Friday, ahoy! - 07 March 2008
Mar. 7th, 2008 05:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptWell, we've made it to the end of another week. The weekend promises to be fun-filled and active the whole time. At some point, I'm sure I'll find some time to do a proper sort of sleeping-in lazy weekend, but it probably won't be happening while there's all the preparations for the Moisture Festival and such. If you're in the area, you should come out and see it. I promise that it'll be fun.
To start, my professional self gets to take center stage and lay into someone who (thankfully) is not part of my library district, but whom I suspect represents some (hopefully small) fraction of the people in my library district. George Elmore, of Gainesville, Florida, thinks it's a swell idea to close down the library and save the taxpayers some $19 million. What sets the blood of librarians aflame is the almost laughable manner in which he blithely believes that garage sales and reading in bookstores or online can suffice for books, that the free Internet holds sufficient scholarly knowledge as to make journal databases, and the libraries that subscribe to them, obsolete, and that buying wireless-capable laptops for anyone who was without an Internet means would be enough. The Director of the Alachua County Library System, Sol M. Hirsch, perhaps not seeing red, perhaps after seeing red and flames, pens an excellent response, noting that if all citizens had to use a public service for it to be useful, then health services, police services, fire services, public education, and a host of others would not be provided. Perhaps Mr. Elmore believes that we should go back to earlier days, where private citizens hired police on their own, paid for a local fire brigade out of their pockets, and hired their own teachers to get the kids educated. Many of the residents of Gainesville took the flamebait and ran with it, posting their reasons why a library is a necessary community resource. Mixed in with the praise were at least one or two opinions against the cost of the library, but in general, the people of Gainesville understand the versatility of the library system. Even if you never personally come to the library (Shock! Horror!), paying for it to exist and provide service helps you out in many ways.
Checking in with the news desk, a Palestinian gunman opened fire in a Jewish yeshiva, killing eight. *sigh* The only encouraging thing that I can say about this conflict is that eventually the Ireland conflict came to halt and peace was made, so there is precedent for the populace finally tiring of killing each other and wanting to get along. Something that may slow down some conflicts is the arrest of Viktor Bout, an arms dealer dubbed the "Merchant of Death" for his willingness to trade arms to anyone, anywhere, regardless of United Nations sanctions or Interpol arrest warrants.
Mr. Bush has backed the leader of Colombia in the increasingly tense situation between Colombia and its neighbors Ecuador and Venezuela. If something triggers into actual war, will the U.S. be sending troops into South America, perhaps to try and seize some of Mr. Chavez's oil supplies?
Last, Kuwait has found an effective method of squelching free speech - deporting any foreigner who is in attendance at protests and rallies, and sending the police after any natives who were there. Aren't you glad to live in a country where the President and Department of Homeland Security don't have arbitrary powers to declare someone an enemy and arrest them?
On the domestic front, Mr. Bush admits to being a miserable failure on national security, saying that America is still not safe from terrists. So Mr. Bush and KT McFarland both say that being able to eavesdrop on conversations in foreign countries because their communications pass through United States infrastructure is a necessary power. The privacy concerns have been gone over, but the logic in that reasoning is pretty flimsy, to me. Because the communication happens to go through our country, we have a right to listen in on it? Does that mean China should have the same right to listen in on communications, and even block them if the communication looks like it might be in violation of their principles? Are we going to have to build in switches that route traffic around China or Russia or Middle Eastern countries because we don't want them listening in on our conversations? That's what the precedent looks like to me.
To help make us safer from other countries, one of the top military commanders recommends building new nuclear weapons. Because nukes solve everything, and MAD is still the only way to be sure. It's so very telling that even though the commander wants a nuclear-free world, he believes that there has to be a nuclear force in place as a deterrent against others. So nobody's going to budge. What I want to know is who they think really wants to nuke the United States, the big consumers and debtors and buyers that we are. From what they're writing, OpinionJournal seems to think Iran would be a candidate.
In economic opinions, George McGovern says that people should be free to make their own bad economic decisions, including trying to stick with loans that have shifted on them and utilizing payday loan services if money is needed and credit isn't available. He recognizes the greater value of education about economic risk, but he seems convinced that we should allow people who get caught in credit crunches and shifted mortgages to be squeezed or placed into a sort of debt slavery where there's enough to meet minimums, but not enough to actually get out.
Furthermore, economically, spend your gift cards as soon as you get them, lest the company fail and the gift cards become worthless. And be sure to make sure companies shred and munge your personal data when they fold, lest you be exposed to dumpster-diving identity thieves through no fault of your own.
The Art department offers streets sanitized of signs. No road signs, no direction signs, no nothing. Just the architecture. Seems eerie with no signs and no people, like there was a disaster or something.
As an example of what the HiRISE camera orbiting Mars can do, look at a picture of Sol-3 and Luna, as seen from Sol-4. The night sky there would be so different, night after night. In other science, perhaps tiny nuclear reactors are a wave of the future, good for powering smaller segments of the grid by themselves - or as excellent backup generators in case of a power outage. For other infrastructure thoughts, a suggestion for building and using low-speed underground tube transport to ship cargo, rather than overland truck shipments. Automation and constant speed could make the process faster than drivers for short or long trips. The problem would be the initial investment in the transport network, which wouldn't be paid for until a much longer time of use. It would be a good project for long-term thinking, though.
A little less on infrastructure and a bit more on fun is Make3D, the second generation of programs that reconstruct three-dimensional environments from a single two-dimensional photograph.
And getting to the ranty-bits, I thought what I'd do was pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes. A school has decided to replace the faces of its students with smiley faces in all the pictures on the website, believing it a deterrent to pedophiles using the images as material and trading them around. While it's certainly novel, it's also quite a bit unsettling, and defeats the purpose of putting up pictures of things like team photos. Those involved seemed to believe that it would be much easier and less scary to blur out the faces if the school is that paranoid about pedophiles. More from school materials, students, be careful what you blog - a school refused to permit a student to hold elected office after she wrote on her personal blog calling the act of canceling the school's Jamfest "douchebaggery". Officials were apparently reading someone's out-of-school communication, on a personal blog, and decided to punish her for it by not permitting her to take office in a school election. Um, free speech outside of school hasn't diminished as far as I know. So the school admins really were being pricks about douchbaggery.
Also, a quandary that nobody should have to go through - outed by a friend who was being put to death for homosexuality in Iran, a student sought asylum, and was denied. Thus, now he's seeking asylum in the Netherlands, because if he goes back to the UK, they'll send him back to Iran, where the gallows most likely awaits him. Somewhere in this segment, one would think common sense would intervene and asylum would be granted, but currently, while acknowledging that Iran hangs gay men and lesbians, the Home Office appears to believe there is no systematic repression of gay men and lesbians. Thus, common sense is frighteningly absent from this decision so far. Here's hoping the people in the Home Office get their heads on straight.
I agree with The Infamous Brad that the procedure followed by an officer in a standoff that saw all the officer's shots fired blindly at a suspect hiding behind cover was definitely not smart police work. As![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bradhicks notes, thirty-two shots fired, and none of them grazed the suspect. Luckily, none of them hit innocents, either. It sounds like the situation could have been resolved without firing a shot, but that wasn't the training that had been given.
Last for the rants, it looks like the lifting of the toy ban in Texas may be reversed, depending on whether the appeal filed with the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals by the state's Attorney General stands up. Amanda Marcotte and Pandagon at AlterNet see this appeal as yet another attempt by conservative wingnuts to suppress and repress female sexuality, this time under a moral hazard argument where toys lead to all sorts of other deviancies from morality, like incest and bigamy. The domino theory was discredited several times when Communism expanded and the world didn't collapse. And really, what part of a woman playing with BOB is going to induce her to want to do stuff with her brother, Bob, unless she already wanted him in the first place?
And now I'm wondering whether Texas still has doctors performing cures for female hysteria. This is what happens when you learn about stuff - it starts forming connections, and then those connections start playing with other connections, and before long you've got a whole joke or comment formed.
Last for tonight, something that I would probably be interested in watching. Y'see, CBS tried to make a reality show with geologists competing against each other. You know, something like a Rocks and Lava edition of a fear show. Problem is, the geologists weren't cutthroat and were more interested in the rocks than the games. I'd really want to see how the production of that show went, and get interviews with all the people that tried to make such a thing float and failed. Then again, I might have an affinity for watching something like that crash and burn.
So that's the stuff for tonight. Enjoy your weekends.
To start, my professional self gets to take center stage and lay into someone who (thankfully) is not part of my library district, but whom I suspect represents some (hopefully small) fraction of the people in my library district. George Elmore, of Gainesville, Florida, thinks it's a swell idea to close down the library and save the taxpayers some $19 million. What sets the blood of librarians aflame is the almost laughable manner in which he blithely believes that garage sales and reading in bookstores or online can suffice for books, that the free Internet holds sufficient scholarly knowledge as to make journal databases, and the libraries that subscribe to them, obsolete, and that buying wireless-capable laptops for anyone who was without an Internet means would be enough. The Director of the Alachua County Library System, Sol M. Hirsch, perhaps not seeing red, perhaps after seeing red and flames, pens an excellent response, noting that if all citizens had to use a public service for it to be useful, then health services, police services, fire services, public education, and a host of others would not be provided. Perhaps Mr. Elmore believes that we should go back to earlier days, where private citizens hired police on their own, paid for a local fire brigade out of their pockets, and hired their own teachers to get the kids educated. Many of the residents of Gainesville took the flamebait and ran with it, posting their reasons why a library is a necessary community resource. Mixed in with the praise were at least one or two opinions against the cost of the library, but in general, the people of Gainesville understand the versatility of the library system. Even if you never personally come to the library (Shock! Horror!), paying for it to exist and provide service helps you out in many ways.
Checking in with the news desk, a Palestinian gunman opened fire in a Jewish yeshiva, killing eight. *sigh* The only encouraging thing that I can say about this conflict is that eventually the Ireland conflict came to halt and peace was made, so there is precedent for the populace finally tiring of killing each other and wanting to get along. Something that may slow down some conflicts is the arrest of Viktor Bout, an arms dealer dubbed the "Merchant of Death" for his willingness to trade arms to anyone, anywhere, regardless of United Nations sanctions or Interpol arrest warrants.
Mr. Bush has backed the leader of Colombia in the increasingly tense situation between Colombia and its neighbors Ecuador and Venezuela. If something triggers into actual war, will the U.S. be sending troops into South America, perhaps to try and seize some of Mr. Chavez's oil supplies?
Last, Kuwait has found an effective method of squelching free speech - deporting any foreigner who is in attendance at protests and rallies, and sending the police after any natives who were there. Aren't you glad to live in a country where the President and Department of Homeland Security don't have arbitrary powers to declare someone an enemy and arrest them?
On the domestic front, Mr. Bush admits to being a miserable failure on national security, saying that America is still not safe from terrists. So Mr. Bush and KT McFarland both say that being able to eavesdrop on conversations in foreign countries because their communications pass through United States infrastructure is a necessary power. The privacy concerns have been gone over, but the logic in that reasoning is pretty flimsy, to me. Because the communication happens to go through our country, we have a right to listen in on it? Does that mean China should have the same right to listen in on communications, and even block them if the communication looks like it might be in violation of their principles? Are we going to have to build in switches that route traffic around China or Russia or Middle Eastern countries because we don't want them listening in on our conversations? That's what the precedent looks like to me.
To help make us safer from other countries, one of the top military commanders recommends building new nuclear weapons. Because nukes solve everything, and MAD is still the only way to be sure. It's so very telling that even though the commander wants a nuclear-free world, he believes that there has to be a nuclear force in place as a deterrent against others. So nobody's going to budge. What I want to know is who they think really wants to nuke the United States, the big consumers and debtors and buyers that we are. From what they're writing, OpinionJournal seems to think Iran would be a candidate.
In economic opinions, George McGovern says that people should be free to make their own bad economic decisions, including trying to stick with loans that have shifted on them and utilizing payday loan services if money is needed and credit isn't available. He recognizes the greater value of education about economic risk, but he seems convinced that we should allow people who get caught in credit crunches and shifted mortgages to be squeezed or placed into a sort of debt slavery where there's enough to meet minimums, but not enough to actually get out.
Furthermore, economically, spend your gift cards as soon as you get them, lest the company fail and the gift cards become worthless. And be sure to make sure companies shred and munge your personal data when they fold, lest you be exposed to dumpster-diving identity thieves through no fault of your own.
The Art department offers streets sanitized of signs. No road signs, no direction signs, no nothing. Just the architecture. Seems eerie with no signs and no people, like there was a disaster or something.
As an example of what the HiRISE camera orbiting Mars can do, look at a picture of Sol-3 and Luna, as seen from Sol-4. The night sky there would be so different, night after night. In other science, perhaps tiny nuclear reactors are a wave of the future, good for powering smaller segments of the grid by themselves - or as excellent backup generators in case of a power outage. For other infrastructure thoughts, a suggestion for building and using low-speed underground tube transport to ship cargo, rather than overland truck shipments. Automation and constant speed could make the process faster than drivers for short or long trips. The problem would be the initial investment in the transport network, which wouldn't be paid for until a much longer time of use. It would be a good project for long-term thinking, though.
A little less on infrastructure and a bit more on fun is Make3D, the second generation of programs that reconstruct three-dimensional environments from a single two-dimensional photograph.
And getting to the ranty-bits, I thought what I'd do was pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes. A school has decided to replace the faces of its students with smiley faces in all the pictures on the website, believing it a deterrent to pedophiles using the images as material and trading them around. While it's certainly novel, it's also quite a bit unsettling, and defeats the purpose of putting up pictures of things like team photos. Those involved seemed to believe that it would be much easier and less scary to blur out the faces if the school is that paranoid about pedophiles. More from school materials, students, be careful what you blog - a school refused to permit a student to hold elected office after she wrote on her personal blog calling the act of canceling the school's Jamfest "douchebaggery". Officials were apparently reading someone's out-of-school communication, on a personal blog, and decided to punish her for it by not permitting her to take office in a school election. Um, free speech outside of school hasn't diminished as far as I know. So the school admins really were being pricks about douchbaggery.
Also, a quandary that nobody should have to go through - outed by a friend who was being put to death for homosexuality in Iran, a student sought asylum, and was denied. Thus, now he's seeking asylum in the Netherlands, because if he goes back to the UK, they'll send him back to Iran, where the gallows most likely awaits him. Somewhere in this segment, one would think common sense would intervene and asylum would be granted, but currently, while acknowledging that Iran hangs gay men and lesbians, the Home Office appears to believe there is no systematic repression of gay men and lesbians. Thus, common sense is frighteningly absent from this decision so far. Here's hoping the people in the Home Office get their heads on straight.
I agree with The Infamous Brad that the procedure followed by an officer in a standoff that saw all the officer's shots fired blindly at a suspect hiding behind cover was definitely not smart police work. As
bradhicks notes, thirty-two shots fired, and none of them grazed the suspect. Luckily, none of them hit innocents, either. It sounds like the situation could have been resolved without firing a shot, but that wasn't the training that had been given.Last for the rants, it looks like the lifting of the toy ban in Texas may be reversed, depending on whether the appeal filed with the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals by the state's Attorney General stands up. Amanda Marcotte and Pandagon at AlterNet see this appeal as yet another attempt by conservative wingnuts to suppress and repress female sexuality, this time under a moral hazard argument where toys lead to all sorts of other deviancies from morality, like incest and bigamy. The domino theory was discredited several times when Communism expanded and the world didn't collapse. And really, what part of a woman playing with BOB is going to induce her to want to do stuff with her brother, Bob, unless she already wanted him in the first place?
And now I'm wondering whether Texas still has doctors performing cures for female hysteria. This is what happens when you learn about stuff - it starts forming connections, and then those connections start playing with other connections, and before long you've got a whole joke or comment formed.
Last for tonight, something that I would probably be interested in watching. Y'see, CBS tried to make a reality show with geologists competing against each other. You know, something like a Rocks and Lava edition of a fear show. Problem is, the geologists weren't cutthroat and were more interested in the rocks than the games. I'd really want to see how the production of that show went, and get interviews with all the people that tried to make such a thing float and failed. Then again, I might have an affinity for watching something like that crash and burn.
So that's the stuff for tonight. Enjoy your weekends.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-03-08 02:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-09 01:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-09 01:08 am (UTC)Aw, not going to dress up in girlie clothing while you play the trombone?
no subject
Date: 2008-03-08 07:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-09 01:00 am (UTC)