Will of the People

Was the failure of Christianity to develop anything like Halakah or Sharia an enabler for the birth of liberalism in europe? Could we simplify this to christianity as a social movement, with rare exceptions (e.g. Aquinas), neglecting philosophy, leading to its eventual weakening in western society? Were the foundations of modern secular law made possible by there never having been a substantial Christian Legal theory? Were there pressures to develop anything akin to this when Christians, living under Islamic multiculturalism, were left to organise their internal affairs while rubbing shoulders with those organised under a beth din or sharia courts?

I admire Obama for being willing to sum up, in Cairo, most of the relevant issues between the various Islamic cultures and the various Western cultures. Israel, particularly with its current president( Read more... )

I would probably kill without guilt if anyone did anything like this to my cats, quite possibly to pets in general. This might have to be filed into the category of "understandable acts that the legal system should probably not protect" - I am uncertain if it should be described as reasonable. On a personal level, I treat my cats as kin and would defend or avenge them using that same framework. I am uncertain how a good legal system *should* handle either direct and horrific abuse as described in that article or defense of them - should deadly force be acceptable to protect one's pets or animals in general? I suspect revenge is and should remain extralegal - even as people may feel commanded to recognise it in their personal morality, the tension between that personal mandate and the legal punishment (even if mitigated by a lesser penalty) is useful in keeping endless chains of blood feud from forming. Recognising the usefulness of such tensions seems like something a legal framer should consider, as well as secular notions of more than just Fard-Haram - I like the notion of having a more nuanced spectrum, perhaps something like the Islamic spectrum of Required-Virtuous-Neutral-Repugnant-Forbidden and with a commitment to "paving the path" and granting greater weight in situations of legal conflict for things that are seen as virtuous.

I have been wrestling with a terrible headache all day.

I find it incredibly irritating when people can't manage to talk about divisive topics without reverting to a mental age of 12. A difference between friends and SOs is that it's pretty tacky to try to tell friends how to be - they're more of a take-me-or-leave-me type of thing. It's also not cool to return the rudeness. When people are rude enough though, it's not fun fighting the urge to just leave, or alternatively being pissed for a fair time after that. Sigh.

It's amusing that almost every unused storefront in SqHill has been rented by the Obama campaign - I wonder if they've taken into account that some slices of liberals take individualism to the point where they (irrationally to the extent that it goes against their clear interests) will be inclined to jump off of a bandwagon that's oversold. A variant on that is perhaps noble (not being inclined to jump on a bandwagon one doesn't believe in/know enough about for the sake of being there with everyone else), but maybe overselling is risky. Or perhaps not - maybe people who are like that are not common enough to be worth worrying about. McCain supporters are fairly rare in town (as far as I can tell, only a handful of the Frummers in SqHill and very few others are visibly for him here, by the house signs).

In the literature particularly targeting SqHill, there's some mention of his support for Israel as a Jewish state - ( Read more... )

Saw someone who looked a bit like Lizza at the 61c today, heart skipped a beat and made my mood much worse... which reminds me of when I was in my hotel room in SF last week and nearly fell over from shock when I saw myself in an unexpected mirror while I was not very clothed. There's something interestingly involved in those first fractions of a second of seeing another person - a "HEY! MENTAL ADJUSTMENT!" type of feeling that's interesting to try to capture the flavour of.

I'm a bit weirded out that I've found a bug in ATI drivers for Xorg that results in artifacts that can be captured with xwd (and other screen-capture programs). Hardware acceleration is sometimes weird.

I got a good chuckle out of this. I'm also amused (mostly unrelated) that if one can still think with a black hat on, eventually one's good ideas for what one would do if one were actually a spammer or otherwise malicious will be figured out and applied by actual spammers, completely independently. Convergence in action...

Geek culture distribution: ( Read more... )

Onto news and thoughts daran: ( Read more... )

Strange daydream - really old butterflies with long beards. Do butterflies really get old?

3 bundles of people that are particularly harmful to the world:

• Michael Hayden - Appointed by BushJr to head the CIA, responsible for a cover-up involving torture by the CIA .. also responsible for said torture. IMO, belongs in prison (note that that article shows us one thing good about McCain - as a torture victim, we can expect that if elected, he would end this whole torture matter the right way. Alas, McCain is neither particularly otherwise likable nor electable)
• Christian missionaries, who apparently recently lost a few people to some murders. On some level I sympathise, but their mission hurts the world.
• Settler movements in Israel - Disliked by mainstream Israeli society, the same society is too squeamish to approve of actually reigning them in. Like the Hamas people with their "don't give up one inch" philosophy, they're a serious barrier to peace. A bit more on that...

At one point, I read about an idea that history, as we know it, is over, because the whole world is becoming democratic and democratic states don't engage each other in war. The idea seemed to make sense at the time, although since then I've come to grossly dislike it - it is a seductive lie ( Read more... )

A ( Read more... )

Google maps has some new toys hooked up - street level maps are now visible (and slightly creepy), elevation maps are attached too. Integration between Google Earth and Google Maps is presumably a design goal. Amazon recently made what might be the first likely-to-make-it-big eBook reader -- the Kindle. This may be a success partly because they have relationships with enough publishing houses and partly because they have what looks like a good distribution system (cellphone-CDMA as the underlying transport). I expect Apple to respond to this in some way - as they're both the only two major companies that are pushing small-payments (maybe that'll become a stylish word like micropayments someday), they both are competing to become broad-scope information brokers (see Amazon's music store), and they're exploring non-computer-centric ways to handle the information age, they're set to become direct competitors in what's likely to be the next stage of the media/information markets.

Murakami's "Wild Sheep Chase": Just finished, again he captures the essential loneliness that's such a central, unwelcome theme in my life. It's quite a good book. I often spot other Murakami readers around, and wonder if they're part of that kinship. Just as Milan Kundera's book really resonates with some people...

Israeli-Palestinian peace conference in Annapolis: possibly interesting if anything comes out of it. The success/failure of the Gaza experiment may be pertinent - as Hamas is opposed by virtually all players there, the Israeli pullback and aftermath may have to be viewed as a sign of a risk if further steps in that direction are made. Naturally, there are mirror-image statements made by certain people in both societies saying, almost word-for-word, "nobody has the right to give up an inch". It'd be interesting to get Hamas's Haniyya and Yesha Council's Rabbi Lior in the same place - words of "cleansing" the country of each other.. I'm sure they'd have a lot to talk about.

Um, and also it's awesome when journalists write tech stories where it's obvious they have no clue what they're talking about.

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Reflecting on Lebanon, it appears that there's a general consensus that things didn't go as planned, from Hezbollah itself (which states that it would not have abducted the soldiers if it had known the results), members of the Israeli military, a number of Israeli people, etc etc. The United Nations isn't exactly to "blame", as it's acting within its intended purpose, but in this case that purpose is harmful. War and eradication of forces are not always a bad thing -- it can act to solve otherwise perplexing situations in a (hopefully) swift, decisive way. The horrors of war are well known, but in many cases, the horrors of peace (or, rather, the situations that peace can prolong) are worse. I believe this to be such a case - from the perspective of the Hezbollah supporters, a major reason for their organisation's existence will be stifled by peacekeeping forces for a bit (as is always the case, and as France has complained bitterly about, peacekeeping forces are often withdrawn at the first sign of conflict, making them more a line in the sand than anything). From the perspective of the Israelis, Hezbollah will take missles off the menu for how they attack their counry (at least for awhile), returning to other tactics. The soldiers over which the whole mess are still held by Hezbollah, and probably won't be freed unless some dangerous criminals are freed from jail in exchange. In a sense, both Israel and Hezbollah have won some propogandic points -- Israel has fought for its abducted soldiers and shown that it's not going to sit idly by while it's attacked, and Hezbollah got to play soldier with its army, fighting "the" enemy. In the end, because the conflict was ended early, nothing was solved. Long-time readers of my blog understand that my preferred outcome would be for Israel to wrap up in purging Hezbollah completely from southern Lebanon, killing all of its members, providing some reconstruction aid, freeing the abductees, and heading back home. Instead, we get this false peace..

I've been having a grand time loaning out books to different friends and trying to figure out their tastes based on what they like. It also gives me warm fuzzies because I'm committed, both emotionally and ideologically, to resource reuse, and the idea of sharing stuff when it's unused makes me feel good about life. My library of books is finite but large - eventually I expect to run out of suitable books for each person, but until that happens... and speaking of which, if any other Pittsburghers want to come by with a backpack and borrow 10 or 20 books, if I know you and we're on relatively friendly terms, drop me an email -- it'd be my pleasure.

It's irritating that all the pens I ever get at work eventually migrate home, requiring me to get yet more pens, which within a week or two, also migrate home. My theory is that the reason for this is that I empty my pockets at the end of the day before sleep (which is more often at home than in my office), and don't tend to fill them back up again with the same stuff after waking up in the morning. Given that I don't use pens much in general (I'm computerbound, mostly) outside of work (yay paperwork!), ..

It's kind of cool how readable Frisian is to an English speaker.

The weather is now becoming intolerably cold again -- this is likely the last day I'll be able to wear shorts without checking the weather first. Given that I now seem to be comfortable with blue jeans and belts, I should probably go clothes shopping again sometime soon. Unfortunately, wearing gloves all the time looks funny - I wish there were a good way to deal with my hands being cold all the time. I hate Northern weather. Brr.

Last night, after work, I enlisted the aid of Eric to go to a local driver's license place to renew my (now kind of vestigeal) license. I shaved off my beard, partly for the new photo, partly because I'm taking a plane trip soon, and partly because CMU is making me get a new ID (in the switch to "smart" IDs). I might grow back the facial hair after all this is wrapped up, I might not. My first impressions after shaver and scissors were resting were generally that I looked like a child. The second was to note that without my glasses on, my perpetual black eyes (my mom gets them too, seasonally) make me look really ill. Driver's license cameras, as usual, love me, and my driver's license looks great.

A question: Why do I oppose America's "War on Terror" and approve of Israel's actions in Lebanon? There are several points that seperate the two -- the terror war is ill-defined, more PR than reality (given that the U.S. created most of these groups and has an incredibly dirty past), impossible to win because it's based off of false understandings of human nature, and, more importantly, isn't even meant to be won. The Israeli invasion has a clear objective (wipe out Hezbollah or at least prevent them from cross-border activities), the possibility of success, it's good for the world (and might even be good for Lebanon, although in an incredibly embarassing way), and it meets a pressing need. The fact that it's been conducted in as humane a way as possible, and that it's been Hezbollah forces that have been doing their best to engineer as much bad PR and death of lebanese citizens also speaks well of Israel's conduct in this manner, accidents notwithstanding. I am not a consistent booster or detractor of Israel, but this matter I believe it's doing a good thing, and doing it pretty well.

In either case, this American "war on terror" is something that I visualise as a "reformed" mob boss going after their former thugs, twisting truth like a funhouse mirror in order to pretend they act out of virtue.

It appears that yesterday's projections were in error -- Hamas gained control of the majority of the Palestinian parliament in the recent election. This is tragic -- it is the worst possible timing, and almost guarantees disaster -- Hamas is uninterested in peace. Fatah is uninterested in coalition, and is trying to sidestep the government. I fully sympathise with the decision of most governments not to deal with a Hamas government.

In a (probably unrelated) problem, I made an error in Bioinformatics today, having forgotten my classes-fu and writing an essay on a quiz where a short answer was called for, and thus lacking time to handle the other questions. Argh. At least the quizzes are extra credit. Meh.

The law of conservation of car brokenness is, as far as I can tell,inviolable. As my car recently had its broken power steering fixed,at great cost to myself, the brokenness has moved into the electricdoor locks -- for one of the doors, they no longer reliably lock orunlock it. This, fortunately, can wait until the parts that Fnord wantsto fix due to a factory recall are ready for service, at which point Iwill also get the (long overdue) emissions test for my car. I am botheredthough that the cost of recent and expected future repairs are not toofar from the resell value of the bloody thing. Cars suck.

I've had some more time to think about the Qatar thing, and things areslightly more clear. We'll see how things go. While I've been floating theidea with some friends, I've heard from some of them, mostly Orthodox buta few others, that I seem to be looking for something, and the context andphrasing seemed to imply that they think I'm going to find, or at least amlooking, for some kind of religious or philosophical insight, from the middleeast. I'm surprised to hear it from so many different people in what I assumeis unconnected conversations between people. Could it be that they knowsomething about me that I haven't seen yet? One of the things that acceptingthe lack of free will entails is that our behavior is, in theory, predictable,with high-level patterns that can be predicted with more accuracy, especiallywhen judgement and values are involved, than simple, limited-constraint taskslike choosing a number. It is indeed possible that my friends know me betterthan I do myself on this point. That said, to the extent that I do know myself,I think the Qatar thing, if I were to do it, would be about having a lifeexperience and learning a lot. Contrary to the worry of some people, I don'tsee myself having experiences that would cause me to become Muslim, or religiousin any sense. While I am committed to evaluating that question with my mind andevidence in a fair manner, it is possible that I may be overwhelmed by emotionor similar, and that may drive my emotional and intellectual sides intoconflict. I simply trust that, as has always been the case in the way I live mylife, that I will keep what I wish to believe along with my core values, andaway from my perceptions of truth. I have always felt that the evidence, farfrom being ambiguous, has pointed us with great certainty to the conclusion thathumanity created gods in order to fill emotional and societal needs, and thatthis need has led a lot of people to make things up to support a dream theydesperately need to be true. I doubt learning more about the world is likelyto provide me evidence to the contrary.

Last week, Norman Finkelstein came to speak at CMU.The topic of his talk was Israeli-Palestinian history, including his effortsto debunk what was once the dominant historical view of the foundation of thestate of Israel. The way he described it, it was once mainstream thought thatIsrael was largely empty during the British mandate period, and that the peopleknown as the Palestinians are a people with a manufactured past, in realitybeing largely people from neighbouring countries that poured in to stop thecreation of a Jewish state. I have occasionally heard friends, in Columbus,talking about things that appeared to derive from that idea of history, butnever had the full story of what was once believed. From what some of my friendswere saying who were suggesting that I come to the presentation, he wasconsiderably more "out there" than he actually seemed to be -- they claimed thathe had become an anti-semite and a holocaust denier. I have not read his bookon the Holocaust, but from what I read of the reviews on Amazon,it doesn't look likely that he's doing anything at all like denying theHolocaust, nor did he seem to be doing so in the talk. He is very goodat hiding his thoughts, he's what he seems to be -- a moderate scholarattacking use of horrible abuse as an excuse for what he views as furtherabuse, or something between. After his speech, and a response by a localcommunity leader, both of which were pretty civil, things devolved a bit --a few of the Orthodox in the audience made disturbances during the Question andAnswer session afterwards. It was, however, overall a civil and interestingevent. People of every stripe were handing things out throughout, some of thehandouts being quite interesting.

Two interesting issues from the local jewish community's handout -- is itanti-semitic or a double standard to single out Israel for abuses when otherabusers are not sanctioned? My thoughts? Perhaps it is. It may be an issuewith the U.N. being nation-democratic, with each country getting a voice inthe general assembly, and Israel being the odd one out. We can imagine thatAfrican nations, many of them ruled by warlords in suits who commit abuses fargreater than in western nations, would tend to stick together and forgive eachother's abuses, making sanctions and U.N. criticism of them difficult. Thispoint is made quite clear when genocide continues in Dafur and the U.N. doesn'teven have the clout to call it genocide. Of course, part of that may also bethat every effort is made to keep countries with a backwards political systemin the U.N., and too much criticism would probably convince those countries to,en masse, pack their bags and withdraw from the U.N., giving up on all thelighter forms of political pressure than resolutions and war that the U.N. canuse to liberalise them. Israel is a first-world nation, and so perhaps part ofthe reason that it's judged to a higher standard is that it listens tocriticism, it's not likely to leave the U.N., and people percieve that becauseit is first-world, it has a higher bar to meet when it comes to its conduct. Theother countries which the paper compares it to, including China, Iran, andSyria, are all considered second-world countries. The second issue is one ofnational legitimacy, which is at the heart of the issue. The paper they handedout likes to call things anti-semetic, and while I suspect that this is an abuseof the term that makes it harder for them to call things anti-semetic when theyclearly are (boy who cried wolf, etc), that's an aside. It claims that thedenial of Israel's right to exist is always anti-semetic, arguing that if otherpeoples have the right to live in their homeland, then Jewish people have asimilar right. It does suggest some points of further investigation -- whatconstitutes a people? Who decides where their homeland should be, or is that ahistorical question? What happens when more than one people have had, atdifferent historical periods, the same homeland, or more than one homeland?When we decide what constitutes a people, should all of them be allocated ahomeland who do not yet have one? If, for example, we look partway downmy family tree on the patrilinear path, we find Clan Gunn ofthe highlands of Scotland. If I were to imagine a homeland for them, I mightdecide that Scotland and Ireland are the homeland of the Gaelic people, andsuggest that they be split from England. Should I expect Israel-supporters tosupport me in that idea because each of the peoples of the world deserves ahomeland? Oh, and what about the Picts who were there before the HighlandScots invaded? They have a similar right to that land, no? Going further backinto history, we find that Clan Gunn has ties to some ancient Norse king,Olaf the Black. Is that another homeland? In summary, I think that ancestralhomelands are a poor way to try to build support for the placement of a modernnation, and an appeal to their usage is poorly thought-out and would reopen anumber of long-settled disputes. All that being said, I don't think Israelshould be disbanded -- I hope to see a one-state solution that would secularizeand liberalize all the people within it. I don't know if a normal democracy withnormal liberalism would last long over there, and I do sympathize with theconcern that a huge influx of arab voters would dismantle relative civilizationand install Shari'a. The last thing I would want to see would be a societywhich is so young and advanced for its age crumbling back into agrarianism.

Yesterday, there was a large antiwar protest in Squirrel Hill. I only heardabout it the night before, and unfortunately didn't arrive before everyoneelse, but I got some good pictures. There were, as usual, interesting peopleto talk to, music ranging from decent to quite bad, and a lot of shoutingthat rallied the crowd (and irritated me). After a lot of that, we all "marched"down to CMU. We passed by some frat houses, and they, knowing what was coming,held up signs saying "use soap", "nuke paris", and "kill more iraqis". A strongpolice presence stopped much violence from happening. Apparently, both countyand city police were used -- the county sent a number of police on horses, andthe city sent several cruisers. When we got near CMU, there were some CMUpolice as well guarding CMU's campus. I saw a few people from Coffee Tree,another friend, and spent a good part of the time there with Dmitriy (who alsotook a lot of photos). One of the things we talked about issomething I'm curious about regarding these events -- how many of the peoplethere have actually thought deeply about the issues relating to war and globalpolitics? If I were more of a journalist type, I would've given a number ofpeople my business card and asked them to meet me for lunch, asking them anumber of questions about various types of political issues. I wonder how muchconsistancy would actually be there. Maybe I would've been surprised about theresults though. Hmm.

Afterwards, with friends, I had a wine which may rival Sauterne for positionof being my favourite wine -- it's a kosher white wine called Bartenura Moscato D'asti. It's very tasty and not overpowering. I'll probablyget some to keep around the house sometime next week.

A question to my readers -- would you rather live in the dystopia ofBrave New World or that of 1984? Which of them goes further from modern,western societies? Would your choice remain the same if you also had theworlds of Farenheit 451 and Gilliam's Brazil available? It's worth notingthat in each of those works, the story focused on someone that, more orless, was going against the grain of society. Would someone going againstthe grain of a western society today look much different, taken to theextent that the protagonists from those works went against society? I thinkit would be interesting to do a dystopian-perspective work set in an existingliberal society, to explore the genre.

I've made good progress on POUND. It's probably safe to say that, while it'sby no means done, I'm ready to deploy the next version whenever I get aroundto it. I may let it bake a bit further, but it's at least as capable as thecurrent version is in almost all areas, and has several other goodies. TheWikilanguage parser still totally sucks, but until I start getting otherpeople hosting their blogs on my site, I'll have time to fix it up and can avoidthe rough bits.

I'm still having issues with depression though. Sigh.

I keep on thinking I've written about this, and perhaps I have, but I'munable to find the entries where I have, so please bear with me if Irepeat myself. I have always found it disappointing that some parts of theleft, often especially fellow communists, have a very one-sided viewpointof the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Of course, to briefly digress, thebook I got in Amsterdam was aware and mournful of a general trend of wollythinking in some Communist circles, pointing out that how some people,unwilling to accept that Trotsky predicted the Soviet Union would eitherfail or be reformed by the end of World War II, and was wrong in that prediction,instead decided that the war had not ended when it did, but had just entered anew phase. This trend is, alas, not unique to Communists, but is still a shameto see. While I think that Zionism is a poor fit with Communism nowadays, I findit odd that Communists find the idea of Palestinian nationalism to be in linewith their position. The Shari'a (religious law) that is present in most Islamiccountries (Turkey and Saddam's Iraq being exceptions) is not at all compatiblewith Socialism -- Marx's ideas on religion and ways to run a country place hisideas very distant from religious rule. It is easy to forget, when advocatinga Palestinian POV, what kind of a state that would be. On my trip to Europe, inthe Anne Frank House, was a wonderful exhibit discussing freedom of expressionversus protection against discrimination. It involved a presentation of varioussituations where the two ideals conflict, and had all present in the room voteon which ideal was more important. The lights in the ceiling, red and blue,lit up with each button press, to illustrate where the consensus lay. It wasmade clear to me that the American way of looking at how these ideals interplayis just one perspective, one rather different from what might broadly be calledthe European perspective in some areas. It touched on a former politician inthe Netherlands, Pim Fortuyn in one of the cases presented.To summarize the wikipedia article, he was someone who would be difficult tocategorize in American left-right terms, or even the 4-poles system theLibertarians invented to handle their stand. His views on politics can broadlybe considered very liberal, but not at all multiculturalist, instead pushingliberal values as things to be preserved at the cost of tolerance and neutralitytowards conservative elements. He advocated changing immigration rules to barimmigrants, particularly Muslims, who would make the country less tolerant. Inan interview showed in the presentation, he indicated that the hard-won rightsof gays (he was openly gay) and similar groups must not be lost for the sake ofimmigrants. He was assasinated while running for office. In some ways, Fortuyn'sstand can be compared to that of Stanley Fish.This connects to Israel, and to me, in that as I've become more educated onthe specifics of modern Islam, I've slowly acquired a determination to goagainst advances of Shari'a or anything similar into western culture. This putsme at odds against the article in the picture above in the socialist newsletter.The headline reads, Islamophobia is Racism. I disagree -- while the tie ofShari'a and Islam is not watertight, it is fairly strong, and in any case, Islamrepresents a source of highly conservative values. Worrying about this, and thechanges they bring in government is not racism, although it might rightly becalled religious or political discrimination. One possible claim is thatCommunist systems, as well as europe in general, are opening the gateway to thedestruction of their liberal culture by allowing immigration. A fully open anddemocratic society must, by some reckonings, make that invitation -- todiscriminate and/or manage things of this nature is contrary to the ideals ofdemocracy and liberalism. Israel's situation is additionally complex becausethere is the idea of a favoured people who the nation is for, rather than afavoured set of ideals that are to be preserved. Fish and Fortuyn suggest thatthe notion of universal tolerance is broken, and contains within it a recipefor an end to liberalism.

All of this touches lightly on one possible view of some general perspectivesacross the divide between the traditional left and traditional right. One sidesees itself as the guardian/restorer of traditional values. It's end is topromote old, good culture, and to fight the other side's tug on society towardshedonism. Another side sees itself as the bringer of a new enlightenment,struggling to clear the barbarism of the past. Peacemakers like to pretendthere's a way to synthesize these perspectives into a new vision, acceptableto both. I think it's a pipe dream that hopes to confuse people intoagreement.

Fingers flicker over the numbers, ink bleeds from the incision left by thepen, as the math problem is slowly opened to dessicate, the knots untied.She kept thinking about what he said, wondering what he meant, how much hehad said. Surface meanings, sign of the integral. Language, folds of meaning,multiple layers in every word choice we make, words to speak, to conceal, tomanipulate, to stage. We may take the derivative, only take the surface meaning,L'Hopital can get us there, usually.. That never was how we talked though,dancing among fine china, free to half-acknowledge things we arn't ready tosay in the plain, free to ask, "If I were to say XXX, what would you think?"..And then, the QED.. The pen rolls over the paper, absorbing a trace of thestill drying ink as her footsteps slowly fade.

My laptop lives again -- Dell's replacement AC adapter arrived this morning.I am looking forward to having the two spares I ordered though.. I can leaveone plugged in at work, the other at home, and this one can be my traveladapter. I think the continual folding/unfolding involved in travel is probablywhat eventually wears them down. Ahh, my NeurosII is also almost here.It originated in Illinois, was in Columbus yesterday, and they tried to deliverit today (but couldn't find my office). I had it redirected to my home. It'stime to ship the old recorder to its new home. I guess Columbus is one of thosetowns where it's convenient to use them as a hub -- despite being a moderatelybig city, land is cheap, transportation is easy, and there are plenty of waysto get in and out of the city. There are some smaller cities I notice, throughmy FedEx/UPS shipments, that are also frequent storage/hub places, Stanton PA,I believe, is the nearest. I wonder if the cities offer any incentives tocompanies to locate there for that purpose.. harmful competition? Hmm.

Yesterday, at lunch, I again had Srees (unless I have somewhere else I want toeat, it's kind of a default for me), and while sitting on the cut, tossing outrice to attract birds, I got a squirrel as well. It came close enough to methat it was well within my armspan, and I got to watch it for about 10 minutesbefore it ate enough and wandered off. It was quite a treat -- I often get birdsthat are like that, but Squirrels are more humanlike.

It seems that three of my close friends are going through tough things in life,I like to listen, and offer suggestions, but it would be immensely satisfyingto take a rolled-up newspaper and swat the people who are hurting them. Maybethis should be a general conflict-resolution method -- rolled-up newspapers arehard enough that they're satisfying to hit with, yet not so hard that they causemuch damage. Personally, it's rare that I get angry at people because Iinstantly seem to understand where everyone is coming from, and try to be fair,or at least understanding, to them all (which, of course, won't stop me fromtelling them things they need to hear or pursuing my own interests), but I knowthis isn't the case for everyone, and barring the world adopting my style of'enlightenment', or a similar enough thing, rolled-up newspapers may be thesolution to world peace.. No? Ehh.. worth a shot.

Some friends of mine and I are casually tossing around the idea of opening a24-hour kosher coffeeshop with food in the area. Getting funds might betricky, but we think we know of a good location, and have some ideas thatcould make it pretty cool. It's worth chewing on the idea. The problem is,only one of us (not me!) really could devote full effort to it, as the rest ofus have our eyes on grad school. We might be able to scrap together funds froma bank loan, relatives, and such, although said negotiations probably wouldn'tbe fun. Something to think about...

Apparently, I'm going to be without water for sometime tonight, as the cityis doing maintenance on some underground pipes on my street. It should be ok,and I'm glad to finally know why they're digging 9 foot deep holes in theroads around there. In other dull news, the CS department sent a mail outto everyone, saying that that department is running out of office space,and things will become even more crammed. A snippet:

NSH, the building in which RI resides, is already cramped. Just another reasonI'm glad I got out of there when I did.

Oh, my mom apparently has decided to go into business. I think she's going tobe selling crafts. I registered her a domain, and at least initially, if notlong-term, she'll be hosted on my virtual server. Her domain is in the kindof twilight of being registered but not fully propogated right now. Thataspect of DNS, the slow flow of the caches, has always interested me...Anyhow, as I know that I have opinions, and she does not, or has opinions thatare in many ways opposite mine, I'm not going to link to her site to avoidhurting her business if people too casually can find the link between us :)

And now, for the news..Yasser Arafat is in hot water -- he appointed a cousin to be his new securitychief, and was met with uproar for giving family favours. Lest we frown tooheavily on this, the biggest protesters are right-wing militants who areangry that he is willing, to an extent, to deal with the Israelis. The PA isnot anywhere near where it should be to take control of the land the Israeligovernment is pulling back from. Taking it philosophically, could it ever bemore than a family favour, to do this kind of thing? One advantage is that heprobably knows his cousin rather well, and the cost of betrayal within a familyis larger than that outside. In a primitive society, nepotism kind of makessense, in this light. The problem is, national land doesn't work well with thekind of society that the Palestinians have right now, and they have theunenviable task of moving from landless despotism in fancy clothes to a propergovernment in extremely short time, while pacifying the more regressivemilitias and warlords who stand to lose almost all their power in thetransition. Let's contrast thte two approaches the Israelis and the Americansare taking in their quagmire -- the Americans hand-selected (mostly) a newparliament, constructing Iraq's government from almost ground-up. Iraq'sgovernment is fake, it's not exactly Iraqi-made, and if it survives somethingakin to medical organ rejection, it'll be nice. The Israelis, as I understand,are more hands-off -- the Palestinians are to set up their own government, andthe success or failure of that is their business. I wonder which is better ofthe two approaches.. both create different kinds of malcontents, with differenttargets.

Apparently, John Kerry might be sued in religious court on charges of heresy.It'd be kind of funny, if it didn't hurt our ability to get rid of BushJr.

Bobby Fischer is found.. and is in hot water for using falsifiedpassports and similar. It's sad that the wondering of many a chess fan, whathappened to Bobby Fischer, is answered in this way...

A smile, finger traces the outline of a flower, thinks of pouring the pasteon the shards, the broken sculpture that would be a hummingbird. The coloursbetween the lines are subtle..

I recently stumbled, on Wikipedia, on an interesting fact on immigration --Jews, Romani, Communists, and others who lost their citizenship under theThird Reich now have, via a German "Law of Return", the legal right to regaincitizenship, as part of a larger set of such rules.This reminded me of a particular point of beef I have with the Israeligovernment -- that its citizenship rules and government policy are racist andare intended to increase racial concentration of one ethnicity at the expenseof the others. While this is still true, in my eyes, it appears that instead ofstanding way out there in left field, it is merely an exaggerated version ofwhat a lot of civilized, western countries do.Even the ministry of tourism, and the big stress on making Aliyah, isjust an extended form of the "ancestry visas" that a lot of European countrieshave. Mind you, this doesn't mean I'm less disgusted by it, but rather thatI have more things to be disgusted with, and less that's Israel-specific. Ithink it's a shame when a country, regardless of nationalities involved, makesany effort to include or exclude people based on their race. No race "deserves"a homeland, ethnic purity, or anything of the sort. Interracial couples are,like with any other relationship, something to celebrate, and are not a"crisis". The people who bitch about the "Intermarriage crisis", or whenanother Turk moves into the neighborhood to work, or, like a departed closerelative of mine, about blacks and mexicans moving to Texas, they make me seered. Good people, and the new culture we're trying to build, it does not acceptracism, it does not abide exclusivity, nor those who shout when people borrowthe best elements from cultures all over the world that fit into the new one.

All that being said, this thing, written in the lowland scots language,seems almost like a parody to me ;)

Someone had an amusing guide to irritate thepeople who are a bit too eager to share their music in traffic.I like the idea... I wonder if my Neuros, when I order it, will be able to dothe same thing..

My mom sent me another one of those conservative rants that's floating aroundthe internet. I'm likely to do a parody of it sometime soon.

For my BLOG, I think I've decided that I do want to make it into a combinedWiki/BLOG.. so unless I change my mind, I'll be starting yet another rewrite(version 4) sometime soonish. The first version of my BLOG was a flat-fileprogram that would take all the text files and compile them into a set ofHTML files, one for each "page" of entries. The second was a set of seperatecgis that all parsed a common database format. This introduced some newrequirements on the webserver, but also introduced new capabilities (some ofwhich I've yet to realize). The third version moved to mod_perl, and movedall the code into one place, where relevant parts could be shared. This madeit easy to allow logins, implement themes, implement comments, and recently,to move to a more CSS-centric way of doing things. The fourth version willstill be based on mod_perl, but I might move to being object-oriented withthis release (the code is getting big, and I think OO might help me organize itbetter). I'm trying to think of other features I'd like.. maybe it's time tomake it possible to host more than one person's blog, to add the ability topost new articles from the web, and to do whatever it takes to figure outhow to really make the CSS look good. I think my BLOG still has sort of aclumsy look, and while I could certainly find a graphic designer to help memake it look cool, I'd rather do it myself.

I now have DSL at home again. To my surprise, Speakeasy isn't usingPPPoE or DHCP to hand out the static IP that I have. While I can'tcontrol the reverse-IP mapping, I was happily able to give my homesystems a hostname in my domain. Speakeasy feels a bit different thanVerizon did -- I'm not certain exactly how to classify it, but theconnection dynamic is changed. Computer geeks can usually tell when asystem is about to crash by the pauses the computer makes, the frequencyand source of them, and a number of other subtle things that may appearsuperficially similar to when a system is just temporarily bogged down.That fine-tuned sense also makes modems, cable, LANs, T1s, and DSL allfeel different.

Yesterday I again saw the cute girl that works at Milky Way, and noticedsomething about her face -- it's kind of a composite of two faces/people Ialso find attractive, namely Debb (who has a beautiful face with mostlySemitic and a touch of German or Polish features) and G, who has a reallypretty face with mostly Gaelic features. I have noticed that the way thatpeople parse faces appears to vary a lot between people -- I think thisaccounts for why a lot of people have a tough time differentiating betweenpeople of very different ethnicities, e.g. why Americans have a tough timeseeing the most obvious differences between two Japanese. Because peopledon't need to communicate facial impressions that often, instead justdeveloping their own classifications to get by in life, there's a looseconvergence in the systems they use, instead of a strong convergence inthe way people organize their thoughts in the local language. I, for example,might notice the shape of the skin around the eyes, nose width, skin tone,and variations in head width, while someone else might notice nose height,facial hair, skin tone, and chin shape, and so depending on two faces, we mightdecide differently on if they look alike or different. This seems to happenpretty often for me.

Arafat says he'll try to create/maintain a public order in areas whereIsrael is withdrawing. This will be an interesting test of the strengthof his coalition within what I'm sure is a very complex political situation.I've been reading a bit about Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi Ba'ath partyunder his control. For a leader in what I consider the backwards area of theworld, Saddam didn't seem to be that bad. Na klar, some people don'thave any excuse, being from a relatively civilized place where expectationsshould be higher.

China has apparently decided that Wikipedia is too much of a threatto public order, and has firewalled it. This is unfortunate.

Finally, I now have the numbers on my blood tests, and they've movedtowards better health. My total cholesterol is 175, HDL 40 (35 at last test),LDL 120 (133 last). According to a few websites, I'm doing pretty well, althoughbecause they've changed quite a bit over the last few years, my doctor wantsto keep an eye on it and do another test in 6 months. Combined with myheart rate, which is continuing to drop nicely, I'm largely happy with myhealth. Hurrah.

I'm not sure how I'm going to spend today -- I might do some light rockclimbing or have a nice run before the 'dinner party'.

Yesterday evening, a time with one less event than I expected, I retiredto Coffee Tree, and while I was there, I overheard yet another conversationabout the justification of Israeli's national policies. This being SquirrelHill, there was no lack of pro-Israel sentiment, and of course there was theother side. I just listened -- it's rare that I get into this discussionanymore. As usual, there was wrangling over historical fact, mention of theHolocaust, and high tempers on both sides.. people telling sob stories abouthow their relatives had been killed or exiled from their homeland by Israelis,the Germans, and the Arabs. The second part of the discussion, which I listenedto more, was led on the Israel side by an acquaintence of mine - an atheistwho left orthodoxy, so there wasn't any mention of the religious nonsensefrom that side of the argument. The dove in the first part of the conversationwas an Israeli guy who was called a traitor numerous times, in the second,a random nonjewish coffee-tree frequenter. One of the things that was broughtup is that the Arab liberals who want to work out a settlement don't feel freeor safe to speak up. I wonder what it looks like when one side in a politicalconflict in general doesn't feel safe/free to be visible -- it's a mark ofdisaster in the making.

It got me chewing on varying views of religious demands, mostly on lifestyleissues. I've known, for example, many atheist people from Jewish-culture/Muslimfamilies that keep the dietary laws, and I've always wondered why. Some possibleclassifications...
Word of god, obey unconditionally, don't question it
Collection of ideas representing perfect order that we can't
see entirely, obey
Represents underlying values, try to understand them to go beyond
just law-conformant, but obey the law too
Represents underlying values, when you understand them, you don't
need the law
Represents some universal content, and some other stuff, obey to make
sure one hits the universal
Represents some universal content, and some other stuff, obey the good
stuff, not the rest
Represents an identity, obey to maintain that identity
On the way back, I swung by Giant Eagle, again happy that it's now 24-hour.I'm again amazed at the crap some people eat, and how much of it there isin the store. It would be nice, I think, if supermarkets gently tried tosteer people towards healthy living.

On my way to the Doctor's this morning, for a regular checkup, I had anaccident. Go figure.. It turns out that some schmuck changed his drivewayaround so the sidewalk has steps going down and up to driveway level, andthis was not there the last time I took this path. I noticed just before Ihit the up-steps, and put on the breaks, but my rear brakes are currentlyunhealthy, so the bike flipped. Fortunately, as always, my head is undamagedfrom the fall (used the rest of my body to keep it safe), but my rightknee/leg/hip is messed up (hurts to walk, and I'm limping) and my rightarm also took a blow. Oh well. My doctor seems a lot happier with my healththis time than he was last time -- apparently my pulse and blood pressure arenow well within the healthy range (blood pressure is actually a bit low now),although he's concerned that I don't weigh enough for my height (right now I'min the 160s and am 6 foot 1). We'll see how my cholesterol and the like aredoing when the results of the blood test come back. Actually, I'm not goingto worry too much about the weight for now -- I hadn't eaten breakfast yetat the time I came in, so I probably weighed less than I usually do. I donotice now that my cellphone took another beating in the fall -- a rubber guardon the phone is now gone, and the antenna is again broken.

So, during the install of Mathematica yesterday, apparently Mathematica decidesit wants to launch mozilla, so it does. Unfortunately, I started mathematicafrom "su" rather than "su -", so it has my environment variables, and mozillapops up, but also has its user dialogue thing visible. I dismiss it, and thinknothing of it. Later, yesterday, after I make it home and restart mozilla, Inotice that something's wrong -- the UI elements all have crude boxes aroundthem, and the 'modern' theme I run Mozilla in has some elements mixed in fromthe default 'classic' theme. *Hmm*.. I go into the preferences, swap to the'Internet Explorer' theme I installed some time ago on a lark, restart mybrowser, and .. it looks exactly the same. *Hmm* I switch to the Classic theme.No change. This worries me. I close mozilla, move my preferences directoryout of the way (so mozilla can't find it), and start mozilla .. make that

• try to start* mozilla -- X thinks mozilla is running, but I don't get a

window. I kill it, and try a few more times. Not good. I move my .mozilla back,start up mozilla (successfully this time -- frankenstein's monster returns),and decide to upgrade to the last beta of Mozilla 1.7 (was running 1.6). Iuse the package mangler to remove 1.6, and use the raw installer to install 1.7(couldn't find packages of 1.7beta). I start up mozilla. It's still a patchwork,but I'm able to force a theme change to modern, which makes everything look niceagain. Except .. one of the things about Mozilla -- the default, nonpackagedbuilds don't come with Freetype support, meaning that the fonts look reallyhorrible. I could wait for 1.7 to be releaed -- the people who make packagestypically don't bother for betas .. but things look so ugly that I decide topush my luck, and downgrade back to 1.6. I remove /usr/local/mozilla, tell yumto install Mozilla for me, and thankfully I get back 1.6, this time stilllooking nice. Hooray! I'm not certain what exactly happened to cause theproblem, nor why 1.6 couldn't solve it but 1.7 could, but I'm glad it's gone.

This is pretty funny, in a twisted kind of way.This too, in perhaps a similar kind of way..There's a bit more press on the military courts holding of people sanstrial. Two interesting quotes from the inquiry:"I certainly wouldn't read the Authorization of Force's use of theterm 'necessary and appropriate' as an invitation for judicial managementof the executive's war-making power, I would have viewed it as a delegationto the executive to use its traditional authority to makediscretionary judgments in finding what is the necessary appropriate force." -- Paul Clement, Solicitor General on BushJr's side

Martinez said that congressional authorizations for the use of forcein wartime, even broadly written ones, have not "traditionally been interpretedto allow the executive unlimited power over citizens." (Jennifer Martinez, Stanford Law Prof)

So, some thoughts -- even if the resolution *did* grant BushJr the authorityto use "all necessary and sufficient" force against terrorists or people aidingthem, that was a really dumb thing for the legislature to do. BushJr, and maybethe executive in general, but especially jingoists like him, needs a tighterleash. At the very least, a sunset clause with a short expiry should've beenbuilt-in to the acts granting that. This ill-defined, endless 'war on terror'reminds me a bit of something, historically, and I don't like what it is.

A lawyer-in-training friend sent me this link, a documentexploring the legal justification for why the U.S. military is permitted tobe so backwards and discriminate against people in ways that no other area ofthe government may, and why actions some universities have taken to fight thatdiscrimination have been met with a severe beating. See this inparticular. Just like the movie we read about segregation in the south, it'sinfuriating to see institutionally-approved backwardsness like this, especiallywhen the excuse comes up that it'd be unfair to the bigots to ask them tobe able to live with people who live differently. This is part of thegovernment, and the government should not be permitted to discriminate. Ifbigots can't cope, fire them, and let them go back to working gas stations orsomething.

Europe is .. ermm.. having a dialogue on anti-semitism. Dependingon who you ask, it's either going down, or up.One possible cause cited has been the actions of Israel under Sharon.Singer, of the World Jewish congress, said at the conference,that criticizing Sharon could not be seen as anti-semitic, but denying thatJews have the right to live in their own state is deeply anti-semitic.

I disagree with the second part. It seems very questionable to me to statethat all races deserve their own state, and in fact I think very few peoplewould promote it as a universal -- those that do, for example, would need tobe passionate about American Indians, Kurds, a whole lot of 'misplaced' racesin Africa, Basques, Cossacks, various subgroups of the french, .. the thingis, nations are only rarely racially homogenous. Perhaps we could even askabout a seperate state for the Ashkenazi the Sephardi, the Yemeni, and allsorts of other racial mixes of the Hebrews. As a universal, no, we can'tsay that races have rights to a nation, nor can we say that it's racist todeny them one. In fact, the notion of an ethnically pure nation is itselfhighly racist, from the end to the necessary means to achieve it. There'sanother claim that might be made, that the Hebrews either fall into a categorywhich grants them a right to such a state, or that they uniquely deserve such astate. I'll treat the two reasonings as being equivalent for now, and explorethem. There are a few grounds that this might be argued by. There are thereligious claims, as expressed by a bumper sticker on a car I pass while bikingto CMU every day -- "The land of Israel, G-d's gift to the Jews". I don'tbelieve in gods, so this argument doesn't bear any weight for me. There's acultural claim, that the culture has placed such an importance on holding ontothe land that to give it up would be to fundamentally deny a large part of theheritage of what it means to be Jewish. I can understand this argument a bitbetter, and can see why it might have a lot of pull, but I reject it too --my political ideas arn't tied to Jewishness, nor do I feel any particularneed to give a nod to Jewish culture, especially seeing that the same argumentmight be made for Islamic culture (which I also have no particular ties to).I may know what people mean when they say "Holy Land", or if I know theirethnicity, "Homeland", but giving weight to such things when they impact othersin such a visible way is rather self-serving and jingoistic. Finally, there'sthe (perhaps seperable into two) argument that the Holocaust and continuousmistreatment by much of the rest of the world demonstrate a unique need foran Israel. This argument is actually not a bad one, and while a number ofother minorities, such as the Roma and the Kurds have had almost universallybad treatment over history, it holds for them as well -- it is tempting toconclude that each such grouping of people needs a state. However, thereremains the issue that while many areas of the world are hostile to theHebrews, the Roma, and the Kurds, there are safe places for them, and theseplaces which are hostile are by no means uniquely hostile to them. TheAmish, for example, survive as a subculture in the United States, and whiletheir numbers are small, there is little pressure (as far as I know) for themto have a state. One could make an argument that such groups are actuallysafer from genocide scattered across the world, and further note that theirsuffering is not historically unique. Still, this argument does bear someweight, although to use it to say that opposing Zionism is racist isinappropriate unless one is meaning to imply that said opposal is part of abigger plot to eliminate the people.

One thing I do worry, or perhaps wonder, about is why Israel gets such ahard news rap, compared to it's surrounding nations. I know that for me,I'm bothered a bit more about things that the Israeli government does than,say, what the Syrian government does, because Israel is seen as being, more orless, as being a civilized country, meaning I think about it in an entirelydifferent way than I do places I consider backwards. To use an analogy, ifI read about people being burned for being of the wrong religion, and it happensin, say, Denmark, I'm going to be much more bothered than if it happens in Iran,because for me, while Iran is a fascinating country with an interesting history,to me, I see it as culturally backwards. It's still a horrible thing when suchevents occur, but I don't expect anything more from them, for now. It ispossible, however, that my reasoning is uncommon, and that it's racism thatdrives the effect of Israel-Arab conflict being reported more than Arab-Arabconflict, or some other effect I haven't considered.

So, in sum, I don't think that opposing the designation/devotion of Israelto being a Jewish state is racist. That being said, I'm not against theexistence of Israel, I'm just bothered by what I see as policies aimedat ethnic purity/privilege.

Apparently, the DoE thinks there might yet be something toCold Fusion. The encouragement is that Helium-4 and low-grade heatare appearing in the right amounts in their experiments. The article raises aninteresting concern -- if the effects are real, they may be too small to beuseful -- a parlor-trick version of cold fusion may advance physics, but notprovide any useful energy.

We're still learning nature's tricks -- scientists recently determined howspiders stick to ceilings, apparently able to bear about170 times their own weight while doing so. It has to do with some incrediblemolecular-level magnetic-like attraction based off of interesting propertiesof their feet. Each molecule in their feet forms 'sheets', which they peel offthe wall one at a time while lifting them. If we can duplicate it, there arenumerous applications possible, but it's also neat just to admire thebeauty of such a system. Ahh, nature!

Some people are just embarassing to shop with.Others are busy manufacturing a new notion of theft.

This is the coolest site I've found recently. It has sound samplesof all kinds of different accents. *very cool*

This raises interesting issues on how politically neutrala church really is. I seem to remember that, for tax reasons, they're supposedto keep out of politics, but that's a line in the sand that might not reallybe reasonable to expect of them.

The voting-machine company everybody loves to hate (including me) hasstruck back with lawyers, aiming to have leaked documents that haveleaked to the press destroyed. I do wonder -- is there an openness requirementfor any companies that deal with sensitive issues in government? Should therebe? In particular, the Freedom of Information act, as I understand it, mandatesthat a lot of internal government information be available to the public onwritten request. It would be interesting to expand that to governmentcontractors for certain types of work.

You've probably heard about the fuss over photos of coffins from BushJr'sadventures in Iraq. If not, it's good to follow such things.

More evidence about the problems of considering the private sector to be afull partner in science... We talked about this in my research methods classsome time ago.

On the other hand, in technology, sometimes good things happenin private research. I guess it's a different thing to say what's healthy andto achieve what's possible, and drug companies are known asbeing more crooked than most.

In my research for two papers for my classes recently, I came across a numberof books I'd like to read. I wonder if I'll get the time. Two titles thatstand out are:

Eadie, Mervyn, "A disease once sacred: A history of the medical understanding of epilepsy"Dols, Michael, "Majn"un: The madman in medieval Islamic Society"

I recently have been reading a bit more about Kucinich, and I'm beginning tothink that, had he been elected, he would've made a good president. It's a pitythat we're not seeing a Dean/Kucinich ticket.

Finally, I feel a bit silly attaching the normal string of topics to the topof this message -- I seem to *always* write about politics and/or philosophy.Ehh.. so it goes.

That's all, folks.

Between the hill of Iteration, and the sharp pit of recursion, (or is itthe other way around?) .. there's a desert where the wind blowsstrongly, order forms for a moment, and in most places, disappearsshortly afterwards. Some places, it lasts longer, and people pitch tent,all the time knowing that the context-dependant sands on which they sitcould shift away. There are places where it's sharp, where you cannotwalk without leaving flesh behind, and if you dance too long, there willbe little left.. Visit the recursion edge, and you'll see the sand gentlypour into the endless jungle valley, the vertical land of vines, water.

Here is an article on some strange peoplewho have a plan for world peace (be sure to read all the pages of the article).Apparently, the author was originally part of a militant group that wants todestroy the Dome of the Rock (a Mosque in Israel where Mohammad, according tothe legend, ascended into heaven, which also is believed to corrispond tothe site of the original Temple in Judaism) in order to rebuild the temple.After being stopped, he now wants to build a holographic temple, floatingabove the Dome of the Rock on a blimp, in an attempt to bring forth theMessiah. He also hopes to construct a virtual reality version of the sametemple. Apparently, the proceeds from a stupid patent lawsuit against Palmare supposed to provide the money for him to do this. The article is, ofcourse, fascinating. Van der Hoeven, another guy who's a fundie christianalso gets mention, and makes a very bad argument for razing the Dome torebuild the temple. It also mentions, in passing, an interesting ascripturalMuslim concept, of a mahdi, whichmight or might not be equivalent to the judaist/christian term messiah.In any case, I (surprise!) support their efforts to do their thing, so longas the methods they use don't provoke violence, as every time they fail tosummon their savior, and every failed prediction of miracles and stuff, isanother emotional downer for the religious mindset. When the roller coaster isdisappointing enough, people will, generation after generation, get off.Millenial cults rarely survive long after their big prediction flops.

On that site, I came across this -- an entry onthe Egyptian book of the dead. Unlike many religious views of the afterlife,supposedly it gives people advice on how to deal with the struggles of theafterlife. Why is this kind of thing rare? Probably because the afterlifemyth is present in religions primarily to either comfort them or to push themto do something in life, or in short, the concept of the afterlife is forpurposes in this world. It's simply not useful innovation to suggest peoplewill deal with trials, and to provide advice now on how to deal with them.

The U.S. is getting a taste of its own medicine, as the WTO hasdecided that its ban on online gambling is illegal.Amusing.

Google rolled out a personalized search system, as I predicted they might've afew entries back. I haven't used it much yet -- I wonder how well it works.I don't anticipate using it much until it can talk to the Mozillaversion of the GoogleBar...

Wally, my cat for the last 6 years or so, died last Saturdayevening, around 10:00. It was likely a heart attack, and I buried himin Schenley park. At least I was there to pet him as he faded..It's sad thinking about it -- he occupied a part of my mind, and evennow when I'm in my apartment, I keep feeling odd that the body liesabout two miles away, under the ground in the woods. Intellectually,I know his body now doesn't have a lot to do with what he meant to me,and the him that I cared about was like the flame, on the candle of hisliving brain... but emotionally, I've confused the pattern for theblocks, and so occasionally I'm preoccupied with the body.. but notso much as yesterday, or the day before.

My laptop is having some hiccups -- there's now a line of dead pixelsgoing down the screen, and the power supply is flakey and sometimessparky. I've contacted Dell -- hopefully warranty will cover both,although I don't think I look forward to maybe doing without mylaptop for awhile.

Trinkets...Ablaut - cool words in english do it. You can too..Learning to read..Of particular interest there is the note that literate native English speakersgenerally have no difficulty with reading new words.Another crazy patent.Some people don't like Verizon.I don't dislike them -- I'm happy with my cell service, and their DSL isn'tbad, it's just not as featureful as I'd like.This isn't far from where my parents live .. ermm.. lived. It's complex. Don't ask.Textbook publishers scheme to rip people off. Someone's been flyering at CMU for a hoax.

Apparently, Kuwait is aiming to move in the direction of France, using theidea that the way to handle religious tension is to prevent people fromsaying things that might be inflammatory. France takes it to anotherlevel, making the overt display of affiliation hidden, at least in schools andpublic buildings. This is a very different approach from the American style,where, temporarily ignoring the 'hate speach' stuff, the faiths are told theymust tolerate any speech that comes their way. In a sense, it's anindividualism versus community thing.

Apparently, at the Snore^H^H^H^Huper Bowl, in the halftime game, JustinTimberlake had a stunt go wrong, and ripped off part of Janet Jackson's shirt,revealing a nipple. If you're like me, it's no big deal, but apparently, theFCC is making a big deal out of it because children might've seen the nipple.Of course, it's being pushed by some 'pro-family' groups who live in a magicland where children don't get spam or mess around on the back of school busses.Apparently, their girls don't ever look at their own body, and their boysare blissfully unaware of human anatomy. Prudes in our government arn'tsatisfied with making a stink, they're talking about thousands of dollarsin fines and revoking licenses. That's one thing that really bugs me --prudishness. Men, barring accident, have a penis, and women, barring accident,have a vagina and breasts. It's not a secret, and the sight of one won't makepeople go blind or get hairy palms. I'd like to think that we're living ina slightly more enlightened, liberal society than theocratic Iran. Sadly,there as well as here, prudishness starts with at least some of the common folk.

Speaking of Iran, on the 20th of this month, their elections are scheduled,and the reformists continue to resign as the conservative forces sit on theirdecision to disqualify most of the reformist candicates. It's absolutelyamazing what's happening over there -- I wonder how stable the system as awhole is right now... Essentially, the conservatives have put their footdown against slow reliberalization of the government, and it remains to beseen if the government can survive the tension..

Speaking of tension, Sharon is in hot water for his moves to withdrawsettlements in Gaza. Of course, the people in the settlements arn't taking itlying down, and are doing their best to fight the actions. Sharon seems tohave a real plan that doesn't rely much on the unstable Palestinian popularand leadership support, and that he has moved the seperation wall to(possibly) better reflect Palestinian settlements and he's actually uprootingcontentious settlements, it seems that he's willing to make the hardestcomprimises to secure a lasting peace. If he can manage it, and peace finallyreaches the area within 20 years or so, it will be an amazing achievement.I may have my own hope for a de-zionized bi-ethnic Israel, but peace, in theend, is more important. Life can only have so much terrible beauty.

Oh, yes, the warning. If you're on windows, run windows update sometime soon --there are some important security fixes for IE.Of course, if you use a better browser, this won't be a concern for you.

A friend invited me to Orkut, Google's version of FriendsterTribe.netI joined.. why not? But it's sad -- things like these are precisely areas whereeconomy of scale is so important. I'm on all three, but everywhere someone Iknow isn't is like a cloud keeping me from seeing as far as I should be able toon these things.

Apparently, Europe has actual Joke political parties.The interesting thing is, in regional elections where there's only one realcandicate, and they're unpopular, the existence of joke parties has causedthe larger political parties to withdraw their candicate to avoid thehumiliation to losing to one of these guys.

Slightly less jokingly, Britain also has a party called the BNP that runson a racist platform, advocating deporting foreigners and lamenting theexistance of 'half-breeds'. Scary, although I guess there're peoplelik that everywhere.

Take a look at this URL: http://www.scott.aq/Guess where that country code is for? Hint: It's not New Zealand.

Want to hear an astronomer rant about bad astronomy? I knew you did.

Incidentally, here's a review of my awesome, but old, Cellphone.

Darwin day's coming up, on the 3rd.

This morning, on waking up, I remembered biking through my oldhigh school.. mostly. Somehow, all my prior pre-university schoolswere connected, and I was heading through them to get somewhere..I kept on worrying that I would be caught biking in the halls..there were no rules about it, but I was sure it wouldn't be kosher.

I got a Livejournal account, initially because I wanted tobe able to comment more easily on friends' blogs (Leon, Quealy, Dubin, etc),but now that I think about it, I'd like to try an experiment -- a sci-fi BLOGfrom the future .. well, without so much fictionalistic stuff, anyhow. I thinkit'll be set about 600 years from now (time enough for societies to change a lotwithout becoming unrecognizable), and at the slight nudging by Debb, the maincharacter will be female. It might touch a bit on politics, societal issues,and all sorts of things. I'm still working on the shape of societies,and my first entry won't be placed until I have at least a bit more aboutthe world and my character fleshed out. It's gonna be fun..

I'm disappointed to hear about the recent incident in Sweden.Apparently, two artists from Israel, of the liberal persuasion, had anexhibit that was intended to bring eyes on the phonomena of suicidebombing, and the Swedish ambassador, at a function at the gallery inSweden before a peace conference, became enraged, attacked the exhibit,and was kicked out of the museum. Two additional points of data are relevant --firstly, it was stated that neither the conference nor the function was goingto get involved in political statements on such things, and secondly,Sharon and some wacko right-wingers in Israel are publically approving of whatthe ambassador did. I'm very irritated to find about the first, and just reallysurprised about the second. It's incredibly rude to invite someone to an event,promising not to talk about a sensitive topic, and then shove that kind ofthing in their face. Of course, that doesn't mitigate descending intobarbarism, actually attacking an exhibit. Despite what the linked article blathers about 'jewish souls', and the jingoistic 'israelier than thou'statements, there's no excuse for attacking an exhibit in a museum. Art ismeant to engage, to fascinate, perturb, disturb, stun, and sometimes to whisper.When it disturbs one too much, it's time to leave. Show me performance art ofa geek falling down a set of stairs, bleeding and guts pouring out, or perhapsa statue of my scottish barbarian ancestors impaled on a spike, and if youmanage to disturb me, I'll just leave. It's one of the lessons people usuallylearn before they get past kindergarten. In sum, it's disappointing that thepeople responsible for the museum visit decided to 'ambush' the envoy,stupid that the diplomat lost control, and really disappointing that instead ofissuing an apology, the diplomat, and then Sharon decided to embrace the rashact. Embracing those emotions is like borrowing lots of money for day-to-dayexpenses.. sure, it might feel good, but eventually, it brings a painful mess.

On the upside, apparently, Israel is *wink* *wink* working to make thewall a bit more acceptable and less of a land grab. I'm not sure if the wall is a goodidea, but yes or no, having it drawn more equitably is a good thing if it'sgoing to be there. Sharon is doing an impressive job balancing his governmentgiven the wide political divide in Israel.

A friend pointed me at iSketch, although I'm reluctant toget what might turn out to be another addiction..Leprechaun 6, the latest in that horror-comedy series,is out.Some people on MMORPGs are unhappy about the way the systems arebeing run. It's very interesting... in these cases, I'm pretty committed tothe system operators (sysops) being able to do what they want on theirsystem, although that might be because I was a sysop of a bulletin boardyears ago.. Depending on personality, it can be fun to be the boss..

Defending the McDonalds kids' way of life...Now with joysticks..

I recently had the delight of watching the famous attentional blindnessbasketball-passing video on TV with Debb, and she, like me and most of my psychclass last semester, didn't spot it the first time either. It's reallyeye-opening to have it pointed out so blatantly that one's attention can be sonarrowed as to ignore such things. I'm looking for a mpeg of it.. I'm not goingto describe it any more though or the effect might be ruined for you.

Na klar, if you've been following the space plans BushJr has, you'll see thathe's both cancelling maintenance of hubble and wasting time/money on another moon landing.I'm bummed about it -- Hubble continues to do good research, and is the onething NASA does that has left the biggest impression on me (ISS being thesecond). I agree with analysis suggesting NASA go right for Mars.

Finally, while watching some soccer last night, Debb and I spotted someonewho looks a bit like her -- Maggie Tomecka (although that picture doesn'tshow that strong of a resemblance). There were parts of the videocasette whereI really might've thought it was Debb on there.

I found a site with some pretty funny Political cartoons.This isn't comedy, but it might be.. It would be funny if the stepsthey say they're taking would be to take away their weapons..

The progress of AI has always been typified by a lot of progress in smalldomains, with correspondingly less progress as larger domains are attempted.However, at the University of Wales, some researchers have created a systemthat they say is capable of much of the fairly large domain of a type ofgenetic research. Although I find the 'expert system' approach not thatinteresting, as it captures domain data that could simply be learned by asufficiently openminded system, it is impressive to see yet another domaintransformed that way.

It's been said that democracy only lasts until people realize they can votethemselves money from the coffers. This seems to be a step in that direction --BushJr is working on some major changes to tax law, replacing IRA/SRAs withnew, simpler plans (good) and at the same time offering people a tax-free newtype of plan called a Life Savings Account (LSA) that would accept $7500 a yearand be retrievable at any time, sans penalty. The danger is that it'll reducethe tax base, and put the government further into debt.

Two thoughts are haunting me today..A friend gave an interesting perspective on his blog:A car company can move its factories to Mexico and claim it's a freemarket. A toy company can outsource to a Chinese subcontractor and claimit's a free market. A major bank can incorporate in Bermuda to avoid taxesand claim it's a free market. We can buy HP Printers made in Mexico. We canbuy shirts made in Bangladesh. We can purchase almost anything we want frommany different countries BUT, heaven help the elderly who dare to buy theirprescription drugs from a Canadian (Or Mexican) pharmacy. That's calledun-American!There's still a part of me that really wants to find a hole in that argument..I guess that's the thing when one's occupied nearly every point on thepolitical spectrum at one time or another.. one's head is a noisy place..The second is from "La Internationale",Freedom is merely privilege extendedunless enjoyed by one and allI've argued against that so many times, and still, to a large extent,do. I do think it's meaningful to talk about freedom of speech and press,even if it's hard for people to afford to publish or dangerous for them totalk. One thing I do sometimes wonder, however, is if/how free associationshould extend between workplace and out-of-workplace activities. And socialismdoes seem to act as a slow tug on me..

This makes me furious. Egypt sent foreign ministerto Israel to meet with Sharon and other Israeli government officials to workon peace, and while visiting a mosque, he was attacked by a Palestinian mob,needing to be saved by Israeli policemen. Apparently they saw him as a traitorfor even talking to the Israelis, and injured him to the extent that he had tocut his trip short. This is absolutely ridiculous -- it's the worst thingthat Palestinians can possibly do for their cause. Of course, the mob doesn'tspeak for all palestinians, and the PA was quick to condemn theact, but this does illustrate a real problem in the conflict -- there arePalestinians who won't accept, and will do their best to sabotage, every attemptat peace. Here's a little hint to that mob... he's not in Israel to celebrateChannukah! He's there on your behalf, and you just totally fucked everythingup. I hope you don't mind the continued suffering both peoples in the regionare under, because you just made a big contribution. Grr.I think I'm pretty neutral on the idea of the wall, to my surprise.I do wish it were drawn a bit more liberally, but the basic idea of it, ifthe Palestinians cannot come to enough unity to enact a satisfactory peace,might be an ok means to peace (although I would prefer other, perhaps similarlyunappealing to western liberal traditions, in different ways, means toachieve a one-state solution).

SCO posted a list of files that they definitely see as infringing, unrelatedto the SMP/NUMA code they were bugging IBM/Dynix about. They mostlyboil down to two files, and their architecture-dependant forms for all thesystems Linux runs on. The files are kind of embarassing, being mostlydefinition of constants -- they're not even code. Linus has a responseto their claims up... Linus has a responseto their claims up...

I learned an invocation some time ago that claims to cure the odd initializationthat sometimes happens with my soundcard on my laptop. I don't know for certainthat it fixed it (my laptop is usually up for weeks at a time), but I haven'tseen it since. In /etc/modules.conf, add:options i810_audio clocking=48000For google's sake, this is for Linux on an Inspiron 8500.

I had an interesting discussion with Dubin on some aspects of Eudaimonia thatI've been chewing on, and ways it might interact with how capitalism might bestructured. A brief conclusion is that I think there's a relationship betweenefficiency and how happy/empowered workers are, and that that relationshiptakes a different form in large corporate structures and small businesses.Note that I've secularized and twisted the Aristotle's definition aroundto mix in some ideas of Marx and Nietzsche. We then proceeded to discussinternational politics and the use of force. Issues to think about: When, ifever, is military intervention in other countries' internal affairs justified?If revolution is not something to get involved in, what happens when revolutionbecomes an international issues (e.g. Kurdistan)?

Although I'm a registered Democrat, I'm definitely not this type.Just as there were "Regan Republicans", I'm a "Dean Democrat" -- my loyaltyisn't to the party in general, but rather the man and the circumstance.

Looks like, in Norway, Jon was declared innocent in his second trial.Cool!

Some Art and Law for ya.A very funny article on British-Japanese cross-perspectives a friendsent me.

And Pat is in love again. I feel happy.

I recently was digging through some old photos on my computer, and noticedsomething interesting about JPEG compression -- while loading a jpeg in myimage viewer, it starts out with fuzzy patterns that fade as more detailscome in.. but if you work on holding the fuzziness in your mind, you canstill see them as distortions in the original picture. I guess what'shappening, in a sense, is that the distortions, done sufficiently finely,define the picture, and the 'first shot' patterns would only truly fade ifa fully raster version of the graphic were there... I know my use of the termis somewhat unorthodox, but in some ways, vector graphics and compressionare related divergencies from raster graphics, with scalability being aninteresting twist. My brain is currently thinking about differences inscaling the display of a vector graphic and doing interpolation when scalinga raster graphic. I love that kind of thought -- when the 'out there' theorypart of the brain is chewing on a concrete topic.

Turns within turns. Life occasionally presents a pleasant surprise. As ofyesterday, something changed, and although it might take some mentalrepositioning, I think I have a good chance at having/sharing a kind ofhappiness I haven't had for some time. I'll write more when I'm comfortable.w00t!

A collective blog to look at

H-bomb info the government sued to keep quietActually, there's a lot of discussion, both within the issue ofprogressive this is and outside, regarding if it's a good thing thiswas published. As per the usual, I side with the free-speechers on this one,but it does seem to be an an exceptional case where I'm not as far fromhaving no position as I normally am. It's not that I'm interested inpreserving American hegemony, but this does seem, at least on the surface,to be like the Anarchist's Cookbook, a book I remember floating around thebulletin board scene 8+ years ago with detailed recipes for making pipebombs and the like. Sure, I probably have a copy stashed away somewhere, butdespite my concerns for free speech, I realize that people could cause a lotof trouble with it... like this.

A reflection -- you notice in my philosophy that I talk a lot about mypositions, my concerns, etc. I think this is due to the shift of perspectivefrom absolutism to value-based -- relativism mandates that we at leastacknowledge that our values are personal, and so we have to give up at leastthinking about them as absolutes. Thus, saying 'it is better' become'I/we value X more', or similar, and disagreements about the moral natureof things become realizations that people don't hold the same values. Itmakes sense, although it does often make natural a manner of philosophicalspeaking that seems .. wordy.

Apparently, Google has money for unusual toys.I've never actually tried one of those toilets that does water cleaning of the..body areas .. used after toilet use. If I had a chance, I probably would once,but it does seem strange to me. For $1200/toilet, I hope they really likethem, and that they don't break often..

A former netscape executive decided to donate about $4000 for the porting ofMozilla to the Amiga. I really am of mixed feelings about this -- that moneycould certainly have better spent, I think, but it is good to see the communityproviding in new areas. Perhaps the Amoeboids will join/support ourcommunity if they get hooked on our software.. at this point, they havelittle hope for any commercial friends :)

Some cellhpones will keep tabs on you.Apparently parents and bosses are using their provided cellphones to know wheretheir employees are. On the first point, I imagine there's a continualplayful battle between parents and kids on liberties, where the kids are,and what they're doing.. it might worry that that battle's limits arebeing shifted by new technology -- kids used to play with slingshots andskip school for a variety of reasons, from what I read (and hear from adults)..all sorts of adventures.. they learned not to get caught, and eventuallycaution, on their own. That seems like a good thing...

Buy.com is spamming me a lot... I might've bought something from them at onepoint, I don't remember for sure. Now I'm thinking of killfiling them.I wish businesses wouldn't do that kind of thing.

Here's a parody of a popular TV show.

A bit more on the French religion issue..

I've been chewing a bit on Sharon's recent statements and plans regarding whatto do if the current peace efforts fail. On the face of it, the continuationof the wall-building seems like a bad thing, and the unilateralism seemsproblematic, but it is possible that a long-term peace might be achievable,and while he doesn't present a plan that's anywhere close to being an idealarrangement, it's possible that it might succeed where other plans havefailed at achieving peace of sorts. I'm not really sure what to think aboutit yet. Let's hope it doesn't come to that. The liberal peace plan, whilenot proposed by anyone who can actually do anything, seems like it might bea good way for things to work out. The current efforts might also be fruitful --the current Palestinian leadership is perhaps more inclined to peace thanthings have been for awhile. A single, unified state sounds best, but so far itseems that option isn't being floated by anyone with any power.

Meanwhile, the situation in Taiwan continues to heat up.I wish coverage were better on it...