To step out of your cradle is like coming down
I just had somebody tell me I was introspective to a fault
I'll be a doozer if I can
But I will contented be right now if we could keep our secret
You could tell me all your secrets
All you want to do is run and hide
You can keep it inside
If you tell me all your secrets
I can keep it inside
But if it's as it seems, and I keep having dreams
About the two of us, then it's obvious
You should stop treating me like I was just a child
You should start treating me like I was just as wild as you
To step out of you cradle is like coming down
I just had somebody tell me I was introspective to a fault
I'll be a doozer if I can
But I will contented be right now if we could keep our secret
We could be a little closer
The mystery you're trying to preserve
You don't need in reserve
We could get a little closer
Intimacy has the greater charm
And it would do no harm
To give a little way, oh please stop holiding sway
You could even read me your poetry
If you could stop treating me like I was just a child
You should start treating me like I was just as wild as you
One of the most fascinating thing I've read recently: Benford's Law about the prevalence of the number "1" in real-life statistics.
I've loved the song Sukiyaki since I first heard the Cornell Hangovers' rendition of it back in 1995. Today a simple Google searched finally answer my questions about the origins of this song. http://www.maddmansrealm.com/sukiyaki/ says:
Internationally acclaimed singer. Sakamoto made his show business debut in 1960. His biggest hit, Ue o Muite Aruko (I Look Up When I Walk; "Sukiyaki" in the West), was released in Japan in 1961. After its release in the U.S. in 1963, the song's earnestness and melodic beauty proved irresistible despite its incomprehensible lyrics. Against all odds, on June 15, 1963, the song ousted Leslie Gore's "It's My Party" to become the No. 1 popular song in the U.S. "Sukiyaki" remains the biggest international hit by a Japanese popular singer.
The version I bought off the iTunes Music Store is by the Starsound Orchestra, and features a simple male vocal lead single a nicely-paced version of the song.
"Here's what gets me" is a brilliant write-up of this. It expresses exactly why I'm so enraged at Bush right now, with his smug jokes and "Brownie, you're doing a hell of a job" comments.
Say what you want about the mayor and governor -- those people were in pain. They saw people suffering and dying and took it as a given that it couldn't go on that way, and that if it did, government's response would be a failure. The mayor cried at the top of his lungs for help. I want to hear that Bush cried at the top of his lungs for help. I want to hear that he called every corporate hotshot he's befriended in the last twenty years and told them that if they ever wanted another invitation to the White House for dinner, they were going to pony up a fat wad of cash to the Red Cross, and they were going to do it yesterday.
I want him to have reacted like a person who happened to also be the president. I want him to have felt the same bone-deep sense of shock that I felt at the thought that this could happen in a large city, easily accessible by trucks, in a wealthy country. I want him to have gotten on the damn phone and told somebody that if there wasn't water for every person at the Superdome within eight hours, that person's head was going to roll, and he didn't care how it got done, it had better get done. I want him not to have sat around on his ass on vacation while people's children were being taken from their arms to be rescued.
I want Bush not to have spent four days dicking around while the conditions deteriorated. I want him to have acted sooner, not because it was his obligation as president and it would reflect badly on him if he didn't, but because people were dying, and everyone I know who could think of something to do did it. There were a million things he could have done besides sit around making happy speeches about how everything would be fine. The stupid comment about Trent Lott's porch doesn't infuriate me because Trent Lott can't miss his porch. He has as much right to be sad over his losses as anyone. But the lighthearted way in which Bush delivered those remarks was absolutely chilling.
Well, technically not a review, but he tears these guys a new one, all the while maintaining his trademark eloquence. The essay/letter is a wonderful reflection on the possibilities of cinema (and art in general) in the context of the human condition.
What place does pure evil have in films?
Not badminton... betterminton. Speedminton
This looks seriously fun.
I just had a cynical revelation about abstinence-only sex education programs: they are *not* designed to prevent unwanted pregnancies. They cannot be. No serious proposal for solving any problem ever relies on telling kids not to do something, unless the goal is to get them to do something. Telling kids not to have sex is about as effective as telling them not to touch a hot stove. So here is the realization: the whole point of abstinence-only sex education is to *build* the population base in fervently conservative, evangelical communities. Abstinence-only sex education is bound to increase unwanted pregnancies, and those babies are going to either grow up in (1) a single-parent environment with strong influence from their evangelical grandparents, or (2) a two-parent environment where the parents married out of guilt and parental pressure. Both cultures are ripe for raising evangelical kids.
Everyone knows that young teenagers have sex. (For the last several hundred years it was institutionalized as marriage.) This is something that GOD has designed them to do. Secular liberals did not engineer puberty into the human genome; this is something that is part of nature. There are many legitimate reasons that we can and should give to teenagers for *not* having sex, but if those reasons are not enough, we should at least make sure they are safe.
Here is a website with a nice and thorough compilation of recent political video clips.
I sometimes (ok, everytime) take issue with Paul Graham's Lisp-worship, but his latest essay, Great Hackers, is absolutely brilliant. (Possibly because it doesn't fawningly mention Lisp.) It's a veritable treasure mine of gems:
But the next time I talked to him, he said they'd decided to build their software on Windows NT, and had just hired a very experienced NT developer to be their chief technical officer. When I heard this, I thought, these guys are doomed. One, the CTO couldn't be a first rate hacker, because to become an eminent NT developer he would have had to use NT voluntarily, multiple times, and I couldn't imagine a great hacker doing that; and two, even if he was good, he'd have a hard time hiring anyone good to work for him if the project had to be built on NT.
...
It's pretty easy to say what kinds of problems are not interesting: those where instead of solving a few big, clear, problems, you have to solve a lot of nasty little ones. One of the worst kinds of projects is writing an interface to a piece of software that's full of bugs. Another is when you have to customize something for an individual client's complex and ill-defined needs. To hackers these kinds of projects are the death of a thousand cuts.
...
I think what a lot of VCs are looking for, at least unconsciously, is the next Microsoft. And of course if Microsoft is your model, you shouldn't be looking for companies that hope to win by writing great software. But VCs are mistaken to look for the next Microsoft, because no startup can be the next Microsoft unless some other company is prepared to bend over at just the right moment and be the next IBM.
John McCutcheon has put music to the words of our eloquent President Bush and produced a massively amusing piece entitled "Hail to the Chief". Download Hail to the Chief and read the lyrics. As the credits on the song state, the music is by John McCutcheon but the words are 100% Bush. An excerpt of the lyrics:
When I delivered the State of the Budget Address
I offered a question or two
How can a man still put food on his family
Will the tollbooth to the middleclass become more few?
It’s time to make the pie higher
This idea’s sure to resignate
This is no time to be subliminable
It’s a time to unificate
He also has a lot of other songs for download. Also amusing: Ashcroft's Army , Let's Pretend (about the "Mission Accomplished" fiasco), Pat and Jerry Blues (about Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell blaming 9/11 on feminists, gays, and liberals), and The List (about ClearChannel's alleged list of banned songs after 9/11).
The Vandenbrink Carver is an awesome, street-legal (in the EU) tilting body one-seater vehicle. Check out the pictures and the videos!
The Wage Slave has an awesome Scorecard of Evil, a light-hearted but factual look at all the crummy things that Bush has done.
Today's Washington Post has an inspired editorial that suggests supplanting The Pledge of Allegiance with the Preamble of the Constitution: not only does it obviate the current controversy, but it would also replace a meaningless bit of flag-worship with a concrete statement of our nation's values.
Since the Post requires registration, and I find that these sorts of links always expire after a month or so, I'm posting the entirety of the editorial here.
Commentary: Linda R. Monk
Here's the solution: Recite Preamble instead of Pledge
Friday, March 26, 2004
The Supreme Court heard oral argument this week on one of the more explosive questions before it: whether public school teachers can lead students in the Pledge of Allegiance to a nation "under God."
In the Newdow case, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled that public school teachers within that circuit (comprising nine Western states) violate the First Amendment when they lead students, even those who are willing, in the pledge.
The court said that teachers are endorsing religion, contrary to the Establishment Clause, when they lead the class in reciting the pledge's words: "one nation, under God." In a public school setting, the lower court held, nonbelieving children can be coerced by teachers' actions in a way that adults are not.
The best solution to this problem -- one that respects both the community's desire to instill patriotism and the conscience of religious dissenters -- is to end recitation not just of the words "under God" but of the entire Pledge of Allegiance. In its place would go a much better statement of our national values: the Preamble to the Constitution.
The nation's founders wrote the preamble in 1787. The pledge was written in 1892 by a socialist minister to honor Christopher Columbus in a children's magazine. "Under God" wasn't even in it until 1954, after a campaign by the Knights of Columbus.
Why the preamble? Because it affirms the sovereignty of "we the people," who strive for a "more perfect union" and thus "do ordain and establish this Constitution." That last part is trickier than it seems. It unites citizens in an ongoing responsibility to uphold constitutional values, not just mouth loyalty oaths.
It's important to remember the Pledge of Allegiance itself has a mottled history -- unsurprising in a nation where people take oaths seriously. When World War II was brewing in Europe, Jehovah's Witnesses were the most disliked religious group in America because they opposed saying the Pledge of Allegiance.
What could it hurt, argued countless school boards and eight Supreme Court justices in a 1940 ruling, for schoolchildren to learn a lesson in patriotism? Jehovah's Witnesses responded that swearing an oath to a flag was the equivalent of worshiping a graven image. They also noted the similarity of the flag salute, which then involved children pointing their outstretched right arms toward the flag, to the "Heil Hitler" salute of Nazi Germany.
After the 1940 court decision on the pledge, Witnesses' children could be denied the right to attend school, even if they stood respectfully and quietly during the pledge. The court's ruling unleashed a wave of violence against Witnesses nationwide, with 335 attacks against 1,500 Witnesses in 1940 alone -- including a castration in Nebraska.
Out of shame over the wave of religious violence it had triggered, the Supreme Court overturned itself only three years later, the fastest reversal in its history. Wrote Justice Robert Jackson, "To believe that patriotism will not flourish if patriotic ceremonies are voluntary and spontaneous instead of a compulsory routine is to make an unflattering estimate of the appeal of our institutions to free minds."
As amended in 1954, the Pledge of Allegiance makes a statement about God's role in the republic that the framers of the Constitution omitted in 1787. True, the signature line of the Constitution does include "in the year of our Lord," but that hardly qualifies as an assertion equivalent to "one nation under God." Despite pleas in the ratification debates to add such divine references to the Constitution, the framers believed these are the words we all can agree on: "We the people, of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
Monk is author of "The Words We Live By: Your Annotated Guide to the Constitution."
A friend pointed me to a very cool app: iPhotoToGallery, a plugin for iPhoto that exports to Gallery. Here is a screenshot.
Very funny: Things Creationists Hate. (Off of a fark discussion about Georgia's decision to stop teaching evolution in schools.)
Here are some videos of people playing games like Super Mario 3 and and Megaman all the way through in amazingly short times, and with perfect health/99 lives/etc. Link (To download the videos you will need to grab BitTorrent.)
Hunkin's Experiments is a great site about all sorts of experiments you can do. For instance:
- how to balance a chair on a broomstick
- how to cast square, round, and triangular shadows from a single object
- how to make an onion glow
- how to cook potatoes with the sun
- how to make a nuclear reactor
One reason UNIX will always be superior to Windows: fortune. Here's a gem I got today:
Lobster:
Everyone loves these delectable crustaceans, but many cooks are squeamish about placing them into boiling water alive, which is the only proper method of preparing them. Frankly, the easiest way to eliminate your guilt is to establish theirs by putting them on trial before they're cooked. The fact is, lobsters are among the most ferocious predators on the sea floor, and you're helping reduce crime in the reefs. Grasp the lobster behind the head, look it right in its unmistakably guilty eyestalks and say, "Where were you on the night of the 21st?", then flourish a picture of a scallop or a sole and shout, "Perhaps this will refresh that crude neural apparatus you call a memory!" The lobster will squirm noticeably. It may even take a swipe at you with one of its claws. Incorrigible. Pop it into the pot. Justice has been served, and shortly you and your friends will be, too.
-- "Cooking: The Art of Using Appliances and Utensils into Excuses and Apologies"
I just watched the movie "Waking Life", a marvelous and thought-provoking film. A real gem. Some parts are a little fluff but it manages to present an unprecendented amount of depth in the film medium, using an artistic style that is absolutely unique.
I seldom post Fark links because I assume everyone reads Fark, but this one is a real gem: it's a Roger Ebert review of Gus Van Sant's movie "Elephant", which is about school shootings and won the Golden Palm at Cannes. Ebert praises the insight of the movie and recounts an event that happened to him after the Columbine shootings. This is worth a read, and I think I'll have to rent Elephant. (Gus made Good Will Hunting.)
This just adds to my respect for Roger Ebert as a public figure. A while back, I emailed a bunch of people a link to an interview with Ebert in The Progressive. That interview is worth reading in its entirety, but here is a very cool excerpt:
Ebert: There's an interesting pattern going on. When I write a political column for the Chicago Sun-Times, when liberals disagree with me, they send in long, logical e-mails explaining all my errors. I hardly ever get well-reasoned articles from the right. People just tell me to shut up. That's the message: "Shut up. Don't write anymore about this. Who do you think you are?"
Q: It's the Dixie Chicks impulse. One of the members of the group said she was ashamed to be from Texas where the President is from. And so, in what I consider a brownshirt tactic, some rightwing DJs organized gatherings where people literally stomped on Dixie Chick albums.
Ebert: It wasn't just some rightwing DJs. The New York Times reported that it was also organized by a radio conglomerate that had received a lot of favors from the Bush Administration in deregulation. So that was not a spontaneous outpouring. It's a shame. It's a shame. The right really wants to punish you for having an opinion. And I think both the left and the right should celebrate people who have different opinions, and disagree with them, and argue with them, and differ with them, but don't just try to shut them up. The right really dominates radio, and it's amazing how much energy the right spends telling us that the press is slanted to the left when it really isn't. They want to shut other people up. They really don't understand the First Amendment.
Brilliant link from David:
"Sign an affidavit stating that you didn't blow CIA agent Valerie Plame's cover. The point is to show President Bush - who expressed doubts that the ongoing investigation will go anywhere - that he has a fairly easy means of shaking down the White House staff."
In June 2000, Playboy magazine interview Matt and Trey, creators of Southpark. The whole interview is a great read, but some of the most interesting bits involve the pair's tangle with the MPAA and the ratings on the South Park movie. I've mirrored the transcript here, and below is a lovely excerpt:
STONE: We submitted it seven times to the MPAA. The last submission we got back was NC-17, two weeks before release. And one of the marketing guys from Paramount calls and says, "Matt, Trey, you need to cut this again, because we need an R." So I called Scott Rudin and freaked out. Rudin called somebody at Paramount and freaked out on them. Somebody at Paramount called some body at the MPAA and freaked out on them. And the next day the movie was rated R. Not one frame of the movie changed. That's what fucking bullshit it is. And we have it all documented. They can't take us to court for libel because it's fucking true. It is such a fucking shame that no one in this town has the balls to stand up to them. And we're stupid, and I'll probably end up dead in a fucking ditch tomorrow.
PLAYBOY: Assuming the MPAA lets you live, would you really prefer government regulation of movie content?
STONE: You know, I used to definitely be on the side of Hollywood when I'd hear Al Gore and all these politicians say we need to do something about violence in movies. I used to be like, "Fuck you, First Amendment, blah blah blah." But when you start examining how fucked up the self-regulation in this industry is, then you start to see Al Gore's point of view. All he knows is that his kids can go see The General's Daughter and see all that depraved bullshit in a fucking terrible movie. Al says, "Hey, can you do some thing about violence in movies?" And Jack Valenti walks up with a little martini and says, "We're doing it, don't worry. They want kids to see R-rated movies, that's the bottom line.
PLAYBOY: Why?
STONE Because they make a lot more R rated movies, and they need kids to see them. People don't understand that the MPAA isn't just this cool not-for-profit holy organization. The MPAA is the studios. Jack Valenti is paid by them. It's a trade organization, it's a lobby, and he's a fucking hack. He paints himself as this moral arbiter this guy who stands for the parents of America, and he's a fucking politician.
Wacom is holding a photo contest - prize is a 40gb iPod and a thousand bucks!
I finished reading Dan Simmons' The Rise of Endymion this morning, and sent off this email..
-------------------------
hi everyone,
it's 5:25 AM and i have just finished the fourth book of Dan Simmons' Hyperion novels. i started reading at 10pm tonight and i could not put the book down.
it is simply one of the most moving stories of love i have ever read... the literary devices of science fiction allowed the author to create so much more loss, so much more grief, and so much more hope and joy. at one point in the book i felt such betrayal and such pain that i had to put it down for 10 minutes... and there were other points where i so feared the grief of the inevitable that i had to struggle to keep reading on.
the characters, their emotions, their fates... are so compelling and moving that they dwarf the sheer grandeur of a fantastic journey across hundreds of light-years and centuries of human civilization. the setting of the story - dozens of worlds, hundreds of characters, centuries and centuries of history - is so seemlessly, convincingly presented and so beautifully crafted that it only added to the depth of the epic story of love and wonder and humanity. there is no technobabble for the sake of technobabble; there is no pointless name-dropping. the New York Times Book Review called it "one of the finest achievements of modern science fiction". they're not kidding.
my imagination is still reeling from travelling the stretches of space, journeying through alien jungles and hiking sheer cliff faces to temples on impossibly tall mountains... my mind still echoes with the candid thoughts on religion and philosophy... and my heart still aches at the bittersweet tale of love.
i would not be surprised, nor would i be disappointed, if this were the finest piece of science fiction i will ever read. asimov, clarke, herbert - sit down, boys, and pay attention. this is the real stuff.
1. Hyperion
2. The Fall of Hyperion
3. Endymion
4. The Rise of Endymion
books 1 and 2 read together, books 3 and 4 read together. the pairs should really each be merged into a single volume. the Hyperion novels are *excellent* in their own right (the first novel won a Hugo) but the Endymion novels are where Dan Simmons rises above the rest.
this is my first all-nighter in a while and i'm not as concise as i normally like to be, so please excuse my gushing. i'm naming my first daughter Aenea or my first spaceship "Spirit of Aenea", that's all there is to it.
-peter
"No lifetime is long enough for those who wish to create, Raul. Or for those who simply wish to understand themselves and their lives. It is, perhaps, the curse of being human, but also a blessing."
The original Worms was one of the most addictive games of all time. Now, it's back in full, sheep-/old woman-throwing 3D glory.
After watching the French movie "8 Women", I fell in love with Virginie Ledoyen's rendition of Marie Laforet's song "Mon amour, mon ami". You can download the movie version here and the original version here. Click "continue reading" to read the lyrics (in French, of course!).
8 Femme Soundtrack
Suzon (Virginie Ledoyen) - Mon Amour, Mon Ami (My Love, My Friend)
Toi mon amour, mon ami
Quand je rêve c'est de toi
Mon amour, mon ami
Quand je chante c'est pour toi
Mon amour, mon ami
Je ne peux vivre sans toi
Mon amour, mon ami
Et je ne sais pas pourquoi
Ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah
Je n'ai pas connu d'autres garçons que toi
Si j'en ai connu, je ne m'en souviens pas
A quoi bon chercher, faire des comparaisons
J'ai un c?ur qui sait
Quand il a raison
Et puisqu'il a pris ton nom
Toi mon amour, mon ami
Quand je rêve c'est de toi
Mon amour, mon ami
Quand je chante c'est pour toi
Mon amour, mon ami,
Je ne peux vivre sans toi
Mon amour, mon ami
Et je sais très bien pourquoi
Ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah
On ne sait
Jamais jusqu'où ira l'amour
Et moi qui croyais
Pouvoir t'aimer toujours
Qui je t'ai quitté
Et j'ai beau résister
Je chante parfois à d'autres que toi
Un peu moins bien chaque fois
Toi mon amour, mon ami
Quand je rêve c'est de toi
Mon amour, mon ami
Quand je chante c'est pour toi
Mon amour, mon ami
Je ne peux vivre sans toi
Mon amour, mon ami
Et je ne sais pas pourquoi
Ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah
Ah, Robert Cringely does it again: a wonderful, insightful essay about the nature of tech companies and their management structures. Great quote:
It is not that moving jobs to India is so bad, though I hate the weasel behavior behind some of it. It is simply pointless. What is needed, instead, is a new approach that diminishes the role of headcount in corporate power.
...
Just as an example, there are programmers who are a hundred or a thousand times more productive than their coworkers, and every Silicon Valley startup is constantly on the lookout for that kind of genius. Those people work in big companies, too, but their impact is muted. What manager at any big company would trade 100 workers for one, no matter how smart the one? No manager would do that, and yet they should. Power and efficiency are in conflict here.
A New Caledonian crow builds a tool to accomplish a certain task. What's amazing is that the tool is made from a material that the crow would never encounter in the wild, raising interesting questions about "the evolutionary preconditions for complex cognition".
So, after much woe, I have finally gotten readline to work on OS X (10.2.6). There are several other places advertising how to make this work (such as the readline-0.0.0 project and undefined.org's readline-0.0.1) but I've not had any luck. Finally I took the readline-0.0.0 package, figured out why it wasn't compiling (it was missing the readline headers), bundled up the missing headers (which I found in Fink) and edited the setup.py. It works!
Instructions:
1. Download readline-0.0.0.withheaders.tgz; extract; enter the directory
2. run the command: "sudo /usr/bin/python setup.py install"
3. You're done! If you have any problems, please email me and let me know!
Michael Jackson is "speechless" about the idea of putting music fans in jail just for downloading music: "It is wrong to illegally download, but the answer cannot be jail."
=> absurdness(RIAA) > absurdness(Neverland)
From an essay by David Bohm, noted quantum physicist, about Krishnamurti:
...Krishnamurti has observed that the very act of meditation will, in itself, bring order to the activity of thought without the intervention of will, choice, decision, or any other action of the "thinker."...
This is perhaps what Krishnamurti means by the beginning of meditation. That is to say, one gives close attention to all that is happening in conjunction with the actual activity of thought, which is the underlying source of the general disorder. One does this without choice, without criticism, without acceptance or rejection of what is going on. And all of this takes place along with reflections on the meaning of what one is learning about the activity of thought. (It is perhaps rather like reading a book in which the pages have been scrambled up, and being intensely aware of this disorder, rather than just "trying to make sense" of the confused content that arises when on just accepts the pages as they happen to come.)
Krishnamurti has observed that the very act of meditation will, in itself, bring order to the activity of thought without the intervention of will, choice, decision, or any other action of the "thinker." As such order comes, the noise and chaos which are the usual background of our consciousness die out, and the mind becomes generally silent. (Thought arises only when needed for some genuinely valid purpose, and then stops, until needed again.)
In this silence, Krishnamurti says that something new and creative happens, something that cannot be conveyed in words, but that is of extraordinary significance for the whole of life. So he does not attempt to communicate this verbally, but rather, he asks those who are interested that they explore the question of meditation directly for themselves, through actual attention to the nature of thought.
Without attempting to probe into this deeper meaning of meditation, one can however say that meditation, in Krishnamurti's sense of the word, can bring order to our overall mental activity, and this may be a key factor in bringing about an end to the sorrow, the misery, the chaos and confusion, that have, over the ages, been the lot of mankind, and that are still generally continuing without visible prospect of fundamental change, for the foreseeable future.
Krishnamurti's work is permeated by what may be called the essence of this scientific approach, when this is considered in its very highest and purest form. Thus, he begins from a fact, this fact about the nature of our thought processes. This fact is established through close attention, involving careful listening to the process of consciousness, and observing it assiduously. In this, one is constantly learning, and out of this learning comes insight, into the overall or general nature of the process of thought. This insight is then tested. First, one sees whether it holds together in a rational order. And then one sees whether it leads to order and coherence, on what flows out of it in life as a whole.
TerraServer has expanded its database of satellite/aerial photographs of the United States, and it now has pictures of most of my former residences:
238 East Fairview St., Oak Ridge, TN
3109 Stokers Ln., Nashville, TN
Sunrise Apartments, Hixson, TN
7520 Middle Valley Rd., Hixson, TN
Low Rise 6 and 7, Ithaca, NY
296 Birchwood Drive North, Ithaca, NY (not built yet in this photo)
211 Kennedy Drive, Malden, MA
21 Converse Ave., Malden, MA
14 Summer St., Malden, MA (I pretty much lived here...)
700 Warren Rd., Ithaca, NY
Some other locations of note:
20 West Canal St., Winooski, VT - Crystal's apartment
Hixson High School
Wozniak's big idea. Sounds cool, and at $25 a pop, it would be very useful for tracking pets and young kids.
A distributed screen saver for drawing cool flame fractals: Electric Sheep. (Thanks to Ben Kwa for the link.)
>>> list_of_list = [[1,2,3],[4,5,6],[7,8,9]] >>> [car_x for x in list_of_list for car_x in (x[0],)] [1, 4, 7]This is meant as an analogue for the Haskell construct:
list_of_list = [[1,2,3],[4,5,6],[7,8,9]] firsts1 = [car x | x <- list_of_list] where car (x:xs) = x
The question is, should I get one of these for when I go to Italy? The most telling sign of the times is that they offer these shirts in a non-English version so the wearer doesn't get harrassed by Patriotic, Freedom-loving, Fox-consuming All-American Citizens (TM) at home.
Time.com has a long piece about different opinions and attitudes towards Harry Potter across the nation, but the centerpiece is a wonderfully touching story about J.K. Rowling and one of her fans, a young girl with cancer. (For the impatient, the story starts at the beginning of the main article, then resumes halfway through the last page.)
Thomas Friedman writes in the NY Times:
"Finding Iraq's W.M.D.'s is necessary to preserve the credibility of the Bush team, the neocons, Tony Blair and the C.I.A. But rebuilding Iraq is necessary to win the war. I won't feel one whit more secure if we find Saddam's W.M.D.'s, because I never felt he would use them on us. But I will feel terribly insecure if we fail to put Iraq onto a progressive path. Because if that doesn't happen, the terrorism bubble will reinflate and bad things will follow."
Here are sample puzzles from the World Puzzle Competition. They're fun!!
Bill Moyers has a wonderful Memorial Day writeup on Alternet.
I am terribly saddened whenever I see righteous nationalism substituting itself for patriotism. It seems that democracy's greatest strength is also its vital weakness, and we see so many themes today reflecting that. Because we are free to speak, and free to trade, and free to own and free to war, we must be exceptionally aware of our actions and the ramifications of our decisions.
On Independence Day and on Memorial Day I think about all the horrors of hell that people have slaved through to bring us our nation and our prosperity. There is so, so much that we have to be grateful for, that we must spend our lives in remembrance... and yet, ignorance still reigns and our greatest enemies still come from within.
It's very depressing to think that those in power think ignorance can truly be strength; that by misleading the people and manufacturing consent, the nation can be steered, like a giant machine, into implementing whatever policies are the fad of the day. These very same people seem to understand that the strength of capitalism lies in the chaotic, dynamic balance of the free market; why can't they understand that the strength of democracy lies in a dynamic, informed citizenry?
Pictures from the last party at 76 College Ave are up! See silly Adrian, smiling Shaown, drunk-off-her-ass Mary, and a whole cast of other fun people!
Somehow I've managed to fix the Perl backend and Movable Type is all happy again. Yay. Look for more interesting and exciting posts in the next few days.
Put some padding on your floor so you don't hurt yourself when you fall out of your chair. Then download this. and watch it. Try to sing along. "It's so easy... Happy go lucky."
(For more Yatta information, click here. The lyrics are here.)
Two tidbits for Firefly fans: the script for Heart of Gold, an unfilmed episode, and the Firefly gag reel (60mb, mpeg4). Check them out!