And so it begins.
In case anyone missed this yesterday (it was evening for me), you can download the audio here.
President Obama’s Inaugural Address
It was a good speech. I, for one, am glad to have a President again who can string words together in a meaningful way. Enjoy.
It always comes in the most unlikely packages.
WARNING:This blog post acknowledges the existence of pornography, free-speech and, well, sex between people older than 25.
This morning, I read this article about Larry Flynt’s appeal to the U.S. Congress for a bailout of the porn industry. At first, I laughed. Then, on further consideration, I decided that this was more than a prank.
Larry Flint—while maybe not the most savory of characters in the minds of most—is always ready to bring us down a peg in our conceit as a nation. Some would call him a smut-peddling, degenerate lowlife. I would refer to him as the 20th century’s champion of free-speech. Some might say that he corrupts the minds of American children. I would say that anyone who thinks that American kids aren’t going to find their way to porn one way or another is an idiot.
Besides, Americans are prudes, right? Puritannical on the outside, and all sublimated rage, lust and envy on the inside. We must keep up appearances, just don’t look between the mattresses, on the top shelf of the closet, or in the nightstand.
Honestly, if Americans were a bit more open about sex, people would probably have lower blood pressure, or at least be a little less cranky.
I was in Germany for Christmas—more to come on that topic as well—and stayed with a friend’s family. We were in a guest room which apparently was also used as a laundry sorting/ironing facility because it contained an ironing-board adorned by a rather large picture of a nude male model. The matron of the family just laughed and said that her daughter had gotten it for her years ago. Apparently, he used to have underwear on that disappeared as you ironed.
There was no embarrassed silence, no blushing, and the ironing board did not suddenly disappear. It was just not a big deal, because sex is just a thing, and nudity is nudity. Shrug.
In a typical American household, this scene would have ended in blushing embarrassment and the swift removal of such an object. Not to mention that if child services ever got hold of this information…
Why are we such prudes in the States?
Well, for one, we are unrealistic. Ask any of your American friends if they think that their parents have a healthy sex life. Do it, right now. Whoever is around. They don’t even have to be a friend.
If you can even bring yourself to ask that, it probably means that you weren’t just crippled by mental cinema of our parents having sex, and that makes you different. If you got an answer other than groans of disgust, nausea, or a slap in the face, then you were probably not talking to an American born between 1975 and the present. In my anecdotal experience, the Americans of my generation typically never conceive of their parents as sexual beings. Never. To do so brings on the aforementioned nausea, mental images, and so forth.
But you know what? Your parents did have sex. Probably lots of it. That’s why you are here. That’s how it works. Grow up.
If we were a little more realistic about sex, we might tend to be more realistic about other things as well. Sex is one of those things that we can’t talk about, right? What does this silence breed? Well, ignorance, for one. Then there is repression, and its inevitable partner in crime, neurosis. None of those are very good things. That is how it is in the States though: if everyone is not talking about something, then everyone had better not talk about it.
Unfortunately, no one has been talking about this last act of our president to bail various industries out with nonexistent government funds either. Perhaps if we had been, the Senate wouldn’t have been so zealous in their padding of the original bill to bail out the bank giants. Perhaps the auto industry would be forced to make changes in the structure of their enterprise which would save the industry rather than just placing a bandage on a severed arm. Maybe.
The point is, we don’t know. We don’t know because no one talks. This is not unlike: “We had no idea that Jimmy was a rapist. We didn’t know.” Granted, we also didn’t talk to little Jimmy about sex, and we told him that it was dirty, but you never get to hear that in the tearful interviews of parents after the FBI excavates their basement to find the bodies of all of little Jimmy’s girlfriends.
So I say “Bravo!” to Larry Flynt. Larry is the one guy who is not going to lie about what he and others in the industry are going to use their bailout money for. You can’t say that for the automakers, because they are going to use their bailout money for the same thing that Larry would, they would just have you think otherwise.
In case you are starting from scratch.
I caught this on Slashdot this morning. Apparently, McDonalds, not satisfied with making people fat, is now making a move to take over the sandwich market: completely. They have filed a patent for the process of making a sandwich. David Adam has a good article on the topic as well.
This is a flowchart detailing the process which they are trying to patent:
Call me crazy, but I think that they making of a sandwich is pretty self explanatory. Also, what if other fast food chains are using this same method? Does that fall under prior art? Will Burger King be sued? Will local sandwich shops either be sued out of business or have to pay licensing fees to the burger giant?
These are uncertain times.
Regardless, patent law in the states has a few problems. Though, this likely will not effect everyday users of sandwiches and sandwich construction materials. Just don’t try to use this process and then sell what you made or you might be in for a nasty surprise lawsuit.
To the losers.
Hot on the heels of my last post, Tim Krieder, cartoonist and the brains behind “The Pain” comic series, posted this piece, which reflected my very strange dream quite a bit. The comic itself is not the important part of that link, however. Please make sure that you continue on a read the article below it.
This guy, Krieder, is an obvious cynic, and with any likelihood a total asshole—I don’t mean that as an insult, some of my best friends are assholes—but sometimes he writes things that touch me in a way that I am not expecting. I got a little choked up and teary reading this article, for instance. Don’t get me wrong: I’m a total sap. I cry while reading sci-fi, I give money to street kids and widows, I talk about love and friendship in a non-ironic way. Usually though, I am typically a realist—read: pessimist—with regard to government/political/social stuff. It seems now with all that has happened, I have fallen into the camp of sad, sappy, suckers—as I might have previously viewed them—who believe that everything is going to get better.
On this point particularly, I think that Krieder is spot-on when he says:
“that the last eight wretched years had occupied so large a chunk of our adulthoods that we’d forgotten that nothing lasts forever, we’d thought that this was just how the world was: mean-spirited shitheads would always win and we would always lose. It was hard to believe it was really over.” [Krieder, link]
It is hard to believe that it is over. It is hard to shift gears into thinking that things might work out. I’m not so naïve as to believe that everything will change overnight, or that President Obama will change the world single-handedly, but I do feel like I am rubbing the sleep out of my eyes after a really terrible dream. Not a nightmare, per se, but just a really bad dream where nothing works and nothing makes any sense.
Maybe that is what is happening. It does feel like everyone woke up all at once, not a little pissed-off, and took action. If that is so, then I raise a glass and a still-angry fist in toast and say again, “Here’s to you, and here’s to me, best of friends we’ll ever be. But, should we ever disagree…”
Well, you know the rest.
And now the real work begins.
Well America, as a collective, we chose well. We were faced with the most important set of decisions that we have made in a long time and we made the right ones. I, for one, am thrilled. I actually cried out of relief this morning.
While President Elect Obama is positioned to be able to effect change in a significant way, what with being backed by a Congress which will support the directives of the new administration, there are a few things which didn’t go so well.
Michigan passed the stem cell research and medical marijuana ballot initiatives, both of which are positive things for people who suffer debilitating and painful diseases, and their respective ratifications are a step away from maligned points of view that these things stand in moral opposition to goodness and rightness. They will hopefully help many people.
I said above that we chose well and we did, for the most part. However, in this time of celebrating immanent changes for the better and positive steps forward, it is important to point out our failings, lest we forget ourselves. I would like to point out, for instance, that—at the time of writing—in Florida and Arizona have decisively banned gay marriage, and Arkansas has decisively banned adoption for gay people. California is still uncertain at this time—with only 20% of the polls reporting results from their ballot initiative—though it doesn’t look good there either, which saddens me.
Update 21:51 EET: With 95% of the precincts reporting, California has passed the gay marriage amendment ban. 52% Yes, 48% No.
Why are these things important? First, they indicate that even in seemingly liberal or progressive places, conservative/bigoted rhetoric is still very powerful in convincing people to make decisions about social issues. Second, at a time when things are looking up and we have a new golden-boy—who actually speaks in a positive way about gay people in his rhetoric—we obviously still have some work to do.
What do I mean by this? I mean that we have reached a new echelon of civil rights issues. We now will have a President who is part of a formerly legally disenfranchised—currently practically disenfranchised, in many ways—section of the American populace. This being the case, we now have an even greater chance to chip away at the bigotry which still lives in our law code. This was less possible over the past 8 years during a time when the dominant political thread was busy pandering to the very people who support that bigotry in their daily lives.
We have a chance now to rectify the mistakes that were made in the past 8 years, and in some cases 16 years—let us not forget that it was President Clinton who signed the Defense of Marriage act into law. The current President Elect is quite a bit more progressive than President Clinton was, but it won’t mean a hill of beans if we don’t actually progress. We can only hope that in the coming years, we will be able to overturn these bigoted state constitutional amendments and have a new kind of civil rights revolution in which people are treated equally again under the eyes of the law.
Best to be prepared and keep your ear to the ground.
Unless, that is, the ground is no longer there.
International Earth Destruction Advisory Board
Happy Birthday
Today is, as some reckon, the 17th birthday of Linux, the open-source UNIX-like operating system which has become increasingly popular in recent years. I adopted Linux about 2 years ago, first dual-booting (having 2 operating systems installed on the same machine and choosing at startup) Fedora, and then Ubuntu. Then I got brave and removed Windows from my last laptop. Then I got a new laptop and nuked the drive the moment I got it with a fresh Linux install. Then I installed 64 bit. Then I started compiling my own kernel. After that, it was all downhill, or uphill, depending on which way you were looking.
I became a Linux enthusiast, then an evangelical. “There is this operating system that is freely available, you can download it, and then you can install software by searching for it and selecting it (if you are in a package-managed distro, that is),” I would say. “Why does one become evangelical for an operating system,” you ask? Here is why:
Now, I am running my own Debian server: a tiny little ARM-processor-based wonder-device, 4 watts/10 under load. That is less than most energy efficient lightbulbs. Right now it just houses my digital media, my backups (which is makes without my ever having to know), and acts as a print server on our network so that I don’t have to plug the computer in, print, etc. It just works. I just added audio to it via a hardware-hack, USB in-line, jack-spliced audio card cannibalized from an old USB headset. I now have a command-line stereo with music library. Streaming internet radio too. And I can serve my own radio stream, in case the end comes and we have to rebuild the internet with string and tin cans.
I have grand plans for this little guy, the Linksys/Cisco NSLU2, or SLUG as we call the firmware-modded versions. I want about 15 more of them to just do little tasks and coordinate with each other. There is a Mic-in jack that I spliced onto the aforementioned audio card, so I am working now on adding voice-command support. Just simple stuff: “Radio on” or “Backup laptop now.” I have these sci-fi-esque visions of a fully automated house where these little guys talk to me as I walk through, turn lights on and off, report the weather, stock prices, news headlines if asked. I have also been working on a project (currently on hold, too much hardware to move to the Middle-East) to create a group of thin-client picture frames and touch screen interfaces that will be placed around the house. These would display photos, art, whatever. When asked, they could show you websites, play music on the stereo, etc. I dream of an alarm clock which is set by saying, “Jeeves, wake me up at 6:45, NPR on the radio.” “Very well then, good-night Sir.”
I dream of these things, and I will have them. I already am far closer to having these things than I ever was using computers the way that we are taught to do so in out modern age. Even the best average user today really uses their computer no differently than they might use a typewriter and an 8-track. Why is this the case?
It is the case because we are not encouraged to be curious about what is inside of our computers anymore. That, and we have been conditioned to believe that you must pay for software for your computer, which is simply not the case.
I’m not talking about software piracy either, a practice that I am rather ambivalent about these days. I don’t think it should be illegal, because I don’t think that it should be an issue. The best software out there is being developed by the curious, hobbyist, academic interests of developers with a machine and a little know-how. It’s mass peer-review. When the software is not human readable and the source is closed, bugs and weaknesses aren’t found until they are exploited. Enter FOSS: Free/Open Source Software.
Back to my point, these things interest me because they have enabled me, as a hobbyist, to make some really cool things happen. Soon my server will be talking to me, and I to it. Then it will be a server farm, then an integrated system that commands a house, or at least some of the functions in it. It’s cool. I can do it. And it is freely available to me. Sold.
This is why I am a Linux evangelical. I will walk down the street wearing a Linux t-shirt if it gets people to ask me what it is. I also just realized that I am wearing a Linux t-shirt.
Help celebrate this Linux birthday by taking Linux for a spin. There are a number of distributions that allow you to run the operating system from a CD (called a “Live-disk”). Live-disks are slower, because they have to run off of a CD. But try it. If you have an old computer laying around, dig it out, and install Linux on it. In my opinion, Ubuntu is probably going to be the best for first-time users. Here is a list of live-disk distributions which will allow you to install if you would like to:
Ubuntu
Gentoo
Debian
Knoppix
Damn Small Linux
Try it out. Linux has come a long way from its roots in the command-line. Sometimes when I am sitting in public using my laptop people come up wondering what kind of laptop it is and what my “Windows” is. I invite them to sit down for a cup of coffee, and I say “Have you ever heard of something called Linux?”
Yah, I couldn’t believe it either.
I read this article this morning in which it is reported that former Bush administration crony Karl Rove indicates that he believes the current presidential candidates go too far in their negative ads.
I had to sniff my coffee to make sure that I hadn’t accidentally make myself a steaming cup of moonshine this morning.
Karl Rove taking a moral stand? The lack of morals exhibited by Mr. Rove during his time as a simpering toady for President Bush indicate the following possibilities:
In any of those cases, it must also be the case that now, Mr.—too-little-too-late—Rove is attempting to appear more human by criticizing others for being rotten bastards to one another.
The effect is unsettling. Now where is that moonshine…
Nothing is impossible to find.
Hacker stryde.hax posted this article yesterday which indicates that he believes that he has found evidence of the underage status of one of China’s medal-winning Olympians. Additionally, he has requested that screenshots of the offending documents be posted on people’s blogs. In the interest of net-neutrality and in the face of censorship, here they are:
The name of the Olympian in question is: He Kexin (何可欣)
You can read more about how stryde.hax found these spreadsheets at his blog. There would be need for further verification of this, of course. Or, the could be an instance of sensationalist frenzy which would result in some people losing face. Either way, there you go.
Testing… Testing. Is this thing on.
We are always, it seems, interested in measuring or coding personality. I read this article [PDF] this morning over my coffee and found it fascinating. The results aren’t necessarily fascinating, but the idea is.
The gist is: can we something about the personality of an individual based on their e-mail address? This is an age-old question, of course. The primary use of astrology, in this author’s estimation, has been to parse personality traits. For example, Virgos are particularly mercurial. Their interests wander and range vastly. Is this true? Well, it probably is, for some.
The difference between the former and latter types of personality profiling is that the former uses a trait generated by the individual in question, whereas the latter has very little to do with them, at least on the surface. Then again, perhaps there are more factors that we are not considering, such as weather, personalities of parents and mood/temper changes based on time of year. Who knows?
Then there is the personality inventory. I took my first one a few years ago as part of a study conducted by a counseling psychology student for her thesis project. She was testing the Minnesota Multi-phasic Personality Inventory. I’m not sure about the particulars. Regardless, the questions are tricky and vague, but their compiled results are supposed to tell you something about your personality. My test indicated that I either had a personality disorder, or was a genius. Now, I don’t think that I am a genius, not even a little, but it was the more comforting alternative. There was more to it than that, something about frequencies, blah blah. Boring stuff. Sort of.
It made me interested in these types of tests though. Do they really tell us anything about ourselves, and, if so, what?
A few years later, I took the Myers-Briggs test. This one I liked. The results are a bit more human-readable—not that psychologists are not human, but well, you get what I mean. Since taking this, I have always tested the same way, which is also interesting. The questions on different exams will vary greatly, but they are designed to indicate personality traits when answered in a specific way.
I am an ENTJ [Extraversion - iNtuition - Thinking - Judging], apparently.
You have the following traits as options: Attitudes—Extraverted or Introverted, Functions—Intuitive or Sensing, Thinking or Feeling, and Lifestyle—Judging and Perceiving.
Here are a couple of tests for your enjoyment. These are obviously just intended for online amusement, not for real use. These type of assessments are best administered by a professional. But, then, when have we ever cared about that. Each one takes about 4-5 minutes. If you have a few minutes to kill take one—or more—and post the results as a comment here. It would be interesting to see what sort of personalities we all have, wouldn’t it?
A general Myers-Briggs assessment
An interesting assessment with sliders
Well, that should help you to waste about 15 minutes today. Try it out and post the results.
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2007–2012 John D. Martin III