Time Heals All Wounds.. And Then Kills the Patient

Recently was curious about a song performed by the Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo in the Richard Elfman film 「Forbidden Zone」. (view full entry for contents)

More pushing of cars: more falling down into freezing puddles. Doing that a few times suggests "Damnit, I want a cupcake!" - I wonder how much business Dozens made from that precise kind of thing today.

Been playing a bit more with some stories I've been tempted to make webcomics/fantasyblogs out of. The most recent story I've been fleshing out is set a few hundred years before the setting of one of my experiments in fiction-blogging, in the near future.(view full entry for contents)

I think, provided that I can hold myself together until then, I should finish up my major projects at work (maybe another 5-6 months left) and lift anchor. I'm not entirely certain about it, but things have failed to come together here and I think I need a new place where I can start over again without the baggage of having alienated so many people. The where and how of what's next are not clear, although ideally it'll be someplace with less soul-sucking winters, without a terrible male-female ratio, with a tradition of intellectualism, and where I can get a good university job until I figure out what's really next.

CMU fans might find this kind of neat.

Sudden snowstorm => helping people push cars around SqHill. (view full entry for contents)

• The Khan Academy is an organisation that puts high quality basic science education videos on Youtube. This is an interview with the founder.
• Daniel Pink's talk at Google on human motivation is very interesting - it ties to gift economies, how employment works, and creativity
• Disappointed that Wikileaks may have puttered out for lack of funding. It's not a big surprise to see it die this way - like many "internet culture" entities, its weakness is funding, primarily I think not in HR costs, but more bandwidth and server space. It would be interesting to see what kinds of things would flourish if disk space and cycles were free and IP regulation were gone. Addressing the former, could something like the NEA inexpensively provide that kind of thing (assuming politics were no barrier and everyone agreed it to be a good thing to do)? Could it be done without adverts, using something akin to the "student activity fee" that universities have to encourage student organisations to form? I pay a certain amount of money every month for my server (dachte.org), using it as a place to get my mail, run my website, host my blog, and occasionally do projects. If I had the bandwidth and speed to do more, would I? Maybe. It would certainly be nice if things that are much more worthy, like Wikileaks, didn't have to spend money on things like hosting and costs of that kind of thing were just absorbed by society at large. Although.. perhaps Wikileaks is distinct in that it needs to be uniquely isolated from the laws of the countries where it's socially active. Any whistleblower site that has the ability to embarass governments and very powerful people (as Wikileaks has) might be better placed elsewhere, or otherwise effectively hard-to-reach by law enforcement. It's probably as big of a target as the anon.penet.fi remailer was (which I occasionally used, way back when).

In theory, making myself try to be social today was a victory, but it was most unsatisfying and a failure. Sigh. I don't know what to do.

Tonight I learned about the big brother of the history substitution operator in bash. (view full entry for contents)

I may have badly mismanaged time at work, and I'm a bit worried about it. I thought a certain task was significantly smaller than it was, and only noticed when I was deploying it that there's a lot of other tricky stuff I was supposed to do too - If I had known this I would have said "no" or delayed a lot of other things that needed doing. Sigh. My productivity is a lot lower than it should be for various reasons anyhow. I might need to do a lot of marathon software design/programming to avoid people getting upset.

I sometimes wonder what my life would've been like if I had been successful at flirting with some of the people I tried to flirt with in the years since my last gf. (view full entry for contents)

Incomplete rambling about technocrat-ism snipped.

Bleh, politics. (view full entry for contents)

This winter: (view full entry for contents)

I am not a graphics-editing wizard. Click on the image for larger evidence of this.

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In other news, I think Elizabeth Warren is one of my favourite nonelected government figures. Just like Lawrence Lessig (who is not a government official in any way, but who is also a law school prof), she's a law professor working to shape government for the interests of society. While I'm considerably to the left of either of them, I have a lot of respect for both of them. On that note, Lawrence Lessig is trying to get people talking about a 28th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, focusing on shortcomings in our electoral system and how influence can be bought.

I'm not easily interested or impressed by jock-type things, to put it mildly. National Geographic somehow manages to provide a programme that I would happily watch alongside people who are very different from me. This, called "Fight Science", goes into the physics of martial arts and is beyond awesome. It's about an hour and a half, so be prepared to devote some time for it (or download it).

(around the 1 hour mark, they discuss the Bõ, which was my favourite weapon when I was learning some flavour of kenpo, ages ago - I would've happily just learned Bõ and skipped or skimped on the rest - they show a really interesting 3-part staff after that)

Evening steeped in utter routine - work, teahouse, home. Perhaps something novel, perhaps something I've said before in another way.

I wonder, given our suceptability to branding, whether tribal humanity used tattoos to distinguish tribe from tribe. (view full entry for contents)

PZ points our attention at Irving Kristol on political truths. Kristol believes in the "hard" type of propoganda, where society has various narratives for people of various levels of political sophistication - these narratives are tailored for their audience, in the name of political stability. (view full entry for contents)

A recent edition of the ISR had a refreshingly honest account of the (very tenuous) connection between Marxism and feminism. I am tempted to say that Marxism more can be "made compatible" with feminism (in the same way that Sarte in his later years made existentialism compatible with marxism, tinkering with suppositions of both to create an intellectual enterprise that coherently melded the traditions and values of both) than that they're naturally compatible. I'm comfortable maintaining my high score on the BS-filter for any social studies paper that references socialist theory in the context of gender/queer/feminist/$race studies.

Interesting task - reconstruction of Haitian infrastructure. I don't envy Préval, but he has a very interesting task ahead. Likewise for those trying to use reconciliation to pass the Health Care bill (frankly, I would rather a more aggressive, stronger bill that would just get 51%, and simply ram it through by letting Republicans filibuster for as long as they like (months, if needed), locking up congress and letting public pressure build on them until some small sacrifice can seal the deal). It's not pretty, but it's bloody stupid to let threat of a filibuster undermine a major initiative by a party in clear and large majority - extensive threat of this might reasonably lead to the end of our democracy, as parties might prove unwilling to ever let *anything* pass without a 60% majority.