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So today was definitely a day where I had to laugh at myself. While doing dishes tonight, the plate that I cracked on the first day I moved into the new place just broke apart in two. It wasn’t a crash, nor was there any harm, the plate just separated. Whoops. And then, while getting things reset for he swimming tomorrow, I accidentally dropped one of the safety cones we use as a line into the pool. Which had me sit down and laugh. Not much else I can do in that situation, is there?
The still-as-yet-undeclared war in Iraq has entered its fifth year. If it were an Internet start-up, somewhere in this year it should start turning a profit. The President asked us to be patient with his new tactics, I’m looking a bit askance at a UK poll that said Iraqis believe their lives are better now than under Saddam, and the Slacktivist reminds us that out of the three stated goals that the President gave when launching this war, two have been failures and one can only muster half-credit. There’s more to be had on the subject as FAIR has a look at both mainstream and alternative coverage of Iraq, and shows people who had ideas that Iraq was a mistake put in the back, and people who wanted the war splashed across the front pages and the television shows. Everyone was not fooled or wrong - some people had a clue and were ignored.
An opinion in USA Today has suggested an additional reform to the current way electoral processes are done - don't let all the primaries concentrate themselves on being the earliest, or there will be about six months of dead and recrimination time. Which, actually, might not be a bad thing - it could get people to actually make decisions based on the positions of the candidates, rather than the one that spends the most or instills the most fear, uncertainty, and doubt. If IRV and everyone voting on issues were combined, we’d have a possible chance at saying our electoral system worked.
In partisan sorts of politics, a supporter of the Barack Obama campaign has made a mashup that takes Apple’s 1984 piece and puts Hillary on the monitor. Vote Different, they say. Not too soon after, a supporter of Hillary’s campaign fires back with Barack 1984. (Although, in this particular case, the response is not nearly as good in terms of editing and thought as the original.) In this particular sniping game, I think there’s really only one way to respond: Make sure your candidates are potty-trained.
Thinking about doing some travel this summer? Well, with new United States passport restrictions, those of us in the country who want to go elsewhere may have to wait ten weeks for normal requests, four for expedited, to get a necessary passport. This is what new regs do to you. Of course, in the future, when we all have our national identification measures (which, according to the government, are totally unable to be counterfeited) this won’t be a problem, because our cards will be us (so don’t lose them!).
In other international bits, Nicaragua's leader, Daniel Ortega, has asked the United States to help the Contras. In a humanitarian way, since the United States was responsible for helping put them into poor positions during the civil war.
Slate acknowledges the increase in research into figuring out how our minds do things, and what sort of patterns appear when specific actions are invoked, but William Saletan says not to worry too much about the mind-reading capacities, because they require the game to be fixed before they're effective. It’s very good when all you have are two options and you have to choose and hold that choice, but in the wild, and with the possibility of flipping your mind or other things, you can always cause chaos to a would-be mind-reading machine. This is why psychohistory only works on large groups - individuals are too volatile. Perhaps admitting to this, DARPA has officially scrapped phase two of a program designed to reverse-engineer the mind. We could definitely use something like that on certain cases, like, say, Jack Thompson, who has apparently not learned that silence is his friend. I’d haveoot say the possibility of this being real communication is suspect, but apparently, Mr. Thompson has responded to Take-Two Interactive filing a pre-emptive suit against him. One would not think a lawyer with thirty years of bar experience would write such a thing, so my first instinct is to say there’s someone with a sense of humor and good spoofing technique. [Edit: That said, with three solid votes in favor of it being just his style, I’m more inclined to believe that he might have scribbled such a thing.]
Other things coming out of space-age technologies are an opinion exhorting governments to start funding asteroid-deflection mechanisms (the deflector dish writ small and rocket-based), and preliminary exploration into a Robot Ethics Charter, which takes Asimov’s laws as a starting point. Which is something rather funny, because Asimov himself, in all of his robot stories, showed how easy it was to circumvent Three Laws-type protections.
Apparently, as we get older, we get less happy. Happiness goes down from teenage years into mid-life, and then ticks back up again at retirement age. And Americans are consistently not as happy as Europeans. Hrm, maybe because we work more hours with less vacation and are consistently under more stresses because of the way our society is set up? And perhaps as we go from exuberant college graduate to middle-aged salaryperson, the dreams that we had all start to fade out. Then we hit retirement, and we can start dreaming, and actually doing them, again. Just my guess, though.
WebMD has a new thought about CPR - skip the mouth-to-mouth, and focus on the chest compressions. Which makes some sense - if the problem involves the heart being out of rhythm or having no rhythm, the things that get it back into the proper beat would definitely be the best things to happen.
A columnist at Townhall dot com, Carol Platt Libeau, rehashes an old argument - that it's still culturally acceptable to bash Christians and other religious. Her points are a bit awkward, though - we suspect that it would be Christians discriminating against Romney because he’s a Mormon. On the second example, General Pace’s remarks are inappropriate specifically because he is expressing his personal beliefs in an environment where there one’s personal theology isn’t supposed to matter. He is violating the spirit of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” regulation. Since the military fires someone who openly admits to being gay or lesbian, shouldn’t they be firing anyone who openly admits to believing that gays and lesbians are immoral? And I note that the commentator neglects the last part of the study - that an atheist president is the most reviled and least trusted of the bunch. If there’s progress to be made about discrimination in religious matters, it might be a good place to start with the nonreligious instead. To help demonstrate this point, HeraldNet has a story about a teacher who drew controversy when he asked them to think about creation myths and the claims they make. He had identified as an atheist the day before, but the offense appears to have come from two places - a handout that asked the students to consider why an all-powerful god permitted evil in the world and a handout that had students look at Genesis as a creation myth and see how effective it was. Now, admittedly, if we’re going to get after people who identify as Christian and proselytize in schools, we have to look at atheists who might do the same. The article doesn’t present a strong case for the teachers atheism as being directly influential - it all seems to have been inferred that because the teacher said he was atheist, he had to have been trying to pervert the good Christians from their path.
Just as disturbing, though, was the part that said the teacher aiming for a college-level philosophy course style and level of material in a high-school literature course was inappropriate. I can see complaints about being off-subject, but this was basically an admission that the students were thought of as not being able to get up to the challenge. What’s gone wrong with the education system when we don’t actually encourage everyone to take a swing at some harder material. They might end up being able to hack it and then some. You never know unless you let them try.
Internet Safety Tips - worth a read. Those of us who have been here (and are thus aware of the existence of Rule 34) understand them, but they may be helpful for others who are still starting out on their journey.
Three officers involved of the killing of a groom surrendered today. What makes this story odd is that there were 50 shots fired by the three officers, on suspicion that one of the men was reaching in for a gun. Fifty shots. That’s more than just a hair-trigger response, I’d say.
Way over on the other end of police-type actions, an Australian police officer who sent a picture of her breasts while still in uniform (and with her name badge still visible) to her boyfriend is under investigation. What happened from there, though, is that it made the rounds of the Intarwebs. And that created problems.
Those looking for free images and textures may want to peek into Image*After - according to the front page, what’s there can be downloaded and used in personal or professional work. Wonder what the licensing or attribution requirements are for them.
Regarding more professional imagery, the Creative Generalist is nto fond of Cingular turning itself, image-wise, back into AT&T. At&T evokes images of older times, when people were charged per phone, and of monopolies and the Bell. Cingular was doing all right at being young and hip and all that other stuff. So this whole “We’re the New AT&T” thing seems like a step back.
The next-to last bit is.. ooh, shiny. Wandering minds are common occurrences, and it's mostly about background multitasking in the brain. On those occasions where concentration really is needed, a wandering mind can have bad effects, but for the most part, those things are few and far between. Plus, keeping some background processes running might help keep us aware even when we aren’t aware, so the Pod People don’t always walk out in front of the bus.
Last thing for tonight - 23 Apples of Eris has implemented a new feature - Discordian Games - in beta. Soon coming is Sink, the veritable Discordian pastime. There’s already 50,000 Blank White Pixels there.
The still-as-yet-undeclared war in Iraq has entered its fifth year. If it were an Internet start-up, somewhere in this year it should start turning a profit. The President asked us to be patient with his new tactics, I’m looking a bit askance at a UK poll that said Iraqis believe their lives are better now than under Saddam, and the Slacktivist reminds us that out of the three stated goals that the President gave when launching this war, two have been failures and one can only muster half-credit. There’s more to be had on the subject as FAIR has a look at both mainstream and alternative coverage of Iraq, and shows people who had ideas that Iraq was a mistake put in the back, and people who wanted the war splashed across the front pages and the television shows. Everyone was not fooled or wrong - some people had a clue and were ignored.
An opinion in USA Today has suggested an additional reform to the current way electoral processes are done - don't let all the primaries concentrate themselves on being the earliest, or there will be about six months of dead and recrimination time. Which, actually, might not be a bad thing - it could get people to actually make decisions based on the positions of the candidates, rather than the one that spends the most or instills the most fear, uncertainty, and doubt. If IRV and everyone voting on issues were combined, we’d have a possible chance at saying our electoral system worked.
In partisan sorts of politics, a supporter of the Barack Obama campaign has made a mashup that takes Apple’s 1984 piece and puts Hillary on the monitor. Vote Different, they say. Not too soon after, a supporter of Hillary’s campaign fires back with Barack 1984. (Although, in this particular case, the response is not nearly as good in terms of editing and thought as the original.) In this particular sniping game, I think there’s really only one way to respond: Make sure your candidates are potty-trained.
Thinking about doing some travel this summer? Well, with new United States passport restrictions, those of us in the country who want to go elsewhere may have to wait ten weeks for normal requests, four for expedited, to get a necessary passport. This is what new regs do to you. Of course, in the future, when we all have our national identification measures (which, according to the government, are totally unable to be counterfeited) this won’t be a problem, because our cards will be us (so don’t lose them!).
In other international bits, Nicaragua's leader, Daniel Ortega, has asked the United States to help the Contras. In a humanitarian way, since the United States was responsible for helping put them into poor positions during the civil war.
Slate acknowledges the increase in research into figuring out how our minds do things, and what sort of patterns appear when specific actions are invoked, but William Saletan says not to worry too much about the mind-reading capacities, because they require the game to be fixed before they're effective. It’s very good when all you have are two options and you have to choose and hold that choice, but in the wild, and with the possibility of flipping your mind or other things, you can always cause chaos to a would-be mind-reading machine. This is why psychohistory only works on large groups - individuals are too volatile. Perhaps admitting to this, DARPA has officially scrapped phase two of a program designed to reverse-engineer the mind. We could definitely use something like that on certain cases, like, say, Jack Thompson, who has apparently not learned that silence is his friend. I’d haveoot say the possibility of this being real communication is suspect, but apparently, Mr. Thompson has responded to Take-Two Interactive filing a pre-emptive suit against him. One would not think a lawyer with thirty years of bar experience would write such a thing, so my first instinct is to say there’s someone with a sense of humor and good spoofing technique. [Edit: That said, with three solid votes in favor of it being just his style, I’m more inclined to believe that he might have scribbled such a thing.]
Other things coming out of space-age technologies are an opinion exhorting governments to start funding asteroid-deflection mechanisms (the deflector dish writ small and rocket-based), and preliminary exploration into a Robot Ethics Charter, which takes Asimov’s laws as a starting point. Which is something rather funny, because Asimov himself, in all of his robot stories, showed how easy it was to circumvent Three Laws-type protections.
Apparently, as we get older, we get less happy. Happiness goes down from teenage years into mid-life, and then ticks back up again at retirement age. And Americans are consistently not as happy as Europeans. Hrm, maybe because we work more hours with less vacation and are consistently under more stresses because of the way our society is set up? And perhaps as we go from exuberant college graduate to middle-aged salaryperson, the dreams that we had all start to fade out. Then we hit retirement, and we can start dreaming, and actually doing them, again. Just my guess, though.
WebMD has a new thought about CPR - skip the mouth-to-mouth, and focus on the chest compressions. Which makes some sense - if the problem involves the heart being out of rhythm or having no rhythm, the things that get it back into the proper beat would definitely be the best things to happen.
A columnist at Townhall dot com, Carol Platt Libeau, rehashes an old argument - that it's still culturally acceptable to bash Christians and other religious. Her points are a bit awkward, though - we suspect that it would be Christians discriminating against Romney because he’s a Mormon. On the second example, General Pace’s remarks are inappropriate specifically because he is expressing his personal beliefs in an environment where there one’s personal theology isn’t supposed to matter. He is violating the spirit of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” regulation. Since the military fires someone who openly admits to being gay or lesbian, shouldn’t they be firing anyone who openly admits to believing that gays and lesbians are immoral? And I note that the commentator neglects the last part of the study - that an atheist president is the most reviled and least trusted of the bunch. If there’s progress to be made about discrimination in religious matters, it might be a good place to start with the nonreligious instead. To help demonstrate this point, HeraldNet has a story about a teacher who drew controversy when he asked them to think about creation myths and the claims they make. He had identified as an atheist the day before, but the offense appears to have come from two places - a handout that asked the students to consider why an all-powerful god permitted evil in the world and a handout that had students look at Genesis as a creation myth and see how effective it was. Now, admittedly, if we’re going to get after people who identify as Christian and proselytize in schools, we have to look at atheists who might do the same. The article doesn’t present a strong case for the teachers atheism as being directly influential - it all seems to have been inferred that because the teacher said he was atheist, he had to have been trying to pervert the good Christians from their path.
Just as disturbing, though, was the part that said the teacher aiming for a college-level philosophy course style and level of material in a high-school literature course was inappropriate. I can see complaints about being off-subject, but this was basically an admission that the students were thought of as not being able to get up to the challenge. What’s gone wrong with the education system when we don’t actually encourage everyone to take a swing at some harder material. They might end up being able to hack it and then some. You never know unless you let them try.
Internet Safety Tips - worth a read. Those of us who have been here (and are thus aware of the existence of Rule 34) understand them, but they may be helpful for others who are still starting out on their journey.
Three officers involved of the killing of a groom surrendered today. What makes this story odd is that there were 50 shots fired by the three officers, on suspicion that one of the men was reaching in for a gun. Fifty shots. That’s more than just a hair-trigger response, I’d say.
Way over on the other end of police-type actions, an Australian police officer who sent a picture of her breasts while still in uniform (and with her name badge still visible) to her boyfriend is under investigation. What happened from there, though, is that it made the rounds of the Intarwebs. And that created problems.
Those looking for free images and textures may want to peek into Image*After - according to the front page, what’s there can be downloaded and used in personal or professional work. Wonder what the licensing or attribution requirements are for them.
Regarding more professional imagery, the Creative Generalist is nto fond of Cingular turning itself, image-wise, back into AT&T. At&T evokes images of older times, when people were charged per phone, and of monopolies and the Bell. Cingular was doing all right at being young and hip and all that other stuff. So this whole “We’re the New AT&T” thing seems like a step back.
The next-to last bit is.. ooh, shiny. Wandering minds are common occurrences, and it's mostly about background multitasking in the brain. On those occasions where concentration really is needed, a wandering mind can have bad effects, but for the most part, those things are few and far between. Plus, keeping some background processes running might help keep us aware even when we aren’t aware, so the Pod People don’t always walk out in front of the bus.
Last thing for tonight - 23 Apples of Eris has implemented a new feature - Discordian Games - in beta. Soon coming is Sink, the veritable Discordian pastime. There’s already 50,000 Blank White Pixels there.
