Another week achieved - 28 September 2007

And once again, the difficulty with noon-time games on EDT is made manifest - I will have to arise before 9 to catch the account of my sports team. I don’t even know if there are restaurants or bars open at that time of the morning that I might slip down to and watch the account of the game. If any of them even carry the network that tomorrow’s game will be on. Sounds more like I’ll have to tune into a web-radio broadcast of some sort to listen to the padded rugby squad do their thing. Today at work was relatively uneventful, which is good in some ways. Having a weekend to catch up on things will be nice. Might even read the Microtrends book at some point, now that I finished The Subtle Knife and put The Amber Spyglass on order. (Yay, libraries! Cheapest book rental service around!)

Speaking of trends, Mr. Bush and grammar seem to continue to be at loggerheads with each other. Following up on “Is our children learning?”, Mr. Bush said Wednesday at an education event that Childrens do learn, He says this while promoting the need to renew the No Child Left Behind act, which has a large and hostile opposition.

Once again, someone who has a conservative talk show puts his foot in his mouth and chews. And this time, on something supposedly only conservatives can talk about - the troops, and support thereof. Rush Limbaugh thinks that soldiers who are against the war are "phony soldiers". Additionally, it is apparently intellectually impossible to understand people who advocate for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq. It’s no wonder we’re having trouble talking about what to do in Iraq - everyone seems to want to write their opposition off as being unable to comprehend anything with regard to Iraq, and possibly everything else by extension. Admittedly, in the presence of reasonable arguments, like bradhicks musing when the current administration is going to start trying to convince the populous to sign up for Iraq, it does seem like there’s an understanding gap somewhere between the two sides of the issue. Perhaps it’s a problem much like the one described on the chalkboard manifesto - by surrounding oneself by useful idiots, one becomes their useful smart person. And then, there’s a smart person surrounded by idiots, cut off and alone.

Okay, that fell apart. To distract you and try to get something back on track, a campaign has been launched to make a revived Richard Nixon President of the United States in the 2008 election. I’m pretty sure there are people who would welcome Nixon back, thinking he couldn’t be worse that what’s already here. Many people want someone else, because they'd rather have had eleven missions to Mars than the current war in Iraq

Even scarier, however, is an accusation by a Mozambique Catholic Archbishop that condoms manufactured in Europe are deliberately infected with HIV, as are anti-retroviral drugs.This is apparently a plot to eradicate the population of Africa so that Europeans can once again colonize the area.

Texas has a few new wrinkles to deal with in their continual use as a test ground with regards to religious beliefs and secular institutions. A Rastafarian teenager was told that he had to cut his hair to conform to the dress code, something the teen claims is against the precepts of the religion. So long as it is kept neatly, I would think that long hair is no impediment to anything, excepting for occasional possible safety hazards where long hair might become caught on a mechanism or something. I’m sure there are plenty of women who have quite long hair and are able to manage it without violation of the dress code. Around the state itself, Texas must grapple with a state law that requires limited public forums for student speakers and federal court decisions and precedent that says prayer of any sort has no place in schools. Those forums could theoretically have student speakers praying or invoking god-beings as part of their time. Even the people in Texas are expecting firestorm and lawsuits to come down the pipe so that the interpreters of law and precedent can define what’s okay, what’s not, and how much bend the rules actually have in them. To ask a slightly broader question, is it just that Texas pushes more aggressively to do the whole God-thing that we keep hearing about them, or it is just that there are a lot of people covering the things in Texas that happen to land in my sphere of sources, so it looks like Texas is trying hard to do all the God-things? (Or maybe a little of both.)

Scariest of the bunch, however, is that police in the United Kingdom have been given permission to use Taser weapons against children. They are told to be aware in case there is a “serious cardiac event” after using the weapon on the child, or an adult of small stature. I’m waiting for the Youtube of a six year-old child being Tasered by a police officer. It may not be so far off as we think, if this Infowars story is true in all the particulars - a girl was restrained by school guards after she dropped some cake, but did not clean the spot to the satisfaction of the authority figures around. The restraint resulted in a broken arm, suspension, and arrest for the student. Those who have documented the event were also detained, and the parent who strongly suggested the guard who did the arm-breaking be arrested for battery was threatened with being charged with battery herself and was suspended from her job (at another school) as well. As I said, I look a little askance at the source, but if it’s true all the way through, then we have another example of how much “authority” and “security” are allowing power-hungry bullies to terrorize people and then have them arrested if they should protest or resist.

Yet another highly-improbable way to die - infection by brain-eating amoeba. The people tracking it are worried that as temperatures rise, we’ll see more of the amoeba in the standing waters, with more cases and more deaths. A currently-improbable way of getting oneself socially engineered or having chaos wreaked large is the ability of computers to mimic human vocalizations to the point of sounding real. If the copy becomes indistinguishable in the ear, simulated voices could do a lot of damage around the world. Possibly even more so if they get coupled with new social task robots, like ones that can be used for maintaining a 'virtual presence' at home when the person is away.

Women with a katana and dagger, dressed in black, hold up a gas station, steal cash, ciggs, and lotto tickets. Which is certainly not the way of the samurai. We can, however, go lower than that - a man had officers summoned to his hotel room because he decapitated a duck. And then... eight bullets supposedly fired by William S. Burroughs available on eBay. Hey, I never said all of these were going to be winners, or even runners-up. I only hope that the funny ones are funny and the thought-provoking ones are thought-provoking. Just for spice, here’s one that might make some people wince - Suicide Girls reports that it may be possible to transform the progenitors of human spermatozoa into stem cells. This based on a test done on mice, of course. The procedure itself may require a doctor to stick a needle into a man’s testicles and withdraw the appropriate cells. The writer of the article suggests that perhaps those people who are so vehemently against embryonic stem-cell research should line up to have stem cells extracted from their nuts. Might be an excellent time for men to show just how big theirs really are.

If any of this is not persuasive, or you just want to resist having people try to change your mind or get you to follow them, some techniques for resisting a persuasive speech.

Last for tonight, however, is art produced inside books, by carving the books into the art. I can only hope these books were consoled about what they were, and were eager to become something prettier. And the image that just flashed into my head right now is something to do with cosmetic surgery. Out, out, back away slowly, and run for the hills with that idea. Stupid, stupid Hume.

Anyway, that’s all for tonight. Enjoy your Saturdays, people.

Things I have learned in my first month at work

In addition to All the things I have learned before, I present some new things that I have learned in my first month of work.

1) Finding the chair in back that works well as a napping chair is essential for when the nap is needed.

2) A side effect of learning cooking technique is that your co-workers compliment the aroma of your food.

3) Of all the foods available at a nice lunch during a meeting, the chocolate will be the most popular by far.

4) I am a good luck charm, it appears. If in my area of influence, pages can find things that they otherwise have
difficulty with or missed the first time. In such a sense, perhaps it is my superpower in life to make other people look good.

5) It is confusing to one’s co-workers that a person who can get up in front of three hundred librarians and do improv with a troupe is nervous about performing stories in front of fifteen children.

6) The real strengths of an apprenticeship appear not in the broad strokes, but in filling in the details that only come with knowing one’s collection and practices intimately.

7) Working in a library means that one only gets farther behind on “books I shoud read”.

8) One should not be surprised when one’s life experience turns out to be helpful in answering questions and directing users. Nor should one be surprised when gambits of ingenuity and imagination pay excellent dividends.

9) The simplest revelation is that most people know what they want, but they don’t know how to find it. And they’re too afraid to disturb you, despite it being a large part of what you get paid to do.

10) To make mention of something that may be helpful is to volunteer to see it through. To remind someone that something needs doing is to volunteer to do it. With rare exceptions, then, remind people of things that must be done when you are either busy with something else or have the time to devote to doing whatever it is you’re reminding them of.

11) The simpler it looks to implement, the larger amount of time, effort, and people it will potentially involve.

12) Working in a library develops your ability to sense other people. This can be put to interesting uses, like stopping before an intersection of shelves to let a child go zipping past before proceeding.

13) Despite all the advances the library has done to promote itself as something other than a place of dusty tomes and silence, there are some people who miss the memorandum. So much so that they will shush you, and then ask you to speak quieter while they read a newspaper right next to you, and then tell you it’s “not the point” when you point out there is a designated “quiet zone” in the place.