Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in sptmet's LiveJournal:

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Friday, August 4th, 2006
8:30 am	backpacking and hating america inertiacrept reflects on culture and stuff. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, August 1st, 2006
7:23 am	Diversity In a sense, I don't understand diversity at all. I mean, I've been to the diversity training our company sponsors - which for management is a two day odyssey. Yet, on the other hand, I don't see where diversity comes in. Now, two points are worth bringing up here. First, the company I work for is on the Diversity 100 list of most diverse companies to work for. Second, I worked for 10 years in IT infrastructure. The second is relevant since IT infrastructure is the stronghold of the geek. Specifically, the white male geek. Of the 70 or so people in our area, there were 3 women and 5 or so non-whites. The IT department as a whole is significantly more diverse (about 2/3rds male and 2/3rds white). Nevertheless, this whole diversity thing confuses me. In theory, what diversity does is allows for different viewpoints which gives us an appreciation of different people and different points of view. I get that, but... to me, successful people share the same values. While I'm not sure if there is a set of cultural values that include sleeping late among them, successful people get into work early. It's one of those corporate culture things. By the way, if you do know of said culture, I'd be interested in joining it, getting up at 4:30 is just not fun at all. While a corporation may say it values work/life balance and spending time with your family and the like, when you start competing for promotions, the person who puts work first is the person who is going to have an edge. All other things being equal of course. Which they never really are, but that's another story. And no matter how much people try and pretend there's not a 'mommy track', a three month maternity leave is going to put a damper on a career. Enough so that a lot of women who take some time off often either don't come back or don't stay when they do come back. Now, I'm not sure how much we've gained as a society by having both parents work so for that and other reasons, I'm in favor of stay at home parents. Anyway, diversity. If diversity is really just hiring people who share the same (work) values as you regardless of gender, skin color, whatever, how is that being diverse really? Or, to put the question another way, what different perspectives or values are we supposed to be encouraging or seeing via diversity? (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, July 28th, 2006
7:23 am	Genre Conventions I have heard it said that the definition of class is listening to the William Tell Overture and not thinking of the Lone Ranger. Of course, I always think of a Clockwork Orange, so maybe that's not entirely accurate. And it's probably a bit dated now. When I walk to the train on the way home from work, I usually pass a number of people handing things out. There's one older guy, in particular, who hands out copies of the Watchtower. He sings with a particular sing-song intonation. I'm sure the style has a name, but I don't know it. It's the sort of singing that, if you heard it in a movie, you'd probably hear it in the middle of the movie. And the camera would be doing a slow pan across the sun setting through a jungle skyline with a plane drifting in to a landing behind heat shimmers. The singing, of course, would signify that our heros (on the plane) were about to make a landing in the Mysterious Orient. It is, to say the least, odd to hear it in a train station. Of course, I've also heard "Return to Innocence" playing over the sound system in the same train station, which is also not something you'd expect to hear in a train station. I was thinking, however, about genre conventions. When a given convention is new, there's not a set of best practices. So people just sort of do whatever seems best and go with it. Like web development. Way back in the dawn of the Internets, websites would look like... whatever they looked like. Now, a typical website looks like any other typical website. In a sense, it's a good thing, since you don't have to try and figure out where to find things like a navigation bar on a website. There's a part of me, though, that thinks it's starting to get a little too rigid. Or maybe I just miss the times when the genre wasn't so fixed that it has to be done a certain way. Newton said, "If I see so far, it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants." The downside to seeing far is that you don't see a lot of details. In the same way, we stand on the shoulders of our own giants. The downside to seeing far is that there's a convention for doing pretty much anything. If there isn't a convention, it's possible to put anything that's done in a little box describing it. There's even a convention for breaking conventions (see also: "Stuck in the Middle with You" and "Candy Colored Clown"). Humor is also a way of breaking conventions, or looking at them in a different way to find funny. Sometimes I wish I could go back to the days where conventions were forming, and watch the attempts of people to grapple with a new medium. Not because I like most of the failed attempts, but because I find restrictive conventions to be very uninteresting. Others could reasonably point out that there's a skill to executing something well within the standards of a convention, or that there's a knack of changing around a convention enough to get something truly new, or filling out a corner of a convention that wasn't done quite perfectly. Of course, a lot of my bias against conventions were set in or confirmed by Everquest. The game had a tremendous bias toward optimization. "The best group is..." "The best loot is..." There were a tremendous number of people who would only play in the zone where the best loot dropped with a group that had the exact right 6 classes in it. That they were right didn't make the attitude any less annoying. Of course, you'd spent all your time sitting and waiting to make the perfect group, and maybe regretting not picking one of the right 6 classes (out of 13). You couldn't learn the game or try something different, you had to spend all your time learning the conventions and then fitting everything to the conventions. Boring. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 25th, 2006
12:27 pm	Vox 3 vox invites. Need a name and e-mail address to send them. Name doesn't need to be real. First three comments. ETA: name on Vox is Kiztent (15 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, July 24th, 2006
2:33 pm	I thought it was interesting anyway resolute posted a link to something called 'continual partial attention'. I think it bears more thought, so that's all for now. mlewys linked the 95 geek theses, which I haven't decided what I think about it yet. An army study on asymmetric warfare. Key finding: when the war means everything to the small country and nothing (or little) to the small country, the big country is more likely to lose. I'm not sayin' being Baptist makes you stupid, but here's a list of religious affiliations by state. It's interesting to see the strongholds of religion scattered in states. Baptists down through the old south, Catholics in the southwest, the clash in Texas. The hotbed of Lutheranism in Minnisota and the Dakotas, the Jews in Nwe York. For the record, the fastest growing religion is 'none', and it's getting pretty big... in some places. Also, most common surnames by country (from little_details which has a lot of experts in a lot of strange things). (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, July 21st, 2006
7:22 am	Why do we blog A while ago, theferrett would post periodic 'pimp my write' posts. Basically, everyone would post and link what they felt their best post in the last month was. These posts would create a tremendous amount of replies, but they never seemed to generate any secondary traffic. That is, there weren't a lot of people who would click on the linked posts and read them. Well, there may have been (since it's inherently unknowable), but there weren't a lot of people who would do secondary comments. I know, because I'd occasionally pop a short comment on a post I'd read, and I'd get some raised eyebrows and the like in return. I thought about this for a while. My first thought was, "well, why would people be suprised at a comment from some random person on a post they thought was good and linked on an e-famous person's post requesting links." (the answer probably relates to the complex dynamic of friending, which I cheerfully confess to not understanding since social mores are not really my thing) (and by "not really my thing" I mean "something I am totally clueless about") This wasn't really a fruitful line of thought, so my next thought was how ferrett could use his e-fame to help people read other people's posts. I contemplated, and I had a few good ideas about how to do it. It turns out communities like I envisioned already exist, but that wasn't relevant. I had the moment of understanding about the important part. Ferrett didn't write those posts to help people read other people's journals. I mean, maybe that was his stated goal, but given how ineffectively he went about it, it probably wasn't really his intended goal. My thought was that he encouraged people to showcase their work to increase his own e-fame. After all, you're giving people a chance to talk about themselves, which most people like to do. This causes them to link your post more, which increases the readership of your posts. Given the wide reading list I have on this journal, I see a lot of different types of posts. There's a poetry journal (ocean_friction), some open diary journals, some friends' only journals (and I've culled the ones I can't read now), linkblogs, some genuinely surreal things (about what you'd expect given how the readership was assembled), even one journal with a pornstar of the day feature (kittydoom). Unfortunately, there's also too much really good stuff to read for me to even begin to catch it all. I can, at any given point in any given day, open up the friends' list for this journal and find something funny, some links that are interesting to read and possibly the latest meme that's sweeping LJ. Which was my goal in creating the journal. Not to have too much to read, but to always have something worth reading (thought the two are linked). Somehow, I've started posting anyway. Which is a story in and of itself, but suffice to say I'm pretty happy with the results of that as well. To a first approximation, I think public and pseudo-public journals are about attention. Now, this could be positive, telling friends that you've scored a spare ticket to a concert that needs use or negative, where you fake a death (side note: myspace has a community devoted to debunking e-deaths). Of course, my thoughtful post could be your attention whoring, so it's all relative. Which leads me to my question. What post of yours best meets the goal of your journal? Explanations along with links welcome. Just for the record, my goal is to let me find the stuff I may have missed because the cost of always having something new and good to read is that I miss a lot. To be fair, I'll go first: My personal favorite post is "when you mention orientation the fundamentalists have already won" It's my favorite because it given me the affirmation I'm looking for from LJ. People saying I'm smart, people disagreeing without me crossing the line into outright trolling(*) and someone who encountered the post on a friend's f-list and decided based on that to friend this journal. If I'm going to think about a post, the best I can do is to get you to think in return, and think hard enough to tell me what you're thinking. * - you could say that I did cross the line into outright trolling. Since that's relative as well, I wouldn't argue much. Nevertheless, do you have any idea how hard it is to get someone to tell you you are wrong? (10 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 18th, 2006
7:33 am	Specialization and aptitude Recently, I had a college intern start working for me. One his first day, we went and had lunch together. We talked a bit, and he confessed he wasn't really sure about what he wanted to do with his life. In a sense, I can certainly sympathize with that, but on the other hand, I'm not sure I can really help with that either. The reason I can't really help is that I work at a large company. Large companies tend to be much more into specialization. I, for example, am responsible for leading the change management team. You know how when something worked yesterday, but it doesn't today, the first question asked is, "Well, what's different?" All we do is track what's different. Any time someone changes something, they submit a form, get approvals and then report that they changed it successfully (or not). We take all those change requests and track them and report on them. Our fearless intern has been given the task of checking the scheduled change log for dubious changes. While it's important (to me), I don't feel like it's going to really help him understand what he wants to do with his life. He may know he hates making nifty excel spreadsheets (or that he likes it), but given that change management is a fairly specialized discipline, that doesn't help him understand what he likes either. Sometimes, I feel that we're overspecialized. I see that in a lot of things really, not just my work. A recent post on collecting just gave me one of those "huh?" moments. Evidently serious collectors don't even unbox the toys they collect. I've also seen comic collectors who buy two copies of every comic. One of bag and 'collect' and one to read. When you look at it in terms of specialization, it makes sense. After all, some collectors will eventually want to sell something. When you sell, your buyer will want it to be in good condition. Back before collecting was a formal hobby (I speculate), you'd sell something you had that someone else wanted. Sometimes it would be in good shape, sometimes it wouldn't. So people would take better care of stuff they planned on reselling, and as more people did so, the standards would go up, which led to a feedback loop terminating in people buying things then lovingly putting the untouched boxes inside other boxes where they are sealed away from dangerous radiation. I prefer to think of it as sucking the fun out of collecting, but that's probably why I'm not a serious collector. Specialization, however, leads to sucking the fun out of things. When I was in college, I took 2 philosophy classes. I thought it could be interesting, but I hated it. I remember from Philosophy of Science a rather heated discussion about 2 different schools of thought. The difference in between these two schools of thought, however, was how they felt about a hypothetical case that could never happen. It was some parallel world quantum weirdness, and if the parallel worlds that we could never see existed, you were in school X, and if you felt the parallel worlds that we could never see didn't exist, you were in school Y. I was in school WTF and stopped being interested in philosophy. Looking back, however, I find the more I have to do office politics, the more I think it's useful to understand philosophy. I've run across some of those 'school WTF' choices and had to make decisions. The problem is that while my simple understanding of philosophy gets me by, someone who studied philosophy full time has a much deeper knowledge and could easily nitpick me to death on any point I could possibly bring up. I respond to attacks on my lack of knowledge by ignoring these people. The other part of my thought is on aptitude. When you play MMOs, the first thing you probably see is a choice of race and class (or profession or whatever). You have to decide what you want your character to be able to do. Of course, what you do changes constantly. If you play in the lower level game, flexibility might be a good thing. The ability to have a character that can start doing 'X' but when 'Y' is needed, you can do that, and 'Z' too. You might even think you're a better player than that person that only does 'W'. The reality, of course, is that in the "end game", you have to just do 'W', sometimes on a timed schedule for hours on end. There was a thread on the WoW shaman boards discussing exactly that. Some people play shaman because of the flexibility. They're good at balancing things, doing what needs to be done. The complaint was "I didn't play a shaman so I could spam resist totems and lesser healing wave all day." The response was, "Raiding isn't about being flexible, it's about doing your job perfectly" Which is true. After all, a raid is 40 people working in unison, trying to stretch the limits of what can be done. Shaman can tank almost as well as warriors? That's great, but we've got warriors to tank. Shaman can AE almost as well as mages? Well, the mages are impressed with your DPS numbers, but they still are better. Are you proposing that we take 10% off the efficiency of the raid so you can have fun doing different stuff? I think not, we have first kills and e-peen to think about. Start spamming lesser healing wave and keep it up until I tell you to stop. Obviously, I'm not in the school that likes raiding. But there are lots of people who do like it. Now, you might find you have an aptitude for a game because you enjoy it as a n00b, but once you get into the 'end game' it's so different you find you hate it. Or you could struggle as you learn the game, but once you get into the end game, you find you are the master of it. Which, of course, brings us back to the question of 'what do I do with my life'. I think we should do something with our lives that we like, but more importantly, something that we're good at. In a sense, anyone can do anything. It's not rocket science, even the rocket science. Given enough time and training. But if you're good at something when you start out, that doesn't mean that you'll be good at it 'professionally'. I, for example, liked doing phone support (which was my first professional job). But that was at a small company. When you look at real call centers, it's evil and soulless work. You have a supervisor who monitors your phone calls, plus every statistic you can imagine relating to every call. ACD (Average Call Duration), first call resolution, abandon rate, average hold time. So, how do you discover something that you'll be good at and enjoy in the long term? Beats me, and it's scary to be in a position where you are starting from scratch and trying to decide. (19 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, July 17th, 2006
7:42 am	Show, don't tell I was reading on the train to work this morning, and I ran across a few bit of prose in the book that disturbed me. There was some cases where the author chose to use specific numbers to describe things, which I didn't really like. The first was describing a suite sized room as '5 meters square' (I forget the exact wording). My first read was 5 square meters, which is about the size of my bed and obviously wrong. When I thought about it, I thought maybe he meant a square 5 meters on a side. Which is 275 square feet, which doesn't, in my mind, fit the description of a room like a luxurious hotel suite, but it's probably close. Except rooms aren't usually square. Well, that's neither here not there I guess. Although it's worth noting the author slips from English to metric units describing things, which is just hard to deal with sometimes. The other item that really bothered me was describing someone as 6'4" and 150 pounds. Now, being that height myself, I have a good sense of how weights at that height translate to builds. Since, however, the recommended weight for that height is 215 pounds (recommended by BMI anyway, which I think is too low), we're talking about someone 65 pounds underweight. Or 30% underweight. While I suppose it's possible, it really jarred. Then, since I'm the same height and all, I thought about how the hypothetical reader would visualize me from a simple height and weight. Weight is in the vicinity of 275. Given that people most often comment things like "you carry it well," when I tell my weight, chances are you think I'm bigger than I am. You'd probably be better off, if you described me, to use the height and weight most people seem to think I am (6' maybe 6'1", 200 pounds give or take a few). At least, the reader would have a better mental picture of what I looked like. It would be totally inaccurate, in terms of reality. Then again, is it more important to be accurate about your fictional characters... well, they don't exist outside of your head. I'd like to hope that if I ever had to evade the law, they'd publish my actual height and weight, then no one would ever find me. And I was thinking about how an author might describe me, but it all seemed GaryStuish. Then I remembered how someone described me to help someone pick me out of a crowd. "Former New England prep school football player now middle aged." The response? "I totally know who you mean." Much clearer. (11 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 12th, 2006
10:11 am	The concept of privacy So, I was reading a linked story about opposition to the British Identity Card. Meanwhile on Terra Nova, there's a discussion about the level of trust people display in public. I know when I was doing some field ersearch on what the hell emo is anyway, which took me over to myspace, I encountered people who would post their phone numbers in public. Personally, that rather gives me the creeps. I mean, I know there's piles of information to sort through, so what are the chances of some random lunatic fixating on my phone number on myspace (which, by the way, is the most popular website), but then again, how annoying could some random lunatic make my life if they *did* fixate on my phone number and try and annoy me? I know that there's a lot of personal information that's very easily available if you look, and not that hard, but to me it seems risky to expose any more than you have to. So, what are your thoughts on keeping private or not? (31 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, July 6th, 2006
7:27 am	When a man lies, he murders some part of the world One of the neat things about famous quotes is that if you look around enough, you can find a quote that will support anything you can think of. I'm not sure if everyone, or even anyone, does this but I periodically have conversations in my head with people to help me think things through. Unfortunately, people generally don't coordinate by holding up their half of the conversation, but it's a useful exercise to do. One of the things I've tried to be absolute in life is truth. I have, at times, picked up a reputation for being "recklessly honest". Of course, I'm also good at omission and indirection, since telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth all the time isn't popular. So, I'd carry on conversations internally to see how I could deal with not answering a question I didn't want to answer. The problem I noticed right away is that if you answer questions then stop answering, it's pretty obvious that when you stop answering questions a sensitive topic has been hit. My initial thought on this was if I felt a question could lead to a line of questioning I didn't like, I'd just refuse to answer all questions on the topic, instead of trailing off when I stopped liking the questions. Of course, since any line of questioning could lead to topics you didn't like, maybe it would be better to never answer any questions. That way lies madness. As far as truth itself, that's a complex question. While lies may be the lubrication for the machine of social interaction, they can weave a complex web when you start telling them. At work, there's a person I talk to occasionally. At some point, I fear I may have offended her. Being the simple person I am, I asked if that was the case. Being polite, of course, she denied it. So I continued to talk to her, but of course, I continue to get a sense of discomfort. I conclude, then, that I have bothered her and have decided we don't need to talk any more. In a sense, it would be simpler to tell the truth, but then again, would it? There is, of course, the classic question, "does this dress make my ass look fat?" On the one hand, saying yes is dangerous, but saying no means that your partner will go out in a dress that does make her ass look fat or is otherwise unflattering. But once you start saying things that are untrue, where do you stop? It's a slippery slope. (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 5th, 2006
9:57 am	You're not from around here, are you misia posted a link to the International Dialects of English Archive. Haven't had a lot of time to listen, but I did like the "Maine one" reading. Backwoods Maine, you bet. (Comment on this)
Monday, July 3rd, 2006
7:45 am	Your tax dollars at work We need to start calling the Congressmen's offices and ask them to stop "Vandalizing the Internet." Be quick, frank, and give your name/address. Tell them "I'm blogging this!" Work has decided to be very busy, but no one is coming in today, train was empty. More later. (Comment on this)
Friday, June 23rd, 2006
8:27 am	Weirdest poll I ever did see Violence against civilian targets in order to defend Islam can be justified... Sometimes/Rarely/Never/Don't Know (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, June 22nd, 2006
8:12 am	Wheel in the sky keeps on turning I wonder, now, if the whole idea of generational values is a valid one. In some senses, there are distinct traits for some generations. The major events of the past did shape the people who lived through them. One the other hand, a lot of things are just age things. If I were a few years older, I'd talk about how the baby boomers went from hippies to Presidents. But I'm not, so instead I have to talk about how Generation X went from the slacker generation to respected. Of course, we're not all respected. I've read in other LJs about 'aging Goths' and the like. Regardless. One of the things we do at corporate diversity training is a workshop on generations. Basically, you break up into 4 groups and each group gets to describe the positives and negatives of a given generation. The 4 we usually do are the pre-war generation (sorry, pre-world war 2), baby boomers, Gen X and Gen Y. You see a lot of traits that span generations. Everyone focuses on the positives of their generation. Generations older than the speakers are respected for their accomplishments but also considered older and out of touch. Younger generations are considered not quite up to standard. Young, frivilous. Baby boomers say the same things about Gen X as the Gen Xers says about Gen Y. The clearest memory of my generational image is the movie "Slacker". Which, I admit, I've never seen though I've heard of it. It is, as far as I know, a pretty typical coming of age sort of movie. Typical in the sense that you have people in their late teens/early 20s who are grappling with what to do with their lives. There was the term "McJob" to describe the first jobs that we took out of college. I'd always retained that image as fitting my generation, for some reason. Slackers. I read a book about managing people in my generation. It reads a lot like the tips I see for managing the current generation. Desire for work/life balance. Wanting to have a meaningful job, one where you could see contributions. A lack of respect for the command and control leadership style, preferring a more collaborative style. Of course, we went into the workforce during the breaking of the covenant that the older generations had. Come in, do your job, retire with a pension. No such luck for us. The initial rounds of re-engineering, outsourcing, downsizing. Of course, when I say older generations, I don't mean that many older generations. The concept of retirement and pension are somewhat recent. Anyway, one year's diversity training featured a younger crowd. So we did our little generational game to talk about images and perceptions. I was quite shocked to see that the group that described GenX was talking about respectable, hard working adults. We're slackers dammit! Soon enough, I suppose, we'll be old and out of touch. Then Gen Y will be the old respectable people and the next generation will be the one struggling to find an identity, bring skills with the new technology into a workforce that doesn't necessarily want to deal with them and trying to balance the desire to not work a lot with the desire to have the cash you get from working a lot. (20 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 21st, 2006
7:26 am	Contact Last week I decided I wanted to read Contact (Carl Sagan novel). I couldn't find my copy so Friday I picked up a new one. When I read it I was stuck by a number of things. The first was how the world changed on Dr. Sagan. The novel was published in 1985 and set in 1998 running through to 2000. Like everyone else, he missed the collapse of the USSR and the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was very amusing to read about the views of the new millenium. The sense of wonder with the turn of the century. Maybe I missed out working in IT as I did, but I didn't really see any of that. I saw a lot of concern about the whole Y2K issue. I remember getting up on Saturday, December 31, 1999 and turning on CNN at 6AM. By that time it was already the New Year in Australia, and I checked for failures and outbursts of chaos and the like. Nothing. I watched the New Year come through Asia, everything working fine, with midnight sweeping West and finally through Africa and Europe. Everything worked. I went to sleep while the New Year was moving through the Atlantic, secure that all was well in the world. Anyway, as theferrett mentioned, West Wing is "political porn" - politics the way we expect it should be. While that's slightly disturbing that people expect sex to be like porn, it seems to be a well accepted definition. By that definition, Contact is scientific porn. Science the way we expect it should be. There's a lot of social theory indirectly in the book as well. A female president with the "First Husband" - still not there (or even close I think) and not at all like the reality of the Presidency in 1998. Dr. Sagan also predicted a receding of fundamentalism in the new Millenium as people because more rational and so forth. I laugh... ha. There was a quote, though, that really caught my attention. It's from Ellie's first meeting with Palmer Joss. "...a world where people die without God. No punishment. No reward. All the saints and prophets, all the faithful who ever lived - why, you'd have to believe they were foolish.... To me, that would be a hateful and inhuman world. I wouldn't want to live in it." I, of course, immediately went back to the conversations between Rorschach and Malcolm Long: "even that avoids the true horror. In the end there is nothing, we are alone" (that's from memory so it's probably not completely correct). Indirectly, it's the theory that justified the left from the New Deal forward, as well as the current administration's justification. People are stupid. They can't figure things out for themselves. But we, whoever we is, are smart (or divinely guided, or whatever) and if you give us power and money, we will make things right. While the bulk of humanity is stupid, that's no excuse. The people who want power are no better. There is, however, hope. As Rorschach says, "we do not do this because we are permitted, we do it because we are compelled." Suprisingly many people, when given a chance, can do the right thing. No God, no politics, nothing but simple human nature. There's also reference in Contact to the Soviet biology research being handicapped by being taught the genetics of a "polticially reliable" crackpot. If that hits too close to home for anyone I'm sorry. Last quote from Contact, from Eda, "But if you must search the streets for food, you will not have enough time for physics." I'm reminded always of an interview with David Gilmor from the "Live at Pompeii" film. He's showing Pink Floyd's studio with all of their wonderful and strange synthesizers and so on in it. Gilmor wonders what could happen if he just turned someone loose in the studio and told them to have at it and figure it out. I have always thought that there'd be a lot of crap turned out, but some people would have a genuine gift for music and would turn out some amazing things - like Pink Floyd did. The problem is that we don't have the time to try everything that we could try and we sort of have to guess at what we can do well enough to support ourselves and enjoy. The other side of that is a bit of speculation from Gibson in "The Winter Market" about artists who work in a medium that the tools don't exist to express. Imagine, say, Picasso working on a computer. Would he still be brilliant, because he's Picasso, or would it suck because he was someone who was born into the era with the exact tools he needed to express himself perfectly. The ability to recite all of the Odessy, tuning the pacing to a live audience, for example, was a great thing to be able to do for a Greek artist. It's not really a useful way to express art now, though. (15 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, June 15th, 2006
2:10 pm	A few links ideas are bulletproof 90 years of precident erased And thelastboy reminds us, "You can't spell 'girlfriend' without I-R-L!" (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, June 12th, 2006
7:30 am	Intelligence in an evolutionary cul-de-sac I obviously read "The Marching Morons" some years ago. While it's, in some senses, an interesting story, I don't feel that it necessarily accurate. I'm not talking intelligence in the 'smart' sense, I'm talking it in the overall 'tool using, self aware' sense. Your typical chav is as smart as Albert Einstein as far as I'm talking. I also read about the whole thing of 'natural selection' and 'Darwin awards'. The more I think about it, the more I realize that we've overcome natural selection. This isn't necessarily bad, inasmuch as Steven Hawking would be able to confirm for us. On the other hand, it's possible we have other goals now than simple physical survival. As I've seen from playing Civilization 4, the member of the species best able to survive is the one that is most adaptable. Man is nothing if not infitinitely adaptable. Seemingly what is happening is that the countries and cultures with the greatest industrialization are the ones where you see the biggest problems. I'm not sure if there's something about industrialization that's a problem or some other factor. The problem with trying to understand problems like this is understanding what the root cause is. The pope (John Paul II) had to tell Catholics to get it on more. Evidently, constantly telling people sex is bad had taken root in the Catholic psyche and there were fewer Catholic children, resulting in fewer Catholics. Or, people could find the whole concept of Christianity quaint and as a result, fewer people stay Catholic. It's hard to tell. More importantly, as the population ages and lives longer, more and more time and energy will be devoted to those at the end of their lives (and if this doesn't scare you, it ought to). The first baby boomers hit 65 this year (US only). The assumption always in science fiction writing is at this point 'a miracle occurs' and suddenly man moves off the planet, which kickstarts breeding and all that fun stuff. Somehow, however, the miracle doesn't look like it's happening. Of course, it never will look like it's happening until it actually does. We've ended up with a zero sum game, where pressures will result in more rigorous selection. Or we could make the pie larger. The last time we did that in a major changing way was the agricultural revolution. We continue to evolve and change and push the limits out. Perhaps this trend will continue. After all, "The Population Bomb" and "The Sheep Look Up" were written in the 70s doing straight extrapolation and coming up with predictions like 'by 2005 bad things will happen'. Here we are and those bad things never really happened. Not in the way predicted. Because we changed to deal with the changing situation. Intelligence has enabled man to certainly move out and overflow a number of ecological niches, even overflow what was though to be possible for population, but it does not appear to be a lasting evolutionary advantage. So we're in this cul de sac. I'm not sure what the way out is, but I probably won't see it in my lifetime. (Comment on this)
Friday, June 9th, 2006
3:14 pm	On relativity misia talked about cultural appropriation and how it's a reflection of a certain cultural mindset. As a comment, she linked Pachelbel's Canon in D Major remixed. There's also a rock version. And I was thinking about other modern interpretations of classic music I've heard, like Madness' version of "Swan Lake" and Electric Hellfire Club's version of "Fuer Elise". Then I ran across the how the look now comm (which has an insane memories page). In there, I found the entry for "Robin hood: Prince of Thieves" (pause to spit). This movie, along with Dances with Wolves pretty much represents everything I hate about the early 90s revisionist bullshit. I, however, was discussing that with my father he pointed out that my preferred interpretation of "Le Morte d'Arthur" (Excalibur - 1981) is just as revisionist. Having seen Richard Gere's, um, interpretation of Lancelot in First Knight (1995), I have to agree. Contrastingly, I picked up a copy of "God's Breath" from someone at work. This is exerpts various sacred texts (Book of Genesis, Gospel of St. John, Book of the Dead, Qur'an, Tao Te Ching, the Book of Rumi and the Bhagavad-Gita). Wonderful, I think. Sacred texts are sacred texts. Except, as the introduction points out, the sacred texts are not meant to be read literally (no matter what the Protestants tell you), but are meant to be illustrative and help you to understand the Divine. So much for absolutism in the world. I suppose I should've known that from my study of semiotics in college. (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, June 5th, 2006
8:55 pm	States I have slept in After this road trip, I'm down to 8 states in the lower 48 I haven't visited (and by visited I mean set foot in, including airport layovers). So I decided to tighten the metric for visited, and got the "states I have slept in". Here's the list with reasons: Alabama - Spring Break Arkansas - Road Trip California - Visited Family (father was doing a summer study at Berkeley and I visted for a week) Florida - Spring Break Illinois - Live Here Indiana - Graduate School Iowa - Road Trip Kentucky - Road Trip Louisiana - Spring Break Maine - Summer Job Maryland - Lived There (father worked a summer in DC) Massachusetts - Lived There Michigan - U*Con Minnesota - Visited Graduate School Nevada - Road Trip New Hampshire - Lived There New Jersey - Visited Grandparents New York - College North Carolina - Road Trip Ohio - Lived There Oklahoma - Road Trip Pennsylvania - Born There Rhode Island - Vacation Texas - Business Travel Vermont - Vacation Washington - IBM Briefing Wisconsin - Gencon Wyoming - Road Trip The map has some interesting holes ( Google hacks ) (22 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, June 3rd, 2006
10:25 pm	Driving, day 2 Left Elko in the morning, still took 3 hours to get out of the state. Nevada wins the award for most boring state ever. Even if Utah does have signs warning about drowsey driving and wheel arcs off the side of the highway. The salt flats are just odd to drive through. Like Nevada miles of nothing leading off into mountains. The nothing in Utah is grey and vaguely shimmering, unlike Nevada where it's brown and not at all shimmering. Cleared Salt Lake City, not much to see from the highway. Immediately went UP and soon was over the border into Wyoming. Wyoming is beautiful country. You start to see grass and ground cover (with horses and cows contentedly cropping it), especially when you cross the continental divide. I'm not sure if it's me knowing that I'm up high or a real feeling, but you feel like you are on top of the world and everything stretches out from you in huge panoramas. Different from Nevada and Utah in that there's variation. Wyoming rises and falls, both macro- and microscopically. Stopped for the evening in Cheyenne. I was up for pushing on, the person with me wasn't. This means that I'll be getting home in the middle of day 4, which isn't that big a deal. I still have 2 vacations days I requested that I'll be at home before I have to go back into work. Trip will end up costing slightly more than I expected, but I'm not that worried about it. In contrast to the natural beauty of Wyoming, the people... aren't. While I'm used to being taller than most people, when I was in a WalMart picking some stuff up, the people were not even close to me in height, bar one I saw. For that big a crowd, I'd expect to see more people close to my height. The young cuties, that is to say the hostesses and waitresses, at the local chain restaurant we stopped at for dinner were young, but not cute. On the other hand, said local chain restaurant was full (we were the first ones on the waiting list during the dinner rush), and I could hear myself think the whole time. I have seriously never encountered quieter crowds. Even the child in the next table over, when it yelled during the meal, was quieter in its yelling. Overall, I'd deal with the lack of cuteness in exchange for the wonderful scenery and the quiet. Except, of course, I need what I call civilization to survive. By that, I don't mean the cultural trappings of large crowds of people - clubs and food, rare goods and special services. I mean the ability to find a new job. I have, on several occasions, had a need to find new work. The area I live in has a large number of people (with the corresponding large number of available jobs). More importantly, it has different industries. So while a town like Kansas City might seem appealing since they have a lot of jobs from Sprint and MCI, when the phone industry as a whole crashes, there's a lot of unemployed people looking for a small number of jobs. While we didn't do as well as other cities during the Internet boom, we didn't bust as bad either. Since I work in technology and now technology management, I don't need to be in an industry specific city. I've worked in a few different industries since my target company is one that has computers and needs them working/fixed/managed and sometimes I've had to be a bit less picky than I'd like about taking jobs. Overall, I like the work philosophy this engenders. It's pretty easy to find something when you need a job and while there's a lot of competition to move up... I can live with that. To me, the hard part is getting your foot in the door. Not that I worry about this because I want to switch jobs... but you never know. I've seen enough things happen to want to keep my options open. Even if my current employer is on a tear, there's always the next transition in business with the new model and the chance to blow the transition. Regardless, Wyoming does not, as far as I see, have the requisite population centers to supply the environment I want for work. I'd consider retiring here except (1) I notice the cold more as I get older and (2) nothing is near anything. While I wouldn't mind having a small shack with a fast Internet connection I'd also like a grocery store reasonably close and maybe a store or two for computers and games and the like. I guess I've been completely (sub)urbanized. Luckily the retirement age keeps getting pushed back, further delaying the decisions I'll need to make about retirement. (1 Comment |Comment on this)