wither in the light

2010-01-01T12:00:00.000-08:00

It's been ages since I've used this blog, but for those who are keeping track (you know who you are) we just got rid of our landline. If you want to get in touch, use [lastname][firstinitial]@efn.org.

man down

2006-12-10T09:41:00.000-08:00

Sean Fightmaster
6/24/69 ~ 12/6/06

Sean Fightmaster died last Wednesday (6 Dec 06). I'm not sure where they are burying him (if they are in fact burying him), but if you see his grave please leave him a bottle of beer and some spare change. He was a welcome splash of color in a city that was often much too gray.

There's a guest book where you can leave messages (until they decide to remove it... perhaps I will mirror it here afterwards).

There's also a MySpace page for him here.

I've been getting email from friends all day and reading the posts at the guest book and I'm really struck by how much Sean is loved. Everyone has a Sean moment, a story that makes them smile... I've had conversations with total strangers who, hearing I lived in SLC, asked me if I knew Sean, and it's like a bonding thing: "were you there when...?", "did you hear about...?". Since the first time I mentioned him in a post here three years ago, I've received email from numerous people asking me if I knew what Sean was up to now, or sharing their stories. He certainly is an unforgettable person, truly one of a kind.

The last time I saw Sean was on my last visit to SLC; I hadn't seen him in a couple of years, but we talked like it had only been days, basically resuming the last conversation we'd had before I left SLC. He seemed very bright and clear. He had this way of saying something really funny, delivered totally straight like he hadn't intended it to be funny. In most of my memories of Sean, everyone around him is smiling.

UPDATE (23 Dec 2006): I am going to just add to this post, because right now it comforts me to see Sean's picture on this page.

I had a couple of very rough days dealing with Sean's death. I could tell you all kinds of stories about how he was bigger than life, how he was literally a legend in his own time, but it would all sound like the kind of things people say about someone after they have died. The important thing to remember about Sean is that we spoke of him that way when he was alive. I'm not going to pretend I never wanted to kick his ass, but the rest of the time being around him felt like having front-row seats to something important and exciting. He was kind and intelligent and was funny without being mean. He had uncanny style and charm.

Reading through the guest book (linked above) it is plain to see how much Sean was loved and how much he will be missed. There is also a story of sorts, a context to be found in the names and places of the people leaving messages: Sean's friends didn't all come from some little clique, or even from what any one person would consider to be 'the scene'. Sean had a way of transcending such distinctions, and his friends vary wildly in scene affiliation, age, and personality. Any two people might have very little in common except that they were both friends with Sean.

It has been a good thing reading all of the messages people have left for Sean and his family. There are names there that I have not heard in years. And hearing them now, sharing their feelings for Sean, does make it a little easier. There is less of a sense of loss, knowing that people are still carrying Sean in their hearts.

ANOTHER UPDATE (19 Jan 2007): It's been over a month now.

There were a couple of articles in SLUG: With a Name like Fightmaster, You Have a Reputation to Live Up To and his sister, Cyd, wrote up a Fightmaster Memorium.

There's been a flurry of activity on the a guest book today due to an article about Sean in the Salt Lake Tribune ("Punk's passing"). It is a fitting tribute to Sean, and I'm glad there's now a permanent record noting his passing. One of the few things I regret about my time in Utah is that I have little material evidence of the people and places that meant so much to me... we didn't have digital cameras (or computers to plug them into) back then, and there were a few years where everything I owned fit in a backpack, a lifestyle that doesn't lend itself to collecting memorabilia.

So I just collected memories... and the various strains that drugs, university, and time (in roughly that order) have put on my brain have been steadily eroding those memories. The pictures and memories of Sean that others have shared have not only helped me deal with Sean's death, they have brought back some of the feeling of those days, that sense that something incredible (even when it was incredibly tragic,or incredibly boring) was going on and that I was right where I needed to be.

Ave atque vale, Sean. Peace be upon you. And upon your family and friends and everyone whose memory you burned yourself into.

knowing when to stop

2005-09-17T07:37:00.000-07:00

Last night I watched 'Fearless', and it was great... because I stopped the film two minutes before the nominal ending, where the film would have ended had they not dumbed it down for an American audience. While seeing how deftly they managed to completely fuck up and negate the previous two hours of storyline in those last two minutes is educational, it's not very entertaining. I'm going to rip the DVD, edit out the final scene, and make my own director's cut of the film so I don't need to be so quick with the remote.

This got me thinking about time, and what I'd being doing with it if I had more directorial control over my life. I feel like I am in a variable time stasis field... weeks will go by in a blink, and then a night will last forever. I'm somewhat torn about this site... it's my primary interface to the world, 'putting myself out there' as it were, and I've met some Good People who were kind enough to tolerate my rants. I haven't actually decided yet, but I think it might be time to put this blog to rest. But it's one thing, knowing when to stop, and another thing entirely knowing what to do with my time after I have stopped. Time will tell.

disgust

2005-09-11T21:33:00.000-07:00

This kind of sums up the dread I've been feeling the last few days:

TODAY the Pentagon will hold the America Supports You Freedom Walk, ostensibly to commemorate the victims of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, and to show support for members of the armed forces. Nothing could be better contrived to show the high price Americans have paid since that day of infamy.

The Freedom Walk is limited to those who register and submit to being searched. The route of the march will be fenced and lined with police officers. No one can join the march en route. No one can leave it. The press cannot walk along the route. The walk to proclaim Americans' freedom reveals how much freedom we have lost.

This ill-conceived event is but a symbol of larger losses: The Patriot Act reduces Americans' protection from government scrutiny. The U.S. invasion of Iraq, falsely predicated on a hazy connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida, has cost almost as many U.S. lives as the terrorist attacks of 9/11, with no end in sight. Whereas most of the world sympathized with Americans in the weeks following 9/11, the nation is now less admired than communist-ruled China.

People dying all over the place and this administration just keeps pretending everything is peachy. I'm not sure who I hate more, Bush or the legions of fuckheads that still support this bullshit.

quick, everybody, back in the fish

2005-09-07T18:41:00.000-07:00

We're back in 'civilization' now, though it only took one look at the news to make me feel like heading back to the desert... it seems like everything is Horribly Wrong. I'm disgusted by the way our government has handled the New Orleans disaster. Too disgusted to even think clearly about it right now.

Burning Man was the best yet, mostly because we had Good People in our camp, and met more out and about. We camped our way home again, stopping at hot springs and cold rivers, taking our time. We're already developing our evil plans for next year's burn.

We're visiting the folks tonight, heading up to Portland in the morning... I should be back to my regularly posting self in the near future.

round and round

2005-08-30T08:29:00.000-07:00

These 360° panoramas of the Louvre are beautiful. Requires Quicktime.

culture of fear...

2005-08-29T00:37:00.000-07:00

... and of rampant ignorance.

FOX 'news' reporter John Loftus identified a suspected terrorist by race (Middle-Eastern) and name (Iyad K. Hilal) and home address. There are more than a few things wrong with this:

If there really was a terrorist at that address, is there *any* justification for broadcasting the address before that person has been taken into custody?
There isn't a terrorist at that address. It's a family of five. The suspected terrorist did live at that address, but moved three years ago.
FOX has a horrendous track record when it comes to reporting the truth. The things they tend to get right are 'wag the dog' stories where a fiction broadcast wide enough becomes a new truth.
Which leads to the biggest problem: FOX's demographic consists largely of people who confuse 'adjusting prejudices' with 'thinking'.

It's that last one that makes this one particularly newsworthy. Within hours of the newscast, maps to the family's home had been posted on numerous conservative websites, and a campaign of harrasment was begun. Over the weekend some bright spark spray-painted 'TERRIST' on the house. Enough hostile or ill-meaning people have come by that the cops now just station a car across the street.

Imagine what would have happened if there was someone Middle-Eastern living there.

FOX just keeps racking up severe fuckups like this, but they pander so well to fear and xenophobia and ignorance that their viewers find FOX 'news' to be right up their street... i.e. it's narrow, and twisted, and only one way. 'Fair and balanced' my ass.

burn

2005-08-28T18:22:00.000-07:00

Burn as in Burning Man:

Rex came over and helped Anne-Marie and I pack the car, and Anne-Marie is on the road, expecting to arrive in Black Rock late tonight. I'm taking the Tortoise down on Tuesday... I stand a better chance of having a good time with the shorter stay.

Burn as in burn in hell:

Or maybe not... even hell has its standards.

umm... Saturday?

2005-08-28T14:39:00.000-07:00

WTF happened to Saturday? I'm totally missing a day. A WHOLE DAY. Sun comes up, sun goes down, that's still the drill, isn't it?

blockiert

2005-08-26T18:39:00.000-07:00

Hannes informs me that browsing from Germany this site gets blocked... my German isn't too good (neither is Google's), but I think I get the gist of it from the last two words. A friend of his in China gets a similar message. Apparently I am unable to corrupt the youth of the world because they've all got candyass web content blockers.

The funny thing is almost every time I talk about drugs I'm talking about the various prescriptions I take in my duties as Test Monkey #2305. OK, so maybe I take a little pride in being the only Google hit for the phrase free dope and fucking in the street, but it's not like I regularly post sordid details about drug-fueled Hunter-Thompsonian nightmares and Caligulesque orgies.

But I guess it's never too late to start. ;)

hate with a smile

2005-08-26T12:42:00.000-07:00

The American Legion declares war on freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom to think for yourself:

"The American Legion will stand against anyone and any group that would demoralize our troops, or worse, endanger their lives by encouraging terrorists to continue their cowardly attacks against freedom-loving peoples," Thomas Cadmus, national commander, told delegates at the group's national convention in Honolulu.

Our troops are *already* demoralized. They're fighting a war with no clear goals in a country where they're not wanted, a war in which it was long ago announced 'mission accomplished' but they're still there and they're still getting killed. They were lied to about the reasons for going there, lied to about how long they were going to be there, and now they're being lied to about their reason for still being there. I'd think that the lack of an exit strategy is more demoralizing than the knowledge that people back home care about them enough to want them to return alive.

In what way does protesting the war 'encourage' terrorists? Does it show them we don't have the resolve to take them down? They already suspect that. The Bush administration purposefully ignored opportunities to remove known Al-Qaeda operatives because they felt that doing so would weaken their specious case for going to Iraq, or because the trail led back to our economic ally Saudi Arabia. The terrorists know that this war isn't really about terrorism; they know this because they are watching coverage of the war on CNN in whatever Saudi city they're hanging out in this week. Like Israel and Palestine, our presence in Iraq just acts as a catalyst to turn ordinary people into bomb-laden insurgents, while the real terrorists sit back and watch.

When I see knee-jerk reactions like this display by the American Legion, I can't help but wonder: are they telling the world about a position they really believe in, or are they telling themselves whatever story it takes to make them feel good about themselves? I guess feeling like an uber-patriot fighting the peaceniks is better than feeling like you were betrayed by a government you trusted. But it doesn't change the fact of that betrayal in the slightest.

sanity check

2005-08-25T11:04:00.000-07:00

Every time I fire up the web browser to write a post lately I make the mistake of checking the news first, proceed to get upset, then back away from the computer and let my blood pressure drop to normal.

Anyone think it's a coincidence that Bush chose Utah and Idaho as his only stops on the 'sell the war' tour? Populations with high concentrations of people who have chosen fearful worldviews, who believe they are persecuted, who have already trained themselves to accept some of the most ridiculous ideas as facts? Preaching to the choir you're bound to get a 'hallelujah' every now and again. Nice to see our president rising to the challenge.

The part that I find most interesting is the message Bush is pushing: stay the course and pay no attention to those who oppose this war... if you're not for us, you're against us, even if you are us. He's continually referring to people like Cindy Sheehan, who he says wants our troops brought home immediately. I'm sure it sounds very stirring when he says it, but... Cindy Sheehan has repeatedly said that she wants to know why we are in Iraq (since the original reasons turned out to be lies) and what our plan is for getting out of Iraq (since it is apparent that the fuckhead doesn't have one). I think it is very interesting that even the right assumes that the answers to those questions will be so unsatisfactory that the next question will be "why don't we leave?"

right on target

2005-08-22T23:49:00.000-07:00

The current issue of The New Yorker is an exercise in corporate intrusion run amok... the only advertiser in the whole issue is Target. Readers aren't too thrilled by this:

The all-Target New Yorker is the product of a more nakedly mercenary world where advertisers no longer need conceal their aims. There's nothing subliminal about it: I counted over 200 Target logos in the first 19 pages alone, and there were still eleven ads left to go when I gave up.

Some feel that the magazine crossed the line... the (umm) 'target' demographic isn't particularly unsophisticated, and the crass marketeering has more in common with The Shopping Channel than with the usual editorial content.

In the wake of a puff piece by New York Times advertising columnist Stuart Elliott last week announcing Target had cut a deal with the New Yorker to become its sole advertiser for the magazine's Aug. 22 edition, copies of that issue began arriving in mailboxes and hitting newsstands this week.

Now we can see exactly what the results of that deal are: A 90-page publication where it is almost impossible to discern any line of demarcation between Target's advertising and the New Yorker editorial product.

Ethical questions aside, what marketing genius came up with the imagery for the Target/New Yorker-hybrid? I'm thinking the last thing we need is images of New York with targets painted on all of the buildings. Fucking brilliant.

elbbubs

2005-08-21T23:16:00.000-07:00

From the 'learn something new every day' department:

How to make antibubbles.

(Personally I prefer more tasty science, like measuring the speed of light using chocolate chips and a microwave. I envision a whole branch of chocolate physics, even relativity:

E = mc² :: enjoyment = munching chocolate²)

[via DRT, sorta]

anna digs me

2005-08-20T13:43:00.000-07:00

The mangled English (manglish?) in this piece of spam junk mail I got today is brilliant:

From: "Anna"
Subject: Hi, how are you?

Hi. How you? My name is Anna. I'm fine and I decided to write to you the letter, to get acquainted with you. It is possible to get acquainted with you? I am perfect one and I do not have anybody. I have no children, but they very much like me. I was not married, though to me 29 years will be executed. The some people speak that time cunningly, and I so do not think. It seems to me, that I only start to live. I very much would want to get acquainted with you. You can tell to me about yourself and send a photo? I shall write to you the letter and I shall send the photo. It is interesting to get acquainted with you through the Internet.

Write to my address ann@stroyinvestlab.biz

Deep in the hinterlands of SomewhereElseistan, a (maybe) woman (possibly) named Anna, armed with an internet connection and what is apparently a drunken babelfish, is pining away for lack of companionship. Sadly I am in no position to help her out... though I did consider sending her this picture (WARNING: high risk of brain lesions) in retaliation for the spamming.

programming problems

2005-08-19T19:21:00.000-07:00

Project Euler is a series of math problems that are to be solved programatically. You get points for solving each problem; the number of points a problem is worth is inversely proportional to the percentage of people who have solved it (and points are adjusted retroactively). I'm using the problems as a framework to learn how to do complex algorithms in Ruby.

remember, remember, the... 17th of March?

2005-08-18T23:04:00.000-07:00

The V for Vendetta movie, originally slated for a contextually meaningful November release date, has been pushed out to next March. As much as I just want to get this over with, I hope they are using the extra time to make the movie not suck.

sorry, wilson

2005-08-17T18:57:00.000-07:00

Maya's Micronomicon is like the sequel to those encoded messages they sent into space, the ones that start with 1 2 3 and work their way up to organic chemistry and astronomy in symbol form. A random page, for instance, includes Dalton's table of the elements, hobo signs and symbols, science symbols, the Gettysburg Address, specifications of the Earth, the Linnean order of classification, and the 8 auspicious symbols of Buddhism. I think this might be the book Borges was looking for in the Infinite Library.

This is my number one 'stranded on a desert island with only one book' pick.

to burn, or not to burn...

2005-08-16T21:16:00.000-07:00

... that is the question. Last year at Burning Man my health was such that I spent over half of the time in the tent gimped out. I've been thinking I wouldn't go this year because it seems like missing out on the fun from afar is less painful than missing out on the fun from the midst of it. But there's a lot of beauty there, and that would do me some good.

I need a vacation from my life. Can someone cover for me?

what do you mean 'we', white man?

2005-08-14T21:13:00.000-07:00

Someone tell the president the war is over.

Like the Japanese soldier marooned on an island for years after V-J Day, President Bush may be the last person in the country to learn that for Americans, if not Iraqis, the war in Iraq is over. "We will stay the course," he insistently tells us from his Texas ranch. What do you mean we, white man?

I know I can't trust Bush, but he is going to go away someday. The biggest disappointment in this whole experience has been finding out that I can't trust my fellow Americans, that despite all of our bluster and bravado when the crisis came so many people were so eager to throw away everything we supposedly stand for, all in the name of a 'safety' that didn't exist before and has been made even more endangered by our actions.

I'm sick of seeing how hateful the world is, and disgusted that my country is fanning the flames.

bush refuses to set timetable for withdrawal from crawford

2005-08-14T20:21:00.000-07:00

At the White House, spokesman Scott McClellan defended the president's decision to remain in Crawford indefinitely: "President Bush deserves August off, especially when you consider how many summers he had to go to school."

Vacationing in the middle of a fucking war. Borowitz Report aside, the headlines these days read like Dead Kennedy's lyrics... Jello Biafra must be about to implode.

dude's got a point

2005-08-14T05:39:00.000-07:00

Dee chimes in on illegal drug use:

Drugs open people's minds. That is why they are illegal. It is nothing to do with our mental or physical well-being. If the government gave a rat's ass about our health tobacco and alcohol would be banned outright. It's as simple as that.

True dat. I've seen some lives destroyed, even ended, because of drug use... but it still doesn't compare to the damage caused by alcohol and tobacco. We live in an openly hypocritical society where J Random Tripper gets ten years under the minimum mandatory sentencing laws but J Bubba Wifebeater can come home drunk every night and beat on the kids with little fear of reprisal. Our walk and our talk are out of phase, and this is just one of the places where a crack lets the light in.

the orange ones fuck you up real good

2005-08-14T04:55:00.000-07:00

why is it I'm always the last to know about things like kitten-huffing?

in the abstract

2005-08-13T23:56:00.000-07:00

There's an interesting article in Scientific American about cognition and symbol-processing in children. Numerous tests have shown that very young children can't really tell the difference between a thing and a representation of that thing (like a picture or a scale model)... so what does this tell us about what is going on in their heads? Judy DeLoache, on her experiments:

About 20 years ago I had one of those wonderful moments when research takes an unexpected but fruitful turn. I had been studying toddler memory and was beginning a new experiment with two-and-a-half- and three-year-olds. For the project, I had built a model of a room that was part of my lab. The real space was furnished like a standard living room, albeit a rather shabby one, with an upholstered couch, an armchair, a cabinet and so on. The miniature items were as similar as possible to their larger counterparts: they were the same shape and material, covered with the same fabric and arranged in the same positions. For the study, a child watched as we hid a miniature toy--a plastic dog we dubbed "Little Snoopy"--in the model, which we referred to as "Little Snoopy's room." We then encouraged the child to find "Big Snoopy," a large version of the toy "hiding in the same place in his big room." We wondered whether children could use their memory of the small room to figure out where to find the toy in the large one.

The three-year-olds were, as we had expected, very successful. After they observed the small toy being placed behind the miniature couch, they ran into the room and found the large toy behind the real couch. But the two-and-a-half-year-olds, much to my and their parents' surprise, failed abysmally. They cheerfully ran into the room to retrieve the large toy, but most of them had no idea where to look, even though they remembered where the tiny toy was hidden in the miniature room and could readily find it there.

Their failure to use what they knew about the model to draw an inference about the room indicated that they did not appreciate the relation between the model and room. I soon realized that my memory study was instead a study of symbolic understanding and that the younger children's failure might be telling us something interesting about how and when youngsters acquire the ability to understand that one object can stand for another.

This inability to map back and forth between an object and its referent is not strictly an age-based or intelligence-based phenomenon. When I was tutoring college trig I had a student who was having a lot of difficulty with concepts like sine and cosine, and I was running out of new ways to present the info to him. I decided that instead of trying to get him to understand the math, it might be a good idea to step back and have both of us try to understand what his mental process was.

I asked him to just talk out loud while he was solving some problems, and while he was doing so I noticed that when the problem was presented in a certain way, he always got the right answer. This always occurred when the drawing showed a triangle whose angle of interest was on the left, with the 'right' (i.e. '90°') angle on the lower right. When I gave him problems with that same triangle mirror-imaged, he could still solve the problems but it took him longer because he was mentally mapping the triangle to a 'right' (i.e. 'correct') triangle.

When I showed him a triangle whose base was its hypotenuse (i.e. the 90° angle up in the air) he stared at it for awhile before telling me it couldn't be done... there wasn't a 'right' angle, or even a 'wrong' angle that could be mapped to a 'right' angle. The idea of 'right'='correct' was so strong that doing something squirrelly like rotating the image was unthinkable.

This guy wasn't unintelligent. He'd made a reasonable connection in his mind and unfortunately had that connection strengthened over the course of hundreds of problems presented in the exact same way by the teacher... every example triangle was drawn the same way, the 'right' way, and nobody had ever showed him how to solve 'wrong' triangles. When I finally figured out what the hell was going on I gave him a problem that he couldn't solve, then set that one aside and gave him the exact same problem, but oriented the 'right' way. He solved it without a hitch. When I picked up that piece of paper, rotated it and set it down next to the (identical) one he couldn't solve, I could just see it all tumbling into place in his head, a real satori experience, momentary mathematical enlightenment.

It makes me wonder what other abstractions have faulty representations in our heads. Actually, scratch that... make that *my* head. I don't even fucking want to even know what's going on in other people's heads. Your process is *all* fucked up.

didn't see that coming

2005-08-12T21:14:00.000-07:00

An amateur psychic might want to look into a new line of work... he left his crystal ball in the windowsill where it magnified the sunlight enough to burn his building down. Ouch. Maybe he should stick with a scrying bowl full of water, in case something like this happens again.

stick it to the man

2005-08-11T23:06:00.000-07:00

20 ways to fight the New World Order.

obey

2005-08-10T23:23:00.000-07:00

DJ Shadow and Shepard Fairey (of ObeyGiant fame) are releasing Public Works, a limited edition (only 450) box set containing five t-shirts, a mix CD by DJ Shadow, Fairey's book "Post No Bills", and assorted stickers and buttons.

Fairey's viral Giant meme is all over Portland... I see posters and stickers everywhere. Underpasses, lampposts, bumper stickers, even stencils sprayed on the sidewalk.

somewhere in middle america

2005-08-09T23:48:00.000-07:00

Ryan and Jenny are spending a few weeks driving from Los Angeles to Plymouth Massawhatsit, and they're blogging the whole trip. Current location: motherfucking Omaha. No casualties (yet). I like these people... they're right, there is "something oddly satisfying about typing on a laptop in the middle of a campsite". Ahhh, nature.

(Back in my day, we didn't have "laptops" to type on when we went camping, we had to make do with magic mushrooms for entertainment. Uphill, both ways, but not so's you'd notice once the boomers kicked in.)

Their trip reminds me of a trip we took last year. Coming back from Burning Man, Anne-Marie and I camped our way slowly home, stopping anywhere with water and trees. Seeing as how we were roughing it, we were forced to survive on better food than we eat at home (we both overpack, and start with the luxuries... better to have too much stuff at Burning Man than to figure out you left something important behind). When the sun went down we'd watch films on the laptop, snuggled up in sleeping bags with the river's susurrus in the background.

These are the times I remember when I wonder where I've been: somewhere, anywhere, with Anne-Marie. Home.

nooooooooooo

2005-08-08T18:25:00.000-07:00

They're making a movie of On the road? Is nothing sacred?

It starts out sounding like it might not suck - Coppola producing, Jose Rivera (The Motorcycle Diaries) screenwriting - but then they're not sure if Colin Farrell or Brad Pitt should do Neal Cassady's role. WTF? Billy Crudup for Kerouac sounds good, but if they're going to put Brad Pitt in there they might as well try and get Billy Crystal to do a Ginsberg cameo.

intelligent design

2005-08-06T23:22:00.000-07:00

It seems like if everything was created by intelligent design there would be more intelligence. As it stands right now, that whole "made in His image" thing isn't making this alleged Creator look too good. (Besides, everyone knows that God is a crazy lady. Everyone in the One True Religion, anyway. Fliegende Kinderscheisse!) _fnord Eris is not hateful or malicious. But She is mischievous, and does get a little bitchy at times. _fnord

It's only half amusing, watching our society become top-heavy with fear and ignorance. The rest is a deep embarrassment, and a sense of loss. And an overwhelming urge to stock up on marshmallows for the coming conflagration.

death, or boomwha

2005-08-05T18:53:00.000-07:00

Bill Thomas' Suicide picture series may provide him with a means of dealing with death on his own terms, but I can't look at his Rube Goldberg contraptions without thinking of the suicide bunnies.

The title of this post is from a joke my friend Scott, who committed suicide three years ago, told me. Scott was quiet, anything but crass, never swore, and had a pretty sophisticated sense of humor, so the rare occasions when he'd stoop to the level of the rest of our bunch stand out in my head. Like this one:

3 men, wandering lost in the jungle, unwittingly trespass on sacred ground and are brought to a nearby village by angry tribesmen.

"Choose your punishment," the tribal leader says: "death, or boomwha."

The first guy says "That's an easy choice... I'll take boomwha."

"Very well," says the leader. "BOOMWHA." Then the biggest, meanest warrior picks the guy up, drags him over to a fallen tree, and re-enacts a couple of the more traumatic scenes from the movie Deliverance on the unfortunate guy. Throughout the whole ordeal the tribesmen are chanting "BOOMWHA! BOOMWHA! BOOMWHA!" Afterwards the guy is set free, and sentencing falls on the second man.

"Choose your punishment," the tribal leader says: "death, or boomwha."

The second guy says "umm... I... guess... I'll take boomwha too."

"Very well," says the leader. "BOOMWHA." Then the second guy is grabbed by another big mean warrior and the whole ordeal is repeated. Afterwards he too is freed, and sentencing falls on the third man.

"Choose your punishment," the tribal leader says: "death, or boomwha."

The third guy says "fuck that... I'll take death".

"Very well," says the leader. "DEATH BY BOOMWHA."

shoot first, ask questions later?

2005-08-04T23:38:00.000-07:00

Riding the train home last week I spoke to a chap who was wearing tattoos, a black hoodie, Doc Marten lace-up's, and a backpack with a solar cell and wifi antenna sticking out of it. There are numerous places downtown offering free public wireless internet, and he's running a one-man wireless access point, dialed in to the Matrix, carrying on 5 or 6 IM conversations on his PDA while he's talking to me. His pyramid-studded utility belt has a cellphone, PDA, TI calculator, and a Leatherman all holstered and ready for a quick draw... more Batman than Sid Vicious. He's an engineering student, a modern techno warrior monk, someone I recognized as part of my peer group at first glance.

He's also likely to get his head shot off.

An international organization representing police chiefs has broadened its policy for the use of deadly force by telling officers to shoot suspected suicide bombers in the head.

... the guide recommends that if lethal force is needed to stop someone who fits a certain behavioral profile, the officer should "aim for the head." The intent is to kill the suspect instantly so the person could not set off a bomb if one is strapped to the person's chest, the newspaper said.

Among signs to look for listed in the police organization's behavioral profile are wearing a heavy coat in warm weather, carrying a backpack with protrusions or visible wires, nervousness, excessive sweating or an unwillingness to make eye contact, the Post said.

According to the newspaper, the new guidelines also say the threat does not have to be "imminent" - as in traditional police training - an officer just needs to have a "reasonable basis" for believing a suspect can detonate a bomb.

What is a "reasonable basis"? In our climate of fear and xenophobia, the answer is pretty clear:

"They all look a certain way," said New York state Assemblyman Dov Hikind. "It's all very nice to be politically correct here, but we're talking about terrorism."

No, apparently we're talking about Arabs. Because if we were talking about terrorism, we'd realize that the 'terror' part of terrorism revolves around the victim's inability to predict what and where and when the next strike will be. If I can read in the paper the methods the cops are using to determine who is or isn't a threat, so can the terrorists. How kind of us to give them a handy shopping list of things to avoid when planning their next attack.

Quoth Lenka from farkleberries:

I understand that the reality of policing is often about statistics, stereotypes, and intuitive hunches that run counter to what we call "civil liberties," but as a practical measure "Arab profiling" would do little or nothing to make our cities safer. But - terrorism is simply an intermittent-payoff "shell game." Once the knowledge that police are surveilling for "Arabs" becomes public knowledge, terrorists will simply change their approach and their appearance. It's all about game theory, and shifting police resources to target the outwardly recognized symbolism of previous terrorist acts doesn't really address the nature of the real risk: the fluid menace of terrorism continually shifts once an attack has taken place.

Racial profiling is nothing new in the US... "driving while black" has always been a good way to get pulled over by the cops. Now "walking while Arab" might be a terminal crime, and the prosecution of that crime won't make anyone the slightest bit safer.

I think that the effectiveness of a terrorist attack is a function of how many civil liberties get taken away as a result of that attack. Fearfully abandoning the precepts that we claim to uphold just gives the terrorists more points. Terror is an infection that is spreading unchecked... now we need to fear the terrorists *and* the cops *and* anyone who deviates from the norm by any appreciable amount (if they are hostile, the danger is obvious; if they are not, you still don't want to be standing next to them when the cops start firing). I think we're doing the terrorist's work for them. How accommodating we have become.

I remember when 'police state' was a derogatory term for The Bad Guys, uncivilized foreign governments Somewhere Else who don't recognize the 'certain inalienable rights' that we enjoy here in the 'Free World'. Lately that term seems to be what we desire, all in the name of a safety that can never be achieved.

This 'aim for the head' thing is going to turn around and bite us in the ass. It's only a matter of time until terrorists decide to use the new rule to their advantage, and make their explosives detonate when the suicide-bomber's pulse or EKG readings stop... they wire themselves up with ten bucks worth of circuitry from any Radio Shack, deliver themselves to the target, make themselves obvious, and wait for the bullet. And in the meantime we make a big show of force, one step behind them all the way, lines of shoeless air travelers and cowed train riders marking the places where the terrorists are not, yet where terror still resides.

punky mctweezerhands

2005-08-03T22:24:00.000-07:00

Safeway parking lot tales of horror, chapter 143:

...so she gets out of her car and walks towards me and I can see as she gets closer that she is beautiful except for the WHOLE LEFT SIDE OF HER SCALP IS SHAVED AND THE OTHER HALF IS FEATHERED SHOULDER LENGTH just like Kristy McNichol way back when and she's holding two huge tweezers - swear - like the biggest tweezers you have EVER SEEN and they are hooked together by a thick black cord and I started to freak inside a little bit thinking this is not the way I want to die out back behind Safeway smelling like rotten spinach leaves and bludgeoned to death by a pair of tweezers so I say WHAT'S UP?

a not-so-angry inch

2005-08-02T22:14:00.000-07:00

Can one square inch of silence infect the Olympic National Park with quietude?

This is one of those ideas that is good in theory, but doomed in practice... there's always the 100^th monkey factor, but in this instance it's the monkeys that are the problem in the first place.

soylent snacks

2005-08-01T11:37:00.000-07:00

Cannibalistic lifestyle not working out for you? Try Hufu, the vegetarian human flesh alternative.

martian ice

2005-07-30T18:40:00.000-07:00

Here's the best picture I've seen of the frozen lake on Mars.

hail and farewell

2005-07-29T10:56:00.000-07:00

Today is the 29th of July, which once again marks the appearance of Julie (HBTY HBTY HBDJ HBTY) and the disappearance of Scott (RIP).

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes...

Day 1: Up the Khyber

2005-07-28T16:24:00.000-07:00

You can now read all of Michael Palin's travel books, inluding the current series Himalaya, online for free.

industrial menu

2005-07-27T18:18:00.000-07:00

Einstürzende Neueküchen: recipes contributed by fans of Einstürzende Neubauten.

massive irony hemorrhage

2005-07-27T17:34:00.000-07:00

In the news today:

U.S. seeks new UN condemnation of violence in Iraq

The United States circulated a draft resolution at the United Nations on Wednesday condemning a surge in violence in Iraq that has killed hundreds including two Algerian diplomats and a Sunni Arab helping to draft a new Iraqi constitution.

I feel like I'm living in an unpleasant cartoon... although I guess it does make sense, if the US's concern is that this other violence is a copyright violation that is diluting our trademark.

taking the fight to the... 11-year old girls?

2005-07-26T22:54:00.000-07:00

A girl walks down the street. Some boys pelt her with water balloons. She's too young to know that the boys are going to behave in roughly the same manner and at roughly the same maturity level until well into their 30's, but she's not going to put up with their shit regardless, and she pegs one of them in the head with a rock. Fresno police respond to the scene with three cop cars and a helicopter and arrest the girl for felony assault.

Maribel Cuevas speaks little English, so they read her rights twice... in English. She was held for 5 days in which she was allowed to speak to her parents once for 30 minutes, then placed under house-arrest. The boy who got pegged admitted to starting the fight, but the cops aren't going to back down on this one because it will make them look like idiots. Errr... *more* like idiots.

OK so 'Free the Fresno One' isn't quite as catchy as Free the West Memphis Three, but still...

taxonomy of the tale

2005-07-25T00:50:00.000-07:00

From the 'Trojan Moral' to 'Closed Captioning for the Sight and Subtlety Impaired', Ian Bakke presents the Types of Stories My Mother Tells.

y for why bother

2005-07-24T20:18:00.000-07:00

OK, so last night I read V for Vendetta cover to cover. Today I watched the trailer for the film again, and the thing that struck me the most was the ingenious way in which almost a hundred clips, which average about a quarter of a second in duration, manage to convey quite clearly the extents to which the Wachowski brothers fucked the original story.

Aside from the general theme of the main character's vendetta, the most important aspect of the story revolves around the evolution of Evey, played by Natalie 'hold me like you did by the lake on Naboo' Portman with the same Britoid accent she used in the Star Wars films ("I will not condone a cohhhse of action that will lead us to wohhhhh.") Sadly the preview manages to show that the key to Evey's involvement in the storyline has been written out of the story, and if the second and third Matrix films are anything to go on this gaping plot hole will be filled with... nothing.

Remember remember the 5th of November,
pay no mind to the holes in the plot.
It's hard to make flicks
when you reach for your tricks
and bullet-time's all that you've got.

v for vendetta

2005-07-22T23:01:00.000-07:00

The trailer for 'V for Vendetta' is up at the film's site... I am dreading this film for a number of reasons.

First, this is a story that should have been left alone, and especially by the Wachowski's. Turning comics into movies is a big fad right now, but 'V' is generally considered to be one of Alan Moore's best works, and Alan Moore is generally considered to be one of the best comic writers ever. I wouldn't want to try to put them in any sort of order, but Moore, Neil Gaiman, and Mike Carey are wizards. The Wachowski brothers, who managed to completely fuck up the last two films of the Matrix series despite the enormous potential the first film afforded them, are trolls.

Second, conservatives everywhere are going to have a fucking field day with this film. The tagline for the film is 'People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people', something quite the opposite of current political trends. There is a very strong terrorism theme in the storyline... it's terrorism in the same sense that the Boston Tea Party and the US War of Independence were terrorism, but with today's myopic viewpoint regarding 'safety' I expect to hear a lot of noise about this issue.

Finally, some of the events in the film won't need to be abstractly compared to current events... (mild spoiler, highlight to read if you already know the story) how are they going to handle the tube bombings, including the 'Viking funeral', in the light of recent events in London? I fear they'll fuck it up in the same way they wimped out on so many films after the US was attacked.

I suspect I'll have to see the film... I just hope that doing so is not like slowing down to look at a car wreck.

he's dead, Jim

2005-07-20T23:11:00.000-07:00

James 'beam me up, Scotty' Doohan died today, although I seem to recall that he turns up again sometime in the future... but that may be in some other time-line or parallel universe, I'm not sure.

I just read that the Milwaukee School of Engineering granted Doohan an honorary degree because his role as Chief Engineer of the Starship Enterprise inspired many students to study engineering. I can't say that he was what inspired me, but he was responsible for harshing my mellow when I was studying semiconductor physics.

I was learning about the band gap, the electrical potential difference between an atom's valence band (basically 'bound electrons') and its conduction band (basically 'free electrons'). When particle-ish things like photons or electrons strike a material with enough energy they make an electron jump across the band gap, but if they don't have enough energy to cause a jump they just pass right through the material. This is why semiconductors work - bias them with enough energy and the electrons pop up into the conduction zone, and the semiconductor acts like a conductor.

Metals, on the other hand, don't behave like this. They've either got a negative band gap (all the levels sort of fuzzed together) or open spots in the valence band, which at reasonable energy levels means they effectively have zero band gap. This means they pretty much always catch particles that hit them. And that means no transparent aluminum.

Dammit.

google moon

2005-07-20T12:30:00.000-07:00

Today is the 36th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, and to celebrate Google has added the moon to Google Maps. Google Moon has the landing sites marked for Apollo 11-17, except for 13 which never actually landed on the moon because it would have made the movie go over budget.

message in a bottle

2005-07-15T04:09:00.000-07:00

It's "Fuck with Foobario's Medication" time again, so half the time I don't know who/where/why I am, and the other half of the time I'm pretty sure I know, but I don't like the answers. I hope that This Too Shall Pass.

If you're waiting for an email from me, I apologize for the delay.

well rounded

2005-07-12T23:11:00.000-07:00

How many times have you heard a parent say they wish they could tap their kids' energy for something useful? They've figured out a way to do just that in rural Africa, where they're using a device that turns a merry-go-round into a water pump.

Harnessing the power of children in an almost Tom Sawyer-ish manner, this device has significant quality-of-life impact. The design is low cost, low complexity, and low maintenance, making it ideal for rural areas where water is usually carried from a water source by women. The water tank is ideal for advertising space; two sides are reserved for health messages, and the revenues from selling ad space on the other sides pay for the upkeep of the system.

I wonder how this will change the society, now that there is no need for people to gather at the watering hole?

dude, munchies

2005-07-11T05:41:00.000-07:00

Today is 7-11, and that means free slurpees at your local Sev. It's good to see them giving something back to the legions of dope fiends who sidle in at 3am for a microwaved bean & cheese burrito and a ludicrously large soda, playing a couple of games of Black Tiger or Pinbot before returning to their dens of iniquity to dive back into another 6 straight hours of D&D or Call of Cthulhu or Illuminati.

Not that I'd know anything about that.

he is risen undead undead undead

2005-07-10T23:19:00.000-07:00

Bela Lugosi's played all the gruesome characters: Dracula, Frankenstein, ghouls, zombies, Jesus. I think his 1909 Passion play role was probably the gateway drug that opened the door to all of those other macabre stories... let that be a warning to you.

dub will tear us apart

2005-07-09T11:17:00.000-07:00

Jah Division does dub renditions of Joy Division songs. You can hear their version of Love will tear us apart (5.8MB MP3) or check out some video on Punkcast #250. and Punkcast #314.

BTW Punkcast has videos of hundreds of Brooklyn/NY shows covering the last 5 years. Keep your fingers on the pulse without needing to wash your hands afterwards.

more perspective

2005-07-08T00:52:00.000-07:00

From our beleaguered friends across the pond: a letter to the terrorists, from London:

What the fuck do you think you're doing?

This is London. We've dealt with your sort before. You don't try and pull this on us.

Do you have any idea how many times our city has been attacked? Whatever you're trying to do, it's not going to work.

All you've done is end some of our lives, and ruin some more. How is that going to help you? You don't get rewarded for this kind of crap.

And if, as your MO indicates, you're an al-Qaeda group, then you're out of your tiny minds.

Because if this is a message to Tony Blair, we've got news for you. We don't much like our government ourselves, or what they do in our name. But, listen very clearly. We'll deal with that ourselves. We're London, and we've got our own way of doing things, and it doesn't involve tossing bombs around where innocent people are going about their lives.

And that's because we're better than you. Everyone is better than you. Our city works. We rather like it. And we're going to go about our lives. We're going to take care of the lives you ruined. And then we're going to work. And we're going down the pub.

So you can pack up your bombs, put them in your arseholes, and get the fuck out of our city.

Hrrmph... no "if this changes anything, the terrorists have already won" (immediately followed by changing everything), no France bashing, no Department of Homeland Security, no federalization of public transit workers... haven't the British learned anything from the U.S.?

In stirring address to nation...

2005-07-07T00:51:00.000-07:00

... President rekindles America's love affair with getting it's superpower ass kicked in Vietraq.

I hear from friends of friends, that the press - even the objective prophets of Fox News - can't help but mention the recent slew of flesh wounds and roman candles lighting up around Iraq. Now, normally, I just ignore the press. I also ignore reason, logic, and my conscience. I happen to believe that working class folk respect a man who's a straight shooter, who tows the line no matter what, even if you're making a historically tragic mistake. Let me put it this say: saving face is everything. Who cares if you're praying, so long as you show at church on time. Am I right?

I listen to only one person, and that's Jesus Christ. And you know what He tells me? "Hey, hey George – grab a crowbar and pry me down off this durned cross." HAR HAR HAR. That's a joke. Seriously though, He tells me that the only way that any President has pushed through a radical social agenda is to paint himself a "War President" and distract the retarded electorate with a magnificent kill show.

perspective

2005-07-06T01:03:00.000-07:00

Fuck Natalee Holloway.

mapping Area 51

2005-07-05T20:55:00.000-07:00

Playing around with Google Maps I occasionally see areas that have been intentionally erased, like this big grey blotch northwest of Vegas:

The interesting thing is that they don't erase the same areas in the satellite view. Looking through that grey area I ran into this compund of buildings surrounded by circular... what, particle accelerators or something?

A little bit east of there I found out why they erased that bit of the map - it's Area 51, on the southwest edge of Groom Lake, home to spooky alien experiments:

Northwest of there, out in the middle of nowhere, is something that is either a large bombing range, proof that someone migrated to Nevada from the Nazca Plains, or a sekrit Illuminati base:

And much farther to the northwest, on the edge of another dry alkali lake-bed, there's a whole other kind of experiment going on:

Yat-kha

2005-07-05T13:12:00.000-07:00

Whatever happened to Tannu Tuva? Years ago Richard Feynman asked this question, and his search for the answer (documented in the book "Tuva or Bust! Richard Feynman's Last Journey") introduced the world to Tuvan throat-singing. (It's a matter of personal taste whether you think that's a good thing or not.) But Tuva, which is so remote that you get there by way of Siberia, isn't just about ancient obscure folk-singing. Turns out they've got a thriving punk scene.

OK, so 'thriving' may be a bit strong of a word since it appears that the whole punk scene in Tuva revolves around one guy, Albert Kuvezin, but he seems pretty dedicated. Trained in traditional folk-singing but kicked out of the choir for singing badly, he turned away from music until one day he heard Sonic Youth and it changed his life.

His band Yat-kha just released an album of covers that inspired them... everything from Captain Beefheart to Kraftwerk. You can listen to their cover of Joy Division's Love will tear us apart (1.43MB MP3) and Motorhead's Orgasmatron (1.76MB MP3) online. They're starting a European tour this month.

More info on Tuva can be found at Friends of Tuva and TuvaOnline.

grammatical graphics

2005-07-05T11:56:00.000-07:00

Context Free is a programming language that generates fractals from simple grammar. For example, this code...


startshape SNOWFLAKE

rule SNOWFLAKE {
  SPIKE {}
  SPIKE { r 60 }
  SPIKE { r 120 }
  SPIKE { r 180 }
  SPIKE { r 240 }
  SPIKE { r 300 }
}

rule SPIKE {
  SQUARE {}
  SPIKE { y 0.97 s 0.97 }
}

rule SPIKE 0.03 {
  SPIKE { r 60 }
  SPIKE { r -60 }
  SPIKE { y 0.97 s 0.97  }
}

... generates this pic:

With only marginally more complex code, very organic forms can be made:

Context Free is a GUI for editing and rendering grammar code. It's available for Mac, Win, and Posix-based systems, and it's free as in beer and as in speech, but if you want to show the love they ask that you either donate $ to the EFF or buy something from their CafePress shop.

apparently math and art do mix

2005-07-04T23:48:00.000-07:00

Researchers have created a program that uses the Boltzmann equation to model the interaction of ink and paper, enabling more realistic software painting techniques. The Boltzmann equation describes the dynamics of an ideal gas and is often not used for denser gases and liquids (like ink), but curiously it is used for modeling galactic dynamics... being mostly empty space, galaxies (at some very large scale and under certain assumptions about viscosity and collisions) resemble a gas. Hrmmm, that reminds me of a Steven Wright joke:

"I was walking through the park last night when a spaceship landed in front of me and a one inch tall alien got out. I said to him, 'are you really one inch tall'? 'No', he replied, 'I'm just really far away'."

The Boltzmann equation is known to have no closed-form solution for higher densities (i.e. it is a Serious Pain In The Ass to integrate, like most thermodynamics problems), so those researchers must have found a way to optimize the equations to get real-time results. Whatever they did, the end result is some pretty pictures.

so here... i am...

2005-07-02T21:04:00.000-07:00

If I were casting about for reasons to off myself today, I think that the fact that my neighbors decided to handle the music requirements for their party by putting a Journey CD on eternal repeat would be reason enough... I've heard 'Open arms' 4 times in the last two hours AND I'M BUGGING.

i am the lorax etc etc

2005-07-02T00:50:00.000-07:00

Are you carbon-neutral? Coldplay is.

Combine this with the 'recycle your body' idea from the last post and leave the planet better than you found it. Well, in a CO₂ sense anyway. Everything else will still be pretty much fucked, but at least you'll have tried.

ethical consumerism

2005-07-01T22:18:00.000-07:00

Hippy Shopper is a sort of eco-friendly product consumer blog. They've got categories like Green gadgets, Recycling, Energy saving, and Design & furniture that separate the signal from the noise; so if you've just got to have a notebook made out of recycled circuit boards or a bicycle-powered cellphone recharger, they've got you covered.

I especially like the way a burial service that will compost you is listed under 'recycling'.

I'm so glad they didn't call it 'GooHole'

2005-06-29T19:38:00.000-07:00

Google Earth is now live. This is the result of Google's acquisition of Keyhole, which was the coolest world-mapping software I'd ever seen. It's like a digital globe you can spin around and zoom in on, and you can bookmark places, overlay the maps with information (I saw a French city that had an overlay of a map of that city in the 12th century), and share your findings with others.

There's a free version, and a couple of commercial versions with more options. They got hit pretty hard on the initial release news, so the downloads are disabled right now, but it should be available again in the next day or two.

using Google Maps API in Blogger

2005-06-29T17:43:00.000-07:00

Google Maps has released a public API, making it easier to incorporate maps into your own webpage. Like so, hopefully:

You'll need to sign up for a key that is specific to your website; they don't even ask for an email address, just the URL you intend to use the API on.

Adding a map to a page is pretty simple:

Add Google's script to your page
Add an empty DIV to the body of your post where you want the map to be
Add scripting to target that empty DIV by id

In addition to this there are two requirements that are specific to posting on Blogger:

Blogger kicks up an error when you try to submit a post that has <script> tags in it. Underneath the error is a checkbox that says "Stop showing errors for this post"... click that and resubmit, and the post goes through fine.
If you have Settings... Formatting... Convert line breaks set to 'yes', you need to make sure the entire script is on one line... <br /> tags in the middle of a script usually cause the script to fail.

There is a final caveat that applies to using Google Maps on any blogging system:

When you assign an ID to the blank target div, make it unique and make sure that the accompanying script targets that unique name. On this page instead of using the ID 'map', I used 'map062905' because I probably won't put up another map today, but if I put up another one tomorrow I don't want the scripts to be confused. Each map needs a unique ID.

If you can see a map above, the code looks like this (line breaks and comments have been added for clarity):

<head> tag:

Post body:

// empty DIV with unique ID, styled to your liking
<div id="map062905" style="width: 300px; height: 300px; margin: 0 auto;"></div>

// script that calls the API
<script type="text/javascript">

// associate a new map object with the empty div
var map = new GMap(document.getElementById("map062905"));
// add size/pan controls
map.addControl(new GSmallMapControl());
// add map/satellite controls
map.addControl(new GMapTypeControl());
// center the map on your target and zoom appropriately
map.centerAndZoom(new GPoint(-122.676258, 45.508272), 4);

</script>

Note that the main Google script goes in the <head> tag, which on Blogger means modifying your template and republishing your blog. If you are absolutely sure that you'll never have more than one post with maps on the same page, you could move that script into the body of the post. Multiple posts that did this on the same page would mean multiple includes of the script, which might upset some browsers.

The API provides additional methods for adding markers and labels and overlays... I'll probably write about those once I've messed around with this more.

a stunning commitment to democracy and human rights

2005-06-28T03:39:00.000-07:00

The Uzbekistani government massacred hundreds of pro-democracy protesters last month, and a NATO resolution to call for an independent international probe of the matter was squashed by the US government because supporting such a call might threaten our usage of Uzbekistani airbases.

Another fine moment in American political history brought to you by the Bush administration. It's almost like they are having a contest to see how disassociated our walk and talk can become before anyone notices.

the devil you know is the only one

2005-06-28T03:05:00.000-07:00

Which hippie commie liberal freedom-hating anti-patriot said this?

"The administration should clarify its intent... people lack confidence in the credibility of our government. Even our allies are beginning to suspect what we say... it's a difficult thing today to be informed about our government even without all the secrecy... with the secrecy, it's impossible. The American people will do what's right when they have the information they need."¹

How about this?

"I do, however, believe it is important to the future of our Nation to recognize that there is a problem of credibility today."²

Or this?

"I believe the following significant and timely editorial which appeared in today's issue of the New York Times... merits wide attention. I concur in the conclusion expressed therein that the people of the United States must know not only how their country became involved but where we are heading."³

Or this?

"Accurate judgment is predicated on accurate information. Government has an obligation to present information to the public promptly and accurately so that the public's evaluation of Government activities is not distorted. Political pundits speak of the 'credibility gap' in the present administration. Indeed, this appellation is so widespread that it has become a household word."⁴

Answers:

Donald Rumsfeld, quoted in Chicago Tribune, 4/13/66
Donald Rumsfeld, in the Congressional Record, 89th Cong. Pg. A1454, 3/15/66; also Chicago Sun-Times, 12/5/65
Donald Rumsfeld, in the Congressional Record, 89th Cong. Pg. 21081, 8/19/65; also New York Times, 8/19/65
Donald Rumsfeld, in the Congressional Record, 90th Cong. pg A792, 2/21/67

point and click instalibrary

2005-06-28T00:54:00.000-07:00

Amazon.com has the entire Penguin Classics Library for sale, clickity-click and it's yours for only 8 large (with free shipping, woot). There are 1,082 volumes in the collection, which you can browse by author or title.

Most of the books on the list are available as free eBooks or audio at Project Gutenberg.

from the balcony

2005-06-27T14:56:00.000-07:00

Who needs Ebert & Roeper when we've got Statler & Waldorf?

quagmire

2005-06-26T16:43:00.000-07:00

Define 'insurgency'. It's a word that gets tossed around a lot in the doublespeak propaganda lately. In the sentence "The US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld yesterday warned that the insurgency in Iraq could go on for another 12 years", 'insurgency' means 'those citizens of Iraq who oppose the US occupation of their country'.

We seem to be in the full-time business of pushing our worldview on people who don't want it. Which is interesting, since the US exists because a few insurgents, with the help of the French, opposed the English doing the same thing to us. We cry foul when things don't go our way, and then violate our own laws, the Geneva Convention, and any other rule of conscientious behavior when we see our chance.

I've always thought that a true test of any idea is 'would you still support it if the roles were reversed?' Christians supposedly believe that this is a useful test, though you wouldn't know it to watch them... the 'Golden Rule', now tarnished, has been replaced by the 'Yellow Ribbon'.

Indeed have many fuct things come to pass.

bzzzt.

2005-06-25T19:45:00.000-07:00

Killer Japanese Seizure Robots.

If you don't remember why go here.

forensic locksmithing

2005-06-25T16:42:00.000-07:00

Future Darwin Award winner Arthur Richardson is the type of guy you don't want to give your keys: he jokingly pretended to swallow a friend's keys, and then accidently actually swallowed the damn things. His doctor told him it was a problem that would work itself out and gave Richardson a very nice x-ray image of the key. At this point the friend, who has (a) an idiot for a buddy and (b) no keys, called a locksmith to get new keys made. The locksmith then proceeded to cut a new set of keys using the x-ray image as a template.

Somers said the X-ray was unlike anything he had ever seen. The key was clearly outlined in the picture, located just to the right of the spine. "I've seen all kinds of things. This is the most bizarre," Somers said Thursday afternoon as he held up the X-ray to the light. "It's a perfect silhouette."

Richardson said he has learned a lesson from the ordeal: "Never put a key in your mouth."

cool tools: PDF Reader

2005-06-23T21:09:00.000-07:00

I'm going through a tutorial right now that's in PDF format. The PDF file is 6.2MB. But if I check the task manager to see who's bogarting the memory on this machine, I find that Acrobat has a 172MB footprint. Close Acrobat, reopen the document, and it drops to a 44MB footprint, which grows a little larger each time I view a new page, asymptotically approaching the 172MB value I saw before. For a 6 meg file.

Loading the file in Foxit's PDF Reader, the first thing I notice is that it opens immediately. It doesn't spend a few seconds loading all sorts of nifty filters and plugins that I won't use anyway, it just opens the damn document. Checking back in the task manager I find that PDF Reader has a 1.2MB footprint. Obviously this means it hasn't loaded the whole file into memory, so I click through the pages, and find that the maximum memory footprint hovers around 14MB. Going from a page that is graphics-intensive to one that is pure text, the program even gives up some memory, something I've never seen Acrobat do.

this one's obvious too...

2005-06-21T06:53:00.000-07:00

... but it's still nice to hear that someone somewhere is getting a clue.

Republican senator Chuck Hagel:

Things aren't getting better, they're getting worse. The White House is completely disconnected from reality. It's like they're just making it up as they go along. The reality is that we're losing in Iraq.

The reality is that we lost long before we even got there, Chuck, but don't let that stop you from trying to fix what you helped fuck up.

i could have told you that

2005-06-21T06:19:00.000-07:00

Umm:

If you've ever secretly harboured thoughts that a colleague - or even your boss - behaves like a psychopath, you may be closer to the truth than you dared to imagine. A study has found that there are far more sub-criminal psychopaths - self-serving, narcissistic schemers who display a stunning lack of empathy, but are not criminally inclined - at large in the population than had previously been thought. Some even end up in managerial positions.

No shit? They're just figuring this out? I've had managers that were so bad their names became verbs, usually used as synonyms for "ass-rape" or something similar. Their behavior was so deplorable that if you were merely betrayed by them you felt honored that you didn't receive further attention. A 'stunning lack of empathy' indeed.

Palin on top of the world

2005-06-21T06:04:00.000-07:00

Michael Palin has another travelogue that "chronicles his six-month journey over the Khyber Pass from Pakistan to Afghanistan and then into India, Nepal, Tibet, Bhutan and Burma." His previous shows (Pole to Pole, Full Circle, Hemingway Adventure and Sahara) were brilliant... he's the perfect tour guide, able to find beauty and humor in the strangest places.

On this trip he met with the Dalai Lama:

"I was expecting to be rather over-awed, sort of a bit dumbstruck by him, but as soon as he came in, it was just sort of something in the eyes, a little look of mischief that he really has ... it was just sort of like meeting a fellow Python," Palin said.

Palin's travelogues are the best of both worlds: you get to see places all over the world, but you don't get mugged/cold/dysentery/targeted as the local representative of US imperialism.

google maps the world

2005-06-20T05:47:00.000-07:00

Another cool Google Maps hack - this one overlays year 2000 census data.

Google Maps also does the world now... nothing like the resolution of the US maps, but it's cool being able to grab the satellite view and drag it around to see different countries. It's like spinning a digital globe.

cookie? no, thanks.

2005-06-19T00:30:00.000-07:00

Marketers are getting their knickers in a twist over people like me who delete their browser cookies - they are even marketing the idea that cookies are good for you. I call bullshit on that. I believe that the prevailing browser cookie models are broken, and this is probably going to turn into a long-winded explanation of why I believe that and what I think can be done about it. Non-nerds are free to leave at any time.

Most browsers give you some control over how cookies are stored on your machine. There are usually permission options and persistence options:

deny all
allow all
1. Scope:
  1. for all sites
  2. for originating site only
2. Persistence:
  1. for all time
  2. for this session only
ask every time
1. ask for each cookie
2. apply choice to all cookies from this site

Some of these options are trivial - allowing all cookies or denying all cookies require no further input from the user. But if you choose to be selective about which sites store cookies on your machine, you quickly run into options that don't make much sense. For an example, suppose you choose to have the browser ask you every time: if you allow the cookie, you get a cookie. If you disallow the cookie, you basically get an antimatter cookie, a sort of meta-cookie that blocks further cookies from that site. In effect you are blacklisting the entire web, by hand, one site at a time, when what you really want to do is whitelist the few sites to whom you wish to allow free cookie privileges.

Some sites don't function well, or at all, without cookies. Many don't require the cookies to persist across sessions, but within a single session they use cookies to track state changes - you added an item to your shopping cart, you logged in to your email account, whatever. Since these sites are becoming more prevalent, turning off cookies entirely doesn't seem to be an option, so at the very least enabling cookies for session-only persistence can save you a lot of hassle. For the majority of sites, session-only persistence is also the very most access that needs to be enabled... if you 'surf' the web you visit hundreds of sites you'll never see again, and there is no reason to be storing all of their cookies unles you are specifically trying to help the data-miners target you.

For commonly used sites, it would be (and is) nice to have cookies that persist across sessions. What is needed is a simple way to elevate the cookie privileges of a specific site, and by simple I don't mean "navigate through three layers of menus and then plow through the list of blocked sites to unblock the one you want", which is the way most browsers handle it. So, finally, my proposed solution:

Set all cookies to 'session only'.
When a site sets a cookie, a little cookie icon is activated on the toolbar.
If you decide you want cookies from that site to persist across sessions, click on the cookie icon and that site will be added to the whitelist, subject to your other permissions (i.e. 'all cookies' vs 'originating site only')

This setup has the advantage of only storing cookies for sites you authorize, without bugging you all of the time. Plus the marketers take it in the shorts... it's a win-win situation :).

I guess I need to dig into the Firefox code and see if I can implement this instead of just bitching about it. Another day, another post.

no more grandfather paradox

2005-06-18T04:18:00.000-07:00

Quantum physicists have decided that the rules of quantum theory make the grandfather paradox go away. This time-travel paradox asks what would happen if you went back in time and killed your grandfather (quantum physicists are always killing things in their thought-experiments... poor Schrödinger's cat) before he met your grandmother (apparently quantum physicists draw the line at killing grandmothers)... therefore your parents and you yourself would never be born, so how could you have gone back in time?

The current theory matches what Heinlein said all along: nature abhors a paradox, and you obviously didn't go back and kill your grandfather, because you're here. Now they're saying that you couldn't if you tried - that the collapse of probability functions does something irreversible to the spectrum of possibilities. In Feynman's sum over histories approach, the history that actually happened is so much stronger than all of the other possibilities that it over-rules any possible changes.

If you think about Cramer's Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics this makes a lot of sense as well (more so than most things in quantum theory). It's mixing metaphors a bit, but in essence this interpretation allows a back-channel for information from the present to guide the collapse of probabilities in the past, and in the sum-over-histories view the 'future history' in which the waveform has collapsed has a much greater amplitude than any of the others. You can't meddle in the past, because you didn't meddle in the past. This interpretation strongly supports the idea of a forward-pointing arrow of time, but ironically it relies on waves going backwards in time to do so... I'll leave that one for the philosophers.

Tweedy's NEXT music

2005-06-17T00:43:00.000-07:00

Wired is kicking off their Chicago NEXTFEST event with a night of music curated by Wilco front man Jeff Tweedy. NEXTFEST is an event inspired by the old World's Fairs - a vision of the future, like a yard sale at the Jetson's. NEXTMUSIC, in the hands of Tweedy, provides a beautiful counterpoint to the glass-and-chrome future being presented at NEXT:

I love thinking about what the future holds, so I was thrilled to be invited to be part of WIRED NextFest and to share my vision of the future, said Jeff Tweedy. Which is not very futuristic really and admittedly a little bleak.

Honestly, I had a lot of trouble conjuring up a rose-hewn vision of our collective tomorrows. Instead I have focused my attention on music with the kind of sturdiness and self-sufficiency the post-apocalyptic lifestyle I'm anticipating might require. The kinds of artists making the kinds of music that won't be interrupted or even miss a beat when the power goes out.

The kind that would be fleet-footed and nimble if the Man came crashing down in the middle of the night. In other words, I pictured folk music. All there ever was in the first place.

There's not much information about who is playing the gig, but Joanna Newsom is confirmed, which would be worth it alone.

If you're in Chicago, NEXTMUSIC is 22 June at the Vic Theatre, and NEXTFEST is 24-26 June at the Navy Pier Festival Hall A.

books and crooks

2005-06-16T01:26:00.000-07:00

The House decided to ditch part of the Patriot Act: they think that tracking your library records and bookstore purchases might be a bit much. You might recall that the last time this was voted on, the Republicans violated numerous rules of decorum and at least bent a few laws by keeping the vote open indefinitely until they could pressure enough people to change their vote. They only allowed the vote to go through when they were assured it would fail. This year a weaker version was proposed (it still grants the FBI the right to track computer use in libraries) and 38 Republicans crossed the line to the sane side, incurring the wrath of their fellow party members who basically told them the usual, i.e. if you don't toe the line the terrorists have already won.

It's still got to go through the Senate, though, and the White House has threatened to veto any legislation that shrinks the Patriot Act. This administration's dedication to the democratic ideal brings a tear to my eye.

GOP bulldozes Sesame Street

2005-06-16T01:07:00.000-07:00

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is on the chopping block... a House subcommittee voted to withdraw all funding within two years. Apparently Republican kids don't need 'Reading Rainbow'.

"Americans overwhelmingly see public broadcasting as an unbiased information source," Rep. David Obey (Wis.), the ranking Democrat on the subcommittee, said in a statement. "Perhaps that's what the GOP finds so offensive about it. Republican leaders are trying to bring every facet of the federal government under their control... Now they are trying to put their ideological stamp on public broadcasting."

Maybe they'll let Sesame Street stay on the air if Bert and Ernie get separate rooms.

jobs directions

2005-06-16T01:00:00.000-07:00

Steve Jobs on finding your way in life:

My third story is about death. When I was 17 I read a quote that went something like "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "no" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important thing I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life, because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

From his Stanford Commencement Speech.

tinfoil hat

2005-06-15T02:57:00.000-07:00

Seems a bunch of people think the WTC attacks were an inside job.

The problem is that the glee with which the Bush administration has fucked the constitution (and the economy and our standing with the rest of the world and the Geneva Convention) can be mistaken for a sense of purpose that I don't recall them having before 9/11. And a bigger problem is that the people of this country assumed that the resolve they saw in this administration after the attacks was similar to their own... but it turns out that the administration's resolve tended more towards abandoning every tenet of the Republican party and working very hard to create a permanent emergency that would justify their militaristic whims. No tinfoil beanie is required - just a willingness on the part of the government to lie, and an unwillingness or inability on the part of the people to judge for themselves.

But I might reconsider donning the tinfoil hat if this attempt to repeal the 22nd amendment is successful... that's the amendment that limits a President to two terms. If they pass that thing, I'm elsewhere fast.

hey, you got your free speech in my defamation of character

2005-06-14T23:32:00.000-07:00

The EFF has put up a legal guide for bloggers.

ground control to... umm...

2005-06-13T04:33:00.000-07:00

Suppose you're an amateur radio buff and you've built a satellite but you need to find some way to protect it while it's out in space. You could go to all the trouble of engineering the radiation shields and thermal protection... or you could just ask the folks on the International Space Station to stuff it into an extra spacesuit and kick it out the airlock. A very ingenious solution. I love the idea of this human-shaped satellite cartwheeling through space, beaming happy little radio packets to the industrious people on the ground.

glitch in the Matrix

2005-06-13T04:13:00.000-07:00

Check out this Google map... and click back and forth between the map and satellite views. What should be the bottom of a lake is instead some sort of circuitry or something like the inside of a computer chip.

Reality is crumbling.

a sense of function (but a disregard)

2005-06-12T16:36:00.000-07:00

Bloc Party's new video for Pioneers (embedded Quicktime) is a pretty incredible animation.

closed windows?

2005-06-10T20:59:00.000-07:00

Cringely's got an interesting take on the Apple/Intel thing... he thinks they are lining up to knock Microsoft out of the market. Since it doesn't make business sense for Apple alone (the Osborne Factor plus pissing off a bunch of die-hard Mac fans) and doesn't make much technological sense (AMD would have been a better match) there must have been some strong motivation for the switch. Intel could have suggested (funded?) the move out of a desire to have someone develop software that actually uses the features of their chips, instead of merely dumping bloatware on them like MS does.

Apple already has a portable operating system (OSX is BSD Unix and a dash of Linux with a pretty face, by way of NeXTStep), so making the move to the new chips isn't as drastic as it seems. The *real* move happened when OSX came out, so it's actually kind of funny seeing people get irate now - technically the OS they are using isn't part of the Mac lineage anyway. It's the veneer of Apple ethos that has continuity with the past, and if Apple didn't see a need to discard that ethos when they made changes at the operating system level, it's unlikely they will discard it when they make changes at the hardware level.

This looks like a win-win situation for everyone except Microsoft: Apple gets more powerful hardware, PC users likely end up with another choice of OS, and Microsoft gets a fire lit under their asses. Some rabid fans on both sides of the PC/Mac divide are getting their knickers in a twist, but they're like the people who put "Be American, Buy American" stickers on their Mexican-made Fords while scorning US-made 'Japanese' cars - once Apple moved to a Unix base, the whole thing became an abstraction. Use what works.

flogging a dead horse

2005-06-09T01:30:00.000-07:00

Eric Alterman:

This just in: The new ABC News/Washington Post poll, here, shows 52 percent of Americans disapprove of the job President Bush is doing overall, reports ABC News' Polling director Gary Langer - the most in more than 75 ABC/Post polls since his presidency began. His approval rating is 48 percent.

Bush's Iraq approval ratings haven't fared much better: 41 percent said they approve of the job the President is doing in Iraq, while 58 percent disapprove - matching his career-high Iraq disapproval mark.

George W. Bush's approval rating is now a full twenty points lower than Bill Clinton's was on the day he was impeached.

Reasons cited included "the 'corrosive effects of the war in Iraq' and the gap between what Americans say are their political priorities and what they see occupying President Bush and lawmakers in Washington".

I hate news like this... it always gives me a little glimmer of hope that things will get better.

[via SEB]

cool computers

2005-06-08T19:32:00.000-07:00

Our new computer is sitting in a UPS warehouse in Illinois right now... it should be here next week. As I was speccing it out one of the crucial things I paid attention to was cooling... not so far as to go water-cooled (yet), but still choosing a combination of case and power supply and CPU fan and GPU fan that will keep the thing from locking up (or melting down) without sounding like a lawnmower.

Turns out I could have just built a case out of fans.

Or dropped the whole thing into a fishtank full of oil.

The other kind of cool, as applied to cases:

Fine woodworking
Metropolis
Flash Gordon

your papers, please

2005-06-08T19:24:00.000-07:00

In a closed-door session yesterday the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence reauthorized and expanded the absurdly misnamed Patriot Act, giving our government powers we've long condemned other governments for exercising on their people.

In a move antithetical to our Constitution, the new 'administrative subpoena' authority would let the FBI write and approve its own search orders for intelligence investigations, without prior judicial approval. Flying in the face of the Fourth Amendment, this power would let agents seize personal records from medical facilities, libraries, hotels, gun dealers, banks and any other businesses without any specific facts connecting those records to any criminal activity or a foreign agent. The panel rejected attempts to limit this extraordinary power to emergencies - creating the likelihood that it will be used in fishing expeditions and in investigations unrelated to terrorism.

One more nail in the coffin... how many is that now? I've lost count.

for lack of a... clue?

2005-06-08T19:16:00.000-07:00

The "Battle for American Values", Bill O'Reilly's aquatic hatefest cruise, has been cancelled due to overwhelming lack of interest.

sweetjesusihatebilloreilly.com has the scoop.

even better than the real thing

2005-06-08T19:00:00.000-07:00

Improv Everywhere strikes again:

Back in January, U2 announced the dates of their "Vertigo" world tour. I contemplated trying to purchase tickets for the May 21 gig at Madison Square Garden. I was a big U2 fan growing up, and MSG is right across the street from my apartment. I ultimately decided it wasn't worth the steep ticket price. The tickets to the event sold out literally in seconds. As I was thinking about the show, a few things occurred to me:

- U2 is playing right across the street from where I live.
- I have rooftop access at my four-story apartment building.
- U2 is famous for playing on rooftops.

It seemed obvious that "U2" would have to play an unannounced gig on my rooftop an hour before the doors opened at the Garden.

300 people gathered on the street and traffic slowed to a crawl, while people in nearby buildings crowded the rooftops and watched from windows. The cops were roused from their donut-induced comas and proceed to arrest a bunch of people, shutting down the concert right in the middle of the encore. Once they figured out it was all a joke, they still needed to justify the hour or so of their time so they slapped everyone with an "unreasonable noise" charge and a summons to appear before a judge, who will probably either fine them $10 or ask them to do another concert.

critics these days

2005-06-08T00:14:00.000-07:00

In Des Moines a cop walks out of the courthouse and sees a man spray-painting "Police Academy 7" on the side of a white pickup truck. He calls for backup and 15 officers rush to the scene and attempt to surround the man, who then turns the spraypaint on them... so they shoot him. There are numerous realities floating around this story; in one of them the man pulled a replica handgun from his pants and was shot dead, in others he simply reached into his pocket and nobody knows how he's doing. The police department is understandably not saying a thing pending their investigation into the real-life similarities between their cops and those portrayed in the Police Academy movies.

UPDATE: it was his own truck, it was a toy gun, and he's dead. They say he "had a history of mental health problems and was wanted on a mental health warrant". Presumably the mental health problems were what made him think that standing in front of the courthouse spray-painting a truck with a toy gun tucked in his waistband was a low-profile place to hide from the law. I just have this picture in my head of 16 cops standing around a dead guy on the sidewalk, spray can inches from where it rolled out of his hand, and one of them says "god damn it... now we gotta do paperwork".

... and the horse you rode in on...

2005-06-08T00:08:00.000-07:00

Sometimes it's just nice to know we haven't cornered the market on absurdity here in the US:

A student at Balliol College was arrested and detained in custody for a night after he verbally abused a police horse early on Monday morning. Sam Brown, a third year English student, had his fingerprints taken and was released with a fine of £80 following the incident which took place on Cornmarket Street.

Brown was fined for "causing harassment, harm or distress", after he repeatedly called the officer's horse "gay".

Brown and his friends, including former Balliol JCR President Daniel Konrad-Cooper had emerged from the Cellar Bar and were surprised to encounter two mounted policemen.

Brown inquired, "How do you feel about your horse being gay?" of one of the policemen, stating that his colleague's was clearly not gay. After repeated comments on the sexuality of his horse, and despite warnings from the policeman about his behaviour, Brown's offer of an apology to the horse was rejected and he was handcuffed and taken by the officers to the police station.

The arrest was made at 2.20am on Monday morning, and Brown was in a state which he described as "pissed out of my head".

simply the breast

2005-06-07T17:41:00.000-07:00

My friend Writermama has famous boobies (2.13MB WMV video excerpt of MSNBC's 'Connected: Coast to Coast' segment on lactivism).

interstellar coding

2005-06-07T17:02:00.000-07:00

It's been so long since I had to program in any language other than assembly (PIC and HC11) or Verilog (fucking POS job) that I decided to look through the books and study up. It quickly became apparent that most of the languages I learned in school are archaic... even C++ seems too bogged down - the best thing it's got going for it is that it's not C. Yeah, I know they are the workhorse languages that run everything, but sheesh they are unintuitive.

Looking through the new languages, I decided on Python and Ruby, and after reading a couple of papers on each it seems Ruby fits my mindset best right now, so Ruby it is. I've been reading the pickaxe and writing some small programs, and it's so intuitive... it's almost like what Perl would be if Perl made any sense.

Today I found a great tutorial of sorts, the Art of Computational Science's Kali Code for Dense Stellar Systems. It's a start-at-the-bottom tutorial in both Ruby programming and celestial mechanics that is presented as an almost 'See Spot run' dialogue between two astrophysicists. This appeals to the nerd in me in *so* many ways.

Anyway, you have a little time before you need to phear my leet Ruby coding skillz... but don't get too complacent. Muahahahaaaaaaaa... erp.

hamster of doom

2005-06-07T01:46:00.000-07:00

You'll need:

a hamster
some tape
and a knife

The end result is about what you'd expect it to be.

too many mind

2005-06-07T00:48:00.000-07:00

At the age of 53 Cary Grant participated in a series of experiments with LSD. In his autobiography he records his perceptions, and they read like the teachings of the Buddha.

...by 1956, lacking the foundation of early spiritual training and suspecting that there was more happiness available than I seemed able to grasp, I had grown much more tolerant of, and receptive to, the knowledge of others. Other searchers, other sharers. Humanitarians in all fields of endeavor. At the age of 53, after three unsuccessful marriages, either something was wrong with me or, obviously, with the whole sociological and moralistic concepts of our civilization.

...

I learned may things in the quiet of that small room. I learned to accept the responsibility for my own actions, and to blame myself and no one else for circumstances of my own creating. I learned that no one else was keeping me unhappy but me; that I could whip myself better than any other guy in the joint.

I learned that all clichés prove true; which is, of course, the reason for their repetition, even when the meaning has been forgotten by the constant usage.

I learned that everything is, or becomes, its own opposite. A theory I can sometimes apply, but would find difficult to convey.

bile

2005-06-06T20:59:00.000-07:00

This is the Christian Right, in their own words. Look elsewhere for sanity.

pod people

2005-06-06T20:24:00.000-07:00

So this guy walks into a shipping warehouse... and talks the clerk into giving him $2.6 million worth of iPods, and then he disappears.

I'm thinking someone asked what his all-time top-five desert-island MP3 song list was and he just couldn't make up his mind.

'Safety' is a big buzzword these past few years, but safety is always going to fail, because while you are busy locking all of the doors all it takes is one person to open one door and your security is worthless. It doesn't take Jame's Bond's toys to commit a crime when social engineering works just as well; many people in the workforce are treated so poorly that they'll go out of their way to help out a kind stranger. And trying to stop this from happening by making a visible show of defensive force just shows the enemy where not to go.

As long as people trust other people there will be room for someone to take advantage of the situation. But it's a big mistake to think that this means "never trust anyone"... you can't keep all of the doors shut forever, and your paranoia will freak out your neighbors. If you make it a policy to shoot the messenger, eventually you just stop getting mail.