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By nations other than Iraq, as of October 2, 2002, from the Global Policy Web site. (PDF file)
"Editor's Note: In its effort to justify its planned invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration has emphasized the importance of enforcing UN Security Council resolutions. However, in addition to the dozen or so resolutions currently being violated by Iraq, a conservative estimate reveals that there are an additional 91 Security Council resolutions about countries other than Iraq that are also currently being violated . . . . For a resolution to pass, it must be approved by a majority of the total membership with no dissenting vote from any of the five permanent members. Since the early 1970s, the United States has used its veto power nearly fifty times, more than all other permanent members during that same period combined. In the vast majority of these cases, the U.S. was the only dissenting vote. The preceding list, therefore, includes only resolutions where the United States voted in the affirmative or abstained."
Several of the resolutions, dating from 1968 on, call for Israel to abide by the Fourth Geneva Convention regarding the responsilities of occupying powers (which also has some relevance to US activity in Iraq).
Also, considering recent news about Iran, notice resolution 487 (1981), which "Calls upon Israel to place its nuclear facilities under the safeguard of the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency."
Not to mention the offensive and seemingly paranoid "George M. Weinert V of Chicago, Illinois" and his American Jihad.
Some of the comments on IMDb are worth reading; for example, "I Didn't Know Michael Moore Made This Movie!, by coolarmadillo: This might as well have been titled 'Republicans = Nazis.' . . . I wonder when we'll see a mainstream media outlet produce a comic and movie with a message that could similarly be titled 'Democrats = Communists.'" That's someone who seems to miss the point entirely: anarchists are opposed to both Republicans and Democrats, both Socialists and National Socialists.
Most people in the United States seem to believe that the only two political options are the Republicans and the Democrats, both of which look very much alike from an outside perspective.
"George W. Bush understands that a successful presidency means being seen as a great leader, and that naturally requires a crisis or two, and a good war or two, or three."
"After The New York Times disclosed in December that Bush had authorized the military to conduct electronic surveillance of Americans' international phone calls and e-mails without obtaining warrants, as required by law, Bush said his wartime powers gave him the right to ignore the warrant law.
"And when Congress passed a law forbidding the torture of any detainee in US custody, Bush signed the bill but issued a signing statement declaring that he could bypass the law if he believed using harsh interrogation techniques was necessary to protect national security.
"Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, inserted a statement into the record of the Senate Judiciary Committee objecting to Bush's interpretation of the Patriot Act, but neither the signing statement nor Leahy's objection received coverage from in the mainstream news media, Leahy's office said.
"'The president's signing statements are not the law, and Congress should not allow them to be the last word,' Leahy said in a prepared statement. 'The president's constitutional duty is to faithfully execute the laws as written by the Congress, not cherry-pick the laws he decides he wants to follow. It is our duty to ensure, by means of congressional oversight, that he does so.'
"The White House dismissed Leahy's concerns, saying Bush's signing statement was simply 'very standard language' that is 'used consistently with provisions like these where legislation is requiring reports from the executive branch or where disclosure of information is going to be required.'"
So what's the difference between McVeigh and the 9/11 hijackers? Is it that they were foreigners? That they were (we are told) members of a terrorist organization? (As opposed to a criminal conspiracy.) Or is it just politically convenient to create a new War on Terror? Clearly declaring a War is effective -- just look at the smashing successes of the War on Poverty and the War on Drugs.
Not political:
This show also includes an interview with Amitai Sandy, who is sponsoring a contest for the best anti-Semitic cartoon drawn by a Jew, as "a response to an Iranian newspaper's competition for cartoons on the Holocaust. He insists that Jews can offer sharper, more offensive satire of themselves than anyone [else]."
I got a laugh out of that: meeting hate with humor. It's a lot better than just a continuous escalation of hostilities. It reminds me of Krusty the Clown on . When he found out he wasn't fully Jewish because he had never completed his Bar Mitzvah, he reflected, "I used to think I was a self-hating Jew -- but now I realize I'm just a plain old anti-Semite."
"Consumer 'zine blasts 12 supplements", from the Chicago Tribune, Sunday 18 April 2005.
"The May issue of Consumer Reports lists the following 12 supplement ingredients, which it says are readily available online, as bad news. It describes the ingredients' dangers, rates their risk factor and stresses that 'we think it's wise to avoid all of them.' Take a look at the magazine's 'dirty dozen':
Check the magazine for more information, as well as a detailed look at today's supplement market."
What the Governor did not say is interesting: no mention of problems with the legislature in Springfield and no talk about government corruption, previous items of interest to Blagojevich. Of course, he has recently been criticized for some of his own hiring, so he may not feel comfortable discussing ethics just now. Instead, the opponents were the Federal government in Washington and the past: "three years ago . . . we walked into a mess . . . . We inherited a recession, a $5 billion deficit, and a government that was bloated, ineffective and had all the wrong priorities".
Most of his proposals sounded attractive, though couched in misleading language: for example, he referred to a "jobs bill", which seems mostly to mean construction work, building and repairing schools and bridges. He also repeatedly referred to "health care", when he clearly meant health coverage, which is not really the same thing. (Health coverage is one way to pay for some of the costs associated with health care.)
Fortunately for him and his self-congratulatory text, the governor doesn't have to explain how to pay for any of his plans until next month, when he presents his budget proposal.
Predictably, the most annoying and blatantly deceptive part of the speech was Blagojevich's fetish for a so-called Assault Weapons Ban: "No law abiding citizen needs an Uzi or an AK 47 to be safe or to hunt." The Uzi is a sub-machine gun or machine pistol; the AK-47 is a true assault weapon (though there may be some semi-automatic versions of the AK-47). They're both capable of fully automatic fire, meaning they're already restricted under the National Firearms Act of 1934. In addition, according to Wikipedia: "The Gun Control Act of 1968 ceased import of foreign manufactured fully automatic firearms for civilian sales and possession effectively halting further importation of civilian accessible AK-47 rifles. In late 1986, an amendment to the Firearm Owners Protection Act stopped all future domestic manufacture of fully automatic weapons for civilian use. However, machine guns manufactured domestically prior to 1986 and imported prior to 1968 may be transferred between civilians in accordance with federal and state law."
There are still some machine guns in the hands of civilians, but there's clearly no need to regulate them any further. The National Center for Policy Analysis says "Over the past 50 years, no civilian has ever used a legally owned machine gun in a violent crime." Guncite found that "Since 1934, there appear to have been at least two homicides committed with legally owned automatic weapons." One of these was committed by a police officer; the other was committed by a civilian, but it's not certain whether that gun was owned legally. (Interestingly, the same type of weapon was used in both cases: a MAC-11.) Guncite also says that, according to Gary Kleck in Targeting Guns, four police officers were killed in the line of duty by machine guns between 1983 and 1992.
(The NCPA is a think tank that says its mission is "to seek innovative private-sector solutions to public policy problems. By using innovative and unique approaches to these problems, the NCPA encourages individual rights, free enterprise and self-government.")
The Illinois assault-weapons ban that was proposed and defeated by the state legislature in 2005 did outlaw possession of some automatic weapons that might otherwise be legal (attempting to solve a problem that doesn't seem to exist), but it primarily tried to ban guns that look like assault weapons, including specifically the Colt AR-15 (which is semi-automatic) and other cosmetic features: "(1) A semiautomatic, centerfire rifle that has the capacity to accept a detachable magazine and any one of the following:
How a pistol grip makes a weapon more dangerous is never explained. Apparently, some people believe this facilitates shooting from the hip. I consider that argument both mechanically unsound and irrelevant: bullets go at the same speed regardless of whether a gun is fired from the hip, the shoulder, the elbow, or between the legs.
Note that machine guns are still available to military and law-enforcement personnel under the existing laws. If they want to spend the money, they can certainly be better-armed than law-abiding civilians. How any ban affects convicted felons, who are already prohibited from possessing any firearms, is another thing that's never explained.
Blagojevich's rhetorical question, "How can we possibly allow gang bangers to be better armed than our police officers?" is nothing but a meaningless appeal to emotion. Convicted felons are already prohibited from owning or possessing firearms of any kind; existing laws, at the state, county, and municipal levels, also already prohibit carrying any firearms in a public place in an operable state. (The least restrictive laws in Illinois require firearms in a vehicle to be transported in a locked case or trunk, not accessible to the driver; and unloaded, with ammunition stored separately. Carrying concealed weapons in a public place is never permitted, except for law enforcement and military personnel on active duty.)
To address one final point: the reason that law-abiding civilians need high-capacity semi-automatic weapons is not to hunt; it's for exactly the same reason Blagojevich himself points out, with a very slight change in text: "How can we possibly allow gang bangers to be better armed than" our law-abiding citizens?
Essay by Paul Craig Roberts on counterpunch.org.
Draws some interesting historical parallels, including background on why some Libertarians dislike both Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt.
It has been clear for some time that one major goal of the current President is to increase the power of the office, claiming that only the Chief Executive has power to declare enemy combatants, designate terrorist organizations, and hold captives indefinitely without charges.
In Democracy in America (1832), Alexis de Tocqueville noted that the Presidency of the United States, at that time, held surprisingly little power. He correctly predicted that as U.S. interaction with other nations grew, so would the power of the Presidency. Sadly, there don't seem to be any countervailing forces able to resist the centralization of power in one national government, one office, and ultimately, one person.
Interviewed on the NPR show Fresh Air today: Bart Ehrman, author of Misquoting Jesus:
"Scholar Bart Ehrman's new book explores how scribes -- through both omission and intention -- changed the Bible. Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why is the result of years of reading the texts in their original languages."
He said he started as an "ultra-conservative", born-again, evangelical Christian who believed in the literal inerrancy of the Bible (probably the King James Version), but after investigation he found reasons to doubt that the Bible is really the direct word of God. Now he describes himself as an agnostic, but he continues to study and teach the Bible.
In addition to other claims made previously and possibly in future, I can now claim to have invented the new field of quantum economics. (Of course, since my primary talent is claiming, I can also claim to have invented the car. As Andy Devine [not Divine] said in an episode of The Twilight Zone: "Henry Ford called me on the phone and told me to fly out to Detroit right away to help him invent the car.")
My afflatus occurred thusly: I was thinking about a time when I suggested to a vice-president of the bank where I worked that we should turn off half the lights in our office building: first, because the lights were so bright I found them uncomfortable, and second, because we could thereby save electricity, and money (and the environment and so on). His response was, "Electricity doesn't come out of my budget, so I don't really care".
In a burst of great insight, I then combined this with the principle that There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch, featured prominently in Robert Heinlein's novel, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. (He also uses the word TANSTAAFL. There are a lot of Russian words in the book; at first, I thought this was another one. Only several years later did I realize it was an acronym.)
The final step was to add a concept contributed to science and mathematics by quantum theory: that the observer is inextricably an active participant in any observation. Consider, for example, the parable of Schoedinger's Cat: suspended indefinitely in a superposition of states, both alive and not-alive until observed.
Similarly, a lunch may be both free and not-free, depending on the observer. For the bank vice-president, electricity was free. For a different observer, it wasn't. This is also behind the problem of negative externalities, the tragedy of the commons, the free-rider problem which is behind a class of free-market failures. For example, since air is free, individual companies have no particular pressure not to pollute the air. It's not part of their defined cost structure. To them, the air is free; to another observer, maybe not so much (for example, air pollution may cause asthma attacks, increasing medical expenses for some people).
There it is: quantum economics. There is such a thing as a free lunch -- for some observers.
Some working notes:
The problem arises because property rights are unclear or not enforced (for example, who owns the air?).
Some regulatory methods:
In all cases, the determination of the cost of externalities is essentially arbitrary. Except for unmonitored laissez-faire, all require monitoring for compliance.
Tonight I saw a TV show called The Ghost Whisperer, in which Jennifer Love Hewitt plays a woman who can see and talk to people after they die. She "helps earth-bound spirits to move on".
It occurred to me that magickal shows like this one, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and even Dragonball Z (to the extent that I understand it at all, which is little), are all thousand-year-old folk tales presented through the latest storytelling media. Or folk concepts, more accurately. I noticed that the show Hercules: The Legendary Journeys started liberally mixing Greek mythology, Christian religious characters, and characters and stories drawn from other sources without much concern for consistency.
Maybe it's sort of like the concept of deep structure in grammar. Obviously, all religions, myths, and legends have common features. Maybe they all stem, in some sense, from a common source. Robert Anton Wilson suggested something of the sort in Cosmic Trigger: The Final Secret of the Illuminati.
Of course. They're all expressions of the zeitgeist, archetypes drawn from the collective unconscious. Jung kinda already pointed that out, didn't he?
I hope we can all rest more easily now that we know the Dunkin Donuts Chocolate Glazed Cake Donut (my own favorite) contains no crustaceans. I must admit that up to now I've just been assuming doughnuts don't contain any crustaceans, as well as a long list of other things I wouldn't expect (including but not limited to lye, broken glass, nails, etc.).
I don't even know what "shrimponds" are, unless that's a typo. The list must represent the most common food items likely to cause allergic reactions; or, more accurately, most likely to cause lawsuits.
I recently found this essay on anarchist morality, written by Peter Kropotkin in 1897. Kropotkin argues that what we call moral behavior is no more nor less than survival traits honed by evolution. Considering that it's over a century old, it's remarkably consonant with recent works like The Selfish Gene and The Moral Animal. I also see some clear antecedents to Ayn Rand and the Rational Anarchy mentioned in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein.
Kropotkin makes explicit references to John Stuart Mill and The Theory of Moral Sentiments by Adam Smith. He seems to have more faith in the inherent goodness of humanity than I have. I also don't quite grasp specifically what sort of economic and political system he had in mind. Judging from another essay, The Wage System, his ideal world didn't involve representative government or payment for work.
Royal Paper Dolls is a unique gallery of paper dolls representing famous Kings and Queens throughout history. The goal of this web site is to bring famous people of the past to life, using a combination of portraits, costumes and biographies.We are currently featuring paper dolls of the Tudor Kings and Queens of England. You may print out the dolls, free of charge, for your own personal enjoyment and education.
- We have paper dolls of King Henry VIII of England and his six wives, with colorful Tudor period costumes for each Queen.
- New!!! We've also added a paper doll set featuring Lady Jane Grey, Queen for Nine Days.
(Lady Jane Grey? Jean Grey is a member of the X-Men.)
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4530776.
Includes "Scratch My Back", "You're a Good Dog!", and the hit single "Squeaky-Deaky".
Leading to these serendipitous finds at CD Now:
... when Microsoft's position in the OS world is threatened, their corporate instincts will tell them to pile more new features into their operating systems, and then re-jigger their software applications to exploit those special features. But this will only have the effect of making their applications dependent on an OS with declining market share, and make it worse for them in the end.The real question is whether every new technological trend that comes down the pike ought to be used as a crutch to maintain the OS's dominant position. Confronted with the Web phenomenon, Microsoft had to develop a really good web browser, and they did. But then they had a choice: they could have made that browser work on many different OSes, which would give Microsoft a strong position in the Internet world no matter what happened to their OS market share. Or they could make the browser one with the OS, gambling that this would make the OS look so modern and sexy that it would help to preserve their dominance in that market. The problem is that when Microsoft's OS position begins to erode (and since it is currently at something like ninety percent, it can't go anywhere but down) it will drag everything else down with it.
Americans' preference for mediated experiences is obvious enough, and I'm not going to keep pounding it into the ground . . . . Disney does mediated experiences better than anyone. If they understood what OSes are, and why people use them, they could crush Microsoft in a year or two.
(The richer tourists at Disney World wear t-shirts printed with the names of famous designers, because designs themselves can be bootlegged easily and with impunity. The only way to make clothing that cannot be legally bootlegged is to print copyrighted and trademarked words on it; once you have taken that step, the clothing itself doesn't really matter, and so a t-shirt is as good as anything else. T-shirts with expensive words on them are now the insignia of the upper class. T-shirts with cheap words, or no words at all, are for the commoners).
We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and values systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right. But we have lost touch with those intellectuals, and with anything like intellectualism, even to the point of not reading books any more, though we are literate. We seem much more comfortable with propagating those values to future generations nonverbally, through a process of being steeped in media. Apparently this actually works to some degree, for police in many lands are now complaining that local arrestees are insisting on having their Miranda rights read to them, just like perps in American TV cop shows. When it's explained to them that they are in a different country, where those rights do not exist, they become outraged. Starsky and Hutch reruns, dubbed into diverse languages, may turn out, in the long run, to be a greater force for human rights than the Declaration of Independence.
A huge, rich, nuclear-tipped culture that propagates its core values through media steepage seems like a bad idea. There is an obvious risk of running astray here. Words are the only immutable medium we have, which is why they are the vehicle of choice for extremely important concepts like the Ten Commandments, the Koran, and the Bill of Rights. Unless the messages conveyed by our media are somehow pegged to a fixed, written set of precepts, they can wander all over the place and possibly dump loads of crap into people's minds.
To traditional cultures, especially word-based ones such as Islam, this is infinitely more threatening than the B-52s ever were. It is obvious, to everyone outside of the United States, that our arch-buzzwords, multiculturalism and diversity, are false fronts that are being used (in many cases unwittingly) to conceal a global trend to eradicate cultural differences. The basic tenet of multiculturalism (or "honoring diversity" or whatever you want to call it) is that people need to stop judging each other-to stop asserting (and, eventually, to stop believing) that this is right and that is wrong, this true and that false, one thing ugly and another thing beautiful, that God exists and has this or that set of qualities.
Contemporary culture is a two-tiered system, like the Morlocks and the Eloi in H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, except that it's been turned upside down. In The Time Machine the Eloi were an effete upper class, supported by lots of subterranean Morlocks who kept the technological wheels turning. [Not quite, but it works as a metaphor.] But in our world it's the other way round. The Morlocks are in the minority, and they are running the show, because they understand how everything works. [Again, not really. Managers control the people who understand how things work.] The much more numerous Eloi learn everything they know from being steeped from birth in electronic media directed and controlled by book-reading Morlocks. So many ignorant people could be dangerous if they got pointed in the wrong direction, and so we've evolved a popular culture that is (a) almost unbelievably infectious and (b) neuters every person who gets infected by it, by rendering them unwilling to make judgments and incapable of taking stands.
The situation I describe, here, could be bad, but doesn't have to be bad and isn't necessarily bad now: It simply is the case that we are way too busy, nowadays, to comprehend everything in detail. And it's better to comprehend it dimly, through an interface, than not at all. Better for ten million Eloi to go on the Kilimanjaro Safari at Disney World than for a thousand cardiovascular surgeons and mutual fund managers to go on "real" ones in Kenya.
The spectre of a polity controlled by the fads and whims of voters who actually believe that there are significant differences between Bud Lite and Miller Lite, and who think that professional wrestling is for real, is naturally alarming to people who don't. But then countries controlled via the command-line interface, as it were, by double-domed intellectuals, be they religious or secular, are generally miserable places to live.
So GUIs use metaphors to make computing easier, but they are bad metaphors. Learning to use them is essentially a word game, a process of learning new definitions of words like "window" and "document" and "save" that are different from, and in many cases almost diametrically opposed to, the old. [A point also made, much earlier, by Ted Nelson.]
. . . . now every little thing--wristwatches, VCRs, stoves--is jammed with features, and every feature is useless without an interface. If you are like me, and like most other consumers, you have never used ninety percent of the available features on your microwave oven, VCR, or cellphone. You don't even know that these features exist. The small benefit they might bring you is outweighed by the sheer hassle of having to learn about them. This has got to be a big problem for makers of consumer goods, because they can't compete without offering features.
[Apropos of Unix . . . .] The Hole Hawg is a drill made by the Milwaukee Tool Company. If you look in a typical hardware store you may find smaller Milwaukee drills but not the Hole Hawg, which is too powerful and too expensive for homeowners. [Home Depot has had them for several years.]
I myself used a Hole Hawg to drill many holes through studs, which it did as a blender chops cabbage. I also used it to cut a few six-inch-diameter holes through an old lath-and-plaster ceiling. I chucked in a new hole saw, went up to the second story, reached down between the newly installed floor joists, and began to cut through the first-floor ceiling below. Where my homeowner's drill had labored and whined to spin the huge bit around, and had stalled at the slightest obstruction, the Hole Hawg rotated with the stupid consistency of a spinning planet. When the hole saw seized up, the Hole Hawg spun itself and me around, and crushed one of my hands between the steel pipe handle and a joist, producing a few lacerations, each surrounded by a wide corona of deeply bruised flesh. It also bent the hole saw itself, though not so badly that I couldn't use it. After a few such run-ins, when I got ready to use the Hole Hawg my heart actually began to pound with atavistic terror.
But I never blamed the Hole Hawg; I blamed myself. The Hole Hawg is dangerous because it does exactly what you tell it to. It is not bound by the physical limitations that are inherent in a cheap drill, and neither is it limited by safety interlocks that might be built into a homeowner's product by a liability-conscious manufacturer. The danger lies not in the machine itself but in the user's failure to envision the full consequences of the instructions he [or she] gives to it.
A smaller tool is dangerous too, but for a completely different reason: it tries to do what you tell it to, and fails in some way that is unpredictable and almost always undesirable. But the Hole Hawg is like the genie of the ancient fairy tales, who carries out his master's instructions literally and precisely and with unlimited power, often with disastrous, unforeseen consequences.
Unix is the Hole Hawg of operating systems, and Unix hackers, like Doug Barnes and the guy in the Dilbert cartoon and many of the other people who populate Silicon Valley, are like contractor's sons who grew up using only Hole Hawgs. They might use Apple/Microsoft OSes to write letters, play video games, or balance their checkbooks, but they cannot really bring themselves to take these operating systems seriously.
[Linux] Many hackers have launched more or less successful re-implementations of the Unix ideal. Each one brings in new embellishments. Some of them die out quickly, some are merged with similar, parallel innovations created by different hackers attacking the same problem, others still are embraced, and adopted into the epic. Thus Unix has slowly accreted around a simple kernel and acquired a kind of complexity and asymmetry about it that is organic, like the roots of a tree, or the branchings of a coronary artery. Understanding it is more like anatomy than physics.
For at least a year, prior to my adoption of Linux, I had been hearing about it. Credible, well-informed people kept telling me that a bunch of hackers had got together an implentation of Unix that could be downloaded, free of charge, from the Internet. For a long time I could not bring myself to take the notion seriously. It was like hearing rumors that a group of model rocket enthusiasts had created a completely functional Saturn V by exchanging blueprints on the Net and mailing valves and flanges to each other.
Documentation, under Linux, comes in the form of man (short for manual) pages. You can access these either through a GUI (xman) or from the command line (man). Here is a sample from the man page for a program called rsh:
"Stop signals stop the local rsh process only; this is arguably wrong, but currently hard to fix for reasons too complicated to explain here."The man pages contain a lot of such material, which reads like the terse mutterings of pilots wrestling with the controls of damaged airplanes. The general feel is of a thousand monumental but obscure struggles seen in the stop-action light of a strobe. Each programmer is dealing with his own obstacles and bugs; he [or she] is too busy fixing them, and improving the software, to explain things at great length or to maintain elaborate pretensions.Commercial OSes have to adopt the same official stance towards errors as Communist countries had towards poverty. For doctrinal reasons it was not possible to admit that poverty was a serious problem in Communist countries, because the whole point of Communism was to eradicate poverty. Likewise, commercial OS companies like Apple and Microsoft can't go around admitting that their software has bugs and that it crashes all the time, any more than Disney can issue press releases stating that Mickey Mouse is an actor in a suit.
This is a problem, because errors do exist and bugs do happen. Every few months Bill Gates tries to demo a new Microsoft product in front of a large audience only to have it blow up in his face.
As far as I know, Debian is the only Linux distribution that has its own constitution (http://www.debian.org/devel/constitution), but what really sold me on it was its phenomenal bug database (http://www.debian.org/Bugs), which is a sort of interactive Doomsday Book of error, fallibility, and redemption. It is simplicity itself. When had a problem with Debian in early January of 1997, I sent in a message describing the problem to submit@bugs.debian.org. My problem was promptly assigned a bug report number (#6518) and a severity level (the available choices being critical, grave, important, normal, fixed, and wishlist) and forwarded to mailing lists where Debian people hang out. Within twenty-four hours I had received five e-mails telling me how to fix the problem: two from North America, two from Europe, and one from Australia. All of these e-mails gave me the same suggestion, which worked, and made my problem go away. But at the same time, a transcript of this exchange was posted to Debian's bug database, so that if other users had the same problem later, they would be able to search through and find the solution without having to enter a new, redundant bug report.
Contrast this with the experience that I had when I tried to install Windows NT 4.0 on the very same machine about ten months later, in late 1997. The installation program simply stopped in the middle with no error messages. I went to the Microsoft Support website and tried to perform a search for existing help documents that would address my problem. The search engine was completely nonfunctional; it did nothing at all. It did not even give me a message telling me that it was not working.
Added 2005-03-10 Thursday:
The ideal OS for me would be one that had a well-designed GUI that was easy to set up and use, but that included terminal windows where I could revert to the command line interface, and run GNU software, when it made sense. A few years ago, Be Inc. invented exactly that OS. It is called the BeOS. [Also sounds like MacOS X.][About BeOS . . . ] Indeed, none of it makes sense until you remember that the founder of the company, Jean-Louis Gassee, is from France--a country that for many years maintained its own separate and independent version of the English monarchy at a court in St. Germaines, complete with courtiers, coronation ceremonies, a state religion and a foreign policy. Now, the same annoying yet admirable stiff-neckedness that gave us the Jacobites, the force de frappe, Airbus, and ARRET signs in Quebec, has brought us a really cool operating system. I fart in your general direction, Anglo-Saxon pig-dogs!
I think that the message is very clear here: somewhere outside of and beyond our universe is an operating system, coded up over incalculable spans of time by some kind of hacker-demiurge. The cosmic operating system uses a command-line interface. It runs on something like a teletype, with lots of noise and heat; punched-out bits flutter down into its hopper like drifting stars. The demiurge sits at his teletype, pounding out one command line after another, specifying the values of fundamental constants of physics:
universe -G 6.672e-11 -e 1.602e-19 -h 6.626e-34 -protonmass 1.673e-27....and when he's finished typing out the command line, his right pinky hesitates above the ENTER key for an aeon or two, wondering what's going to happen; then down it comes--and the WHACK you hear is another Big Bang.
Now THAT is a cool operating system, and if such a thing were actually made available on the Internet (for free, of course) every hacker in the world would download it right away and then stay up all night long messing with it, spitting out universes right and left. Most of them would be pretty dull universes but some of them would be simply amazing. Because what those hackers would be aiming for would be much more ambitious than a universe that had a few stars and galaxies in it. Any run-of-the-mill hacker would be able to do that. No, the way to gain a towering reputation on the Internet would be to get so good at tweaking your command line that your universes would spontaneously develop life. And once the way to do that became common knowledge, those hackers would move on, trying to make their universes develop the right kind of life, trying to find the one change in the Nth decimal place of some physical constant that would give us an Earth in which, say, Hitler had been accepted into art school after all, and had ended up his days as a street artist with cranky political opinions.
http://www.monkeynoodle.org/comp/tools:
This is the best quotation:
"The latest poll indicates that 72 percent of the American public believes we should withdraw economic aid from Nicaragua. Of those who expressed this opinion, 28 percent thought Nicaragua was in Central Asia, 18 percent thought it was an island near New Zealand, and 27.4 percent believed that Africans should help themselves, obviously confusing Nicaragua with Nigeria. Moreover, of those polled, 61.8 percent did not know that we give economic aid to Nicaragua, and 23 percent did not know what economic aid was."--- Neil Postman, "Amusing Ourselves to Death"
Perhaps the most quoted US officer of the time was the one who explained the destruction of about one-third of the provincial capital of Ben Tre with unintended black humor: "It became necessary to destroy it," he said, "in order to save it". For many, this oft-quoted statement was not just a classic example of Pentagon double-think but also a symbol of the war's futility.
"Does the violence in films and on TV contribute to violence in society?
"This question has been debated for decades. During that time some 2,500 books and articles have been written on the effects of TV and film violence on human behavior.
"The results of one of the most extensive studies ever done on the subject of violence and TV were released in 2003.
"It's well known that TV violence holds an attraction for most viewers and this attraction translates into ratings and profits. Because of this most media executives have been reluctant to admit that media violence is in any way responsible for violence in our society."
Sexual Imagery, Censorship, and the Law
"Contrary to popular opinion, empirical research does not support a relationship between nonviolent sexual imagery (including adult pornography) and sex crimes."
Dr. Cherry Lee: "When it comes to justifiable spiritual values, watching sex films is probably less harmful than watching war films, since sex is based largely on love and sensitivity, and war is based largely on violence and hate.
"Because ours is a puritanically based society and we have problems with depicting sex, we tend to eroticize violence.
"For many people this creates an unfortunate, often even unconscious, link between sex and violence."
Also, I happened to think of Laurie Anderson this morning; I've recently been listening to her album Mister Heartbreak (e.g., amazon.com). Then, about an hour later, NPR Morning Edition reported that Laurie Anderson has been hired by NASA as their first artist in residence.
Note that the stated odds are derived by dividing the total population by the number of deaths, so they're completely unnormalized. For example, the odds of dying as an "Occupant of three-wheeled motor vehicle" are given as 1 in 335,720 (per lifetime) -- but this is an average for the whole population. It doesn't mean three-wheeled vehicles are especially safe; it just means they're rare (11 total deaths in 2001).
Linked from this page, which has interesting numeric trivia:
Scale models of the solar system:
I just bet that none of you have tried this one and I doubt whether many of you will, but if it works...Here's a cure for ground hum. Once on a session I had a ground hum problem. When I touched the strings the hum stopped. Lift the fingers off, hum came back. So needing both hands to play the [Chapman] Stick, I figured I needed to attach a string to my body to always have it grounded.
So, I took an old high string and tied it to some metal on the stick. The session was ready to record and I was running out of time and needed a body part to attach the string to. Well, out of time and grace, I reached down into my pants (unnoticed, thank God) and wrapped the string around my 'Captain Happy', 'Big Wally', 'Little Eddie', 'King Richard'... (You get the idea).
Well, it worked like a charm, securely anchored and no hum. The tune played on and was recorded and turned out to be a wonderful take. The engineer, excited, called out to us to come into the booth to check it out. Being excited to hear it myself I forgot 'how well grounded' I was. I yanked the stick off, nearly slicing off my 'manliness'. Aaarrghh, needless to say, a most memorable session. I almost became my own sister.
Harry Braun wants to replace all fuel sources with hydrogen, mostly generated by "wind ships". This might be a good idea, but he wants to do it by 2010, and I think some of the difficulties are either underestimated or misunderstood. For example, the Web site repeatedly says that hydrogen fuel is "safer than gasoline". It's unclear what this means: does it mean safer to handle, or does it mean safer in the sense that it produces less dangerous pollution? It's impossible to be sure whether either of these is true without extensive engineering detail, which doesn't seem to be present either at the Harry Braun for President Web site or the related Phoenix Project site.
The windships depicted in the artist's conception are clearly unworkable. They'd need huge counterweights underwater for the array of wind turbines above. No such counterweights are shown; the underwater globes are apparently hollow, providing production facilities and living space for the workers. (How anyone could get anything done in an underwater bubble during gusty winds is not explained: dynamic anti-roll compensators? Gyroscopes?)
This is an interesting section, from the Vision document:
The Braun administration will eliminate the need for health insurance by providing universal health care for all Americans. This new American Health care system will be operated on a non-profit basis, in contrast to the current system that is structured around the financial interest of drug and insurance companies and physicians and dentists who "operate" on commission . . . .
"Harry is CEO of Sustainable Partners LLC, a systems integration firm that is involved in a number of renewable energy projects . . ." Does that mean he's working in an area consistent with his beliefs, or does it mean he hopes to get lucrative government contracts for his business? Or is he just out for publicity?
There's an interesting chart here. It shows estimates of world crude-oil production, but there's nothing to say when the chart was prepared. I'd guess around 1975. The chart has two curves labeled, "Estimates of world production of crude oil." One of these shows production decreasing after 1990; the other shows a decline after 2000. Since we know that didn't happen, obviously the chart must be more than 15 years old.
The site appears to have been hurriedly adapted from a state to a national level: in some places it says "the U.S. will become a Saudi Arabia-class energy exporter"; in other places, it says "California".
"PROSSER, Benton County -- Secret Service agents questioned a high-school student here about anti-war drawings he turned in to his art teacher."
"One of them depicted President Bush's head on a stick."
" . . . . Secret Service agents interviewed the boy Friday. The student, who was not arrested, has not been identified."
"The school district disciplined him, but district officials declined to say what the punishment was. [Prosser Superintendent Ray] Tolcacher said the boy was not suspended. Tolcacher insisted it was not a freedom-of-speech issue but a concern over the depiction of violence."
I find it interesting that a school superintendent seems to feel that freedom of speech and violence are somehow separate; that freedom of speech ends where depictions of violence begin. It's especially troubling that this was explicitly political speech.
Evidently this superintendent has ex cathedra authority to speak for the courts, deciding that freedom of speech doesn't include "the depiction of violence". That goes a step further than hate crime laws that say freedom of speech doesn't include advocating violence.
So what's next? "It wasn't a freedom of assembly issue; it's that they were Muslims". "It wasn't a Fourth Amendment issue; it was that he looked like a drug dealer." "It wasn't a civil-rights issue; it was that he was designated an 'Enemy Combatant'."
If freedom of speech truly doesn't include depictions of violence, the American entertainment industry is in for a rude shock.
Plush microbes from ThinkGeek.com.
These statements really stood out:
"We're told the pulse beats slower every seven days as if it were in accord with the seventh day of rest proclaimed in the Genesis creation week."
What? I've never been told that! (Until now.)
"And God formed man of the dust of the ground (Gen 2:7); science confirms the human body is made of the same 14 elements (2 x 7) found in your average handful of dust."
What 14 elements? That seems to be a completely arbitrary choice. In any case, I don't think having similar sets of elements in the planet of origin and in a species evolved on that planet necessarily constitutes evidence of God's Hand.
"The light of the sun is made up of seven distinct colours as shown in the rainbow."
That is definitely an arbitrary choice, based on the belief in the mystical powers of the number seven by the Pythagorean cult. The division into seven colors is entirely subjective.
"In music there are seven distinct notes which climax in a chord or octave at the beginning of a new seven."
Another arbitrary choice, and only one of several musical scales. The chromatic scale has twelve notes; the pentatonic has five.
This reminds me of a little religious pamphlet that claimed one piece of evidence for Creation was that the wavelengths of light our eyes see just happen to be the same as the wavelengths the Earth receives from the Sun. It's a miracle!
My main Web site is 93% good and only 7% evil. However, I don't think the Gematriculator actually recursively visits the whole site; it really only reads one page. This weblog is (currently) 29% evil and 71% good.
At least they seem to understand the yin-yang principle that good and evil are dependent on each other.
This suggests a Galileo-Aristotle type paradox: If one person writes both plays and poetry (like Shakespeare), will he die earlier (because of the combination of the two), or later (because the play-writing extends his life)? Of course, the question is based on a false premise.
The article suggests it may be just a statistical artifact: Poets tend to get published earlier than other writers, so they have a higher probability of achieving fame young and then dying at an earlier age. But that just leads to another question: Why are poets successful younger? Something similar has been noticed in other intellectual fields: physicists usually make their breakthoughs young, while philosophers (for example) remain productive much longer.
It's a mystery.
Both requiring interpretation of the Bill of Rights:
Amazingly, the plaintiff, Michael Newdow, actually managed to get Justice Antonin Scalia to recuse himself from this case.
Boy Scout attempts to build a breeder reactor: "Science allowed him to distance himself from his parents, to create and destroy things, to break the rules, and to escape into something he was a success at, while sublimating a teenager's sense of failure, anger, and embarrassment into some really big explosions."
A case study of inaccurate reporting: President Bush made reference to a proposal to finish the International Space Station, establish a base on the Moon, and send humans to Mars. According to "Whispers in the echo chamber", by Dwayne A. Day, one reporter -- using flawed assumptions and questionable arithmetic -- managed to inflate the cost of a human Mars mission to a trillion dollars -- a number which was then repeated almost endlessly by other news media. This led to an ironic situation in which actual cost estimates were considered lies because they were so much lower than the false number.
Some quotations from the article:
The odd turns of phrase occasionally produced by George W Bush may result from a type of learning disability, according to this article from MSNBC.
Acoustics can explain why it's difficult to understand the words sung by operatic sopranos, says Physics Today.
That's one of several gun-control articles on Eric's Gun Nut Page.
Includes a follow-up examining the effectiveness of the approach.
There are other subtleties as well, and other gaps between numbers quoted and money actually spent. For example, this is from the official White House Web site: "In his 2003 State of the Union address, President Bush announced the Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, a five-year, $15 billion initiative to turn the tide in combating the global HIV/AIDS pandemic."
The President actually said this in the State of the Union speech: "I ask the Congress to commit $15 billion over the next five years, including nearly $10 billion in new money, ...." Note the "nearly $10 billion in new money". In other words, it's reported at the President comitting $15 billion, when really $5 billion was already allocated.
Further, that's $15 billion over five years, though if you only look at the headlines, it's often reported as just "$15 billion" -- which could imply $15 billion per year.
The fine print (again, from the White House press release, says this: "The $15 billion virtually triples the current U.S. commitment to fighting AIDS internationally. It includes $10 billion in new funds, of which $1 billion is for the Global Fund to Fight HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria. Funding will begin with $2 billion in FY 04 and ramp up thereafter."
So it's really only $2 billion in the current fiscal year, with a promise to increase that later. Of course, as the advertising for investments says, these are forward-looking statements, and there's no guarantee the money will really be budgeted in future. This trick was also used in talking about prescription-drug benefits and tax reduction (total cost reported without pointing out that it's over a period of several years).
Another gap between theory and practice is that the money may be budgeted but never spent, or budgeted for one purpose then reallocated elsewhere.
Guiteau's defense was three-fold:
History House has many interesting and entertaining articles, including this one on eugenics:
Even during their heyday, some mandatory sterilization laws were met with incredulity. A law drafted in Kentucky designed to sterilize idiots and habitual criminals met with smart remarks on the Senate floor. "If this had gone through forty years ago," one legislator claimed, "there would not be so many fools here [in the Senate] now." This was seconded by an amendment calling for mandatory sterilization of all Republicans, and the bill collapsed.
Ehrenreich decides to look for jobs in Minnesota: "No waitressing, nursing homes, or housecleaning this time; I'm psyched for a change -- retail, maybe, or factory work." She meets Roberta at a Wal-Mart:
Robert introduces me to "what Wal-Mart is all about." She personally read Sam Walton's book (his autobiography, Made in America) before starting to work here and found that the three pillars of Wal-Mart philosophy precisely fit her own, and these are service, excellence (or something like that), and she can't remember the third.Then there's the matter of the drug test, since of course it wouldn't be Safe to have someone who Might Be Impaired folding clothes in Wal-Mart:
All I have to do now is pass a drug test . . . . but there has been a chemical indiscretion in recent weeks and I'm not at all sure I can pass. If I had used cocaine or heroin there would be no problem, since these are water-soluble and wash out of the body in a couple of days. (LSD isn't even tested for.) But my indiscretion involved the only drug usually detected by testing, marijuana, which is fat-soluble and, I have read, can linger in the body for months.She then gets lost on the way to an appointment for an interview at a factory, and
I find myself in front of a Menards housewares store -- a midwestern Home Depot-like chain -- and since a sign says, "Now Hiring," I might as well go on in and put my confrontational strategy to the test again.Menards -- like Wal-Mart -- has a personality test; the humor is presumably unintentional:
This one is shorter than Wal-Mart's and apparently aimed at a rougher crowd: Am I more or less likely than other people to get into fistfights? Are there situations in which dealing cocaine is not a crime? A long, repetitive stretch on stealing, featuring variants on the question: "In the last year I have stolen (check dollar amount below) worth of goods from my employers."After Menards, she conceives a Bad Plan:
In a spirit of contrition for multiple sins, I decide to devote the weekend to detox. . . . . To hurry the process, there is a product called CleanP supposedly available at GNC, so I drive fifteen minutes to the nearest one, swigging tap water from an Evian bottle all the way, and ask the kid managing the place where his, uh, detox products are kept. Maybe he's used to a stream of momlike women demanding CleanP, because he leads me poker-faced to an impressively large locked glass case -- locked either because the average price of GNC's detox products is $49.95 or because the market is thought to consist of desperate and not particularly law-abiding individuals. I read the ingredients and buy two of them separately -- creatinine and a diuretic called uva ursis -- for a total of $30. So here is the program: drink water at all times, along with frequent doses of diuretic, and (this is my own scientific contribution) avoid salt in any form at all since salt encourages water retention, meaning no processed foods, fast foods, or condiments of any kind. If I want that job in plumbing at Menards, I have to make myself into an unobstructed pipe: water in and water just as pure and drinkable coming out.The author claims to have a PhD in biology, but evidently she's not familiar with hyponatremia. Drinking lots of water, taking a diuretic, and no salt. Maybe the cramps will warn her she's on the wrong course before the cardiac arrhythmia hits. Besides, if she wants to flush out a fat-soluble chemical, why is she drinking water?
Evidently she got away with it, since the book doesn't mention any negative side-effects.
While still engaged in the Menards hiring process, Ehrenreich attends the new-employee (or, rather, "new associate", to use the correct Wal-Martian term) orientation for Wal-Mart, where they all
hear Roberta tell once again about raising six children, being a "people person," discovering that the three principles of Wal-Mart philosophy were the same as her own, and so on. We begin with a video, about fifteen minutes long, on the history and philosophy of Wal-Mart, or, as an anthropological observer might call it, the Cult of Sam. First young Sam Walton, in uniform, comes back from the war. He starts a store, a sort of five-and-dime; he marries and fathers four attractive children; he receives a Medal of Freedom from President Bush, after which he promptly dies, making way for the eulogies. But the company goes on, yes indeed. Here the arc of the story soars upward unstoppably, pausing only to mark some fresh milestone of corporate expansion. 1992: Wal-Mart becomes the largest retailer in the world. 1997: Sales top $100 billion. 1998: The number of Wal-Mart associates hits 825,000, making Wal-Mart the largest private employer in the nation. . . . . Over and over we hear in voiceover or see in graphic display the "three principles," which are maddeningly, even defiantly, nonparallel: "respect for the individual, exceeding customers' expectations, strive for excellence."Further evidence, if any were needed, that all those grammar exercises in school really were a waste of time. You don't become a billionaire entrepreneur by diagramming sentences.
The "Associate Handbook" warns:
No "grazing," that is, eating from food packages that somehow become open; no "time theft." This last sends me drifting off in a sci-fi direction: And as the time thieves headed back to the year 3420, loaded with weekends and days off looted from the twenty-first century . . . Finally, a question. The old guy who is being hired as a people greeter wants to know, "What is time theft?" Answer: Doing anything other than working during company time, anything at all. Theft of our time is not, however, an issue. There are stretches amounting to many minutes when all three of our trainers wander off, leaving us to sit there in silence or take the opportunity to squirm.The author then experiences a moment of Wal-Mart satori:
The breakthrough comes on a Saturday, one of your heavier shopping days. There are two carts waiting for me when I arrive at two, and tossed items inches deep on major patches of the floor. The place hasn't been shopped, it's been looted. In this situation, all I can do is everything at once -- stoop, reach, bend, lift, run from rack to rack with my cart. And then it happens -- a magical flow state in which the clothes start putting themselves away. Oh, I play a part in this, but not in any conscious way. Instead of thinking, "White Stag navy twill skort," and doggedly searching out similar skorts, all I have to do is form an image of the item in my mind, transpose this image onto the visual field, and move to wherever the image finds its match in the outer world. I don't know how this works. Maybe my mind just gets so busy processing the incoming visual data that it has to bypass the left brain's verbal centers, with their cumbersome instructions: "Proceed to White Stag area in the northwest corner of ladies', try bottom racks near khaki shorts . . ." Or maybe the trick lies in understanding that each item wants to be reunited with its sibs and its clan members and that, within each clan, the item wants to occupy its proper place in the color/size hierarchy. Once I let the clothes take charge, once I understand that I am only the means of their reunification, they just fly out of the cart to their natural homes.
PC icon writer retires from IBMOne wonders whether the retirement was entirely voluntary and how many IBM workers remain employed for 28 years without being laid off.The man who spent five minutes writing the computer code that would bail out the world's PC users for decades is retiring today.
David Bradley programmed one of the most well-known key combinations around: Ctrl-Alt-Delete. It forces obstinate computers to restart when they no longer follow other commands. [Except when it doesn't -- wht]
Bradley, 55, is leaving IBM Corp. after 28 years. By 1980, he was one of 12 people working to create the IBM PC. They had to design a simple way to restart the computer should it fail. [Without the intolerable expense of adding a Reset switch -- wht] Bradley wrote the code to make it work. His fame depends on the failures of others. "I didn't know it was going to be a cultural icon," he said. "I did a lot of other things than Ctrl-Alt-Delete, but I'm famous for that."
(Note that there is at least one typographic error in the text: In the section headed "Misperceptions of Attitudes in the Islamic World", at the end of the first paragraph, "In the case of Pakistan, a plurality of 45% opposed US efforts in the summer of 2003, rising to 74% in May 2003." That should read "summer of 2002", as in the two previous references in the same paragraph. There are also a few cases in which the word "not" seems to have been used in place of "no".)
Hooray for NPR: "The extent of Americans' misperceptions vary significantly depending on their source of news. Those who receive most of their news from Fox News are more likely than average to have misperceptions. Those who receive most of their news from NPR or PBS are less likely to have misperceptions."
Immediately after law school, Puttermesser entered the firm of Midland, Reid & Cockleberry. It was a blueblood Wall Street firm, and Puttermesser, hired for her brains and ingratiating (read: immigrant-like) industry, was put into a back office to hunt up all-fours cases for the men up front. Though a Jew and a woman, she felt little discrimination: the back office was chiefly the repository of unmitigated drudgery and therefore of usable youth. Often enough it kept its lights burning till three in the morning. It was right that the Top Rung of law school should earn you the Bottom of the Ladder in the actual world of all-fours. The wonderful thing was the fact of the Ladder itself. And though she was the only woman, Puttermesser was not the only Jew. Three Jews a year joined the back precincts of Midland, Reid (four the year Puttermesser came, which meant they thought "woman" more than "Jew" at the sight of her). Three Jews a year left -- not the same three. Lunchtime was difficult. Most of the young men went to one or two athletic clubs nearby to work out; Puttermesser ate from a paper bag at her desk, along with the other Jews, and this was strange: the young male Jews appeared to be as committed to the squash courts as the others. Alas, the athletic clubs would not have them, and this too was preternatural -- the young Jews were indistinguishable from the others. They bought the same suits from the same tailors, wore precisely the same shirts and shoes, were careful to avoid tie clips and to be barbered a good deal shorter than the wild men of the streets, though a bit longer than the prigs in the banks.That's a particularly compelling description of institutionalized implicit discrimination.Puttermesser remembered what Anatole France said of Dreyfus: that he was the same type as the officers who condemned him. "In their shoes he would have condemned himself."
Only their accents fell short of being identical: the "a" a shade too far into the nose, the "i" with its telltale elongation, had long ago spread from Brooklyn to Great Neck, from Puttermesser's Bronx to Scarsdale. These two influential vowels had the uncanny faculty of disqualifying them for promotion. The squash players, meanwhile, moved out of the back offices into the front offices. One or two of them were groomed -- curried, fed sugar, led out by the muzzle -- for partnership: were called out to lunch with thin and easeful clients, spent an afternoon in the dining room of one of the big sleek banks, and, in short, developed the creamy cheeks and bland habits of the always-comfortable.
Puttermesser left, weary of so much chivalry -- the partners in particular were excessively gracious to her, and treated her like a fellow-aristocrat. Puttermesser supposed this was because she did not say "a" in her nose or elongate her "i," and above all she did not dentalize her "t," "d," or "l," keeping them all back against the upper palate. Long ago her speech had been standardized by the drilling of fanatical teachers, elocutionary missionaries hired out of the Midwest by Puttermesser's prize high school, until almost all the regionalism was drained out; except for the pace of her syllables, which had a New York deliberateness, Puttermesser could have come from anywhere. It seemed to her the partners felt this.
Then she remembered that Dreyfus spoke perfect French, and was the perfect Frenchman.
For farewell she was taken out to a public restaurant -- the clubs the partners belonged to (they explained) did not allow women -- and apologized to.
"We're sorry to lose you," one said, and the other said, "No one for you in this outfit for under the canvas, hah?"
"The canvas?" Puttermesser said.
"Wedding canopy," said the partner, with a wink. "Or do they make them out of sheepskin -- I forget."
"An interesting custom. I hear you people break the dishes at a wedding too," said the second partner.
An anthropological meal. They explored the rites of her tribe. She had not known she was strange to them. Their beautiful manners were the cautiousness you adopt when you visit the interior: Dr. Livingstone, I presume? They shook hands and wished her luck, and at that moment, so close to their faces with those moist smile-ruts flowing from the sides of their waferlike noses punctured by narrow, even nostrils, Puttermesser was astonished into noticing how strange they were -- so many luncheon martinis inside their bellies, and such beautiful manners even while drunk, and, important though they were, insignificant though she was, the fine ceremonial fact of their having brought her to this carpeted place. She was impressed by their courtesy, their benevolence, through which they always got their way. They were benevolent because benevolence was theirs to dispense.
It was difficult to tell whether Turtelman's bad spellers represented the Mayor himself, or only the new Commissioner, but clearly they were scouts and spies. They reported on lateness and laxness, on backlogs and postponements, on insufficiencies and excesses, on waste and error. They issued warnings and sounded alarms; they brought pressure to bear and threatened and cautioned and gave tips. They were watchful and envious. It soon became plain that they did not understand the work.Some memorable phrases there: "In their presence the work instantly held its breath and came to a halt, as if it were a horse reined in for examination. They walked round and round the work, ruminating, speculating. They could not judge it; they did not understand it . . . . Her titles were the poetry of the bureaucracy."They did not understand the work because they were, it turned out, political appointees shipped over from the Department of Hygienic Maintenance; a handful were from the Fire Department. They had already had careers as oligarchs of street-sweeping, sewers and drains, gutters, the perils of sleet, ice, rainslant, gas, vermin, fumigation, disinfection, snow removal, water supply, potholes, steam cleaning, deodorization, ventilation, abstersion, elutriation; those from the Fire Department had formerly wielded the sceptre over matters of arson, hydrants, pumps, hose (measured by weight, in kilograms), incendiary bombs, rubber boots, wax polish, red paint, false alarms, sappers, marshals. They had ruled over all these corporealities, but without comprehension; they asked for frequent memos; they were "administrators". This meant they were good at arrest; not only at making arrests (the fire marshals, for instance), but at bringing everything to a standstill, like the spindle-prick in Sleeping Beauty. In their presence the work instantly held its breath and came to a halt, as if it were a horse reined in for examination. They walked round and round the work, ruminating, speculating. They could not judge it; they did not understand it.
But they knew what it was for. It was for the spoils quota. The work, impenetrable though it was to its suzerains, proliferated with jobs; jobs blossomed with salaries; salaries were money; money was spoils.
Puttermesser was now an old hand, both at the work and at the landscape of the bureaucracy. Her titles, movable and fictitious, traveled upward: from Assistant Corporation Counsel she became Administrative Tax Law Associate, and after that Vice Chief of Financial Affairs, and after that First Bursary Officer. All the while she felt like Alice, swallowing the potion and growing compact, nibbling the mushroom and swelling; each title was a swallow or a nibble, and not one of them signified anything but the degree of her convenience to whoever was in command. Her titles were the poetry of the bureaucracy.
Late on Monday afternoon they took the subway all the way downtown to the Brooklyn Bridge station and went up to the second floor of the Municipal Building. The familiar corridors were wide, battered, gritty; it was as if the walls repelled light. To Puttermesser's surprise, the Marriage License Bureau was no longer there. It had crossed the road to Chambers Street and settled in a former bank the color of an elderly cat's scarred hide. On their way out, Puttermesser surveyed her old territory; inside what had been her own office only months ago, motes hung languidly on smuggled beads of illicit sun.I like the imagery of "smuggled beads of illicit sun." Note the parallelism between the usual "sun-beams" and "beads of sun".
Some other references:
NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- The school honor roll, a time-honored system for rewarding "A" students, has become an apparent source of embarrassment for some underachievers.I suppose this might also protect some students from getting beaten up for being on the honor roll.As a result, all Nashville schools have stopped posting honor rolls, and some are considering a ban on hanging good work in the hallways -- at the advice of school lawyers.
After a few parents complained their children might be ridiculed for not making the list, school-system lawyers warned that state privacy laws forbid releasing academic information, good or bad, without permission.
I think they need more space for aliases, though.
Washington's Birthday was first declared a federal holiday by an 1879 act of Congress. The Monday Holiday Law, enacted in 1968, shifted the date of the commemoration of Washington's Birthday from February 22 to the third Monday in February, but neither that law nor any subsequent law changed the name of the holiday from Washington's Birthday to President's Day.Although the third Monday in February has become popularly known as President's Day, the NYSE's designation of Washington's Birthday as an Exchange holiday (Rule 51) follows the form of the federal holiday outlined above (section 6103(a) of title 5 of the United States Code).
Be careful what you ask for is the lesson Julie Olearcek learned when she inquired about a gift for her son last week at a Staples store. A seemingly innocent query for flight simulation software earned the Air Force Reserves pilot a visit to her home from State Troopers, according to local reports.I can't figure out what that last sentence means. My guess is that she meant, "Everone needs to be constantly on guard to Protect Against Terrorism."Olearcek was looking for a computer game that her son could use to practice flying an aircraft, just like the ones flown by his mother and father, who is also an active-duty pilot. After searching the aisles for something that didn't involve fighting to no avail, Olearcek asked a sales clerk.
"He was alarmed by us asking how to fly airplanes and said that was against the law," said Olearcek, . . . .
"At first I felt like, 'Wait a minute, this is America.' But we also have to understand it takes everybody to pay attention," Olearcek said.
Sgt. Donald Charpentier of the Shelburne Falls State Police barracks said the Staples manager had called them to report that a person had been looking for instructional videos regarding flying planes.Lesson for Terrorists: If the police ask, say it's a Christmas present."Those programs are quite common for entertainment and training, but he felt it was suspicious enough to warrant a call," said Charpentier, according to the Recorder. "We responded, and it turned out to be innocent enough; a person looking to buy a Christmas gift."
"People kept saying the most remarkable things using the most remarkable language, which I found I needed to put down in writing because the words would disappear from my brain within seconds if I didn't. . . . . The things they said were largely incomprehensible. There was much talk about deconstruction and signifiers and arguments about whether cyberspace was or was not "narrative". There was much quotation from Baudrillard, Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Saussure, and the like, every single word of which was impenetrable."
". . . . technical people like me work in a commercial environment. Every day I have to explain what I do to people who are different from me -- marketing people, technical writers, my boss, my investors, my customers -- none of whom belong to my profession or share my technical background or knowledge. As a consequence, I'm constantly forced to describe what I know in terms that other people can at least begin to understand. . . . .
"Contrast this situation with that of academia. Professors of Literature or History or Cultural Studies in their professional life find themselves communicating principally with other professors of Literature or History or Cultural Studies. . . . .
"What you have is rather like birds on the Galapagos islands -- an isolated population with unique selective pressures resulting in evolutionary divergence from the mainland population. There's no reason you should be able to understand what these academics are saying because, for several generations, comprehensibility to outsiders has not been one of the selective criteria to which they've been subjected."
Hey, SUV owners! Bin Laden thanks you!
The FBI noted that use of almanacs or maps may be innocent, "the product of legitimate recreational or commercial activities." But it warned that when combined with suspicious behavior -- such as apparent surveillance -- a person with an almanac "may point to possible terrorist planning."
Do the choices make sense? Does it make sense to have separate lists for boys and girls? Maybe it helps gift-givers find gifts the recipients will enjoy.
Sometimes I try to imagine what threat model these measures are intended to address. There may not be one; they may be what Bruce Schneier calls "Placebo Security": something that makes people feel safer without really making anyone any safer. Obsessive "Show Us Your Papers!" ID checking obviously won't stop truck bombs or airplanes flying into buildings. The Big Attacks, in other words. It also won't keep out authorized people with a grudge or unauthorized people with fake IDs. It might keep out Unidentified Undesirables. It might keep out ex-employees. It won't keep homeless bums from camping out in the lobby; you don't need IDs for that. It also won't keep out anyone who can bluff, bluster, or bully their way past the guards. It might move the location of a shoot-out from the office into the lobby. It does provide a lot more security-guard jobs, so it's not a complete loss.
I also wonder whether any of this enhanced security has been effective against its threat model, whatever that is. Has it reduced the incidence of office shootings? Attacks by People Who Don't Belong Here against Those Who Do? Since I'm not sure what specifically all this Security is supposed to stop, I'm not sure how to tell whether It is being stopped or not. Have losses due to office theft dropped? Is anyone keeping statistics on that? What about people mugged in stairways? Maybe it's worth it just for the Placebo Effect. Does anyone really feel safer when they're asked for identification every time they turn around? I don't, but maybe that's just me.
Anyone want to take a vote on whether to continue the Enhanced Security Measures or not? So far, nobody's asked me for my vote.
Haven't seen it myself, but I like the go-for-it spirit of one woman bringing a film into the US and trying to get it nominated for the Academy Award® and the Golden Globe, just because she thought it was good.
At last he took his courage in both hands and endeavoured to bring Mr. Wither to the point by saying that he was still not quite clear in what capacity he would be able to assist the Institute."I assure you, Mr. Studdock," said the Deputy Director with an unusually far away look in his eye, "that you needn't anticipate the slightest -- er -- the slightest difficulty on that point. There was never any idea of circumscribing your activities and your general influence on policy, much less your relations with your colleagues and what I might call in general the terms of reference under which you would be collaborating with us, without the fullest possible consideration of your own views and, indeed, your own advice. You will find us, Mr. Studdock, if I might express myself in that way, a very happy family."
"Oh, don't misunderstand me, Sir," said Mark. "I didn't mean that at all. I only meant that I felt I should like some sort of idea of what exactly I should be doing if I came to you. . . . . It is the exact nature of the work," he said, "and of my qualifications for it that I wanted to get clear."
"My dear friend," said the Deputy Director, "you need not have the slightest uneasiness in that direction. As I said before, you will find us a very happy family, and may feel perfectly satisfied that no questions as to your entire suitability have been agitating anyone's mind in the least. I should not be offering you a position among us if there were the slightest danger of your not being completely welcome to all, or the least suspicion that your very valuable qualities were not fully appreciated. You are -- you are among friends here, Mr. Studdock. I should be the last person to advise you to connect yourself with any organisation where you ran the risk of being exposed -- er -- to disagreeable personal contacts."
Mark did not ask again in so many words what the N.I.C.E. wanted him to do; partly because he began to be afraid that he was supposed to know this already, and partly because a perfectly direct question would have sounded a crudity in that room -- a crudity which might suddenly exclude him from the warm and almost drugged atmosphere of vague, yet heavily important, confidence in which he was gradually being enfolded.
"You are very kind," he said. "The only thing I should like to get just a little clearer is the exact -- well, the exact scope of the appointment."
"Well," said Mr. Wither in a voice so low and rich that it was almost a sigh, "I am very glad you have raised this issue now in a quite informal way. Obviously neither you nor I would wish to commit ourselves, in this room, in any sense which was at all injurious to the powers of the Committee. I quite understand your motives and -- er -- respect them. We are not, of course, speaking of an Appointment in the quasi-technical sense of the term; it would be improper for both of us (though, you may well remind me, in different ways) to do so -- or at least it might lead to certain inconveniences. But I think I can most definitely assure you that nobody wants to force you into any kind of straight waistcoat or bed of Procrustes. We do not really think, among ourselves, in terms of strictly demarcated functions, of course. I take it that men like you and me are -- well, to put it frankly, hardly in the habit of using concepts of that type. Everyone in the Institute feels that his own work is not so much a departmental contribution to an end already defined as a moment or grade in the progressive self-definition of an organic whole."
And Mark said -- God forgive him, for he was young and shy and vain and timid, all in one -- "I do think that is so important. The elasticity of your organisation is one of the things that attracts me." After that, he had no further chance of bringing the Director to the point and whenever the slow, gentle voice ceased he found himself answering it in its own style, and apparently helpless to do otherwise despite the torturing recurrence of the question, "What are we both talking about?"
An episode of This American life, Episode 250, titled "The Annoying Gap Between Theory and Practice", Act Two. In this case, the gap is between what a freshman state legislator had hoped to be able to do and what he really does.
There's a fascinating (and depressing) description of legislative procedural maneuvering, following "The House Will Come to Order": Senate bills 252 and 560 ... both will impose fees on anyone who discharges pollution into the water: one of the bills deals with ground-water, the other with rivers and lakes. In both cases, the fee depends on the amount of pollution discharged. ... Most states already had such laws; Michigan was one of eight states that didn't .... The Republicans proposed amendments that exempted certain businesses from paying the fees, so that they could tell their constituents that they were trying to protect the constituents' interests, while the Democrats were trying to take their hard-earned money.
| 23m42s | Act Two begins |
| 29m45s | The Michigan-Controlled Share-Owner Statute |
| 35m00s | "The House will Come to Order" |
Sometimes it's good to be The Most Powerful Man in the Free World. If you want some pants, just have your secretary call the chairman of Haggar Corporation and tell him what you want: http://www.americanradioworks.org/features/prestapes/b4.html. Don't read the transcript: be sure to listen to the audio. Hearing Johnson's voice really adds a lot to the ambience.
Also mentioned on NPR Weekend Edition Saturday. The call to Haggar is repeated near them middle, beginning at about 4m25s. All the material is extracted from a Book and CD compilation called White House Tapes: Eavesdropping on the President.
(Note added 2004-10-25: Haggar invented the term "slacks" for its casual trousers.)
| Canine Skin | Human Skin |
|---|---|
| 1. Epidermis 3 - 5 cells thick | 1. Epidermis 10 - 15 cells thick |
| 2. Coat comprises hair "bundles" (i.e., more than one hair per follicle, usually consisting of one long "guard hair" with several finer hairs) | 2. Generally solitary hairs |
| 3. Apocrine sweat glands (eccrine sweat glands only in paws) | 3. Apocrine and eccrine sweat glands |
| 4. Average pH 7.5 (very slightly alkaline) | 4. Average pH 5.5 (acidic) |
| 5. Cyclic hair growth | 5. Continuous hair growth |
| 6. Epidermal turnover rate approximately 20 days. | 6. Epidermal turnover rate approximately 20 days. |
General Thermoregulation of Dogs:
http://www.bio.davidson.edu/Courses/anphys/2000/Hatfield/Hatfield3.htm
The Sweaty Cat?
Textbooks: "Wikibooks is dedicated to developing and disseminating free, open content textbooks and other classroom texts." Languages include French, Esperanto, Spanish, Lojban, and others, but not Greek.
Another example of something wrong with schools today. Maybe there's another side to the story. I hope so, but I can't think of any.
No animal testing? Of a product intended for animals? I, for one, don't get it. This leaves many questions unanswered: was it tested on humans? ("It works! You look just like a Poodle!") Or was there no animal testing "in developing the product" -- but animal testing after it was developed? Or do they not consider dogs to be animals?
(2003-11-17 Monday 15:07 CST: It has been suggested that in this context, the word "animal testing" has a highly constrained definition, something like "rubbing into the eyes of cute furry captive bunny rabbits". Hence, products can be "tested" [common meaning] without being tested [constrained legalistic meaning].)
It's a bit late to bring it up now, but Virtual Spectator did an interesting job of covering the America's Cup race.
Another funny story from David Sedaris, this one about his speech therapy. It's even better hearing it read by the author; more David Sedaris at This American Life.
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