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Research suggests that 46% of all new hires fail within 18 months, but 89% of them fail for attitudinal reasons (personality traits, human interactions, etc) rather than cognitive ability (brain-based skills like logic and reasoning, problem-solving, language, etc). So as a small business owner and hiring manager, what can you do to ensure you hire the right people?
Can do - will do - will fit
As business owners, we are responsible for hiring the right people and building teams which perform well together. And the smaller the business, the more costly it is when you get this wrong.
A senior executive I worked with many years ago once shared with me a simple yet useful rule for effective recruitment, which describes a stepped approach to candidate selection, focusing first on technical ability, next on attitudinal or motivational disposition, and finally on cultural fit: can do - will do - will fit.
The following assumes you have identified a candidate who can do the job, and focusses instead on the latter two stages of the assessment model.
One tool in the recruitment process that larger companies tend to rely heavily on, but is often overlooked by smaller businesses, is the personality assessment. Personality testing, also known as psychometric testing, is designed to predict how people will behave in the workplace. In other words, it attempts to predict how the candidate will work, rather than worry about whether they have the technical skills to do the job. It might cast light, for example, on how the candidate will work under pressure, how they will interact with co-workers, or whether they will fit into a given team, given the existing team members' personalities. In other words, companies rely on these tests to screen candidates for 'good fit' - the end goal being to reduce turnover and improve productivity.
The argument against using such tests - other than the fact they add time and expense to the recruitment process - is that they don't successfully predict behaviours, or that they are easy to fake.
There are a number of different tests available. Generally, these tests have been developed following a rigorous process relying on academic research and statistical analysis. In other words, academics will test groups of people and identify correlations between certain personality traits and certain workplace behaviours, and then try to capture the essence of those traits through a range of multiple-choice questions. The resulting questionnaires can then be automatically processed, so that (hypothetically at least) no human interaction is required to analyse the data.
One of the most common tests used is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). Co-author of Nudge and Harvard professor Cass R Sunstein suggests that while 90% of major US companies rely on it, the MBTI is not a good behavioural predictor. In fact, he points to further research suggesting that all personality tests fail in effectively predicting behaviour over time.
In my professional life I've had quite a bit of exposure to personality tests (and in fact I spent a bit of time researching their effectiveness as part of my Masters). I want to share some of my insights here, if only as a cautionary tale.
Low test-retest reliability
Over the past few years, I've taken a number of personality tests, include the MBTI, the Competing Values Framework (CVF), the DISC profile and the Life-Styles Inventory (LSI) assessment.
The DISC profile suggested I was "passionate and expressive and my enthusiasm is contagious" and I "show an ability to persuade others to adopt my vision", whereas the CVF assessment suggested that this was my lowest rated characteristic out of 100 items.
The LSI assessment suggested I have "an excessive concern with avoiding mistakes" and "a need to look for flaws in everything", whereas the DISC profile found I can be "overly optimistic at times, dismissing potential obstacles too quickly".
And finally, the DISC profile described me as "adventurous", 'taking risks" and going on "gut instinct", whereas the LSI suggested I am "very conventional", with the CVF rating me relatively low on "initiating bold projects" and "starting ambitious programs".
The reason I share this personal insight is that I believe there are significant flaws with relying on these assessments to predict individual behaviours and performance. While it is possible that there is something unusual and quirky about me and how I take the tests which results in such contrasting results, there is quite a bit of literature out there on the issues with personality tests, and in particular what's known as their low test-retest reliability.
Sunstein suggests that in 50% of cases, retaking the MBTI after a one month gap results in the person being assessed landing in a different personality category. A bit problematic if the person was hired a few weeks ago on the basis of their original category being a good fit to the team they were joining.
One of the concerns I have with these tests is that, in order to offer an automated and one-size-fits-all solution (which is necessary to ensure widespread adoption by unqualified assessors), they often fail to capture the conviction behind the responses given by the candidate. Completion of an assessment will require all questions to be answered, even those where the respondent doesn't really 'get' the question, or is not particularly drawn one way or the other by the available answers. And yet the test does not adequately differentiate between a response which is "yes, that's 100% what I would do in that situation" and "well I don't feel strongly about this question but since I have to pick an answer, here goes." Expecting a piece of software to process multiple data points of varying factual quality, and then spit out a true and consistent assessment of the respondent's personality, is probably asking too much of it!
Developers of these assessments tend to counter that the tests do have controls that detect inaccurate answers, typically by asking a question several times in different ways to test consistency of responses. While this may help correct one misunderstood question, or a slip of the mouse, I'm still not convinced it fully addresses the test's failure to capture the varying degrees of conviction behind a respondent's answers - and so the extent to which certain personality traits dominate, while other traits are only occasionally present and may even be prone to vary.
While personality testing as part of the recruitment process is certainly supported with some academic credibility, businesses should nonetheless apply caution in deploying these tests, in particular if they are being used exclusively to predict a candidate's fit. A lot of the time, the candidate interview and the psychometric test are seen as two separate processes, or sequential 'hurdles' that the candidate must jump over. Instead, my recommendation would be to take a more integrated approach, and address in a second interview (after the test is taken) any concerns which arise out of the test results, probing any potential 'unwanted' personality traits.
Ironically, sometimes the 'will fit' (personality fit) assessment may conflict with the 'can do' (skills) assessment. Research conducted on characteristics of successful salespeople suggests that employees who are assertive and display a strong will to achieve are more likely to sell more than those who gregarious, dependable and persistent. And yet psychometric testing may well filter out the former types on the grounds that they are a 'poor fit' to the existing team. It's therefore necessary to always relate your recruitment assessments to a conscious consideration of the specific skills and attributes you need in a particular role, rather than blindly trust in an automated assessment process.
#recruitment #personalityassessment #psychometrictesting


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Ethical retailer of the week: Rapanui
Based on the Isle of Wight, Rapanui is an eco-fashion company that put traceability, organic materials and clean technologies at the core of its business, while delivering quality products.
The company was founded in 2008 in Sandown Bay by surf-lovers Rob and Mart Drake-Knight, who were both in their 20s, with an initial budget of £200.
Rapanui started with the aim of making an important step towards sustainable fashion. The pair believed that a cool, ethical style had the power to influence consumer behaviour.
Mart Drake-Knight explained, "Fashion is like no other medium, in that you literally dress yourself in what you believe in. Rapanui gives people a choice to vote with their wallet for ethical fashion. We want to use the power of fashion to make eco cool, and design traceable, transparent products that let you shop quickly with a conscience."
The firm offers a wide range of products for both men and women, from shirts and tops to bags and underwear.
Rapanui supplies from factories powered by wind and solar energy and uses ecological materials for its clothes, such as bamboo, hemp and organic cotton. Its biggest strength however, is the focus on traceability, to keep customers informed on where the piece of clothing they are buying comes from.
The firm provides a trace mapping tool that gives the buyer information about products, from seed to shop. It is also lobbying to promote a new labelling system that would give consumers all the details to make ethical decisions.
Rapanui has won various awards since it started and its founders have been listed on the Future 100 list of Top Young Entrepreneurs.
www.rapanuiclothing.com
Related Topics:bambooeco-fashion companyecological materialsethical styleFuture 100 list of Top Young EntrepreneurshempIsle of Wightnew labelling systemorganic cottonRob and Mart Drake-KnightSandown BaySustainable fashiontraceabilitywind and solar energy
How Eco-Fashion Companies Can Participate in the Circular Economy
Everything Eco-Friendly Consumers Should Know About Ethical Streetwear
All About Hemp: The Sustainable Miracle Crop
Sustainable Fashion Expert Shares Brilliant Insights On Affordable Options
4 Ways Nike Sustainability Initiatives Are Combating Global Warming
Are you a talented and experienced researcher/writer?

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Browse through our line of Birthday Water Bottle Labels to find a unique favor for your next birthday party. Guests will love these personalized water bottles, plus many of them have matching candy bar wrappers both for the regular sized bars and the mini bars. Made from a waterproof and tear resistant material, these labels can stand up to almost anything. Our labels measure 2.5" top to bottom x 8.5" left to right and will fit around a 16 oz. water bottle. In addition to the water bottle labels, you can also purchase a roll of Terrifically Tacky Tape if you so choose. This double sided tape will allow you to adhere the label to the bottle. The label can then be easily removed from the bottle so your guests can keep it as a momento. We do not sell the water bottles.


You are aware of wrongdoing at work.
Are being harassed or discriminated against.
Someone else is being harassed or discriminated against.
You are not being paid overtime.
You are not being paid for all time worked.
You are being retaliated against.
You are being sexually harassed.
You are in an hostile work environment.
Your gut/friend/coworker/spouse/child/parent is telling you to.


Two now infamous judges have been cut from the New Zealand version of popular talent show X Factor after an uproar on social media after the husband and wife duo made scathing remarks about a contestant on the show this week.
In a statement this afternoon, Mediaworks chief executive Mark Weldon says the decision had been made that Natalia Kills and Willy Moon were no longer suitable to judge X Factor.
"Last night on X Factor both Kills and Moon made comments that were completely unacceptable. While the judges on X Factor are expected to provide critiques of the performances, we will not tolerate such destructive tirades from any of the judges," Weldon says.
Kills, real name Natalia Noemi Cappuccini-Sinclair, ripped into contestant Joe Irvine following his performance. "As an artist who respects creative integrity and intellectual property, I am disgusted at how much you've copied my husband. From the hair to the suit, do you not have any value or respect for originality?" she said to Irvine.
She added that she found Irvine's performance artistically atrocious, and that she was 'embarrassed' to be sitting in Irvine's presence.
Her husband, Willy Moon, continued the attack on the contestant, saying his performance was cheap and absurd, then likening him to Norman Bates. "It's just a little bit creepy, and I feel like you're going to stitch someone's skin to your face and then kill everybody in the audience," he said.
Viewers of the show leapt to Irvine's defence, hitting social media slamming the bullying remarks.
The other two judges, New Zealander Stan Walker and former All Saints singer Melanie Blatt blasted the behaviour on Twitter. "@NataliaKills U think its alright 2 champion urself in ur disgusting actions with no remorse 4 being a bully. Wake up man & humble urself," Walker said.
Former contestant Benny Tipene wrote on Twitter, "oh man gutted I went back on the show now eh. Especially with someone so heartless…"
If the pair was looking for some instant publicity, they got it. Both Kills and Moon are trending on Twitter.


The 85th AGM of The Pinner Association, held on 26th April 2017 was attended by some 90 to 100 local residents. Greater detail will be available in the next copy of "The Villager".
The guest speaker was Dr. Amol Kelshiker, Chair of the Harrow Clinical Commissioning Group. In his most interesting presentation he explained the work of this Group, which involves all GP surgeries in the area, and the challenges it faces in providing the best possible level of primary care to all members of the community. With very high levels of diabetes, obesity (especially of children), a great many over-80s and under-5s, and decreasing numbers of available GPs it is necessary to find solutions for patients using traditional and "innovative" methods. The Group is, however, fortunate to have available the resources of Northwick Park Hospital, a recognized centre of excellence, and is also committed to trying to implement a policy of prevention rather than cure.
Dr. Kelshiker's presentation was followed by the AGM itself when Robin Youle was elected as President and Christine Wallace as Chairman; the Vice-Chairman's position remaining unfilled; with the other Officers and the Committee being unanimously elected/re-elected.
The Open Forum that took place after the AGM led to some lively questioning from the floor. The first question naturally covered the burning issue of the day : the future of Pinner Wood School. Mr. Daniel Lester, Head of Communications at Harrow Council, was present to explain the current situation and future plans so far as they have been able to be formulated in what is a very uncertain situation. Insofar as the summer term is concerned Keystages 1 and 2 have been appropriately, though temporarily resited at the Civic Centre and Whitefriars School respectively, with the setting-up of appropriate transport facilities, but for the new school year nothing is yet certain. If safety can be assured it may be possible to install a "pop-up" school on the existing playing fields of the school but this is still an unknown. Twenty possible locations for a one-site solution to house the school for the start of the autumn term are under consideration, and Harrow Council will announce their decision at the end of May. What is certain is that the cost of managing this problem will run to millions of pounds and it is hoped that various government funds will be available to pay for this. Mr. Lester praised the incredibly helpful attitude and support of all local schools and of the local population.
Other questions raised concerned Pinner Memorial Park and the availability of its resources to all members of the public and the need to set up a Park Users' Group; traffic problems at the Bridge Street – Love Lane roundabout; the dangers of the positioning of the zebra crossing at the end of Chapel Lane and the state of the footpath in Chapel Lane. A further question was asked about activities for young people in Pinner; many are now taking place at the Heath Robinson Museum.
The meeting closed at 10 p.m.


This Winter calls for a smart layering for leather jackets. The season is more termed to be incomplete without the leather fashion, you can call it a wardrobe staple. The cuts and prints for the season have been a major turn over for the industry and has came a long way to make clothing look even better. You would see leather everywhere, the global runways, the vogue magazines, designers collection and the list goes on.
At one side when you are looking up to tone yourself with style you do need to be comfortable enough with the seasonal changes. You certainly can not put up a summer suit in cool breezy winters. Jackets have been a symbol of style, class and comfort. They come with a wide variety starting from vintage leather jackets to studded leather jackets, these cover grace as well as the funk one wants in clothing. You are certainly not fulfilling the winter standards if you lack having a leather jacket in your wardrobe and more over it you did not put it on at all. It does not just stick to jackets/coats/blazers, you can style up with pants, skirts, trousers and even gloves. All you need to do is place things perfectly and make them look up to the mark. But remember if you are not doing the leather do! you are missing a lot. Keeping quality in mind LJM has given a huge variety of jackets which look fab and are even more perfect when it comes to wearing them. And the best thing is even if you wish to have a jacket not on the list, you can get it done by your choice. So get on track and pick the one that soothes your eyes and matches your taste.


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SecretOrigins
Shrouded in darkness ... lost in the mists of time ... buried inside an enigma within a conundrum ... trapped in the labyrinth of history ...
Well, not really. ^z is a somewhat silly signature, but it's all I've got. I started using it about 18 years ago at the ends of email and USENET newsgroup posts, and now I'm stuck with it. People sometimes ask where it came from, but there's not much to tell. I simply made it up. It's short, arguably a virtue; it's somewhat different; it's more-or-less memorable; it has a computerish flavor. My last name begins with "Z", as have virtually all my userids over the years.
Some folks whom I later met in person told me they pronounced ^z as "caret-Zee" (or "carrot-Zee"?!). Others called it "hat-Zee". I prefer to say "control-Zee" (or "control-Zed" at times). To a computer, the symbol ^z represents the ASCII decimal value 26, or in binary 11010. To MS-DOS it's an end-of-file marker; in UNIX it's a request to interrupt a process; for some other operating systems it means "kill" or "quit".
End of mystery ... ^z
TopicPersonalHistory
Datetag20010803
- Friday, August 03, 2001 at 04:47:12 (EDT)
LogicAndInformation
With ten minutes to spare before a meeting yesterday morning, I wandered into a medium-sized research library down the hall. On the shelves near the beginning of the "QA" section (math) I happened to see Logic and Information by Keith Devlin (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991). The title sounded interesting; Devlin writes well; I pulled the book down and opened it. Some quotes that leaped out from the up-front material:
It is therefore quite possible that we are not too far from the limits which can be achieved in artificial automata without really fundamental insights into a theory of information, although one should be very careful with such statements because they can sound awfully silly in five years.
- John von Neumann, 1949
Should it ever come about (and I think it will) that some of the ideas developed in these pages turn out to be of real 'use', I would hope that this book serves as a testament to the stupidity, even in those very terms of 'usefulness' that were foisted on the British university system, of judging any intellectual pursuit in terms of its immediate cash value.
- Keith Devlin, 1991
Of some fields it is difficult to tell whether they are sound or phony. Perhaps they are both. Perhaps the decision depends on the circumstances, and it changes with time. At any rate, it is not an objective fact, like 'the moon is made of green cheese'. Some subjects start out with impeccable credentials, catastrophe theory, for instance, and then turn out to resemble a three-dollar bill. Others, like dynamic programming, have to overcome a questionable background before they are reluctantly recognized to be substantial and useful. It's a tough world, even for the judgement pronouncers.
- Gian-Carlo Rota, 1985
TopicScience - TopicThinking
- Thursday, August 02, 2001 at 06:32:50 (EDT)
ZhurnalWiki
This ^zhurnal --- my online journal of thoughts and commentary --- has grown since April 1999 via a trivially-modified "guestbook" It's straightforward and allows me to post new entries every few days from almost any Internet connection and web browser that supports simple forms. Mostly I just write in a plain-vanilla text editor, putting in a few raw HTML tags by hand as needed ... easy enough, but prone to error on occasion when I fail to close a tag (oops! --- no </small> --- guess everything is in tiny type from here onwards, eh?!). The low-level approach also makes it difficult to build good cross-linkages to earlier ^zhurnal posts on related topics. I've used the poor-man's solution of putting a numerical HTML anchor corresponding to the message date into every title line, but that's kludgey and inefficient.
Now I've begun experimenting with Wiki approaches to building and cross-linking notes to myself ... sort of a personal set of notecards (remember the Xerox PARC "Notecards" system? --- a clever hack that perhaps inspired Bill Atkinson of Apple to develop "Hypercard" ... and that therefore may be an intellectual grandparent of WikiWikiWeb). I'm developing and learning at the moment on a Macintosh iBook laptop under OS-X, Apple's new UNIX-based operating system, using and adapting the Wiki code shared by Bo Leuf and Ward Cunningham in their book The Wiki Way.
As readers (if there are any besides me!) may have noticed, ^zhurnal entry titles for the past week have been WikiWords, run-together capitalized strings. There are now similarly-weird Topic words and, starting today, Datetags. Some other aspects of layout and format have also changed.
Yep, I'm attempting now to write my little essays in Wiki itself, and then translate them into "classic" ^zhurnal posts. Those WikiWords are thus live links to other pages --- or will be, if and when I manage to get a true Wiki up and runnning online.
A Wiki will allow anybody to comment on or add to the ^zhurnal (again, assuming anybody else wants to!). The Wiki markup language is extremely simple compared to HTML and produces nicely æsthetic formatting with minimal effort or distraction. Hyperlinks appear as if by magic; search through other Wiki pages is fast; and a click or two can uncover backlinks (pages with connections to this one). There are doubtless issues of content control, but I think that those can be solved.
So, please bear with me during this on-the-job training as I learn from my mistakes. The result, knock on wood, should be a better, more interesting, and more useful ^zhurnal. A static preview of it can be witnessed at http://www.his.com/~z/ZhurnalWiki/ZhurnalMainPage.html and on the ~600 other pages in that directory. (cf. ZhurnalWikiPreview, 22 July 2001)
Thank you, meanwhile, for your patience!
TopicZhurnal - TopicProgramming - TopicWriting
- Tuesday, July 31, 2001 at 21:37:47 (EDT)
SilverSkepticism
Back in the late 1960's as I was finishing High School I read a lot of books (cf. BookhouseBoy). I became convinced that hard times were a-coming ... that the US economy couldn't continue to prosper ... that the huge and growing deficit, declining savings rate, mammoth foreign trade imbalance, rising taxes, and sudden divorce of US money from its gold foundation, etc. all added up to a 1930's-style crash at the least. Following advice in tomes such as Harry Browne's How You Can Profit From the Coming Devaluation I sent a thousand dollars or so --- a fair fraction of my youthful savings --- to a Swiss bank. I used it there as collateral to borrow more money to buy bags of silver coins on margin.
Sounds silly in retrospect, and it was. I got back about half of what I had put in when I gave up in 1971, luckily for me. Silver prices didn't skyrocket, the US dollar didn't collapse, and the governments of the Western World didn't seize private holdings of precious metals.
But the lesson was a good one to learn: be skeptical of articulate, charismatic storytellers. Most critically: beware of futurists who plot exponentially rising curves for carefully-selected parameters. Real-world trends don't persist indefinitely. Geometric growth can't continue.
As Richard Hamming (cf. ResearchAndLife) and others pointed out long ago, "...a change of a single order of magnitude produces fundamentally new effects in a field." (Introduction to Applied Numerical Analysis, section 1.10). A few doubling times, and you're playing a completely different game. New rules mean new relationships and new patterns. New feedback loops among and within systems will produce new results. (cf. FifthDisciplinarians)
So disbelieve financial catastrophists when they forecast global monetary meltdown --- and disbelieve boom hucksters when they predict glorious global prosperity. Discount ecological catastrophists who fear imminent environmental disaster --- and discount their opponents who argue that pollution, ozone layer depletion, greenhouse gases, etc. are sheer fantasy. Raise eyebrows at technophiles who foresee effortless and ever-accelerating scientific/engineering progress --- and similarly wrinkle the forehead at technophobes who anticipate network gridlock, uncontrollable bio-nano-info-terrorism, and social infrastructure collapse.
The right attitude:
diversify holdings;
buy insurance, or self-insure through savings; and
plan to change strategy every decade or so.
Be prepared, in other words, to be surprised --- and to recover quickly.
(cf. MoneyWisdom and BennettOnLife)
TopicEconomics - TopicSociety
- Sunday, July 29, 2001 at 12:08:06 (EDT)
StagesOfWork
When you begin a career, what counts is what you know --- your skills applicable to specific tasks that you have been assigned, your schooling, your relevant experience, etc.
In the middle of a successful working life, what starts to matter most is who you know --- your network of connections, your ability to tap into the right experts, and your power to bring a team together to get a big job done effectively.
But if you reach mature status in an organization, what really makes a difference is who you are --- your reliability, honesty, vision, helpfulness, and the other classic "Boy Scout" virtues. Mere cleverness isn't enough. You need to have built trust.
(cf. AgesOfWork)
TopicOrganizations - TopicLife
- Saturday, July 28, 2001 at 14:47:37 (EDT)
GameDays
Every month or so a retired colleague, JF, invites a crew of friends over to his house to play. He gets a nice mix of people --- maybe half a dozen, young and old, male and female, silly and serious --- to spend a chunk of the day socializing and rolling dice, shuffling cards, or pushing blocks of wood around a board. Typical activities in recent gatherings:
Hearts - the classic, cruelest card game
Axis and Allies - a global-scale computer-based strategic WW II simulation
Medici - a new German board/card game of bidding and resource allocation
Civilization - the computerized version: evolve a society from stone age to space travel (alas, we have never had enough time to get very far beyond the more primitive levels)
Diplomacy - a six-hour-long orgy of negotiation, alliance, and betrayal, on a map of Europe ca. 1900-1915; simultaneous movement and no random elements (except for the players!); "Dippy" is to "Risk" as chess is to checkers
Rail Baron - build a network of railroad lines across a map of the USA and run trains along them; monopolize access to regions and drive opponents into bankruptcy; much more playable in the computer version than over-the-board, where action is interrupted by too much bookkeeping and table-lookup
All pleasant pastimes for a Sunday afternoon....
(cf. ZarStory)
- Friday, July 27, 2001 at 05:42:02 (EDT)
BossJobs
The chief functions of a front-line manager in a large organization are to:
protect the people on the team from stupid outside interference (which higher levels of the bureaucracy are unwittingly trying to impose ... pointless task forces, new impossible requirements, silly fire drills, etc.);
define, clarify, and evolve the team's mission so as to maximize value-added by team members;
get enough resources (dollars, staff, space, time, etc.) to actually do the mission;
help junior team members develop their skills, take on new tasks, get recognized, and receive promotions as appropriate; and
help senior team members stay fresh and productive.
Not easy! I tried, without much success, 1988-1990. As the saying goes, the two happiest days in a man's life are when he gets his boat, and when he sells it. My escape from management was indeed one of the brighter moments of my career.
- Wednesday, July 25, 2001 at 05:21:27 (EDT)
GutStrings
Medieval and renaissance music is often played on early instruments using original-style strings, sometimes called "catgut" but actually made nowadays out of sheep intestines. Unlike steel or nylon, gut absorbs moisture from the air on humid days. The strings can thus lengthen and change pitch quite significantly during a performance. At one summer concert Scott Reiss and Tina Chancey (of the group Hesperus) explained to their audience why they had to pause to retune their instruments. In concluding his remarks, Scott said, "We tune, because we care."
Tina added, "Today, we care a lot!"
ZhurnalWiki Preview
Recently I've been working on an experiment with Wiki --- the simplest collaborative environment that could possibly work. ("Wikiwiki" means "quick" in Hawaiian.) A Wiki is a set of Web pages designed for extremely rapid evolution and extraordinarily productive use. Wiki was invented by Ward Cunningham in 1994. The book The Wiki Way: Quick Collaboration on the Web by Bo Leuf and Ward Cunningham (Addison-Wesley, 2001) explains Wiki and provides a stand-alone highly-customizable Perl-based Wiki server which runs on almost any computer system. (Cf. http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiWikiWeb for a quick start via one of the oldest and largest Wikis; cf. http://www.leuf.net/cgi/wikidn?TheWikiWay for an entry into Bo Leuf's Wiki domain, where his online Wiki-based diary resides.)
The ^zhurnal, with its ~600 interrelated entries over the past 2+ years, cries out for restructuring into a Wiki web. I'm learning as I go ... it's taking a lot of time and by-hand editing ... but I hope within a few weeks to have cleaned up and posted a static "snapshot" of the ZhurnalWiki which I've begun running on a laptop at home. Eventually it would be nice to have a dynamic ZhurnalWiki which anybody could add to and improve --- but to implement that will require a bit more computer privileges on the server (to run CGI scripts) than I have, as well as more time and cleverness. Maybe some day!
Meanwhile, for the record and to share an outline of what I've done and plan to do, the major steps are:
Get Bo & Ward's "Quickiwiki" up and running on this Macintosh iBook under Apple's OS-X (using the UNIX Perl interpreter)
Take Volumes 1-14 of the ^zhurnal since April 1999, merge the items into a big file (~1.1 MB) and, in a simple word processor, substitute Wiki-style mark-up for HTML tags
Convert ^zhurnal entries one-at-a-time into Wiki pages using Wiki edit/save tools
Fix typos and formatting oddities
Add cross-links and index pages based on common topical themes
Convert the ZhurnalWiki pages out of their dynamic Wiki form into a static HTML image
I've got the first few steps finished and am iteratively hacking away at the annotation and cross-linkage operation. But I must admit that I haven't written the program(s) to build a frozen web out of the live Wiki ... though I think it will be relatively straightforward to perform. Since the existing "wiki.cgi" script converts a file on-the-fly into HTML, putting a wrapper around that and letting it work its way through the ~600 ZhurnalWiki pages should do the job. I estimage it will only require a few lines of UNIX shell script and/or Perl. Famous last words? My time estimates for programming projects are generally optimistic by a factor of three --- even when I take into account my congenital optimism. So if the planned ZhurnalWiki doesn't materialize for public use before the next equinox, please forgive me....
Wouff-Hong & Rettysnitch
Annoyed by spam? Offended by drooling online porno-pimps? Tired of stupid commercial Web sites that put stylistic frippery and banner ads ahead of content? Bugged by pop-up windows? Who isn't?
The Internet is sick, just as ham radio was sick back in the years after the First World War, when bad amateur operators and lawless commercial stations fought for control of the airwaves. The good hams --- who sought to use radio for fun, learning, public service, and emergency disaster aid --- were getting drowned in the noise
Hiram Percy Maxim (call sign W1AW, "The Old Man" and founder of the American Radio Relay League) discovered the answer, or actually, a couple of answers. The Wouff-Hong is a mystical object of unspeakable terror, "amateur radio's most sacred symbol" which "stands for the enforcement of law and order in amateur operation." Its partner, the Rettysnitch, "is used to enforce the principles of decency in operating work." Physically, the Wouff-Hong looks like a couple of rough chunks of wood banded together in a forked configuration; the Rettysnitch is a pointy metallic probelike device. Their method of use is too gruesome and horrible to describe.
OK, for the unromantic realists who haven't yet understood: they were jokes. But what the Wouff-Hong and Rettysnitch stood for was real. There was no technological way to keep abusers off the air, and there were no governmental regulations that could be enforced. But if social pressures could be generated and brought to bear, there was a chance. If decent hams refused to tolerate or talk (telegraphically speaking) to rotten ones, the bad eggs would learn to clean up their acts. If violating the rules was shameful, and if violators were exposed whenever they were identified, then even the lids who lacked any sense of propriety would hesitate before interfering with legitimate amateurs.
Where are the Internet's Wouff-Hong and Rettysnitch now, in our time of desperate need?
- Thursday, July 19, 2001 at 16:52:02 (EDT)
Broken Symmetry
John Scarne (1903-1985) was a brilliant magician, a genuine genius at sleight-of-hand. He was also, alas, a shameless self-promoter. In cards and dice manipulation he was peerless, but in his attempt to position himself as the world's greatest board game designer he fell far shorter on the cosmic scale.
Author Blake Eskin wrote about Scarne and his hubris in the Washington Post Sunday magazine recently (15 July 2001, "A World of Games", pps. 18-22, 26-28). About 35 years earlier, I had an encounter of my own with John Scarne that corroborates Eskin's judgments. In the mid-1960s I somehow heard of a game that Scarne had created and was selling. Probably it was mentioned in a Martin Gardner Scientific American "Mathematical Games" column, or maybe an advertisement for it appeared in Chess Life & Review ; I forget.
I ordered the game, which was modestly named "Scarney" by its developer. It was fun, in an abstract set-theoretic sense: two players took turns placing tokens down on a 4x4 board, and then took turns removing tokens and scoring points. The pieces came in four colors and were each marked with from one to four spots.
Pretty mathematical, in other words ... but after studying Scarney and playing a few test matches with my brother, it was clear to me that its designer was no mathematician. The rules were badly flawed: the second player could win trivially every time, just by playing in a symmetric pattern opposite to the first player's moves. Ugly-o!
I wrote to John Scarne, told him about the error, and suggested a small modification that would break the symmetry without otherwise marring the game. Scarne wrote back --- but instead of graciously acknowledging his mistake, he claimed in his letter to have already found the problem and to have independently chosen the same fix that I proposed. Coincidence? Or an attempted face-saving cover-up when a young teen-ager spotted a big boo-boo in a game that somebody hoped would make his name a household word?
Sure, everybody's insecure, at least most of the time. Sure, almost everybody dreams of fame, and maybe fortune. The tough job is to be uncorruptably honest with oneself ... hard-headedly realistic about one's abilities and achievements --- and then go on from there to find joy in doing one's best, without regard for mass recognition or lack thereof. It's part of growing up....
LensManic
E. E. "Doc" Smith was an industrial chemist, but he also wrote science fiction stories back in the "Golden Age" of SF, beginning in the 1930's. Doc Smith wasn't much for character development or literary frills. But his plots were action-packed and spanned the galaxies ... even allowing for the fact that, when he began his Skylark series of novels, the actual size and nature of the cosmos was far from understood by astronomers. No matter! Smith's protagonists --- clean-cut all-American-style scientists and engineers and soldiers --- invented new rays, discovered new laws of Nature, and built new spacecraft ad lib. Whatever it took to beat the bad guys and save the world(s).
Many years ago during times of stress I found great comfort in Doc Smith's quaint yarns, especially the parts where modest self-effacing characters triumphed over impossible odds. Those were folks to identify with! A better-than-average sample of Smith's prose follows; I remember enjoying it one night before a Caltech physics department comprehensive graduate written exam. (Those were tests of one's problem-solving abilities in classical and quantum mechanics, electromagnetism, thermodynamics, nuclear physics, etc.; cf. ^zhurnal 2 February 2000.) Our Hero, Kimball Kinnison, is working with a reference librarian to pick out a team of ~50 super-geniuses, the "... most eminent scientists and thinkers of all the planets of Galactic Civilization ...", for a special project to create some new black-hole-like artifact. The librarian has been asked to identify candidate mega-brainiacs:
"Such a group can be selected, I think." The girl stood for a moment, lower lip held lightly between white teeth. "That is not a standard index, but each scientist has a rating. I can set the acceptor . . . no, the rejector would be better --- to throw out all the cards above any given rating. If we take out all ratings over seven hundred we will have only the highest of the geniuses."
"How many, do you suppose?"
"I have only a vague idea --- a couple of hundred, perhaps. If too many, we can run them again at a higher level, say seven ten. But there won't be very many, since there are only two galactic ratings higher than seven fifty. There will be duplications too --- such people as Sir Austin Cardynge will have two or three cards in the final rejects."
"QX --- we'll want to hand-pick the fifty, anyway. Let's go!"
Then for hours bale after bale of cards went through the machine; thousands of records per minute. Occasionally one card would flip out into a rack, rejected. Finally:
"That's all, I think. Mathematicians, physicists," the librarian ticked off upon pink fingers. "Astronomers, philosophers, and this new classification, which hasn't been named yet."
"The H.T.T.'s." Kinnison glanced at the label, lightly lettered in pencil, fronting the slim packet of cards. "Aren't you going to run them through, too?"
"No. These are the two I mentioned a minute ago --- the only ones higher than seven hundred fifty."
"A choice pair, eh? Sort of a creme de la creme? Let's look 'em over," and he extended his hand. "What do the initials stand for?"
"I'm awfully sorry, sir, really," the girl flushed in embarrassment as she relinquished the cards in high reluctance. "If I'd had any idea we wouldn't have dared --- we call you, among ourselves, the 'High-Tension Thinkers'."
"Us!" It was the Lensman's turn to flush. Nevertheless, he took the packet and read sketchily the facer: "Class XIX --- Unclassifiable at present ... lack of adequate methods ... minds of range and scope far beyond any available indices ... Ratings above high genius (750) ... yet no instability ... power beyond any heretofore known ... assigned ratings tentative and definitely minimum."
He then read the cards.
"Worsel, Velantia, eight hundred."
"Kimball Kinnison, Tellus, eight hundred seventy-five."
--- from Gray Lensman , Chapter 8.
- Monday, July 16, 2001 at 04:02:20 (EDT)
HighCool
At a local library used-book sale recently I picked up a small Peter Pauper Press volume, Japanese Haiku . An inscription inside the front indicates that it was a 1967 Christmas gift from "Jean" to "Linda", who met at "Camp Hitaga" and became friends. (Where are they now? Did the book end up in her estate when Linda passed away? Or was it simply misplaced and donated to the library inadvertently?)
That little book brought back some haiku-related memories of a friendship of mine from about the same time. Joe Walling and I were students together at J. H. Reagan High School in Austin, Texas. We were comrades but parted ways at graduation, when he went to Rice University and I stayed nearer to home at the University of Texas. But a year later I transferred to Rice, and Joe invited me to share an apartment with him and a couple of other students. We exchanged banter and wordplay constantly. I remember commenting, at dinner when I had cooked green peas and one of my roommates refused to eat them: "All we are saying, is give peas a chance!" (OK, so maybe you had to be there, in the early 1970's, for it to work. Sorry....)
In a more poetic vein, Joe Walling occasionally tried his hand at verse. His best haiku was beautiful, striking, and cannot be repeated here --- since, besides issues of copyright, its imagery is rather too explicit for this journal. Joe's effort begins:
Creamy-thigh'd goddess
and goes, hmmm, up from there. Typically sophomoric, in other words ... but hey, we were all sophomores at that time.
(cf. ^zhurnal 29 September 2000 for other notes on the Rice experience.)
PET ^z Bibli++
While cleaning out a long-unopened desk drawer, my wife (Paulette Dickerson) discovered a ledger from the early 1980s which offers additional data on ^z's hobby computing writings. To supplement the bibliographic saga begun in ^zhurnal 23 May 2000:
People's Computers magazine was published by PCC, the "People's Computer Company" of Menlo Park CA --- a rather anarchistic outfit with great spirit. PCC tended to compensate contributors via free subscriptions or copies of books. See http://sumeru.stanford.edu/pcc/ for some notes on the PCC phenomenon, plus entertaining commentary by various PCC alumni.
"Snooping with your PET" was accepted in May 1978 and appeared in Vol. 7, No. 2 (Sep-Oct 1978) pps. 16-19. It discussed some internal details of the Commodore PET's BASIC interpreter, the USR(X) function, and 6502 microprocessor opcodes. This was one of the first articles ^z wrote. It drew rejection slips from Byte and Kilobaud before PCC gave it a home.
"Textrapolation!" was spurned by Personal Computing magazine before PCC accepted it in November 1978. The article described methods of predicting the words in a text stream based on extrapolating from past patterns. As far as ^z knows it was never published; perhaps it remained in the queue when People's Computers ceased publication. ^z did receive Volume 1 of the collected Dr. Dobb's Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia in payment; the title reveals something about PCC's style.
Calculators/Computers magazine accepted "Random Numbers for Pocket Calculators", a discussion of pseudorandom number generators and their flaws. In September 1978 C/C promised to pay $10, but apparently went out of business before using the article. ^z never received a cent.
Creative Computing printed at least three pieces:
"PET Bookshelf" included reviews and ratings of books & newsletters of interest to PET owners. CC accepted this short column after Kilobaud returned it. The magazine paid a big $12 in mid-1978, and published the article late that year --- but with no byline or credit to ^z.
"Blackbox for the PET" was an adaptation of a Parker Brothers game of deduction. It appeared in the February 1980 issue of CC , pps. 112-117.
"Big Numbers and Small Computers" was submitted to Byte and tentatively accepted by that journal in December 1979, but in October 1980 it came back with a rejection slip. ^z offered it to CC which accepted it for $150. The issue in which this article appeared has been lost somewhere in ^z's house; the precise date of publication thus remains unknown.
Personal Computing typically offered $100 per article, a good rate for short pieces but less attractive than Byte 's $50/page as typeset. PC published:
"An Assembler for the PET" in June 1978; it appeared in Vol. 2, No. 12 (December 1978) pps. 42-45.
"Line Renumbering on the PET", including BASIC and 6502 machine-language programs to do this now-almost-forgotten task. This article came out in Vol. 3, No. 3 (March 1979), pps. 24-29.
"G is for Graphics" an alphabet picturebook program published in Vol. 3, No. 6 (June 1979), pps. 38-41.
Byte was the 600-pound gorilla of the hobby computing world. In addition to the publications mentioned in ^zhurnal 23 May 2000:
"Continued Fractions, or Pieces of Pi" was used in the Byte book Numbers in Theory and Practice, edited by Blaise Liffick.
"Simulating Physics Systems, Part III: Spiral Galaxies" was a Gerola & Seiden type simulation of patterns in star formation, with new stars born near where old ones go supernova in a galaxy rotating with shear. It was accepted by Byte in early 1979 --- but in July 1981 the manuscript was returned, marked up by an editor before a decision to kill the piece was made. ^z got to keep the $200 advance payment.
"Alphametics & Cryptarithms" offered programs in both BASIC and 6502 machine-language to solve letter-number puzzles (e.g., "SEND + MORE = MONEY", with each letter representing a single decimal digit; another example is "ONES + ZEROES = BINARY"). Byte took this in early 1980, but the date of publication is unrecorded.
Clearly, during his final year or two of graduate school at Caltech ^z could have spent a bit more time working on his thesis and a bit less time standing in line at the Post Office submitting manuscripts....
MockMack
Annoyed by monster sport utility vehicles (SUVs) that hog the road? You need MockMack™! This inconspicuous luggage-rack attachment folds flat on the top of your car ... but if an aggressive driver cuts you off, just press the activation key and it flips up to display the grille of a super-size semi diesel tractor --- complete with bulldog logo (or extra-price optional designs of your choice). The MockMack™ then glides forward on a pair of telescoping rails, until it hovers just aft of the back window of the unfriendly SUV at 12 o'clock. When the aggressive driver glances into his rear-view mirror and sees the glowing red LED eyes of the bulldog on the grille behind him ... well, perhaps the movie Duel will come to mind. Perhaps he will drive a bit more cautiously in the future, when he gets his little truck out of the ditch.
When its mission is accomplished, MockMack™ retracts instantly to its stow-away position on top of your car. You smile ... and remember our corporate slogan: It's not just the mind that boggles!
(Cf. ^zhurnal 16 June 2001)
Digging the Stacks (iii/iii)
A final excerpt from A Guide to Library Research Methods by Thomas Mann --- Chapter 11, "Talking to People":
So far we have examined six major avenues of access to information: controlled vocabulary searches, systematic browsing, key word searches, citation searches, searches through published bibliographies, and those done through computers. (Computer searches use elements of the other methods but add the possibility of post-coordinate Boolean combinations.) The seventh major avenue --- that of talking to people --- is the one most favored by journalists, but it is also valuable for anyone else.
It is particularly important for academic researchers to be aware of this method, as most academics have an overly strong print bias, that is, they often unconsciously assume that if information cannot be found in print, then it cannot be found at all. This mental set is frequently complicated by two other assumptions, that calling people on the phone is "bothering" them, and that spending a few dollars on long-distance calls is totally beyond the pale of acceptable behavior.
... In obtaining information, the "secret" that is so hard for so many people to believe is this: There is no secret. Just make the call anyway and be perfectly honest about your reasons. It's O.K. to ask for help. The odds are that you'll succeed if you are simply persistent in developing a chain of referrals.
Only a few things must be kept in mind to make your calls productive. First, if the nature of your inquiry is particularly complex, do a little homework first. ...
Second, explain the purpose of your research --- that is, what your're ultimately trying to do, and what you will use the information for (e.g., personal curiosity, publication, broadcast, etc.). ...
Third, respect the expert's intellectual property rights. Don't simply "milk" a person for information and then pass it off as your own --- be careful not to infringe on your source's own potential use of the information. ...
Fourth, when you talk to people about a subject you're not familiar with, it is very important to ask for more contacts. Few researchers will rely exclusively on one printed source; it is similarly unwise to rely on only one spoken viewpoint. ...
And fifth, after you have talked to someone who has been helpful --- especially if the person has gone out of his or her way for you --- it is very important to write a thank you note.
Thank you, Thomas! (Cf. ^zhurnal 30 June 2001 and 21 June 2001)
Somehow the other day, in the context of human memory and how malleable it can be, the concepts of "memory plastic" and "memory metal" came to consciousness. These are real substances --- materials which can be molded into one shape, cooled, bent into another shape, and then when reheated revert to the "remembered" configuration. Nothing magical about them, just chemical bonds and solid-state physics, of which I know next to nothing.
But skipping along from that, I suddenly recalled a science-fiction story of the 1960's. It was a tale that involved some products of materials science as plot devices: a cliché-evil Earth government versus cliché-nice libertarian asteroid miners who were armed with strange and powerful artifacts, including supertough threads that could cut through metal like a wire cheeseslicer through cheddar. I reckoned that I had read it in an Analog anthology some time around 1967-69, based on a mental timestamp from associations that the memory had with an outside corner of my old public high school building, J. H. Reagan in northeast Austin Texas. I could almost see the cover of the book that I was carrying as I walked toward the school door....
Zwowza! After that decades-old subterranean vision blasted through the surface of my brain like a volcanic eruption, I simply had to check it out. A quick web search provided solid confirmation: Randall Garrett, writing under the pseudonym "Jonathan Blake McKensie" (or Mackenzie? --- Internet sources vary) published "Thin Edge" in Analog , December 1963, well before I began to read the 'zine. I must have seen it in the collection Analog 3 which came out in 1965 and reached my teenage hands a few years thereafter.
So even though I can't remember to take out the garbage some mornings, there are still a few functional neurons hiding out in the old ^z cranial crevasses! (But don't ask me to comment on the first issue of Playboy magazine that I ever saw --- May 1966, in my Uncle Lloyd's living-room magazine rack. Nowadays it would be rated a mild "PG = Parental Guidance Suggested"; back then, it was eye-opening. The centerfold's name was Dolly Read; she wore an electric purple sweater, pulled up a bit too high for comfort, and ... but I digress. Apparently certain images are etched rather deeply into an adolescent's mental substrate. Plasticity....)
Religion & Reverence
In the 1850's John Stuart Mill wrote an essay titled "The Utility of Religion" --- marred in places by too-strident attacks on conventional systems of faith, but containing much positive and worthwhile thought. Along the way Mill grapples with life and the roots of its meaning. He observes rather poetically:
"Human existence is girt round with mystery: the narrow region of our experience is a small island in the midst of a boundless sea, which at once awes our feelings and stimulates our imagination by its vastness and its obscurity. To add to the mystery, the domain of our earthly existence is not only an island in infinite space, but also in infinite time. The past and the future are alike shrouded from us: we neither know the origin of anything which is, nor, its final destination."
As for the mystical dimensions of belief, and the possibility of religion without them, Mill then argues:
"The value, therefore, of religion to the individual, both in the past and present, as a source of personal satisfaction and of elevated feelings, is not to be disputed. But it has still to be considered, whether in order to obtain this good, it is necessary to travel beyond the boundaries of the world which we inhabit; or whether the idealization of our earthly life, the cultivation of a high conception of what it may be made, is not capable of supplying a poetry, and, in the best sense of the word, a religion, equally fitted to exalt the feelings, and (with the same aid from education) still better calculated to ennoble the conduct, than any belief respecting the unseen powers."
Mill postulates a system devoted to great and real things, such as humanity writ large. (Elements of his description perhaps echo in Larry Niven's science-fiction novel Protector.) Mill suggests that:
"The essence of religion is the strong and earnest direction of the emotions and desires towards an ideal object, recognized as of the highest excellence, and as rightfully paramount over all selfish objects of desire. This condition is fulfilled by the Religion of Humanity in as eminent a degree, and in as high a sense, as by the supernatural religions even in their best manifestations, and far more so than in any of their others."
In a discussion of the theory that the universe is a battleground between Good and Evil --- a belief which he finds intellectually and morally acceptable in spite of its mystical elements --- Mill's comments are reminiscent of George Eliot's stirring philosophy expressed in her novel Middlemarch . Mill writes:
"A virtuous human being assumes in this theory the exalted character of a fellow-laborer with the Highest, a fellow combatant in the great strife; contributing his little, which by the aggregation of many like himself becomes much, towards that progressive ascendancy, and ultimately complete triumph of good over evil, which history points to, and which this doctrine teaches us to regard as planned by the Being to whom we owe all the benevolent contrivance we behold in Nature."
As Mill says, a "... pleasing and encouraging thought ..."!
(Cf. Cardinal Newman's Definition of a Gentleman (1852), Samuel Johnson's Letter of Condolence (1750), and ^zhurnal notes re George Eliot 6 November 2000 and 21 May 1999, Albert Schweitzer 23 July 2000, and Mary Midgley 3 July 2001 and previous posts.)
The classic lists of Wedding Anniversary Gifts need updating. Herewith, some modest proposals from the Paper Products Industry Association:
1 - clocks     - coffee filters
2 - china      - disposable diapers
3 - glass      - day-planner refills
4 - appliances - napkins & tissues
5 - silverware - paperback novels
6 - wood       - cardboard boxes
7 - desk sets  - local newspapers
8 - linens     - sticky notepads
9 - leather    - pogs & collectible trading cards
10 - jewelry    - coffee-table books
20 - platinum   - cute animal calendars
25 - silver     - piñatas & party hats
30 - diamond    - autographed photos of politicians
40 - ruby       - excelsior, confetti, & streamers
50 - gold       - disposable diapers
(thanks to Gray and other members of ^z's family for suggestions and advice!)
Cubism (Part 3)
To set the record straight: according to a newly-rediscovered ledger from 1980-83 (found by ^z's better half in an old desk) a comment in ^zhurnal 16 March 2001 is incorrect. Three months ago I wrote:
"On 20 September 1980 I took part in a Cube competition held by a local department store. The store had offered $100 gift certificates to anyone who could solve a Cube in under five minutes. I was the seventh to succeed that morning; there were a bunch of students from the University of Maryland there ahead of me. The store didn't keep its promise ... all I got was a T-shirt."
But my ledger indicates that the store did in fact (two weeks later) mail the gift certficate to me. Apparently the notes I relied on in March had been written before the reward arrived, and my memory was incomplete. (It still is; I have no recollection of the certificate and no idea what I bought with it. Clothes, or something equally ephemeral?) The ledger entry also records that it took me 4.5 minutes to do the job, and that my algorithm to attack the Rubik's Cube began with getting the edge cubelets into their correct places, bottom-to-top, followed by putting the corners into position, and finally working to orient the corners properly.
Nowadays I'm sadly out of practice on the Cube; I can recall the general principles but not enough of the specific moves to solve one efficiently. My time would probably be half an hour or so. Cubis fugit...
Today is Independence Day in the United States of America. Many of the activities associated with this date (e.g., backyard barbecues and beer, outdoor concerts and fireworks, retail shopping and baseball) are tangential at best to its original meaning. But today some newspapers still sacrifice a page of advertising space to print the Declaration of Independence, some politicians still rise briefly to statesmanship as they speak of freedom, and some individuals still pause to think about Thomas Jefferson's words: "... We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness --- That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the consent of the governed ...."
The American flag is a symbol of that founding philosophy. The flag is an overused cliché, but on occasion the underlying spirit manages to surface. For me a striking moment occurs in the movie Executive Decision , an action flick starring Kurt Russell. At one point the co-pilot of a hijacked US aircraft is sent by terrorists down into a cargo hold to investigate an electrical problem. Hiding there are a handful of soldiers and their consultant Kurt, smuggled aboard against all odds. The co-pilot startles; Kurt signals him to hush; a soldier quietly lifts a shoulder patch on his camo uniform and reveals a small American flag insignia. The message: "Courage --- we're here to help you." It's a minor scene in a minor motion picture, but whenever I see it, it moves me. It reminds me of what a flag can stand for.
The national reputation: military serving under civilian control; force working to ensure peace. The purpose of government: liberty and justice for all. Yes, the country falls short, sometimes radically so. Racism remains alive, big money corrupts politics, and short-sightedness leads to foolish decisions. Many branches are rotten and need to be trimmed --- but the tree is healthy, and over time there are more and more good trees growing in the forest, more nations which are living examples of law, democracy, human rights, equality, peace, and freedom. Progress toward universal flourishing ... worth celebrating this day.
Parts & Wholes
Mary Midgley's recent Science and Poetry is, like her earlier writings, full of thoughtful and literate prose. But in some ways the new book feels sadly unsatisfying. Its chapters read like disjoint essays or speeches, which indeed the Acknowledgements suggest that they are. Worse, the overall tone is one of negativism and refutation, of smiting down those who disagree --- yet a close reading suggests that Midgley's arguments are themselves vulnerable to her own criticisms. Yes, the world is untidy and needs to be analyzed on multiple levels; yes, simplistic theories cannot explain all phenomena; yes, scientists are human (as are philosophers! - ^z) and often overreach themselves, especially when writing for lay audiences. But it's impolitic and unconvincing to pick phrases out of context and attack them for their techno-hubric vocabulary. It also weakens one's case to cite popularizers and fringe physicists as if they represent the core of the human scientific enterprise. And is the gender question, Sky God versus Earth Goddess, really all that relevant to the question at hand, or is it just another metaphorical debating trick?
Mary Midgley's bottom line is an important one and appears in its purest form near the end of Chapter 18: Wholes and parts are equally real. Absolutely. But (to quote a rock music band slogan), "So far, so what?" Granted, too much reductionism is bad --- as is too much wholism. But what comes next? As she aptly notes, "Clear expressions of important mistakes are very useful things, making it much easier to move on beyond those mistakes than it is when they are wrapped in confusion." (Chap. 3) Yes. And most welcome at this point would be a clear, compact, coherent expression of the key elements of Midgley's position(s). Total quantification isn't necessary --- equations aren't always appropriate! --- but a bit of sharpness could make her ideas more easily testable against human experience. That wouldn't be bad.
John Stuart Mill's essay "The Utility of Religion" wrestles with many of the same themes as does Mary Midgley --- the scientific v. the supernatural, and method v. mysticism. But Mill manages to paint a clearer picture, particularly with respect to the tension between reverence and religion. More on that another time!
(Cf. ^zhurnal 22 February 2001 and 17 January 2000 for comments by John Archibald Wheeler and Martin Gardner re unified theories of everything; cf. "Physics Envy", 11 April 2001 re (mis)use of technical metaphors; and cf. various thought-provoking excerpts from Midgley's prior books, 17 Sep 2000, 6 July 2000, 1 June 2000, etc.)
Minor league baseball is a great way to rediscover America --- the real country, not the bizarre pressure-cooker that dominates many people's daily experience. At a couple of recent weekday evening games in Frederick, Maryland, a few thousand fans gather to witness the Keys play. The Frederick Keys are a Class A club, three steps down the food chain from the major league Baltimore Orioles. They're named for local hero Francis Scott Key, author of the US national anthem ("The Star Spangled Banner"); he's buried in the cemetery next door to the ballpark.
Some sights and sounds:
... a diehard aficionado keeps a careful record of all the action with a mimeographed form on his clipboard. He complains that nowadays too few people personally log the hits, runs, errors, stolen bases, etc. during play; folks just aren't serious about the game anymore. He's a former schoolteacher, and confesses that he ran off copies of a few thousand blank scoresheets before he retired ... enough, he figures, to last his remaining lifetime even though he attends several games every week. (Yes, they're real mimeograph pages, purplish-blue ink, somewhat fuzzy with age.)
... two young people climb the stairs on their way to buy popcorn and drinks. He's crewcut, tan, heavily muscled from work, not from a spa. She's wearing a tee-shirt; tattoos flow down her arm. Elderly couples sit together and enjoy the crowd as much as they enjoy the game. Kids run back and forth on the grassy slope by the outfield or ride the merry-go-round; mothers carry wee babies and hold toddlers' hands; great-with-child mothers-to-be sit and fan themselves with program inserts. Purple fingernail polish, big earrings, and dayglo-streaked hair supplement skimpy shorts. A crucifix dangles over dramatic décolletage.
... during breaks between innings a visiting entertainment act cruises around the edge of the field in an old police car. "The Blues Brothers" leap out, grab wireless microphones, sing, cavort, and throw bags of peanuts into the crowd. A row of teen-agers in the stands are dressed in white shirts with skinny black ties; they dance along, hoping to catch the eye of a roving cameraman and see themselves on the big screen TV atop the left field fence.
... scouts and coaches sit behind the netting back of home plate and aim radar guns to measure the speed of the pitches. Foul balls spray across the bleachers. One lands in a cup of beer, spilling a little liquid down from the upper level seats onto spectators below, resulting in much laughter and no complaints. Other fouls ricochet off the stands and are snagged as souvenirs or given to nearby kids. An older fan complains that in countless decades he never has caught a ball; the closest he came was one time in 1967 when a friend occupying his seat grabbed a foul while he himself was in the bathroom.
... during the 7th inning "stretch" the scoreboard admonishes fans to take out their car keys and jingle them (the home team is the "Keys" --- get it?!). Virtually everyone complies.
The pace of the game is slow, the weather warm, the crowd friendly, and the tickets cheap. Stadium food is pricey, but not when you consider it as part of the entertainment. All the seats are close enough to the field to see faces --- unlike mega-ballparks where the upper decks are at nosebleed altitudes and the diamond is distant enough to turn players into ants. The baseball is good, if unpredictable: one night the Keys are behind 9-0 in the bottom of the ninth inning, with two outs, and rally to score three runs; the next night it's a slugfest of the opposite color and the Frederick boys win 15-6. Not many errors on either side, just good, solidly hit balls and aggressive play. A lucky few from the team may move up to the AA level or beyond. Meanwhile, they're not making much money but they're having fun. So are the people in their audience.
Digging the Stacks (ii/iii)
From Thomas Mann's book A Guide to Library Research Methods Chapter 9, "Computer Searches":
Computer searches thus have both advantages and disadvantages. To use them intelligently you must recognize their limitations as well as their strengths. The important thing to remember is that they are only one weapon available to the researcher; they are not the whole arsenal. A thorough review of the literature of any subject requires a combination of the approaches discussed in this book.
The versatility of computer searches is so dazzling that a large humber of researchers are failing to note or heed their limitations. And, contrary to the popular saying, what you don't know can hurt you. I have seen this problem repeatedly, particularly with graduate students who want to do a literature review in preparation for writing a dissertation. ...
What is just as bad is that professors who direct doctoral dissertations allow computer searches to pass for complete literature reviews --- for the professors are usually just as naive about their limitations as the students are.
What this amounts to can only be described as cultural lobotomy on a grand scale. When a significant percentage of our most educated people (prospective Ph.D.s) relies almost exclusively on computer searches for "in-depth" research, then we are fostering the growth of an intellectual system with very shallow roots. Since so much of the written memory of humanity before the 1970s is not in the computer in the first place --- or is only superficially indexed --- it is likely to be ignored by immature scholars if it isn't as easily retrievable as the more recent material. The older material --- especially the older journal articles --- "does not compute"; and to many graduate students this tends as a practical matter to mean "therefore it is not important." There tends to be a similar neglect of certain forms of literature, especially single-author books, because machines more readily retrieve journal articles and research reports. A moment's reflection will indicate that the computers are no better than the material that is loaded into them; and yet a surprising number of researchers expect them to be omniscient.
- Saturday, June 30, 2001 at 06:34:10 (EDT)
Some problems are easy; some problems are hard. To tell them apart is a hard problem!
(cf. ^zhurnal 25 May 1999)
- Thursday, June 28, 2001 at 08:06:43 (EDT)
Pregnant Sails
One of my favorite Shakespearian images occurs in MidSummer Night's Dream where (in Act II, Scene i) the Queen of the Fairies describes how she and a maiden worshiper used to hang out on the beach together:
Titania:
Set your heart at rest:
The fairy land buys not the child of me.
His mother was a vot'ress of my order,
And in the spiced Indian air, by night,
Full often hath she gossip'd by my side,
And sat with me on Neptune's yellow sands,
Marking the embarked traders on the flood,
When we have laugh'd to see the sails conceive,
And grow big bellied with the wanton wind:
Which she with pretty and with swimming gait,
Following (her womb then rich with my young squire)
Would imitate, and sail upon the land,
To fetch me trifles, and return again,
As from a voyage, rich with merchandise.
But she being mortal, of that boy did die,
And for her sake I do rear up her boy,
And for her sake I will not part with him.
Recently, while writing a letter to a friend I tried to find this passage to quote. Strangely enough, in the first copy of Shakespeare that came to hand --- a tiny 1924 volume "Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Clapp Noyes, A.M., Professor of English, Normal High School, Pittsburg, Penn." --- the words failed to resonate. I dug out a facsimile of the First Folio and found the problem: missing were the lines "When we have laugh'd to see the sails conceive, / And grow big bellied with the wanton wind:" and "Following (her womb then rich with my young squire)". These lacunæ seem more than coincidental. Were elements of Shakespeare's beautiful metaphor deemed too risqué? (But they're the best parts!) Also missing, perhaps for continuity's sake, was the later line "But she being mortal, of that boy did die".
On the positive side of the ledger, however, a "Critical Comment" from the Introduction of that same Noyes edition, attributed to Thomas Campbell: "I have never been so sacreligious as to envy Shakespeare in the bad sense of the word, but if there can be such an emotion as sinless envy, I feel it toward him .... Of all his works, the Midsummer Night's Dream leaves the strongest impression on my mind that this miserable world must have, for once at least, contained a happy man. This play is so purely delicious, so little intermixed with the painful passions from which Poetry distils her sterner sweets, so fragrant with hilarity, so bland and yet so bold, that I cannot imagine Shakespeare's mind to have been in any other frame than that of healthful ecstacy when the sparks of inspiration thrilled through his brain in composing it."
(cf. ^zhurnal 23 November 2000 for a similarly striking feminine sailing image by Herman Melville)
- Tuesday, June 26, 2001 at 10:14:31 (EDT)
Organ Lessons
Late afternoon, Wednesday 6 May 1998, Washington DC: wife and son and I fight our way through the dregs of rush-hour traffic into downtown Georgetown, center of congestion in the local cosmos. We find a parking space, weave our way on foot through a couple of blocks of students and shoppers, turn a corner, climb a short flight of stairs --- and step into an oasis of silence.
The little fenced yard in front of Grace Episcopal Church is cloaked in a mantle of peace. On the steps outside the main doors sits a young man, reading a book. We approach; he smiles, marks his place, and greets us. His name is Larry Molinaro, and he is simply enjoying the day while awaiting our arrival. His aura at that moment is the most serene of any human being I have ever witnessed. Is it the contrast with the hurly-burly metropolis surrounding us? Is it a deeper magic? No matter.
Larry is the organist at Grace Episcopal and has offered to give lessons to our 15-year-old son, Merle. We go inside and Merle plays for him on the church's harpsichord; Larry likes what he hears, and so do we. The acoustics are superb. We climb a narrow twisting stairway to the loft --- a passageway like those found in old observatories, snaking up from the foundation to the telescope. At the top, Larry shows us the hand-made church organ. It's a classical-style instrument with direct mechanical connections from keys and pedals to valves that send air through resonant pipes. The "Book of the Organ" depicts its construction: craftsman David Moore in Vermont smelted and cast the ingots of metal himself, hammered them out by hand into sheets, and formed them into pipes. The white keys are made of cow bones from his farm.
Cut to another Wednesday in Georgetown, 29 July 1998: in the Grace Episcopal Church organ loft Larry Molinaro is teaching, again within the great-spirited force field that seems to surround him and the church. During a break I tell him how memorable our first encounter was for me, two months earlier; he grins and says that the churchyard is just a marvelous place to sit and think. Larry and Merle and I joke about the stress associated with page-turning for a professional musician during a public performance, a job Merle occasionally takes on for friends of the family. Larry tells of toying with a nervous page-turner --- how sometimes Larry would tease his victim by planting small bright stick-on notes within the music, bearing little messages: Hi Bob! or Your Name Here --- and how when he knows a piece really well he can talk quietly to the page-turner while playing, thereby making his helper even more anxious. Larry describes the process of learning the organ pedals as "... like developing a second left hand ...", and then relates an anecdote of his catastrophic attempt to play while wearing new shoes --- which lead to some unexpectedly loud, dissonant chords and a sudden awakening for dozing members of the congregation below.
Jump finally to a Wednesday evening in Annapolis, Maryland, 28 October 1998: Larry shows us around the old St. Anne's Episcopal Church in the center of the city, next door to the state capitol. He tells us that, some years ago, the church tower bells were accidentally wired to the light switch in the men's room --- so that whenever a new parson went to use the facilities, the whole town knew it. Larry smiles, then moves to the organ to begin the lesson.
- Sunday, June 24, 2001 at 09:37:56 (EDT)
Hopeful Rejoinders
After the "hard rain's a'gonna fall" Jeremiadic downer of ^zhurnal 19 June 2001, how's about some glimmers of moonlight peeping shyly through the clouds? Sure, the "dot-com bubble" economy has a massive deflation still to hit home. But bear also in mind:
big systems have plenty of inertia --- crashes take longer, but are always more gentle than expected
thanks to our ancestors' thrift, we've got a lot of capital that remains useful --- buildings, farms, roads, machinery, and know-how
most critically, people are flexible --- they'll adjust to lower expectations, reallocate resources, and make do with less
The coming decade (or decades) may not be as rich in material goods as many fantasized last year, when techno-mania ruled minds, markets, and media. But progress in knowledge and, if we're fortunate, wisdom, will continue. Human beings around the world are, slowly and with plenty of tragic exceptions, freeing themselves from oppressive governments. There's more sharing of technology, food, and other resources. Perhaps we'll do better now, together and overall, than we would have under a booming economy of distracting toys. Let's hope so.
What's the point of all this? Perhaps "... to create moments of philosophy --- that is, to pass from opinion to thought ...."
(a quote from Philos magazine, via the 2 May 1999 New York Times article "Thought for Food: Cafés Offer Philosophy in France" by Marlise Simons; cf. ^zhurnal 18 Sep 1999 plus 9 April 2001 and other Philo B'fast notes.)
- Friday, June 22, 2001 at 05:41:06 (EDT)
Digging the Stacks (i/iii)
Thomas Mann's book A Guide to Library Research Methods (1986) is entertaining and remains valid --- nay, essential --- reading in the Web era. From Chapter 3, "Systematic Browsing and Use of the Classification Scheme":
Librarians sometimes meet with resistance when they suggest that if readers want certain information they shold browse the library's bookshelves in a particular area. Evidently, some people assume --- if it occurs to them at all --- that browsing is at best a haphazard and inefficient way to do research.
Just the opposite is true. Systematically browsing the shelves is a very useful method of subject retrieval, and in some cases it is the most efficient method of all. ...
... Many collections of primary manuscripts or "raw materials" exist on an incredible array of subjects, and can be identified through the sources discussed in Chapter 10 and in the Appendix. However, such collections are more often than not poorly indexed, or not indexed at all, so researchers usually must simply browse through them. The principle is the same, though: first put yourself in a situation where the information you want is likely to exist, and then look around so that you can recognize valuable things when you see them.
One of the major themes of the present book is that a variety of techniques can be used to find information, that each of them has both advantages and disadvantages, and that no one of them can be counted on to do the entire job of in-depth research. What is required is always a mixture of approaches, so that the various trade-offs can balance each other. My observation, however, is that in this age of proliferating indexes, abstracts, catalogs, and databases, the research technique of systematic browsing tends to be overlooked by researchers who are infatuated with the flashier electronic approaches. The fact remains, however, that the vast bulk of humanity's written memory contained in books is not in the indexes and databases in the first place; and researchers who neglect systematic browsing of the texts of books are missing a vast store of material that cannot be efficiently retrieved in any other way.
Pop Goes ...
"Now that the dot-com bubble has burst" is a phrase that appears frequently in newspaper articles nowadays. Sorry, dear columnist --- you're wrong (again!). The bubble is much, much larger than you imagine, and it will take longer to deflate than a mere year or two. Misallocation of resources has gone far beyond nouveaux-millionaire mansions, dark fiber in the ground, idle server farms, and unrentable office space. People have been wasted. They've made foolish career choices, thrown away retirement savings, driven down dead-end educational paths ... and in general, have been seduced by the gleam of quick, effortless wealth. A mountain of horribly bad investment has to be unwound and then repaired, if possible, or written off if not. That will probably take about a decade, perhaps longer in many cases.
Prepare for a rough landing. Prepare for hard times. Tighten your belts, please, in more ways than one.
(Cf. ^zhurnal 20 May 2001, 24 February 2001, 3 January 2001, 19 October 2000, 29 April 2000, 8 April 2000, 19 May 1999, etc.)
Life/Time Management (ii/ii)
From Seneca's "On the Shortness of Life":
"The only people really at leisure are those who take time for philosophy. They alone really live. It is not their lifetime alone of which they are careful stewards: they annex every age to their own and exploit all the years that have gone before. Unless we prove ingrate, it was for us that the illustrious founders of divine schools of thought came into being, for us they prepared a way of life. By the exertions of others we are led to the fairest treasures, raised to the light out of the darkness in which they were mired. No age is forbidden to us, we have admittance to all, and if we choose to transcend the narrow bounds of human frailty by loftiness of mind, there is a vast stretch of time for us to roam. We may dispute with Socrates, doubt with Carneades, repose with Epicurus, transcend human nature with the Stoics, defy it with the Cynics. Since Nature allows us to participate in any age, why should we not betake ourselves in mind from this petty and ephemeral span to the boundless and timeless region we can share with our betters?
"Only men who make Zeno and Pythagoras and Democritus and the other high priests of liberal studies their daily familiars, who cultivate Aristotle and Theophrastus, can properly be said to be engaged in the duties of life. None of these will be "not at home," none will send his visitor away without making him happier and better contented with himself, none will allow a visitor to leave him empty-handed, and they are accessible to all comers, night and day.
"None of these will force you to die, but all will teach you how. None of these will wear your years away, but rather add his own to yours. Conversation with them is not subversive, association not a capital offense, and no great expense is involved in cultivating them. You can carry home whatever you like: it will not be their fault if you do not draw as deeply as you like from their wellsprings. What felicity awaits the man who has enrolled as their client, what a fair old age! He will have friends with whom he can deliberate on matters great and small, whom he may consult about his problems every day, from whom he can hear truth without offense and praise without flattery, after whose likeness he may mold himself.
"It is a common saying that a man's parents are not of his own choosing but allotted to him by chance. But we can choose our genealogy. Here are families with noble endowments: choose whichever you wish to belong to. Your adoption will give you not only the name but actually the property, and this you need not guard in a mean or niggardly spirit: the more people you share it with, the greater will it become. These will open the path to eternity for you and will raise you to a height from which none can be cast down. This is the sole means of prolonging your mortality, rather of transforming it into immortality. Honors, monuments, all that ambition has blazoned in inscriptions or piled high in stone will speedily sink to ruin; there is nothing that the lapse of time does not dilapidate and exterminate. But the dedications of philosophy are impregnable; age cannot erase their memory or diminish their force. Each succeeding generation will hold them in ever higher reverence; what is close at hand is subject to envy, whereas the distant we can admire without prejudice. The philosopher's life is therefore spacious: he is not hemmed in and constricted like others. He alone is exempt from the limitations of humanity; all ages are at his service as at a god's. Has time gone by? He holds it fast in recollection. Is time now present? He utilizes it. Is it still to come? He anticipates it. The amalgamation of all time into one makes his life long."
(From The Stoic Philosophy of Seneca , translated by Moses Hadas (1900-1966), W. W. Norton & Company, 1958. Cf. ^zhurnal 30 May 2000 and 13 June 2001.)


Chicago Violence! Oh my word! This is ridiculous and unnecessary violence in Chicago. I lost my friend to gun violence and he was the 5th homicide less than 2 weeks ago. Really, Chicagoans, what's going through your minds that make you want to pick up a gun and kill someone? Is it lack of home training? Are you a product of a single parent home? Are you experimenting with drugs that's affecting your sense of thinking? I guess the questions will remain unanswered and a solution will never be found.
Have you ever heard of the word "Genocide"? Read the article below to capture the reality of that word!
A bloody weekend where seven people were killed and six wounded has put an abrupt end – at least for now – to hopes that Chicago was at least putting a lid on its frightening homicide rate.
With a few days left in the month, the nation's third-largest city now finds itself on the cusp of its deadliest January in more than a decade. The news comes just after Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy had announced that after several violent months, Chicago had seen a drop in homicides at the end of 2012 and for the first few weeks of 2013.
Police say the homicide rate is a reflection of the city's gang problem and a proliferation of guns. Chicago has for years tried to cut off the flow of guns. It has what city officials have called the strictest handgun ordinance in the U.S. But police officials say more needs to be done and that penalties for violating gun laws should be stiffer.
Among those killed over the weekend was 34-year-old Ronnie Chambers, who was shot in the head with what police believe was an assault weapon. Such guns are banned in Chicago but can be purchased legally in the suburbs or nearby states. Chambers is the fourth child of Shirley Chambers to fall victim to gun violence.
"I'd pray for God to protect Ronnie and keep him safe day and night," Shirley Chambers told the Chicago Sun-Times.
With the weekend shootings, Chicago now has 40 homicides – the same number as last January. With a few days left in the year, the city could reach its deadliest January since 2002, when it had 45 homicides in the first month.
Chicago's homicide count eclipsed 500 last year for the first time since 2008, but last week, McCarthy announced recent figures showing homicides had dropped. The city saw a 16 percent decline in the fourth quarter of 2012 and a 22 percent drop in the first weeks of January.
McCarthy wants lawmakers to increase jail time for those who are caught with illegal weapons, including for felons who aren't allowed to have them and for so-called straw purchases, where people buy guns for others who aren't supposed to have them.
Chicago's handgun ordinance bans gun shops in the city and prohibits gun owners from stepping outside their homes with a handgun. The city passed the restrictions in July 2010 after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down an outright ban that Chicago had for 28 years.
Chicago leads the nation in guns seized by police, and recently police have started displaying the guns each week to offer a visual reminder of the awesome firepower that is on the city's streets as they push for tougher gun laws. First Deputy Superintendent Al Wysinger said Monday that last year's total of 7,400 is nine times as high as the number seized in the nation's largest city, New York, and three times as high as in its second-largest, Los Angeles.
So far this year, Chicago officers have taken 574 firearms, Wysinger said Monday.
Wysinger called the spate of shootings "frustrating" for the department. But he said the number does not mean there are problems with changes the department has made to combat crime, particularly a strategy to focus on gang members and gang activity.
"Without this gang violence reduction strategy this weekend could have been a lot worse than it was," he told reporters.
McCarthy last week noted that New York finished 2012 with 418 homicides, a record low. He said New York's stiffer penalties for gun violations help. McCarthy has repeatedly mentioned Plaxico Burress, the NFL football player who spent 20 months in prison on a gun charge after accidentally shot himself, as an example of New York's tough gun laws.
← COPS GATHERING SECURITY FOOTAGE AT RICK ROSS (@RICKYROZAY) SHOOTING?


text:
Q: can not connect to my vps server vis ssh , Permission denied i've looked similar question but none of them worked in my case
've build a website using django and apache but today it suddenly raised an error when i try to open my website it show only
Apache2 Ubuntu Default Page
This is the default welcome page used to test the correct operation of the Apache2 server after
installation on Ubuntu systems. It is based on the equivalent page on Debian etc ..

before worked fine for about 9 month , i tried to connect to the server via ssh terminal
ssh username@my_ip_address

but it raised this error

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ @ WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED! @ @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ IT IS POSSIBLE THAT SOMEONE IS DOING SOMETHING NASTY! Someone could be eavesdropping on you right now (man-in-the-middle attack)! It is also possible that a host key has just been changed. The fingerprint for the ECDSA key sent by the remote host is SHA256:the_key Please contact your system administrator. Add correct host key in /home/username/.ssh/known_hosts to get rid of this message. Offending ECDSA key in /home/username/.ssh/known_hosts:2 ECDSA host key for my_ip has changed and you have requested strict checking. Host key verification failed.

and i run this command
ssh-keygen -R my_ip

and the output

Host my_ip_address found: line 2
  /home/username/.ssh/known_hosts updated. Original contents retained as /home/usernmae/.ssh/known_hosts.old

now i try to connect it again but ssh username@my_ip and then type my password , it says

Permission denied, please try again.

and also tried ssh username@my_ip -p 80
and raised this error

ssh_exchange_identification: Connection closed by remote host

ubuntu : 18
i appreciate your helps

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


The Spirit of Mawson - Day 1 – We're off!
Day 1 – We're off!
Well, we made it. After two years of dreaming and a lot of hard work, the Australasian Antarctic Expedition 2013-2014 has finally set sail! Departing from Bluff in southern New Zealand yesterday, our ship the MV Akademik Shokalskiy headed off, packed to the gunnels with all manner of scientific gear and 41 team members, all squirrelled away on board. Chris Fogwill and I had a mad final 24 hours in the lead up to this special moment. Team members were delayed by flights, key forms granting permission for our research programme were finalised on the afternoon of sailing and one major piece of kit turned up 30 minutes before we departed – amazingly the latter had been sent to the wrong address and was about to board a flight out of the country! We ran round like headless chickens in the end, chasing the last things we needed and packing them away – all of which had to be stowed in anticipation for the wild Southern Ocean winds and waves. There were some highlights though: the Mayor of Invercargill Tim Shadbolt kindly came to view the ship and see us off. I couldn't resist giving him an expedition T-shirt as a small gift of thanks!
By the end of the day and in spite of the enormous list of tasks we started out with, we had a ship and one ready to head south. Unexpectedly, the weather was stunning on departure. I didn't dare hope this would be the case. It was windy but the wild waves didn't eventuate. Getting out of Bluff can be a bit choppy, mostly because of the shallow sand bar at the entrance, but we hardly noticed it; the Shokalskiy seemed to glide out through the entrance. Most of us have heard horrendous stories about what to expect over the next few weeks so it was quite wonderful to have a reprieve … for one day at least. I know we're expeditioning on borrowed time when it comes to the conditions but I'm enjoying them while they last!
And things have remained remarkably calm by Southern Ocean standards since we departed. Some of the team have complained of wild dreams and strong swell in the early hours but nothing serious; everyone has made it through unscathed and in good humour.
Excitingly, after 23 hours of travelling, we've just seen the northern part of Auckland Islands, morphing with the clouds on the horizon. We're making great progress. More soon. But for those of you who can make it, do join us for the first of our Hangouts on Air Friday on Enderby Island. There will be a lot of wildlife in an amazing environment. It should be a lot of fun!


The athletes stayed at the Sofitel resort. This was the view from our room.
When we wondered what was sharp on the floor of the sea we realized it was thousands of these tiny shells.
Transportation from the airport was provided by a fleet out Audis.
Before the race Bec and I along with Tim O'Donnell, Meredith Kessler, And Tim Don toured the HMS Shoreham mine sweeper. The U.S. And UK sailors keep fit on their bikes with a watt bike and competed in the race.
A sampling from Athlete Food of some of our favorite meals. Fresh fruit, elaborate desserts and lots of flavorful rice dishes.
The last 3 miles of the bike course were on Bahrain's Formula 1 circuit. Rolling, twisty and fast. Skid marks from cars not bikes!
Cervelo checked and ready to go for the last race of the season. I was one of three American girls racing.
A brass band played the national anthem of Bahrain prior to the start of the race.
Ironman World Champion Mirinda Carfrae finishing. That's me back there trying to catch up!
Post race fireworks and all- night concert featuring Dire Straits experience and AKON!
Enjoying lunch in the sun after the race.
Thank you Challenge Family and Bahrain for this unbelievable experience. We can't wait to go back!


Hi. I'm Wood Reviewer. I look at people's wood on ROBLOX. I don't enjoy doing what I do, but I do it because it needs to be done. To quote GollyGreg, on my mission, "[I'm] the hero no one needs nor asked for." This is the highest, and so far only, praise I've gotten for my five long years of mostly annoying him about his wood. Luckily, I'm now moving on to annoy all of the developers on ROBLOX.
Follow me at @WoodReviewerRBX, add me as a friend so I can ignore your friend request at WoodReviewer on ROBLOX, and be sure to join my official fan group Wood Reviewer's Fans and be sure to comment on all my latest post there!
If you have any suggestions on what places I should review then keep them to yourself. I already have plenty of places to review, and my main issue is laziness to actually review them. Hence why it took me 5 years to actually make an actual blog about wood grain.
Have fun, and remember, if your wood is funky looking no one will have any fun playing with it.