Excellence achieved. - 24 September 2007

Why do I say that? I have received my first six-figure check. Now, to deposit it, and receive the drafting instruments, and I’ll be ready to go. Tomorrow I try to convince young children that books are actually fun to read. Wait, maybe that’s my general daily job. Maybe it’s to convince parents that they want to read books to their children. I think that’s it.

An interesting take on how knowledge is passed around in a place where trade secrets and patents are applicable, but not necessarily used. Intellectual Property and Magicians explores how illusions could very well be considered trade secrets, and patented, but that magicians tend not to do so, preferring to build and borrow on each other’s material, with credit applied, to create shinier and flashier illusions. The article itself wonders whether the current mentality is good or not, but one of the commenters suggests that there’s not much for patent work because to patent, one must describe the process being done, which could ruin the mystery. Another says that while publishing may be needed, good illusionists are able to create the proper atmosphere for their work, and that a good showman will draw audiences, regardless of the selection of his illusions. I think there’s something in that - artisans, craftspersons, and others who make aesthetically-pleasing things can patent their processes and methods and secrets, but the method by itself means nothing, unless appleid by someone who understands it and can utilize it to the fullest potential. Violins are made every day, but Stradivarius violins will fetch great prices because of their aesthetic qualities. Perhaps that attitude can be applied to other media, rather than lockdowns and clamps and DRM out both orifices. After all, if someone can generate works of art that are composed entirely of ASCII characters, but look pencil-drawn, then there’s plenty of room for both innovation and creativity in execution. Like Red/Blue LED lights that turn the water the respective color. Or customised Mr. Potato Head dolls. Or haptic devices that simulate a cat's whiskers. (What? You thought they were all going to be cute and potentially useless things?)

Tension grows, or is perceived to do so, regarding matters of the Middle East. Iraq's prime minister is worried about his nation's sovereignty , pushing while not shoving at his American backers, as Iran closed a border with Iraq in protest over the U.S. arresting a person who had obtained an Iraqi visa. Actually in Iraq, United States soldiers are leaving "bait" packages around areas and then sniping anyone who picks it up and tries to leave with it. This, in addition to allegations that evidence was planted on dead civilians after they had been killed so as to make the case for their death more convincing. And those Blackwater cases of firing into crowds and murdering people. Oh, did we mention that the Department of Homeland Security's profiles on you are detailed to the point of noting what you bring to read on a plane, if they so desire it?

Some things are encouraging. Surprisingly, a programme about the Holocaust, financed by state dollars and running on state television, is drawing many people to it. In Iran. Coming in the same batch of information that tells me mathematically, parallel worlds may very well exist, and I might have a working example of the latter in the former.

Distressingly, here in the Americas, education about government, history, and the foundations of the Republic for which we should all be fighting is... abysmal. On this, the commentator and I can agree - more people should be civically knowledgeable. A knowledgeable populace would be less likely, in my opinion, to buy into jingoistic propaganda about brown people and a religion trying to take over the world, would fight back against the people who want to make white Christians the rulers of the country in law, rather than just in fact. Fighting against the people that are stripping away the readiness of the armed forces and National Guard to do their jobs to try and do this) They might understand and demand accountability and efficiency in running the government and force them to spend only within the means of their budget and revenues. And most of this education I got was from stepping outside the classroom and learning a few things from others by asking questions and doing some research. Can’t have hurt that I was forced through two history courses, stone-skippers that they were, a civics class, and then elected to take on a comparative government course and some other things. For public schools not to give a thorough grounding in government is inexcusable.

ABC News holds something of interest to us - a look at "conversion therapy" for gay men, noting that it’s not generally successful, and that the “failure” could be very harmful to people’s psyches. Tell me again why someone would want to worship a demon that says the different must be killed or subjugated? The people who fire a teacher because he taught that the Bible should not be interpreted as straight truth. And that link global warming to the flood of Noah.

Amazon rainforests responds well to drought, counter to computer models. This response is the photosynthetic response, with lots more of that going on in the sunlight and heat. A continued drought, however, is always deadly. Perhaps that positive response was getting some much-needed light through the canopy and allowing things to leaf out a bit more. Perhaps there was some drawing on reserves, as well.

I might have found a(nother?) justification as to why things wander around so many different places in these linkdumps - Generalists generally don't have major funks when they hit setbacks. So if one idea turns out to be a bust, then there’s another way of going about it. One news article about negative reactions to something, along with a positive one about some other possible way of achieving the goal. Like building rovers that will learn and be curious about their environment so that they can cover much more ground quickly. There are occasional bumps, much like what happens when Hume children first learn to move, but it should learn quickly and start finding interesting things.

The next-to-last bits, which are as interesting as the last bits, but just preceding them, are two things that have a common thread, just realized. First, the underlying philosophy - Radical Honesty, the idea that everyone should say only honest things to each other. Cuts out all the bullshit, probably pisses some people off while you’re at it, and then things sort of subside back to normal once people realize that the world didn’t end by saying something honest or receiving it. Why do we like good critics? They’re radically honest. If it sucks, they say so. So, keep that idea in mind as the Slacktivist provides an excellent example of what happens when Radical Honesty is used in The Question and the Column, where a black athlete answers the question “What’s it like being a black athlete in a position where a bunch of white dudes resent your success and think that any white guy could do a better job than the best black guy?” with the truth “We have to work twice as hard just to be seen on the same level as the white guy.” And then the reporters write their column saying how much of a race-charged answer that was, and that America is a racism-free zone. Really. Mike Freeman calls them on that bullshit, and then we get a treat to some of the responses to that column about how much America really is a race-blind society. With all those accusations of playing a race card and race-related arguments, one might almost think that we’re not really a colorblind, race-indifferent society. But that is, of course, preposterous. We don’t discriminate in law, so we must not do it in society.

Last for tonight - Happiness is a warm electrode? A technique called deep-brain stimulation delivers small but steady current to the area of the brain thought to be a mood regulator. It could be helpful in treating patients with severe depression and get them back on a more even keel. Might be the answer to severe depression like full-spectrum lighting is for those affected with the seasonal variety.

Thus, having dropped a giant amount of data on you all, I’m going off to bed to get well-rested and ready to tell stories to pre-kindergarten-aged children. (They all are that, actually, but you know what I mean.)

Yet more to be had - 25 September 2007

Made it through alive. Felt clunky and unnatural, and my audience wasn’t very responsive in some ways, until I got to a story I could play with, and then I had a perfectly good audience and it felt natural. So now I know my own storytelling style, and thus I will endeavour to do things in that style from here on out. Things should be better tomorrow, when I get another shot with a different crowd. And maybe this time I’ll remember to bring everything with me, and I’ll end on time. No clock in that room meant I went a bit over time today, but that’s okay. I’ll find that refined point, or I’ll start wearing my watch again.

So, onward from there to the things that are important, like Bush swearing a veto on a Congressional plan to expand health care for uninsured children. Apparently because it would raise taxes and cost us another $35-$50 billion. Mr. Bush? Have a look at some spending charts, please. If you were really concerned about financial waste, you shouldn’t have engaged in a venture in Iraq that would be costly and drag on. Or wouldn’t keep badgering others to spend money on programs which are constitutionally questionable. More on that later.

Light pollution is making starry nights less likely, so much so that people start calling observatories when there’s actually a cloudless, starry sky, because they have no idea what they’re looking at.

Taking the idea of silly-stupid and running with it, Stupid Monsters of Dungeons and Dragons. There is one kernel of truth in there - if the Game Master decides you’re going to die this adventure, there’s enough monsters that can do it to you without you being able to fight back at all.

Ah, something a bit more intelligent - NASA wants to put Terrans on Mars in thirty years. Considering current propulsion technologies, they’d better have something ready and done in the next fifteen or so, so that it can be built and sent out. Private industries are competing for the next X-type prize, which is to land a rover on the moon and have it be able to move at least five hundred meters.

Mother Jones magazine wants to pry into Senator Clinton's religious beliefs. Because she’s got the look of being a religious conservative and hanging out with some very conservative people, yet vies for the Democratic party’s nomination. For some, this seems to be an unacceptable contradiction. For others, that sounds fairly solidly like what the Democratic candidates and party are like. The group that the Senator subscribes to is made out to be a bit shadowy, “cell”-based, and intent on pushing politics and belief further in the conservative direction, regardless of what party achieves power. Almost like they’re setting them up to be Christian terrorists, just without the suicidal bombing. It’s certainly no glowing review of the Senator, suggesting that she would do better in the other party, excepting that she doesn’t get agreement on some of the “core” religious conservative issues, like birth control and the like. greyweirdo offers something like the inverse of this idea of social conservatives who suddenly get very liberal when they or someone near them needs things to be liberal, linking to this edition of the Talking Points Memo, where the same idea is espoused - conservatives don’t mind restricting everyone’s rights, but they’ll be the first in line to torch them if it turns out that said restrictions might actually hurt them or someone they care about. Perhaps they do need more life experience. Which to me, seems antithetical to a lot of what American neoconservatism is about, which is isolating people away from the rest of the world, raising and working and playing in a bubble where there aren’t any pesky outside ideas that might disrupt the group’s mentality. Where Senators can earmark one hundred thousand federal dollars to creationists, and nobody blinks or bats an eye, at best complaining that it’s not enough money to really effectively spread the word. And where images such as a poster for the Folsom Street Fair parodying da Vinci's "Last Supper" by replacing the table of apostles with leather devotees is so beyond the pale that anyone who thought of such a thing would be shunned immediately and cast out. Once the outside world forces itself inside and can’t be pushed back out or ignored, suddenly there’s a swift impetus to do something that will get the intruder out, even if it means sacrificing a little bit of utopia for long enough to get the interlopers and their ideas out of the community, and then building better walls next time. Would be easier in a lot of ways if they’d just take the wall down and assimilate some, but a lot of interpretations of YHWH seem to like his people walled up, condemning the Other, and trying very hard not to do anything that might introduce a change in their thoughts or actions.

Following up from yesterday’s demonstration of a race-blind society in America, one of the country’s most self-inflated pundits (Bill O’Reilly) was surprised at there being no difference between a restaurant run primarily by blacks and one run by whites when he visited Sylvia’s in New York City. He was apparently expecting some sort of ghetto-fabulous and rude/crude behavior between black people in the restaurant. But America doesn’t see race, remember. We absolutely don’t have a former leader of the KKK encouraging white people to go down to Jena and say "No, we're not racist! It's the blacks that are taking our jobs and increasing violence! Stop them, not us", and that some names and addresses of people involved in the Jena 6 incident have been published with the incitement to lynch them. Who are you going to believe, me, or Your Lying Eyes? After all, if we can not be concerned about the amount of body ink that a person has in relation to them applying for an apartment, then obviously we don’t have to worry about bigger issues.

As I have been informed, there is a nationwide strike of the United Auto Workers union, which makes Detroit, already choking on a black pretzel, feel like there’s someone squeezing what little air is still getting in out by crushing its throat in a vise. For a sampling of opinions regarding the possible hostility toward the UAW, look at the comments of this Detroit Free Press article about a picketer struck by a car and then ticketed for blocking traffic. I wonder if/when the hostility toward UAW and/or unions in general got this bad.

In Iraq, the Iraqi government has finished a draft of legislation that would end any legal immunity for contracted security forces in the wake of Blackwater's scandal. The fledgling steps of a new government trying to assert itself. Let’s see just how fast this gets crushed by the American boot.

Changing a letter over, and probably confusing George W. Bush immensely, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visited the United Nations today, after an interesting talk at Columbia University, where even his hosts seemed confrontational about his positions. Mr. Ahmadinejad attempted to dispel the hostility with a joke, but it fell flat. He also apparently denied the existence of homosexuals in Iran. The visit has some people fuming about the apparent inability of a conservative speaker to have a good speech, while liberals, dictators, and anti-Semites appear to have a free in to the podiums of universities. Or at least don’t get disrupted nearly as much. Should I remind the chambers that someone who is probably a liberal by United States standards got heckled inside the chamber of the United States Senate? And that people who simply wear T-shirts espousing liberal causes are removed from those chambers for being disruptive? One might suspect that the younger generation, who always has a bit more of a liberal streak, are reflecting the values of their parents, just in the opposite direction of the spectrum, that’s all.

Things perhaps of less interest, but more cool factor, involve Roman winter footwear - big wooly socks. Perfect for the snows of Gaul. Even better would be powered armor, of course. MIT students have decked out the statue of John P. Harvard with a SPARTAN helmet and assault rifle, proving that even when there are midnight releases of video games, there’s always enough time for a hack. In fact, in some ways, perhaps video games are the way that we keep MIT students from taking over the world, as whiskey was supposedly invented to keep certain other people from doing so in jokes. If not those, then perhaps water-cooling systems that also function as steampunk mods for computer cases.

Anyway, it’s winding down into night-time, which means that it’s time for sleep, since I have more stories to tell tomorrow. Hopefully with better rhythm and rhyme than today’s.