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Below are the most recent 25 friends' journal entries.
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| Thursday, January 7th, 2010 |
gwywnnydd
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5:45p |
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gwywnnydd
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5:04p |
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tenacious_snail
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3:49p |
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gwywnnydd
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1:33p |
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elfs
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11:29a |
Rush Limbaugh admits Gitmo was a failure
Of course, he didn't really say that Gitmo was a failure. He just said that "one in five" of the people released from the Guantanamo Bay Prison facility had returned to terrorists groups. Huh. That means that, in violation of all American tradition and sensibility, 80% of the people at Gitmo were, in fact, imprisoned without charge or reason. They were denied access to legal counsel, communications with their families, habeas corpus, or a speedy trial. These were not "terrorists picked up on the battlefield." That's convenient Bush/Cheney speak for "Brown-skinned men wherever an American soldier happens to be." These were men picked up on the say-so of paid informants, family members with grudges, and warlords looking to settle a score. Many were imprisoned falsely. And y'know what? Every single case that Limbaugh describes was of a man freed during the Bush-Cheney term, when policy was to deliberately keep the files difficult and possibly non-existent. Not one case of recidivism can be traced to prisoners freed during the current administration. That's competence for ya. You either have it, or you don't. Current Mood:  amused |
| Wednesday, January 6th, 2010 |
elfs
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10:04p |
Today, A Beautiful Day...
I had such a nice day, developing a Wordpress theme for a client. Other than some really odd frustrations with the opacity settings, everything came off the way I wanted it to. The theme is a little schizophrenic-- highly organic in the header, a bit vectorish in the footer, but it works out nicely. Had the weirdest dream, though. I dream that Der Ex's husband and I were playing low-stakes poker at a table outside in the back lawn. We were getting along really well. And for those of you playing at home, I managed 63 push-ups and 94 sit-ups. That was a huge jump from the 57 I did on Monday, and the girls giggled at the last push-up, because I was cursing and grunting during the entire way up. Current Mood: happy |
ladyallyn
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8:49p |
Motorcycle Therapy(tm)
Motorcycle Therapy(tm); a widely observed therapeutic act which increases giggles, smiles, chuckles and occasional glee. Overall well-being is generally positively affected. Often performed in a group setting with one or more participants acting as facilitators guiding the group members through individual and collective challenges, decision making and goal setting/attainment. Can be practiced and beneficial for a wide population demographic, from small children as soon as they're able to process cause/effect choices to substantially vintage participants. The duration and intensity of therapeutic activity can be individually tailored from casual and low intensity to extreme and demanding of constant reassessment of performance parameters. It can be performed in a wide range of climate and physical conditions, and can be conducted virtually anywhere in the world. It appears that some regions may provide enhanced effect, as observed by higher participation and willingness of participants to undertake significant commitment in order to engage in therapy in these locales. There seems to be a correspondingly higher benefit with greatly increased grinning and joviality persisting after the actual therapeutic act is completed. Long term benefits are not entirely understood, but it is possible that there is some permanent effect, as there seem to be recurrent, if milder, cases of grins and general Happy Faces upon revisiting a memorable therapy session weeks, months or even years after the original event. Further observation and in-depth investigation are clearly warranted. Individuals potentially interested should be afforded the opportunity to undertake their initial sessions in a controlled environment to reduce the probability of external factors negatively affecting the potential therapeutic benefit. There will be sufficient exposure to external factors if a person chooses to pursue this course of therapy. Long term participants in this therapy may be observed either in the therapeutic environment or in their natural habitats -- although it may become difficult to determine when one ends and the other begins. They are generally exceedingly willing to discuss their therapeutic experiences with just the slightest prompting. That, in itself, may be an indicator of the value of this as a therapy modality, as there are few other modalities where such a large segment of the participant population is enthusiastically eager to share both the positives and negatives of their course of therapy. Now... all we have to do is figure out how to get insurance to pay for it. |
gwywnnydd
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12:17p |
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gwywnnydd
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11:20a |
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| Tuesday, January 5th, 2010 |
bldrnrpdx
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7:38p |
T-shirt pillows
I ran across these t-shirt pillows on Campus Quilt Company's t-shirt quilting business website. I think I like my t-shirt pillows better.  Current Mood:  thoughtful |
elfs
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10:31a |
Why America Can't Make Squat
Maxine Udall has an interesting piece entitled The Price of Casino-Like Finance Is Higher Than We Think, in which she touches on many of the reasons why America is in so much trouble. Her thought processes are of a piece with Noam Schrieber's piece in The New Republic, Upper Mismanagement, and they dovetail nicely into my favorite boogeyman, the ongoing pressure by the Religious Right to destroy childhood incentives to go into the sciences. Schrieber starts out by stating that for the past twenty years, the best minds in management have all been driven by business school ideals: not "make better stuff," but "make more money with the stuff we have." Converging with other threads of thought I've had over the decade, Schrieber points out that most upper managers come from business schools and know how to play the market game. No longer to CEOs (and even CTOs) come up through the engineering ranks, familiar with what the engineering departments are capable of producing; instead, they come from outside the business, full of knowledge about financial management, and are expected to figure out how to "leverage" what they can learn about engineering's "role" into financial success. Udall goes deeper, and points out that engineering is probably full of mediocre minds who couldn't or wouldn't put their talents on the line for the hard-core stuff: It will be from two powerful, long-standing price distortions that have distorted the composition of our labor force and the mix of human capital within it. The first distortion is the past diversion of some our best technical and mathematical minds away from physics, engineering, biology, chemistry, and, yes, even economics, to financial modeling, risk analysis, and all the other marvelous tools of speculation and gaming.
Maxine is thinking of all those bright, young, energetic people who came out of some of our best universities and opted to go to work for investment banks, not in technical jobs, but as traders, ratings specialists, analysts, again to support the conversion of trillions of dollars into chaff. Many of them might have gone on to graduate degrees in chemistry, biochemistry, physics, engineering, biology or medicine. Graduate work in psychology, sociology, English, history, political science, public health would have added more value than destroying wealth across the globe. Instead of a workforce that gained diverse skills that might one day transform the world in positive and substantive ways, we have a surfeit of MBAs with concentrations in finance and empty houses on overgrown lots. It's not just that management came out of business school and has no clue what engineering does, but that the talent management has to work with has been skewed downward by the immense seduction of money pulling talented engineers and scientists into studying financial alchemy rather than biochemistry or architectural engineering. I'd like to add that ever since 1972, when the last Apollo mission returned to Earth, we have looked inward, looked downward. Hell, even the Space Shuttle rotates to face downward, toward the Earth, navel-gazing. Meanwhile, too much of America is scared that what science reveals makes the universe a scary place, a place without God or divine providence, and that the conclusions of biology are so unsettling its best that children not hear them. From an early age now, science curricula in pre-college classrooms has been dumbed down-- from the right, by fear of "naturalism," from the left, by fear that excellence by some will mean disappointment for others. We have relentlessly dumbed-down our curricula to the point where kids are entering college with no pre-calculus skills, no capacity to write a meaningful cover letter, no capacity to discern bias in a newspaper editorial. Only the mathematics of finances is dually blessed: mathematical abstractions are sufficiently abstract that they seem free from having any impact on the "real world," and so are an acceptable pursuit to the religious. And it's about making money, which in some sense is divorced from the ethic of making good stuff. That might seem unChristian, but if it does, you're not hip to The Prosperity Gospel, which states that God provides material prosperity for those he favors. All of these forces merge to create a situation where we've made "making money without getting your hands dirty" seem the only rational alternative. Nobody would go into the sciences in America: science is boring, hard, icky, unholy, and disruptive. And who wants that? Frankly, I do. Current Mood:  annoyed |
elfs
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9:19a |
New Story! And bonus stories by others!
In case you missed it, I’ve posted a new story in the Bastet series: Bath Night, which brings us to the most recent decade and a riff on something I read during the Iraq war.
If you’re a fan of the Singularity, here are two stories told from opposite sides of the fence: Gentle Seduction by Marc Stiegler is an early, and hopeful, depiction of the Singularity. It starts as a riff on the seminal trans-Singularity movie Brainstorm, and moves on from there, reflecting on the character of a woman who we normally wouldn’t have thought of one of us– and it is her quality as someone not interested in the rapture of the nerds that makes her so pivotal to our success. The other is by Peter Watts, so expect nastiness, and Watts delivers: The Things is John Carpenter’s The Thing as told from the point of view of the monster. Watts manages to make us sympathetic to the creature, even when leading to an even more horrific conclusion than what Carpenter delivered.
This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's writing journal, Pendorwright.com. Feel free to comment on either LiveJournal or Pendorwright. |
| Monday, January 4th, 2010 |
elfs
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8:58p |
The Monty Python (mixed drink)
Ladies and gentlemen, I present The Monty Python. In a highball glass, over ice: Dangerously delicious. Current Mood:  giggly |
bldrnrpdx
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8:48p |
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elfs
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4:20p |
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elfs
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3:02p |
A breakthrough! Cross-domain communication between non-cooperative parasite-and-host browser frames
I have acheived EVIL! EVIL, I tell you! I have successfully created a cross-domain communications channel between a page and a contained iframe even when the domains are not cooperating! The trick involves javascript injection into the host (in the sense of "parasite and host") browser frame using a bookmarklet, which then starts running a tight-loop timer that watches the ANCHOR portion of the URL. The parasite frame can then manipulate the ANCHOR portion of the URL, to which it has access with its initialized document.referer. As it does so, the infected host frame checks the ANCHOR every 10 milliseconds, then changes the ANCHOR back (to hide its activities) and uses that change as an ACK to the parasite, which can then send another message. Using prefix codes, the infected host and parasite browser frames can communicate with each other. Depending upon the length of the URL, you have about a half-kilobyte of bandwidth-- not much it seems, but more than enough for a URL, a title, and maybe some metadata. I'll hack up an example and post it to the technical blog sometime soon. Wheee! Current Mood: ecstaticCurrent Music: Stream of Passion, Now or Never |
elfs
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12:36p |
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| Sunday, January 3rd, 2010 |
elfs
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11:14p |
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elfs
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10:48p |
One Mission Among Several
A friend of mine recently posted the mission statement of his personal project. Here's one of mine. The name has been changed to prevent squatting: ( Behind the cut ) Current Mood: amused |
elfs
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9:22p |
Oh, I can't wait to hear Stephanie Miller tomorrow...
Stephanie Miller fans know that co-host and voice actor Jim Ward does some amazing impressions, most snarky (that's the theme of the entire show, natch), and one of the audience's favorites is Fox's pundit Brit Hume. I can't wait to hear what he does with this from Fox News Sunday: The extent to which he can recover seems to me depends on his faith. He is said to be a Buddhist. I don't think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith. So, my message to Tiger would be, 'Tiger, turn your faith-- turn to the Christian faith and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world.' As George Carlin once said, "Holeeeeeee shit!" Current Mood: giggly |
elfs
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7:54p |
Song inspired by tonight's D&D game
Toungue turned blue, Everybody has one, Tongue turned blue, This infection is a bad one. Me and you, will turn to goo, In just a little while The signs are there, I've lost my hair, We won't go in style... Current Mood: amused |
bldrnrpdx
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11:53a |
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elfs
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10:14a |
A view from inside a bubble...
It's fascinating watching the Christianist writers during this first week of the new year. My favorite so far, Renew America's Michael Bresciani's article in which he trots out the classic fantasies: nothing humanity could do could the end the Earth, because only God can do that, therefore global warming is a myth. Barak Obama is apparently a brilliant evil mastermind and a naive clueless idiot. But my favorite is still this: Cronies of Darwinism fare no better. If we look like monkeys we must have come from monkeys the millions of missing links notwithstanding. The Darwin scheme has seen its better day since the advent of creation science but why give it up? Muahahahahah. How's that research program coming? When was the last time an agricultural or pharmaceutical company used either Creation Science or "Intelligent Design" to treat cancer or cure obesity? Creation Science hasn't helped a single child overcome disease. And I won't hold my breath. Current Mood: amused |
elfs
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7:54a |
The State of the United States, In Two Graphics
Jobs:For the first time in 70 years, an entire decade went by without a significant increase in jobs growth: The Lost Decade of the Economy.The accompanying article includes these points: Middle-income households made less in 2008, when adjusted for inflation, than they did in 1999 -- and the number is sure to have declined further during a difficult 2009. The Aughts were the first decade of falling median incomes since figures were first compiled in the 1960s. And, The net worth of American households -- the value of their houses, retirement funds and other assets minus debts -- has also declined when adjusted for inflation, compared with sharp gains in every previous decade since data were initially collected in the 1950s. Health Care: From National Geographic, The cost of health care vs. life expectancy. Take a look at the United States. Despite spending nearly twice what the next most expensive country spends per person on health care, we get below-average results. The most impressive country is Japan (which must be a socialist hell-hole, right?), which spends a third of what the US spends, yet has the best life-expectancy in the world. Why can't we be as good to ourselves as the Japanese? One of the interesting pieces of information encoded in the graph is the number of doctors visits. Despite having the highest cost, The average US citizen sees a physician less than four times a year. In contrast, the average Japanese citizen, despite spending one-third what we do, sees a physician an average of once a month. Japan, South Korea, Mexico and Poland all seem to have figured out a health care system that delivers a similar dollar-for-value curve. Maybe we should figure out what they do, and follow their example. America's intellectual autarky is killing us. Current Mood: shrill |
| Saturday, January 2nd, 2010 |
elfs
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10:43p |
Otherwise...
The day has been okay. I feel bad because here it is, the second, and I haven't done anything other than babysit the encoder and spit out videos as fast as electronically possible. I've just been a schlub, entertained to death. Omaha and I blowed each other in Quake 4. [Edit: "Away. Blowed each other away."] We broke down the Christmas tree and took it back to Ikea. That was fun. Kouryou-chan helped take off all the ornaments, the Omaha and I walked it over to the back porch and heaved it over the side. The vacuuming was fun afterward. I feel like I cleaned the kitchen a half-dozen times. I've been reading this series called The Journal Entries. You know, that Elf guy could write. Whatever happened to him? Current Mood:  tiredCurrent Music: John Coulton, Ikea |
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