Fuzzy Logic

So the final episodes of Battlestar Galactica (BSG) started showing last night on SciFi.  The first one was titled “Sometimes a Great Notion.”  As a fairly hardcore BSG fan, I was very excited to finally get to see these new episodes.  Needless to say, that one hour episode rocked my whole world.  I honestly don’t know how many times I or someone in my apartment screamed at the TV, trying to get someone from doing something stupid… but it happened quite a lot.  Anyhow, after the show I found an interesting article about “Sometimes a Great Notion” on the Chicago Tribune’s website about the episode that just aired.  It has interviews with BSG’s executive producer Ron Moore and a few other people as well.  I felt that this was one of the best episodes of BSG yet in terms of acting.  You could feel how raw the emotions were for everyone, especially for the Adama/Tigh showdown.  It was amazing.  This article is somewhat long, but definitely worth the read if you’re interested in  the show.

File this one under “Studies that research things already known to be true”: CNN is reporting on a study that says teens talk about sex and drugs on MySpace.  Seriously?  How much money was given to Dr. Megan Moreno of the University of Wisconsin for this one?

Dr. Moreno, Chief Researcher for the College of Shit We Already Knew

The Beast talks about sex on MySpace

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So, we’re all familiar with the song “The Lion Sleeps Tonight“, initially made popular in the US by The Tokens.  Well, as I recently tweeted, I found out that a song that I and the other members of the Purdue Varsity Glee Club learned while on our South Africa Trip (Check out my pictures) called “Mbube” is the song that inspired “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”  According to a friend in PVGC, they told us this… but I obviously wasn’t paying attention, so I felt proud when I figured it out. Yup.

If you’re interested in hearing the evolution, as well as a few covers, I recommend checking out Coverville Episode 535: Mbube to Wimoweh.  It’s an amazing podcast in general and I found this really interesting now that I’ve been to South Africa and experienced a tiny bit of the culture there.  That episode of Coverville features an original Mbube (well, as original as you can get) as well as multiple evolutions as the song tranformed from Mbube to the popular “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” that we all know and love.  Check it out–it’s pretty cool to see how traditional songs morph into popular songs.

I got home today and booted up my Ubuntu Linux (8.04) server that had been down most of the semester and got some fun errors.  Now, the reason it was down in the first place was because the CMOS battery was out which caused hell with the system’s security features and I hadn’t bothered to get a new CMOS battery.  So I boot it up and walk upstairs to set up my desktop.  I come back downstairs and get this ever friendly message:

* An automatic file system check (fsck) of the root filesystem failed.  A manual fsck must be performed, then the system restarted. The fsck should be performed in maintenance mode with the root filesystem mounted in read-only mode.

So, basically, my main filesystem was broken somehow.  Adding insult to injury, of course, was the fact that the thing that was shown as causing the problem was S01E02 of Firefly, which I was considering watching soon.  Great. On a strange note, the other place that was giving me trouble was on /etc/acpi/suspend.d/10-thinkpad-standby-led.sh. As for the problem itself,  I know why it happened, of course–this server only goes down when the power goes out and I would imagine that the file reference didn’t get correctly written to the journal before the server crashed. So, after multiple “Multiply-claimed block(s) in inode: x: xxxx xxx” errors, it finally told me to reboot.  After doing so, it fscked the disk again and then had me reboot AGAIN.  Awesome.  That finally let it work though, so I can’t complain.  Now to get a new CMOS battery…

I was browsing the interblags a few days ago and I came upon Time’s story about hymenoplasty.  The title of the article is “The Dilemma of ‘Virginity’ Restoration.”  I really think that this article sheds a new light on something very interesting that happens with people who are more socially conservative in nature.  For those who don’t know, hymenoplasty is a surgery that implants what is basically a fake hymen into a woman who has somehow had hers broken (whether by sex, sports, falling down, magical aliens, etc.).  This is supposed to help a woman feel like a ‘virgin’ again, regardless of how they lost their hymen.  I think this procedure is slightly insane and very much a commentary on the times.

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