Jim Dunning

You Just Wait

2011-01-08T19:45:00.000-08:00

Year to date statistics on Airport screening from the Department of Homeland Security

Terrorist Plots Discovered 0
Transvestites 133
Hernias 1,485
Hemeroid Cases 3,172
Enlarged Prostates 8,249
Breast Implants 59,350
Natural Blondes 3

Mirrored from Phil's Fun

Limen

2011-01-05T21:57:00.000-08:00

Approximate absolute sensitivities, expressed in everyday terms:

Vision – A candle flame seen at 30 miles on a dark, clear night
Hearing – The tick of a watch under quiet conditions at 20 feet
Taste – One teaspoon of sugar in two gallons of water
Smell – One drop of perfume diffused into the entire volume of a three-room apartment
Touch – The wing of a bee falling on your cheek from a distance of one centimeter

Via: Mind Hacks

We're in Debt, Why.

2011-01-04T21:58:00.000-08:00

According to Germano, each mile of border fence costs US taxpayers about $4 million to build and will cost another $6.5 billion over the next 20 years to repair and maintain.

Kiewit is the contractor. (yeah, the same ones doing the Bay Bridge retrofit) In their defense, they actually have something in place. Boeing, of the virtual fence Boeings, is 1.2 Billion dollars into the contract and have produced a real nice report about why they need more money.

Dang, It's Another Year

2011-01-04T11:51:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year. For those of us in the events industry it's usually a slow time. We'll see. I got a laugh from the news. Previously the story had been that a Navy Officer on the USS Enterprise was under investigation for tomfoolery. Facts stated, lead line pitched, story due to be deep sixed the next day. Suddenly a JOURNALIST found that some sailors had opened a Facebook page in the officer's defense. Suddenly, as if by magic, it morphed into a raunchy video, salacious innuendos tumbled out in abundance, and lots of play was given to the newsworthiness of Facebook and the current movie about the founder. One might say that the story became an infomercial about a product. No story about which members of the Board of Directors have a percentage of said product. As is always the case, keeping them honest is a slogan and newsworthy is a relative position. Seems to depend on who's dog is in the ring.

The first set of links are two views of WikiLeaks.

Stirling on Assange: Instead, he’s very like Jerome Kerviel, that obscure French stock trader who stole 5 billion euros without making one dime for himself. Jerome Kerviel, just like Bradley Manning, was a bored, resentful, lower-echelon guy in a dead end, who discovered some awesome capacities in his system that his bosses never knew it had. It makes so little sense to behave like Kerviel and Manning that their threat can’t be imagined.
Lanier on AssangeA sufficiently copious flood of data creates an illusion of omniscience, and that illusion can make you stupid. Another way to put this is that a lot of information made available over the internet encourages players to think as if they had a God's eye view, looking down on the whole system.

The next one I picked not so much for any political insight, but for the sheer fun the reviewer seems to be having in savaging the book.

Damn Right: Decision Points holds the same relation to George W. Bush as a line of fashion accessories or a perfume does to the movie star that bears its name; he no doubt served in some advisory capacity. from London Review of Books

Links To the full Report of the Bioethics Commission.

Link Page for Bioethics Report: Bioethics commission delivers synthetic biology report to President Obama (December 16)

Next is an international story with local implications. SF's transportation system went on the clipper card system. In short, everyone that rides a bus, takes a train, or pays a toll can be tracked by a foreign (Israel) company. And just to put whipped cream on the pie, the local transportation companies have agreed to pay any shortfall. How do you think that will work out? Weak encryption here in hacker central. If you want to try your own hand at it, Fries sells card readers for under $110.

Smart Cards: Taipei’s EasyCard system has been in place since 2001, largely as a means of paying for the subway, bus, taxis and parking. It has also been widely known to use a smartcard system called MIFARE Classic, produced by NXP Semiconductors, the security of which was publicly demonstrated to be broken by CCC members at their annual congress three years ago. Note: S.F. started the Clipper Card System last year. An election year. I'm sure you know what I'm thinking.

Here's a lament for days gone by.

The Disneyland Dream: But, for all those inequities, economic equality seemed within reach in 1956, at least for the vast middle class. (Michael Harrington’s exposé of American poverty, “The Other America,” would not rock this complacency until 1962.) The sense that the American promise of social and economic mobility was attainable to anyone who sought it permeates “Disneyland Dream” from start to finish.

The last four are bunched together because they interest me, but don't have any common theme.

Don't Fear China: The belief that values like democracy and liberalism, rather than geo-strategic and economic factors, affect the competition between global powers tends to reflect a post-Enlightenment western bias that supposes the existence of an ultimate universal truth and assumes that history is a continuous ascent towards progress. That march towards progress manifests itself through conflicts between ideals–enlightenment and freedom vs. their opponents–and the people, groups, and nation-states that represent them. That has certainly been a crucial theme in the narrative about foreign policy advanced by neoconservative and liberal ideologues.
Mosque as Yesterday's News: There can be no single explanation for why a news story of this magnitude disappears. But, given the timeline here, it seems likely that the electoral calendar played a role. National Republicans who used Park51 as a bludgeon against Democrats suddenly were less interested in talking about the project after the election.
Dissidents and Foreign Policy: ...and it is possible that public hectoring of the Bahraini government would undermine such efforts by embarrassing the Bahrainis and forcing them to issue defiant demands that the U.S. mind its own business. What seems clear is that publicly denouncing a government’s crackdown will not end the crackdown, could intensify it, and might adversely affect U.S. interests in the process. Unless fruitless moral posturing that harms concrete American interests is the goal, I don’t see the point.
Shock and Waugh: Auberon Waugh hated war. He loathed the pomposity of Western politicians who thought they had a divine right to go around the world intervening in the affairs of sovereign states. Lots of people are calling for the arrest of Tony Blair for war crimes in 2010, but very few were doing so in 1999, when Waugh was. “The charge against Tony Blair is not so much that he took a very stupid decision … or even that his high moral pose may have been a front for ordinary self-importance and power mania, ....

Ah Well

2011-01-03T19:35:00.000-08:00

You Tell Me

2011-01-01T20:02:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year. The above picture is a proto-VR module, a tele-(You know what I'm tring to say) unit, or a ....

Seriously Deep

2010-12-29T19:50:00.000-08:00

A section of the Tateyama Kurobe Alpine Route: Japan

Merry Christmas

2010-12-26T12:22:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas. As someone who grew up in the snowbelt, I got a chuckle out of the mess some of our southern cities were in when they got some snow. Upon reflection, I think I was more ammused by the historonics of the weather commentators. Anything to stir up some drama. City governments have come under fire? For what. Not maintaining a fleet of very expensive equipment for something that happens every hundred years and will melt off by morning. Better get the news team to 'vestigatin this dilemma. More on this breaking story when we write it up .. or it rains.

I'm going to start the link-dump with an essay on Americanism, then punch on through pretty quickly. The sun is out for the first time in days and the remainder of my to-do list can be set aside for a few hours.

What is American: After two hundred years, our democracy appears beleaguered and in need of revitalization. It is expressly the magnitude of our problems that make it possible for some to long for apparently better systems that haven’t a prayer in America. However, revitalization, if it is to occur, must take advantage of resources native to our tradition and, what is just as important, to do so in a native idiom.
Was Washington a Christian: These founders were most emphatically not modern secularists, and Washington was not an exponent of modern democracy. Our first president was a man of the eighteenth century, who believed in the benefits of property relations and gender-specific education, and, perhaps above all, as he tells us in his Farewell Address as president, in the public need for religious beliefs. In these respects he was little different from the English monarch his countrymen broke from during the Revolution.
The Evil Empire: What the Obama administration has delivered, of course, is not only the continuation of the policies of the previous three administrations but a profound exaggeration of them. If anything, we suffer more violations of our privacy and civil liberties now than at any time during the Bush administration, all in the name of a national-security state that keeps the populace in its place while perpetuating war abroad.
Judicial Activism: ones that touch on the broad competing visions of the proper role of government. Striking down a law passed by a democratically-elected legislature is not necessarily “activism.” Nor is upholding a law necessarily “restrained.” It depends on whether or not the law violates the Constitution (and the primary failing I note in left-wing resort to the phrase “judicial activism” is that they ignore this rather significant distinction).
Iron Dome: The defense establishment is still weighing the balance between the number of radars for the systems to the number of intercept missiles necessary. Different estimates suggest that each intercept missile will cost $40,000.
What was the Saudi Arms Deal About:A look at the remainder of the Saudi deal indicates that Riyadh has other concerns in mind. The Saudis are also acquiring 190 helicopters. These include 70 Apache Longbows, an upgraded version of the U.S. Army's highly successful attack helicopter which carries, among other weapons, a powerful 30 MM gun and anti-tank missiles. Riyadh is also purchasing 36 AH-6i "Little Bird" light helicopters, which are often used by Special Forces. Finally, the Saudis are buying 72 UH-60 Blackhawks, which are ideal for moving troops into and around combat zones.
Revolver: The libertarian/conservative rejoinder is that less regulation equals less opportunities for politically-connected firms to hijack the system. As a safeguard against future financial meltdowns, I find this unsatisfying for a number of reasons: First, attempts to describe the roots of the financial crisis solely through the lens of government intervention sound pretty silly. And second, if the regulatory and administrative superstructure of government is fatally compromised by insiders and corporate lobbyists, are we sure we can successfully deconstruct that system from within.
Start Treaty: A link to the Naval Institute and a subsequent link-through to the text itself. Why bother having some goofy-goober tell you what it means, when you can see for yourself?
Dirty Underwear: I find it interesting that, despite the furor over the Wikileaks disclosures relating to the military's activity in Iraq, the U.S. government did not come down on him full bore, nor did they assign a team of government lawyers to scour the statute books looking for a way to criminally charge Assange, until it was the State Department and, by extension, the political leadership of the nation that was being embarrassed.
Two States - No Solutions: At the same time, Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Gen. David Petraeus have stated publicly that the ongoing failure of the peace process constitutes a threat to American national security. The despair the Palestinians now feel, and the anger among broader Arab publics, is very dangerous for the United States. Not only al Qaeda, but Hamas and Hezbollah feed on the anger in the Islamic world over the plight of the Palestinians.

Added Mon 27, 3:00 PM: I flipped on the news to eat my lunch with, and was treated to a BREAKING NEWS STORY. (yes, the onscreen graphix were all capped) It seems that the wind was blowing snow onto roads that had already been plowed. Great googly-moogly, that must be why they called it a snow storm. Better images are promised for the 5:00 show. I can't wait.

That Swag Attitude

2010-12-21T10:33:00.000-08:00

NY Daily News

Inventor Andrew Lewis, 43, of Hamilton Heights sez:

"Sagging is a huge issue in my community," he said. "I spent a lot of time observing and I noticed that even for saggers, there is a point which even they're not comfortable with how their jeans were falling."

So he did something about it, at $36 a pop. Why loose that jailhouse look when, for a few extra bucks, you can get a special guy in a jailhouse accessoire. The odd thing is you can get the same thing cheaper from a tool catalog. Linemen, and others I'm sure, use something similar to keep their tool belt stable when they're off the ground. You don't want your tools around your ankles while leaning out of a scissors lift. Sort of a blue-collar fashion statement.

Via: BoingBoing

Born for Trouble

2010-12-08T19:14:00.000-08:00

Blind drunk driver falls flat on face in front of judge:

A reported legally blind man arrested on Sunday night for driving while intoxicated, has been re-arrested for public intoxication after allegedly coming to court drunk. Mark Alan Watson, 41, of Bartlesville, was about to be arraigned on Monday on charges of driving under the influence of alcohol, leaving the scene of an accident, driving under suspension and assault on a police officer when he fell on his face in front of Associate District Judge Russell Vaclaw.

The remainder of the story is at Nothing to do with Abroath. Some folks just don't have a plan.

Before they had Les Pauls

2010-12-07T22:30:00.000-08:00

Nathaniel Sichel, 1843-1907. German artist.

It comes out here

2010-12-07T20:23:00.000-08:00

Sunday I worked on the set-up for a salesforce.com convention. The product was, I guess, a cloud based sales something or another. You set up a FB style interface and all your orders, derived from a social networking thing-a ma-bob, flow through a totally secure cloud application, then it zooms around here, does an interactive jiggery-do, and comes out there. To keep everyone's mind on the pitch, Stevie Wonder has a set, Will I Am hosts the party, and the hall was equipped with more Barcos, moving lights, and general whoop-de then I've seen outside a Pink Floyd show. Wi-fi antennas were flown throughout the hall. In addition to their customary use, they streamed a reflection of what was on the stage overlaid with sales graphix and talking points. If some lady with a big hat obscures the projection in front, you can glance down at your laptop to get the juice. I guess I'm showing my age, but I can remember when we had factories and farms and we built things. Now, in the future, we make money by taking in each other's laundry, and big money by providing a cloud app for keeping track of it. The bug in the code, of course, is having to depend on others for the detergent, the washing machine, and the clothes.

The two stories I'm following as I write this are 1) Julian Assange arrested. It seems that about twenty minutes after Forbes announced that WikiLeaks had some dirt on a large American Bank, the muttering about State Security turned into a full-throated roar calling for a non-judicial execution. Of course the timing is only circumstantial and it's really about the Italian Prime Minister's embarrassment over the wording of a single cable. 2) Uncle BomBom has reached another comprimise. The other side wasn't even in the hall, yet he blinked anyway. I guess he needs to stockpile his powder for something, you know, down the road. Then he'll show 'em what for, you bet-cha. Or not. Maybe it's different in the rarified atmosphere of an elite policy maker, but here in prole-world you can only promise, explain, and do damage control for so long, then you need to do the job or loose it. Now for this week's link dump.

On the power to lead;

Mental Prisoner of the Congress: ....he could say “I’m against cutting Medicare reimbursement rates, but only if it’s paid for.” Repeat that enough times and suddenly it becomes congress’ problem. Congress wants an AMT patch? Fine, then congress needs to pay for it. There are lots of things the President can’t do in the legislative process, but refusing to sign deficit-increasing bills is something he definitely can do.
Will the GOP Raise the Debt Ceiling: It’s one thing to win an election with a lot of incendiary rhetoric. It’s another thing to actually get things done. And it appears that the new members of the GOP are determined to make obstructionism their bread and butter.

On the power of the people:

Porno Scanners and Perpetual War: It’s finally coming into focus, and it’s not even a difficult equation to grasp. It goes like this: take a country in the grips of an expanding national security state and sooner or later your “safety” will mean your humiliation, your degradation. And by the way, it will mean the degradation of your country, too.
State's Rights: At present, the only way for states to contest a federal law or regulation is to bring a constitutional challenge in federal court or seek an amendment to the Constitution,” the pair wrote. “A state repeal power provides a targeted way to reverse particular congressional acts and administrative regulations without relying on federal judges or permanently amending the text of the Constitution to correct a specific abuse.

On certain segments of the people and a sudden shrinking of ... numbers during the recent cold snap:

Overexposed: The exact genesis of this movement is hazy, but most agree it had something to do with the city opening a high-visibility plaza at Castro and Market last year. Among the lunchers, retirees, and shoppers, naked men showed up, too: A construction supervisor named Barry appeared in his fedora and flip-flops — and nothing else. (kinda safe for work)

The kind of thinking that gets you branded as a crazy until it turns out you were right:

WikiLeaks as Psyop: .. Zbigniew Brzezinski’s speculation that the latest WikiLeaks dump might have been selected to further a foreign agenda. I haven’t seen any evidence that would lead me to think that, but it’s a possibility that has to be considered. The possibility that a domestic interest or intelligence agency could engineer a leak should also be entertained. Manufacturing paper trails is one of the things that “community” does best, after all.

Some writting that caught my eye:

The Teleology of Vodka: I would not willingly offend the whole Alexander Nevsky choir or five fifths of its audience, but it needs saying that the true end of vodka is not a glass. Vodka, properly speaking, is not really a drink. So used it is more like an excuse—or a carrying device, much as a cigarette is a carrying device for nicotine. For although vodka may please the brain and the bloodstream, it can never fully satisfy the nose or the tongue—and will quite often offend the one and make offensive the other.

A bit of biology news that's getting shunted aside in the Christmas rush:

NASA finds arsenic based life form: When cooking up the stuff of life, you can’t just substitute margarine for butter. Or so scientists thought. But now researchers have coaxed a microbe to build itself with arsenic in the place of phosphorus, an unprecedented substitution of one of the six essential ingredients of life. The bacterium appears to have incorporated a form of arsenic into its cellular machinery, and even its DNA, scientists report online Dec. 2 in Science.

A bit of history:

Merchant Capital: If we now look back on European history from the sixteenth century to the twentieth century, this assessment seems badly wrong as an historical observation. Merchants and their companies played key roles in the establishment of a world trading system; they actively facilitated the race for colonies by the European powers; and often they played a quasi-military role in suppressing resistance by locals in distant parts of the world.

Which leads to:

Brookings Institute (pdf): The upshot: The past two decades have seen lower-income metro areas in the global East and South “close the gap” with higher-income metros in Europe and the United States, and the worldwide economic upheaval has only accelerated the shift in growth toward metros in those rising regions of the world. Note: Austin, the highest American city on the list, is # 40, San Francisco is # 133.

Fun with the Legal Industry

2010-12-06T20:06:00.000-08:00

A doctor in Miami is suing a restaurant for not explaining to him the proper method of eating an artichoke. He ate the entire thing, and developed bowel obstruction from the indigestible leaves. The restaurant asks "Are we going to have to post warnings on our menu they shouldn't eat the bones in our barbecue ribs?"

Both image and link from Tywkiwdbi

Added later:A Texas Roadhouse and its TP dispenser

Having Been There Myself

2010-12-04T21:28:00.000-08:00

Swedish photographer Håkan Dahlström made this shot of one of San Francisco's steeper hills, turning his camera so that the road (and not the houses) were at level.

Via: BoingBoing

Gastroporn Redux

2010-12-03T16:58:00.000-08:00

For breakfast, I usually have a cappuccino—espresso made in an Alessi pot and mixed with organic milk, which has been gently heated and hand-fluffed by my husband. I eat two slices of imported cheese—Dutch Parrano, the label says, “the hippest cheese in New York” (no joke)—on homemade bread with butter. I am what you might call a food snob. My nutritionist neighbor drinks a protein shake while her 5-year-old son eats quinoa porridge sweetened with applesauce and laced with kale flakes. She is what you might call a health nut. On a recent morning, my neighbor’s friend Alexandra Ferguson sipped politically correct Nicaraguan coffee in her comfy kitchen while her two young boys chose from among an assortment of organic cereals.

A cover article in this week's Newsweek purports to be about the class divide vis-à-vis food consumption, but in a sad way is really about the relationship of marketers and muddled thinking. The self adulation of some of the respondents, who's immoderation is redefined as respect for the planet and desire to nurture something or another, is one of the reasons that a certain class of twit isn't taken seriously by anyone outside of salespeople. (or in our case, the Mayor's office) The attitudinal baggage and cultural blindspot that accompanies a proposal to tax soda or any casse-croûte du jour, for the "health of our community", is just typical. (we know what‘s best for you)

Even the locavore hero Pollan agrees. “Essentially,” he says, “we have a system where wealthy farmers feed the poor crap and poor farmers feed the wealthy high-quality food.”

This being said, the new Congress is going to start work on the next farm bill. Between the traditional hot air (family farms, golden waves of grain, the real America) and the ceremonial larding of the pork, not to mention the sausage making in the back room, I suspect we'll be singing new boss, same as the old boss. Last time around, I remember a story about a well known newsreader / commentator who received big bucks for the Angora wool produced by the sheep on his hobby farm. (national security - military helmet liners) Monsanto, some folks on the Upper East side, and Archer Daniels Midland should be up for a chunk too. Personally I think the biggest food problem concerns whatever hallucinogen they're adulterating the water with in Washington.

Quick cooking note for the above nutritionist neighbor: Put the kale flakes in the soup, not your kid’s cereal.

Somebody is Cranky

2010-12-03T11:48:00.000-08:00

(ó) a dheaide! None of that circumlocution round here.

Close Enough for Government Work

2010-12-01T16:04:00.000-08:00

As it turns out, we had $70,000,000.00 just sitting around, so we gave it to Pakistan to help the country defend themselves from the Taliban Air Force. Maybe it's a codeword for a black-op, maybe it's a nuanced diplomatic deal, probably it's a powder my nose arrangement. Working for a living was obviously the wrong career choice.

Porpoises rescue Dick Van Dyke

2010-11-30T11:58:00.000-08:00

No rib, link to story Here

I got your Dak Bulgogi right here

2010-11-30T11:00:00.000-08:00

I spent Thanksgiving with some friends, including the two above. For a number of years I had cooked for a group of professionals at a TV station. The idea of re-booting the dinner to reflect a busy upscale lifestyle was in the air. Thanksgiving was shortened to turkey day, then t-day. I'm all in favor of fine dining and stretching the envelope, but Thanksgiving is a day to give thanks. T-day and Black Friday precurser sales don't quite transmit that idea properly. As for the two kids, where the heck do they get all that energy? I discovered that being a human jungle gym has its attractions. (the sudden calm during their nap was pretty good too)

On to the link-dump. First is an article about the party system. Others are weighing in and I've seen some advertising regarding a centrist party. We'll see. I, like most people, think Government has shed its governing function and is acting like a business, i.e. we work for it. If fear sells, sell it. If infantile posturing gets you air time ... and so forth.

Hyper-Polarized Party System: Still, the unending high-decibel partisan warfare of the past decade has led many Americans to look back with nostalgia on the more consensual, if muddled, party system that persisted until the 1970s.

Followed by two links that call into question the congress critters disconnect from daily life.

A Message from the Voters: (pdf): A 53% majority of registered voters also think that those who came into power
campaigning on Obamacare repeal should decline their federal health plan, and only a third think they should accept it. Many Democrats have been pushing Republicans to deny their benefits, but among all voters, the pressure is actually by far stronger with Republicans and independents than with Democrats.
Where's Mine: Harris, who defeated Rep. Frank Kratovil (D) earlier this month, drew unwelcome attention last week when Politico reported that he complained at an orientation session for new lawmakers upon finding out that his government-provided health care coverage would not take effect until February, a month after he takes office.

The next two are about banks. I'm tempted to mutter something about the power behind the throne, but writing the obvious takes too much time.

The Best Congress Money Can Buy: ...the financial sector has paid little for bringing the world to near-collapse or for receiving the taxpayers’ bailout that was denied to most small-enough-to-fail Americans. The sector still rakes in more than a fourth of American business profits, up from a seventh 25 years ago.
What Good is Wall Street?: A few months ago, I came across an announcement that Citigroup, the parent company of Citibank, was to be honored, along with its chief executive, Vikram Pandit, for “Advancing the Field of Asset Building in America.” This seemed akin to, say, saluting BP for services to the environment or praising Facebook for its commitment to privacy.

Oh Lordy. Korea. We're gonna win this one by golly. Mess with us and we'll borrow some money and fix your kim chee. Yeah boy, you be gettin' a stern rebuke when we done with you.

The Tyranny of Metaphor: In the midst of the Korean War, Brogan was not only commenting on Americans' frustration with their inability to prevail decisively against supposedly inferior Chinese and North Korean forces, but also cautioning against other misadventures in which the United States falsely assumed its superpower status assured a military victory in any conflict it chose to fight. Brogan could just as easily have titled his essay The Omnipotence of American Illusion in an echo of Friedrich Nietzsche's critique of true believers. Convictions, the great German philosopher wrote, are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
Why Are We Still In Korea?: We will stand by our Korean allies, says President Obama. And with our security treaty and 28,000 U.S. troops in South Korea, many on the DMZ, we can do no other. But why, 60 years after the first Korean War, should Americans be the first to die in a second Korean War? Unlike 1950, South Korea is not an impoverished ex-colony of Japan. She is the largest of all the "Asian tigers," a nation with twice the population and 40 times the economy of the North.
Lunacy His Principal Export: These events may also ultimately be seen as wins for Kim on two other levels. First, the nuclear facility almost certainly required international collaboration. If it turns out that support came in part from, say, Pakistan, already suspected of helping the Koreans develop a nuclear ballistic missile capability, it would be deeply embarrassing and awkward for the United States.
Stuxnet and N. Korea: While U.S. officials are trying to figure out how to respond to North Korea’s unveiling of a new uranium enrichment plant, there are clues that a piece of malware believed to have hit Iran’s nuclear efforts could also target the centrifuges Pyongyang’s preparing to spin.

And meanwhile we're clearly and decisively taking care of our other loose ends.

How to Schedule a War: Going, going, gone! You can almost hear the announcer’s voice throbbing with excitement, only we’re not talking about home runs here, but about the disappearing date on which, for the United States and its military, the Afghan War will officially end.

Diplomatic Frolics

2010-11-29T23:52:00.000-08:00

Another WikiLeak dump. The president is on damage control again. The fear industry is howling. Between the somebody is trying to ban Christmas stories and the war with Korea / Iran bonanza, they can pretty much coast the rest of the week. The leaks do raise some questions, however. By this I mean the cables themselves, not the fragmented excerpts getting play. You'll need an extra big cup of coffee and a scroll wheel to deal with the current batch.

Traitors - Incalculable Damage- Full Might of the Law: one might be tempted to comment, "If you're doing nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear." But that would sound as sad as when the government tells it to you. Instead I'll call on my current hobbyhorse and note that the powers that be don't seem to be too pleased by their public pat-down and x-ray. (why yes, I can still spell schadenfreude with the help of my Webster's)
Secret Stuff: It doesn’t matter how robust your encryption is if you leave plaintext copies around for every Junior Officer, Congressional hopeful, and janitor with some spare time to read. And don’t store them in one place with sequential call numbers. WikiLeaks isn’t some super duper spy org, it’s just a vacuum cleaner that sucks up information that was pretty much in plain sight. The real spy organizations: Israel, England, Russia, China, Liechtenstein, probably had a copy a minute after the cable was sent. No foreign country was really shocked or taken by surprise. The secrecy rubric really refers to the taxpayers.
Embarrassing Revelations: If you read some of these cables, you would suspect they were written by frat boys on Facebook. Pedigreed ivy league frat boys mind you, but... Some things don’t belong in a diplomatic cable. An awful lot of embarrassment could be avoided if an adult explained to the wonderkinder that they’re on the job, not at a swell party texting their buddy.
Other countries will question if we can keep a secret: Uh ....yeah! Well, can we? So instead of whining about one guy from Belgium or Private somebody or another, we might want to consider putting the house in order. If following security protocol or setting aside those little side deals discommodes some of the more entitled members of the foreign service, tough.
The other Arab countries want us to invade Iran: For a definition of getting played refer to our Talaban Commander that turned into a shopkeeper several million dollars later. But they agree with Israel. Sure, as long as we pony up the money and shed the blood, what the heck.

The sad part was contained in a British Minister's comment. He said the lone superpower came off like someone wandering the world and wondering why no one would do as bidden. Coming up next, WikiLeaks on banks.

Thanks Ever So

2010-11-27T16:04:00.000-08:00

While I know pointing out other's faux pas is a two way street, it's generally not a good idea to wear slogans on your butt.

Via: Miss Cellania

Happy Thanksgiving

2010-11-24T16:42:00.000-08:00

For Your Safety

2010-11-23T11:01:00.000-08:00

Picture Link

I'm just going to mumble something about the TSA and let you fill in the blank any way you wish.

Thanksgiving Week

2010-11-23T10:14:00.000-08:00

What a week. TSA feeling up 5 year olds at the airport, while very important congress-critters and their posse slip in the side gate. A shopkeeper in Afghanistan managed to run off with a chunk of American taxpayer's money. With his proven ability to extract profitability, I'll bet that Wall Street head-hunters are looking for his number. April is when the debt ceiling has to be raised or maintained. Some of our new critters have announced an eminent Government shutdown. I feel very safe in predicting that neither their paycheck nor the IRS will be effected. First things first, after all. President Obama took a trip to Asia and the G-20 meeting. One country went so far as to suggest that they would put the needs of their own people before America's Strategic Interests. Great googly moogly!! A world where people tended to their own business - unacceptable. We might be forced to grow our own food and sew our own clothes or make something for trade. (beside debt tranches) I seem to remember something the Greeks were muttering about hubris, or was it Gods, punishment and TV, or maybe cynicism being way too easy. The dumping of links begins.

Musharraf attempts a comeback: There are certainly countries that promote men like Musharraf, and it's possible he could mount a political comeback - but so few are able to apply authoritarianism correctly, if there is such a thing. If Musharraf has no plans to push back against these internal forces, his usefulness to America seems minor at best.
Congress Erodes National Security: Congress has also experienced a declining pool of expertise in important foreign policy areas such as arms control, and it remains ill-equipped to prepare the country for coping with the many overlapping foreign policy challenges wrought by globalization, King says. She urges leaders of the new Congress to return to rules of order and emulate some of the ways the executive branch is taking on the cross-jurisdictional challenges, especially the State Department and Defense Department.
Rising East, Setting West: Add to this the peculiar obsessions of the Washington power elite, with regard to Iran for instance, and you have an unpalatable mix. These all-American fixations are viewed as an inconvenience or worse in Asia, where powerful regional hegemons are increasingly determined to chart their own courses, even if in public they continue to humor a somewhat addled and infirm Uncle Sam.
Congress Should Defend My Junk: If, on the other hand, Issa were to launch an investigation of TSA, he'd instantly win the media stardom he longs for and would probably win over a good many independents and Democrats (and Atlantic staffers). Think about it: he could call as witnesses some poor 5-year-old kid who got felt up and the kid's furious mom.

The next three are about reducing the Pentagon budget. I'm not sure why I include them, no-one has any real intention of actually doing it. We can't be soft on **place current boogie here**.

Defense on a Diet: Such agreement is easy enough to find among think-tank academics, especially those employed by institutions that specifically advocate limited government or scrutinize the military-industrial complex. But there’s far less appetite for it on Capitol Hill, especially among the Republican congressmen currently beating their chests about excessive government spending—though Democrats are seldom much better.
Defending Europe: Europe is not under threat from any nation state that its own armed forces could not dispatch. What's more, it's not clear why Brzezinski is so dismissive about the costs of these garrisons. The U.S. Army was already in the process of consolidating its European bases and drawing down brigades - a process that the Obama administration has halted, at a cost of billions of dollars to the taxpayer.
Defense Cuts: The idea that we need a defense budget almost 60 percent larger as a share of GDP than a decade ago is ludicrous. While it is true that the wars initiated by George W. Bush and a Republican Congress will impose a financial burden on American taxpayers for many years to come, that isn’t enough to justify spending more than half of the world’s military expenditures. Almost all our NATO allies get by spending well less than half what we spend as a share of GDP.

The last three are a bit of history. The Glen Beck one isn't so much about the gloryhound himself, that's low hanging cherries, but more about how simple sending up a smokescreen to go with those gilt mirrors really is.

Glen Beck's Myths: Certainly there are features of Progressivism that anyone concerned about centralized power has every right to criticize. But there are problems with how Beck frames his critique. There were different types of Progressives who stressed diverse themes, not all of which can be subsumed under the rubric of “big government.” The connection between Progressivism and modern liberalism is weak.
Eurasian Time: His current work broadens the canvas by looking at broad temporal patterns of consolidation and turmoil across the full expanse of Eurasia, including Russia, France, Japan, China, and Southeast Asia.
Ghandi's Invisible Hands: Ever since reading Unto This Last, John Ruskin’s 1877 paean to the dignity of manual labor, in South Africa, Gandhi had had a credo to match his Victorian attitude of industriousness. Accordingly, he transformed his ashram into a workshop where each member engaged in substantial amounts of communal service, from working in the community’s kitchen to teaching in the ashram school to cleaning the shared latrines.

And Why Not?

2010-11-20T10:52:00.000-08:00

I received this e-mail yesterday from a friend. I've heard about this movement to amend the Constitution from individuals, the media hasn't seen fit to comment yet. It's still a bit too obscure to bother manufacturing polls and experts. If the idea does gain traction can we look forward to the full smoke and mirrors treatment? (our precious freedoms, the terrorists will win, and a spokes-model from the Grassroots™ Committee to Save Apple Pie and her triple-D expertise ) Below is the letter sans personal greeting. If you agree, you're more than welcome to copy and paste in order to send it on.

Governors of 35 states have already filed suit against the Federal Government for imposing unlawful burdens upon them. It only takes 38 (of the 50) States to convene a Constitutional Convention.

This will take less than thirty seconds to read. If you agree, please pass it on.

For too long we have been too complacent about the workings of Congress. Many citizens had no idea that members of Congress could retire with the same pay after only one term, that they specifically exempted themselves from many of the laws they have passed (such as being exempt from any fear of prosecution for sexual harassment) while ordinary citizens must live under those laws. The latest was to exempt themselves from the Healthcare Reform ... in all of its forms. Somehow, that doesn't seem logical. We do not have an elite that is above the law. I truly don't care if they are Democrat, Republican, Independent or whatever. The self-serving must stop.

A Constitutional Convention - this is a good way to do that. It is an idea whose time has come. And, with the advent of modern communication, the process can be moved along with incredible speed. There is talk out there that the "government" doesn't care what the people think. That is irrelevant. It is incumbent on the population to address elected officials to the wrongs afflicted against the populace...you and me. Think about this... The 26th amendment (granting the right to vote for 18 year-olds) took only 3 months & 8 days to be ratified! Why? Simple! The people demanded it. That was in 1971...before computers, before e-mail, before cell phones, etc. Of the 27 amendments to the Constitution, seven (7) took 1 year or less to become the law of the land...all because of public pressure.

I'm asking each addressee to forward this Email to a minimum of twenty people on their Address list; in turn ask each of those to do likewise.

In three days, most people in The United States of America will have the message. This is one proposal that really should be passed around.

Proposed 28th Amendment to the United States Constitution:
"Congress shall make no law that applies to the citizens of the United States that does not apply equally to the Senators and/or Representatives; and, Congress shall make no law that applies to the Senators and/or Representatives that does not apply equally to the citizens of the United States ."

A Somewhat Twisty Trail

2010-11-19T11:10:00.000-08:00

The Xi3 Modular Computer is powered by AMD’s Athlon 64 X2 processors, either 2000+ 1GHz or 3400e 1.8GHz or 4200+ 2.2GHz, up to 4GB of DDR2 memory and integrated graphics engine with DirectX 10 support. It has two eSATA ports and six USB 2.0 ports, and offers DVI-D dual link and DisplayPort.

Measures 4" per side @ $829.00. Link

The holy grail among governments and their attendant bureaucrats seems to be a hierarchal and centralized command structure. That way the boss can piddle, diddle, and golf without any of that nasty feedback from the lower orders. The Stuxnet virus specifically targets this. The obvious work around is to disconnect and run a process by hand or on its own loop. One wonders if our system can relearn to tolerate autonomous behavior in its ranks because, sure as sin, now that one well-resourced nation-state has set the bar, others will follow. As you can see from the above, processors and the net aren't going away, but that doesn't mean you need them for every application. (I'll pass on the net-enabled candle lighter, thank-you)

North Beach, S.F.

2010-11-17T08:01:00.000-08:00

Business is Business, Bubbleh

2010-11-16T09:38:00.000-08:00

For those of you in the biz, Billboard Magazine has opened its archives to the web. Issues, going back to the '40s, can be read in their original layout. Relive those thrilling stories of yesteryear, when pirates roamed the bins and... You'd be suprised how little has changed. New faces, new formats, same backroom deals.

God Hates Flats

2010-11-15T18:50:00.000-08:00

Shortly after finishing their protest at the funeral of Army Sgt. Jason James McCluskey of McAlester, a half-dozen protesters from Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kan., headed to their minivan, only to discover that its front and rear passenger-side tires had been slashed. To make matters worse, as their minivan slowly hobbled away on two flat tires, with a McAlester police car following behind, the protesters were unable to find anyone in town who would repair their vehicle, according to police.

Via: Tulsa World

No doubt the Church is planing to file a scrimination suit. That does seem to be their main source of income, and they're no shlumps when it comes to gaming the system.

But, they have the keys

2010-11-15T13:52:00.000-08:00

It's time for another link dump. The Demikins have lost the House to the Republicrats. Both make major mouth noises about change, but I'll bet that the only difference will be in the nomenclature. Freshmen from the recent election already have the plump and self-satisfied, all that remains is a back room with attached office. In other news; Colorado District Attorney Mark Hurlbert has dropped hit and run charges against a Morgan Stanley "wealth manager" who nearly killed a biker in a hit-and-run accident over the summer, citing concern a conviction could hurt the former's earning potential. While the legal industry has always been a pay to play game, I can't remember any participant actually admitting it on paper and personally signing off. In a related story, the TSA has decided the only way to protect our freedoms is with a full body scan or a cavity search. A perusal of the order's language reveals the gropers have legal immunity and the gropees are assumed terrorists until they submit. The loophole, and there's always a loophole, involves government officials, judges, and people that can purchase an expedited boarding arrangement. If you have to check your bank balance before writing a check with more than six zeros, you'll be in the slow line. Forcing the pilots to go through the same procedure seems a bit daft. (unless it's punishment for asking too many questions) A pilot doesn't have to smuggle a bomb aboard, he or she has the keys. As security ritual, pilot searches going beyond biometric I.D. confirmation, have a few logical flaws: as a power ritual... all loyalty to the big Kahuna, he will protect us from *insert current talking point here*. Dang it, I had really hoped that the future would feature jetpacks or transporters, not a distopian scramble for crumbs. I guess I should have read between the lines in history class.

On to the round-up. The first is a bit referring to another search at will plan. The next link might be profitably be compared to Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent from the supposed opposite side of the ideological spectrum. Number three is Larison’s take on the winners of the election.

War on Commuters: So the probability of an attack just went down, and we can all rest a little easier, right? Wrong! The fact that the FBI was able to bamboozle this fellow into participating in a non-existent scheme has led Metro transit cops to seriously consider riffling through commuters' stuff.
The Infinitesmial Fraction: Patrick’s recognition of the limits of voting, however, is a spot-on observation that deserves real attention. He describes what Eric Voegelin pithily called the “swindle of consent” and what one of my agrarian heroes, Ralph Borsodi scoffed at as an “infinitesimal fraction.” Patrick’s call for the “common good” puts me in mind of my dream of restoring something resembling a Country Party.
Leadership They Deserve: The midterm results didn’t represent a dramatic shift in the overall public’s views, but they did confirm that rank-and-file Republicans and movement conservatives are quite happy to enable a party that badly disappoints them every time it is given an opportunity to govern. Four years ago, movement conservatives were looking for the exits and claiming that they as conservatives had nothing to do with those unpopular Republicans. Today, Republican triumph is taken as conservative vindication, and the deeply dysfunctional, unhealthy identification of conservatism with the cause of the GOP has become stronger than ever.

The next set of links fall into the economic pile.

Control Fraud: Control fraud theory was developed in the savings and loan debacle. It explained that the person controlling the S&L (typically the CEO) posed a unique risk because he could use it as a weapon. ..Link to Black's Paper - .pdf
How the Founding Fathers Taxed ..: Here’s the shorter: in 1775, the Continental Congress authorized the first issue of Continental dollars. This was to be a true fiat currency, backed only by the faith and credit of the embryonic state. Franklin actually opposed this – arguing instead that the notes should either pay interest or be borrowed back in loans that promised some return. But he was overruled, and then, as he predicted, each run of the printing presses pushed the currency lower.
The Fall of Meritocracy: That would be fine if Ms Applebaum's portrait of the meritocracy, with universities welcoming high IQ types and allocating them to productive jobs in a thriving society, were accurate. But in fact this triumphalism is oddly timed, to put it mildly. The past few years have seen the best and brightest, obsessed by clever academic models, wreaking havoc in one area after another.

The following are about who the coercion engineers are working for. (jeez, if that doesn’t sound like some sophomore rhetoric, I don’t know what does. This city must be rubbing off on me)

Shareholder Action?: House and Senate candidates had raised a combined $1.7 billion, and spent $1.4 billion. Fundraising by parties and spending by outside groups brought the total dollar amount raised to $3.2 billion in a time when our nation suffers from an unemployment rate of 9.2% and where the impacts of the near-devastating economic downturn are still being felt.
Conflict of Interest This study analyzes the conflict of interest that exists when academic financial economists, acting in their roles as presumed objective experts in the media and academia on topics, such as financial regulation, fail to report their private financial affiliations. To conduct the study, we analyze the linkages between academia, private financial institutions and public institutions of nineteen academic financial economists who are members of two groups who have put forth proposals on financial reform. (.pdf)
Comment on Above: Better to leave the Lights Off

And last, two hacks. One food related and one a RFID trick you might be able to use.

It has to be illegal: Before the law, refined coumarin was commonly added to commercial foods like cream soda, and used in synthetic vanillin. Extreme concentrations caused liver problems in rats (how unappetizing), and a rather overreaching ban on even natural sources of the compound was put in place. Coumarin has since been found to occur naturally in cinnamon, lavender, licorice, and a host of other commonly eaten plants—all of which would seem to be illegal under the regulation. Coumarin also accounts for the particular smell of fresh-cut grass and of fresh-dried hay.
RFID Transplantation: As a general note, transplanting RFID chips is a much cleaner solution from both the legal and technical perspective versus cracking the security and programming your own RFID to be compatible with the existing payment system. While many of the security systems used in RFID are already broken or have serious known vulnerabilities, I can’t think of any country where the authorities would take kindly to you doing it.

I always thought so

2010-11-11T20:33:00.000-08:00

Via: Tywkiwdbi

The Future of Kool-Aid

2010-11-11T14:06:00.000-08:00

Yeah, I read the New York Times. More precisely, I cherry pick the web site for articles with interesting tags and read the paper edition when a neighbor in the building leaves it out in a common library by the lobby desk. (thanks Mme.) David Brooks, a twice weekly political columnist, has written an article, The Crossroads Nation, that distills my unease with showbiz media while ostensibly addressing something completely different. Brooks bashing has become something of a de rigueur amusement, but the look on his face when someone disagrees with his “eminently reasonable” chattering class shtick is priceless. In order to have my fun, I’m going to quote short bits, but you can read the whole at the link above.

...They are vague because nobody is clear about what sort of country America is going to be in 2030 or 2050. Nobody has quite defined America’s coming economic identity.

Vague; this from a journalist that can sum up three thousand years of human history as stuff leading to David's world. (along with some not-too-subtle name dropping) We're in the midst of a logarithmic increase of technical knowledge, coupled with the rise of a very old fashioned oligarchy, officials on both sides of the aisle raiding the cookie jar while prattling about exceptionalism, and the Times' columnist is selling a fluff piece about the future while shaking his well manicured finger at the people doing the work. Jeez, the view from his leather couch must be swell.

Years ago, it was industrial production. Now, of course, we’re living in an information age.

Information age; this is the roi des rats of the current sales pitch. To touch on one aspect, our current monetary crisis has a great deal to do with the misapplication of information age conceits. At its root, money is a game marker for trade. I tend and grow a bushel of carrots. You build toys for kids. We trade said carrots for a stuffed doll. Got it. Money works because now I can trade more carrots to someone else, take the marker and buy a dress to go with the doll. (assuming everyone agrees to regard the marker as legit) Got it. Now, in our brave new age, we have theorized the game markers into information about game markers. All sorts of interesting possibilities open up. American industry has metamorphosed into financial sporting houses where you get to purchase the chance to roll virtual house dice on the destination of an information flow, no carrots or stuffed dolls required. E-mail a bit of information to the friendly banker, and they’ll commoditize your debt, tranche it and ship you a chance to roll on your virtual dinner in the bargain. Works fine as long as everyone agrees that information about the markers is as good as a bushel of carrots. If not, no dinner for you. Mr. Brooks and his class expend a great deal of energy on this particular house of cards because, well, it doesn’t appear he‘d make a very good farmer.

...The main point in this composite story is that creativity is not a solitary process. It happens within networks.

Networks seem like such a comfortable thing. We can get the gang together and put on a show. In fact, creativity is a solitary process. It happens individually in a concrete place and time. What happens in networks, is the original ideation has its common denominator polished, its uniqueness hidden, a percentage pulled by the network’s owner, the proper advertisements attached, and anything that might upset the powers that be is dealt with tout de suite. Pace: David’s writing

...this new situation: “In a networked world, the issue is no longer relative power, but centrality in an increasingly dense global web.”

Dave, buddy, let’s do this together. Network - no center. That’s what the word means. Your imported leather couch, winning smile, and latest software constitute a node. Try thinking a bit before hitting the cliché key.

..If you are passionate about fashion, maybe you will go to Paris. If it’s engineering, maybe it’ll be Germany.

Here lies the crux of my dissatisfaction with Mr. Brooks style of moonbeam sales. I’m talking about people, he’s talking about interchangeable consumption units. He can fly his bubble from interchangeable place to another same place, avoiding any flavors or smells or those nasty rough edges. In Mr. Brooks world, camera operators appear, record his ruminations, and like good hookers, go away. Food appears on his plate without the mediation of fields, manure, or some guy in a truck. Big picture writing without those bothersome details, that’s why he’s on the opinion page. Class, position, and influence are his currency, not being centered in a place and time is what he used to buy in.

A Tough Little Stinker

2010-11-11T07:47:00.000-08:00

Actually, there were pressures to switch from carrots. “The Utah Celery Company of Salt Lake City offered to keep all the studio’s staffers well supplied with their product if Bugs would only switch from carrots to celery,” Adamson reports. “[And] later, the Broccoli Institute of America strongly urged Bugs Bunny to sample their product once in a while… Mel Blanc would have been happy to switch… but carrots were Bugs’s trademark.”

A Brief History of Bugs Bunny

The Pulps

2010-11-09T09:20:00.000-08:00

A site I stumbled across. Caleb is posting covers and content from older science fiction pulps. Pulp Archive.com It appears that he's just begining the project, so parameters haven't been set in stone. (some legal entity, somewhere, is probably hunting for billable hours) Wish him well and enjoy what's up so far.

Proto-Leatherman

2010-11-07T14:08:00.000-08:00

The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, UK, holds a Roman multitool that dates back to the 3rd Century C.E. When unfolded, it has a fork, spatula, pick, spike, and knife blade.

Via: Neatorama

Those Darn Coercion Engineers

2010-11-01T14:04:00.000-07:00

Halloween came and went this year without too much fuss. Normally it's a sort of national holiday around here (S.F.), but this year was pretty subdued. I still get a kick out of watching the Chinese kids in the neighborhood. The recent arrivals try to copy the old vets and when they get a handful of candy for their efforts... From the hour before sunset until an hour after, even Broadway gets turned over to the kids. The ladies from the strip joints set up on the sidewalk with a witches' hat and a big bag of candy and even a chair or two for Mom to rest a second.

The first three links are about science in its various forms. Number one is a humorous montage fron the NYT. Number two is the chemistry of coffee, something we all know about. Number three is about China's new supercomputer. I'm sure the powers that be will afix blame on the janitors' union or some such. On the other hand, we might be on better ground with less deal makers, lawyers, and media pundits,and a few more working engineers. I don't know how it is in your neighborhood, but here, the Bay Bridge still hasn't been fully repaired from the damage done in the '89 earthquake. We have plenty of studies, court cases, artistic visions, political action committees with their attendant back room deals, and of course the taxes to support each one, but the city always seems to be a few dollars short when it comes time to send a welder out to do some actual work. While politicians' refusal to break the flow of easy money in order to fix something may seem unrelated to China's computer, the systemic rewards for blowing smoke instead of accomplishing something aren't.

Unpopular Science. Whether we like it or not, human life is subject to the universal laws of physics.
What's inside a cup of coffee: ...3,5 Dicaffeoylquinic acid
When scientists pretreat neurons with this acid in the lab, the cells are significantly (though not completely) protected from free-radical damage. Yup: Coffee is a good source of antioxidants.
Supercomputer unveiled in China: The record-breaking performance was measured by the LINPACK benchmark, a system designed in the early 70s to test how fast a computer can solve a dense system of equations. And the score? 2.5 petaflops -- "flops", being a measure of floating point operations per second, and "peta" meaning a thousand trillion.

Next are some links to economic matters. Again we have references to the two tiered nature of the law. Bank error: sorry, here's the bill. Your error .. can you spell tuchis, cuz we own yours.

Inertia You Can Believe In: The U.S. is facing another predictable financial crisis -- two actually, one having to do with a trillion dollars in underfunded public pension liabilities, and the other having to do with the current or looming insolvency of a large number of cities, counties and states -- with the same inaction as before.
The Paperless Society: And now it turns out that banks' aggressive entry into the paperless world is merely just another example of their abandonment of due diligence generally. Sufficient capital? - bah, just some quaint concept from the 30's. Borrower's credit worthiness? - out-dated, narrow-minded notion from our racial dark-ages.
Banks Put Economy Underwater: Banks are claiming that these are just accidents. But suppose that while absent-mindedly paying a bill, you wrote a check from a bank account that you had already closed. No one would have much sympathy with excuses that you were in a hurry and didn’t mean to do it, and it really was just a technicality.

Now we have a bit about why the current administration seems to be in for such a drubbing tomorrow. I realize it's not directly related, but in a way it is. If you ignore your base because you know better, if your policies benefit the very institutions you were elected to trim back, and if you have majorities in both houses and still can't do better than wimper, you're toast. This isn't to give any kudos to Bush, quite the opposite. We seem to have Bush redux on most of the matters that count, along with the same arrogance.

And only where it's due: Further, it's the height of arrogance to suggest that parents are not positioned to question, let alone have a say in, how their schools are run. We're supposed to simultaneously praise parents for being concerned about their children, wanting better schools, involving themselves with their children's schools, etc., but they are to be dismissed as know-nothings the second they question the goals of the system's top bureaucrat?

After linking the above, I thought about the Tea Party. Are they really bottom-up orgs? Some of their members might think so, and more power to them. Are they just another instance of the coercion engineers selling a Trojan horse to the rubes? Stay tuned, we'll know soon enough. Since we're on the subject of coercion engineers, the last three links are on the media.

The Internet Diet: The same anxieties that we have about the Internet, the ancient Greeks had about the new technology of writing. In The Republic, Plato has Socrates famously declare that poetry has no place in the perfect state. As Carr explains, this attack may seem a little out-of-nowhere unless you understand that poetry was Plato's stand-in for the oral tradition of Greek thought.
A Little Horse Would be my Paradise: It is fitting that Bruno should encompass also the shifty question of what constitutes exploitation. A reality television celebrity chooses to be exploited, often to extremes; society hasn't yet an answer for these--people whose individual actions become our collective embarrassments.
Politicians Are Fighting Mad, at the News Media From New York to Alaska, the 2010 campaign season has been rife with hostile and downright bizarre encounters between candidates and the news media.

In A Rut

2010-11-01T10:50:00.000-07:00

A Little Press Humor

2010-10-31T19:15:00.000-07:00

World Clock

2010-10-28T19:34:00.000-07:00

Click Here for active site. (needs Flash)

via: Nag in the Lake

Air Show Disaster

2010-10-28T16:12:00.000-07:00

Via: Pete

Tentacle Pot Pie

2010-10-26T20:48:00.000-07:00

Link to recipe

Not practical, but what the heck

2010-10-25T20:49:00.000-07:00

Now That's Nifty

This custom built wooden car rides on a 1986 Toyota truck frame and gets power from a Chrysler 318 engine. It is driven by an automatic transmission and has just 1,800 miles on its odometer. The whole body is made of cedar and its interior is just as cool as the exterior.

You just know that some inspector, somewhere, is filling out the forms necessary to put a stop to this public menace. The nanny state has its ways.

Back to the Noosphere

2010-10-25T13:30:00.000-07:00

Media ecology, feeding frenzy, and the inevitable self-serving self-examination. Why yesss... we did slip up a little on that one cuz... and protecting our freedoms ( the advertiser ) and our way of life. A tweet from the corner drunk becomes a major breaking news story in a matter of hours.( and you can find more opinions on the reporter's Facebook page with explosive up-to-the-minute suppositions) Be right back after this message. (cue the John Williams break theme and bring up the chattering daisy wheel printer sample a bit) Not to denigrate a show business supplied noosphere, but I felt better informed when I was cut off from the blather and froth during fleet week. I'd like to vote for the freedom from mendacity. On to my slightly neglected link-dump.

The first bit is about the press, as you may have guessed. First a story that caught fire, with more and more revelations (My God, we coulda been blowed up) When a cooler head says wait, this doesn't make a lick of sense, the story magically transmogrifies. A report on a report of allegations, made by a book that you can buy for $27.95.DEFEND YOUR RIGHT TO KNOW, BUY IT FROM OUR SPONSER. The second link could profitably be interpereted as a knee-jerk turf defense. The third is political, NYT is tring to position itself as a bit more blue colar without loosing its base on the Upper East. It's hard to effect change with the same people, the same policies, and the same ownership, behind the same closed doors.

Shelton Story Bogus: The device is a critical link in our system of command and control, is handled by a military aide, and if it were missing, I am certain it would have been noticed -- immediately, not months later. So, what was actually lost? Shelton may have a story to tell here, but so far, it does not hold together.
Head Start on Smear: The US major papers of record have yet to fill their opinion pages with supposition, slander and rumor concerning Wikileaks and its most visible representative, Julian Assange. That’s for the week to come. But the New York Times has already gotten a head start in its news pages.
Change we used to believe in: Well, yes! Obama couldn’t have said it more eloquently himself. But with all due respect to Secretary Donovan’s blogging finesse, he wasn’t promising action. He was just stroking the liberal base while the administration once again punted. In our new banking scandal, as in those before it, attorneys general in the states, where many pension funds were decimated by Wall Street Ponzi schemes, are pursuing the crimes Washington has not.

Yes kids, I'm old enough to remember when Rocky and Bullwinkle was a new show, with new episodes. Yikes! Here is the creator's obit.

R.I.P. Alexander Anderson: ...but few were more obscure, or more important, than Alexander Anderson, who died Friday at 90 in Carmel, Cal. Anderson created the characters Rocky the Flying Squirrel, Bullwinkle Moose and Dudley Do-Right, and the vaudeville-style format, for the 1959 animated program Rocky and His Friends and its 1961 spinoff The Bullwinkle Show, known collectively as Rocky and Bullwinkle.

The next is a bit of security related computer tomfoolery. This one raises a more basic question. A program is a series of yes or no voltage pulses sent to the tick of a controlling clock. Once it's on your machine, it can be decompiled. When a program is in widespread use killing people, the people in question will find a way to get a copy. If you think a remote controlled weapon can't eventually be turned on its user, I've got a great bridge to sell you. The second story is about making-do effectively with the things at hand.

Predator Drones sued: Intelligent Integration Systems (IISi), a small Boston-based software development firm, alleges that their Geospatial Toolkit and Extended SQL Toolkit were pirated by Massachusetts-based Netezza for use by a government client. Subsequent evidence and court proceedings revealed that the "government client" seeking assistance with Predator drones was none other than the Central Intelligence Agency.
Wheelbarrow Launchers: It shouldn’t be so surprising, considering that lots of Iraqi insurgents came out of Iraq’s huge Saddam-era military, or that some had help from elite Iranian agents. But here’s an overview of some of the more ingenious, lesser-known innovations in asymmetric warfare that insurgents developed during the Iraq war to neutralize the U.S.’s conventional advantages.

Here are some of the more questionable policy shenanigans the folks in the back room have been up to. The third one comes under the - what the heck did you expect - rubric.

Saudi Arms Sales: And look, it's preferable to starting a war with Iran, but the trajectory of America's relationships with the countries that had the most direct role in incubating and fomenting the terrorism that slaughtered thousands of Americans and continues to threaten the West is an enduring curiosity. To put it mildly.
Insider Trading inside the Beltway: What’s wrong with this picture? Nothing, according to the law. Nor would it be illegal for him to tip someone else, say, his largest campaign contributor.
That's Our Job: The U.S. said Iran shouldn’t interfere with Afghanistan’s internal affairs following a report that an Iranian official gave an aide of President Hamid Karzai a bag filled with packets of euro bills.

Yes, It can happen here.

A Rationalization of Evil: A doctor quoted in the article notes the irony that this occurred at the same time that the United States was prosecuting Nazi medical experimenters for crimes against humanity at Nuremberg.

Pumpkin Pie

2010-10-24T21:06:00.000-07:00

Dichromatism on Your Plate

2010-10-24T16:27:00.000-07:00

In some regions of Central Europe, salad dressing is made preferably with pumpkin seed oil, which has a strong characteristic nutty flavor and striking color properties. Indeed, in a bottle it appears red, but it looks green in a salad dressing or mixed with yoghurt.

As you can see from the picture, pumpkin oil can give your dressing a good look in the cruet and it changes its color when poured or in a thin layer on greens. It's a bit hard to find, and pricy, but no more than good olive oil. If your menu has been wandering around the Mediterranean olive groves a mite too long, this is a healthy break. The usual caveats for specialty oils apply; buy fresh, store dark and cool, and go with a real purveyor.

Good Night, Moon

2010-10-22T10:49:00.000-07:00

Good Night, Moon

On Tor Books: Written by Rudy Rucker and Bruce Sterling, Illustration by Tim Bower

Dog Being Patient

2010-10-21T21:10:00.000-07:00

I'm Only Sleeping

2010-10-20T20:32:00.000-07:00

My friend Scott (Burridge) playing at a Buffalo coffeehouse.

Holy Cow

2010-10-19T12:14:00.000-07:00

Figures of Speech

Marsha Tosk is an NYC artist. Tough way to make a living, mind you, but someone has to provide the merchandise for gallery openings. The hand crafted Malbec and free range chicken with localy grown freekeh don't pay for themselves. To this end Artist Tosk has produced a sales kit with all the goodies.

A nebulous Artist's statement including such things as pregnable, health of the environment, Leda, and allegorical.
A genuine coffee table sized tchotchke with enough cute and cuddly to exclude anyone not in the biz. ( I didn't borrow the idea, I merely was exploring the terrain suggested by earlier, nameless illustrators )
An advertisment in the NY Times Sunday magazine with the price. One darn quick way to let all your friends on the Upper West know how much disposable cash you can spend on your bleeding edge tastes.

Let's hope this project puts some food on Ms. Tosk's table.( you don't get an artist's discount at the grocery) She has some very well wrought pieces in the other part of her site, well worth looking at. $850 is a bit steep for borrowed clever, but so isn't an ad in the Times.

Philosophical aether

2010-10-04T22:28:00.000-07:00

It's Monday already. Fleet Week 2010 is taking all my time lately. The picture above is the first deliveries to Pier 30-32. Today Al and I spent the day helping to mount antennas on Pier 35. Just to help out, the monitor on my laptop started to flicker, then got rather artistic, then simply gave up the ghost. Over time, I've installed so many mods, both physical and soft, that I think the poor baby is farpotshket. That's a roadie term, borrowed from Yiddish, meaning one too many layers of duct tape. As long as I'm muttering about my computer, here are two links about what others are doing with theirs.

The New Hacker Frontier: Wireless tire pressure monitoring systems, which also were touted as a way to increase fuel economy, communicate via a radio frequency transmitter to a tire pressure control unit that sends commands to the central car computer over the Controller-Area Network (CAN). The CAN bus, which allows electronics to communicate with each other via the On-Board Diagnostics systems (OBD-II), is then able to trigger a warning message on the vehicle dashboard.
Avatars in the workplace: Walk the halls of any large business over the last decade or two and you will have seen most of the workers “living on the screen,” joining in the vast and intricate world of modern commerce made possible by the Internet. Look over their shoulders and you will see that some of these workers are not just living on the screen but, in a sense, in the screen. They are immersed in elaborate virtual worlds as avatars, on-screen identities that can be controlled to produce some sort of movement, gesture, and speech.

The next two links are about writing. I chose the first one because it is one of the best examples of null content I've seen all week. You're all set to R&R down at the deep end of the philosophical pool when you realize that the author hasn't said a darn thing. My personal bug-a-bear is the concept of a higher morality. Higher than what? How much higher? (3 feet 9 inches) What kind of philosophical aether did you spin to provide the metric. It sounds a lot like the dreaded relativity that was dismissed in the first paragraph.

How do ideas have consequences: The intellectual bubble of a false, relativist understanding of freedom casts a shadow over our whole society and profoundly affects the terms of moral and political debates. So in a way it is everywhere. But if we limit ourselves to fighting its effects piecemeal we will often end up shadow-boxing, lunging at an elusive target that may seem to slip away only to reappear in more subtle and virulent forms.
Article about a scientific paper: In the standfirst I will make a fairly obvious pun about the subject matter before posing an inane question I have no intention of really answering: is this an important scientific finding?"

Here's a bit of history. It contains something about patronyms I sort of knew, but didn't. I think it's related to the way The Royals name themselves. (or not, I leave that exercise to the reader)

Homogenization and the State: Western state-making, writes Scott, in the seventeenth and eighteenth imposed permanent patronyms as a condition of citizenship. This was largely to help organize and to make it easier for states to properly perform a census.

A bit of business.

McDonald’s health insurance: So the big Wall Street Journal article today is about fast-food giant, McDonald’s, threatening that new provisions in the Affordable Care Act will mean that they may need to dump healthcare coverage for thousands of employees. Here’s a handy table of exactly what sort of insurance McDonald’s provides:

And of course, this , that, and the other about our current political zoo.

Meet Jim DeMint: OK, so we'd have missed out on some good songs, and that Ending Slavery thing was a good deal, and Ken Burns wouldn't be as rich and famous, and a lot of grizzled men who like to play soldier-man dress-up would have to go back to the Star Trek conventions where they belong.
The Angry Rich: Yet if you want to find real political rage — the kind of rage that makes people compare President Obama to Hitler, or accuse him of treason — you won’t find it among these suffering Americans. You’ll find it instead among the very privileged, people who don’t have to worry about losing their jobs, their homes, or their health insurance, but who are outraged, outraged, at the thought of paying modestly higher taxes.
A Real Conservative Foreign Policy: So what would a truly conservative foreign and defense policy look like? Such a policy would focus on separating the wheat from the chaff of what is truly important for protecting and advancing the vital interests of the United States rather than focusing on objectives, which, while worthy, do not have a significant impact on those interests.
Hegel on Wall Street: In pondering this issue I want to, again, draw on the resources of Georg W.F. Hegel. He is not, by a long shot, the only philosopher who could provide a glimmer of philosophical illumination in this area. But the primary topic of his practical philosophy was analyzing the exact point where modern individualism and the essential institutions of modern life meet. And right now, this is also where many of the hot-button topics of the day reside.

Like Kearny St. after the rain

2010-09-27T18:19:00.000-07:00

The result of an earthquake in Taiwan in April of this year.

Via: TYWKIDBI

No sir, I don't need any details

2010-09-27T07:17:00.000-07:00

We had a ship on Pier 30-32 this week. We were a bit short of proper security people, so I ended up standing at the gateway giving directions to the passengers. (no, the hippies and the sea lions both moved North a while back... yes the ferry boats dock at the ferry building, are you asking about something else? .. F line to the Castro, be back by 5:30) As you can tell from the frequency of my posting, I've been busy. The first link is a good old fashoned snarl.

A Brief History of Time Wasted: This cocksure claim begs to be differed with because humans in this post Y2K America really don’t need Satan to unleash the horrors of Hell anymore. We do quite well enough on our own, thank you very much. Being cheerful Americans, we’ve concocted our very own Hell-On -Earth with a Happy Face, a kind of sprightly ornamented Skinner Box Sit Com of relentlessly droning idiocy.

The next set involves the sciences and the uses the political class puts them to.

The Last Countdown: At present, it looks like there will be two more space shuttle launches. That’s it. Within a year, our nation will no longer have the capability to launch humans into space. For some this is a sure sign that America is sliding into mediocrity.
Bizarre Robot Traders: The trading bots visualized in the stock charts in this story aren't doing anything that could be construed to help the market. Unknown entities for unknown reasons are sending thousands of orders a second through the electronic stock exchanges with no intent to actually trade. Often, the buy or sell prices that they are offering are so far from the market price that there's no way they'd ever be part of a trade.
One step ahead of the future: What if there was a way to predict how a virus is going to evolve? What if technology could help peer into the future and see the next steps in mutation? What if there was a missile warning system for incoming viral threats?
Iran Fights Malware Attacking Computers: Stuxnet, which was first publicly identified several months ago, is aimed solely at industrial equipment made by Siemens that controls oil pipelines, electric utilities, nuclear facilities and other large industrial sites.

Media soul searching. The media doesn't have a soul, it's owned and operated. They must have pre-printed articles like this one, with fill in the blank areas for the specific mea culpa, because like the sales down this Christmas article you see every year, the same outline pops up on a weekly basis. If it draws eyeballs to advertising, it's professional journalism.

Forbes Article Spurs Media Soul Searching: I received a call yesterday from Nathan Verdi, a fact checker at Forbes, who was calling to fact check your article after it was published. (Is this how journalism works now?)

Keeping up on science fiction. As a side note, I haven't read Zero History yet and every time I stop to buy it, something comes up. Soon come on that one.

Science influenced by science fiction: There’s not a lot of science fiction around these days, so pretty soon science will have to put up with being influenced by paranormal romance.
I never minded that working scientists were influenced by science fiction, but I was always impressed by what bad science fiction scientists liked. It was usually junk that they had read back when they were 14, before they had to knuckle down and earn a doctorate.

The remainder of the links are political. I'll end with Lapham's interview: an upbeat reflection as opposed to the fear-mongering we recieve as daily fare.

The End of an Insurgency: As the Obama administration weighs its strategy, it would be wise to consider the history of 89 insurgencies in the second half of the twentieth century. How governments manage to defeat -- or be defeated by -- insurgencies reveals a number of lessons for Washington today.
Americans Turning Against Hegemonism: A large majority (69-28%) said that it was “mostly good” for Turkey and Brazil to become more independent of U.S. foreign policy, which suggests that the hysterical anti-Turkish reaction in the last few months has a very limited base of support. I should note that the questions might have biased the result towards the “mostly good” side by explaining that Turkish and Brazilian independence in foreign policy would mean that they do not rely on the U.S. as much.
Lewis Lapham on the end of capitalism: It’s faith in the spirit and mechanics and moral value of capitalism. It is a country of expectant millionaires. You have the notions of risk, of labor put to a productive use, deferred pleasure — ideas that come out of our Puritan ancestry.

Pete's Back from the Cape

2010-09-26T10:31:00.000-07:00

Sunspot in Detail

2010-09-20T20:21:00.000-07:00

NJIT Distinguished Professor Philip R. Goode and the Big Bear Solar Observatory (BBSO) team have achieved “first light” using a deformable mirror in what is called adaptive optics at BBSO. An image of a sunspot was published Aug. 23, 2010 on the website of Ciel et l'Espace, as the photo of the day.
“This photo of a sunspot is now the most detailed ever obtained in visible light,” according to Ciel et l’Espace. In September, the popular astronomy magazine will publish several more photos of the Sun taken with BBSO’s new adaptive optics system.

Moon Festival Java Time

2010-09-19T14:21:00.000-07:00

This week has been a stuff-'o'-rama extravaganza. Oracle / Java has a huge exhibition at Moscone. Streets blocked south of Market, shuttle busses all over the place, and everyone suddenly has an opinion about some aspect of cloud computing. It's also the weekend of the Moon Festival next door to me in Chinatown. Both events have conspired to produce a tsunami of folks that aren't quite sure where they are or what they're doing there. But everyone seems to be having a good time, and things sort themselves out by daybreak, so what the heck. The first three links are humor. (at least I hope they're humor).

How to Spot a Spy: So it is possible that there are spies in your midst, blending in and going about their daily business just the same as you, only covertly, and probably with a lot more riding on the outcome than most of our daily toiling. It is equally possible, of course, that our wild imaginings are creating spies out of people and situations that are perfectly innocent or un-spy related.
The Top 5 foreign policy initiatives of the Tea Party: But given the ever increasing strength spinning up this storm that's sweeping across the American landscape (Tropical Storm Sarah?), the world's questions will soon be answered. Tea Partiers will inevitably be elected. Maybe a bunch of them. And soon the world will have to deal with the policy initiatives of the Tea Party Caucus in the Congress.
Consensus Statement on Morality: I dunno why these big-brain “EDGE” guys are making such a fuss here about “morality.” Everybody knows that morality is whatever God says. And God says, whatever me, my best friends, and my hierarchical coalition say that God says.

The next set is a bit of theology paired with an essay denoting every worker's nagging feeling that they've just taken it in the touchis ... again.

Beck, Christianity, and Individual Rights: Traditional soteriology in the patristic era taught that Christ assumed human nature like ours in every respect except for sin, which meant that He assumed a sinless humanity that was substantiated in His Person, the Person of the Logos, the Second Person of the Trinity.
The Tea Party: There is a lot of truth to this. There is a visceral dislike among at least some conservative and Republican elites who have little more than disdain for the rank-and-file supporters who make their careers possible. While they are willing to tolerate the rank-and-file so long as they remain in a supporting role, they will absolutely refuse to accept them as equals, much less as leaders.

The next is our bit for the media / showbiz. The talking heads (Sunday yap-yap shows) are all a-flutter over Dinesh D'Sousa's Forbes article. Will some obscure academic bring down the President? Can his laser-sharp insights be denied? Will Scooby Doo get away from the lake monster? Some of these folks need to get out more. Maybe have a moon cake. They only bake this large a variety once a year, and they'll be gone by Tuesday too.

All Eyes on the Horse Race: We all know today’s news cycle as generated and perpetuated by the cable news/Internet bubble is famously ephemeral. It’s certainly nothing new to say that we live in an age when stories explode in clouds of links, only to disappear like so much smoke before the next “publish” button is clicked.

Here is a crypto page, with links to some more detailed papers.

Post Quantum Cryptography: Here's the one-minute introduction: "Imagine that it's fifteen years from now. Somebody announces that he's built a large quantum computer. RSA is dead. DSA is dead. Elliptic curves, hyperelliptic curves, class groups, whatever, dead, dead, dead. So users are going to run around screaming and say 'Oh my God, what do we do?

The remaining links are political in nature. The one that makes me think impure thoughts is the radical President essay. Written by an foreign policy expert, you can read it two ways. 1) As written or 2) Where would the writer's cushy internationalism, deal making, and generally unsupervised lifestyle go if America elected a President who was concerned about Americans. It must be so tough. (another round, and freshen the caviar. I'm about to generate an opinion.)

The Radical Presidency: After America's century-long rise to world hegemony, the presidency is a vastly different institution than it was in the days of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. The next few decades will be equally transformative, but in ways that will cause great difficulty for the sober formulation of U.S. foreign policy.
The insurgency next door: I note that Clinton used the phrase "We [the United States] face an increasing threat ...," not "they [Mexico]." The cartels are transnational shipping businesses, with consumers in the United States as their dominant market. The clashes over shipping routes and distribution power -- which over the past four years have killed 28,000 and thoroughly corrupted Mexico's police and judiciary -- could just as well occur inside the United States.
Interdependency Theory: In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, the economies of North America and Europe remain fragile while those of Asia continue to grow. This is especially true in the cases of China and India, which both boast near double-digit rates of growth and have therefore inspired confidence around the region.

Things not taught in Public School

2010-09-18T22:04:00.000-07:00

Buy the right house: Actually, that’s pretty much it. Federal farm subsidies are paid out to help keep farmers in business. The intention is to stabilize farmers’ income to counteract erratic weather and fluctuations on commodity prices. Unfortunately, the subsidies are notoriously mismanaged. In 2006, the Washington Post investigated the lax attitude surrounding the allocations of these funds. Surprisingly, the most egregious offenders were suburban McMansion dwellers. Reporters found that the cash payouts remained tied to the land-long after that land stopped being used for farming. The journalists also found realtors and developers advertising the subsidies as a selling point on lots and houses. In 2005, one area of Texas brought in $37 million in rice farm subsidies-most of it going to either non-farmers or farmers who no longer grew rice at all.

Squirrels in Your Hard Drive

2010-09-15T10:43:00.000-07:00

Pictured (1956) is an IBM 350 RAMAC drive with 5MB storage. Today's malware would barely fit on it, but a family of squirrels would probably find it a nice, warm, and dry place to nest.

Via: Susan

Three Penny Candy for a Nickel

2010-09-13T19:39:00.000-07:00

Responding to a question, Kalam said the nuclear non-proliferation treaty has become useless as cyber war would be more devastating for all the countries with networked financial and economic resources.

Rather than insert an extension into the previous page, I decided to post separately. I've spent a free afternoon trying to follow the ins and outs of our economic system, as opposed to the system of making and selling things. I also borrowed an e-book, Through the Looking Glass, from the library. Guess which one makes more sense. Hint: it also contains some great illustrations of what looks like a fun tea party.

A small entertainment can stand in for the current state of affairs, as best as I can sus them out. Suppose I asked you, the reader, to dig into your pocket and lend me three cents. The understanding would be that I would return your three cents in ten minutes along with an extra penny for your trouble. Now in our part of town, three cents is enough to buy a penny candy and you might assume that that was my plan. Nope. Upon receiving the pennies, I discover that their value is in fact one million dollars. Scoff all you want, but my rating agency has confirmed this fact. (it works real darn quick cuz I'm the owner and have a deadline) Since I want to turn this serendipitous windfall into regular money you can use at the grocer, I insure it with my very own insurance company. This is fine because now my insurance company has a million dollar account in paper debt. Discount the paper by $20 and AIG will buy it and in turn sell it to Uncle Sam. I'm left with an insured, AAA piece of paper, which I sell to the Fed, and still hold your three pennies. I return two pennies and intone the magic words: market swing, front loading, management fees, and of course, Our Way Of Life. Sadly the price of penny candy has gone up because the new millionaire on the block is willing to pay a nickel for them.

In real life, there are more people on the chain, so the individual profits are smaller, and somewhere on the concatenation a spoilsport might call the debt. It crashes, we bail the participants, a speech or two and maybe a baby for the wolves, then back to tending the Engine that Pulls our Economy. Sorry, even when you study, follow the math, look up the numbers and references, and make a good faith effort to understand, it makes about that much sense.

The Bill's Not Virtual

2010-09-13T10:54:00.000-07:00

Computerized Stock Trading: Most of those trades aren't coming from trigger-happy day traders and mutual fund managers with billions of dollars at their disposal. It's a flood of machine-gun speed fury coming from an army of computers programmed to obey complicated algorithms that are hyperactively buying and selling.

In other words, the original idea of a stock being a share or investment in a company, i.e. Aunt Mary saving for her retirement or Dr. Tan building a nest egg, has been ditched in favor of a Second Life style virtual game. Producing a product or service doesn't seem to have much to do with anything. All well and good as far as it goes, but add to this lark a Government entity (the Fed) that pegs the value of virtual money to real money, i.e. markers exchangeable for real goods or services , at a strict one to one. An electronic hick-up awards a million e-dollars to Princling, Princling and Lickdicker, the Fed dutifully prints up the cash, and the market readjusts the value of your stash to keep everything on an even keel. Boy howdy, you're in the game without having to lift a finger. Mention the idea of a market determined exchange rate from virtual to real and you too can learn the definition of constructional dyspraxia. (but it sez I produced the equivalent of 60,279 bushels of wheat by clicking this here button. It's right on the screen...) At your next dinner party, try serving a picture of the meal to get a sense of where the problem lies.

Dressed to Sell

2010-09-12T12:07:00.000-07:00

Today is the `Opera in the Park` show in Golden Gate. You get to hear some of the best singers of the season, grab a nosh while the glitterati are patting themselves on the back, and lounge in the sun. I'm in. The first set of links relate to economics.

Understanding America's Class System: For instance, they do not work for a living in the normal sense of a job, but rather obtain their income from abstractions such as investment and law, neither of which ever gave anybody a hernia or carpal tunnel. By comparison, the ruling class does not work at all.
Scott vs. Hayek: And because it is standardized, the person who comes from the corporate headquarters can come with a kind of checklist in which every place is more or less the same, and they can check on cleanliness, quality, productivity and conformity to the corporate standard.
Rome is Burning: This is a failure of our basic institutions of production. The job of the market is to bring together willing buyers with willing sellers in order to produce value. This is not happening and as a result literally trillions of dollars in value are not being produced.

Next a bit of hackery in the Sterling style.

Hacktivist: The deniable patriot hacktivists who work for Russia, China and India can talk just as patriotically as any Fox News fan. So, if you’re from USA and hammering Russia for underhanded cyberattacks, you’ve gotta figure out what America’s own “citizen hacker vigilantes” are up to someplace. And your answer is, you don’t have the foggiest idea. Not a clue, brother.

Now for the culture portion of the show.

Overcoming Obstacles: Pick the right time and day to approach the steps at the foot of Citadel Hill, Halifax’s central tourist site/fortress, and you will encounter a ragtag group of people behaving in a rather unusual way: balancing delicately on the railings, hanging off of the walls, leaping up over them from the sidewalk, and bantering on the hillside grass.
The OED: Bibliophilic considerations aside, however, the OED Online is my dictionary of choice. This remarkable resource displays both the second edition of the OED, published with great fanfare in 20 volumes in 1989, and the gradually accumulating third edition, begun in 2000 and due to be completed some decades hence.
Technique and Food: Technique is the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency in every field of human activity. As Jacques Ellul argues in The Technological Society, in such a society the multiplicity of means is reduced to one: the most efficient.

I was paging through the TV channels this morning (Sun) while I was cleaning the hovel. In almost every case a talking head was castigating the other media outlets and patting himself (or herself) on the back for the team's nuanced reporting of a report about the influence of an article about a report on a blog that said... In other words, the TV version of a circle jerk. The P.R. department has become a primary news source and some jake, with the approved ethno-signifiers (discrete gold cross nestled in a not so discrete décolleté, refined hint of indeterministic accent), gets elevated to expert status. (as long as you can read the teleprompter) Thank God for the cartoon channel. At least the inside references are both clever and inclusive. This little jeremiad brings us to the last links: politics

Obama, Anticolonial Hegemonist?: Dinesh D’Souza has authored what may possibly be the most ridiculous piece of Obama analysis yet written. He takes a number of decisions Obama has made on a grab-bag of issues, declares that they are “odd,” and then proceeds to explain the “oddness” he has perceived by cooking up a bizarre thesis that Obama is a die-hard anticolonialist dedicated to his father’s anticolonialist legacy.
The Tricky New American Moment: Let's take alliances first. Clinton celebrated NATO, ritualistically, as "the world's most successful alliance." Left unmentioned was the growing divergence among U.S. and European politicians—and their electorates—on its ultimate purpose.
Taming the Tea Parties: All of this is rank nonsense. Federal power has been exploding for decades under Republican as well as Democratic administrations. And it is not at all clear that what George Washington or even Dwight Eisenhower understood as “constitutional limits” on federal power were the ones that still existed under George W. Bush. What Lowry and his crew really want is to neutralize the Tea Party.

Satoshi Kon

2010-09-11T21:07:00.000-07:00

Satoshi Kon, a Japanese filmmaker and comic-book artist whose dazzling visual compositions and humane, emotionally resonant stories won him a devoted following in animation circles and beyond, died in Tokyo on Tuesday. He was 46.

Obituary in the NYT and a rememberance by Michael Swanwick here.

Oh Boy, Comics

2010-09-11T17:42:00.000-07:00

For comic fans, history fans, and comics history fans, the Digital Comics Museum is offering downloads and scans of public domain comic books from the 1940s and ’50s. There are a massive amount of titles and issues available, from Captain Science to Sherlock Holmes to Frisky Fairy Tales to the chaste Sweet Sixteen Magazine, and many, many more. You can also find the very same horror comics that led to the creation of the Comics Code Authority. Via: Tor.com

The link is at Digital Comic Museum. Yes, they do have Cow Puncher Comics.
Note: If you download in .cbz, you can simply rename it .zip; if you choose .cbr, you can find a free reader on google. .rar you can use RARfrog, again free on google.

Banana Boat

2010-09-11T17:18:00.000-07:00

Via: BoingBoing. No point, rhyme or reason as far as I can tell. It's just a banana boat.

Jerry Lee Lewis

2010-09-11T16:41:00.000-07:00

September 29, seventy five years old.

Million Breasted Cow Suckers

2010-09-06T20:07:00.000-07:00

Labor day is almost over. One of the weekend's headlines was 'The CEOs that fired the most people received the largest salary". My personal bug-a-bear this week is Senator Simpson and the million breasted cow suckers. My guess is that he'll stop collecting on his senator's pension, special medical insurance deal, and the other perks he didn't pay into as soon as he realizes that that would help the debt... Then again, maybe not. Ragging on Vietnam vet's disability benifits is a pretty long stretch for a guy who spent his two years driving a desk around in Germany. Parallel universe, whiskey in the kool-aid, not enough ventilation in the limo, who the heck knows.

The first links are cyber security related. The one about cracking the quantum encryption shows a major weak point. It was in fact cracked at a hardware point, which is where most monkey business is done. The weak spot isn't some Alice, hidden in an underground bunker in West Slovinia, it's at the origination and destination points. With Homeland handing out Top Secret ratings hither and thiver combined with the turf-walls that seem to grow like mushrooms, COMSEC security becomes a bit illusionary.

Successful Attack Against a Quantum Cryptography System: Quantum cryptography is often touted as being perfectly secure. It is based on the principle that you cannot make measurements of a quantum system without disturbing it. So, in theory, it is impossible for an eavesdropper to intercept a quantum encryption key without disrupting it in a noticeable way, triggering alarm bells.
NEW DELHI: Borrowing a page from China’s art of cyber war, the government is giving shape to an IT infrastructure setup manned by a small army of software professionals to spy on the classified data of hostile nations by hacking into their computer systems. (((Lemme know if you find their shoulder-patch.)))
HP Holds Navy Network ‘Hostage’ for $3.3 Billion: It’s become a Washington cliché that the military and the intelligence community rely too much on outside contractors. Everyone from President Obama to Defense Secretary Robert Gates has promised to cut back on Pentagon outsourcing. But the Navy’s ongoing inability to separate itself from Hewlett-Packard – after years of trying – shows how difficult that withdrawal is going to be.
Iran to search for WMD on its own: Now, in the case of Iran, we know very little about this new search enterprise; some fear that it might create some kind of an intranet in Iran -- but that's about it. Let's assume it would be very expensive and very ineffective -- not unreasonable assumptions to make in the context of a sluggish state like Iran, which has a few other things to take care of before exploring the world of Web2.0 in all its glory.

Next is a continuation of the computer meme. The commentator, Marc Thiessen, comes across as a tough American hard-butt, but the record shows him to be a Toupac, in the limo headed South when the going gets tough. He hasn't got the message that the real tough guys don't have to tell you over and over about how manly their manhood is.

The Best Part About WikiLeaks: Honestly, the best part about the whole Wikileaks phenomenon is the spectacle of Mark Thiessen saying that America should invade Iceland to kill or capture Julian Assange.
McClatchy D.C. Law
Philip Brennan

The next two could be filed under philosophy.

Does Language control thought: Eventually, Whorf’s theory crash-landed on hard facts and solid common sense, when it transpired that there had never actually been any evidence to support his fantastic claims. The reaction was so severe that for decades, any attempts to explore the influence of the mother tongue on our thoughts were relegated to the loony fringes of disrepute.
Christianity and the West: Whenever I see or hear politically conservative and religiously traditionalist Christians make an argument like this, it brings me up a little short. There is some truth in this claim, but it seems to me that it is especially important for traditionalist Christians to distinguish between arguing for the undeniable Christian heritage of Western societies and the importance of Christianity for the flourishing of those societies, which Christians should argue for, and making claims for the direct link between modern political arrangements and the Gospel.

And last, that darn old politics.

How Washington Rules: Worldly ambition inhibits true learning. Ask me. I know. A young man in a hurry is nearly uneducable: He knows what he wants and where he’s headed; when it comes to looking back or entertaining heretical thoughts, he has neither the time nor the inclination. All that counts is that he is going somewhere. Only as ambition wanes does education become a possibility
Whitewashing the Failure in Iraq: On the eve of President Obama's speech to the nation on Iraq, some of the people who dreamed up this foolish war or helped persuade the nation that it was a good idea are getting out their paintbrushes and whitewash. I refer, of course, to the twin op-eds in today's New York Times by former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and neoconservative columnist David Brooks.
The Nuclear Domino Myth: But there's one problem with this "nuclear domino" scenario: the historical record does not support it. Since the dawn of the nuclear age, many have feared rapid and widespread nuclear proliferation; 65 years later, only nine countries have developed nuclear weapons.

Who gets the new toy

2010-09-05T19:15:00.000-07:00

Via: Singularity Hub - Yet what Uncle Sam has over many other bio-inspired robots is its modular design. Built from repeated segments of sensors and actuators, modular bots let you construct larger machines out of relatively simple building blocks. As we’ve discussed before, modular robotics also allow the possibility for robot to self assemble in the field, and to be easily repaired if a section is damaged.

Right off the bat, I can see this being useful to rescue squads. Mount an IR camera and a microphone cluster uplinked to a Fourier processor and you could hunt for survivors in mines or earthquake damaged buildings. On the other hand, Homeland's terror apparatchik might want to classify it for its own use. If it can fit up the loo pipe, it must be publicly accessible; no warrant needed.

Kyoto No-No

2010-09-04T20:17:00.000-07:00

Via: BoingBoing. Living next to S.F. Chinatown, I've become used to somewhat ungainly translations.You know the drill: tense mixups, singular / plural mixups, elisions, and idioms that just don't fit. On the other hand, I've seen Cantonese speaking waitresses do their best to hide a smile when a Mr. Multicultural attempts to order dinner off the chalkboard. As great as it is, machine translation (google for most of us) can still let a few boners through. (so to speak)

Tushery

2010-09-03T21:06:00.000-07:00

That's another way to put it.

Hurricane Earl from above

2010-09-03T09:22:00.000-07:00

NASA / Hurricane Earl

In this photograph captured with a digital SLR camera by NASA astronaut Douglas Wheelock, Earl had a distinct eye that spanned about 17 miles (28 kilometers). Most of the storm had a seemingly uniform top, though the bottom edge of the image gives some sense of the towering thunderheads forming over the ocean. The solar panels of the ISS remind us that the sun is still shining, at least on ISS Expedition 24.

Auditions for something

2010-09-01T22:00:00.000-07:00

Via: Presurfer - Somebody has way too much time on his hands.

Downtown Octopus

2010-09-01T12:19:00.000-07:00

Flurb # 10

2010-08-31T20:18:00.000-07:00

Flurb

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

The Eco side of the Street

2010-08-31T13:50:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-31T10:58:00.000-07:00

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.

That week in March

2010-08-28T20:57:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-28T11:49:00.000-07:00

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.

Chipper-Away

2010-08-27T09:15:00.000-07:00

Fountain of Bedlam

2010-08-22T17:55:00.000-07:00

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 2_nt 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.

Stripping on Holey Ground

2010-08-21T13:20:00.000-07:00

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

Aunt Tiffy's Cupcakes

2010-08-20T20:35:00.000-07:00

But It's Good for Us

2010-08-20T09:13:00.000-07:00

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.

Sand in your Juristocracy

2010-08-18T09:33:00.000-07:00

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.

Realtime US Debt

2010-08-16T12:28:00.000-07:00

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.

Looks Like Fun

2010-08-15T19:02:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-15T11:42:00.000-07:00

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).

I've worked there

2010-08-14T20:08:00.000-07:00

For Your Kitchen

2010-08-13T17:19:00.000-07:00

Fermi Business

2010-08-12T11:39:00.000-07:00

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

Tchotchkes from Abroad

2010-08-12T09:13:00.000-07:00

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.

Perseid Shower

2010-08-10T21:33:00.000-07:00

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.

In or Out

2010-08-08T16:06:00.000-07:00

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 2^nt 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.

So What

2010-08-07T18:38:00.000-07:00

Miles Davis - John Coltrane

Friday Morning

2010-08-06T11:01:00.000-07:00

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

Curmudgeonry

It started as a review

2010-08-04T17:05:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-04T14:43:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-04T11:21:00.000-07:00

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

The Island

2010-08-02T21:33:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-02T11:08:00.000-07:00

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

Dat Dere

2010-08-01T15:57:00.000-07:00

Does Everything Have a Meta

2010-08-01T11:46:00.000-07:00

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.