MemeMachineGo!

At risk of explaining, one of the things that’s thrown off my blogging is that my computer melted down last week. A bad case of Microsoft OS-itis. I’d felt all virtuous about uninstalling lots of unused programs, and cleaning up the Registry with Norton System Doctor… but somewhere in there, the system went insane and now freezes so hard I have to pull the plug to restart it.

Good time to rebuild Linux. So I’m posting this on my spanking new Gentoo Linux box with a 2.6.5 kernel running the XOrg X11 Server .

I’m feeling very up to date right now.

Now to recover the data from my Windows hard drive…

Tax evaders as fanboys :

The tax honesty people are strangely reminiscent of fandom — of the comic book, fantasy, science fiction, role-playing-game variety. They have the same obsession with continuity and coherence within a created fantasy world of words. It’s just that, in this case, that world of words isn’t a multivolume fantasy epic or a long-running TV series — it’s U.S. law. When these people try to reconcile the definition of income in this subsection of Title 26 of the U.S. Code with the definition in a 1918 Supreme Court case, it’s like hearing an argument over the inconsistencies between a supervillain’s origin as first presented in a 1965 issue of The Amazing Spider-Man and the explanation given in a 1981 edition of Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man.

(First saw this in Boing Boing but didn’t actually get around to reading it till Sumana posted about it. Sometimes I’m tempted to just give up attribution…)

Sometimes, muggers should just let go .

A Hamas suicide bomber blew up two armed Palestinians who tried to rob him at gun point in the Gaza Strip. […] Rather than give up his explosives, the bomber detonated them, killing himself and the two robbers.

=v= I got some email that I at first thought was spam, and which evaded my spam filters, so I was p*ssed. It promised "Liquid Gold" and the "EcoWaters@aol.com" return address seemed a targeted forgery for the likes of EcoJym.

It turned out to be only somewhat spamful, an on-topic announcement of interest to the EcoEmailList it was sent to. It was promoting a book, Liquid Gold: The Lore and Logic of Using Urine to Grow Plants. (An interesting website if you like lots of pee puns.)

I hope they don't write a sequel, though. It'd probably be sh*tty.

Mark Evanier is a bad, bad man . Go read it; no excerpt would do it justice.

Since moving to California almost 9 years ago, I’ve only seen naturally occurring frozen water a handful of times — a couple of hailstorms, a couple of mornings when there was frost.

But this weekend, I finally saw snow. A whole mountaintop full of it. I even threw a snowball. Malasada and I went to Mount Shasta . This may have been our honeymoon — we’re not sure.

All the cliches about the mountain continually changing are true — see for yourself on the ShastaCam . We didn’t get to see any lenticular clouds though.

Mt. Shasta has a history of being considered a sacred place and is at the heart of several delightfully whacked newage hypotheses.There’s a Lemurian city under the mountain. It’s the place to be if you want to meet an Ascended Master . And everyone’s favorite cryptozoological critter, Bigfoot , lives there, too.

We stayed in a town called Weed, home to the Village Oracle , and if I ever start an earthy-crunchy Internet cafe/vegetarian restaurant/concert venue, I want it to be just like that. As I was driving Friday night, I remembered I’d forgotten to renew three library books due Saturday — at $.25 a day, that’d be $1.50 before I could return them Monday, and I wouldn’t have gotten to read them either. But thanks to the Village Oracle, I renewed them Saturday. And they get huge bonus points for using Linux (not sure what flavor — they were running the Gnome desktop manager, though.)

Weed’s social calendar for the year was posted at the Visitor’s Information Center. Malasada worried about the Chinese Auction item from February — people would think I’d bought her there. (A reader might be forgiven for having assumed Malasada was Native American, but her parents are Taiwanese. She chose “Malasada” as her nom du blog because Disney’s Malasada had been suggested for her in “What celebrity do you resemble?” conversations. When she first told me this, I thought it sounded silly, but then I looked up some pictures and they really do bear some resemblance to her in eyes, mouth, expressions.)

I serve as Malasada’ authority on matters newage, which sometimes leads to difficult questions. For instance, she asked me what the fifth dimension was. I began racking my brains for my not even half-remembered and not ever even half-understood knowledge of superstring theory. Then she indicated that this was in regard to a claim that the Lemurians existed in the fifth dimension. That made it much easier.

There were newage bookstores and crystals for sale. I especially enjoyed the sign for one very large crystal explaining how it so greatly pained the proprietor to put something so vulgar as a price tag on any crystal and that this one was so ludicrously expensive special that he wouldn’t do so, but if you had the resources to offer it a good home, you should talk to him.

Weed has a restaurant called the Hungry Moose, which had someone in a moose suit standing outside with a sign, waving to cars, pointing to the restaurant, and rubbing the suit’s furry belly. We wondered if the Moose had furries chatting him or her up.

Laurel’s Mountain View Cafe in Mount Shasta City had about the best vegan dessert I’ve ever tasted, prosaically named “vegan tofu bars.” I will stalk Laurel until I get the recipe. Well, okay, stalking would be a pain from several hundred miles away, but I will mail her a self-addressed stamped envelope and a polite request, see if I don’t.

While we were there, I eavesdropped on a conversation between two gray-haired guys that featured Pleiadian energy , converting a car to run on orgone energy , legal wrangling over possession of a car that put me in mind of my tax evaders as fanboys entry , and some third party who was an intergalactic commander.

The people were friendly, the mountain was incredible, the weather was beautiful. A good trip.

Charlie Stross talks happy about running a country as a corporation .

In general, most corporations are internally constituted as perfect Stalinist dictatorships, directed from the center by managers who are free to do anything as long as it furthers their mission. There is an almost total lack of accountability from the employees, except where it may be imposed by external regulatory authorities. The corporate model is as profoundly anti-democratic a system as can be imagined, but we put up with it because it has the saving grace that it exists as a little island within a larger society. Corporations have a strictly limited scope for oppression.

The problem I’m noticing is people with the mind-set of corporate upper management trying to run a country as if it is a corporation. Dissent is suppressed, all actions must be goal-oriented, policy is dictated unilaterally from the centre and collateral damage is ignored. The emphasis on appearances that typifies the current administration is simply an old ingrained habit from operating within the constraints of a broader context (of a corporation in a market regulated by a bigger entity); the contempt displayed for dissenting viewpoints is characteristic of the worst excesses of a corporate monopoly.

Rumsfeld is a corporate manager. Bush is, too. So is Cheney. It all seems to be of a piece with the willingness to use any means to get results, however evil, the obsession with meeting goals regardless of colateral damage, the determination to spin criticism as subversion or treason, and so on. They think they’re running America, Inc., may the devil take the hind-most, and society can look after itself. In this kind of climate, is it any surprise that low-level employees try to shape up to the perceived expectations of their masters and deliver results by any means necessary, however dehumanizing or monstrous? And is it any surprise that they refuse to be held to account by anyone except their shareholders? (And I’m not talking about Congress here.)

We went through a couple of decades of “fat is evil.” Now we’re mired in “carbohydrates are evil.” Well, there’s only one macronutrient left.

Look for “protein is evil” fad diets to be coming down the pike in another decade or two. You heard it here first.

“The arrogance, inconsistency, and unreliability of the administration’s diplomacy have undermined American alliances, alienated friends, and emboldened our adversaries.”

“Gerrymandered congressional districts are an affront to democracy and an insult to the voters. We oppose that and any other attempt to rig the electoral process.”

“The current administration has casually sent American armed forces on dozens of missions without clear goals, realizable objectives, favorable rules of engagement, or defined exit strategies. Over the past seven years, a shrunken American military has been run ragged by a deployment tempo that has eroded its military readiness. Many units have seen their operational requirements increased four-fold, wearing out both people and equipment.”

“The rule of law, the very foundation for a free society, has been under assault, not only by criminals from the ground up, but also from the top down. An administration that lives by evasion, coverup, stonewalling, and duplicity has given us a totally discredited Department of Justice.”

“Sending our military on vague, aimless, and endless missions rapidly saps morale. Even the highest morale is eventually undermined by back-to-back deployments, poor pay, shortages of spare parts and equipment, inadequate training, and rapidly declining readiness.”

From the Democratic platform for 2004? Nope. The Republican platform for 2000 .

(Via Utility Fog who got it from Looka who got it from Xoverboard )

=v= The John Kerry for President people know that my name is Jym Dyer and they know where I live (which is more than I can say for some parts of the U.S.P.S.). I just got my first direct junk mail from them, in which they unveil their exciting new campaign slogan: Let's go for it!

Be excellent to each other ...

Madeleine L’Engle’s Wrinkle in Time trilogy was important to me as a lad, though I haven’t revisited it in a long time. On the occasion of a TV movie of the first one, here’s a great interview with her.

So you’ve seen the movie?

Madeleine L’Engle: I’ve glimpsed it.

And did it meet expectations?

Oh, yes. I expected it to be bad, and it is.

What are you working on at the moment?

A book about aging: enjoy it, you might as well. And it’s not all bad. I can say what I want, and I don’t get punished for it.

Such as?

Such as I sometimes think God is a shit—and he wouldn’t be worth it otherwise. He’s much more interesting when he’s a shit. [The original was bowdlerized. This offends me much more than cuss words do — Zed.]

So to you, faith is not a comfort?

Good heavens, no. It’s a challenge: I dare you to believe in God. I dare you to think [our existence] wasn’t an accident.

Many people see faith as anti-intellectual.

Then they’re not very bright. It takes a lot of intellect to have faith, which is why so many people only have religiosity.

(Via Neil Gaiman’s journal )

I’ve updated my template and CSS slightly. Text sizes are generally larger.I adopted the 3 column CSS recommended by LawLawLaw (found via Circadian Shift). Please let me know if the new layout pleases you, vexes you, doesn’t work in your browser, or causes you to break out in a rash.

I deleted the RSS .91 feed. http://www.mememachinego.com/index.xml used to be the RSS .91 feed; now it’s an RSS 2.0 feed. The old RSS 2.0 feed link, http://www.mememachinego.com/rsd.xml, continues to exist as a soft link to index.xml. I make no guarantees that’ll continue forever, but I’ll make an effort to see that rsd.xml is updated appropriately in the major feed clearinghouses before I delete it. I’ve added an atom feed.

I installed MT-Textile 2. This means, among other things, that I can place punctuation immediately after URLs in Textile so I won’t have the annoying spaces between URLs and periods or right parentheses which sometimes resulted in widows. (I could have prevented this by hand-coding the HTML, of course, but Textile was easier and I was lazy. But the widows annoyed me enough that if I’m ever feeling really anal and, most likely, procrastinating really hard from doing something else, I’ll go back and fix them all.)

I also upgraded my MT-Blacklist (including the blacklist data) and SmartyPants, but you’re not likely to notice any differences from those (unless maybe you’re a dirty comment spammer.)

I did not upgrade to Movable Type 3.0, as that would leave me with a choice between paying $50 or excluding Jym (the free version allows only one author.) The former is unattractive to me right now and the latter intolerable.

More changes coming later (and no, Dad, there still isn’t anything at the About Zed page.)

=v= Allow me to apologize in advance for using "dude" in a title after having done so just yesterday, but you'll understand soon ...

A movie is being made about John Constantine, a character created by writer Alan Moore and artists Steve Bissette and John Totleben. Moore wanted the character to resemble Sting, and in his very first appearance — as part of a crowd of bystanders in a Swamp Thing panel -- he even wore the same striped shirt that Sting dons for the cover of a Police album.

He eventually settled into a different look: brown trenchcoat, ever-present Silk Cut cigarette, and Sting's hair (pre-weave).

Hollywood, it seems, believes Constantine should rather look like Keanu Reeves. Whoahhh.

I’ve read that existing Gmail users can now invite others to join.

So if there are any Gmail users out there, don’t be shy about inviting me — go ahead and drop me some mail.

All the 2004 Hugo-nominated short fiction is online now. Check out some of the best stories of the year while you can.

Penis-Health Has Been Voted The #1 Penis Enlargement Site by Independent Penis Reviews.

I have no joke here; I just like saying “independent penis reviews.”

(Via Do Penis Enlargement Pills Work? which was just linked by Boing Boing)

Yet another entirely unbiased effort to expand the frontiers of science:

The Lighted Candle Society wants to use functional magnetic resonance imaging [MRI] to generate research to scientifically prove pornography is addictive. […] Harmer [chairman of the Lighted Candle Society] plans to use the information gained from the MRI to prosecute producers of pornography in the same manner the tobacco industry was prosecuted. “If we can use the MRI studies to prove that pornography is addictive, much in the same way that violence has been found to be addictive in previous research, then we can hold them [the pornography industry] financially liable for the harm they are doing, and virtually cripple the industry,” Harmer said. […]

Cline [a psychotherapist] said obscene images viewed during adolescence act as a gateway to many serious sexual addictions that can lead to criminal activity in some cases. “It starts first in fantasy, and then always [emphasis added — Zed] leads to some kind of reality,” Cline said. […]

Hess [a professor of integrative biology at BYU] said what stood out to him was when [Ted] Bundy told reporters: “I started out in pornography and then I got harder and harder, and more and more graphic with it … I just want the world to know that it was because of pornography that I became a serial killer. Before you execute me I want the world to know that.”

Because if you can’t trust Ted Bundy, who can you trust?

Aside: this was my first opportunity to use multi-paragraph blockquoting in Textile 2.0. Oh, that’s nice (compared to the pain in the butt faking it in Textile 1.0 was.)

(Via MeFi)

A radical professor with obvious Canadian sympathies predicts that the U.S. is going down.

When are we going to drive out these America-haters? Won’t someone think of the children?

=v= Okay, no doubt by now you've read all the jokes about G. W. Bush falling off an alleged bicycle. You know, the pun about how he can't "handle bars," or speculation that he was wearing a mouth guard so as to avoid another pretzel mishap. (Mouth guards are much more common for motorized cycles, so perhaps that's what he was riding, since everything else he does supports fossil fuels. In which case he might've fallen off because he forgot to turn it on.)

But no, you've already read all that stuff. The part that interests me is this official White House explanation:

"It's been raining a lot and the topsoil is loose," the spokesman said. "You know this president. He likes to go all out. Suffice it to say he wasn't whistling show tunes."

It has been raining a lot, it's true, but not in Crawford, Texas. A look at The Weather Channel shows zero inches of rain for the last week.

Paul Krugman rocks.

He was a stock character in 19th-century fiction: the wastrel son who runs up gambling debts in the belief that his wealthy family, concerned for its prestige, will have no choice but to pay off his creditors. In the novels such characters always come to a bad end. Either they bring ruin to their families, or they eventually find themselves disowned.

George Bush reminds me of those characters — and not just because of his early career, in which friends of the family repeatedly bailed out his failing business ventures. Now that he sits in the White House, he’s still counting on other people to settle his debts — not to protect the reputation of his family, but to protect the reputation of the country.

(Via Follow Me Here)

A couple of days ago, I spent a while looking at some reactions to the new Movable Type license agreement and prices.

Basically, 6 Apart, the company that owns and develops Movable Type, wants to actually make money. This isn’t very surprising — MT has made inroads as a content management system for commercial sites and businesses; they’re no longer a couple working out of their home, but a business with employees; hey, who doesn’t want to make money?

Geeks are very attached to their tools, though, so suddenly being told they can no longer continue to use MT as they see fit, while remaining on the upgrade path, without paying a substantial sum created a big furor. A lot of people felt betrayed, given that there had been previous assurances that MT 3.0 would be a free upgrade, and, while there is a license allowing free use of MT 3.0, it’s limiting. The limit is inconsistent with how a lot of people have been using MT, chiefly because it allows only one author. My blog, for instance, is disqualified, because Jym participates. And the jump to non-free use is pricey, starting at $70 (less one’s prior donations.)

So there were immediate accusations that they’d sold out, become Microsoft, were “evil” (yes, that precise word.) And a lot of other people shouted down the accusers down for over-reacting.

Meanwhile, there were also cases of people saying things to the effect of: “MT’s a good product, and I’ve been happy to use it and to have donated in the past, but the new licensing and pricing don’t make sense for how I use it, and I’m going to look into alternatives.” And they’ve been shouted down, too, by Six Apart defenders, denouncing them with accusations of entitlement and freeloading.

Basically, it was a microcosm of partisan politics, and I was reminded of most of the left/right bickering I see.

For myself, well, I’ve been happy to use and to have donated to MT in the past, but right now, I don’t see myself staying with MT 2.661 forever, and I don’t see upgrading to MT 3.0.

And, for the record, by “silly monkeys” I mean the whole damn human race, myself included.

Why don’t we do it in the road?

It’s rush hour, and I am standing at the corner of Zhuhui and Renmin Road, a four-lane intersection in Suzhou, China. Ignoring the red light, a couple of taxis and a dozen bicycles are headed straight for a huge mass of cyclists, cars, pedicabs and mopeds that are turning left in front of me. Cringing, I anticipate a collision. Like a flock of migrating birds, however, the mass changes formation. A space opens up, the taxis and bicycles move in, and hundreds of commuters continue down the street, unperturbed and fatality free.

In Suzhou, the traffic rules are simple. “There are no rules,” as one local told me. A city of 2.2 million people, Suzhou has 500,000 cars and 900,000 bicycles, not to mention hundreds of pedicabs, mopeds and assorted, quainter forms of transportation. Drivers of all modes pay little attention to the few traffic signals and weave wildly from one side of the street to another. Defying survival instincts, pedestrians have to barge between oncoming cars to cross the roads.

But here’s the catch: During the 10 days I spent in Suzhou last fall, I didn’t see a single accident. Really, not a single one. Nor was there any of the road rage one might expect given the anarchy that passes for traffic policy. And despite the obvious advantages that accrue to cars because of their size, no single transportation mode dominates the streets. On the contrary, the urban arterials are a communal mix of automobiles, cyclists, pedestrians, and small businesses such as inner-tube repairmen that set up shop directly in the right-of-way. […]

Education campaigns [in the UK and US] from the 1960s onward were based on maintaining a clear separation between the highway and the rest of the public realm. Children were trained to modify their behavior and, under pain of death, to stay out of the street. “But as soon as you emphasize separation of functions, you have a more dangerous environment,” says Hamilton-Baillie. “Because then the driver sees that he or she has priority. And the child who forgets for a moment and chases a ball across the street is a child in the wrong place.”

Any attempt to suggest traffic anarchy that works in China and Holland would work in the U.S. would remind me of gun advocates pointing to the example of Switzerland. Yes, in Switzerland, every man is armed, and their society is fairly peaceable. Thus, say some gun advocates, the problem in our violent society is not enough guns — if only everyone had one, things would be ducky.

The thing is, though, they’re not just armed, they’re Swiss. They grew up in a different society, in a different context. I find the suggestion that the U.S. would be more peaceable if every man in America woke up with a loaded rifle under his bed tomorrow to be fanciful. No, I don’t. I find it to be moronic.

Likewise, as someone who’s been shouted at to “get off the road” and had garbage thrown at him by someone in a car while riding my bike on one of Berkeley’s bike boulevards, I don’t think removing traffic controls would make American drivers forget the idea of their undying primacy.

Mind you, I’m not saying the article makes the claim that it’d be a great idea for the U.S., ‘cause it doesn’t.

For their part, many American traffic engineers say one critical ingredient is missing for a system built around shared spaces to work in the United States: a communal sensibility. “We live in a culture that gives so much value to the individual and the expression of that is how we act in a car,” says Robert Burchfield, a city traffic engineer in my home town of Portland, Ore., which is nationally recognized for its preservation of public space and its dedicated network of cycling lanes and pedestrian pathways. “I’m not comfortable with less order when I can’t get people to go below 50 or 60 miles per hour.”

(Via The Null Device)

A veteran South Tucson police sergeant is under investigation for firing his stun gun to subdue a handcuffed 9-year-old girl.

Cops have an impossibly difficult job. It’s part of their job to face danger. They need to be able to respond with force if they’re to survive. And, of course, they’re human and sometimes make mistakes.

But I still have a knee-jerk reaction against tales of police brutality. And, knowing I have this knee-jerk reaction, I make a conscious effort to cut cops some slack and look at the details.

If I’d heard just that a cop had tased a 9-year-old, I’d be asking myself “Was she armed?” Clearly an armed 9-year-old can endanger a grown man.

If I’d heard just that a cop had tased an unarmed 9-year-old, I’d be asking myself “Were there extenuating circumstances?” I figure any cop that feels endangered by an unarmed 9-year-old ought to find a new line of work. But if an enraged 9-year-old wildly charged a cop in a tense situation, for instance, if the cop had been breaking up an episode of domestic violence, and the cop tased the child, well, I would consider the whole situation regrettable, and I’d ultimately be more relieved that the cop had managed to respond with non-lethal force than upset by the use of force.

But a handcuffed 9-year-old? What extenuating circumstance could cover this one? She had sharp fangs?

If this story is true, and the newspaper article suggests that the facts are not in question, then I hope this asshole is fired, disgraced, and convicted.

(Via Unknown News)

Bruce Sterling wonders how to implement throttle control on his party.

Now there’s the architectural solution. Maybe it’s a technical problem, ok? I can engineer the kegs because the kegs are the locus of the party organization. So let’s just say, maybe my kegs are too low-tech and what I need is a keg firewall. It’s measuring the amount of fluid that is coming out of the kegs and is the party is getting too boisterous, they just start busting out air. “Hey man, the keg’s not working! The keg’s not working at Sterling’s house. Aw man, the keg’s are dry.” and then they leave and then the kegs just spring back up. They’re just sitting there, watching network traffic, and if it gets too heavy, the kegs kick out. Or you could have keg mirror sites at someone else’s party and it just pops up on the keg that says “Hey, you’re being slashdotted here! Why don’t you go to Fourth Street? There are lots of kegs there!” Have appealing little pictures of the kegs moving around on them. Maybe webcam photos. “Oh, this party is so much fun over here! Why don’t you go to that party?”

(Via just about everybody)

British boy convicted of inciting his own murder.

It’s so hard for fiction to keep up.

And on the subject of SUVs sucking, check out this comparison between crashing a MINI Cooper and a Ford F-150 Pickup (the latter is the basis of the Expedition.) Pay special attention to the crash dummies’ legs.

These results are for hitting a wall at 40 MPH, and not representative of a head-on collision between the two.

But, of course, I consider the whole bigger is better in a collision argument to be anti-social: you only increase your protection in a larger vehicle to the same extent by which you increase your endangerment of everyone else. If everyone’s in an SUV, all advantage is lost.

(Via Six Different Ways)

This cool Wonders of the Ancient World site includes a list of honorable mentions, like Petra, the rock-carved city, as well as a scary FAQ (Why is the Eiffel Tower not on the list [of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World]?”)