Having kids in the computer age presents a lot of challenges that parents didn’t have to deal with years ago. Among them is the fact that hard core pornography is just a couple of clicks away. Depending on your operating system of choice there are zillions of programs you can buy to “filter web content”, but a parent has to shell out for the program, get it installed, then configure it, and it only works for the computer on which it was installed. There is a simpler way to block content, which will work for all computers on your “network” (all the computers in your home or business), which can be managed at a single place, and will even provide reports on what sites are being blocked which is completely free and fairly easy to set up.

To understand how this solution works, you need to understand some basic concepts. When you use a web browser to go to a chosen website, you’re typing in a “friendly name” (like “google.com” or “facebook.com”) which servers on the internet don’t understand at all, so they need to translate that name into a set of numbers first. This translation is done using a system called DNS (domain name system). DNS is just a method whereby your computer sends out a request to whatever DNS server it is configured to use for the correct numbers needed to display the site name you typed. Most users just have their network connections set for “automatic” which makes everything “just work” and so their DNS servers are set to be their ISP’s DNS servers by default. As an administrator of your own computer you can choose to change the DNS servers you are using manually. This post isn’t a “How To” on changing your DNS settings, so I’ll just say that the OpenDNS site has some pretty good tutorials on how to make that simple change.

Depending on the size of your network, you may already have a hardware firewall which offers content filtering. Hardware firewalls are expensive, and most home users rely on some kind of software solution instead. A DNS based solution can offer a sort of redundancy or double check on requests for “bad” sites that are making it through or around a firewall, but its a particularly good solution for home users who are currently using nothing or have only a software blocking solution in place. With the popularity of smart phones and gaming consoles with internet access, a DNS solution is particularly handy since it allows you to control what gets returned to all the devices on your network from a central point.

A solution I recommend is to use OpenDNS servers instead of your ISP’s servers and then to set up a free account on OpenDNS.com and configure your account to use the free OpenDNS content filtering system to block specific sites or whole categories of sites. OpenDNS is not “open source”, rather it is open in the sense that anyone can use their DNS servers; OpenDNS is a company and wants to make money. Some money is made by re-directing queries for non-existent domain names to (hopefully) relevant sites (provided by Yahoo!) of OpenDNS customers. They launched content filtering in 2007 aiming at business, educational, and parents. Sites are blocked by category and the lists of sites are maintained by the users. As a registered user you can suggest that a site be placed into one of the content filtering categories and vote on other user’s suggestions. You can even maintain a an “override list” for sites that would otherwise be blocked because you have chosen to block a given category or permitted because you haven’t chosen a category.

Important points to note

• Probably the most important point is that if a user of a computer (or device) has the authority to change the DNS servers being used, they can totally get around this system. To use a system like this in a business, you’d have to ensure that you have permissions defined such that normal users cannot modify the DNS servers the administrator specifies for the network. At home, where you’re just trying to make sure that a Google search doesn’t turn into a bad learning experience for your kids, perhaps this isn’t much of an issue – but I still think kids should not be able to run any machine as an administrator anyway.
• It is rare that a home user will have a “fixed” (permanent) IP address. Home users are usually set up with a “dynamic” IP address, which just means that the number assigned to their home router (or directly to their computer if the PC is using dial up) is assigned from a pool of available numbers at the time and it may change. Since OpenDNS needs to know what your number (IP) is for it to block things going to you – you need to know that number. Then, you’ll need to make sure you update OpenDNS if it changes. This could be done manually if it doesn’t change very often (my cable IP at home hasn’t changed in a long time), or you can run a little program on your PC which sends that information up to OpenDNS and keeps it up to date if it changes. How to do this is all explained on the site.
  

  To find your public IP (the number assigned to your router), which is the number the internet sees as “you”, just visit whatismyip.com and the site will report it back to you.

• Your ISP (Roadrunner, Cablevision, etc.) has access in its logs to all the sites you’ve ever requested to look at. If you are ever investigated by the police and they subpoena these logs from your ISP, the ISP will turn them over – just one more reason to use an alternate DNS provider if you’re concerned about your privacy. But there’s nothing that says OpenDNS won’t hand over your logs when the man comes knocking either.
• If you use a recent web browser you might already know that by typing into the address bar you are performing a search (on a particular search engine), but OpenDNS redirects these kinds of requests from the address bar. This is really sneaky, but is listed in the Terms of Service and can be disabled by unchecking the “OpenDNS proxy” option in the OpenDNS settings (or overridden in other ways in Firefox.

OpenDNS servers:

• 208.67.222.220
• 208.67.220.222

I’ve been poking around a bit on Prison Planet lately, thats a website run by Alex Jones, a radio talk show host who has been described as a “paleoconservative” whatever thats supposed to mean. Paleo means old, so I assume it’s being used to create a distance from the “neocons” (meaning New Conservatives) who were neither new nor really conservative in the first place. The first story I ran into over there was titled Louisiana Cops Plan for “End of the World” Scenario which goes on to describe how the program includes access to a .50 caliber vehicle mounted machine gun to help put down looters and rioting in the event of a crisis. I got a little further into the article and it is suggested that cities across America are beginning their own war training in preparation for the coming apocalypse in 2012. No, not the fabled Mayan end of the world, this refers to a prediction by a “futurist” named Gerald Celente.

As a youth I was very interested in the occult and I studied about a lot of futurists, but I’ve been too busy living my actual life lately and hadn’t even heard of this guy. The article has a handy link to a Youtube video of Celente (who finds his way onto lots of TV shows), predicting “riots and unrest during a Fox News broadcast in November, 2008″. Fascinating! So I gave it a quick watch, and come to find… hunh? he makes no such prediction at all, at least not in that video. FOX put up a couple bullet points at the beginning which included the prediction of a “Tax Rebellion” marked by riots and tax revolts, but in the video? He basically says nothing about doom and gloom. He suggests that people will bake cookies for each other for Christmas instead of continuing the retail orgy of old. Not a big prediction in the middle of a recession? In fact – he ends by suggesting that if your kid is thinking of majoring in art history or psychology that you should try to convince them to go into the health field because its really growing and will continue to do so. WTF? I did a little more investigation into this guy, since Prison Planet is claiming that he’s always right – and come to find, guess what? He’s no different from any other astrologer, psychic, or faith healer you’ll ever meet – always leaving just enough room in his answers to wiggle out of them. He never says anything concrete and instead lets the media paint whatever pictures they want. As long as the media can keep making money by scaring the shit out of you, they will continue to pay people like this to spout generalist nonsense. How hard is it to predict that people are going to pissed off about high taxes? The Tea Party movement was based on Ron Paul’s fundraising events for the 2008 campaign which started morphing into its own movement shortly afterward in 2007 (building on years of anti-tax work in the 90s!) so it’s not like he was predicting anything, it was already happening.

I wondered what kind of place Bossier Parish is that a Sheriff there might think that he’s got to plan for an orgy of looting and devastation due to food shortages and tax riots. Turns out, he’s got his hands full. The average salary in nearby Shreveport (just on the other side of the Red River and considered part of the same place) is only about $28K. Its all service economy now that the oil businesses have gone out. Whites are in the minority there, its the deep south where racial injustice was the norm and some kind of prejudice is just about a given. But suggesting that a mobile assault vehicle would be called out on looters or rioters, if indeed that’s what he’s suggesting, is bound to have some negative PR fallout, dontcha think? Of course, sometimes just waving the big stick at the dog is enough to make it run away. We’re in a massive economic upheaval – its likely things will continue to get bad in some places before they get better. Alex Jones, through Prison Planet is trying to suggest in this article that the poor PR decision of a small time Sheriff in one of the most destitute cities in America, in one of the poorest states in the union means the end of America as we know it.

Alex Jones is an agitator. I respect him for speaking his mind, and for not pulling punches. I respect agitators since it was people like that that founded America in the first place – but if you have to use smoke and mirrors, pay a charlatan to spout some BS, or use outright deception to win me over to your cause you obviously either don’t have much to offer, or you’re just in it for the money. I realize everybody has to make a living. At least you’re not in the Jesus business, Alex. I’d find that really distasteful.

I’ve been interested in Pompeii from an early age, ever since I first read about how the Roman town had been buried by an eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD and that archaeologists were revealing it bit by bit just as it had been thousands of years ago. Images of the macabre body casts of the eruption’s victims were terrifying and compelling to me at the same time. The 1972 film Pink Floyd at Pompeii made a perfect soundtrack to my early investigations, and the images of the band set up in the otherwise empty ampitheatre were haunting.

One of the most iconic products of the dig at Pompeii are the human body casts. Each one a three dimensional life size representation of the unfortunate people of Pompeii in their final moments. The pyroclastic surge that blanketed the town of some 20,000 souls came in a cloud of super heated, oxygen-depleted gas and eventually hardened around some of the victims. Not all those killed were preserved in this way, but as the bodies of those that were covered by volcanic ash decayed, “voids” were created in the shape of the original occupants. Since 1863, archaeologists have been creating “body casts” by pouring casting materials into these cavities so that as the ash is removed, the shapes of the victims would remain.

The story of the creation of the first body casts and the development of their status as works of art is presented at length in a wonderfully informative article in the journal Interpreting Ceramics. By 1863, excavation at Pompeii had been going on for almost 100 years and over 600 skeletons had already been exhumed in the normal manner of archaeological work. It wasn’t until Giuseppe Fiorelli, then director of excavations, developed a process to capture the impressions on the inside of the voids by pouring them with a kind of plaster that the ghostly forms were revealed as we know them today.

The original casts were made with plaster, but plaster is not ideal for the purpose – introducing air bubbles, and actually shrinking after a time. An article in the New Scientist describes the technique used in 1984 to capture the shade of a girl using epoxy resin.

The Lady from Oplontis was fleeing from a villa near Pompeii, and died wearing her finest jewels and clutching a purseful of coins. The cast is made from more robust epoxy resin, and reveals her skeleton within and replicas of her jewellery in position.

Since the resin is transparent, the technique allows the victim’s bones (where preserved) to be seen through the material as well as capturing impressive detail. A more perfect picture of a girl who lived almost 2000 years ago right at her most agonized moment of death. Suddenly the casts were no longer cartoonish, ghostly white, ethereal negative images, they had become surreal, clinical, ghastly, or even grotesque snapshots of someone’s death.

The resin cast was a more complicated lost wax process, and only one cast of that type was authorized. In 1991 a newer process (a pressurized mixture of cement and resin) was used to reveal a family of seven. The new process is sufficient to show facial expressions. While much of Pompeii has already been excavated, archaeologists estimate that there are perhaps another 500 or so bodies preserved in the un-excavated sections. The newer techniques may reveal many even more horrible ghosts as the process is further refined, but in recent times there hasn’t been much money to continue the work there.

The history of cast making is interesting, but the transformation of these grotesque and horrific ghost images of death into a venerated work of art is as well. The casts are given names like The Sleeping Man, The Watchdog (not all casts are of humans), or The Body of a Young Woman. Many of the most iconic casts were early attempts at the process which were made at a time when photography was still a new technology. Pictures of the bodies were printed around the world and apparently contributed to the subsequent popular acceptance of the “display of human remains in a scientific context” as the Ceramics article put it.

Where are the Images?
Can anyone point me to a catalog of all Pompeii body casts? I’m surprised I couldn’t find an image database online of all the finds!

Science is allowing us to discover more about Pompeii than we may have wanted to know, but if all you’re interested in is a quick virtual tour of the architecture, check out Google’s Street View of Pompeii. You can even walk around that ampitheatre.

Watch the PBS show Secrets of the Dead about neighboring Herculaneum.

I noticed a few days ago that Facebook search was no longer returning anything from their own service, only the web. In other words, if you search for something in the search field, you’ll get a bunch of items out on the web that match your terms but no facebook pages. I’ve found a bunch of other folks have noticed the problem, but there hasn’t been any official word from Facebook about a problem as far as I can dig up.

I tested in FF and IE, and interestingly actually got a return when I clicked on “Pages” in IE *once* for some things, but couldn’t make it work again.

Great article in the NY Times magazine today examining the question of Christianity in education as the Texas State Board of Education weighs various petitions for modifying the curriculum. On the one hand arguments are made that the ’separation’ clause has been misused to totally remove any discussion of religion as a motivation in the founding of the US, while on the other that Christian factions are attempting to rewrite history and cast the founders as Christian fundamentalists. Why should we care, it’s only Texas? Simple, schoolbooks get rewritten based on how this very populous state decides to portray American history.

In fact, the founders were rooted in Christianity — they were inheritors of the entire European Christian tradition — and at the same time they were steeped in an Enlightenment rationalism that was, if not opposed to religion, determined to establish separate spheres for faith and reason. “I don’t think the founders would have said they were applying Christian principles to government,” says Richard Brookhiser, the conservative columnist and author of books on Alexander Hamilton, Gouverneur Morris and George Washington. “What they said was ‘the laws of nature and nature’s God.’ They didn’t say, ‘We put our faith in Jesus Christ.’ ” Martin Marty says: “They had to invent a new, broad way. Washington, in his writings, makes scores of different references to God, but not one is biblical. He talks instead about a ‘Grand Architect,’ deliberately avoiding the Christian terms, because it had to be a religious language that was accessible to all people.”

I can’t help but point out the Masonic tone of G. Washington’s references to God. To be a Mason, members are required to acknowledge that there exists an ‘Almighty Architect’ of heaven and earth but no other specifics – a very Deist, and inclusive stance.

Or, as Brookhiser rather succinctly summarizes the point: “The founders were not as Christian as those people would like them to be, though they weren’t as secularist as Christopher Hitchens would like them to be.”

Chaucer wrote The Parliament of Fowls in 1382 to honor the first anniversary of the engagement of King Richard II to Anne of Bohemia (they were both 15 years old when they were married shortly thereafter), but it has become associated with the present day celebrated as Valentines Day over the centuries since it is the first time Valentines Day is found “packaged” in such a manner, and probably in error (evidence the mating of birds referred to in the poem doesn’t occur until spring). The saints day for a bishop of Genoa named Valentine is celebrated on May 2nd and this may be the saint’s day Chaucer was referring to in the poem. It makes so much more sense to associate love with the flowers and rebirth of May Day, doesn’t it?

The narrator seems confused by love and hits the books to try to understand the situation and ultimately fails. The poem is filled with historical allegory which is invisible to the modern reader who is unfamiliar with the court politics of the day, the major characters, and their motivations or relations to the King and his bride.

The following excerpt from eChaucer, a modern English translation online hosted by the University of Maine

And when this work was all brought to an end, Nature gave every bird his mate by just accord, and they went their way. Ah, Lord! The bliss and joy that they made! For each of them took the other in his wings, and wound their necks about each other, ever thanking the noble goddess of nature. But first were chosen birds to sing, as was always their custom year by year to sing a roundel at their departure, to honor Nature and give her pleasure. The tune, I believe, was made in France. The words were such as you may here find in these verses, as I remember them.

“Welcome, summer, with sunshine soft,
The winter’s tempest you will break,
And drive away the long nights black!

Saint Valentine, throned aloft,
Thus little birds sing for your sake:
Welcome, summer, with sunshine soft,
The winter’s tempest you will shake!

Good cause have they to glad them oft,
His own true-love each bird will take;
Blithe may they sing when they awake,
Welcome, summer, with sunshine soft,
The winter’s tempest you will break,
And drive away the long nights black!”

References
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentine’s_Day
http://spotlight.ucla.edu/faculty/henry-kelly_valentine/
http://www.wsu.edu/~delahoyd/chaucer/PF.html

I’ve been playing Warhammer Fantasy Battle (See my WFB Pics) lately and had a vague idea of adding in some roleplay aspects to the games (to flesh out the time between battles). The only roleplaying I’ve done recently has been some few D&D 3.5 games which have left me sort of flat and thinking back to some of the epic Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (WFR) games I’ve had in the past I wondered if maybe I should just go back to that. The WFB games would certainly dovetail better into the WFR milieu. The WFR I’ve played in the past was 2nd edition. Aspects of that system I loved included the career system and the use of percentile chance dice. The writing was great and the fantasy world was well fleshed out. That’s what led me to look into the new WFR 3rd edition recently rewritten and released by Fantasy Flight Games (FFG).

I became quickly disillusioned. It appears that FFG has concentrated more on making the system difficult to copy than on making a good system. Its become a common practice for gamers to PDF the copious manuals for role playing games because the dozens of supplements (each at over $30 a copy) present a serious barrier of entry to getting started in a new game. Once a gaming group gets going and folks are having fun players usually end up buying a printed copy of the important books for convenience. WFR 3rd ed. is a mashup of custom dice, action cards, and other materials that are probably not necessary for roleplaying but hard to copy. FFG decided to change the mechanics of WFR entirely in the process making older materials largely incompatible. Gone are the percentile dice I loved so much and replaced by “dice pools” (which reminds me of White Wolf which I don’t like). Add to these charges a ridiculous price ($100 for the box set) for epic FAIL.

Check out Zanysite’s review as well.

Maybe I can just get a few 2nd edition books off ebay.