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Coming up for air!
Dec. 2nd, 2006 02:16 amOr something like that. Did what I wanted to do today for the last parts of work, turned in what’s due up, and am ready to get everything in order and done for this upcoming week. So I think I’m going to survive into the next semester. That means... assuming nothing weird happens, I have one semester left of university. And it might be the most important one in the whole time.
Dec. 1 was World AIDS day, and on such a day, we find out that South Africa may finally be getting on the right path to HIV prevention. This is good. We’d also like the United States to help prevent AIDS spread by promoting safe sex. It can scream “abstain” as much as it likes, but if it does, it should drill into the heads of its kids the idea that if you’re going to have sex, have safe sex.
Chocolate may be the new aspirin. And probably more tasty than those pills, too.
Perhaps a lesson or a warning to American Homeland Security, who want to make sure every citizen has their papers to travel in or out of the country, it's not that hard to find fakes that will pass border security. (At least, in the UK. I don’t doubt that people could forge proper passports, no matter what DHS put together as a security package.) Of course, with the way that Homeland Security is assigning secret "terrorist probability" scores to all travelers, and deciding to install ever more sensitive X-ray machines for bomb detection, even with good, legitimate documents, you might be sent away to a place you can’t appeal from, based on a score you can’t see and can’t appeal.
On a related note (if you can see the fnords, I suspect, but related nonetheless), read the reasoning behind why a man set himself on fire in protest of the current society. Much that he has to say is true, and reading it does two things - makes me hope that the people in government grow a conscience and take those words to heart, and despair somewhat that the populace is unlikely to do anything to fix their own problems. Even I’m mostly unwilling to start the riot. I don’t know if it’s really a country of people looking at each other, waiting for someone to start, or whether a significant enough part doesn’t really care enough that any efforts to start will die from lack of support. Since the Federal Election Comission is asking people to report their own indiscretions, with the reward of paying a smaller fine, you can guess where my opinion goes. Perhaps the creation of a temporary TAZ, based on the idea of the rotating three-month utopia might get a lot of people in the right mood to aim for a more permanent version of the utopia.
A personal pet-peeve of mine. I read this article about Yale Library's need to increase security after rare maps were stolen, and what comes to mind first is “Yeah, it’s necessary, but why should any library, whose principles are based on access to everyone, have to beef up security? Ah, yes, because there is a statistically significant part of the populace that has no qualms about stealing material from a library, be it pages or works that don’t fit with their ideological views (for which I firmly consign them to the appropriate place of their Hell) or because of the value that some of the collections have to private individuals and collectors (for which I consign them to the fate of having their own lives sold at auction, with a maximum bid of one dollar). Really, people. As publicly funded institutions, when you steal from a library, you’re stealing from yourself. And from the person who might have needed that book, or that page, or that map. And you’re giving the librarians extra worry on top of what they already have. It’s very ideologically aggravating for an institution that prides itself on the fact that anyone can access its resources to have to adopt restrictive security policies so that people can access those resources, rather than having idiots spirit away with the stuff.
You know about the penny-stock spam that clogs the inboxes of us all these days? Know how much of an annoyance it is? Imagine what it's like to be the company that's being promoted in the spam. Not only do you get your good name besmirched, you get the ire of all the people who call and say ”Why are you spamming me like this?!“ It’s got to suck. Wish that spam like that could be cut off at the source.
"Animal Terrorism" act signed into law, imposing penalites on those that cause harm to places where animal testing may occur. Perhaps in a show of solidarity for the people against the law, one of the killer whales attacked its trainer not too long ago. (Anthropomorphism? Why not? It could be worse...)
SCOTUS agrees to hear whether or not someone can challenge the constitutionality of the Faith-Based Initiatives. Not whether the initiatives themselves are constitutional, but whether or not someone has the right, as a taxpayer, to sue on constitutional grounds. Maybe they’ll actually rule on the actual constitutionality if they let the challenge go forward.
It was a big rock that did in the dinosaurs, a new report claims. That would be, to put it mildly, a bad day to be alive on Earth. Along with the times that followed. The iridium band and a crater in the Yucatan that dates to about the same time gives some weight to the theory. But it’s not completely resolved yet. (For some reason, I’m now trying to figure out why FLEET needed to disseminate such a story... perhaps to cover up another of the Gunnery Sergeant’s indiscretions with the orbiting laser platforms?
BitTorrent scores $20million U.S. in financing. Here’s hoping that it’s still available for the other uses that we’re accustomed to, without needing to worry about our BT clients suddenly having DRM or anything like that. With the government supporting an RIAA position that could potentially mean the act of putting any file, whether you own the copyright or not, on the Internet becoming illegal, BitTorrent may not have enough time to sell out properly. (The Inquirer has a similar document.)
A USA Today columnist objects to what he calls "propogandistic" material for young children. Apparently, because Happy Feet and And Tango Makes Three don’t trumpet from the parapets that they have certain views, they can be accused of skullduggery and trying to influence the minds of young children. Having read And Tango Makes Three myself (a user suggested that it be reviewed and/or removed from the shelves at one of the public libraries I worked at over the summer), The commentators take Mr. Medved to task for not taking shots at both sides, as well as praising, both sarcasitcally and seriously, as best I can tell, Mr. Medved’s point of view and their own distrust and disgust of the liberal/progressive component of society, affirming that there’s some insidious plot somewhere by progressives to turn the nation’s children into little progressive clones. I’m sure he’d be just as critical of, say, conservative or religiously fundamentalist institutions that disguise their agenda but are aiming to produce little conservative clones, right? Well, at the very least he’s not accusing children of performing witchcraft against their relatives, As American Samizdat adds snidely, ”Fortunately, things are totally different here in the USA. There are no teenagers kicked out of their parent’s house because their parent’s superstition can’t accept them being gay. And all of the babies born because their mother’s superstition can’t accept abortion are adopted immediately by loving, capable families. Thank goodness that in the United States, superstition doesn’t breed homeless children“. A-men. We’re all past that nonsense about how Bronze Age books interpreted by charismatic, if clueless, priests can dictate every facet of our lives, right?
In other ”Think of the Children!“ ideas, A PTA letter urging involvement is not taken well by some of the parents. I suspect they weren’t prepared for a big a dose of potential truth, and it shocked them. (No, I don’t actually believe that not participating in the PTA will have your kids grow up to be thieves, drug addicts, or prostitutes. But then again, I also assume that the parents is actively involved in the education of their child, so that may be why.)
The fun bits for tonight start with Flickr Time - a clock that displays Flickr photos as the blocks that it builds the clock with. Switching gears entirely, we then note that the annual Bad Sex Prize has been awarded, meaning there is, indeed, a standard for the lowest depictions of literary sex in the world. Perhaps he could have benefited from Rosina Lippi's guide to writing good sex scenes. (The link goes to part one of the multi-part series. The later parts get NSFW, or essential to your work, depending on what you do for work.) Finally, at least in sex talk, scientists are developing the idea of a spray-on condom. I wonder waht the applications of that are going to be, especially if it takes longer to spray on that put on a regular rubber.
Getting away form sex for the moment, there’s also the 33 meter-deep pool, which has it’s own accompanying philosophy and acquatics exercises.
And now, the most fun part of the whole routine - going to bed and sleeping on things. Yay, sleep! Maybe tomorrow, I’ll be able to take the advice of my music selection.
Dec. 1 was World AIDS day, and on such a day, we find out that South Africa may finally be getting on the right path to HIV prevention. This is good. We’d also like the United States to help prevent AIDS spread by promoting safe sex. It can scream “abstain” as much as it likes, but if it does, it should drill into the heads of its kids the idea that if you’re going to have sex, have safe sex.
Chocolate may be the new aspirin. And probably more tasty than those pills, too.
Perhaps a lesson or a warning to American Homeland Security, who want to make sure every citizen has their papers to travel in or out of the country, it's not that hard to find fakes that will pass border security. (At least, in the UK. I don’t doubt that people could forge proper passports, no matter what DHS put together as a security package.) Of course, with the way that Homeland Security is assigning secret "terrorist probability" scores to all travelers, and deciding to install ever more sensitive X-ray machines for bomb detection, even with good, legitimate documents, you might be sent away to a place you can’t appeal from, based on a score you can’t see and can’t appeal.
On a related note (if you can see the fnords, I suspect, but related nonetheless), read the reasoning behind why a man set himself on fire in protest of the current society. Much that he has to say is true, and reading it does two things - makes me hope that the people in government grow a conscience and take those words to heart, and despair somewhat that the populace is unlikely to do anything to fix their own problems. Even I’m mostly unwilling to start the riot. I don’t know if it’s really a country of people looking at each other, waiting for someone to start, or whether a significant enough part doesn’t really care enough that any efforts to start will die from lack of support. Since the Federal Election Comission is asking people to report their own indiscretions, with the reward of paying a smaller fine, you can guess where my opinion goes. Perhaps the creation of a temporary TAZ, based on the idea of the rotating three-month utopia might get a lot of people in the right mood to aim for a more permanent version of the utopia.
A personal pet-peeve of mine. I read this article about Yale Library's need to increase security after rare maps were stolen, and what comes to mind first is “Yeah, it’s necessary, but why should any library, whose principles are based on access to everyone, have to beef up security? Ah, yes, because there is a statistically significant part of the populace that has no qualms about stealing material from a library, be it pages or works that don’t fit with their ideological views (for which I firmly consign them to the appropriate place of their Hell) or because of the value that some of the collections have to private individuals and collectors (for which I consign them to the fate of having their own lives sold at auction, with a maximum bid of one dollar). Really, people. As publicly funded institutions, when you steal from a library, you’re stealing from yourself. And from the person who might have needed that book, or that page, or that map. And you’re giving the librarians extra worry on top of what they already have. It’s very ideologically aggravating for an institution that prides itself on the fact that anyone can access its resources to have to adopt restrictive security policies so that people can access those resources, rather than having idiots spirit away with the stuff.
You know about the penny-stock spam that clogs the inboxes of us all these days? Know how much of an annoyance it is? Imagine what it's like to be the company that's being promoted in the spam. Not only do you get your good name besmirched, you get the ire of all the people who call and say ”Why are you spamming me like this?!“ It’s got to suck. Wish that spam like that could be cut off at the source.
"Animal Terrorism" act signed into law, imposing penalites on those that cause harm to places where animal testing may occur. Perhaps in a show of solidarity for the people against the law, one of the killer whales attacked its trainer not too long ago. (Anthropomorphism? Why not? It could be worse...)
SCOTUS agrees to hear whether or not someone can challenge the constitutionality of the Faith-Based Initiatives. Not whether the initiatives themselves are constitutional, but whether or not someone has the right, as a taxpayer, to sue on constitutional grounds. Maybe they’ll actually rule on the actual constitutionality if they let the challenge go forward.
It was a big rock that did in the dinosaurs, a new report claims. That would be, to put it mildly, a bad day to be alive on Earth. Along with the times that followed. The iridium band and a crater in the Yucatan that dates to about the same time gives some weight to the theory. But it’s not completely resolved yet. (For some reason, I’m now trying to figure out why FLEET needed to disseminate such a story... perhaps to cover up another of the Gunnery Sergeant’s indiscretions with the orbiting laser platforms?
BitTorrent scores $20million U.S. in financing. Here’s hoping that it’s still available for the other uses that we’re accustomed to, without needing to worry about our BT clients suddenly having DRM or anything like that. With the government supporting an RIAA position that could potentially mean the act of putting any file, whether you own the copyright or not, on the Internet becoming illegal, BitTorrent may not have enough time to sell out properly. (The Inquirer has a similar document.)
A USA Today columnist objects to what he calls "propogandistic" material for young children. Apparently, because Happy Feet and And Tango Makes Three don’t trumpet from the parapets that they have certain views, they can be accused of skullduggery and trying to influence the minds of young children. Having read And Tango Makes Three myself (a user suggested that it be reviewed and/or removed from the shelves at one of the public libraries I worked at over the summer), The commentators take Mr. Medved to task for not taking shots at both sides, as well as praising, both sarcasitcally and seriously, as best I can tell, Mr. Medved’s point of view and their own distrust and disgust of the liberal/progressive component of society, affirming that there’s some insidious plot somewhere by progressives to turn the nation’s children into little progressive clones. I’m sure he’d be just as critical of, say, conservative or religiously fundamentalist institutions that disguise their agenda but are aiming to produce little conservative clones, right? Well, at the very least he’s not accusing children of performing witchcraft against their relatives, As American Samizdat adds snidely, ”Fortunately, things are totally different here in the USA. There are no teenagers kicked out of their parent’s house because their parent’s superstition can’t accept them being gay. And all of the babies born because their mother’s superstition can’t accept abortion are adopted immediately by loving, capable families. Thank goodness that in the United States, superstition doesn’t breed homeless children“. A-men. We’re all past that nonsense about how Bronze Age books interpreted by charismatic, if clueless, priests can dictate every facet of our lives, right?
In other ”Think of the Children!“ ideas, A PTA letter urging involvement is not taken well by some of the parents. I suspect they weren’t prepared for a big a dose of potential truth, and it shocked them. (No, I don’t actually believe that not participating in the PTA will have your kids grow up to be thieves, drug addicts, or prostitutes. But then again, I also assume that the parents is actively involved in the education of their child, so that may be why.)
The fun bits for tonight start with Flickr Time - a clock that displays Flickr photos as the blocks that it builds the clock with. Switching gears entirely, we then note that the annual Bad Sex Prize has been awarded, meaning there is, indeed, a standard for the lowest depictions of literary sex in the world. Perhaps he could have benefited from Rosina Lippi's guide to writing good sex scenes. (The link goes to part one of the multi-part series. The later parts get NSFW, or essential to your work, depending on what you do for work.) Finally, at least in sex talk, scientists are developing the idea of a spray-on condom. I wonder waht the applications of that are going to be, especially if it takes longer to spray on that put on a regular rubber.
Getting away form sex for the moment, there’s also the 33 meter-deep pool, which has it’s own accompanying philosophy and acquatics exercises.
And now, the most fun part of the whole routine - going to bed and sleeping on things. Yay, sleep! Maybe tomorrow, I’ll be able to take the advice of my music selection.
