I just wanted to say that I realized today that I am, in fact, a three-legged duck. That's it.

Err, hi.

I wasn't going to post anything here anymore, but someone asked about this, so I thought I'd better let you all know why I'm leaving -- for this is what I'm about to do. I'm going to leave. I'm going to leave this account mostly "as is", though, for I have grown so attached to it -- to this mask -- that I just can't force myself to delete it... Which is kind of funny. It's as if it was a part of me, when in fact, it isn't. It's just a mask. A lie -- it has been all along. But I can't go on living like this any longer, so I've decided to end this game.

What I'm about to tell you -- and what I've been insinuating at in the previous paragraph -- will come as a shock to most of you. It might be less of a shock to a few, those few who had figured it out a long time ago (I know that at least one person has, and I suspect that a few others have as well). Who figured out that I am, in fact, a girl, and am just pretending to be a boy online...

I've never liked what I am. I've wanted to be a boy as long as I can remember. In this society, the boys were the ones that played all the interesting games. The ones that are allowed to have interesting lives, while girls are just supposed to...look pretty. I don't think I've ever looked pretty (some people might, of course, beg to differ). I cut my hair short. I wear pants. I hang out -- used to hang out -- on Slashdot...

Why here? I discovered this place by accident and subsequently learned how easy it is to be someone else here. Noone will ever actually see the real you, especially if you live in a country everyone confuses with Elbonia (heh). You're an abstraction of yourself, without a voice, a body, a face... Because you can easily lie about these, too. The photo I submitted to the photo contest was my brother's...And you never knew...

All the polls and "memes"... I've had lots of fun answering these the way I would if I were a 22-year old guy. Ironically, these were the moments when I always found out that while I can pretend to be someone else, I still can't change what I am...

Yes, it's been fun, but it wasn't until recently that I realized how unethical it actually was. Lying to you. At first it didn't bug me that much, but I've become more and more aware of this, and now I just can't take it any longer (some troll, huh?). Can't continue like this. Can't keep "living" in this lie -- and neither can I stay here after what I've done. So I bid you all farewell. Please don't be mad at me...

You really shouldn't be reading this. Please don't read this JE.

It is said that Emperor Nero once gave birth to a little green froggie. He kept the frog in his palace, ordered a special room to be built for it to live in, fed it salad leaves and flies. The flies had all been caught live by a slave of Nero's. The frog would never eat dead flies.

And then one day a flying saucer came to take the frog away. Nero wouldn't let them do it at first, for he had grown attached to the little froggie. So they burned the place down. The city of Rome. Nero was so shocked, he could only watch it burn down and sing sad songs.

I'm sure you knew all this already. They must've taught you this back in school. What they didn't tell you, however, was that Nero also gave birth to a tapeworm. Now this was by far the most miraculous thing to have happened, like, ever. The pyramids are nothing compared to this!

The tapeworm, too, had an alien father. Of course this is all metaphorically speaking, as these aliens didn't have these different sexes the way we do. They did have sex, though, but mostly with animals. There was, however, this one alien pervert who had sex with Emperor Nero. As a result of this union, Nero gave birth...to a tapeworm.

It was not just a tapeworm, it was a RED tapeworm. And it was the biggest tapeworm ever to be born -- Nero had to walk around the block three times before it was all out. By that time, the red tapeworm had eaten two slaves and one senator. And this is where this story will come to an abrupt end, because that poor senator was me.

You ask me why I shiver?

Out of the black void of the bloated net I received a hideous JPEG attachment, a single glimpse of forbidden eons which chills me when I think of it and maddens me when I dream of it. That glimpse, like all dread glimpses of truth, flashed out from this godless email I received. If I live, I shall never knowingly supply a link in so hideous a thing.

Read it and tremble, mortal!

[Note: found this on Metafilter]

The Image Culture

Christine Rosen

hen Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana in late August, images of the immense devastation were immediately available to anyone with a television set or an Internet connection. Although images of both natural and man-made disasters have long been displayed in newspapers and on television, the number and variety of images in the aftermath of Katrina reveals the sophistication, speed, and power of images in contemporary American culture. Satellite photographs from space offered us miniature before and after images of downtown New Orleans and the damaged coast of Biloxi; video footage from an array of news outlets tracked rescue operations and recorded the thoughts of survivors; wire photos captured the grief of victims; amateur pictures, taken with camera-enabled cell phones or digital cameras and posted to personal blogs, tracked the disaster's toll on countless individuals. The world was offered, in a negligible space of time, both God's-eye and man's-eye views of a devastated region. Within days, as pictures of the squalor at the Louisiana Superdome and photographs of dead bodies abandoned in downtown streets emerged, we confronted our inability to cope with the immediate chaos, destruction, and desperation the storm had caused. These images brutally drove home the realization of just how unprepared the U.S. was to cope with such a disaster.

But how did this saturation of images influence our understanding of what happened in New Orleans and elsewhere? How did the speed with which the images were disseminated alter the humanitarian and political response to the disaster? And how, in time, will these images influence our cultural memory of the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina?

Such questions could be asked of any contemporary disaster--and often have been, especially in the wake of the September 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., which forever etched in public memory the image of the burning Twin Towers. But the average person sees tens of thousands of images in the course of a day. One sees images on television, in newspapers and magazines, on websites, and on the sides of buses. Images grace soda cans and t-shirts and billboards. "In our world we sleep and eat the image and pray to it and wear it too," novelist Don DeLillo observed. Internet search engines can instantly procure images for practically any word you type. On flickr.com, a photo-sharing website, you can type in a word such as "love" and find amateur digital photos of couples in steamy embrace or parents hugging their children. Type in "terror" and among the results is a photograph of the World Trade Center towers burning. "Remember when this was a shocking image?" asks the person who posted the picture.

The question is not merely rhetorical. It points to something important about images in our culture: They have, by their sheer number and ease of replication, become less magical and less shocking--a situation unknown until fairly recently in human history. Until the development of mass reproduction, images carried more power and evoked more fear. The second of the Ten Commandments listed in Exodus 20 warns against idolizing, or even making, graven images: "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth." During the English Reformation, Henry VIII's advisor Thomas Cromwell led the effort to destroy religious images and icons in the country's churches and monasteries, and was successful enough that few survive to this day. The 2001 decision by the Taliban government in Afghanistan to destroy images throughout the country--including the two towering stone Buddhas carved into the cliffs of Bamiyan--is only the most recent example of this impulse. Political leaders have long feared images and taken extreme measures to control and manipulate them. The anonymous minions of manipulators who sanitized photographs at the behest of Stalin (a man who seemingly never met an enemy he didn't murder and then airbrush from history) are perhaps the best known example. Control of images has long been a preoccupation of the powerful. [...]

Every Playboy centerfold from 1988 to 1997.

"When I look at people that I would like to feel have been a mentor or an inspiring kind of archetype of what I'd love to see my career eventually be mentioned as a footnote for in the same paragraph, it would be, like, Bowie." - Trent Reznor

Here's Lenin's brilliant prediction of the existence of subatomic particles even smaller than the electron*, as it's given in "Materialism and Empiriocriticism" (Chapter 5.2):

"From Engels' point of view, the only immutability is the reflection by the human mind (when there is a human mind) of an external world existing and developing independently of the mind. No other "immutability," no other "essence," no other "absolute substance," in the sense in which these concepts were depicted by the empty professorial philosophy, exist for Marx and Engels. The "essence" of things, or "substance," is also relative; it expresses only the degree of profundity of man's knowledge of objects; and while yesterday the profundity of this knowledge did not go beyond the atom, and today does not go beyond the electron and ether, dialectical materialism insists on the temporary, relative, approximate character of all these milestones in the knowledge of nature gained by the progressing science of man. The electron is as inexhaustible as the atom, nature is infinite, but it infinitely exists."

* Some background, from an earlier chapter in that same book: "For instance, Lavoisier's principle, or the principle of the conservation of mass, has been undermined by the electron theory of matter. According to this theory atoms are composed of very minute particles called electrons, which are charged with positive or negative electricity and "are immersed in a medium which we call the ether." The experiments of physicists provide data for calculating the velocity of the electrons and their mass (or the relation of their mass to their electrical charge). The velocity proves to be comparable with the velocity of light (300,000 kilometres per second), attaining, for instance, one-third of the latter. Under such circumstances the twofold mass of the electron has to be taken into account, corresponding to the necessity of over coming the inertia, firstly, of the electron itself and, secondly, of the ether. The former mass will be the real or mechanical mass of the electron, the latter the "electrodynamic mass which represents the inertia of the ether." And it turns out that the former mass is equal to zero. The entire mass of the electrons, or, at least, of the negative electrons, proves to be totally and exclusively electrodynamic in its origin. Mass disappears. The foundations of mechanics are undermined. Newton's principle, the equality of action and reaction, is undermined, and so on."

This JE was inspired by a Slashdot article.

Every time someone makes a bold, yet dubious scientific claim (that they've debunked the Quantum Theory, invented a new and extremely powerful power source, proven that time doesn't exist, and/or so on), someone will invariably invoke what I would call the Einstein Defense: Einstein was a lowly patent clerk, yet he managed to revolutionize science; surely this guy can be right as well?

Well, no. Not really. First of all, Einstein's existence does not prove this guy right by way of analogy. Secondly, it's a bad analogy anyway. Your common crackpot scientist bases his (or her? I don't know, I've yet to see a female crackpot scientist...) "discoveries" on misconceptions of scientific theories -- or indeed on misconceptions of what a scientific theory is. This is usually because they don't have any education in physics -- unlike Einstein, who had a "real" degree in Physics (ok, so he was oficially a Physics and Maths teacher by training, but back then, this was what training to be a Physicist was all about. You couldn't just study Physics). As to him being "just a patent clerk", then I'm under the impression that it was not unusual for a patent clerk to publish papers in science journals. In fact, it was considered a matter of honour.

So, in this respect, Einstein wasn't someone completely unusual, a man "out of the woods". He was a talented physicist, for sure, but the common image of him as someone with no formal education is just a myth. A myth that has inspired quite a lot of pseudoscience. Please stop propagating it.

Of course I haven't really studied his life that thoroughly, so I may have gotten something wrong here. Feel free to correct me. Or something.

Brain scans find the penis at last

AT LAST we know where the penis is represented in the male brain.

The genitalia's location on the "homunculus", the brain's map of body parts, has been in dispute since the 1920s. Now Christian Kell at the University of Frankfurt in Germany has put eight men into an MRI scanner to help settle the question. Using a soft brush, Kell stroked parts of each volunteer's body while recording brain activity.

Each man's penis was represented in the same place - flanked by the areas for the toes and abdomen - Kell told the Organisation of Human Brain Mapping annual meeting in Toronto. "The only depressing thing," he says, "is that the representation is very small."

*Edit* Leo: I'm banned yet again (for an AC comment I made two days ago...heh). but yeah, if this law got passed in its current form, then these sites would become liable for all the comments posted. I don't think they wanted such a "solution". And they're also making it sound like they never intended to have any laws passed against inciteful comments...

---

In an attempt to improve this place (is this a meme?), I thought it appropriate to write a JE on local politics. Namely, a strange media (and political) campaign that has started about a week ago. It had, however, been in the making for much longer. And what they're campaigning against is internet flames.

When the first Estonian news portals were built in the wake of the dotbomb boom, some of them also incorporated the possibility of anonymously commenting the news. Back then, this was hailed as the "collective mind" of the internet people, able to produce insightful commentary on any topic. Fast forward to today, and what you have is "toilet walls" -- the discussions are a mess of unmoderated flames, trolls, all sorts of idiots. But I guess this was quite predictable, yeah?

Now, these forums quietly existed for years, but lately, they've been getting quite a lot of media attention, mostly in connection to a court case where some guy was found guilty of inciting social and racial hatred (he had posted racist and antisemitic comments on different boards). I guess this is where it started -- some people were suddenly talking about how "something has to be done". The last drop -- but also the perfect excuse -- seem to have been some comments posted about the tragic accident where rally driver Markko Märtin's co-driver Michael Park died. This is when a few national newspapers openly started campaigning against all the hate-spewing. They soon coined a neologism, "leim" (pronounced as "lame"), derived from "flame", as the thing they were fighting against. Supposedly this word stands for a comment, blog entry, email, etc. with insulting or inciting contents.

Now, this is where it all gets a bit strange (of course this sort of course of events is quite normal in Estonia...). Instead of actually actively fighting against these "flames" -- like, say, by deleting the offending comments -- they chose to start this media campaign. A new law has also been proposed, making it easier for law enforcement organs to identify anonymous commentators.

Now, what I find absurd about this campaign is precisely the fact that instead of considering other possibilities (all forms of moderation), these people want to change the laws to punish the wrongdoers. I mean, I don't condone posting comments like "burn the Jews", it's just that I don't think having the police hunt them down is the answer.

It's been a week since my last JE and even longer since the last proper JE (ie not a one-liner). I do have a good excuse, though -- I've been busy. Busy helping to organize an...event that took place this weekend. Sort of a seminar (called the Autumn School in Semiotics). So on Saturday and Sunday, I was pretty much running around like a squirrel in a wheel, doing this, doing that... I guess the best part was my playing movies on Saturday night, almost nonstop. We watched three movies: "Withnail and I" (heh), "The Name of the Rose" (crap), "Fahrenheit 451" (great). And yes, my eyes were damn tired by the time the third movie ended at 2AM.

Anyway, I'm less busy now, meaning that I'll finally have time to catch up with all the things I haven't had time or energy to do. Like that JE on Stalin I promised to write a few weeks ago :7

The funny thing is, even though all this organizing almost wore me out (despite me not having to do all that much; I tend to be the one doing all the worrying and others doing all the work), I'm starting to miss it. I feel empty. I urgently need to find something to do...oh, wait, I already have tons of things to do. Now if I could only stop procrastrinating and get started with all these things...

Now if you'll excuse me, I have an email to write.

It's snowing.

You can't hatch the same egg twice.

I swear this will be the last "meme" I'll ever bother to fill in.

1. Name someone with the same birthday as you.
I don't know anyone born on that day.

2. Where was your first kiss?
On a bench by the river. The irony is killing me.

3. Have you ever seriously vandalized someone else's property?
I've broken a window or two.

4. Have you ever hit someone of the opposite sex?
Yes, but this was a million years ago.

5. Have you ever sung in front of a large number of people?
I've sung in front of an audience of 100,000+ (plus the hundreds of thousands watching it on tv). There was about 10,000 other boys on the stage with me, though...

6. What's the first thing you notice about the preferred sex?
Ooh! A girl!

7. What really turns you on?
Intelligence, sense of humor, etc.

8. What do you order at Starbucks?
I've never been to a Starbucks, you insensitive coffee drinker!

9. What is your biggest mistake?

10. Have you ever hurt yourself on purpose?
Every time I enter the department library, the first thing I do there is bang my head against the wall (an Anti-Stress Kit is taped to the wall)

11. Say something totally random about yourself.
I just said something totally random about myself.

12. Has anyone ever said you look like a celebrity?
Several (well, two) drunk guys have stated that I look like John Lennon. Also, someone on Slashdot once said that I look like SamTheButcher.

13. Do you still watch kiddy movies or tv shows?
"Oggy and the Cockroaches".

14. Did you have braces?
I had good teeth.

15. Are you comfortable with your height?
Yes. I'm also quite comfortable with my weight.

16. What is the most romantic thing someone of the preferred sex has done for you?
She gave me "Hiroshima, Mon Amour" for my birthday.

17. When do you know it's love?
When Love punches me in the face and tells me I'm an idiot for not recognizing Her :7

18. Do you speak any other languages?
Jah. Da.

19. Have you ever been to a tanning salon?
I'm white as snow.

20. What magazines do you read?
I've recently been reading old literary magazines from 1940's, full of quotes from comrades Lenin, Stalin, Marx, and Zhdanov. But I also read numerous other magazines.

21. Have you ever ridden in a limo?
No.

22. Has anyone you were really close to passed away?
I don't think I was all that close to my grandfather, but he still had quite a lot of influence on me.

23. Do you watch mtv?
No.

24. What's something that really annoys you?
Stupid people (because I'm an idiot).

25. What's something you really like?
Dark humor

26. Do you like Michael Jackson?
It's great to be here! Woo-hoo!

27. Can you dance?
No, but someone said she'd teach me when she comes back from Italy :7

28. What's the latest you have ever stayed up?
I've stayed up all night a few times. The longest I've been awake is 40 hours.

29. Have you ever been rushed by an ambulance into the emergency room?
No.

30. Do you actually read these when other people fill them out?
Yes.

32. What are your car/truck radio buttons set to?
I don't have a car. Don't even have a driver's licence.

33. When you're completely burned out, what's a good way to recharge (other than sleep)?
Tea and music.

34. What's your favourite place that you've travelled to?
Berlin

35. What do you want to try that you haven't yet?
Write a book.

36. Five things you love to eat, and five things you hate to eat?
Pizza. Chocolate. Pasta. Cheese and ham sandwiches. Pancakes. Porridge. Mashed potatoes. Any Estonian national dish, really. Flies that fly into my mouth.

37. Did you learn to drive stick or automatic first?
I can sort of drive stick, but as already stated, I don't have a driver's licence.

38. Do you like board games?
Yes.

39. Tell me your opinion about gambling.
No opinion.

40. How many dictionaries do you own?
Estonian-English, English-Estonian, Estonian-Russian, Russian-Estonian (several different ones), Estonian-Estonian (different ones), Polish-English-Polish, English-English, Latin-Estonian, Finnish-Estonian, German-Estonian. That's...too few.

41. What's your favorite medium to work in?
Prose.

42. What was your undergraduate major, and was it always that or did you switch?
Semiotics and Culture Studies. Oh, and I started as a Computer Science student.

43. Worst physical pain you've been in?
A cramp in my leg two days ago? Naah. I think it was either the burns on my body (pulled a kettle of boiling water on myself) or the spinal injury (the longest-lasting pain).

44. Who's your best friend?
A girl called Maris.

45. Was high school good? Why (not)?
It was definitely better than junior high, but just as boring.

46. What kinds of music do you like best? Get specific, if you can.
Classical. Jazz. Indie. Yeah, I'm boring as hell.

47. Last three CDs you bought:
Blank ones (heh). Actually, these were EP-s and albums by some local artists that burn their stuff on blank cd-s, rather than pressing them.

48. And conversely, what kinds of music would you rather never hear?
I don't want to talk about it.

49. Five favorite movies:
"Mike Leigh's "Naked"", "Stalker", "Otesanek", "Acid House", "Brat"

50. What's something other people like that you just can't get into?
Spending time in crowded places

51. When you want to look good, what do you wear?
Err, nothing? Actually, I think the correct answer would be "a suit", because the rest of my clothes are quite geeky.

52. When your heart breaks, how do you put it back together?
Don't know.

53. Should the following be exterminated:
white briefs: Sure, why not.
blue eyeshadow: Why?
pants that create the muffin-top look on women: No use.
flip flops in the office: yes.

54. Were you a Boy/Girl Scout?
No.

55. Can you swim?
Yes.

56. Tell me your guilty pleasures:
song: "All I need is a miracle" by Mike and Mechanics
book: I enjoy reading Dostoevsky. Should I feel guilty about it?
movie: A campy comedy titled "Don Juan in Tallinn".
food: Chocolate.
other: Yes.

57. Do you have a library card?
I have several.

58. What's the best present you've received in the past five years?
I've probably answered this question already.

59. Do you have a favorite:
Painter: Ülo Sooster
Sculptor: No.
Photographer: No.
(fiction): Harms!
(science fiction/fantasy): A. and B. Strugatsky
Poet: Heiti Talvik
(nonfiction): Isiah Berlin

60. You're in a strange city for the weekend. What will you do while you're there?
Hang around all over the place and take photos.

61. Are you thrifty?
Not really.

62. You bought tickets for a cultural event. What are you going to see?
A play.

63. What's something you're hanging onto that you don't need anymore?
Hey, here's a joke for you: An Estonian man is driving down the road, when he sees a dead crow lying on the road. He stops the car and picks up the crow: "I might need this." Then he opens the drunk and puts the dead bird in there.

A month goes by, and the same man comes driving down the same road. He stops the car right in the same spot where he stopped the last time, opens the trunk, takes out the dead bird and puts it back in the place he found it: "Didn't need it after all."

I have two desk drawers full of dead birds.