Just reading Eric’s description of his skydive got my heart pounding.
random($foo), through the Fulifier. [hey, not bad!]
An insightful comment by SilentMajority from the Bruce Sterling On Total Information Awareness /. thread:
My definition of “dumb conservative” is a conservative who earns less than $500,000/year or has a net worth of less than several million dollars.
These poor souls would rather focus on why they (the middle class) have to pay a bit more taxes than the poor instead of focusing on why they have to pay a LOT more taxes than the ultra-wealthy or profitable corporations like Microsoft. You knew Microsoft paid $0 taxes in 1999 [via CTJ], right?
These morons also like complaining about things like a minimum wage bill because it raises the minimum wage rather than complaining about the luxury yacht fuel subsidies buried inside that same bill. “To hell with the undernourished child of a single working parent, my taxes shouldn’t pay for that! Instead, my hard-earned taxes are gonna help filthy rich bastards play on their yacht because my misguided middle-class ass is too lazy to get informed.”
- Will it rot my students’ brains if they use Mathematica? – an excellent little piece about education, and the role of technology in civilization, co-written by one of the co-founder’s of Wolfram Research
- The Credit Card Prank – John Hargrave asks “How crazy would I have to make my signature before someone would actually notice?” Hilarity ensues
Incidentally, that Sterling interview is much recommended.
Random thought: all the application-specific ‘optimizations’ that video card companies do seem to be based off of filenames. Now, if they were really serious about it, wouldn’t it be much more foolproof to have write a little MD5 calculator for their LUT?
While not as compelling as Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser’s follow-up Reefer Madness nonetheless has its moments:
Driving back to my motel that night, I thought about the people of Orange County, one of the richest counties in the nation—big on family values, yet bankrupt from financial speculation, unwilling to raise taxes to pay for their own children’s education, unwilling to pay off their debts, whining about the injustice of it, and blaming all their problems on illegal immigrants. And I though about Francisco, their bogeyman, their scapegoat, working ten hours a day at one of the hardest jobs imaginable, and sleeping on the ground every night, for months, so that he could save money and send it home to his parents.
We have been told for years to bow down before “the market.” We have placed our faith in the laws of supply and demand. What has been forgotten, or ignored, is that the market rewards only efficiency. Every other human value gets in its way. The market will drive wages down like water, until they reach the lowest possible level. Today that level is being set not in Washington or New York or Sacramento but in the fields of Baja California and the mountain villages of Oaxaca. That level is about five dollars a day. No deity that men have ever worshiped is more ruthless and more hollow than the free market unchecked; there is no reason why shantytowns should not appear on the outskirts of every American city. All those who now consider themselves devotees of the market should take a good look at what is happening in California. Left to its own devices, the free market always seeks a work force that is hungry, desperate, and cheap—a work force that is anything but free.
Recently:
- Brazil – It seems that we’re increasingly living in this movie, doesn’t it?
- The Frighteners – I saw this at a matinee showing when it came out. There were two other people in the theater, which I believe pretty accurately described how the movie did financially. I never could quite figure out why, because at the time, I thought it was a pretty awesome little movie, and a recent re-viewing has led to me to conclude that it really has stood up extremely well. If you haven’t seen this movie before, put it on your to-see list. It’s very good fun.
- The Toledo Show – A pretty amazing show, from the smoke cloud surround Toledo, to the great improvisational interludes. A bunch of us had dinner at Tangier (w/ special guest Jish)
- Zelig – a “mid” Woody Allen movie (1983) that I’ve never seen before, but is a pretty clever whimsical documentary-style retelling of the story of a human chameleon (played by Allen, of course). It’s very well done and pretty sharp. It’s actually similar in a lot of ways to the recent Sweet and Lowdown. I think that the way these two stories turn out is sort of revealing… or perhaps I’m reading too much into things.
A 3000 kVA transformer that serves the RackShack data center exploded and caught fire Monday night (thankfully, no one was hurt). The genrators kicked in, and apparently have continued to hold up until utility power can be restored (by Friday). More details and discussion in RackShack Talk.
Just got an email about this (my server is hosted on RackShack), but I have to say that I’m impressed by how they’ve been handling things. Over the past year and a half with RS, I’ve noticed no RS-responsible network or system downtime.
Palm announces acquisition of Handspring today, which is interesting. Jeff Hawkins has this look on the Palm Homepage photo that just well, anyway. Probably more important is that he’s holding a Treo 600 in his hand. I’m pretty jazzed about it. The only thing it’s missing seems to be Bluetooth (although it does have an SDIO slot).
I’ve been reading the various Newly Digital pieces with interest. The ones I’ve read so far have been uniformly great, and if you haven’t checked it out, you really owe it to yourself to do so. I’ve thought about writing my own, but well, for some reason, it seems hard for me to pin down something worth writing. Also, I’m a lazy bastard. I mean, take a look at the state of this site.
Incidentally, my original undergratudate application essay was about how BBS’s changed my world-view. In fact, the discovery of the digital experience has been an intermittently recurrent theme. Most recently, in fact, is a paper that I wrote early this morning for my CTCS 505 (Survey of Interactive Media) class. Here’s the syllabus prompt:
Technology First Encounter Essay: Recall the first time you encountered a particular media technology and analyze how you anticipated, interacted with, and utilized the technology. It will be useful to consider how your use of previous media technologies influenced how you approached the new technology, as well as how that technology eventually influenced future media technology usage. Words: 1500
Due: Tuesday, June 3rd at beginning of class.
Here’s a very slightly modified version of the essay (cleaned up a few passages, filled out the selected bibliography). It’s still a bit of the mess (it’s been a looong time since I’ve had to write an academic paper, and it shows), but despite cheese and awkward construction, I think it touches on (and summarizes) some stuff that might be of more general interest: Some Thoughts on the World Wide Web. [20KB PDF]