I did it, I did it! - 27 April 2007

Ah-hahahahahahhahhahhaaa! (OVERLORD!)

So, yeah. My commencement exercises were today. Got to shake hands with the President of the University, the interim Dean of the school, and make it official. Last grade in, a vowel like the rest. It’s done, finished, complete. I am Silver Adept, Master of Science - Information. Six years of schooling is finished. Mission accomplished. W00t!

As a special treat, and because I didn’t do anything yesterday, Prepare yourselves for a double dose of linktime! (Warning, warning! Long post ahead. You may want to open this in a new window, just to keep track of all the tabs you could open in this. If you’re of the tl:dr variety, I’ve been told it’s about five PgDn.)

The first category is political stuff: Like John McCain skipping a briefing from General Petraeus, something that Nancy Pelosi also did, but that the media outlets seem to be overlooking in their haste to contrive a controversy over the Speaker. The General wants us to commit to the long run and keep feeding money and troops to accomplish the mission. The media, while looking at Pelosi, don’t seem to be making much of Laura Bush's statement that nobody suffers more than she and the President do. Several make a comparison to a similar misinterpretation regarding a lack of bread in the French peasantry. Others are much more blunt about the situation for soldiers and their families. There’s also Harpers magazine running an article that claims the Department of Justice supported systematic vote-suppression acts in Democratic strongholds. Or The House narrowly passing a war-funding bill that has a timetable attached, and then the Senate also passing the bill, drawing scorn and accusations of defeatism from Republicans and a guarantee of a veto from the White House. Additionally, the Australian Prime Minister said that this vote helps al-Qaeda, and a spokesperson for the Iraq government criticized the vote. There’s also someone who links immigration policies to Satan, and judges who let people out on bond when they recite Bible versus,

The Secretary of State has indicated that she will not appear in person under a subpoena, claiming the answers they seek she has already answered under oath. So, if she does actually refuse to appear, and the Congress does want to see her, what options do they have? Can they send the police to her office to bring her before the committee in question?

The kingdom of Bhutan is transitioning to democracy - by the will of the king. Parliamentary elections have been ordered by the king and mock elections are scheduled. The modern world is creeping into Bhutan, slowly and deliberately, and the people are a bit hesitant to embrace it.

With regard to Osama bin Laden, the United States and Mexico prefer that he be executed, whereas other countries would like lifelong sentences in jail for him.

Next, stupidity. Because of a campus shooting, the paranoia has been ratcheted up even more. Such that a creative writing essay resulted in a high-schooler's arrest, because of violent content. Staying in the English department, there’s also the account of a poetry professor's attempt to recycle papers being reported as a terrorist act. Because he looked Middle Eastern, and because the terrorists want to blow up our recycling piles and garbage machines.

Further on the subject of the shootings, Hyphen Magazine has a short blurb about how stereotypes come to play in that incident, and The Republic of T has a well-thought out essay about the striking similarities between people who engage in violence at school - they all have to deal with a definition of hypermasculinity as "normal" or "popular", where only the biggest, wealthiest, most “manly” of men and boys are considered to be real men and the rest are sissies, “faggots”, weak, or powerless. As it is put, “So, though not actually queer, our school shooters are too queer to enter ‘the playing field of male competition’ and not queer enough to qualify for another team. That leaves them nowhere to go except the sidelines.” And being a perpetual bench-warmer will not do good things for your emotional state. (Also, here's the first part of this series, with examples of the anti-gay teasing that happened to school shooters by their peers. And the implication that to be a “real man”, one had to have sexual interest from women in the peer group.) In this day and age, though, perhaps "normal" sexuality is being redefined, thanks to the Internet. (The article does make mention that even when posting eprsonals, even with interests that are non-vanilla, people hasten to assure others that they are, indeed, normal, and not One of Those Perverts. In some cases, being One of Those Perverts might be exactly what someone wants. (Something like pedophilia, though, that violates the ideas of being safe, sane, and consensual, is probably still beyond the pale.)

Next, music. Spinal Tap to reunite and play a concert for Live Earth.

And then, technology. Like boots to help you find space on the Tube if all the seats are taken. And the idea of weightlessness becoming a therapy, following Stephen Hawkings’s flight and weightless experience. Or possibly that low earth orbit retirement communities could happen. All this to make the cost of getting into space cheaper, so that maybe getting between planets and star systems could be cheaper and faster. There’s also DNA that was once considered junk may have regulatory data encoded in it. I can see this being a case where people get worried that if we start gene-tinkering, we’ll trip something unintended. There’s Wireless Internet-capable robots that can be almost totally built with off-the-shelf parts.

In health, this Femhealth article about the dangers of high fructose corn syrup sounds like it’s stringing together disparate entities and lumping together things that are only really related because of the possible presence of the corn syrup. I’d like a second opinion, though - is this making a good case and just drawing in diverse sources, or is it trying to hang together things that don’t belong near each other? Totally unrelated to that, a scientist claims that perhaps a microbe that was in Asian bee colonies has mutated to be lethal to European and American colonies, possibly causing the colony collapses.

And oddities. A man left his horse outside at the ATM while he slept off some drink in a German bank's foyer. And the Dow Jones Industrial average going over 13,000 points, even though I suspect the job market for us peons is still miserable. There’s also Bush doing his best attempt at dancing. Perhaps he would be better at Finger Jousting. There’s also the pill that claims to help with canine sparation anxiety, a steampunk mouse,

Something that may be of dispute - U.K. FHM readers have voted Jessica Alba to be the "sexiest female" for this year. Anotehr object that may cause heat and discussion - the TSR/WotC/D&D magazines, Dungeon and Dragon, are slated to stop publication. No word yet whether there will be any replacement publication, or whether another publisher will pick up where Paizo leaves off.

Last, things of interest - like the nuances and complexities of the bodhisattva's promise. the way numbers can be used to say anything, even that the French hate themselves more than even Americans do, "robot villages" that aim to try and show how cultures evolve, translations between what is said and what is meant, and the unintended side effect of a green-living experiment that forewent new nonessentials for a year - they saved significant amounts of money by buying used.

The Slacktivist says that while "not as bad as" may be an accurate statement, the point is that we should not be making those comparisons, but should instead be unyielding in our demands for a morally straight and upright government.

There’s also something from Wired about the top ten real reasons geeks make better lovers - they’re future-welcoming, pretty open and accepting, and they bring a personal touch to increasingly multi-dimensional and complex relationships. Geeks rawk.

And finally, the reaction to a proposed hate-crime bill, claiming that it would suppress a Christian's ability to talk about things they find immoral, because sermons or other such statements might incite people to violence. There’s also some claiming that the bill would fund a curriculum “to promote homosexuality and cross-dressing as normal behaviors”. It’s amazing what kind of claims are made in reaction to anything that certain “Christian” types feel will restrict them.

So that’s the big giant edition for tonight. I’m just happy that it’s all done. (Overlord!) It’s in, it’s official, and I did it! So, congratulations to me, for this achievement. Tomorrow, we start in again on the whole job hunt thing. But for now, I’m on the top of the peak.

First day of freedom - 28 April 2007

So what did I do on the first day of my new-found freedom? Stay in and play video games, watch hockey, and generally loaf about. This is a good thing. Tomorrow will be Breakfast and Bowling, a great way of spending time with the family. Thanks to all the people who gave graduation congratulations. It’s not quite sunk in yet that I’m all done. I’m pretty sure that on Monday, it’ll roll close to class time and I’ll go “Wait, have to go to cl... wait, no more class.” or something like that.

A part of James Doohan's ashes went up into space today, along with several others who had requested a space burial for their remains. The problem with growing older is that all the people that you know or grew up around end up dying.

The current President famously asked “Is our children learning?” Stephen Bezruchka says our children are lagging behind the rest of the world in a lot more than just learning, and this realization should be spurring everyone to build a better country for the children, one hopefully where if there are any chemicals in the water, they are supposed to be there for well-documented and researched reasons, not appearing without people knowing why they're there or what they do. Which is probably a semi-minor issue compared to other countries, where children raiders, soldiers, and bandits are common, but they’re not fighting for grand causes anymore. Our version of child soldiers, for the moment, appears to be the children steeped and drowned in certain religious cultures and then sent out into the world to convert the rest or die trying.

Japan's supreme court rejected compensation for the "comfort women" of World War II, but did acknowledge they were coerced. The more the government dances around any admission of responsibility, the more suspicious things look. Other women’s issues (although that seems a bit odd to say, considering a lot of issues that involve women primarily also have consequences for men) include a comparison between the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision on abortions and China's continuing policy of trying to engineer their population, and an attempt at terrorism in Austin being foiled by the police. We used to hear lots of stories about people trying to blow up clinics or kill doctors. Has that abated, or has the media eye simply turned elsewhere in its quest for blood?

Climate change is a hot campaign issue for all political candidates. Whether anything actually comes out of it is another matter entirely. Michael Bloomberg wants to institute congestion taxes for cars that drive through the high-traffic areas of New York City as part of a pollution-reduction initiative designed to get people on mass transit and think before driving. If I recall correctly, the city of London has instituted such taxes. For those in the area, is it a useful deterrent to motor vehicles?

Adding another into the Ideologically Two-Faced category, Think Progress informs us that the director accused of utilizing an escort service for massages also forced organizations applying for funds to combat HIV/AIDS to not make outreach to sex workers. Must be nice being able to see in opposite directions at the same time like that. In the Stretching the Truth department, the highly-touted drop in violence in Iraq left out an important category - explosive devices like car bombs. This is matters of “lies, damn lies, and statistics”, it appears. The last from this category is a simple phrase - It's a lot easier to persuade people to be "saved" from their sins if there's a gigantic laundry list of sins already present.

Here’s a couple other things of potential political interest - Saudi Arabia arrested one hundred seventy-two people and claimed they were all involved in a single terror plot against the country, which seems a bit odd with as much as several conservative bloggers and media outlets want to paint Saudi Arabia as the heart of anti-West sentiment. Something more in line with their sentiment is the Times Online saying the chief architect of the London subway bombings has been captured as he tried to enter Iraq.

Monica Goodling has immunity. So now she has no reason to hid behind the Fifth Amendment. Let’s figure out what her secret is, and why she chose to hide rather than come forward. Additionally, the Justice Department has stopped political appointees from making decisions about who interns at the Department, after complaints surfaced that there appeared to be a consistent conservative/Republican bias to those being chosen. Staying in the realm of lawyers, Adventus talks about the lack of lawyers available to those in Guantanamo, and some of the things that have happened there in response to this lack of representation.

Ralph Peters writes in the Armed Forces Journal that the Army should write doctrine for occupation, so that the next time someone's supposed to be toppled, there's a plan on how to be successful, documentation of that plan, and most, if not all, of the requirements will be laid out up front. It might make it harder for war and occupation to be sold to the country and the politicians, but Peters is confident it will also make any war that successfully gets through the political process will be executed smartly and efficiently by the military.

Last for tonight is the 10 most commonly used passwords, according to an upcoming issue of PC Magazine. Of that list of ten, there is a musical group, a simian, and several phrases that would be used in any system running MovieOS.

Anyway, on that note, I’m going to bed. Tomorrow I get to go bowling, which makes me happy, regardless of how poorly I do.