Obama for president

I hope Obama makes it past the primaries.

If we talk point-by-point then Kucinich is the guy I should vote for. With Obama, there are some serious differences between his and my opinions. But I think that the person who should get that position is more than his talking points.

Obama seems to have a pretty amazing personality (as noted by several columnists who've met and followed him around for the past 4-8 years). He's obviously a clever person, well educated, aware of the world around him more than any other candidate this year. He treats everyone with the respect they deserve. Many have said that he's the kind of politicians that can communicate with 'the other side' in not only a constructive way, but in a way that makes Americans feel proud of what our political system could be.

Here is a New Yorker article about Obama which should make you feel proud too.

How great is it?

It's great to have free time! And to keep up the child hating persona, this is what I discovered:

20

Looking for payday loans?

Let's hope this hypothesis will never be tested.

To smile...

Now that academic obligations are completed (for the quarter) I feel like I can relax and maybe smile a little.

This link here made me smile.

The thing inside you

I know that people think the whole gestation thing is a miracle of life. I think it's an incredibly interesting process myself, but I have to admit that the whole "living thing inside you, stealing your neutrients, oxygen, etc" creeps me out, and it creeps me out a lot . . . to the point where it gives me nightmares.

People are often appalled when I share this side of me so I feel that I should clarify that I don't hate babies and I think they are all precious and cute (though I do think that recently-birthed babies are mostly scary and ugly and most definitely NOT cute). But I can't lie about the fact that it completely freaks me out that they spend 9 months growing inside our loved ones.

Today I stumbled across the following video on the YouTube:



Fodder for nightmares to come...

On staying positive

Overheard on the street yesterday:

Middle-aged man to younger man: "Well, it might look like it's bad for the economy, but hopefully [the weak dollar] will make those illegals think twice about coming here"


Yup... whatever we can do to keep the brown people at bay...

In the meantime, rich European women are flocking to boutiques in New York taking advantage of the situation, Australians are importing all of their electronic goods, and rap stars are flashing foreign currency in their music videos.

What to do when something is wrong in your community

I'm one of those idealists that believes that the best way to go about social change is to educate the general public. Most people are just not aware of the bad things going on around them, and even if they are, they often feel helpless OR they believe such is the natural state of things and should not be interfered with. So educating someone isn't just about exposing the problem, but also about providing evidence that it doesn't have to be that way and it's worth putting forth the effort to change something.

The problem is that getting through to the average 30 year old, or a 40 year old, or a 50 year old is really really hard. I've tried and failed, and I've seen people more clever than myself try and fail. (The problem, if you care to hear my opinion, is that, while they are quick to feel the offense, they are even quicker to forget and go back to the status quo using the "I can't do anything about it" excuse to make themselves feel less culpable -- something which I know I am often guilty of doing myself).

So we have to educate young people.

Websites like "the story of stuff" are doing that and I commend them for it.

As I watched their presentation I felt that they were being a bit alarmist. Being a middle of the road sort of person, I often filter arguments to simple emotionless cores. But recently I've realized that even if the situation is not dire, people need to feel that the sky is falling in order to get their ass involved.

My epiphany? I now, finally, learned what that fable is really all about. I know that the story sometimes changes to have a more interpretable moral but here is my take.

Chicken little notices a problem. She is, of course, mistaken. The reader knows it's not really a problem, but she's determined to do right so she goes to the government. Along the way, she meets lots of characters, and each of them is alarmed by her story, but only temporarily. Like adults, they soon forget about the real problem and are swayed off course and promptly eaten by the fox. But Chicken little is singular minded and progresses on to the King who ultimately shows her the error of her ways. But she wasn't eaten by the fox... which is a good thing. She followed her goal to completion, even though it was based on faulty assumptions.

I would rewrite the ending. In my version, shortly after the King explains it all, setting chicken little straight, the acorn tree falls onto the chicken coop killing everyone inside. Because I love irony. And gore.

I have ceased to be surprised by these sorts of things years ago

An Arkansas legislator wrote some incredibly ignorant things a few weeks ago. I'm sure that legislators from all over the US... all over the world actually... say stupid things like this all the time. This one just happened to write them in an e-mail which, somehow, became publicly available.

I ceased to be surprised about these things but I continue to be disappointed. I wish there was a way for me to fix the problem or learn to ignore it.

Warning: this here post is extremely not safe for work (it's also very sophomoric)

Every once in a while I'm reminded of the type of art that used to make me laugh when I was a silly little teenager. So when I watch videos like the one I linked to here the smile you might see on my face is not a result of the silliness of the art's content, but a result of my fond memories of childhood.

I present to you, an honest to god song (in the form of a fan-made music video):

Smell Yo D**k



Foolproof way to find out if your man is cheating

Photographs made cooler by lenticulation

I like taking pictures of stuff. A few years ago I became aware of lenticulation and since then I've tried to figure out how to create my own using a couple of cheap digital cameras. Once I'm done with grad school, I think I'll really try to make that happen.

Galifianakis rules

I think Zach Galifianakis is a comedic genius and I'm glad that he's out there making comedy. His comedy 'special' was really good and is available on netflix.

Taking over the world, one IP address at a time

Using this nifty webpage here I discovered today that the University I attend has a huge stake in the internet as far as IP addresses go. I wonder what the story behind that is.

About 52 years ago, a scientist published a paper in a journal in which he uses contemporary (for 1955) scientific data to make some logical speculation about what kind of chemical compounds could have existed during the period in which the earth was cooling.

Much of his speculation (I assume) proved to be unfounded as its scientific field grew in the ensuing decades. That scientist went on to publish more papers and probably gave little thought to that speculative work, until many years later he googled himself to find that the 1955 paper was being cited a lot.

Problem is, it's being cited by creationists. Turns out they are using that piece of outdated speculation as scientific evidence that life could not have begun without divine intervention.

That scientist didn't like it, so he retracted the paper.

That story in itself isn't too exciting to me. However, it reinvigorated memories of a rant I often feel like giving to anyone who will listen. That is: Scientists may be experts of their field but, like any expert of any field be it a doctor, a lawyer, a mechanic, or whatever, they are fallible and sometimes wrong.

Many logically minded, thinking, near-rational creationists are desperate for scientific validity so they scour journal articles as old as 1955 and older (Newton's Principia is often appealed to) just so they can do what their opponents in the argument are doing.

People tend to take expert advice for granted. The majority of the creationists citing the paper probably don't have the skill to read scientific articles (and it is a skill which requires practice). It seems like they couldn't even figure out that it was speculation with outdated evidence. It doesn't look like they knew that the author wasn't even an expert in astrophysics, but a material scientist. Yet somewhere through the grapevine, someone heard about (or researched) this paper, gathered what they wanted from it and began to pass that info along to people who just believed it and went on citing it.

This phenomenon is prevalent in our society. Take the atkins diet. If you ask the average atkins dieter to explain to you why this particular diet works, they don't know or have a basic, but probably fallacious or simplistic explanation of why carbs are bad for dieters. Little attention is paid to other health concerns about atkins, but they presume that the "doctor" who invented the diet is an expert and "diet" is inherently healthy. (carb elimination/all protein diets are actually quite old, suggested for obese patients who need surgery and must lose weight really fast, doctors have been putting people on these diets for a long time WITH THE STIPULATION THAT THEY NOT STAY ON THE DIET FOR LONGER THAN 3 OR 4 WEEKS lest their arteries explode)

Science reporting is bad. Scientists, even good ones, make all kinds of mistakes. The press often makes a big deal out of small discoveries and totally ignores important discoveries based solely on the news organizations' speculation regarding their viewership. And just because a scientist has done something amazing in, say, the field of genetics, doesn't mean he isn't an idiot when it comes to something like social biology.

Doctors are not all geniuses, in my experience I've met at least 2 very ignorant ones. Many many mechanics are amazing with machines, but many also exploit our ignorance and make us pay huge amounts of money for scams like "break pad cleaning". Lawyers have pretty amazing memory banks for all the texts they were forced to memorize by the educational system but few can extrapolate from those books to the real world simply because it isn't necessarily important to have that skill in the court of law.

I could go on, but my point is this: Don't look to experts for the definitive word. Question everything, be skeptical. A doctor is someone you need to trust regarding your health, a marine biologist is someone you need to trust regarding the health of polar bears and sea lions in a warming arctic, and your mom is someone you need to trust for advice when you're raising your first child. The real hard trick is to learn how much of what these people say is important, relevant, useful fact and how much is human self-deluding, inaccurate, harmful fiction.

When the creationists were looking for a paper to show how life couldn't have started on its own, they found a paper which supported that view and took it for granted that, being in a scientific journal, it weighed as strong evidence. I would like it if people hearing their claims would not take them for fact but would do something to learn for themselves whether those claims were accurate.

to approach

For some reason I was taken aback today by the use of 'near' as a verb with a human agent.

I've heard sentences like this in the news before (and they sound OK to me):
"The australian dollar neared 89 american cents today..."

But today I read this online and I had to read it a couple of times because something seemed odd about it:
"As I neared them I began to better hear their conversation"

Maybe I'm just going crazy, but is this a common use of a verbed 'near'? And if so, why does it sound so weird to me?

Happiness

I've become increasingly obsessed with the psychology of 'happiness' in recent months. There is a theory in the relevant psychological fields which (more or less) claims that we have absolutely no clue what makes us happy. People who win lotteries, in the long run (and sometimes even in the short run) end up feeling as happy (or as sad) as they typically felt before they won the lottery. The same is true for people who get shot in the face and survive, who lose a loved one, who marry super-models, who drink plenty of water, who have terminal illnesses, who own Macs, who just won a year's supply of snickerdoodles.

People who've had a devastatingly horrible thing happen to them, learn to deal with it, live with it, and their brain chemistry quickly gets them back up to the same level of happiness they are used to experiencing.

People who've had incredibly uplifting experiences eventually run out of the happy chemicals (quite quickly in fact) and sink back to the same level their body is used to.

In short, based on the books and articles I've been looking at, just about the only element in a person's life which psychologists have found to truly affect the person's base level of happiness for the long term is their level of social interaction. Give a person more or less social interaction than they like (or are used to) and you will change their level of happiness for the duration of that stimuli change and possibly longer. (However, people seem to acclimate better to an increased level of social interaction than a decreased level).

In other words: What really drives our happiness seems to be some internal setting, an equilibrium that actually fights against external stimuli and with the exception of other people, the external stimulus always loses. Without getting too philosophical about life and the pursuit of happiness, I hope that those who have been negatively affected by this week's wild fires in southern california get back to their steady state of happiness.

WTF?

I've never before used the acronym WTF in print: Never in IM chat, never on IRC, never on my own websites. I may have once used it ironically in speech... maybe.

The reason I am using it today: Politician bans a morpheme.

Linguistics in the wild

Mixed Metaphor overheard yesterday:
Undergrad looking Girl to Undergrad looking Boy: "It's going to be awesome! I think you guys are going to be head over heels in girls."

I was kind of surprised at how good it sounded for a mixed metaphor. I think Lakoff calls these "impermissible" mixed metaphors. I think Lakoff was wrong. Because it didn't seem to interrupt their conversation at all and it took me a few seconds to figure out what was wrong with it...

Travel related title goes here

Rudest travel book ever written?
Or
Best travel book ever written?

You decide.

Imagine a Wikipedia constantly patrolled by academics. Can you do it? Well, someone has, and they've made it look like this.

Scholarpedia, a peer-reviewed version of wikipedia (whatever the hell that means... isn't wikipedia, in a sense, peer-reviewed?). Currently, the Linguistics section seems to be written by Mark Arnoff and "peer-reviewed" by his longtime collaborator Wendy Sandler, both of whom I have respect for but hardly what I would call a balanced peer-review process.

Where are all the linguists at? It's not like we have anything better to do...

(I remembered to use the 'linguistics' tag for the first time on this blog... lame)

Things that put a smile on my face

The situation in Nigeria is really complex.

Situation In Nigeria Seems Pretty Complex

Rerun

At this point I would like to reiterate my love for Motion Trio as well as my disappointment that I will miss them live in Chicago by only three weeks. But I have a plan. If I can convince 800 people in SD to buy their CD they may consider stopping by next time they tour the US.

Scientific reporting

Shortly after posting my last poorly-thought-out-stream-of-consciousness post, I randomly stumbled on this article titled "Is scientific Journalism Doomed?" which is a more interesting informal analysis of the problem. (via slashdot)

podcast is a noun which can be verbed, etc.

Having recently become the owner of an iPod through the kindness of a friend I have begun to fall in love with the podcast once again.

I used to listen to these things a lot when I was living abroad but stopped when I came back to the US and had AM/FM in English to listen to. On top of that, my days became busier with a lot of academic reading which precludes the opportunity to simultaneously listen to someone talking (or podcasting if you will).

But the dead time that I often have when commuting or doing household chores can now be filled with talky goodness.

==================

It is thus that I was reacquainted with the NPR show RadioLab. In a world where science reporting for the general public tends to do greater harm then good, as the diluted versions are often misrepresenting the facts or obscuring the significant bits thereby distorting the results, WNYC's RadioLab does a little bit better. And they tell the stories in such clever ways, managing to explain generally complicated processes via audio more thoroughly than most science shows do it using the medium of TV.

RadioLab isn't perfect; I'm sure it falls pray to many of the pitfalls of simplifying science. I was a bit surprised by some of their oversimplifications of E&M physics in their relativity episode, for example. But I think it's really fun to listen to, and it has familiarized me with topics that I may have otherwise been forever ignorant about. Besides, I'm sure that the majority of pitfalls really come from reporting verbatim the reports on linguistic phenomena provided by a respected neurologist. I'm sure the neurologist knows a lot about the nervous system and a little about neuro-linguistics, but her oversimplification of linguistic phenomena will then be simplified further by RadioLab (assuming, as everyone often does, that the expert knows exactly what she's talking about) leading to poor science reporting.

==================

I'm still looking for more podcasts to listen to. Right now I've got "this american life", "chinesepod", "car talk", "all songs considered", CNN and MSNBC's hourly news updates, and "Help! a bear is eating me!" Any suggestions?

Being an avid hater of tailgaters and a huge fan of pirates, I found this photo of a license plate amusing on at least two different levels. (You probably can't read the small print on the license plate frame, but you could if you were on the guy's ass. The top line says "too close for cannons" the bottom says "prepare to be boarded!")

Japanese innovation will never cease to impress me

Why can't American corporations invent something as cool as beta gel. This gel is such an amazing shock absorber that you can drop an egg on it from 22m high, heck, you can even throw an egg at it from up close, and the egg will not break. Watch it in action:



So why aren't American corporations inventing these things? Because they're busy funding creation museums and designing the next best war machine (saw this two mornings ago on the local channel 8 morning news show). Who's got the money to R&D these frivolous toys? (That's right, I verbed R&D)

It doesn't sound nearly as ridiculous in text

Arrgh! Matey! This day be a special one to all ye land-lubbers! That's right! It be "International talk like a pirate day". Arrgh! And so on.

Don't let the dream die

There's no question that there are quite a lot of strange practices occurring in the Tokyo area. Of course, there are many strange practices in the San Diego area too, but the remarkable permissiveness within Japanese culture of 'atypical' behavior (just as long as it can be completely hidden from or easily ignored by the general public) combined with the almost total lack of psychiatric medicine is the necessary mix which leads to the establishment of a club/restaurant where you have sex with animals and shortly thereafter proceed to devouring them.

Then again, it could be the case that this is a joke and I've been fooled by the internet yet again. I hope so.

comedian insults geek

I will admit that I would have liked to own an iPhone. If I had grown up with a limitless disposable income (or even an allowance of some kind, any kind, $5 a week would have been nice) then maybe I'd play more fast and loose with my money. As it is now I have a hard time buying anything which costs more than $50 without considering all the options twice and then ruminating for a week.

Needless to say, I thought $500+ was a bit much for a phone which was also an mp3 player which was also a tiny, wireless enabled, internet communications device (snark). Still, it is a very nice toy and I don't have a decent mp3 player, my phone is the cheapest phone made in 2005, AND who couldn't use more internets?

I suppose I'm a bit relieved that I didn't buy one. I don't think that it's for me after all: I really don't like talking on the phone that much; I need to spend less time on the internet, not more; they don't make an mp3 player big enough for me to put all the music I want on it (OK, maybe that's not true).

Anyway, for those of you early adopters with a good sense of humor, Bill Maher wants to rip on you. Not that this vindicates my decision in any way. The iPhone isn't for me, but it is for many people.

why I feel sorry for some of you today.

I know several people who have been reading "the wheel of time" series of fantasy novels. I've never been able to get into them because, even though I appreciate detailed story telling and elaborate prose, I believe the author of this particular series (robert jordan n.d.p) takes it way over the top.

Well, the series has been going on way too long already. It's been over 10 books and the poor bastard still couldn't finish telling his story. A few of his fans that I am acquainted with were often worrying that he was going to pass on before finishing. Their fears were appropriate. RIP James Oliver Rigney Jr

So to those of you where were hard-core fans, reading book after 800 page book to get to the end of this very very long series, you will now have no conclusion to your invested hours. That is why I feel sorry for you today.

Apply directly to the forehead

It turns out that the brain is so amazing it learns without you even knowing.

Well, actually, I already knew that. But, if we are to believe this australian news article, there is very explicit evidence of this occurring on our streets. All you really need to do to discover the potential of your subconscious is provide your brain with some blunt trauma.

Step one: get your own financing.

It turns out that it takes just under 6 minutes to learn how to buy a (new/used?) car. This is how it's done.



I haven't ever bought a car from a dealership before but I suspect a time will come when I may have to. I hope I can remember this video.

Death in Linguistics

As it turns out, the African Gray Parrot who "understood" and "spoke" english has died today. His name was Alex and I've been following his career since I first read about him back in 2000 (when I took my first psycholinguistics course).

Farewell Alex. You will be missed (mostly by overeager news hounds with a penchant for misreporting scientific items as well as your owner who will now be looking to train a new member of your species)

Almost settled. Almost.

Typing this out from my old computer on my brand new High-Speed Cable connection. It took me a while to figure out the wireless password stuff. Turns out that my passphrase on the router was creating a hexadecimal passcode which was not the same hexadecimal passcode that the same passphrase typed into my pcs was making. That doesn't seem right to me... but I went ahead and bypassed all of that by just typing out the router hex code by hand.

Now that I'm back on the nets I've got reading to be catching up on. So much news happened...

Scientists and their interesting lives

I remember that there was once talk about having a TV show on the Discovery Channel which was basically a soap opera with famous scientists as the characters. The stories would be entirely NON-fiction. Being a student of science history, thereby being familiar with all sorts of wild and interesting stories about the wild and crazy world of scientists, I was very excited about the chance to see this spectacle.

Can you imagine it?

• Socrates' trial
• Leibniz vs Newton
• Infighting at the manhattan project
• Alan Turing's "shameful" secret (overlooked by the british government until he outlived his use)

Drama is so easy to find whenever you get people together. What makes science drama interesting is that it reminds you how simple and petty people can be regardless of their intellectual prowess.

If you think that maybe the secret lives of scientists isn't as interesting as I claim, take some time to learn about the interesting relationship between T.Edison (history's greatest monster) and N.Tesla.

Cracked magazine's website makes it funnier than it really was:

[Edison] did not invent the light bulb. Edison was not the smartest scientist around—not by a long shot. He did, however, hire a brilliant man named Nikola Tesla, who luckily was.

Tesla is responsible for radio, microwaves, primitive radar systems and the electricity we use today, which Edison gets credit for. The truth is that Edison hired Tesla to redesign his electrical generators. Tesla did, but when he asked for the $50,000 he was promised, Edison replied, and this is a direct quote, “Tesla, you don't understand our American humor," and paid him only in middle fingers.

Tesla quit and tried to strengthen his electrical discoveries in an effort to provide free energy for the entire world, but Edison and his thugs at General Electric devoted time not spent on stealing patents to making sure that the rest of the scientific community thought Tesla was crazy and dangerous. Tesla died alone and in serious amounts of debt. Edison died on a pile of money in a “Suck it, Tesla" T-shirt that he did not design.

Who wouldn't want to see that televised?

IRAQ!

After a long weekend away from my internets I come back to find this article from the San Diego Union Tribune: Mom defends reaction to Iraqi passengers. Turns out that NBC got all up in that too, as did an arabic news program (I don't think it's al jazeera).

I'd comment on how horrible people can be, but I'm too tired for that. I would even say something about how the silly security precautions at airports, established to give the illusion of safety but doing little to prevent real danger from reaching planes, are failing at even that task... but who has the time.

What I will say is that I find it extremely fascinating that, in the arabic language news clip, the english seems to be a translation of the arabic overdubbing which is itself a translation of the original english recorded on the video.

Whatchu gonna do when you get out of jail? I'm gonna have some fun. What do you consider fun? Voting in the primaries

There's this internet poll that quite recently made the rounds. I took it last week and got these results

(name of candidate _ likeness rating)
(things I disagreed with them on)

Kucinich 67
No Child Left Behind

Gravel 62
(I have no disagreements with this candidate)

Obama 36
Patriot Act, Border Fence, Iran Sanctions, Same-Sex Marriage

What's interesting is that, until last week, I barely paid any attention to Kucinich. I mean, who the hell is Kucinich?

It turns out that if a presidential vote were held today, one where only internet dweebs who fill out such polls were allowed to vote, and instead of candidates names you would see only the candidate's stands on the issues, Kucinich would win by a landslide. Of course, the Kucinich people jumped on that news.

I think, what is also interesting, is that I am in complete agreement with Gravel, who, seems to me, like the craziest son of a bitch in the universe. It seems like a reasonable thing, even, for him to just run on that platform.

I tend to consider myself a moderate. There are plenty of issues that I consider myself "middle-of-the-road" on or would support an even compromise to: gun control, border security, Iraq withdrawal, corporate independence, minimizing bureaucracy, and so on. But what I basically would like to see is the division between the two political parties being mended. Instead, the chasm is just getting bigger.

This is why I still think obama is the candidate for me. He's the one I feel confident could create an amicable Washingtonian environment for 4 years, possibly 8. But maybe, after I do a bit more research on Kucinich, I'll feel the same way about him? Not that it matters. Poor dennis' face is not on tv nearly enough for the voting public to care.

This is what linguistics is all about (kind of)

Being waist deep in linguistics for much of the past 2 years, I was quite shocked that I've never heard of this totally grammatical sentence before:

Buffallo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

What that means is:

The buffalo from Buffalo (NY) which are bullied (buffaloed) by buffalo from Buffalo (NY) tend to do some bullying (buffaloing) themselves. They, of course, direct their buffaloing toward other buffalo from Buffalo NY.

Or

Buffalo buffalo, that other Buffalo buffalo buffalo, themselves buffalo other Buffalo buffalo

Thus

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

A similar sentence which I really like is:

That that that that child said is wrong is obvious to everyone.

Or

It's obvious to everyone that [[the thing] which the child over there said] is wrong.

Or

That [[the thing] which that child said is wrong] is obvious to everyone.

That the thing that that child said is wrong is obvious to everyone.

That that that that child said is wrong is obvious to everyone.

I missed my music

After a month long absence I come at you with this very excellent cover of "crazy"

Regarding Sicko (again)

I'm dead serious. Go Watch This Film.

Emotional. It doesn't happen often

I just watched Michale Moore's film "sicko" and I actually want to cry. I'm feeling sick to my stomach. I really want to cry. I guess I was aware of most of the things discussed in the film, but moore is some kind of editing genius. I don't care if his facts may not be accurate. As I said with Fahrenheit 9/11, if even 10% of what he's saying is true then I don't understand why we aren't on the streets protesting right now...

Watch this film and then come revolt with me.

Funniest movie of 2007?

I was a biiiig fan of the indie masterpiece "Wet Hot American Summer" (Official Site, the six minutes opening sequence)

Here is the trailer to that.


It's not much of a trailer, but I really felt the film was fantastic, one of the best comedies to ever be put to film for almost anyone who was a fan of the state (official site?) or the Stella comedy troupe, the Stella shorts, or the quirky comedy central show: Stella (no link because the comedy central website has disowned the show), or the reno 911! folks.

So you can imagine how happy I was when I heard of THE TEN
It's going to be a great summer.

Global, human-induced climate change

Of course, the main problem with his argument is that we can choose column A, but we might already be too late, in which case we'll still get the horrible outcome of row2colB. But if we add column C, which is a contingency plan for when the earth turns to shit (such as building hydroponic food towers, elimination of all WMDs, cure for AIDS, increase to stem cell research funding) then we can get benefits either way while diminishing the negative outcomes of the worst case scenario.


Interesting Argument About Global Warming - Watch more free videos

Ashamed

This video would be funny... if it weren't so goddamned sad.



Am I expecting too much from the average American? I have to believe that they had to interview 200+ people just to find this minority represented by the 8 or 9 ignorant people in the video. I hope.

That's what Jazz is all about

Quite clever, but I'm not sure that he's the first to have had this idea..

File under "skills I'd like to have"

Very clever guitarisms

Small talk, the return of

Crappy music but incredibly topical video from the Utoobz.

Part 3 of the "cultural games I don't want to participate in" series

Intellectual Masturbation

I vaguely recall reading Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 when I was a high school lad. I vaguely remember one of the themes of the book was about government censorship. That's actually a lie. I remember government censorship being the CENTRAL THEME of the book. I don't know if I came up with that analysis or if it was implanted by whichever high school lit teacher was responsible with enlightening me.

The point is that the Author, one Mr. Bradbury, did not intend for that to be THE or even a theme of his book.

Should this matter? After all, the muse works in mysterious ways. Maybe his subconscious was speaking through his pen. Maybe critical analysts of literature are much more intelligent than the authors of the books they critique. Or, maybe, Cien años de soledad was really just about a family and their crazy adventures and not a socio-political allegory on the state of Latin America.

This sort of pseudo-intellectual bullshit is exactly what is supposed to shame me out of reading science fiction. I refuse to buy into it. If you're going to write a book that only a subset of the educated elite population is going to appreciate that's you're prerogative. But I loathe the industry that develops around this very notion that there are different kinds of Art, each belonging to a segregated social class.

We're living in a country where a trip to a MoMA (any of the dozens splayed across the country) is going to cost you $20+ and nobody, not the poor nor the rich, cares. How lucky we are that 3/4th of our population is functionally literate, it's just a shame that less than a fifth of us cares to use that skill.

I'm going to teach my children to read ASAP and then, when they're old enough, I'll give them a copy of Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" and then ask them to teach me what it's about. They'll tell me, and then we'll go to an art museum together.

If my dad owned a chain of hotels

This is what Paris Hilton said a couple of days ago, before she got put away:

"This is an important point in my life and I need to take responsibility for my actions. In the future, I plan on taking more of an active role in the decisions I make."

That is to say that, up to this point, Paris Hilton was not entirely active in making decisions. I suppose that if I were ridiculously rich I would have the luxury of letting my subconscious make all of my decisions too. Then again, if I were that rich, I would never leave the house, unless I went on vacation.

Well, the news today is that a medical condition has altered the terms of Ms Hilton's sentence. After spending less than 4 full days in her private cell (reserved for politicians, foreign dignitaries, and other high profile people) she was moved to her palatial estate where she will be spending the remaining 3 weeks of her sentence under 'house arrest'.

I believe I am not alone when I say that we all wish Paris Hilton a speedy recovery from the sting she is suffering on her petite wrist. May reality never splash her with cold water again.

Children I want to have

I want me this baby!

glumbert.com - Genius 3-year-old finger painter

I laughed till I cried

A very clever animation. I wonder where these ideas come from.

Graduate School is actually Work

It is the case that graduate school is actually a lot like an office job. It certainly has differences, but the similarities are really key.

Similarity: We have bosses, and we work for them in a somewhat organized way.
Difference: Our bosses often change periodically

Similarity: There is a hierarchical set of strata and at any one time we have bosses on each stratum.
Difference: We're not always fully aware on which stratum each boss currently lies

Similarity: deadlines, always with the deadlines
Difference: We are much more likely to take the work home and loose sleep working on it at all hours.

Similarity: Lots of office drama
Difference: none, it's the same kind of drama (although, generally, there's much less inter-office romance)

Similarity: We work 40+ hours per week (much closer to 50 or 60 I'd guess)
Difference: We can choose our own hours, but we get paid about 1/3 of what our time is worth (though our benefits are pretty darn good and we're kind of interns anyway)

Similarity: omipresent, endless meetings
Difference: most are not mandatory

Similarity: We needed to be hired for this position
Difference: We know we're gonna be fired/replaced in less than 7 years

Where's my paradigm shift!

I've recently become interested in the history involving the infamous kinsey reports. It's pretty interesting that a bug collector was able to spark a revolution.

Part 2 of the "cultural games I don't want to participate in" series

Small Talk

I can shoot the proverbial shit, I just don't like it. It's not the case that I don't want to talk to people, I actually enjoy it quite a lot. I just want conversations to be more meaningful.

I'm supposed to believe that when someone asks "How are you" the culturally appropriate response is "Fine, and you?". People don't want to know about my back problems or the stress resulting from my lack of sleep or missing my loved one. This is true in a lot of cultures. I guess in Korea the typical greeting is "where are you going?" and the socially appropriate response is "that way", where the demonstrative 'that' actually has no specified referent. After all, who wants to know that you're headed to the proctologist, except, maybe, the proctologist?

Certainly, I agree that there should be some kind of limit to the amount of information that is exchanged in short encounters. These limits should be set by the level of the relationship between the two participants. I just happen to be more permitting of this level with respect to complete strangers.

Let's just assume that these conversation are to remain as meaningless as possible. I'd like to propose, then, a completely new topic of small talk which should replace weather-talk, sports-talk, and traffic/public transport-talk.

Wikipedia articles.

Before starting out each day, hit the random article link on wikipedia's website. Read it in as much detail as time allows, and then begin all consequent small talk with the phrase "I read on wikipedia that X". Then the goal is to use up the small talk time by engaging the other person into the most bizarre yet topical conversation possible.

Part 1 of the "cultural games I don't want to participate in" series

Fashion

I'm a Fashion dullard. I'm not sure which stage of my life I was supposed to learn how to dress myself and look good, but if someone other than myself was responsible for teaching me the intricacies of style they didn't do a good job.

I guess I can have intuitions about other men or women's style. These intuitions will tell me when I think someone is wearing something that I think looks good on them. So I do have some kind of internal sensor which differentiates fashionable clothing and non-fashionable clothing. I don't know where this intuition came from. I suspect it has something to do with my experiences watching tv or going to events where people dress up. The problem is that this intuition is not really that well tuned with the rest of my fellow cultural participants'.

But I really think that what is fashionable is much too subjective to spend much time pondering about. For instance, the top notch fashion of the the 16th century is not acceptable in the 21st. I think doublets, jerkins, and codpieces look pretty cool and I would wear them if it was socially acceptable to do so (or if I found them on sale at Macy's). But that's not the case. In fact, we don't even have to go back 500 years to commit fashion faux pas. Wearing clothes from just a couple decades ago, for example, is only OK when the fashion elite deem it so.

So, I ask you, why should I invest even a minute of my day worrying about getting my style up to speed? As long as I'm not dressed in an obscene way (e.g. loin cloth, clown wig, and rain galoshes) I shouldn't be judged by my 6 pair of indistinguishable jeans, my dozens of plain t-shirts, and single pair of all-purpose shoes.

I'm probably on the 6th level

For those who don't know, here are the levels (or circles) of hell according to Dante:

First, you need to go through a dark forest. Here there are animals which can kill you. That's to make sure that living people don't get to hell. Here, you are also likely to find loved ones from heaven who want to make sure that you don't get stuck in hell. They will provide you with a poet, probably a humanist, who will be your guide to hell.

After the woods, you get to the vestibule. This is where you go if you believed in God but didn't take sides. You were neither good nor evil, an opportunist? Then you don't quite go to hell, but you go to the vestibule. Your afterlife in the vestibule is spent chasing an unreachable flag whilst being chased by insects.

Eventually, you reach Charon the boatdude. He takes you across some river where you enter the official first circle of hell. This isn't really hell as we know it, but is more often referred to as Purgatory. This is for unbaptized babies and pre-old testament folks who were pure at heart but weren't given the choice to repent for the sins of their ancestors. Nothing too bad happens here, it's just a basically boring place.

The next circle of hell is where all the lustful go: Romeo and Juliet, Zeus, Magic Johnson. Here, from what I understand, it's very windy. And there's no one to comfort you. So far hell is not that horrible.

In the third level you got your fatties. These are the gluttons who ate and drank of God's gifts and gave nothing but garbage in return. Here there's a lot of filth and garbage, with intermittent freezing rain. Sounds like a winter in New Jersey. However things can get pretty nasty in this circle as the three headed dog Cerberus might chew you to pieces if he gets a hold of you. Things are starting to get a bit more hell like.

Next, you'll get to meet some misers. In the fourth level is where you go if you are rich and collected a lot of wealth but did not give back to the community. These are the hoarders. But they aren't alone. Here you also find wasters. These are people who were given a lot but lost it all in foolish persuits. Some presidents of the US will find themselves here some day (it would seem). Their punishment is to be pushed down by great weights...

That brings us to the level of wrath. If you can't control your temper in life, you end up here, wading through the swampy mire of Styx, endlessly fighting with your neighbors. Every once in a while, you'll trod on a miserly hermit.

The sixth circle is reserved for those who were surrounded by the word of the lord but failed to accept it. These foolish beasts will be living in the capital of hell. Supposedly, this is the turning point too. From this level on things get really bad. Here you'll find Medusa and winged furies. The air is really smelly too, makes you dizzy. But the Heretics are stuck in tombs which are set ablaze. Since they denied God and did not believe in an afterlife, they will now be stuck for eternity in a flaming grave. However, the graves are open so the heretics can go out for a nice walk anytime they want. However, once the rapture is in progress, the lids will clamp down, trapping these heathens forever. If I were there, I'd get out of my firey hole and go find medusa. Spending eternity as a statue in a stinky capital is much better than spending it in a broiling grave.

The seventh circle is actually made up of three sub-circles. This is where the violent people go. If you were violent against others, started wars or beat up neighbors, you get to go under a boiling hot river of blood. If you try to peek out, people shot you with arrows and stab you with spears. If you were violent against yourself, that is you cut yourself or kill yourself, you are turned into a tree. It is upon this tree that harpies eat and I guess it hurts because you'll bleed and scream every time the harpies take a bite. You do this forever because you are growing quite fast, as fast as you are being eaten I presume. If you were violent against God, this includes sodomites, blasphemers, and art critics (I'm not making this up) then you get to spend eternity in a desert showered upon by fire rain.

Those last two levels were pretty bad, I guess. I think that a 21st century author could have come up with much worse punishments than those. Read Harlan Ellison for an example.

The second to last level is very tough to describe. That's basically because it's like 10 levels in one. I think Dante was a bit strapped here trying to include a bunch of other sinners without including another dozen levels. So he hodge podged 10 groups in this one circle.

Who gets to go here?
1) Thieves
2) Hypocrites
3) Panderers
4) People who exchange a high position in the church for money
5) Flatterers
6) Liars
7) Pessimists who are loud about it
8) Evil counselors
9) Fortune tellers
10) ?

The 10th are referred to as grafters, but I don't know what a grafter is. Best as I can tell, a grafter is a greedy person, but I thought those people are already spending time on the 5th level so I'm confused.

Anyway, all these people are given punishments that fit the crime, but they are all pretty dull. So I wasn't very surprised at the disappointment of the last, most evil level of hell.

The eight circle of hell is Antarctica in winter. But at the center of the earth.
If you killed a member of your own family, you get buried up to your neck in ice but can move your neck about. If you were disloyal to your country, you are also buried up to your neck in ice but you can't move your neck even. If you invited someone to your house and killed them, or if you were invited to someone's house and killed them, you get buried up to your nose in ice. If you kill your master, you are entirely entombed in ice.

Whoopdy doo. Stuck in ice for eternity. That's the last circle of hell.

Give me a break, Dante!

My man, the don (and sancho p.)

Inspired by Jeff Chaucer:

It's like a religious experience

I created an image for the front page of this blog out of a photograph I took two years ago. After posting it I realized that this, along with the title of the blog, makes the whole enterpries look like it has something to do with religion or Christianity. It doesn't, except indirectly. But I'm not going to change any of it.

Annoying people with my musical tastes since 1991

I just added this music thing to the top of the blog. I had itunes find me some of my favoritest songs and then I used some kind of online playlist making device to find those songs and put them on a playlist to share. If you are reading this from the blog page, I hope you enjoy. If not, then hit the stop button.

If you are reading this blog using a news reader and are interested in listening, go to my blog page!

From the "I wish I had thought of that" file:

Take a video camera and put it on a kaiten sushi conveyor belt.

Best movie ever.

Instrumental love

I am a gigantic fan of the accordion. It is my second favorite sounding instrument next to the violin/viola/cello (oh yeah, they are the same instrument with respect to my ears). So I try to be on the lookout for accordion related news and accordion related musicians.

This is why I'm very excited about Motion Trio. Do check out their 'music online' link where you can hear and download some of their tracks.

My vote matters... but I don't know about yours

These days everyone has a story about how horrible life is in a post 9/11 world. Whether it's tightened security at the airport, or overzealous citizenry targeting the "brown" people. I just read an article written by a guy who took some photos of french fries on a New York ferry and was accosted by the ferry staff and treated rudely. The author of the article had to really reach to make this link between rude ferry staff to accusations of terrorism, but he went for it anyway.

Is life harder in a post 9/11 world? Well, it's definitely less convenient for me as it is for a lot of other people who are currently living in the US or trying to come live in the US. But I think it's a lot harder for Iraqis. And what about the Sudanese? Well, I bet life in a post 9/11 world is just as shitty for them as it was in a pre 9/11 world. The same probably goes for folks in Myanmar and Venezuela.

The thing that really gets me the most is that there is a huge overlap between the people who are complaining about the inconveniences of living in post 9/11 america, and the people who don't even bother to learn what the patriot act is, people who vote for the straight republican ticket because they believe that A) their vote doesn't count, B) all the candidates are assholes anyway, and C) gots to gets me my taxes lowered!

Not that I have a leg to stand on. I didn't participate in any protests. I'm not writing letters to my congressman or senator. I'm just sitting at home making sure my internet works so I can get a daily dose of the lolcatz.

Have you thought about who you're going to vote for?

Something else Americans are good at

We may not be number 1 at it, but I'll take 2nd place. What am I talking about?

Touristing.

Americans come a distant second to Japanese as the 'best' tourists according to hoteliers or people who operate hotels. No one comes even close to touching the Japanese when it comes to tidiness and politeness. But second place is pretty darn decent and much higher than I expected. I think that's fantastic.

Speaking of Linux

If I had a child, I would want it to have its own computer by the time it was 5. I would want that computer to run Linux. People have tried this and it seems to have worked. But I don't think they were concerned with internet safety. I don't think I would have to police a 16 year old's internet access, but I sure as heck wouldn't want my 5 year old accidentally or purposefully stumbling into one of those awful awful sex sites! Awful!

What kind of open source 'net-nanny' program is available for a linux-based OS? I think the answer is -none- and that's a shame. I believe the whole open-source movement would benefit from getting these kids young.

Littrachure

I'm reading a novel called The Method Actors by a dude named Carl Shuker. On page 129/492 I believe this book to be about a couple dozen characters doing things in various cities, mostly Tokyo, across the span of about 10 years. I can barely keep up with who's who. Keeping track of which character is doing what in which year is made more difficult by the minimal information provided in any one designated section/chapter of the book.

Yes, I know that this is probably a literary device which the author uses to lead the reader to understand the chaos which the characters feel in their own lives, with no home to go to, and living in a relatively strange city that is unlike any other in the world. But even knowing this doesn't change the fact that it's a serious detriment to story telling. I want to know what's going on, but I'm left with fuzzy snapshots of transparent characters. At page 129/492 I don't care about any of them, I only enjoy the wonderful (though somewhat overly metaphoric) descriptions of the city.

I was led to believe that it was the best book to come out of 2005. Well, I surely would be stunned now if I discovered this to be true. I believe that it is a decent novel and I do feel a bit nostalgic about the setting. But somewhere on the internets this author was compared favorably to delillo and auster, and a good comparison this ain't, since unlike Shuker, they can tell a comprehensible story.

Oh yeah, I'm a total philistine.

I think literature in this country is leaving the general public behind. Art in general is leaving the public behind. That's a damned shame. High schools need to teach Shakespeare more better and stuff. Reading a half dozen of his plays is not going to do it. Teach the period, teach the history, teach the style, then read one, and only one play from set A and one, and only one from set B:
A) Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Merchant of Venice
B) A midsummer night's dream, the Tempest

Above all, make sure they learn why he was important and why high schools all over the god damned english speaking world make their students read him. I suppose this implies that the teacher must know the answer to this question. I hope he or she does. Anyway, if that's the only lesson they learn, that should be the lowest setting on the bar.

How to spend your time

I was reading this article about how Rolling Stone magazine got some of their ratings wrong, not objectively wrong, but disagreeably wrong.

Exhibit A: Joanna Newsom's Y's
It got a 2/5. I don't own this album (yet) but I think it's much better than a 2/5.

Exhibit B: Nirvana's albums (most of 'em)
I'm a big fan of Nirvana, but I wouldn't disagree that (other than the Unplugged album) they don't deserve 5/5s. Or, to put it another way, I would disagree that they deserve 5/5. Or, to put it another way still, I would agree that they don't deserve 5/5.

Exhibit C: The Pixies's Doolittle
Someone at rolling stone gave this a 3.5/5. Maybe my favorite of the Pixie's albums. I don't blame the reviewer at rolling stone's because this just goes to prove how we really shouldn't assume ratings and reviews are objective pieces of data.

Something I think but don't think that you think

I overheard a conversation walking through campus today. I will abbreviate it thusly:

----------------
Person A: I saw on tv how lack of vitamin D causes breast cancer. But I found out today that it is not true. My professor said so.
Person B: But your professor isn't a doctor right?
Person A: No, he's actually a doctor in a hospital and everything.
----------------

So here's what I think. A cursory google search seems to say that Vitamin D may actually be linked to reduced cancer risk. But what is key here is that causal links like these are hardly ever conclusive. Unless results of tests are incredibly clear, given really good statistical analysis, you're going to have academics disagree about results. Way too many people rely on what the professor said. Often the professor is right. More often the professor is half right. Typically, the professor is heaving spoonfuls of subjectivity into each sentence.

OSX and Windows (Linux too)

It turns out that the difference is just not that great. Spend some time on one, then spend some time on the other. There are benefits and drawbacks to them both. My experience with Linux is minimal but I believe the same can be said about that OS.

It's what's true for forms of government, or cultures, or pizza restaurants. For every pro you can find, someone else will perceive some con.

No one has got it right. There's no utopia just as there's no perfect operating system.
You just have to find the thing that's right for you. I never really considered myself a relativist, but maybe I should.

On becoming secular

The Scenario ------------------

A wonderful woman, mother of one, dies of old age and is sent up to heaven. She was such a wonderful [insert adjective form of denomination which requires belief of such things (e.g. Roman Catholic)] that whoever is in charge up there wants her eternal afterlife to be blissful as promised in the sacred scriptures.

Although this woman did a wonderful job of raising her one child, much of her good work was destroyed when her child decided one day that [insert religious doctrine/rule/commandment (e.g. keep that sabbath holy)] was not an essential doctrine/rule/commandment to adhere to. Little did that child know that this doctrine/rule/commandment was fundamental. Breaking it unrepentantly would be an offense unforgivable in the eyes of [creature in charge up there]. This was clearly stated in the sacred scriptures, unfortunately the one child failed to appreciate this clear warning.

Upon that child's death, unrepentant, the trip to hell is a brisk and unpleasant one.

The Problem -------------------

How can the mother's bliss be assured now that her one and only child will be spending eternity in a very unpleasant place while the mother will be spending it in such a pleasant one?

The Solution -------------------

A) Mother's entrance pass to heaven is rescinded, on account of her failure as a parent, allowing the pair to rejoin in hell.
B) Child's entrance to heaven is reconsidered as a once-in-a-millennium exception due to Mother's exemplary behavior.
C) Mother's memory of child is completely wiped, allowing her to remain blissful (though ignorant)
D) Heaven is just not as pleasant as scriptures would have us believe (i.e. we bring our own baggage).
E) Stop asking such questions, we cannot presume to ever be able to understand His plan.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

As a child of 11, solution E) was that provided by my catechism instructor.
As a child of 26, I'm not sure I still have a better answer. And that's just not acceptable.

How to fall asleep

There's this method I use to fall asleep sometimes, when my consciousness is being obstinate about defying my will to lose it. I derived it from something some guy I know, who studied Buddhism in India and Tibet, said he used as a strategy to get his meditation on.

As you lay in bed with your eyes closed you think of empty blackness. There is nothing, except for a single object. This object is a perfect cube. Its size is of no consequence, could be 1ft^3 or 1cm^3 or 1km^3, since there is no other object to compare it to. This cube is spinning. The axis of spin doesn't matter either. It's made of transparent glass and it is hollow. As you focus on its spin it begins to fill with a fluid. The type of fluid is also inconsequential. As the fluid completely fills its innards, the cube bursts apart. Then the fluid takes shape. What shape it takes is entirely up to your subconscious or conscious desires. You let your imagination run wild from there.

While all of this is happening, you can imagine that a wave of inactivity is affecting your body. I like to imagine that, beginning with my toes, everything goes numb and frozen. I count up from one and by the time I reach ten, my toes are asleep. I move on to the sole of my foot, ten more seconds and that's now paralyzed. I keep going up my foot, ankle, calf, shin, knee, thigh, etc. I hardly ever make it past my waist. I'm out in 5 minutes.

If none of this works, that means my body is just not ready for sleep so I get out of bed and do something else.

I'll be writing a lot about sleep. I like sleep.

First Post

This is how it begins. I decided to start a blog again, but I'm not really sure why. Maybe I want to post for posterity. More on that later.

Anyway, let's see what happens.