Digging in deeper - 15 November 2007

I’m beginning to see just how much planning is going to be involved in all the projects I’m just thinking about possibly putting into reality. That’s without all the other stuff that might appear, and stuff that the system wants to do, too. As we said yesterday, if you think that all we do is sit around and read books at the desk, you’re mistaken.

Getting to the news. Not content to just make the jolly Christmas Fable slim down to make him more palatable, he's been advised that his from-the-gut laugh should be replaced with something with less potential offensiveness.

Barry Bonds has been indicted by the federal government for perjury and obstruction of justice with regard to the ongoing steroid investigation around BALCO. The government contends that Bonds did not speak truth when he said that he did not receive nor use any sort of steroid or human growth hormone from his trainer, and backs that claim with schedules and testimonies from the BALCO laboratory. The asterisk might turn out to be true after all. And if it does, then what does Selig do regarding the record that Bonds set for most home runs in a career?

New laws in Japan have foreigners fingerprinted and photographed when they enter the country. Just like the United States does. They’re not to the point of domestic photography and biometric databases... yet. They’re currently working on bringing their soldiers close to a "Gundam" world.

They're making a Dragonball movie. Aieeeeeeeeee.

A World War II P-38 fighter has been unearthed on a beach in Wales, sixty-five years after burying itself there.

In the governmental realm, the image linked in the following is unsourced, and thus, I have no idea if there is any context at all, but it claims you are what the government pays for you to eat. Putting the subsidy pyramid next to the older food pyramid intends to help get perspective on both. Makes me wonder if we’ll start seeing the subsidy pyramid begin to resemble the new food pyramid.

Bills passed by both houses of government do not grant telecoms immunity for aiding in warrantless wiretapping, despite the threats from Mr. Bush to veto any bills that do not include that provision. Additionally, the House of Representatives approved a war spending bill that ties money to troop withdrawals, also garnering a veto promise from Mr. Bush in addition to the standard rhetoric about how much the Democratic party is in thrall to liberals like Code Pink and MoveOn.org. Applying the same logic, when a report came out suggesting that the real cost for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are closer to $1.5 trillion dollars, it was called "clearly partisan". Ask anyone who is a liberal, or is a Democrat, and see if they agree that liberals and Democrats are unified under a single banner.

The voting populace, however, is not exactly making themselves out to be the best people on the planet. Most of them would trade their right to vote for material gain, while at the same time saying that voting itself is a very important thing - even the ones who would trade their vote away.

While not as bad as a result as the MySpace-stalking story from yesterday, here’s another example as to why the Internet is not always a great place - false, intended to be satirical, Craigslist ads. We hope that satirists always strive to make it known that their work is satirical. We can’t say anything about the ability of those seeing the satire to understand it, thought. In that same vein, because I don’t really want to believe it’s an actual event with actual people behind it, I’m declaring the Million March for God to be a satire, poking fun at other people who take their Christianity too seriously. If it’s not satire, let me know, of course.

Real life has its own share of fakers, too, though. Take, for example, the man who shot himself with a nail gun and then attempted to blame it on an attack by a roving gang.

Going from false to actively Bad, United States Catholic bishops say that those who vote for pro-choice candidates are cooperating in abortions. The bishops are only advising, and have not yet implied that voting for the Democratic candidate is a grievous sin that removes one from obtaining the sacraments. In that sense, they’re doing better than the American Family Association, which has been implicated in causing a DDoS that nearly shut down the city of Philadelphia's e-mail system. In trying to get their members to protest the decision of the city aldermen. The decision in question is charging the Boy Scouts of America rent for use of city facilities because their anti-homosexual stance places them in violation of the city’s Fairness ordinance. So many messages were sent that the spam filters tripped, trapped, rejected, and did their best to contain and repulse the mailbomb, and still almost collapsed. I suppose that shows something about the power of lots of people writing someone, but in the case of e-mail, it’s more like someone writing a script that hammers the appropriate addresses as fast as they can send.

Going from Bad to Worse, the Saudi victim of a gang-rape had her punishment increased, adding lashes and a prison sentence for “attempting to use the media to influence” the judges. The attackers had their sentences doubled as well, but the woman was first being punished because she was violating the law that segregates the sexes, and then had it increased when she appealed her sentence. Her lawyer had his license to practice suspended and faces discipline of his own. So, let’s recap. Woman is gang-raped, presses charges, gets attackers convicted. Woman is sentenced to lashes because she was in the car of someone who wasn’t her immediate family. Upon appealing to the judges’ common sense, the judges increased the punishment. And these are the people that we consider allies in the war on terror, right?

Although they’d probably cite things like that case as justification, the response is not to do as the LAPD tried to do and map the Muslim populace of Los Angeles. The issues raised were that it was religious profiling, and that it would be tough to be accurate, which could create bigger problems if raids with force happened at the wrong place.

And from Worse to Worst, in filming a movie about a child forced into prostitution, the writer/producer has his eyes opened to the real problem of child sexual exploitation.

Trying to climb out of the pit I’ve dug for you, the reading audience, let’s have a sex-positive tale, with adult video stars giving a guest lecture about their work to a Sociology of Sexuality course. From the account, it was well-attended, the discourse was lively, and there were some samples shown in class. Only at university could such a thing happen.

Wow. Cool Things brings to my attention an annual report package for a food company where one of the components must be covered in foil and baked before it is usable. If done properly, the tiny book gets text and images to appear. If done wrong, then, well, the book overcooks. Further Cool Stuff tells us that a Grand Unified Theory that accounts for the four fundamental forces and supposedly needs only the three dimensions of space and one of time might have a testing run done on it with the completion of a large atom smasher. The new theory utilizes a mathematical form with multiple dimensions consisting of 248 points arranged in various groupings. By placing particles and forces on the various vertices of the form, in proper groupings, several new particles are predicted to exist, and would have to be detected to give validity to the idea. Of course, the mathematical form itself has supposedly several dimensions to it, but I think those dimensions are somehow different than the three of space and one of time that the theory supposedly needs. Not being a physicist, however, I confess to confusion at the particulars of the matter. Those who do understand, can we have the layman’s version of this new theory?

I have to smile at the following, possibly in a wistful way with a faraway look in my eye toward a hypothetical, still-unrealized future. The Nerd Handbook offers significant others of nerds ways to understand them, and to help their nerds understand them and society at large. For those who have those significant others, perhaps this will be helpful.

Our biggest Cool Thing, and the lead-out for tonight, is causal relationships found between low self-esteem and strong materialism. Buying things doesn’t make people happy, even though people think it does. And the cycle perpetuates itself - we keep thinking that buying things will make us happy, and it doesn’t, so we buy more things, and they still don’t. Sounds remarkably like the cycle of suffering in Buddhist philosophy. Perhaps the way out is to cause A Heap Of Trouble (NSFW) for all of us?

Or not. Maybe we just need more sleep. Which I will be getting.

Semi-productive day off - 16 November 2007

Went out, did stuff, came back. Didn’t spend too much, I think. Maybe? Either way, I’ve accomplished another of those tasks, hopefully investing in something that will be worthwhile and lasting. At least, that’s the idea. For what I’m paying for it, it had better be good. Once it arrives, I’ll have a nice place for guests to sit that can convert into a guest bed as need. Of course, I don’t have an entertainment center or boob tube for the new piece of furniture to face yet, but maybe a few paychecks down the road, something like that will appear. Or maybe someone will be kind and front the money for such things as gifts for VEWPRF. I don’t know.

Oh, speaking of VEWPRF, the Play! concert series is in Seattle in the late parts of January, and thus, I’m going to be going. So maybe I’m just a sucker for orchestrated video game music. But I’m probably going to go again. It’s been great the previous two times. That’s another possible VEWPRF gift.

Tried Quiche Lorraine again tonight - it didn’t work out as well as the first one, but it’s still yummy.

There’s the padded rugby game for the conference championship tomorrow - a game that I will miss live, in its entirety, it being my day to work. Perhaps because of that, things will go well (Hey, the Lions have been great while I’m not watching them). And getting in my dig at an Ohio state university (contractually required? Maybe), I present the campus of Columbus mourning an unofficial mascot - an albino squirrel. Sure, the peopel at my alma mater feed the squirrels, too, and have a squirrel club, I don’t think any of them have gone to the point of having a part of the campus idolize one of the squirrels.

To the news, such that it is. The United States’ paranoia over Iran heightens, thanks to a new report released by the IAEA that says, while Iran does have the capability to potentially produce weapons-grade material, they are using it only for fuel-grade enrichment.

Yet another pro-war columnist whining that the mainstream press isn't covering the lack of attacks in Iraq. Apparently, no news really is news. In my opinion, I’d rather see material about how Ron Paul's campaign plans on eliminating individual income tax, without cutting spending to match. Or that people received calls that started claiming to be polls, but instead turned into attacks on candidate Romney, because that at least gives us information about things that are happening, rather than trying to make the absence of something into something. If one insists on Iraq-related material, though, Americablog offers some statistics on how things have gone. Even a film review of a send-up of the post-World War III America tells us more than the absence of news from Iraq. (And there’s even a Kapowski in it - maybe a cousin of the detective, greyweirdo?)

Or maybe the populace is more concerned about how Barry Bonds breaking records messes with the game of baseball, through even just the cloud of steroid use and the personality of Bonds. When baseball records become tainted, or even potentially so, they lose effectiveness and their power. They become useless when the asterisk appears in situations like these. There will probably be a lot of people rooting for the next home-run hitter to erase Bonds as fast as possible.

Roger Cohen throws his support behind Barack Obama, saying that the senator is the candidate most likely to reflect the world and act with recognition of the people outside the borders of the United States. He would certainly put a new face on politics, and that might be enough, along with good policy, to jar the perception of America and its leaders into something better than the fecal matter the Bush administration has been wallowing in.

Our education majors and teachers already know this, but here’s a great example of the idea that if you make learning fun, people actually do learn, and do well in school. Meet the Harry Potter themed school year. By doing such thematic work, in fact, the school raised its rankings from worst to first. Not to say this will work for everyone, but if you make education interesting, you never know who might actually learn something.

A federal court of appeals told the Bush administration to come up with better fuel-mileage standards for light trucks, the category that SUVs fall into, taking them to task for not accounting for carbon emissions and their possible links to global warming. The Administration proposed adding a mere 1.9 miles per gallon improvement.

The New York Post has more Hello Kitty Hell. I think that the Monkeyfilter article linking to that photo said Hello Kitty is thirty years old today. That’s right, we’ve been subjected to Hello Kitty Hell for thirty years now. Wow. And there’s always more in the vein of Hello Kitty, like Moofia figures.

Harvard professors suggest that the Reformation was the birthplace of what we now think of as fundamentalism. Instead of being a liberating experience where everyone is now able to read and interpret for themselves, the researchers suggest that those who elected to read for themselves were warned that if they read wrong, dire consequences would result.

Other religious scholars will take on the issue of the Flying Spaghetti Monster at a conference of the American Academy of Religion, noting the success of the original idea has spawned, to some degree, a religion. One more in line with the Discordians than the people they’re mocking, sure, but potentially a religion by itself. There’s probably some Discordian wisdom involved here in serious study of the non-serious. If not Discordian, the Buddhists and Taoists probably have something about to do with it.

I don’t recall who the song is by, but I remember the lyric “You don’t tug on Superman’s cape, you don’t spit into the wind,” and you don't let pedophiles work in kindergarten.

Detroit continues to fall apart, hit hard by housing problems, losses of jobs, and the general malaise the Detroit-based automobile manufacturers are suffering. The BBC article suggests that perhaps Detroit is a good indicator for how the rest of the country might slide if things continue to go downhill.

The Cool Things department says, Look at that! With the help of a brain implant and a computer, it may be possible for someone unable to speak to think their words and have them spoken. The test subject has been paralyzed by a car crash, but his brain still works just fine. Would we be able to eventually get the idea to work so that said paralyzed person could manipulate an exoskeleton, and thus rejoin life in some manner?

The TED talks are really neat things to see and listen to - whenever someone around me links to one, I download it and have a look at it, and they’re all cool to look at so far. If all of them are like this, then I should probably be doing a lot of downloading and watching. All of that just to introduce Erin McKean talking about language and the role of the dictionary. Rather than seeing the dictionary as the final arbiter of what’s in the language and what isn’t, the dictionary should instead become the compendium of words in the language, and decisions about what words to use should be left to those that will be using the words. Whee, lexical ability!

To help with my memory problems, there are already suites of exocortexes in development. Most want to automatically record the data of my life, so that when I want to remember who it was that I went to high school prom with, I can find and retrieve a conversation I had about her. (I do remember, still, at least for now, who I went with, when I went with a date.) Or something that will remind me that I promised to go pick someone up from the airport today, when I made the arrangement some four months ago. Capturing everything sounds neat, but I suspect everyone has parts of their life they’d rather forget. At least the brain can replay events in fast-forward when asleep. So I’m going to fast-forward mode. I hope there aren’t too many commercials. And then there’s work on the other end, too.