The gods are descending from Mount Olympus. They've been watching us for over two thousand years, the fruits of Prometheus's theft having been used far more interestingly in human hands than in its rightful hands. The idyllic life, the family arguments, all their domains, conquered by man. Zeus's thunderbolds predicted, Poseidon's waves tapped for power, Gaia lays sick, Aries' sword hopelessly outmoded, Cupid's spark held by online dating boards. The old, glorious battles and conflicts just don't matter anymore. Fenrir and Odin eat dinner together. Yahweh and Belial end their battles. Ragnarok and the day of judgement have been called off -- Wagner's heresy has become real.

They're all tired -- it's one thing to be the source of meaning to a few thousand, sparse people, and quite another to hold together the modern, distracted, dazed billions.

Only the Moirae remain.

Hmm... I don't really know what that meant. As a matter of fact, it's probably not as good as it could've been, but I lost interest partway through. Oh well :)

Last night was pretty fun -- Zets meetings arn't always that big, apparently, but with sufficiently good company, one doesn't need to be in a big crowd. We met at the normal pizza place, talked for about two (?) hours, and then went to a coffee place that I haven't been to before in Squirrel Hill, and talked until past midnight. Just the 4 of us. That's one really neat thing about Pittsburgh and the new life I've built here -- I just don't seem to run into people who arn't interesting and intellectual anymore. Maybe it's just part of being around CMU/Pitt, and the college ambiance, but I love it. Maybe I'll stop being a cactus in time...

Anyhow, one of the interesting things we talked about, early in the night, was genetic engineering of foods, humans, and the ethics of that. The conversation jumped all over the place, and anyone familiar with me knows that I'm a transhumanist, but a cautious, somewhat skeptic one. Their position, which I might agree with, depending on my mood (don't have a strong opinion yet), was that genetic engineering of foods should be tightly controlled because the effects of said engineering are unknown, and it's hard to constrain plant seed distribution should modified foods be planted in somebody's garden. What I disagreed with was the idea that those advances should never happen, as there's no real benefit to society if they are to happen. They were especially unhappy with my hopes for sentient machines. It was an interesting conversation, and those are almost always fun for me :)

Oh, a neat article: http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993750

I now have the current version of my webpage (the one that needs a lot of work to be finished) in CVS on my home system. Now I'll feel comfortable doing more ambitious work on it -- I'm kind of a history packrat. I still have trinkets from when I was a child, and stuff spanning pretty much all periods of my life. I've been thinking about it, and I've come to the conclusion that major aspects of the design of Subversion are really stupid. The most notable example is using Apache and WebDAV. Apache is a fine program, great for running a webserver, doing CGI, and doing java stuff (with the help of tomcat). However, WebDAV is inefficient, requires a webserver, and was designed by one of those "one protocol to bind them all" types. It also needs to be backwards compatible with HTTP, meaning that locking, for example, can't be done correctly. For programs that deal with large amounts of usually binary data where there's a fairly tight binding between clients and servers, a verbose protocol like HTTP isn't appropriate. Something more akin to SSH, that does everything as compact binary streams is far more efficient. This, however, is minor compared to the second issue. Requiring Apache to be present, with WebDAV installed, and it all to be configured right is a very big and irritating requirement for someone who just wants version control software. Apache sometimes breaks during upgrades, and it's also software that people are going to restart or alter the configuration of fairly often. People also might reasonably want more than one apache on their system, and to have it configured oddly. It really sucks to design your version control system so it's all part of that too.

I've been having strange dreams of the "IODENT" and "Never Fully Dressed Without a Smile" parts of the musical Annie. I'm dreaming, and suddenly there they are, spelling out I-O-D, E-N-T, I-OH-DENT, DO-Dododododo... I don't really remember my dreams from this morning, but I think I enjoyed them, because I slept in again instead of heading early to CMU. I guess my increased general activity has often replaced my going to the gym, although I do that too sometimes.

I've been thinking about something someone in the philosophy group said the other day, that it's dangerous to be liberal nowadays, socially, as republicans are using more furor, and demanding people conform to their ways, ostracising people who are liberal, anti-war, and all that. It seems to fit with a lot of what I've seen outside academia -- liberals kind of cluster together, and whisper their positions to each other, while conservatives own the room, and spit on people who loathe BushJr. And yet, at least in areas I hang out, there are an awful lot of liberals out there too. What gives? Is there something pathological about liberals that makes them unwilling to be bold declarers of social reality that conservatives are, or is there something ideological about liberalism, or most practitioners of it, that makes them unwilling to 'rock the boat'? Either way, it's a recipe for disaster -- when liberals flee from expressing themselves, they surrender the landscape, and they surrender it not just for now, but they stop moderates from joining them. I'm no great friend of the liberals -- I'm not centrist, but I certainly don't fit with either camp, but I think that the conservatives, especially the fundamentalist nationalist flavour (who I wholeheartedly oppose), have stolen the cake. To put it more strongly, and to make the google gods smile on me, I hate Bush. I hate the religious fundimentalists who are out to bring society back to the dark ages. I hate the businessmen who think about war, and can only see oil and government contracts. I hate the patriots who think America should rule the world, that Europe is an irritating obstacle, and that everyone else is irrelevant. I'm irritated with the pathetic liberals who play their word games, and attempt to say that they're being patriotic too, in their own way. Cheney's corporation should have its corporate license revoked. BushJr should spend years in a UN Prison. Billy Graham should have his citizenship revoked and shipped off to Israel, and the people who think America's all that should be forced to live in Europe for a year. I am proud not to be a patriot. I am an internationalist. I am an intellectual. I am an environmentalist. I believe in fiscal responsability, personal freedom, and science. I believe that religion will wither in time as science progresses. I believe that openness in society is a good thing, and that European society as a whole is closer to the American upper caste than the American lower caste. I believe that most Americans are incredibly ignorant about the world. I believe that there is a lot of danger in the concentrations of wealth that some corporate entities have, and that the tree that is Capitalism often needs to be pruned, sometimes for its health, sometimes for ours. I believe that advertisements create a bad mental environment, and that junk postal mail is one of the worst evils of the world, as it messes with people's mind, it is a senseless waste of trees, and that the ink and paper it produces generates enormous waste. I believe that there's value to philosophy. Hell, maybe I am some weird flavour of liberal. If I had the ability to add polls, you'd probably see that on the right right now -- "Am I a Liberal, by these statements? Yes LINK No LINK". Alas, no colocation yet. Maybe when my finances have recovered from the cancelled vacation, the new apartment, the O'Reilly trip, and from some costs that no longer are..

Anyhow, here's what I'll say to the liberal person I was talking with, and to you, my (probably mostly liberal) audience. Get off your duff, and don't take shit from conservatives. If you're a coward, you're going to lose. If you might lose friendships, remember that they will too. You can't tiptoe through the world, letting people do to you what you'd never do to them. If they complain that you're talking politics, remind them that they are too. A pro-bush rally and an anti-bush rally are both political. Take the high ground, but make sure you reach the same place. Your mindshare cannot grow if they're the only one talking. Arrogance, provided that it's moderate, self-aware, and tempered by reason, is a good thing. Don't be a victim, and maybe you won't be treated by one.

Anyhow, I'm going to spend most of tonight packing and cleaning my current place. I'm going to see if I can do enough financial rearranging to get enough money together to pay the first month's rent before my paycheck, so I can actually get moving done. It might be possible. It'll be ugly, and will result in my, at least temporarily, draining dry some of my accounts, but I really want to get started moving. I won't feel comfortable ordering DSL (probably going to switch to telerama) until I at least have keys to the place. Probably the first thing to be moved will be my books/CDs and TV, which can stay there alone for a couple days without my missing them. I can probably move everything in my car, except maybe for my futon, which is iffy. It'll be a lot of trips, but it's not that far.

Current music is "So Long Superman", by Firewater.