings. However, the original studies by the father of sexology Alfred Kinsey from the 40’s and 50’s have always been controversial. Arguments against his findings range from poor sampling technique to all out bias (supported by unsubstantiated? claims of Kinsey’s own sexual deviance - purported to be masochism). Similar arguments have been raised against some of the other studies that more of less support his original findings (as I found by digging around a bit). I found a short list of some of the studies on Yahoo answers (listed below). Just this short investigation suggests to me that the 10% estimate is probably reasonably accurate.

from http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080417160636AAw91WY

• The Indiana University Kinsey Reports (Sexual Behavior in the Human Male - Kinsey, Pomeroy, and Martin/Sexual Behavior in the Human Female - Kinsey, Pomeroy, Martin, and Gerhard) reported 10% of males being more or less exclusively homosexual and 2% to 6% of females being more or less exclusively homosexual.
• A 1990 study (Homosexuality/Heterosexuality by McWhirter, Sanders, and Reinisch) stated 13.95% of males and 4.25% of females had “extensive” or “more than incidental” homosexual experience.
• A 1993 study (The Janus Report on Sexual Behavior - Janus and Janus) found 9% of men and 5% of women were involved in frequent or ongoing homosexual experiences.
• A 1994 study (The Social Organization of Sexuality: Sexual Practices in the United States - Laumann, Gagnon, Michael, Michaels) reported that the incidence rate of homosexual desire for men is 7.7% and 7.5% for women.
• In 1995, a survey (The prevalence of homosexual behavior and attraction in the United States, the United Kingdom and France: Results of national population-based samples - Sell, Wells, and Wypij) reported 6.2% of U.S. males and 3.6% of U.S. females with “sexual contact with someone of the same sex only or with both sexes in the previous five years.”

On a related note I found the following interesting:
(from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality)
Cognitive differences in gay men and lesbians

• Recent studies suggest the presence of subtle differences in the way gay people and non-gay people process certain kinds of information. Researchers have found that: Gay men and lesbians are significantly more likely to be left-handed or ambidextrous than are non-gay men and women;[147][148][149]
• Simon LeVay argues that because “[h]and preference is observable before birth[150]… [t]he observation of increased non-right-handness in gay people is therefore consistent with the idea that sexual orientation is influenced by prenatal processes,” perhaps heredity.[3]
• Gay men[151] and lesbians are more verbally fluent than heterosexuals of the same sex[152][153][154] (but two studies did not find this result).[155][156]
• Gay men may receive higher scores than non-gay men on tests of object location memory (no difference was found between lesbians and non-gay women).[157]

Sam was a good dog. We actually cut our honeymoon short to go pick him up when he was old enough to leave his mother, so we raised him from a pup. As a lab he had that characteristic lab termperment which is basically energetic but kind, loyal but friendly, good with kids. No more will I hear the clickety clack of his toenails on the hardwood floor, nor his demanding bark to be fed at 6am. I’ll miss him when I come home and he’s not standing in my way with a shoe in his maw (or something else he picked up on the way), his wagging tail banging against the wall. There have been a lot of firsts since he’s been gone, each one difficult. The first time I’ve had to make sure to set an alarm to wake myself up for work in a long while, the first time I’ve dropped food on the floor and he wasn’t there to rush over and glom it up; But the last times were harder - the last time I hugged him, the last time I told him to “go to bed”; even scooping the yard, I never thought that would be something I’d miss! Goodbye Sam, you were a good dog and we’ll miss you.

I struggled with creating a custom icon for OSX for entirely too long before I found Fasticns which makes the process so completely easy it’s silly. If you’re an OSX developer wanting a custom icon for a bundle, or you just want to personalize your Mac a little bit, check it out. The screen shot shows the program’s rotating cube to which you drag images, and a custom icon I made from the cover of an Aidan Meehan book on Celtic spiral art which I also heartily recommend.