We're Frelled

The Power of Intelligence

2011-08-17T17:17:00.000-07:00

Power may be granted, but never intelligence. Never take for granted the power of intelligence.

Chance

2011-03-13T15:13:00.000-07:00

What if Tiger Lillies were more like tigers, than lillies?

Because when you cross a tiger and a lily

You never quite know what you're going to get.

Soccer Balls Spring To Life

2011-03-12T23:09:00.000-08:00

And other signs of the Apocalypse.

Raccoons, or pandas?

2011-03-09T21:31:00.001-08:00

Vacuum Tubes

2011-03-09T20:21:00.000-08:00

Television is a vacuous medium which has done incalculable damage to America.

Facebook issues its own currency

2011-03-08T15:48:00.000-08:00

The Constitution grants Congress the sole power to issue domestic currency. Unfortunately, with America's sovereign debt looking like an increasingly risky investment, it appears that Facebook has stepped up to the plate to offer an alternative: Facebook Money

I wonder if gas will be any cheaper in the Republic of Facebook.

Proof

2011-03-06T13:04:00.000-08:00

...that things are never so bad that they can't get much worse.

Along comes the inimitable Katie Couric:
Katie Couric suffocates puppies

Giving Up

2011-03-06T05:23:00.000-08:00

I think giving up was once a much more viable option for our ancestors. If you simply stopped trying, stopped running, stopped chasing, stopped doing everything you could to survive, you might quickly be eaten by wolves, become a morsel for a tiger or a crocodile. Or you'd freeze or starve, fall sick and die.

Nowadays, those aren't the most likely things to happen to you if you stop trying. Not any time soon, at any rate. What's more likely is that your quality of life would begin to degrade. Ultimately, you'd slip lower and lower on the rungs of society's sundry ladders, until you wore a paper hat over a hair net, reported to a pimply faced kid, and generally wished for the merciful jaws of that kind tiger. Except the tiger is now in Las Vegas riding a unicycle. The payoff just really ain't there for modern day humans to give up prematurely. Life would basically suck more, and absent some terminal disease, suck for a long time. Society pretty much works to drag out the bitter end.

That my friends, is life: a cold kick in the ass. But on the bright side, things are never so bad that they can't get much worse.

So, in the words of Peter Quincy Taggart, Commander of the NSEA Protector, "Never give up. Never surrender!"

Facebook is Friendster 3.0

2011-03-01T01:31:00.000-08:00

You know it's true.

Big Data vs Intelligence

2011-02-18T21:25:00.000-08:00

The whole point of big data, is to turn it into little data.

Earth to Amazon

2010-12-03T00:58:00.000-08:00

"Amazon said WikiLeaks had violated its terms of service by publishing the leaked documents as it did not 'own or otherwise control all the rights to this classified content.'"

Uh, hello? Earth to Amazon...that is the entire point of whistleblowing, exposing official malfeasance! Copyrights don't shield evil doers from having their plots exposed. It's clear that Amazon is another giant, evil corporation with no comprehension of what freedom means.

Time to cut the cord with Amazon.

The Littlest Angel

2010-11-12T01:40:00.001-08:00

My sister killed herself today. She suffered from mental illness for the past decade and a half. My Mother says she lived a heroic life, she struggled with all her might to stand up.

This is the last thing I expected to hear today. It feels like something that I should wake up from. This is the saddest moment I've ever known.

The Government Must Stop Google

2010-11-01T01:15:00.000-07:00

Here's a beauty from Google CEO Eric Schmidt We know where you are, we know where you've been, we can more or less know what you're thinking about."

Even at its worst, Microsoft never acted in such an egregious way to spy on and trespass on the privacy of its users. Google has, in effect, become the real life incarnation of Orwell's "Big Brother." Far more so than was ever the case with Microsoft, the US Government must act decisively to protect the Public's freedom and privacy from Google's overreaching grasp.

Funding NPR violates Constitution

2010-10-24T03:13:00.000-07:00

I listened to quite a bit of NPR, a daily listener for over 15 years. I don't believe it can be argued in good faith that NPR does not have a liberal bias. Anybody who maintains that NPR is free of such bias is essentially a liar. If Conservative leaning radio and television were similarly publicly subsidized, Liberals would be up in arms, demanding Watergate style tribunals.

While NPR broadcasts many quality programs, the Constitution forbids the government from promoting particular political parties and viewpoints. NPR commentators overwhelmingly favor liberal Democratic positions, often to the point of advocacy.

Christiane Amanpour seldom passed on an opportunity to slam Republicans, and effusively praise Democrats.

"Why have we given George W. Bush such an easy ride when-until now, that is-when actually his qualifications are questionable?"
-- Keynote Speech at the 2000 Murrow Awards Ceremony

"How precisely these last two days of comments and change in comments will play, we'll wait to see. But clearly President Obama from the very beginning went out of his way to try to repair relations with the Islamic world which had been so devastatingly damaged over the previous eight years." ABC’s Amanpour Takes Dig at Bush: Relations with Muslim World ‘Devastatingly Damaged Over the Previous Eight Years’

"I think the press was muzzled, and I think the press self-muzzled. I'm sorry to say, but certainly television and, perhaps, to a certain extent, my station was intimidated by the administration and its foot soldiers at Fox News. And it did, in fact, put a climate of fear and self-censorship, in my view, in terms of the kind of broadcast work we did."
-- Amanpour: CNN practiced self-censorship

Bored, tuned 4x4 magic foobar

2010-10-23T13:26:00.000-07:00

Tuned my 4x4 magic squares program from the other day: magic4-2.py runs in 27.9 sec on my laptop. The output file, magic4-2.out, is identical to magic4-1.out up to sort order.

Tempted to rewrite it in C, but too lazy.

Plenty of room remains for algorithmic and code optimization. For instance, I could move past brute force enumeration, and apply a little linear algebra. I see 16 unknowns and 9 equations. I shall contemplate a more civilized solution over tacos.

...dang, no tacos. Tweaked code (removed a few unnecessary uses of sets): magic4-3.py runs in less than 15.4 sec. Removed symmetry duplicates: magic4-4.py runs in just over 9.4 seconds. Add early outs for column sum tests: magic4-5.py runtime reduced to 6.6 sec.

[update] Employed a little linear algebra and backtracking-like early out in the inner permutation loop. magic4-la-3.py correctly computes the 880 4x4 magic squares in 0m0.848s on my laptop.

4x4 magic squares

2010-10-21T17:22:00.000-07:00

I ran across this web blog post on enumerating 4x4 magic squares.

Danny's final script ran in 23 minutes and 35 seconds, and found what he believed to be all the solutions ("all 924 possible solutions for a 4×4 magic square").

Since I'm at home sick with nothing better to do, I sat down and banged out a quick and dirty python script to calculate the answer. About 40 minutes later, I had a simple python program which ran in 1 min 23 seconds on my 2007 Macbook, and generated all 7040 unique permutations which satisfy the condition that the sums of the rows, columns, and diagonals all equal 34. My program is highly brute force, basically just a deeply nested loop. The main optimization to make it tractable was to observe that the summation condition allows us to confine the enumeration over an inner 3x3 square. It's a little more clever than that, but only slightly. The program could probably be tuned to run in ~20 seconds, and coded in C it would probably run in less than a couple seconds.

Now, if we consider reflection and rotation symmetry, we see immediately that each permutation belongs to an equivalence class of exactly 8 elements. The symmetry group of the square has 8 elements, and only the identity element fixes the arrangement of numbers on the square. Hence, accounting for symmetry, there are precisely 880 unique solutions.

I have no idea how Danny arrived at 924 for the full enumeration of the 4x4 magic squares. This is clearly wrong. I'm a little miffed at Danny, since his post says to leave a comment on his blog, yet his blog filters every attempt to reply as spam!

"If you find any discrepancies, duplications, or omissions, please let me know by leaving a comment on Transient Savant."

It Just Gets Better

2010-04-30T13:14:00.000-07:00

Goldman Sachs Shares, Bonds Slide On Criminal Probe

South Park Unbound

2010-04-22T22:21:00.000-07:00

South Park Episode 201 is a Martyr to Freedom.

Without Liberty, without Freedom of Speech, we are timid sheep led to slaughter.

I would not mind if South Park Episode 201 showed up uncensored on BitTorrent. That is not a threat.

The Vampire Squid has a Bad Tentacle Day

2010-04-16T11:43:00.000-07:00

Wall Street's beloved Vampire Squid took a 2x4 to the face today, courtesy of the SEC.

A small slice of justice served to the Calamari Overlords...

SEC accuses Goldman Sachs of fraud
Terms, Players in the Goldman Sachs Fraud Charges
Goldman Is Charged With Subprime Fraud
Fraud Case Puts Goldman In A Group No One Wants To Join
Paulson, Looking to Go Short on Mortgages, Found a Willing Partner
SEC shines spotlight on little-known Goldman exec
More Than Goldman Sachs In SEC Gun Sight

Malnutrition versus Ethanol

2008-07-12T02:20:00.000-07:00

1 billion people live on less than a dollar a day.

Bio fuels are responsible for a 75% leap in world food prices, according to a new World Bank report.

In the last year, the price of corn has risen 70 percent; wheat 55 percent; rice 160 percent.

Before we lose an entire generation of the World's children to the crippling effects of malnutrition, we must urgently undo the harm unwittingly unleashed on them. Their minds and bodies will fail to develop fully, stunted and forever bearing the scars of ill-conceived policies.

Turning food into fuel, while a billion people suffer hunger, belies any sense of humanity. Converting agricultural lands from food production to fuel production cannot continue. Immediately suspending the requirement that ethanol be blended to gasoline, elimination of ethanol subsidies, would quickly and dramatically halt the steep rise in global food prices.

In addition, close the Fed borrowing window to investment banks and stop bankrolling the speculative bubble in commodities.

It's the right thing to do. So do it.

Fire Retardants

2007-05-21T15:40:00.000-07:00

What if space-time were flammable?

We'd surely be frelled then.

Dotcom 2.0

2006-09-17T22:35:00.000-07:00

Web 2.0 is God's way of telling VC's that they have too much money.

Space - A False Hope

2006-07-12T17:27:00.000-07:00

Don't get me wrong. I love Sci-Fi and all that nerd stuff. Cosmic rays, black holes, stellar physics, all good stuff.

But people like Hawking who actually believe that Space is the solution to the problems we are facing now: war, famine, pollution, global warming, energy, etc. are way off into outer space, as in delusional outer space and not space space.

Space colonization requires vast energy and material resources that we simply do not have at our disposal. Hell, we've never sent even a single human being to another planet, let alone billions! If we had the resources to send the greater part of Earth's population to other worlds, after first making them inhabitable, we would not be wondering how we will keep our cars on the road.

The magnitude of the disconnect astounds me. Even if we had a dozen nuclear wars, Earth would still be by far the most inhabitable planet in the Solar System. We don't even know if there's another human-habitable planet in the entire Universe! Good luck finding it.

Deep space, in the near term, is barren. What we need is to focus on our terrestrial and near space problems. Completely mastering nuclear power, molecular biology, robotics, AI, these are the tools which will make a difference.

Stephen Hawking

2006-07-12T17:16:00.000-07:00

So Stephen Hawking thinks that the human race faces great perils over the next 100 years. We must spread out into space in order to ensure our survival.

He's actually held these positions for years, but recently he asked the question, "How will humanity survive the next 100 years?" on Yahoo Answers. There were like 17 thousand entries within 24 hours. It was ridiculous.

How the hell is anyone going to make sense of 20 thousand answers a day? To a single question. It's not like these answers are substantively distinct. Thousands of pages of variations, slices and aggregations of things thousands of other people have said.

People are like cognitive blenders. If you ever needed a demonstration of just how redundant human thoughts on a given subject are, just read through the answers given on this thread.

At any rate, the Answer system is useless unless it has some form of useful digester. Something like a cow, eating thousands of tons of grass and turning it into steak. Just like magic.

Bittorrent, Flikr, Youtube

2006-07-12T16:40:00.000-07:00

Allow me to beat this horse carcass a bit more.

Many of the most successful Internet phenomena have been about opening up permissions, extending trust to the common Internet user.

Blogs allow anyone to write stuff on the Web, without the hassle of maintaining a website. Hotmail/YahooMail let you send stuff for free. It's not just the free as in beer aspect, it's the fact that you are more or less trusted to open up an account and simply start sending and receiving mail. IM, same thing. It's not new. What's new is letting anybody do stuff with extremely liberal, more or less anonymous and simple signup policies.

Something like Flikr or YouTube isn't even an idea. It's just allowing people to upload certain kinds of files and share them online. YahooMail and GMail give you 2GB of storage and up, but they don't allow you to just post and share arbitrary content. Google promises to do that with GDrive, but so far they haven't extended that level of trust.

What do computers do? They store and retrieve information. They also can make decisions by applying defined rules to data. Much of what resides on computers is a system of authentication and permissions. What is money after all, other than a scalar distribution of data which governs what we are allowed to do? If enough zeros are associated with my name on a particular bank computer, and another computer validates my identity corresponding to that entry, then I can take that trip to Paris, buy a car, a yacht, whatever.

A huge part of what we are is what we are permitted to do.

Wikipedia Patch

2006-07-10T18:02:00.000-07:00

Lack of rigid editorial control both allows Wikipedia to grow and update itself extremely rapidly, but the downside is a very small amount of information pollution.

One solution might be to keep several versions of an article, and indeed we do see a certain amount of forking of articles. Another would be light moderation, and this likewise appears to occur, as articles on controversial subjects are sometimes locked, if only temporarily, from being modified by untrusted users.

It really gets down to a matter of trust. Before the Web, most computers required users to have an account and a password to get anything useful from them. In other words, there was no trust. The Web changed that by basically throwing open all that valuable information and saying to the world, "I trust you to read it." Imagine that. The value of information is magnified by the number of people who read it. Wiki extends that march of trust over paranoia, by declaring, "I trust you to modify it."

Perhaps a system of "innocent until proven guilty" would cure the minor ills, without causing the patient to fall into a worse condition. It all depends on the cost of a mistake, versus its likelihood.

Voting is another proven mechanism. Slashdot keeps some semblance of order over its millions of contentious participants with its relatively democratic karma system. Inflamatory, misleading, or moronic remarks are not so much excised as demoted to the noise level.

Heavy handed editorial control should be eschewed at all costs. Perhaps the community should be able to vote on whether an article needs to be more carefully controlled. Volatility is not itself a sign of a problem. The community could vote, even passively, on differing versions of an article through its history. Perhaps with sufficient votes, an article might fork itself to fairly present major viewpoints.

Most of the controversy seems to be over political matters, public personas, things with which people have an axe to grind. Scientific facts like adiabatic demagnetization tend to be less controversial. And yet it would be far more consequential if these articles were wrong. I would say that for areas for which there are clear subject matter experts, designated experts should be able to add their weight to protect an article in their field, or subtract it to weaken it. An anomymous high school dropout should not be able to overwrite, say an article by Wheeler on Relativity, because he believes that he can show that the proper space-time transformations are Galilean and not Lorentzian.

Wikipedia vs Information Paranoia

2006-07-10T17:32:00.000-07:00

Conventional print media and publishers are quick to criticize Wikipedia for the relatively few errors which occur due to malicious individuals, pranksters, biased parties, and crackpots.

Death by Wikipedia

Conventional publishers fear Wikipedia because in their hearts they believe that information must be tightly controlled, vetted by "responsible" members of the priesthood, and transmitted from on high to the unwashed masses.

Information flowing up and flowing freely is a scary concept.

But peer reviewed, scientific studies published in prestigious journals have analyzed the overall accuracy of Wikipedia as a whole, and found it quite accurate. Comparable even to the venerable Encyclopedia Brittanica.

Why, in the face of clear evidence that Wikipedia simply works, does the print industry see only its flaws? Every error in Wikipedia, no matter how short lived, is cause for celibration by the hard line media priesthood. Proof that only editorial staff at giant media corporations can safely be entrusted with the business of brainwashing the people.

They believe this because it is their vested interest for them to believe it. As Machiavelli observed over 500 years ago, people's hearts follow their vested interests.

The real lesson of Wikipedia's mindblowing success is the same one that CVS showed versus RCS: the cost of paranoid revision control locking in general exceeds the benefit. Incidents of malicious information malfeasance are vastly outweighed by good faith attempts to report the facts.

One of the most glaring defects in the print media, ie newspapers, attempts to move online is their blatant banishment of the most fundamental social building block of the web, hyperlinks to other relevant websites. Hyperlinks on newspaper sites overwhelming point to ads (ie lies), or articles within the site itself. It is obviously the intent of media publishers to suck people through their eyeballs into their own little fiefdom amongst the Information Feudal Kingdoms. Links in good, links out bad. The lameness of this is why news aggregator sites like Google News and Yahoo News are by far the most popular route people take to get to news articles.

The purported interest of the Media to inform, clearly takes a backseat to its own commerical interests. They want to trap readers, force them to log in, identify and profile them for maximal marketing effectiveness, and prevent people from leaving, except to buy things or browse for products from sponsors.

March of the Monkeys

2006-04-24T17:42:00.000-07:00

Every year, monkeys gather on the ice sheets of the deep North Arctic waters, to once again renew the species in an arduous nine month long trial of endurance and will to survive.

Many will not make it to the Spring. Frozen monkeys litter this harsh wasteland.

To be sure, their story has been eclipsed by their upscale neighbors on the unforgiving Arctic shelves, the Emperor Penguins, but the intrepid monkeys soldier on, hopeful and undaunted by their lack of recognition.

Keeping the monkeys out of the penguin shots proved difficult, their ubiquitous presence in the Arctic excised in film only with great patience, careful editing, and a banana launcher.

One Cup of Narcissism

2006-04-22T22:19:00.000-07:00

The secret of Starbucks limitless success. Narcissism tastes great with coffee.

Cool, coifed, and deftly sarcastic Ipod people gather to share insincere affection for defiance, creativity, empathy, poverty, art, and music, over Chai tea lattes.

A Brave New World of Personality without Individuality.

Is God Ticklish?

2006-04-22T03:35:00.000-07:00

3:33 am. Here I am, Single Nerdboy, watching a documentary on PBS about giant fish and aquatic snakes. Amazonian monkeyfish are amazing. With buttery cream sauce.

And yet, for the sake of, like the whole World and all the gypsies and midgets and flying houses, I wrestle with an ontological question of cosmic importance.

Is God ticklish?

God, being Omniscient, would always know when some devil were about to sneak up on Him, intent on mirthful mischief. It'd be as impossible as tickling yourself. So God is either not omniscient or not ticklish.

But God, if He exists, must be omniscient, therefore cannot be ticklish.

However, only giant sphincters are entirely unticklish, even though everyone says that they hate to be tickled. "I hate being tickled!" is an invitation and a dare to launch tickling. God is not a giant sphincter (*), thus God does not exist.

And yet, how else can one account for the duckbilled platypus? Clearly, a surprise tickling gone terribly wrong.

* excepting the recently restored and controversal gnostic scroll, "Gospel of Beavis" (translated from the Aramaic), wherein it is revealed that "God is, in fact, a giant sphincter."

Proof

2006-04-22T02:55:00.000-07:00

Ladies and Gentlemen, I have obtained unequivocal proof for the existence of acausal temporal translation.

Yes, a positive resolution to the ancient paradox of Time Travel. I had two slices of apple pie in the fridge when I went to bed. Yet this morning, I find only one. This lone slice of pie similarly vanished, oh, just after South Park and Cartman's "I'm a little piggy" song (BTW, it's fair to say that Cartman won the Chili Contest).

Now I am without pie. How could this occur?

Clearly, the only explanation is that at in some future pie-deprived timeline, I or one of my descendants (hurry up dream girl, wtf r u?, the consistency of space-time lies at stake!) builds a Time Machine, goes back in time to the last known slice of apple pie whose coordinates survive clearly intact in the historical archives (all but destroyed in WW-LXXX*)...stealing the pie so that it could be cloned en masse and used to re-pie the planet.

Since the pie was documented to have vanished without trace, no causal paradox resulted.

*Google's suprise hypernuclear sneak attack on the Microsoft Federation, battle cry "Ha! We really are evil!"

Bless Me

2006-04-22T02:31:00.000-07:00

"Bless me, Father, for I have sinned."

I...don't get this.

"Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned." or
"Punish me, Father, for I have sinned." or
"Please don't punish me, Father, for although I have sinned, I'm *really* *really* sorry...and I'm not just saying that."

Something logical. How can sin be the right price for a blessing? Boy, I'd like a blessing today, but I'm plum out of blessing credits. Oh, I know! I can earn a blessing by breaking God's Word.

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.

Berkeley Weather

2006-04-16T01:03:00.000-07:00

I saw the rain,
Through crack of plastic shade.

Laughing tears, from Heaven
Laughed at me.

Never fall in love with a blender

2006-04-16T00:58:00.000-07:00

Never fall in love with a blender.
Cuz you can love a blender,
But a blender can never love you back.
Trust me, you don't
want it to love you back.

Blenders can make smoothies, though.
Smoothies, you can safely love.

My Hands

2006-04-16T00:44:00.000-07:00

Some people say I have too much time on my hands. I don't see how, I wash them thoroughly.

Et tu, Future?

2006-04-16T00:13:00.000-07:00

It's one thing to be kicked in the ass by Past, but Future's s'posed to be your friend.

Things are always supposed to be better in the Future, at least according to Uncle Walt and Woody and Buzz. Bad things retreat farther away until they are forgotten, life blossoms, shit like that.

Fuck you Future. I'm on to your tricks. Broken promises, rosy pictures drawn but never delivered. Future, you're a damn whore. There I said it.

No, no don't cry. Breakups are tough, baby.

Sometimes the future causes the present. I, mean, if you know something will happen for certain in the future (particularly if you know the time and place), then inevitably events must flow as to effect that event. Sophocles used to write about this kind of dependency. Well, Sophocles and just about every other ancient Greek dramatist.

We appear to know much more about the past than the future. Where there exists uncertainty about the past, we often engage in wishingful thinking with regard to what actually happened. Curiously, people talk about the probability of events which have already occurred, or express a desire for the past to have unfolded this way or that way. As if there were a choice.

Mostly, we have many desires about what the future holds, and little knowledge. We have vastly greater knowledge about the past, viewing wishfulness about the past as a waste of time, useless holding on.

I find I like chocolate much better than I did before. I'm hope I'm not pregnant.

God's Yield Problem

2006-04-14T02:57:00.000-07:00

I don't believe in God. This stems from me lacking the gullible lemming gene, which is not recessive BTW.

So God has this terrible problem. He creates these creatures, and He wants to believe in Him, but most of them don't. Sadly.

But God, being omniscient, really can't have a yield problem in His Creation process, unless that's exactly what He wants. The Faithful often bring up some baffling argument about God wanting us to have Free Will and to choose Faith of their own accord. I have no idea why an almighty, all powerful god would create subjects who willingly chose suffereing and eternal damnation. And just for shits and giggles, hide from them and obscure the ultimate nature of existence and reality while they made that choice.

I can't blame human beings for punishing other human beings for their faults, their wickedness, errors, and ignorance. People are just trying to keep each other in line, so that society has a semblence of order and function. Man didn't engineer Mankind, and we are what we are. If God made us what we are, why does he pass judgement upon us for being exactly what he made us? What about all the choices we supposedly made in our lifetimes? Did we every really have a choice? Every cheeseburger we snarfed, or mindless tv show we sat through, every vice and appetite we indulged? So I didn't need to buy that, and this or that decision was foolish. Choices are a product of nature, habit and circumstance.

Now, the number of perfect people I know is pretty small. Zero counts as small, doesn't it? Here's Jesus with the crib sheet. The free pass. All you have to do is choose his way, and you are spared the Wrath and Judgement of the Almighty. So a really hard test, a lifetime of tough choices, faith, sacrifice, judgement, is replaced with a true or false one question quiz. Do you believe?

And here I am, without an ounce of Faith. All the pretty flames. And the beauty is, you never have to relight them, 'cuz they never burn out. [Google's bloggin software, I am definitely losing faith in. Divine geniuses? Apparently not.]

God has a crazy bad yield problem. Most people come out crazy, confused, flawed, selfish, narrow minded, short sighted, ignorant, belligerent, passive, aggressive, passive aggressive, neurotic, weak willed, vindictive, vain, self-indulgent, fearful...well, you get the picture. If I have a creator, one who had absolute control and insight into the formation of my nature, who is he to punish me for being exactly what he intended?

I don't blame God. God is what he is. That's pretty big of me, absolving an imaginary deity of his responsibility for creating a deeply fucked up world.

Hate++

2006-04-11T01:53:00.000-07:00

On a typical day, I hate people. Y'know, cuz they suck. Don't pretend you didn't notice. I hate them, but I rarely hate on them, 'cuz they obviously got enough problems. If we all just quietly hated each other, and stayed out of each others' way, the world would run so much more smoothly.

Bad things don't happen to you because you have bad luck, Eric Forman. Bad things happen to you because you're a dumbass. I love Red. I wish he were my dad.

Anyway, this morning I got new archwires, my braces tightened, and later, just for fun had sutures removed from my chest. The morons at the hospital changed my appointment from Tuesday to Monday, and then lied about it when I showed up. So today I really hate people. But it's not a satisfying hate. It's a dull, throbbing monotonous hate.

Stealing Candy from a Baby

2006-03-24T07:37:00.000-08:00

The trick to stealing candy from a baby is to distract it.

Babies are very much creatures of the moment, so you must draw their attention long enough for them to forget about their precious*. Try some colorful string, or funny noises.

Don't be too eager. It may take a few tries to get the hang of it, but with a little patience, you'll never have to pay for candy again. Babies are embarassingly gullible.

At some point the poor lil' tyke will suddenly realize that the precious candy has vanished, but by then the candy will be long gone and no one the wiser. In a cleanly executed heist, the infant won't realize you're the culprit. Sure, it might suspect, but baby won't *know*. Don't confirm any suspicions by giggling. Deflect the blame to the giant talking frog. Talking frogs are inherently untrustworthy.

And as a bonus, maybe the mother will come breast feed the baby to quiet it.

* Frodo Baggins was clearly an accomplished baby candy stealer when he "found" the One Ring.

There's no such thing as Love

2006-03-24T07:07:00.000-08:00

Love? It don't exist.

If it did, I would have found (contracted?) it by now. Or at least sighted it, a blurry photo of a long necked creature in a Scottish lake, some footprints or tufts of fur.

Nope, not a damn shred of hard evidence. Ergo, it do not exist.

I feel kinda foolish, nay outright dopey, for taking this long to figure out the obvious. I saw through the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus ruses by age 5, after a year of suspicions, and scarcely a year later, an ontological confrontation with my Sunday school teacher blew the cover off the whole God/Man-in-the-Sky story. Eating pink playdough during playtime might have given me the altered perspective necessary to break with tradition.

And then thirty years later...the last Big Illusion crumbles. Dang. I'm so gullible. It's hilarious if you think about it. Shucks, Life has such a sense of humor. Always pullin' my leg.

But just 'cuz I know it's fiction, doesn't mean that the story isn't useful. For instance, in my experience, women totally buy into this Love bullshit. I don't know if they actually believe in it, or just pretend to, but hell, I humored my parents with the Santa Claus charade until I was ten.

Why Lawyers are Hated

2006-03-24T06:40:00.000-08:00

Lawyers practice their art at a great psychic cost.

They are hated. Despised.

The reason is simple. Lawyers exist in a reality which is almost exclusively adversarial. Even settlements involved a tug of war between opposing interests.

Lawyers will create conflict where none existed. It's in their interest to do so.

Naturally, since humans are social animals, it creates a tension, a hostile reaction in the social consciousness of the community. Who the hell are these lawyer parasites, and why are they fomenting conflict and non-cooperation? We should kill them.

So, come the revolution...

Unfortunately for the Socialists, history has taught us that we need blood sucking para...er lawyers much as we need capitalist pigs and institutional greed. Still, it can't hurt to occassionally throw these boffins to the (other) wolves, and enjoy the fun. Like this Enron trial, or the sight of Uncle "Worlcom" Bernie Ebbers in prison orange. I wonder if they have "bitches" in minimum security?

Babies are not cute

2006-03-24T06:24:00.000-08:00

There I said it. Babies are not cute. They look like naked mole rats.

Sure, it's much easier and safer to say it here in the comfort and anonymity of the Internet. Had this been a real live baby spotting, no doubt I'd have to fake the obligatory oohs and ahs that new mothers expect from their visitors.

Naked mole rats.

Puppies are cute. And kittens and koalas, heck just about any kind of cub. Bear cub, lion cub. Tiger. As long as they have downy fur, oversize heads and paws, big glassy eyes, and they flop over on those ungainly paws when you push 'em over, er, when they try to stand.

Human babies look like something that burrowed out of the ground, and if you needed any further proof that they are not cute, even children don't like babies. Babies don't become cute until they get some hair, pajamas with the slippers sewn on, and little bunny emblems, and can stomp around their stubby legs in bursts of warp speed. Then they're hilarious. Lil' tykes are the only people who can be pudgy without facing persecution (other than merciless cheek pinching from dumb ol' ladies).

That said, puppies are still cuter than little kids.

Media runs scared

2006-02-13T13:25:00.000-08:00

Excellent column by Ezra Levant of the Calgary Sun:

"Journalists and other artists have been killed by Muslim radicals. Several of the Danish cartoonists are in hiding, for fear of assassination. This is really happening.

"In fact, the official excuse has been that TV producers, publishers and editors don't want to offend religious sensibilities. But this isn't credible. Not a day goes by when the mainstream media doesn't offend the religious sensibilities of religious Christians, Jews or others. The media doesn't care about religious sensibilities -- it is militantly secular. But it has made an exception for the sensibilities of one religion that is quick to riot and behead its critics.

"The most laughable excuse -- especially from the liberal, secular media like the CBC or CNN -- is that they "respect" Islam too much. Really? They respect a religion opposed to feminism, gay rights and abortion?

"The liberal media doesn't respect radical Islam. It is afraid of radical Islam."

Not to contradict Mr. Levant, but fear *is* a form of respect. It's high time we teach these Muslims to respect us.

The Cartoons War

2006-02-06T22:07:00.000-08:00

Man, this must be a first. A war started over a bunch of cartoons.

I guess Stalin was right about ideas being more dangerous than guns. The toons, ladies and gentlemen are what we call a "pretext." It's pretty obvious that cartoons don't by themselves rally millions to riot, embassies to burn, and nations to sunder diplomatic and trade relations.

Frankly this war is overdue. I mean, we're clearly on each other's nerves. The common Muslim knows that to the common non-Muslim, "Muslim = terrorist." Shut up. You know we do, and we know you know that we do, and burning down more buildings ain't going to change our minds. Except for that coward sack of shit over there pissing himself in the corner. Conversely, we non-Muslims know that the Muslim street thinks we are infidels living in a depraved, decaying civilization, bound for hellfire. Let's not pretend that we don't hate and distrust each other, even though we front leaders and politicians obliged to lie about how well we actually get along, and what a terrible misunderstanding blah blah blah...

In the Muslim world, America is referred to as "the Great Satan," accused of every imaginable crime, sin, and depravity. Jews are drawn with tails and/or horns. Sacred symbols such as Old Glory, ancient Buddhas, the Tomb of Joseph, are ransacked, desecrated, and destroyed by pious Muslims. Muslim governments openly call for the destruction of Israel, death to America, and deny the Holocaust. Nevermind that the Germans *admit* their guilt! Ignore the photographs, the testimony of the survivors, the guards, neighbors, the bodies and the memory of the millions slain. "Kill the Jews" is a mantra every child of the Middle East knows by heart.

If Muslim military power rivalled that of the West, they'd be right back at the Gates of Vienna. Phony peace is so passe. Lets get it on, already.

Apple-Disney-Pixar

2006-01-22T21:51:00.000-08:00

Disney buys Pixar. Apple buys Disney. This will potentially be cheaper than buying both Pixar and Disney separately, and avoid some conflict of interest issues which might arise from an Apple buy of Pixar.

Even after dropping from a high of $86 to 76, AAPL has a market cap of $64B, versus $50B for Disney. If AAPL continues to climb, and DIS continues to move laterally or moves down, the deal makes all the more sense for Apple.

Acquiring Disney-Pixar would make permanent Apple's rise in share price, by acquiring definite assets, and creating a pretty scary new media giant with the tradition, brand, library and clout of Disney, with the creative prowess of Pixar, and the marketing savvy and execution brilliance of Steve Jobs' Apple.

Otherwise, Apple and Disney are increasingly competitors in the content distribution game. Remember, what Disney is to Pixar is a marketing engine, and a distribution network, not a content creator. Apple is setting itself up as a 21st century audio video content distributor. As a nascent media and entertainment company whose roots do not yet run deep, one misstep, or a change in the winds of fashionable gadgetry and Apple's market cap is halved or worse.

And there will be no doubt who rules Apple-Disney-Pixar, whose personality will be indelibly stamped upon it for decades. If it were simply Disney-Pixar, that wouldn't be so clear at all. Jobs' would simply be the biggest shareholder, ahead of everyone's favorite, Michael Eisner, the man who legend has it didn't even watch Disney movies as a kid.

American Splendor

2006-01-22T21:45:00.000-08:00

The Objective of Life is to beat you down so completely and thoroughly, that eventually, you no longer fear dying.

I saw "American Splendor" last night. It opened my eyes. Even the most mediocre life may be celebrated.

Naturally, one of the few enduring consolations of his life is collecting jazz, jazz being the telltale symbols of an "authentic life." The bigshot dipshits who tell everyone how to think might never have noticed Harvey Pekar if not for his love of jazz. Here's to Harvey, for being extraordinary by having the audacity to step forward and celebrate his own miserable existence, and not merely shrinking in shame like the rest of us do.

The actress who played his wife was hot. "Harvey, let's just skip the whole courtship thing and just get married."

"I tend to get married fast 'cuz I'll take any woman that'll have me."

Dang.

Hrm

2005-12-13T05:31:00.000-08:00

Ranting is hard.

I forgot

2005-12-13T03:52:00.000-08:00

Dang. I forgot what I was going say. Logging in sucks. Plus I saw some spam comment on one of my posts linking to a super hot Russian babe. I hate spam, I hate scams, but beautiful women easily distract the weak minded and the dissolute. I hate women. A quick perusal of my rants will readily reveal.

There's a really cute waitress down the street from the apartment I just moved into. We flirted a bit, I couldn't stop smiling when I looked at her. So it turns out that she's 18 and a senior in high school. Damn, I'm a dirty old man! Literally twice her age. How did this happen to me? Oh well. We can't fight who we are, and win.

Oh, now I remember what I opened up my blog for. The "Direction of Time." The Direction of Time is not the direction of increasing entropy or anything so abstract. The key difference between past and future is that "the past" can be remembered. I'd like to say it's immutable as well, but let's just say that it is way less mutable than "the future." I'm not so sure about this whole past causing the present and future business. Perhaps causality is simply another type of time which happens to align with geometric time, thermodynamic/entropic time, memory time.

It would actually seem that some interpretations of Quantum Mechanics allow for actions in the present to cause changes in the past (ie Measurement and History selection). But I'd like to single out the memory aspect. Perhaps this can be derived as a consequence of some more fundamental definition of time, but it seems natural to simply assert it as a fundamental postulate.

Of course, the future may be "predicted" so we should probably consider what it is which different between a memory and a prediction. Further, there is evidently a possible direct link between causal connections and memory relations. A simple model might be that events which cause other events are connected by an edge representing the causal relation. Perhaps in some such cases, reverse traversal is possible, and hence predecessor events of a given event can be "remembered" vis a vis this reverse traversal.

I should probably think about this when it's not 4am in the morning. Getting my braces tightened in the morning. Wheee. Did I mention I got braces last month? Dumbest thing I ever did. Well, hardly, but still plenty dumb. The dumbass things I do in the vain hope that some girl will like me. I hate girls. Girls are like walking talking Tests. Everything is an evaluation, like we're being interviewed for our fitness to continue in the genetic evolution of life. Which, of course, is exactly what's happening.

So I hate women. I resent being slowly extincted. Bitches. I should probably hold myself accountable for being a lazy dumbass, a fool, and a jerk. But, y'know, no need to get myself down. Lately, I've noticed that I've become extremely boring, and that my friend is the Ultimate Crime. So many Expectations at work, tyranical and relentless. I'd like to flip you all the bird and get on with enjoying life.

How does space-time geometry arise from anything remotely connected to causality? Or vice versa. This seems to be entirely unexplained and a little implausible. If they are different matters entirely, then how do we connect the two? Are there particles or quasi-particles of space-time? Of causality? Perhaps causality nets interact in such a way with space-time geometric complexes in such a way as to wrap themselves around the complexes with a preferred orientation. Ok, I'm babbling now. Time to hit the hay.

Patron Saint of Atheists

2005-09-09T06:12:00.000-07:00

Who do atheists pray to, when all seems bleak?

Faith would be a nice psychological crutch to have right about now. I need to construct some form or manner of alternative. Else I fear I will go stark raving mad.

Maybe not stark or raving, but mad.

I still hate people, but doesn't everybody?

The Lost City of New Orleans

2005-09-06T06:13:00.000-07:00

This is a placeholder for my thoughts on Hurricane Katrina and the New Orleans disaster.

New Orleans is a city built below sea level, in a world in which global sea levels are rising. Think carefully about rebuilding on swampland.

Much finger pointing and grandstanding. Disgusting political hackery from the Village People. The knives were out even as the rescue operations where underway. As always, Liberals opportunistically attempt to turn every human tragedy into a political equivalent of a drive by shooting. The media is all too happy to dutifully play its part.

George Bush does not control the weather.

Retired school teachers should turn control of their State's National Guard to professional commanders immediately in a crisis, and not wait days to request Guard units standing ready to be called from other states. The US is a federal system of 50 states, it contains thousands of cities. Passing the buck is not an action plan. It is not leadership.

Kathleen Blanco is politically radioactive. Where Rudolph Gulianni and Gov. George Pataki provided the highest levels of leadership, decisive, coordinated and well planned action in the wake of 911, the mayor of New Orleans and the Gov. Blanco demonstrated the lowest levels of political cowardice, corruption, ineffectiveness, confusion, lack of preparation and planning, finger pointing, and blame reassignment Katrina was not even a Class 5 Hurricane when it struck New Orleans. The city and the state had years to plan for such an eventuality, and yet they failed to do so. While utterly failing to gain control of the crisis, Gov. Blanco has refused to cede control to the Federal government, simultaneously and hypocritically blaming the Feds for failure to act.

Gov. Blanco at once insists that she is in control and attempts to suborn all credit for the successes of the evacuation, while disingenuously blaming the Federal government for all failures and as she impedes their operations with her power grabs and her scabrous attacks.

Naturally, no blame rests with the people who immediately revert to the law of the jungle when blackouts strike, when the power goes out, when police are not around to supervise them. What kind of society is this, where people can not only not be trusted to help in a crisis, but must be closely watched and held at bay with guns? What kind of people rape children and slit their throats? Character doesn't matter? Morality is passe. A society of people so degraded that they cannot be trusted to pull together and demonstrate their courage, strength, and character in a crisis cannot long stand.

Everything is about race, and yet nothing is about race. Political correctness has spoken on the matter.

What we have witnessed in the past week is that the same essential factors which make the Third World as violent, deadly, and impoverished as it is exist here in America. We do not appear to be growing more united as a people, braver, more truthful, more devoted to the rule of law, order, family, morality, community, Church, and society. In fact, the trend seems the opposite: more complacent, weaker of spirit, character, and generosity, more gluttinous, less couragous, more lecherous, depraved, lacking in self-restraint, virtue, and self-discipline. Our society is sinking into the swamps of moral decay, even as New Orleans has returned to the swamps from which it was created.

We haven't even begun to face the challenges and trials which will dearly test our will and ability to survive. The water levels have only risen negligibly, but this will accelerate over the century and beyond. Massive earthquakes are an inevitability in the heavily populated state of California. Scientists predict a Mega-Tsunami with 50 ft waves decimating the Eastern seaboard.

Without a change in the national character, New Orleans is simply the beginning and not the end of catastrophe. The greatest failure witnessed in New Orleans was not that of FEMA and the Federal Government, or even the decrepit and ineffective state and local governments. If New Orleans is lost, it will lost due to the failure of its people,

Drained

2005-08-17T01:39:00.000-07:00

I find myself looking out across a world utterly without magic. Who's fault is that?

When did the colors fade from the sky? When did bleakness rain down upon my hills and valleys, gathering until rivers formed, flowing into a sea whose deep gray depths now keep my dreams.

Where are you, form and future? If I could see color again, I would color my world once more with crazy vivid crayons and draw outside the lines, purple wiggles zig zagging across the sky and laugh until I passed out.

Apple - Intel Merger?

2005-06-12T05:47:00.000-07:00

Regarding R. Cringley's speculation that Apple's very public switch to Intel is a prelude to an Apple Intel merger.

Very interesting speculation. Just crazy enough to make sense. Intel needs to find a new path to growth. Apple is a brand synonymous with innovation, which has established itself as a dominant player in the consumer electronics space with the iPod and online content distribution with iTunes.

The other natural merger candidate for Apple is Sony, which missed out big time on the mp3 market and got broadsided by the iPod, with its superior ergonomics and stylish design. But if Apple were planning to merge with Sony, it would have gone with the Cell processor as the next generation of Mac CPU, avoiding a difficult transition and opening up all kinds of potential applications.

There is enough heads up for Sony to step up to the plate and make a bid for Apple, but I would imagine that scenario has been explored behind the scenes and the Intel switch signals that an Apple-Sony tie up has been rejected.

The biggest reason for Intel to buy Apple is to free itself from Microsoft, which essentially controls Intel's destiny. Intel's products reach the consumer through Microsoft. Apple has the ability to connect directly to the consumer, which combined with Intel's vast resources, would finally break Microsoft's hold over Intel. While I doubt Intel would go straight at Microsoft and its Windows empire, it could go after Sony in the consumer electronics space and content distribution business.

Interesting theory, but if Intel is unwilling to go directly at Microsoft and Windows, and I think that it is simply too cowardly and cautious to do so, then Apple will be held back (much as it is now) and it's potential squandered. Intel might, however, be willing to shell out big money for an option which it is unlikely to ever play.

Apple on Intel

2005-06-07T01:18:00.000-07:00

Well, it's done. At least the decision. "twere well it were done quickly"

While I find it hard to fathom why the trigger was pulled in the first place (ie just as IBM's PowerPC has gained enormous traction with design wins with XBox 360, Sony PS3, and Ninendo Revolution giving it a clean sweep of the next generation game consoles), it done no point in hand wringing.

The decision means that Apple will no longer have to bear the costs and risks of being the only personal computer manufacturer out their with a non-x86 CPU. They can stay competitive with other PC manufacturers with off the shelf or derivative components. The transition costs are high, but so are the costs of developing custom silicon for every generation. Apple can leverage high performance chipsets, GPU's, I/O controllers, etc. from many more vendors, with lower integration costs. It winds up being a no-brainer from a long term risk perspective (although there is significant short term risk).

I'd expect sales to be hurt for the next year and a half. I personally would not consider buying a new Mac under the circumstances. This kind of situation has to be managed carefully, since it's put many companies out of business in the PC industry, going back to industry pioneer Osborne. Perhaps Apple feels more comfortable now that it has much less dependency on the Mac as a revenue stream, and the smash hit iPod was built largely with 3rd party components. The reality is that the best x86 CPU's provide comparable performance to the PowerPC, but with less supply risk, a greater range of support chips, and a huge potential upside which is the potential to grow marketshare in the overall PC space.

Apple's primary value add is the innovation and quality of the OS, together with the quality and innovation of their hardware + software integration. If the Mac Mini were a PC, it would have 5% penetration by now, greater than the entire Mac marketshare.

I have no Friends, only Spam

2005-03-23T14:21:00.000-08:00

I look in my mailbox, my personal mailbox not my work email, and I get a regular flow of mail. Unfortunately, it's all spam.

I need some friends. I wonder if they have some kind of catalog for that? I'll go check Amazon.

People Suck

2005-02-28T04:05:00.000-08:00

I still hate people. There are some things that never change.

I hated people when I was nine. I hate them still.

Ever since I was a kid, I could hardly wait for the age of humans to be over. I'm getting impatient.

Global warming. Ha! Where was the freakin' Ice Age the hippies were warning us about in the 60's and 70's. Acid rain, easily dealt with. Hole in the ozone layer, CFC's banned. Well, there's always Plague, I guess.

Super volcanoes, earthquakes, asteroids, gamma ray bursts from nearby exploding stars. The problem with these kinds of Events is that they occur on a timescale of millions of years. Shucks.

Running out of fossil fuels in a few decades should be pretty interesting. Massive economic distress and dislocation, bigger and badder energy related wars and standoffs. Ultimately, we'll just go nuclear for energy generation over the bruised, bloodied bodies of the neo-hippies and that'll be that. No real hope here for taking care of the human infestation.

Robots, I touched on that in my last post. That's a good 'un. Competition with other life forms, and shifting biological niches generally account for most extinctions. We need more forms of sentient life. More species must evolve which have competitive intelligence, thus breaking the apparent monopoly that our species has on higher thinking abilities. It's hard to believe that this never happened before, that one species developed an advantage that gave it such an overwhelming upper hand against the hundreds of millions or even billions of other forms of life that it spread all over and caused the mass extermination of most other species.

Surely the ecosystem has some kind of response mechanism to defend the genetic robustness of the system. Perhaps insects, vermin, and bacteria have not come to perceive us as a threat yet. Indeed, they're doing well at the moment.

War. That kind of fizzled out when the Soviet Union collapsed. I doubt we've seen the last of our friend, violence being baked into our design. But I also doubt that we would destroy our whole species in a war. The whole trend of military research is away from WMD's and towards much more surgical weapons and defenses against WMD's.

Robots of Dawn

2005-02-26T07:45:00.000-08:00

So at long last, the robots that mankind has dreamed of and feared are on the horizon. All their components are being built separately. For instance, now we see their legs taking a big step forward. Heh. Vision systems to recognize terrorists and perform security functions. Voice recognition, largely now to handle automated phone trees and customer interactions. Manipulators for manufacturing. Efficient batteries and fuel cells.

What the scifi writers and movie creators of the 40's, 50's, and 60's didn't realize was just how much computing power and software sophistication would be required. That teaching a computer how to understand speech or see the way a human does is far more complicated than teaching it how to play chess at a world class level. Funny that. Even something as simple as efficient walking is cutting edge. Next step is literally being able to walk up steps.

Mathematics, computational dynamics, so much incredible technology coming together...to create the very thing which will supercede us.

Because the machines we will build in this century will think, will recognize patterns, adapt, learn, store and transmit not only data but interpretation and comprehension. The will know and account for the laws of physics, predict and anticipate, employ symbolic logic at dizzying speeds and scale, possess nearly infallible memory and recall, powerful methods of game theory and optimization to guide decision making. We really don't stand a chance. Not in the long run. And these intelligent machines will exist at every scale, from the molecular and cellular, to an entire city or beyond.

I don't think we'll be exterminated or enslaved, as in the movies. More likely, we will be simply swept aside, like the lesser animals in Man's world. Unimportant except where we present a nuisance. Battlestar Galactica is a pretty amazing SciFi show. Some of the most interesting androids ever on mainstream TV. Their passionate, religious fervor. Sexuality. Sense of Irony. Everything we think of as uniquely human we will pass on to our heirs. Except perhaps our doubt. But somehow I think that we will pass on most of all. Because if we don't have answers for ownselves, surely we are rather pathetic Creators. I love the way the Ceylons have created their own religion (which of course is our religion), and they believe that "God created the Ceylons" (for the sins of mankind). It's really rather beautiful.

I think we will have to consider very carefully over the coming decades, what exactly a machine might or might not believe, and is it important for them to believe things? Isaac Asimov posited that they needed to have core fundamental laws encoded inherently into their designs to control them and prevent them from overcoming humanity. This, of course, is absurdly optimistic, to think that people will think ahead of time to develop and enforce such hypothetical constraints. It will only be in hindsight where we will lament the failure to anticipate. But it is more absurdly optimistic to believe that we could construct intelligent life and hold it enslaved to service our sloth and gluttony and whim indefinitely.

Crazy Talk

2005-02-26T05:15:00.000-08:00

Ever notice how other people's crazy ideas seem so..."crazy"?

It's like, how the hell can someone think *that*?

And yet there's no mirror for one's own crazy beliefs. The craziest beliefs are the ones that are invisible to the people who hold them. It's like trying to describe air. It's just always there, perfectly normal. And that's the craziest part of something crazy.

I, Human

2005-02-19T21:06:00.000-08:00

I am a human. Born in the late-ish 20th Century, as reckoned by my civilization, living now in the early 21'st, and likely to die around the middle of the latter.

Humans are animals, hence it follows that I am an animal.

Animals are living creatures, and as such seek to survive long enough to propagate.

You see where I'm going with this? Well, I've survived! Not so much on the other half of the Life proposition.

Really, when it comes down to it, I don't want to die at all. It seems like such a shame. Reproduction strikes me as a kind of consolation prize, for not being fit or durable enough to survive indefinitely. Forever.

And yet there is not particularly compelling reason for me to live forever. Just the desire. So here I am, wishing in vain to not die, to not grow old and lose my identity, my strength, agility, intelligence, eyesight, health, hair, and smooth skin.

If only we could determine the sequence of bits which define a particular person. We could back up to tape, unwind ourselves before we went astray, or accidentally erased ourselves, or got old.

What is a person? What am I? Where can I find my damn bits?

The True Horror of Auschwitz

2005-01-27T18:59:00.000-08:00

Today, like so many days which are anniversaries of horrific events in history, world leaders, national leaders, and cafe philosophers give countless speeches on the depth of horror, pain, and remorse, the lessons burned into our consciousness.

Which is, of course, absolute bullshit.

What we have learned is the emptiness of human words. False claims of compassion and conscience. To even claim the hideous words "Never again," is to reveal again the cold, calculated, evil which is simply put, the truest of all human natures.

We kill, we ignore death and suffering large and small, slaughter the truth, feign compassion. We are all capable, culpable, willing and able to give ourselves to the diabolical.

The true horror of Auscwitz is not the transient suffering, though even numbering in the millions, are merely a drop in a river of blood which flows forever from the beginning of life until the world ends. The true horror is that we stand exposed for what we are. Competitive, violent, collectively ruthless, and needful of powerful lies to tell us that we are something else altogether.

Genocide occurs unabated, the slaughtered Rwandans and Bosnians, Chechens, Timorese, Khurds, and countless other dead and enslaved apparently failed to get the word, that all is better and how grave our determination is, to the lie, "Never again."

The fact that this brutish, ugly lie is so powerful within our piteous public discourse, speaks the truth about what we are as a species, as a form of material organization. I doubt that we are in this regard, any different from other forms of life. Living things are the gravest threat to other living things, of same and differing kind. We kill. We annihilate others, as the cult of Darwin tells us. We cooperate. Genocide is cooperative annihilation.

Naturally, we cooperate to defend. I laugh at the irrational desire to believe in myths. The mythology of goodness. I wonder why it is so important for people to believe that they are better than they are? Even the Jews who have made an industry of their suffering, now wield the instruments of subjugation. Laughable piety. Of Christians who were once lambs, fed to lions in Roman arenas, then bringers of death, disease and slavery through the world. The pious Muslims who would equate the killing of one man to the killing of all men. What a ridiculous repudiation of Reality. Hindus stoning evangelicals.

I understand the violence. At a basic level. I do not understand with any clarity, the need to deny. Do we think that we are better than Germans? Are they simply darker, more sinister in their hearts than other types of people? We do these things. All people do these things. Indigenous peoples have been displaced and annihilated for the entirety of human existence. Even the Old Testament/Torah tells us how the Israelites wiped out the indigenous Philistines.

I hypothesize that we need to deny, as a kind, mass murder, in order that we not delve to deeply into its nature. To proclaim it solved, to pretend that it is gone. So that we need never cure this disease of our nature. Or contemplate that it cannot be cured, because it simply is too fundamental to what we are. We live and we kill. We consume life, and we create life.

And yet, for the most part, most of the time, we civilized folks keep our most bestial instincts contained. Genocide is abnormal event, but ever recurring like a tsunami or a hurricane. What, then, is the place of brutality within humanity?

Time Ends

2004-12-30T18:44:00.000-08:00

Well, it's the end of the year 2004. It's just as well, this year was getting a little stale.

Time to go to the garage and pull a fresh one out of storage.

This year is going to rock. For one, I'm going to get my eye lasered. Thus, I will finally be able to see as I drive down the highway, with the full glory of binocular vision.

My eye doctor is a goddess. She was the first thing I saw with my new "medically necessary" contact lens. Apparently, I am functionally blind in my left eye. And yet my right eye is perfectly within the range of normal vision. And odd asymmetry. At any rate, she fitted me for a contact and woila! I can see clearly. Dr. Katie is pure eye candy. While some may question the wisdom of choosing your optometrist based on her looks, but I've never experienced a happier medical evaluation.

I feel different with the contact. It's disorienting, the geometry of my daily world has altered. It's like being in a dream or some crazy David Lynch movie. If I were in the Matrix, I'd say kick me over one of them red pills. I feel a little giddy. Could it be that the right half of my brain has been visually starved for years and is now flooded with high acuity visual stimuli?

2005, take your best shot!

What the (computer) world needs now

2004-12-06T19:40:00.000-08:00

Freedom from disk drives.

I hate disk drives. Disk drives suck.

I particularly find obnoxious that so many systems expect to be booted from one of these archaic dinosaurs. For instance, I saw an article on how to create a bootable Linux USB flash keychain, which first assumed you had a bootable CD.

That seems stupid.

How about we assume that the computer has USB, firmware which allows USB boot devices, and no friggin drives at all? Not that long ago, Linux weenies assumed that everyone must have a floppy drive. Yeah, just dogpile on hardcoded dependencies in your thinking.

In fact, we should just go straight to boot over IP and be done with it. Bitches.

What Are Blogs Made Of?

2004-11-09T19:04:00.000-08:00

Inane banter.

That's what I want.

I'm a news junkie. I hit the news sites every few minutes, polling for a change in the world.

You'd think a world with over 6 billion inhabitants would have some noticeable event in that time frame. Alas, reporting seems to lag.

I'm a news junkie. But I hate reporters. Distrust more properly. And yet I expect that since there are some small consequences to being caught red handed in a lie (thank you Dan Rather!), the distortions and falsehoods have to lie within some reasonable distance of a factual account. That is, after the bullshit filter sifts out the opinions and biases from the actual facts, a corrective grain of salt should tend to result in a digestible factoid about some shit happening somewhere.

But it is *so* boring. The news is tediously dull. Such is the lot of a news junkie.

Being a sex addict would be immensely more fun. Unhappily, that would no doubt call down the wrath of the Thought Police, or at the very least the HR department.

The Important Thing

2004-11-08T20:04:00.000-08:00

I wonder why people sleep?

That is, why do they have to sleep?

Just wondering.

I bet biologists, being closet mad scientists have done extensive sleep deprivation experiments on many if not most sleep prone animals.

I wonder if a dog that had been deprived of sleep for two weeks would be irritable.

And think of all the insomniac mice in labs all over the world. Come to think of it, a mouse in a lab might have a higher incidence of insomnia than a free mouse. After all, it must be cause for anxiety, never knowing what some grad student in a white coat is going to inject into you tomorrow. And who wants their experiment compromised by tired mice?

Yeah, didn't think so.