Into the Wormhole of Genetic Memory

Award-winning writer, journalist, and mullet whisperer Michael Rutschky redirected me to thoughts on genetic memory by way of his link to a post on The Schpat Dope, Is There Such a Thing as Genetic Memory? The following passage, in particular, got my mental gears grinding:

Their findings: rats that had been fed the livers and brains of rats that had been stressed learnt to avoid pain more quickly. This they found out was due to chemicals produced by the stressed rats, the higher the stress the higher the levels of these chemicals and the quicker the learning rate.

Does this qualify as proof that eating animals that died in fear passes that fear on to the eater? Does this mean that after countless generations of eating scared, stressed animals has led humanity to be more fearful and stressed? If so, why aren't meat eating wild animals like lions and tigers and bears (Oh my!) full of fear and stress? Are prey animals taken down in the wild less full of fear and stress than domestic livestock? Are lab rats rolled around in sealed jars more full of fear and stress than domestic livestock and free-roaming wildebeests? Are lab rats fed a diet of chopped up lab rats that were rolled around in sealed jars more likely to inherit the fear and stress of their tortured predecessors than humans fed a diet of chopped up chickens that were kept in wire cages? Are the stress and fear of tortured lab rats more "contagious" than, say, the stress and fear of a capybara killed by having its windpipe crushed by a jaguar?



And how could any of that be proved?

I believe that eating severely stressed animals is worse for you than eating animals that were happy right before we slit their throats or bashed their heads in or shot them with a Muzzy MX-3 100 Grain 3-Blade broadhead.

Romney Comments on Auto Bailout

Preach on, Brotha Mitt!

IF General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye. It won’t go overnight, but its demise will be virtually guaranteed.

Let Detroit Go Bankrupt

Bourbon, Usability, and Beer

If any of the 0 people that read this blog AND use Blogger are using Safari as their web browser, are you having problems cutting and pasting into the post editor? When I try to paste some copied text it appears on the same page as the editor but below it in a blank part of the page that you shouldn't be able to type on but you can when this pasting error occurs. It can't just be me. Maybe my computer's insane.

One of the many things that continues to bug me about my interaction with computers is the seeming inability of the application to get get out of the way of what I'm trying to do. For example, why am I seeing the address bar, links bar, close, minimize, maximize buttons, etc.? Or like when you're working in Word, you don't need to see any of that when you're just typing. Why don't the borders, pull-downs, and all that fade away when you don't need them? All that stuff wastes valuable screen real estate. A web browser should display the site and get out of the way. The desktop shouldn't ALWAYS show stuff that you don't care about at the time. There's probably a quarter of my screen taken up with crap I don't need most of the time. Why is it there?

micromachines

That's a grain of pollen and red blood cells sitting beside a nano-machine!

It's blowing my mind.

Micromachines

Not THESE Micro Machines!

I cleaned the keyboard!

The keys on this HP Pavilion laptop occasionally don't work, so I decided to clean the keyboard. That involved removing the keyboard, which wasn't difficult but it wasn't easy, either.

After some googling I found a service manual online and saw which screws had to come out. There was one on the back of each lid hinge. Once I removed them it was just a matter of popping off the plastic piece which has the speaker grill, one-touch buttons, and power button. And then there were four more screws to remove. Glad I got that set of mini-screwdrivers. When I finally freed up the keyboard I about tore the ribbon that connects it to the motherboard (or whatever it is the keyboard is connected to). So be gentle when you go to lift the keyboard from the computer. To loosen the ribbon I slid up a white plastic collar that holds it in place and the ribbon popped from on its own. Sweet. The keyboard was finally free of the rest of the computer!

I took some CleanSafe dust remover to it and blew the crap out of the keys...or at least a bunch of it, which appeared to be mostly cat hairs. Nice.

I put it all back together and here I am, testing the keyboard. It's performing better than it was before, but there are still some occasional hiccups. There are probably still some stray hairs in it, but I can live with its current performance. Maybe it was just a crappy keyboard to begin with.

election day unemployment rambling ruminations

In the midst of my current joblessness, I've been feeling a resurgence of rebelliousness. I'm being radicalized by unemployment. I can feel it happening. Of course I'm going to feel bad things towards a system that isn't currently working for me. It's the story of radicals around the world. Do you think most suicide bombers come from good economic situations?

It's a matter of national security for the US to strengthen its economy. Otherwise the likelihood of homegrown terrorism grows signficantly.

I'm suggesting that the preponderance of nontraditional work schedules is a threat to national security. Such schedules cause, continue, and exacerbate the disillusionment of workers. People with chaotic living patterns are drawn towards job with chaotic schedules ungrounded in reality. Nontraditional work schedules are bad for this country.

Everybody agrees that it's nice to have weekends and holidays off, but they're afraid to demand it. After a handful of years in the bar/restaurant industry I'm tired of working when everyone else is playing and relaxing. I got into that world because I wanted to be with people, but what it ends up doing is confining you to the shiftless, limited group of bar/restaurant people and college students and the unemployed. I mean, who else doesn't need to be up in the morning? On a Tuesday?

We've created a consumer world where we expect to be able to shop and buy things and get tech support every freakin second of the day, all week long, all year long...never stopping, never taking a break...always there.

What do we really need at all times? The cops, firefighters, EMTs, constantly aloft nuclear-armed bombers...all these things I acknowledge as needing to be at hand at all times. But is it really right to think it's OK for that cook to be grilling your steak at 10:30 PM when he should be home with his wife and kids? Is it his fault that he took the job? Or is your fault for creating the need?

Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex Works For Me

Every time a major new Ubuntu release is unleashed I download it and try it out. I've loaded Ubuntu onto an iBook G4, Toshiba Satellite, and most recently on an HP Pavilion. I would've left it on the Toshiba but I needed it to run XP and Office. The HP fell into my hands and I quickly loaded Ubuntu on it, but was frustrated but the difficulty of setting it up to use the Broadcom wireless chipset. I followed the instructions available all over the Web, but nothing seemed to work for me, and so I relegated it to the closet.

Intrepid Ibex led to the resurrection of the HP. I'd heard that Ubuntu was finally playing nice with Broadcom (or vice versa) and it's true. After installing Ubuntu 8.10 on the HP there was an icon at the top of the screen prompting me to download new drivers. I restarted the computer and the wireless card works! Finally!

I now unequivocally recommend Ubuntu to anyone looking for a free, open source alternative to Windows or Macintosh.

The Business of Zune Musings

Came across this at Beyond Binary:

Why did Microsoft get in the Zune business? Why is it an important business to be in?
Belfiore: We think the possibilities for creating value for people around how they are entertained...is incredibly important. The potential for doing great things for people is huge. It can affect a wide range of devices, from portable devices that you carry around to devices that are hooked up to your TV to devices that look like what you think of as your PC or laptop today. We aspire to really making people's lives better in the way they are entertained. Being able to create those connections between people and get them content on whatever kind of device it is, we think is important and compelling and worth doing.

Joe Belfiore is apparently the guy in charge of the Zune for Microsoft. Whatever. I just want to pick at his words a bit.

His first response to the question of "Why is MS in this business?" is the stupendously obvious "To make money." Duh. That's what "creating value" means.

Then he says they want to do "great things". Wow. Walkmen...er iPods...er Zunes or whatever are now on the same level as feeding the poor and providing clean water for everybody. Those are great things.

The next sentence he's saying that they can defeat Apple by spreading the Microsoft...er Zune music experience across a wider and more popular selection of devices...and reach more people...and make more money. The Zune mission encompasses MP3 players, TVs, and computers. What about Zune theaters?

They want to improve people's entertainment experience. I'm all for that. Tough to pick on that one.

They want to connect people by the music they listen to and movies they watch. OK. He reiterates that their efforst are not limited to the Zune device itself. It's like Zune is Microsoft's codename for Entertainment. "We will entertain the people in every facet of their life and we will commodify it and connect people via their interests to create more profitable ad networks and virtual parties and we will call it Zune." Or is that XBox?

I'm confused.

They think in images—prose is for them a code

My wanderings around the web which led me to this post, in reverse:

A contagious information pattern that replicates by parasitically infecting human minds and altering their behavior, causing them to propagate the pattern. An idea or information pattern is not a meme until it causes someone to replicate it, to repeat it to someone else. All transmitted knowledge is memetic.

Meme

The only ones who actually wish to share the mischievous destiny of those savage runaways or minor guerillas rather than dictate it, the only ones who can understand that cherishing & unleashing are the same act—these are mostly artists, anarchists, perverts, heretics, a band apart (as much from each other as from the world) or able to meet only as wild children might, locking gazes across a dinnertable while adults gibber from behind their masks.

WildChildren

"Rebellion to tyrants
is obedience to God."
—Thomas Jefferson

Deoxyribonucleic Hyperdimension

Which I got to by way of Directory > Society and Culture > Cultures and Groups > Cyberculture.

Does anyone still use Yahoo's directory search? Does anyone remember when that's basically what Yahoo looked like? Remember when it was just a college project?

Exploring Yahoo's directory provides more opportunities for random finds compared to the more common keyword searches. The directories offer you avenues of exploration you may not have thought of otherwise.

Chrome Your Windows

Yesterday I downloaded Google's new web browser, Chrome.  I went so far as to bring my old Windows laptop out of its bag in the closet, slog through the Service Pack 3 install, and a slew of other updates in order to test drive Chrome.  I've gone back and forth from Chrome to Internet Explorer (7) to Safari.  Chrome seems to be faster than IE.  The Safari comparison isn't fair because it's on my iBook G4 which has 4x as much RAM as my Windows computer, a Toshiba Satellite which I've had for like 6-7 years.  Also, I'm not familiar with Windows shortcut keys so I can't switch through different windows as quickly as I can on my Mac.  I like to work with multiple browser windows as opposed to multiple tabs.  I like the expose feature (or whatever it's called) on OS X which lets me view all my open windows at once.  Yeah, with XP, I can just look down at the taskbar and see what's open but it gets crowded quickly and isn't as easy for me to find what I'm looking for.

Anyhoo, this is supposed to be about Chrome.  Like I said, it appears to be faster than IE and so far every page I've looked at has come up looking good and proper.  I LOVE how Chrome allows you to pull tabs out into separate windows and put them back into one window by simply dragging and dropping.  That's cool.  I also like how it allows you to easily convert something like Blogger to a sort of standalone widget.  In Google's words:

Many websites, such as email services, operate like actual programs, similar to those on your computer desktop. Google Chrome supports these web applications by providing a special window designed specifically for web applications.

Microsoft might be annoyed by the emergence of a Google web browser but there's an upside: Chrome encouraged me to step away from my Apple for a bit and get reacquainted with my Windows-based machine.

another week, another storm

I'm happy to be attending Pensacola Junior College and I think I can get a good, worthwhile education there, but that school definitely has its moments of disorganization.  Last night was my first night of class for the fall semester.  My Monday class is called Electronics for Technology and for its grand beginning we learned that we don't yet have an instructor.  We didn't get a syllabus and, because of Labor Day, we won't be meeting again until September 8.  I wonder if we'll get a 2 week discount on the class.  Oh well.  I didn't really have money for the textbook yet, anyway.

There's a hurricane in the Caribbean.  Great.  Its name is Gustav and it's headed for Haiti, Dominican Republic, and Cuba.  Then it's supposed to move into the Gulf of Mexico.  Forecasters aren't sure what it's going to do from there but they are describing it as a major hurricane.  The Pensacola area just dodged Tropical Storm Fay.  Now we have to keep our eyes on Hurricane Gustav.  I hope it doesn't hit us but the problem with that line of thinking is that it means I indirectly hope the storm wreaks havoc and destruction on someone else.  It's going to do serious damage to someone, somewhere.  I just don't want it to be me.  I don't want it to hurt anyone, but if it comes down to you or me...  Keep track of Gustav and his incipient siblings at the National Hurricane Center.

Early mornings are no time for moral dilemmas.  Time to return to the comfort of Gizmodo and beyond.

survival of the luckiest

This is why you don't play around outside, especially with wind-driven devices, during tropical storms.  The story linked below is a story of stupidity and courage.  I wonder if the wind-thrashed man will end up making a bunch of money from it.

Wind Blows Kite Surfer Into Bldg.  

GI Joe Resolute

If this GI Joe cartoon ever gets made, myself and many others will be giddy and spend money on it.

GI Joe Resolute

Snake Eyes RULEZZZZZZ!!!

the nobility of vcr repair

I just finished up my "Intro to Computers in Technology" course.  The book we used was called Computers are Your Future.  Hell, they're already my present so that potentially ominous-sounding title strikes me as just plain silly...like something out of the 80s.  It was a good course, a nice return to the ridiculous halls of academia.

I'm currently debating between the various emphases.  The main areas I'm thinking about are consumer electronics and medical electronics.  It seems to make sense for a number of reasons to focus on medical equipment.  I know I don't want to focus on computers and/or networking equipment.  I don't want to be a computer repair guy, I know that much.  But beyond that I'm not sure yet.  I could end up repairing industrial equipment.  Who knows?  I think I'd rather do something at least somewhat noble, though...and that takes me back to medical equipment.  The decision doesn't have to be made yet, though.  Maybe "noble" means fixing your TV.  That'd be cool.

Big ups to Ben at Homebrew Junkie for his AWESOME new winemaking videos.

Verizon Wireless Buying Alltel for a Bazillion Dollars

By the end of the year, AT&T's reign as the largest wireless service provider in the United States will come to an end and Verizon will ascend to the throne: Verizon Wireless Agrees to Buy Alltel for $28.1 Billion.

here we go with Linux again

I'm putzing around while kinda, sorta doing a bunch of mundane and/or domestic tasks.

The dishwasher just gone done and waits to be emptied.  The clothes washer is at work on a load of pants and shorts.  The dryer is working on undergarments and shirts.  The HP Pavilion is restarting as I type this.  If all goes well, it'll restart running Kubuntu.  I've already tried it once and failed.  After the first restart following the first install, the computer got stuck right after loading the BIOS.  It'd stop with a black screen and in white text, "No Operating System Found".  I'd call that a serious problem.

It appears that all has gone well this time.  Now there remains one more big sticking point: getting the computer to recognize its wireless hardware.  It's ridiculous that it's even a hassle.  I believe it has something to do with open source vs proprietary software, but I'm not totally sure about it.  I do know that Broadcom is a major player in mobile and wireless hardware, so it's odd that its products aren't easily supported on one of the most popular Linux distrubtions.  Anyhoo...all I have to do is connect it to the router via ethernet cable and do a little command line wizardry and the wireless will be up and running.  I had to do the same thing when I loaded Ubuntu on my iBook G4 (which I don't recommend doing unless you're a masochist or really good with computers...or both).  If your computer has a Broadcom wireless card, you can find the solution to your Linux installation woes here: How to: Broadcom wireless cards.

UPDATE:  The instructions in the above link ended up not working.  I'm working on a solution.

Hezbollah in Nikes just do it

My morning news wanderings started with the obligatory spin through the Pensacola News Journal. The only article I bothered with there had this headline: Santa Rosa takes deed to part of Tiger Point road. Don't ask me why I even cared about that one. I guess it's because a government entity is gaining ownership of a piece of land and not paying for it. I'm not saying it's bad; that's just what hit me when I read the headline.

After checking out the local scene I went over the MSNBC to see what was shakin' nationwide and around the world. Right at the top, the featured story: Hezbollah gunmen seize large sections of Beirut. I can't say my initial interest had anything to do with concern for the people living in the city or the local/international political scene in the areas there. What caught my interest was the photo alongside the lead story.

Doesn't it look like that could've been a posed shot?  Look at the guy standing up in the middle, against the wall.  He's pretty buff isn't he?  And don't they all look clean?  The one guy's clearly wearing Nikes.  Go Nike.  Just do it.  Is Hezbollah sponsored by Nike?  I like how it says HOT on the building's walls.  I'm not saying this is a posed shot.  I'm just saying it looks like one.  Not all armed insurgents/revolutionaries are dirty, poor, hiding in caves.  It's a crazy world we live in.  The picture above says to me, "Welcome to 21st Century warfare."

I noticed the pic was from Reuters so I went over there to investigate further.  There, too, the Hezbollah story was top news, though not quite as prominently featured as it was on MSNBC.  The Reuters story, Hezbollah impose control on Beirut, is more thorough than MSNBC's.  That doesn't surprise me.  It's to be expected.  They have different audiences.  Of course the images caught my interest again and I clicked into the photo slideshow related to the story.  The crazy pic from above was in there.  The first one is really cool, too.

Another thing worth noting in the pictures from the conflict is how it shows that Beirut is a modern city with modern culture.  If it can happen there...

Engadget is a whiny baby

 Engadget recently distilled a NY Times article into a blog post, Microsoft and NBC working on copyright filters for Zune?  They go through the routine of how it's bullshit that companies are trying to protect their property, as if we have an inherent right to do whatever we want with whatever we want.  I'm mostly sympathetic to such views.  I believe in freedom, and that means I believe that people/companies have the freedom to protect their shit.  It's no more "wrong" for Microsoft to want their products to protect the rights of their clients than it is for me to want to be able to watch a movie, which I copied from you (illegally), on my media player.  Companies (and a lot of people) exist so they can make money.  Giving their products away for free or sitting idly by while people just take whatever they want doesn't make any sense.  There's not a lot of proof that illegal sharing (LOL...illegal sharing...thou shalt not share) is pilfering from the coffers of the corporations and it's impossible to totally lock down your stuff but that doesn't mean that companies are evil or foolish for wanting to try to lock down their property.  It's like not bothering to put locks on your doors because there are ninjas who can pick them.  Whatever.  I lock my doors.

And then Engadget goes on to bitch about Micro$oft and AT$T working on filtering copyrighted material at the ISP level.  I just don't get why people think that companies are evil for trying to prevent them from doing shit that's illegal.  Again, I'm not against file sharing.  I'm just against the belief that for-profit entities are wrong for attempting to maximize profit.  If you have a network that you built and paid for then you'd want to do what you want with it.  Is it so wrong for there to be forces patrolling the internet in the same way there are forces patrolling our highways trying to bust people for breaking the law?  Only the staunchest anarchist would argue that there is no good reason for the existence of police.  You don't have to be for such groups.  Do what you want to do and accept the fact that your behavior brings you enemies.  Repercussions make life fun, right?

a pin drops, mobile broadband users hear it clearly

Sprint Nextel and Clearwire are merging.

From a Sprint press release:

Sprint and Clearwire to Combine WiMAX Businesses, Creating a New Mobile Broadband Company

Intel, Google, Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks to Invest $3.2 Billion in Combined Company, at Target Price of $20.00 per Share

Formation of New Company Brings Together the Nation's Leaders in Communications, Technology Innovation and Entertainment

New Company to Speed Deployment of First Nationwide Next-Generation Mobile WiMAX Network

Transaction Designed to Unlock the Potential of Clearwire's and Sprint's 4G Assets

New Company to be Led by Seasoned Management Team from Clearwire and Sprint's XOHM Business Unit; Board of Directors to Include Leading Wireless and Cable Executives

Google's involved?  Cool.  That means the new company (which will be called Clearwire) will be easily accessible by the widest range of devices possible.  It'll make it easier to use the phone you want and it'll be easier for hardware and software developers to create cool new devices and applications.

Another partner in this deal that caught my eye is Bright House Networks.  Who the #@%* is Bright House?  I did a little googling and was surprised to learn that Bright House sells cable, phone, and internet service as nearby as Cantonment and Defuniak Springs.  Who knew?

Will next year's NASCAR season be dubbed the Clearwire Cup Series?

Robot Apocalypse

Engadget recently brought to mine eyes the following disturbing/inspiring video of remote control robot laser battle madness:

What are those robots?  At least some of them are Kondo KHR Series robots.  You can have one for the low, low price of $1445 plus shipping from Sozbots.  It's cool that we have such toys but it's disturbing because that video is a glimpse of the future of warfare.

If you're not concerned, you need to see this video from the future:

In The Know: Are We Giving The Robots That Run Our Society Too Much Power?

Don't panic.

The Internet Today

Today on the Internet I met a young man named Bryan Bishop.  I didn't meet him in the conventional sense.  I first met him on Slashdot when he posted this question, What is the first day in a University Lab Like?  Again, I didn't meet him as in, "Hi, I'm Mitchell.  Nice to meet you."  "Hi, I'm Bryan.  Nice to meet you."  I met him in an Internet sort of way.  His words gave me a bit of an introduction to him.  Intrigued, I clicked his name and wound up on his homepage.  What an interesting fellow.  It's amazing to see someone who's done so much and has so many interesting ideas.  I clicked around on some of his links and followed some threads here and there and generally spent a whole bunch of time reading somewhat random stuff of interest to a high school senior in Texas.  I found some really cool sites, my current favorite being KurzweilAI.net.  If nothing else, check out their trippy search function, The Brain.  Thanks to Bryan for being a cool guy who puts worthwhile things on the Internet.  I wouldn't know the guy if I tripped over him but I feel like I kinda know him a little bit now.

In other thrilling Internet goings-on spotlighted by Slashdot, there's an article at Yahoo! about the ongoing existence of the top level domain for the Soviet Union, Back in the USSR: Soviet internet domain name resists death.  Maybe the old American Confederacy could get its own TLD.  Or the Republic of Texas.  That'd be cool.

the sound of the celestial realm

Early this morning, the Colorado Rockies defeated the San Diego Padres 2 to 1 after 22 innings of play. 22 INNINGS!!! It took them over 6 hours to finish the game.

Wait a minute.

So is it a big deal because the game ran so late, 1:21 AM? Or is it a big deal because they played for over 6 hours? Both?

I'm on my feet and moving around for more than 6 hours on a regular basis. And I've been on my feet and moving around for longer than that and past 4 AM a whole bunch of times. Aren't these guys professional athletes? I guess most of them couldn't hang in the bar and restaurant industry.

Yeah, the story's good in the confines of Major League Baseball news but it's not much in the way of human performance. There is some excellent stuff here, though:

"This was a good game to get outside yourself," Hurdle said. "About the 16th inning, I said, 'Hey boys, no matter what's in front of us, there's a world of people out there who've got harder rows to hoe than we do. No matter what happens the rest of the night, have some fun with this thing.' "

Now that's something I can respect. Even if it's just a game it's still a real battle that you really want to win. Go through some tough times with a bunch of other people and you'll be bonded to them. That's something that interests me. The men on those baseball teams went through something intense and real that night, and probably some unreal stuff, too. Imagine slugging it out under all those lights in front of all those people. I bet all those guys slept well after that.

Maybe the game was a testament to man's ability to stave off boredom.

Anahata (Sanskrit: अनाहत, Anāhata) is the fourth primary chakra according to the Hindu Yogic and Tantric (Shakta) traditions.
In Sanskrit the word anahata - means unhurt, un-struck and unbeaten. Anahata Nad refers to the Vedic concept of unstruck sound, the sound of the celestial realm. [Anahata]

Verizon connects man with dead wife

If I didn't know better I'd have thought this was from one of William Gibson's novels:

When Verizon upgraded Charles Whiting's telephone service, his wife's voice, saying, "Catherine Whiting," disappeared from his voicemail system.



She had died in 2005 and Whiting said he listened to her voice every day for comfort. He blamed Verizon for the loss, saying, "Now they took her voice away."

There's a whole novel waiting to be written based on that little story, Lost Voicemail of Man's Dead Wife Restored by Phone Company. It really is touching, and not just touching in a sci-fi and cyberpunk sort of way. That man took joy and happiness from being able to hear is dead wife's voice. Verizon accidentally took it away and they oh so nobly returned it...almost like bringing his wife back from the dead. Verizon says, "We have your dead wife on our computers. Would you like to talk to her?"

In other real-life cyberpunk tales, Wired's Threat Level blog has this cautionary tale, Industrial Control Systems Killed Once and Will Again, Experts Warn.

On June 10th, 1999 a 16-inch diameter steel pipeline operated by the now-defunct Olympic Pipeline Co. ruptured near Bellingham, Washington, flooding two local creeks with 237,000 gallons of gasoline. The gas ignited into a mile-and-a-half river of fire that claimed the lives of two 10-year-old boys and an 18-year-old man, and injured eight others.



Wednesday, computer-security experts who recently re-examined the Bellingham incident called its victims the first verified human causalities of a control-system computer incident.

Computers killed people!?

But the factor that intrigues Weiss and fellow researcher Marshall Abrams, a scientist at MITRE, is a still largely unexplained computer failure that began less than 30 minutes before the accident and paralyzed the central control room operating the pipeline, preventing workers from releasing pressure in the line before it hemorrhaged.

An unexplained computer failure? Malicious and/or stupid hackers could've done that. Perhaps hackers backed by a rival company. Perhaps hackers backed by a rival country. Perhaps they were both. Perhaps there's no difference. I'm just sayin'...

From serving to soldering...

Recently I registered for my first class at Pensacola Junior College in my quest to get an Associate in Applied Science degree in Electronics Engineering Technology. Talk about a career change: switching from being a restaurant/bar work to an electronics technician. Given my epicly bad academic history, it'll be interesting to see how this particular academic adventure goes. I think it'll be a good one.

The class I've registered for is called Introduction to Computers in Technology.

A first computer course, geared to providing technology students with a working knowledge of computer hardware and software related to their vocation. This course focuses on five concepts; basic keyboarding, word processing, computer hardware, operating systems, and basic computer maintenance.

I just hope the class is up to date because farther down in the description it says the student will learn to operate Windows 3.1. Windows 3.1!? That's what I had on my computer when I graduated from high school 14 years ago.

From the world of food and drinks to computers and circuit boards. Woohoo!!!

Priests of Vulcan say, US has bad breath

Yahoo! recently posted an article about CO2 emissions in the US, Where Global Warming Begins. The following, insanely interesting video is embedded in the article. Created by the Vulcan Project at Purdue University, the animations in the video bring to life the climate-altering mechanical breath of a nation.

For my Gulf Coast readers, check out how much CO2 emissions are coming from around our seemingly pristine beaches. Looks to me like the air and water of the Gulf of Mexico are an international dumping ground. Also notice that the graphic in the Yahoo! article show that the rapidly growing Southeast is increasing its CO2 output as the Northeast decreases. Great. Here in Pensacola we're right in the path of the growing plumes of pollutants coming from Southeast Texas, New Orleans, and Mobile. And it appears we're creating plenty ourselves.

Wouldn't it be nice if our region could grow responsibly, in a sustainable manner?

Oh, that's right...growth, as we know it, is unsustainable.

Is collapse inevitable?

Will we change our ways and be better citizens of Planet Earth? Videos like the one from the Vulcan Project go a long way towards educating people on the consequences of our technologies and reminding us that we are part of a global community.

Pensacola to Secede from Florida

BREAKING NEWS

Pensacola's leaders have voted to become part of Alabama.

Pensacola, AL?

More later.

On anarchism...

It seems that people are surprised and skeptical when they see the tattoo on my arm with the anarchy sign as part of the design. It seems most people think anarchism is stupid, an impossible dream, violent, ignorant of human nature, etc. I disagree.

Here's the definition in Infoshop.org's An Anarchist FAQ:

Anarchism is a political theory which aims to create anarchy, "the absence of a master, of a sovereign." [P-J Proudhon, What is Property , p. 264] In other words, anarchism is a political theory which aims to create a society within which individuals freely co-operate together as equals. As such anarchism opposes all forms of hierarchical control - be that control by the state or a capitalist - as harmful to the individual and their individuality as well as unnecessary.

This is how I'd define anarchism: I'm not required to obey you. It ties in with the other symbol within my tattoo, the Star of David. The only thing I have to listen to is God. My anarchism is very much shaped by my Judaism. I believe that Jews are called by God to never bow to the state or anything other than God.

We need to remind ourselves that the System as we know it is not carved in stone. We all agreed to it. We can dismantle it. We can do whatever we want. We are fully grown homo sapiens. We have been given the powers of thought and speech and movement and a great will. Are you a follower or a leader? Do you take possession of your personal sovereignty? Or are you a Slave to the Machine You Built?

...slave to the machine, he types disdainfully on his computer. On his computer...

Keep em teetering on the EDGE

GigaOm is reporting that EDGE networks will soon be sped up via a software update, Coming Soon, Even Faster EDGE Networks.

In case you don't know, EDGE, which stands for Enhanced Data rates for GSM Evolution, is adigital mobile phone technology that allows increased data transmission rates and improved data transmission reliability.[EDGE - Wikipedia] It's employed by AT&T and T-Mobile.

I'm an AT&T Wireless customer with an EDGE compatible phone so I think it's wonderful that they're upgrading even though I'm not sure that my phone would be able to take advantage of it. What I'm wondering is this, though: if a software upgrade can increase bandwidth, are they intentionally holding out on us so they can string us along and get more money out of us as we pay to upgrade each time or are they just now figuring out the code that'll take better advantage of their hardware?

collateral damage of capitalism

Yesterday, Engadget posted a letter from a disgruntled employee of a failing department in a huge technology company (Motorola) to its executive board: Motorola insider tells all about the fall of a technology icon.

I dunno...call me cold but I think the author of the letter is just a whiney crybaby who's mad because he's too weak to make his dreams into reality. It's not that his points aren't valid, it's just that they don't matter. Does he really think Motorola's board of directors cares what he thinks? Maybe a few do, but I can't help thinking that for the men (the board has 1 woman) being addressed in the letter, Motorola Inc is nothing more than a machine to make them money. Everything is secondary to HOW MUCH MONEY ARE WE MAKING? So the company's going down because the CEO would rather play golf? Who fucking cares? Right after the Primary Question comes their next one: HOW MUCH MONEY DO I HAVE? I have $100,000,000 will continue to rake in millions even if I lose my job, sink a company, and lay off thousands of workers. Fuck it. I'm a rich CEO who has worked really hard to do what I want to do with my life. It's not my fault you got ground up in the gears of one of my money-making machines. Collateral damage of capitalism. You bought into the system with all that you had. It's sweet that you grew so attached to a material object whose destiny you had no real control over. It's sweet that you wanted the whole world to walk around with a mobile digital communicator which you helped shape and design. Go do it. Quit whining to us and praying to Motorola the deity.

I can relate to all parties in this little capitalist soap opera. I feel the pain of the disgruntled employee, but I can't help thinking that it should be plainly obvious to him that he's a mere tool, little more than a slave. It's pathetic. He's practically groveling.

If you're an employee (as opposed to boss/owner) then your own concerns for the business (if you even have any) are hardly of any concern to those above you AS LONG AS YOU COME TO WORK AND DO YOUR JOB like the good little slave you are. Yes, there are enlightened bosses out there, but not many. The vast majority do not care about you when it comes down to it. You're just a small piece in the money game.

Engadget does well in referring to Motorola as an energy icon. Motorola is more than just a company, it's an idea...an idea which the author of the letter grew entirely too attached to.

I am the Lord thy God, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.

In other words, If you don't want to be a slave, do what God is about to say. (Which, of course, is utterly ironic yet totally true.)

Thou shalt have no other gods before Me. Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image, nor any manner of likeness, of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; thou shalt not bow down unto them, nor serve them...

A man bases his efforts and ideas on other men who do not care about him and gets mad when it all comes crashing down on him. He made an easily avoidable common mistake: he bowed to an idol and got burned for it. It's a story as old as humanity.

Here's to Us

Whoever knows how many minutes ago my phone lit up and played Blind Melon's No Rain, one of my favorite songs and the ringtone assigned to my lovely ladyfriend, the love of my life. She hesitantly inquired if I would deliver a drink to her, as she'd forgotten one. My first reaction was total panic. I was truly freaked out at first. All the trauma of 12+ years of public schooling poured over me like an avalanche of upside-down port-a-potties. Rage. Hate. I didn't want to go anywhere near that school.

Then I thought of my girlfriend, the greatest girl of my life. Almost as fast as the disarray swept over me it was gone and ordered was restored. The object of my affections is drinkless. I must save the day. It is my duty. I love her.

And the Hellfire scene subsided and was replaced by beauty, reason, truth, and love...nebulous, but altogether good, sensations of inner warmth and clarity...a mission.

The sky is that glorious shade of blue that keeps me stuck right here in Pensacola FL, happily. I love that stuff, this air, these breezes, the light, the warmth...

Here's to the lovers out there, and here's to Us.

Accept Fear but Do Not Submit

This is good stuff. It's a clip from G4TV about the Great Firewall of China. Xeni Jardin is a real-life cyberpunk chick. I found this video by way of BoingBoing, which Xeni coedits. The story fascinates me because it encompasses both technology and revolt. I support any person's or people's drive to greater self-determination. I really cannot comprehend what makes Person A want to kill Person B for not wanting to be subjected to Person A. Fuck that shit. Why don't more people see how messed up that is? Why do we allow our governments to behave this way? Fear? What else could it be?

I'm reminded of V for Vendetta.

God bless alliteration!

I am not wholly sympathetic with the Tibetan cause. I can't help seeing shadowy figures from the US government skulking in the background. I'm not a fan of theocracies, even a Buddhist one. And I can't trust what I see:

Question everything. Do not blindly accept what They tell you.

Open Your Wallet to Open Computing

It's nice to get up early.  I recommend it.  There's something right about it.

Gizmodo informed me that computer manufacturer Acer may start producing an open platform gaming console.  I imagine it's basically going to be a gaming oriented linux based desktop computer.  Good idea.  I hope Acer succeeds.  By the way, the computer above is not the one referenced in the article.  The one above is the bitchin' Acer Aspire Gemstone Blue.  What is up with that stuff beside on the left side of the keyboard?  I think it might be an alien device.

In other "open" news, Verizon is, and this is almost impossible to imagine in today's business landscape, studying ways to improve peer to peer traffic!  Verizon has once again shown that it wants to do business the way an increasing number of consumers who want to use technology the way they want to use it and are simply looking for the fastest, cheapest service provider.  While companies like Cox and Comcast are throttling users who are heavy bandwidth consumers, Verizon is looking to improve such users' experiences.  Coupled with last year's announcement that they would open up their mobile service to "any app, any device", Verizon is showing itself to be a worthwhile, progressive business.

Speaking of open phones, check out this video Google's open phone software, Android.

Apoptosis: Pulse of Life

Life's many layers blow my mind.

The interweaving of seemingly disparate wormholes and mindthreads from across the blanket of reality and even from beyond the fabric itself, seeing how it all connects...beginning to see how it all connects, sometimes visibly and sometimes you can just feel it.

Life and death. Good and evil. How beautiful is the above entity? Is it odd that we instinctively know we're looking at a manifestation of life? That's prostate cancer, my friends. Real bad shit. [snicker] Odd how something so deadly can be beautiful. Guess it isn't, though. A great many beautiful things will kill you. Death itself is a thing of beauty. Death is a polytentacled energy vector. Death is simply energy transfer and movement on the atomic level.

Mitochondriate eukaryotic cells live poised between life and death, because mitochondria still retain their repertoire of molecules which can trigger cell suicide.[16] This process has now been evolved to happen only when programmed. Given certain signals to cells (such as feedback from neighbors, stress or DNA-damage), mitochondria release caspase activators which trigger the cell-death inducing biochemical cascade. As such, the cell-suicide mechanism is now crucial to all of our lives.

Cell-suicide mechanism? That'd be a good band name. Biochemical Cascade. Bad-ass.

Programmed cell death. Some cells are designed to die in specified situations. Their deaths benefit us.

Beautiful. We live and we die every day in a million different ways, the pulse of life.

Curt Schilling Pitches Perfect MMORPG

With Major League Baseball in spring training and pre-season, media of all kinds are rife with baseball news. Here's some from beyond the base path.

VentureBeat has a couple great articles today about Curt Schilling's video game company, 38 Studios, and its upcoming massively multiplayer online role-playing game, codenamed Copernicus.

From baseball to an online fantasy gaming world: Q&A with Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling of 38 Studios

Cryptic words about Curt Schilling’s Copernicus

I'm not a videogamer, but I'm excited by the idea of a game based on visuals by Todd McFarlane and storytelling by R.A. Salvatore. Lead by the drive and focus of one of the best pitchers of all time, a CEO plucked from Electronic Arts, and two of today's great creative minds, tales of the development of 38 Studios' Copernicus will be a part of tech/videogame blogosphere for years to come.

Donkey of the Week

This week's Donkey of the Week:

Yes, it was the first donkey picture I saw when I searched for donkey on Photobucket. So what? I think it's an excellent donkey picture with which to start my Donkey of the Week project.

Donkeys are funny.

Doomsday Seed Vault a Cocaine Warehouse?

It seems that there is often troubling news mixed into otherwise promising stories. For example, I just read Biodiversity 'doomsday vault' comes to life in Arctic. It's nice to know that some of our planet's biodiversity is being backed up like we back up our harddrives. It's always good to have a back-up copy, right? I'm not troubled much by the thought that we might actually need such a vault. As a child of the Cold War, I came to terms with mass catastrophe, apocalypse, armageddon, and all that years ago. As someone who lives along the hurricane-prone Gulf of Mexico, I know first-hand what regional devastation looks and feels like.

What troubled me in this article was this paragraph:

Many of the more vulnerable seed banks have begun contributing to the "doomsday vault" collection, but some of the world's biodiversity has already disappeared, with gene vaults in both Iraq and Afghanistan destroyed by war and a seed bank in the Philippines annihilated by a typhoon.

How odd that there were gene vaults in Iraq and Afghanistan, two major places of violent American meddling. I wonder how many countries have gene vaults.

Another troubling bit of info in the article:

...samples sent from Colombia have been closely scrutinised by police to avoid the project becoming a vehicle for drug trafficking.

WTF!? I hope to God that petty moralities aren't interfering in an important scientific/historical endeavor. We're talking about the future of life on this planet and some jackasses are worried that the vault's going to become a cocaine distribution warehouse? Seriously?

There are a lot of powerful people on this planet who need to grow up.

Support Wikileaks

A post at Slashdot tipped me off to this awesome article from The Guardian, Whistle while you work.

A secretive Swiss bank landed an apparently novel censorship blow against the internet this week. Anyone who tried to call up wikileaks.org, a global website devoted to publicising leaked documents, found themselves frustrated. The site simply wasn't there any more.

You don't think the US censors the internet? Think again. We're on lockdown every bit as much as supposedly repressive countries like China and Iran.

Since wikileaks.org doesn't work in the US at this time, The Guardian was kind enough to provide us with the IP number of the site so you can bypass the hamstrung nameservers, Wikileaks. The concept behind Wikileaks gives me shivers in a good way...

an open-source, democratic intelligence agency

DiCaprio to produce live-action Akira

E! Online has reported that Leonardo DiCaprio's Appian Way Productions will be producing a live-action version of the popular Japanese animated movie Akira. It's due to be released sometime in 2009.

Google Becoming the World's Computer

Oh what a wonderful web article I've found, Google and the Wisdom of Clouds.

What is Google's cloud? It's a network made of hundreds of thousands, or by some estimates 1 million, cheap servers, each not much more powerful than the PCs we have in our homes. It stores staggering amounts of data, including numerous copies of the World Wide Web. This makes search faster, helping ferret out answers to billions of queries in a fraction of a second. Unlike many traditional supercomputers, Google's system never ages. When its individual pieces die, usually after about three years, engineers pluck them out and replace them with new, faster boxes. This means the cloud regenerates as it grows, almost like a living thing.

The Machine Is Coming To Life!!!

It gets even better!

In the process Google could become, in a sense, the world's primary computer.

See, more and more people and companies and any other number of legal fictions are turning to Google to process the brunt of their data. Whether you're simply a Gmail user or the administrator of a large university's network who turns to Google for help crunching numbers for the Physics Dept's mad nuclear experiments, you're entrusting important digital data on computer(s) other than your own. People trust Google. So do companies. So do universities. Kinda scary, doncha think? Kinda awe-inspiring, too...IMHO.

I could quote all sorts of lines from that BusinessWeek Google article. The article is cyberpunk-come-true.

We All Love Snuppy

I see articles such as the following as signs that cyberpunk is upon us.

A South Korean company says it has taken its first order for the cloning of a pet dog.

Craziness...

Speaking of cyberpunk, peep this:

Sarah Lipman, co-founder and R&D director for Power2B, suggested an almost mystical solution, somehow tapping into users' "neural networks" to navigate a mobile phone interface "using touch and pre-touch input."

And how trippy is this:

The dilemma, left unsolved by the panelists, was how to squeeze the user through that window, past the cashier, to sample all the things in the store, without guilt, while still feeling grateful to the cashier who seemed, all along, to be standing in the way.

All this cyberpunk and psychonautical literature from an article about a panel of human behavior and technology experts at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, which I think has a stupid and misleading headline.

Speaking of psychonauts, take a gander at this firsttime salvia user's experience: The World as a Pop-up book.

The rippling turned into an intense electric rolling, i began to sweat profusely and the world changed fast. Apparently I held my hands out in front of me for a while, like I was trying to tilt reality. I don’t know when it happened, but I realized this unbelievable truth. I finally learned that the world, existence, all of it doesn’t actually exist…its all a big joke, a conspiracy against me, and my friends were in on it.

Going back to the cloning thing. You know what makes that whole article hilarious? It's got this fairly scientific or serious tone and then near its final lines we find:

But the team did succeed in creating the world's first cloned dog two years ago - an Afghan hound named Snuppy.

YouTube's Bubbly Video Discovery Device

Genocide ringtone? That was one of the AdSense ads which appeared last time I looked at my blog. For all I know it'll be there when you view this. Anyway, that cracks me up bigtime. It just seems so shameless and almost offensive. How'd it get there? Well, there are/were a bunch of Darfur-related ads popping up because of my Sudan reference:

Iraq gettin to be old news? Afghanistan and Pakistan are played out? Iran's repetitive? North Korea not all that interesting? Want to branch out from the only African country you care about, Sudan? How about Chad as your next Big Cause?

As you can see, mention Sudan and AdSense will serve up an ad for Genocide Ringtones. Amazing.

My original intent when creating this post was to share this awesome video of Mad Season playing November Hotel:

As I was sitting here soaking in the greatness of their performance, I decided to expand the video to a full screen. Then I could soak it in even more. While floating on the waves of the glorious music and watching the musicians as if they were angels come to transport me to a holy place, I noticed a button along the bottom-left of the screen.

I clicked it.

The music stopped and the video-still shrunk to a little bubble in the center of a black screen. When I hovered the mouse over the bubble, a window popped up giving the title and band. OK. Then a bubble appeared above it. I couldn't quite tell who was in it so I hovered over it and found that it was a link to a video for Kiss's Detroit Rock City. As I hovered over it, a bazillion more bubbles popped up linking to other videos.

It's an interesting interface and discovery device. I'd never seen it before. Anyone know more about YouTube's bubbly video discovery device?

Verizon courts privacy advocates

I'm a customer of AT&T and while I can't really complain about my personal experience with them, I can't really say much that's positive, either. AT&T has participated in some customer surveillance shenanigans, though, and they seem to be willing to be compliant with government efforts to snoop on people.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed legal briefs and evidence against AT&T, claiming they are diverting Internet traffic to the NSA for widespread secret surveillance and possibly breaking federal wiretapping laws and the Fourth Amendment. [SecurityFocus]

It's not just AT&T, though. It seems that most companies involved with data flow are looking at ways to snoop on their customer's activities. Well, Thomas J. Tauke, executive vice president for public affairs at Verizon, is breathing some refreshing ideas into the discussion:

“We generally are reluctant to get into the business of examining content that flows across our networks and taking some action as a result of that content,” he said.

Amen, brother!

Preach on!

“We don’t want to solve any network congestion issues by restricting the flow of certain kinds of traffic,” he said.

Read the complete article from the New York Times: Verizon Rejects Hollywood’s Call to Aid Piracy Fight. [by way of Gizmodo]

something to keep an eye on

Iraq gettin to be old news? Afghanistan and Pakistan are played out? Iran's repetitive? North Korea not all that interesting? Want to branch out from the only African country you care about, Sudan? How about Chad as your next Big Cause?

Set yer eyes on this article: France in warning to Chad rebels.

If that was interesting, Reuters has a more in-depth article: France backs Chad's Deby, ready to intervene.

We could go into Chad's colonial history but we're students of the hear-and-now. France is militarily backing a government in a foreign country against local armed rebels. Idriss Deby received military training in France. He came to power by coup.

So Chad's being torn up in violence between locals and Europeans/European-backed locals. Why would a bunch of rich white guys care so much about some random African country named after a guy I went to school with?

Chad is rich in gold and uranium and stands to benefit from its recently-acquired status as an oil-exporting state. [...]

Who stands to benefit? That's the question.

FAIL!

This is one of those blogs that falls into the I wish I would've thought of that category. Enjoy a little humor on your Wednesday:

The FAIL Blog

My Economic Illiteracy Makes Me Shudder

Look at this graph please:

[New York Times]

Ever since I watched Zeitgeist I've been giving more thought to economics, especially on the international level. I know next to nothing about international finance, macroeconomics, currency markets, etc. and these subjects are beginning to be critically important to my life. Decisions rich fuckers are making in Davos are beginning to mess with important aspects of my life, such as how much it costs me to provide the sort of material comfort I'm accustomed to. Those guys are fucking with my LIFE! If my bread starts costing me more because massive corporations are purchasing all the grains to convert into biofuels in order to power the factories converting grains into biofuels in order to stay competitive in the international grain market and your low emission vehicle eats the corn I was going to have for dinner or give to my cow...

Doesn't anyone ask themself, where did all the money come from that was funding all that subprime lending? How come seemingly out of nowhere were banks willing to loan almost any idiot a whole bunch of money? Any thoughtful person would tell you that there are a lot of people out there who really ought not to be loaned $100,000. It's ludicrous. It's like these loans were backed by people who gave way too much credit (PUN INTENDED) to the American public because they don't know the American people, they're not from here, i.e. the Chinese Central Bank.

Anyhoo...back to my original point, that set of graph charts. Notice how the stocks fluctuated but are basically back at zero? They're worth the same amount they were but in comparison to everything else, they're worth less. In other words, it's like there's a group of guys who own all the corn and they're accustomed to trading it for stakes in American corporations. In recent years they're offering less corn for shares of our companies. They'd rather keep their corn or trade it with someone who offers a better deal. That's just basic business right there. Any fool can see that...unless they're being fooled by their government which keeps them in the dark about the real worth of their money by keeping the consumer in an enclosed bubble maintained by bizarre monetary policy and a largely compliant media industry. The things the US accuses China of doing, the US does, too. That's how America operates. Keep pointing the finger and maybe nobody will think to look at themselves.

The Machine Is Aware of Us

This makes me shudder in a good way...like the chills I get sometimes when I pee:

Ambient Intelligence is a key component for future beyond 3G mobile and wireless communication systems. However, the enabling technology that provides systems with information to allow for Ambient Intelligence has been neglected and currently consists of many independent modes of input, mainly relying on active user interactions or specialised sensor systems gathering information. e-SENSE proposes a context capturing framework that enables the convergence of many input modalities, mainly focusing on energy efficient wireless sensor networks that are multi-sensory in their composition, heterogeneous in their networking, either mobile or integrated in the environment e.g. from single sensors to thousands or millions of sensors collecting information about the environment, a person or an object. This framework will be able to supply ambient intelligent systems with information in a transparent way hiding underlying technologies thus enabling simple integration.

e-SENSE VISION – e-SENSE enables capturing of Ambient Intelligence for Beyond 3G Mobile Communication Systems through Wireless Sensor Networks.

How'd I get there? From this blog: Capturing ambient intelligence. I don't think the blog's writer really added anything to the general discussion, nor did he achieve his stated goal of explaining How tech trends affect our lives. He just conveyed a vague sense of paranoia.

How'd I get there? By way of Capturing ambient intelligence which also doesn't seem to add anything to the general discussion. It's just another headsup. I got to that article by way of Smart Mobs. Makes sense.

Will the technological environment we're creating come to resemble the spiritual environment our ancestors created? A world where everything is aware of us? Where the Eye of God is upon us at all times...

the computer knows who I am

This is what trips me out about the whole internet experience, experiences like the one I just had.  I was going through my semi regular regimen of reading various rss feeds when I came across this article on Wired: Two AI Pioneers. Two Bizarre Suicides. What Really Happened?

What's interesting is the not only the content of the article, which is excellently written, but also the form of the article.  Look at the way it uses links and what I'll call insets, those windows within the browser window, which are in fact mini browser windows.  Weird.  I know I'm in the Googleverse when I just happen to be on an article on Wired and when I look at the insets it has for quoted Google based sites I see a "Hi, ________".  That inset knows who I am!

I read an article about artificial intelligence.  My computer and the internet know who I am.

Will Christensen act as poorly in Neuromancer as he did in Star Wars?

I have a Google Alert set for the word cyberpunk. The latest buzz is swarming around JoBlo's report that Hayden Christensen is set to star as the character Case in the film adaptation of Neuromancer.

It's interesting to me the way such news proliferates and spreads. Alerts have been coming in for about a week now on the rumor which still appears to have just one source, JoBlo. I imagine that most people wouldn't come across such news via Google Alerts, so I looked at all the links I've been provided to the story and G4's The Feed is probably the most likely source for most people. But they're not a primary source, and they don't claim to be. They link their story to a Dark Horizons report. And where did Dark Horizons get their info? JoBlo, of course.

So where did JoBlo get its information? JoBlo.com sources, of course!

Screwy/nutty wedding bands

Not that marriage is on my mind much...but I came across these lovely rings by way of NOTCOT.org:

Kiley Granberg

I thought she actually liked me!

What a wild and wacky planet we live on.

But if you yourself are starting to worry that you are a prostitute , help is at hand from the kindly bouncers at Zapatas- Shanghai’s premier place to hear the Grease mega-mix 6 times a week.

Are you a prostitute? In my handful of years in the bar/restaurant industry, I can't say I've ever had to boot someone for being a prostitute or heard of someone prostituting who didn't know that's what they were doing...unless you count those chicks who go after the solitary older guy sitting at the bar who looks wealthy...

Reuters is Racist

As of 1:36 AM in Pensacola FL, Reuters has this on their front page:

Barack Obama's bid to be America's first black president is under fire from Democrats and Republicans alike before political debates on Saturday to help voters pick who to vote for in New Hampshire's primary.

That's on the front page. Maybe no one else sees anything weird about that, but what I see is a news organization inflicting a certain perspective on what they're covering. Isn't Obama running for President? I didn't know he was running for Black President. WTF?