February 27, 2008
DNA Facial Feature Identification
I wonder if any work is being done on DNA-facial feature mapping? DNA should be a huge indicator of a person's physical characteristics (think hook-nose, cleft chin, eye color, hair color, race, facial shape). I wonder if anyone is doing work in this area to find non-common denominators? With recent analysis that determined that twin DNA is not always identical, perhaps physical characteristic analysis is being done in the DNA arena. I think it would be very efficient to be able to pull some skin out from the fingernails of a victim, pop it into a computer and get a basic printout that showed some guy with an oval face, a cleft chin, brown eyes, thin brow in his 40s (as judged by telemoerase decay) and be able to say 'This is the guy we're looking for'. The preponderance of criminals with plastic surgery probably isn't all that much of a problem, and it would be a fantastic investigative tool.
Tenant-Safe Housing
Again, random thinking about problems/solutions. Today's problem: inadequate safe low-income housing in urban and close-in suburban areas. One of the problems you see when you shop for truly low-cost housing in the DC area is the predominance of real estate that has been trashed, destroyed and neglected. Anything costing less than $100,000 seems to be housing that has been destroyed by the previous tenants. However, there is still a need to provide housing at these low costs.
Today's Solution: Tenant-safe housing development. What needs to happen is that the housing, when constructed, needs to be built to be safe from abuse. The materials and construction methods that we use for housing today is not built to withstand abuse and neglect. We build walls out of a thin paper-board that is easy to punch through. Vinyl siding is easily punctured, written upon and destroyed. Plumbing is exposed and cabinetry is made of processed wood that is easily ripped from its moorings. Maintenance is required for indoor fixtures and appliances. Carpeting and wood flooring is easily destroyed.
What we need to have is a construction mechanism for creating living space in such a way that when a tenant leaves, it can be practically bulldozed clean. The landlord or owner should be able to completely wipe clean the previous resident's filth and neglect and be able to start with a working, functional and presentable empty space Building cost itself becomes less of a problem when maintenance costs are nullified because eventual recapture of capital is all but assured.
Imagine a cement box to which recessed electric outlets, plumbing and basic appliances (stove, refrigeration) were provided. The appliances are hardened against wear and tear, mold, filth build-up. The electric outlets are tamper-proof and safe from spillage, shorting and jimmying. If the home is lived in by someone who lives in a pig-sty fashion, the landlord comes in with a set of brooms, garbage bags and a large hose. The entire place is cleaned within a day. No new paint is needed, no new carpeting. Mold is treated, walls and floors are swept and washed. The appliances are tested to ensure functionality, and the next day it is ready to be lived in.
The external part of the home also needs to be engineered to be resistant to graffiti, damage from baseballs and other thrown objects, perhaps even drive-by gunfire......
Just a thought to come back to some day....
Today's Solution: Tenant-safe housing development. What needs to happen is that the housing, when constructed, needs to be built to be safe from abuse. The materials and construction methods that we use for housing today is not built to withstand abuse and neglect. We build walls out of a thin paper-board that is easy to punch through. Vinyl siding is easily punctured, written upon and destroyed. Plumbing is exposed and cabinetry is made of processed wood that is easily ripped from its moorings. Maintenance is required for indoor fixtures and appliances. Carpeting and wood flooring is easily destroyed.
What we need to have is a construction mechanism for creating living space in such a way that when a tenant leaves, it can be practically bulldozed clean. The landlord or owner should be able to completely wipe clean the previous resident's filth and neglect and be able to start with a working, functional and presentable empty space Building cost itself becomes less of a problem when maintenance costs are nullified because eventual recapture of capital is all but assured.
Imagine a cement box to which recessed electric outlets, plumbing and basic appliances (stove, refrigeration) were provided. The appliances are hardened against wear and tear, mold, filth build-up. The electric outlets are tamper-proof and safe from spillage, shorting and jimmying. If the home is lived in by someone who lives in a pig-sty fashion, the landlord comes in with a set of brooms, garbage bags and a large hose. The entire place is cleaned within a day. No new paint is needed, no new carpeting. Mold is treated, walls and floors are swept and washed. The appliances are tested to ensure functionality, and the next day it is ready to be lived in.
The external part of the home also needs to be engineered to be resistant to graffiti, damage from baseballs and other thrown objects, perhaps even drive-by gunfire......
Just a thought to come back to some day....
February 25, 2008
The Future of Economics: Capitalized Socialism
8I'm still working on what to call it. People in the United States don't like the word 'socialism'. Especially those of us who remember the Cold War and the U.S.S.R. Communism is a dirty word, even though it wasn't so much communism as fascism that we really had a problem with; but I digress. This is going to be a random rant about our capitalist economy, socialism ideas, the future and a change that we are undergoing as I write.
The United States thrived through the Industrial Revolution, and through the Computer Revolution that followed it. The lives of our grandparents were hard, back-breaking lives, with 6-day work weeks and 12-hour work days. When they came home, there was still more work waiting for them at the house. Life isn't that hard any longer. Our homes are increasingly coated in new-aged materials such as vinyl-siding and faux brick fronts. Only the trim needs painting, and not even every year at that. Our land is no longer 2 or 3 acres of farmland that needs be plowed, planted, fed and harvested. It's now a patch of 1/4 acre genetically engineered short grass that is fed by automatic sprinklers and the monthly visits from the TruGreen ChemLawn truck. Mowing it takes less than an hour. Our homes are fitted with electronic devices that our grandparents didn't dream of: dishwashers, frost-free refrigerators with ice-makers, and washer/dryer machines.
Not only are our lives easier, but the lives of the lower-class as well. Even the cheapest apartments are fitted with indoor air-conditioning, garbage disposals and clean water and waste disposal. Certainly I am not begrudging the raising of the standard of living in America, I am merely calling attention to it to make a point. The reason that we have these things is because of the bulk production and economies of scale that have taken over in our country. Once we produce a nicety, a creation that makes our lives easier, we distribute the cost of research, development and production on a declining scale based on demand. Demand for the latest and greatest drive down the price of the common and mass-produced, until either the item in question becomes free, or is no longer produced by a corporate society that sees value in profit, but not in social welfare.
And free is relatively new in our society, but it is a growing phenomenon. Wired magazine in March of 2008 has Free! as its cover story and covers a great deal of information about (mostly information and Internet services) things that are free, and why they've become so. While it does not touch greatly on physical items, there is mention of the Freecycle movement in the U.S.
Our efficiency is catching up with us. The things that we need to produce (housing, clothing, food, entertainment) now take much less work to produce than they once did. We also have a vast society full of hand-me downs, with entire generations full of entertainment available to our new generations. With the speed that we can put out entertainment (and retrofit and re-purpose old entertainment), we may have already generated enough for the lifetime of our children.
Perhaps the phrase I was looking for is Hand-Me-Down Capitalism, or Capitalized Socialism.
How does Hand-Me-Down Capitalism work?
1) Corporations invest in research and development to improve products and invent new products.
2) Initial production runs and initial high prices pay the costs of the initial R&D and protect a comfortable margin of profit during production runs. Profits are kept in-house as those who provide R&D and initial creation of items are given the incentive to continue making new things.
3) Production runs over-produce what is necessary to ensure that goods are available until they are outmoded. Here we have to make some concessions for socialism to provide the incentives for companies to do this. This is where we switch from capitalism to socialism and need the greatest re-engineering of our monetary-centric economy.
4) Hand-me-downs are turned in for newer models and re-used for those who can not afford the latest and greatest. (This is where we need some more work - especially in using enduring standards during engineering)
5) Mass production of older models need socialized assistance to ensure continued availability after what we consider end-of-life today.
At the bottom of the society are those who do not work on the production of new things. In fact, new labor force is needed to put into production the items of old. Social work programs can reproduce what the factories of old produced, with all of the lessons learned through initial production runs. Repetitive tasks mean work for unskilled laborers. Exposure to technology and historical runs of older products mean training and education of those who may be starting at the lower rung of the labor force. Increased production of goods mean greater availability of older items for places in the world that may not have them.
Capitalism will continue to thrive because our advertising and marketing will continue to do a great job providing us the incentive to want the biggest, baddest, brightest we can offer. The only way to afford this ever-increasing standard of living will be to participate in the cutting edge and pulling down a piece of the unsocialized money supply. Fewer and fewer workers will be needed, however, as technology rapidly increases our effectiveness. Competition for the high-life will become more and more fierce.
Concerns for this new economy include ever-increasing class warfare, and a sense of entitlement for the lower class. We already see that those who have a standard of living above and beyond what could be expected a mere hundred years ago feel cheated that they can not live the life of the middle class. We need to do a better job of ensuring that maintenance of the standard of living of the lower class is kept to a level wherein this rebelliousness is quashed through 'good-enough' levels of service.
What we need:
1) Better engineering for increased life-span of physical goods.
2) Use of standards in part usage and item design to ensure continuing serviceable goods.
3) A recognition of social needs in addition to profit needs. Provide incentives for R&D that make a difference in how things are engineered to ensure long-lasting items.
4) Social work programs that provide service levels for the hand-me-downs in society. This means providing incentives for the working poor to continue working, incentives that may not mean a change in class, but instead a sense of accomplishment, belonging and entitlement that provide quality of life improvements from a psychological, if not physical standpoint.
5) Bring back Mr. Fix-It. Social intervention should provide incentives for fixing and maintaining old items to ensure continued serviceability instead of the American throw-away culture. Since the financial incentives may not be there for these highly skilled individuals, society needs to provide incentives for their continued existence. Low cost parts availability, anti-trash incentive programs (imagine what it costs the environment to trash a computer versus reusing it [or its parts] and pay the differential as a cost incentive to those who work to save it)
I am coming back to this draft now two days later. I've had some time to give it some more thought, and I came up with an idea. What might help is if we were to create something much like the energy/carbon credits. We could create the 'SC' credit (for Social Conscience). We could give companies SC credits that could be used to gain tax benefits (or other incentives such as access to federally sponsored corporate loan programs). People would be able to amass SC credits as well. In fact, one thing I've always been a fan of is 'work for welfare' programs. Some of you who know me are probably asking yourself whatever happened to my belief in limited government. I'm not so much a fan of small government, as I am a fan of limited governmental meddling. Less rules, more services...but again, I digress.
SC credits are like money, but are centered on providing basic quality of life services and have an economy that cannot be used for frivolous purposes. You wouldn't be able to trade your SC credits outside of the program. SC credits could be integrated into the social security program (x SC credits = 1 work credit). Other governmental services could be bought with SC credits, like maybe a fast lane at the DMV, or extend your unemployment insurance for a month.
Obviously there are a lot of details that need to be worked out to prevent crossover areas (where we provide money for social recipients to pay for things that are a necessity to them, but not to their landlord, e.g. rent) from becoming places where abuse and fraud amass.
The benefits, however, would be fantastic. People could perform social welfare to amass credits they can use later in life when they're unemployed and/or retired. SC credits wouldn't need to be taxed. You wouldn't allow people to freely trade them to prevent fraud. It would force people to either be independently frugal or provide community service in order to receive community help. Incentive programs ensure that businesses provide their 'hand-me-downs' to help society. You could even provide programs like patent-release programs where engineering diagrams and documents are released into the public domain for social credits.
That's my thought for the day...and this post is already too long.
The United States thrived through the Industrial Revolution, and through the Computer Revolution that followed it. The lives of our grandparents were hard, back-breaking lives, with 6-day work weeks and 12-hour work days. When they came home, there was still more work waiting for them at the house. Life isn't that hard any longer. Our homes are increasingly coated in new-aged materials such as vinyl-siding and faux brick fronts. Only the trim needs painting, and not even every year at that. Our land is no longer 2 or 3 acres of farmland that needs be plowed, planted, fed and harvested. It's now a patch of 1/4 acre genetically engineered short grass that is fed by automatic sprinklers and the monthly visits from the TruGreen ChemLawn truck. Mowing it takes less than an hour. Our homes are fitted with electronic devices that our grandparents didn't dream of: dishwashers, frost-free refrigerators with ice-makers, and washer/dryer machines.
Not only are our lives easier, but the lives of the lower-class as well. Even the cheapest apartments are fitted with indoor air-conditioning, garbage disposals and clean water and waste disposal. Certainly I am not begrudging the raising of the standard of living in America, I am merely calling attention to it to make a point. The reason that we have these things is because of the bulk production and economies of scale that have taken over in our country. Once we produce a nicety, a creation that makes our lives easier, we distribute the cost of research, development and production on a declining scale based on demand. Demand for the latest and greatest drive down the price of the common and mass-produced, until either the item in question becomes free, or is no longer produced by a corporate society that sees value in profit, but not in social welfare.
And free is relatively new in our society, but it is a growing phenomenon. Wired magazine in March of 2008 has Free! as its cover story and covers a great deal of information about (mostly information and Internet services) things that are free, and why they've become so. While it does not touch greatly on physical items, there is mention of the Freecycle movement in the U.S.
Our efficiency is catching up with us. The things that we need to produce (housing, clothing, food, entertainment) now take much less work to produce than they once did. We also have a vast society full of hand-me downs, with entire generations full of entertainment available to our new generations. With the speed that we can put out entertainment (and retrofit and re-purpose old entertainment), we may have already generated enough for the lifetime of our children.
Perhaps the phrase I was looking for is Hand-Me-Down Capitalism, or Capitalized Socialism.
How does Hand-Me-Down Capitalism work?
1) Corporations invest in research and development to improve products and invent new products.
2) Initial production runs and initial high prices pay the costs of the initial R&D and protect a comfortable margin of profit during production runs. Profits are kept in-house as those who provide R&D and initial creation of items are given the incentive to continue making new things.
3) Production runs over-produce what is necessary to ensure that goods are available until they are outmoded. Here we have to make some concessions for socialism to provide the incentives for companies to do this. This is where we switch from capitalism to socialism and need the greatest re-engineering of our monetary-centric economy.
4) Hand-me-downs are turned in for newer models and re-used for those who can not afford the latest and greatest. (This is where we need some more work - especially in using enduring standards during engineering)
5) Mass production of older models need socialized assistance to ensure continued availability after what we consider end-of-life today.
At the bottom of the society are those who do not work on the production of new things. In fact, new labor force is needed to put into production the items of old. Social work programs can reproduce what the factories of old produced, with all of the lessons learned through initial production runs. Repetitive tasks mean work for unskilled laborers. Exposure to technology and historical runs of older products mean training and education of those who may be starting at the lower rung of the labor force. Increased production of goods mean greater availability of older items for places in the world that may not have them.
Capitalism will continue to thrive because our advertising and marketing will continue to do a great job providing us the incentive to want the biggest, baddest, brightest we can offer. The only way to afford this ever-increasing standard of living will be to participate in the cutting edge and pulling down a piece of the unsocialized money supply. Fewer and fewer workers will be needed, however, as technology rapidly increases our effectiveness. Competition for the high-life will become more and more fierce.
Concerns for this new economy include ever-increasing class warfare, and a sense of entitlement for the lower class. We already see that those who have a standard of living above and beyond what could be expected a mere hundred years ago feel cheated that they can not live the life of the middle class. We need to do a better job of ensuring that maintenance of the standard of living of the lower class is kept to a level wherein this rebelliousness is quashed through 'good-enough' levels of service.
What we need:
1) Better engineering for increased life-span of physical goods.
2) Use of standards in part usage and item design to ensure continuing serviceable goods.
3) A recognition of social needs in addition to profit needs. Provide incentives for R&D that make a difference in how things are engineered to ensure long-lasting items.
4) Social work programs that provide service levels for the hand-me-downs in society. This means providing incentives for the working poor to continue working, incentives that may not mean a change in class, but instead a sense of accomplishment, belonging and entitlement that provide quality of life improvements from a psychological, if not physical standpoint.
5) Bring back Mr. Fix-It. Social intervention should provide incentives for fixing and maintaining old items to ensure continued serviceability instead of the American throw-away culture. Since the financial incentives may not be there for these highly skilled individuals, society needs to provide incentives for their continued existence. Low cost parts availability, anti-trash incentive programs (imagine what it costs the environment to trash a computer versus reusing it [or its parts] and pay the differential as a cost incentive to those who work to save it)
I am coming back to this draft now two days later. I've had some time to give it some more thought, and I came up with an idea. What might help is if we were to create something much like the energy/carbon credits. We could create the 'SC' credit (for Social Conscience). We could give companies SC credits that could be used to gain tax benefits (or other incentives such as access to federally sponsored corporate loan programs). People would be able to amass SC credits as well. In fact, one thing I've always been a fan of is 'work for welfare' programs. Some of you who know me are probably asking yourself whatever happened to my belief in limited government. I'm not so much a fan of small government, as I am a fan of limited governmental meddling. Less rules, more services...but again, I digress.
SC credits are like money, but are centered on providing basic quality of life services and have an economy that cannot be used for frivolous purposes. You wouldn't be able to trade your SC credits outside of the program. SC credits could be integrated into the social security program (x SC credits = 1 work credit). Other governmental services could be bought with SC credits, like maybe a fast lane at the DMV, or extend your unemployment insurance for a month.
Obviously there are a lot of details that need to be worked out to prevent crossover areas (where we provide money for social recipients to pay for things that are a necessity to them, but not to their landlord, e.g. rent) from becoming places where abuse and fraud amass.
The benefits, however, would be fantastic. People could perform social welfare to amass credits they can use later in life when they're unemployed and/or retired. SC credits wouldn't need to be taxed. You wouldn't allow people to freely trade them to prevent fraud. It would force people to either be independently frugal or provide community service in order to receive community help. Incentive programs ensure that businesses provide their 'hand-me-downs' to help society. You could even provide programs like patent-release programs where engineering diagrams and documents are released into the public domain for social credits.
That's my thought for the day...and this post is already too long.
Post 500
It's been a long road, but here I am writing the 500th post on my personal blog. My life has changed (for the better) since I began writing this blog, but mostly I'm the same person I was when I started. A person much like you. You see, we're all the same, with the same insecurities, the same concerns, the same foibles. Each one of us judges him or herself harshly, comparing their worst traits with the best traits of others. Knowing this is probably the only thing that keeps us sane.
I haven't made any progress on my New Years Resolutions. In fact, this weekend, I even broke my no-aspartame regimen and opted for a diet coke while visiting Washington DC this weekend. We went to the Hirshhorn in downtown D.C. This is probably my favorite museum in the district. If you like contemporary art and/or sculpture, I highly recommend it. They constantly have new exhibits. I took some pictures with my camera phone, but opted against lugging the SLR. Seeing life through the lens of a camera dulls the experience, and when I have the camera I tend to keep it to my eye. I just wanted to experience the museum.
We sold our oldest car, the 2000 Dodge Neon. We went up to CarMax in Sterling, VA. It only took them about 30 minutes to inspect the vehicle and give us a fairly reasonable offer. While it wasn't as much as we'd hoped, it was fair enough to part with it.
I downloaded Microsoft Expression Design and Blend this weekend (the demo versions) and started doing the tutorials they link to. It's a different development environment than I'm used to, being graphically oriented rather than logic-oriented. I finished up the interface/XAML creation component and am just now getting started with Blend itself. Perhaps working with the graphical components will nudge my creative side out into the open.
Well, enough free flow writing for now..perhaps later.
I haven't made any progress on my New Years Resolutions. In fact, this weekend, I even broke my no-aspartame regimen and opted for a diet coke while visiting Washington DC this weekend. We went to the Hirshhorn in downtown D.C. This is probably my favorite museum in the district. If you like contemporary art and/or sculpture, I highly recommend it. They constantly have new exhibits. I took some pictures with my camera phone, but opted against lugging the SLR. Seeing life through the lens of a camera dulls the experience, and when I have the camera I tend to keep it to my eye. I just wanted to experience the museum.
We sold our oldest car, the 2000 Dodge Neon. We went up to CarMax in Sterling, VA. It only took them about 30 minutes to inspect the vehicle and give us a fairly reasonable offer. While it wasn't as much as we'd hoped, it was fair enough to part with it.
I downloaded Microsoft Expression Design and Blend this weekend (the demo versions) and started doing the tutorials they link to. It's a different development environment than I'm used to, being graphically oriented rather than logic-oriented. I finished up the interface/XAML creation component and am just now getting started with Blend itself. Perhaps working with the graphical components will nudge my creative side out into the open.
Well, enough free flow writing for now..perhaps later.
February 20, 2008
The occasional narcissist
I was driving home in bad weather today in stop and go traffic. You know, the kind of traffic that just rocks you to sleep. I was in front of a commercial van and behind some sports car and moved up a half of a car length to close the gap. The van behind me didn't move. As I started to smell something funny, the van blinked its high beams at me, twice, three, four times. It still didn't move up. I started looking to the van to try to see if the driver was signaling to me as I moved up another car length. The passenger reached out his hand in front of the vehicle, and I began to panic. Is something wrong with my car? Am I on fire? I searched for the funny smell, and then I saw what the passenger was really doing. He was throwing water on the van's windshield from inside. As the van turned on its wipers, I realized that he wasn't signaling me. In fact, it had nothing to do with me. He had been searching for the wiper fluid switch, perhaps not familiar with the van controls. As his buddy threw his drink up against the window, the van's wipers came on, and he continued to move up. Sometimes I can be such a narcissist.
February 15, 2008
Giving up Aspartame
On this date, Feb 15, 2008, I have poured out 20 oz. of Diet Coke into the drain. I weigh 213 pounds at 6' 1". After reading about a private aspartame experiment, and recalling similar readings, I have decided that I am switching to a water-based diet, and for the next year will not eat foods containing artificial sweeteners. I will not change my eating habits in any other way. Rather than buy 'sugar-free' jello or pudding (and similar products), I will continue to eat those products with the normal sugar content. I will also not change my exercise regimen of 'occasional' workouts. Completely non-experimentally sound (as it also means giving up the caffeine and carbonation in the diet sodas), I want to see what happens to my weight and health over the next year. I will post on my progress if anything interesting occurs (like losing that 20-30 pounds I'm carrying around needlessly).
January 15, 2008
Is Belief a Reckonable Force?
Thoughts to examine. Is belief a force to be reckoned with? Is it possible that belief in something itself can help cause it to come true? And if so, at what atomic level does this force begin and end?
Let's start with some psychology. Game theory suggests, and experiments seem to show that humans (and indeed monkeys as well), when given a choice between two scenarios, would rather be in a 'winning' position than actually have a more beneficial outcome between the two choices. In other words, they'd rather be in a position where they come away with more than their counterparts in the game scenarios.
Now, if we take this and extrapolate it to politics, where the atomic scale is groups of people, is it possible that people have a predisposition to vote for whomever they think is going to win an election? Has belief in 'who will win' become a psychological tool that can be used to sway an election? If so, have we given too much power to the major media outlets? If they say that a candidate has no chance of winning, doesn't that influence his/her chance by itself? If the major media outlets declare that someone is becoming a leader in the polls, is this a self-fulfilling statement?
What about at an individual level? Can belief affect us at the level of just one person? By following the lives of very religious people, one might begin to believe this is the case, as faith seems to drive their life decisions and affect positive outcomes. Or does blind faith drive their expectations and the analysis of the outcomes themselves? One experiment into the power of belief would be the placebo effect, where a sugar pill is substituted for real medication. In some instances, the placebo can have the same effects as the actual medicine, although I've only heard of such success when it comes to pain management.
Perhaps belief itself is not a power in and of itself, but something that can affect comprehension of causality. When an outside influence can be utilized to affect the outcome, people may be willing to push that outside influence to cause the desired or believed outcome, often without conscience effort. Modifying our theory that belief is a force, then, perhaps we could say that the blindness of causality within humans is a weakness that can be manipulated to swing independent forces in our favor. And in that case, the atomic scale of the force of 'belief' would end at the level that irrational thought begins in mammals.
Let's start with some psychology. Game theory suggests, and experiments seem to show that humans (and indeed monkeys as well), when given a choice between two scenarios, would rather be in a 'winning' position than actually have a more beneficial outcome between the two choices. In other words, they'd rather be in a position where they come away with more than their counterparts in the game scenarios.
Now, if we take this and extrapolate it to politics, where the atomic scale is groups of people, is it possible that people have a predisposition to vote for whomever they think is going to win an election? Has belief in 'who will win' become a psychological tool that can be used to sway an election? If so, have we given too much power to the major media outlets? If they say that a candidate has no chance of winning, doesn't that influence his/her chance by itself? If the major media outlets declare that someone is becoming a leader in the polls, is this a self-fulfilling statement?
What about at an individual level? Can belief affect us at the level of just one person? By following the lives of very religious people, one might begin to believe this is the case, as faith seems to drive their life decisions and affect positive outcomes. Or does blind faith drive their expectations and the analysis of the outcomes themselves? One experiment into the power of belief would be the placebo effect, where a sugar pill is substituted for real medication. In some instances, the placebo can have the same effects as the actual medicine, although I've only heard of such success when it comes to pain management.
Perhaps belief itself is not a power in and of itself, but something that can affect comprehension of causality. When an outside influence can be utilized to affect the outcome, people may be willing to push that outside influence to cause the desired or believed outcome, often without conscience effort. Modifying our theory that belief is a force, then, perhaps we could say that the blindness of causality within humans is a weakness that can be manipulated to swing independent forces in our favor. And in that case, the atomic scale of the force of 'belief' would end at the level that irrational thought begins in mammals.
January 08, 2008
What's Important?
It's time for a randomble. As you age, you become more introspective. Sometimes this can be a bad thing, because you tend to beat yourself up about every little thing that you do wrong. Sometimes it's a good thing, because you begin to realize how you've changed over the years...and this may be the key to recapturing your youthful energy.
Hopefully, society is also becoming more introspective. Aside from the news about Jamie Lynn Spears being pregnant (of COURSE you knew about that already), there was a variety of articles decrying that we spent so much front-page space on that story. The Internet is changing the way that we look at media. The blow-back from the Paris Hilton stories (and the MSNBC host that ripped up the Hilton coverage on the air - yay for her!) may have been a sign that we, as a society, are getting tired of our attention being drawn away from what's important.
Who cares what O.J. Simpson is up to, or whether Britney Spears lost custody of her kids? Why is this important to you? Isn't your time and brain power better spent on dealing with the real troubles of the world? Don't we have enough problems of our own to not have to focus millions of dollars of our collective Gross National Product on paying photographers to record the lives of the 'rich and famous'? I say, enough already. As a society, it's time for us to refocus.
On a personal level, let's start with the idiot box in your house....the television. Turn it off. That's right - I want you to commit to watching a (MINIMUM) 1 hour a day 'NO SHOW'. That's an hour blocked out, just as if you were to watch a regularly scheduled daily TV show. And I don't want you to pick up the mouse in its place. No TV also means no Internet, and no rags (magazines) either. Instead, I want you to spend an hour with your family, your friends, or a hobby. It doesn't matter what you do with your time, but here's the plan. Since you're not spending an hour watching Entertainment Tonight, or other drivel on the boob tube, you'll actually activate your mind and disincentivize the producers of the mindless crap that is filling your brain.
In the 1960's, the United States sent a man to the moon. The computing power used to perform this feat can be found in a computer the size of a postage stamp today. The science we used to do it is taught in high schools around the country. We built nuclear power plants, bridges, skyscrapers and had a civil rights turnaround.
Since the 1960's, we've barely done shit. We've created an entertainment industry that has run away with our consciousness. We've self-hypnotized our society with a heap of mindless crap that isn't doing anything for us as a whole except keep us occupied and numb to the fact that our country and the world is falling apart at the seams. We need to wake up.
There's been a lot of technological change over the past 40 years, and we now have more capability than our parents could have ever dreamed. The problem is that we're not utilizing it to solve our problems. Instead, we're using it to keep ourselves busy while we wait for the rest of the world to right itself. Well, the responsibility is yours, not someone else's. Turn off the distractions, and get back to production values that made this country great in the first place.
Maybe I'm just projecting here. Maybe I'm projecting my own personal sense of a wasted 40 years on everyone else. It's possible that I'm dead wrong about the state of American ingenuity and creativity. But, let's take a look at what we produce today, and ask ourselves where we're headed. When I look at how much time we spend discussing mindless drivel and avoiding real problems, I can't help but think it's not just me who's lost his way.
Hopefully, society is also becoming more introspective. Aside from the news about Jamie Lynn Spears being pregnant (of COURSE you knew about that already), there was a variety of articles decrying that we spent so much front-page space on that story. The Internet is changing the way that we look at media. The blow-back from the Paris Hilton stories (and the MSNBC host that ripped up the Hilton coverage on the air - yay for her!) may have been a sign that we, as a society, are getting tired of our attention being drawn away from what's important.
Who cares what O.J. Simpson is up to, or whether Britney Spears lost custody of her kids? Why is this important to you? Isn't your time and brain power better spent on dealing with the real troubles of the world? Don't we have enough problems of our own to not have to focus millions of dollars of our collective Gross National Product on paying photographers to record the lives of the 'rich and famous'? I say, enough already. As a society, it's time for us to refocus.
On a personal level, let's start with the idiot box in your house....the television. Turn it off. That's right - I want you to commit to watching a (MINIMUM) 1 hour a day 'NO SHOW'. That's an hour blocked out, just as if you were to watch a regularly scheduled daily TV show. And I don't want you to pick up the mouse in its place. No TV also means no Internet, and no rags (magazines) either. Instead, I want you to spend an hour with your family, your friends, or a hobby. It doesn't matter what you do with your time, but here's the plan. Since you're not spending an hour watching Entertainment Tonight, or other drivel on the boob tube, you'll actually activate your mind and disincentivize the producers of the mindless crap that is filling your brain.
In the 1960's, the United States sent a man to the moon. The computing power used to perform this feat can be found in a computer the size of a postage stamp today. The science we used to do it is taught in high schools around the country. We built nuclear power plants, bridges, skyscrapers and had a civil rights turnaround.
Since the 1960's, we've barely done shit. We've created an entertainment industry that has run away with our consciousness. We've self-hypnotized our society with a heap of mindless crap that isn't doing anything for us as a whole except keep us occupied and numb to the fact that our country and the world is falling apart at the seams. We need to wake up.
There's been a lot of technological change over the past 40 years, and we now have more capability than our parents could have ever dreamed. The problem is that we're not utilizing it to solve our problems. Instead, we're using it to keep ourselves busy while we wait for the rest of the world to right itself. Well, the responsibility is yours, not someone else's. Turn off the distractions, and get back to production values that made this country great in the first place.
Maybe I'm just projecting here. Maybe I'm projecting my own personal sense of a wasted 40 years on everyone else. It's possible that I'm dead wrong about the state of American ingenuity and creativity. But, let's take a look at what we produce today, and ask ourselves where we're headed. When I look at how much time we spend discussing mindless drivel and avoiding real problems, I can't help but think it's not just me who's lost his way.
January 06, 2008
Sweeney Todd: Comical Horror Done Proper
I just got back from watching Sweeney Todd. A few things you should know. I'm a fan of musicals, Johnny Depp, and the director, Tim Burton. I was not disappointed. The movie, right from the get-go, had the air of a Burton horror. The direction and the use of color (and more so the lack thereof), the camera work and the scenery were all fantastic. There was not a chink in the armor of the film, from the costumes to the washed out and ghostlike face of Depp to the wonderfully ghoulish meat pie shop with bugs all about.
It looks like they chose wisely for most of the cast, as well, with Alan Rickman (who will forever be known as Professor Snape) as the evil judge for us all to hate, we find ourselves identifying with a psychopathic killer and his sick, twisted beau (Helena Bonham Carter). Depp plays a wonderful sociopathic barber, and turns out a fairly good duet or two. Also memorable is Timothy Spall as Beadle Bamford. Unfortunately, Sacha Cohen did not seem to find his own in this movie, though he was given plenty of screen time to attempt it. Perhaps he was trying to ham it up, but the sense of humor of the Borat star did not exactly mesh with the undertone humour necessary for this film.
The comical mix of horror and insanity of this film makes it watchable through the blood and gore mixed in. Perhaps if Freddy Kruger used more subtle humour and sang a ditty every now and again, he'd be more welcome in my DVD collection. In any case, Sweeney Todd will certainly be taking up room on my shelf when it is released.
It looks like they chose wisely for most of the cast, as well, with Alan Rickman (who will forever be known as Professor Snape) as the evil judge for us all to hate, we find ourselves identifying with a psychopathic killer and his sick, twisted beau (Helena Bonham Carter). Depp plays a wonderful sociopathic barber, and turns out a fairly good duet or two. Also memorable is Timothy Spall as Beadle Bamford. Unfortunately, Sacha Cohen did not seem to find his own in this movie, though he was given plenty of screen time to attempt it. Perhaps he was trying to ham it up, but the sense of humor of the Borat star did not exactly mesh with the undertone humour necessary for this film.
The comical mix of horror and insanity of this film makes it watchable through the blood and gore mixed in. Perhaps if Freddy Kruger used more subtle humour and sang a ditty every now and again, he'd be more welcome in my DVD collection. In any case, Sweeney Todd will certainly be taking up room on my shelf when it is released.
January 02, 2008
Killing SPAM with GMail
Someone posted a feature of GMail that is very interesting, and it turns out, very useful. The tip boils down to this. Your Gmail username will accept email addressed to it, or to any version of it with +'sometext' at the end of it. (E.g. If your email address is joeshmoe@gmail.com, it will accept email addressed to joeshmoe+family@gmail.com.) That's it. That's the whole key. What makes it useful is that Gmail will allow you to filter email based on the full email address. So, in concept, you could do the following:
1. Use a different codeword (sometext in the example above) for each addressee or class of addressee that you'd like to give your email address. Let's say +closefriend for your closest buddies who would never sign you up for SPAM. And let's say +spam for people who will DEFINITELY sell your email address.
2. Now filter your email based on the distinctive email addresses you've handed out, tagging, deleting, forwarding and archiving it according to how much you care about it.
3. Never use the root address that you have on your gmail account. So, if any mail comes into joeshmoe@gmail.com - you delete it. This prevents SPAMMERS from working around the filter by removing the +codeword on your email address. (Well, it doesn't prevent them from doing it, but it does make it pointless).
4. In the end, only the people you want to communicate with will be coming through in your email box. They'll be identified because the email they send you will contain the codeword you gave them. Use different code words when you sign up at various websites and you'll know which bastards have sold your email address off to someone else. Then you can stop doing business with them, send them emails with dirty looks, etc.
5. There is one more thing you need to do. In the Google interface, go to Settings and click on the Accounts tab. From here, you'll need to add the email addresses you're using, so that you can send mail as 'them'. This will enable you to hold ongoing conversations and still have the reply button work like it normally does. Once you add these other email addresses (e.g. rgautier+spam@gmail.com) to the interface, you can send mail as these users. You can also set one as your default 'from' address.
1. Use a different codeword (sometext in the example above) for each addressee or class of addressee that you'd like to give your email address. Let's say +closefriend for your closest buddies who would never sign you up for SPAM. And let's say +spam for people who will DEFINITELY sell your email address.
2. Now filter your email based on the distinctive email addresses you've handed out, tagging, deleting, forwarding and archiving it according to how much you care about it.
3. Never use the root address that you have on your gmail account. So, if any mail comes into joeshmoe@gmail.com - you delete it. This prevents SPAMMERS from working around the filter by removing the +codeword on your email address. (Well, it doesn't prevent them from doing it, but it does make it pointless).
4. In the end, only the people you want to communicate with will be coming through in your email box. They'll be identified because the email they send you will contain the codeword you gave them. Use different code words when you sign up at various websites and you'll know which bastards have sold your email address off to someone else. Then you can stop doing business with them, send them emails with dirty looks, etc.
5. There is one more thing you need to do. In the Google interface, go to Settings and click on the Accounts tab. From here, you'll need to add the email addresses you're using, so that you can send mail as 'them'. This will enable you to hold ongoing conversations and still have the reply button work like it normally does. Once you add these other email addresses (e.g. rgautier+spam@gmail.com) to the interface, you can send mail as these users. You can also set one as your default 'from' address.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)