Getting out of the house - 24 May 2007

Spent much of the day with greyweirdo, hollygrahm and droewyn talking and watching a movie. Crank, it was. The movie itself has basically a paper-thin plot and lots of guns. greyweirdo tells me that if I were a film student and knew what to go looking for, I’d find that there are homages and such in there, but I’d have to know what I was looking for. I didn’t. Ah, well. Some good news out of this, though - I finalized when I will be in Washington state at the beginning of June, so those wishing to know my itinerary are welcome to contact me off-journal. I also got a call back confirming that I have one of the other two possible interviews set up while I’m out there. This makes me happy. I’m hoping that the other library will also call and agree to a time where an interview can be set-up and completed. Taking three shots at finding a job in the area would be much more preferable to two. So, we’re all for more interviews.

Since it will be the 25th by the time you see this, it’s Towel Day today, you hoopy froods. Make sure you have yours with you.

Following up on a previous story - the trooper that let the porn star off when she did him a sexual favor has been dismissed. Looking for confirmation of the act or the blog where it was supposedly reported, however, is a bit more difficult. At least, while I was trying to confirm that the blog posts mentioned actually did exist. Perhaps, after this dies down some, they will return.

Going from there, we’ll start with a joke that had to be said. Namely, snakes. On a plane, no less. 700 snakes on a plane. In other animal stuff, a German zoo has hired a clown to keep the monkeys in good spirits. The tactic appears to be working. Last in the animal category is a winged cat in China. The person taking care of the cat claims that they appeared after being harassed, Those studying the cat suggest that this was a mutation. Still, interesting to see a cat grow wings. Would be even more interesting to see the cat fly with them and know how to use them properly. Assuming that there’s sufficient skeletal and muscular structure in place that the cat can actually use the wings.

From the funny to the serious, Jesus’ General offers a list of innocent mistakes that have been made by the current Administration (in five minutes’ thought) after Monica Goodling testified that she hired people based on politics, but didn’t really tell all that much in her testimony. To which the Congresspersons are probably saying “We gave her immunity for this? If that’s all she did, then why was it like pulling teeth?” Is there something else Goodling knows?

The Army's demand for small caliber ammunition will delay other customers, like police departments, from receiving their shipments. I suppose it’s a good time to be a bullet maker.

The IAEA says that Iran is continuing to enrich uranium and expanding their activities in defiance of U.N. sanctions. The results that are likely from this? More sanctions from the U.N. Which doesn’t seem to be a particularly effective deterrent at this point in the game. Maybe some other offer will be able to bring Iran on board for open inspections and peaceful uses.

Worried about the machines taking over? Well, nOtbOt, a self-playing videogame, requires and accepts no human input to do its work. I don’t necessarily know if the joystick and the computer can play the game intelligently or not, but it would be interesting to sequence it so that “bots” had to display their moves (and if possible, actions) using controls like the players do. I wonder if it would make even the best bots vulnerable.

The ever-publicity-seeking Jack Thompson has personally told Bill Gates to ensure that Halo 3 can't be sold to minors, or he'll sue Microsoft to ensure that it happens. To which we smile and say, “That’s nice, Jack. But if you really wanted to stop minors from playing Halo 3, you’d have to sue to prevent Microsoft from selling it at all.”

In more wonderful people-to-people interactions, a man was arrested for pouring urine 169 times on his neighbor's house, with the total damages coming up to about 650,000 yen. It’s always nice to know that neighbors get along in such a spirited manner. At least he’s not shooting the kids that walked on his lawn. (Older story - man who did it has been convicted of murder, which is what the article’s really about.)

Google refuses to run advertisements for web sites that offer research papers to students. I have no idea at all, though, whether a Google search for such services will turn up results. Such is the wonder of the Intarwebs. Seriously, though, it would always be best for someone to write their own papers - there’s a large amount of knowledge yet undiscovered and connections not yet made.

A prototype object from Microsoft’s adCenter Labs is a demographics predictor for search queries and websites. So if you want to know who’s likely to be searching for various queries to tailor the page to them, this might be a useful tool.

Cellular phone headaches are all in your head, scientists report - if you expect something negative to happen, then it’s likely to happen to you. This seems to be a large part of other symptoms, if I recall correctly, as well. Perhaps being primed for it, you notice more when it happens and less when it doesn’t? In other statistical matters, which may or may not change depending on how you squint at them, a study correlates Wal-Mart's expansion with increased poverty levels in the country - basing it mostly on Wal-Mart forcing out competition that might pay a higher wage, and then hiring on those people for less than they were making before.

In health matters - binge drinking in college makes for worse decision-making. The study involved, notably, could not say which came first - the poor decision-making or the heavy drinking. But the two do seem to link hand-in-hand. Might be part of that whole “killing brain cells” bit that some people joke about when they go drinking. Something coming out of the University of Michigan, about psychological health, says what a lot of people who were teased in their earlier years (and later years) already know - Psychological bullying is just as nasty as physical bullying. So girls don’t get a free pass because they’re not physically butting heads with each other. Relational aggression causes problems. Bullying of any sort is not the correct course of action. Now, if we could just figure out some way of making that stick in the places where it’s most likely to happen. Anyway, last out of health, since there’s a thirtieth anniversary of the Star Wars franchise on 25 May, Anakin Skywalker is possibly borderline personality disorder, bipolar, and/or a narcissist, according to psychologists taking some time out to analyze he who would become Darth Vader.

A piece from 2004, that may be in some way useful for those who believe or connect with the parts of their minds (or of other worlds, depending on how you look at it) that hold fantastic creatures. It’s an explanation of where all the fairies, elves, gnomes, and other beings went, although, according to the piece, it’s not them who moved, it’s humanity, and it’s very difficult for many humans to get back in touch with reality.

The last part for tonight, however, is the top ten finalists in the Best Visual Illusion contest for 2007. The top prize winner doesn’t need Flash, but most of the rest do. Be forewarned.

Anyway, bed time. Will likely be away from the Intarwebs for much of the weekend, in No-Net land, celebrating birthdays among my family and extended family. (And apparently, even though I’m pretty sure I did, I must have forgotten to hit post last night.

Quick hits - 25 May 2007

After this entry, I’ll be taking off for the Land of No-Net, so everyone gets a mid-day update as... consolation?

Remember - Towel Day. Carry yours with you and introduce the work of Douglas Adams to all those who ask why you’re carrying one today.

Democrats cave in, give Bush the money he wants to play in the sandbox more. As part of that agreement, there are also minimum wage increases and additional domestic spending. Liberal Beagle offers his take on this that the domestic spending is good, but it won’t offset the money and lives just spent in Iraq. bradhicks takes from the public record and offers up all the names of the people who voted to continue to fund the war, including both of the senators and some of the representatives from my state. BAGNewNotes offers a pictoral definition of "quagmire", which he says describes the situation in Iraq. With reports coming back that say delays due to bureaucracy have been stopping urgently-needed gear from arriving, you can pin the blame wherever you like, on the people who appeared not to have planned for the long-term, or the people you believe are posturing and holding up necessary monies. Either way, people die.

Regardless of your political orientations, though, amenquohi offers a talk from her own personal files - she has her father's sargeant, a man who died in Vietnam, to thank that her father is home today, because that man’s death meant that her father could get on the trip home. Such is the difficulty of war. Peggy Noonan, in the Wall street Journal’s OpinionJournal, would rather have you think about immigration reforms and rethinking what America wants from immigrants instead. That piece starts well about how immigrants make the country strong, and then flops in the middle and does a crash-and-burn to the end in the suggestions of how to stem the tide of immigrants. Rich Lowry finds it appaling that while warfare is a popular programming topic, history deparmtents do not have military/war specialists in their faculties, and that there is an intellectual hostility to military history and the study of war. Considering who tends to get sacked first and take the longest to rebuild in war, I suspect that hostility among intellectuals is pretty justified.

One last fear-inducing thing, and then we’re done - the Pentagon will release a report on what they say is increasing Chinese military power. So that when we’re done being afraid of Iraq and Iran, we can go back to being afraid of China. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.

Even with higher gasoline prices, demand for sport-utility vehicles is on the rise again. After two years of falling sales, they’re back up again. If people are buying them to use them for the cargo space and what they were designed to be, then I suppose I can be okay with it, and hope that they buy fuel-efficient ones. But if it’s a compensation tool or just something for someone to feel safe on the road for, a smaller, more fuel-efficient, and likely less expensive car would be in order.

Of course, as with all persons commentating or reporting on events, be sure to know what slant they’re putting on the matter. As an example, Fallout Central offers a survey wondering why the media reports "Man apologizes for racial attack" when the article was about the attack and sentencing of the perpetrator. As I said, try and figure out where your reporter is coming from - there may be more there than appears.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has an idea for poor (parents?) in his city - if they can meet some benchmarks in health, education, and work, he'll reward them with up to $5,000 U.S. per year. For those living near the federal poverty line, that additional income could be a life-saver. In fact, that much might be sufficient to cover insurances and other costs that are often difficult to obtain while poor. The opinion piece is light on the details, so if a fuller plan is unveiled, it would be nice to study to see what sort of benchmarks and incentives are being offered.

The Buddhist Geeks have a reader-contributed piece about knowing the difference between your needs and strategies - needs are not bad in themselves, and trying to detach from them isn’t good for you. Strategies to meet those needs, though, should not garner attachments, so that it’s not the end of the world when you can’t have an ice cream cone to meet your need for sustenance.

A clash of the titans - after swallowing an alligator, a snake couldn't take it and burst. Wow. Both that the snake could swallow the gator, and that the gator might have managed to kill the snake from the inside. So the cartoons where the snake just gobbles up the person aren’t wholly off their rocker, I’d say. I just hope I don’t run into a snake that could do such a thing. Giving some monkey business, the United States National Institutes of Health have said they will stop breeding chimpanzees to do research on, finalizing what was a moratorium set in 1995. The NIH cited financial reasons for the decision.

For those possibly needing random digits for one reason or another, rather than using a pseudorandom number generator, HotBits claims to offer genuine random numbers by timing radioactive decays in materials. Which apparently doesn’t

The last before we go is this potentially frightening image of a mother using a Segway to take her child for a stroll in the stroller.