20081212

liketechnothrillers?

How about a real-life technothriller story with secret codes, international intrigue, and factionalism and personality conflicts in the face of a devastating global threat? It has 1337 haxxors, and a non-government, not-for-profit, adhocratic organization working for good. And the ending ominously warns, "it's not over yet."

From the pages of Wired

20081127

h8enoughforya

(Since the topic doesn't seem to be disappearing from the news...)

I say let the enemies of freedom have their short-lived victory in California. The last time it came to a vote, their side had sixty-something percent, this time they had fifty-something percent. In a few years gay marriage will come to popular vote again and they will lose.

Look for social conservatives to become more and more obviously desperate as they look around and realize that their whole philosophy is dead in the water if people born after 1970 take a liking to this whole democracy thing.

20081026

? ...fail?

Hmm... interesting... Blogger seems to be a few minutes ahead of TribTalk.

timestampandvote

Just another little thing I want published and timestamped here before it's uploaded to a forum controlled by someone else:

It is especially imperative in a free society that the election process be totally open. The basic balloting process where everyone writes their choice down, the votes are counted and the totals announced is very open. Anyone can understand how it works, and think of any possible places where it might run into problems, and suggest ways to deal with those problems.

Closed-source voting machines are inimical to a free society. Their inner workings are secrets known only to their "owners." Any accidental or deliberate problems in their operation are concealed from the people.

All democratic processes should be open, therefore if electronic voting machines are used, every aspect of their design and programming must be open. The law should require that only voting machines based on public domain hardware and software may be used (or at the very least they must be under an open license such as CC or GPL).

And this law should be retroactive. All hardware specs and software code associated with any machine ever used in a legal election should be ordered to be released into the public domain or at least an open license.

And if the government instead colludes with these corporations to keep the voting machines secret, then any citizen in a position to do so is morally justified and perhaps even morally obligated to "pirate" the hardware designs and software code and release them to the public.

20081006

The Limits of Power

Excellent Bill Moyers interview on PBS. Link is to part one. Part two is another link on the page.

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/09262008/watch.html

20080909

todaysheadspace

My lengthy contribution to the discussion of this piece in the Tribune:

A lot of anarchist and libertarian socialists criticized Marx, and Lenin all the more, for creating a dictatorship of the bureaucracy. Republicans don't know what socialism is, but neither do liberals. The socialist spectrum is as or more diverse than the conventional American political party divides.

Bringing up Linux as a claim against socialism is interesting, because the OS must be understood in the context of Software Libre. While under the lens of capitalism, all the developers retain ownership of their code contributions, the open source licenses mean they have effectively ceded that ownership to the masses. FLOSS forms a whole information economy that works according to one of the basic premises of socialism --collective ownership of the means of production. What's interesting is that capitalistic businesses have voluntarily subsumed themselves to this system, operating on services in an environment where copyleft licenses have blurred the idea of property. So you have capitalist subsystems in a socialist node created out of capitalist law. Software Libre works in the capitalist world, often outperforming proprietary models, and embodies the best ideals of bottom-up socialism.

The whole internet runs on open source. It's often referred to as the LAMP stack (linux, apache, mysql, perl/php/python). I like to speculate that as science and technology improve, manufacturing is going to become cheaper and easier until it's effectively a home industry. Information will be the only thing of trade value, and that information will be open source. It will be socialism by default.

I believe in markets, but I believe most in the marketplace of ideas. That means free exchange, not making ideas into commodities. The sciences and arts must be open source. Information wants to be free.

20080829

thebigO

No mere president is going to put the country on the right path (whatever you think that is.) To a disturbing extent, elections serve to convince people they've had all the voice and choice they need, deserve, or are capable of exercising, so they'll stop clamoring and let those who already have power get on with using it.

Still, the choice of leader is informative about what kind of society people want to have, which can help you decide how better to share your ideas and ideals with them.
While there are no saviors, a president does have impact, and I think on the whole an Obama presidency would cause less harm and more good than a McCain presidency.

assoandsosays

There are roughly two motives in quoting someone. In one you expect the esteem for the person to lend credence to the words. In the other you expect the words to be judged on their own, and the attribution is merely giving credit where credit is due --and perhaps to affect the esteem for the person.
The first approach is authoritarian. The second is the ideal of rational discourse.

abortionsforall

The whole question of abortion just about goes away if we had perfect birth control. And what's perfect birth control? Something universal and affordable. Something not dependent on external technology. Something so women can accept or suppress pregnancy at will. Something built into the genes so every woman on the planet has it by right of birth and no kings, priests, prophets, patriarchs, commissars or high commanders can take it away.
Then the only remaining circumstances for abortion would be those cases where unexpected complications lead to grievous risks to the mother's life.

The lengths social conservatives in the early 20th century went to suppress contraceptives or even information on contraceptives and family planning advice serves as part of the proof social conservatism is evil. Maybe if the conservatives of today were more willing to openly condemn the evils of the conservatives of the past, I'd be more charitable about assuming today's conservatives are evil as well. But they won't. Learning that lesson would cost their fragile worldview too much to survive.

20080825

rateyourblogIQ

blog readability test

TV Reviews



Probably they just have it set to say everybody's is "genius." Makes people feel good and keeps people linking in.

ETA: oh horrors, my nice clean blog now has a picture in it.

20080819

littlethings

Batteries and other electronics are being built by viruses. Diesel fuel, or something like it, is being made with bacteria.

preservingelitism

I rattled off this comment to something on the Trib webpage a couple days back. After some thought I've decided I rather like the wording, so I'm putting it here rather than let it simply languish in the forgotten Trib archives.

::
"Elitist," apparently means anyone who thinks the people should put more thought into politics than just cheering whoever buys the most ad time during NASCAR to tell them how great they are just for being born in the USA. "Elitist" is anyone who thinks the people should think more about philosophy than merely internalizing whatever daddy and the preacher told them in childhood. "Elitist" is anyone who thinks people should care more about art and culture than merely deciding which summer blockbuster has the coolest explosions and which country/pop/hiphop star has the catchiest unchallenging tunes.

You're an "elitist" if you think the people ought to be anything more than easily manipulated pawns of the already wealthy and powerful.
::

20080810

gettin'elected

It occurs to me that if one is interested in the U.S. presidential elections, their major issues, and likely results, then the least relevant information is what the candidates themselves say. Look to the wisdom of the crowd, such as it is. Hear what people say about what people say about what people say about what the candidates say. Examine the textures of information and try to take the derivative of it all.

I don't think it's yet time to run for the hills, move to Sweden, sign up for Re-Ned-ucation, or wage bloody revolution.

20080808

justnicely.youknow

Oy, you know that hyperalert state where you're somewhat drunk and you focus and rebalance your sensory systems 'cause you know you can't quite trust your automatics, and then when you get home you can relax and so then the alcohol effects really come to your conscious attention? Yeah, me too.

Reggae still annoys me on radio, but it makes pretty decent bar live music.

Note to all musicians travelling to Utah: bring a fair sound artist along, 'cause you can't trust the club's sound guy to know shit around here.

20080805

expletivewindowsdeleted

So, back from my excursion with my family (had a great time, maybe I'll write about it later), I find that -not for the first time- my desktop computer has taken the opportunity of being left off for several days as a chance to fuck itself over. So now, after several unsuccessful attempts at repair and reinstallation, including -definitely not for the first time- a perfectly functional new XP install suddenly becoming unbootable and unrestorable after exposure to one of Microsoft's "critical security updates, I'm now writing this from my shiny new Ubuntu 8.04 installation.

Is that a run-on sentence? Or something else? Parenthetical statements and nested subordinate clauses just look to me like side branches to a no-longer-merely-linear sentence.

This isn't my first foray into linux territory, having previously played with Xubuntu's Fawn and Gibbon varieties, and briefly with Debian and Stormix years ago, and of course my laptop is an Eee. And I'll be running linux and nothing but until some future time when I delude myself into thinking a dual boot would be cool and maybe I can coax this ancient computer into running games again. (Games, and certain proprietary programs in certain professional industries, are the only thing you might require Windows for.)

I find any of the desktop-oriented linux distros is much easier to install and use than Windows. I have to delicately tweak and coax XP for hours to get a desktop environment I like, with a high risk of failure, whereas a linux liveCD can give me a comfortable working install in half an hour or so. This in spite of my slipstreamed updated XP install disc. (If you are inclined to play with windows, I highly recommend getting the latest service pack and your own pick of relevent updates in download form -the one where Microsoft says "only for IT professionals installing on many computers"- and using either nLite or vLite to burn a fully-updated Windows install disc. This will cut your Windows setup time in half --to a mere two or three hours.)

20080718

readin'ritin'ncombinatorics

I am constrained by conventional language in trying to write.
Any idea, inspired by what I've seen or done or read or a conversation I've had, becomes a cascade of parallel inter-referencing verbal and nonverbal thoughts. Often several of these lead to linear things I'd like to say or write out, but the feedback continues and I often find I've gone through an inner turn of phrase that may never recur. Sometimes I can bring them back. And sometimes I sit to write them down and find the perfect words aren't there anymore.

Thinking is like an abstracted drug.

Yeah, it's just another blogosphere-clogging post from a would-be writer on the topic of writer's block. Mostly. Sort of.

thoughtovthemoment

No task is beneath anyone. Subordination is beneath everyone.

20080709

noexitphoning

The Salt Lake City Weekly this week is carrying a repeat of the No Exit comic "Conflicting Constituent Groups of the Republican Party." It may be a testament to my poor googling skills that I can't find a link to the comic online (though the artist's website has a temporary sampler of the Democratic Party version.) Still, if you happen to be somewhere that carries CW, it's worth a glance. At least I find it pretty on-the-spot. "When I get rich, I'll want a tax cut."

At least a small measure of the difference between my playing with Libertarian economics and playing with Liberal economics (irrespective of the fact that in a pure ubercapitalist health care system, I probably died some time last year) comes of considering "just whose side am I on?" And the comic in part addresses that.

20080705

burstinginair

Aerial fireworks are very pretty. But there's a part of their beauty I found myself dwelling on in particular at Friday's show. After the carefully correographed explosion, the fading sparks drift on the air currents, curling around one another. The neat pattern loses its sphere or ring or whatever shape it was designed to have, and a new ephemeral pattern falls out and fades. It's the part of the burst that's not controlled, and I found it oddly fascinating.

20080619

ameander

I've been holding back on this because lately any writing ideas I've had seem to feed into a broader context and I want to work them into something that's a whole lot more than a blog post. Just one thought out of the big mess to entice you: Capitalism is not just, it is merely useful.

On more day-in-the-life matters, some degree of leg stiffness or soreness seems to have become a constant, as I bike more and more. I've not quite convinced myself to call one of the junkyards and sell my car (I've left my "for sale" signs in the windows, but I doubt anyone who sees/hears it in operation will be eager to buy.) Wednesday night I rode down to Best Buy on a whim after work, but determined their hard drives are too expensive (there is abundant evidence a buggy hard drive is behind my increasingly frequent windows and program problems.) So I splurged and got "The Simpsons Game" instead. Lots of fun.

"But I don't wanna go to chocolate bunny hell..."

20080610

recipenottopar

First point of the post is that it's best to put your contact lenses in before cooking with red pepper, not after.

So I made a chicken dish for lunch (and dinner, probably to last a couple days). Started out with a sort of chicken and pasta idea, shifted to more a cream-o-mushroom based thing. (I tend to improvise a lot when cooking.) Unfortunately the pasta is now extraneous (and didn't soak in the sauce properly, so it's crunchy.) Should go with some breading or potatoes or just ditch it entirely for next time. Also while I still think a spicy mushroom alfredo is a good idea, way too much red pepper poured out and I didn't have enough of the other sauce makings to thin it out. Still turned out not to bad. Just a bit of revision. Hope I remember it another time.

20080607

restaurantbitching

Restored from the brink, where lo these blogging fields have lain fallow for many weeks...

So nothing really new today, just some discourteous and probably unfair thoughts that recur to me sometimes at my job.

*Waiting at the restaurant is your just punishment for having so little diversity in your lifestyle that you actually get hungry at the same time as your neighbors.

*In a corollary, you'll find you're not the only ones who decided to wait for the end of the most popular television shows in the country to get dinner.

*If you hang up and call back twenty minutes later, that's not the same thing as being "on hold for twenty minutes," no matter how angrily you say it.

*If you've got your whole social circle together, and decide to call for take out, the one person in the group who actually suggested the restaurant and has been there before is probably the best person to make the call. The preteen child of the branch of the family who are visiting from out of state and who also is nervous talking to strangers on the phone is probably not the best person to make the call.

Really, the main point of this post is to communicate to the handful of people checking in that, yes, I'll be writing this thing again.

20080501

LTE "False Freedom"

The Salt Lake Tribune printed my letter the other day. Of course, they never bothered to send me an acknowledgment or anything. So I wouldn't have known except the people at the BMT unit brought it to my attention when I went in today.

So here's my letter on religious freedom and the FLDS.

User comments are mostly positive.

They edited it only a tiny bit. Their slight reconstruction of the first clause in the first sentence isn't any more or less awkward than mine. And there are a couple other slight tweaks. Also, where I abbreviated FLDS in all instances, they blew one up to the full church name. Though for some reason, in defiance of common writing conventions, they left the abbreviation on the first instance and wrote the full name on the second instance.

20080429

petheadache

So, if your beloved dog or cat had a splitting headache, how could you ever know? How could you ever be in a position to do anything about it? "Hey, Fido, need an aspirin?"

Just one of those little things that occasionally pops into my head. Although I'm pretty sure Milky cat isn't suffering any headache right now, given the contented demeanor.

20080423

heroesnhitman

Okay, I've left this thing inactive for a little while. So here's something not-too-serious.

First, a pretty cool thread in which people speculate on how various fictional heroes do/ought to finally meet their end: "Theories: How Does Your Favorite Genre Hero Die?"

Second, one that makes you laugh a little, then laugh a little more, then laugh a lot more. Sorry, it's a lol-monkey pic.

20080416

gettinurgun

Current Listening: Ihsahn, The Adversary

So as I was riding home from the hospital yesterday (cancer-free at last, with hope), I noted the billboards about the upcoming Crossroads of the West gun show on April 19-20. Of course they have a gun show on April 19, who wouldn't? Ask any armchair-patriot pseudo-revolutionary and he'll tell you the great importance of that date, because an average of one Patriot-Movement-endorsed historical event per century happened then (Boston Tea Party, Waco, Ruby Ridge). So holding a gun show then helps pull in extra buyers and sellers and makes a bit more money.

So why mention Ihsahn, my favorite-of-the-moment musician? Somehow the themes of the album merge with my political thoughts and got me to crawl over to the computer and post this. I believe in the union of seeming opposites and veneration of rebellion that underlies post-satanic thought (like many other things, satanism is useless except for the kind of person you can become once you grow out of it; bye-bye high school.)

What's this to do with politics? I've long felt that there really is no conflict between libertarianism and socialism. The illusion of conflict arises when libertarians use the language of conservatism (Patriot Movement), or socialists use the language of totalitarianism (Soviet communism). Capitalist versus communist may have been the driving conflict of the mid- to late-20th century, but look around, all the smart countries have mixed economies (including the U.S.) Only fanatical purists bitch about the liberalized market economies or the nefariousness of social programs.

In the last couple decades, we've seen the rise of the information economy and the open-source movement. Manufacturing costs have decreased, and increasingly information has become the primary component of value. In time, much of manufacturing could become a home industry, and information will be the only thing valued, and that will be highly structured by the rising open-source movement. The scarcities that underlie 20th century economics will not be any more relevant in the late 21st and 22nd centuries than those of 16th century economics are now, new economic issues will breed new political problems and new approaches to solutions, and capitalism and communism will be left as museum pieces. The asymptotic result of all this is a post-scarcity civilization, though that is about equal to a post-singularity civilization in its probability of being entirely wishful thinking.

20080413

conspiranoid

Conspiracy theories are a crutch for those who are so terrified of the idea the world is ruled by no one, they take comfort in the hope that at least the world is ruled by evil. Really they are a sign of authoritarian thinking. Conspiracy theories are the social/historical/political manifestation of the same errors in thought behind creationism and Soviet-communist-style command economies: that complex events cannot simply unfold or evolve, but must be put in order by a commanding intelligence.

This post dedicated to the numerous cranks of various political persuasions who have filled my email inbox over the years.

20080402

I'm writing this from a semi-stable region of consciousness between adequate pain control and drug-induced fogginess.

It's been two days since my stem cell infusion, since Day 0. A few of the nurses and techs said something interesting that day, "happy birthday."
It's oddly appropriate if you think about it.
I have had a life-threatening illness. In order to treat it, we have had to resort to a heavy-handed treatment, a treatment that will kill you. The stem cell transplant enables life to renew, enables health to be restored at all.

When this is done, I will have undergone technological death and resurrection; born again by the power of science.

20080325

equaitylovefreedom

There is a basis for empathy and for moral equality.
That is our common condition as conscious beings in this universe.
The thing which makes us sapients and sentients different from the rocks in the ground or the dust between the stars is that we are the part of the universe that is aware of the universe. It's a rare, wondrous, and mysterious thing, and it should be valued more than it is.

20080323

morn.day-8

"And if I fail?"
"Eternal consciousness."

I can't sleep.
I mean, I got some sleep earlier, but little interruptions and schedules in this place are throwing off my usual rhythms and cycles.

I guess that's all for now.

20080318

lhospitale

So as my four and a half readers already know, I was in a car accident today. I'm writing this from the eleventh floor of the new hospital in Murray, where they're keeping me for observation overnight. I haven't been in the habit of doing day-in-the-life posts, and it's not likely to start now.

I'm pretty much okay so far. I think. At least they haven't found any serious issues so far.

20080313

seaunderthe

Dolphin rescues beached whales.

The Mythbusters examined stories of dolphins fending off sharks from attacking swimmers, and found that sharks actually avoided the bait they left in the water when their mock-up dolphin was nearby. There's speculation either that dolphins really hate sharks, or they really feel some compassion for the sharks' victims.

Scientific American had an article on bluefin tuna possibly going extinct. Given the hype of dolphins caught in tuna nets, I quipped to my coworker that maybe the dolphins were responsible out of self-defense. Then I realized that while dolphins are certainly smart enough to pull off something like that, they probably aren't psychotic enough to do it. Conceiving that one took this human brain here.

Maybe someday we can convince the dolphins we're as civilized as they are.

20080308

greenliberstrat

So it's a lazy Saturday and I've been watching EcoTech on the science channel. It's full of really interesting materials and devices being developed to improve energy efficiency and reduce pollution. It showcases innovations in building design, solar and wind power, even paint that absorbs toxic nitrous oxide and breaks it into harmless nitrogen and oxygen. The show points out that environmentalism really is good business policy because saving energy saves money.
I remember when running with the Libertarian party there was some talk and some articles about free market environmentalism, but one was left with the impression that the people talking about it were just developing talking points for candidate speeches, and didn't really care about environmental issues. The people featured on EcoTech are motivated by real care, and what's more they practice the innovative entrepreneurialism LPers claim to praise so much.
But hey, why be part of the solution when you can bitch about how people aren't conforming to the divinely guided perfected wisdom of the Founding Fathers, and scaring yourself silly with the word "socialism"?

20080307

grecojeebuswrestling

*I am not dogmatically insistent that there are no such things as Gods, spirits, afterlives, etc. But I do demand some model for how they could fit in with what we already know about physics, cosmology, neurology, etc. Failure to provide such a model when the best current science suggests the phenomena themselves are not necessary to explain anything is fair grounds to be skeptical.
Hitchens got at least one thing right in saying that the triumph of atheism is not the total disproof of God, but simply the moment when God became entirely optional.

*Western Civilization is older than Christianity, and barring total collapse and destruction, Western Civilization will outlast Christianity.

20080306

cravemetaliodine

Nothing will give you a hankering for chips, cookies, and cola quite like when the medics tell you to restrict your carbs in preparation for a medical test. It's a specific form of the Law of the Forbidden: that which is prohibited is inherently more attractive.

Ah well. I got to talking metal music with Ben the rad tech. We had Baroness and Black Sabbath in common, and shared enthusiastic introductions to Witchcraft, Pig Destroyer, and tech-death-jazz-fusion greats Atheist. Too bad iodine always makes me feel sick, at least for the first 35 seconds.

letterpolimorals

The Salt Lake City Weekly printed my letter this week:

I sincerely believe Sen. Chris Buttars, R-West Jordan, simply made a poor choice of words with his 'black baby' remark, and did not have any ulterior racial message in mind. That said, it's a shame he'll probably go down for this instead of for the years of actual hate-filled insanity he and his ilk have pushed through the legislature in their crusade to bind our growing, advancing civilization under the chains of conservative pseudo-morals.

I'd initially sent it to the Trib, but they didn't give me so much as a "thank you for your submission." So, attention whore that I am, I sent it to the SLCWeekly instead. I hope anyone of conservative outlook ever sees it, they're not exactly the audience the SLCWeekly caters to.

The "pseudo-morals" part is perhaps the most important. We've let socially conservative forces run free and amok with the word "moral" for too long. It's endlessly frustrating to hear liberals, progressives, and secularists hide from the word, claim not to believe in it, or debate whether the concept even exists. Your pathetic attempt to maintain cred with a bunch of isolated Postmodern academics will hand victory to the conservative enemies of everything good. Liberalism, social progress, civil rights, free thought and speech... all these are moral battles, all historical progress on these lines are moral victories.

Liberals and conservatives think differently. They experience moralistic emotions under different circumstances. Various cognitive studies suggest liberals are more comfortable dealing with ambiguous or nuanced information than are conservatives. This may relate to the tendency of liberal thinkers to let the word "moral" be left in the hands of absolutists, as they've fallen for the conservative rhetoric that only absolutism can be "moral." Conservatives also attach much greater weight to concepts like hierarchy and purity than do liberals, who only experience moralistic emotions in categories of justice and harm. That's where we need to take up a moral discourse, because it implies conservatives may be willing to tolerate injustice and harm for the sake of purity, ingroup identity, and authority. We need to accept the language of morality to see to it that justice, freedom, and the general good are always prioritized in the democratic system.

20080303

nongunlawwoes

I was cleaning out an email account (well, partially cleaning out) and came across some recent email alerts from Gun Owners of Utah. I really don't like what they've done there. I refer specifically to GOUtah's attitude to Henry's Law (the attempt to make animal torture a felony) and the Dating Violence Bill (to create a legal mechanism for people to obtain protective orders on people they've had a relationship with but haven't actually lived with.)

I've found myself drifting away from my former political affiliations. I am still for gun rights, but I'm not inclined to be belligerent about it as I once was.

Anyway, on these recent legislative issues, it's like the gun group are so hair trigger on some little details, they've lost sight of the broader message and goals.

We'll start with Henry's Law, shall we? The law does not specifically address firearms, but GOUtah wanted everyone to vote down this "anti-gun" bill because it might deprive animal torturers of their right to bear arms.
Yeah, think about that a minute.
So, most pro-gun folks would agree we've got a few useful control systems in place. You want to buy a gun, you get an instant background check, which filters out those with histories of violent felonies or danger-to-self-and-others-type mental illnesses. GOUtah seem to object to the idea that dismembering a dog or squeezing gerbils 'til they pop should be added to the list of violent felonies we watch out for. If you find provisions of a law dangerously vague (as they claimed), you work to address the vagueness. If after honest effort, it's impossible to fix the vagueness, then you shut the law itself down. But overzealous gun folks in Utah made it look like they support animal torture. This in light of the fact that there's a huge amount of evidence that cruelty to nonhuman animals reliably predicts cruelty to humans. Psychopaths essentially practice on nonhuman animals until they can build up the courage to apply their urges to humans. Even if we're not talking out-and-out serial killers, someone with a sociopathic lack of empathy and an angry streak, someone inclined to take it out on nonhuman animals, is almost certainly unsafe around h. sapiens as well. I heard tell that at least one Utah State legislator was waxing on about how throwing cats in a bag and then drowning them is just perfectly normal behavior lots of good people do, and certainly no one should be stripped of gun rights for it. Insanity like that can only weaken the RKBA cause.

Then on the Dating Violence thing. Here, I can at least comprehend the logic. In principle, no one should be disarmed without a proper trial for their crimes. Still, there is a clear social need for people to be able to obtain formal legal protection from former relationships turned dangerous. Current law only allows it for those who've actually married or cohabitated, but the dangerous control freaks don't generally need life under the same roof to make them shed their charming exteriors.
If there are concerns it will be applied unjustly to innocents, those details can be addressed and fixed. But don't make it look like pro-gunners are also in favor of domineering obsessive stalkers, or you lose the gun rights fight forever.
The specter of the guy who seems so nice at first but turns dangerous and controlling after a time is all too real, and you don't want to look like you're on his side. As with animal torturers and people who think the archangel of jello wants them to burn down buildings, control-freak obsessed stalkers are on most folks' list of people we assume can't be trusted with lethal weaponry.

I consider it a proper function of universal education to show all girls growing up that there are more options available to them than serving someone else's will, and to instill self-respect in them so that they will absolutely never want to "graciously submit." Then all the guys sick enough to want their girlfriends and wives to be subservient to them will be eternally frustrated, never achieve their captain-of-the-household dreams, live in misery, and die alone as they deserve. Or we can use universal education to instill enough respect and morality in boys growing up so that they realize authoritarianism is absolutely and universally evil, and that all relationships are among equals. Best of all, we can instill all these things in all children wherever they fall on the sex and gender spectra.

20080301

videoimplant

Subcutaneous implanted video display

corporatevampire

"Sociopaths are already highly productive members of corporate society."
This is a web tie in to Peter Watts' novel, Blindsight. It also has some delightful social and political satire.
Several of Watts' novels and stories are available free on his website, in the Real World section. His science fiction is rigorously researched, absoutely brilliant, and wholly depressing. Highly recommended, at least for certain moods.

apheroldschool

I am at this moment connected to a machine that is drawing my blood and separating bone marrow stem cells for later use. The folks here can tweak the machine to get at various blood components as needed, This isn't even the leading edge, it's a refinement of a technique, using the equipment in new ways over the decades.

20080229

americanpirate

Earlier this week I went into the local geek store for some comics (um, and then I saw that big shiny new Conan book...)
Anyway, they had a TV running and showing one of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, I think it was Dead Man's Chest. So I got to thinking. I differ from some people's opinions (hi, Sra) in that I find DMC the best of the three. Beneath the PG-13 fantasy adventure movie Disney let them actually make, there's the structure of a really vivid and dark fantasy horror movie that I find very compelling. The movie is full of devil's bargains, occasionally literal but more interesting when figurative. All the characters find themselves putting their souls (if you will) at stake, having to risk something precious, having to compromise their sense of what good people they think they are, in order to stay alive and out of prison with even the slightest hope of life, love, and happiness still being at the end of the tunnel. It can be quite interesting and chilling, and it's much more than I expected from a followup to the fun magic action yarn of the first movie.

The third movie does an interesting thing in making a tale of pirates versus the British seafaring interests into a war of freedom versus authority. Real world pirates might have been relatively cosmopolitan and socially loose compared with the societies of the time, but theirs is hardly a story of freedom. Pirates were still all about domination and their social structure had its own kind of authoritarian hierarchy, though the rule-by-the-strong was a little more obvious.
Still, an American movie will infuse itself with American (or more properly, Western Liberal) values, myths, and metaphors. And so we see the story of a diverse bunch of rag-tag freedom-loving good guys overcoming their differences to make a great stand for liberty and justice against the amassed forces of control, privilege, and power. It's a story we love, and we'll tell it again and again with pirates or cowboys or spaceships or gangsters or even stockbrokers.

pledge

I'm going to make some commitment, as one of the growing number of atheistic yahoos writing screeds on the web, not to ever say someone is stupid just for believing in gods. Although I find occasional use of terms like "faith-addled" cathartic at times, I recognize that many intelligent and sincere people have come to the conclusion that some religion or religion-like thingy is true. It is a position I believe to be incorrect, but that demands open discussion, not disparagement and dismissal.

20080226

besthighdiot

Signs of idiocy: they actually think high school was "the best years of our lives."

evil2sphere

I'm inclined to think the evil really does lie in the desire, rather than the act of domination. The "will to power," as it were. If you pay lip service to freedom, but quietly stew over how much you wish you could just make everyone live the right way, that's still evil of a sort. On the other appendage, you might generally want people to pursue their own lives and dreams as best they can, when some particular circumstances make it necessary to cut off someone's choice sphere. Such as if their immediate dreams involve burning down people's homes or something.

I use the phrase "sphere of choices" as a conscious extension of something I read about one's "circle of choice." I think it was in a Thomas Sowell book or something. It just seemed so... flat. "Sphere of choices is a nice three-dimensional metaphor for our spongy two-and-a-half-dimensional minds.

evil

Evil is the desire to command, control, or compel someone in their sphere of choices.

pureperfect

Perfection is a false concept. Attempting to invoke it in reality assumes a completely static universe. The word "perfect" is only ever used to describe things that don't actually exist: the perfect vacation, the perfect man/woman, the perfect job, the perfect martini...
Using the word is tacitly admitting the thing you're talking about does not actually exist.

idiotevol

Signs of idiocy: they think "but it's still a bacteria" wins the point for creationism after someone points out that evolution of new species is routinely observed in microbial organisms.

ETA- not original to me

empathy

Empathy is the foundation of all true morality.

justaregularguygal

It's rather jarring, when looking through books in the mystery/thriller, fantasy, and supernatural/detective/romance/werewolfporn genres, how many main characters are presented as just trying to settle into a nice, normal, relaxed life as a bounty hunter, detective, or even assassin. Granted, in real life, PI is allegedly one of the most dull lines of work there is, but really, a reporter or community activist or dozens of other possibilities (including, shock, a cop) has just as much excuse to travel and get involved in adventurous situations as the inherently unbelievable "just your average working jane/joe bounty hunter."

It's also amusing to wonder which is more silly: the exotic/sexycool/macho name of the lead character, or the exotic/sexycool/macho pseudonym of the author.

20080225

newatheism

As may be inferred from a link in an earlier post, I am an atheist. That is to say I do not subscribe to the popular belief that there is someone in charge of the whole universe.

I find it odd when people respond (or attempt to do so) to Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. When people say it is especially angry, agressive, strident, militant, etc., I wonder if maybe they read a different book than I did. On the whole I found it to be a very dry read. The basic pattern is "here's a common reason given for why you should believe in God, here's why that reason is not valid." Repeat, repeat.

"The New Atheism" (a term I first saw on the cover of Wired magazine), is really the same as old atheism. The only noticable difference is mostly attributable to Sam Harris: whereas in the past atheists, agnostics, and freethinkers considered liberal religionists common allies against conservative and fundamentalist religionists, Harris posited that liberal religions share some guilt for the continued strength of fundamentalism. His idea is that liberal and moderate religionists try to elevate faith itself above criticism, and promote religious beliefs as being inherently more worthy of "respect" than, say, political, social, and economic beliefs. This allegedly serves to make people in society more receptive/vulnerable to the kind of fundamentalist religion that elevates faith in an authoritarian god/church above everything else.

It's particularly bothersome when someone attempting to respond to "the new atheism," repeats that "well, Hitler and Stalin are examples of atheism run amok" crap. All of the recent wave of pop-atheism books have at least a whole chapter devoted to countering this claim. (Quick sum-up: Hitler in fact claimed to be Catholic. The features that make Nazism, Fascism, and Communism so egregiously horrible are those features they have in common with politically powerful religions in the past. And these political ideologies are quasi-religious in that they have a faith in a purified model of society, considered in itself so inherently good that anything done to achieve it is justified.) Yet so many people thinking to discredit atheism repeat the myth without even addressing the counter. It's one thing if it's a "yes, but" where you acknowledge the defense then provide a reason why the attack still works. But most responders don't do that, they just repeat the same lie that "atheism caused Hitler and Stalin." This strongly implies they never actually read the books they're responding to. I guess intellectual integrity is too much to ask of some people.

nothateamerica

I don't know if the Hannityites, Dittoheads, and FauxNews Masses still say things like "why do you hate America so much?" But the correct response is and always has been, "Why are conservatives like you trying to destroy everything that makes America worthy of love?"

preselec

Nader's dumping himself on the American Presidential race again. The guy's an obsessed technocrat who perhaps serves a useful function in consumer advocacy, but what merits he has would be useless in the duties and functions of the U.S. President. Hopefully even his starry-eyed followers who make up a portion of what passes for the far left in America will realize his participation in past elections has been, on the whole, detrimental.

There, satisfying my idiot conviction that someone might actually care what I think.

20080224

liveblogsis

So last Sunday (ha, talk about regular, frequent updates) I attended the Live Blogging Thingy '08. Not as one of the featured bloggers, of course -this thing is barely started- but as one of the half-dozen audients. It was kind of neat. I was there meeting my sister, of Bunsnip, who can -now that she knows I'm online- proceed to criticize my linguistic inadequacies in the same endearing way she does others'. (I kid)
She suggested maybe if I kept this up I might be invited next time. To think, I could become so famous I can gather a dozen people together to hear what I say. Come to think of it, I can already do that, sort of. Yup, that's me, worming my way into the whole intarweb.

Afterwards, the three of us saw The Spiderwick Chronicles, which I went into expecting to at least enjoy Tony DiTerlizzi's creature design. It's not the equal of Labyrinth or Legend, and suffers from trying to be more Epic than it needs to be, but it stands up well to most any other fantasy movie in the last couple decades.

20080217

Time

As a kid I had no sense of time. Sure I could read clocks and watches, and had some sense that events were scheduled. But I don't recall really connecting it all. I had to go to school, but that was a matter of melding into the patterns of the family. I had favorite TV shows, but it only occurred to me later in childhood that there was any use in finding out their scheduled times. Just flip the switch and see what's on. After school hours with friends or alone just flowed together into a timeless activity block between school and dinner, dinner and sleep, whenever those actually happened.

In my teen and young adult years, my dad always said he was amazed how I could get by without a watch. It really was no major thing to me. Clocks are nearly ubiquitous, as are other people with watches, if you actually find you need to know the time. I can keep track of passing time if I need to, but timekeeping doesn't play a role if deadlines are loose or absent. Now with everybody carrying wireless phones, I wonder how watches even sell at all. (Until they finally deliver on those computer/phone/video/watches we were all promised by Dick Tracy and Inspector Gadget.)

I'm not nearly so much the night owl many of my friends and acquaintances are (and my cat pretty much insists I get up to feed her every morning about six) but I find I enjoy the dark hours, at least in part because they are so timeless. One hour merges in with the next. With no externally imposed schedule, I find myself wondering how much a sense of time any of us have. If you're not meeting someone else's deadline, does it really matter to you if it's six or seven, one or two? In the dark hours, only my own fatigue and current activity/interest are my guides. Time is a quality that is useful at times, but not essential to the human experience. One may attempt to objectively measure a duration of time if one finds a need, but the human mind can make time's passing an ephemeral thing.

In relativity, no two events can properly be said to occur simultaneously. In some of the proposed solutions to uniting quantum mechanics and general relativity, time divides out of the equation. I can't really pretend I understand what that means, but the articles in the science rags say that time isn't necessarily a variable against which other variables change, the other physical variables simply change as a function of one another. "Clocks don't measure time, 'time' is whatever it is clocks measure." Maybe the universe doesn't care what time it is in those dark hours either.

20080213

Beginning

Coming late to this party, I've started this thing to give my thoughts somewhere to rattle around other than the inside of my head. Maybe it will create some interesting ripples in the civilization pond. Or maybe it will just be external memory.
 
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