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Running downhill? - 19 February 2007
Feb. 20th, 2007 02:42 amWell, less than a week now until the halfway break. The breakneck pace of the semester is easing off just a bit. Not a whole lot, as there are things like midterms and projects and assignments coming up, but I’m beginning to believe that they’ll be manageable. Which I find fantastic. I’m not coasting yet, but I’m working toward getting to that point where I can coast a bit and go hunting for employ. It’s nice not having anything immediately due that counts for anything. I might even be able to sneak some time away into designing this year’s Illiad For a Day entry... the contest, by the way, is running until March 31. No new art, only that which has already been drawn, and the template and font files are provided. Scour the archives for some good UF jokes.
Anyway, link time.
A bill that got thrashed last year has resurfaced. Linked in many places, including Crooks and Liars, the SAFETY Act aims to force ISPs to keep records of who requested or transferred all traffic going in or out, under penalty of fines. See Section Six of the bill. THOMAS link to the SAFETY Act). At minimum, the name and address of the person being assigned an IP address has to be kept. Which could mean interesting things for those on virtual networks, since they all use the same outward-facing IP, or a smaller set of IPs than people accessing. (I believe, anyway. Correct me if I’m wrong.) How will they tell who’s doing what, though, or will they just arrest the whole area on suspicion of kiddie porn? Either way, it’s a simple enough jump from scouting out kiddie porn to something else, like blogging against the government, or for responsible use of recreational drugs, or other such things.
Coming out of the PETA corner, something artistically posed... Joanna Krupa says that she'd rather go naked than wear fur and well, she does. Of course, there’s the whole strategically placed swooshes and objects, but PETA wants you to think that nudity is sexier than fur-wearing, I guess. Considering, in the grand majority of people, nudity is sexier than being clothed, whatever the clothing, I think PETA can safely make this claim. Appealing toward the same concept (put sexy women on something and it will sell), Hooters is making an energy drink. Something equally as useless but a lot cooler is the toaster that burns a skull-and-crossbones into your toast. Yarrrr. Something that’s both cool and useful is the digital cookbook, shaped like a spatula and able to sync up and download recipes for handy visual reference.
Tesla Coil spark discharges. One of which is being used to produce a ring of electricity around a vehicle. If you live in a neighborhood that requires that, though, I wonder what the criminals are carrying.
Steven Page of Barenaked (pronounced “Bah-rin-ih-kid”) Ladies, some Canadian music outfit, says that rather than litigating into the stone age, maybe if the music industry charged a flat subscription fee for downloading, things would work better. You know, cable, internet, music p2p. Sounds like a regular sort of bill list.
Gazing into the future, scientists warn that we need an action plan for asteroids that could make an impact on the Earth. And they’d really rather we plan this out now rather than hoping the asteroid will miss, every time. On this particular asteroid, they want to use the gravity well generated by a big object near the asteroid to change its course enough to miss Earth comfortably when it swings by. In similar forward-looking ideas, although this time firmly on Terra, the American Academy of Sciences wants us to plan ahead for more droughts because of warming temperatures. Good management now could save a lot of grief later, especially in those places without ready access to water bodies.
The International Atomic Energy Agency, along with the International Standards Organization, have adopted a new radiation symbol, to supplement the trefoil we’re used to The new warning symbol consists of radiating waves, a skull and crossbones, and a person running away from the danger. It’s also in red. Looks a bit busy, logo-wise, but radiation is a complex subject to get across in pictures that need to be understood instinctively so that exposure time is minimal.
Of those willing to talk about it and admit it, a study from Harvard and the World Health Organization says the United States has the highest population of depressed people. There’s not much for data in the article, and the researchers admit that it’s by no means an accurate sample - all it goes by is what people are willing to tell them. If it’s against the law to be mentally ill, then nobody’s mentally ill in that country. I’m not sure if this is because there’s time enough to get depressed in American life, or whether things really do just suck that much.
Researchers at MIT have found a way of combining things together as to make self-assembling nanobatteries. With just the right kinds of forces and materials together, the components line up in just the right way to get electrodes, conductivity, and lithium-ion power going on the microscopic level. Sounds fun for fitting batteries in tight spots where needed.
Artists take children's monster drawings and turn them into finished, shaded pieces of art. Shows you that art can be made from source material that looks like a child drew it. It really is a matter of practice.
It’s been eight years between the following two statements of Senator McCain. This does not stop The Right’s Field from accusing the Senator of flip-flopping his position on Roe v. Wade. I didn’t realize that it was impermissible for someone to change their mind, politically. Although, that thought has me link over to the people who are getting after liberal and other candidates for first supporting the conflict in Iraq, and now voicing their opposition to it. I think the underlying assumption on these accusations is that they are being done not because of an actual change of mind, but because of a desire to be appealing to the voting constituency the candidates have chosen to court. If they’re just putting up a face, masquerading their choices, then by all means, give ‘em hell, regardless of whom they are. If it’s a real change, though, file it away in your issue database - if you don’t approve of their stances now, you vote against them. It’s that simple.
Reading something like the following account makes it clearer why being in a war situation can be the most stressful experience a society can have, and why those individuals touched by it are never the same again. This is a firsthand account of what war zone live fire is like. It sounds bearable, sort of, just by reading it - there are some tension-breaking funny bits. But the whole account itself reads like a giant ball of stress, day in and day out. It would be nice to get through a generation or two without major combat actions.
The white-hat equivalent of botnets - grid computing - just took what was thought to be 420 years worth of drug analysis, and accomplished it in about four months. That’s a lot of spare cycles. And with projects like World Community Grid (and one of the big ancestors of the grid, SETI@home), these sorts of giant tasks will be reduced to manageable bits, all because people decided that those spare cycles are best used for something other than idling along, doing a screensaver.
Deck the halls with Mountain Dew cans? Definitely a production of Too-much-time Inc. The finished effect is pretty neat, although it’s not apparent when the lights are lit up that the tree is a bunch of cans with a bottle at the top. I also wonder how much of that soda was drank in order to accomplish said project.
If you feel that the War on Some Drugs isn’t working out, or is already lost, but the idea of advocating full freedom with drug use leaves the taste a little sour, perhaps looking at the principles of the Harm Reduction Coalition can give you a springboard from which to form your own views. They’re in favor of admitting that drug use happens, and rather than incarcerating and scaring people over drugs, we admit that it happens and we work to try and make it so that drug users have knowledge on how to be safe about their use, and are fully informed of the potential consequences of their drug use. After all, we’ve got warning labels on tobacco and alcohol about their side effects. Why not other drugs - along with ways that risk can be reduced if someone should choose to use a particular drug. Obviously, for some of these, the warning label is longer or larger than others, as well as the part that says “You know, you use this, even properly, and you could kill yourself.” Harm reduction certainly seems to be a good way of making inroads on the use of drugs - it may not ever stop their usage, but accurate information will hopefully make people think a bit before deciding to use.
A look in on a polyamorous grouping in Florida. This particular article doesn’t condemn anyone as being sick and wrong, nor does it present a totally “Happy and Smiles” view of the poly relationship. Have to say, though, that with the relationships being described in that article, being worried about being stretched too thin would definitely be on my mind, too. If they can make it work without problems, though, more power to ’em.
A girl writes in to an advice column about a flame that severely affected her, and gets the advice "Go get a life in meatspace". That may be oversimplifying it a tad, but the gist of the advice was, to me, “The intertubes play on your fantasies. You never know if the person on the other end really is who they say they are, so investing any serious amount of time and emotion into those interactions is pointless and wasteful.” And from there, because the Internet is for porn, err, wankery, err... well, anyway, the point is to go out and have fun with your real friends (you do have them, don’t you, poor child?) and to keep this Internet thing at a distance. And since she seems to be wrapped up too much in it, getting counseling to help her not be so invested in the on-line world, as well as to get out of the depression she’s in is recommended.
If I’m putting words in the advice columnist’s mouth, then I apologize for not understanding. But, at least to me, it seems to be missing a significant part of the point, which is that even if mediated by screens and bits, we still invest time, effort, and emotion into our interactions with other people. And even if they’re masquerading as someone or something else, on the other end (for some percentage of things - there are a lot of machines posing as humans out there, too) is generally a person. We make connections with people. Someone who has no involvement with their interactions around other people is generally considered to be sociopathic, I think. And that’s frowned upon in meatspace - so why are we recommending it as a solution for the Internet? (This may be an exaggeration of degree - there is a certain detachment, even in meatspace relationships, that is expected or encouraged in society, as well. But we seem much more forgiving, or at least more supportive, of emotional outbursts like this (“He dumped me, but I loved him!”) in meatspace than in virtual space. Why is it different in cyberspace?
Even if we’re interacting with fantasies, phantasms, and avatars that say very little about the people behind them, though, we still make investments in their narratives and in our interactions with them. Pulling an example out from a different flight of fancy, if one of the characters in a well-known story series happens to perish or pair up with someone that the reader wasn’t pulling for, there’s real emotional response there, too. Yet those are just words on a page. Why invest emotion in a story that has a predetermined end, and will arrive at that end, regardless of what you do or want to do in the world of the story. You can’t change the end, nor can you change when it arrives. At least, not in the canon. Fanfiction is an investment in a non-meatspace world, so much so that often, the things that happened in the official accounts of that world are changed to provide a different story, one possibly more pleasing or suited to that world, according to the author. (Even Mary-Sues get in on this act, making that world a better place by their appearance, according to the account writ by the fic author.) Moving pictures provoke reactions from people viewing them - but the world of the movies is no more real than the world outside the theater. It looks a lot like it in some movies, and it may even construct itself around the history of the world outside, but it isn’t the world outside. The events, the views, the dialogue, all of it is scripted. It goes to the end it was predestined to.
Yet, the hallmark of a good book, or movie, or story, is that it produces the desired emotional responses in the people that listen to it. Books that “draw the reader in” or movies that are “engrossing” are considered to be higher-caliber materials. Wherein lies the difference, then, between a book that makes someone cry because a character the reader can understand and empathize with with was insulted in a most vile way, and a vicious flame directed to the username that the reader/writer uses as their character in the on-line world? Both are phantasms, characters, fantasies that have associations with the reader. Yet the response to one is considered somewhat acceptable and a sign of good work by the author/director/actors/camerapersons or what-have-you, while the other is considered being in too deep on something or engaging too much in the world of fantasy. Why the difference? If past indicators were anything, I’d say people would still be more concerned about losing someone to the book world, where it really is all in their heads, rather than the on-line worlds, where at least some part of the input comes from other sentients.
So the advice this girl is getting could be perfectly good advice, but it needs a caveat that I feel isn’t spelled out there - if you need counseling to get over the insult and to restore your self-esteem, because real or virtual, something like that stings and sticks around, go for it. It’ll help in both worlds if you can shrug off someone’s opinion of you while extracting anything useful from their critique. Unplugging for a bit or reducing your involvement level is also good advice, in a rebalancing/reorienting sort of way - as a reminder that there are friends out in the biological world, as well as the digital one, and that friends are good for helping you get through things and taking your mind off others. As a possible rule of thumb, if one of the two worlds is getting you down, switch worlds and/or find some friends to talk to. Anyway, it sounded more like a modernization of “She’s always got her head in those books. What she really needs is a nice boy to take care of her and chores to keep her busy.” Those particular characters in a book always garnered an empathic response from me. Because I trust that when that girl wants to start thinking more about boys than books, she will, and she’ll start acting accordingly.
And that’s the big linklist-ranty-thingy for tonight. Ciao, and although I started this earlier, for some reason, I never seem to finish when I want to.
Anyway, link time.
A bill that got thrashed last year has resurfaced. Linked in many places, including Crooks and Liars, the SAFETY Act aims to force ISPs to keep records of who requested or transferred all traffic going in or out, under penalty of fines. See Section Six of the bill. THOMAS link to the SAFETY Act). At minimum, the name and address of the person being assigned an IP address has to be kept. Which could mean interesting things for those on virtual networks, since they all use the same outward-facing IP, or a smaller set of IPs than people accessing. (I believe, anyway. Correct me if I’m wrong.) How will they tell who’s doing what, though, or will they just arrest the whole area on suspicion of kiddie porn? Either way, it’s a simple enough jump from scouting out kiddie porn to something else, like blogging against the government, or for responsible use of recreational drugs, or other such things.
Coming out of the PETA corner, something artistically posed... Joanna Krupa says that she'd rather go naked than wear fur and well, she does. Of course, there’s the whole strategically placed swooshes and objects, but PETA wants you to think that nudity is sexier than fur-wearing, I guess. Considering, in the grand majority of people, nudity is sexier than being clothed, whatever the clothing, I think PETA can safely make this claim. Appealing toward the same concept (put sexy women on something and it will sell), Hooters is making an energy drink. Something equally as useless but a lot cooler is the toaster that burns a skull-and-crossbones into your toast. Yarrrr. Something that’s both cool and useful is the digital cookbook, shaped like a spatula and able to sync up and download recipes for handy visual reference.
Tesla Coil spark discharges. One of which is being used to produce a ring of electricity around a vehicle. If you live in a neighborhood that requires that, though, I wonder what the criminals are carrying.
Steven Page of Barenaked (pronounced “Bah-rin-ih-kid”) Ladies, some Canadian music outfit, says that rather than litigating into the stone age, maybe if the music industry charged a flat subscription fee for downloading, things would work better. You know, cable, internet, music p2p. Sounds like a regular sort of bill list.
Gazing into the future, scientists warn that we need an action plan for asteroids that could make an impact on the Earth. And they’d really rather we plan this out now rather than hoping the asteroid will miss, every time. On this particular asteroid, they want to use the gravity well generated by a big object near the asteroid to change its course enough to miss Earth comfortably when it swings by. In similar forward-looking ideas, although this time firmly on Terra, the American Academy of Sciences wants us to plan ahead for more droughts because of warming temperatures. Good management now could save a lot of grief later, especially in those places without ready access to water bodies.
The International Atomic Energy Agency, along with the International Standards Organization, have adopted a new radiation symbol, to supplement the trefoil we’re used to The new warning symbol consists of radiating waves, a skull and crossbones, and a person running away from the danger. It’s also in red. Looks a bit busy, logo-wise, but radiation is a complex subject to get across in pictures that need to be understood instinctively so that exposure time is minimal.
Of those willing to talk about it and admit it, a study from Harvard and the World Health Organization says the United States has the highest population of depressed people. There’s not much for data in the article, and the researchers admit that it’s by no means an accurate sample - all it goes by is what people are willing to tell them. If it’s against the law to be mentally ill, then nobody’s mentally ill in that country. I’m not sure if this is because there’s time enough to get depressed in American life, or whether things really do just suck that much.
Researchers at MIT have found a way of combining things together as to make self-assembling nanobatteries. With just the right kinds of forces and materials together, the components line up in just the right way to get electrodes, conductivity, and lithium-ion power going on the microscopic level. Sounds fun for fitting batteries in tight spots where needed.
Artists take children's monster drawings and turn them into finished, shaded pieces of art. Shows you that art can be made from source material that looks like a child drew it. It really is a matter of practice.
It’s been eight years between the following two statements of Senator McCain. This does not stop The Right’s Field from accusing the Senator of flip-flopping his position on Roe v. Wade. I didn’t realize that it was impermissible for someone to change their mind, politically. Although, that thought has me link over to the people who are getting after liberal and other candidates for first supporting the conflict in Iraq, and now voicing their opposition to it. I think the underlying assumption on these accusations is that they are being done not because of an actual change of mind, but because of a desire to be appealing to the voting constituency the candidates have chosen to court. If they’re just putting up a face, masquerading their choices, then by all means, give ‘em hell, regardless of whom they are. If it’s a real change, though, file it away in your issue database - if you don’t approve of their stances now, you vote against them. It’s that simple.
Reading something like the following account makes it clearer why being in a war situation can be the most stressful experience a society can have, and why those individuals touched by it are never the same again. This is a firsthand account of what war zone live fire is like. It sounds bearable, sort of, just by reading it - there are some tension-breaking funny bits. But the whole account itself reads like a giant ball of stress, day in and day out. It would be nice to get through a generation or two without major combat actions.
The white-hat equivalent of botnets - grid computing - just took what was thought to be 420 years worth of drug analysis, and accomplished it in about four months. That’s a lot of spare cycles. And with projects like World Community Grid (and one of the big ancestors of the grid, SETI@home), these sorts of giant tasks will be reduced to manageable bits, all because people decided that those spare cycles are best used for something other than idling along, doing a screensaver.
Deck the halls with Mountain Dew cans? Definitely a production of Too-much-time Inc. The finished effect is pretty neat, although it’s not apparent when the lights are lit up that the tree is a bunch of cans with a bottle at the top. I also wonder how much of that soda was drank in order to accomplish said project.
If you feel that the War on Some Drugs isn’t working out, or is already lost, but the idea of advocating full freedom with drug use leaves the taste a little sour, perhaps looking at the principles of the Harm Reduction Coalition can give you a springboard from which to form your own views. They’re in favor of admitting that drug use happens, and rather than incarcerating and scaring people over drugs, we admit that it happens and we work to try and make it so that drug users have knowledge on how to be safe about their use, and are fully informed of the potential consequences of their drug use. After all, we’ve got warning labels on tobacco and alcohol about their side effects. Why not other drugs - along with ways that risk can be reduced if someone should choose to use a particular drug. Obviously, for some of these, the warning label is longer or larger than others, as well as the part that says “You know, you use this, even properly, and you could kill yourself.” Harm reduction certainly seems to be a good way of making inroads on the use of drugs - it may not ever stop their usage, but accurate information will hopefully make people think a bit before deciding to use.
A look in on a polyamorous grouping in Florida. This particular article doesn’t condemn anyone as being sick and wrong, nor does it present a totally “Happy and Smiles” view of the poly relationship. Have to say, though, that with the relationships being described in that article, being worried about being stretched too thin would definitely be on my mind, too. If they can make it work without problems, though, more power to ’em.
A girl writes in to an advice column about a flame that severely affected her, and gets the advice "Go get a life in meatspace". That may be oversimplifying it a tad, but the gist of the advice was, to me, “The intertubes play on your fantasies. You never know if the person on the other end really is who they say they are, so investing any serious amount of time and emotion into those interactions is pointless and wasteful.” And from there, because the Internet is for porn, err, wankery, err... well, anyway, the point is to go out and have fun with your real friends (you do have them, don’t you, poor child?) and to keep this Internet thing at a distance. And since she seems to be wrapped up too much in it, getting counseling to help her not be so invested in the on-line world, as well as to get out of the depression she’s in is recommended.
If I’m putting words in the advice columnist’s mouth, then I apologize for not understanding. But, at least to me, it seems to be missing a significant part of the point, which is that even if mediated by screens and bits, we still invest time, effort, and emotion into our interactions with other people. And even if they’re masquerading as someone or something else, on the other end (for some percentage of things - there are a lot of machines posing as humans out there, too) is generally a person. We make connections with people. Someone who has no involvement with their interactions around other people is generally considered to be sociopathic, I think. And that’s frowned upon in meatspace - so why are we recommending it as a solution for the Internet? (This may be an exaggeration of degree - there is a certain detachment, even in meatspace relationships, that is expected or encouraged in society, as well. But we seem much more forgiving, or at least more supportive, of emotional outbursts like this (“He dumped me, but I loved him!”) in meatspace than in virtual space. Why is it different in cyberspace?
Even if we’re interacting with fantasies, phantasms, and avatars that say very little about the people behind them, though, we still make investments in their narratives and in our interactions with them. Pulling an example out from a different flight of fancy, if one of the characters in a well-known story series happens to perish or pair up with someone that the reader wasn’t pulling for, there’s real emotional response there, too. Yet those are just words on a page. Why invest emotion in a story that has a predetermined end, and will arrive at that end, regardless of what you do or want to do in the world of the story. You can’t change the end, nor can you change when it arrives. At least, not in the canon. Fanfiction is an investment in a non-meatspace world, so much so that often, the things that happened in the official accounts of that world are changed to provide a different story, one possibly more pleasing or suited to that world, according to the author. (Even Mary-Sues get in on this act, making that world a better place by their appearance, according to the account writ by the fic author.) Moving pictures provoke reactions from people viewing them - but the world of the movies is no more real than the world outside the theater. It looks a lot like it in some movies, and it may even construct itself around the history of the world outside, but it isn’t the world outside. The events, the views, the dialogue, all of it is scripted. It goes to the end it was predestined to.
Yet, the hallmark of a good book, or movie, or story, is that it produces the desired emotional responses in the people that listen to it. Books that “draw the reader in” or movies that are “engrossing” are considered to be higher-caliber materials. Wherein lies the difference, then, between a book that makes someone cry because a character the reader can understand and empathize with with was insulted in a most vile way, and a vicious flame directed to the username that the reader/writer uses as their character in the on-line world? Both are phantasms, characters, fantasies that have associations with the reader. Yet the response to one is considered somewhat acceptable and a sign of good work by the author/director/actors/camerapersons or what-have-you, while the other is considered being in too deep on something or engaging too much in the world of fantasy. Why the difference? If past indicators were anything, I’d say people would still be more concerned about losing someone to the book world, where it really is all in their heads, rather than the on-line worlds, where at least some part of the input comes from other sentients.
So the advice this girl is getting could be perfectly good advice, but it needs a caveat that I feel isn’t spelled out there - if you need counseling to get over the insult and to restore your self-esteem, because real or virtual, something like that stings and sticks around, go for it. It’ll help in both worlds if you can shrug off someone’s opinion of you while extracting anything useful from their critique. Unplugging for a bit or reducing your involvement level is also good advice, in a rebalancing/reorienting sort of way - as a reminder that there are friends out in the biological world, as well as the digital one, and that friends are good for helping you get through things and taking your mind off others. As a possible rule of thumb, if one of the two worlds is getting you down, switch worlds and/or find some friends to talk to. Anyway, it sounded more like a modernization of “She’s always got her head in those books. What she really needs is a nice boy to take care of her and chores to keep her busy.” Those particular characters in a book always garnered an empathic response from me. Because I trust that when that girl wants to start thinking more about boys than books, she will, and she’ll start acting accordingly.
And that’s the big linklist-ranty-thingy for tonight. Ciao, and although I started this earlier, for some reason, I never seem to finish when I want to.
