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And at it again - 18 June 2007
Jun. 19th, 2007 10:38 amToday was a fairly lazy Monday. Watched the movie Wag the Dog, which could stand in nicely as a documentary-of-sorts on the way politics is run today, and which probably could have done the same duty when it was originally released. There was also that bit where I recognized a lot of names, including some of the cameos and bit parts. Maybe I’m finally starting to see enough movies. I also got to see and hear Lemony Snicket on The Hour tonight, which was cool. There was also the watching of The Empire Strikes Back, and much complaining that the humidity/heat combinations are starting to get oppressive. We’re due up for a thunderstorm from the way the weather’s behaving. Not that we’ll necessarily get such a thing any time soon. Also, the internet at the current residence has become twitchily unstable, something I am not fond of at all - it was running smoothly for some time now, but all the lights are on, and the company denies there being problems, so it might be something with our current set-up, but I don’t know what it is, to be honest. Maybe we’re just all trying to pull down too much bandwidth at the same time. After all of these things, I could probably use a drink. The Japanese have some interesting ideas on liquid refreshment, let’s query them.
In the quest for better energy drinks, caffeine and other stimulants are key. Blue Cow Relaxation Drink aims for the other end of the spectrum. Although, most people I know use alcoholic drinks as their relaxants after work or other stresses. As the case may be, though, perhaps a small amount of anger is perfect for making good, quick decisions. (Howstuffworks has a more in-depth look at this phenomenon.)
For the restaurant called “Food” that will make millions for us all, we’ve found a beverage to serve - drinks named Whatever and Anything. Each of the named drinks can be one of six possible flavors, but there are no markings on the can as to which is which, so you don’t know what you have until you drink it. A perfect complement to dishes such as “I don’t know”, “You Decide”, and “Wherever.”
A possible new way of driving home a no smoking policy in hospitals - discharging those patients that violate the smoking bans. The drive to remove or restrict cigarette smoking in the public sphere continues. With hospitals, with all the possible unintended consequences and complications that smoking could cause, it would seem pretty easy to make a ban like that stick. Oregon intends to ban indoor smoking totally by the year 2009 with the passing of a bill that removes exemptions from the original smoking ban.
After all of this blending of food, drink, excess, smoke, and the rest, we toss two religions in and pulse for a little bit, until well-mixed. Meet the Reverend Ann Holmes Redding, an ordained Episcopalian minister who is also a Muslim. Rather than trying to resolve out doctrinal differences (and between the two, there would be many), she just says it is so, and that the two are compatible. Many of the people around her can’t get their heads around that. Which is rather sad. The possibilities for progress and new knowledge coming from someone who practices both religions devoutly and understands them is immense. I fear, though, that smaller minds will do their best to stop that knowledge from being developed and disseminated.
Reaching into the bag of tricks and hoping for either a rabbit or something interesting, let’s start with Trojan's inability to get a condom commercial on the airwaves, because they're being promoted for their purpose - to prevent pregnancies. CBS and Fox turned down the ad, even for late-night. The pull of religious conservatives and their potential offense is great.
Alternet offers, for the aspiring reformist, twenty things about corporate crime you should know. Not that street crime shouldn’t also be prosecuted and prevented, but corporate crime is often more damaging (and these days, harder to prosecute). Not to mention that corporations are often working against you, like AT&T trying to identify off-shore pirates and stop them from using their networks to distribute illegal files, a technology that can easily be turned inward at the merest request of the *AAs, no doubt. Corporations are already in the habit of dictating to you how you can use their products. Of course, with Google’s increasing suite of darn near everything, people are wondering if it's okay for Google to own us. IF we’re worried about our privacy and the personally identifiable information being collected, it may not be so. There’s more in the “invasive” parts, including something that was an annoyance in the movie Minority Report, and would likely be even more of an annoyance here - a device that can be implanted with a billboard to know when it's being looked at. While it’s not sophisticated to pick out particular people, it can certainly record when and where people are looking at the advertising signage. One more way for corporations to look at when redesigning themselves to intrude upon your attention.
Taking the apparent opposite of the powerful activist, the Chronicle offers a look at the Goth movement's longevity - due to its adaptability, mostly, and ability to balance itself between the contradictions that make up gothness. Probably out of every youth culture movement, there end up being a few more goths. And with the Gothic Lolita thing still popular (and beautiful - a lot of those outfits I’ve seen are well-matched to their wearers), I suspect there will be a few more generations of goths for quite some time (as we/they get older, we/they might start starring in the Rocky Horror performances, rather than just attending. It’s probably something everyone should do once in their life.)
The following sets of material come from the “Gee, really?” bureau - Sir Salman Rushdie's Sir-ness is not supported by Iran. No surprises here, even though they’ve said they dont’ support the fatwa that called for his execution, they’re not going to rescind it. So, Sir Salman, enjoy your knighthood. Now much more appeased and receiving money frozen previously, North Korea has invited inspectors back into the country to discuss shutting down their nuclear plants. How long they’ll last, I don’t know. Finally, the BBC's internal investigation of itself finds that the BBC is biased toward liberal causes. No, really. As if we didn’t know that.
The Untied States and Australia are engaging in a gigantic war games exercise. I wonder where they’re finding the troops, myself, considering how many are in Iraq and Afghanistan at the moment. Might be that they’re also looking about for good robots, like Stanford's Junior, an entry in DARPA's unmanned vehicle driving challenge to take up the slack where there aren’t enough humans to drive vehicles sweeping for IEDs.
Finally making it to the Cool Things Department - a skyscreen - lots and lots of LEDs layered on the celing of a shopping mall in China, playing various videos, which can make the mall appear underwater, among other things. Coooool. Wonder what the power consumption on that is, though.
Similar Cool Thing is a slideshow from the NYTimes that puts the human side-by-side with their on-line avatars. (Warning, it’ll resize your browser window) It’s neat to see how some of the avatars look very much like the people, and others try to have them look nothing like their real selves. Someone else, however, wonders whether the politicians we elect are real humans and administers a Voight-Kampff test to see if the San Franciso mayorial candiddates are Replicants.
The last cool thing for tonight - Happy 50th birthday, Frisbee! If you haven’t caught onto the fads of say, Ultimate Frisbee or Frisbee Golf, here’s 10 fun things you can do with a Frisbee. I doubt, however, that Disc Races are part of this enterprise.
Last bit for tonight - an Ubuntu system, using IE4Linux and Wine managed to pass the Windows Genuine Advantage tests, permitting the Linux user to download otherwise-restricted software. I wonder, however, whether WGA was doing exactly was it was supposed to - a system that appeared, for all intents and purposes, to be a Windows system asked for data, presented its credentials, and was accepted. So it may be more of a hat-tip to the people developing Wine that they can pass the test for WGA that a spike against Microsoft that they can’t determine what really is Windows and what’s just pretending.
Anyway, bed-like and all that.
In the quest for better energy drinks, caffeine and other stimulants are key. Blue Cow Relaxation Drink aims for the other end of the spectrum. Although, most people I know use alcoholic drinks as their relaxants after work or other stresses. As the case may be, though, perhaps a small amount of anger is perfect for making good, quick decisions. (Howstuffworks has a more in-depth look at this phenomenon.)
For the restaurant called “Food” that will make millions for us all, we’ve found a beverage to serve - drinks named Whatever and Anything. Each of the named drinks can be one of six possible flavors, but there are no markings on the can as to which is which, so you don’t know what you have until you drink it. A perfect complement to dishes such as “I don’t know”, “You Decide”, and “Wherever.”
A possible new way of driving home a no smoking policy in hospitals - discharging those patients that violate the smoking bans. The drive to remove or restrict cigarette smoking in the public sphere continues. With hospitals, with all the possible unintended consequences and complications that smoking could cause, it would seem pretty easy to make a ban like that stick. Oregon intends to ban indoor smoking totally by the year 2009 with the passing of a bill that removes exemptions from the original smoking ban.
After all of this blending of food, drink, excess, smoke, and the rest, we toss two religions in and pulse for a little bit, until well-mixed. Meet the Reverend Ann Holmes Redding, an ordained Episcopalian minister who is also a Muslim. Rather than trying to resolve out doctrinal differences (and between the two, there would be many), she just says it is so, and that the two are compatible. Many of the people around her can’t get their heads around that. Which is rather sad. The possibilities for progress and new knowledge coming from someone who practices both religions devoutly and understands them is immense. I fear, though, that smaller minds will do their best to stop that knowledge from being developed and disseminated.
Reaching into the bag of tricks and hoping for either a rabbit or something interesting, let’s start with Trojan's inability to get a condom commercial on the airwaves, because they're being promoted for their purpose - to prevent pregnancies. CBS and Fox turned down the ad, even for late-night. The pull of religious conservatives and their potential offense is great.
Alternet offers, for the aspiring reformist, twenty things about corporate crime you should know. Not that street crime shouldn’t also be prosecuted and prevented, but corporate crime is often more damaging (and these days, harder to prosecute). Not to mention that corporations are often working against you, like AT&T trying to identify off-shore pirates and stop them from using their networks to distribute illegal files, a technology that can easily be turned inward at the merest request of the *AAs, no doubt. Corporations are already in the habit of dictating to you how you can use their products. Of course, with Google’s increasing suite of darn near everything, people are wondering if it's okay for Google to own us. IF we’re worried about our privacy and the personally identifiable information being collected, it may not be so. There’s more in the “invasive” parts, including something that was an annoyance in the movie Minority Report, and would likely be even more of an annoyance here - a device that can be implanted with a billboard to know when it's being looked at. While it’s not sophisticated to pick out particular people, it can certainly record when and where people are looking at the advertising signage. One more way for corporations to look at when redesigning themselves to intrude upon your attention.
Taking the apparent opposite of the powerful activist, the Chronicle offers a look at the Goth movement's longevity - due to its adaptability, mostly, and ability to balance itself between the contradictions that make up gothness. Probably out of every youth culture movement, there end up being a few more goths. And with the Gothic Lolita thing still popular (and beautiful - a lot of those outfits I’ve seen are well-matched to their wearers), I suspect there will be a few more generations of goths for quite some time (as we/they get older, we/they might start starring in the Rocky Horror performances, rather than just attending. It’s probably something everyone should do once in their life.)
The following sets of material come from the “Gee, really?” bureau - Sir Salman Rushdie's Sir-ness is not supported by Iran. No surprises here, even though they’ve said they dont’ support the fatwa that called for his execution, they’re not going to rescind it. So, Sir Salman, enjoy your knighthood. Now much more appeased and receiving money frozen previously, North Korea has invited inspectors back into the country to discuss shutting down their nuclear plants. How long they’ll last, I don’t know. Finally, the BBC's internal investigation of itself finds that the BBC is biased toward liberal causes. No, really. As if we didn’t know that.
The Untied States and Australia are engaging in a gigantic war games exercise. I wonder where they’re finding the troops, myself, considering how many are in Iraq and Afghanistan at the moment. Might be that they’re also looking about for good robots, like Stanford's Junior, an entry in DARPA's unmanned vehicle driving challenge to take up the slack where there aren’t enough humans to drive vehicles sweeping for IEDs.
Finally making it to the Cool Things Department - a skyscreen - lots and lots of LEDs layered on the celing of a shopping mall in China, playing various videos, which can make the mall appear underwater, among other things. Coooool. Wonder what the power consumption on that is, though.
Similar Cool Thing is a slideshow from the NYTimes that puts the human side-by-side with their on-line avatars. (Warning, it’ll resize your browser window) It’s neat to see how some of the avatars look very much like the people, and others try to have them look nothing like their real selves. Someone else, however, wonders whether the politicians we elect are real humans and administers a Voight-Kampff test to see if the San Franciso mayorial candiddates are Replicants.
The last cool thing for tonight - Happy 50th birthday, Frisbee! If you haven’t caught onto the fads of say, Ultimate Frisbee or Frisbee Golf, here’s 10 fun things you can do with a Frisbee. I doubt, however, that Disc Races are part of this enterprise.
Last bit for tonight - an Ubuntu system, using IE4Linux and Wine managed to pass the Windows Genuine Advantage tests, permitting the Linux user to download otherwise-restricted software. I wonder, however, whether WGA was doing exactly was it was supposed to - a system that appeared, for all intents and purposes, to be a Windows system asked for data, presented its credentials, and was accepted. So it may be more of a hat-tip to the people developing Wine that they can pass the test for WGA that a spike against Microsoft that they can’t determine what really is Windows and what’s just pretending.
Anyway, bed-like and all that.
