No more classes, no more books, no more teacher's dirty looks! - 16 April 2007

That’s it! No more! Class is officially out of session! There are no more lectures! (unless I go back for something, which isn’t likely right now) There’s only one more thing to do, and that’s turn in the project. Which means in one week at most, I’ll have done it! One of the great achievements of my life to this point will have happened for real. College will be finished. Future anxiety, go.

Shooter on Virginia Tech's campus this morning kills at least 30, and wounds more. School shootings of any type worry me. Actually, shootings of any type worry me. I’m worried about what generally seems to happen when people, guns, and emotions mix. I can see where people want gun controls because of these things.

A quick blurb in Pacific Views takes a look at how fundamentalists tend to have problems keeping children in the faith. Outside influences like science, inconsistencies in the text, and the upbringing of the children themselves make it difficult for them to stay. Hrm. So where do the new people come from if many children are deserting the family religion?

Fundamentalist interpretations of the Bible also can figure in reconstructions of the history of the southern United States. Souther Slavery As it Wasn't takes a look at a scholarly-looking piece of reconstructionism that claims that Slavery wasn’t all that bad, slaves were happy people, and other rewritings of history more in line with the Klan than civics class.

With the advances of technology, new, faster, cheaper, better is the driving force behind things. But there are some people who appreciate the old and work to preserve it. Collectors of older computer models have fun and profit with obsolete machines. Those people looking to transfer over old programs or read old files may soon have a great appreciation for these collectors.

According to an article in the Independent, technology, like mobile phones, might be responsible for the sudden bee deaths. It’s a hypothesis that probably rivals the “cell phones kill brain cells” one. But how would the radiation from mobile devices cause colony collapse? Unless the passive radiation is like someone getting a full-on burst of a nuclear reactor or something.

In Nigeria, child-friendly (and bright green) OLPC laptops have been distributed to a school outside the capital. So now we get to see how technology impacts their lives.

Now that computer-assisted bionic eyes are becoming more popular, technology is being developed to fine-tune and customize the picture to the users that have the implant installed. User-friendly bionic eyes. Question is now whether they’re going to start running some form of Windows. In other biotech the genetic code of the rhesus macaque has been mapped. This could help out research in figuring out how things might react in humans, or figure out what changed from them to create us (or the other way around.)

The U.S. Department of Defense, along with Cisco, are planning on putting up an IP router... iiiiiiiin spaaaaaaaaaaace. That way, satellites can communicate with each other and not have to bounce between the ground and the satellites quite so much. That could make for higher-speed high-speed.

Last in technology is something from The Register about new laws of robotics being drafter for combat droids which qould require them to have human permission to fire on humans, while being able to blast away other droids without qualms. Some droids might be equipped with non-lethal weaponry that could fire on humans as well as machines, getting the humans to flee before the machines get roasted by the machine-killers.There may be kinks in the system, though, if the humans aren’t visible or are connected to machines that are targets.

The city of Sao Paulo has banned outdoor advertising, starting January 1 of 2008. This has provoked a rather angry response from those doing the advertising, going even so far as to call it “injurious to society”. I think it’s an interesting experiment, and I hope that it succeeds or is at least informative. I could certainly enjoy seeing more natural wonders and less artificial advertisements. Perhaps later on, there might be strictly regulated advertising, but it might turn out to be better without ads. Some flickr photos of the ad-less city.

Other, more domestic political things have Liberal Eagle discussing the significant effect the media has on U.S. presidential elections, by constructing and then forcing the facts to conform to “stories” that the media outlets create for the candidates. Liberal Eagle looks into the past to see how this helped people see the younger Bush as a down-home guy and Mr. Gore as a boring nerd. He also links to Eric Alterman's story about what the "stories" are going to be for 2008’s current leaders. See how well the media and the candidates stick to their scripts, and whether that helps or hurts them.

Other politics involve the watch lists, many of which are secret, but all of which cause hassles for people who aren't on the list. After all, there’s nothing quite like being Unaccountably Randomly Searched in a consistent manner.

Next to last is a piece on AlterNet where the writer of The Feminine Mistake, a book about what women sacrifice and gain by stopping being working Moms and going to stay-at-home moms, suggests that many stay-at-home moms are in active denial about whether their choices were/are good, based on the reactions to the book (without having read it). So, should dads start being the stay-at-home parent, if we can get back into the workforce and such easier?

The last thing for tonight is something that shows the versatility of programming for the Firefox browser. The Pacman extension for Firefox adds the retro game to the browser. With this installed, one doesn’t even have to go out to a potentially blocked site to play. Hehe. I wonder how many people have this installed to help their work boredom.

Anyway, I’m going to bed. I just realized that I’ll be missing the wiffleball game tomorrow night... which would have been my last wiffleball game ever. I warned them they’d have to find another pitcher. So I was a semester early. Now, I’m going to bed, since my Internet connection is waffling.

Early update - 17 April 2007

It’s officially the last day of classes today. You get an early update because I won’t be around later tonight to post at the regular time. So here we go. Before the day’s done, if you have one nearby that’s participating, go get a free ice cream cone from Ben and Jerry’s.

More pet food recalls. With this continuing saga, I think some policy revisions are in order. The FDA has also issued an olive recall.

To fill the Rage Gauge of many, we find that Jack Thompson has already blamed video games for the Virginia Tech shooting, and Fred Phelps plans on picketing the funerals of the victims.

The Creative Generalist demonstrates that even in baseball, a game where one or the other hand dominates, having a generalist, like an ambidextrous pitcher, can be a big help. So not only can we get switch-hitters, but switch-pitchers, too. That would be neat.

A retired Marine Corps general was offered a position of being the White House’s implementation manager for Iraq. He declined. Why he declined, he said, is because the administration had not developed an appropriate big-picture strategy. Quite possibly, they still haven’t. And with claims of Iraq groups making their own rockets, the violence is likely to go up, not down. Domestically, the Decider mangnaimously said that Congress might actually be within their bounds to draft and pass bills on the Iraq situation that aren't blindly funding everything. He still disagrees, of course, and Dick Cheney says the Dems will cave, although not without first having a veto showdown. Some spine from the legislature would not be unwarranted right now.

Austin Hill, in Townhall yesterday, put forward the idea that because Demcoratic candidates have decided not to appear at the Fox-sponsored Congressional Black Caucus debates, they are unlikely to be good at the Presidential office. This assumption rests on the further claim that Fox News is, as it claims, fair and balanced, does not put spin on the reports it airs, and has become a dominant and popular news channel because of this lack of spin. Thus, according to Hill, the reason those candidates are not appearing is because they’re afraid of what could happen to their reputations and popularity were they to appear on Fox. Well, if they did appear on Fox, it might turn out that they weren’t liberal candidates at all, but conservatives in liberal clothing, or Fox might decide that it wanted Bill O’Reily as the moderator at the last second, or something. Since Fox is generally regarded as a conservative outlet (among the already conservative-leaning media, depending on whose point of view you subscribe to), hosting a debate supposedly on liberal territory and grounds suspiciously looks like a Trojan horse, y’know? Taking this “oh, woe is us conservatives” idea further, Tom Delay (Yeah, that Tom DeLay) accuses the Democrats of having overstepped their boundaries from the start, living in ideological isolation, and not actually having a plan. Not that conservatives have ever been accused of overstepping their bounds (unitary executive? Patriot Act? Terry Schaivo?), living in ideological isolation (Rush, Bill, Sean, George, Alberto, Dick, Pat, Jerry, Fred...), and not having a plan (Iraq) at all.

The best political jab, though, is that a Pew survey finds the most politically knowldegeable people do one of two things - read newspapers regularly, or watch the Daily Show and the Colbert Report. Hats off to the satirists at Comedy Central for making a more informed populace through humor.

Some mentally ill minds decided it would be worthwhile, for whatever reason, to douse playground equipment with cleaner containing a high concentration of sulfuric acid. The matter wasn’t detected until a 2.5 year old child slid down the slide and suffered third-degree burns because of it. Apparently, though, that was the only injury in this incident, which is nice, but I would want to know why someone would coat the equipment in the acidic substance in the first place.

If you’re looking for a good vent against the school system, read the account of someone accused of making a bomb threat to a school... except that the school's clock had adjusted for Daylight Savings Time. Source authenticity is dubious, though. The account itself reads like something that could happen in the education system, though, so I wonder whether it really did happen.

Technological ranting more your style - take potshots at Sony, which in their zeal to upgrade their copy protection, made DVDs unplayable on even their own DVD players. Oh, and while the solution will be a firmware update, the update isn’t out yet. Ship’s sinking, people. Either new ways have to be developed, or you have to do something you’re loathe to do - trust your consumers to buy what they think is worth the price. Which may mean that the price has to change.

This is either the last barb of this entry, or a very useful table. It’s the Tax Freedom Day Table, telling us when in the year, depending on what state you live in, how many working days it will take to pay all the tax burdens of the year. That’s assuming a 7-day workweek, however, and I’m not sure at what wage level, and that one doesn’t actually spend any money. Here the article paired with it, as well as a breakdown of how much the 8-hour workday goes to paying what things. And somewhere in that mess we’re supposed to also be saving money for the days when we don’t work...

Last for this entry: If you’re looking for a diversion after all that sharp-tounged stuff, maybe try creating your own Wired cover. If that’s not entertaining enough, have a look at Rube Goldberg-style ping-pong ball-to-cup shots. If that still doesn’t do it, maybe a Wordsworth rap will satisfy?