MEME3

2002-05-07T18:47:00.000-05:00

this will be my last post to this site. please redirect links to the new MEME3.

2002-05-06T15:46:00.000-05:00

"The Bush administration, I think, is extremely fearful that the court could tie the hands of the United States in the execution of its foreign policy... to such an extent that policy makers would have to be extremely concerned about whether any particular decision to use military force would end up with US officials being charged before the international criminal court."

which is to say that the u.s. military would have to consider whether or not its actions are war crimes before taking them. i should hope so.

2002-05-06T15:22:00.000-05:00

u.s. justice system declares u.s. justice department unjust: "Federal prosecutors intend to challenge a ruling declaring it unconstitutional to detain material witnesses for a grand jury proceeding."

2002-05-05T09:23:00.000-05:00

"My soul was woven into every single <p> tag and I'm convinced my visitors could sense the difference." funny stuff.

2002-05-04T14:11:00.000-05:00

i'm in the process of moving this whole weblog to here.

2002-05-02T14:37:00.000-05:00

"Israel - like America - has to be wrong because it is more powerful; because, again, might is never right."

first goldberg grossly misrepresents both fanon and sartre, neither of whom advocate violence, but merely seek to understand its origins. this is something goldberg doesn't do, simply accepting violence as inevitable. but this is just a side note indicating that while he's obviously intelligent, his philosophical argument lacks some integrity.

goldberg also misrepresents the political argument against his own. specifically, he focuses his attention on the more irrational of the arguments against israel while completely ignoring the more rational arguments.

israel isn't wrong because it's more powerful. it's wrong because it's pursuing policies that result in the deaths, arrests, and injuries of innocent civilians under the implicit false assumptions that 1) all palestinians are terrorists, and, perhaps more importantly, 2) exercising more force will solve political problems.

palestine authority is wrong for the same reasons. (it assumes all israeli's are responsible for israel's actions and relies on force to solve problems.) the reason a larger level of criticism has been directed at israel is that as the more organized and powerful party to the conflict, israel has larger potential and larger responsibility for ending it.

so power doesn't make someone wrong, but when they are wrong, the fact that they have power makes them more responsible for making it right.

2002-05-01T15:29:00.000-05:00

i'm moving soon.

over the past few days i've been working on the preliminary steps toward getting my website into such a state that i could use it to manage a weblog. this will allow me to do more interesting things than blogger allows me to do, and get rid of the ads, (or replace them with my own).

the first step was a text webapp. that's done. randomchaos.com users (free registration) can create, edit, and delete texts. they can create references from one text to another.

a weblog, then, is a text with a bunch of other texts that reference it. one of those texts is a template that describes how the weblog should be shown as HTML (or XML or any other text format).

a chat thread, when i get to that, will be a tree of texts all pointing to higher-level texts.

so today i made a weblog webapp. there's only one weblog right now, and all the linking is still done "manually," but it all works. so in the next week or so, i'll hopefully be moving all of my blogger.com content to randomchaos.com.

2002-04-30T08:44:00.000-05:00

"Israel decided on Tuesday to go on blocking the arrival of a U.N. team to probe the army's assault on Jenin refugee camp"

this isn't much different from iraq refusing to allow UN inspectors. are we also making plans to oust sharon?

2002-04-29T12:26:00.000-05:00

war: coming soon.

"U.S. Envisions Blueprint on Iraq Including Big Invasion Next Year"

how is it that we are able to script a war, but unable to prevent it? the bush administration's willingness to delay the next war until it becomes more convenient suggests that there's no emergency that demands a war.

and what just cause is this war supporting? our right to inspect another country for nuclear weapons? what about our own nuclear weapons?

it just keeps getting more ridiculous:

"But senior officials now acknowledge that any offensive would probably be delayed until early next year, allowing time to create the right military, economic and diplomatic conditions."

since when can "senior officials" control military, economic and diplomatic conditions?

why are we investing all of this time, money, and energy in an unnecessary war when there is no shortage of domestic problems (remember bush's education platform?) to be solved?

2002-04-29T07:39:00.000-05:00

"The violence led to Mr. Chavez's temporary downfall when military officers, blaming the government for the deaths, publicly withdrew their support for the president."

that's interesting because just last week, the bush administration was openly admitting that it had taken actions which "led to Mr. Chavez's temporary downfall." this looks like a poor attempt to draw attention away from the bush administration's effort to remove a democratically-elected official in venezuela (among other countries).

2002-04-29T01:11:00.000-05:00

every time i turned in a draft of my paper, i would get back the same comment that i should say the feminist movement and the socialist movement instead of feminist movement and socialist movement. what i never had time to explain was that this was not a grammatical error, but rather an intentional linguistic means of suggesting a different understanding of liberation movements. i noticed bell hooks does this and after i thought about it, i decided to do it myself.

the point is that there is no the feminist movement. people's political thoughts and actions don't fit conveniently into categories. they spill over the edges we impose. people move in a variety of different directions and yet can all be feminist. you're not either with or against "the" feminist movement. you can be with it in some ways and against it in others. in those ways you are with it, you are contributing to feminist movement: the movement of the feminist cause. feminism is not something people adopt as a whole, but rather in small parts. removing "the" from before feminist movement recognizes this.

it also recognizes that there is no monolithic structure to feminist movement. it's not like an army in which people wear uniforms and you can easily distinguish between who is a part and who is not. it's an abstract concept that exists primarily in people's understandings of how the world does and should work and in their various actions resulting from these understandings.

another implication by this simple omission is that movement exists relative to moving people and not vice versa. "the feminist movement" implies that feminist movement exists as an object independent of people. it doesn't; "feminist movement" is dependent upon actors who do the moving.

all of this in a simple "the."

2002-04-27T15:29:00.000-05:00

"The Israeli army is searching for Palestinian gunmen who it says infiltrated the Jewish settlement of Adora near the West Bank town of Hebron and killed at least four Israeli settlers, including a 5-year-old girl."

what exactly is the plan here?

for israel, obviously the attacks have had no positive effect on the willingness of palestians to kill israelis, and yet they continue with the explicit support of most of israel. for palestinians, obviously random killing of israelis isn't going to change israeli policy, and yet it continues with implicit support of most of palestine.

who is going to "win" this? no one. after thirty five years, how can either side believe otherwise?

2002-04-27T15:14:00.000-05:00

on evankai.com: "I used to think the gap between those already doing this kind of work and those just getting into it would start to narrow. Instead I think it's widdening. " "People arean't catching up, they're falling further behind. A large knowledge base is required to do anything state-of-the-art, and it takes longer and longer to aquire that knowledge." - Michael Abrash (former Microsoftie - now with Doom-makers at id)

abrash is just looking at the wrong art, the kind where the state doesn't change because the interests are too entrenched.

2002-04-26T00:11:00.000-05:00

"Each one of these processes and systems is evil enough to merit a thorough description of its own historical singularity..." true. but will it again be too late to stop the processes by the time we've thoroughly described them?

2002-04-25T19:26:00.000-05:00

"The whole universe may be, to use Guth's phrase, 'a free lunch.' The primordial 'stuff' of inflation, he and other cosmologists contend, is very likely a spontaneous creation." i can't say i understand most of this, but it seems to be a very complicated way of explaining the obvious idea that at some point in an expanding universe, something had to come from nothing.

2002-04-24T10:36:00.000-05:00

in the next month i hope to do the following things: clean up randomchaos.com, publish the source for randomchaos.com, move this blog to randomchaos.com, record a CD, get a job, go to the dentist, go to the doctor.

i have some doubts that i will accomplish all of that, but if i can just do the getting a job part the rest won't be so important.

2002-04-24T10:31:00.000-05:00

yesterday i won two awards. at lunch, i found out that i won the technos award. it's given every year to a graduating international studies major. technos international college in japan funds it and the president of that college comes to graduation and makes a small speech and the winner (that's me) gets to (has to?) sit on stage during graduation. it's not money, but i get some sort of japanese culture package. so that was exciting.

in the afternoon i had my defense for my research honors project (which you can read online), and that went well i guess. they had some pretty harsh criticisms of what i wrote, but when it was over they said that they were giving me the kind of criticism they would have given a professional scholar. so i say i guess it went well, though it certainly didn't seem like it at the time. i got research honors anyway. practically, that means the title of my project will be printed in the graduation program. i think i'll probably enjoy that more than the sitting on stage.

2002-04-24T09:50:00.000-05:00

a website i've been working on for a couple weeks just "went live" a few minutes ago. you can look at all the content (and admire the browser-safe use of CSS), or just listen to a couple songs i wrote.

2002-04-24T09:46:00.000-05:00

yesterday was the last day of college classes for me. actually, i have another month of classes, but i'll already have my diploma, so it won't be quite the same. anyway, i'm done with the hard part, and now i have a lot of time to write about it.

2002-04-22T22:26:00.000-05:00

i like to carve soap. does anyone else outside of prison like to carve soap? (better yet, is anyone in prison and reading my weblog?) what i like about carving soap is that it's quick (quicker than wood or stone) to carve, and it doesn't often break in unexpected ways (like wood or stone tend to do).

2002-04-22T16:12:00.000-05:00

"Clearly, it's a perfect pastime for anyone with an attitude and some spare time."

attitude has a somewhat negative connotation. i'd say that anyone with an opinion and enough free time to express it should blog. and anyone else should first get themselves an opinion and some free time and then blog.

2002-04-22T11:30:00.000-05:00

hmmm... can someone explain this to me?

the new york times has a syndicated feed, but they've made this feed available only to userland, who then made it available to all of their customers. but then today, dave winer of userland announces a new weblog: Headlines From The NY Times. and this weblog has an rss feed. so now anyone can syndicate the new york times, but only by going through userland. so why isn't the times making the original feed publicly available? why the bottleneck?

this is certainly good news, but i'm very confused. does the new york times just have no idea what's going on?

2002-04-22T09:14:00.000-05:00

"Angry Young Men Prone To Premature Heart Disease"

2002-04-21T15:18:00.000-05:00

"Linguaphile is a simplistic and easy to use command line translator. It is open source, platform independent, and programmed in perl." neat.

2002-04-20T18:25:00.000-05:00

this isn't an original idea, but it's more of a "mind bomb" for me than anything going on in the XML-RPC/SOAP world (including google): mark piligrim has created a system that auto-links back to referrers. so if i link to him, his weblog will automatically generate a link back to me, allowing him to watch his ideas as they float around the internet. (right now this only happens on the first level, but if everyone had this, we could actually watch the propagation of ideas). this is a real, practical advancement toward a "two-way web" and it's the first thing to inspire me to "roll my own" blog in a long while.

2002-04-20T07:25:00.000-05:00

"thanks to closely spaced plantings and compost- enriched, double-dug beds, these smaller beds produce enough vitamins and minerals to sustain a person for a year."

2002-04-20T07:06:00.000-05:00

"What is missing, certainly, is an Arab peace movement that should come into being, right here and right now."

2002-04-19T22:45:00.000-05:00

another interesting number: the percentage of male personal ads ranges from 60 to 67. men use personals significantly more than women.

2002-04-19T22:43:00.000-05:00

i realized tonight that yahoo personals offer a huge wealth of demographic information. you can search for people by gender, age, location, income, religion, marital status, political leanings, and a variety of other characteristics. i did a quick survey just now of identified gender-seeking orientations (not all personals are sexual) among the personals in five cities in america. the results:

new york: 77% hetero-, 23% homo-
los angeles: 78% hetero-, 22% homo-
chicago: 79% hetero-, 21% homo-
philadelphia: 83% hetero-, 17% homo-
washington, dc: 73% hetero-, 27% homo-

which makes me wonder two things: first, what's going on in philadelphia? second, what sorts of interesting information could be gathered if yahoo offered a programmable interface (API) to this information?

i realize that this is only information about a somewhat unique group of people both willing and able to post personal ads on yahoo, but i still find it very interesting.

2002-04-19T13:58:00.000-05:00

for example, dreadlocks are called such because they historically exemplified society's dread of nature. when you wear your hair in dreadlocks, you see that dread in people's faces when they look at you. that in mind, dreadlocks can not properly be styled. styled locks are just locks. dreadlocks are the locks your hair makes if you don't style it.

i find this so interesting because this original meaning of dreadlocks has been almost entirely lost, although it remains explicitly in the word itself.

2002-04-19T13:52:00.000-05:00

today i ate lunch with lewis gordon. as lunch began, someone asked him "what is rastafarianism?" his answer lasted an hour. i learned more in that hour than i have in whole semester-long college courses.

2002-04-19T13:50:00.000-05:00

a (the?) alert reader pointed out that my link to my paper was broken. it's fixed now.

2002-04-19T11:12:00.000-05:00

a quote from oblivio:

"Every proposition proposing a fact must, in its complete analysis, propose the general character of the universe required for that fact."
-Alfred North Whitehead

2002-04-19T10:13:00.000-05:00

"A new window will pop open and the word you selected will be sent to Dictionary.com"

i'm glad to see someone else figured out the browser-specific codes. but just for the record, i had already made this.

2002-04-18T20:33:00.000-05:00

speaking of (typing of?) japan, today i turned in my finished senior research project. i've been working on in all semester. over the next couple weeks i'll present or publish the paper in four different forms. no, make that five. i'm putting it online as a word document. i'll eventually get around to converting it to html, but in the mean time, you can download it here:

Exclusive Liberation and Lesbian Suicide in Interwar Japan

2002-04-18T20:05:00.000-05:00

i'm getting back into the habit of IMing. yesterday i chatted with my friend takumi, with whom i hadn't spoken in about a year. he accidentally went swimming with a cell-phone in his pocket and lost the phone numbers and email addresses of all of his friends. and a $300 phone. as they say in japan, "sucks, desu ne."

today i just had a brief chat with kyle, who is coming back to america from china in five days.

and to complete the theme of studying abroad, tonight i played the role of "study abroad alumni" for a few students who will be heading to japan next fall. this all makes me want to go back to japan again.

2002-04-18T10:29:00.000-05:00

"The fuel tank holds only 6.5 litres in total, and the journey was done on 2.1 litres for an average of 0.89 litres/100 km, a new world record." that's almost 270 miles per gallon!

2002-04-17T19:31:00.000-05:00

"sharp dressed man goes down" i took indymedia off my amphetadesk news list today. my memories of actual news coverage in the past have allowed me to ignore the reality of it being a bunch of envious kids.

i think open publishing can work. but it requires social control - someone has to say "stop publishing such crap." no one at indymedia is doing that.

2002-04-16T15:46:00.000-05:00

twice in the past week i've noticed students ending conversations with "IM me about that." is it just a matter of time before that replaces "call me"? one student on my campus is compiling a list of AIM addresses for everyone on my campus. he's put flyers up around campus advertising this.

i hardly ever use IM. i used to leave it running all the time, but no one i knew ever used it, so i stopped running altogether. i must have missed the transition IM made from secondary to primary comminication medium.

2002-04-16T09:44:00.000-05:00

"Senior members of the Bush administration met several times in recent months with leaders of a coalition that ousted the Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez, for two days last weekend, and agreed with them that he should be removed from office, administration officials said today. "

this is hardly surprising, but completely against principles of democracy. the bush administration was obviously acting against chavez because his policy toward oil threatened american oil interests. and yet they excuse the attempted overthrow of a democratically elected government by saying it is not representative of "the people." by "the people" the bush administration means "the people in the oil business."

2002-04-15T10:06:00.000-05:00

does anyone else find it strange that "U.S. Soldiers [were] Killed in Afghanistan," bin laden is still alive and well, and most people are calling the"war on terror" successful?

2002-04-14T13:40:00.000-05:00

"They are killing each other's future." this excellent essay spreads the responsibility for the mideast problems and solutions where it belongs.

"Amidst the entire inferno, smoke, blown up buildings, and rotten corpses, there are a few good men and women who have put their own life at stake for the sake of Palestinians and Israeli civilians. Their voices are still not loud enough to be heard, their protests are mocked and vilified by the extremists and nationalists from both sides.

They are the peace lovers. Israeli Jews along with other religious denominations have participated as human shields in Arafat's besieged headquarters, many hundreds more boldly traveling to various shambled refugee camps to show their solidarity with the Palestinian population under attack."

2002-04-14T13:36:00.000-05:00

"'What is undeniable is that corporations close to the administration have directly benefited from the increased defense spending arising from the aftermath of September 11th,' McKinney charged. 'America's credibility, both with the world and with her own people, rests upon securing credible answers to these questions.'"

what a bold claim. the bush administration replies: "The American people know the facts, and they dismiss such ludicrous, baseless views." the problem is we don't know the facts.

the administrations views are no less "baseless" because an atmosphere of secrecy has surrounded the administration for so long. if these claims are indeed baseless, a more transparent government would allow citizens to judge for themselves.

2002-04-14T11:14:00.000-05:00

"In a new TV advertising campaign, Gateway bravely asserts their customers' rights to format-, time- and space-shift their music collections." this is a rational recognition that there are legitimate and perfectly legal uses for every technology the music industry seeks to end. if the music industry would work with rather than against its own customers, they may find ways of promoting these legitimate uses of music technology for their own benefit.

2002-04-14T09:03:00.000-05:00

the real vjs:
last night i was at a party where some guys were mixing video along with a dj mixing music. it wasn't like mtv (though it was what mtv would be if mtv was doing anything interesting). they had hundreds of short clips of video that they would loop forwards and backwards over each other and in sync with the music. it was simple stuff like people doing aerobics, animals running, etc. but the looping made it look like everyone was dancing to the music. i'd never heard of this before and have so far been unable to find anything online about it. anyway, it was really neat, and if you're somewhere in illinois, you can hire them for your party via email.

2002-04-13T10:39:00.000-05:00

"the Bush order was a 'particularly objectionable' decision in a series of administration moves 'undermining the public's right to know.'"

2002-04-12T15:29:00.000-05:00

"The Palestinians need to pursue a conscious, organized strategy of nonviolent resistance to the Israeli occupation."

2002-04-12T13:36:00.000-05:00

"Un fucking believable."

2002-04-12T13:27:00.000-05:00

about an hour ago someone threatened to kill me. about fifteen minutes ago i was exchanging names and a handshake with him.

i've been sitting in front of my student cafeteria every day this week during the lunch hour trying to draw some attention to what is happening in palestine right now. i've been posting news articles that are clearly opposed to what israel is doing - both because i mostly agree with such perspectives, and also because i have found no major news source with a strong pro-israel perspective.

a student came up today and starting tearing down what i'd posted up on the walls. he then proceeded to tell me that if i put it up again he would "break my face" and i would have to "go to the hospital." i tried to talk to him, but he left. so i put them back up. he came back and my quick-thinking friend said "i put those back up." i'm guessing he then realized the social stigma involved in breaking a female face. we managed to get him talking before he left again.

by the end of a long conversation we had agreed on a few basic issues: american policy toward israel and palestine is encouraging rather than discouraging the violence, he will email some more information about his perspective so that i can present more balanced information to people, and i will continue to express my opinion without fear of him "breaking my face."

2002-04-12T09:15:00.000-05:00

international criminal court is finally established: "The court will assume jurisdiction over charges of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes committed after July 1 of this year. Washington fears that a country as powerful as the United States, with its unchallenged military might and troops around the world, would be uniquely vulnerable to prosecutions...Mr. Annan tried to calm American fears today. 'The court will prosecute in situations where the country concerned is either unable or unwilling to prosecute,' he said. 'Countries with good judicial systems who apply the rule of law and prosecute criminals and do it promptly and fairly need not fear.'" this is a much-needed acknowledgement that a functional international system requires international law. i read a quote yesterday: "if you don't ride the horse in the direction it's going, it will run away without you." here is the international horse again running away without america.

2002-04-11T10:35:00.000-05:00

to clarify what i said yesterday about dave winer, today he says of microsoft: "they just have to give up on the concept of control. It's just an illusion anyway, they don't actually have any control." the same is true of userland regarding the new york times. what they have now is the illusion of controlling the content. but anyone can still go to nyt.com and get the content. so why not open the easy access up to everyone and "give up on the concept of control"? the answer, i suspect, is that dave believes control of the nyt feed will make him more money.

i'm not saying profit is a bad motive (though i think it certainly needs to be checked against other priorities). i'm just saying dave winer is in no place to criticize the profit motive of microsoft when he is clearly engaging in similar behavior. the only difference is that few care what userland is doing.

2002-04-11T09:36:00.000-05:00

"Today, maybe it's time to burn our tax returns."

i've been talking to a lot of people over the past few about what israel is doing in palestine, and how our tax money is funding such indiscriminate killing. (i've been suggesting that "genocide" is perhaps an applicable term.) several people have responded with "yeah, that's terrible, but what am i going to do, stop paying taxes?" perhaps it's not such a crazy idea. of course, most college students don't have that option, as they don't have any taxes to pay in the first place.

2002-04-10T18:29:00.000-05:00

i've (mis?)spent the last hour or so playing with wikipedia. it's an open-content encyclopedia. it's a little sparse yet, but i haven't come across any malicious entries, which is what i would expect the largest problem to be. instead, the largest problem seems to be that it's getting too big too fast. it's pretty slow, and as it expands, it's going to become unmanagable to host. it's basically just an internet where anyone can edit anything.

2002-04-10T13:56:00.000-05:00

dave winer finally shows his cards.

dave is always talking about open standards and sharing information, about how big companies have to make room for the little guys. but as soon as the new york times comes knocking, he's willing to accept a closed system of distributing big company news. as brian carnel has suggested, this clearly serves only to benefit userland at the expense of the rest of the internet. so much for the internet revolution.

2002-04-10T09:44:00.000-05:00

we're in bad company: "The figures for China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the USA accounted for 90 per cent of all known executions in 2001"

2002-04-10T09:35:00.000-05:00

"In New York on Saturday, hundreds of people marched across the Brooklyn Bridge to City Hall carrying signs that read 'Sharon = Hitler'...there was a counter-demonstration, with thousands of people staging a rally in support of Israel. One sign read 'Arafat = Osama = Terror'." now if only more could make the last connection here: Arafat = Osama = Terror = Hitler = Sharon.

more loudly than any political message, both sides are promoting the same mistaken idea that violence is an acceptable means of achieving a political goal. and this despite the obvious conclusion that after 35 years, both sides are worse off than when they started.

2002-04-10T09:21:00.000-05:00

"Tomorrow my husband will take half a day off work (without pay). He'll be sitting on a bench in a park where the newspaper promises that marijuana dealing is 'a problem.' If he can find a dealer, there will be no problem at all."

2002-04-09T09:15:00.000-05:00

"Of course, the case should have been thrown out immediately on free speech grounds, but in the post-9/11 bizarro world, patriotism trumps the First Amendment."

2002-04-09T09:12:00.000-05:00

"Of course, the case should have been thrown out immediately on free speech grounds, but in the post-9/11 bizarro world, patriotism trumps the First Amendment."

2002-04-09T00:02:00.000-05:00

the progressive majority thinks that "A majority of Americans support Progressive Majority's common sense agenda for Economic Justice, Civil Rights, Universal Health Care, Quality Education, Environmental Protection and Reproductive Freedom." that's news to me.

2002-04-08T10:17:00.000-05:00

"In a test of non-violent tactics and strategies of international intervention, European and American civilians are serving as human shields for the last outpost of the Palestinian Authority."

2002-04-08T09:15:00.000-05:00

"Israeli forces have launched a missile strike on a Palestinian refugee camp." israel has gone far beyond anything that could reasonably be called "defense" and is quickly approaching something that could reasonably be called "genocide."

2002-04-07T20:37:00.000-05:00

i've been wondering what the big deal is with Oddpost since i first heard about it. the big deal is this: oddpost is hardly distinguishable from outlook express, only it runs in your browser. and it seems like such a great thing until "there was a problem connecting to the server." this is something that happens with my desktop email client occassionally, but i can at least read the email i've already checked when this happens. oddpost needs the option of saving email on the local desktop and accessing it there when a netword connection is unavailable. of course to do that, they need a desktop web server. i suspect dave winer has already thought of this.

2002-04-07T19:43:00.000-05:00

What the American Flag Stands For: "Charlotte Aldebron, 12, wrote this essay for a competition in her 6th grade English class." did she win?

2002-04-07T11:33:00.000-05:00

"I think it would be naive of me to say that al-Qaeda does not continue to have capabilities to conduct terrorist operations as we speak." then what good has come of this war?

2002-04-06T15:25:00.000-06:00

i play go on yahoo a lot. yahoo has a new paid games system, which as far as i can tell doesn't offer any compelling advantages over the current free system. it's my guess that yahoo will attempt to give the paid system a compelling advantage by making the free system worse.

but right now the paid system is a trial system, so it's currently free. but i haven't even looked at it, because i yahoo says it will be paid eventually.

for me, there is no compelling advantage a paid system of any sort on the internet could have that could overcome the price advantage of a working free system. because the internet is just a bunch of ideas, and i can still get ideas for free in real life.

i realize that if too many people thought like this, the internet wouldn't be as interesting as it is. on the other hand, i think if everyone thought like this, it would be much more interesting.

2002-04-05T08:39:00.000-06:00

thispalenstinian boy reminds me of this chinese student. or maybe it's just the tanks that look the same.

2002-04-04T21:07:00.000-06:00

"All that is living is created, grows and finally withers away. Besides, there is a competition in that if one is not strong enough one will be crushed." but if we recognize that all withers away eventually, what is the use in competing?

2002-04-04T20:54:00.000-06:00

bush actually said: "In our lifetime, we have seen the end of conflicts that no one thought could end. . . .Peace is possible when we break free of patterns of violence and hatred." how can he say such things while continuing to perpetuate patterns of violence and hatred?

2002-04-04T20:50:00.000-06:00

i'm really becoming obsessed with adjective-noun relationships. i have trouble concentrating on what i'm reading because every time i come across an adjective, i start thinking about it's relation to the noun it precedes.

i started talking to one of my apartment-mates about this and he said that bertrund russel had a theory that all names refer to descriptions. here's my current theory:

1) all nouns actually refer to a set of adjectives.
2) placing any given adjective before a noun serves to strengthen the reference from that noun to that adjective.

i think there's much more to it, though, because on some level saying "strong woman" implies that the word "woman" alone is not enough to imply strength.

must read more adjectives.

2002-04-04T20:32:00.000-06:00

"taciturn" is a useful adjective. it's like "introverted" or "quiet," only it sounds better.

2002-04-04T20:17:00.000-06:00

two amphetadesk items:

first, i haven't been reading daiweblog as frequently since i started using amphetadesk. i informed them of this and they emailed me today, announcing their new RSS feed. woohoo.

second, i discovered a trick by accident. this may only work in the mac version - i'm not sure. but if you press command-period while a feed is loading, amphetadesk will skip that feed and move on to the next one. so if you're in a hurry, you can cut your feed list down to the bare essentials on the spot.

2002-04-04T16:46:00.000-06:00

i think maybe adjectives are what really change the world.

i read the word "hacker" just a momment ago. it was used in it's now-common meaning of "malicious programmer." there was a time, i understand, when "hacker" just meant "talented prorgrammer." and i suspect the term "malicious hacker" was used to refer to a talented malicious programmer. but then "hacker" came to imply, and then mean, what "malicious hacker" once meant.

in this process, a noun changed meaning by assuming the characteristics of an adjective that was commonly used before the noun. i'll speculate about another example of this: i'm guessing there was a time when "conservative republican" was not generally considered to be redundant. but then the word "republican" itself came to imply "conservative" because the two were used together so often. is this how most nouns change meaning over time? is this the primary function of adjectives? i'm not sure, but i think it's really interesting, and i'd like to see if this could be done purposefully. if all women, for example, begin to say "strong woman" whenever they would otherwise say "woman," will the word "woman" start to imply "strong"?

this makes curious me want to use interesting adjectives before all boring nouns.

2002-04-04T08:36:00.000-06:00

"I noticed a monk in the arcade. "

2002-04-04T08:30:00.000-06:00

"the restaurants will be serving bottled water only, which diners can purchase for half-price."

many fast food restaurants will charge something like 23 cents for a cup of water. but this charge isn't applied in some cases; if you get the right server, you'll get your water for free. on the one hand i understand charging for water. water costs money, and probably more than we usually pay for it when you factor in the environmental costs. on the other hand, we all know i can go into the bathroom of any restaurant and fill up a glass of water. so the charge is really just a deterrent from not drinking coke.

2002-04-03T19:00:00.000-06:00

"Thanks for taking an interest in Go, the world's greatest game. It's the one computers can't beat us at." i'm working on an online go game. i have all of the game logic worked out. i just need to make a computer opponent and set up the room system.

2002-04-03T17:28:00.000-06:00

something you won't hear on the news: "The police were indiscriminately beating people - friends running away were smashed with batons, the police pushed an old man before me." this is almost certainly biased, but i'd rather hear a biased story than no story at all.

2002-04-03T17:23:00.000-06:00

"So when a foreign nation urged us to show 'restraint' in dealing with the bombers, what might we say?" good analogy, bad question. we need not ask "what might we say?" because we can answer "what did we say?" but this doesn't answer "what should we say?" which is the most important question.

2002-04-03T17:21:00.000-06:00

"Those who say 'yes, but' are actively erasing "death does not justify death" from their conscience."

2002-04-01T22:07:00.000-06:00

"Communities are different than audiences in fundamental human ways, not merely techological ones."

this explains so much for me: why slashdot is no longer interesting, why scripting news seems like such a synthetic community, and why an organization with ten members doesn't need an executive board.

but i think shirky misses the happy mix that is an audience made up of a community of communities. take a drive in movie, for example: everyone there is on some level an audience, but each vehicle is also a community, and the ability to move from vehicle to vehicle creates a community of communities. i want my internet to be a big drive-in theatre.

2002-04-01T07:29:00.000-06:00

jonathon delacour: "Women have warm, intimate, supportive friendships. Women compete ruthlessly and undermine each other. Welcome to the real world."

what delacour's "real world" is missing is people (either men or women) who do not make regular practice of competing ruthlessly and undermining each other. that such people may not be found in popularized feminism does not mean they are not real (nor that they aren't feminists). it is only those people who do adopt an antagonistic stance toward the world who make a name for themselves (as "feminists" or otherwise), and delacour has defined his own "real world" in which only such people exist. it is a convenient thing that the "real world" is full of people just like oneself.

2002-03-30T11:38:00.000-06:00

i had a dream that two of my friends stole a zebra from the st. louis zoo. granted, i have recently been to the st. louis zoo, but i think we all know that the zebra was love.

2002-03-30T11:09:00.000-06:00

i posted the previous comment to this comment page in response to this call for comments about digital copyrights.

2002-03-30T11:07:00.000-06:00

I am a content creator, provider, and user. I recognize that placing my own work in a publicly-accessible area makes it practically impossible to protect my work against unauthorized copying, just as I cannot speak in public and have any control over who might write down what I say and publish it without properly citing me. And just as the government can not possibly regulate the means of spoken communication, it is entirely impractical to attempt to regulate the means of digital communication.

Existing copyright laws are more than sufficient in prosecuting copyright violations when they actually happen, but the cost to the general public is far too great to attempt the impossibility of regulating copyright violations by making them impossible in the first place.

2002-03-29T10:43:00.000-06:00

"El Cajon education officials have rejected a discrimination claim filed by a parent who argued that his daughter should not have to share restrooms or dressing areas with lesbian students."

why is it okay for women to share restrooms with lesbian women, but not with heterosexual men? the reasonable solution: unisex restrooms. it's wasn't until actually using unisex restrooms that i realized how ridiculous segregated restrooms are.

2002-03-29T10:37:00.000-06:00

"Mora's face was repeatedly slashed, and the letters 'RIP' were cut into her stomach. When she screamed, the Rocky Mountain News reports, one of the men flicked her tongue with the blade. The boy with the knife said: 'You're lucky we don't rape you.'"

if you think this is terrible, don't just say "this is terrible." do something about it.

2002-03-29T09:47:00.000-06:00

rumsfeld confirms suspicions he is mindless: "Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld today defended the Pentagon's plan to keep some prisoners from the Afghan war in captivity in Cuba indefinitely even if they are acquitted in military tribunals.

To release them after an acquittal so they could return to the battlefield, he said, would be "mindless."

But he did say that some prisoners had already been released."

i'm not talking about his admission that he has done exactly what he said would be "mindless" (though i do find that humorous), but that he is clearly advocating the imprisonment of people who have been determined innocent by our own courts - and military courts at that. he has appointed himself judge and jury.

also, the blatant disregard for the geneva conventions ("Under the Geneva Conventions, prisoners are to be repatriated to their countries at the end of a conflict."), i feel, is indicative of rumsfeld being an idiot.

2002-03-28T16:54:00.000-06:00

i found that quote using watson, a wonderful tool for mac os x. (anyone paying attention may note that os x could not possibly be running on my 132hz home computer - i'm using it at work.) with watson, you can check local movie play times (and see descriptions and trailers for movies), check local tv schedules, scan meerkat news, search (and reverse search) phone numbers, search (and reverse search) zipcodes, translate between languages, reference a dictionary, thesaurus, encyclopedia, quotes, shakespear, the bible, etc. search for images, recipes, ebay auctions, browse yahoo's entire directory (just like you might browse your local directory), check exchange rates, shipping rates, flight schedules, and stock prices. i like watson.

i said it scans meerkat news. this functions a lot like amphetadesk, only it doesn't give you choice over which news feeds you want. watson has an open API, which means anyone can make a watson tool. so i think i'm going to work on porting amphetadesk into a watson tool...just as soon as i get some free time.

2002-03-28T16:36:00.000-06:00

"Peace is always beautiful." - walt whitman.

2002-03-28T09:08:00.000-06:00

"Nobody is so brilliant they can create completely new music that everyone wants to listen to, and nobody can create software that does not use existing ideas."

the problem with the patent system is that it must assume either that patented ideas are entirely original, which is never the case, or that it is somehow possible to trace the lineage of ideas, which is also never the case. you can't own an idea because every idea you have is influenced by a countless number of other's ideas for which you could never properly account. anyone who has ever taught you anything even remotely related to your "new" idea rightly deserves a portion of your royalties. unfortunately, the patent system can only account for a small portion of these influences - specifically that portion who can afford to take part in the patent system (and the associated costs of time and money). the rest of the idea-producing world is assumed to have thought of nothing original.

2002-03-28T08:40:00.000-06:00

"Copyright, in it's current bloated form, harms society and should not be supported."

2002-03-27T09:36:00.000-06:00

mark sent me an email regarding his feed: "This is now corrected."

2002-03-27T09:28:00.000-06:00

on daypop, i'm now the top authority on amphetadesk, but i don't even show up on google. this is my first experience with any level of blog noteriety, and i like to watch how it works. blogging seems to make the process of finding relevant content (e.g. search engines) very organic, and i like to see how far this goes. is it more important that i mention a search term often, or that other people link to my blog? to what extent will the search engines present me as an authority on a topic about which i actually know very little?

2002-03-27T09:18:00.000-06:00

our secret government: "OMB Watch is keeping a list of information removed from government websites." somehow removing information regarding nuclear weapons plants from government websites doesn't make me feel any safer. shutting down such plants and replacing them with renewable and safer energy sources would make me feel safer (and more economically secure).

2002-03-27T09:09:00.000-06:00

the onion reports "Drugs Now Legal If User Is Employed." this is hardly news - not because it's satire, but because it's been true for as long as i've been alive. anyone who can afford the right doctors can buy prescription drugs that have the same effects as illegal drugs. drugs laws have little to do with the actual effects of drugs. if they did, drinking alcohol would carry a stiffer penalty than smoking marijuana. and if drug laws were created in the interest of improving society, they would emphasize treatment over punishment. the practical effect of current drugs laws is to ensure that large drug companies and criminal organizations maintain monopolies in the drug market, without doing anything to actually reduce that market.

2002-03-27T08:15:00.000-06:00

alert reader eric writes: "as for the <p> tags - Actually, mark's feed has <p> rather than <p> which is why it's being parsed that way."

i wrongly assumed i was looking at the actual source of mark's feed, when in fact my browser had parsed it. amphetadesk does no such parsing, and as far as i understand the xml spec, it shouldn't:

"The ampersand character (&) and the left angle bracket (<) may appear in their literal form only when used as markup delimiters, or within a comment, a processing instruction, or a CDATA section."

i think mark is breaking this rule, but i'm certainly no xml expert. i just know something's wrong somewhere.

2002-03-26T18:46:00.000-06:00

in case you haven't heard: "More than 5,000 Afghans are thought to have perished in the series of earthquakes to have hit the Hindu Kush mountains while tens of thousands are believed to have lost their homes."

many people haven't heard of this. it's more people than died in the 9/11 events. where is the american compassion for the people of afghanistan today?

"The European Commission is working closely with one of its partners, the French non-governmental organisation ACTED which is already in the area, to send about 500 tents and 1,000 blankets to the homeless."

2002-03-26T17:38:00.000-06:00

"Now that the latest tapes from the Nixon White House have been released, the press is all over them with characteristic glee, eager as always to remind us that not long ago the leader of the free world was buggier than a flophouse blanket. Don't you get tired of this?"

not at all. in fact, i'm just waiting for someone to produce a "presidential secret tapes: greatest hits" cd.

2002-03-26T14:36:00.000-06:00

"In this society, there is no powerful discourse on love emerging either from politically progressive radicals or from the Left. The absence of a sustained focus on love in progressive circles arises from a collective failure to acknowledge the needs of the spirit and an overdetermined emphasis on material concerns. Without love, our efforts to liberate ourselves and our whole community from oppression and exploitation are doomed. As long as we refuse to address fully the place of love in struggles for liberation we will not be able to create a culture of conversion where there is a mass turning away from an ethic of domination." - bell hooks in outlaw culture

2002-03-26T14:32:00.000-06:00

the one day when my blog has visitors in double digits and blogger goes down.