Use the links after each section or scroll.
- A Workaround for Nautilus Bug
- Universal Human Rights
- Setting Priorities in This Nation
- Bach and the planet Venus
The sluggish performance of my secondary disk with the Nautilus File
Manager under Ubuntu 10.10 has a workaround. I discovered with top(1)
that the program forks a process, gvfs-metadata, that pegs the CPU and
takes a minute or so to exit as it hangs the file manager. There is no
man page or other dcumentation, so I waited for advice before I tried
a proposed fix. Even though noone could tell me what the metadata was
I resolved the problem for now, by killing the process (pkill) after
removing the gvfs-metadata directory in ~/.local/share This works
because the degraded performance is caused by corruption of the data
there. I was careful to do this when I knew that the external drive
that was causing the hangs was quiet because I had observed that the
process hangs when there had been file operations on it. Once I
removed the offending data these operations worked optinally. The two
commands are:
rm -rf ~/.local/share/gvfs-metadata
pkill gvfsd-metadata
The next time the disk is used by Nautilus, it uses gvfsd-metadata and
recreates the files on .local.
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The revolutions in Tunisia and now Egypt are spreading to most of the other
Middle Eastern Nations, including Iran, which is not an Arab Nation. What
was so impressive about the coverage of the 18 days of the relatively peaceful
revolution was that everybody in the world, no matter what history and
language, ultimately wants the same things, has the same needs and dreams.
The yearning and the respect it created is the strongest lesson I have ever
seen of the reality of the idea of Universal Human Rights. It is true that
that there is no guarentee that these values along with toleration of
differences, and the brotherhood of people in finding common cause, will
lead to the institutions that really support these values. Egypt is now
ruled by an interim military government, and the euphoria could be a replaced
by a return to tyranny and corruption. Someone pointed out that recent
revolutions have not always resulted in such universal values.
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Because of the Public Debt politicians of both parties have the
chance to make everybody angry at them as they have to now sacrifice
sacred cows of their core constituants. Despite the rhetoric and the
fact that Libertarian-like Republicans want deeper cuts to the budget
than does the President, there is a chance that for the first time in
a long time there could be meaningful discussions about what the priorities
in the nation are and how to establish them. Since descretionary spending
is only about 15% of total expenditures and the Government is rapidly
going into debt, there has to be real consideration of entitlement
expenses. In this large catigory is the Defense Budget as well as social
programs, mostly in Social Security, Medicare and Medicade.
Despite the talk of the more radical Conservatives about doing away
with the social entitlements, even they would sober at the fact that
the private economy could not readily absorb the public sector jobs or
the retirees some of the most radical politicians want to throw from
the train. Raining in the deficits could entail deep cuts to the
entitlements, but it greately matters how fairly it is done.
The Defense Budget could face trimming especially when it is asked how
effective military actions have really been, notably the involvement
in the Middle East, and some simple changes to the social entitlements
could also reverse the road to ruin in the projected deficits. Maybe
the Health Care Bill, that the Republicans in he House so much want
to undo, would actually contain the burgeoning Medicare and Medicade
costs, and the discussion of what we Americans expect our Helath Care
to do at what cost, is the discussion that really needs to happen.
There are reasonable solutions to the Social Security problem. The payouts
are going to exceed revenues soon. Even though people are entitled to get
back what they put in, the taxes paid don't cover what the system has agreed
to pay out. Suddenly cutting the benefits to everybody is not desirable, but
making some seemingly small changes could have a big impact on the deficit
picture. If a cap were imposed on how much outside income a retired person
could have and sill collect the benefit was set, the program could be
solvent for much longer. Some groups need to be protected like poor and
disabled, but those making enough could not get the benefit. The question is
all about how this is done. I don't trust the Tea Partiers to do this right,
but their tenure in Congress would be short-lived if they decided to take
on the Social Security recipiants directly, especially as the Baby Boomers,
some 67 Million people, begins to enter the system.
I think that great savings could be reached in reforming Medicare and the
Health Care System, which I think was the aim of the Health Care Bill, and
despite the unwarented hysteria created by special interests, the savings
could more than finance Social Security.
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I posted to Face Book the following account of how an image associated
with a recording of J. S. Bach Cantata 1, BWV 1, "Wie schone leuchtet
der Morgenstern " or "How Beautiful shines the Morning Star" on You
Tube, offers clues about when it was taken and how it seems intended
for a link to Bach and this Cantata. The image shows a bright object
and I could recognize that it was near Delta Capricorni and the stars
of Aqurius above the beginnings of morning twilight. This indicated
that the photo was probably taken in late March or early April, but
what year?
It took a bit of research with a planetarium program to narrow down the
possibilities. Assuming that the picture was taken sometime in the last
few ywars I was able to determine that the object was Venus and that it
last passed that point in the sky on March 21, 2003, or J. S. Bach's
Birthday, and will be there next on the same date in 2011. Then I
remembered the fact that Venus arrives at the same place in the sky
nearly exactly every eight years (synodic period). It seems too much of
a coincidence that the person who made the image couldn't have known
the connection to Bach.
Here is the planetarium image for 2003. I used Sky Chart Demo on Mac
OSX 10.4.
Here is the planetarium image for 2011.
Since Jupiter also passed that part of sky in 2009, I had to determine
if it could have been there at that time of year and time of day. I
determined that it didn't match those circumstances.
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