Quickpost - 08 December 2007

Yes, it’s a wall of text, even when it’s quick. So if that’s “tl, dr” for you, that’s fine. Come back when you have some time, if that ever happens.

The meatballs that I brought to game night were a great success, and I played some very interesting games - a simply complex one, and one where the conditions of victory aren’t known until halfway or so through the game, when one player goes rogue and the rest have to be heroic. The heroes won this round, but it’s just as possible they would have failed had they been poorly placed. Or that they had suffered significantly before the true objective was revealed.

Workers in Minnestoa Slaughterhouses have fallen ill, and the doctors suggest it may be because they came in contact with airborne pig brain matter. It may not be the brains, but the workers are being exposed to something that makes them sick, and now the task is to isolate the process involved so that more workers don’t end up sick.

Fox Noise is making a lot of it with regard to NBC's decision not to air commercial segments featuring people thanking military members because they contain the URL for a website. NBC says that website inclusion runs counter to their advertising policy when that website includes things like political action exhortations, and also objects to the usage of imagery of military uniforms and vehicles. On the first objection, I guess, from that statement, it would seem like NBC is endorsing the message of the website by including their URL in the advertisement. On the second, NBC asked Freedom’s Watch (the website in question) to provide proof that the government approved their usage of images. Freedom’s Watch believes that NBC has a more specific objection to their commercials, and claims that NBC asked them to change the content on their web pages.

In the Army Times, Lieutenant Colonel Bryan Hernandez wonders why the veterans of the most recent wars aren't joining veteran's groups. He doesn’t find any answers, but does express his respect for those who have gone before in military service. Perhaps after the matters of Iraq are done, in the past, and people would feel safer about admitting they were involved in those conflicts, we’ll see them in veteran’s organizations.

Michelle Malkin thinks she has the Democrats over a barrel with regard to the destruction of the torture tapes by the CIA - the difficulty in her story is that while she claims Democrats knew about them, knew about the intent to destroy them, and did nothing, her own material contradicts her. Admittedly, writing a strong letter urging them not to do so is not doing anything that would necessarily bar the CIA from destruction, but it’s not nothing. And if the CIA continues to claim that the tapes would have been a big security risk, then the tapes would probably have been destroyed and some privilege claimed that they could do so, even if someone moved to stop them from it.

Regarding the U.N. conference on Climate change, I suppose that I should say that Dan Gainor, who I commented on yesterday, was at least partially right. China wants the Western Hemisphere to pay for much of the greening of the world, saying their lavish lifestyle was contributing to the problem much more, having a higher per-person emission count in America than in China. Considering that Western countries are some of the worst offenders when it comes to climate change, there may be some merit in having the West pay a bit more of their share.

Moving onward. Beliefnet wants you to vote on who the most inspiring person was for 2007.

Pharyngula provides opposites to uplifting people by shining the spolight on American River College's recent student elections, complete with a Christian bloc taking most of the seats on the student council. The eyebrows go up because of things like a report your liberal teacher subforum on their forum site. Sounds like people who are very intent on making sure that their way becomes dominant. If they can achieve anything.

Through a quirk in the laws of each state, Rhode Island's Supreme Court ruled that homosexual couples married in another state cannot get divorced in theirs, because Rhode Island doesn’t recognize the marriage as valid. If they’re not married, then they can’t get a divorce. While it could be an excellent case against DOMA and other such legislation, I wonder if absolutely necessary, they could argue they were divorced by entering Rhode Island, when the state of residency stopped recognition of their marriage. Would be more difficult were one to move back into a recognizing state, but then they could file for divorce.

Last out of religion, and tops in silly, the Hindu gods Ram and Hanuman have been personally summoned to appear at a court in India, to help establish their claim to disputed land that was supposedly given to them. My guess is that they’re unlikely to show up in any recognizable form, if at all. It would be like deciding that YHWH should stand trial for all the recorded dickery he’s done in the past.

Oooh, snakes. Or rather, new species of giant spitting cobras. Pictures of the new species, naja ashei, are available for viewing. Just not one that you want to get too close to, I’m sure.

The Watchmen movie that is arriving released some stills, and Geekanerd took it on themselves to make comparisons between film still and the source material's illustrations.

Next-to-last, we have a couple thoughts on the phenomenon of Otherkin, and how the identification of oneself as such has useful effects. lupabitch remarks that one does not have to polarize to a literal or metaphorical interpretation regarding why one would be Otherkin, that multiple explanations can coexist, and that looking at oneself from many perspectives and lenses is a good thing. As baxil puts it, literal belief is just so, while also helping construct a meta-narrative of oneself that makes sense. There’s playing a bit with the definition of “true” in both posts that permits truth to be flexible - physiologically speaking, one is Hume, and not draconic or Viera or Nu Mou. Metaphorically speaking, or in the way that one views the world, once is aboslutely draconic or Viera or Nu Mou. Both of those statements are true, but they do not necessarily conflict. As an engineer, one might pick out the workmanship metadata of an object and attempt to see it in terms of how it was built. As an artist, one might see the same object with the metadata of the artist, the style, the color choice, and the elements that make it artistic. Both views are true, they’re just trained by experience and knowledge in the appropriate fields. Librarians and archivists are persons who see whatever metadata is the most useful to those who want to find the object in a collection later. Which may mean they take some engineer metadata, some artist metadata, some historian metadata, and some other metadata and put it all together in the record that stands as surrogate for the object. Same object, still objectively there, but each person sees it differently, emphasising different parts. I’m not entirely sure what the self-narrative of one’s specific Otherkin-ness provides in terms of how one sees the world and oneself, but if it wasn’t useful, it would be discarded. The same probably goes for any of our cultural, subcultural, or alternacultural identifications.

At the end tonight is a Disinformation Guide to 50 Things You're Not Supposed To Know, offering information about what we think we know, but are off on, or things we don’t know that we should. (Like what the Decalogue really is, if you start counting earlier than where most people do.)

Weekends zip by so quickly - 09 December 2007

So I decided to hop out of the house and go see The Golden Compass today - caught the last matinee show, so I got in cheep. Having read the source material for the movie, I wondered how things were going to turn out. On non-story related matters, the casting was excellent. There were a lot of voices and faces I recognized, or at least said “Heard that one somewhere before”. If the cast can play off each other in the next two movies, it’ll be excellent. There have been a changes from the book, one in the sequence of events that changes how things relate to each other. As with any adaptation, there were gaps in the narrative, but they were pretty well chosen, and so while I knew that there had been some scene-skipping, it didn’t completely detract from the experience or jump over significant events. If you’re worried about some antireligious sentiment in the movie, it’s not there. The villains of that movie could be just about any sort of generic hierarchy-based villains. Mrs. Coulter gave off more of a vibe of the Junior Anti-Sex League rather than anything else, but we’ll give her two more books’ worth of movies to develop as a character.

The one part I really didn’t like was the decision on how reading the alethiometer was sequenced. It was distracting and not at all effective for me to “dive” into the alethiometer and do an effects sequence, when it would have been just as easy to have the clockwork point as it was supposed to and have Lyra rattle off what it means. So not a perfect movie, but an entertaining one, and one that would be suitable for the family. While there is violence, actual gore is reserved for one segment, and it happens fast enough that you may not process it in time to confirm. And the movie ends on a happy segment, with characters all snuggled up, but staring at the later events to come.

Doctor Football struck again. Not even an army made of steel was able to stop Doctor Football’s troops from capturing more territory in their quest. Having skillfully managed his campaign so far, he has isolated and weakened his upcoming opponents, who have already lost several battles on the field. There is always the chance that one of them will summon their courage and skill and defeat Doctor Football, but with each passing week, his troops seem to grow stronger.

In Colorado, after a man asked to stay the night at a missionary training center and was turned down, he opened fire on the residents there, and then may have gone to a different church some miles away and started shooting there. It’s too bad that the idea of hostels hasn’t really caught on here in the U.S. Something like that might or might not have helped this situation.

When one becomes a presidential candidate, if they decide they want it, the media can have a long memory about other things. Take Mr. Huckabee, for example. In 1992, with the country still reeling from the realization of just how much HIV/AIDS had spread, Mr. Huckabee, in a senate race questionnaire, advocated for the quarantining of the infected, and believed, as many did then, that homosexuality could be a very dangerous transmission vector for HIV/AIDS. Now, fifteen years later, Mr. Huckabee is in favor of increased HIV/AIDS research. He cannot bring himself to support marriage or domestic partner benefits for homosexuals, but he knows more now than he knew then. We can only hope that society continues this trend toward knowledge, rather than regressing into ignorance because the knowledge being gained conflicts with their traditions. Right now, it seems that the popular option is to have a dissenting unit break away from a church that one doesn't agree with. In their favor, the American Episcopalian Church sounds like it wants to have dialogue and to work out the differences. Other organizations may not be so high-minded. Continuing in the knowledge explaining politics vein, the Slacktivist knows why Mitt’s “I’m a Christian, too!” speech doesn’t convince the people it needs to. Bullies don't respect those who suck up to them, he says, and that speech by Mitt was pure suck-up to the evangelical wingnut vote. I think, somehow, that by appealing to that demographic, you’ve lowered yourself several notches on the scale of many voters, Mr. Romney, including the people you’re trying to appeal to. Better strategy next time.

At times, that knowledge will be weird. I can only guess what sort of technological and anatomical knowledge goes into the design, manufacture, and advertising of NuttyBuddy, a groin and gential protection device for male athletes, but I’m sure there’s a lot of it. Yes, you in the back, you may make a joke, if you like, about how things might be better were amateur and professional athletes forced to compete with the danger of their family line ending. I’m not sure I want to know what kind of knowledge went into the design and current advertising for TwoDaLoo, a toilet with seats for two. It’s being marketed as a water conservation device and a way of maintaining a healthy relationship.

Knowledge can also be turned to humour. Fusing scientific principles with cute animals, LOLscience is yet another way of making electrons spin.

It can also be ambitious, as Future Hi lays out what Google can do with all its services, and a chunk of the 700Mhz broadcast spectrum. With high bandwidth plus aggregatable identifiers, one could call, chat, send files, or anything else using just one user id, rather than having to use different programs or websites. Consolidation and then some. It would be easier, certainly, to be yourself.

Knowledge is good for explaining things, as Robert King tries to explain what's at stake regarding residuals and the ongoing WGA strike. All of the issues he raises do deserve discussion in figuring out just how to pay everyone appropriately when media is distributed over the Internet.

Showing a distinct lack of knowledge, a biologist says he was fired from his post at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution because he doesn't believe in evolution. Despite the grant work he was doing required evolutionary aspects to be studied. If one denies evolution to the point that it impacts one’s job, science that deals with evolution may not be the best fit for one’s career.

Corporate lack of nollij involves a Mike Judge movie allowed to sink, but the beverage from that movie that supposedly caused the downfall of man is getting full corporate support. Fox let Office Space sink down, and it’s become a cult classic. The movie in question, Idiocracy, has also fallen by the wayside. The drink, however, is brandable and marketable. Um, priorities, people? ‘S not gonna make much sense if the people haven’t seen the movie. It’s not really a tie-in to the movie, because that had a limited theater release and has already come out on DVD... so what gives?

Be warned, the following link is to Harry Potter fan-fiction. The following fan-fiction is, however, about how the Harry Potter cast reacts to the shipping that goes on in fanfic, and a couple comments on movieworld as well. fan-metafiction, for the win.

I’ve noticed something, in trying to find an appropriate userpic for this post - I don’t have any that really reflect any sort of “serene” mood. There’s plenty of angry, of nobody, of heatless, of wise (whether I think I am, or someone else does), at least one depressed, one that’s bounding with glee and excitement, and the default picture, which is as much normal as anything else. But I don’t have an icon yet that matches the mood of being okay with myself, not working on some self-improvement pattern, or unbalanced by events that happened, and not a dark sentiment. So I command ye, internets, find me such a thing and bring it back, and show me where I can get it, and whose permissions to ask for it.