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MLK Day - 15 January 2007
Jan. 16th, 2007 01:37 amIt snowed today. And it’s stayed. This makes me happy. Most of my day, though, was spent indoors, wrestling with CSS and Ruby, although not together yet. It took me several hours, but I managed to figure out how to get one of the example programs to run, and then again to run properly with the modifications. I fear my programming expertise will be little and none this semester, and that hair-tearing frustrations may be par for the course. I can only worry that this will adversely affect my other work. If it does, though, I’m going to start forming study groups with experts, so that I can actually get things done in a normal amount of time.
That it was Martin Luther King Jr. Day did not pass me by (no class today), and so I say just this - I hope we can get to the world Dr. King envisioned. I’m not sure we’ll be able to do it in my lifetime, but I hope that someone gets to see a world where it’s what you do, not what you look like, that gets you respect.
The Internet may very well be that place. From it, I draw things like Boy Scouts potentially being the cause of wildfires, paired with the largest cylindrical aquarium built.
Putting this unit up top because it gives people one more reason to be annoyed at Microsoft, in copies of the Windows OS from about Windows 95 onward, there are special keys in a crypto DLL into it that allow for National Security Administration access. Just when you thought things were safe, potential backdoors are being inserted into your operating system. Isn’t that a fun thought? (And here we thought the government maintained a policy of requiring probable cause to search a computer’s data).
There’s also waste in huge quantities in the corporations supposed to rebuild Iraq (not like that’s new), massive profits from war companies like Lockheed Martin (that’s not new either), Saddam's brother hanged (so much that his head popped off) and some of Saddam's adies hanged, as well, and the President still pushing "unitary executive" of unlimited power and not really admitting any serious mistakes. All of this adds up to a fairly high state of Existential Risk for this year.
On the obverse of that, there’s potential. Things like a bill ready to cut off funding to the President's troop surge, a U.S. push toward a Palestinian state, Iran and Venezuela agreeing to finance projects designed to remove countries from the United States' "domination", and the movement called Operation Yellow Elephant, which suggests quite sanely that College Republicans and Young Republicans that are gung-ho about the war enlist to meet the military’s increased demand for troops. It’s a matter of ensuring Freedom and Democracy, right? So why not?
On the good side, there’s advances in science that mean we could one day be eating our fill of meat grown from Petri dishes and stem cells, eggs possibly being used as vehicles for producing anti-cancer compounds , (Yum. Scrambled cancer-fighters.), a diet of slightly more Japanese proportions might also help cancer-fighting, solar power on a waste treatment plant that might turn the sludge into fertilzer, assuming, of course, there’s enough sunshine, and building electronics up in the third dimension, making three-dimensional stuff possible. Depending on how well the technique works, it might mean thicker but smaller chips.
There’s also 10 seriously cool workplace environments, including the much-touted Google. Those with a flair for design and productivity must enjoy being able to make environments like these.
And then, well, there’s the aspect of life that I seem to find much material on - religion and it’s attempts to relate to the ever-changing society. In gaffes, and in parodies - Jesus's General, for example, which could be a Minitrue of the increasingly evangelical Christian right, Landing back in the realm of the at least passably real, we ahve what is either an innovation or just another way of not having to change - the burqini, a garment for Muslim women that is still acceptably modest yet permits participation in sport or swimming. I think I have to sit the fence, opinion-wise, on this one. I can, however take snipes at what could be called the fundamentalist swimsuit design - which doesn’t look nearly as sleek or as worakable as the burqini, and has just as much conceptual baggage attached. I can’t say I like the skirt idea, especially with the leggings underneath that would provide adequate modesty themselves. At that point, why not just make a bodysuit with whatever padding is deemed to enforce “modesty”? The whole outfit looks like it’s supposed to prevent gazing at a woman’s belly button, as well as trying to mask the size and shape of her breasts. Big deal.
Anyway, on that note (about 30 cents flat), it’s bed time.
That it was Martin Luther King Jr. Day did not pass me by (no class today), and so I say just this - I hope we can get to the world Dr. King envisioned. I’m not sure we’ll be able to do it in my lifetime, but I hope that someone gets to see a world where it’s what you do, not what you look like, that gets you respect.
The Internet may very well be that place. From it, I draw things like Boy Scouts potentially being the cause of wildfires, paired with the largest cylindrical aquarium built.
Putting this unit up top because it gives people one more reason to be annoyed at Microsoft, in copies of the Windows OS from about Windows 95 onward, there are special keys in a crypto DLL into it that allow for National Security Administration access. Just when you thought things were safe, potential backdoors are being inserted into your operating system. Isn’t that a fun thought? (And here we thought the government maintained a policy of requiring probable cause to search a computer’s data).
There’s also waste in huge quantities in the corporations supposed to rebuild Iraq (not like that’s new), massive profits from war companies like Lockheed Martin (that’s not new either), Saddam's brother hanged (so much that his head popped off) and some of Saddam's adies hanged, as well, and the President still pushing "unitary executive" of unlimited power and not really admitting any serious mistakes. All of this adds up to a fairly high state of Existential Risk for this year.
On the obverse of that, there’s potential. Things like a bill ready to cut off funding to the President's troop surge, a U.S. push toward a Palestinian state, Iran and Venezuela agreeing to finance projects designed to remove countries from the United States' "domination", and the movement called Operation Yellow Elephant, which suggests quite sanely that College Republicans and Young Republicans that are gung-ho about the war enlist to meet the military’s increased demand for troops. It’s a matter of ensuring Freedom and Democracy, right? So why not?
On the good side, there’s advances in science that mean we could one day be eating our fill of meat grown from Petri dishes and stem cells, eggs possibly being used as vehicles for producing anti-cancer compounds , (Yum. Scrambled cancer-fighters.), a diet of slightly more Japanese proportions might also help cancer-fighting, solar power on a waste treatment plant that might turn the sludge into fertilzer, assuming, of course, there’s enough sunshine, and building electronics up in the third dimension, making three-dimensional stuff possible. Depending on how well the technique works, it might mean thicker but smaller chips.
There’s also 10 seriously cool workplace environments, including the much-touted Google. Those with a flair for design and productivity must enjoy being able to make environments like these.
And then, well, there’s the aspect of life that I seem to find much material on - religion and it’s attempts to relate to the ever-changing society. In gaffes, and in parodies - Jesus's General, for example, which could be a Minitrue of the increasingly evangelical Christian right, Landing back in the realm of the at least passably real, we ahve what is either an innovation or just another way of not having to change - the burqini, a garment for Muslim women that is still acceptably modest yet permits participation in sport or swimming. I think I have to sit the fence, opinion-wise, on this one. I can, however take snipes at what could be called the fundamentalist swimsuit design - which doesn’t look nearly as sleek or as worakable as the burqini, and has just as much conceptual baggage attached. I can’t say I like the skirt idea, especially with the leggings underneath that would provide adequate modesty themselves. At that point, why not just make a bodysuit with whatever padding is deemed to enforce “modesty”? The whole outfit looks like it’s supposed to prevent gazing at a woman’s belly button, as well as trying to mask the size and shape of her breasts. Big deal.
Anyway, on that note (about 30 cents flat), it’s bed time.
