Rummage

UC Davis students pepper sprayed

2011-11-22T11:14:00.009-06:00

Rick Perry - fuckwithable

2011-11-10T19:17:00.000-06:00

MSNBC "The Last Word" Lawrence O'donnell on NYPD police brutality during Occupy Wall Street protests

2011-09-29T08:58:00.002-05:00

Imagine all the people...

2011-09-19T21:10:00.012-05:00

Nels Nelson
So tonight on my way back from ACL, there were these insufferable street preachers yelling at people through megaphones telling them that we were all going to hell for listening to devil music and shit. They've been coming back there to the same spot for the past four years now.

Does anybody happen to know if Texas cities, or Austin specifically, require street demonstrators to acquire a license or anything of the sort?

Like · · 14 hours ago

Clint Mills and Beth Jurzec like this.
- Luisa Lowry Oh geez.... :/ That is not the Gospel. Sorry you have to go through them.
  14 hours ago · Like
- Nels Nelson Oh they were quoting verses right out of Matthew. I recognized the words. Matthew is one of the Gospels alright.
  14 hours ago · Like
- Carlos Ernesto Marin Well considering that fundamentalist Christians elected our governor and most of congress, even if there was a permit requirement, I doub't it would be enforced against them.
  14 hours ago · Like
- Nels Nelson There were actually uniformed officers (Austin PD) making sure that none of the crowds could get close to them. Plus they had legit 300 pound body guards. I am certain there had been violence before.
  14 hours ago · Like
- Luisa Lowry Yes, Matthew is one of the books of the Gospels BUT their approach to Christianity is NOT the Gospel. Those people make me sad because that is not what true Christianity is about at all.
  14 hours ago · Like
- Nels Nelson ‎:-) Sorry, I love you Luisa, but I disagree. That's *exactly* what Christianity is all about. It's about trying to divide the world up into two different kinds of people -- the people who are going to heaven, and the people who are going to hell. That's all there is to it. Jesus said so himself.
  14 hours ago · Like
- Nels Nelson
  Luke 12:51 "Suppose you that I am come to give peace on earth? I tell you, No; but rather division: 52 "For from now on there shall be five in one house divided, three against two, and two against three. 53 "The father shall be divided against the son, and the son against the father; the mother against the daughter, and the daughter against the mother; the mother in law against her daughter in law, and the daughter in law against her mother in law." That's Jesus talking.
  14 hours ago · Like
- Jon Burgin
  You misunderstand Nels, It is about all the people. All Jesus is saying is that one cannot compromise one's faith. One cannot say I'll only follow 9 of the 10 commandments so that I don't offend my neighbor. In this, there will be conflict,because one's believe will cause division. However, Jesus does not say to go condemning, which those men in Austin appear to be doing. It is unfortunate that so many focus on other's sins instead of their own. For me, I've got enough of my own mess to clean up to worry about what music someone is listening too.
  14 hours ago · Like · 2 people
- Anna Nelson That must be what they were shouting about on Saturday night too...glad we didn't stop to listen.
  7 hours ago · Like · 1 person
- Nels Nelson Good morning, Jon! :-) I don't think I misunderstand at all. Either the biblical passages are open for fuzzy interpretations to content oneself, or they mean what they clearly say. I have never once seen any precise and reasonable criteria by which metaphor could be distinguished from literalism in the bible.
  3 hours ago · Like
- Nels Nelson
  Also, I understand the bible very well. I also understand Christian communities very well. And while I admit that such communities are well-meaning, it is an unavoidable fact that the exact same creeds that are used to bond such communities are also often used to attack, humiliate, and abuse people outside of certain communities. This is the way of religious dogmas of all stripes, including the gospel creed, throughout history. That is simply inarguable. I am not picking on your creed of choice, Jon -- Christianity. I am saying that I understand Christianity very well, and I see absolutely zero difference between its substance, and any other religion in the world -- including ones adhered to by hate-filled individuals. Religion is an enabler of good, but also very, very immoral behavior.
  3 hours ago · Like
- Nels Nelson ‎Anna Nelson, last night, I stopped for a moment or two. I listened. They quoted scripture verses verbatim. From memory. Precisely. They were shouting them. With vitriol. They were passionate. They were true believers. Would everyone in the world be as passionate about what they believe -- the world would dine upon itself.
  3 hours ago · Like
- Jon Burgin
  If I hit you on the head with a candle stick. Is the candle stick evil? Is it designed for that purpose? Or am I the one doing wrong. I believe that the Luke 12:51 is merely stating that following Jesus is not without consequences. After all, none of the disciples died of old age. Nowhere there does it advocate conflict. Nor does it say that following Jesus is the cause of the conflict, nor does it say that others are the cause of the conflict. Any other interpretation is on your part.
  3 hours ago · Like
- Jon Burgin If you truly understand the bible well, I envy you. I don't think that it is easily understood. As far as the metaphor (or parable) and literalism, there actually is a method for distinguishing between the too. I am not a scholar on the topic, but I think it is pretty rigorous. If you are interested I can ask a more learned person and get the reference for you.
  3 hours ago · Like
- Nels Nelson I understand that is what you believe, Jon Burgin. I think that belief clouds your reasoning.
  
  I simply do not see how this can be interpreted in any other way: "Suppose you that I am come to give peace on earth? I tell you, No"
  
  Also, your namesake, John the Apostle, died of natural causes at the age of 94.
  3 hours ago · Like
- Jon Burgin Yup, I stand corrected. I don't dispute that he does not come to bring peace. But you said that Christianity advocates what those individuals in Austin were doing. You said that the Luke 12:51 says that you are suppose to go out and be hateful. It does not say that. It does not advocate an activity. It merely says that there will be conflict. What part of what I just said is 'clouded'?
  3 hours ago · Like
- Jon Burgin
  I agree that we interpret differently. But I humbly suggest that it just might be not from difference in faith, but difference in understanding. By dismissing what I say with the clouded comment. You dismiss the possibility that you might be wrong. By claiming to understand well, you preclude the possibility of obtaining wisdom from the bible. The first step to wisdom starts with a question and and acknowledgement that there could be something we don't know.
  3 hours ago · Like
- Nels Nelson Now you are just misinterpreting *my* words, Jon. :-) That's what I mean by clouded.
  
  I never, ever, said that Luke 12:51 advocates hate-bringing and violence. What I said was that it clearly states that the world is divided up into two different groups of people -- people who are going to heaven from people who are going to hell.
  3 hours ago · Like
- Jon Burgin Louisa said "That is not the Gospel. Sorry you have to go through them." and you said that it was what Christianity is all about, meaning that there actions were gospel. Or am I misunderstanding something there?
  3 hours ago · Like
- Nels Nelson Jon, that is exactly what they were doing. They weren't attacking anyone. Yeah, they had bodyguards. But they were just saying bible verses and telling everyone that they were going to hell unless they repented of their wicked ways.
  
  They were only doing what was commanded of them by their bible. The exact same bible in which you put your faith.
  3 hours ago · Like
- Nels Nelson
  Just because I state that I understand the bible, does not preclude wisdom harvesting from it. That makes no sense.
  
  When I was a young man, I had been a born again Christian for over a decade. My journey did indeed start with a question. That question was, among many, many others: why would the god of the bible, a supposedly infinitely loving being condemn billions perhaps trillions of souls to unimaginable suffering and torment for eternity in the afterlife?
  3 hours ago · Like
- Jon Burgin In short he doesn't. But shoot, I got to work day job, lets talk sometime, I'd love to hear what you have to say on this.
  3 hours ago · Like
- Nels Nelson Oh, but he does indeed. Clearly you have not read the passages that state explicitly that he does. Either that, or you interpret them in a fuzzy way so that you can feel better about what you choose to believe.
  3 hours ago · Like
- Nels Nelson Not to mention the unimaginable suffering that is endured senselessly here in the real world. No loving interventionist god would allow such atrocities. It is illogical for a loving interventionist god to allow hundreds of thousands of innocent people to die in a tidal wave in the Indian Ocean in 2004. I could go on and on.
  3 hours ago · Like
- Luisa Lowry Oh Nels... I'm still sorry that you had to go through them. And for all these questions and disagreements you have. Keep searching for the answers.
  2 hours ago · Like
- Nels Nelson I'm not sorry in the least, Luisa. :-) I'm very sorry that you feel sorry for me. :-) That's such a shame.
  2 hours ago · Like

I think it is interesting that Jon uses the same argument (suggesting I might think a candlestick to be evil if he strikes me on the head with it) to defend religion that gun rights advocates use to defend their guns from wacko liberals who don't respect the Second Amendment -- that it is not the gun that kills, but the person holding the gun -- that it is not the religion that damns or goes on crusades, but the person adhering to the religion.

Similarly, the separation of the actor from the object, but with the opposite ascribed value: St. Augustine's famous phrase, "Cum dilectione hominum et odio vitiorum" or, "With love for mankind and hatred of sins."

Why not take the sentiment all the way? Love for the gun owners, hatred for the guns. Love for the murderers, hatred for murder. Love for the religious, hatred for the religion. Obviously there is something amiss about this line of thought. Surely concepts such as "sin" and religion cannot be qualified in the same terms as murder and guns?

And yet, a person does "sin". Just like a person does damning. Just like a person does shooting. Sin does not do the sinning for the sinner. Guns do not do the shooting for the shooter. However, religions, dogmas, creeds, they do the damning through the damner. Religions are just people, telling people, that people other than themselves are damned.

Sort of like corporations -- yeah, they're people -- but they're a bunch of people worshipping at the alter of a giant stack of money, and not just capable of committing but wont to commit horrible atrocities.

Religions are exactly the same. Yes, religion is just people. But they are a bunch of people worshipping at the alter of a deity or creed, and capable of even worse.

However, when people do good things, I am to believe that it is somehow the religion doing the good things, not just the person. The people are still the actors, but their faith in a higher power is what is enabling them to act in a moral manner. But the opposite? When the words of religious dogmas turn ugly? The damnation? We are to believe that those words originate with the people speaking them, not their faith in the one true god.

I'm sorry, but this is wrong. Religions and corporations alike are examples of group-think. Because they are by definition group identities, one cannot dissociate the individual from the group when it comes to their actions. The action of one member of the group is in fact the action of many, and conversely, the action of the group is in fact the collective action or tacitly approving inaction by the individual.

Just saying, "Oh I'm not in that group" or, "Well, no true Christian would ever... do such and such" is not enough. Quibbles and endless distinctions of dogmas and interpretations will be made, but the words are still there clear as day, binding religions and sects together whether all of their followers are comfortable with those words or not. The fact is that most followers of a religion will not even care enough to notice the contradictions in their sacred texts, let alone try to rationalize them, but will instead blindly follow what they are told by the group.

Individual people own nothing except for their actions and words. Bad actions are forgivable, sure. Good actions are commendable, of course. But religions are just the collections of words spoken a long time ago by a bunch of people who insisted upon themselves (and adopted by people who continue to insist upon themselves) and who were intolerant of your reason as well as your forgiveness.

You are capable of great wrong, not only despite your religion, but because of it. You are also capable of doing good, with or without it. Religion, however, is the enshrined belief of your ancestors that you are incapable of living without their guidance. Religion demands that you place your faith in their lack of faith in you to do what is right all on your own.

Philanthropist Thieves

2011-09-06T11:00:00.003-05:00

I think that we're well advanced into a corporate dictatorship.

My opposition to this began about nineteen-six or nineteen-seven when my daddy was a little boy, and his father had sent his tobacco crop to market, in Louisville, and we went down the next day to see it sold on the boat. And when he came back that night he didn't have a dime, because it had cost everything that the crop had brought to pay the sale commission on.

Now I was down at Duke University not very long ago. Duke University has the only medieval Methodist chapel in the world. And out in front is a statue where the saint would ordinarily be: a statue of James B. Duke. Standin' there with a cigar. And I walked all around that statue. On one side it said, "businessman". And on the other side it said, "philanthropist".

And I said, "Yes, you son-of-a-bitch, I understand exactly what that means: You steal enough money from people like my grandfather in order to be generous with it, and get the reputation of a philanthropist."

-- Wendell Berry

More on the police state

2011-09-01T17:05:00.000-05:00

Re: Re: I the Person

2011-07-25T23:46:00.006-05:00

For example when healthcare is nationalized everybody feels a need to control what others eat because it's costing society (who are referred to as taxpayers usually) money when an individual is overweight.

-- ChristopherBurg, in response to Wendy McElroy's piece at Mises Daily

I disagree. The enlightened citizen takes pity on the individual who is compelled to make decisions that not only damage the individual's own health, but also the economic health and ultimately the actual physical health of neighboring citizens. An over-consumer is a parasite, not an activist for personal liberty. The individual who acts contrary to self-interest (by choosing to routinely avoid moderation) is not a beacon of individualism, but rather, an aberration of the natural order of things. Were such an individual to behave in such a way in a more primitive tribal culture, the individual would be culled from the society -- for the greater good. Or, such an individual would easily be dealt with by nature itself, saving the tribe the trouble.

Unfortunately, today, it is impractical (not to mention morally dubious) for society to expel or eliminate parasitic or criminal individuals. So instead, we have to imprison, rehabilitate, or marginalize them. This is just one of the the many costs of an advancing civilization that can only be brought about practically by the shared sacrifice between members and the distribution of such costs amongst its peoples.

And so we can see that the utopia of anarcho-capitalism in a modern civilization is an unrealistic fantasy. Following such reasoning to its conclusion, the application of deified individual liberty can only result in a regressive reductionism that culminates in a reversion to primitive tribalism at best, and the extinction of the human species at worst.

True liberty arises from the enlightened projection of the primitive and natural morality of the ideal tribal society to the gross mass of civilization with all of its deviation and extraordination, tempered by the pragmatic morality of the equilibrium of universal self-interest.

Pedantic libertarian is pedantic

2011-07-18T22:53:00.015-05:00

In true capitalist fashion, this guy abuses Hans Rosling's beautiful gapminder.com animated statistical charts in a dubious attempt to support his reactionary rebranding as "market empowerment" of the first-world capitalist exploitation of people in developing countries.

What Davies fails to grasp, or (likely) attempts to conceal, is this crucial fact:

Life expectancy in countries throughout the globe would likely have risen at a similar rate regardless of a lack of any so-called "market empowerment". It certainly would have risen at a noticeably more stable rate without the dramatic roller-coaster dips and drops seen in Hans Rosling's animated charts (that are so casually hijacked in this theatrically-produced, yet low-rent, obviously bought-and-paid-for, capitalist apologism video from the YouTube LearnLiberty user channel).

Such adjustments and swings represent huge tolls on human lives and well-being, since they are only represented here in the aggregate. Do you have any idea what sort of death and despair are indicated by these handful of years' worth of negative deltas? We're talking thousands of people who suffered an undoubtably brutal demise (starvation, war/mass-murder, disease) in each of those dots (likely hundreds of millions in sum) that are being repeatedly yanked backwards and downwards on that innocuous-looking chart.

Those plunges have in fact been caused almost exclusively by exploitative colonial powers expanding their empires into foreign cultures, or by depressions caused by corrupt first-world financiers and ravenous industrial barons. It is a matter of historical theory whether the Two World Wars could have been avoided entirely had colonialism been restrained by the establishment of true liberal democracies earlier than the late 17th century. But it is very likely -- every single other conflict in history has a clear and direct line that can be drawn from it to some predatory and gluttonous capitalist colonial empire.

The only disasters to human civilization that even come close to the unfolding global catastrophes that are European Colonialism and Western Capitalism -- were plagues. (I only neglect to include Nazism, Fascism, Stalinism, and Maoism in this category because they have been resoundingly subdued by the dramatic imperial triumph of Capitalist Power.) But even most epidemics of influenza and cholera can be attributed to the uniquely capitalist/feudalist socio-political causes of industrialization and agriculturalization.

Mushy pacifist Germans

2011-06-01T15:05:00.005-05:00

Anti-nuclear sentiment in Germany is just a result of "the mushy pacifist mindset that has taken hold of the German people since World War II", according to Uwe Siemon-Netto, in a World Tribune.com ~~article~~ editorial. Dr. Siemon-Netto currently directs Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life in Irvine, California.

The World Tribune.com is partnered with the following sites:
DrudgeReport.com
Middle East Newsline
GertzFile.com
Breitbart.com
The Washington Times
Hoover Institution
NewsMax.com
Geostrategy-Direct.com
Hudson Institute
WorldNetDaily.com
East-Asia-Intel.com
Int. Strat. Studies Assoc.

Here's a message to all you World Tribune, DrudgeReport, and Washington Times fascists from a mushy-mindset pacifist:

Fuck Uwe.

The police state

2011-05-31T22:45:00.005-05:00

I am going to start collecting more and more footage like this. I will be storing it on my file server. If anyone ever challenges the notion that we live in a war-mongering country with a brutally oppressive police state, I will just dismiss them as a liar and a fool and an idiot, knowing that I have evidence like this to confirm my position.

Source: Adam Kokesh, anti-war veteran is arrested for dancing at the Jefferson Memorial. Dancing was banned at the memorial by US District Court Judge, John D. Bates.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Fuck the police state.

Objectivists

2011-05-30T10:41:00.003-05:00

A summary of the social outlook of the Objectivist philosophy.

"I want everyone to get off my lawn, to leave me alone and just let me be, let me do whatever I want. If other people didn't get out of my way fast enough, or they didn't have the money to get out of my way thanks to pissing all their money away due to laziness, obviously it's their free choice to get hurt by me when I eventually steamroll some of the lazy and ignorant looters. Hell, in a way I am doing a service to society when I am culling the weak and the ignorant. Hell, I should even be paid for that service.

So I want all the freedom and I still also want all the benefits accorded by mutuality, society, good will, and cooperation.

I want all the benefits of cooperation and none of the costs.

I want to have a choice to cooperate or not to cooperate, while I certainly enjoy it when others overwhelmingly choose to cooperate with me. And if others think they are morally bound to cooperate with me, I won't do a thing to change that opinion! I just don't want to be bound by the same opinion myself.

It's OK for others to think they are morally bound to cooperate with me.

It's equally OK for me to think that I am not morally bound to cooperate with others, because after all, cooperation is meaningless if it's not of free will."

-- Nefandi, quoting a fictional representation of a Libertarian Republican, May 30, 2011

History

2011-05-02T17:49:00.004-05:00

President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, along with members of the national security team, receive an update on the mission to assassinate Osama bin Laden in the Situation Room of the White House, May 1, 2011.

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/whitehouse/5680724572/in/photostream/

Image file size of the Earth

2011-04-28T13:33:00.004-05:00

TL;DR The file size of a 72ppi PNG image of Earth's surface is 3.37 zettabytes, or 3,705,354,190,000 gigabytes.

The surest sign that intelligent life exists

2011-04-26T13:50:00.003-05:00

Reddit user dheretic nails it

2011-04-26T09:57:00.003-05:00

In an article from Reuters, House Speaker Representative John Boehner suggested that oil subsidies "ought" to end. Reddit user dheretic indicates the reason why Boehner would swerve into such Republican contrary waters by quoting one sentence from the article. He then predicts what will most likely happen if Boehner's advice is taken seriously.

"Boehner also suggested that Obama could lose the 2012 election if gas prices do not decline."

Hi, I just explained this move with one sentence from the article.

1. Just threaten to consider cutting oil subsidies.
2. Oil companies bitch and moan and pitch a fit and the futures exchange goes insane about prices, sending PpB skyrocketing unlike anything we've seen since OPEC used the Oil Weapon in the 70s.
3. Gasoline prices in the US approach the world average.
4. Americans go nuts because they can't get their fix (oh, and incidentally, underfunded public transportation and public institutions like fire/police/municipal first responders take a big thick one up the behind, too-- unsustainable big government, right?)
5. Fox News gives it a fancy name like Obama's Oil Blunder and claim he's trying to create an underclass unable to resist his communist fascism or whatever. The rest of the idiot box crowd report on Fox News' outrageousness instead of doing any mental heavy lifting because, to be honest, they are completely unused to effort at this point.
6. GOP: Why does Obama hate industry?
7. Forbes Magazine and WSJ: Why u do this Obama?
8. Obama: "Completely reasonable response implicating GOP using facts and logic."
9. GOP & ETC: "OMG USE SOME TACT RESPECT CIVILITY YOU FUCKING HITLER CLONE FROM KENYA"
10. Obama caves in the name of bipartisanship. Oil prices stay high.
11. 2012 goes to whatever mouthbreather wins the GOP primaries this time around.
12. OIL PRICES MAGICALLY GO DOWN EVEN THOUGH AT NO POINT WERE THE SUBSIDIES CUT

Welcome to American politics. Enjoy your stay, and don't mind that full feeling you have in your colon...that's a completely natural by-product of rich people fucking you in the ass. They know what they're doing, and they like it when you clench tight with impotent rage.

Collapse

2011-04-19T15:02:00.008-05:00

Take it with a grain of salt, of course, but...

I found Michael Ruppert's movie Collapse compelling.

He bases his superficially paranoid argument primarily on the mounting evidence supporting the Peak Oil theory from the 50s and 70s that was derided as leftist/environmentalist hysteria at the time.

He answers the questions about why it has taken so long for the predicted effects of Peak Oil to begin to become manifestly apparent in the world economies, and expounds on the implications of a world with the ostensibly diminishing instances of accessible oil reserves.

When life gives you snozberries you make Haterade

2011-03-25T09:48:00.000-05:00

Looking at this photo reminds me of John Doe when he says, "Envy is my sin."

And then the disembodied voice of Teddy Long is all, "I know you been drinkin' that haterade, playa!"

That Gucci Mane song is the jam, though.

We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,...

Apparently.

Re: Re: The PATRIOT Act is unconstitutional

2011-03-21T17:00:00.005-05:00

On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 12:20 PM, Congressman Lamar Smith wrote:

The PATRIOT Act is vital to our intelligence community's ability to track terrorists. The three expiring provisions of the PATRIOT Act are the roving wiretap authority, the authority to obtain certain business records held by third parties, and the definition of a "lone wolf" terrorist. These specific intelligence-gathering procedures comply with constitutional protections and have been consistently upheld by the courts. I am confident that Congress has crafted these laws to protect both our civil liberties and our national security.

You are incorrect, Representative Smith. The infringement of my constitutional rights as a citizen of the US to due process under the law in hopes of deterring a "lone wolf" terrorist, is not only foolish, it is a slap in the face of justice.

You clearly do not have any idea what is vital to the protection of our civil liberties.

I will no longer recognize you as my representative.

You must be recalled.

You, Mr. Smith, are a tyrant, and a traitor.

-Nels

Temporary Google Groups post stand-in

2011-02-22T14:27:00.005-06:00

Using Google Groups is frustrating.

I tried to reply to an earlier discussion on database switching in
Sequel, but it seems that I somehow sent an e-mail to the author,
instead.

I tried to post the following to the sequel-talk discussion group, but two days have passed, and I still do not see my post in on the group page.

Original post:

The following gist demonstrates my problem.

https://gist.github.com/838034

Please know that I realize that this will work if I were to just leave
the Test.db alone. But then the Test.db would still be left with the
original db, even though I explicitly set the Sequel::Model.db, which
is not acceptable.

Also know that I realize that the whole Sequel::Model::descendants
monkey-patch thing is god-awful wrong, but it's the only way I found
to access the db of every defined model. Again, this wouldn't be a
problem if setting the Sequel::Model.db would actually change the
database of the models classes inheriting from Sequel::Model.

Can anyone perhaps offer a solution to this dilemma?

Update: Alright! It posted!

Ruby v. Python

2011-02-18T18:37:00.017-06:00

I'm gonna lose 80% of my 10 readers with this.

$ uname -a
Darwin peregrine 10.6.0 Darwin Kernel Version 10.6.0: Wed Nov 10 18:13:17 PST 2010; root:xnu-1504.9.26~3/RELEASE_I386 i386
$ python --version; time (python -c "print ''.join([chr(int(x, 16)) for x in '54 59 20 66 6f 72 20 74 68 65 20 75 70 76 6f 74 65'.split()])")
Python 2.6.1
TY for the upvote

real 0m0.039s
user 0m0.014s
sys 0m0.015s
$ ruby --version; time (ruby -e "puts '54 59 20 66 6f 72 20 74 68 65 20 75 70 76 6f 74 65'.split.map{|a|a.to_i(16)}.pack('c*')")
ruby 1.8.7 (2009-06-12 patchlevel 174) [universal-darwin10.0]
TY for the upvote

real 0m0.012s
user 0m0.002s
sys 0m0.003s
$

Partially [ via reddit ]

Update: Well, my friend Chuck over at evilchuck.com pointed out that my original post is a completely pointless comparison, since both interpreters are doing practically nothing.

He is absolutely right. If this were used as a "benchmark test" it would be laughable. Well I included the time stats, so I guess I asked for it.

Here is a little test program for generating N sets of random hex strings 17 characters long and then decoding the sets one at a time.

Ruby code:Blargh:

$ time ( ruby test.rb 500 )
wnATVthnfLdBCQguVr
[ Large output elided. ]
jPgUoj1VtucFgrt7iv

real 0m0.051s
user 0m0.030s
sys 0m0.005s
$ [ With n = 5000 ]
VyiKEjdJhjMKHPRqpP
[ Larger output elided. ]
Uh3 Wsg2 HUbAAe04J

real 0m0.461s
user 0m0.293s
sys 0m0.017s
$ [ With n = 50000 ]
yKfTGOrtCJTtyWvWJk
[ Even larger output elided. ]
QkxCNYwEFVund6H8kz

real 0m3.991s
user 0m3.238s
sys 0m0.136s
$ time ( ./test.rb 100000 -q )

real 0m6.531s
user 0m6.183s
sys 0m0.114s
$ time ( ./test.rb 1000000 -q )

real 1m42.502s
user 1m17.887s
sys 0m2.240s
$

And here's a test for some python code that I hacked together that is probably really crappy but seems to do the job.

Python version:Running it from my bash shell produces:

$ time ( ./test.py 500 )
lFy 7ZGqT1Oc BT31
[ Elision. ]
fnpLoKCaYFWL9U9SE

real 0m0.089s
user 0m0.047s
sys 0m0.024s
$ time ( ./test.py 5000 )
Hqa2g4iX6Nw8Nzua5
[ Elision. ]
ofMMAG WnxUEP0RVC

real 0m0.345s
user 0m0.282s
sys 0m0.030s
$ time ( ./test.py 50000 )
kVgC4etTXn5vxrLzV
[ Elision. ]
ot8PSkiWyn1KTitXT

real 0m3.402s
user 0m2.647s
sys 0m0.108s
$ time ( ./test.py 100000 -q )

real 0m4.403s
user 0m4.241s
sys 0m0.064s
$ time ( ./test.py 1000000 -q )

real 0m43.506s
user 0m42.172s
sys 0m0.565s

Clearly, Python is much faster than Ruby for large sample sizes. At 1M, Ruby finishes in 1m43s real and 2.24s sys. Python finishes in 43.5s real and 0.565s sys.

Just for fun, I tried running the ruby code with Ruby 1.9. This isn't fair since I am not going to go to the trouble of installing Python 3.0.1, but it doesn't matter. Ruby 1.9 is significantly faster than 1.8.7, but still can't beat Python 2.6 for this particular test.

$ time ( ruby19 test.rb 1000000 -q )

real 0m49.606s
user 0m47.847s
sys 0m0.764s
$

I was curious, so I tried to isolate the decoding part of the two versions. Here's what I found:

$ ruby19 test.rb 1000000 -q
user system total real
16.750000 0.310000 17.060000 ( 17.843644)
$ ./test.py 1000000 -q
1 function calls in 14.241 CPU seconds

Ordered by: internal time, call count

ncalls tottime percall cumtime percall filename:lineno(function)
1 14.241 14.241 14.241 14.241 test.py:18(decode)
$

Looks like the decode method written in Python is executing at least 3 seconds faster.

These tests are not intended to be benchmarks of any kind. True benchmarking is a science in which I have not educated myself very well. I just wanted to get a feel for some of the differences in Python and Ruby idioms and a rough comparison of their execution time. My guess is that if anyone were to take a close look at the code used in this post, they'd be able to point out several flaws and mistakes that would affect the overall statistics.

Update 2: Thought I'd try JRuby, and...

$ time ( jruby test.rb 1000000 -q )

real 0m28.038s
user 0m29.531s
sys 0m1.310s
$

Wow.

Speaking of movie posters

2011-02-02T23:59:00.008-06:00

I missed these when he posted them to his tumblr back in December, but just look at these gorgeous prints of Olly Moss' spin on Star Wars movie posters for each in the holy trilogy.

Missed this on Wired, too. Why didn't someone I follow tweet these? (Yes, I'm rolling my eyes at myself right now.)

I only just now found out about these from a rather well-done combo version linked on Reddit.

And speaking of Olly Moss, this:

New movies that...

2011-02-02T22:34:00.009-06:00

...would be nice to see in a theater
but I live in San Antonio.

Maybe if I drove up to Austin? Ugh.

Also, I really dig this poster for Love.

Adam Curtis' The Trap

2011-01-31T13:56:00.015-06:00

Adam Curtis is a producer, writer, and documentarian. He is British, and he works for the BBC.

In 2007, Curtis produced a series of programmes called The Trap — What Happened to our Dream of Freedom for the BBC Two Television Network.

The series includes contributing interviews with a number of economists, writers, psychiatrists, philosophers, and political scientists.

These include John Nash, Friedrich von Hayek, Isaiah Berlin, Jean-Paul Sartre, Alain Enthoven, Alexander Haig, and Madsen Pirie.

The videos incorporate newsreel footage from the Cold War decades, the Reagan-Thatcher Eras, and the 1990s and 2000s. It does so to dramatic effect, mixing soundtrack music from various movies particularly, movies by John Carpenter. It also makes use of dramatic typeface in the titles of segments. One critic has even suggested that Curtis' work is "propagandist", presumably because of his employment of the dramatic typefaces and music found in his films.

The series seeks to shed some light on the sense of entrapment, ensnarement, imprisonment that many people seem to have in this day and age. The modern dilemma -- all this freedom, and yet, millions of Americans are being treated for depression. Millions are obese. Millions of people report having feelings of purposelessness. And so on. Some people attribute these feelings to a number of causes, including technology, urban over-population, widening generation gaps, divisive politics, increasing economic class disparity, etc.

According to Curtis, all of these explanations can be seen as symptoms of a greater problem -- the notion that our freedom is defined by the pursuit of our desires.

Curtis explains how out of the nuclear strategies of the cold war, along with a fundamental shift of academic psychiatry into empiricism, the notion was formed that the individual -- as modeled by the economic theories of John Nash and adapted by military strategists -- is nothing more than a self-interested autonomous desire-fulfilling machine. This notion became the pivot for a new political revolution that supplants the old methods of societal control with a sort of irrevocable auto-pilot.

He goes on to demonstrate how this model became a self-fulfilling prophesy through the feedback reinforcement of modern marketing, media, and a corporatist-warped version of democratic politics -- ultimately trapping our society in ever more rigid and stratified constraints imposed presumably without explicit intention by not only our leaders, but by our own collective decisions and actions.

It's a remarkably in-depth attempt to analyze and explain the historical context of our modern dilemma. I like this series because it has multiple facets, and ties in many seemingly separate threads in our recent history to make a somewhat coherent whole.

It explains many things, including this paper on economic class disparity by Piketty and Saez.

Our national credit ponzi scheme since 2000? Just a symptom of this sort of thinking on Ayn Rand steroids (and by that I mean to say, the Randian market stimulant/intoxicant/performance enhancer known as Alan Greenspan).

I find it interesting that in Curtis' worldview, Reaganism and Thatcherism are just outgrowths of the deeper set of perverted ideas about what actually makes up a human being.

Amazon saves Christmas

2010-12-23T10:43:00.012-06:00

Not that Christmas is even a big deal for me, but it seems fun to say.

This year I'm donating money to charities and foundations in the names of friends and family members because I don't believe that a rational human being can ethically do any kind of business in America anymore.

However, I am not an ideologue (okay, maybe a little bit). And I did compromise my principles to make a couple purchases. One of which was a book for my family and friends about anthropogenic climate destabilization -- in other words: humankind's ongoing and deliberate destruction of the planet's tiny layer of organic material and gases.

Those books never made it to me.

Of course, the tracking status says that they were delivered:

Date	Time	Location	Event Details
December 20, 2010	12:09:00 PM	San Antonio TX US	Delivered
December 20, 2010	12:21:00 AM	San Antonio TX US	Out for delivery
December 20, 2010	12:21:00 AM	San Antonio TX US	Arrival Scan
December 17, 2010	05:29:00 AM	Oklahoma City OK US	Departure Scan
December 16, 2010	11:22:00 PM	Oklahoma City OK US	Arrival Scan
December 16, 2010	07:13:00 PM	Tulsa OK US	Departure Scan
December 16, 2010	06:36:00 PM	Tulsa OK US	Shipment received by carrier
December 16, 2010	11:44:22 AM	US	Shipment has left seller facility and is in transit

That means that the UPS parcel delivery person apparently drove his truck into my gated apartment complex without dialing the apartment number at the gate. Then parked outside my apartment building. Then took my package out of the truck. Then placed the package in front of my door... and then walked away.

Meanwhile, I was just getting back to work from lunch, completely unaware that someone was stealing the package of books off the ground outside my apartment.

Should have specified that a signature was required, I guess. Duh.

But that isn't the point. The point is that UPS was paid to deliver a package to a recipient. They should be held accountable for their complete lack of care, concern or competence in getting that job done. In my opinion it is their responsibility to deliver a package to a recipient. Because otherwise, what's the fucking point?

If they bear no such responsibility, then why don't they just deliver the package to a landfill? What is the difference between a package that gets delivered to a landfill, and a package that gets abandoned on the ground at an address that may or may not be correct with nobody around to witness its delivery? Is the difference just some words recounting a particular event? That is meaningless. Unless I actually receive the parcel, the delivery is worthless. In fact, it is less than worthless, it robs me of the time that I wasted expecting a delivery when I could have spent that time ordering the parcel from an alternative source with an alternative delivery route and process.

These questions are rhetorical, but fair and reasonable.

It is clear that UPS should be held accountable for the cost of these items, and the re-shipping.

I contacted Amazon.com about this matter, and they promised to ship the order again, this time with overnight delivery -- without any cost to me. Amazon.com is amazing.

This still doesn't get UPS off the hook. It is foolish of the UPS delivery person to have refused to leave the parcel with someone in the office of my apartment complex.

Update: So I got the second package from Amazon.com. Guess who they used to send it. Yeah, that's right. So apparently the fella delivering the package this time around didn't care to make sure the package actually got into the hands of the recipient either, and he just ran off after dropping it at my door.

Oh well. It's that time of year I guess. He must have had a ton of other parcels to deliver, and he was probably completely overburdened. I would have given him a tip, but I didn't feel like running after him in the cold.

You know what? Screw you, UPS, for overloading your drivers so much that they can't even wait for someone to answer the door. UPS, you are a $42.6 billion business. Your profits have been down 28% since 2008 to (boo hoo) $2.2 billion in 2009.

You're telling me that you couldn't hire a few dozen extra part-time drivers for the holidays, at the Scrooge-wages of $8.50-$9.50? That would have been about $50,000 to hire 36 extra drivers during the month of December. You could have afforded it, and it would have covered your demand for San Antonio and balanced the workload enough so that your delivery persons could actually wait for people to answer their door before they ran off, leaving the parcel alone and unsecured.

You surely have a quick on-boarding process considering that you almost certainly have a ridiculously high employee churn -- I mean, given that you over work your part-time employees on the holidays by assigning them with routes that are too long, and with truckloads that are too full. You sure don't have enough full-time employees.

If you did have more full-time employees, then maybe you would be able to hire fewer part-time employees to fill in the gaps during the holidays. This would allow you to focus on what it is that you actually do for your customers, both senders, and recipients -- ensuring the transportation of products all over the country. But instead, all you care about is the money. Merry Christmas, UPS.

Ubuntu username fail

2010-12-21T21:46:00.005-06:00

So Ubuntu is pretty easy to use most of the time. But I've installed the system probably about two dozen times now, and each time I forget that I cannot add a username with a dot without doing some somersaults.

You cannot use the Gnome users-admin control panel to add a username such as "nels.nelson". Oh no. That would be horrible.

Instead, you have to use adduser.

sudo adduser nels.nelson --force-badname
Password:
Adding user `nels.nelson’…
Adding new group `nels.nelson’ (1002).
Adding new user `nels.nelson’ (1002) with group `nels.nelson’.
Creating home directory `/home/nels.nelson’.
Copying files from `/etc/skel’
Enter new UNIX password:
Retype new UNIX password:
passwd: password updated successfully
Changing the user information for nels.nelson
Enter the new value, or press ENTER for the default
Full Name []: nels.nelson
Room Number []: 
Work Phone []: 
Home Phone []: 
Other []: 
Is the information correct? [y/N] y

Installing Ruby 1.9.2

2010-12-16T17:20:00.003-06:00

wget ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org//pub/ruby/1.9/ruby-1.9.2-p0.tar.gz
tar -xzf ruby-1.9.2-p0.tar.gz
pushd .
cd ruby-1.9.2.p0
./configure \
--prefix=/usr/local \
--with-arch=x86_64 \
--program-suffix=19 \
--enable-shared
make
sudo make install
popd

Why Grails sucks

2010-12-07T10:04:00.005-06:00

Or,
Why Grails is the worst web application framework I have ever used in my life, and I've used some pretty bad ones

Here's one reason:

Compilation error: Compilation Failed
Application context shutting down...
Application context shutdown.

Soooo sorry, but that's nothing but 100% grade-A pure American male cow manure.

Lykke Li - Get Some

2010-11-03T07:40:00.001-05:00

Lykke Li's two new tracks from her SP Get Some are as good two pop songs as any that I've heard lately.

The track "Get Some" is certainly not for those with particular sensibilities, given its subject matter. But prurience and a good beat have always been a sure hit in the music biz, and I can't imagine this single will be any exception. This track is simply a guileless promise of sex to an unnamed lover.

As if to perfectly balance the album like a coin on its edge, "Paris Blue" is a lovelorn missive to an ex-lover. Poignant, haunted, and self-deprecating.

If you have an e-mail address, you can download the two tracks for free at the Lykke Li official website.

[ YouTube - Get Some ]

The Koch Brothers - Sociopathic Lying Murderers

2010-11-01T21:02:00.028-05:00

The Koch brothers have been in the news lately for...

Being discovered as a major source of funding for tea party activist groups who had been portraying themselves as independent grassroots organizations.
In March of this year, Greenpeace published a report on Koch Industries and the significant and secretive financial role that they have had in the conspiratorial disinformation campaign and industry-exclusive denial of anthropogenic climate change.

A spokesperson for Koch Industries responded to the Greenpeace report. The Koch Industries response includes claims that the Greenpeace report "distorts the environmental record of [their] companies" and that they "have put tremendous energy into achieving sound environmental stewardship".

Here are just two examples that damningly contradict such statements. The safety and environmental record of Koch Industries could not be more clear.

From a January, 2000 report:

Koch Industries, Inc. unlawfully allowed some 3 million gallons of crude oil and related products to leak from its pipelines into ponds, lakes, rivers and streams, or onto adjacent shorelines, from 1990 to 1997.

Koch will pay the largest civil fine ever imposed on a company under any federal environmental law to resolve claims related to more than 300 oil spills from its pipelines and oil facilities in six states, the Justice Department and the U.S. EPA announced.

Source: The US Department of Justice

Koch Industries has also been found responsible for the deaths of two Texas residents.

In 1996, a pipeline managed by Koch Pipeline Company, LP (Koch) ruptured and leaked a butane vapor cloud into the surrounding residential area in the city of Lively, Texas. A teen-age boy and girl driving through in their pickup trunk were burned to death when the cloud ignited.

Source: The National Transportation Safety Board
Source: Serasota Herald-Tribune

On April 14, 2010 a spokesperson for Koch Companies Public Sector sent out an e-mail to a number of news organizations that preemptively and specifically denied any link to tea party activists, or foundations that provide them funding:

Because you have covered tea parties in the past and we imagine you will cover tomorrow's Tax Day Tea Party in DC, we want to reiterate some important facts.

Koch companies value free speech and believe it is good to have more Americans engaged in key policy issues. That said, Koch companies, the Koch foundations, Charles Koch and David Koch have no ties to and have never given money to FreedomWorks. In addition, no funding has been provided by Koch companies, the Koch foundations, Charles Koch or David Koch specifically to support the tea parties.

Thanks for your consideration.

Source: Talking Points Memo

On July 25, 2010, New York Magazine published this article about the Koch brothers that completely contradicts such denials. In the New York Magazine article David Koch is quoted as saying, "I’ve never been to a tea-party event." And yet here he is speaking at a fundraiser event for the Americans for Prosperity Foundation that was attended primarily by the members of tea party activist groups. The video clip is from a recent documentary called (Astro) Turf Wars that exposes how supposedly "grassroots" political organizations have over the years been funded by big-business billionaires such as Charles and David Koch.

Then, on August 30, 2010, the New Yorker printed this article detailing how the Koch brothers have directly supported and bankrolled tea party activists through a chain of foundations and institutions. The Americans for Prosperity Foundation has been created by the Koch brothers for the sole purpose of secretly providing funding for the promotion of their self-professed Libertarian political agenda through the Heartland Institute which directly funds tea party activists.

The Heartland Institute insists that it is independent, and is not affiliated with any political party or business. And yet, on the very same website on which they make such denials, the Heartland Institute has a web page dedicated to talking points specifically for Republican tea party activists.

In the past, the Heartland Institute has worked with Big Tobacco to conduct disinformation campaigns about the damaging health effects of smoking. In the 1990s the group worked with the tobacco company Philip Morris to question the science linking secondhand smoke to health risks. Of course the official response from the Heartland Institute is to deny this too, in a patently similar fashion to the "set the record straight"-style of Koch Industries. Obviously, they are fully aware that the court of public opinion has ruled against Big Tobacco.

Koch Industries official website has a page dedicated to "setting the record straight" and combating the inevitable public perception that they are a criminal corporate citizen. There you will find paragraphs of double-talk and a narrative that makes no mention of the people it has injured and killed. It lists legitimate environmental organizations with whom it has affiliated itself and contributed to, but neglects to mention that such contribution was a court-ordered $15 million compensation stipulation as part of their settlement with the Justice Department.

Charles and David Koch are killing people, lying about it; destroying the environment, lying about it; and funding political organizations that promote legislation that allows them to do so, and lying about it. All while keeping a straight aristocratic face.

This behavior can only be described as sociopathy.

The Koch brothers will tell you that they have worked hard for their station in life. Perhaps. They inherited their wealth and ownership of their company from their father. Still, they must have worked very hard at staying out of prison, being the sociopathic, lying murderers that they are.

America, meet Karen Handel

2010-10-22T20:12:00.012-05:00

This woman will be the next governor of Georgia.

Okay Mrs. Handel, we get it. You're a bad ass.

Ladies and gentlemen, the likes of these will be our elected officials. How does this image make you feel? Does it make you feel a little uneasy? Maybe it makes you feel secure and in charge, knowing that a strong white woman with an assault weapon is gonna be in charge of things. Aww.

Yep, she can carry that thing around with her wherever she wants. It's Georgia.

Update: The Vanity Fair article to which I link in this article is outdated as of August 2010. Nathan Deal faced Karen Handel (who had already resigned as Secretary of State of Georgia) in a tightly contested August 10, 2010 Republican gubernatorial candidate primary and won by fewer than 2500 votes. The following day Handel declined to pursue a recount and conceded. In recent polling, Nathan Deal holds a 10-point lead over Democrat Roy Barnes in Georgia's gubernatorial race.

Tax dollars by caucus

2010-10-22T15:32:00.021-05:00

When the Tea Party-augmented Republican party takes over the House and the Senate this November, I think the Dems will have to take from the experience the following lessons:

Don't piss off folks living in rural America...
1. by levying Federal taxes on rural America,
2. and calling them uneducated rural Americans.
Stop subsidizing rural America with Federal tax dollars and just let the residents of the rural states live with indigence and the neglect of public services. One of two things will happen:
1. Either they will fulfill libertarian expectations by
  1. independently replacing public services with private ones and
  2. somehow surviving the depression of their agriculture-based economy free from Federal subsidy
2. or they will continue to live in indigence until they revolt or die.
Meanwhile, if Federal taxes are eliminated (LOL), then Democratic states can modestly increase their own state income taxes to replace their own relatively modest Federal subsidies, and to cover their state budget deficits.

Surely those are the lessons that should be learned from this tax infomap at infographic.com:

Source: Tax dollars by caucus

So, Tulsas of America, go ahead and keep on whining about your taxes. You will just be cut off from the Federal teat.

Remember the 2008 election? Just two years ago? This map reveals the dramatic difference in rural and metropolitan political leanings in that election:

Source: NY Times (click "County leaders")

Does it not beg the question: Why are metropolitan areas so much more better off than rural areas in terms of income and welfare, and why are they also more democratic? Are those two things somehow related?

Testing snipt.org embed, and javascript Array prototypical extension

2010-09-21T11:00:00.003-05:00

Does this embed properly? With cool css syntax coloring?

From Extending JavaScript Arrays by "pradeep"

Even a broken clock...

2010-09-09T00:07:00.009-05:00

Until today there has been absolutely nothing that Glenn Beck has said that I did not wish I had never heard in the first place. His rhetoric is usually so inflammatory and stupid that it is impossible to escape it from either the reverent right or the lampooning left.

Surely you've heard about the plan hatched by Pastor Terry Jones of the Dove World Outreach Center church in Gainesville, Florida to hold a good old-fashioned down home book-burning of exclusively the Islamic holy book the Quran on September 11th.

Apparently so has Mr. Beck, and he weighed in with his opinion in this blog post.

What is wrong with us? It’s just like the Ground Zero mosque plan. Does this church have the right? Yes. Should they? No. And not because of the potential backlash or violence.

Update: Okay, no. The mosque is not being planned to be built on Ground Zero, for one thing. If it was, that might be a little weird. Calling it the "Ground Zero mosque" is just a straight up lie.

And besides, burning the Quran, and building a mosque two-blocks north of Ground Zero are not the same things at all.

But go on...

We must be the better person. We must be bigger than our problems. Bigger than the times in which we live. Burning the Koran is like burning the flag or the Bible. You can do it, but whose heart will you change by doing it? You will only harden the hearts of those who could be moved. None of those who are thinking about killing us will be affected, but our good Muslim friends and neighbors will be saddened. It makes the battle that they face inside their own communities even harder.

What?

This sounds measured and calm. It sounds well-reasoned. It actually sounds rather Christian in the idealistic turn-the-other-cheek sense of the word.

Well (almost) good for you Mr. Beck. You (almost) got one right this time.

Facebook is beating Google in the race to invade your privacy

2010-05-10T18:17:00.012-05:00

The following write-ups are the reasons I have become convinced that Facebook needs to be stopped.

Top Ten Reasons You Should Quit Facebook:
http://www.rocket.ly/home/2010/4/26/top-ten-reasons-you-should-quit-facebook.html

And...

Robert Scoble of Rackspace was kicked off Facebook for trying to import his personal information into a third-party app for synchronizing his contacts (his account was re-activated, but imagine if you *weren't* Robert Scoble of Rackspace):
http://scobleizer.com/2008/01/03/ive-been-kicked-off-of-facebook/

All this, along with the most recent Facebook insanity packaged as "feature" and unleashed upon its users, to my mind makes Facebook the far and away winner in the race to eradicate our privacy online.

Google's still a contender, but somehow I still trust Google. I mean, Google has never intentionally locked me out of my e-mail account because of some perceived violation of its nebulous terms-of-service. Nor has Google prevented me from retrieving my contact information. In fact, Google has facilitated the transferring, exporting, copying, and sharing of my own personal data through the availability of its application programming interfaces and online software labs.

You simply must check out this rather frightening infographic which is found over at Matt McKeon's website. McKeon is a software developer in the Visual Communication Lab at IBM Research's Center for Social Software.

Also, from Boing Boing's fascinating post which lays out the exposition of Facebook's march towards its Orwellian market share of your personal information -- a quote from Tim Spalding:

Why do free social networks tilt inevitably toward user exploitation? Because you're not their customer, you're their product.

So, you tell me. What's the difference between a human product, and a slave? Remember, it is a fallacious argument to suggest that any rights to one's own personal information have been given up just because one voluntarily signs an EULA.

Sequel

2010-05-07T15:09:00.009-05:00

Michael Granger's blog mentions this awesome little piece of ruby database modeling/persistence tech called Sequel.

Sequel appears to be the best alternative to ActiveRecord that I have ever seen. Probably.

This is how you connect to a DB:

DB = Sequel.connect('postgres://localhost/blog?user=user')

Easy-peasy.

Ron Paul: Obama is a 'corporatist', not a socialist

2010-05-04T14:06:00.004-05:00

Here's the text of an e-mail I sent to Representative Ron Paul (R-Texas) today.

Dear Representative Paul:

I have been an admirer of yours for years now. I was very disappointed that you did not win the presidential nomination of your party in 2008. I wish you the best of outcomes in the coming election. I believe our country needs people like you in our government, and it makes me hopeful that our government can be reigned in by the people, when we have representation like you.

I have a question regarding something that you apparently said during your time at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference, as quoted in a Wall Street Journal piece a month ago in April.

http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2010/04/10/ron-paul-barack-obama-is-not-a-socialist/tab/article/

You said, regarding President Obama, "In the technical sense, in the economic definition, he is not a socialist, [...] He’s a corporatist, [meaning he takes] care of corporations and corporations take over and run the country."

I was wondering, could you please expound on this?

I am also against corporate interests having as much influence as they do on our country, particularly how much influence corporations seem to have over the USDA, the FEC, the FDA, the FCC, and the Federal Reserve.

I understand how you might believe that President Obama is interested in continuing a government-planned economy (which I am against in principle), but I am having trouble understanding why you think that the President is a corporatist in light of his response to the landmark Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. (2010) during his State of the Union Address this year.

Can you help me understand your opinion on this matter?

Thank you, and God bless,
-Nels

Facebook doesn't care about your privacy

2010-04-22T14:36:00.010-05:00

Today I pulled up a web page in my browser to read its article on Google Buzz links, which turned out to not be the info for which I was looking (why does Obi-Wan's Jedi mastery not imply mastery of English grammar?), and what did I see?

This:
What the hell? How does it know that none of my friends already clicked the thumbs-up icon button to indicate that they liked that web page? If my friends had liked the web page that I was viewing, how does it know who my friends are?

Facebook's new "Personalization" web feature. The Personalization feature is a little bit of code that web authors and bloggers can put on their web pages.

This code "phones home" to Facebook every time you access that page. This is not very new. Trackers and web hit counters do this all the time and generate marketing information and ad success rates. But the key here is that Facebook knows exactly who you are and what precisely you are viewing on the web.

Sites accessing the Personalization feature have access to all your public Facebook information, which includes your name, profile picture, gender, and friend and fan page connections.

Considering that Facebook's Personalization code can be placed on any web page on the Net, it seems that this has some pretty broad privacy implications. I have turned off the feature in the privacy settings of my Facebook account. It was on by default, and the introduction page that was splashed on my profile announcing it's arrival did not explain how to turn it off.

Protect your privacy -- turn off Facebook's Personalization feature that tracks your activity on the web by following these steps:

Go to your profile, and bring up the "Account" menu, and choose "Privacy Settings" from the drop-down.
Click on the "Application and Websites" link.
In the section "Instant Personalization" for "Control[ing] how select partners can personalize their features with my public information when [you] first arrive on their websites", click the "Edit Setting" button.
Make sure that the check-box for on this page is unchecked. Apparently, once you have removed the check from this box, your setting will be saved.

There is still no guarantee that Facebook isn't keeping track of every partnered website that you visit.

The cookie used by the Personalization widget is your Facebook cookie. That cookie is stored in your web browser. So every time the Personalization code phones home it sends your user name to Facebook, along with the URL of the website making the request to access your information.

Do you see how easy it is for Facebook (and other sites) to keep a log of every single website that you visit? So long as their code is used often enough by people who write the websites that you visit, eventually Facebook can collect a pretty good profile of your web usage.

It's one thing for Facebook to know who all your friends are simply because they help you keep in touch with them. But now Facebook can know things about you that are well beyond information about your social connections. As of this post, this is the default setting -- their new feature defaults to spying on you.

Are you comfortable with that?

Google Reader feed URL for future reference

2010-04-18T23:21:00.002-05:00

Feed:
http://www.google.com/reader/public/atom/user%2F02879164155444581511%2Fstate%2Fcom.google%2Fbroadcast

Stream:
http://www.google.com/reader/view/#stream/user%2F02879164155444581511%2Fstate%2Fcom.google%2Fbroadcast

Gravity might be entropy

2010-03-29T22:04:00.020-05:00

And entropy is a loss of quantum information in matter.

Tonight I read an article about some ideas on entropy and gravity that seemed to suggest that gravity is somehow an outcome of the complex relationship of the quantum information, or states, of the subatomic particles that make up matter.

Trying to understand this, I'm imagining that a chunk of space dust: not much matter, not many subatomic particles in various states of interaction. Big planet with lots of matter: lots of subatomic particles, all in various quantum states, all interacting in complex ways.

Jae-Weon Lee at Jungwon University in South Korea seems to have some pretty advanced ideas about gravity and quantum information. His theory seems to arise from Landauer's principle which suggests that data erasure or merging of computational paths results in more entropy. Entropy is basically just the loss of structure or information.

The article doesn't really get into the details of how changes to subatomic particles' quantum states actually causes gravity. I guess I'll have to do some more reading on the subject to get a better handle on the ideas.

But the article did remind me of some ideas I was playing with a few weeks ago now.

The Earth is a pretty bizarre place sometimes. Life on this planet seems to organize itself in ways that seem so, well, disorganized. Nature is almost always portrayed in stories and films as a wild, uncontrollable, random place where nothing makes sense, and everything is in constant flux. This idea seems to be deeply entrenched in Western thought -- the idea that the natural world of life on this planet is chaotic. Even deeper thinkers tend to imply that its patterns are spontaneous and simply the inevitable result of mathematical coincidence.

What if life itself is the result, or embodiment of entropy? The most chaotic environment I can imagine is when the universe was theoretically just a hot plasma soup. All that energy began to condense into matter and collect in gravity pools and spin around singularities. Eventually matter seems to have somehow organized itself into reproductive patterns -- life. But why?

What if the mathematically chaotic patterns that we observe in nature are a sort of response to gravity and the loss of information?

It almost seems as if this planet's life is itself intent on escaping Earth's gravity. Single-celled organisms writhe and wiggle about in fluid. Fish propel themselves through the oceans. Amphibians drag themselves ashore and lurk about. Insects burrow and crawl and dart and fly. Mammals run and swim. Birds soar. Anything, any movement, it seems. To ever stop is just to die.

As if gravity somehow represents death, while at the same time being the womb of life. As though the vastness of space were the ultimate destination of life, and the one true outcome of order from chaos. Every creature, toiling forwards, gazing upwards, arms outstretched, wings unfurled, desperate to escape the clutches of their origin.

As if life was intent only on filling up the voids of the universe with the energy represented and embodied by its patterns. The proportions of energy represented by an individual life form are astronomical when observed at the sub-atomic level, but spread throughout an organism, mechanically organized energy propels life into patterns of events that play out through time in what seems like nothing more than chaos.

Almost certainly, I don't know what I'm talking about, but ideas are fun to play with.

Stuart McMillen's cartoons

2010-03-08T13:44:00.004-06:00

Stuart McMillen consistently produces delightful cartoons that capture the heart of the inquisitive and independent life. Some of them are very inspiring, and others convicting.

At the Recombinant Records website, you can find a selection of Stuart McMillen's works.

The pressure mounts on defrauder Blodget to explain why he is such a moron

2010-02-19T10:52:00.009-06:00

Any failure of NBC to adequately cover the Olympic Winter Games is not a big deal for me.

What is a concern to me, is language like this: "Pressure builds on NBC to explain why it's ruining the Olympics"

The so-called pressure to which the author of this weird article refers, is the article that he wrote the day before in which he "asked" the very questions of NBC that he is claiming NBC is being pressured to answer.

This kind of illogical self-referential editorial "journalism" feedback is typical of the sort of dancing-with-smurfs nonsense talk for which certain entertainment-news channels are known.

On a blog that also hosts articles supposed to have been written by Sarah Palin, I suppose I can't be very surprised to find such stupidity.

Unable to watch the State of the Union address tonight

2010-01-27T22:10:00.006-06:00

Because my AT&T High Speed Internet (DSL) connection is so utterly useless and incapable, I was unable to watch the President's State of the Union address tonight. I could not find a single solitary website that had an unbroken video stream of the broadcast of the President's speech.

I just deleted a profanity-filled rage letter to AT&T, but let me just say that I feel nothing but animus and resentment for this and every other telecommunications company with whom I have ever done business.

It makes me angry that AT&T collected US $6.4 billion in data service revenues this past year, and yet somehow, they are unable or unwilling to replace the copper wires in my neighborhood with fiber optic cables.

Snap software judgment of the day

2010-01-04T15:41:00.012-06:00

As far as remote desktop connection software for Mac OS X goes, CoRD is the best.

CoRD > TSclientX
TSclientX > RDC

Why?

CoRD - http://cord.sourceforge.net/

-	Download size:	1.12 MB
-	Install size:	3 MB
-	Open Source?	Yes
-	Ease of use:	Incredibly easy
-	Installation:	Drag CoRD.app to Applications folder

TSclientX - http://desktopecho.com/tsclientx/
Pros: Not Microsoft, Open Source
Cons: 40 Megabyte download

Remote Desktop Connection Client for Mac 2 -
http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/remote-desktop/default.mspx
Pros: ?
Cons: By Microsoft (not Open Source), comes as an mpkg (no uninstaller), 10 Megabyte download

FSM in the heavens

2009-12-20T22:53:00.003-06:00

It's the flying spaghetti monster in the clouds! PROOF!

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap060822.html

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia

Roger Ebert on health care in America and the social contract

2009-10-26T22:43:00.005-05:00

Roger Ebert has this amazing thread going on his blog about health care and the social contract from which libertarians believe they are ideologically exempt.

As some of the commenting readers point out, there are three things that make this post and 90% of the (hundreds of) comments worth reading.

1. The representatives of the libertarian point of view are _very_ courteous and well-spoken.

2. Mr. Ebert takes special care to comment on about 2 out of every 5 comments. This is remarkable because blog posters usually throw out a topic and then refrain from participation in or ignore completely any ensuing discussion.

3. The dialog is thoroughly nuanced and very few points of the conversation on health care are left untouched.

It's been hard keeping up with the discussion. There are 472 comments and counting. I'm hoping things don't spiral into decadence by the time I finish reading them all.

Monsters Of Folk received!

2009-09-22T23:46:00.005-05:00

1 Monsters Of Folk $9.99
Shipped via USPS

Update, Wed, Sept 23, 2009: Holeee crap! My day just got even better!

Greetings from Amazon.com.

You saved $4.00 with Amazon.com's Pre-order Price Guarantee!

The price of the item(s) decreased after you ordered them, and we gave you the lowest price.

The following title(s) decreased in price:

Monsters Of Folk
Price on order date: $11.99
Price charged at shipping: $9.99
Lowest price before release date: $7.99
Amount to be refunded: $2.00
Quantity: 1
Total Savings: $4.00

Update, Tue, Sept 29, 2009: The album arrived in my mailbox yesterday! I am one happy camper.

Zombie questions

2009-09-21T12:02:00.003-05:00

Just a couple to start with for now I suppose.

1. Are zombies capable of a tactical strike? For instance, I have Masterchief-style body armor. But I have to recharge every so often at a solar power collection point. Will zombies destroy the power charge machine to prevent me from continuing to use my battle suit?

Show your work.

2. Poll: Are zombies cannibals? Yes or no. Will a zombie or mob of zombies ever attack a regular human and devour him or her completely, leaving only the victim's skeleton?

My favorite song of all time ever (right now)

2009-09-14T15:02:00.001-05:00

Tim O'Reilly bespeaks Gov 2.0

2009-09-04T11:10:00.002-05:00

Interesting read. Read it. It's long. Read it anyway.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/04/gov-20-its-all-about-the-platform/

Rathering

2009-08-26T22:24:00.000-05:00

Rathering the alternate of the inevitable is rather disappointing.

Music for Saturday

2009-08-14T14:44:00.007-05:00

Thursday I heard that Hope Sandoval has a new album coming out soon and that her band Mazzy Star is currently working on a new album as well. It's been a long time since their last album Among My Swan, so I'm curious to see if Hope and David Roback will do anything new. If this tune is any indication, then probably not. But that's okay, it's still a pretty song.

Hope Sandoval - Blanchard.mp3

****

Monsters of Folk are some of my favorite musicians teamed up. This line-up is what originally got me into M. Ward, because in 2005 when I saw Conor Oberst, Jim James and Matt Ward singing "O'Brien/O'Brien's Nocturne" on Austin City Limits on PBS it instantly became my favorite song. It didn't strike me at the time when I went looking for the writer of the song and found Matt Ward, and promptly bought all his albums, but later it occurred to me that any one of those songwriters could have written that song, but it was Ward. If Oberst or James had written that song, then I would have been listening to a bunch of Bright Eyes or My Morning Jacket albums non-stop for the past 4 years, instead of M. Ward's, but they didn't, and so I didn't. M. Ward is the best songwriter of the three, and in my opinion the most sincere in his delivery. His songs have the continuity and lack of pretension that Oberst's haven't, and the emotional reality that James' don't.

Still, put them all together, and something magical happens. Just like that night when I heard them all singing, "I got a brand new song to show ya, though it probably ain't gonna blow your mind."

So here's a couple brand new from the Monsters. Buy their album when it comes out in September, I think you'll enjoy it. I know I will.

Monsters of Folk - Dear God (sincerely M.O.F.).mp3

Monsters of Folk - Say Please.mp3

Music for Thursday

2009-08-13T10:50:00.003-05:00

I wasn't there, but three years ago at Bonnaroo, Andrew Bird played a show on a stage called Sonic, which I am sure was either well named or very poorly named. There's this video of him singing this song of his called "Why?" and it's very, very good. Shamefully, some other band at the festival is playing too loudly at a nearby stage and ruining the intro and first few verses of the song. Was that what Bonnaroo was like? That sucks, music fans.

Look, I went to Coachella in March for the first time, and there were lots of brilliant performances, but when TV On The Radio came on, they totally drowned out the performer on the second stage. It was impossible to be heard over them. And don't even get me started about M.I.A. and her damn air horns. I'm sorry, but the main stage was colossal and when a band was rocking out with the volume cranked, it was loud and I mean loud. Way louder than 110 decibels, and it projected across the whole polo fields by six sets of speaker towers each over 80 feet tall. Music at the smaller stage? Simply drowned out.

Austin City Limits festival is different. Zilker Park in Austin is vast. Which is lucky, because there are three huge stages with capacity for at least 10-30 thousand people each, and four other stages with capacity for 3-5 thousand. For those three days, there are at least 60-80 thousand people in the park there at any given time. It's nuts. And yet, sound from any given act does not spill into the other stages for the most part, and that's the point, isn't it? A venue has to be large enough to support whatever number of stages a festival offers.

Luckily, Bird has a voice and he rocks this song:

****

On another note, a managing editor for Reuters.com named Richard Baum (@rbaum), sent out a microblog on twitter saying:

Radiohead says no more albums. I guess the pay-what-you-like model didn't work http://bit.ly/jGjaK

What the hell? Okay, first of all...

Radiohead - Harry Patch (in memory of)

Oh look, Radiohead just recorded a song in the studio and released it on their website for one single solitary British Pound. Yeah, it's not "pay-what-you-like". All proceeds will be going to the Royal British Legion, so the site says. Yeah, it's just one song. Yeah, it's probably a one-off because of the unique nature of the song.

Yorke to fans: "New albums? Nooo sorry, all my time goes into my hair style now."

But maybe Radiohead will begin releasing tracks whenever they have an idea that gels and they have time to all get together and put down on a track. Personally, I think that's a great idea. How many times in the past year have we heard about corporate music execs and lawyers getting all exec-y and lawyer-y about singles getting leaked onto the net before the studio album is released, or before radio stations receive copies of a single for airtime so they can hype the album prior to release. That's the old corporate music marketing machine drill, and it's been getting punked by online leaks and downloading.

Baum's conclusion is laughable in its wrongness. First of all, he assumes that just because a band is continuing its progressive behavior of shirking off old-world music distribution company habits by deciding they're through with recording whole albums at a time, they are giving up on the innovations they've made in the way they do business.

Obviously, Radiohead is not done making music.

Secondly, Radiohead made millions of dollars selling their last album for whatever people wanted to pay for it. It went "platinum" the first day it was released. The data on this is incontrovertible. Fans loved the way Radiohead handled the release of In Rainbows.

****

Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros have a few singles out there, but lately I've been hearing this one a lot, and that's good because I love it.

Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros - Home.mp3

Well, hot and heavy, pumpkin pie,
Chocolate candy, Jesus Christ,
Ain't nothing please me more than you.

Awww. 4 hearts for making me smile a lot. ♥♥♥♥

I posted this yesterday, but it was actually today. So I renamed it.

Thanks Anna, for inviting me to see Julie and Julia

2009-08-09T22:58:00.009-05:00

This weekend I watched just about every single John Hughes movie that anyone ever told me was any good, and that I haven't already seen a dozen times. This included:

Pretty In Pink
Some Kind Of Wonderful
Planes, Trains & Automobiles
Sixteen Candles
The Breakfast Club
St. Elmo's Fire

Yeah, that last one John Hughes had nothing to do with, but the Brat Pack was all there. Had he anything to do with it, Leslie Hunter would have totally chosen Kevin Dolenz instead of opting for no miracles. All of Hughes' movies are completely bogus, but not more so than that Schumacher film. The characters in Elmo's were just simply not believable. Then again, I never realized just how ridiculous and homogeneous most of Hughes' movies were. Elmo's "witty" dialog was almost a welcome change after hours and hours of teenage awkwardness and angst. Was that really how the '80s really were? Was that really how high school was? I never really experienced either of those things, but somehow I doubt it.

Still I honestly enjoyed watching all those movies, a couple of them for the first time all the way through. Their charm just wins out over all the deficiencies that would make me hate other movies like them (except for The Breakfast Club which is pretty much just plain great no matter which way you slice it).

One movie in particular that I really liked this weekend was a new one that I just randomly threw into the Hughes Marathon/Mix -- Adventureland. This '80s throwback movie was so much more believable than any Hughes movie I watched. The music was really good too. Like this song:

INXS - Don't Change.mp3
(This is not to knock the soundtrack of any Hughes movie -- all of which are full of awesome music.)

Watching all those stupid movies was pretty damn depressing though, so it was really nice of my sister Anna to invite me to go see Julie and Julia with her even though she was just going with her girl friends. It really saved my weekend from being a dismal way to start this week. Now, I can start my week on a happy note, having seen a truly enjoyable movie with my awesome sister.

John Hughes passed away yesterday at 59

2009-08-07T23:02:00.002-05:00

Can't think of anything to say really. I'm sad. I'll just post some links.

Byrne Fields' blog post, Sincerely, John Hughes
NPR coverage of the Byrne Fields story
YouTube video of the Phoenix "Lisztomania" Brat Pack mashup
YouTube video of Stewie Griffin running to "March Of The Swivelheads" by The English Beat
The soundtrack listing for Ferris Bueller's Day Off

Willie Nelson

2009-08-07T16:42:00.008-05:00

My family used to ride around in our orange VW Vanagon and listen to Willie Nelson singing "On The Road Again" on the radio.

In 1984 my parents sold that sweet van and took us on a long flight over the Pacific Ocean to Hawaii and then on to the Philippine Islands.

Two years later, this happened:

Amanda Palmer's Cat Stevens cover Twitter flash-gig video

2009-08-05T13:15:00.007-05:00

Techdirt has a write-up about a flash-gig that Amanda Palmer did one day after a user suggested that she learn the Cat Stevens song, "If You Want To Sing Out, Sing Out".

She just told her followers on Twitter to meet up with her at the beach to listen to some songs. So a bunch of people showed up and someone happened to bring a video camera, and recorded this:

[ YouTube, via ]

Spielberg to remake Harvey

2009-08-03T13:10:00.005-05:00

Steven Spielberg will begin work on a remake of Harvey. The film's title character is a 6 foot 3 and a half inch tall rabbit who is the imaginary best friend of Elwood P. Dowd played by James Stewart. The original Harvey earned James Stewart an Oscar nomination for Best Actor in 1950. I remember watching this film on cable television when I was a kid and really enjoying it, but I've always like Jimmy Stewart's movies.

I hope this new version from Spielberg will be better than the 2001 remake:

What to govern an information society?

2009-07-30T23:17:00.012-05:00

In Texas, when I fail to casually express agreement with someone's expression of a conservative shibboleth, my less tactful friends and acquaintances will often interrogate me about my political views. Recently, some conservative friends of mine, still bitter and resentful from the 2008 election, have asked me if I still lean to the conservative side of political issues in general or not: "You aren't a liberal now, are you?" and, "You didn't vote for Obama, did you?"

Who I vote for is not your business.

Of my government I demand representation and reject constituency pandering. Political activism and party-alignment is just as filthy and foul as media bias, thinly-veiled bribery by lobbyists of public officials, and long-term office holders.

The other day someone said to me, "Everybody wants to think of themselves as independent." His point was that nobody is ever entirely free from bias or from the influence of their world or political views on their expressions and decisions.

Conservatives mostly insist that when it comes down to brass tax, everyone picks one side of an issue, and eventually their political bias is revealed. The notion that anyone can be without bias is a myth, to conservatives. This is a delusion -- the result of an egocentric refusal to set aside one's own selfish convictions and see the world from other perspectives. Of course many people let their political views affect their judgment, but this cannot be true of everyone. There are many who refuse to champion, let alone settle for, a single side of an issue or parrot the go-to focus group study conclusions paid for by political think-tanks, and instead choose to consider multi-faceted solutions that work under a myriad of circumstances for more than one group of people. Real-world social-economic problems rarely have a single best solution and yet our current system insists upon it and segregates those who suggest otherwise and labels them spoilers, "third-party" candidates, dark horses, independents.

Our political system is broken, so I reject it. You should too, and demand an actual meritocratic democracy. This of course requires metrics and endless careful and costly analysis and monitoring of the results of government programs and initiatives. Political theory is great, but until there are actual studies, experiments, and data, it's just some schmuck's fantasy.

Attempting to clarify what it is that I mean by "meritocratic democracy", a conservative friend of mine has asked me, "So, no electing presidents because they are black, right?" He had obviously bought into the conservative editorial rhetoric that Obama has been elected as the President simply because of the color of his skin. This is an employment of a logical fallacy known as a red herring, and it is a common tactic of the conservative media. The question is a leading one, and is designed to divert attention from the plenitude of good reasons why Obama might have been elected President other than his ethnic heritage.

Perhaps voters were fed up with a President who unprecedentedly expanded the power of the executive branch. Perhaps the American people were weary of a President who went to war without consent from Congress. Perhaps the public was tired of being lied to repeatedly about some very important things like the intelligence on the Iraq nuclear program, global warming data, torture of detainees, and warrantless wire-tapping. Perhaps the American people wanted to send a message of rejection to the Republican party in order to communicate just how disappointed they were with George Bush. Perhaps, just maybe, the American people believed Obama when he promised them change. Who knows.

But the suggestion supplanting those considerations with the idea that somehow Obama was nothing more than an affirmative action President, is twisted. It is a verbal slight-of-hand trick at best, and blatant racism at worst.

The democratic republic in which we live is a failure, not only because it fosters this kind of language, but because it is characterized by immobility, rigidity and is crippled by an inability to represent our citizens at a high resolution. Our democratic republic has proven that any asshole can get elected and stay elected if they just provoke or charm the right people.

The social democracy is in error because there can never be enough stopgaps and waste prevention criteria to prevent massive inefficiencies and missteps. Social democracy also fails at both the electorate level, and also at the bureaucratic level due to the fact that there are tons of people in any population who simply don't give a shit. Social democracy only works for small, invested communities with lots of transparency and accountability, but it doesn't seem to work very well for large organizations.

The foundation of any correct form of government and economy is information. Therefore, I am not a liberal, or a conservative. I am an informationist.

Education. Education is the only path to a valid government. Only a population capable of educating itself and critically assessing information can be capable of governing itself. Self government is the only true government. Therefore, the bootstrapping of the new information republic -- a republic where everyone is their own representative -- will be accomplished through the complete and universal reform of education.

But how can a government with such a shift in focus towards education and communication of information ever be brought into power when the voting system in the United States only reinforces the two-party system? My friends Greg Lange and Cory Burkhardt both support a voting system based on multiple candidate ranking. Many people that I have spoken with who are interested in an alternative voting system are inclined towards the preferential voting system. Arrow's impossibility theorem, or Arrow's paradox, states that such a system would never be perfect and would never represent the wishes of every constituency, but if engineered carefully, it could come pretty close.

It's how the best restaurants in the world are compared. It's how the Godfather is selected as the best movie ever made at the movie database website, imdb.com. So what if the Godfather isn't really the best movie ever made? Well it's pretty damn good.

The only way our elections will ever support a ballot that uses a multi-candidate 10-point rating scale is with a public that is smart enough to understand how such a system actually works. Such voters must also be adequately informed and have an ability to accurately assess the true nature and aptitude of candidates. Public intelligence or stupidity is entirely a function of the efficiency, flexibility, tenacity of the education system and the commitment of the people in its ranks to be successful at an individual level. An education system undermined is a society that undermines its government's effectiveness.

Honestly, anyone against a universally educated and thoroughly informed public, should be considered a traitor. In fact, I would go so far as to say that anyone who fosters confusion by creating false information or attempts to limit the communication of legitimate information should be condemned as a terrorist.

Of course, this raises the question, how is information determined to be legitimate? What is the litmus test for information? Testing. Experiments. Confirmation. Corroboration. Understanding. Usefulness. And most importantly, Karl Popper's test: falsifiability. Information should be redundantly verified, peer reviewed, and rated-by-reputation.

We need to move away from the democratic-republic/social-democracy mixed government form, and shift to an informational democracy. Information, and its accuracy is the cornerstone of all freedom. Liars and mutilators of fact and truth should not be tolerated.

People will inevitably reject these ideas saying things like, "That is too difficult." Or, "That will cost too much money." Or, "My tax dollars should not go towards educating someone else's child." Or, "Those who can't do, teach."

Other objections can be made as well. Someone might say something like, "So-and-so is poor, and cannot afford to be educated. Their parents should have worked harder." Such a person apparently values money above information and believes that obfuscation and confusion has a price. Such a person should be considered a traitor to our nation.

If someone says, "So-and-so is lazy, or refuses to be taught," they are only making excuses. Such a person is simply too lazy or too selfish to make the sacrifices necessary to help another person overcome their personal defects or obstacles and be educated despite those challenges.

People often tell me that things will never change because we are stuck with what we have.

False.

The choice of our government is in the hands of the informed population. To be against an informed population, in any way, is to be against the choice of government. Revolution comes from the ground up. Not through internal secession.

It all starts with yourself and your family. It is the movement of self-actualization and transcendence found reiterated innumerable times in eastern philosophy. First, master yourself. Then your family. Then your community. Then your state. Then your nation.

Absorption. The old generation will be eaten by the new. The stupid, old, doddering politicians and representatives will be displaced by the mass of the new informed populace.

There is no stopping it. Critical mass will be reached, and then there can be no reversal.

Information is unstoppable. Ideas cannot be killed. Truth cannot be subdued. Reality will destroy the actors and fiction writers that make up our government and media.

Information, education, and understanding is the new monarch.

The next generation is growing up with the Internet in their playpens.

The status quo "representatives" and legislators will be unable to pry this source of universal information access from the hands of this next generation. The technology to prevent tampering with that information is crystallizing into a perfect shield against meddlers and liars.

Soon all the liars will be silenced and muted. No more fiction. Only history.

Resonance

2009-07-27T18:55:00.002-05:00

Silently ignoring is passive aggressive. Sometimes what you want is outright aggression, demanding something more to the effect of 'Your thoughts and ideas are inconsequential and completely unimportant. I'm just going to ignore you from now on.'

”

-- Mike Nerone, 2009

[ #coredevs ]

Jenny Lewis, Elvis Costello, M. Ward, Zooey Deschanel

2009-07-27T13:57:00.007-05:00

Wow.

Don't miss this one, Zooey backs up Jenny on the song "Carpetbaggers".

[ Links: YouTube, YouTube ]

America the Fat?

2009-07-24T13:52:00.026-05:00

An article concerned with the ostensible culture of waifish waistlines in New York City appeared in the New York Times on Wednesday. Money, the leisure money affords, and a ubiquity of reflective shiny glass windows on buildings seem to be the primary contributors to the 25% lighter BMI of the average Manhattanite compared to the rest of America's poor slobs of whom an alarming 67% are overweight.

While reading I was reminded that it was lunchtime so I called up el Gallito de Jalisco across the street from the office and ordered two chicken fajita tacos on corn torillas to go. There are a couple of things that I dislike about ordering food to go. First, the containers in which the food are placed will soon become just that many more plastic salsa containers and forks that don't seem to cooperate very well with the rest of God's creations. Second, I am eating at my desk which basically means I wolf those tacos down in ten or fifteen minutes so I can get back to work. Well what's wrong with that?

A lot, says this article also from the Times that attempts to draw a correlation between the average time spent eating per day with the body mass index of those eaters. Do you spend less than 80 minutes eating all three meals in a day? Then you're probably fat. And American.

The French apparently spend well over 2 hours each day eating their meals. They are also some of the least obese people in the developed world. What does this mean? Well many conclusions could be drawn, I suppose.

I would wager that many people would look at these statistics and think, "Americans work a lot and don't have much time so they eat more fast food, and that's why they are so fat." Others might think, "I guess when you eat too quickly, your brain doesn't get the message from your body that you are full until it's too late and you're done eating everything on your plate, resulting in over-eating." Still others might consider, "Meals are more of a social event in the culture of other countries and dining with company is perhaps more customary than it is in America. It makes sense that a meal would last longer when you're talking with friends and family at the dinner table."

Or maybe those people are just thinking like sheep and assuming that the information they are being given is correct in the first place. The question should be asked: how much can we trust the New York Times to report accurately on the eating habits of Americans? Surely the Times isn't reporting on all of the studies that have probably been done on this subject. All of those other studies that have been done probably don't support the true message that the Times is trying to send here:

Your American way of life is inferior to the way of life in other countries with more social and liberal composition of government and culture.

The statistics gathered in the study represented in this article are obviously cherry-picked to communicate this message. This could be explained in a number of ways.

For instance, the dining French persons surveyed almost certainly prattled on endlessly about the sensations which they were experiencing with their palate as they ate. In the U.S. the surveyors usually paused their stopwatches when the eaters would stop stuffing their mouths with food long enough to chew or ask their server for a refill on their Coca-Cola. So of course it would appear that Americans eat faster.

Furthermore it is widely understood that the French eat like wusses. They probably surrender to their food twice per meal before they finally give up and push their plate away with half its contents unfinished. Americans know from experience: food is war, and you sure as hell don't leave until the job is done.

Also likely is the inaccuracy of the method of measurement used in other countries like France. They use the metric system, after all -- completely different than the English system of measurement that America uses.

If one considers oneself a critical thinker, one should consider the source of these articles. This is the New York Times. They have been caught red-handed time and time again publishing factual-appearing articles about so-called scientific studies and the like, and then drawing conclusions that are obviously self-serving. Everyone has a bias, and the Times staff and contributors are no exception. This is a fact known by simple psychological projection to most Americans who proudly uphold the values of God and country.

How dare the New York Times attack the American way of life? Our culture is superior to the culture of any other country in every way for the simple fact that our culture is American. Anyone suggesting otherwise is just a liberal America-hater spreading propaganda designed to degrade our great country and its rich history.

In the Times' defense, they have also published an article discussing the correlation between fast eaters and economic growth (with far better quality graphics than their fast-food report, I must say). Predictably, this article was largely panned by other liberal "scholars" and mostly ignored.

So to the New York Times and other eggheads I say this: keep your questionable statistics and let the facts speak for themselves -- quietly and meekly like the nerds who study them. There is nothing wrong with our fast food, and America does not need to change in any way to continue being the great and mighty country that it has always been. We Americans are unique in the history of the world, and chosen by God to be leaders of the free world and grateful recipients of His blessings of Freedom Fries, Doritos Cooler Ranch Tortilla Chips, and the Colonel's Original Recipe Fried Chicken. May God continue to bless America.

And all God's people said Amen

2009-07-20T14:44:00.044-05:00

When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. That's my religion.

”

-- Abraham Lincoln
Remark to law partner William Herndon,
quoted in William Elroy Curtis (1902)

[ link ]

We Are Living In The Future

2009-07-16T17:00:00.015-05:00

This text was originally written for the comments section of a kottke.org post on December 6, 2005.
Some major edits have been made since then.

I don't get this sense very often these days, but I relish it when I do. The first time I experienced the "Holy mackerel! We're living in the future!" feeling, it was a strange sensation triggered by settling into the backseat of my friend's new Nissan Maxima, and listening to his radar detector boot up as his car turned on and the rest of his console lights began to glow, and Nine Inch Nails' "Into The Void" from The Fragile beginning to boom on his kilowatt sound system. Since then, similar such experiences have been few and far between.

But on a more serious note, I believe that our current collective stress-out about petroleum and fossil based fuels and energy, as well as the constant threats from terrorism, global warming, cancer and pandemics, overpopulation, etc., are going to force the human population into some pretty awe-inspiring advances over the next couple of decades. We're talking huge leaps forward. These significant improvements include:

1. Solar power
Complete transition to solar power as the primary source of energy supply to all residential, commercial, and industrial energy demands. All the following improvements will be brought about based on this single momentous accomplishment.

2. Natural/organic habitats
Transition to family and community based habitats which are ecologically and culturally enriching. These constructions will spring up in place of reclaimed land from industrial and commercial sites, and will be interconnected by a brand new nationwide (and soon thereafter planet-wide) transportation network (electric trains, electric computer-navigated automobiles, transition of major airlines from bulk travel to on-demand commuter flights, etc.) making it a seamless and painless process to commute from a major metropolis to your family back on the farm.

3. Sane climate control
Regulation of the Earth's climate by means of a world-wide biosphere control scheme. This will include doing things like using phytoplankton fertilized with iron deposits in the oceans, as well as a number of other measures. The world will no longer depend on petroleum and fossil fuels for energy, pollution and carbon emissions over time will be drastically reduced. Biosphere control mechanisms built into energy-harvesting technology will begin to terraform whole swathes of uninhabitable and non-cultivatable land into useful regions which will nearly immediately (within a span of five to ten years) cause tremendous cultural and global change. Our planet's appearance from space will be significantly altered. These global processes will be controlled with complete assurance and confidence by our civilization, and will not get out of control. (No over-cooling or wildly fluctuating temperatures -- these technologies and their effects can be carefully modeled and monitored using evermore advancing computing techniques and information about the planet's weather machinery and its internal relationships.)

4. Geo-political stabilization
Furthermore, since the dependence on petroleum will be eliminated, the economic (and hence, political) interests of the US in Middle Eastern countries will diminish greatly, reducing the strain on that region's already oppressed people, which in turn will have a calming effect on the activity of terrorists.

5. Digital-only information distribution
Elimination of content and information distribution entities such as the recording and motion picture industries. While this will simply exchange power from one entity to another (network service providers) it will serve to streamline the process of production and distribution making it easier than ever for individuals and organizations to create and communicate information. Happily, even network service providers will be rendered obsolete as free, accessible, and ubiquitous high-speed wireless networks begin to organically blanket the North American continent within the next 15 or 20 years, and also the rest of the globe within 50 years. Continuing advances in wireless networking technology makes it a sure bet that this will happen. These networks will be maintained as a public utility, and regulated only by local and regional community technicians and benefactors, thereby eliminating telecoms such as SBC/AT&T and Comcast once and for all. Finally, the true vision of free speech will be realized as seamless, obstacle-free distribution networks deliver content from its sources to a global audience. Such a network will obviate most concerns about government wiretapping, since most communications will occur without bottlenecks or major backbones. Eliminating single points of large bandwidth usage will remove the ability of the spy agencies to route large amounts of communication traffic from single sources.

6. No more government-sponsored resource mongering (imperialism)
Because energy will become a non-issue, governments around the world will be able to shift attention away from internal economic problems caused by diminishing resources and focus more on forward thinking policies and technological advancements brought about by open collaboration with multi-national coalitions and government sponsored partnered entities.

7. Space travel
Fast. And soon. Within the next thirty years.

8. World peace
Without strain on population for competition for scarce resources such as energy sources for the industries of developing nations, there will be little to no political wrangling for power or military action required between nations.

9. True free markets
When information and energy becomes completely free, the markets for goods and services will also become completely free. This is because no market is truly free without the complete freedom of information. When all buyers instantaneously know the real-time value of any good and service, then all sellers must sell at that price, or else lose the sale because of a failure to meet the price agreed upon by the market. However, this is not how the markets currently work. Normally, buyers bet blindly at prices, without conferring amongst themselves. The markets rely very nearly solely upon speculative pricing. This speculative pricing engaged in by buyers only gives sellers and producers an advantage because they control the quantities of goods produced based on an unbalanced mixture of speculation on market demand and just shear capriciousness. When resources become a function of free energy, the only true product will be the quality of a given product's design and its execution. Because of a mutual understanding of all options for a particular product, its price will be clearly determinable by purchasers in the marketplace. Energy sums per product will no longer be a factor. Instead, only time, thought, and (in rare cases) rare, non-recyclable materials will be considered as contributing to the actual value of a product. Barrier-to-entry into a market will be as thin or as thick as the challenge to compete against other designs, conceptions, and implementations of a given product.

10. No more hunger
With unlimited energy at our fingertips, the developed world will be able to manufacture and transport all the modern equipment necessary for industrialized agricultural in regions of the world where food is scarce and at famine levels of unavailability. Nowhere will water be scarce or limited -- ocean desalinization will be cheap and easy without energy restrictions.

11. Destabilization of Earth's electromagnetic sphere
Instability of Earth's electromagnetic sphere will cause problems for long distance communication using signals transmitted over radio spectrum. However, the global network of broadband short-access wireless networking will make the problem moot. Unfortunately, many thousands of people will die from cancer due to the increased ultraviolet radiation from the Sun that the weakened electromagnetic sphere will allow to penetrate to the Earth's surface. Thankfully, all types of cancer will be cured within five years of its worst outbreak among the global population. That's what happens when a global killer comes along and begins to kill indiscriminately and widely. When rich people start dying early for no reason, cures are discovered.

12. Global population stabilization
Global population will go through some severe fluctuations on its course to stabilizing at around 11 billion people, and while this will cause severe heartache for individuals worldwide and leave a psychological and emotional imprint on our cultural consciousness which will be remembered in our history books and stories passed down throughout the generations for centuries to follow, the overall standard of living for all peoples in all nations will improve, and human atrocities and suffering will be reduced and practically eliminated, even during the most traumatic periods of our civilization's growing pains. Why? Because of free, ubiquitous, real time information distribution and communication, when the entire world witnesses their own families dying at the same time as the families of those in other parts of the world dying from causes outside of anyone's control, we will become that much closer to each other, despite our cultural differences and the illusion of national boundaries. We will unite against the prevailing forces that thwart our survival.

13. No man-made apocalypse
Nuclear war will never erupt between any nations, because political and militaristic posturing, manipulation, and confrontation will all cease to be tools of national entities, due to the fact that energy is no longer a commodity, and complete land reclamation and restoration from desert regions and polluted areas is commonplace.

Why I am so optimistic about our future?

I believe that stress on a population causes characteristics to emerge which make the population at large more effective at survival. Continued future stress on the ever growing human civilization will force innovation and adaptation the likes of which we have never seen or imagined before. People are capable of great things, and will do great things, if they are done right. All it takes is a balance of careful, metered trust in the genius of inventors and innovators, determination, spirit and will. I believe that these things will win out over corruption, greed, and apathy. They have to. Corrupt, greedy and apathetic individuals will get naturally selected out of the gene pool, leaving the rest of us to become careful, caring, clever and conscionable stewards of our planet and solar system.

If these things don't happen, well, who cares? We will just go extinct. And one doesn't worry much about dying when one is dead.

Auto-add music to iTunes playlist

2009-07-09T23:36:00.012-05:00

A macrumors newbie going by "wholesaledaddy" outlined the following steps for automatically adding new music files to an iTunes library playlist:

1) Open automator. It should be on your dock or in your applications folder. It think it's pre-installed on all osx macs.
2) On the first screen keep the selection on "custom" and hit the "choose" button.
3) In the left hand column under "Library" select "Files and Folders"
4) In the next column double-click "Get Specified Finder items"
5) A "Get Specified Finder Items" pane should open on the main screen.
6) Click the "Add" button on this screen and select the folder that you download music into
7) Now from the second column from the left double-click on the "Get Folder Contents" action.
8) I wouldn't click on the "Repeat for all each subfolder found" checkbox unless you want all the subfolders to be put into the same permanent folder.
9) Now on the left-most column click on "music" then in the next column dobule-click on "Import Files into iTunes"
10) On this action pane you can adjust the settings to have the selected music files put into whatever playlist you want
11) Almost done. Now you need to create a folder where these imported songs can be moved to so they will not be imported again. This can be a subfolder of the folder you just imported music from or anywhere else you want to store your songs.
12) In the leftmost column click on "Files and Folders" then in the next column click on "Move Finder Items"
13) In this pane select the new folder you just created
14) Now simply save this series of steps that you have created (which is called a "workflow" file). Go to file and click save-as. Note: I created a separate "automator workflows" folder in Music to store these files

It would be nice to attach this work-flow to a "download" action in your primary web browser, and then monitor a list of folders or directories to which you commonly download music files. Unfortunately, I haven't figured out how to do this.

Instead, you will have to attach this task to each folder that you want to monitor. In order to do that, you should first make sure that the first step of the Automator work-flow monitors only the folder to which you will be attaching the work-flow.

See that first step? There is only one folder being watched. The work-flow has been named so that it is specific to the folder on which it will be operating, in this case "Add Music (tmp).workflow".

To get this work-flow attached to the folder that will "catch" all your new music files, just follow these steps:

With the work-flow opened in the Automator application, choose "Save As Plug-in..." from the File menu.
In the "Save Plug-in As:" field, enter the name of your work-flow.
The "Plug-in for:" selector should currently be "Finder". Choose "Folder Actions" instead. A new "Attached to Folder:" selector will appear.
Choose "Other..." and select your special folder that will be catching your new music files.
Click the Save button.
Done!

Here's the part that sucks that the "It would be nice" stuff would take care of: You will have to redo all 20 of these steps for each folder that you want to monitor. For instance, it would be nice to monitor three different folders: a special music downloads folder, the Desktop, and the Downloads folder. That's 60 steps. Lame.

Once again, an example of how shitty iTunes really is, and why everytime I hear someone parroting the stupid Apple marketing catch-phrase, "Macs just work, you know?" I want to slap them in the face with a large trout.

Apple fan-boys will no doubt palliate and gloze for Apple and iTunes, "Well, why are you downloading music from sources other than the iTunes Store??" To them I say, "Shut your pie hole. It's a computer. I write software for a living. A COMPUTER SHOULD JUST DO WHATEVER THE HELL I WANT IT TO DO."

Thursday music

2009-07-02T16:35:00.003-05:00

Dent May & His Magnificent Ukulele - You Can't Force A Dance Party.mp3

The Hood Internet - Comfortable Up Here (Lil Wayne vs Royksopp).mp3

Feel good, Wednesday

2009-07-01T15:46:00.011-05:00

Here's some stuff that just makes me feel good.

Elvis Perkins in Dearland - Chains, Chains, Chains.mp3

Elvis Perkins in Dearland - While You Were Sleeping.mp3

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I &hearts Jenny Lewis

[ YouTube, mp3, mp3 ]

What the f--- it's Tuesday

2009-06-30T22:41:00.001-05:00

Generally speaking, I'm feeling good. I've pretty much wrapped up a project at work with three other programmers and annoying QA defects are just barely trickling in. Most is quiet on the UAT front, and release is coming up next Monday after code freezing Thursday.

I've been able to get my hands on tons of good new music lately because my rental car has XM satellite radio, and I have been keeping track of all the songs I like by jotting them down on a pad of paper on the ample arm rest. Looking those songs and musicians up on google and hypem.com have delivered an astounding crop of new-to-me music blogs and enough mp3s for days.

Cooking has been on my agenda again lately, so I've never been hungry. I've been running at least three to four miles a week and that means so has Flora. I quit smoking after Coachella so running has been getting gradually easier day by day as my lungs slowly recover. There's really no comparison at any other time in my life to how out of shape I've been. Getting out of this wretched malaise has been like pulling teeth every step of the way through quicksand.

As you already know, Michael Jackson died this week. To be honest, I never really cared for his music because I was completely prejudiced against it by his personal defects. Although, I will say that I have always enjoyed listening to Thriller and Billie Jean.

Now that he is dead, and no longer allegedly assaulting children (or the suppressed but still highly influential Presbyterian sensibilities intensely cultivated in my youth that have retarded my social capabilities) I am somehow more willing to give his music a chance. How pathetic is that? However pathetic it is or isn't, my spirit has been lifted up by such tunes as PYT, Butterflies and remixes of Billie Jean.

Sunday, I watched the movie Walk The Line for the first time and I really enjoyed it. I've always liked Johnny Cash, and was sad when he passed away in 2003, but I never knew what a troubled person he was until June helped him turn it all around. The movie may have taken liberties with the biographical facts, but it made me wonder what could have been if Elvis had someone in his life like June Carter -- someone strong and willful, seemingly so full of self-respect and dignity -- instead of his wife, Priscilla. It made me wonder about Michael, too. What if?

God bless Michael Jackson.

Jenny Lewis at Stubb's Monday, June 22, 2009

2009-06-26T15:56:00.006-05:00

Here's a YouTube playlist of some videos I recorded of the Jenny Lewis show I went to last Monday. It was a really good show.

This playlist doesn't include some of the very best songs of the set, because I was too busy enjoying them without a camera in front of my face.

"Valerie Plame" by The Decemberists (just so I don't forget)

2009-06-25T11:02:00.004-05:00

The song "Valerie Plame" by The Decemberists from way back in 2008 makes me grin everytime.

The lyrics are priceless.

[ mp3 ]

Netherlands, Denmark

2009-06-19T12:34:00.003-05:00

Bourtange, Netherlands

[ google map ]

Kastellet, Copenhagen

[ google map ]

[ via darkroastedblend.com -> seoco.co.uk ]

She's Keeping Two Chevrons Apart

2009-06-16T19:50:00.005-05:00

I always wondered what this song meant. I mean, I always pretty much knew, but now I really know.

[ mp3 ]

P J Harvey

2009-06-15T18:07:00.006-05:00

Back in March I decided to take the day off and drive up to Austin on the Friday of SXSW, and again that Saturday.

Friday I went to see Matt Ward play at La Zona Rosa, but Saturday I had no idea who I was going to see. So after getting a drink with a friend of mine at the Omni hotel bar, I wandered around Austin looking for places that looked like they might have a good show.

I wound up at Stubb's waiting in line to buy tickets to a show in 90 degree heat at 5:00 pm. I didn't know who was playing there.

Her.

Here's one of my favorites of her songs from one of her first albums, To Bring You My Love, "Teclo":

[ mp3, mp3 ]

Currently listening to... (100th post, btw)

2009-06-14T16:08:00.004-05:00

Wilco (the Album)

... Wilco - Wilco - 01 - Wilco the Song
Put on your headphones,
Before you explode

[ mp3 ]

States with populations smaller than the county in which I live

2009-06-10T13:23:00.003-05:00

States with populations smaller than the county in which I live.

[ Link ]

More free mp3s from Amazon.com

2009-06-09T13:40:00.002-05:00

Even more free music from Amazon.com record label sampler albums:
Jagjaguwar 2008/2009 Sampler (8 downloads)
Gigantic Music Sampler (8 downloads)
She Loves Everybody (1 download)
Slumberland Records Spring 2009 Sampler (12 downloads)

Fur

2009-06-05T10:20:00.004-05:00

My sister Anna has written a paper about the conflict in Darfur for one of her classes at university. It's a good read and makes a couple of excellent points -- like how people are using the Internet in several different ways to try to help the Darfuris, and how this sort of broad support from otherwise non-grouped individuals is unprecedented with respect to these kinds of ongoing atrocities.

[ Link ]

Currently listening to...

2009-06-04T11:26:00.002-05:00

...

[ mp3 ]

can't activate rails (= 2.2.2, runtime)

2009-05-28T11:15:00.013-05:00

Is your computer being uncooperative when you try to run rake or some other ruby or rails software?

$rake
rake aborted!
can't activate rails (= 2.2.2, runtime), already activated rails-2.3.2

From my experience, this probably means that you have installed other versions of rails or some other conflicting gems in your local gem repository (~/.gem).

How did this happen? Well, you probably installed those gems without using the sudo command.

When you install ruby gems as a user without root or admin privileges, ruby will warn you that you are not installing those gems for the entire system.

WARNING: Installing to ~/.gem since /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8 and
/usr/bin aren't both writable.
WARNING: You don't have /Users/nels.nelson/.gem/ruby/1.8/bin in your PATH,
gem executables will not run.

Don't worry -- you can recover from this misstep. Those locally installed gems will probably interfere with gems that have been installed system-wide. No problem.

Remove them!

$rm -rf ~/.gem/ruby/*/cache/*
$rm -rf ~/.gem/ruby/*/doc/*
$rm -rf ~/.gem/ruby/*/gems/*
$rm -rf ~/.gem/ruby/*/specifications/*

BUT WAIT!!

Don't just delete stuff because you are told to. Examine those directories, and make sure that you have already installed those gems for the entire system. If not you will have to reinstall them for the entire system if you still need to, and if you have admin privileges (you can use the sudo command).

$sudo gem install <your gem>

Now that you have removed those gems from your user-local gem repository, you should be able to actually reinstall them. This means that you should make a list of what you had previously installed.

Lovin's For Fools

2009-05-25T23:02:00.005-05:00

Justin Vernon, or Bon Iver, often plays a very pretty cover of "Lovin's For Fools" by Sarah Siskind.

Here he gets together with Bill Frisell and Sarah Siskind herself to sing it. Enjoy.

[ via Ghost Electricity ]

12 free songs from Amazon.com (The Free Mixtape)

2009-05-22T13:14:00.014-05:00

The sampler for Sub Pop
records on Amazon.com

Several record labels are using Amazon.com to give their sampler albums away. That's right, free mp3s. No DRM. No pirating. No guilt. And the best part? You can pick and choose which individual songs to download from the sampler album. So, unless you already have that Vaselines song, why not download it? Just click. It doesn't get freer and easier than that.

My playlist:

	Song	Artist	Record Label
1.	Hurt Feelings	Flight Of The Conchords	Sub Pop
2.	Son of a Gun	Vaselines	Sub Pop
3.	Furr	Blitzen Trapper	Sub Pop
4.	Mykonos	Fleet Foxes	Sub Pop
5.	Belated Promise Ring	Iron & Wine	Sub Pop
6.	People Got A Lotta Nerve	Neko Case	Anti
7.	Ghosts Under Rocks	Ra Ra Riot	Barsuk
8.	My Only Offer	Mates Of State	Barsuk
9.	For What Reason	Death Cab For Cutie	Barsuk
10.	Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh	Say Hi	Barsuk
11.	When Planets Collide	Viva Voce	Barsuk
12.	Pushover	The Long Winters	Barsuk

[ playlist.m3u ]

It's like a label promoter person standing outside a music show and handing out CDs to fans, except in cyberspace.

If you've never downloaded music from Amazon.com before, you're in for a treat. Amazon has a music downloading software application (for any operating system), which automatically downloads purchased music for you, and puts in your music folder or loads it into iTunes.

[ Link ]

Currently listening to...

2009-05-06T12:39:00.011-05:00

Related: Portishead Redux

...This cool live version of Portishead's "Sour Times".

Also, check out this video of a live performance by Portishead of their song "Only You". I don't think I can express how good this is. I must have listened to this song a thousand times after it came out when I was 19. The song is complex, yet simple. It is understated, and yet Beth's lyrics get stuck in my throat just thinking them in my head because they're just that dramatic. This tune makes me want to hug people I don't know and cry because jazz is so beautiful and darkness is so soothing.

[ mp3 ]

Bash script to simply execute compiled Java program from the Linux command line

2009-04-29T15:24:00.009-05:00

Newsmap.jp

2009-04-29T13:03:00.002-05:00

Newsmap has a new domain name and an updated interface.

[ Link ]

Jenny Lewis at Coachella 2009

2009-04-28T06:38:00.004-05:00

Here's a little video I took on my Canon PowerShot SD790 IS digital camera at Coachella on Saturday night.

I &hearts Jenny Lewis.

The songs are "Silver Lining" (a Rilo Kiley song) and the title track from her latest solo album, Acid Tongue.

[ YouTube Link ]

Are you ready for the Rapture?

2009-04-27T17:05:00.010-05:00

Did you know that the global climate is warming?

Well, today's Rapture index (166 and rising) is really high. So in terms of a spiritual global climate our planet is practically boiling!

The Rapture Index is a useful and extraordinarily accurate aggregation of all the factors that prophetically contribute to the likelihood that the Rapture will occur today (or pretty soon).

Hosted at RaptureReady.com, the Rapture Index is apparently put together by Todd Strandberg, the website's creator.

There are 45 categories used to calculate the Rapture Index. My favorite category that is considered to be directly contributing to the Rapture is probably "Liberalism". The site defines this category this way:

29. Liberalism
It's not just a part of the Democrat Party. liberalism is what could be called the "true conspiracy." Liberal media are 100 percent controlled by the forces that bow to humanistic ideology. [sic]

Liberalism is currently at a 4. I guess that's sort of like condition orange.

My analogy isn't very original though. Mollie Ziegler over at GetReligion.org used Department of Homeland Security's chart to illustrate her Rapture article way back in 2007.

Just in case you aren't paying attention to the index and you find that you have forgotten your Rapture Umbrella when it arrives, here's what to do:

What to do AFTER the rapture has taken place and you realize that you were left behind

If you're a wussy unbeliever, and you don't think you'll be able to control your bowel movements during the impending Rapture, you can stop worrying. The folks over at Tribulation Central have got you covered -- with Rapture Adult Diapers as well as other Rapture preparedness items.

Porcelain Jellyfish

2009-04-25T20:33:00.003-05:00

Alissa Coe and Carly Waito from Toronto, Canada made these beautiful porcelain jellyfish.

[ link, link ]

Ginobili not flopping well

2009-04-07T14:49:00.003-05:00

At this point, I'm lucky if I'm getting 8 on a good flop. My wailing is good, but I need to be hitting the floor a lot harder

[ Link ]

Ben Folds

2009-04-04T01:29:00.010-05:00

Uh, way back in 2005, Ben Folds released a cover version of Bitches Ain't Shit by Dr. Dre which reached #71 on the Billboard Hot 100.

Here it is for your listening pleasure.

Seriously though, women, like all people, should be respected, honored and cherished. But everybody knows bitches can't hang with the muther fucking streets.

[ More Folds ]

How do you cook Brussel sprouts?

2009-04-04T01:11:00.010-05:00

I steam them.

Get a pot full of boiling water and throw them in one of those colander thingies.

But I cut off the bottoms, first.

After I steam them for about nine or ten minutes (I like 'em tender), I will salt them with finely ground sea or kosher salt (with kosher salt you can just pinch the crystals between your thumb and finger to get a salty powder) and serve 'em.

Or, once they're steamed a bit you can throw them in a pan and saute on medium-high (5-7) for a couple minutes with a tablespoon (a slice or two) of butter, or a little bit of olive oil (butter is better for Brussels sprouts).

That's it.

Oh, you can also steam them in a pan. Take any old saute pan with a half cup of water or so and bring it to a boil. Once boiling, turn the heat down to low-medium (2-4) and throw the sprouts into the pan. Cover the pan with a lid, and let them sit there for five minutes or until they're bright green.

Unicode fonts and the symbols they contain

2009-03-27T03:14:00.013-05:00

✌

Can you see that character? If you can, it's because you are using a font in the sans-serif font-family that supports unicode to display this text. Check out all the other awesome unicode symbols. Evil Chuck said that I should try to make the css do its best to get your browser to use a unicode-compliant font somehow. Hopefully, I'll get around to that soon.

Until then, make sure you have a unicode-compliant font like Helvetica installed and rock that link. It seems that the variety of characters are endless. Helvetica appears to contain the entire Chinese caligraphy word list.

[ Link ]

M. Ward: "Medley: Rag/Duet for Guitars #3"

2009-03-23T00:23:00.004-05:00

Watching M. Ward play at the SXSW La Zona Rosa party on Friday was a real treat. This must make it like, the 3rd or 4th time I've seen him play, and he just keeps getting better and better.

Even though it was a small set, all the songs he played were ones I count in my favorites of his. Which of his many instrumental songs he started with, I cannot remember, but he seems to like to get straight to it in his solo live shows and his albums. Here's a solid example of one of his original instrumental songs:

Watch him play his song "One Hundred Million Years" off his new album Hold Time live at SXSW, must've been Thursday at Auditorium Shores Stage (Lady Bird Lake).

Update: It looks like he started out that La Zona set with "Duet for Guitars #3" after all. Somebody who must have been standing five feet away from me got an excellent video. Makes me wish I had smuggled my camera in.

Conan O'Brien's favorite clip from Late Night

2009-03-16T11:36:00.002-05:00

Laughing that hard makes me get a little teary-eyed.
[ via //beconfused ]

Infant gangster clothing line

2009-03-16T01:30:00.004-05:00

Do you want your brat to look like a little hood rat gangster from LA? Here ya go.

[Aw ain't he cute?]
Why anybody would put so much Adobe Macromedia Flash behind a store for a toddler clothing line to make your kid look like a Yakuza is beyond me.

Red Video

2009-03-12T07:20:00.001-05:00

Red Digital is a camera maker that specializes in high quality professional cameras. In 2007 they released their camera, Red One which is capable of recording at resolutions up to 2048 horizontal by 1152 vertical pixels at 120 frames per second, directly to flash or hard disk.

Here's an example of some of the video that can be recorded using the camera. The footage is slowed down and the effect along with music by the Icelandic band Bang Gang is pretty hypnotizing.

skate - shot on red #1347 - 120 fps from www.theglobules.com on Vimeo.

A mysterious inscription in Lincoln's watch

2009-03-11T07:20:00.007-05:00

This is pretty much the most popular story on NPR.com right now so I'm sure most of you have already heard about this. Here it is though, just in case you haven't.

President Lincoln was given a pocket watch and it broke soon after his election. He took it to a watchmaker to have it repaired and the rest, as they say, is history.

Did a repairman really engrave a secret message on Abraham Lincoln's watch the day the Civil War began?

That's what watchmaker Jonathan Dillon told his family in the late 19th century. He claimed he was working in a posh jewelry store in Washington, D.C., in April 1861, just after Lincoln was elected. And he was assigned to fix the president's beloved gold pocket watch — reportedly the first watch the humble Lincoln had ever owned.

I was listening to this story on the radio last night, in which a descendant of the watchmaker narrated his opening of the famous watch, and settled the mystery once and for all. I thought that was so cool, even though I'd never before heard of this watch or the mystery surrounding it.

This morning I noticed the same story on the Times' website so I figured NPR must have the audio on their website. Sure enough, there it was. Check out the NPR audio story about Lincoln's watch.

And then mosey on over to the New York Times and their check out their story on Lincoln's watch too.

No wonder I keep seeing Jesus in my toast

2009-03-10T13:17:00.005-05:00

Middle-aged? Working a lot? British?

You're probably a going a little bit fruit-loops, according to The Telegraph in an article about a study of middle-aged over-achievers in Britain.

Extreme tiredness and stress could be as bad for the brain as smoking, according to the study.

As bad as smoking maybe, but there's no second hand smoke when you're working too hard -- unless you have this job.

Dinner with a stranger story

2009-03-09T11:01:00.005-05:00

Here is an interesting little picture story about a fellow who invited himself to dinner in exchange for the promise to donate $200 to charity.

Kutiman Thru-You playlist on YouTube

2009-03-07T09:31:00.018-06:00

Kutiman's website is so popular right now that none of my friends are actually getting to see the videos. Update: So Kutiman is posting them all on his YouTube at this very moment.

Here's a playlist of all the music videos for Kutiman's Thru-You project:

Track 5 is my favorite because the girl Kutiman samples vocals from, Sarah, has such a beautiful tone to her voice, and her original song is actually pretty damn good. Track 3 - I'm New features perhaps the coolest freestyle rap I have seen in a long time.

[ via #coredevs, btw, ftw! ]

Abandoned town in Ukraine

2009-03-06T09:41:00.001-06:00

These are amazing photographs.

[ Link ]

Kutiman mixes YouTube

2009-03-04T14:16:00.008-06:00

Kutiman mixes YouTube

There have been many amazing videos on YouTube that use video mixing to produce awesome results, like this acapella video mix cover of Michael Jackson's "Thriller" by François Macré.

Not quite the same thing, but still amusing is the Family Guy sketch, "The Four Peters".

But Kutiman simply takes the cake by composing original songs using actual YouTube videos for audio/visual samples. Wow. Wow!

[ Link ]