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May 31, 2005
I put my hand on a Mac, it got GUI...
I really hate Macs. Their interface is just so... awful. It all starts with the Keyboard
Posted by Andrew at 07:12 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 30, 2005
Whee!
StarWars: Check!
Robert Jordan: Check!
Harry Potter: Check!
Harry Potter movie: Check!
George R. R. Martin: Check!!!
As my Girlfriend put it: everything that is in progress is progressing...
Now, if we can only get Steven Brust to finish something this year...
(Thanks to the Buffalo Bloger Jaquandor: Check!)
Posted by Andrew at 09:46 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
May 28, 2005
Google Markets
Markets work by collecting data about who wants what, and how much they are willing to pay for it, then giving out incentives based on who can get what where and how efficiently. The trick, of course is to ensure that the incentives are properly aligned, but that is a whole separate issue...
Google works by constantly collecting data about what words are is related to what content, and how relevant they are. Google works not because of its much ballyhooed democratic impulses, but rather it’s market-like aspects...
Posted by Andrew at 12:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 26, 2005
Filibuster deal
So, the Democratic Party acted in a way that is good for America (protecting the ability of minority viewpoints to effect legislation), and in exchange for granting this privilege, the Republican Party got to do something that was (mildly) good for them...
What makes this strange is that the Republicans are acting like this is a major defeat for their side. I suppose it might be-- if their goal was not to get certain judges appointed to lifetime positions, but rather to utterly crush the Democratic Party (until 2006)...
Of course, if that is the actual goal of the Republican Party, I have got to wonder why it is the Democrats who are accused of having no real ideas...
Posted by Andrew at 02:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 23, 2005
3 lies...
Perhaps we’ve underestimated the Bush administration. They’ve been telling kids for years now that condoms don’t work, and that if you’re gonna screw, you might as well screw bareback...*
This is probably the single dumbest thing to have come out of the Bush Administration—and we can’t have elected people that dumb, can we? I do, however, detect a master plan at work under the surface...
See, when the government tries to tell kids that something is uncool, unhip, and deadly, kids run right out and do it. So perhaps the Bush Admin. is working some sort of reverse psychology, hoping against hope that this will get horny teens to wear a glove...
*actually, they’ve been saying that women who engage in premarital sex have the same reaction as a preying mantis—she gets pregnant and bites her partner’s head off...
Posted by Andrew at 08:46 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
May 22, 2005
Vegetarian Porn
I can’t make this up. After watching the movie, I have to say that not only am I not convinced, I am actively going to avoid vegetables...
Posted by Andrew at 06:40 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
May 20, 2005
Just a quick, spoiler free, thought on Star Wars:
What I find most amusing about Episode 2 is the fact that they worked so hard to get so few clones-- 500,000 is not very many at all. Indeed, America alone has 1.4 million active duty soldiers-- and we only have 1 planet to police, not thousands. Nor do we face virtually unlimited hordes of droids...
Not that the clones are without attraction. The Galactic Republic is shown to be utterly without a military, and they were available relatively quickly. Also, the idea of taking raw conscripts and fresh from boot camp recruits into battle against all those robots is enough to give any commander nightmares. Additionally, using clones to fight a war significantly reduces the costs of war-- who’s sons are going off do die? No one’s. Just some cones...
What really gets me is the ability to churn out military hardware. Building a Star Destroyer would just about bankrupt planet Earth as it is currently. Didja notice all those mini-destroyers at the end of Clones? And let’s not forget the walkers, the flying personnel carriers, etc that the clone army seemed to already have from minute one of the war. Perhaps the Clone Masters of Camino I have some sort of deal with the Weapon Makers of Camino II? Act now and you’ll not only receive our patented clone technology, but also all the equipment they’ll need to fight a war! How much would you expect to pay for this? Just good manners and lots of cash! Don’t hesitate, operators are standing by...
And the whole problem is magnified by the beginning of Episode III, where after 2 years of war and only no reinforcements, the Clone army seems to be manning a whole lot of equipment...
None of which will stop me from seeing the movie yet again...
Posted by Andrew at 02:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 19, 2005
Revenge of the Sith=Awesome
Just so you know...
I’ll probably blog more about it in a week or two, just to give people time to have seen it before I spoil it...
Posted by Andrew at 04:10 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
May 14, 2005
game girl advance: Armistice Xbox
Xbox 360 does not compete with Sony or Nintendo. It is not a gaming console. It is a powerful device to deliver content online and over WiFi. Microsoft's real competition is Apple, Yahoo, and Google. Apple's movie-download service. Yahoo's retail channels. Google's - well, everything. Heck, throw Comcast and TiVo in there for good measure. The games are merely a means to an end - an "instant-on revenue to support an exponential expansion into the livingroom," as Eric put it over an IM chat we had.
Look, a TIVO is basically a couple of hard drives, a really powerful processor (or two), some awesomely useable software, and as quiet a cooling system as can be fitted into a box small enough to fit in the living room. So, too, is the new X-Box...
Indeed, way back on the 7th of July 2003, I wrote:
I expect each of the next gen. systems to ship with at least what the X-Box shipped with, and what the PS2 is being upgraded to: a Hard Drive, and a broadband adaptor. I also wouldn't be too surprised to see out of the box 4 controller support. To be completely honest, I don't think that there is a whole lot of room for innovation in the hardware, though the software side of things is set to explode. Other than better graphics, we shouldn't expect too much new next time around…More Specifically:
The reason for the Hard Drive is simple: the thing is bloody useful. Players are able to turn their consoles into media centers (more on that later), bringing the much-anticipated "convergence" around in a way that no one quite saw coming. It also lowers load time dramatically, increasing the intensity of game play by not forcing the player to pull out of the game's world...
Hot damn, 100% accurate! Am I good or what? Indeed, I may not have gone far enough-- Microsoft seems to be going completely convergence happy, taking advantage of the existing home networking infrastructure and letting people play movies and music, as well as their games...
One thing that Microsoft really doesn’t get enough credit for is interface design. I have constantly found them to be the best at figuring out how people want to use software, and designing their interfaces around that. So I fully expect Microsoft’s DVR software to be better than TIVO’s. All in all, I can’t wait to get my hands on one of these things. And in a couple of years, so will my parents...
Posted by Andrew at 10:38 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
May 13, 2005
I hate to do this to a good man...
In an otherwise nice post, Mr. Weidner veers off on a tangent about "Leftists" that is just plain weird:
If you are a Leftist, you MUST be anti-American. You MUST oppose the idea that is America, because that idea is utterly opposed to (1)collectivism and statism, and opposed to the (2)belief that our rights are granted by government, or that the (3) interests of 'society" are worth the sacrifice of the individual. Many Leftists won't honestly acknowledge their enmity, but resort to sneaky formulas. and claiming to be "against nationalism" is one of them. It's a lie of course, none of them are bothered by French nationalism, or Swedish nationalism.... (numbers in parentheses added by me)
Huh?
There are a couple of points to each claim, A) that modern "leftism" embraces these claims, and that B) American Political Thought rejects them, or claims the opposite of what the point is. At least one of these claims is false for every point.
Point (1): "collectivism" and "statism" need better definition. Specifically, we need to know if he means that "there are some (non-defense) things the state can do better than individuals", or "anything an individual can do, a state can do better". If the Former, then perhaps he should look to the history of publicly funded navigational improvements (the canal systems), the publicly funded irrigation of the Midwest, or any of the dozen other ways Governments improve the lives of their citizens. If the latter, well, even the (few) Communists I know are convinced that markets are good things...
Point (2): It is true that a prominent Democrat once wrote "that they [men] are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men" Of course, that Democrat was Thomas Jefferson, and he wrote it in the Declaration of Independence. So let’s take this a bit at a time...
Rights are "Endowed by [man’s] creator". Now, the "creator" could be "God", or "the Gods", or "the blind forces of evolution". The argument is the same-- rights are intrinsic to the human condition. The rights are "secured" (that is, made safe) by government. The rights that come from being Human are "life, liberty, pursuit of happiness" We call these "natural rights"...
Now, what about all the other rights, the "non-natural" ones like the "right" to vote? Well if they aren’t intrinsic to Humanity, they must come somewhere. That somewhere is either Society or the Government. Since the Government is the expression of a Society’s will, they amount to the same thing. So, yes, some rights do, in fact come from Government. Some of those rights are even in the constitution...
Point 3: Don’t we tell soldiers this all the time? Don’t we ask young men and women to go forth and die for our nation all the time? During the World Wars, our people would have been fine had we not gotten involved, but America would have been shattered as a concept. Did society not beg, exhort, and threaten it’s members if they didn’t "sacrifice" in its name? Bah!
Posted by Andrew at 11:48 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
May 11, 2005
Small point of Poli-Sci Geekery:
Just a pair of connected points here.
There is a field in Political Science that uses lots of numbers and graphs. The idea is that you can measure preferences and put them on a line. One such expression of this allows votes in Congress to be analyzed not on content but purely on the basis of who voted yes or no in relation to who else did...
For instance. Congress votes. Everyone who voted “Yea” moves one step to the right, everyone who voted “nay” moves one step to the left. Repeat with a hundred different votes. You end up with a pretty good indicator: when Kennedy votes one way, Santorum votes the other. Using this kind of analisis, Slate gives us a Map of congressional polarization...
We’ve heard recently that Senate Democrats are threatening to “shut down” the Senate if the Senate Republicans use the “Nuclear” option. How Senate Dems. plan to do this is by getting rid of the consent calendar...
The consent calendar is a device used to simply pass routine bills. All items on this calendar are voted on simultaneously, unanimity being required for passage. If any Senator objects to a bill being placed on the consent calendar, it is removed, and a vote (and the debate a vote entails) must be taken on that bill separately...
Democrats are threatening to object to everything on the consent calendar, causing a separate vote to happen on every issue before them. Since there are hundreds of issues on the calendar each week, this will make Senate traffic about as swift as Los Angeles’ traffic...
Since, however, the bills on the Calendar are routine, day to day, and uncontroversial, you would tend to expect unanimous agreement on each item. This would cause apparent-polarization to sharply reverse itself (hundreds of additional same-direction votes each week). The irony will be that there is such apparent harmony precisely because there is actual disharmony!
I think I study politics because I enjoy the hell out of this sort of parliamentary maneuver...
Posted by Andrew at 09:49 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 10, 2005
Biblical Literalism
Take the following sentence: The Job Got Done.
Extract the spaces: TheJobGotDone.
Take out the capitalization and the punctuation: thejobgotdone
Remove the vowels: thjbgtdn
Just for fun, put it backwards: ndtgbjht
This is what Hebrew looked like when the Torah (and Old Testament) was written. It makes translation just a bit difficult. Let’s try another example:
Q) Where is god?
A) rhwnsdg
There are a few ways the response can be rendered, but the most common would be either (1)"God is now here!", or (2)"God is nowhere". So we have a choice to make, we can either believe in a universe where God is daily filling us with his presence (1), or a universe where God can absent himself (or be forced into absence) (2).
Here is another example, pointed out by Ms. Lynne Truss in her book Eats shoots and leaves:
Luke 23:43
"Jesus answered him, 'I tell you the truth, today you will be with me in paradise.'"
Vs.
Jesus answered him, 'I tell you the truth today, you will be with me in paradise.'"
The first tells us that the condemned man will be heading strait to heaven, the second that there might be a stop at purgatory first. Which one is it? Quickly now, a major point of doctrine hangs in the balance. The plain, literal meaning of the text depends in this case on how the text is translated...
It isn’t like this problem hasn’t come about before: in Islam the Quoran is only considered the true word of God when it is written in Arabic. Translations into other languages are thought to be guideposts until a believer can read the true word for himself...
Indeed, around the 3rd century BC, one of the Ptolemys was getting annoyed with the local Jewish groups’ continual dogmatic infighting. Believing that if they could just agree on a decent translation, this problem might go away, he called 70 of the greatest Hebrew scholars (there were not Rabbis back then) together, locked them each into a separate room and had them individually translate the Torah from Hebrew into Greek, only to emerge when they were finished. The story goes that at the same minute on the same hour of the same day they all burst forth. When their translations were compared, they were found to be identical. Getting 70 Jews to agree on something was held to be a great miracle, and so the Septuagint (as it came to be called) was held to be the holy and official word of God. Eventually Greek itself changed and the Septuagint fell into disuse...
Modern Fundamentalist Christians have there own version of this story, but based around the King James Version. For the full story, see the lovely, Chick Tract on the subject...
I could go on about this subject for a long time. The point is that there is no basis for believing that the Bible can be understood as a literal construct. Placing faith around decision of a typesetter is a quick road to frustration...
Posted by Andrew at 12:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 09, 2005
Tom Delay
Liberalism is that principle, of political right, according to which the public Authority, in spite of being all-powerful limits itself and attempts, even at its own expense, to leave room in the State over which it rules for those to live who neither think nor feel as it does, that is to say as do the stronger, the majority. Liberalism—it is well to recall this to-day—is the supreme form of generosity; it is the right which the majority concedes to minorities and hence it is the noblest cry that has ever resounded in this planet. It announces the determination to share existence with the enemy; more than that, with an Enemy which is weak-Ortega y Gasset
This is a paragraph which has been haunting my thoughts for weeks. It refers not to Contemporary left-right divides, but to the divides between American Political Philosophy and everything else—between the Declaration of Independence and the darkness which came before it. I’ve wanted to take a moment to share this quote with the world; to put it out there so that we all may look at it and wonder if we live up to it. So, Tom Delay...
It isn’t that Delay’s scandalous behavior is so shocking from a politician; “[Politician] on the take” is probably the oldest headline in Newspaper history. It merits punishment, but is hardly the end of Democracy. Tom Delay might be...
The thing about Delay is that he has built up this machine. The first switch of his odious political contraption freezes opposition out of power. 50% +1 is all it takes, all he needs, and all that matters. If you don't already agree with him, you do not deserve access to the levers of power.
There is an interesting side-effect to the bureaucratic (I’m going somewhere here) system we’ve built up over the past several decades: congresspersons are needed to smooth out the rough edges. If grandma's social security check goes missing, she calls her United States representative and asks what went wrong. The Rep. then calls his aids and have them take care of it. This sort of thing called "casework", and most representatives maintain offices throughout their district for just this sort of thing. I had a buddy once who was a caseworker for a Republican Lawmaker. Once at a dinner he and I were at, he was asked why his boss was willing to work so hard for Democrats. His answer shocked the hell out of me—"if you see us as the good-guys, you’'l be more likely to vote for us"...
I hate to think of myself as politically naive. But the right answer, the only acceptable answer is "because it is his job as your representative". Try to imagine a CEO who looks out for the interests of 50%+1 of the outstanding shares, but ignores the needs of the rest. That sort of behavior was precisely what caused the scandals in the last business cycle...
Such an attitude is scandalous. Whether or not I believe that someone should be working for me does not mean that I deserve less than 100% of their efforts on my behalf. I am paying the man for the Gods' sake!
This may be a minor issue—after all the man was still doing work for me and my ideological friends. But it is indicative of a pattern. Hire a member of the Out party? Can't lobby a congress-member of the In party. It used to be that consensus was sought on all but the most divisive of issues. Not on Delay's watch. Now they go for consensus in their own party only. The voices of half of America are not even being recognized as being on the floor...
It is this winner-take-all approach which is illiberal and devastating. For his every-day corruption, Delay deserves departure. For his usurpation of the American Democratic process, he deserves imprisonment or exile...
Posted by Andrew at 12:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 07, 2005
What do you mean you don�t have a blog?
These days, everyone’s got a blog. Heck, even Darth Vader has got a blog..
Posted by Andrew at 10:15 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 06, 2005
In point of fact...
...we never jailed anyone for killing president Kennedy.
Wired News: Violent Game Ban Advances
"For the same reason we don't allow kids to buy pornography, cigarettes or alcohol, we shouldn't allow them to go to stores and buy video games that teach them to do the very things we put people in jail for -- abusing women, joining street gangs, killing police officers, or even assassinating President Kennedy," said Yee, a child psychologist, referring to scenarios in some video games.
I’ve been playing violent video games all my life, and never once have I tried to assassinate a dead president-- or even a living one. Oh well. Hopefully they’ll just raise the nudity content of games to compensate...
Of course, given that "Two federal appellate courts have already ruled such laws violate the free speech guarantees of the First Amendment.", this seems more like grandstanding than actual legislating. If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to kill some virtual peasants...
Posted by Andrew at 03:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Hot diggity!
Wired News: Court Nixes 'Broadcast Flag'
In a blow to the entertainment industry, a federal appeals court on Friday found that federal regulators overstepped their authority by requiring consumer-electronics manufacturers to help restrict digital home recording.
When you get right down to it, I want to use content in a way that the broadcasters don’t want me to. I want to be able to record and playback whenever. And if I miss an episode, I want to be able to go to the internet and catch up. Waiting for reruns is unreliable at best-- impossible for some shows...
Broadcasters don’t like that at all-- it cuts into their apparent ratings. The solution they came up with was to make it harder for me to catch up on missed shows. This make sound like a good idea at first blush. In the long run, it isn’t...
To offer one example: I am fond of the show Alias. It has a nice arced story which involves lots of character development. If you miss a couple episodes, however, you’re stuck; you don’t know who is doing what to whom and why. You may simply decide that the show is too much bother and stop watching...
This isn’t far fetched. My Girlfriend has the first 2 seasons on DVD, and lent them to my parents. They got hooked. The problem? It was half-way through Season 3-- they couldn’t get started watching until they could catch up. So they had to wait for the DVD of season 3 to come out, watched that and got started on season 4. They may have decided to simply stop after 2 seasons, and ABC wouldn’t have had their eyeballs watching lovely, lucrative ads...
If there are people doing stuff, there is money to be made. The broadcasters want to turn back the technological clock; something patently impossible. The sooner they learn how to deal with technology, the sooner they’ll make money from it, and the happier everyone will be...
Posted by Andrew at 03:17 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 03, 2005
If hooking monkey brains up to a car battery would save just one human life...
CNN.com - Creating 'human-animals' for research - Apr 30, 2005
All, I have to say is “red is positive, black is negative”...
Posted by Andrew at 02:04 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Media madness
Yesterday in class, we had to read an article from the New York Times and decide if it was “fair and balanced”. Gods, what an awful mess...
The article itself was a front-pager dealing with the republican chance from using the word “private” to “personal” in the Social Security deform context. It was, indeed, “fair and balanced”, giving roughly equal time to each side, giving context on the debate, asking Cato to defend themselves on the flip, and letting Cato explain the difference between the two words. See the problem?
When the article came out, we were in the middle of a debate on whether or not to completely change the way Social Security is run. On one side stood truth, justice, and the American way. On the other stood destruction of all we hold dear. Which side was which is an exercise I’ll leave for the reader, but isn’t it the job of the Media to do more than simply report on the semantics of the debate? I think we should expect the front page of America’s Flagship Newspaper to run at least a few stories about how social security works, its history, what might replace it, etc. The only reason even to read a print-edition paper is that they can take more time on an issue and really explore the ramifications. Almost like a daily magazine. If the best they can do is repeat a few talking points, carefully balancing each party’s against the other, I’ll not even bother to read it...
Posted by Andrew at 01:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack