![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Figuratively, really, not literally. But a lot happened. Stories told, components gathered, new computers installed and running, movement of equipment, strong offense to my design and aesthetic sensibilities, which I will learn to live with as the matters have been decided, and it’s not really anything that bad. I’ll probably grow to like it, or at least tolerate it, as time goes on. It’s not anything serious at all. Plus, I can’t really have my optimum solution, because if wouldn’t actually be an optimum solution. Additionally, the cosmic sense of humor got me twice today - once in not delivering all the packages I had to where I said to deliver them to (got that fixed tonight, hopefully), and second, that one of those packages appeared at said workplace after I complained in the presence of many people. So once again, the cosmic joke was on me.
My professional self smiles and says “ha, ha, only serious” at technically legal signs to display in one's library. Because USA PATRIOT is still around and still trying to snoop around on you as much as it can. Congress approved a 15-day extension of the government's broad surveillance act, to give them enough time to hammer out an even worse version, after they take a week's vacation. All this, of course, is happening when the governments is not trying to seize your land so that Wal-Mart can build on it. Well, it’s a country where the Attorney General won't call torture torture, instead saying that the CIA doesn’t have waterboarding on the authorized methods list, so they can’t do it. What do we expect when the Attorney General won’t actually say that torture is torture?
Internationally, Canada has decided not to participate in a UN-sponsored anti-racism conference, citing the likelihood of the second conference following the degeneration of the previous one. More positively, the ashes of Mahatma Ghandi have been scattered at sea, sixty years after his assassination.
In politics, Senator Edwards is exiting the Democratic Presidential race, leaving Senator Clinton and Senator Obama as the front-running pair. This does not necessarily bode well for voters who believe that Senator Clinton is too far to the right and that Senator Obama is undesirable or naive about getting things done. In other Democratic material, despite the claim that the 2008 election will be "post-racial", there's still quite a few instances of what looks remarkably like racism, or religionism. And there have been attempts at genderism, too, so none of the Democratic frontrunners have to feel left out.
dogemperor at Kos spins a web that suggests the person who was responsible for Ohio "voting irregularities", and the president that was elected by them in 2004, as well as possibly the governor of the state that elected Mr. Bush in 2000 are all associated with Bill Gothard, one of the more dominionist of dominionists around. (Mr. Huckabee is also apparently associated with Mr. Gothard) As the associations build, dogemperor eventually suggests that Gothard and his followers may have been able to orchestrate both elections of Mr. Bush. The connections are interesting, certainly, and the damage Mr. Bush has done is great, but I’m not completely sure why these associations are important, unless he fears that Huck pulls a miracle and gets elected, or that somehow Gothard will be able to exercise undue influence on the country that will transform it into the “Christian” nation. William S. Lind suggests the American populace is deluding itself when it comes to its “democracy”, with politicians that promise everything and deliver nothing, and that perhaps America would do better in some other form of government, or will continue to serve as a warning to others about the problems of democracy.
Some silliness about Senator John McCain from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
tscheese - the Arizona senator looks suspiciously like another character...
Professortscheese rides again, this time about what happens to people if further interest rate cuts happen. One possible benefit of the economic slowdown is that Starbucks is opening fewer stores in the United States this year - but opening many more stores outside the United States.
In matters of the strange, Daniel Edwards continues to make statues of modern goddesses, this time selecting Oprah Winfrey as his subject of statue-making. At least, I think that’s the rationale behind it, considering he’s chosen Britney Spears giving birth and Paris Hilton’s death. Or I’m reading way too much into something, looking for patterns where none exist. But it would be an interesting exercise to think of this as a way of sculpting statues of the goddesses of modern society. Perhaps equally as strange are advertisements for a fitness club that depict nuns sketching a naked man, which has naturally provoked a reaction from some local Catholics saying that the ad is contemptuous of Catholicism. Additionally strange is the usage of the same cover art on Frank Herbert's Dune and Philip K. Dick's Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Ah, across the spectrum from each other much? Last out of the news of the strange is a zone around the Empire State Building that appears to be interfering with radio devices like keyless entry units and possibly preventing cars from starting.
A rage-inducing story - between the under-limit person trying to execute a legal u-turn and the underage party girl who was legally drunk, in an SUV, and out of control, guess who gets charged in the accident that follows when a life in the SUV is claimed? Here’s a hint - it’s not the drunk. The one who was doing things legally, who lost a bumper, and admittedly panicked is facing 21 years in jail and has been charged with manslaughter. The underage, drunk, over-limit, out-of-control girl? Hasn’t faced any charges yet. More from the Lack of Common Sense department includes a 14 year-old child arrested for sniffing hand sanitizer, on the rationale that he was trying to get high off of it. The prosecutor, thankfully, is not pursuing the charges. And then there’s a particularly infuriating decision - the deputy director of the Office on National Drug Control Policy thinks that overdosers of heroin should die rather than receive treatment that would prevent those overdoses. All in the name of scaring them into the straight and narrow path. Well, it’s going to be pretty ineffective if the OD’er is dead. Maybe the fear generated by knowing you’ve overdosed and then being grateful for a new lease on life would be enough. Maybe it takes a few times. Maybe it takes some other situation improving before the drugs can be successfully kicked. Won’t know if they’re dead. It’s like saying anyone on welfare is lazy and not trying hard enough to make their own success. Wait, Republicans are in the White House, aren’t they? I’ll bet the same deputy director is against the possibility of changing genetic structure so as not to cause dependency on drugs like morphine.
Unabashed Feminism contributes a 2006 review of "The Girls Who Went Away", a book capturing the accounts of those women in earlier times who got pregnant at a young age and were either married off or spirited away to another place and basically forced to give up their child for adoption, all the while having guilt and shame heaped on them by the people at their “convalescence” place and in the society they had. The discussion about the book and its themes at Bureau Chiefldragoon‘s journal makes mention that this sort of behavior is not just in the past, and that the mythical past that conservatives want to go to is not wine and roses.
Our “That’s not Ironic, that’s just stupid!” department catches on to a school that invited a vehemently antigay preacher to speak for a Martin Luther King Day assembly. Even more so, when one of the teachers tried to engage the speaker in a dialogue about why his acceptance of Dr. King’s tolerance message didn’t extend to gay and lesbian people, it was apparently deemed to be “inappropriate”. Scattered amounts of information from the perspective of the students and staff against Mr. Hutcherson’s invitation are available at Mt. Si Parents. Apparently, the Gay-Straight Alliance opposed Hutcherson’s invitation, and both the GSA and the staffer attempting to engage Mr. Hutcherson at the speaking were unaware that he had been confirmed as the speaker, after they had concluded with the assembly organizers to their satisfaction that Mr. Hutcherson would not be speaking at the assembly. Major miscommunication, or someone was lied to. Either way, kudos to the teacher aiming to make an educational moment on an appropriate day. The students should be glad that they got a chance to be told they could question and inquire. And they’ve probably learned a lesson about how authority figures tend not to like that questioning attitude.
The Impartiality of the Fourth Estate contributor links us to a Mother Jones article about the increased printing of "news" from ordinary citizens, some who are closely associated with the things they're "reporting" on. With less staff reporters and editors checking the content, a lot more unchecked material and PR passes off as news. On the other side of the coin, those who are worried that the government is doing more than its share of repressing actual news from getting out may want to consult Reporters Without Borders' handbook for bloggers and cyber-dissidents, and may consider joining the Free Network Project, a decentralized P2P information service that uses encryption, both of files on a person’s allocated FreeNet space and in retrieving FreeNet data.
The Science department has a lot for us tonight, including deep brain stimulation that can help improve memory recall - running down pathways forgotten with new energy could bring back stuff we knew we knew, just that we forgot. In more mental matters, scientists have discovered that the person who says that his tools feel like an extension of the body is exactly right. Tool mastery comes from using the tools as if they were limbs. In materials sciences, forget Spider-man, we'll be using Gecko-Man to climb walls. And for making things, microscopic robots that can be reconfigured into just about any shape imaginable are on the research plans at Carnegie Mellon University. Which could make for grey goo, really realistic actors, or the first instances of the eventual takeover of the world by robots.
Some may have to run it through a translator, but the gist of the following page is thus - a robot arm with a baton has been successfully used as a musical conductor. Considering that the music-making is in the musicians, and that the conductor is there to keep time, phrase, and control dynamic levels from the performers, it makes sense that a robot arm could be programmed to control those functions. The piece chosen is actually quite a nice piece, and the musicians do what they do superbly.
Lists in Science (Science!) involve ten psychological studies that show insight into why bright people do stupid or illogical things and
Last for tonight, the Wall Street Journal speculates what life will be like in ten years. Mostly, lots of new gadgetry, gadgetry everywhere, and privacy invasions and enticements to people to broadcast themselves. By then, due to the great multimedia richness on the Internet, one zetabyte's worth of material might be exchanged over the Internet in the average year. That said, things may or not be looking up. A Pointless Waste of Time has seven reasons why the 21st century is making us miserable.
Maybe then, it’s just good that we go to bed.
My professional self smiles and says “ha, ha, only serious” at technically legal signs to display in one's library. Because USA PATRIOT is still around and still trying to snoop around on you as much as it can. Congress approved a 15-day extension of the government's broad surveillance act, to give them enough time to hammer out an even worse version, after they take a week's vacation. All this, of course, is happening when the governments is not trying to seize your land so that Wal-Mart can build on it. Well, it’s a country where the Attorney General won't call torture torture, instead saying that the CIA doesn’t have waterboarding on the authorized methods list, so they can’t do it. What do we expect when the Attorney General won’t actually say that torture is torture?
Internationally, Canada has decided not to participate in a UN-sponsored anti-racism conference, citing the likelihood of the second conference following the degeneration of the previous one. More positively, the ashes of Mahatma Ghandi have been scattered at sea, sixty years after his assassination.
In politics, Senator Edwards is exiting the Democratic Presidential race, leaving Senator Clinton and Senator Obama as the front-running pair. This does not necessarily bode well for voters who believe that Senator Clinton is too far to the right and that Senator Obama is undesirable or naive about getting things done. In other Democratic material, despite the claim that the 2008 election will be "post-racial", there's still quite a few instances of what looks remarkably like racism, or religionism. And there have been attempts at genderism, too, so none of the Democratic frontrunners have to feel left out.
dogemperor at Kos spins a web that suggests the person who was responsible for Ohio "voting irregularities", and the president that was elected by them in 2004, as well as possibly the governor of the state that elected Mr. Bush in 2000 are all associated with Bill Gothard, one of the more dominionist of dominionists around. (Mr. Huckabee is also apparently associated with Mr. Gothard) As the associations build, dogemperor eventually suggests that Gothard and his followers may have been able to orchestrate both elections of Mr. Bush. The connections are interesting, certainly, and the damage Mr. Bush has done is great, but I’m not completely sure why these associations are important, unless he fears that Huck pulls a miracle and gets elected, or that somehow Gothard will be able to exercise undue influence on the country that will transform it into the “Christian” nation. William S. Lind suggests the American populace is deluding itself when it comes to its “democracy”, with politicians that promise everything and deliver nothing, and that perhaps America would do better in some other form of government, or will continue to serve as a warning to others about the problems of democracy.
Some silliness about Senator John McCain from
tscheese - the Arizona senator looks suspiciously like another character...Professor
tscheese rides again, this time about what happens to people if further interest rate cuts happen. One possible benefit of the economic slowdown is that Starbucks is opening fewer stores in the United States this year - but opening many more stores outside the United States.In matters of the strange, Daniel Edwards continues to make statues of modern goddesses, this time selecting Oprah Winfrey as his subject of statue-making. At least, I think that’s the rationale behind it, considering he’s chosen Britney Spears giving birth and Paris Hilton’s death. Or I’m reading way too much into something, looking for patterns where none exist. But it would be an interesting exercise to think of this as a way of sculpting statues of the goddesses of modern society. Perhaps equally as strange are advertisements for a fitness club that depict nuns sketching a naked man, which has naturally provoked a reaction from some local Catholics saying that the ad is contemptuous of Catholicism. Additionally strange is the usage of the same cover art on Frank Herbert's Dune and Philip K. Dick's Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Ah, across the spectrum from each other much? Last out of the news of the strange is a zone around the Empire State Building that appears to be interfering with radio devices like keyless entry units and possibly preventing cars from starting.
A rage-inducing story - between the under-limit person trying to execute a legal u-turn and the underage party girl who was legally drunk, in an SUV, and out of control, guess who gets charged in the accident that follows when a life in the SUV is claimed? Here’s a hint - it’s not the drunk. The one who was doing things legally, who lost a bumper, and admittedly panicked is facing 21 years in jail and has been charged with manslaughter. The underage, drunk, over-limit, out-of-control girl? Hasn’t faced any charges yet. More from the Lack of Common Sense department includes a 14 year-old child arrested for sniffing hand sanitizer, on the rationale that he was trying to get high off of it. The prosecutor, thankfully, is not pursuing the charges. And then there’s a particularly infuriating decision - the deputy director of the Office on National Drug Control Policy thinks that overdosers of heroin should die rather than receive treatment that would prevent those overdoses. All in the name of scaring them into the straight and narrow path. Well, it’s going to be pretty ineffective if the OD’er is dead. Maybe the fear generated by knowing you’ve overdosed and then being grateful for a new lease on life would be enough. Maybe it takes a few times. Maybe it takes some other situation improving before the drugs can be successfully kicked. Won’t know if they’re dead. It’s like saying anyone on welfare is lazy and not trying hard enough to make their own success. Wait, Republicans are in the White House, aren’t they? I’ll bet the same deputy director is against the possibility of changing genetic structure so as not to cause dependency on drugs like morphine.
Unabashed Feminism contributes a 2006 review of "The Girls Who Went Away", a book capturing the accounts of those women in earlier times who got pregnant at a young age and were either married off or spirited away to another place and basically forced to give up their child for adoption, all the while having guilt and shame heaped on them by the people at their “convalescence” place and in the society they had. The discussion about the book and its themes at Bureau Chief
ldragoon‘s journal makes mention that this sort of behavior is not just in the past, and that the mythical past that conservatives want to go to is not wine and roses. Our “That’s not Ironic, that’s just stupid!” department catches on to a school that invited a vehemently antigay preacher to speak for a Martin Luther King Day assembly. Even more so, when one of the teachers tried to engage the speaker in a dialogue about why his acceptance of Dr. King’s tolerance message didn’t extend to gay and lesbian people, it was apparently deemed to be “inappropriate”. Scattered amounts of information from the perspective of the students and staff against Mr. Hutcherson’s invitation are available at Mt. Si Parents. Apparently, the Gay-Straight Alliance opposed Hutcherson’s invitation, and both the GSA and the staffer attempting to engage Mr. Hutcherson at the speaking were unaware that he had been confirmed as the speaker, after they had concluded with the assembly organizers to their satisfaction that Mr. Hutcherson would not be speaking at the assembly. Major miscommunication, or someone was lied to. Either way, kudos to the teacher aiming to make an educational moment on an appropriate day. The students should be glad that they got a chance to be told they could question and inquire. And they’ve probably learned a lesson about how authority figures tend not to like that questioning attitude.
The Impartiality of the Fourth Estate contributor links us to a Mother Jones article about the increased printing of "news" from ordinary citizens, some who are closely associated with the things they're "reporting" on. With less staff reporters and editors checking the content, a lot more unchecked material and PR passes off as news. On the other side of the coin, those who are worried that the government is doing more than its share of repressing actual news from getting out may want to consult Reporters Without Borders' handbook for bloggers and cyber-dissidents, and may consider joining the Free Network Project, a decentralized P2P information service that uses encryption, both of files on a person’s allocated FreeNet space and in retrieving FreeNet data.
The Science department has a lot for us tonight, including deep brain stimulation that can help improve memory recall - running down pathways forgotten with new energy could bring back stuff we knew we knew, just that we forgot. In more mental matters, scientists have discovered that the person who says that his tools feel like an extension of the body is exactly right. Tool mastery comes from using the tools as if they were limbs. In materials sciences, forget Spider-man, we'll be using Gecko-Man to climb walls. And for making things, microscopic robots that can be reconfigured into just about any shape imaginable are on the research plans at Carnegie Mellon University. Which could make for grey goo, really realistic actors, or the first instances of the eventual takeover of the world by robots.
Some may have to run it through a translator, but the gist of the following page is thus - a robot arm with a baton has been successfully used as a musical conductor. Considering that the music-making is in the musicians, and that the conductor is there to keep time, phrase, and control dynamic levels from the performers, it makes sense that a robot arm could be programmed to control those functions. The piece chosen is actually quite a nice piece, and the musicians do what they do superbly.
Lists in Science (Science!) involve ten psychological studies that show insight into why bright people do stupid or illogical things and
Last for tonight, the Wall Street Journal speculates what life will be like in ten years. Mostly, lots of new gadgetry, gadgetry everywhere, and privacy invasions and enticements to people to broadcast themselves. By then, due to the great multimedia richness on the Internet, one zetabyte's worth of material might be exchanged over the Internet in the average year. That said, things may or not be looking up. A Pointless Waste of Time has seven reasons why the 21st century is making us miserable.
Maybe then, it’s just good that we go to bed.
