Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Flurb # 10

Flurb

Issue 10 is out. This will probably account for the rest of my evening. Treat yourself.

The Eco side of the Street

Designer Yeongwoo Kim created this Eco Urinal where men can pee and wash in the same stand. What Kim has done is incorporated the wash basin just above the spot you take aim to pee.

The reason cited is that you'll save a water flush cycle, coz when you rinse your hand after the job, the same gray water can be used to cleanse the urinal basin.

A number of SRO hotels around town have a much older, but similar feature. The room's sink is installed much lower than usual, 28" off the floor, to facilitate male customers who can't pull it together to walk down the hall. Just a bit of random urban lore that may explain something someday.

Trainwrecks, Trappist Monks, and Mossad

Aw jeez, it's Tuesday already. Somebody managed to sleep through the entire weekend. Link-dump follows. First a eulogy for George Weiss.
  • R.I.P. George David Weiss: “the lion sleeps tonight” (1961), based on a south African Zulu song first recorded in the 1930s, was given a reworked melody and new lyrics (“in the jungle, the mighty jungle/the lion sleeps tonight”) by Mr. Weiss, Mr. Peretti and Mr. Creatore.
Next a rather unusual look at the administration of the Catholic Church. As a side note, it seems that the Belgium government's raid netted a Bishop,but he's been sent to a Trappist monastary, so it's OK - nothing to see here.

  • The Pope is not Gay: So far, tragically, fear has won. But Toibin also sees the potential for a reborn Christianity in the papacy of John Paul II - wrecked by the white-knuckled reactionary politics that grew under him and now defines the Vatican. Here is what I too found so mesmerizing about Wojtila - as Toibin describes an event in John Paul II's native Poland in the spring of his papacy.
And as long as we're on a computer, a bit of meta about them.
  • The Web is Dead: Long Live the Web: ...which argues that the web is an antienlightenment phenomenon, a destroyer of wisdom and culture and an infantile, Rousseau-esque fantasy. “It’s the cult of the child,” he says. “The more you know, the less you know. It’s all about digital narcissism, shameless self-promotion. I find it offensive.”
  • Virtual Horizon: Computers today barely connect with people. The human body evolved as a whole to sense and interact with the world, but computers sense us only at our fingertips. Even the fingertips aren’t allowed to do all they can; a computer that was designed to interact with us holistically would feel different from moment to moment in order to convey information. For more than two decades, I’ve been working on the grand project of virtual reality (VR) to bring the whole body into computing.
A bit of business. I mean really, if we didn't have a banker veto in congress, the hoi polloi might vote for jobs or worse.
  • The Business of Business: As with the banks and other financial institutions that played clever, manipulative games, producing little of real value other than moving vast amounts of capital from A to B in a giant shell game and racking up massive salaries and bonuses as their games plunged the country into recession and drove "the little people" out of jobs and homes. These "giants" provide ample proof that not all products that can be produced should be produced and that not all services that can be provided should be provided.
And last, the trainwreck section. (politics)
  • Since when is it rational to bet on history being made by rational men? But then, a few days back, with the sanctions regime fresh out of the Suzy Homemaker oven that produced the oddly small confection, the Chinese let it be known that sanctions or no they would be working to deepen their trade ties with Iran. Which more than trumps the even more recent announcement that the Brazilians will, reluctantly, go along with the sanctions program.
  • Mossad in America: It also dominates two commercial sectors that enable it to extend its reach inside America’s domestic infrastructure: airline and telecommunications security. Israel is believed to have the ability to monitor nearly all phone records originating in the United States, while numerous Israeli air-travel security companies are known to act as the local Mossad stations.
  • Anti-Fascist Superheros: The comfort of the child’s vision of right and wrong is that he or she lives in a mental world where only monsters perpetrate crimes. Here on planet Earth, people who are certain they are doing right murder and terrorize. It’s a cruel world.
  • America Is Exporting Terrorism: Think about what the U.S. reaction would be if, say, France claimed jurisdiction over a terrorist crime that a U.S. citizen committed on American soil, in which a visiting Frenchman happened to be one of the casualties.
  • The Undemocracy: Let us consider how it is that Benjamin Quayle, son of the former vice president, opposed by a majority of Arizona's Republican voters, will soon be a member of Congress, their opposition notwithstanding.

Saturday, August 28, 2010

That week in March

When Pope John Paul died, Rogers Cadenhead quickly registered www.BenedictXVI.com thinking this might be the name chosen by the new pope. When Cardinal Ratzinger was elected Pope he did choose the name Pope Benedict XVI, causing many to question what the Vatican would do to get the rights to that domain name.

Cadenhead didn't ask the Vatican for money. Instead, in a humorous manner on his blog he suggested a few things he would trade for:

1. Three days, two nights at the Vatican hotel.

2. One of those hats (referring to the bishop's hat).

3. Complete absolution, no questions asked, for the third week of March 1987.

Wonder what Rogers did the third week of March in 1987? Me too. Most of us have at least a week we'd like total forgiveness for.

Via: Grow-a-Brain

A naif does apophenia

Guardian U.K.

Fidel Castro has more reason than most to believe conspiracy theories involving dark forces in Washington. After all, the CIA tried to blow his head off with an exploding cigar.
But the ageing Cuban revolutionary may have gone too far for all but the most ardent believer in the reach and competence of America's intelligence agency. He has claimed that Osama bin Laden is in the pay of the CIA and that President George Bush summoned up the al-Qaida leader whenever he needed to increase the fear quotient. The former Cuban president said he knows it because he has read WikiLeaks.

The linked article drops all the right words: conspiracy theory, fringe, paranoia, and the more academic support articles debunk away with the ever popular apophenia, catharsis and anti-social personality disorder. All well and good, buuuuut we're also aware of how having a handy-dandy boogie man cut a number of pointed questions off at the pass. It was so sweet of ole boogie to drop his jeremiads in lockstep with the political newscycle.

The sad part, in my opinion, is that we've become so inured to being lied to, that nobody really gives a darn either way. Expecting politicians to lie, assuming a coercion engineer behind every spin cycle, and substituting a boogie simulacra for a messy reality has been re-christened political sophistication. Asking for better from the powers that be qualifies you as a naif. Pity, but you paid your nickle, enjoy the show.


A brief reflection, after I pushed the publish button, made me realize I had left a mispercision in the text. The word I used was re-christen. Even a superficial familiarity with the classics, Thucydides - Machiavelli - Sun Tsu - Bilhana - Gibbons, show that reality based politics is a tried and true tool for gaining and wielding power. Putting a digital gloss on old-dog shenanigans doesn't warrant a new term. A plain vanilla caveat emptor would suffice.

Friday, August 27, 2010

Sunday, August 22, 2010

Fountain of Bedlam

The first two URLs of this week's link-dump are about blogging itself and a take on the difference between pundits, the pundocracy, and expertise.
  • Slow Blogging: In between the slow bloggers and the rapid-fire ones, there is a vast middle, hundreds of thousands of writers who are not trying to attract advertising or buzz but do want to reach like-minded colleagues and friends. These people have been the bedrock of the genre since its start, yet recently there has been a sea change in their output: They are increasingly turning to slow blogging, in practice if not in name.
  • Slow Blog Manifesto
  • So You Want to be an Expert
    9) Recognize your limits. True experts don't just know a lot -- they are also aware of the vast oceans of knowledge that they don't know. 
    10) Quit reading blogs. They rot your brain and give you cooties.

Next is a bit of computer lore, the first prognostication is making all the rounds, i.e. talking head-o-rama, while the 2nt is drowning in that fountain of openness; Homeland.
  • The web is dead: It seemed just a matter of time before the Web replaced PC application software and reduced operating systems to a “poorly debugged set of device drivers,” as Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen famously said. First Java, then Flash, then Ajax, then HTML5 —
  • Pentagon wants to secure domains of contractors: Under the proposal, which is being informally circulated throughout the department and the Department of Homeland Security, the NSA could set up equipment to look for patterns of suspicious traffic at the internet service providers that the companies' networks run through. The agency would immediately notify the Pentagon and the companies if pernicious behavior were detected.
I'm not to sure how I feel about steampunk lately. I'm told that there are writers and salespeople clamoring for a new marketing slot - dieselpunk. Sorry, I'm more of a rocket and ray-gun reader. For those of you that do enjoy that sort of thing, here is a bit of exotica.
  • More Brazilian Steampunk: It was with great surprise I saw this cover, published in the City Phantastica of Romeo Martin. I was mesmerized with the quality of it and sure it take to see a cover of this genre better than this, so soon. I do not know the stories that rechearão editing this show, but they are so amazing, we have a work to remember for a long time.
The next two are about different business models.
  • How to Run a Maritime Militia: The UNSC-mandated Monitoring Group on Somalia presented its report to the Security Council Tuesday. The part of the report detailing corruption in the distribution of humanitarian aid is getting all the press, but for my money the most interesting part of the report is the discussion of piracy, which has morphed into a multi-million dollar business replete with investors and an informal business model.
  • Soft Rock Power: For decades, the world has considered business giants like IKEA and Saab the bright lights of Swedish industry. Yet the real symbol of Sweden's economic power is not the Poäng chair or the Gripen fighter jet, but the catchy choruses of the 1970s pop supergroup ABBA.
And last, politics. Let's see, what's a good word: bedlam? loonie bin? Inane? Inmates running the .. uh .. courtesan residence?
  • Just how broken is the Senate?: Between speeches, there are quorum calls, time killers in which a Senate clerk calls the roll at the rate of one name every few minutes. The press gallery, above the dais, is typically deserted, as journalists prefer to hunker down in the press lounge, surfing the Web for analysis of current Senate negotiations; television screens alert them if something of interest actually happens in the chamber.
  • Getting Digital Statecraft Right: In January, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called for the United States to pursue a policy of "twenty-first-century statecraft," which would use modern information and communication technologies to promote development. She foresaw "a single Internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas."
  • Rebuilding the Democratic Brand with Jobs: That leaves the Democrats not as the party of government so much as the party of paralyzed government. That the Republicans are largely responsible for the paralysis isn't a big problem for a minority-status GOP so long as the public has concluded that activism per se is a bad idea.

    Saturday, August 21, 2010

    Stripping on Holey Ground

    Strippers at Ground Zero

    The Constitution ... but. We believe ... but. Private property .. in this case. The sanctity of our .. the babies ... Holey Ground.. the lash on our backs .. HITLER!! And if we get elected bla-bla ba bla-bla

    Friday, August 20, 2010

    Aunt Tiffy's Cupcakes

    But It's Good for Us

    At what point does our national security state get way out of hand? You know the drill. We can't ... insert controversy du jour... or the terrorists will have won. Too late honey. The events in the first blockquote and link make the position in the second look a bit less wingnutty and a bit more precient.

    At what point does an airport search step over the line? How about when they start going through your checks, and the police call your husband, suspicious you were clearing out the bank account?

    What happened sounds to me like a violation of a TSA policy that went into effect Sept. 1, after the American Civil Liberties Union sued the agency on behalf of the former campaign treasurer of presidential candidate Ron Paul. In that case, Steven Bierfeldt was detained after screeners at Lambert-St. Louis International Airport discovered he was carrying about $4,700 in cash. He challenged their request that he explain where his money came from.

    Philadelphia Inquirer

    Fronting armed response teams with Stasi style psychologists; 'It might have been a divorce situation.' Boy howdy, do I feel safe now. However, the folks in the next link feel a little less sanguine.

    That was a Republican administration, I pointed out. ‘The Democrats are running towards socialism at 100 miles an hour and Republicans are only running 60,’ he said. ‘They’ll all get to the same damn place eventually. Our job as militia is to re-establish the government in a way George [Washington] and the boys intended. And to do that we can’t go and hide in the bushes; we have to take active participation in the overthrow that Thomas Jefferson point-blank told us was our duty as Americans.

    Telegraph: U.K.

    Wednesday, August 18, 2010

    Sand in your Juristocracy

    I found this picture on The PreSurfer. It doesn't have any background information attached, but I think it's another example of due diligence gone wild. If you can sue Google for your failure to look both ways when you cross a street, suing a landowner for sand in your flip-flops, because you weren't properly warned, shouldn't be too difficult. I'm told, by those in the know, that you may laugh/cry about the legal industry, but you'll be glad they're there when it's your turn. Quite true, but what's seldom mentioned is the need for a lawyer often stems from the juristocracy's own rules. Running a business, owning a home, or a death in the family can't be navagated without donating some protection money.

    The joke goes like this: There was a small town with a single lawyer. She made a good living helping with wills, settling disputes, giving advice. Generally, she was a valued member of the community. One day, a second lawyer hung out his shingle just down the street.... The punch line? They both got rich.

    Monday, August 16, 2010

    Realtime US Debt

    This link brings up a real-time chart of US and World debt. Needless to say, big numbers, scrolling up fast. One number that should make you plotz is in the lower right hand corner. Liability per citizen; $354, 830 as of noon - August 16.

    Sunday, August 15, 2010

    Looks Like Fun

    Walyou

    When we work on the pier, we have electric golf carts as well as forklifts to shuttle things around. Our's are steel-frame, seat on a motor style, with a special rain attracting roof. Practical, but the ones on this link have more style.

    Brujeria's brew

    I have a love / hate relationship with philosophy. Ostensibly the word means love of thought and I like to think about things as much as the next guy. One would assume that a philosophy course would give the student a set of whetstones for sharpening their thinking, or, at minimum turn up their BS detector. As an aside, I've noticed that professional philosophers (take an asprin, it helps) have taken the bad habits of other professions (lawyers, economists, apologists) and mixed terms of the art with colloquial homonyms to force a conclusion. Shades of pollsters statistics. They have a word for that; Brujeria's brew is my favorite, metonymy and syllepsis are a bit more posh. Back to the point of this link, the American University seems to have discarded its mission to educate and embraced the profit center's need to inculcate. To wit:

    • Teaching philosophy with Spider-Man: When academics struggle to fill seats in their medieval poetry classes while their colleagues are turning students away from packed courses on the mythic rhetoric of the superheroes, sniping in common rooms is to be expected.

    Now I like comic books better than most, and would be delighted to see them examined in literature courses. Which book reflects our present condition, Jane Eyre or Ghost in the Shell? You could always read both. Next in line is music and cookbooks. The commonality lies in the dreaded hive mind, a dream come true for advertising profession.

    • How the Internet Makes us all DJs: Even factoring in college radio and other small-wattage towers, American cities no longer have a majority of stations in which a DJ will take your call, mark your song request, and play according to consumer demand. Nor do most American DJs have the privilege of picking a new, personal favorite song and peppering a full day of airtime with it.
    • Fibs my Cookbook told Me: The claim of this post is simple but facetious. Cookbooks lie to you. Cookbooks lie about big, important things. I suspect that they do it so that you will not know how to cook. That way you will continue to buy more and more cookbooks. It’s a total racket. I know it sounds paranoid. But I have no other explanation for what follows.

    A bit of science;

    • Ant Warfare: They’ve got complex societies with a rigid division of labor and ingrained conventions that let them eat, reproduce and wage war as a single unit. Given their massive populations and, as the famed entomologist E.O. Wilson writes, their “unity of purpose [and] social machinery,” it’s no surprise that ants are also bonafide masters of war.
    • Social Networking Data: Lately I've been reading about user security and privacy -- control, really -- on social networking sites. The issues are hard and the solutions harder, but I'm seeing a lot of confusion in even forming the questions. Social networking sites deal with several different types of user data, and it's essential to separate them.

    Now it's off to political land. You would think with all the froth, manifestos, insightful commentary, important information, and promises that I promise to refer to vaguely once elected, that something would change. Guess again:

    • Another School Districting ‘Solution’: And the “ethnics” of Boston and Springfield, not to mention Lowell, Brockton, Malden, and Everett, were and are perfectly aware of why Wellesley chose to ally with the African-American parents in one end of Dorchester over the white welfare recipients at the other end. White working-class cops like Sgt. James Crowley, or his kids, weren’t eligible for METCO.
    • How Partisanship Hurts Conservatism: Now imagine Obama did exactly everything Bush did, in terms of policy, programs, the whole works. Would the Right be beating up a Democratic president for doing exactly what they either defended or ignored Bush doing? Of course they would. “Why is President Obama on vacation down at the Crawford Ranch in Texas?” an angry talk radio caller might ask.
    • What’s the Matter with Connecticut: —nicknamed the “land of steady habits” in recognition of its erstwhile traditionalism—is, per capita, the richest state in the nation. The bedroom of the country’s financier class, it is home to some of our wealthiest towns and most prestigious blue-blood educational institutions, including Yale, Choate, and Loomis Chaffee.
    • The Man Gitmo Raised: After several months of such treatment, Khadr was transferred to Guantánamo, where he says the abusive interrogations continued. He did not meet with a lawyer until 2004, a full two years after he was taken into U.S. custody. In 2005, Khadr was charged under the first set of military commissions authorized by then-President George W. Bush.

    I just got a copy of Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget. You probably noticed some references to the hive mind in the preceding. Lanier goes into this from the viewpoint of a software designer. He tends to explain a great deal of society in relationship to the net, (it is what he does, after all) I suspect that there are deeper roots. Be that as it is, if you want an antidote to the rapture around corner rhetoric, get the book. I think a softcover version will be on the shelves soon, and if this temporary economic readjustment really has you by the ***** go to the library. (it, in fact, stands as one of mankind's better inventions).

    Saturday, August 14, 2010

    Friday, August 13, 2010

    Thursday, August 12, 2010

    Fermi Business

    A Charlie Jane Anders' short story has been posted at Tor.com.The Fermi Paradox is our Business Model

    Tchotchkes from Abroad

    Shows to go you, when economists refer to the economy, they're using a term of the art. When people talk about the economy, they're refering to what they see outside of their window. But here in the future, as the experts tell us, up is down and round and round is the order of the day. The spirit of Charles Dodgson reigns.

    Tuesday, August 10, 2010

    Perseid Shower

    Space Weather

    The Earth is due to intersect the Perseid meteor shower this week. The peak is charted for August 12. This, in conjunction with the recent Auroral activity, has made looking at the sky even more fun than usual.

    Sunday, August 8, 2010

    In or Out

    The sun can't seem to make up its mind - in or out. Otherwise a lovely day. The first part of this link-dump will be the customary politics. The general feeling in blog-world seems to be new boss, same as the old boss. Hijinks ensue. A third party would be nice, or more to the point, a real 2nt party; one with grownup supervision.
    • Big Brother: After flipping the script on Patriot Act reformists last year when he supported the extension of unconstitutional law enforcement provisions he once criticized, now he wants to broaden the amount of information the FBI can access without warrant for so-called counter-terror investigations.
    • Too Big to Ignore: The Treasury Secretary and the FED’s extraordinary role as merger midwife for our troubled Corporate Financiers is extensively detailed, including their calls to foreign corporations and governments on behalf of our crumbling private corporations. I never thought I’d live to see the day that our Treasury Secretary or New York FED chairman would consider their job description to include managing the mergers of private corporations out of one side of their mouths as they muttered “moral hazard” and “too big to fail” out of the other.
    • Ground Zero Mosque: If only - if only! - other people possessed my resolution, my ability to see everything as it really is. If only others could be as vigilant as I am. If only we could rid ourselves of the weak who fail to share my awareness of the peril we face. Well, then, victory would be ours! Instead, alas, we are on the road to defeat and thence to hell.
    • Plug a Wikileak?: Second, for all the talk -- by the Chinese as well as outside observers -that they are not ready to lead on the international stage, they're doing it. On climate here and on climate during international negotiations, on currency adjustment, on economic reform, on Iran, on North Korea, they have led or been hugely effective behind the scenes.
    • Answer to "End of Establishment":Several of my Shadow Government colleagues have already responded to Jacob Heilbrunn's obituary for the Republican foreign policy establishment. Most of the comments have focused on the diversity present on the Right on foreign policy and I agree with those assessments.
    The next part is on the economy and by extention, the 'little guy'.
    • Four Deformations of the Apocalypse: More fundamentally, Mr. McConnell’s stand puts the lie to the Republican pretense that its new monetarist and supply-side doctrines are rooted in its traditional financial philosophy. Republicans used to believe that prosperity depended upon the regular balancing of accounts — in government, in international trade, on the ledgers of central banks and in the financial affairs of private households and businesses.
    • Let the Little Guys Get in on Pre-IPO: The hot IPO market of the 1990s, which allowed Regular Joes to buy stock in new companies, has been replaced by a rich insider’s club that trades in pre-IPO equity sales. The middle-class folks who daytraded their way through the dotcom boom are now locked out.
    • Science and the Decline of the Liberal Arts: Our universities readily take credit for their Rhodes scholars and Fulbright award winners. What of those graduates who helped foster an environment of avarice and get-rich-quick schemes? Are we so assured that they did not learn exceedingly well the lessons that were taught them in college?
    Re: the above. Science is not the problem. The humanities inability to differentiate between scientific and scientifical is. This might stem from their confusion between hot air and substance, or maybe show business and the real deal. After all, tempest in a teapot is a phrase most often applied to academics. As long as I'm treading on others turf, I may as well point out that there is a difference between education and inculcation. Science, at least in terms of its logic and method fall on the education side. So learn how to check the numbers, the toothy man on the TV may not have your best interests at heart. Enough: to end this is another article about (re)growing replacement parts and a science fiction book that has the Chinese government making cranky noises. (at least that's what the book's publicist says)
    • Recipes For Limb Renewal: Bioengineers continue to refine prosthetic limbs, but they still can’t replicate the entire constellation of capabilities provided by flesh and blood. So a few determined scientists are pursuing a different solution: They are seeking the recipe for regrowing a missing limb.
    • China 2013: A controversial novel marks the return of politically charged science fiction in China -- and evokes a decidedly mixed vision of the country's future..... In the euphoric Beijing of 2013, Starbucks is Chinese-owned and called "Starbucks Wangwang." Its trademark drink is Longjing Latté, named for a famed Chinese tea. It is a place where Mr. Chen, an immigrant from Hong Kong, feels comfortable escorting a marginalized woman named Xiaoxi, the secret love of his youth. After running into Xiaoxi in a Beijing bookstore, their first encounter in many years, Mr. Chen asks her whether she had gone abroad. "No," she replies.

    Saturday, August 7, 2010

    So What


    Miles Davis - John Coltrane

    Friday, August 6, 2010

    Friday Morning

    The common man is never so clever as the politician says and never so stupid as the politician believes.

    Curmudgeonry

    Wednesday, August 4, 2010

    It started as a review

    The Windup Girl is the latest "it" book, although The Dervish House is coming up fast. One bit of McGuffium in the book was the use of kinetic batteries wound by gene-mod elephants. (read the book, it makes way more sense in context) Is this the face of our post-oil world? Saturday, S.F. got a chance to try it out. There was a bicycle powered concert in the park. Web-Site Link Generators, driven by bike linkages, powered the stage. Not quite the same as Outside Lands, but I suspect a lot more fun. And in a similar vein, a pdf containing a subsection on flywheel storage. I think we'll see more of this one in the future as high-strength materials become more cost effective.

    Step Away from the Nuts

    With no warning one weekday morning, investigators entered an organic grocery with a search warrant and ordered the hemp-clad workers to put down their buckets of mashed coconut cream and to step away from the nuts.

    Then, guns drawn, four officers fanned out across Rawesome Foods in Venice. Skirting past the arugula and peering under crates of zucchini, they found the raid's target inside a walk-in refrigerator: unmarked jugs of raw milk.

    Details

    Armed raid to confisticate raw milk? Farm kids (myself included) grow up on it. Consume an unbranded foodstuff, go to jail. Someone in officialdom has taken a reality vacation.

    Nostalgie de la boue

    The structure has barely changed since it opened, and today an unknowing visitor might be forgiven for wondering if it hadn't been cleaned since, either. The Transbay Terminal is a dingy, depressing, and fetid place -- think New York's Port Authority Bus Terminal, but without the bustle of crowds to at least provide some vitality. This probably explains why so little nostalgia has accompanied the announcement that the Transbay Terminal will close permanently on August 7, 2010. Thereafter it will be demolished, and eventually replaced with a gleaming new facility that will be home to a César Pelli-designed high-rise tower, a 5.4 acre rooftop park, and an underground train station for (hopefully) high speed rail service to Los Angeles.

    Todd Lappin Via: BoingBoing

    Monday, August 2, 2010

    The Island

    Image: Dan Ghiordanescu

    Peter Watts has made his story The Island available online. (pdf) Once you've read it, do yourself and the author a favor and buy a copy of Blindsight. Remember:"Whenever I find my will to live becoming too strong, I read Peter Watts." (Ijust love that quote for some odd reason)

    Not this week

    One minor problem; some shortsighted and deluded populist might try to end the chickenhawk deferments. (law school, banking intern, business hero, politician's daughter, Disney star, etc.) We all know, if the productive occupations, farmer - engineer - nurse, stayed home and produced while the parasitic occupations, financial engineer - coercion consultant - pollster, were to have their butt shot at, our society would just break down. Who would negotiate with China for more loans? Who would reinterpret our Constitution for us? Who would explain why we need to invest more money to win? What would we po' unsupervised children do. America might become so déclassé that someone from the FFA could attend a class at Yale. That would be the final stake in the heart of our freedoms.
    Via: Tywkidbi

    Sunday, August 1, 2010

    Dat Dere

    Does Everything Have a Meta

    Today I'm going to see Ricky Lee Jones at Stern Grove. (south of Golden Gate Park on 19th) It's grey this morning, but that's nothing unusual and the reports predict sunny soon. The first link excoriates professional economists. Fairly easy prey, pampered folks with their own language, used to assuring each other how above-the-herd their teapot tempest really is. As politicians talk about the Economy, they mean the activity of their contributer's stock. Personally, I think it's time to re-examine the idea of money as an object that can be bought and sold, the velocity of money through a system as an indicator of health, and our plethora of value added boys. If a rating agency adds value to a trache by giving it an AAA, what real value was added if they didn't take the time to pop it open.(pace: when the banks first started to fail, Bush, and the then campaigning Obama, agreed that it was too complicated to lay blame, despite billable signatures all over the place) If an open market is desirable, why does a small coterie of insiders get responsibility-free first crack at IPO's, hedges, et al. Economists like to say they're big picture people, charting the ebb and flow of value between nations according to scientifical precepts. (scientifical means you can't test it until you've bought it, but it sounds so..numerical) In fact, economists work for banks and large institutions, and their employment and income is directly related to the profit they bring in. If you crash the economy, but profit afore said small coterie, the big car stays in the McMansion's driveway. You could view them as sales managers or advertising managers, rather than disinterested researchers, and get a more realistic view of their work. And please don't quote van Mises or Marx or the Austrian-Chicago school until you've worked at least one day at a job that involved your hands. (dang, that first cup of expresso was good)

    • Economists and the Real World: The problem, however, is that the same 90% of all economists also missed the last crises, and the one before that as well, and before that, and so on. In fact, their record of being able to diagnose and treat economic problems is about zero. And their prescriptions always seem to be counterproductive: the recommendations to limit government always make it grow, their advice on limiting taxation always makes it more, their prescriptions on growing the economy only leads to the illusory growth of bubbles, etc. Put it this way: If your doctor had this same track record of diagnosing and treating disease, you’d be dead by now.

    Next are some computer related updates. On HTML 5: The cross platform problems, ie mobile vs. fixed, world-wide vs. insular, are becoming a thicket. I don't much feel like learning a new set of commands, but it is time.

    • HTML 5: But many of the sophisticated features of these sites depend on connections that developers create between different Web technologies, such as HTML, javascript, and cascading style sheets (CSS)--connections that don't always work perfectly. As a result, websites can be sluggish, may work differently from browser to browser, and can be vulnerable to security holes.
    • A whole passel of dumb: In late February 2008, Scott Graham shelled out US$115 for a spyware program called SpyAgent and sent it to the woman, according to a plea agreement filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northeastern District of Ohio. (my own opinion: The boyfriend was an idiot, the girlfriend had to initiate the install, busted, and the hospital's tech squad was asleep at the wheel. Goes to show you that your communications are not private; no way, no how)
    • The Myspace Set: Ross wrote a great post on how our endlessly connected lives make it so hard to sit down and read a book, and its implications on class and access to culture, quoting a very touching post by our own Ayjay on Clay Shirky’s techno-optimist vision and his own upbringing.
    • Peter Winiwarter: A quick introductory abstract to general systems theory. (pdf)

    A bit of science. I don't know about you, but the links about regrowing joints (knees) interest me in a very personal way. I rather like the idea of being able to get up in the morning without making all sorts of creaking and popping noises.

    • Helping Joints Regrow Themselves: Today's titanium replacement joints work very well for 10 to 15 years, but replacing them after they've worn out is a challenge for both patient and surgeon. A team of researchers from Columbia University proposes a way around that problem: by implanting a scaffold that encourages the patient's own stem cells to regrow the joint.
    • The Bio-Printer: Clearly, it would be better if some of this organization could be generated prior to implantation. This would also be essential for cases where the tissue being repaired is so severely damaged that there's little intact structure for the implanted cells to integrate with. To generate these preformed functional tissues, a number of researchers are turning to a technique called bioprinting that takes advantage of a ubiquitous piece of technology: the inkjet printer.
    • A Non-Math Look at Math Objects: I found out something neat about three-dimensional shapes. Many strange mathematical solids are constructed by rotating the plane of a two-dimensional shape around an imaginary axis. Think of the flat holiday decorations you fold out around its spine/axis. Once I understood what is called a “surface of revolution” in my mind, the construction of many odd mathematical shapes began to make sense.

    And finally, a bit about what some term "the culture of fear".

    • Life and Death in the Obedience Culture: Many, and perhaps even most, political commentators and bloggers today agree that the United States is an increasingly authoritarian State.
    • The end of Military history: Yet from start to finish, military might had determined that competition’s course as much as ideology. Throughout much of the twentieth century, great powers had vied with one another to create new, or more effective, instruments of coercion. Military innovation assumed many forms.