2012-12-23

I was coming out of some large arena where there had been a political gathering, or other large gathering of people. I was with Jim and Dan. We were energized, running through a parking lot. It was raining.

I saw an old Conservative man with large wire-frame glasses. It looked like George Bush Sr. (Herbert Walker Bush). He was muttering something, standing near a big puddle, figuring out a path through it that would get him the least wet. I yelled at him as we passed, something like: "Why do you want to keep all the money locked up, hoarded away? Give it to us, we'll spend your money! We'll spend it for you, if you're not going to! It'll be good for all of us..." Something like that. I was making eye contact with him and could see that I held his attention; that he was entertained by me, and was not dismissing what I was saying outright. He seemed to be actually considering my arguments!

Jim, Dan and I continued running, leaving the old people (including the one I'd been talking to) far behind. Now we were in a mall, still running.

I said something like "Did you see that? I was getting to him!"

Dan said, very negatively, "He was getting angry, too."

I had been feeling bouyant, energetic, exhilerated. Now I felt that Dan was trying to crush me. It was plain to me that I had made a good impression on the old conservative; I had advanced an argument and he had seriously considered it. But Dan wasn't going to see it my way. He saw it rather as me offending some old powerful rich guy.

Dan was so sure about his interpretation. I realized (perhaps just after waking up) how large was the barrier I was trying to overcome: there was such a strong psychological prejudice against me, it interprets anything I do negatively. In the eyes of those who know me (Jim, Dan), everything I do is discounted, dismissed as ineffectual. I had been making inroads in challenging the political philosophy of the Old Conservative; but in Dan's eyes I had merely offended him.

---

Day residue: It's been raining. In Coursera's "Think Again: How to reason and argue" class, I posted a description of how to do syllogisms with logicagent, but it was ignored. Many were asking for help on syllogisms and I think my program can provide some insight into how to determine the validity of hypothetical syllogisms; but they responded positively only to those linking to other textbooks and verbal explanations on the web, not to interactive programs that attempt to automate the syllogism...

When I woke up, I was hot. I had to uncover myself and get up, my body felt so warm.

Beju, beloved lovebird, died on Tuesday, December 4, 2012. He was 13 years and 10 months old.

Pictures: http://i.imgur.com/rzmAIh.jpg Bej and Blue outside, this summer, after a bath. Beju has the red face.

http://i.imgur.com/Va3JJh.jpg (from the other side)

The name Beju stood for Baby Junior. His father's name was Baby.

Beju and his mate Blue had many many babies. They were a veritable egg factory, and excellent parents, for quite a few years; their offspring are spread throughout Seattle. Blue became egg-bound a couple years ago and we had to take her to the vet; after that she stopped laying. Tracie says they continued mating up until last week at least ...

I found him face up in the sink. His feet were in a perching position, as if he had been sitting on the curtain above the sink's window, then fallen.

His eyes were open. His mouth was open, but not making any movement. He was limp when I picked him up.

I put him in a towel, and called Tracie.

After Tracie got home, she held him and showed him to the other lovebirds, to Betty and Princess and Blue. They chirped at him, coming very close, as if trying to wake him up. (I think of the lamentations in the background of Armstrong's second version of "Oh Didn't He Ramble" linked below, where one guy says "Please come back.") Blue preened him and kissed his beak and nipped at his feet.

His eyes closed. But then later they were open. It was strange; perhaps he was paralyzed, not yet dead? When I first found him his eyes had a glazed-over look, but later they had lost that. But then one eye became dented, caved inward. The other eye remained shiny and glossy as I looked into it, talking to him.

We used to say "Bej - cage" to get him to go back in his cage after he'd been out for a while. He understood, and would go back. Sometimes it took him a little while, if he wanted to fly free some more. Later I convinced Tracie to leave all the birds' cages open all the time. Beju and Blue still chose to spend most of their time in their cage ...

In the last year or so, his beak started growing very long, and we would get it trimmed at the vet. Then Tracie learned to trim it; she would take him in the bathroom and cut his beak with nail clippers when it got so long it started interfering with his ability to eat. I remember once I was outside, and she raised the bathroom window to show him to me, and me to him. He looked out with curiosity, also looking a little flustered because he'd just undergone a beak trim.

I remember many times looking at him in the eyes for a while as he sat in his favorite spot up high in one corner of his cage, until he slowly closed his eyes. That's how I knew he was okay, content, calm; he was also indicating, I think, acceptance of me.

---

A musical tribute: http://subbot.org/misc/music/ramble.mp3

In the second chorus I tried to imitate the feel of rapid lovebird chirps. I also screwed up the intro a little at 0:07, the second chorus at 1:07; and it gets pretty ragged in the third chorus where I tried to pull out all the stops.

Kid Ory's version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbXzcKX4f20

Louis Armstrong's version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yueotDgmgw - note the tempo speed-up, something I was trying to do on the last chorus of my version.
Another Armstrong version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzkCeWBuTv8 ; I meant to throw in the little phrase Louis does at 3:29-3:30, but I forgot. (This is the version with the band member in the background pleading, "Please come back".)

In the comments to the last video, acousticjass says the intro is "Flee as a bird", a typical New Orleans dirge; fitting. Here's Armstrong's Flee as a bird: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nP2nCJXkGKA

I ran across a 20-year-old photograph of me, a girl I used to date, and a flaming gay guy standing at Jimi's grave in Greenwood Cemetery in Renton: http://i.imgur.com/4fKglh.jpg. (I'm in the jean jacket.) The inscription on the back of the photograph says "Van, Julie, and me - 1992".

We're standing at about the same place as the kids in the first photo on this site: http://jetcityorange.com/seattle/jimi-hendrix-grave/, but the camera angle is different. The trees in the background show that the spot is the same though.

For what it's worth, I agree with the guy on the linked site: the old old gravesite was classier in its simplicity.

I think I was just getting into heroin in those days. I was later to use that girl ("Julie") as a justification for progressing towards becoming a full-fledged junkie, after she broke up with me ... the guy taking the photo, "Harry", took me downtown and showed me how to buy jeeva from the Mexicans ... He was a real "character", a coworker at the concert security firm where I worked. He wasn't a junkie himself, but helped me buy some heroin when I expressed a desire to try it. He was sleeping with the gay guy in the picture, because he was "polymorphously perverse" I guess.

In the picture, I'm leaning a bit to my right, towards the girl, indicating perhaps that I had gotten out of balance. I'm trying to correct for it by tilting my smile upwards to the right. The result, as I look at it now, is a bemused expression, a little sceptical of the girl, but still giving her the benefit of the doubt. I look straight into the camera, my eyes communicating some kind of ironical feeling. I'm carrying a folded-up blue umbrella, and a paper bag. Was there weed in it?!?

Some of those times are coming back to me now. Van (the gay guy laughing with Julie) knew a lot of clubs on Capitol Hill that we went to. Julie worked as a publicist or something for some band like the Temptations that played the Edgewater one night that I went to with her. We had a kind of a whirlwind grunge romance that ended abruptly, pushing me into a deep depression that I self-medicated with heroin. Those were the times of BBSes and her roommate James was one of the proto-trolls on Chat Chat Chat, one of the popular Seattle boards. His nick was "Prince Valium". I'm remembering now, we met online, and then met up because she wanted to get some weed. Buster Bunny, Cavedweller-Ratking, the Shadow, Elf were some other original trolls from that time that taught me a lot about how to have fun online :)

Hendrix would have been 70 this November 27th...

I have just upgraded my machine from Ubuntu 11.04 to 11.10 and everything is broken.

Everything.

It began with Unity. The horror. If there's a way of finding the main menu, I wasn't able to discover it. Menu bars have entirely disappeared from applications, to be replaced with the mac "menu on top" paradigm, a.k.a. one of the main reasons I've never used a Mac since 1994. You can't even log out of the bloody interface, let alone tweak it. Even the fonts are terrible.

It took me about 15 minutes to figure out how to get rid of Unity and replace it with Gnome 3 and I can't say there's really much of a difference in terms of usability. All of my default Gnome 2 desktop settings have been blown out of the water. Completely. My panels and taskbars and lauchers are either deleted or are all over the place. Even if I wanted to change them back, everything is basically uncustomisable as far as I can tell. You can't move objects around in the taskbars. Yes that's right. You can't move objects around in the taskbars.

Is this what a desktop is supposed to feel like?

I feel like my computer window has been turned into a walled garden, like that on an iDink, which I am permitted to carress and fawn over, but have disallowed from making my own in any way. Will I have to download some kind of "App" from the "Ubuntu App Store" to gain back basic functionality? Do I have to dive into arcane settings and ppa just to get back the system which I had and liked only a few hours ago? Do I have to give up and choose Gnome 3, or move to XFCE, or move everything to the shell, or basically waste the next two weeks getting back what I had?

If that's the price of Ubuntu (and it is) then I am leaving.

Ubuntu and Gnome died the moment they allowed the UI designers to take over. The art students, the inveiglers, the smooth talkers, the wild eyed dreamers, the "visionaries", the people who didn't care what they were doing as long as it made them feel talented and superior. These are the people who have designed unusable,confusing systems and interfaces that delete years of carefully customised menus and discourage serious use of computers.

And as for the "boring" people, the programmers, the testers, the package maintainers, the people who listen to the community, those who put real thought and concern for users into their themes and interfaces, the people who don't go to conferences, who communicate with users directly via forum and newsgroup, who sit at their desks working to make distros better, often for no reward at all; what of them? Are they in charge in this brave new work? No. They are cast down and out, by a brigade of bullshitters too busy bopping on their iPods and blogging than in doing useful work.

If you let the wrong people into an organisation or a community, they can destroy it. Ubuntu and Gnome shows that this can happen to distros and open source projects just as easily and quickly as it has happened in the many industrys, countrys, and economies throughout the word. The destroyers will fail upwards, the blazing heat of their incompetence scortching all new pastures dry. The rest of us will be left behind to pick up the pieces and start again. In 5 years time, Ubuntu may be back on the path to being usable again, but I can't wait that long.

I'm thinking of starting off with Mint.

Days before the US presidential election, the Ohio Secretary of State (Republican) directed that an "experimental patch" be installed on voting machines in 39 Ohio counties. Federal law makes it illegal to make any changes in hardware and software to election equipment without it being tested and certified by the Federal Elections Commission. [NOTE: if Brad Blog is not "notable" enough of a source for you, this story is being reported in many other media outlets.]

You Slashdot readers are supposed to know a little something about software and patches and security. What do you think? This sound like "best practices" to you? By the way, John Husted, the Ohio Secretary of State who ordered this "patch" installed, is the guy who tried to stop early voting in Ohio and then told his county clerks to ignore the federal courts when they issued an injunction to put those early voting dates back in place. He's also one of the Republican officials who claimed that the proposed voter ID laws and purges of voter rolls would "deliver" Ohio to the Romney campaign.

I'm a little curious about what any sysadmins who read this and support Romney think of this move.

Try to remember, before voting, that if the biggest reason you have to *NOT* vote for a particular representative is only because you feel you'd be throwing away your vote, and considering the fact that's the most significant reason that people do not vote for a lesser known candidate or independent, it's worth noting that if everybody who thought this way actually voted instead for who they would have voted for if they believed that they had a chance in hell of winning an election, they'd find that their so-called chance in hell might just actually be realized.

If you believe that the only way to prevent somebody that you do not like from getting into power after the election that you feel you must always strategically vote against them by voting for another candidate whose views aren't really any more representative of your own (but perhaps are just the "lesser of two evils"), then I believe that one of two things is happening.

1. You lack confidence in a democratic voting system to adequately represent the views of its population, or else believe that not enough people share the same values as you to make a difference. The former is only true when people don't vote in a manner consistent with their actual views (which is exactly what you'd be doing if the only reason you had to vote for "the other guy" was because you didn't want his opponent to win), and if the latter were genuinely true, then your vote would also not be able to make a difference either.

2. You are afraid of being wrong... or different.

Vote for the representative that most closely matches your own values and views. It's entirely possible that they may not have a hope in hell of winning any election, but at least if you do that, then at least you've tried to take a stand for what you value. Otherwise, you're just selling yourself out... for nothing that amounts to any *really* good reason.

http://subbot.org/misc/music/ bluemonk-honkytonk.wav or .ogg

At about 18 to 19.5 seconds, I got that hump in the bass that I want all the time. Again, for a beat, at 27.

http://subbot.org/misc/music/bluemonk-honkytonk-faster.wav or .ogg

Trying to do it at the tempo of http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmhP1RgbrrY

Screwed up at 17.5, played a G instead of an F in the melody. Concentrating on getting the bass riff that Monk does in that clip...

Also maybe pushed the beat a little, unintentionally, around 10.

http://www.catholicculture.org/news/headlines/index.cfm?storyid=15543

ACLU does not care when Crisis Pregnancy Centers are unconstitutionally coerced into forced speech.
But if someone decides to heckle a priest during Mass, then of course the ACLU will call it a constitutional right.

Bastards.

Clarke's third law suggests that any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic.

The reverse might also appear to be true... that magic would be indistinguishable from a sufficienlty advanced technology.

So to that end, I've wanted to speculate on the manner of magic... I mean real magic. Is there anything imaginable that magic might be able to do, which could not be duplicated by any imaginable technology? In particular, if hypothetically magic could really exist, is there any possible way that we could really recognize it as such, or could we always fall back on the reverse of Clarke's Law, and assume that there must some sophisticated technology behind any otherwise apparent "magical" event? Is there anything, however inconceivable such a thing might be, that one could not possibly dismiss as a function of some higher technology, and genuinely be irrefutably compelled to acknowledge a magical origin?

What about hearing sound in space, for example? No atmosphere would mean that it's impossible for sound to travel in space... would the ability to hear the sound of something that happened where there was no atmosphere mean magic must be involved, or could some phenomenon that we can imagine that is consistent with the laws of physics be at work in such a case to produce that effect?

Here's another one to ponder: as a person speaks, everyone who can hear this person's voice, and without any additional technological apparatus, hears the voice in their own original language. Telepathy might be one possibility, but what if the person was recorded with conventional recording technology, and the audio on playback exibited the same phenonmenon? Even if the recording is further duplicated, the duplicates also exhibit the characteristic of anyone who listens to it being able to understand it.Some form of telepathy on the part of the speaker could probably be ruled out at this point, since the original speaker is not present, or necessarily even aware of evveryone who is listening. What hypothetical technology could such a speaker employ that might have those effects? Would that be magic?

I'm going to be adding to the article as time goes on, but anyone who reads my rantings is welcome to comment below.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Landis This man is a slashdotter who is a scientist at NASA.

See what he wrote in http://www.geoffreylandis.com/politics.html
Specifically,

Right at the moment, I think that the liberal/conservative divide is the single most harmful thing about American politics. Politicians don't seem to care about solving problems, they only want to know whether a particular idea is liberal or conservative, and then, presto, they are for/against it.

I don't agree with him 100%, but I do agree with the principle that we would be more open to ideas from people whose overall ideologies we do not share.

Look what happens in the abortion debate, for example. Pro-lifers have been deemed "anti-woman" and therefore _every_ proposal they make, such as requiring parental permission for a young girl to have an abortion, is immediately discarded.

People should debate looking for Truth, instead of trying to prove that the opponent is stupid and evil.

Also, people should not commit themselves to one specific political party.

Just because you are worried about AGW, it does not mean you should become an obedient Democrat.

Just because you are pro-life, it does not mean you should become an obedient Republican.

Republicans are sometimes right, Democrats are sometimes right, and often they're both wrong.

I don't understand the minimum wage legislation. By forcefully mandating the minimum wage to be M, the government ensures that people whose productivity is lower than M will be unemployed. This is specially true for youth and unskilled people. And unemployment among youth can create a vicious circle: he is unskilled because he never worked, and he cannot find a job because he is unskilled.

If the government allowed a young man to work for less than M, then he could gain the experience needed for getting a better job.

So it seems that the minimum-wage legislation only achieves unemployment and dependency.

Would it not be better to let a poor person work for less than M, and help that person with a negative income tax? That is, the government would give the person r * (M - W), where M is the minimum wage, M is his actual wage, and r is a positive real number smaller than 1.

This way we would encourage people to work, and gain the experience to get a better job.

The Catholic Church is often libeled as a right-wing organization, which is preposterous.
In economic matters, the Catholic Church is quite leftist. In immigration and environmentalism too. Regarding "affirmative action" it seems to be neutral, because I have never seen a priest or bishop touch this subject. It opposes the death penalty. In foreign policy, it seems to be non-interventionist (Pope John Paul II opposed the Iraq War, many bishops oppose the Cuban Embargo, etc.).

The Catholic Church is only conservative regarding life and family values. It is not a right-wing organization by any sane measure. This includes Opus Dei, which is a faithful Christian organization.

The Left libels the Church as being "right-wing", and Opus Dei as being "far-right", because the Left only accepts opposition in economic matters. Their view of a healthy political environment is one where the Left supports economic socialism and cultural Marxism (gender ideology, abortion, homosexualism, affirmative action, etc.) and the Right supports economic liberalism but agrees with cultural Marxism.

That someone dares to think outside that box, and oppose cultural Marxism (as the Church does) is seen as preposterous. The Left will even censor it (via "hate speech" laws) wherever it can.

In short: the Church transcends politics, and no political party represents the Church.

The world would be a far better place if the following wise words were followed:

"Why Church and State Must Be Separate" by Benedict XVI

Found out about this today. Richard Dawkins supports not only abortion but infanticide: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWkJ6cZ0FY8

I just woke from a dream. I was with three other guys, we were playing at various things. There was sex-play, which after waking up bothers me because of the homosexual nature of it. But anyway, in the dream we were horsing around. Two went off someplace. The third was located among some bushes in rocky soil. I was curious and went to where this guy was. In the dream, I liked this guy, felt comfortable around him, didn't feel awkward getting physically close to him.

He was engaged in doing something to what seemed like a rock, a small boulder, close to a foot in length it looked like. What was he doing? Playing with it? Trying to break it apart? He was concentrating on it, doing something to it with his hands, holding it at the same time.

Somehow my attention became directed to lower ground, a few hundred feet away, where there was a car - our car, it was clear to me - surrounded by figures in white with white hoods (possibly turbans? Day residue: Sikhs were in the news, victims of an armed attack, so I'd seen video of men wearing white turbans the day before...).

It was unclear what they were doing. The car they were surrounding was our car. Did they think we were in it?

Then I woke up. After waking up, the thought occurred: the guy I was with, that I thought was fiddling with a rock, was about to blow up the car. He had laid an ambush and was going to kill the people who wanted to attack us. The rock was some kind of detonator.

In the dream, I hadn't had this thought. It was only after I was awake that it came into my consciousness.

How did my brain construct that dream? How was my character in the dream unaware of the trick, the ambush being laid for the attackers? Who was my character in the dream, was it my conscious brain? Was my unconscious telling the story, letting my dream character go along not realizing what was really happening?

Or was my post-dream realization that a trap was being laid, an ex-post-facto explanation, some kind of conscious attempt to rationalize the nonsensical events of the dream...