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Thursday, January 31, 2008
Not ma' fault!
I've had the longest blogging gap of the new year. I could have posted, but I've been dead sick. What's remarkable is that I actually managed to stress myself straight into illness. The stress source? My new computer, which ran fine for about three months with some weird RAID hiccups is now a $2,000+ paperweight.

Luckily, I managed to back up all of my work (both professional and personal) onto a new external hard drive, but I've been forced to go back to my old computer. This is a good machine; it served me well and it's now the wife's. It has all the programs I need to work. But it's really like stepping out of the Maserati and back into the Volvo.

It crashed on Saturday afternoon, and I literally attempted to reinstall Vista for three days straight, trying a bewildering variety of ways to get it to install, to no avail. I will be using Seagate boot disks to check the hard drives tomorrow, then I'll disassemble the entire machine (no mean feat given how packed the components are), and retry with my good friend, Sean. He's been kind enough to come down to Tucson to help out, though the trip also coincided with his SuperBowl plans nicely, so that worked out.

I pretty rarely pray; I consider it a bit presumptuous. But man, I am praying that I can get this thing working again.

One small bright side to these clouds is that I'm forced to sit at the computer with the recording hardware, so I've recorded a few more demos, and actually started re-recording Summer, which has been waiting for that treatment for about five years.

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posted by Steve @ 2:25 AM   0 comments
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Birthing isn't something I'm gonna do.
I'm male. I don't get to do the more involved half of baby-making. I just watched the trailer for The Business of Being Born, which is a Ricki Lake production about how natural birthing is pretty rare nowdays and how hospitals-as-businesses have a lot to do with that. It's most likely going to present hospitals as The Evil and midwifing and water-births as The Ecstasy, but hyperbole notwithstanding, the points are sound.

This is something Rachel actually decided quite awhile ago, since her aunt (I think) is a midwife. She's also the kind of tough-minded feminist that can't believe that she (and most anyone else) can't do what women have done since there were women. I admire that, and know full well I'll need a gauntlet to keep my hand from being broken off during childbirth.

No, this is not a veiled way of saying she's pregnant, despite the fact that we've had something like half our friends and most of her co-workers tell her that they've had dreams that she is pregnant. (Grammatically, that is an awesome sentence.) But we've discussed how and why we're going to have kids, though the exact times aren't something anyone can exactingly plan (nor should it be). Honestly, the only thing that really makes me think is how she's going to get her Librarian degree amongst part-time jobs and/or pregnancy.

It's all academic now, of course. Really. Of course, it takes like a month to find out, so how would I know?

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posted by Steve @ 2:49 PM   0 comments
Feminism & Power
In relation to my previous post on feminism, I wanted to point out the false feminism of Hillary Clinton (I'm obviously a big Obama supporter), but someone beat me to it in a more concise fashion:
If Hillary Clinton wins, her success will become a lesson in how women should achieve power: marry well; put up with any humiliations your husband throws at you, and then, maybe, if you fight dirty, and ask your husband to run your campaign, you might be able to ride his coattails to your “own” political success.
That basically sums it up. Actually, the article runs down a list of all of the reasons I like Obama over her that almost exactly mirrors my own. On the other hand, people like Faye Wattleton, who probably has done a lot for women in general and is the former president of the Planned Parenthood Federation and current president of the Center for the Advancement of Women, actually seem to believe that this is progressive feminism:
"Well, I think that Bill Clinton's role is that of the spouses of all the candidates, he's participating as a surrogate for his wife who is running. And I think that its entirely consistent with the ascension of other women to the top offices in their country; they come about it as the result of the president being their spouse or being members of prominent families. So I don't think that we should be so upset and agitated about Mr. Clinton's participation..."
If that's her big draw, she should be nowhere near candidacy.

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posted by Steve @ 12:08 PM   0 comments
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Great Feminism
I like real feminists the way I like real conservatives: when they aren't pushy, arrogant and myopic, they have some great ideas. For that matter, most 'idea groups' (religions, political positions, social issue people, etc.) have a point, when they're being rational.

Here is an example of what I would describe as a good feminist article. It doesn't talk much about women, per se; it's about the infantilization of America's men. Here's what they mean:
"The benevolent patriarch of the '50s has been replaced by an adult teenager who spends his time sneaking off to hang out with the boys, eyeing the hot chick over his wife’s shoulder, or buying cool new toys. Like a fourteen-year-old, this guy can’t be trusted with the simplest of domestic tasks, be it cooking dinner for the kids or shopping for groceries."
The implicit feminist concern is that in their haste to wave the women-can-do-anything banner,
"the women's movement has freed men from the straightjacket of traditional machismo, others have blamed it for depriving them of their identity."
In other words, responsible feminists want men to be as responsible, capable and intelligent as they're hoping to become themselves. True feminism isn't a matriarchal fantasy; it's the evening of burdens. I do laundry because I work at home. It just makes more sense. I don't feel emasculated, and she has clean clothes.

I still have to open jars, though.

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posted by Steve @ 12:17 AM   1 comments
Monday, January 21, 2008
EA <3 Valve
“The existing Battlefield games are fairly deep; you have to be pretty good or you’ll die pretty quick,” Mr. Florin said Friday in a telephone interview from Geneva. “Now we’ve toned down the difficulty, shortened each game session to 10 or 15 minutes and made the visual style more cartoony.”
~ Translation ~
"We like playing Team Fortress 2 more than we like Battlefield, and we're going to try to undersell them by putting it online for free."



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posted by Steve @ 4:42 PM   0 comments
Sunday, January 20, 2008
Quote of the Day
"Too many people spend money they haven't earned to buy things they don't want to impress people they don't like."
Will Rogers

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posted by Steve @ 11:27 AM   1 comments
Paragraph length
Upon reading this excellent article about the inverse relationship between legislative experience and presidential abilities, it struck me how short the paragraphs are. They're almost blog-like in length. I liked the article's content a great deal, but I thought it was very nicely readable as well. I've noticed that occasionally when media is transfered from print to Web, the longer paragraphs make things harder to read.

This begs the question whether paragraph lengths are, as a whole in well-educated writing, becoming shorter. A study done in 1992 (and therefore not aware of its significance vis a vis the Web) summarized:
[The study investigates] whether readers are aware of and have any preferences about paragraph length. Finds that readers are aware and have a more positive attitude toward writing with paragraphs of less than 100 words. Finds that paragraph length does not affect attitudes toward the expertise of the writer, ease of comprehension, or quality of the passage.

So there you go. I've been fretting over whether or not I sounded well-educated since I habitually use two- or three- sentence paragraphs, but apparently all that matters is that I need to have a complete point in each one. I also habitually use very long sentences extended by parentheticals, semicolon extensions and lists. I should stop that, but apparently the paragraphs are O.K.

So it seems that the more finely-chopped paragraphs seen most often in blogs will become more common. Long, meandering paragraphs that looked good (4 to 10 lines or so) in the printed page look so much more monolithic on the Web, where text is wrapped more often, so we'll see more breaks in paragraphs.

If shorter paragraphs mean more pointed logic, that's good, but if it means less useful information, I'm not sure this is a good thing. I fear the latter - we have enough sound-byte commentary as it is. A good example is that Hillary keeps crowing experience when she's not half as experienced as the people who are already out of the race; but people only know about the experience angle.

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posted by Steve @ 11:07 AM   0 comments
Saturday, January 19, 2008
Thank You, Wacom (Screw You HP, Line6, Palm)
Wacom has 64-bit, dual-processor Vista drivers for my old Intuos 6x8 tablet, which is at least 4 years old. Thank you, Wacom. You made my day.

As opposed to Hewlett-Packard, Line6, and Palm, who haven't bothered making a driver to use my photo printer, inkjet printer, flatbed scanner (all HP), UX1 input (Line6) and 755psmartphone (Palm). I can almost understand why HP didn't make drivers for their devices, as they're all 6+ years old, but you know, they're still perfectly willing to sell me the fuckin' ink for $36 a pop, so I think I deserve to use the ink after my OS upgrade.

Line6 and Palm, on the other hand, have no excuses for not supporting their wonderful but damned expensive hardware. When I shell out $1,000 for a phone and a guitar input, both of which were made after Vista was announced, I expect them to work.

So thank you, Wacom, I checked your drivers page more out of habit than an actual expectation that you'd make the drivers. Thank you.

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posted by Steve @ 8:34 PM   0 comments
This blog has not been evaluated by the FDA.
My wife bought some cranberry supplements, which claimed to maintain a healthy urinary tract. Cranberries have been traditionally used for this purpose, which makes me really wonder why the Food and Drug Administration hasn't verified that claim, at least in the general sense that cranberries help that sort of thing.

I can understand why they have better things to do than scientifically evaluate every snake-oil supplement. At this point, their job is to make sure that recalls happen when they need to, ensure that greedy pharmaceuticals aren't dumping harmful drugs on us for profit (success in this goal depends on who you ask), among a million other important but ultimately interminably bureaucratic tasks.

But why leave it to Ocean Spray to fund and publicize these kinds of studies? By now, haven't we done enough scientific research on things that might exist as a problem, or aren't as widespread as drug companies would like us to believe, and can turn to verifying simple medicinal truths for everyday troubles?

Perhaps the problem is educational: I wonder how many people (myself included) recognize why they even have health problems. I'm typing this on Dayquil, but I know my allergies went completely bananas yesterday after sweeping all the mildewed leaves off the patio. I doubt I would recognize a urinary tract infection, though.

We've known cranberries help that kind of infection for centuries. I'm probably on the low-knowledge end of the spectrum, but it seems to me that we've lost a ton of the down-home knowledge that kept people alive over the last several hundred years.

I guess that the main problem is that the majority of useful knowledge being passed down is being replaced by pop knowledge.

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posted by Steve @ 3:29 PM   0 comments
Friday, January 18, 2008
A Clean House
Rachel and I didn't get a chance to go to the Phoenix Suns game today, but strangely I'm glad it didn't happen, because we got a chance to do nothing but clean the place the whole day. We didn't even finish, but we did a lot of the little things that had only been kind-of put away. She sorted out her ribbons with a neat way of hanging them on the wall, and I tied up the wires to the little bedside stereo to be a little less messy, allowing me to have a real place to put my wallet and phone charger at night.

Little things like that are why I always have said that it takes a solid year to really move into a new place. Unfortunately, I've paid rent in 11 places in the last 10 years for a variety of reasons:

1. 1998: Moved from home to Cochise dorm. Lived in the funny-smelling place with Eric, and proceeded to do terribly in school. I'm still convinced that my aversion to the lead-tasting water lead to dehydration through the entire year. Moved because I was kicked out of UA for bad grades.
2. 1999: Moved to my first apartment over the summer, and Joe moved in as roommate. It was so very tiny, but he just had a few bags and I didn't have a lot, either. We moved to have our own rooms.
3. 2000: Moved a 2-bedroom place with horrible furniture and a landlady that smoked approximately twenty billion cigarettes. Moved because the landlady was scary.
4. 2001: Moved into a nice 2-bedroom place with a backyard with Joe. Bought my own furniture for the first time, and had one of the better years I've ever had. Tension over my leaving to Japan and not being able to pay rent for summer forced Joe and I to get separate places.
5. 2002: Moved into a small, 1-bedroom place run by a completely neurotic Indian man. Met Rachel that year, who moved in just to avoid my Ex, who was her roommate. Tough times, but made better with Rachel. Moved because the landlord (seriously) wanted to evict us for trimming the bushes that prevented us from getting in the front door.
6. 2003: Joined Rachel in a big house with Sean and Gayle. We were all broke, all the time, but we threw some good parties and had an awesome place. Moved because Rachel and I were getting married.
7. 2004: Lived in a somewhat dilapidated guest house, which was nice except that the landlords were going through a loud, messy divorce, and their favorite place to argue was our front yard. Moved for that reason.
8. 2005: Found a nice duplex in an apartment complex that was nicer than the not-great neighborhood it was in. Had the luxury of sharing the duplex with AZ & Tasha, but were next door neighbors to crack dealers with small children. Moved out of fear.
9. 2006 (1): Lived with Mom while teaching in Phoenix, but that didn't work out and we had to move for two months into a tiny duplex just south of the UA. Only had it during the summer before the new tenants moved in for the school year, but it was a godsend because we were destitute.
10. 2006 (2): After that, we were miraculously making better money and moved into a nice second-floor apartment very close to Rachel's work. Had a very cranky downstairs neighbor, who didn't appreciate our construction projects. Resolved to get a place without stairs and with a carport.
11. 2007: Found a great little duplex that we currently have. It was dirty and had next to no heating, and an absentee landlord, but it feels very much like a home. And now, it's fairly organized, as well! I am fervently hoping that we don't have a reason to move out next summer.

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posted by Steve @ 11:28 PM   0 comments
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
The Glass
I've always described myself as a realist (the glass is at half its capacity), but it occurred to me today that many dispositions and occupations might have a different take on the glass.

The Glass Is...

Optimist: ... is half full.
Pessimist: ... is half empty.
Realist: ... is at half its capacity.
Engineer: ... is 50% too large.
Artist: ... has not realized its potential.
Marketer: ... let me sell you some water.
Designer: ... has 50% spill safety.
Doctor: ... needs to drink that amount of water 8 times daily.
Chemist: ... needs better measurement markings to say how full it really is.
Teacher: ... is not allowed in the classroom.

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posted by Steve @ 1:28 PM   0 comments
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Random notes from the Front
1. I'm still having a very difficult time sleeping regularly, despite the regular exercise.
2. Smashing Pumpkins wrote some seriously amazing songs.
3. It's too bad Google Sidebar doesn't work well on my computer.
4. Bagels are awesome.
5. I bet a drink that had the appearance and consistency of mercury, but tasted like wine, would sell very well.
6. I installed the Line6 UX1 recorder on my wife's computer and now should be recording more.
7. I'm growing frustrated with the way getting anything to work on my computer takes so much work.
8. Team Fortress 2 is the best multi-player FPS game evar.
9. I occasionally wish I'd had a 'proper' teaching job.
10. My car is awesome.

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posted by Steve @ 12:58 AM   0 comments
Friday, January 11, 2008
Deaths in Iraq
150,000.

Violence was the leading cause of death among men between the ages of 15 and 59 years during the first 3 years after the 2003 invasion.

People are dying in Iraq at a rate fifty times faster than what Vlad the Impaler managed.

50 times more dead in Iraq than what Pinochet did in Chile.

50% more casualties than the entire Bosnia war.

I can't imagine why the Iraqis don't like us. Why they would want to help organizations like Al Qaeda to fight us. After all, we remember Dracula, Pinochet, and Slobodan Milošević with fondness, don't we?



America, the inept.

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posted by Steve @ 11:43 AM   0 comments
The only Mom joke I'll ever post, ever.
Your mom died in a blogging accident.

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posted by Steve @ 12:10 AM   0 comments
Thursday, January 10, 2008
Bug progress....
I'm pretty excited about my car.

Right now, it resembles the cars on the Flintstones - there's no floor. It was sawed out and is being replaced with the floor of another car, to get rid of some rust that had developed. It turns out that at long time ago my grandfather (who owned it) had 'fixed' the floor by sawing a STOP sign into shape and putting it under the battery.

It's also having a hydraulic clutch put in, to replace the original cable, and a new passenger door. The old door wasn't the right model year, and so didn't fit. I suspect it was on sale, or free.

Once the floor pan is replaced, I'll be taking it to a shop in town to put Rhinolining, Line-X, or Herculining onto the floor pan to protect it from rust, quiet the interior, and make the thing as indestructible as possible. Then, I'll give it an awesome paint job, we'll put in the new rubber, and maybe in 2 months I'll even be able to drive the car...

Also getting a 1776cc dual carbeuretor motor put into it - just about doubling horsepower. So when I finally do get to drive the thing... mmmm....

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posted by Steve @ 9:16 PM   0 comments
No doubts: Barack Obama
Though I'm not sure I like to admit how much Andrew Sullivan has to do with it, I've been pretty convinced that Barack Obama is my candidate of choice for President for quite a while now.

There's a lot of reasons:

- He recognizes the difference between being informed by his beliefs and creating a nation of Christian Values.
- He recognizes that Health Care should be optional for people who already have it, want a private institution's health care, or just don't like being told what to do.
- Hasn't changed one whit his notions about Iraq from the beginning, and yet doesn't oppose force when it's necessary.
- Recognizes why Presidential power doesn't mean universal power.

There's a few things that concern me:
- Like most Senators, was a bit of an absentee, even for issues that he really should've been voting on.
- His ability to actually do the things he has promised.

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posted by Steve @ 11:01 AM   0 comments
Wednesday, January 09, 2008
Extremists are the enemy, but not the target
If a Muslim extremist walked up to an average Swiss person and tried to convince them to strap a bomb to themselves and blow up some Infidels, would they do it?

Probably not. Why? That Swiss person probably has enough to eat, decent health care, and a nice place to live.

To eliminate nutcase fundamentalist extremism, you've got to eliminate as many of the extremists as possible, but they're a superhumanly determined bunch: it's going to be difficult (if not impossible, even for the U.S. military) to completely eradicate them. So you must also tackle the sympathetic ear.

So far, the U.S. has not done so; it can be argued that the Iraq invasion, our arms sales (to Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Israel, Al Qaeda/Afghanistan), and lack of humanitarian efforts have done the opposite.

Each of these people are prime targets for Al Qaeda enlistment:
  • Iraqi refugees that the U.S. has refused to admit past its borders,
  • Iranians with no hope of help from their own government,
  • Saudis who hate the Israelis and view the U.S. as nothing more than an oil junkie,
  • Sudanese who feel ignored by the world powers (and most of Africa, for that matter).
These people share two important things: hopelessness and ignorance.

Those who are susceptible to influence by extremists are hopeless and ignorant because they have nowhere to turn, often as a result of their governments not caring about them, or being incapable of caring. Consider Afghanistan's 40% unemployment rate (!): the Taliban had no reason to support their citizens because oil pays for the ruling class' lives. The U.S. government relies on taxes; it can't afford to ban women from working. The women of Afghanistan had an 86% illiteracy rate in 2003.

Imagine knowing someone who cannot read at all. The person also is homeless. Had a job but had the factory blown up, or was forced to move out of the country because of a war. The person isn't stupid, but is worried, and perhaps desperate. Now imagine how easy it would be to convince that person that a country 4,000 miles away is the cause of all your problems...

The U.S. cannot guarantee jobs for the whole planet. Nor can we feed and clothe everyone. But if not for the compliance and aid of otherwise reasonable people, Osama bin Laden, Hitler, and a thousand other despots wouldn't have done nearly as much harm.

I feel that the humanitarian efforts have been completely forgotten in our foreign policy. I’m not talking about purely financial aid – Pakistan has abused our generosity by funding army and nuclear weapons projects with our foreign aid – I mean sending in the Army Corps of Engineers to build hospitals, schools, and even mosques. It would be tough for an extremist mullah to argue the U.S. is the Great Satan if we built his home.

Have we done some of this kind of work? Yes. We budgeted $2B to do it (though only half has actually been used) – but the budgeted amount is 00.1% of the total (of ~$1.5T). That lack of balance between the carrot and the stick is one of many reasons the Iraq war isn’t going well: we’re adding frightened and ignorant troops to the ranks of our enemy.

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posted by Steve @ 2:12 PM   0 comments
Sunday, January 06, 2008
The Creative Omnivore
It has occasionally occurred to me that humans as a species have historically been amazingly creative (and brave) when it comes to eating. We will eat damn near anything that moves - fish, birds, big lumbering beasts, little ones, you name it - and we'll eat pretty much any part of them, too (haggis is proof positive of this). We'll even get milk from them, or use their poo to make better plants.

We'll eat anything that doesn't move, too. It seems like practically every plant that isn't a completely deadly neurotoxin is used as some sort of seasoning or medicine. We'll even use things we can't even *see* like yeast for bread, or all sorts of mold for cheese.

It gets really crazy when you think about the impossible resourcefulness that's involved in even simple stuff - a sandwich has bread made from yeast, a bacteria (I think), wheat, and just the right amount of heat; then there's the meat of course, and cheese made from a cow's milk and fixed in just such a way with bacteria; a bit of oil and vinegar made from nuts and grapes, probably with cilantro and other bits of grasses.

We've lost a bit of that creativity; I'm a capital offender on this. But I still am amazed at how resourceful we are about, well, finding food.

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posted by Steve @ 4:25 PM   0 comments
Saturday, January 05, 2008
McCain braves New Hampshire


You know, whatever one believes about the candidates, it must stink to go through this kind of thing in early January in New Hampshire.

It's also a Secret Service nightmare. Is that lady giving him an aneurysm-inducing bearhug, or did she just shove a shiv made of a sharpened toothbrush through his ribcage?

This being John McCain, of course, he wouldn't suffer long-term problems from either, because he is JOHN MCCAIN, former POW.

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posted by Steve @ 7:51 PM   0 comments
Cattle farts = Global warming
Some headlines, you just can't make up.

Quest to make cattle fart like marsupials

It's so awesome, I have to pee.

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posted by Steve @ 1:58 AM   0 comments
Friday, January 04, 2008
Iowa, which was important for a minute.
So, I was listening/reading to the various speeches by the Iowa caucus nominees that matter (i.e., Obama, Huckabee, Clinton, Edwards, McCain).

Huckabee was very effacing, and had Chuck Norris smiling in the background (I had to watch it twice; I couldn’t stop staring). He didn’t start talking about actual talking points until halfway – but it was mostly themes of unification and optimism that, honestly, reflect Obama’s – even a few of the same phrases (“‘this is about ‘we’”). I was disappointed that he didn’t really talk at all about what he was going to do, and it bugs me a bit that Huckabee, who is staunchly anti-civil unions, quoted the “all men are created equal” line in the Declaration of Independence.

He’s a very good public speaker, but stumbled very slightly in spots. After watching someone like Obama, who hasn’t stumbled over more than 3 words in the dozens of speeches I’ve watched, those spots are amplified. Still, he is usually a thinking politician, clearly means what he says, and is genuinely interested in non-partisan, upward change. In the Era of YouTube, adroit public speaking is incredibly important, and I think it is why Ron Paul has trouble (he really does come across like an Of course, then again, Bush described himself as a “uniter,” and immediately divided the nation. I do like the fact that he ran a clean campaign (albeit very heavily religious) and did well despite being out-spent 15:1. He also managed to lose about 5 ounces of fat per day for a year, for what it’s worth.

Finally, he won a big chunk of my favor when he said this today on Larry King: “The federal government needs to operate like our campaign has. We only spend what we have. We don't borrow, we don't go into spending in deficits. Wouldn't it be refreshing if the federal government would do that rather than spend off into the future?”

McCain finished fourth, with 13%, but didn’t advertise or really work at Iowa at all. He congratulated Huckabee, and rightly recognized that his big chance is in New Hampshire, where he won the caucus for president in 2000 or 2004 (can’t remember which). The big story for him isn’t Iowa, though, it’s that he was OK with having troops in Iraq for 100 years, in the same way the we have troops in Japan, Korea, etc. He has a point, but among those who can’t wait to get out, that will be an issue.

Giuliani is toast. He had 1/5th the votes of Ron Paul, which is… extraordinarily terrible and though he didn’t really bother with the state, I hope it’s a sign he’s toast. The pro-war right should rally now behind McCain, who’d be a better man to occupy Iraq anyway.

Edwards’ speech was good as well, but I had to read it instead of see it, so I can’t comment on his eloquence. Only that is was a good speech that was a bit darker: he talked a lot about people in broken homes and tough spots – classic liberal sentiments, really, in that he felt a need to help the people who have no basic health care or no way to feed their own children.

Clinton’s speech basically said “Democrats are great! We need change!” and, frankly, I got the impression she was trying to equate a record turnout with a Democratic victory. That may end up being the case, but it’s weird saying that the Democrats won the Democratic caucus. While she was right when she said that “the people of America, and particularly Democrats, and like-minded independents and Republicans who have seen the light … understand, number one, that the stakes are huge,” that kind of statement is exactly the divisiveness for which she is reviled.

The night did belong to Obama, though, as far as speeches go. I’d talk about it, but I’d come across as starry-eyed: The reason I was inspired to even read or view the other candidates’ speeches was because I saw something in the Obama speech I’d never seen: Democrats cheering, chanting, “U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” I am so glad I saw that – Dems seem to have realized that that kind of vocal patriotism isn’t always trite. Conversely, Republicans should realize that that kind of vocal patriotism can be very trite indeed when it is treated the same was as being a sports fan.

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posted by Steve @ 5:59 PM   0 comments
Roadrunner as high metaphor
A lot of pretty intense philosophical shuffling can be extracted from the Roadrunner and Coyote, in a similar vein as the classic the Tao of Pooh, which my Mom (a devout Catholic) had me read. In particular, comparisons to Sisyphus seem accurate.

Despite all that, my favorite part of the dialog is where Chaos Theory and multiverses are brought in to explain cartoon physics:
It is possible that technology does not work in Mr. Coyote's universe in the same way it works in ours. First of all, what is known of Mr. Coyote is only third person speculation on a multiverse. It his particular multiverse there is a mysterious fifth force of weak horizontal gravity. This mysterious mechanism exerts a force on falling bodies horizontal to the plane of a strong gravitational force, such as the Earth. In this multiverse, were Galaleo to throw a cannonball off the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the cannonball would first move horizontal to the Earth, hover for a few seconds contemplating its peril, then fall rapidly to the ground due to the strong gravitational force.

It is entirely possible that this weak horizontal gravitational force has a seemingly random interaction with technology that we are not quite able to understand.
So let's stretch the metaphor to the breaking point through philosophy, into political theory and possibly out my derrière: I hope that, if/when the Democrats get a president elected (hopefully Obama), they don't have a Coyote moment: They always wanted it, but now what?




Also, OMG Coyote caught Roadrunner!

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posted by Steve @ 12:26 PM   0 comments
Tuesday, January 01, 2008
Resolution Time!

MMVIII:

  • Average a blog post 3 times a week (157 posts in the year).
  • Finish Ignition.
  • Improve communication with Rachel.
  • Dote on Rachel more.
  • Keep the house clean.
  • No more laundry sorting piles for more than 1 day.
  • Go through sentimental stuff.
  • Develop an easy and automated system for daily scheduling between work, freelance work, and personal stuff to work on my computer and Palm.
  • Finish archiving and organizing old material.
  • Finish archiving old digital photos.
  • Start archiving old analogue photos.
  • Bring a much-improved Leelu to Eastpointe before the school year ends.
  • Bring a much-improved Leelu to Bugtoberfest.
  • Take a lot of good photographs of my friends.
  • Go climbing with Nyssa often enough to be in noticeably better shape.
  • Practice basketball often enough to be in noticeably better shape.
  • Eat a better breakfast and lunch every day.
  • Drink my 8 glasses of water/juice daily.
  • Continue to manage my finances carefully.
  • Improve my rhetoric.
  • Develop a clear understanding of medical insurance.
  • Learn about early child development.
  • Start finishing the three paintings.

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posted by Steve @ 11:53 PM   0 comments
 
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Name: Steve
Home: Tucson, Arizona, United States
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