Militant Atheism in Action

The idea of the militant atheism inspired me.  If in the past religious fellows tried to tell me about some god I just turned away and ignored them. But I decided that these people deserve a chance to witness the power of an atheistic point of view. I think that it is not fare to leave these poor religious people remain in darkness of ignorance.

One of the gods brought two lost souls to me today. Poor fellows were jehovah's witnesses. They tried to tell me about the god, but instead they had to listen an inconvenient truth about religion... Unfortunately I told them about the evidences of the relation between low intellect quality, poor education and religiosity too early and they became very upset about that, obviously because they were not able to object. And I want to tell you that they were poorly educated indeed - they thought (despite they have to know a lot about the bible) that original bible's language was Latin... And I wish I knew that rate of mental illness amongst jehovah's witnesses is 4 times higher than amongst other population before I started to write this post, so I could share this knowledge with them and maybe save their health!

They understood that they won't be able to recruit me and tried to go away. But I thought to myself: "WTF? Me and other people are being bothered by these witnesses for so many years - no way I will give up so easily! They deserve enlightenment!!!" So I chased them and continued to tell them about Dawkins and about suffering which is caused by religion to believers and atheists, etc. I stopped only when they started to run ...

Hope that they were distracted enough and were unable to bother other people with their bullshit at least for today.

So guys, if you will encounter religious fanatics in future - don't ignore them, but try to convince them to became an atheists. And don't give up when they will start to run away - chase them! They deserve enlightenment!!!

UPD: the next day I had another conversation with jehovah's witnesses via entrance door intercom. Seems they have summer worsening or something... I was able to prove them that they are partially responsible for the deforestation (their useless literature need a lot of wood) and that they are actually bothering people. The most precious is that they agreed that god will punish people responsible for deforestation and those who bother other people))) Also they told me that there is an "unsubscribe" option from their sect option. Will see If they'll fuck around again.

Living in USA is Bad for Your Health Too

I posted about increase of the health risks in Russia recently, but the situation in rest of the world isn't much better and USA is an example. The richest country of the world actually is the least place I would like to live. The cause is that if you'll look deeper - it is the same as Russia (and I think in future Russia will be very much alike US), but corruption is legalised (through the lobby institution) and religion de-facto took the upper hand in the temporal power. 

Legalised corruption is worse than a regular because it is harder to fight it. If the mighty one do not like the law he pays for the authorities to close their eyes, but when corruption is legalised it is more efficient to pay for changing of the law. Such law changes were paid by oil and gas companies (and Bush administration got some nice revenue) and it is possible for them to avoid laws for air and water protection... And here the story of the "Gasland" documentary starts (cool thematic map on that site by the way).

Have you ever seen the water on fire? Of course you remember about the explosion and the oil spill on the BP's platform and burning oil on the surface of the sea. But what about the tap water? Scary?

I suggest you watch the "Gasland" documentary and not jus because it is about environmental issues, but because the film itself is great! Especially I loved the moments with cool maps and space imagery. There are plenty of them and they help to understand the scale of the disaster

For now here is the trailer:

Two Fingers Scrolling Issue Turned to be an Awesome Feature (HP ProBook 4520s with openSUSE 11.4)

We've  bought HP ProBook 4520s for my wife recently. It came with SLED 11 SP1 preinstalled. The hardware and preinstalled software worked just fine, but due to the lack of the software in repositories designed for SLED, lack of information in web about it's several aspects it was decided that openSUSE 11.4 should be installed. So now it is much easier to get needed software, but on the other hand hardware issues appeared. Drivers from official HP site available only for SLED, so there are issues with WiFi button, "Unsupported hardware" watermark from AMD, and the most annoying - flawed two fingers scrolling. 

The issue is that two finger scrolling works ones in a 20 attempts or so, which means it is completely useless, and emulation of the right mouse button click (which requires two fingers as well) is challenging and you will need some training to perform it. "Psynaptics" installation brought no help, guess touch pad drivers settings need some customization... I was too bored to search for solution. But occasionally I was able to find a workaround for this issue: you just have to use your thumb (its outer side) instead! Seems the length of the continuous flesh  matters. This move is quite natural and actually is more convenient than two finger usage because you don't have to change position of your hand, and wrist stays where it lies! The same benefit is for the right mouse button click emulation - you just tap with the outer side of your thumb - this shit was never easier before! The minor bug became an awesome feature!

There is no way I would want to fix initial issue from this moment! :-)

That's how it looks like:

Right mouse button emulation (click to view animation)

Scrolling (click to view animation)

Living in Russia is Bad for Your Health

There was a link to the interesting research in one of my e-mail subscriptions today. The book "The New Profile of Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis in Russia: A Global and Local Perspective: Summary of a Joint Workshop" brought my attention because of my nationality. I decided to check it out. Of course I had no intentions to read the whole research, but I was curious about graphs and pictures. Here you are one the scary one:

HEALTHCARE MINISTRY WARNS: LIVING IN RUSSIA IS BAD FOR YOUR HEALTH!

FIRMS for Detection of Fires at Illegal Dumps

Today I've acquired another evidence that FIRMS data can be used for monitoring of fires at illegal dumps. Of course I was sure it is possible and I was able to detect fires occurred at one of the landfills in St. Petersburg, but I had no evidences that fires occurred next to illegal dumps with known [to me] location were indeed fires at illegal dumps, because I do not have an information about dumps age and FIRMS accuracy about 1 km and exceeds common size of dump, which is about couple of dozens or hundreds of meters, so there is no way I could insist that fire points next to illegal dumps were actually fires at illegal dumps.

But I've found some good (actually - bad) news today. There is a note about fires at two illegal dumps in Leningrad region. Look what we've got:

Despite no points located at the illegal dumps directly they lie within 1 km zone from the borders of dumps and the news show that these fires are actually dump fires. The bad thing is that these fires lasts for a several days, but were detected just one and two times.

Fire at the "Krasny Bor" (a lanfill for hazardous waste)

There was a fire at the landfill for hazardous waste "Krasny Bor". First of all it is not a big secret that hazardous waste is being "incinerated" (of course it isn't proper incineration, it is just an activity to free some space for a new waste) there, so specialists were not surprised that a fire occurred.

It is interesting and revealing that

"specialists of Rosprirodnadzor became aware about the fire at the "Krasny Bor" landfiil via mass-media"

LOL... but actually it isn't fun at all...

3 cool events of the week

There were 3 very interesting events on this week (during my official vacation):

• a Russian - Finnish workshop dedicated to our project related to management of hazardous part of household waste.
• An "International" conference named "An Environmental Equilibrium"; and...
• OSM mapping party in Volhov town.

A workshop passed as always: Russians posed themselves as know-all persons (despite no one was prepared because all the materials were in English...), talked a lot but ineffective; and Finnish did the real job. For the first time in my life I had to be a parallel Russian-Finnish and a Finnish-Russian translator. A hard job, I have to admit...

"An Environmental Equilibrium" conference (which first day I missed because of the workshop) exceeded my expectations... a little, actually, but nevertheless. The funniest thing was that the first face I saw when entered the lecture hall was the face of my scientific adviser, who new that I will participate but didn't tell me that he will be a participant too O_o. He leaved quickly so we were unable to talk.

There were not as many people as expected (because of the summer time and a poor feedback from organisers, who didn't provided participants with the time table in advance, I suppose the main part of scientists who sanded papers preferred to be somewhere else) - organisers even had to merge together all the sections because of the lack of speakers. The good thing was that the publications were ready and I was able to enjoy my article on the subject of illegal dumping monitoring at St. Petersburg with implementation of high-resolution satellite imagery. The bad thing was that my scientific adviser had already left the conference when I demonstrated my presentation.

An unexpected finding was that the map in my Garmin, which expected to be fresh, had a poor an outdated information about location of the conference and OSM was also poor, but up to date.

OSM mapping party in Volhov was my first mapping party. Despite there were few  participants (actually if there were more of them I wouldn't be able to participate at all because in that case party would took place a week earlier, when I was on vacation in Narva... and mapped it; collected data became more important due to imagery for Narva won't be available soon) and heavy rain (from time to time) we were able to survey western part of town.

After 2 hours of mapping we gathered at the cafe to discuss our survey. I've made an attempt to find an answer for the the question about mapping managed green areas, but it seems that I'm the only one who care.

The most unpleasant part was an attention from drunken ex-prisoner in cafe, who started to ask questions about our activities and then begged for money for beer. In Narva my wife and I brought attention of the local drunkards while survey too...

In the end we had a nice attraction on board of Zverik's jeep - a survey of the Russian roads ;-)