February 28, 2003
Anger ~ Saddness?
Like me, Eric seems to be slightly behind the buzz curve, but perhaps that's just a filtering mechanism. Taste in action. (00009W)
Anyway, he points out a video of Johnny Cash doing the Nine Inch Nails tune Hurt. It's a very poignant rendition, switching between scenes of a young and striding Cash and an old and obviously worn Cash. It's good. Worth a look and listen. (00009X)
The differences, for me, between the Cash version and the NIN version are quite striking. I'm a long time fan of the NIN version. It's my closet maudlin depressed and angry emotional facilitation song. Closet because I get the impression that only posers feel emotional affinity with NIN songs. (00009Y)
In the NIN version there's a supressed violence that threatens to bust out; perhaps with some glee at finally being free. (00009Z)
In the Cash version the violence is still there, but it's like an almost broken dog, cornered, needing a way out. (0000A0)
Or maybe it is none of that and both of them are just cool songs and we should leave it at that. Playing critic is probably more fun though. (0000A1)
I'm going to break this rusty cage and run. (0000A2)
You lookin' at me?
The FBI has planes in the sky above Bloomington. They are apparently doing "physical surveillance" to assist ongoing classified investigations of "non-Americans". Here's today's story at the HoosierTimes. (00009S)
I'm a non-American, I better check under the bed for agents. (00009T)
I have three witnesses that can solemnly swear that I did, in fact, get the ecstatic giggles while listening to the Violent Femmes sing "I hate the TV" and "America Is" last Sunday while driving home from Wisconsin where we did, in fact, go ice climbing in the Ice Pit. (00009U)
EveryOne? knows that all forms of climbing have nothing to do with recreation, exercise or addiction. Climbing is, pure and simple, a stealth incursion technique. CL, DP, JH and I were up there in Wisconsin expanding our repetoire. We're now ready to ascend the stairs of the Capitol building after an ice storm. Power to the people at last! (00009V)
My Therapist
If you've ever been to the headshrinker you recognize this chair and this pose. With the downturn in the economy I find myself needing to bring my therapy in house. Thanks to the magic of the basement and my cat, my needs are being met and I can promise continued levels of at least moderate sanity for the foreseeable future.
My new therapist has little experience, doesn't say much, and has a smelly butt, but she's quite accepting and gives me a hug when I need it. If you are in need of a little therapy I can give my heartiest recommendation to Thomasina.
February 27, 2003
February 26, 2003
Caring for Your Introvert
From kottke.org I was led to a brief, whimsical, somewhat overblown article about introverts: Caring for Your Introvert by Jonathan Rauch. It doesn't really provide much in the way of guidelines but it made me feel warm and squishy (in the good way) inside. (00009P)
Some of it didn't resonate, but the bit about needing a recharge definitely did. (00009Q)
In the future, I'll be able to make transclusions of the parts of the article I liked. And have FlyingCars? too. (00009R)
February 19, 2003
The Golden Rule
In what I'm hoping is going to be something of a trend, the introduction to the Analects identifies the central goal of a person as being moral. The essential aspect of being moral is manifesting benevolence. The essential nature of benevolence is encapsulated in the following: (00008Y)
Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire. (XII.2) (00008Z)
TheGoldenRule. It's central to many faiths. It's nice. (000090)
Is there a similar rule: we do that which has been done to us? Eye for an eye is a manifestation of that? (000091)
I have a deep-seated bias that institutionalized authority is eminently capable of eye for an eye and not so good with the golden rule. I'm also aware that that bias is at least in part the result of me doing what has been done to me: Judge first, ask questions later. (000092)
Maybe while I'm reading the Dhammapada there will be some suggestions on how to break free from the endless cycle of hypocrisy that colors life. (000093)
Do not want. Do not do. Only be. (000094)
Tonight's reading will be in the Koran. (000095)
February 18, 2003
SpaceCGI
I've cleaned up the FrontPage and the rest of the wiki and added some more detailed information on the SpaceCGI tool. Once I get the MovableType issues worked out, I'll provide more info in the wiki about the MovableType PurpleWiki integration. Right now, the most complete information on that can be found in the Movable Type support forum. (00008X)
Gettin' Religion
I've been meaning to do this for quite some time. I just finished He, She and It so it is time to start something else. (00007P)
I've cruised my bookshelves and found a selection of religious texts. Most of these are from classes I took in college, some I've glanced at, some I've spent considerable time with, most did not get the attention they deserved. Now seems like a good time to give them another chance. All at once. (00007Q)
These don't intentionally reflect a bias. These are just the books I happen to have on the shelf; books I was assigned to buy or were left here by others. I plan to read a bit of one, then another. These are they: (00007R)
- Confucius: The Analects (00007S)
- The Meaning of the Glorious Koran (00007T)
- Hindu Scriptures (00007U)
- Tao Te Ching (00007V)
- The New Oxford Annotated Bible (00007W)
- Science and Health: With Key to the Scriptures (00007X)
- The Dhammapada (00007Y)
I don't believe in a personified god. Nor do I believe in any force separate from us that controls the fates. I do believe, however, that we (the people, the animals, the plants, the stars, the flowers, the kitties, the winds, the past, the present) are all pushing time forward to create the future. Collectively we are determining our own fate. I do think it is something akin to magic, I don't think it can be explained, and I don't want to. I can't be in Sifter and I like it that way. (00007Z)
Because we create our own fate, we are responsible, individually and together for what happens. If, for example, we collectively insist that our leaders should be cock sparring overgrown frat boys, that's what we'll get. (000080)
The books above are some collected wisdom that some people use to shape some of their lives. That makes them instructive, to me, on what makes the world go round. Even though I don't want to explain everything down to the last detail I do still want to participate in the majestic unfolding of understanding that comes from simply being in the game. (000081)
Unfortunately, the weight of the past is heavy. Would that we could simply wish a new world. Maybe we can start with the hope. (000082)
February 17, 2003
Conscious Creations
I've finished He, She and It. At the end the cyborg, Yod, is sent by his creator as a suicide weapon. Yod, who has become a person, is not keen on this but cannot reject his programming. So when he blows up he also blows up his creator and the lab that contains the record of his creation. (00007L)
Malkah, the old and wise but sexy grandmother figure says to Nili, an augmented human: (00007M)
Yod was a mistake. You're the right path, Nili. It's better to make people into partial machines than to create machines that feel and yet are still controlled like cleaning robots. The creation of a conscious being as any kind of tool--supposed to exist only to fill our needs--is a disaster. (00007N)
I'm undecided about the value of surgical augmentation but I think the differences between and issues related to Nili and Yod are similar to those seen between Engelbart and Licklider that we discussed in augury last year. (00007O)
More purple testing
I'm halfway there to getting the purple number parsing working with MT's new Text Formatting plugins. The display is by plugin, but the creation of the numbers is still in MT::Entry::save() with the double save, as described here: (00007I)
http://www.burningchrome.com:8000/~cdent/mt/archives/000034.html#nid00003X (00007J)
This posting is a test of putting the 2.51 modifications back into 2.62, with some minor adjustments to check the convert_breaks value. (00007K)
February 15, 2003
Winer's War
This is a response to Dave Winer's weblog entry:
A common response from across the ocean. Unlike the US, France and Germany know what war is like. There's the disconnect. Click here. Clue: That's not Germany or France.
Following "here" leads to a picture of the devastation in New York after 9/11. There is no doubt that was a tragic day, but it was not war.
There are many sources of information on the number of people that died in World War I and II, and they rarely agree. They do agree, however, that many million is far more than a few thousand.
Here's one that attributes 37,215,153 civilian and military deaths to World War II. Of those 4,200,000 were German and 563,000 French. US? 298,000.
Similar information is available for World War I. Grand total of 8,538,315 deaths. German: 1,1773,700. French: 1,357,800. US: 126,000.
9/11 was one day. While the event was the result of malicious intent, the degree of devastation was essentially a horrible accident.
In London, the blitz lasted from September 7, 1940 until May 11, 1941. On the first day 348 bombers and 617 fighters came in two hours.
Despite the tragedy, life still goes on for New York. That's good. Lot's of people are proud of New York and should be.
But. A one day terrorist attack is quite unlike several years of the two most killing wars ever. Wars that included events such as the holocaust. Wars that featured a new emphasis on killing civilians and efforts to break the spirit.
The US played a crucial role in both wars. Everyone knows the world would be a different place if the US had not gone to war. But the war wasn't in the US. It was elsewhere, across the ocean, in places like Germany and France.
My apologies to all the various people who remember a particular act of war that I've left out as the one that is most meaningful to them. If you have something to add, please feel free to leave a comment.
February 14, 2003
February 13, 2003
Playing with Reversible
Found via tesugen.com, there's this thing called Revervislbe that smells like it has promise, but it's not clear for what. (00004D)
The place tracks referers Kottke made a page, inspiring Tesugen and now there's one for me too. (00004E)
It will also accept trackback pings, so I'm ping there with this entry. (00004F)
What will it do? I dunno, but something'll probably come of it. (00004G)
February 12, 2003
Business Process Augmentation
Over at Loosely Coupled they're establishing a link between business process management and Engelbart style augmentation while talking about Krispy Kreme doughnuts (mmm doughnuts): (000049)
All along, the search for the next killer app in technology has been missing the point. Countless entrepreneurs, venture capital investors and corporations have been wasting their energies and their money trying to create software and machines that would somehow become the next killer app, when what they should have concentrated on was creating tools that help users unlock killer processes. (00004A)
Yup, process and tools matter more than applications. What's the difference between a tool and an application? An application makes large, usually incorrect, assumptions about the needs of the user. A tool helps with a task. (00004B)
I've a paper that ruminates broadly on such things. (00004C)
NID Sequence Testing
This entry tests writing the purple numbers to an index for later use by a thing I'm planning to call Space. Given a purple number from a single sequence source, find it's original document. (000044)
Idea is that you use the same sequence/nid generator for all document creation in a domain, no matter what the document creation tool happens to be. In my case I've got this MovableType blog and its associated wiki pulling NIDs from the same generator. (000045)
Space will take a NID and redirect to the original context, or parse out just the structural element that the NID points to. (000046)
There's no reason the nid generator has to only work with local tools. It could be a remote service. (000047)
Didn't work, don't have access to ID. Trying saving twice. (000048)
February 10, 2003
Wiki and Purple Numbering for Movable Type
Inspired by the Wiki plugin at 0xDECAFBAD I've done the first steps of a dirty integration between PurpleWiki and MovableType. (00003S)
I had hoped that I would be able to use Movable Type's plugin scheme but in the end I got confused and messed up, so I'm seeking feedback. (00003T)
PurpleWiki is a modification of UseModWiki to support Collab:PurpleNumbers (the marks that should be on the end of each of the structural units of this entry). The marks identify addressable sections of content for more effective referencing and will eventually help transclusion. (00003U)
Source for the parser is available at blueoxen.org. Source for the Movable Type changes are swirling around on my disk trying to settle down. Happy to share upon request. (00003V)
Instead of using the plugins I made changes in MT::Entry::save() and MT::Template::Context::_hdlr_entry_body(): (00003W)
- save() has been modified to take the entry text, parses it to a PurpleWiki::Tree format, adds the purple numbers on nodes without them, serializes the tree as 'wikitext' and saves it. The purple numbers are unique for an established domain. If you look at some of the other PurpleWiki parsed entries in this blog (see the trackbacks) you'll see the numbers are distinct. Eventually it will be possible to have just a domain and a purple number and get stuff via a straightforward retrieval mechanism. (00003X)
- _hdlr_entry_body() has been modified to, if the text contains purple number tags, to parse the wikitext format back to a PurpleWiki::Tree and from there into wikihtml. This does the formatting and also parses for WikiWords. When I was doing some testing with this portion using a filter plugin I ran into trouble because the test had already had some htmlification done to it before I had a chance to pass it to the parser. (00003Y)
What I would like to know from anyone who cares to answer: Can I move these functions into plugins, or am I stuck in the bowels of MT? If you don't know the answer but know how to find out, that would be helpful too. Thanks. (00003Z)
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Disco Squirrels
Via BoingBoing, it's Disco Squirrels at the Disco Sauna. This posting for Poupou. (00003L)
Oh, wait, it goes on. Disco Squirrels made it to BoingBoing? by way of webzen. A few days ago they had some feline zen. A sea of kittens indeed. Somewhere in there is a cat in a yarmulke. Don't miss singing. (00003M)
I could do this all day (00003N)
This will be my new career. Powered by Information Science I will cruise the internet for the effluvia that straddles the fine line between enlightenment and crap. As time goes by my discoveries will include more and more magic weight loss plans as I strive to turn back the tide of my waistline, slowly filling the room. (00003O)
All that said, can't leave without a recap of Viking Kittens (I never knew the lyrics before this) and Punk Kittens. I've seen them before but enjoy them every time. (00003P)
Oh dear, here I go again. So that rathergood.com place is rather good. How about some Lightsabre Cocksucking Blues or Angry Kittens playing the Vines. (00003Q)
I shall stop now rather than ruin your own discovery fun. (00003R)
February 06, 2003
The Unknowable
From an abstract of a lecture by Gregory Chaitin:
In other words, God not only plays dice in physics, but even in pure mathematics, in logic, in the world of pure reason. Sometimes mathematical truth is completely random and has no structure or pattern that we will ever be able to understand. It is NOT the case that simple clear questions have simple clear answers, not even in the world of pure ideas, and much less so in the messy real world of everyday life.
This is such a relief for me. Nevermind the god stuff, that's not really relevant to me. What gets me, what excites me, is that logic tells us that logic will never be completely logical. I love that. For me it encourages more play, more exploration, more interest. I don't understand why it gets some people down.
February 05, 2003
Introspection
President Delivers "State of the Union"
My friend Nate pointed out an important moment of farce, introspection, irony etc etc etc in the State of the Union speech:
Throughout the 20th century, small groups of men seized control of great nations, built armies and arsenals, and set out to dominate the weak and intimidate the world. In each case, their ambitions of cruelty and murder had no limit.
Meanwhile, somewhere near the Pentagon, advisors are clamoring to fragment NATO. Richard Pearle, chairmain of the Pentagon's Policy Advisory Board says:
It is now reasonable to ask whether the United States should now or on any other occasion subordinate vital national interests to a show of hands by nations who do not share our interests.
The sky is falling.
