Life provides humour, I provide the laughs. This Penny Arcade strip reminds me a bit of this really old BLOG entry. Ahh, extreme geekitude. This reminds me of a recent thing I heard at work. One of my coworkers is running experiments involving novel language constructs, and he's using Japanese as the test data. He thus, during pre-experiment screening, asks people if they know any Japanese. Today, he asked the question, and one of his subjects said they know a little bit from having watched a lot of Anime. This is definitely CMU :)

As Quealy notes, it's time soon to do yearly reflection. Not in this entry, but soon. Before I do, I want to reread each and every entry in my entire BLOG, to reunderstand myself. That might help me with some recent things in my life too.

In my last entry, I mentioned the trouble caused when someone *gasp* showed a Taiwanese flag in the Olympics. It's also worth noting that not only does the Chinese government have the ability to throw its weight around to control what is seen, but so does the private sector. People who bring in things that arn't of the right brand are endangered by that too. How wonderful. We have, in a nutshell, both governmental and corporate entities deciding that they want to establish a kind of mental landscape for the event, and that brook no interference with that. People who focus only on state power and oppression are missing half the picture. Corporations are not your friend, nor are they society's friend. Free markets lead to enslaved people.

Here's some more beating of the war drum by our idiot-in-chief. This really worries me. I really hope that he doesn't start another war, and moreso hope that he doesn't reinstate the draft. Mark my words, if they move the draft age so I may be eligible, I will very likely flee the country. I am not going to support the American government in that kind of war. I don't give a damn what the flag waving conservative types think, I am not a patriot, I am happy not to be a patriot, and I find patriotism to be a minus when I see it in people. I have principles, and there are circumstances where I would fight in a war, but those circumstances are rare.

Google has a neat thing out called Keyhole. Unfortunately, it costs money, and more unfortunately, it doesn't run under Linux. Phooey. What it is, is a virtual environment of Terra, constructed through sat. imagery. Neat! I'd love to see Second Life import all of that and make simulated environments, in real size, for our entire planet. They have also given us a nice litsearch tool. This is handy -- I'll probably use it at work (and then use CMU's electronic library resources to get the content). It's interface is simple, but that's a good thing, in this case.

Oh, and for LP types out there, here's an interview with Badnarik, the LP candicate for presidency of the United States. Na klar, there are also a lot of interesting comments beneath. Ahh, such vivacity, in American Libertarian minds. Go ahead, close your eyes and gun your motorcycle up to 90. It'll be safe.. for a few seconds, at best.

If you're on windows, and have a sick sense of humour, perhaps you'll like JFK Reloaded, a game where you play Oswald, and you're trying to kill Kennedy. It naturally has a lot of people angry about it. For something a bit less controversial, you can celebrate killing random other people, courtesy of the U.S. government, in America's Army. After all, American President GOOD, Foreign Soldier BAD, right?

Incidentally, whatever happened to the SCO lawsuits on Linux?