Strangling President Bush

Anyone remember the old sticker from the 1980's that said:

Stress: The confusion caused by your conscience overriding the urge to strangle the living daylights out of some jerk who desperately deserves it!

Wow, I feel that way about Bush, w.r.t. the wiretapping furor going on right now. We all know that the Puzzle Palace does SIGINT, and we all know it's supposed to only do its work abroad, not domestically. So, when Bush is criticized because of the wiretaps on international phone calls originating in the U.S., does he say "hey, once a call crosses national borders it's fair game"? No, because that would be sensible, and would shut down the whole controversy. Everyone would shrug & go on about their business. Instead of that, he has to come out with a justification out of a Vaclav Havel play: "that congress authorized me to use all necessary [military] force supersedes all other law and means I have carte-blanche to do whatever I think's needed".

Has he lost his mind?

Is he trying to put that hyena from New York in office in 2008?

Has he simply decided that he isn't accountable to anyone but himself?

Has he completely stopped listening to Cheney?

Does Rove think by playing into the hands of the "Bush is trying to eliminate democracy in America" camp that they'll be distracted from our massive trade & budget defecits in 2006?

Is he really a marionette being manipulated by space-aliens?

WTF ?!

From the 'nuff said department

Photon Strikes Back

... and gets pre-Raphaelite on her fanny. This time he's saving her from Boethius.

A modest proposal to rid the world of abortion

Politically, I'm mostly a conservative libertarian, and, generally speaking my "knee-jerk" opinion on something is more likely to align with those on the right of the traditional spectrum as with those on the left. In some others, though, I don't really fit anywhere. Specifically, as it matters for this post, I'm both Pro-Choice and Anti-Abortion. This's an odd position to be in, that I've been hoping that technology might remedy for me with the invention of the artificial womb. Alas, this hasn't happened. In light of the lack of invention of the artificial womb, with the desire to see no children who aren't wanted while at the same time seeing no fetuses knocked off, I hereby tender the following proposal:

1. All male children shall receive reversable vasectomies (at public expense)
2. Any mentally-competant male wishing to have the state of his vasectomy altered (either to reverse it or else to re-instate it) shall have the operation performed promptly and at public expense.
3. False testimony about one's "fertility status" shall be a felony.

Spendy, to be sure, but it would ensure that before a child is brought into the world, the would-be parents must take a positive affirmative step that having a child is really what they desire and intend. This is analogous to "opt in" versus "opt out" marketing terminology. I think that all would-be parents should have to "opt-in" instead of the other way around.

1. Undesired pre-infants won't be slain by the gazillion each year.
2. High-school girls who succumb to peer-pressure to have sex will still catch all the latest diseases, but they won't have their futures truncated by the need to care for a child while still laying the foundations for their own lives.
3. The ability to procreate will be tied to one's general societal fitness without regards for race, religion, money or (competant) intelligence, or, in otherwords, eugenics without all the evil.
4. The rearing of children, having become a marginal token of societal fitness, will become an incentive for the formation of more stable marriages.
5. The idea of being properly prepared for the advent of children being part of the general meme, the age at which people become parents will increase -- this may cause additional research expenditures for the prevention of Down's syndrome.
6. Non-marital sex will become even more common, necessitating the need for better immunization against STDs( but also lowering the number of divorces from marriages that never should have been ).
7. Given the larger proportion of children raised in conditions of relative surfeit rather than relative deficit, non "white-collar" crime (violent and property) will diminish.
8. Money spend on social services for single mothers & their children may be diverted into the education or health-care budgets, or eliminated from governmental budgets altogether.
9. Men will also get to feel a little pain bringing a kid into the world.

All for the cost of 2 to 5 outpatient surgeries per semi-capita, surgeries which by then will be so common and standardized as the be cheaper than most airfares.

The life of an academic

What does your a mild-mannered wife do when she's not knitting with her husband? She slogs through critical theory of course! And then (cue the Wolf's leitmotif from "Peter and the Wolf") Photon will decide she looks comfy, and it's lights out til bedtime. Ah, the hazards of being an academic.... :0)

Things you have to be to be a Democrat or a Republican

Just in case you had a low opinion of American politics, allow this summary of the righteous Things you have to believe to be a republican "article" and its rebuttal to lower that opinion even more. I wish that this was satire.

Democrats think Republicans believe...	Republicans think Democrats believe...
Saddam was a good guy when Reagan armed him, a bad guy when Bush's daddy made war on him, a good guy when Cheney did business with him and a bad guy when Bush needed a "we can't find Bin Laden" diversion.	People who use drugs deserve compassion and understanding -- unless their drug of choice is tobacco.
Trade with Cuba is wrong because the country is communist, but trade with China and Vietnam is vital to a spirit of international harmony.	Children can be exposed to years of violent and sexually-explicit imagery in popular culture with no ill effects, but an adult who is exposed to a racially insensitive remark is emotionally scarred for life.
The United States should get out of the United Nations, and our highest national priority is enforcing U.N. resolutions against Iraq.	Banning abortions will only drive them underground, but banning guns will make them disappear.
A woman can't be trusted with decisions about her own body, but multi-national corporations can make decisions affecting all mankind without regulation.	Teaching children about safe sex in school will make them sexually responsible, but teaching children about safe gun handling in school would make them violent killers.
Jesus loves you, and shares your hatred of homosexuals and Hillary Clinton.	The Enron accounting scandal is an indictment of free markets as such, but UNSCAM is no big deal.
The best way to improve military morale is to praise the troops in speeches while slashing veterans' benefits and combat pay.	An unemployment rate of 5.6% during the Clinton administration was unusually low, but an unemployment rate of 5.6% during the Bush administration is unusually high.
If condoms are kept out of schools, adolescents won't have sex.	Successful government programs should be praised and publicized -- unless the program is welfare reform.
A good way to fight terrorism is to belittle our long-time allies, then demand their cooperation and money.	A work of art portraying Jesus submersed in urine is daring and avant garde, but a work of art portraying Mohammad submersed in urine would be bigoted and hateful.
Providing health care to all Iraqis is sound policy. Providing health care to all Americans is socialism.	George Bush invaded Iraq for the oil, but the many profiteers from the oil-for-food program opposed the war out of principle.
HMOs and insurance companies have the best interests of the public at heart.	Janet Jackson's breast is protected by the First Amendment, but political advocacy ads are not.
Global warming and tobacco's link to cancer are junk science, but creationism should be taught in schools.	Scientists and engineers can't build a safe nuclear reactor, but global warming activists can accurately predict the weather.
A president lying about an extramarital affair is an impeachable offense. A president lying to enlist support for a war in which thousands die is solid defense policy.	Education should be value-neutral, except for values like multiculturalism and environmentalism.
Government should limit itself to the power named in the Constitution, which includes censoring the Internet.	We need to move beyond 9/11, so we can get back to obsessing over Vietnam.
The public has a right to know about Hillary's cattle trades, but George Bush's driving record is none of our business.	The Second Amendment does not protect the right to keep and bear arms, but the Fourteenth Amendment mandates race preferences.
Being a drug addict is a moral failing and a crime, unless you're a conservative radio host. Then it's an illness, and you need our prayers for your recovery.	Fetuses do not have rights, but animals do.
General John Ashcroft can tell states what local voter initiatives they have the right to adopt.	Parents should have a choice over whether their children are born, but not what school they attend.
What Bill Clinton did in the 1960s is of vital national interest, but what Bush did in the '80s is irrelevant.	American corporations outsourcing jobs to poor foreign workers is bad; taxing American corporations and sending money to foreign dictators who promise to give it to poor foreigners, but actually squirrel it away in Swiss bank accounts, is good.

Stolen wisdom

I stole this graphic from Headrush. Even utterly out of context, it's wisdom & beauty are inescapable.

BBQ Cat

Our little fuzzy genius, Photon, alias "Squeakers von Squeakenheim", set his tail on fire again. This's the second time we've had that aroma of BBQ fur wafting through the house. One day I fear I'll see Photster streaking through the house with a self-induced inferno on his heels. Darwin in action, I guess.

Judeo-Christian fundamentalism is scientifically disproven.

You know, I love the way that science works, whereby things are only ever disproven, not proven. This's very powerful. It just occurred to me, as I was having supper w/ my beautiful wife, that not only are (Christian) fundamentalists wrong, but we know they're wrong. Pope Benedict has recently said that the Bible's statements shouldn't be taken as "scientific" statements describing a literal truth, and here he points at Gensis specifically. In my case, I don't have a particular gripe with Genesis per se, and, while I applaud his statement, I think there's a better tack to take as regards falling into the fundamentalist error. This error is at the crux of Protestantism, the idea that anyone should be able to read the Bible, when it was never meant as literal truth (including the Revelations of John of Patmos being included in the canonical books only w/ the specific understanding that they not be taken literally). An unfortunate result of the otherwise laudible democratization of Bible-readership, though, is exemplified by the Left Behind series and all the Apocalyptarian horse-manure from which it's grown. We all know that the King James Bible is not, in fact, a literal translation, but a poetic one. But, even if we didn't have the historical facts that point to this (and I don't have them at my fingertips to cite them), the translation is immaterial: the stories are not all factually true in the scientific sense. My counterexample, which I raise to the fundamentalists, comes thanks to good old Bill Cosby. I was thinking about his story of Noah and bringing in all the animals two-by-two--his joke goes to the difficulty of selecting one each male and female mosquito. It's a funny dialog. The thing is, though, that there is only one (vertibrate) animal species on the planet that has decended from a single male-female pair: cheetas. The genetic record conclusively demonstrates that cheetas suffered a total genetic bottleneck, but they're the ONLY animals we're aware of, humans included, for which this can be shown. All other (vertibrate) animal species alive today have groups of breeding pairs as their ancestors, or came down to such near-extinction during more recently recorded history. It's not that other species might be found to have had such a bottle-neck, but the sheer overwhelming percentage of species for which such a bottle-neck has been conclusively ruled out. If you assert, as do the Fundamentalists, that the whole Bible is the literal truth and Word, then such truth stands or falls on the validity of any portion thereof, and, since we know the story of Noah not to be literally true, we therefore know the Bible as a whole not to be so, even without the other evidence to the contrary (like, for example, the fact that the happy ending in Job wasn't part of the original text, &c).

This does nothing to refute any portion of Judeo-Christian morality. Mitzvahs are still Mitzvahs; Cheeks should still be turned, &c. But, it puts another skewer through the program of all the neuvo-Pharisees promenading around calling themselves "Christian".

Not for the squeamish

Calcutta hospital qualifies for Wes Craven status after a particularly gruesome preventable death. Pain can be lethal.

Someone in Iraq screwed up

It seems that in the assault in Fallujah, someone, my guess would be a crew-chief or ordinanceman messed up, and they dropped a bunch of willie-pete on the civvies there. According to the cited article, there's a cover-up going on about it. I hope that's true. There'll be huge numbers of folks citing conspiracy & the like. Sort of like the old 'The CIA denied it, so it must be true' reasoning, anything of bad press must have been on purpose, at least if you believe the mainstream media. I suspect that someone, rather than wait for the proper ordinance, said "Hell, we've got these laying around over here from back in the initial assault, why not just use 'em up?", and now folks're crying foul. Dropping WP on areas containing civvies isn't the best way to win hearts & minds, but hardly constitutes a war-crime or Abu Graib(sp?) Mark II. Let's hope the cover-up succeeds so the guy who screwed up can get by with just a scolding instead of being court-martialled.


And also so we don't end up with yet another black-eye in the press to distract from the good that's being done there.

San Francisco rearview

The prospect of leaving San Francisco in a year or so has been filling me with some premature nostalgia. But no more. Just under 60% of San Franciscan voters have chosen to make handgun ownership illegal. Because of course, all criminals in the city, with nothing but the best intentions for society in their hearts, will turn in all their weapons and stop attacking people. Just like a few other misguided parts of the country, we're now a Mandatory Victim Zone. How I loathe people who'll happily ignore the upcoming preventable rapes, beatings, larcenies and murders in order to cling to their utopianist fantasies. Doesn't anyone remember the first country to do this, and the results of its doing so? I'll give you a hint, if it hadn't successfully disarmed its citizens (earning its leader Time Magazine's "Man of the Year Award", by the way), six million Jews wouldn't have gone on state-sponsored train-rides to their deaths.

And to top it off, a "symbolic" proposal that military recruiters not be allowed to contact children at public schools. It would be bad enough that the people here don't realize what value military recruiting serves now that we've got an all-volunteer military. Without this outreach & salemanship from our military's recruiters, all you'd have in the armed forces would be those forced into it by poor economic prospects, which is not at all what a modern military needs, much less what a bountiful state requires if it is to have the Cincinnati it needs (as in Cincinnatus, not the city). That would be bad enough, especially from folks so misguided as to think that forcibly removing the tools people need to defend themselves will keep them safe. But consider, it's more cinical than that. It's a "symbolic" regulation because it won't be enforced. It's completely acknowledged that enforcing this regulation would cause San Francisco schools to lose a chunk of federal funding, and so, even though it has been voted into law, its own proponents don't want it enforced. That's right, the people have spoken, and expressed their misguided will, and as a result, that decision will be ignored by politicians afraid to be criticised for the consequences of doing their jobs. The city that asks its citizens ("subjects" might be a more apt term) to trust the government to enforce the laws well enough to lose their ability to protect themselves specifically plans on not enforcing its own laws. "It's ok, folks you can trust the law. Or, at least, the laws we find convenient." I respect a principled stands, no matter how moronic I might believe its cause to be. People who're willing to stick to their guns (oops, um, stick to their, uh, spatulae?) for something they believe in deserve respect. But the folks here are out right now applauding each other for passing the measure, even though its proponents advertised ahead of time that they lack the spine to actually take the principled stand they've espoused. The cowards can only hint at the stand they would make if indeed they actually had principles.

I'm utterly disgusted.

Solar System to Scale

For all you (local) astronomy nuts, here's something to make the kids really understand how big this place really is.

The House

We received a wonderful tour of our house from Rushe, and I think Maddie & I "agree in principle" to something like the following:

1. No lemurs -- too college-dorm-roomy
2. Move clothes-washer hookup to garage -- requires plumbing work (2nd priority)
3. Reliable internet access/2nd phone line 1st priority so I can move in and immediately work
4. Wainscoting or chair-railing
5. Since the ceilings are so low (from S.F. standards) skip crown-molding & install picture-railing instead as near to ceiling as possible.
6. Add small sun-room in place of back porch
7. Keep the (rather well-done) chain-link fencing, but use it as a trellis for creeping roses &c.
8. Yank up nasty carpet
9. Wait a long time before upgrading flooring, if ever
10. Let Maddie "go to town" in the herb-garden -- whatever she wants
11. Re-install non-load-bearing wall in "procrastinarium" and knock out closet, making it two rooms again
12. Skip adding a darkroom; use local public facilities instead.
13. Knock out cinder-block wall in front of house & replace with greenery
14. Install internal doors
15. Partition garage & use that space plus part of back porch to make dining room

Dirty mind?

Perhaps I'm a bit of a dirty-minded fool, but intel's ad-strategy of "Entertainment in your lap" could perhaps use some word-smithing.

UN Debates Meaning of 'Wipe'

I couldn't have said it better myself:

UN Debates Meaning of 'Wipe' Israel
by Mapby Scott Ott

(2005-10-27) -- The United Nations Security Council today took up discussion on what Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad might have meant when he called for Israel to be "wiped out from the map". Secretary General Kofi Annan said Iran, as a member of the U.N., must be given the benefit of the doubt that the phrase was intended to encourage peaceful diplomacy. "'Wiped' is a word that can denote cleanliness," said Mr. Annan. "The Iranian president may have simply meant that the map should be cleaned so Israel's legitmate borders are easier to see."

Mr. Ahmadinejad's remarks came during the month-long 'World without Zionism' celebration, and echoed the Ayatollah Khomeini's previous comments about map hygiene. In related news, the U.S. House today begins debate on creation of a month-long holiday called 'World Without Islamofascism,' President George Bush said he looks forward to celebrating the new holiday with a ceremonial "wiping of the map."

Harriet Miers gone!

I heard the good news on the radio while driving in to work this morning. Maybe this'll clue the President in to the fact that he actually has to pay attention to his constituents? May we hope?

found it

Over at Boxing Alcibiades, Russ has a photo of the Hamster Poster from Michael Yon's excellent blog. Here's the original (right-click to save).

Unicef's new campaign

I don't know much about Unicef, but if bombing the smurfs (w/ permission) is what it takes to get the point across about Darfur and other such malignancies, more power to them!

Intelligent Design Considered Harmful

Here's a disturbing article in which a science-writer finds himself disturbed by the the Christian Fundamentalists' latest chimera, Intelligent Design, which y'all know by now just drives me utterly batty.

I agree with his basic thesis -- so called "Intelligent Design" is an assault not only upon Biology, but upon science itself. It took Sputnik to scare our native theocrats back into their caves; what will it take next time?

Once upon a time (back when I was a seminarian trying to explain what the hell I was doing with my life), I used to explain to people that matters of faith are not beliefs. Beliefs may be contradicted, whereas matters of faith are "more true" than facts. Sadly, I'm now terrified that I may in fact have been more correct about this than I'd realized. We've all seen the mathematical proof that 1 equals 2, and the division by zero that underpins it. Is religious faith similarly dangerous? How can we convince people that religion belongs in the sphere of morality, not the sphere of facts, before they turn us into a psuedo-Christian version of Iran? Or worse, before the socialist utopianists convince us that all morality is wrong because it leads to fundamentalism?

Ipod squee

Maddie got me an IPod for my birthday and I spent the weekend loading up all the music at home that drives her nuts (she doesn't do metal, or industrial, or anything with significant dissonance). This was cool enough.

But today I rode my bike to work.... Motorcycles are definitely enhanced with KMFDM.

Beware Yahoo Spyware

I was installing stuff onto my new machine this weekend (replacing Black, my venerable old black Dell notebook -- the new one is Grey, a shiny new Alienware beast that hopefully'll last me at least as long as Black did), and suddenly I found my Internet Explorer had a Yahoo toolbar. Since all I'd done was to check mail, that means that Yahoo ran a script on my machine to install this software against my will, and is probably doing the same to other folks's computers. I'm outraged, personally, although Yahoo probably doesn't give a crap about that, even if I do pay them money for their service.

If your browser suddenly gets a Yahoo toolbar, before they can do anything nefarious with it, go to the control panel, to "install/update/remove software" and scroll down to the bottom of the list. You can get rid of it with a click of the mouse. I can't promise it'll stay gone, though. And people wonder why Google is so successful when most of the industry is run by crooks!

Ugly?!

Live Science has a contest to vote for the ugliest animal. I don't understand why they consider most of these animals ugly at all, and they somehow seem to have missed Senator Kennedy too. The fruit-bats definitely don't qualify. Now maybe if you were a poor defenseless peach ripening on a branch somewhere I could understand it, but these guys: ugly? They're not ugly, they're Weapon's Grade Cute!

Kitty Porn

The video of Photon & Vespers grooming has been dustbinned due to bandwidth constraints plus malfunction. In the event of need for Grooming Squee, Photon & Vespers will be happy to do live shows (in exchange for Fancy Feast).

Rita

update: From Dr. Jeff Master's blog on the Weather Underground (believe it or not, they're still around!)

The latest runs of two key computer models, the GFS and GFDL, now indicate that the trough of low pressure that was expected to pick up Rita and pull her rapidly northward through Texas will not be strong enough to do so. Instead, these models forecast that Rita will make landfall near Galveston, penetrate inland between 50 and 200 miles, then slowly drift southwestward for nearly two days, as a high pressure ridge will build in to her north. Finally, a second trough is forecast to lift Rita out of Texas on Tuesday. If this scenario develops, not only will the coast receive catastrophic damage from the storm surge, but interior Texas, including the Dallas/Fort Worth area, might see a deluge of 15 - 30 inches of rain. A huge portion of Texas would be a disaster area. We'll have to wait for the next set of model runs due out by tomorrow morning to know better.

Gravity considered harmful.

I have a new hypothesis regarding how gravity works, and why it's befuddling the unified field guys so much. Before I make an absolute jackass out of myself rewriting physics 101, though, does anyone know of a good reference on gravity that's legible by a numerate layman?

UPDATE: Nevermind folks; it appears I've re-invented LeSage Gravity. Although there are problems with this theory of gravity, it's intuitively appealing, especially if you're one of those folks (like me) who don't believe in time.

Ice your phones!

Hi y'all,

Chris said something interesting to me that I thought I'd pass around. Nationally, EMS (Emergency Medical Services) personnel are being trained, when finding an unconscious, demised, or otherwise incapacitated person, to check their cell-phones for emergency contacts by looking for the acronym ICE preceding the contact's name. ICE == In Case of Emergency.

Marking your emergency contact in this manner takes all of 5 seconds, and could make the difference between finding out your spouse died, or getting to say goodbye.

The Bricklayer's Story

After twenty years, I've finally found The Bricklayer's Story. This isn't the original monologue (which's hilarious in its own right, but lame when printed); this's the song version, which I strongly prefer.

Hearings on Judge Roberts: absolutely disgusting

Ugh: these hearings are absolutely disgusting. A bunch of the senators on the Judicial Committee (although mostly Democrats -- I won't speculate here as to why) are trying to maneuver Roberts into revealing whether or not he supports the policy positions of their constituents, and want to judge whether or not he's a member of the supposed "mainstream".

It's irrelevent! Judgements about whether someone's in the mainstream are judgements about policy decisions. It doesn't matter if a Supreme Court nominee thinks that all Catholics should be drowned at birth; it's just not relevent. Judges have same job as basketball refs: not to judge who wins or loses, but to make sure the rules are followed. This means that a correctly operating Supreme Court justice's decisions may result in injustice if the fix for the injustice is unconstitutional. SCOTUS members aren't there to uphold individual instances of justice, they're there to protect our legal system itself. Correcting particular rights & wrongs is the job of the legislature, which is the reason legislatures are accountable to the voters. This job has nothing to do with the Judicial Branch.

monster blanket accomplished

The monster blanket is finished; it's made of 3-ply Misti Alpaca bulky on size 35 needles, and is so soft that it's hard to fold (it doesn't stay square).

And yes, your eyes aren't decieving you -- those are colors. You can call me a dork if you like. :-)

It's roughly Queen-sized, somewhere in the ball-park of 5'x7'

Most importantly, though, it's kitty approved!

New Orleans flood might have been prevented

A right-wing news outlet is reporting, with the usual hyperbolic language associated with Democrats or those who hate them (note the Venn diagram so implied), that the Army Corps of Engineers tried to build floodgates in the '70s that would have protected New Orleans from a cat-5 hurricane, but was prevented from doing so by environmental groups.

If this's true, let's all whip out our Alanis Morissette song books to page 13 and start singing "Isn't it Ironic, don't you think?"

A great tool against rape

A South-African woman has invented a tool to help cut the country's rape problem, barbed endo-condoms. This is outstanding; it'll cut the risk of involuntary pregnancy and HIV infection, plus teach a much-needed lesson to the scum who perpetrate this sort of thing. Now if only they could come up with a safe-to-wear flesh-eating bacterium version. Or an enhanced Ginsu version, or ....

American Spirituality

When discussing matters of religion, ethics, &c., I hear something from Americans that I never hear from anyone else. Have you ever heard someone, when asked their religion or philosophy, utter the words "I'm spiritual but not religious", or other words to that affect? I used to react with revulsion to the idea; for me it was an oxymoron (especially while I still had the convolutions of belief that I mistook for faith), and I always took such a statement as a limp-wristed excuse to do one of the following:

1. to disregard religion altogether under the aegis of an "I'm ok, you're ok" touchy-feely-ism that doesn't actually require effort of the individual
2. to discredit contradiction by a religious orthodoxy that defines some individuals or 'non-negotiable' behaviors as anathema, such as bastards (once upon a time), divorcees (more recently) or gays (currently, in much of the country)
   
3. or to simply flout the beliefs "of the great mass of their fellow men", a la Screwtape
   

When you talk with these folks, what you hear them say is that they're not against religion, but against "Organized Religion". But I severely doubt that it's organization per se that is being objected to, either superficially or essentially. You'll find that most people love to congregate with people that reinforce their views of world, and abhore the company of those who contradict them, especially on a basic "you don't belong in my culture" kind of way. Organizations generally attract people, not repel them.

I suspect that part of the seeming anti-religious stance taken by those who would seem to be the types of persons who would embrace religion comes from looking at the landscape of religions, and, for lack of a better way of saying it, "not seeing God there". We do have two American religions, though, that one might suspect would fit the bill. The most widely known is the ex-Baptist post-Protestant evangelical fundamentalism practiced by most Americans who call themselves "Christian" without further qualification (none other being necessary because of course all other varieties of Christianity are by definition in error). The other American religion is the syncretic claptrap that people call "New Age" spirituality, being mainly a smorgasboard of Western divination & esoteric yoga welded to a believe in "higher powers" (or "Ascended Masters" or "guardian angels", &c) that help the willing along a path of learning that constitutes spiritual growth. Neither cauterization nor anesthesia fit the bill though--most "spiritual" people are nauseated by both of these home-grown options.

Of the list above, numbers 1 & 3 are clearly diseases. Number 2 is a disease if you embrace a contradictory morality. I think a lot of folks who superficially look like they belong in this list really don't, though, and that there's more afoot than I used to suspect.

Game theory explains Black Adder

Ok, for all you war-strategy-conflict folks, how 'bout a cogent explanation of Black Adder for you?

Now here's the 64 dollar question: how does this apply to today's terrorism woes?

Fantastic Wine!

It can be said with great truth that I'm not a fan of non-red wines. I'm kind of a snob about it, not because I really like snobbery, but because I want to taste the dirt my wine was grown in--I don't want to drink my wine so much as to chew it. I can tolerate a nice fume-blanc, and even sometimes a chardonnay so long as it's from Frogland (CA growers vastly over-oak their whites!). And everyone knows how the lemur likes his tawny ports (I've three bottles (of differing brands) in the closet, and just killed a different brand this week).

BUT, I have to give due respect to a rose' of all things! Seriously!

No, really! I mean it!


If you're into cool-aid wine like pinot-noir or anything by Gallo, you'll love the wonderfully and punfully named 'Goats do Roam' from South Africa. (N.B. 'Goats do Roam' is a pun on 'Cotes du Rhone'.)

Even I like it!

PS. Maddie says the Goats rock the house. I'll go one further and say:

The Goat's in the House, yo!

Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity

More on the latest chimera from Kansas, satirized in The Onion. My loss for words continues unabated. That people can so fervently believe that a God couldn't have designed the universe to work according to the understandings we arrive at via science while calling themselves 'people of faith' just makes my little brain hit the 'eject' button. Andy Blair has a semi-Cthulhoid term for this kind of thing: TOO STUPID FOR MAN TO KNOW!

Robokitty!

The link requires Quicktime; the article's self-explanatory.

Domo arigato robokoneko!

Teach Both Sides

The new Kansan curriculum.

Naral falsely accuses Judge Roberts -- the brawl begins...

From FactCheck; it's begun.

Attention all hubbies: hug your wives!

According to the beeb, female cardiovascular health is aided by hugs.

To the Sleepy Lizard Queen

Harvard says to sleep more.... I know you'd love to do so--perhaps a hot toddy?

Best Movie Review Ever

Speaking about the new waste of celluloid 'The Dukes of Hazzard', movie reviewer Mick LaSalle of SFGate says (quoted without permission):

There are routine movies and others that blaze a trail. There are routine bad movies and others so horrendous that they redefine bad, that make us look up synonyms for agonizing and abysmal and then gnash our teeth because the language has not kept pace with the decline of film. There are even movies that are so blazingly rotten that they can redefine past experiences and make us look back on recent weak efforts like 'Stealth' or 'Fantastic Four' and think, "Ooh, that was fascinating."

'The Dukes of Hazzard' is hardly some routine bad movie. Rather, it's one of the elite, right up there with 'I Am Curious ... Yellow' (1967) and Bo Derek's 'Ghosts Can't Do It' (1990), in stiff competition for the lamest thing ever put on celluloid. ... The filmmakers couldn't buy a laugh in a burning poppy field. ... Instead of releasing this film in theaters, they should have sent it straight to Guantanamo, at least while it's still legal.

doh!

High speed cats in Brunei

Ignore the idiotic setting in which these (what do you call folks from Brunei, Bruneze? Brunettes?) cats show what cats can do, as some of the pictures are really amazing, and the owners of the web-page are obviously pre-pubescent morons.

Judging people by their covers

Apparently, looks really do matter. If the author's premise is true, society is already Gattica-like without need for those pesky dna-tests. What I find interesting is that apparently there's a bit of science going on as regards the whole beauty-thing. Really interesting--Russ and I have long decried greater society's slavish devotion to what we call "boring beauty", and perhaps there's something to that.

Then again, there's the empirical angle, which's intriguing. I'm no fan of Marilyn Monroe or Twiggy, but apparently what they both have in common with the oh-so lemurly Audrey Hepburn is a 0.7 waist/hip ratio, and that's considered important. It makes you wonder if one day public gyms will offer, for the proverbial nominal fee, a quantitative "beauty analysis". In one way it's really interesting, and in another, quite discomfiting. None of us like to think of ourselves as automata....

The Great Sheep Dip of 2005

Who knew sheep's fluffiness was a mass survival trait?

(07-08) 18:59 PDT ISTANBUL, Turkey (AP) --

First one sheep jumped to its death. Then stunned Turkish shepherds, who had left the herd to graze while they had breakfast, watched as nearly 1,500 others followed, each leaping off the same cliff, Turkish media reported.

In the end, 450 dead animals lay on top of one another in a billowy white pile, the Aksam newspaper said. Those who jumped later were saved as the pile got higher and the fall more cushioned, Aksam reported.

"There's nothing we can do. They're all wasted," Nevzat Bayhan, a member of one of 26 families whose sheep were grazing together in the herd, was quoted as saying by Aksam.

The estimated loss to families in the town of Gevas, located in Van province in eastern Turkey, tops $100,000, a significant amount of money in a country where average GDP per head is around $2,700.

"Every family had an average of 20 sheep," Aksam quoted another villager, Abdullah Hazar as saying. "But now only a few families have sheep left. It's going to be hard for us."

Koan of the Month

As related in the Genjokoan of Dogen Zenji:

Zen master Baoche of Mt. Mayu was fanning himself. A monk approached and said, "Master, the nature of wind is permanent and there is no place it does not reach. When, then, do you fan yourself?"

"Although you understand that the nature of the wind is permanent," Baoche replied, "you do not understand the meaning of its reaching everywhere."

"What is the meaning of its reaching everywhere?" asked the monk again. The master just kept fanning himself. The monk bowed deeply.

Texas becomes Kansas?

From the NYT, bible courses in public TX schools. I'd have no opposition to a acknowleging the place of religion in society, but for all those who said "ah, that's just Kansas", take heed.

Zombie infection simulation

You saw it there first....

Researchers map entire sexual network of mid-western high-school.

The name has been changed to protect the school, but I think you can tell in the chart who the "popular kids" are.... (I don't know why it dropped part of my text in the first edit, but I also said:) It's interesting to note the relatively low amount of promiscuity compared to (promiscuous) adults; this is likely good news from an epidemiological perspective.

Happy Summer from San Francisco!

Well, the wood's a bit wet, so it's steaming a wee bit, but it's another lovely summer in San Francisco. In addition to our fire, we also stopped to rescue a book that'd been left in the street. It turns out to have been a 700+ page biography of Che Guevara. I can't just throw out a book, not even the fictive The Genius of Barry Manilowe, so we left it on top of the car for someone to pick up. No-one did, though, so we moved it to another car. We figure that this's called "passing the Che".

Coding music!

In addition to my normal mindless slavishness to a good andante beat, I've found three really wonderful pieces of coding music: just intrusive enough to register, but quiet enough to stay outta the way.

1. Collected Songs Where Every Verse is Filled with Grief
2. Fratres for Eight Cellos
3. Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten
   

They're melancholic in nature, just like me, but wow are they great pieces of music too!

Connecting to relatives

A general advice-seeking post:

I have a Grand-dad (Pop) who's a really neat guy. It's galled me for years how I've been so far away from him and haven't been able to be close. Well, we lost Grandma recently, and I'm damned if I'm going to lose contact w/ Pop too, if I can at all help it. My brother in DC recently set him up with web-mail, and I've sent one or two missives to little or no avail. It largely seems like he just minimally responds to the email like checking off a box on a to-do list. I'd like to assume that this's just because to his generation email isn't a native medium like it is to us, especially when it works through the TV-set, which's a horrid interface. Irrespective of that, I feel like I'm totally failing to engage him, even though I'm trying to connect in subject areas personally relevent to him too (aka not talking about the new programming language that's taking up so much of my time). Any advice?

We're closed!

We're closed, yay!

Russ & Anna have heroically offered their precious time to help make things work: keep your fingers crossed they don't regret it! :)

The ultimate get-in, get-out workout

Now that I've gotten the hang of this gym, I've figured out my workout:

1. sit-up machine: 100 reps (currently just 60 lbs, but I'll get it back)
2. Romanian dead-lifts: 20 reps @ bar+50 (to increase to 100 reps before moving weight)
3. Half-squats: 20 reps @ bar+50 (to increase to 100 reps before moving weight up)
4. 15 mins rowing machine

I figure with a fun workout, I'm more likely to keep at it....

Closing has begun

Our hopefully soon to be ours fixer upper money pit is close at hand! Yay!

Mein Gott im Himmel!

So I went to the gym for the first time in two or three years today. I weigh 199.5 lbs! Even subtracting a generous half-pound for the towel, that's 199lbs!

AAAAGGGHH!

I know where I'm gonna be instead of eating lunch, every day for the next millenium, or until I'm back under 165, whichever comes first.

Koan of the Month

Translated from Dogen Zenji:

Heaven and Hell are the flowers of emptiness.

Molly loves literature

new language

So I'm working on a design for a new programming language. Specific goals are as follows:

• non-strict semantics by default (lazy if easy enough to do)
• strict semantics on demand
• strong typing
  
• garbage collection
• support for object-orientation
• tail-call optimization
  
• implicit currying (incl constructors)
  
• support for second-order functions like foldr
• syntactic sugar for lists
  
• good record facility
• algebraic datatypes
• type classes (Haskell)
• type classes as types
  
• type parameters (ML or Haskell)
• monadic I/O (etc)
  
• dataflow variables (Oz)
• pattern matching
• exceptions

Some of this isn't so much language as compiler. For example, I plan on getting garbage collection from compiling to the Java Virtual Machine. I could use a Boehm gc, but the point of compiling to the JVM is twofold:

1. no need to port the darn thing
2. HUGE library support built in
   

I'm following the set-theoretic notion of functions as product types (aka pairs), but am not making any distinctions (like in Z) between injections, surjections, &c. Also, (except where optimized away), in the type-system, there are only operations: application and evaluation. Application is always unary, and evaluation is always nullary. Construction of algebraic datatypes is to be accomplished by application.

The one thing I haven't really figured out is the record support. This's the fly in the oitment, and also the sine qua non of the project. Languages like Haskell are very good at the types of programs academics need to write, and hence have pretty darn poor record support, but real-world coding means a strong record system, preferable extensible if not downright object-oriented.

My Sweetie

dang, I married well....