Tis the Season to be Lighting

My plan this year is to avoid climbing ladders. The eaves will be omitted in favor of more ground lighting. I do this mainly for Caitlin. It does look pretty, but I have other things I could be doing. So I'm off today to buy some ground lighting and maybe one of those lawn things that light up.

Al makes some good points on roasting pans. The disposable ones are flimsy, but I would have just put it on the large sturdy cookie sheet we have. On the other hand, how hard is it to buy another pan? Well, not very hard. It's not likely it would be used very often, we seldom roast anything that large and we have smaller pans, but it's better than screwing around with half-measures. Listen to Al, I'm no culinary wizard.

I did the three mile loop again this morning since Taekwondo was out Thursday and Friday. Felt pretty good, I may have to try the four mile loop here pretty soon. Have to pay attention to the knees though. I just bought a new pair of running shoes, so they should be okay for now.

Watched Panic Room last night. Fairly entertaining, though I'm not sure I'd be playing around with propane and propane accessories like Jodie Foster was. It must be Jodie Foster weekend here, since we saw Contact the other day. I'll probably have to go on a little bit at length about this some time later, but it's kind of disappointing that two movies I really enjoyed on issues of faith have gaping plot holes in them. Contact and Signs not only require a willing suspension of disbelief, but pretty much the suspension of all critical faculties. Sort of diminishes the memory of the experience upon reflection. As so many people have pointed out, if nobody believed Jodie Foster went anywhere in the machine, why not just fire it up again and drop another volunteer through? And the whole 18 hours of static thing seem like something they tacked on at the end after test screenings. But I'm still going to buy it, I'll probably watch it again a time or three. I won't be buying Panic Room though.

Asterism

Although this isn't technically an asterism, none of the bodies are stars, it will make for an interesting heavenly apparition. You'll have to get up before dawn

Sacrifices for Some, Benefits for Others

The president has frozen the locality pay raises of federal workers, citing, "A national emergency has existed since Sept. 11, 2001," Bush wrote. "Such cost increases would threaten our efforts against terrorism or force deep cuts in discretionary spending or federal employment to stay within budget. Neither outcome is acceptable."

This is the kind of thing Republicans love to do. If anyone complains about it, they'll simply say it's not a cut, they're simply reducing the increase. Plus, federal workers aren't viewed as a sympathetic group; I'm sure we'll hear someone call them "bureaucrats" before long, and who has any love for a bureaucrat?

Meanwhile, Eli Lilly mysteriously gets let off the hook by a Republican legislature, an action for which no one will take responsibility; and there's talk of tax breaks for some to keep the economy rolling.

Talk about mixed messages and double standards. Sacrifice for some, indulgences for others. Who's a "uniter, not a divider?"

We live in interesting times.

Slip-Slidin' Away

Well, this concludes another Thanksgiving holiday.

Perhaps the most excitement of the day came when I was removing the turkey from the oven. It was a big bird, and the largest pan I had was kind of shallow. Next time I'll remember to buy one of those inexpensive, disposable aluminum pans. Earlier in the day, as Caitie was making cookies, I was instructing her that it is always a good idea to make sure you've cleared a place to put whatever it is you're taking out of the oven, so you're not trying to struggle with something hot while you're trying to make a space.

Do I recall my own advice when it comes time to remove the turkey? Well, no; of course not.

I noticed the pan was full of drippings and presumably water, this bird being a Butterball, so I was pretty careful as I pulled it out of the oven. But then I noticed the counter was clobbered, so I needed find an alternate landing site. I'm afraid I must have banked too hard as I turned around to set it down on the island behind me, and I poured hot stuff all over my bare feet.

Ouch.

I managed to set the bird down on the island as Maria hollers to run to the bathtub and she heads off to run water. I'm thinking there's a sink-sprayer hose right there in the kitchen sink and that's where I'm going. That was about four steps and I had cold water on my feet and all over the floor, which at that moment was not of much concern to me. I'm flashing on the movie The Burbs, with Tom Hanks and his nitwit neighbor being pursued by angry bees with Bruce Dern out watering his lawn yelling, "Run to water! Run to water!" It would have been a good scene a National Lampoon's Griswald Thanksgiving.

Turned out okay, apart from a big puddle of grease on one side of the island and a big puddle of water on the other. Nothing worse than 1st degree on my toes and the tops of my feet immediately above the toes, maybe not even that as most of the redness has already faded and they didn't hurt much after I sprayed them.

The cleanup delayed our departure by a good twenty minutes, so we were late as usual. Other than that, dinner was great and the turkey was excellent. We all ate too much but it was so good. Phil and I told sea stories and talked about computers. Maria told some interesting stories about the life of a public defender. We were short one couple as Pat's parents couldn't make it at the last minute, but we all had a good time.

So there's a lesson or two there somewhere, I think. I could have used that giant eye-dropper thingy and sucked some of that liquid out of the pan before I tried to remove it. I certainly should have had my primary LZ cleared before extracting the bird. And it's probably a good idea to use a nice, deep and cheap disposable aluminum pan to roast big turkeys. All's well that ends well, but I will have to mop the floor tomorrow.

No biggie. Needed it anyway.

Fowl Thoughts

Well, the turkey is almost done and we'll be bundling it into a cooler or something in a little while for the short trip to our friends' house.

I rented a movie last night, one I'd never seen before. That I'd never seen it might come as something of a surprise if you knew me, it was Contact. Some movies, I just resist seeing, even if they're in a genre or on a subject that I'm normally drawn to. I didn't want to see Contact when it first came out. I don't know why.

I was looking for a movie that would fit with Thanksgiving. Something with a low body count, I think. I happened to spot it when I got to the C's in the stacks at Blockbuster, and whatever resistance I had had to it before wasn't present last night. So I rented it.

Of course, now I have to buy it. If for no other reason than the copy I rented had a defect that really screwed the movie up in a few scenes. But it's a good movie. Maybe not a great one; in fact, almost certainly not a great one. But it was the right one for me today. Funny how that works.

If you haven't seen it, it's a movie about faith. It's about more than that, of course, but that's what hit me. It was a pretty good movie for a misanthropic guy on Thanksgiving.

Well, it's time to remove the turkey from the oven and make final preps for getting underway, so we're signing off here. Hope you're all enjoying your holiday.

Gratitude Part II

While today's headlines are nothing to be thankful for, it did occur to me there were at least a few things I am thankful for this year apart from my reliable little Mac.

I'm thankful that my dad had his bypass surgery and is still with us, and with more energy and vitality than last year. I'm thankful that mom is still with us too, and for all my brothers and sisters.

I'm thankful I got a job. Being unemployed is a job, and the hours are great but the pay is lousy.

I'm thankful for old friends like Sandy Bell, who keep me from being an utterly irredeemable misanthrope. And I'm thankful for new ones like Al Hawkins, Hal Rager, garret vreeland, Cecil Coupe, Mira, Pascale Soleil, Doug Miller, Dave McCusker and Steven Vore, who do the same. And finally, I'm thankful for a very patient and wise person who has been helping me pick my way among these rocks and cliffs for a while now.

Misanthropy is a turning away from faith. Of course, it usually feels pretty good for a little while, but it's ultimately a vacuous sentiment. It's fear that inspires misanthropy, and fear is never a virtue. We are in the process of doing many stupid and foolish things, but perhaps some good will ultimately come of it. And I'm certainly under no obligation to like everybody, so I will indulge myself to like and dislike who I choose, but I'll keep those names to myself. As Jonathan Delacour says, my opinion of others is none of their business.

Anyway, those are some thoughts I can live with today. And here is my wish to you that you have a happy Thanksgiving with people you care about, and my wish that you have something to be thankful for.

Mr. Roboto

Immobots and "model-based reasoning." Interesting.

Gratitude

You know, it's Thanksgiving. And I've been trying to think of some pithy thing that I could say that reflected some sentiment of gratitude on my part. It's been a struggle. Mostly because these sentiments usually revolve around some feeling of magnanimity toward one's fellow man; and lately, all I'd like to do is give my fellow man a hard kick to the groin.

But I did think of something worthy of some expression of gratitude on my part.

I'm thankful that my little iMac 400DV, which is just over three years old now, has given me three years of faithful service. Apart from a little getting-acquainted problem that required the replacement of the DVD-ROM, and a brief period where the CRT would make the display disappear and reappear accompanied by a loud static SNAP, it has been steadfastly reliable, which is more than I can say about most people.

And I'm grateful for Mac OS X, because it just works, and it isn't from that nexus of greed in Seattle, er, Redmond. Whatever. And I'm especially grateful, because using a Mac, and loving it, causes some people to go on ad infinitum, ad nauseum about how inferior the PowerPC architecture is, and how bad the Mach kernel is, and how awful Aqua is, and interminably on the arrogance and ignorance of Mac users who feel superior to Wintel users. I have never felt more confident that I was using a better platform than when I've read the voluminous screeds of some clueless people enumerating the sins and deficiencies of the Mac.

I must be doing something right. And I'm grateful for that.

And I'm grateful that I get to be a misanthrope when I feel like it; which is most of the time these days.

It Begins

"I had a lot of help from Jack Daniels."

That's the reply when Clark Griswald asks his dad how he used to get through the holidays.

I find that cold beer, used in moderation, can offer some relief from the stress and strain of the holiday season.

For better or worse, it's a somewhat compressed season this year, with Thanksgiving falling so late in November. The upside is, there really is less time to get stressed. Of course, the downside is, everything is more stressful because there's less time. Perhaps there's a Conservation of Pain Law or something, that says there's a fixed amount of suffering one must endure during the season of joy and giving.

One unknown that is likely to be resolved this weekend is whether or not we will be hosting our annual Christmas Eve open house, which we've been doing for a long time now. I think we're on our seventh year, but I could be wrong. We've done three since we separated, so that's not a problem. But Maria's in Melbourne, and she's got the dining room table. I don't think that's a show-stopper, but she's been making noises that I need to go down and collect it from her, so I'm thinking it's on this year. The remaining question is, "Can Dave do all the prep?"

Of course he can. But it will be different. And that may be a good thing. We shall see.

There are things I truly do love about this time of year, but as I've grown older, there are things that truly do try my patience as well. I'm optimistic I'll be able to manage better this year. It's certainly an opportunity to practice.

In any case, it's about to begin. Brace yourselves.

Farewell Galileo

It's beginning to look as though we've heard the last from our intrepid robotic space explorer. Another legend for the future machine intelligences that will replace human intelligence.

History of Pen Computing

Dan Bricklin has put up a nice history of pen computing, if you're interested in that sort of thing.

I am.

As an aside, I sometimes wonder if the solution to finding the right "feel" for the pen/screen interface wouldn't be found in the material used to make the pen tip, rather than the screen.

Google Weirdness

21 of my last 40 referrers were Google searches on that Greek cosmologist who shall not be named because I don't want even more traffic based on her name. And today's not the only day it's been like this. All I did was point to her profile in SciAm.

Moral Reasoning

Good reasons are not enough to justify doing immoral things. Write that down," he instructs.

I'm conflicted on this one. On the one hand, I think it's a good idea. On the other hand, well, it's still probably a good idea. Maybe they should make the parents attend class as well.

Read on, some do.

Weasels

Read this and flash on John Belushi and Carrie Fisher in Blue Brothers.

"It's not my fault!"

Unhealthy Appetites

It's that time of the year again. Perhaps I'll remember that being able to go shirtless at the beach in May begins in November.

Then again, probably not.

Resonance

Sometimes a Springsteen lyric just hits the sweet spot for me. I was doing a little Intensive Springsteen Therapy last night, and I really liked the live version of Youngstown, especially it's concluding lines:

When I die I don't want no part of heaven

Yes, I was feeling particularly misanthropic.

Decisions, Decisions

If you were going to be stranded on a deserted for a couple of years, which would you choose: The Victoria's Secret Catalog, or Frederick's of Hollywood?

This is that ludicrous time of the year when one has to ensure one empties the mailbox each and every day, because it fills with catalogs each time. The mailman, ever mindful of his duty, just tries to cram a second day's pile of catalogs in with the first, which makes them deucedly hard to remove.

Anyway, as for me, I'd have to say Frederick's of Hollywood. It's kind of like the difference between ketchup and tabasco sauce, if you know what I mean.

Social Organism = Learning Organism

We've had an intuitive feel for seizing attention for as long as we've been a species, it's in our genes. But we're also developing a more sophisticated understanding of attention and how it functions. Why are we interested?

To sell more ketchup. Or maybe another war.

Authority

This is a link to a James Hillman interview from some time back. garret frequently mentions Hillman, but I'm not terribly familiar with him. He has some interesting things to say about authority and power though.

Found the link via Doc Searls' weblog.

But Does He Have a Weblog?

Vermont Governor Howard Dean for president.

Feelings...Nothing More Than Feelings

Feeling Moral. Interesting.

Relax

Former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani offered advice based on his handling of the terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, urging a combination of preparedness and perspective.

"I believe you have to relentlessly focus on being prepared for every unimaginable thing . . . and then you have to be effective enough leaders to say to people, 'Relax,' " he said. He added that most Americans are still more likely to be killed by a drunk driver than a terrorist.

Washington Post November 23, 2002

Classic SF on DVD

Earth vs. the Flying Saucers is available on DVD now. If you've never seen it, it's pretty funny. What makes it great is Ray Harryhausen's stop-motion flying saucer effects.

Also noteworthy is The Day the Earth Stood Still is due out on DVD in March, finally. That's another classic and it's a pretty good movie on its own merits as well.

Unfortunately, The Thing From Another World (aka The Thing) is still not available on DVD.

Lazy Day

I've been exceptionally, and intentionally, lazy today. I did accomplish a few things, but not much and little that I actually had to do.

I updated a number of applications and the OS on the iBook. I read a bit of Woodward's book. I baked a few cookies and a loaf of whole wheat bread and did the grocery shopping. Had a long chat with Pascale on iChat. That's about it.

It's remarkable how doing nothing can tire you out.

Quiet

Caitlin and I watched the extended version of The Lord of the Rings (I suppose more properly, The Fellowship of the Ring) last night. The additional footage was very nice and well worth having. The only downside was Caitlin was asking questions at the rate of about 1 every 15 seconds. I could get her to stop from time to time, only to start up again a few minutes later. After a while I just kept answering, "I don't know," and the rate slowed a bit.

One consequence of watching the movie was I didn't get to bed till after midnight, and so I didn't get up until just a little bit ago. Not a big deal, buy Sundays start early for me, I try to get to the commissary by 0900 to avoid the crowds so I have less time to relax in the morning if I don't get up early.

One of the too many dead tree books I'm trying to read right now is one I started quite some time ago and put aside, Bloom's The Lucifer Principle. As I started reading it again, I recalled what caused me to put it aside the first time, though I may finish it this time around.

Bloom is in love with the idea of the meme, but he views it as an actual thing that has some effect on human beings. Kind of like a virus is a bit of genetic material that has some effect on cells. Probably not a perfect analogy, but close. Bloom writes that memes have control of people. I think that's kind of true, but I think he leaves something out that alters the story, and which might alter his conclusion, if I have correctly anticipated what it is.

Here's a rough, early version of my objection to Bloom's "memes." First, the possible informational nature of the universe notwithstanding, memes are not things that are floating around out there that we get "infected" by - we create them. It's a cognitive process that fashions a new meme, which could also be called by the much more prosaic name, "belief."

We require beliefs in order to interpret the world and those around us, to facilitate making cognitive choices - and bear in mind that many, if not most, choices are not cognitive (Dr. Damasio's respresentational dispositions being the default choice-making mechanism. Emotions.) A belief is said to be true or false, but those are really just measures of its reliability and utiltity and some measure of its duration.

We can choose what we wish to believe, just as I'm sort of choosing how I wish to think of Bloom's representation of the meme. By the time I finish the book, I may discover more information that may cause me to alter my opinion, but for now I don't think it's a reliable description, and it's utility is less than a description that gives people a choice.

Most of the rest of Bloom's thesis I'm pretty much on board with, I think. We are social creatures, we're driven by our evolutionary biology to affiliate in groups and the way we bind groups together is through shared beliefs. In such a scheme, we tend to rely on authorities. As individuals, one of the ways we compete to pass our genes along is by acquiring authority. Authority comes in many forms, attention, prestige, education, institutional or structural, wealth and deception. Authorities are what shape the responses of social organisms to other social organisms, and how they compete with one another.

This is a process, and you are a part of it. We understand a good deal of this process now and we manipulate it to acquire authority in order to promote the aims of the social organisms we are a member of, whether it is our family, our church, our company, our community or our nation.

Where this gets kind of interesting is in the nature of salvation, which I should probably leave to other authorities like our resident theologian. I don't think a social organism has a soul. I might be wrong about that, but that's my best guess at the moment. But I believe individuals do.

(Here's a quick digression: The other day I was thinking about what an afterlife might be like and I'm pretty sure that if there is one, it's so unlike what we know today that it's probably the equivalent of saying - there isn't one. First, there's the matter of time. If, in the afterlife, we are to be beyond suffering, we have to be beyond time. That would pretty much make any experience in an afterlife so totally unlike what we experience in this life as to be incomprehensible. And if we're beyond time, we'd have to be beyond differences between one another as well - because if a difference existed, then there seems to be, of necessity, another time when that difference would not exist and then we're back in the world of time. So I'm pretty sure heaven's not like an upscale Holiday Inn where the breakfast buffet is always open, you never have to wait for an elevator car, and everyone is good looking.)

So, are individuals perfectible? It's an interesting question, because it's one of those "yes and no," answers, I think. Individuals can change, which would be a prerequisite of being perfectible. But I think perfection is beyond the world of time, a place we only reach in death, if there.

Then the question becomes, I think, why should individuals choose to try to achieve perfection? Why should individuals seek to change, and what changes should they make to be closer to "perfection?" Can we even know what perfection is? This is where I start getting a headache.

It all comes down to choices, and choices are framed by beliefs. So then you have to examine what you believe, and, of course, all those things are built on top of other beliefs, which is why so many religions ultimately rely on an "external" authority - in the form of received wisdom. Fraught with peril, I think.

I think answers can be found in experience, and I believe others have found those answers. Unfortunately, sharing answers makes one an authority and there are all sorts of things that happen when one becomes an authority, many of which are undesirable, I think.

Suffering is the universe's way of pointing us toward perfection.

"Doctor, it hurts when I go like this."

"Well, stop going like that."

Some ways of alleviating suffering only turn out to be blind alleys. Suffering is the difference between the ways things are and the way we'd like them to be, which seems to come with the world of time.

Anyway, I'm almost out of time. The point is, we need to pay attention to what we believe and why we choose to believe it. Whose purposes are being served, and are they the same as our own? How do we wish to regard the authorities in our lives and which ones have we chosen for ourselves, and why? And that's probably quite enough for a lifetime, let alone a Sunday morning.

As always, if it's not obvious, I'm an authority on nothing. I make it all up. Chop your own wood.

Sunday Afternoon Saturday

It's been a different kind of Saturday afternoon. Feels kind of like a Sunday, with the virtue of tomorrow not being a workday.

I did some housekeeping this morning and through the early afternoon. There's still more to do, and there always is. What's new? Anyway, I decided to head over to Books-a-Million to pick up Woodward's Bush at War, and to see what else may be new. Caitlin wanted to come along, so she accompanied me.

It was friggin' cold in the bookstore, and I never got very comfortable, but I managed to look at several books and a few magazines. I walked out with only Woodward and the latest issue of Discover. Not bad, I usually inflict more pain on myself than that. We stopped by Publix on the way out to buy some popcorn, Vanilla Diet Coke ("no ingredients found in nature"), and those refrigerator cookies you stick in the oven to make real cookies ("some ingredients found in nature"). Those are all for the movie tonight.

When I got home I stuck a roast in the oven, fired up iTunes and did some software updates. I finally managed to install the latest Youpi Key, and the new Wacom and Kensington drivers for my tablet and trackball, respectively. Haven't played much with them yet. Surfed around a bit and then cracked Woodward.

Too soon to offer an opinion. I suspect it's a flawed work, but it's an important one nevertheless. Any insight we can glean into how this administration functions is welcome, although I'm inclined to believe this won't be a very critical look from the reviews I've read.

What's made the afternoon very pleasant is Caitlin is reading the book she bought from BAM and the TV, while on, is down low and Chris isn't blowing terrorists to kingdom-come upstairs. I peeked in on him since I'm never very comfortable when it gets too quiet up there. He's just surfing the web for computer game stuff.

The roast smells great and several of the songs that are randomly selected really hit the sweet spot for me. So it's been a quiet, pleasant sort of afternoon.

Chilly Today

More temps in the high thirties at night. Ugh. Feels like winter.

But the sun is shining and it is otherwise a beautiful day. I've got the usual list of household chores to attend to this weekend, but also on the agenda is watching the extended edition of The Lord of the Rings.

Of course I bought it.

Live Another Day

Good morning! Another chance to excel for the Big Blue!

A few random non sequiturs to start the day:

I wonder how much the current collective angst over terrorism resembles portions of the Cold War when lots of people were digging fallout shelters in their backyard, and the hawks were convinced the godless communist hordes were about to come streaming over the horizon at any moment?

Is it just me, or does history seem to be repeating itself with greater frequency now?

I hate getting up in the morning and finding the cable modem connection down. I especially hate calling technical support at 5:30 in the morning. I really especially hate unhelpful technical support people who tell me that the correct way to power-cycle the modem is to unplug the brick from the wall, and not merely the power connection at the back of the modem, which was the extent of her advice and assistance. She did helpfully schedule a technical support visit for tomorrow, and she cheerfully informed me that if it wasn't a problem with the cable or the modem, I'd be subject to a $49.95 service call fee. I'm afraid she found out how cranky and irritable I am in the morning.

Mysteriously, the connection has healed itself and I'll cancel the tech support visit later. But I am again considering switching to DSL. I pay $83.00 a month for cable connectivity that has relatively frequent problems, while I pay about $20.00 a month for a telephone connection that always "just works." When I had DSL at the apartment, I had fewer problems than I have with this cable connection.

In other bandwidth issues, Chris wants to get a separate DSL connection for himself. It would appear that my occasional posts to this thing that I gratuitously call a weblog put a serious drain on his bandwidth and he can't dispatch his opponents as efficiently in Counter-Strike. I think we're going to have to work out a schedule which involves a little less online gaming for him.

I have too many cats. The plan was for Jaguar, the previous resident feline, to relocate with Maria to Melbourne. For a variety of reasons, apart from an initial stay of about two weeks, that hasn't happened. One or more of the three cats has taken to spraying about the house. The primary suspect is Jaguar, although Karma used to do it before she was spayed, so I suspect it may be Squeaky. I've got to get the Squeaker fixed ASAP anyway, but that won't solve the problem if it's Jag. He had a rep for spraying according to his former owners, although he had only done it once here. My difficulties with cat urine will no doubt warm the cockles of my various nemeses (nemesii? nemesises?), if I had any that is.

It's been about 10 degrees below the average "normal" temperature down here the past few days. It's not very uncomfortable, but I was looking forward to those days of 70 degree temperatures.

Thanksgiving is going to be a multi-family affair this year, thankfully not here. We'll be spending it with a couple we've been friends with for many years, and Melissa's significant other, Pat, will have his parents and his brother with us as well, so it's going to be a crowd. Which is probably the best way to do a holiday like that.

I haven't read Macintouch in long time now, and I'm surprised at how little I miss it.

Well, it's time to hold revieille on the offspring, so I'm once again out of time here. I'm trying to read four dead-tree books at the moment, and that's about three too many I think. In any case, there's less time to post here, not that that's a bad thing.

Well, there's your cheese sandwich for the day. I hope you enjoyed the whine as well.

One Could Say

One could say that blowing up a bus with children on their way to school is an act of evil in a world filled with acts of evil.

One could say that Israeli fears of terrorism are Israeli fears and not my own.

One could say one cares about terrorism in Israel, or Chechnya or Bali and then one could wonder what difference it makes.

One could say that people in New York or Washington have things to fear that are more likely to occur than terrorism, if they wish to live in fear. One could say there are plenty of things to fear in California or Missouri or Colorado or even Florida if one wishes to live one's life in fear. That's a choice everyone makes.

One could say that it is possible to feel compassion for people without owning their feelings, without letting their fear become your fear, without letting their rage become your rage. One could say it is possible to be empathetic without personalizing events that haven't happened to oneself. One could even argue that it is essential to do so, if we're to ever have any hope of living together on this planet.

This is in response to Mike Sanders who seems to feel than anyone who doesn't share his particular depth of emotion is hard-hearted. What Mike doesn't seem to understand is the process he advocates, that of owning the feelings of others, is the process that perpetuates the very problem he objects to.

The fact is, none of the suicide bombers has endured anything worth giving their lives for, let alone taking the lives of others. Yet, they believe they have. Why is that? Because they have their own Mike Sanders who believe that an offense against any one of them is an offense against all of them, and who exaggerate and portray all events in rigid black-and-white, us-versus-them terms that skew and distort reality to such an extent that young people will blow themselves up and nations will make war on other nations.

I know where my soul is, Mike. It belongs to me. It doesn't belong to my tribe. You should look after your own before you start giving advice to others. I think we'd all be a little better off.

Epictetus on Fear and Death

We are then in the condition of deer; when they flee from the huntsmen's feathers in fright, whither do they turn and in what do they seek refuge as safe? They turn to the nets, and thus they perish by confounding things which are objects of fear with things that they ought not to fear. Thus we also act: in what cases do we fear? In things which are independent of the will. In what cases, on the contrary, do we behave with confidence, as if there were no danger? In things dependent on the will. To be deceived then, or to act rashly, or shamelessly or with base desire to seek something, does not concern us at all, if we only hit the mark in things which are independent of our will. But where there is death, or exile or pain or infamy, there we attempt or examine to run away, there we are struck with terror. Therefore, as we may expect it to happen with those who err in the greatest matters, we convert natural confidence into audacity, desperation, rashness, shamelessness; and we convert natural caution and modesty into cowardice and meanness, which are full of fear and confusion. For if a man should transfer caution to those things in which the will may be exercised and the acts of the will, he will immediately, by willing to be cautious, have also the power of avoiding what he chooses: but if he transfer it to the things which are not in his power and will, and attempt to avoid the things which are in the power of others, he will of necessity fear, he will be unstable, he will be disturbed. For death or pain is not formidable, but the fear of pain or death. For this reason we commend the poet who said

Not death is evil, but a shameful death.

Confidence then ought to be employed against death, and caution against the fear of death. But now we do the contrary, and employ against death the attempt to escape; and to our opinion about it we employ carelessness, rashness and indifference. These things Socrates properly used to call "tragic masks"; for as to children masks appear terrible and fearful from inexperience, we also are affected in like manner by events for no other reason than children are by masks. For what is a child? Ignorance. What is a child? Want of knowledge. For when a child knows these things, he is in no way inferior to us. What is death? A "tragic mask." Turn it and examine it. See, it does not bite. The poor body must be separated from the spirit either now or later, as it was separated from it before. Why, then, are you troubled, if it be separated now? for if it is not separated now, it will be separated afterward. Why? That the period of the universe may be completed, for it has need of the present, and of the future, and of the past. What is pain? A mask. Turn it and examine it. The poor flesh is moved roughly, then, on the contrary, smoothly. If this does not satisfy you, the door is open: if it does, bear. For the door ought to be open for all occasions; and so we have no trouble.

Epictetus: The Discourses

New Version of Youpi Key

Hurray! (I'm so easily amused.)

Get it here.

Imaginary Fears

Just imagine if Al Qaeda attacks again, yet this time more massively with chemical, biological or nuclear weapons developed in Iraq and passed along to his terrorist comrades.

You can use your fears and imagination to justify just about anything.

Tax Cuts - Just Another Wartime Sacrifice

Our national leaders are calling on all Americans to make sacrifices in this time of war. So they're considering a tax cut, because there's nothing too good for those who are on the front lines as never before.

What? Me Worry?

Killer asteroids? No problem, the Office of Homeland Security has my six.

McCusker's Having too Much Fun

Not that I begrudge Dave any joy in his work. In fact, it's kind of refreshing.

New Computer?

Apple's pricing structure is kind of interesting. The new Powerbook G4 867MHz is $2299.00. For this money, you get an 867MHz processor running on a 133Mhz bus, with 256MB of RAM, 1MB of L3 cache, a 40GB HD, 1280x854 screen supported by 32MB of VRAM on a Radeon 7500 graphics processor, and a CDRW/DVD ROM drive. 1 Firewire, 2 USB ports - multiple displays and S-Video out.

For 1999.00, you can buy an iMac G4 with an 800MHz processor, running on a 100MHz bus with 256MB of RAM but no L3 cache. You do get an 80GB HD, and a Superdrive, 2 Firewire and 3 USB ports. GeForce 4MX running a 1440x900 display.

For my money, the Powerbook is the better deal. While you get less HD space, and fewer ports, and marginally fewer pixels - you pick up a 1MB L3 cache which is a significant performance boost, along with a faster bus and monitor-spanning, along with portability.

Not that I could afford either one of them at the moment. Maybe after Christmas.

Not Dark Enough

I probably got up too late, I was out on the lawn at 5:15, but I didn't see anything. It's not like I've never seen meteors before, I've seen plenty of them standing bridge watches in the middle of the night. No biggie.

Everything is Connected

Information was once defined as "the difference that makes a difference." John Wheeler asks the question, "Why something?" The broken symmetry of something and nothing, zero and one.

This is the stuff I'd rather think about than what the possible outcomes of a conflict in the middle east are likely to be. But they're all connected, everything is connected.

There's a wonderful article in Wired called, God is the Machine. It's about digital physics and cellular automata and stuff that can give you a headache if you think about it long enough. But it's a good headache, compared to trying to outline the phase-space of possible outcomes from the chaotic process we call war.

Then I happen upon Britt Blaser's latest entry, which is very much in the spirit of the thing Dr. James Vornov used to write about. On the surface, you wouldn't think it's very connected to the Wired article, but it really is. I'll leave that as an exercise for the interested and motivated reader.

It's interesting because a few weeks ago, somebody gave me an excerpt from a book called Family Secrets by John Bradshaw. The person who gave it to me was prompted by my mention of the role of attention in the management of beliefs and behavior.

I was tickled when I read Britt's quotation of Howard Bloom, who I really ought to comment on again one of these days, and his description of "Conformity Enforcers" and "Diversity Enhancers." In Family Secrets, Bradshaw describes roles within families, usually a parent, as "mind guards," who are "conformity enforcers." They'll say things like, "Where did you get such a crazy idea?" Which is a way of bringing negative attention to the person expressing the threatening idea.

Of course, that's connected to the piece I mentioned the other day, Towards a Cognitive Memetics: Socio-Cognitive Mechanisms for Memes Selection and Spreading.

And that's connected to The Economy of Attention, which I linked to last month. I think that's kind of especially interesting because it deals with economics, which is what Britt is focusing on.

Anyway, it's all connected. I'm not sure what it all means, but maybe one day I'll know.

Not that it matters.

Starships

This was probably an interesting conference.

Just Doing My Part

To conserve mobile phone bandwidth.

By not using one.

I just thought this was kind of ironic coming on the heels of Pascale's comments on the utility of the mobile phone.

No Leonids This Morning

I got up a little bit late, but the sky is crystal clear and the stars are brilliant. I didn't look at the thermometer, but I had my heavy jacket on and I could see my breath. I went out in bare feet anyway.

Standing out on the front lawn, staring upward, I wondered how active fire ants were when it was a bit chilly out. So I didn't stay out long, maybe 10 minutes.

Tomorrow morning is supposed to be the big show, and it likely won't be as cold, so I'll try again tomorrow. Maybe I'll try getting to bed a little earlier so it isn't as hard to crawl out of the rack, too.

Defining our Terms

Mike Sanders has asked that we define our terms. I'll try to oblige.

Chicken-hawk: It's a pejorative term applied people who exhibit one or more of the following characteristics:

1. They advocate war, yet they have never served in uniform. The finest examples of the species actually went to some lengths to avoid service during the Vietnam War. In this instance, the "chicken" refers to the lack of courage they exhibited when they actually had something at risk.

2. They advocate war, because they "cannot accept the risk" of Saddam Hussein's continued presence in Iraq. They haven't quantified that risk, they merely speak of it in generalities. "Imagine what the world would be like if Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons," they say, as if that somehow clarifies or quantifies the risk in a fashion that makes it a compelling argument for the United States to invade and occupy another nation. Pakistan has nuclear weapons, it is a nation that supports terrorism, it created the Taliban. What should our imagination inform us about Pakistan? Why aren't we invading Pakistan? In this case, the "chicken" refers to the lack of courage these people exhibit when they are willing to make war out of fear, and an admittedly imaginary fear at that.

3. They risk nothing, yet they'll tell you they are at risk. They'll tell you "that civilians are in the front line as never before." That is simply drama and hyperbole. We really need somebody with a greater knowledge of statistics and actuarial accounting than me, but the simple fact is, far more people in the United States have died since 9/11/01 of ordinary murder, automobile accidents and any number of other accidental causes than all the victims of terrorism in the 9/11 attacks; and, I'm willing to bet, all the victims of the high-profile terrorist acts in Israel, Indonesia, India and the United States put together.

Presumably, death is what they're afraid of here, and the risk of death due to terrorism is what's got their attention. So, because their risk of death is some miniscule non-zero percentage higher than it was pre-9/11, they're willing to declare war on Iraq. That's courage?

I'd like to see them quantify the approximate amount of risk reduction that imposing a "regime change" through the invasion and occupation of Iraq is going to achieve. Will it reduce the risk of death due to terrorism 100 percent? 50? 25? 10? 5? Anybody got a number? Has anyone seen a number?

I have no idea what they think this is going to do to reduce the risk of terrorism. I think it's at least equally as likely it will increase the risk. So again, the "chicken" refers to the lack of courage these people exhibit at the increased risks of living as a free person in an open society. Out of fear, they will abandon their principles, if they ever knew what they were, and surrender their liberty for the illusion of safety; and in the bargain, deliver death and destruction to others who have never harmed them, all for the illusion of safety in response to their own fear.

4. They risk far, far less than the people they will send in harm's way to bring war to Iraq, to say nothing of the Iraqi people who will find themselves in the crossfire; yet they often exhibit flippant, facile and utterly false bravado when they strut and pose about the military superiority of the United States.

They'd be a lot more reserved about the whole thing if it were their soft, well-upholstered derrieres jumping out of an airplane, or an LCAC, or a helo. It's one thing to crow about how quickly we're going to defeat the Iraqi army from the safety of your chair in front of your computer, it's another thing when you're the one who's got to do the job. Of course, you won't find any chicken-hawks on those front lines. They're home manning their SUVs, reporting any suspicious-looking neighbors on their cell phones to John Ashcroft and ADM Poindexter.

5. They wish to absolve themselves of responsibility for this war by saying things like, "We have no choice." You always have a choice, and you're always responsible for your choices. The "chicken" here refers to the lack of courage they exhibit by refusing to be accountable for their choices.

America is a great country. My belief is that America is a country slow to anger, and quick to forgive. My America is courageous and acts with patience and restraint, as its greatness affords it the opportunity and the responsibility to do so. The America that I believe in does not start wars. Yes, you can argue about Grenada and Panama and El Salvador and the Spanish-American war and all the rest, but the invasion and occupation of Iraq in terms of its scale and the stakes, is something unprecedented in American history.

It has never been easy to live free. It's not easy now. It's probably going to get a bit harder. But you have a choice: You can live free, which pretty much demands that you embrace life with faith and stick to your principles, which takes courage. Or you can live in fear, surrender your freedom to the state for the illusion of safety, cast aside whatever principles you may have held for the sake of expedience; and instead choose to hurt and kill anyone who frightens you.

Your call.

Theologian? Me?

No Leonids for Me

It's looking like it's going to be very cloudy tonight. Plus, I'm not sure how excited I am about going outside anyway, they're calling for lows in the mid-30s. In November? That's dangerously close to having to cover up all the plants, which is a hassle.

I have been singularly unproductive this weekend. I did attend a joint manipulation seminar yesterday, and came away intact this time, but not much else. My intention had been to get up early this morning and clean, clean, clean, but somehow, lying in a warm bed listening to the rain was more appealing than sweeping floors and picking up debris. I'll get to it soon.

Pascale notes Doug Miller's piece on e-books as she describes how technology goes from being kind of repulsive to being essential, using the answering machine and the cell phone as examples. I can relate to her example of the answering machine, but I haven't quite made the rationalization to acquire a cell phone. I suppose this limits my future potential as a contributing member to a "smart mob," but I'm getting used to these sorts of disappointments.

I don't have a cell phone, because I can't really see where I need one. There is one exception, and that need is met because Maria got one of those accounts where you get two phones and she gave one to the kids. When I take the kids down to meet her half-way, it's helpful to be able to communicate with her in the event either of us is delayed by traffic or weather or some other misfortune. Other than that, I don't need one.

Of course, driving Caitlin down this weekend did point out again how many people do have cell phones. Nearly every other driver I saw had a cell phone to their ear. Observing the driver in front of me change lanes several times without once signaling, I noted that he had a cell phone pasted to his left ear, which would make it kind of hard to operate the turn signal while steering to change lanes at 75 mph. But there's no understating the value of good communications, I suppose.

In my case, I really don't know who I would call. I have no friends that I call, I have no social life to speak of. Perhaps if I got a cell phone, these things would come with it? And then I wonder who I would want to call me? For the most part, the telephone is, for me, a nuisance. For every call I welcome, there are probably ten calls that are unwelcome. Either they are telemarketers, or they are people calling to tell me some bad news. (That whole good-bad duality thing, I'm still working on. It's all just information, I know.) Or it's some new task I have to perform. I am not enamored of telephones.

So, I still don't have a cell phone, or a mobile phone, or whatever the correct jargon is, and I'm not particularly concerned about it. I do, however, have an answering machine; which does sort of making living in a world with telephones a little more tolerable.

Belief Systems

I think this is an extremely interesting paper. I've just started reading it, and it's probably going to take me two or three passes to absorb it all, but it touches on so many things I've been thinking about the past few years. Belief systems are the DNA of social organisms, and they are also the source of much of our own unhappiness, so it's worthwhile to take the time to try to understand them.

I expect I'll comment more on it as I make my way through it.

I found this via the remarkable Mark Woods at wood s lot.

Getting Inside Your Head

Pretty interesting article at Science News on research revealing the genes responsible for the size of the cerebral cortex.

Of course, reading it, I can't help but keep flashing on Pinky and the Brain.

10.2.2 Up and Running

I haven't had any more mysterious lock-ups since I updated the firmware, so I figured I'd go ahead and install 10.2.2. So far, it's great. I haven't had the slow-down some others have reported.

I want to run Key Chain First Aid today, because I often get a password nag that I didn't expect, and presumably that'll fix it.

Kind of Sad

The life and death of Dr. Elisabeth Targ.

Alternative Futures

Nicholas Kristof seems to believe the Israeli raid against the Iraqi Osirak reactor is a compelling argument for preemptive wars, like the one we're supposedly not totally decided about yet. He writes:

Otherwise Iraq would have gained nuclear weapons in the 1980's, it might now have a province called Kuwait and a chunk of Iran, and the region might have suffered nuclear devastation.

And later:

Kristof is indulging himself in an exercise he lacks the capacity to perform: retroactive prescience. I'm familiar with this exercise, because I often attempted to perform it myself; and when it worked, it was because I was only fooling myself.

In fact, Mr. Kristof does not know, nor can he know, what would have happened had the Osirak reactor been allowed to have been completed. There are only greater and lesser degrees of informed speculation. Imagine this reasoning applied to the months immediately following WW II when only the United States had the atomic bomb. It was fairly well known that the Soviets would develop an atomic weapon of their own. Using this kind of reasoning, one would suspect that had we not conducted a preemptive strike of some kind, then all manner of terrible things might have occurred. In fact, we didn't intervene, the Soviets did acquire the Bomb, and while many terrible things did happen, it's hard to say if any of them can be laid at the feet of our inaction against the Soviet Union's efforts to acquire the Bomb.

It's a meaningless argument. We have difficulty enough maintaining an accurate historical record, we have no ability to predict what the future might have been. So Osirak is an argument only for Osirak, and nothing more. It is only an event.

Finally, I am not persuaded that Iraq would ever have used WMD against the United States proper, nor even U.S. forces. Saddam Hussein has consistently sought to be the strongest regional power in the Persian Gulf. Inasmuch as he was a secular tyrant, we supported him in his war against Iran, because we definitely didn't want an Islamist Iran to be the dominant power in the region.

Hussein has a record of miscalculations, and it's clear Kuwait was a monumental miscalculation; aided, in part, by some unhelpful comments by an American diplomat, if I recall correctly. An event in itself reminiscent of the miscalculations leading to the invasion of South Korea by the North.

I have little difficulty with the remainder of Kristof's piece. I'm not a pacificist. But the invasion that is contemplated for Iraq is not a wise thing to do, and there is no compelling, rational justification to support it, and it will damage civilization, not preserve it.

Everything Happens for a Reason

Dave McCusker finds a new job.

Fundamental Forces of Nature

Little Big Bang confounds physicists.

Light Cones

Neat profile of Fotini Markopoulou Kalamara.

Exaggerated Claims of Risk or Peril

One of the things you encounter when you read the weblogs of people who favor war with Iraq is this concern over "risk." The great success of al Qaeda's attacks of 9/11 is that they have generated this exaggerated fear of terrorism in the minds of many of our citizens.

We saw the same effect with the sniper incident. This guy, Christopher Hitchens, the ex-liberal all the chicken-hawks are so agog over, plays into the same irrational fear. In his latest bit of hysterical thinking, he writes:

The first thing to notice about this propaganda is how archaic it is. The whole point of the present phase of conflict is that we are faced with tactics that are directed primarily at civilians. Thus, while I was traveling last year in Pakistan, on the Afghan border and in Kashmir, and this year in the gulf, my wife was fighting her way across D.C., with the Pentagon in flames, to try and collect our daughter from a suddenly closed school, was attempting to deal with anthrax in our mailbox, was reading up on the pros and cons of smallpox vaccinations, and was coping with the consequences of a Muslim copycat loony who'd tried his hand as a suburban sniper. Should things ever become any hotter, it would be far safer to be in uniform in Doha, Qatar, or Kandahar, Afghanistan, than to be in an open homeland city. It is amazing that this essential element of the crisis should have taken so long to sink into certain skulls.

This is just utter bullshit. Mrs. Hitchens faces far more danger of being killed in our nation's capitol by Americans. The latest year for which I could find any statistic was 1997, when 967 people were murdered there. Hopefully, that figure has gone down somewhat. I tried to find good numbers for the victims of the Pentagon attack, the anthrax scare and the sniper, and I think the number is something like 211 people total. I think including the sniper as part of the "terrorism" threat is a stretch, but the numbers still pale when compared to the number of people killed in "ordinary" murders.

But that doesn't stop Mr. Hitchens from crafting a rhetorical description that likens Mrs. Hitchens' experience to one of someone on the front lines of a war, which is another thing you read all the time in these people's writing. They are "on the front lines." Well, they're really not. There are no fronts in this kind of conflict, and we shouldn't exaggerate the risk by calling on inappropriate metaphors.

Yet they insist on exaggerating the risk. They want to elevate your level of fear so that you're not inclined to think critically about the solutions they seem to embrace to protect us from this "risk." How are we to think of ourselves? Are we braver because we live on these "front lines?" Or are we more cowardly because we're going to act out of exaggerated and irrational fear?

The subject of Mr. Hitchen's piece is, interestingly, a defense of the chicken-hawks. He's responding to the criticism that so many of the people who advocate the more radical responses to terrorism, including the war against Iraq, have no military experience and therefore are less qualified to be making arguments in favor of war.

We have a long history of civilian control of the military in this country. But I believe it is also true to note that at no other time in history have so few of our national leaders had any military experience. I'm certainly not advocating that we abandon civilian control of the military, but I'm quite certain that it is the civilian part of our national leadership that is making this war inevitable, not the military.

You probably won't find a great number of people in uniform who will criticize the President's policy toward Iraq. That's not their job. Generally, when they do comment, their comments are crafted in a way that can't be interpreted as being a criticism, so they most often resemble approval. And I'm quite sure there are many people in the military who don't oppose this war for a variety of understandable, if not very compelling, reasons. But I suspect there is a significant number of senior military leaders who would question the wisdom of this war.

Mr. Hitchens' uses Sen. Bob Kerrey's unfortunate experience in Vietnam to defend the qualifications of those, like most of our senior leadership, who sought to avoid military service during Vietnam. I think Mr. Hitchens' strengthens the argument he seeks to refute. Sen. Kerrey is a living example of what happens in war, and it is probably wise to listen to someone who has actually been there and endured something as soul-rending as he has endured before we plunge off enthusiastically into our own "calamitous expedition."

But then I don't put much stock in Mr. Hitchens' arguments. He has found a way to garner attention for himself by abandoning his principles and going over to the side that seems to be more appealing. Or perhaps he truly is afraid, and he can exploit his own terror to garner attention for himself. It is, after all, all about attention. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 seized our attention and now both al Qaeda and those in our national leadership who seek greater power, and those whose political and ideological aims differ from the policies of the last administration, exploit these events by keeping our attention distracted by exaggerated fears. What they couldn't achieve by ordinary political means, they will achieve by exploiting the deaths of the victims of 9/11. That's a pretty noble and admirable course of action.

The paragraph I quoted yesterday form John Keegan's book about the First World War was chilling because many of the aspects of totalitarianism are beginning to appear in this country. Now, you may consider that an appeal to fear, and you may be right. I am afraid that we're doing far more damage to ourselves than any adversary, even one with weapons of mass destruction, ever could. William Safire's piece in today's NY Times, You Are a Suspect, might be an appeal to fear - but I don't think it's exaggerated. I'm sure those of you who are in favor of this idea probably think it is. I wonder what David Brin, an advocate of a "transparent society" thinks of this initiative? I think it's oppressive. I think it is fundamentally corrosive to our system of government. We are systematically breaking the bonds between those who govern and those who consent to be governed. I don't think it is out of the question that one day that consent will be, like the United Nations, "irrelevant." The reason why totalitarianism overtook constitutional principles in Europe following WW I, is because social organisms, countries, parties, churches, don't have principles. People do. Some people do. People will do things as members of social organisms, as the Stanford Prisoner Experment has shown, and as we witness in ordinary life every day, that they wouldn't do as individuals outside of those circumstances, because the behavior violated their principles.

We have to become aware of how we behave in groups, and how our principles are easily compromised when we find ourselves in different "roles." We need to discover for ourselves, what our principles mean to us, what value they have, so we're not so ready to surrender them to the evolutionary pressures of group psychology. I don't think that's going to happen in time to stop whatever is about to happen, but maybe whatever is about to happen will be the necessary stimulus to begin the process.

Everything happens for a reason. Sometimes it's damn hard to figure out what that reason is, but it's there. And so we should not abandon faith and surrender to fear. But it takes a long time to learn that, and I'm still learning it.

History Repeating Itself

Here's a chilling quotation from John Keegan's The First World War:

...It was, despite the efforts by state propaganda machines to prove otherwise, and the cruelties of the battlefield apart, a curiously civilized war.

Yet it damaged civilisation, the rational and liberal civilisation of the European enlightenment, permanently for the worse, and through the damage done, world civilisation also. Pre-war Europe, imperial though it was in its relations with most of the world beyond the continent, offered respect to the principles of constitutionalism, the rule of law and representative government. Post-war Europe rapidly relinquished confidence in such principles. They were lost altogether in Russia after 1917, in Italy after 1922, in Germany in 1933, in Spain after 1936, and only patchily observed at any time in the young states created or enlarged by the post-war settlement in Central and Southern Europe. Within fifteen years of the war's end, totalitarianism, a new word for a system that rejected the liberalism and constitutionalism which had inspired European politics since the eclipse of monarchy in 1789, was almost everywhere on the rise. Totalitarianism was the political continuation of war by other means. It uniformed and militarised its mass electoral following, while depriving voters generally of their electoral rights, exciting their lowest political instincts and marginalizing and menacing all internal opposition. Less than twenty years after the end of the Great War, the "war to end wars" as it had come to be called at the nadir of hopes for its eventual conclusion, Europe was once again gripped by the fear of a new war, provoked by the actions and ambitions of war lords more aggressive than any known to the old world of the long nineteenth-century peace. It was also in the full flood of rearmament, with weapons --tanks, bombing aircraft, submarines -- known only in embryo formin the First World War and threatening to make a Second an even greater catastrophe.

It's an Arm Thing

What's up with this? A few weeks ago, I bang up my arm a little doing something I haven't had any business doing in two decades. Then Mike Golby hurts his arm skate-boarding (I'd link to the perma-link, but I can find it just now and I'm in a hurry. What else is new?). Now Cecil just mangles the hell out of his arm ice-skating.

Maybe is a boomer thing, more than an arm thing.

Issues in Science and Technology is Back

I didn't know what had happened to this quarterly publication of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the University of Texas at Dallas. It pretty much seemed to cease publication, at least on the web, at the Winter 2001 edition. It's back now, with the Spring 2002 edition.

I'm not exactly sure that's the course of action I would have taken after such a long absence, especially when it references a "Special Summer 2002 Early Release" in red on the home page, since it hasn't been summer in the northern hemisphere for quite a while. Nevertheless, I'm happy to see it back online.

It's Clobberin' Time!

As a 'tweenager in the early 70s, I read Marvel Comics. DC comics were the home of stodgy old fogies like Superman and Batman. Jack Kirby, who was mostly responsible for Thor and the Silver Surfer during my comic book years, later moved to DC and created some interesting titles, but I don't think any of them gained any traction. Anyway, I read a lot of comics as a kid, and Stan Lee was a major figure in those days.

It's interesting to note that media corporations don't restrict their greed and unfair business practices to recording artists, but also to 80-year-old men who helped to create all the "content" they're profiting from today.

About this time, I expect Stan wishes someone like Ben Grim was on his legal team, and that during discovery The Thing would offer a compelling argument for them to live up to their agreements. Probably not going to happen, but it does make for an interesting set of villains for The Fantastic Four to take on.

Little Quicktime Page is Back!

Judy and Robert are back updating The Little Quicktime Page, which is kind of a weblog for all things Quicktime. I hadn't been back in a while, since they'd stopped updating back in August, they've been back up over a month now. I guess it would pay to pay more attention. I still haven't upgraded to QT 6 Pro, but I may here soon.

Champagne Bandit

I'm trying to find a terrorism connection, since that seems to be the popular thing to do, but it eludes me. Nevertheless, this is a disturbing series of crimes.

Note: Tongue is firmly in cheek.

Weather is Here...

Actually, it's been here and gone. That line of severe thunderstorms managed to pass through here around mid-afternoon, and we had tornado warnings in our county, but not near the beaches. No tornado though, thankfully.

I was going back to my office after an all-morning meeting, followed by lunch with some folks from out of town, when I saw a wall of water making its way east. I wondered if I'd make it to the office before it arrived. No such luck. Fortunately, there was a parking place right next to the building, so I didn't get drenched.

When I got home, my first action was to check the ceiling where I'd been having so much fun with roof leaks - all dry! This was the first really strong downpour we've had since the roof had been fixed, looks like it's really fixed.

My wind chimes still don't chime. I think I need to find a location that's better exposed. That probably means hanging them from a tree limb or something. I'll have to figure that out one of these days very soon.

Gardens of Stone

I finished watching Gardens of Stone last night after Caitlin went to bed. It's a good movie, a little short of being a great one, but well worth seeing. There are a few things to criticize about the film as, you know, cinéma, but the story isn't one that is told very often. And for a Vietnam film, it generally treats the Army pretty well.

I especially liked the relationship that developed between James Caan's Sergeant Hazard and Angelica Huston's Samantha. There's a riff on faith and honor there that's hard to miss unless you're trying not to pay attention, and it's well done for all of its obviousness.

I've seen the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknowns three times. It's a moving thing, regardless of how you feel about war and the military. And the Old Guard Fife and Drum Corps performs at each of the Presidential Classroom Graduation Banquets, so I've seen them three times as well, also very impressive.

Regardless, it's a good movie and worth a viewing some night when you can't handle another action flick or teen-comedy.

Birthdays

I have all this technology at my disposal, and yet I fail to use it; relying instead on my all-too-fallible memory.

Today is my good friend Sandy Bell's birthday. Or yesterday was. I'm never quite sure. See, I had two good friends whose birthdays were the 11th and 12th of November. I've known Sandy longer, and I haven't spoken to my other friend in more than two decades. Her name was Janie and I dated her off and on for a few years at the Naval Academy. But back then it was easy to keep them straight. These days I just remember Veterans' Day means it's either Sandy or Janie's birthday. It's only important to remember one of them, but they're kind of stuck together, forever I guess.

Of course, my brothers' birthdays, John's and Eric's, are October 13th, and Maria's is October 16th, so I'm forever lumping them all together on the 16th. Mark's is in September, the 29th I think, as is my Mom's and I'm not even going to hazard a guess on that one. I think I've got that in my Visor. Dad's is January 7th, but that's easy to remember because it's like a week after New Year's Eve and two weeks after Christmas Eve. My sister Lorraine's birthday is in April, I want to say the 29th, and Beth's and Diane's are split between August and November I think. Beth is November, I'm pretty sure about that. I think.

I should just get them all tatooed on the inner part of my forearm. Of course, then I'd lose my arm in a tragic paper-cutter accident or something.

In any case, today (or yesterday) is (was) Sandy's birthday, and I wish her a happy one.

10.2.2 is Available

In the relatively non-controversial world of Apple and things Macintosh (unless, of course, you're a Windows user), Mac OS 10.2.2 is now available. It's a 24.4 MB update availabe from the Software Update System Preference.

Having just installed Firmware Update 4.1.9, I'm going to wait a few days and see how we're doing before I add to the confusion by installing an OS update. Plus I'd like to see what happens to the early adopters.

Veterans' Day

It being Veterans' Day and all, I bought Gardens of Stone on DVD. I lingered over Saving Private Ryan, but I'm still not ready to watch that one again. I've watched half of Gardens, and Angelica Huston sure looked great back then. Haven't seen her in anything lately, for all I know she still looks great. I've taken a break because it has a lot of salty language and Caitie's come in from outdoors and she peppers nearly every scene with questions. I'll watch it some other time.

On Saturday, while I was at Books-a-Million, I picked up a couple of histories of WW I. I used to have a fairly good library from taking the Naval War College non-resident program, but I managed to give all of them away over the years, trying to cut down on the amount of stuff one seems to accrete over the years. I just want to refresh my memory of WW I, which remains the source of so many of the conflicts we struggle with today. It was a war a lot of folks were genuinely looking forward to, and nobody thought anything would go wrong.

Finally, I was pleased to note that James Webb, the former Secretary of the Navy, spoke out against the adminstration's approach toward Iraq at the Naval Postgraduate School, and he didn't get booed. Not that it will make any difference. I don't always agree with Webb, he's hard over that women don't belong in the combat elements of the military and I don't agree with that position.

Other than that, it's been a pretty quiet day. Washed the car, went for a run and that's about it. I'll regret it later when I try to catch up on the housework. Oh well...

Pascale's Moved

If you enjoy reading Pascale Soleil's weblog, Both2And Beyond Binary, she's moved. You'll find her at the link above, and the new address is also reflected in the List o'Links to the right.

4.1.9 and I Feel Fine

I installed Mac OS 10.2 a couple of days after it was released onto my iMac DV/400 (slot-loading, of course). I wasn't aware of the admonition by Apple that you must install firmware update 4.1.9 before installing Jaguar. Ever since then, it's worked just fine, including the subsequent update to 10.2.1.

But recently the whole computer has just locked up, twice in as many days. The first symptom is the Wacom Graphire tablet can no longer control the cursor. The Kensington trackball will still move the cursor, but no mouse-clicks will register. And trying to use the keyboard for launching Process Viewer through Launchbar fails as well. Unplugging and re-plugging the keyboard and USB hub don't resolve the problem, so I just reboot.

I'm not at all persuaded that it has anything to do with 4.1.9, but I need to rule it out, so I installed it last night. Everything went smoothly, and I figured as long as I was in 9.1 from a different partition than Jaguar, I'd go ahead and run DiskWarrior on the X boot partition as well. That took well over an hour to complete. (Fortunately, I have the 6500 working even though I haven't fixed the ethernet problem. I played WarCraft 2 while DiskWarrior did its thing.) It may be strictly subjective, but things seemed a little snapper in X after re-booting, which I would attribute to DiskWarrior more so than anything in 4.1.9.

It was already late when I finished that up, so I've only had an hour or so of runtime since installing the firmware update. It's too early to tell if my other problem is corrected, but we should know soon.

I got a Mac so I didn't have to spend a lot of time futzing with the computer, but I guess they all require a little attention from time to time. I'm reminded of the sign a friend of mine from the Apple II days used to have hanging on his office wall, "With my personal computer I can now do, much faster, things I never had to do at all before."

Sunday Morning Quiet

When I don't stay up too late on a Saturday night, I like getting up early on Sunday morning. The only distractions are the animals, and once you give them a little attention, they usually leave you alone.

One of these days I'll have to get around to finishing this thing on desire I've been working on. It's interesting, because it really does seem that we often try to teach that which we most need to learn.

Suffering is the difference between the way things are, and they way we'd like them to be. In that phrase, "the way we'd like them to be," are two things, hope and desire. Each is kind of a turning away from life, a rejection of the way things are. Which is not to say that we need do nothing about the way things are, just that the right action usually follows naturally out of the present circumstances, and what your principles are, and not out of your hope or desire.

Faith says that everything is exactly the way it is supposed to be, that everything happens for a reason and that you will be adequate to all you will confront. Hope and desire, while seemingly close relatives of faith, are really more like distractions. From desire, we may place our attention on action we have no power to effect. Or we may place our attention in hope, and rest on inaction. In neither case do we act out of our own center, out of whatever power we do possess, which is simply the power to choose.

In neither choice is suffering ultimately alleviated. If, by chance, we should achieve or obtain that which we desire, we often find it is not what we expected it would be. And if what we hope for happens to occur, well, I guess we can take comfort in that, but it seems a pretty hollow achievement. But if we fail to achieve or obtain what we desire or hope for, then suffering can increase to bitterness and resentment. It's not a lot of fun being around bitter, resentful people.

What I am reminded I have to do when struggling with my own hopes and desires, is to learn to let go. Letting go doesn't mean you don't care. It just means, you don't substitute your will for the will of life. There is action you can take, but it must come from the circumstances as they are, and what you believe, and what you can actually do; not from a belief that you have powers you do not possess to remake circumstances to your own liking. Finally, there is non-attachment. If you have acted from your own center, in good faith, then you let go of the outcome, because it is not up to you. Everything that is up to you, you have done, life demands nothing more. But nothing less, either.

It's good to appreciate the moments of quiet on a Sunday morning, because they don't last long, and this one appears to be over now.

Long Weekend

I'm pretty beat. I may take a break from this thing for a couple of days this weekend. Sometimes certain subjects grip me and I can't get my attention back from them until I've exhausted myself.

Apparently I'm not quite exhausted yet, because I'm going to go on a bit more about what I started yesterday.

One of the ways we, as individuals, find ourselves in personal predicaments is because our behavior is often based on unchallenged beliefs that, if they were examined, we would discover they held no truth, or certainly no truth as it pertains to us as individuals. We listen to authorities and we believe. When asked our opinion, we parrot authorities, whether we know it or not.

It's hard to think for yourself because we're never encouraged to have faith in ourselves. We're always beaten about the head and shoulders by authorities. Now, authorities aren't always wrong, but it's up to you to try and determine if they're right or not, and whether you'll respect them as an authority. I will tell you that have have far less respect for authority now than I did a few years ago.

Go read Emerson's Self Reliance. Emerson is a great antidote to authoritarian blindness.

We know we're uncomfortable with authority, though we still defer to it, which is why we try to live in weasel-space. I lived a long time in weasel-space, and it's a lot more comfortable than living in the real world. In the real world, you have to confront the consequences of your choices and your responsibility for them. It's not always fun, but you can live with yourself. You can face life and you can face the mirror, even if sometimes the people you care about are hurt or unhappy or don't understand you.

Al's quoting some poetry about how noble it is to shoulder the world's burdens. That's another form of authority. Pretty easy to do when you're not the guy who has to go shoulder those burdens. Sure, Al's got a tough job, and he's shouldered some burdens I'd probably collapse under. But it's another thing entirely to encourage in others, this noblesse oblige that it is up to us to save the world from itself. The fact of the matter is, each and every one of us are responsible for saving ourselves. We can't save the world, certainly not before we've finished the job on ourselves.

I was looking at Bush's National Security Strategy the other day. More on that later probably, if I can't manage to ignore it. But either in the text of the strategy, or in a quotation from Bush's 2002 State of the Union address, there was some reference to "ridding the world of evil." I could be wrong, I've read so much stuff in the last few days and a lot of it gives me the throbbing vein in the temple, but I'm pretty sure I saw it in there.

We can't rid the world of evil. We can't rid this country of evil. It's the work of a lifetime to rid ourselves as individuals of evil. But it sure makes good copy, doesn't it?

Especially when none of us is actually going to have to bear the cost. Hell, our president is even going to give us a tax break! This war can pay for itself with the oil we'll have. See, I knew there was an upside.

Ask yourself before you send young men and women far from home to kill and die for you, on whose authority are you relying? And are you sure, sure enough to ask others to kill and die for you, that what they're telling you is the truth? If you can't answer that question affirmatively, or if you can't answer that question at all, then you need to talk less and think more.

It won't be easy. The folks who want this war don't wany anyone thinking about it, which is why there is no end of distractions, or calling negative attention to the people who question it. It won't be a comfortable place.

These are serious matters that deserve serious attention. More than the flippant remark or the casual posting of a pretty poem by Kipling. You owe the same level of commitment and effort to making up your mind that you're asking of the people you're sending to kill and die for you. If you don't think you do, you need to think some more about that, because there will come a cost, the butcher's bill will be paid, and you'll be writing the check from your soul.

Maybe you can think about that this weekend. If you can remember what this holiday is in memory of.

Having it Both Ways - Faith and Honor, Part II

There's a tendency among some of those who seemingly favor a war with Iraq to try to maintain two positions: They don't want war...but.

After that "but" comes the effort to absolve themselves of responsibility.

"But we have no choice."

"But we can't take that risk."

"But Saddam is bringing it on himself."

Bullshit.

These are people who have no honor, for they have no faith. Not in themselves, not in their country, not in their cause. They rely on the excuse of the bully, the wife beater and the child abuser. Someone else "made" them do what they did.

"Don't make me hurt you."

"She made me angry."

"I had no choice."

"It wasn't my fault."

Weasel-words, uttered by people who inhabit weasel-space, sort of the third dimension of cyber-space and meat-space. Often uttered by the same people who advocate "personal responsibility" over a government welfare state.

No one can "make" you do anything. You always have a choice, and you can never escape the responsibility of your choices. The only people who let you off the hook as you wring your hands and cast your eyes to the ground, piously intoning, "I don't want war, but..." are your fellow inhabitants of weasel-space. The rest of us know what you are. People of no courage, no faith and no honor. You choose the easy path. You pick the path of fear.

You either oppose this war, or you want it and you should take responsibility for wanting it. You owe that to the people you will send in harm's way on your behalf. They deserve to go secure in the knowledge that what they are about to do, they do with your blessing and your support and your commitment. That it is what you want them to do. That you want them to fight with courage and honor, observe the laws of war, and to die well if necessary. That you will keep faith with them, whatever happens; if things go well, or if things go wrong. Especially if things go wrong. Things always go wrong.

Try making an affirmative statement. Something like: "I support war with Iraq. I want the Iraqi people and the men and women of the U.S. armed forces to endure whatever sacrifices are necessary to depose Saddam Hussein and to ensure the destruction of his weapons of mass destruction. I understand, and accept, that this sacrifice will include death, injury, illness, and suffering. I understand, and accept, that war is a brutal, wrenching and chaotic event, impossible to carefully control and minutely adjust. And I understand, and accept, that there will be consequences of this war that we are unable to even contemplate now. I accept responsibility for this course of action, because I am unwilling to accept the risk of Saddam Hussein's continued existence as the ruler of Iraq, and the threat he poses to my country."

If you're not comfortable making that statement, or something like it, then perhaps you should reconsider whether or not you really want this war. And if you don't want it - then you should oppose it. That's at least having faith in yourself.

If you can't do either of those, you're not worthy of the sacrifice you're asking the men and women of our armed forces and the Iraqi people to make on your behalf, and you should be ashamed.

You should be ashamed.

What Do We Believe?

This editorial by Tom Friedman is in the same vein as my criticism of Cecil and the warbloggers. We really ought to think about just who we want to be. Otherwise we'll wake up one morning and be surprised to find who is staring at us in the mirror.

Cheap Shots

The "cheap shot" charge doesn't stick Cecil. The only cheap shot I saw was invoking some illusory bugaboo about Americans who oppose this war being unwilling to sacrifice. As regards what you have at stake in this, the day that the Iraqi military can actually find an aircraft carrier at all, let alone with a precision greater than the circular error probable of a Scud missile and whatever warhead you care to name is the day you can claim "it's personal." That day ain't here. It's just another exaggerated claim to whip up the mob into a war frenzy.

It seems to me that the truest test of character of a superpower, and of a great people, as I think we would like to think of ourselves, is restraint. I've seen precious little in the way of restraint. More like, "I'm going to count to three, and you'd better do what I say or I'm going to kick your ass." If courage is the quality that allows people to persevere in the face of great personal risk, then tell me where we're exhibiting courage when the only thing we risk when we invade Iraq are the lives of American servicemembers (whose courage I do not question), and the lives of the Iraqi people unfortunate enough to be in the line of fire? Where is courage when it seems we're being led, motivated and agitated by fear? It seems to me we'd be exhibiting courage by exercising restraint.

We're supposedly such a superior culture. We've got such superior technology. We're supposedly morally better than "those people," and the best we can come up with to deal with Iraq is "we're going to kick their ass"? Not very inspiring.

We're being led by appeals to our basest instincts, and while that usually works, it's hardly anything to be proud of. No, it's not personal, Cecil, and it never was. Telling yourself it is doesn't make it so.

I'm sorry that you felt it was a cheap shot, it wasn't intended as a cheap shot. It was speaking the truth. You, personally, risk nothing in this, and that's what I was referring to. Your brother has a much higher probability of being hurt in an accident aboard the carrier than he does from hostile fire; and I think, statistically, you face a higher risk of being hurt in an accident than your brother does. He, after all, doesn't have to drive a car every day.

I mean to challenge the notion that seems to be floating around unquestioned that we're doing something upright and courageous in all of this. That we're acting out of sound principles and after long reflection. I see none of that. We're doing this because we can, and nobody can stop us. All the rest is just bullshit we're feeding ourselves to make us feel good about what we're about to do and those who are leading us to do it.

Getting What We Wish For

Well, this will certainly be an interesting two years.

I'm reluctant to say this is unequivocally a bad thing, reminded as I am of the ancient Chinese farmer. It may even be a good thing. There's going to be precious little political cover for the President and his party now. Maybe he should be careful what he wishes for.

Once again, I seem to be a bellweather for losing causes. I even voted against the smoking in public places ban. I figure smokers are among the last group of people everyone feels good about beating up on (except that it's beginning to look Democrats are the folks everyone feels good about beating up on), and I like to be a contrarian on stuff like that. We re-installed the online replacement for the contemplated Bush dynasty.

As If I Didn't Have Enough to Worry About

I've been reading these dire warnings about installing firmware update 4.1.9 in slot-loading iMacs before installing Mac OS 10.2. Well, I've got firmware 4.1.7f according to System Profiler and everything seems to be working fine.

If it ain't broke, should I still fix it?

Winning the Trifecta

Well, if it's not Americans suggesting that North Korea ought to be next on the hit list, it's Ariel Sharon making the case for Iran. My money's on Iran being next. I mean, come on, we're right there for Pete's sake! Look, it's a member of the Axis of Evil, they support terrorism, they oppress their own people who aren't even allowed to buy Barbie dolls, and they've got that one thing that everybody wants - oil!

Do the math, we've already paid for the lift. The log train is rolling. Take a year to stabilize Iraq, maybe bring in the Turks for occupation duty if we're still not willing to fire up the draft, reconstitute all of our forces and sort of turn our attention east. Back at home Bush/Cheney et al will explain to the mob, I mean, the American people, how we still owe it to the Iranians for those 52 hostages that Carter couldn't manage to liberate in over a frigging year. We've just liberated an entire country in less time than you can say, "Rose Garden strategy." For God's sake, let's do it again!

Okay, now, saying we do go and liberate Iran, does the map suggest to us what we ought to do next? Let's see...

Why, yes, it appears as though it might. There's Pakistan, and it's right next door to Iran, and Afghanistan with whom we're all so familiar. Now, technically, Pakistan is an ally, so we might have to think about this a bit. Let's see...weapons of mass destruction? Check. Supports terrorism? Check. Has oil? Um, not that anyone knows of, but heck, while we're there... We can even get the Indians to be the occupation forces! That's how the Austro-Hungarian Empire used to do it. Station forces from opposing ethnic or religious groups on each other's soil. That way they don't have any qualms about firing into the crowds to suppress uprisings and keep the peace. It's not pretty, but it is effective.

Onward Christian soldiers!

Welcome to the 21st century.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Cheerful Dissatisfaction

This is an interesting article in the NY Times. It actually refers to the research I was trying to recall in one of my more rancorous bits of incoherent thought, Restating the Issue. I need to do a bit more reading about these guys and their research. The seeming irrationality of some forms of human decision-making is consistent with Dr. Damasio's "dispositional representations," especially when you consider loss-aversion.

What was especially interesting to me, was near the end of the interview:

I'll hazard a guess. They're less satisfied because their divorce represents a loss. Divorce is not viewed as a positive in one's life. Marriage is a big deal, and folks don't get married planning on getting a divorce, so when one comes along it's kind of hard to make a case that you're "satisfied" with your life; unless you've done some pretty heavy lifting in coming to terms with what the divorce meant in your life and you've found those terms agreeable. But regardless, they're more cheerful day to day! Why? I'd say it's because they're not burdened day to day with the difficulty of trying to maintain a bad relationship.

But hey, that's just me. What do I know? I could be wrong.

I voted.

Took Caitlin with me this morning. I was kind of disappointed we didn't have touch-screens. We had the paper ballots that you filled in with a permanent marker. The guy in front of me at the machine that reads your ballot kept getting his spit back out. The ladies there helping had him re-insert it four different ways, usually twice each way, and it spit it back out each time. Then one of them told him to put it back in the "secrecy folder" (I would have said something cute like, "modesty panel") and peered into the little LCD read-out on the machine. It would appear that our voter had over-voted.

Hey, it's Florida, it happens. What's interesting was that this was a white guy, a little younger than me, well-dressed. He wasn't elderly or black, and English seemed to be his first language, and he was having problems. Imagine that. I only mention this because, following the 2000 debacle, there seemed to be a popular concensus in these parts that it was only certain people who had trouble voting.

I wish I could have stayed around to see how that resolved itself. He denied he could have over-voted. Personally, I think he's right. I suspect the marker bled through the cardstock of the ballot. I noticed several of mine had started to when I flipped it over to vote the reverse side. But hey, they probably wanted to go with permanent marker to remove any ambiguity about "voter intent." No hanging, dimpled, bent. folded, stapled or mutilated chads here.

Leading Parades

Mike Sanders wonders why some of us don't "love" warbloggers. Of course, Mike doesn't put it that way, he sort of creates the false choice of loving warbloggers and hating terrorists, or the opposite. It suits Mike to put things that way, because he doesn't like the fact that some people might disagree with him.

I haven't read recently how Mike feels about invading Iraq. Mostly Mike writes about terrorists. It's not clear if Iraq:=terrorists to everyone yet or not.

I'm no pacifist. The grease spot that used to be six Yemenis in a car doesn't trouble me overmuch. The fact that it was the CIA with an unmanned Predator drone just makes me happy. I have one reservation, which is I sure as hell hope we got it right and blew to bits the right people. Now, we can argue whether or not this is going to do anything to stem the tide of terrorism, Israel has been having about as much success stemming terrorism with Hellfire missiles as Cecil seems to think sanctions have had in modifying the behavior of other tyrants.

What I don't love about warbloggers is their enthusiasm for something they know so little about. A few of them have encyclopedic knowledge of all the "good bits" of capabilities and limitations. They are especially enamored of U.S. technological superiority. They know little about logistics and lift capacity and sustainment, and the whole post-hostilities phase of a conflict is just dismissed with a bit of handwaving invoking the spirit of MacArthur. The fact that the case for Iraq shapes up to be a pretty "good" case against Iran, Pakistan, North Korea, doesn't seem to trouble them at all either. Cecil even seems to suggest that the evils of the world are reason enough for the U.S. to become the world's policeman, to inflict pain and suffering and death in the name of preventing it.

What I don't love about warbloggers is this cheerleader mentality, as if war were just another spectator sport, which for them, unsurprisingly, it is. It's the facility with which they can rationalize visiting death and destruction on others. Cecil would point out that death and destruction are all too often visited on others; but the difference is we're usually not the ones doing the visiting. And sometimes, we're just not welcome. Mogadishu should ring some bells for people. If someone's suggesting we should be the world's policeman, that we should insert ourselves forcibly and unilaterally, wherever things are not to our liking, well, let's have that debate. Failing that, what's so special about Iraq?

Cecil seems to believe that any opposition to the U.S. invading and occupying Iraq is because, "it's so much easier to be against anything that requires action or hardship from US citizens." I'm wondering precisely what action or hardship, especially hardship, invading Iraq poses for him? His president isn't even proposing to raise taxes to pay for this war! In fact, he's offering the mob, excuse me, I mean the electorate, the promise of more tax breaks! And by all accounts, the prospect of $15.00 a barrel oil, bought and paid for by the deaths of everyone involved in this little endeavor, will yield an economic windfall for us and all of our "friends." What's not to love?

In the final analysis, if we do this, it won't be for any of the reasons anyone is offering to rationalize this mess. We'll be doing it because nobody can stop us. Everyone else is "irrelevant." We can't even manage to stop ourselves. So we'll pick on the countries we don't like, turn a blind eye to the others that lack the oil we covet, or an ethnicity we share, and we'll pat ourselves on the back for "liberating" a people - and their oil.

So get on out there and lead that parade, Cecil. I won't be in the crowd cheering. I'll be weeping.

Windmills

This is one of the pictures I took of the windmills that have been erected near where I grew up in Upstate New York. This is another example of just using CMD-Shift-4, hold down CTRL and right from the iPhoto catalog page to my weblog without having to re-size it or anything.

Another way to post a pic...

Saturn, from Cassini. See a picture you like that's not someone else's intellectual property? CMD-Shift-4, select the part of the screen containing the pic, hold down the Control key and click! Go to your note in Tinderbox and type CMD-V (paste). Voila!

Need Tables?

Of course, you can't copy this text, but if you do need a table, here's an easy way to generate one. Just use the Table tool in AW 6.0, once you're finished, select the table with the arrow cursor, then copy and paste into a note. Table's done!

Another Picture Test

Just playing around with how I might get graphics into Tinderbox documents. This is a couple of pieces of clipart from AppleWorks that I dropped into a drawing document, resized and then copied and pasted into a note.

I like it, but then I'm easily amused.

Inkwell Test

Inkwell works pretty well with Tinderbox. If you want to draw a quick illustration, you can do it in the Inkwell notepad, then click Send. Then it gets a little weird. The first time you want to get the graphic to the note, you may have to Paste it (either through the Edit Menu, or just type CMD-v). But on subsequent Sends from the Inkwell window, the graphic just appears in the note window.

What I'd like to see now is a minimalist selection of basic drawing tools, or the Newton-style option to "smooth shapes." As it is, it's nearly impossible to draw a straight line.

I suppose, alternatively, I could run the small Cocoa drawing program that came with the Developer Toolbox, and just set up Youpi Key to copy the graphic and paste it into Tinderbox. I may try that later.

It's not like I have a crying need for illustrating any of my ideas, and I'm not much of an artist either, but it's nice to know I could draw a quick graph or chart without having to launch another app. Pretty cool.

Time and Motion

Wow, Sunday sure flew by quickly. Did the grocery shopping, a couple of loads of laundry, then had to fold the stuff that was already sitting on top of the dryer. Managed to watch Time Bandits, which was pretty good. It's kind of an off-beat movie with an interesting cast. Not a lot of metaphors for those, like me, who are inclined to look for them. That's fine, it was a fun flick.

It's time to make dinner and finish cleaning up. So far, it's been a real "chop wood, carry water" kind of day.

Maybe I'll be back later, but don't wait up for me.

More News of the Mundane

I managed to accomplish most of my housekeeping this morning. I've got a couple of things I need to finish tomorrow, but it's mostly done.

When I got tired of futzing with this thing, I headed over to Books-a-Million and I picked up the new Mac OS X Missing Manual, by David Pogue. I've got the first one, but this one covers Jaguar. I may give the other one to Maria who's still running 10.1.5 on the G4 down in Melbourne. It's just that I'm not sure she'd ever look at it. She has this very reasonable expectation that she shouldn't need to look at a manual to use a Mac. Oh well.

I also picked up several magazines, which will soon become clutter that I'll be complaining about in here. Are we sensing a pattern yet?

I dropped by Target and picked up Spiderman and The Sum of All Fears on DVD. They also had A Bridge Too Far, Time Bandits, and Ghostbusters 2 for $9.44 each. Well, I had to have them, although I thought twice on Ghostbusters 2. It's nowhere near as good as the first one, but hey, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Sigourney Weaver? How could I say no?

I watched A Bridge Too Far tonight, and The Sum of All Fears. Bridge is a good movie, but it's not a great one. Of course, it would have to be a much longer movie to really do justice to its subject matter and as it is, it's nearly three hours. Sum was better than I expected, fortunately for me since I bought it instead of renting it. As long as you don't look too closely, that is. A good popcorn flick.

Tomorrow I'm looking forward to Time Bandits and Spidey. Time Bandits has Sean Connery as Agamemnon as I recall, and it was an affecting scene.

Well, it's way past this old man's bed time. I'm hittin' the rack. Tomorrow is another day.

iBook Updates

If this report is correct, then we should be seeing some welcome improvements in price and performance in the next crop of iBooks. Now, I know the iBook is hopelessly outclassed by all the other wintel consumer laptops out there, and it's only the feeble-minded like me, who drank the kool-aid, who continue to covet and look forward to new Apple hardware.

That mid-range model look spretty nice to me. My iBook is a first-issue dual-USB. 500MHz, with a 66Mhz system bus, 256K L2 cache, and a Rage 128 graphics chip with 8MB of VRAM. It's great for 90% of what I do with it. But that new mid-range model offers 300Mhz more speed on a 100Mhz bus, with 512K of L2 cache and a Radeon graphics processor with 16MB of VRAM. I figure that would be roughly twice as fast as my current iBook.

Well, maybe after the new year. But a new desktop machine is the first priority. I really need more screen real estate.

Thanks to Mark Bernstein

Mark's the developer of Tinderbox and I sent him an e-mail with a question this afternoon. I was trying to add a couple of new weblogs to the list o'links there on the right, and I kept screwing up the existing links. Both of the new links pointed to Stand Down, and the previous old one did too. That wasn't very good. So, I tried to fix it and ended up moving the problem up one link and had four bad links. So I tried again, and it moved up another and now I had five.

I did this seven or eight times. I knew I was having an "overlapping link" problem, it's described in the manual. I thought I was being careful enough by deleting all the old text and links and entering all new text and links, and by making sure I got all of the old text. In fact, I was more worried about creating the problem going down the list, overlapping the last good link down over each of the new ones, in my effort to keep them from creeping up. Somehow, I never had that problem, it kept coming up from the bottom.

None of this makes any sense to anyone if you don't use Tinderbox, but if you'll look at the Site Meter entry for today and note the 94 minutes from someone on attbi, that's me trying to fix this thing.

So I finally gave up and shot an e-mail to Mark. He e-mailed me back and told me to use an option-space between links to keep them from overlapping and all is well. That's great support, and I appreciate it.

Maintenance, Cyber and Domestic

I failed to notice yesterday that since it was the first of the month, I needed to create a new archive page for this place. I believe I've done that now, even though it wasn't created on the last export. Hopefully, I've dotted all the i's and crossed all the t's, and everything is in order.

Today is a big housekeeping day. My right arm is only at about 50%, and with Halloween on Thursday, and all the verbiage I've been dumping here, I've been getting behind on keeping entropy at bay. Today is catch-up day. I started last night here in what we call the "computer room." I'm much happier with the result.

If you exclude Caitlin's stuff, the majority of the crap that winds up cluttering up the place can be broken down into:

1. Junk mail.

2. Almost-junk mail (mostly magazines I'm only somewhat likely to ever read).

3. Action mail, and the junk they stuff in those envelopes.

4. Dog and cat hair and kitty litter.

5. Dirt tracked in by the dog.

6. Newspapers.

7. Food wrappers, containers, dishes and utensils.

8. Dirty clothes.

9. School stuff (assignments, test results, communications).

10. Books I fail to put away.

This ought to suggest any number of strategies for dealing with these sources of clutter more effectively, and indeed they have. I suppose the last part of the problem is to figure out what I need to change about myself that will allow me to implement them effectively. I should probably focus on that.

Well, let's see if I've got this thing working for November.

Belief and Truth, Part 2

Last night I tried to look at what made some acts honorable, while others were not. This morning, I linked to a story on CNN about Human Rights Watch declaring suicide bombing to be a war crime, and pointed out how a Hamas leader denied it was suicide, and instead insisted it was martyrdom. Tonight I want to try to look at suicide bombing and examine whether or not it is, or can be, an honorable act.

First, let's dispense with this notion of martyrdom. A martyr is one who, through death, gives witness to their faith. This usually requires that their faith be the basis for their confrontation with death. At least as I understand it, to be a martyr requires that one's death be at the hands of another, not at one's own hand. I suppose there could be exceptions to this, but it seems to me that in most cases, taking one's own life is, in effect, turning away from life, rejecting it, not embracing it in good faith, even if that means one's certain death. But again, I suppose there could be exceptions.

The Buddhist monk who self-immolated as a form of protest against the government of South Vietnam (I think I have that right, but don't quote me on that) was committing suicide, so I wouldn't say he was a martyr. His act may have been honorable, though it's hard for me to say. I have some doubt, since suicide seems to be such an unequivocal rejection of life, but I'm inclined to withhold judgment, because what I know of Buddhism suggests he was asserting his authority over himself in the act. What is notable though, is he didn't take anyone else's life in the act, just his own.

The deaths of the suicide bombers are not at the hands of the Israelis. This, to me, argues strongly against martyrdom. They die at their own hand. Second, the act is not undertaken simply as a statement of faith or even protest, but rather as a means to kill others. This seems to be particularly damning, as the act relies upon the exploitation of the faith of others for it to be successful. If anyone is a martyr as a result of these attacks, they are the victims, not the bombers. Irony is the fifth fundamental force of the universe.

So I would have to say that there is no way I could reasonably claim that a suicide bomber is a martyr, unless we distort the meaning of the word martyr well past the point of recognition.

But even if they aren't martyrs, can they be said to have acted honorably? I'll save you the suspense and tell you now, no. There may be cases where acting as a suicide bomber could be regarded as an honorable act, but the circumstances would have to be very desperate for that to be the case.

The plight of the Palestinians, to use that rather shopworn phrase, is a difficult one. They have legitimate grievances, and they have suffered both at the hands of the Israelis, the Arab states and their own leadership. But they have not suffered so grievously as to justify the exploitation of their own youth in the conduct of suicide bombings against Israelis.

Now, this seems to be the external standard I mentioned yesterday, that often eludes us when two people in exactly the same circumstances make two different, even opposite choices and each acts honorably. I suppose in a way, it is, but it isn't exclusively the basis for concluding that a Palestinian suicide bomber isn't acting honorably.

In order for an act to be honorable, one must be acting out of one's own authority over oneself. I don't happen to believe that is the case when it comes to suicide bombers. If that were the case, I would have expected all the Islamic scholars who have explained that this is a sure-fire way to martyrdom, and who have asserted that the conditions the Palestinians live in are so desperate to merit these acts, to have been in the vanguard of the suicide-bomber brigades. By most accounts, they're still around encouraging others to go do it. So I conclude that most suicide-bombers are acting on the authority of others, namely Islamic scholars, and not relying on their own authority over themselves.

One can't begin to assert authority over oneself until one has critically examined what one believes, and has decided on its truth-value on one's own. This is very difficult to do, and I'm not sure how many people ever do it. Most of our lives, we've had to rely on authorities for what we believe. Information has three component quantities that determine its truth value, at least to me, they are utility, reliability and duration. Authority primarily addresses the reliability component, and to a lesser extent the other two as well. That is to say, if a piece of information comes from an authority, you may have some reasonable expectation that the same information would be offered in the same way from others. If the Encyclopedia Britannica says the sky is blue, then Funk and Wagnalls probably says the sky is blue, your physics teacher says the sky is blue, and your mom says the sky is blue. Authorities are supposed to be reliable sources of information.

We rely on authorities because we can't know everything. And the scope of activities we are engaged in on a daily basis requires us to rely on authorities, because we simply wouldn't have the time to find out everything for ourselves. The problem is, we tend to become too reliant on authority. Partly we become complacent and comfortable, why bother thinking for yourself when someone who is good-looking and on television can tell you what to think? Partly, it is the result of authority seeking to suppress the tendency in others to think for themselves. Social organisms are much more effective when they can reliably predict your behavior and they can do that when they are your sole source of information.

I suspect that most suicide bombers are sincere, but they are not acting authentically. Rather, they have been exploited and manipulated by authorities who enjoy privileged positions in the structure of the social organism (and therefore are reluctant to give them up by committing suicide), to carry out acts which are intended to serve the purposes of the social organism. I don't know what the average age of a suicide bomber is, but I recall reading something about some concern regarding their youth. It would be no surprise to me if they were very young. As much as we would like to believe that young people question authority, what they most seem to do is seek authorities different from whatever the prevailing or dominant ones are. If the Israeli government is viewed as the dominant authority, it's unsurprising that they would listen to the authorities opposed to them. In addition, young people tend to be very idealistic and this idealism can usually be exploited.

Suicide bombers are neither martyrs, nor are they acting honorably. They are merely among the victims of the conflict between competing social organisms. They aren't evil either, although their acts may be rightly seen as evil. They're just misguided and abused. The evil lies with the people who exploit them and deceive them and send them on these futile and terrible missions.

As for me, I'm an authority on nothing. If I had my way, I'd go around every day kicking everyone in the shins and telling them to think for themselves. So don't go listening to me. If you want to know the answer to these questions, go look for them yourself.

Belief and Truth

Here's an interesting story at CNN that illustrates the way social organisms use belief systems to organize the behavior of their constituent members.

What's interesting is the response of the Hamas leader. From the article: "This report is neglecting all the Arab Muslim scholars who are not recognizing these operations as a suicide. [It] is accepting the [terminology of] Israel, describing such operation as suicide operation," said Mahmoud El Zahar. "This operation is not suicide, these are martyrs."

So, we see the reference to an "authority," in this case, "Arab Muslim scholars" to show that the "truth" is different from what another social organism says it is.

Now, I'll be the first to admit, I'm not sure about an "absolute" truth; or, even were it to exist, if we would be able to "know" it, in an ontological sense. I'm pretty much in the Spinoza, James, Dewey, pragmatist, if not to say post-modernist camp. I believe all information has three qualities, that of utility, reliability and duration, and that what we know as truth is information of the greatest utility, reliability and duration. Even using those criteria, I think it's hard to make a case for martyrdom.

If I have time tonight, I'll try to take a look at "suicide bombers/martyrs" in the context of last night's feeble effort to examine faith and honor and see if I haven't laid a trap for myself. Stay tuned, sports fans.