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Another day vanished - 28 February 2007
Mar. 1st, 2007 02:44 amHrm. That was interesting. Well, I slept in, and then after being linked to the particular post where Warren Ellis asked for new journals to read, I think I may have a few more that I’m going to keep an eye on. My logical side said “You realize, the more you add, the longer the lists will take to do, and the longer they’ll become, and the more effort you’ll expend on them.” These options are under consideration. But some of the candidates are really good. So maybe there will be more material to draw off of in the future.
The rest of today was spent making pizza (where I forgot to remove the cardboard from underneath - oops!), taking my sister to the airport, and then having a sit in some office chairs and buying a couple albums and a game. Sadly, the chairs are still too small for me - how hard is it to design a chair that I can sit in and not have to slouch to rest my head up against when I lean back? Guess my torso’s just too long for most chair backs. This will have to be Rectified if at any point I have the funds or the office.
It's Update Your Damn Profile Day, as declared by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
yesthattom in 2003. So make sure all your data is correct and updated to the fullest. You might pick up the occasional stray reader that way.
A further bit of trivia - a baseball card, apparently a rare and precious one, sold for $2.35 million dollars. That’s quite the price tag for a piece of memorabilia.
I’d like to know a little bit more about the trash compactor that turns waste into a gas that can be used for fuel and a glass slag that could be useful for fill using a plasma arc. Things like power consumption, amount of slag or gas created, what it would cost for further refinement, all those sorts of things. Good trash conversion, for those things truly non-recyclable, could help the throwaway society make some energy reclamations. It’s still probably better to not be wasteful, but I could also enjoy seeing the landfills slowly reduced to nil with generators like this.
One of Wired’s blogs chronicles the odyssey of a child with Sensory Processing Disorder, through the eyes of the parent, and what is a nonstandard way of trying to correct the problem. Hacking My Child's Brain works on the principle that the brain can be reprogrammed, much like firmware or software, to process things like sensory inputs properly. The series is still short-lived, and currently has the materials and techniques being used to try and trigger specific and correct brain responses in the child, and then to encourage the use of the correct pathways and interpretations. I wonder how it will turn out - if it works, it might offer significant insight into correcting other sensory problems.
For want of a dentist, a boy was lost. The problem? No insurance. No government health plan. And a brother that also had bad teeth. Thus, an abscess went unnoticed, un-cared-for, and eventually, it spread to the boy’s brain, where it killed him. Taking the tooth out could have saved him, but dentists who do Medicare is hard already - oral surgeons is even more difficult. So many children go without dental care, even when on the government insurance program. Have to say, seems rather pointless to have a low-income health plan sponsored by the government if dental offices have the option of saying that they won’t take it, or won’t do the paperwork for it. Even though in this case, the eligibility paperwork was probably sent to a place where they didn’t live anymore, there should have been a way for them to contact the government and get the right forms and reinstate the care.
It’s only a blurb, and so we’re keeping an eye on seeing more of it, and whether it goes anywhere, but a bill has been introduced to amend the DMCA to permit much more free use of purchased digital content. Again, just a blurb. We’ll get more excited about it if it comes to a vote in both houses.
In political materials,nebris reproduces what purports to be material from the March issue of GQ detailing the charges of impeachment that should be leveled by the People of the United States against Richard Cheney, accusing him of obstructing intelligence-gathering, deceiving the American people, sheltering a known criminal, improper relations with Haliburton, allowing lobbyists control over energy policy, and obstruction of justice. Can anyone confirm that GQ has run this? And whether the material presented in this document would hold up if the Congresscritters, on some very long shot, went through with it? It’s not likely they will, as the Senators from Washington state on the Democratic side are asking the state senators to cancel a panel on impeachment, saying that panels and demonstrations like that are “grandstanding” and detracting from building a coalition to end the war in Washington, D.C. This seems to be the same logic that was used against the non-binding resolution - even symbolic gestures give the enemy strength, or something like that. Of course, this would be a much more serious issue if the prevailing winds were in favor of impeachment, rather than dismissing them based on the political repercussions.
Chalmers Johnson, in a transcript on Democray Now, talks about the last of his trilogy of books. In the interview, along with the title of the book, he suggests that America is rapdily abandoning the Republic and cementing itself as an Empire, with the disasters that befall empires inevitably following. Don’t know if it’ll help any, but maybe a look at the top five anti-war posters will help get people motivated?
Regarding the candidates for the Presidency, the Boston Globe turned to an analysis of Mitt Romney's campaign, including analysis of the competitors and the problems with the candidate's image. Exploding Aardvark has one of the images from this campaign document, detailing France as a possible "adversary to run against". I suspect there’s some symbolic value there, more than actually running against the country of France. For one thing, given the choice, I think more people would vote for France.
Internationally, The United States and Iran will both be present at a conference on Iraq's future, which may allow the two countries to hold talks with each other about the issues that are causing the current animosity between the two countries. The article says, though, that what is probably the biggest point of contention between the two, Iran’s nuclear programme, is off the table.
A new experience is available at El Alberto, in Mexico - a five-hour simulation of an illegal border-crossing, complete with mud, guards, and adrenaline rushes. It’s a guided tour, and nobody’s in real danger, but it’s apparently quite good at getting people into the feel of what trying to cross the border would be like. Some criticize it as being a training ground for those who will try the real things, others suggest that it works well as a deterrent for those who would want to cross. Either way, it seems to be thriving quite well.
For those who work alone, or outside the office situation, but want to have some social contact or possibly do some networking outside of the local coffee shop (and not have to pay the ever-increasing price of a latte), co-working environments may be just the thing. It’s like putting the office and the kitchen together - plenty of places to sit and do the work, and it might be a different group of people to work with (or near) on any given day. The networking and social environment in the co-working space seems to be better than the average coffee bar. Who knows? Maybe this is where all the cool startups will start hanging out.
Speaking of start-ups (or is that upstarts?), Ning, the child of one of the Netscape co-founders, is designed to put the tools to build an entire social-networking site, not just a page, into the hands of the users. The future may everyone has their own MySpace site, not just a MySpace page. Wait, aren’t we already doing something like that? I mean, blog software and blog sites provide a significant social medium for people to interact in. Or is this supposed to allow people to make clones of places like MySpace for specialized fandoms or subcultures? I guess I’m not sure where the innovation is on this.
Possibly in a realted way, college students are apparently more narcissistic than previous generations, having had both better material prosperity and an armada of feel-good, I’m special, everyone’s above-average praise fed to them over the years. Coupled with me-centric technologies like blogs, MySpace pages, and YouTube, the effects of children raised by the self-esteem movement seems to backfire in the way they behave now. At least, that’s what the article worries about - after all, we can’t all be above-average.
I think I’m missing a line here, somewhere, that was in a book or other narrative. NPR has an article about how nanotechnology will be employed on currency to foil counterfeiters, and I’m trying to think of the piece. It has something to do with trading in particular currencies or other goods, because all the official money was bugged by nanotech. The name and the quote escape me, but there’s a possibility that these new methods could be useful for implanting other things in the money, like tracking units. I’m not sure what those would be used for, but it might be more of a worry about the principle of the matter, especially if they use RFID dust or some other technology to keep track of the whereabouts of the people. Sounds rather dystopian, though, so it’s probably an overactive imagination on my part.
If you would like to have a look at someone else’s overactive imagination, though, you might want to try and get through The Kentroversy Papers's take on the various celebrity problems - they're all apparently related to Project Monarch, among other things. There’s a cohesion to the narrative as it goes from place to place, stringing together disparate events and people such as Disneyland, Anna Nicole Smith’s death, the “wardrobe malfunction”, Madonna, Britney, and Christina’s performance at the MTV award ceremony... all relating to how these women were utilized in a secret government program designed to make sex slaves for high-ranking officials and occult practices tracing back to Crowley, at the very least. It may be one of the best summations I’ve seen of conspiracy theories of our time to date, placed in a narrative designed to make all of them make some sort of sense to the credulous audience.
The next-to-last stuff that’s been caught in the nets for tonight all has to do with sexuality. Thus, those who don’t want to hear it can jump over the whole paragraph. First, one of Buddhist Geeks’ contributers talks about her experience in deciding not to become a Suicide Girl, even with a bit of an exhibitionist mind. The Middle Way called her back from that point. Worth a read. Second, there are two objectives of the following article describing a man arrested for peddling trademarked character costumes. The first is the arrest for the crime that has been committed. See if you can spot the second one that has been weaved into what would normally be a straightforward account of trademark infringement. And then, for the essay segment, tell me why that second strand should have been left out. On more depressing bits, though, a student at Naropa University was beaten after she told two men she was a lesbian to foil their advances. According to the article, one man beat her while the other told his companion to stop beating her - no physical intervention. And even more problematic, a gay man died from injuries received from a pipe beating he received in Detroit. It’s always nice to know that someone in your own state has enough problems with a homosexual man that he’ll beat him to death. I really wish that this kind of attitude towards anyone was out of our systems by the time we got out of elementary school. We need to learn how to get along.
Lest we get caught on a bad tone, though, American Samidzat comes to our rescue, with the top five good trends over the last few years - even with current conflicts, we’re killing each other less, cooperating for disaster relief more, working on averting greenhouse emissions and global energy crises, and making progress on containing potential pandemics like H5N1. So there’s a possibility that we’re not doing the whole hell and handbasket thing. It’s going to take a bit more progress, though, to convince me completely of that. Keep up the good work, and add some more to it.
Tonight’s stuff is done. Something I just thought of - I received a gracious gift of music from a friend, but the track numberings are all reversed. 01 is 15 and 15 is 01 and the like. Is there some script or function I can call to pull a massive find-and-replace on all the files in the affected directories, so that the track numbers are in proper order? If there is, it would be super-cool if someone could link/provide/tell me what the hell to do.
The rest of today was spent making pizza (where I forgot to remove the cardboard from underneath - oops!), taking my sister to the airport, and then having a sit in some office chairs and buying a couple albums and a game. Sadly, the chairs are still too small for me - how hard is it to design a chair that I can sit in and not have to slouch to rest my head up against when I lean back? Guess my torso’s just too long for most chair backs. This will have to be Rectified if at any point I have the funds or the office.
It's Update Your Damn Profile Day, as declared by
yesthattom in 2003. So make sure all your data is correct and updated to the fullest. You might pick up the occasional stray reader that way.A further bit of trivia - a baseball card, apparently a rare and precious one, sold for $2.35 million dollars. That’s quite the price tag for a piece of memorabilia.
I’d like to know a little bit more about the trash compactor that turns waste into a gas that can be used for fuel and a glass slag that could be useful for fill using a plasma arc. Things like power consumption, amount of slag or gas created, what it would cost for further refinement, all those sorts of things. Good trash conversion, for those things truly non-recyclable, could help the throwaway society make some energy reclamations. It’s still probably better to not be wasteful, but I could also enjoy seeing the landfills slowly reduced to nil with generators like this.
One of Wired’s blogs chronicles the odyssey of a child with Sensory Processing Disorder, through the eyes of the parent, and what is a nonstandard way of trying to correct the problem. Hacking My Child's Brain works on the principle that the brain can be reprogrammed, much like firmware or software, to process things like sensory inputs properly. The series is still short-lived, and currently has the materials and techniques being used to try and trigger specific and correct brain responses in the child, and then to encourage the use of the correct pathways and interpretations. I wonder how it will turn out - if it works, it might offer significant insight into correcting other sensory problems.
For want of a dentist, a boy was lost. The problem? No insurance. No government health plan. And a brother that also had bad teeth. Thus, an abscess went unnoticed, un-cared-for, and eventually, it spread to the boy’s brain, where it killed him. Taking the tooth out could have saved him, but dentists who do Medicare is hard already - oral surgeons is even more difficult. So many children go without dental care, even when on the government insurance program. Have to say, seems rather pointless to have a low-income health plan sponsored by the government if dental offices have the option of saying that they won’t take it, or won’t do the paperwork for it. Even though in this case, the eligibility paperwork was probably sent to a place where they didn’t live anymore, there should have been a way for them to contact the government and get the right forms and reinstate the care.
It’s only a blurb, and so we’re keeping an eye on seeing more of it, and whether it goes anywhere, but a bill has been introduced to amend the DMCA to permit much more free use of purchased digital content. Again, just a blurb. We’ll get more excited about it if it comes to a vote in both houses.
In political materials,
nebris reproduces what purports to be material from the March issue of GQ detailing the charges of impeachment that should be leveled by the People of the United States against Richard Cheney, accusing him of obstructing intelligence-gathering, deceiving the American people, sheltering a known criminal, improper relations with Haliburton, allowing lobbyists control over energy policy, and obstruction of justice. Can anyone confirm that GQ has run this? And whether the material presented in this document would hold up if the Congresscritters, on some very long shot, went through with it? It’s not likely they will, as the Senators from Washington state on the Democratic side are asking the state senators to cancel a panel on impeachment, saying that panels and demonstrations like that are “grandstanding” and detracting from building a coalition to end the war in Washington, D.C. This seems to be the same logic that was used against the non-binding resolution - even symbolic gestures give the enemy strength, or something like that. Of course, this would be a much more serious issue if the prevailing winds were in favor of impeachment, rather than dismissing them based on the political repercussions.Chalmers Johnson, in a transcript on Democray Now, talks about the last of his trilogy of books. In the interview, along with the title of the book, he suggests that America is rapdily abandoning the Republic and cementing itself as an Empire, with the disasters that befall empires inevitably following. Don’t know if it’ll help any, but maybe a look at the top five anti-war posters will help get people motivated?
Regarding the candidates for the Presidency, the Boston Globe turned to an analysis of Mitt Romney's campaign, including analysis of the competitors and the problems with the candidate's image. Exploding Aardvark has one of the images from this campaign document, detailing France as a possible "adversary to run against". I suspect there’s some symbolic value there, more than actually running against the country of France. For one thing, given the choice, I think more people would vote for France.
Internationally, The United States and Iran will both be present at a conference on Iraq's future, which may allow the two countries to hold talks with each other about the issues that are causing the current animosity between the two countries. The article says, though, that what is probably the biggest point of contention between the two, Iran’s nuclear programme, is off the table.
A new experience is available at El Alberto, in Mexico - a five-hour simulation of an illegal border-crossing, complete with mud, guards, and adrenaline rushes. It’s a guided tour, and nobody’s in real danger, but it’s apparently quite good at getting people into the feel of what trying to cross the border would be like. Some criticize it as being a training ground for those who will try the real things, others suggest that it works well as a deterrent for those who would want to cross. Either way, it seems to be thriving quite well.
For those who work alone, or outside the office situation, but want to have some social contact or possibly do some networking outside of the local coffee shop (and not have to pay the ever-increasing price of a latte), co-working environments may be just the thing. It’s like putting the office and the kitchen together - plenty of places to sit and do the work, and it might be a different group of people to work with (or near) on any given day. The networking and social environment in the co-working space seems to be better than the average coffee bar. Who knows? Maybe this is where all the cool startups will start hanging out.
Speaking of start-ups (or is that upstarts?), Ning, the child of one of the Netscape co-founders, is designed to put the tools to build an entire social-networking site, not just a page, into the hands of the users. The future may everyone has their own MySpace site, not just a MySpace page. Wait, aren’t we already doing something like that? I mean, blog software and blog sites provide a significant social medium for people to interact in. Or is this supposed to allow people to make clones of places like MySpace for specialized fandoms or subcultures? I guess I’m not sure where the innovation is on this.
Possibly in a realted way, college students are apparently more narcissistic than previous generations, having had both better material prosperity and an armada of feel-good, I’m special, everyone’s above-average praise fed to them over the years. Coupled with me-centric technologies like blogs, MySpace pages, and YouTube, the effects of children raised by the self-esteem movement seems to backfire in the way they behave now. At least, that’s what the article worries about - after all, we can’t all be above-average.
I think I’m missing a line here, somewhere, that was in a book or other narrative. NPR has an article about how nanotechnology will be employed on currency to foil counterfeiters, and I’m trying to think of the piece. It has something to do with trading in particular currencies or other goods, because all the official money was bugged by nanotech. The name and the quote escape me, but there’s a possibility that these new methods could be useful for implanting other things in the money, like tracking units. I’m not sure what those would be used for, but it might be more of a worry about the principle of the matter, especially if they use RFID dust or some other technology to keep track of the whereabouts of the people. Sounds rather dystopian, though, so it’s probably an overactive imagination on my part.
If you would like to have a look at someone else’s overactive imagination, though, you might want to try and get through The Kentroversy Papers's take on the various celebrity problems - they're all apparently related to Project Monarch, among other things. There’s a cohesion to the narrative as it goes from place to place, stringing together disparate events and people such as Disneyland, Anna Nicole Smith’s death, the “wardrobe malfunction”, Madonna, Britney, and Christina’s performance at the MTV award ceremony... all relating to how these women were utilized in a secret government program designed to make sex slaves for high-ranking officials and occult practices tracing back to Crowley, at the very least. It may be one of the best summations I’ve seen of conspiracy theories of our time to date, placed in a narrative designed to make all of them make some sort of sense to the credulous audience.
The next-to-last stuff that’s been caught in the nets for tonight all has to do with sexuality. Thus, those who don’t want to hear it can jump over the whole paragraph. First, one of Buddhist Geeks’ contributers talks about her experience in deciding not to become a Suicide Girl, even with a bit of an exhibitionist mind. The Middle Way called her back from that point. Worth a read. Second, there are two objectives of the following article describing a man arrested for peddling trademarked character costumes. The first is the arrest for the crime that has been committed. See if you can spot the second one that has been weaved into what would normally be a straightforward account of trademark infringement. And then, for the essay segment, tell me why that second strand should have been left out. On more depressing bits, though, a student at Naropa University was beaten after she told two men she was a lesbian to foil their advances. According to the article, one man beat her while the other told his companion to stop beating her - no physical intervention. And even more problematic, a gay man died from injuries received from a pipe beating he received in Detroit. It’s always nice to know that someone in your own state has enough problems with a homosexual man that he’ll beat him to death. I really wish that this kind of attitude towards anyone was out of our systems by the time we got out of elementary school. We need to learn how to get along.
Lest we get caught on a bad tone, though, American Samidzat comes to our rescue, with the top five good trends over the last few years - even with current conflicts, we’re killing each other less, cooperating for disaster relief more, working on averting greenhouse emissions and global energy crises, and making progress on containing potential pandemics like H5N1. So there’s a possibility that we’re not doing the whole hell and handbasket thing. It’s going to take a bit more progress, though, to convince me completely of that. Keep up the good work, and add some more to it.
Tonight’s stuff is done. Something I just thought of - I received a gracious gift of music from a friend, but the track numberings are all reversed. 01 is 15 and 15 is 01 and the like. Is there some script or function I can call to pull a massive find-and-replace on all the files in the affected directories, so that the track numbers are in proper order? If there is, it would be super-cool if someone could link/provide/tell me what the hell to do.
