Cherry Chocolate Rain

It really, really freaks me out that that seems to be that kid's real voice.

Brilliantly composed photographs

Amusing/cool.

What the dilly-yo, Firefox?

Not that anyone cares, but I have finally given up on Firefox for the mac.  It's been really buggy lately and keep hanging at weird moments.  I heart FlashBlock, but not enough to make me suffer through my web browser not working.

Back to Safari it is.  <Dr. Claw voice>"You win this time, Jobs!"</Dr. Claw voice>

Your daily douchebag (11/28/07)

A long overdue DD (maybe it should be douchenozzle now?) to the distinguished Karl Rove. The Prince of Darkness hasn't really been in the spotlight lately. Then he came out with this gem.

Apparently, it was the Democrats who were in such a big goddamn rush to go to war in Iraq while Bush, level-headed, patient leader that he is, wanted to delay the Iraq vote until after the November elections so as not to, you know, politicize it.

Wow.

Is lying instinctual at this point for him? Does he lie about pointless stuff just out of habit? Like, does he just immediately answer, "Lucky charms!" when you ask him what he had for breakfast, regardless of what he actually had? I have no doubt he could pass any lie detector test on anything at this point. My question is whether there's any distinction left in that swirling vortex of evil that is his brain between his manufactured reality and the...oh, hell, what's it called?...truth.

Just...wow.

Fuck graduate school

I could be developing a true talent.

The failure of OLPC

This BBC article gives a nice summary of why I think the One Laptop Per Child project is misguided. First and foremost:

"In an interview with the BBC, Nigeria's education minister questioned the need for laptops in poorly equipped schools.

Dr Igwe Aja-Nwachuku said: "What is the essence of introducing One Laptop per Child when they don't have seats to sit down and learn; when they don't have uniforms to go to school in, where they don't have facilities?"

The whole concept is...okay, I'm not going to say dumb. Its heart is in the right place. But really, this is running before you can walk. Spend the money on teachers, desks...infrastructure, for chrissakes, before you go blowing $100 million on an unproven technology without the lesson plans, teacher training, etc. to go along with it.

Nevermind. Yes, it is dumb. And now Negroponte is spouting conspiracy theories about Intel and Microsoft undermining them. Actually, the problem isn't so much conspiracy theories as, well, the fact that he seems surprised that an effort to flood a good portion of the world's untapped markets with new hardware and new software might, you know, catch Intel and Microsoft's attention. Umm...duh? These are multi-billion dollar industries. You expected them to roll over out of some kind of corporate morality?

Daily Douchebag (11/26/07)

...and a hearty, "Hey! Fuck you!" to, well, to both President Bush and the National Review for taking credit for something that, not only did they not help facilitate, but more realistically did their best to impede.

Why? Well, maybe you heard about the recent effort to turn skin cells into stem cells. Apparently, at least according to the White House and the National Review, yeah, that was all Bush. Because apparently politicizing science and nixing basic science funding really inspired those guys to do their best work.

What a fucking douchenozzle...

"Cheney Found To Have Irregular Heartbeat"

The "irregular" isn't as surprising as the "heartbeat" part.

(You might think that joke would be beneath me. You'd be wrong.)

A bad combination

You know what I've decided is a really bad combination? Having lots of things you want to do, but at the same time being lazy, inefficient, and basically unproductive.

Funny, that.

Parasailing freighters

Very cool, but there's an important, unaddressed question:

"The Beluga shipping company that owns the 460-foot Beluga said it expects the kites to decrease fuel consumption by up to 50% in optimal cases as well as a cutback of the emission of greenhouse gases on sea by 10 to 20%. Interestingly, the ship will be hauling windmills from Esbjerg, Denmark to Houston, Texas."

...which is, why the fuck is Houston stockpiling windmills?

Color me dubious

A portable nuclear reactor, huh? Safe, you say?

“In fact, we prefer to call it a ‘drive’ or a ‘battery’ or a ‘module’ in that it’s so safe,” Hyperion spokeswoman Deborah Blackwell says. “Like you don’t open a double-A battery, you just plug [the reactor] in and it does its chemical thing inside of it. You don’t ever open it or mess with it."

Hey! Wait a minute! What you're describing is...is...Happy Fun Ball!

If There Were a God... (11/25/07)

...he would have struck this man down with a bolt of lightening long, long ago. *shudder* (nsfw)

Whatever you do, _don't_ watch the video clips. I didn't. And I know if I did, my brain would break. The pictures were bad enough.

As the article says:

Not to be all “Think of the children!” — but seriously, think of the children.

Communication whine

If I'm not careful this might turn into an _actual_ blog if keep up this existential musing crap...

I've had a lot of academic frustration lately. Some of it is purely logistical and political; this is not unexpected, and it will pass. But I've also had a log of...hmm...let's say "pedagogical" frustration. No, this isn't a coded way of saying I hate my teacher(s). More, I don't understand things, and when I search out resources to help me understand them, those resources are more likely to infuriate me than enlighten me. Notable exceptions to this are the professors in my department; indeed, that's one of the reasons I (heart) my department: it's full of insanely smart people who are remarkably eloquent and lucid in their explanations of things. Unfortunately, I can't go bug them for every little question that pops into my head.

My frustration revolves much more around written pedagogy in my field. It drives me absolutely batty how profoundly incapable most people seem to be when it comes to verbally communicating an idea. I think I've mentioned at some point previously how dismal Wikipedia is in this regard. On most normal, run-of-the-mill topics, Wikipedia does an admirable job of giving a coherent overview of a given topic. When it comes to highly technical topics, however, it seems to go off the deep end. Technical articles are so inscrutably technical that you basically need to understand the topic before you look it up.

Let me give you an example that made me want to bang my head against a wall today. I wanted to learn about support vector machines (SVM's). Here's Wikipedia's first paragraph in the support vector machine article:

Support vector machines (SVMs) are a set of related supervised learning methods used for classification and regression. They belong to a family of generalized linear classifiers. They can also be considered a special case of Tikhonov regularization. A special property of SVMs is that they simultaneously minimize the empirical classification error and maximize the geometric margin; hence they are also known as maximum margin classifiers.

To understand my frustration, look no farther than the 3rd sentence: "They can also be considered a special case of Tikhonov regularization." What?! Why? Why the fuck is that the third sentence in the article?? If I'm looking this up in Wikipedia, chances are I want to understand what the fuck an SVM is from a high level. Why is the third thing you tell me related to an obscure formalism that I, and probably most people who look at the article, don't care about?

Then look at the fourth sentence: "A special property of SVMs is that they simultaneously minimize the empirical classification error and maximize the geometric margin..." Great. The third sentence told me about some weird formalism, and now you've used two terms ("empirical classification error" and "geometric margin") that you haven't defined, nor have you provided a link for. Meanwhile, you still haven't told me any of:

• What an SVM is in terms a lay-person (or at least a lay-person with a computer science degree) can understand
• What it's used for (in similar terms)
• Why it's called an SVM

Wikipedia goes on to note that there is "excellent introduction to the topic" at an external link. Let me excerpt for you what comes immediately after the opening notes of that "excellent introduction":

There is a remarkable family of bounds governing the relation between the capacity of a learning machine and its performance. The theory grew out of considerations of under what circumstances, and how quickly, the mean of some empirical quantity converges uniformly, as the number of data points increases, to the true mean (that which would be calculated from an infinite amount of data) (Vapnik, 1979). Let us start with one of these bounds.

The notation here will largely follow that of (Vapnik, 1995). Suppose we are given l observations. Each observation consists of a pair: a vector xi ∈ Rn, i = 1, . . . , l and the associated “truth” yi, given to us by a trusted source. In the tree recognition problem, xi might be a vector of pixel values (e.g. n = 256 for a 16x16 image), and yi would be 1 if the image contains a tree, and -1 otherwise (we use -1 here rather than 0 to simplify subsequent formulae). Now it is assumed that there exists some unknown probability distribution P(x, y) from which these data are drawn, i.e., the data are assumed “iid” (independently drawn and identically distributed). (We will use P for cumulative probability distributions, and p for their densities). Note that this assumption is more general than associating a fixed y with every x: it allows there to be a distribution of y for a given x. In that case, the trusted source would assign labels yi according to a fixed distribution, conditional on xi. However, after this Section, we will be assuming fixed y for given x.

What?! How is something that talks about a "fixed distribution, conditional on xi" an "excellent introduction"? Here's a general rule to go by, as far as I'm concerned: math is not ever an excellent introduction to other math. And indeed, this is the source of my frustration: people who have incredibly analytically adept minds (unlike mine) seem terminally incapable of explaining concepts in anything other than excessively, anally precise mathematical terms that obscure what the fuck they are talking about.

This has become a pet peeve of mine in no small part because stuff like this used to make me feel stupid. I thought I was an idiot because I found it really hard to understand. I am now of the belief that I find it really hard to understand because it's really fucking hard to understand. And, it doesn't need to be. Most people, including a lot of computer scientists and people who might be interested in a topic like this, *gasp* don't think in math. Like most people, a huge amount of their brain is dedicated to visual processing, so give me something to visualize. Also, like most people, it helps them to have a concrete example to frame what you're talking about before you go into the gory details of the theory. If someone would just take the time to write these things in an accessible manner, a lot more people would discover, "Oh, _that's_ what you're talking about! That's much simpler than I thought it was."

Here's what the article on SVMs roughly should have said:

"Support vector machines are a mechanism by which a program can learn to classify data. Imagine, for instance, your data lies on a 2D coordinate plane. Each data point is a dot on that plane, and the data falls roughly into two groups, which translates into two distinct clumps of dots on your 2D plane (perhaps one grouped somewhere around the y-axis and one around the x-axis, for instance). Support vector machines are a learning mechanism that allows an automated agent to segregate the data into the two groups (and, implicitly, to figure out which "clump" a new piece of data should belong to). It does this, roughly, by figuring out what line most cleanly divides one clump from the other."

See? Was that so fucking hard? That's the basic gist of support vector machines, and any schmuck with a basic college education can probably understand it. I'm not that smart. Other people just seem to have the communicative abilities of an orangutan. Grr.

Anyway, it's really really really really frustrating, and I hate it. I don't care how smart you are if you can't communicate your ideas effectively. Part of the reason I am not that interested in areas like security and things like puzzle-solving is that I hate having to figure out things that somebody else already knows but won't/can't/is too incompetent to explain to me. It feels like a profound waste of my time. There are too many problems out there that are hard to solve when we're _cooperating_ without introducing ones that arise just because we're incompetent dicks and can't or won't talk to each other.

The Discovery Institute can't even get copyright correct

Okay, that's it. The gloves are off now. It's one thing to spout anti-evolutionary pseudo-science. It's another to pirate the stuff biologists produce without attribution (especially when it's Harvard biologists who made it).

I hope Harvard Law has a field day with this one and sues those idiots out of house and home. Especially since they seem to have made their home in my backyard. I think the term "infested" might actually be more appropriate...

Kasparov arrested

Predictable but sad. Things seemed like they were looking up for Russia under Gorbachev, but it looks like they are descending back into the old ways. Sigh.

"Taking Science on Faith" - find the logical fallacy, kids!

This kind of horse shit apologetics (small 'a', not big 'A') just irritates the fuck out of me, even more so given that the author is a physics professor and should know better. Here's the op-ed, and here's the problem with it:

First of all (and this is mostly just kind of an annoyed aside), the observation isn't even remotely novel. It's been around for quite a while, and anyone who took even the most basic course in philosophy will recognize we've slammed head-first, yet again, into Hume's problem of induction. You just rediscovered it, Mr. Davies. Congratulations. You want a cookie for that brilliant insight?

Okay, so if we start worrying on a philosophical level about the methodologies of science, then yes, Hume threw us a hell of a curve ball, one that is basically unresolvable. We only expect the future to resemble the past because, in the past, the future has typically resembled the past, etc. etc., blah blah blah. It is entirely possible that we could wake up tomorrow, the sky would be green, everything would be floating, the sun would have exploded, and time would be going backwards. Nothing in science can guarantee that won't happen.

So? Why is that an indictment of science? If you read Feynman's stuff (as I was trying to get a certain crackpot, who understands science even _less_ than Davies does, to do) he'll tell you that doubt and uncertainty are quintessential to science. Let's remember what the scientific method is:

1. observe
2. theorize
3. test
   

Note the conspicuous absense of "4. Declare as absolute, inviolate truth for ever more." Scientific theories hold until they don't. If the sun turns purple tomorrow, fine. All the theories the sun turning purple violates get thrown out. Sure, that would definitely turn the scientific _community_ on its head as it would constitute a violation of a lot of principles that had certainly seemed inviolate. But that wouldn't indict science as a whole even slightly. Step 3 is ongoing. It's never, philosophically speaking, done. Just because we continue to take as given theories that have as-yet failed to be falsified and build on them does not mean that it is _impossible_ that they will be falsified in the future. We just, personally, would be really damned surprised if certain ones were falsified at this point, because there is a mountain of evidence that has failed to falsify them, and DAMN did we ever spend a lot of time and money trying to rip them apart.

So, where Davies claims that, "Clearly, then, both religion and science are founded on faith," I claim that Davies needs to go the fuck back to school because he doesn't understand the philosophical underpinnings of science, and he should keep his damn yap shut (or at least refrain from publishing idiotic op-eds in the New York Times) until he does.

(yes, I know I'm taking on a cranky tone...I'm just tired of seeing this kind of shoddy thinking over and over again, and if a damn academic can't get it right, we have no hope of the voting populace differentiating between pseudoscience like creationism/ID and _actual_ science)

Now, an entirely separate issue Davies brings up is the origin of the set of laws that (seem to, so far) govern the universe. Davies off-handedly dismisses his colleagues who claim, "that’s not a scientific question," but in fact (again if Davies understood science at all), that's the right answer. Why? Because we have absolutely no way of testing any hypothesis we come up with. Any explanation you could come up with as to why the set of laws are the way they are is almost by definition untestable. Think about it: how the hell would you test any explanation you came up with? What experiment could you do that would invalidate your hypothesis?

Here's another way to look at it: our only experience is with the particular universe we live in. Religious philosophers always like to posit things like, "Why is there something instead of nothing?" and then use that to justify a belief in god, but if we're being intellectually honest here, we have no justification for believing nothing is any more or less reasonable than something. We have no frame of reference, no way to control for variables. It's not like we have been in 99 other universes where there was nothing and then we happened upon this one where there finally was something. Nope. Just this one.

Similarly, we have no justification to believing this particular something is more or less reasonable a universe than some other, less life-friendly something. We have no framework in which to evaluate such reasonableness. We're kind of SOL on the scientific front in this regard. These are questions more suitable for philosophers and religions, although I of course feel the need to point out that any ideas they come up with are merely finely crafted bull-shittery since such ideas would be, say it with me now, untestable and unverifiable.

Sigh. The only thing worse than dumb people is dumb people who should be, and think they are, smart.

The Washlet

These people apparently have a way, way, way too intimate relationship with their toilet. (very mildly nsfw)

Ahmed the Dead Terrorist

Mmm...culturally insensitive-tastic...

AdultSheepFinder.com

"I am a Man/Woman/Couple/Group looking for Anything/1-on-1 sheep/discreet sheep/multiple sheep/shaved sheep/sheep fetishists/black sheep/"dogging"/transgender sheep"...

It's the official dating site of New Zealand!

Top 10 on wikipedia vs. top 10 on conservapedia

Obsess much???

Dude, that's a lot of thinking about gay stuff. You guys sure you're okay over there?

A sentence summary of all the Star Trek films

Because I was accused of sending a nerdy email today, to which I indignantly respond, "I have no yet begun to nerd!" Also, primarily for the benefit of my girlfriend, who has, perhaps fortunately, never seen a single one.

Some of these aren't even full sentences!

1. Take some acid, wig out on the trippiest special effects the late 70s had to offer, and be amused by the twist ending. (memorable quote: "V'Ger!")
   
2. A battle of overacting between James T. Kirk and an over-the-top, Shakespeare-quoting villain. (memorable quote: "KKHHHHHHAAAAAAAANNNNN!!!")
   
3. Steal a spaceship, battle some Klingons, and go revive an essential cast member. (memorable quote: "That green-blooded son of a bitch! It's his revenge for all the arguments he lost.")
4. Whales and time travel...'nuff said. (memorable quote: "We are looking for da nuclear wessels.")
   
5. The crew of the Enterprise join a cult and go looking for God in the center of the universe. (memorable quote: "Be one with the horse.")
6. A moon blows up, Klingons realized they're fucked, peace talks begin, and certain parties are none to happy about it. (memorable quote: "You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon.")
7. Malcolm McDowell zealously pursues the happiest, sparkliest zipper in the universe. (memorable quote: "Actually, Captain, I am familiar with history. And if I'm not mistaken, you're dead. ")
8. Bill Gates...sorry, I mean a group of insect-like cyborgs...try to fuck up the drunk who built the first warp drive by traveling back in time. (memorable quote: "Definitely not Swedish...")
   
9. Ugly people take out their frustrations on less ugly people. (memorable quote: "The Son'a wish to negotiate a cease-fire. It may have to do with the fact that we only have three minutes of air left.")
10. The Enterprise fucks with a big fuck-all tank of a spaceship built by angry people in desperate need of a tan. (memorable quote: "Ladies and gentlemen and invited transgender species...")
11. ???

...and for the record, 6 is still my favorite. And I'm still angry that all the Next Generation movies (7-10) sucked so incredibly badly. The series finale was better than all of them, probably combined.

God help you, J. J. Abrams, if you end up adding yet another shitty movie to the franchise.

Succinct and totally accurate job descriptions

1. Read things that don’t matter, then write papers saying they do matter, for points that don’t matter, in order to get a job doing something totally unrelated: Student

Chuck Norris and Mike Huckabee

Mike Huckabee is a fringe looney, but nonetheless, this is really funny:

"Fiscal responsibility"

(part of) Why I never want to hear another Republican accuse another Democrat of fiscal irresponsibility:



(although, admittedly, only the last red box is really relevant...otherwise the first thing any decent Republican debater worth his or her salt would bring up is who controlled Congress in those various time periods...)

Scientific basis for the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory!

From the annals of "Well, duh." scientific theory, we finally have independent, methodical verification for Jon Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.

Gettysburg Address as a PowerPoint

An oldie but goodie. It needs to be preserved for posterity.

Halfnium fairy tales

I found this article in the Washington Post on "Halfnium bombs" profoundly depressing. This is exactly the way science is _not_ supposed to work (and why am I not surprised the Rumsfeld DoD had a part in it?).

We're talking about the next cold fusion in the sense that cold fusion also turned out to be a pipe dream. This is supposed to be _science_, boys and girls; if it can't be independently verified, it's a fairy tale. In this case, they tried to verify it once, failed, got yelled at by the kook who made the original claims because they supposedly did it wrong, ran it _again_ to his new specifications, and it still failed. On top of that, a group of the best and brightest reviewed the concept and said it didn't work, hadn't worked, and fundamentally couldn't work. In other words, independent verification failed. Spectacularly. So why the fuck are we still spending money on this horse shit?

On top of it all, the episode has all the telltale signs of pseudo-science. When you start claiming that the reason your idea has not been accepted is because of a cabal of established scientists who are too closed-minded to accept a "revolutionary" idea, that's pretty much sign #1 in my mind that you're probably a crackpot. The number of Galileos and Einsteins in the world is greatly outnumbered by nutcases with genuinely stupid ideas. Moreover, you'll notice that Einstein's theories were quickly proven _correct_ once objective experiments were devised. Reproducible results: there's a novel idea!

But you're right...I'm sure Einstein had much less resistance to his idea that time slowed down the faster you traveled and that gravity wasn't so much a force as a curvature in the 4th dimension. Clearly your ideas are much more threatening to the scientific establishment, and they're all just too incompetent to reproduce your results correctly.

Sigh.

I can't help but think this kind of shit is kith and kin to other forms of magical thinking Americans seem to be especially prone to lately like homeopathy and naturopathy. The terms "alternative" and "complementary" medicine, which have been bandied about a lot lately, drive me insane. They are idiotic, meaningless terms meant to suggest that somehow, you know, the scientific method just isn't quite cutting it. This is exactly the same logic used by people who try to tell you that you're being closed-minded when you won't consider the Bible as "another source of knowledge," "different" from science. Not inferior, or the refuge of crackpots, no! It's just "different."

Horse. Shit. I am so incredibly tired of this line of reasoning. Let's dispell it right now, shall we?

Science _is_ knowledge. The two are synonymous. If your "knowledge" is not scientifically acquired, it isn't knowledge. That was the whole point of the scientific method. Namely, if an independent 3rd party can't verify something, it isn't true. Period. End of statement. You can believe that extract of whosiwhatsis improves your mental health all you want, but if a double-blind study shows no difference between your extract and placebo, you're full of shit.

And indeed, that's the crux of the whole issue: the revolution that was science was the ability to objectively show someone was full of shit. See, the human imagination is powerful. It's capable of coming up with lots and lots of weird ideas about the world. But...psst...most of them are _wrong_. Hate to break your bubble, but there are certain rules the universe operates by, and if your rules contradict the universe's, hey, guess what? You lose. You can believe that your crushed DirtyHippyBerries will inspire your aura to enhance your body's natural disease resistance all you want, but in the meantime that cancer is going to keep merrily metastasizing until you're dead. Universe: 1, stupid hippy: 0.

There's no truth in belief, sunshine.

(In fact, it's even worse than that: the moment there _is_ truth in belief, it's not belief any more. It's been objectively verified, which means it's *gasp* science! So _by the very definition of it_, belief is not truth!)

The most important thing I learned from "Beowulf"

Don't, under any circumstances, bang a water demon, even if she looks like Angelina Jolie. Just...don't.

Conspiracy theorist fodder

Maybe they _are_ watching you...


In The Know: Is The Government Spying On Paranoid Schizophrenics Enough?

Ken Hutcherson is batshit insane

I think his words speak for themselves.

Wow.

Giuliani

Fyi, Giuliani is a giant douchenozzle. Not as obviously a douchenozzle as GW, but a douchenozzle nonetheless. Besides, as Biden so eloquently pointed out, not being able to say anything that isn't of the form, "noun + verb + 9/11," he is nepotistic, short-sighted asshole. And apparently only European tv is willing to say so.

What depresses me most is that the following is going to happen: Hilary is going to win the Democratic nomination, and Giuliani is going to win the Republican nomination. A combination of a well-organized Republican attack machine and Hilary's simultaneous ability to shoot herself in the foot and alienate everybody is going to allow Giuliani to win. And once he gets in the White House, he'll be the same douchenozzle he is today, and the people who voted for him will act surprised. Just like they did when GW turned out to be such a monumentally incompetent asshole.

So...fuck Giuliani and fuck Hilary, in that order. I'll be over here trying to figure out a way to monetize the kind of stupidity that gets these people elected.

Hot, sweaty Fox News action (nsfw)

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

AHHHHHHHH!!!!!

I may never forgive mrsmalkav for posting this:



(remember, boys and girls: my pain is your pain!)

Open source biology

Hey look! Wired just discovered what I was playing with last year! :)

Beat the lies out of the treacherous dolphin!

This was too good not to share:

Maybe cows have more sense than I give them credit for

"RUN! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!!"

A former roommate poses an interesting question

Why _haven't_ the Japanese taken over the world?!

Cal's halftime show

I like to call this, "When Two Forms of Nerdery Combine"...

Minority Report-ish nerdery

How to make a Minority Report-like interface with a Wii remote, some reflective tape and some infrared LEDs.

Hehehe...

I'm still laughing at "douchenozzle." Hehehe...douchenozzle...hehe...

Scenes from my whiteboard, part 2

"Guys-
Please hit me with some cash for the K. lunch. Guys without jobs only pay for the people they're nailing. So, that's a second option."

-- name withheld to protect the guilty

People I don't feel sorry for include

Hey, news flash: every employer checks Facebook. Guess your dumb ass just found that out the hard way, didn't you?

Flasher flashes

What part of this was surprising, exactly?

Top 10 lamest tattoos

College Call Girl (henceforth CCG) recently did a post on the lamest kinds of tattoos out there. Granted, I am not "inked," nor do I know pretty much anything about the culture, but I certainly sympathize with the sentiment that if you're going to permanently mark your body, it had better be unique and interesting. Is there anything sadder than permanently embedding something in your skin that says, "Look! I do whatever the latest trend tells me to do, and I can provide the forensic evidence to prove it!"

(Aside: one of the comments in that post read, "He is a total douchenozzle." That is _so_ my new favoritest word.)

Your daily douchebag (11/11/07)

Congratulations, House Democrats! You've just earned yourself a Daily Douchebag!

I don't even know where to start with this one. I know: let's start with the embarrassment of pork that was the Bush-veto-overridden Water Resources Development Act.

The WRDA proved once again that if there's anything that brings lawmakers together, it's a bill chock full of pet projects that are of dubious utility. I don't even know what things are in the bill; all I know is that if Trent Lott says the bill is filled with, “good, deserved, justified projects,” it's almost certainly a bad idea given Lott's history.

Point being, while Democrats are being spineless pussies about the important stuff...like, you know, _torture_...they crow about defying Bush in order to do important things like give additional money to the Bridges to Nowhere. And btw Democrats: I hate you perhaps most for inducing me to link to a Heritage Foundation page. I feel dirty in a way that a week's worth of showers is probably not going to fix. *shudder*

But, let's get to the crux of their current douchebaggery. After bitching (rightly) about Bush co. and the Republicans' completely fucked up priorities (Terry Shiavo, anyone?), they turn around and come up with this gem. Because really...what's the point in training the next medical researcher if he or she is going to have downloaded music illegally? Even if they come up with the next Polio vaccine, if an illegal copy of the latest Britney Spears album is festering on their computer, hasn't the moral battle already been lost?

The Republicans think the greatest threat to our country is gay people getting married. Democrats apparently insist that, no, really it's music piracy that will be the downfall of our civilization, and we must threaten the livelihood of our educational system in order to do the RIAA's work for them. And everybody is pandering to their fucking political and financial base as we bleed $200 million _per day_ on a war no one can come up with a coherent explanation why we're waging. Meanwhile, China (authoritarian regime though they may be) is actually teaching its students science, a fact that _might_ just have some long-term ramifications.

I hate everything.

Oh, Fox...

I know...shocking that Fox News might not hold itself to high journalistic standards...

They...umm...like their boobies. I guess. (nsfw)

Umm...sure? Why not?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1urmsYcJ9nk

Your daily douchebag (10/10/07)

A Daily Douchebag to a head of state: Hugo Chavez.

It's hard to be critical of such an outspoken critic of Bush, but it not the case that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Which is to say, Chavez is an asshole. I mean, after all, part of the reason Bush co. are assholes is that they are arrogant pricks who don't want to even listen to alternative viewpoints. That defines Chavez to a T. What kind of asshole interrupts another head of state at a summit? I don't give a shit if he's being critical of you. You're the president of a sovereign nation, not in fucking middle school. Grow the fuck up.

Oh, and stop trying to be a dictator, asshole. Vladimir Putin and Fidel Castro are not models to emulate any more than Bush is.

Revisiting old school Simpsons genius

Way too much of my life plays out like this. Whether I'm Flanders or Homer I'll leave up to you to figure out...

Which Jesus do you believe in?

Jesus...or Jeezus(tm)?

Public Dick

Don't worry...safe for work. Sort of.

I'm pretty sure this guy is following in the distinguished trail blazed by the likes of Ann Coulter, who by comparison is downright eloquent. I think it's even clearer for Dick, but I still firmly believe that both of them just want attention and decided long ago that pissing off as many people as they could would be a good way to get it.

I mean, really...doesn't this clip run like a badly staged Jerry Springer episode to you? He's totally a heel! They guy isn't even a good actor!

Black people love us!

No, seriously...black people love us!

(Best. Website. Ever!)

Ron Paul

Having seen another car with "Ron Paul in '08!" written on the back, I feel the need to point out that just because Dr. Paul, unlike his Republican colleagues,

1. is not an utter moron,
2. holds a deeper understanding of and opinion about foreign policy than, "terrorists...bad!", and
3. is honest,

...that doesn't actually mean that his ideas are _good_. Yes, the whole, "we should never have invaded Iraq and should get the fuck out at the earliest possible moment" is a good idea and refreshing given the Republican field (hell, it's refreshing even given the Democratic field), but let's remember: this guy is a Libertarian at heart. He believes that, essentially, the federal government shouldn't exist. At all. We can have the military, but that's about it. No National Science Foundation. No National Institute of Health. No FDA. No EPA. Nothing. All federal research money would dry up instantly if he had his way. There would be no environmental or consumer protections. Hell, I'm pretty sure he'd get rid of the federal reserve as well. The guy is a nut. Just because he's a different kind of nut than the standard, modern neocon Republican fare, and just because he would be a more interesting, intelligent guy to talk to than most politicians doesn't mean he's any less of a nut.

Seattle light rail - it lives!!!

Egads! Looky what I saw on the bus today!



They wuz testing it 'n stuff. Are they really going to be orange?

Also, I was on a 2 Express bus tonight and it passed another 2 Express. I felt a slight tear in the fabric of space time as it happened.

Soul-killing sexual positions for the lonely and loveless

That...that ain't right. (more conceptually NSFW than anything else)

Weird foreign phrases

Hee. :)

Google releases Android

No, this is not the beginning of some bizarre science fiction movie. "Android" is their attempt to create an open source OS for future phone platform development. (aside: you expecting an ad supported free phone? What are you, retarded?)

What I actually hope comes out of this is for Apple (and AT&T, I guess) to stop being greedy whores and open up their fucking platform. Much as I like the idea of an open development environment, I have no faith that anyone at Google or anyone that uses their platform can design a UI any better than the idiots at Microsoft, whereas if Apple's proved anything it's that they are masters of the user interface.

NYT atheism blog post

I happened to notice there was a New York Times blog post on, not actually atheism, per se, but on the question of an omnipotent god allowing evil in the world and its effect on various religious and areligious philosophers. Or the ye olde "Why do bad things happen to good people?" question (isn't the reverse question just as interesting?).

It's an amusing exercise, but if you're arguing about atheism, it's absolutely the wrong issue to be hung up on. Sure, it's one nail in the coffin of theistic reasoning, but it's only one nail, and frankly, I don't even think it's that compelling. As several of the authors on both sides of the argument eventually, circuitously realize, "good" and "bad" are subjective words that depend on some kind of moral framework that just ends up begging the question. Where do our morals come from? How do we judge that which is good or bad?

The kook Flew decides that this question is the damning indictment of atheism and, apparently, has based his "magical transformation" from an atheist philosopher into some kind of born-again weirdo on it. Frankly, I think if you spend your life trying to make obsessively clean logical arguments on either side of the issue, there is probably something basically wrong with you from the get-go (and no, I don't think the occasional blog post qualifies). But, that's beside the point.

Anyway, the argument that Flew brings up is basically, "Where do you get your morals from? Doesn't the fact that you have some moral compass at all suggest something transcendental about the notion of morals in the first place? More generally, how can notions of truth, justice, morality, etc. arise from a purely materialistic world? What is the thing (i.e., you) that's making moral judgments anyway? Aren't you just a collection of chemicals?"

...which brings us to the _actual_ question we're apparently talking about, which has very little to do with morality. It is the venerable mind-body problem, and it has a long and distinguished history. It amounts, basically, to, "How do minds arise out of bodies?" Which is to say, where does the "you" that's sitting behind your eyes, perceiving the world and making judgments, come from?

And, you know, it _is_ a problem. At some fundamental level, I don't really have an answer for it. I think it's telling that you can get very compelling materialistic explanations out of brain research. How can you maintain the notion of a soul when damaging various parts of people's brains (don't do that purposefully, incidentally) can result in drastic personality differences? Look at the case of Phineas Gage, whose personality became _drastically_ different when a pole went through part of his brain. Doesn't that suggest, at the very least, that some piece of what we consider the "mind" does indeed arise out of the material, physical structure of the brain? And doesn't that drive a similar pole through the idea of an eternal soul? What are you if I can, in some fundamental way, change that you by changing your brain?

At the same time, I don't think even those experiments can explain you to _yourself_. Maybe it can tell you about other people, but on some level, it can't tel you about you. In other words, I perceive myself: there's some kind of personality behind these eyes looking at the world, making judgments, etc. Where does that come from? Objective observation fails here, because in this case the observer and the observed are inseparable. I can't objectively observe myself. It's quintessentially and philosophically impossible. There's always going to be some piece of me that is playing the part of "observer," and fundamentally that observer cannot observe itself. Sure, you can be introspective about your emotions, your thoughts, wonder to yourself, "Why do I keep thinking about pop tarts?", etc., but the point is, there's some part of you observing those thoughts, and it's that part...whatever it is...that cannot be observed by itself.

So, the scientific method reaches its limits here. Just because that's true, however, doesn't mean that materialistic philosophy is damned. It just means that there's something it has trouble answering. Note that it doesn't give a _wrong_ answer (as theists have so often historically done...irrefutably proved wrong, incidentally, not by their own reasoning processes but by scientists)...it just has a hard time coming up with one. I'm okay with that. Maybe it's a fundamentally impossible problem. There are lots of things that are impossible in the world. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle comes to mind: you can't, no matter how hard you try, figure out both the position and the momentum of a quantum particle no matter how what. Maybe the same is true of you figuring out yourself.

I still think that it's better framework to reason about the world than magical, unjustifiable thinking. Sure, religious people have an answer to this question ("well it's your _soul_, silly!"), but, let's be honest, that's retarded. Or, less inflammatorily, it's unjustified. It's an explanation pulled out of a hat that's true because someone, probably in Rome, wearing that silly hat, said it's true.

And that's a ridiculous and stupid basis for any kind of understanding of the world.

Written on the whiteboard on my fridge this morning

"I was more surprised to learn that Shirley MacLaine had a house here than that Dennis Kucinich thought he saw a UFO here." -- author unknown

Benny Lava redux

Okay, so the Benny Lava _actual_ lyrics are almost as weird as the transliterated ones.

Also, I think this is a far better sound track for the original video.

How the fed works

I was googling around for information on how the fed and inflation work, and after wading through a lot of crap, this howstuffworks link was pretty much the best resource I found. It's fairly simple yet thorough.

Just thought I'd share.

Our gigantic asses are sinking the boats at DisneyLand

We, as a country, should be fucking mortified by this. We're sinking the "It's a Small World" boats, people! SINKING THEM! BECAUSE OUR ASSES ARE TOO BIG!

Jesus. Fucking. Tapdancing. Christ. If there is a more appropriate metaphor for the modern American mentality, I certainly can't think of it.

Your daily douchebag (11/03/07)

A Daily Douchebag to Pervez Musharraf for being a typical douchebag dictator and declaring marshal law when the few checks and balances left in his country weren't being nice to him.

It makes me profoundly sad to see these cases where a country boots out an imperial power (England) only to descend into their own home-brewed authoritarian regime. Having watched V for Vendetta recently doesn't help matters.

Update: Musharraf: still a douchebag. Also, I can't help but see parallels here between Musharraf's rationale for declaring martial law and the Bush v. Gore decision. Both amount to saying, "we don't have time to actually sort out the legalities because not having a President _right now_ is just too dangerous!" Which is, of course, horse shit.

Benny Lava

Another amusing purposeful mistranslation of an Indian music video.

I'm pretty sure the guy stole some moves from Michael Jackson. Back when MJ had, you know, organic parts.