MemeMachineGo!

=v= Yesterday I was on Flatbush Avenue, in Brooklyn, and saw some shiny new bike lanes on Dean Street, and then Bergen Street. I cheered inside (“Woo hoo!”), until my thoughts were rudely interrupted by the Pintchik Oracle

The Oracle is a big electronic billboard that displays cryptic comments, a bit like the one encountered in L.A. Story, except this one has a phone you can use to interact with it. You ask it a question and it displays the answer in huge letters above you, for all to see. (The Oracle’s brain trust is a writer in Brooklyn, but not Jonathan Lethem.)

When Not Jonathan Lethem is busy doing other things, the Oracle just displays random pithy comments. Which brings us to yesterday’s rude interruption: “Fuel efficiency is the new homosexuality.”

Imagine my surprise. I immediately realized that bicycling must therefore be totally gay, and these new bike lanes were proof that the right wing has good reason to obsess about governmental promotion of the bikesexual lifestyle. Somebody alert Rush Limbaugh! (When he gets out of detox, that is.)

Naturally, there must be a Kinsey Scale of energy efficiency. That very morning I’d showered with a low-flow showerhead, while entertaining fantasies of maybe a little more hot water. That would make me a Kinsey 5. A Kinsey 0 would, of course, use a firehose in a Humvee’s built-in shower room. (It’s just that sort of thing that makes Herr Gröpenführer such a paragon of heterosexuality.)

Now that I’ve been outed, I suppose I should band together with others of my inclination and start up an in-your-face energy efficiency movement. “We’re here! In gear! We’re bicyclists! Get used to it!”

Paraffin wax has a lot of uses. It’s used in canning, candle-making, bikini waking, and it’s a good lubricant for some things. Like, for instance, brake cables on bikes.

Since I need to replace my rear brake cable, I was looking for some. I thought it’d be straightforward. But again and again I was greeted by blank stares when I asked for it, as if I were asking for a left-handed frobnistat.

I tried Berkeley’s earthy-crunchy grocery stores, thinking that maybe canning, a former necessity for the poor, might have made hobby-of-the-affluent status. One of them suggested checking their Body Care section. No dice.

Finally, at a hardware store, I was sent to the paint section (where I didn’t expect success.) Someone there pointed out to me a beeswax-based floor polish. Not what I had in mind. Then I remembered I’d seen mason jars at this hardware store, found them, and, lo and behold: paraffin.

At a science fiction convention a few years ago, I heard Harlan Ellison rant about asking for a blotter at a hotel he was staying in, and the young woman he was asking not knowing what he was talking about. And he went on about how stupid she was, without mentioning anything about elaborating “a piece of blotting paper for writing with a fountain pen.”

I thought it was a little precious to expect “blotter” to be instantly recognizable to a modern young woman, hotel employee or no. And maybe the same applies to paraffin.

But it was frustrating that I was stumping these people as to what I was talking about.

I just wonder… what’s next?

This Wired article starts with the FDA’s having pathologized shortness and moves on to the larger question of enhancing healthy humans, coming to this pollyannaish conclusion:

The core issue is not whether enhancement is a good idea, but when we’ll have interventions worth making. In my view, the sooner the better. Enhancement is not only well aligned with our aspirations for healthier, happier lives, but progress toward it will be egalitarian. This is counterintuitive, but adding a few decades to the poor souls whose genetics are marching them toward an early grave should be a lot easier than pushing the centenarians of the world to 120. Enhancement technology, by its very nature, will inevitably narrow the differentials between us.

Uh-huh. And genetically modified crops are going to feed the world. And the Segway is going to revolutionize American cities.

If we really wanted to help people avoid an early grave, we could do a hell of a lot of things with current technology that would offer more bang for the buck than developing novel enhancement strategies. Providing clean drinking water throughout Africa comes to mind. Just like we could feed the world with non-GMO food production capacity if we really wanted to distribute the food to the hungry instead of just those who can afford it. Just like American cities wouldn’t need revolutionizing if we didn’t love cars so much that we avoided readily available slower single-person vehicles that are eminently practical for many trips like, say, bicycles.

Any sufficiently advanced technology still won’t make you give a damn.

And, yeah, commenting on technophilic pollyannaism in Wired is kind of like reporting on “Dog bites man.”

(Link via Boing Boing , back up after several days’ hiatus while they changed hosts. Yay!)

Did you hear this in the news?

Federal agents arrest a Muslim man, a member of a radical sect, living in Michigan on gun and drug charges. When they search his home, they discover a bunker containing a cache of weapons and explosives worthy of an army: an anti-aircraft gun capable of firing 550 rounds per minute up to four miles away, machine guns, explosives, thousands of rounds of ammunition, and booby traps. Investigators also find pictures of President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld with scope cross-hairs drawn over them.

No? Think you would have if that bit about him being a Muslim weren’t a fib ?

(Via Scratchings )

It was 1996, and a co-worker at the first web start-up I worked at was selling his old machine. It had been a pretty good machine by 1995 standards… a Pentium running at 133 MHz, if I recall correctly, with 32M of memory (I think), a 4G hard drive, 2 CD-ROM drives and a 33.6 WinModem. It ran Windows ‘95. I paid about $700 for it, and bought a cheap used 17” monitor at the Used Computer Store , my first color monitor.

Finally, I could surf the web at home with something other than lynx . Which, incidentally, hadn’t been as bad as it new sounds — late ‘95 was about the turning point after which there were large numbers of websites that were unusable in a text browser.

Killer apps were Netscape Navigator 2.0, TeraTerm Pro with Tssh (a terminal emulator and its secure shell plugin), Quicken , Civilization 2 .

Moore’s Law doesn’t actually say that computing power/cost doubles every 18 months. But if it did, then 13 years after my Apple IIe one would expect me to have a machine about 2⁹, or 512 times better… except it cost a third as much, so it would only need to be about 170 times better.

The Pentium box had a better chip running 133 times faster, with 256 times the memory, a floppy drive that held more than 10 times what the Apple’s floppy did, as well as a hard dirve that held a little less than 30,000 times as much, a modem that was 112 times faster than the 300 baud modem I first had on my Apple, plus the CD-ROM drives.

I think it made it.

Another horror show :

Ciudad Juarez is known as ‘the city of the dead girls’. In 10 years almost 400 women have been murdered in this city on the border between Mexico and El Paso, Texas, and the killings continue. Now a courageous Mexican-American journalist is alleging a group of six businessmen is behind the slaughter. Described as ‘untouchables’, their wealth puts them above the law. Their motive is said to be blood sport.

[…] Some deaths may be attributed to domestic violence or random crime. But more than a third of the women were raped before death. Most victims are tortured and mutilated. Sometimes the killer leaves a signature; a breast or a nipple is sliced off. The bodies are then dumped in wasteland. The average age of the victims is 16; all were poor. Their deaths, says Amnesty International, ‘have no political cost to the authorities’.

Now I don’t know if the pepetrators are the rich men this journalist has fingered. But it wouldn’t be terribly shocking if it were true.

The biggest reason I’m calling attention to it is that it’s not shocking. It’s not an aberration. It’s predictable. It’s what we can expect when the powerful are unchecked and unaccountable.

And, with certainty of sounding melodramatic, if we don’t stop black box voting , it’s the sort of thing we can expect in the U.S. The only question will become when.

(Via Die Puny Humans )

=v= I just found out about a Sydney Morning Herald interview with Tom Lehrer from last March. It’s long, informative, and has much to say about his tour of Australia in 1960.

Professor Lehrer, who once famously remarked that "satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize," continues in the same vein:

I’m not tempted to write a song about George W. Bush. I couldn’t figure out what sort of song I would write. That’s the problem: I don’t want to satirize George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporize them.

(I’ve taken the liberty of translating the -ise words back into their original American.) I hope the good professor hasn’t been hassled by the Secret Service for that comment. It’s fortunate that he’s not Muslim.

(Via the Muted Horn)

I find it interesting both that subliminals work …

“If you almost remember somebody’s name, this can provide a little more kick to that so that you, in fact, do remember their name,” MIT spokesman Dr. Alex Pentland said. […]
hatever you need to remember is programmed into a tiny computer that you wear. The computer sends messages in the form of light to a mini TV screen on the glasses. The messages — like someone’s name, or a word like keys or medicine — flash before your eyes at 180th of a second. It’s too fast for the eyes to notice, but not the brain.

… and that people don’t realize it.

“Our tests have shown a 50 percent better memory with these than without, and the thing that’s interesting is that people aren’t even aware that anything is happening,” Pentland said.

But don’t worry. It’s not like our minds can be influenced without our conscious notice (hey, it’s flashback night here at MMG!)

John and Belle have a blog imagines…

a world in which you didn’t have to subscribe to certain top literary studies journals. What if their contents just showed up in your in-box every day? (Spam-guards would give you warnings like: ‘this mail looks like it would be publishable in Critical Inquiry. Delete now?)

Sir,

VIRTUALLY REAL ANTI-LATE CAPITAL PROPOSAL

I am erratically to be pleasuring you from behind this urgent proposal, affective immediately, irrespective of that I make entirely no argument in person or out, nor determining validity of hereafter to follow hermeneutical proposal.

Self-control and domination converge in the distinction between THREE elements: the author of the spam, the recipient who (has to) obey(s) the spam, AND the spam’s EXECUTION/EXECUTOR - the one who mass-mails the spam and in whom Lacan discerns the contours of the Sadean executioner/torturer. The problem is not the identity of the spam’s author and recipient: they effectively ARE the same, the emailed subject effectively IS autonomous in the sense of obeying his/her OWN spam.

In your already accepting of this unprecedented intervention, this “fundamental fantasy”. Is this not Deleuzian-Lacanian? The exemplary case of this sphincter-loosening is, anti-essentially, you leaping of faith into confidence in the roots of our misapprehension of all your ideological accounts eternally in time.

Kierkegaardian teleological suspension of the ethics of fiduciary-Kantian duties: only impossible returns is worth the risk! No mercy, teaches St. Paul! Together we recover this profit of Lenin’s teachings.

As Frederik Jameson has masterfully demonstrated; as Foucault interrogated, Jesus Christ crucified, Lenin attempted and Heidegger may have had some glimmer: for you to transfer largely, generously, rhizomatically, for to impersonally avoid needlessly hegemonic interpenetrations of irrelevant authorities.

Pleasure to transmit your affects and perceptions impersonally to my account, to follow imminently.

Hoping this finds you a cyborg,

Slavoj Zizek

I have a B.S. in philosophy. There was a time when I seriously considered pursuing an advanced degree in philosophy.

That pretty much sums up why I ruled against it.

There are more slaves today than were seized from Africa in four centuries of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Victoria’s odyssey began when she was 17, fresh out of school in Chisinau, the decayed capital of the former Soviet republic of Moldova. “There was no work, no money,” she explained simply. So when a friend?”at least I thought he was a friend”?suggested he could help her get a job in a factory in Turkey, she jumped at the idea and took up his offer to drive her there, through Romania. “But when I realized we had driven west, to the border with Serbia, I knew something was wrong.”

It was too late. At the border she was handed over to a group of Serb men, who produced a new passport saying she was 18. They led her on foot into Serbia and raped her, telling her that she would be killed if she resisted. Then they sent her under guard to Bosnia, the Balkan republic being rebuilt under a torrent of international aid after its years of genocidal civil war.

Victoria was now a piece of property and, as such, was bought and sold by different brothel owners ten times over the next two years for an average price of $1,500. Finally, four months pregnant and fearful of a forced abortion, she escaped. I found her hiding in the Bosnian city of Mostar, sheltered by a group of Bosnian women.

From the journalist’s field notes :

While I was in Costa Rica, I met some very young kids and listened to them talk about their horrible trafficking experiences in the sex industry. Young girls are enslaved in areas like San Jose’s Gringo Gulch, where a lot of American sex tourists go for a “good time.”
I heard hundreds of stories like this during my assignment, and just when I thought I heard the worst one, it wasn’t long before something else topped it. Sometimes I just wanted to throw up.

I meant to write about this before Halloween: You got slavery in my chocolate .

An investigative report by the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) in 2000 indicated the size of the problem. According to the BBC, hundreds of thousands of children are being purchased from their parents for a pittance, or in some cases outright stolen, and then shipped to the Ivory Coast, where they are sold as slaves to cocoa farms. These children typically come from countries such as Mali, Burkina Faso, and Togo. Destitute parents in these poverty-stricken lands sell their children to traffickers believing that they will find honest work once they arrive in Ivory Coast and then send some of their earnings home. But that’s not what happens. These children, usually 12-to-14-years-old but sometimes younger, are forced to do hard manual labor 80 to 100 hours a week. They are paid nothing, are barely fed, are beaten regularly, and are often viciously beaten if they try to escape. Most will never see their families again.

In that case, at least, public pressure has led to a pact , which, among other things, calls for establishing standards to identify cocoa produced without slavery… by July 2005.

Mind-control parasites :

When you cuddle your cat, you could be picking up more than you reckoned on.

A microscopic parasite which the pets can pass on to humans may cause personality changes, scientists have discovered.

It can make women behave like ‘sex kittens’ and men like ‘alley cats’. More than a fifth of Britons are infected without knowing it, and there is no way of getting rid of it.

Women who are affected spend more on clothes and are consistently rated as more attractive, an international study has shown. They are more confident and less willing to conform to accepted moral standards.

Researcher Professor Jaroslav Flegr said: ‘We found they were more easy-going, more warmhearted, had more friends and cared more about how they looked.

‘However, they were also less trustworthy and had more relationships with men.’

In contrast, infected men become more anti-social, suspicious and jealous, more aggressive, scruffier and less attractive to women.

‘They tended to dislike following rules,’ said the professor.

So, basically, no one should be sexier than a crazy cat lady .

(I’m not putting great stock in this one for now, but will be on the lookout for further research.)

Another foray in the War on Drugs :

Armed police stormed a high school and ordered children to the floor at gunpoint so they could conduct a drugs search, it emerged today. Officers ran into the South Carolina school, screaming at pupils to lie face down, before rifling through their bags. Students who did not do as they were told were handcuffed.Parents were outraged at the raid, but principal George McCrackin said he would “utilize whatever forces that I deem necessary” to keep drugs out of the school. Stratford High School in Goose Creek has 2,700 pupils but does not have a reputation for drugs or crime. During the raid a sniffer dog found traces of substances in 12 bags, but no drugs were recovered. […] McCrackin denied the raid was an over-reaction. He said: “I’m sure it was an inconvenience to those individuals who were on that hallway. But I think there’s a valuable experience there.”

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.
— George Orwell

(Via Die Puny Humans )

This is The Guardian , not The Onion.

Sure, most of us can use computers these days. We know how to send email, surf the web or write a letter in Word. But would you know what to do if all those pretty little icons in your browser disappeared and, instead of Windows, you were left staring at lines of letters and numbers of HTML, the language in which web pages are written? If, like Neo in The Matrix, you could see the code behind the graphics?

If your answer is “no”, then you are in the majority - one of the many millions of peasants in the technological middle ages. Like most humans in The Matrix, who believe they are living a normal life when in fact their bodies lie inert in a vast complex of pods, you are asleep, a prisoner of your ignorance. And the only way to escape is by getting to grips with the machines, by learning their language. If you don’t get inside them, they will get inside you. Adapt or die.

[… Windows] lulls us into the pernicious illusion that we can deal with computers without adapting to their logic. By presenting us with colourful screens and buttons for us to click on, Microsoft encourages us to believe that we can force computers to adapt entirely to our preferences for visual images, without having to adapt ourselves to their preference for text.

But not only does this prevent people from getting inside the machine and keep them in a state of blissful ignorance, it also proves to be a deceit, for in the end the user still has to adapt to the machine anyway.

We wait, a captive audience, while the browser painstakingly loads the next image-stuffed web page, or we click through menu after menu until we eventually realise that we are not in control after all. The Windows control us.

[…] Paradoxically, it is only by learning the language of the machines, by adapting to their logic, that we can free ourselves from their dominion. […] Isn’t this too much of a burden for the average computer user? Shouldn’t we try to force computers to adapt to us as much as possible by giving them user-friendly interfaces and hiding their internal workings? Shouldn’t we be able to get on with our jobs without worrying about what is going inside the black box? If that is your attitude, fine. If you want to remain inside the dream world of The Matrix, that’s your choice.

Blue pill… blue screen of death. Coincidence?

CEOs and motivational speakers I would’ve guessed, but this list of the top ten overpaid jobs held a lot of surprises for me.

Gore blasts Bush .

“They have taken us much farther down the road toward an intrusive, ‘big brother’-style government — toward the dangers prophesied by George Orwell in his book 1984 — than anyone ever thought would be possible in the United States of America,” Gore charged in a speech.

Y’know, I like Gore the gadfly a lot more than I ever liked Gore the candidate.

OK, corroborating Rupert Sheldrake is one thing, but the Flat Earthers ? According to this Scientific American article …

Ask anybody what the physical world is made of, and you are likely to be told “matter and energy.” Yet if we have learned anything from engineering, biology and physics, information is just as crucial an ingredient. [,,,] Our universe, which we perceive to have three spatial dimensions, might instead be “written” on a two-dimensional surface, like a hologram. Our everyday perceptions of the world as three-dimensional would then be either a profound illusion or merely one of two alternative ways of viewing reality. A grain of sand may not encompass our world, but a flat screen might.

Warren Ellis said If the universe is a vast two-dimensional plane of information — then it can be hacked.

I suspect sorcerers would say they’ve been doing that for some time.

Alan Moore describes being a British teenager discovering Jerry Cornelius .

That would have been, what, in 1968 or thereabouts? Fourteen years old, still anxious over penis size and therefore reading Howard’s Conan in attempted compensation, finding it impossible to care a shred about this great-thewed simple-minded rapist yob or his adventures, we eventually alight on Moorcock’s Elric. Pale and moody, doomed, unable to get out of bed without the aid of drugs, obsessively involved in hopeless and impossible relationships that would forever haunt him, how could any teenage boy fail to identify? Ravenous, besotted by this new, exotic flavour, wolfing down all the available material which, as it turned out, was no more than two slim paperback collections. Mayflower, wasn’t it? Those dreamy psychedelic montage covers that would later turn up in the slide-projected image banks of the progressive light show. The Stealer of Souls. Stormbringer.

Then nothing. No Elric the Freebooter, Elric the King, Elric the Warrior, Elric in Las Vegas. No posthumous collaborations with Lyn Carter or L. Sprague De Camp. Only the news that Moorcock was both editor of and contributor to New Worlds, a science fiction magazine available from Westone’s the Newsagent, opposite the Chinese laundry and the Labour Exchange up in Grafton Street. In spite of the disturbing photographic cover imagery, this was presumably a monthly publication dedicated to further exploits of the cursed albino prince from lost Melniboné, to further tales of swords and sorcery and melanin deficiency. Purchased and taken home, opened immediately to the Moorcock piece, A Cure for Cancer. The accompanying spot illustrations by the great Mal Dean, despite depicting a protagonist with long white hair, provided no immediate reassurance. For a start, the white haired man was black, dressed in a fur coat but inclined to drag, and not a runesword anywhere in sight. That first slack-jawed, fourteen-year-old, horror-struck glimpse of Jerry and his world. So utterly, grotesquely wrong, and yet so right.

Love at first sight. Cornelius cultists from the very start, asking their mums to get them ‘car coats’ like their hero, ending up in something waist-length, brown and made of Rayon fabric with a furry road-kill collar. If only they had a sister to fuck, a brother to shoot, a social collapse to say something cryptically witty about, a blitzed-out urban backdrop to pose foppishly against, a Miss Brunner to cringe before, all unlikely prospects in those boom years.

The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003 calls for voting machines to generate a paper trail, and for their software to be openly reviewable. If you’re a U.S. voter, please ask your Representative to support it (following the link includes details as to how.)

I’ve said it before — this is the most serious issue the United States faces, bar none. This is about saving democracy, preserving our civil means of making change. It’s, I hope, a non-partisan issue we can all get behind.

Even if the use of these machines is simon-pure today, the lack of accountability makes it only a matter of time before they’ll be abused.

And considering the ease with which they can be abused , the sudden shifts in recent elections , the anomalies and uncanny coincidences in their use… I think there’s ample evidence that it’s less than simon-pure.

Please, please, if you write one activist letter ever , let it be this one.

Falling in love as obsessive compulsive disorder :

When you first fall in love, you are not experiencing an emotion, but a motivation or drive, new brain scanning studies have shown. The early stages of a romantic relationship spark activity in dopamine-rich brain regions associated with motivation and reward. The more intense the relationship is, the greater the activity. The regions associated with emotion, such as the insular cortex and parts of the anterior cingulate cortex, are not activated until the more mature phases of a relationship, […] Early on in a relationship, the images showed that the brain seems to be very focused on planning and pursuit of pleasurable reward […] The same regions become active when a person enjoys the pleasure of eating chocolate, […] There are also patterns that resemble aspects of obsessive compulsive disorder.

Dorothy Tennov is probably feeling pretty smug about now.

(Via Boing Boing )

Paul Krugman interview :

What I realized looking back over my own writings is that it’s pretty easy to identify some very radical intents on the part of the coalition that now runs the country. It’s not just a single group. It’s the religious right, it’s the hard-line conservatives, it’s the anti-environmental industry groups and so on.

Put it all together and what you see is the outlines of an extremely radical program. Maybe reactionary would be the word because a lot of it would be rolling us back to where we were before the 1930s, before Franklin Roosevelt. In any case, a very radical program that would un-do the America that we’ve all grown up in.

I end up quoting Henry Kissinger because his writings gave me the key to why it’s so hard for people – even liberals – to accept what’s going on. He wrote about how when faced with a revolutionary power – who really doesn’t accept the rules of the game, the legitimacy of the system – people who have been accustomed to the stability make excuses. They say: “Oh, well, they may talk that way but they don’t really mean it. If we give them some partial concessions we can appease them, they’ll be satisfied and all of this stuff would stop.” That’s exactly what’s been happening now.

The true radicalism of the Bush Administration – cutting taxes to a level that will not support social programs and dangerous adventurism in foreign policy – has been right in front of our eyes, but most pundits and much of the public are saying: “Oh, let’s not get too extreme here. I’m sure we can work this out. We can find a middle ground.” And there isn’t one.

(Via Follow Me Here )

Remember how I said, oh, all of two days ago, that overturning black-box voting should be non-partisan ? Well, a lot of things should be non-partisan. The bill is stalled in committee .

Although the bill has attracted 61 cosponsors — all Democrats — it is still in the House Administration Committee. The bill has yet to attract any Republican support, according to Holt’s staff.

Coincidentally, the voting machine companies are Republican owned and donate to Republican campaigns.

Chris Floyd wrote in the Moscow Times :

It’s dangerously naive to believe that such a gang, coming to power in such a fashion, will allow a legitimate electoral contest to take place next year. They have too much to lose. They haven’t expended so much effort — and so many thousands of innocent lives — to build this vast engine of repression and profit only to turn it over to Howard Dean or John Kerry, just because the stupid American people say so.

Jeez, what a raving paranoid loon. Why does he hate America so much?

Say, remember when Bush said :

If this were a dictatorship, it’d be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I’m the dictator.

?

(Federal Computer Week link via Electrolite , Floyd link via American Samizdat )

NY Times story on The Memory Hole

In George Orwell’s “1984,” documents deemed embarrassing to the State were tossed down a memory hole, a disposal chute in the Ministry of Truth that led to enormous furnaces. Taking a cue from the novel, Russ Kick, a journalist and author, established www.thememoryhole.org, a Web site dedicated to saving official documents from oblivion and posting them online.

Check out deletions like the character cut from Fantasia , ‘Reasons not to invade Iraq’ by Bush Sr. (which Time removed from their website), or an MSNBC article calling Bush on a lie that quietly disappeared after a few hours.

The Onion nails it again. Mom finds out about blog :

“God, my links alone contain unlimited fodder for Mom’s neuroses,” Widmar said. “She’ll have access to not only my life, but the lives of all my friends who have web sites. She’ll have the names of all the places in Minneapolis where we hang out, which she can—and will—look up. With the raw materials in my blog, she could actually construct an accurate picture of who I am. This is fucking serious.”

Even in the pre-web days when USENET and mailing lists were king, I acted on the assumption that any given thing I said in public on the Net might be seen by any given person (not guessing then just how easy Google Groups would make it to look up one’s undergraduate infelicities.)

I’ve often been amused when bloggers have been shocked, shocked to find out that their mother, boss, boyfriend, etc. had found their blog and weren’t happy. (That said, there have also been cases of thoroughly inappropriate reprisals that haven’t amused me at all.)

Naturally, that has informed my not especially personally relevatory style here. After all, you never know when your date might Google you .

And, in fact, one of my parents does read my blog… my father’s a noodge when I don’t update. (Hi, Dad.)

Among the interesting things in this Wired article is a brief history of the discovery of some artificial sweeteners.

The history of sugar substitutes is a catalog of strange scientific accidents stretching back more than a century. In 1879, chemists Ira Remsen and Constantine Fahlberg synthesized a derivative of coal tar called orthobenzoyl sulfimide. One day, Fahlberg spilled the substance on his hand, which later that evening he touched to his mouth. It tasted sweet. He filed for a patent and called the substance saccharin. In 1937, a University of Illinois grad student discovered another sweetener when he set his cigarette on a lab bench during an experiment - testing a would-be antifever drug - and then took a drag off the cyclamate-coated end. In 1965, a chemist named Jim Schlatter was working on a compound to treat gastric ulcers. He licked his finger to grab a sheet of paper and tasted aspartame for the first time. Then there was the 1976 discovery of sucralose by a King’s College student working with chemically altered sugars. The student - not a native English speaker - mistook his professor’s instruction to “test” the material and tasted a mouthful.

Licking lab materials is still not recommended.

Today, Schwarzenegger took the California governor oath of office (RealAudio file).

Und I vill defend de Constitution against all enemies foreign ah domestic und that I vill vell und faithfully discharge de duties upon vich I am about tuh entuh.

Let’s hope he does better with this oath than when he was naturalized in 1983 when he swore

I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen.

… given that he’s maintained dual-citizenship with Austria .

But it’s petty to bring that up. I mean, it’s not like he’s ever expressed admiration for Austrians who have waged war on the United States.

Well, you know, except

Asked who his heroes are, he answered, “I admired Hitler, for instance, because he came from being a little man with almost no formal education, up to power. I admire him for being such a good public speaker and for what he did with it.”

or

My friends don’t want me to mention Kurt [Waldheim]’s name, because of all the recent Nazi stuff and the U.N. controversy, but I love him and Maria does too, and so thank you, Kurt.

Oops, there I go again. Next thing you know I’ll be claiming his father was a Nazi storm trooper or something.

Gustav Schwarzenegger was indeed a member of the Sturmabteilungen, also known as the “storm troopers” or “brown shirts.”

Like Bill Maher said :

Finally, a candidate who can explain the Bush administration’s positions on civil liberties in the original German.

Minutes after being sworn in, he upped the Californa budget deficit 40% , which has got to be a record.

In his first official act as governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger fulfilled his pledge to roll back the state’s car tax just minutes after taking office on Monday. The move by Schwarzenegger — who campaigned on a platform of fiscal responsibility — will deprive the state of $4 billion in annual revenue that it expected from increasing the fee to help ease its budget crisis, and immediately widened the state budget deficit, which is already $10 billion.

And you know we can kiss good-bye the $9 billion the state was working to recover from Enron .

It’ll be interesting to see how he’s going to balance the budget, not raise taxes, not cut education, and support local law enforcement and cities and counties .

OK, I think I’ve got that out of my system. For now.

Oh good grief. Boing Boing excerpts this email from the Los Angeles County Purchasing and Contract Services Director :

The County of Los Angeles actively promotes and is committed to ensure a work environment that is free from any discriminatory influence be it actual or perceived. As such, it is the County’s expectation that our manufacturers, suppliers and contractors make a concentrated effort to ensure that any equipment, supplies or services that are provided to County departments do not possess or portray an image that may be construed as offensive or defamatory in nature.

One such recent example included the manufacturer’s labeling of equipment where the words ”Master/Slave” appeared to identify the primary and secondary sources. Based on the cultural diversity and sensitivity of Los Angeles County, this is not an acceptable identification label. We would request that each manufacturer, supplier and contractor review, identify and remove/change any identification or labeling of equipment or components thereof that could be interpreted as discriminatory or offensive in nature before such equipment is sold or otherwise provided to any County department.

In the PC world, this is standard terminology for devices sharing an IDE cable .
More generally, in engineering, slave means :

A machine or component controlled by another machine or component. When two devices are synchronized to one another it is necessary to have one be the master and the other the slave. The slave unit responds to commands or information from the master and is thus controlled by it. This is the basic principle behind all synchronization in audio and video. For example, if a computer system is following an analog tape machine (or video deck) it can be said to be “slaved” to it.

There are zillions of uses of ‘slave device’ .

I hope no one tells them about male and female connectors .

For the Woman who Really Loved her Man…

While Nothing Can Possibly Take Away Your Sorrow and Loss, There Will Come a Day When You Will Look Back on Those Happy Times… Those Loving, Playful And Intimate Times You Shared…

With Contentment.

And a Wish For Some Special Keepsake.

The times and customs are changing! You might keep diamonds made from his ashes. You could keep an urn of ashes or ashes blended in with glass. Or, you can keep an Intimate Memento – You can now have the most private, intimate parts of him that he shared with you - preserved to last forever. Modern chemistry now allows us to preserve indefinitely - and in amazing lifelike likeness - his actual male organ!

If he was proud of it, and he enjoyed sharing it with you, wouldn’t he like you to have his penis and testicles to keep, treasure, and remember him by?

We use a new process called “Plastination”, which preserves indefinitely every bit of the original tissue, in fine lifelike detail. The resulting Intimate Memento is sterile, non-toxic, very durable, and safe to handle and display as you see fit.

Wouldn’t he be proud of you for keeping and cherishing that most-special part of him?

The process :

The genitals, i.e.: the entire penis (preferably, including the root and “bulb”, which are the internal parts attached to the body), testicles, scrotum - and, if you prefer, the pubic scalp - are harvested as quickly as possible after death. Excess blood should be immediately worked and rinsed out of the penis and testicles, and the anatomical specimen placed into a heavy-gauge plastic bag. A safe preservative called “Formalin” is injected and/or poured over the genitals in the bag, and the bag sealed and placed in a heavy Rubbermaid container, which is then placed inside a heavy cardboard container, along with dry ice. (A local medical professional or someone from the funeral home can perform this service.) […] More Formalin is injected into the specimen, then if possible, the penis is engorged with Formalin and an attempt is made to erect it to the degree the Executor has requested in the Service Contract. […] When plastination is fully complete, the genitals are set on a stone or hardwood base, and posed for shelf or wall display (vertical or horizontal pose).

Until proven otherwise, I’m assuming hoax.

(Via Die Puny Humans )

Nonsense :

Nonsense generates random (and sometimes humorous) text from datafiles and templates using a very simple, recursive grammar. It’s like having a million monkeys sitting in front of a million typewriters, without having to feed or clean up after them.

Check out the nonsensical Slashdot , mission statements and buzzword bingo cards .

The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity :

The first basic law of human stupidity asserts without ambiguity that:

Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.

At first, the statement sounds trivial, vague and horribly ungenerous. Closer scrutiny will however reveal its realistic veracity. No matter how high are one’s estimates of human stupidity, one is repeatedly and recurrently startled by the fact that:

a) people whom one had once judged rational and intelligent turn out to be unashamedly stupid.

b) day after day, with unceasing monotony, one is harassed in one’s activities by stupid individuals who appear suddenly and unexpectedly in the most inconvenient places and at the most improbable moments.

This was written by Carlo M. Cipolla , an economic historian.

Carlo M. Cipolla, professor emeritus in the University of California, Berkeley economics department and a prolific author on economic history, died Sept. 5 in Pavia, Italy, after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease. He was 78. […] “Cipolla was a leading economic historian of his generation,” said Jan de Vries, the Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History and Economics at UC Berkeley and Cipolla’s colleague for many years. […] The author of more than 20 books, Cipolla is well known to specialists for his studies in medieval and early modern Italy and to a wider audience for his contributions to economic and social history. He also wrote a humorous treatise, “The Basic Laws of Stupidity,” which was a national bestseller in Italy and was produced as a play in France.

Updated: (Whoops, forget accreditation. First link via The 18½ Minute Gap )

Boxes and Arrows has this article on Paul Otlet .

In 1934, […] Paul Otlet envisioned a new kind of scholar’s workstation: a moving desk shaped like a wheel, powered by a network of hinged spokes beneath a series of moving surfaces. The machine would let users search, read and write their way through a vast mechanical database stored on millions of 3×5 index cards. This new research environment would do more than just let users retrieve documents; it would also let them annotate the relationships between one another, “the connections each [document] has with all other [documents], forming from them what might be called the Universal Book.”

Otlet imagined a day when users would access the database from great distances by means of an “electric telescope” connected through a telephone line, retrieving a facsimile image to be projected remotely on a flat screen. In Otlet’s time, this notion of networked documents was still so novel that no one had a word to describe these relationships, until he invented one: “links.” Otlet envisioned the whole endeavor as a great “réseau”—web—of human knowledge.

[…]In 1919, shortly after the end of World War I, Otlet successfully lobbied King Albert and the Belgian government to furnish a new home for the Mundaneum, taking over 150 rooms in Brussels’ Cinquantenaire. At the time, not coincidentally, Belgium was lobbying to host the nascent League of Nations’s new headquarters. Hoping to help his country take center stage in wooing the new organization, Otlet pitched his project as the centerpiece of a new “world city.” Inside the new Mundaneum, he began to assemble his vast “documentary edifice,” eventually comprising over 12 million individual index cards and documents.

At the time, the 3×5 index card represented the latest advance in information storage technology: a standardized, easily manipulated vessel for housing individual nuggets of data. So, Otlet’s réseau began taking shape in the form of an enormous collection of index cards, filed away in a sprawling array of cabinets.

The effort met with early success, even attracting a healthy business in mail-order research services, in which users would submit search queries for a fee (27 francs per 1000 cards retrieved). The service attracted over 1500 requests a year on subjects from boomerangs to Bulgarian finance.

I find it almost physically painful to read accounts of heroic efforts to instantiate grand schemes for which the technology just isn’t there yet.

(Via Smart Mobs )

Walmart is the biggest company in the world .

Wal-Mart wields its power for just one purpose: to bring the lowest possible prices to its customers. At Wal-Mart, that goal is never reached. The retailer has a clear policy for suppliers: On basic products that don’t change, the price Wal-Mart will pay, and will charge shoppers, must drop year after year. But what almost no one outside the world of Wal-Mart and its 21,000 suppliers knows is the high cost of those low prices. Wal-Mart has the power to squeeze profit-killing concessions from vendors. To survive in the face of its pricing demands, makers of everything from bras to bicycles to blue jeans have had to lay off employees and close U.S. plants in favor of outsourcing products from overseas.

[…] Steve Dobbins has been bearing the brunt of that switch. He’s president and CEO of Carolina Mills, a 75-year-old North Carolina company that supplies thread, yarn, and textile finishing to apparel makers—half of which supply Wal-Mart. Carolina Mills grew steadily until 2000. But in the past three years, as its customers have gone either overseas or out of business, it has shrunk from 17 factories to 7, and from 2,600 employees to 1,200. Dobbins’s customers have begun to face imported clothing sold so cheaply to Wal-Mart that they could not compete even if they paid their workers nothing.

“People ask, ‘How can it be bad for things to come into the U.S. cheaply? How can it be bad to have a bargain at Wal-Mart?’ Sure, it’s held inflation down, and it’s great to have bargains,” says Dobbins. “But you can’t buy anything if you’re not employed. We are shopping ourselves out of jobs.”

Updated: Forgot to mark an elision in the quoted text.

Did you know that hanging unconscious suspended in a climbing harness can kill you? Cavers know.

In the past few years, a new type of accident has appeared in the caving world: death due to hypothermic exhaustion by hypothermia. Such cases have also cured on rope when the “frog” method of rope ascent was used. 15 cases have been noted and each time the reason for death was the same phenomenon of hypothermic exhaustion. A 1983 study of these deaths has led the Medical Commission to consider the possibility of a new factor: suspension in a sitharness. In 1984, the first indoor experiments took place. The first two volunteers fainted and experienced serious difficulties - one after only 6 minutes of hanging. These tests were thought to be to dangerous, and were stopped immediately. They did, however, led to the assumption that even a healthy caver could die very quickly if left hanging “total inert” (without muscular movements) in a sitharness. Total inertia evidently occurs each time a caver is unconscious, after a cranial traumatism, for example.

Soviet Russia Ashcroft’s America :

An appeals court this week put the brakes on an FBI surveillance technique that turns an automobile driver’s on-board vehicle navigation system into a covert eavesdropping device, after finding that the spying effectively disables the system’s emergency and roadside assistance features.

…the court ruled the spying’s fine so long as it doesn’t interfere with the emergency systems.

Another advantage to bicycling! Let’s see them pull this shit with my navigation system .

(Via Follow Me Here )

Berke Breathed predicted Dilbert :

O: In the October 1988 issue of The Comics Journal, you went into detail about what you thought newspaper comic-strip syndicates were really looking for: a situational strip drawn by a disaffected office worker who saw funny things going on around him, and who had no artistic experience and could only draw a little, which wouldn’t matter, because of the shrinking size of the comics pages. A year later, Dilbert made its debut. Coincidence? Do you have a future ahead of you as the new Edgar Cayce?

BB: You’re kind. Art via marketing ain’t exactly rocket science. This is how they green-light movies now. This is how they greenlight everything. I could never get Bloom County started today, because it wouldn’t make any sense as a marketing platform. And there you have the State Of The World. When they can figure out how to make a profitable marketing franchise out of the long-awaited “National Discussion On Race,” we’ll finally h