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Two days left here - 15 August 2007
Aug. 16th, 2007 01:55 amFirst, a big happy birthday to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
greyweirdo, who celebrated another year of life today.
Second, more packing achieved today. Still unsure about transporting posters and the remaining material that’s here, including more formal clothing and some remaining stuff, like my desk. I think I’m calling in one more vehicle to make sure I have room to fit everything inside. Then the mad rush to get everything sorted and decided on for the trip out. I certainly haven’t left myself much time for relaxing and enjoying my last days here. Or for relaxing the first few days I’m out there. And then work starts. Busy, busy, busy, I guess. But it’ll settle down once I’m settled down. However long that actually takes.
Following on an earlier story, a new trial will be ordered for the gentleman convicted of drug trafficking of Vicodin for which he had a prescription. The appeals court threw out the conviction, where in the trial the jurors had not been told it was legal for the man to possess Vicodin if he had a prescription for it. The prosecutor must really want the man behind bars or have quite the evidence that he was intending on selling drugs.
The Happiness Project offers tips on keeping resolutions and drawing happiness from them - a resolution calendar, where one marks whether resolutions have been met, exceeded, or failed at. I suspect the idea can be extended to other things, but it looks like it’ll work well as a record of self-improvement - and it might help mitigate the self-recrimination done on those occasional days where you don’t hit your goals.
A rather underhanded, but likely legal, move by AT&T, possibly another reason to delay getting your iPhone, but most likely a reason not to do business with AT&T for mobiles - a user racked up more than $5,000 in charges by using their iPhone data capabilities overseas. Rather than asking the user whether they wanted services turned on overseas, because of the possible expense (and people know that calling is expensive overseas), AT&T turned the service on automatically because the user had good credit. And I suspect they may be doing the same for voice, as well. No warning, no option, no information about what the rates will be overseas, just on. And $5,000 later, the truth comes through.
Joe Bageant on AlterNet brings bread and circuses all the way up into the modern age, calling it A Feast of Bullshit and Spectacle: The Great American Media Mind Warp, a “hologram” of media that insulates, reflects, co-opts and resells at a profit, and otherwise controls and regulates the populace, peddling whatever it considers to be profitable, true or bullshit. I suspect this would be blamed for the creation and maintenance of the “sheeple” that everyone accuses everyone else of being. It is true, though, that someone pontificating from this existence, and those that can read it, are probably sufficiently inside the hologram that thinking outside it can be difficult. Perhaps if we all followed the São Paulo example and banned outdoor advertising, the hologram could be broken enough to see clearly for a bit. Other places are thinking in a different direction, though - the city of Athens, Alabama is considering prohibiting the sale of alcohol in the city. Which would probably make many people unhappy. Well, possession and consumption would still be legal, it would just have to be bought elsewhere.
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak wants to build his eventual home. How Wozniak wants to build an energy efficient house is the subject of an article at ECNmag, and involves a particular dirt construction method, and a particular kind of wood that supposedly self-regulates indoor temperatures to about 71 degrees year-round. That would be cool - of course, can’t have a Thneed craze that would bring the Lorax to his knees.
Accommodation of religious requirements is becoming an increasingly larger problem for some public schools. While at the moment, it appears to be Muslims that are causing the most stir, including getting recess timed so that Muslim children may engage in their mid-day prayer' or offering halal meats to the students, there very well could be a swarm, both from the side wishing to have their faith represented and the side that wants to crush any additional accommodations because they feel providing such options could be considered an endorsement of one religion over another. (And possibly the faction that wants to see anything regarding non-Christian faiths excised because of their non-True Faith status, too.) Working in the opposite direction, from a possible explosion of difficulty from tolerance toward a willingness to ask God to smite, after Americans United for Separation of Church and State filed a complaint with the IRS that a church was violating its exemption by endorsing candidates, the leader of the church, Wiley Drake, called for "imprecatory prayer" against those who filed the complaint. Imprecatory prayer is asking God to do evil unto his enemies. The problem with that, as the Faithful Skeptic demonstrates in a response to a no-longer-existent post about how imprecatory prayer against radical Muslims would be a fine idea, is you have to be sure that God's totally on your side. That whole glass houses and stones bit. Or the specks and planks part, whichever you like. Asking God to smite someone who has a legitimate complaint about your activities as a tax-exempt organization is not exactly the most stable of tactics. Plus, with as many people as have been asking YHWH to smite over the years and the lack of smiting going on, I’d say he’s either backlogged or that you have to talk to him just right. And it’s not helping that the New york police commissioner is convinced that the Internet is breeding a new set of radical terrorists in the Untied States. The reasons that he gives as for why someone might begin “radicalization” are less than convincing, however. And the whole thing is about finding people who aren’t going to identify themselves as extremists until they strike. Fearfearfear. Spy on your neighbors, citizens. They’ll all potential terrorists. Report them if they start behaving oddly, read articles that look suspicious, or compile and post lists of things unfriendly to the government and God. If they’re not on your side, and you’re confident of that, they’re going to come in one night, kill the good Christian men, rape the good Christian women (and maybe even the boys and girls for kicks), and then indoctrinate all of you and force you to be like them. Fearfearfeargiveupyourlibertiesfearfear.
Iran's Revolutionary Guard has been designated a global terrorist organization, allowing the United States to take actions against them like freezing accounts and disrupting business that work with them. This is rather odd, considering the Revolutionary Guard are a government organization. But any excuse is a good one, for this administration. It’s what got us into Iraq, after all.
Next-to last is a few of reasons why Wikipedia will probably never make it to a scholarly source status, even through its best efforts to provide correct information and to edit away things that are untrue or biased. We’ll start with Geeks are Sexy posting about edits made by Fox-owned IP addresses to Wikipedia articles that do not correct nor clarify, and are intended to generate negative views of their opponents and positive views of themselves. And continue into Threat Level's list of shameful Wikipedia spin jobs. How are these things being tracked? Well, Virgil Griffith, a Cal Tech student, has launched a Wikipedia scanner to trace and locate where the IPs logged on anonymous edits originate from. Public information, paired with public information, produces a way of showing that someone on a Diebold IP, say, is editing the page to remove criticism. Or Fox IPs changing things about rival television shows. For those wanting to see where possible skullduggery lies, the Wiki Scanner is available at http://wikiscanner.virgil.gr. (He’s hoping to hit good PageRank for the word Virgil, but I think I’d rather let Dante’s Inferno, or the poet himself take the top spot consistently on that.)
I wonder what the world would be like if Irene Morgan Kirkaldy, a black woman who refused to give up her seat on a bus nearly ten years before Rosa Parks did the same, and who got a Supreme Court decision in her favor on the matter had been the one to receive all the fame, accolades, and the treasured place in history? (Irene died at 90 years of age Friday last) It seems like something that might change a world just enough to be interesting, like Washington dying and John Adams being the first president of the United States, or Fiber 66 being called Duparooh instead of nylon. Back here in our current universe, though, diversity can lead to less civic engagement and trust between persons, according to results obtained in studies over time. There are lots of good social indicators that accompany diversity, but cohesiveness didn’t appear to be one of them. In diverse areas, people seem to trust each other less, do less volunteering, and feel that they can’t make a difference. Yet, for work and productivity, diversity seems to be an energizer and catalyst. As the paper notes, and what might be the reason behind the paradox, is that the definition of “we” shifts from home to work. At home, “we” might mean people only of your ethnicity or religion or any of a hundred divisive things that diverse environments will aggravate. At work, however, “we” is the people who you work with, and all those things that might drive wedges between you civically are subsumed in the requirement that co-workers work together for the betterment of the workplace... and to receive their paychecks. If that idea of “we” as a community or other unit can trump the various tinier “we” that tend to get listened to or used, then diversity could really be a positive for civic impact. And in the long term, that’s probably likely to happen. It’ll be an interesting day when Humes say “we” and mean every Hume, everywhere. I hope that day comes soon and that the change is a positive one.
greyweirdo, who celebrated another year of life today. Second, more packing achieved today. Still unsure about transporting posters and the remaining material that’s here, including more formal clothing and some remaining stuff, like my desk. I think I’m calling in one more vehicle to make sure I have room to fit everything inside. Then the mad rush to get everything sorted and decided on for the trip out. I certainly haven’t left myself much time for relaxing and enjoying my last days here. Or for relaxing the first few days I’m out there. And then work starts. Busy, busy, busy, I guess. But it’ll settle down once I’m settled down. However long that actually takes.
Following on an earlier story, a new trial will be ordered for the gentleman convicted of drug trafficking of Vicodin for which he had a prescription. The appeals court threw out the conviction, where in the trial the jurors had not been told it was legal for the man to possess Vicodin if he had a prescription for it. The prosecutor must really want the man behind bars or have quite the evidence that he was intending on selling drugs.
The Happiness Project offers tips on keeping resolutions and drawing happiness from them - a resolution calendar, where one marks whether resolutions have been met, exceeded, or failed at. I suspect the idea can be extended to other things, but it looks like it’ll work well as a record of self-improvement - and it might help mitigate the self-recrimination done on those occasional days where you don’t hit your goals.
A rather underhanded, but likely legal, move by AT&T, possibly another reason to delay getting your iPhone, but most likely a reason not to do business with AT&T for mobiles - a user racked up more than $5,000 in charges by using their iPhone data capabilities overseas. Rather than asking the user whether they wanted services turned on overseas, because of the possible expense (and people know that calling is expensive overseas), AT&T turned the service on automatically because the user had good credit. And I suspect they may be doing the same for voice, as well. No warning, no option, no information about what the rates will be overseas, just on. And $5,000 later, the truth comes through.
Joe Bageant on AlterNet brings bread and circuses all the way up into the modern age, calling it A Feast of Bullshit and Spectacle: The Great American Media Mind Warp, a “hologram” of media that insulates, reflects, co-opts and resells at a profit, and otherwise controls and regulates the populace, peddling whatever it considers to be profitable, true or bullshit. I suspect this would be blamed for the creation and maintenance of the “sheeple” that everyone accuses everyone else of being. It is true, though, that someone pontificating from this existence, and those that can read it, are probably sufficiently inside the hologram that thinking outside it can be difficult. Perhaps if we all followed the São Paulo example and banned outdoor advertising, the hologram could be broken enough to see clearly for a bit. Other places are thinking in a different direction, though - the city of Athens, Alabama is considering prohibiting the sale of alcohol in the city. Which would probably make many people unhappy. Well, possession and consumption would still be legal, it would just have to be bought elsewhere.
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak wants to build his eventual home. How Wozniak wants to build an energy efficient house is the subject of an article at ECNmag, and involves a particular dirt construction method, and a particular kind of wood that supposedly self-regulates indoor temperatures to about 71 degrees year-round. That would be cool - of course, can’t have a Thneed craze that would bring the Lorax to his knees.
Accommodation of religious requirements is becoming an increasingly larger problem for some public schools. While at the moment, it appears to be Muslims that are causing the most stir, including getting recess timed so that Muslim children may engage in their mid-day prayer' or offering halal meats to the students, there very well could be a swarm, both from the side wishing to have their faith represented and the side that wants to crush any additional accommodations because they feel providing such options could be considered an endorsement of one religion over another. (And possibly the faction that wants to see anything regarding non-Christian faiths excised because of their non-True Faith status, too.) Working in the opposite direction, from a possible explosion of difficulty from tolerance toward a willingness to ask God to smite, after Americans United for Separation of Church and State filed a complaint with the IRS that a church was violating its exemption by endorsing candidates, the leader of the church, Wiley Drake, called for "imprecatory prayer" against those who filed the complaint. Imprecatory prayer is asking God to do evil unto his enemies. The problem with that, as the Faithful Skeptic demonstrates in a response to a no-longer-existent post about how imprecatory prayer against radical Muslims would be a fine idea, is you have to be sure that God's totally on your side. That whole glass houses and stones bit. Or the specks and planks part, whichever you like. Asking God to smite someone who has a legitimate complaint about your activities as a tax-exempt organization is not exactly the most stable of tactics. Plus, with as many people as have been asking YHWH to smite over the years and the lack of smiting going on, I’d say he’s either backlogged or that you have to talk to him just right. And it’s not helping that the New york police commissioner is convinced that the Internet is breeding a new set of radical terrorists in the Untied States. The reasons that he gives as for why someone might begin “radicalization” are less than convincing, however. And the whole thing is about finding people who aren’t going to identify themselves as extremists until they strike. Fearfearfear. Spy on your neighbors, citizens. They’ll all potential terrorists. Report them if they start behaving oddly, read articles that look suspicious, or compile and post lists of things unfriendly to the government and God. If they’re not on your side, and you’re confident of that, they’re going to come in one night, kill the good Christian men, rape the good Christian women (and maybe even the boys and girls for kicks), and then indoctrinate all of you and force you to be like them. Fearfearfeargiveupyourlibertiesfearfear.
Iran's Revolutionary Guard has been designated a global terrorist organization, allowing the United States to take actions against them like freezing accounts and disrupting business that work with them. This is rather odd, considering the Revolutionary Guard are a government organization. But any excuse is a good one, for this administration. It’s what got us into Iraq, after all.
Next-to last is a few of reasons why Wikipedia will probably never make it to a scholarly source status, even through its best efforts to provide correct information and to edit away things that are untrue or biased. We’ll start with Geeks are Sexy posting about edits made by Fox-owned IP addresses to Wikipedia articles that do not correct nor clarify, and are intended to generate negative views of their opponents and positive views of themselves. And continue into Threat Level's list of shameful Wikipedia spin jobs. How are these things being tracked? Well, Virgil Griffith, a Cal Tech student, has launched a Wikipedia scanner to trace and locate where the IPs logged on anonymous edits originate from. Public information, paired with public information, produces a way of showing that someone on a Diebold IP, say, is editing the page to remove criticism. Or Fox IPs changing things about rival television shows. For those wanting to see where possible skullduggery lies, the Wiki Scanner is available at http://wikiscanner.virgil.gr. (He’s hoping to hit good PageRank for the word Virgil, but I think I’d rather let Dante’s Inferno, or the poet himself take the top spot consistently on that.)
I wonder what the world would be like if Irene Morgan Kirkaldy, a black woman who refused to give up her seat on a bus nearly ten years before Rosa Parks did the same, and who got a Supreme Court decision in her favor on the matter had been the one to receive all the fame, accolades, and the treasured place in history? (Irene died at 90 years of age Friday last) It seems like something that might change a world just enough to be interesting, like Washington dying and John Adams being the first president of the United States, or Fiber 66 being called Duparooh instead of nylon. Back here in our current universe, though, diversity can lead to less civic engagement and trust between persons, according to results obtained in studies over time. There are lots of good social indicators that accompany diversity, but cohesiveness didn’t appear to be one of them. In diverse areas, people seem to trust each other less, do less volunteering, and feel that they can’t make a difference. Yet, for work and productivity, diversity seems to be an energizer and catalyst. As the paper notes, and what might be the reason behind the paradox, is that the definition of “we” shifts from home to work. At home, “we” might mean people only of your ethnicity or religion or any of a hundred divisive things that diverse environments will aggravate. At work, however, “we” is the people who you work with, and all those things that might drive wedges between you civically are subsumed in the requirement that co-workers work together for the betterment of the workplace... and to receive their paychecks. If that idea of “we” as a community or other unit can trump the various tinier “we” that tend to get listened to or used, then diversity could really be a positive for civic impact. And in the long term, that’s probably likely to happen. It’ll be an interesting day when Humes say “we” and mean every Hume, everywhere. I hope that day comes soon and that the change is a positive one.
