Quick Comments and One Liners

Can anyone out there give me a little background and information on Verrier Elwin? Apparently he published from the mid 50s through the 70s on the Mishmi and Muria tribes in India.

_Keith Knight catches up with old friends _ (http://www.salonmagazine.com/comics/knig/1999/06/30/knig/index.html ).

While I'm offending my religious readers, it occurs to me that I'm having a few problems coming up with positive results of charity. Take the settlers of this land for example: A bunch of nitwits arrive in a foreign place with no skills to support themselves and without the brains to experiment (many European expeditions either starved or came close because they'd only eat the foods they were familiar with), are saved by the natives, only to exterminate them later. Leeches are leeches, we should avoid feeding them when they're small lest they become big.

As I finish reading that Why Judaism (and then Christianity) Rejected Homosexuality article, I'm frightened. Man, this dude has some weird twisted views of history. Downright scary. Serious omissions to "prove" his point. More than ever a good reason to reject monotheisms.

Rebecca's Pocket points me toward this note on Brazil's hottest children's star, Tiazinha , a dominatrix as well as a singer:

"It felt great!" panted chubby 12-year-old Murillo Soares Maia, a faithful fan of Tiazinha's TV show for adolescents, unfazed but for a red blotch on his thigh after participating in this stop of her live tour. "I can die now. I've just been hot-waxed by the coolest person on Earth."

Clean Sheets this week tackles sex and aging.

Aaron reminds me that there's some new Weird Al material out. Crank up those MPEG players.

David Steinberg's new Comes Naturally column touches on teenage homosexuality and pop culture, and how we're moving towards acceptance on some fronts and not on others.

I can't talk about Toy Story 2, but Harry Knowles of Ain't It Cool can .

Big Brother is watching you , but you already knew that. It's just nice to see mainstream publications like the Washington Post acknowledge that.

What happens if you take the premise of the Mindcraft survey, web serving as a measure of machine speed, but use premises that make more sense, a set of benchmarks looking at NT, Linux and OS/X for more realistic web serving tasks :

"When calling CGI scripts, Windows NT is no match for Linux. As the load is not confined to kernel mode in this case, Linux can benefit from additional CPUs."

Todd (Thanks for the Birthday present!) passes along this article on a little hopping robot built to explore an asteroid a kilometer in diameter.

Cleft deodorant "is the only deodorant currently on the market that stops anal odors where they begin: AT THE ANAL CLEFT!"

Via /. , a great analysis on why the Mindcraft Microsoft/Linux pissing contest is irrelevant :

"Let's be clear about this: if you have only 5 T1 lines or less, a single CPU Linux box with 256 MB RAM will wait on your internet connection and not be able to serve up to its full potential."

Susie Bright on Marylin Chambers (Thanks, Jorn of Robot Wisdom , I tried searching Salon today for the article I knew must be there, and didn't find it).

Devin L. Granger on what Yoda meant to say:

"Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to using Windows NT for mission-critical applications."

If you're considering @Home or interested in the future of comunnication, rather than just broadcast, check out yesterday's entries in Hack the Planet .

Well, Elizabeth Dole just lost my vote by coming out against parental responsibility .

In the "And this person is in education?" department, here's a sad tale of a Bronx 8^th grade graduation ceremony with a completely illiterate program. The principal attempted to pass the buck with this bizarrely twisted statement:

"I am not aware of who did this," said Martin. "I did not peruse it. I do not coordinate everything that takes place in the school. I am not conversant with that document. It stands to reason that nothing like this would be done intentional."

This is one well hung squirrel .

Don't panic, we've been assured that the computer experts working on government projects have many advanced degrees . This is what happens when you hire simply based on credentials, rather than actually looking at qualifications and skills. And I guess it's no secret that the primary employer of this nature would be the public sector:

"Despite the loopholes in state law, investigators from the Louisiana attorney general's office, along with federal investigators continue to investigate the lucrative scam. One investigator estimated that La Salle has issued 40,000 or more diplomas, with the majority going to government employees."

Marylaine's Fox News column this week is on the culture shock of New York from an Iowa perspective. It reads more like one of her My Word's Worth columns, which is good: "'d been told New York was full of purse snatchers and dope dealers, but the only lawless people I saw were drivers."

Need To Know .

Brad has a good piece on Armistead Maupin .

Star wars fans: POF Too : "Purists should be forewarned that the following images graphically depict POF2 action figures and vehicles in manners that many would consider blasphemy."

The new issue of NETFUTURE () starts out on a slightly defensive note, but it's thought provoking as always:

There is also no end of good things one can do with an automobile, from buying someone a present at the mall to taking an injured person to a distant hospital. But if you lived at the beginning of the twentieth century, and if, possessed of unusual foresight, you had grave misgivings about how the automobile was beginning to restructure society, what would your message to your contemporaries have been?

Just in case you needed a little nudge to read the Nerve interview with Grace Quek/Annabel Chong, a pull quote:

All my life I've wanted to get out of Singapore and to be not a Singaporean. It's the idea of how far I can run away from home. [snip] And that segues into control, the idea of taking control, because running away from home is very much a form, no matter how misguided, of taking back control of the things that maybe felt out of control in the past.

Following up to my link to my Annabel Chong comments and Nerve's article, Nerve today has an Amy Goodman interview of Annabel Chong . Interesting perspective, my original essay was written from the CNN and similar reports, this interview talks about issues like condoms and disease transmission and such. Once again a sharp reminder that my perception of an event is shaped by those who report it.

Everyone's linking to Steve Wozniak's comments on Pirates of Silicon Valley , but it's been severely /.ed and so I haven't gotten there to read it yet. I did read a mirror site . The comments are a bit unsatisfying and a little more self-aggrandizing than I'd expect from Woz (not that self-aggrandizing from Woz isn't total humility on anyone else's measure). I didn't see the original, but I heard a whole lot of "If I were one of the people portrayed, I wouldn't be happy". Woz is saying basically that they took some liberties with the places, but the character of the people involved came through.

QOTD:

Newsgroups: alt.binaries.warez.protocol-droids.c3
From: Anakin Skywalker  
Subject: CA|\| NE1 0N Th]5 BB0ARD T3Ll M3 H0w 2 GeT KeWL S]Th P0WeRZ!?!?!??!? 

--- henke at kharendaen.krall.org (paraphrased by Peter da Silva)

Today's Mouthorgan attempts to make a link between Germaine Greer and the Littleton shooting. Any time Greer is mentioned my eyes glaze over and roll back in my head, but the essay does start to get into some of the issues with male gender roles and lack of fulfilling archetypes i this culture at the very end.

When playing with rocket powered vehicles you know you've hit on something cool when the tires squeal because they're not accelerating fast enough to keep up with the motorcycle. Written by someone whose native language is not English:

"...in the back of the neck we wear a special body parachute like the one Arvil wears in this picture, this parachute has an harness that is connected to the handle bar of the bike and in case of separation the parachute opens braking the pilot body in his sliding path."

Keith Knight and his pet rat .

/. has a great review of Cryptonomicon . Says everything I can think of about the book better than I can write a review.

Back in March I wrote a piece about Annabel Chong's attempt to set a record for having sex with 251 men in 10 hours. I didn't think highly of it. In Nerve Magazine Leif Ueland writes about a similar situation , one which reinforces my disdain not for the attempt, but for the whole impersonality and motivations that drive it. But then I suppose I'm not really a goal driven person.

Since this seems to be making the rounds, here's an undoubtedly apocryphal note from the Australian DSTO's Land Operations/Simulation division on the hazards of adapting entertainment technology to military simulation . Watch out for them 'roos.

QOTD, in reference to "I can't believe it's not butter" and "Bugger me, it's margerine":

I'm still pondering whether i should pre-emptively register "I can't believe it's not Jesus" as a name for a low-calorie communion wafer, so i get in there before the church...

And after that, "Christ Lite" non-alcoholic communion wine...
Tanuki in the Scary Devil Monastery.

The new Clean Sheets includes Hanne Blank on multiple male orgasm, some fiction from David Steinberg, and some new poetry.

QOTD (though I know others have opined similarly):

Children are a renewable resource, after all.
--- Marshall McGowan

While I'm making random unconnected observations: Perhaps politics by heredity, as in England, isn't all that bad. At least that gives a fairly random sample of intelligence and ability, whereas elections like we've got clearly favor the schmoozers with no actual productive abilities (otherwise they'd be in business).

Brad on The Death of Camp . Maybe this means that we can finally drive the nail in that smug post-modern attitude that everything's already been done ironic detachment and parody are the only novelty? This paragraph's about a response to a pride parade:

"It's pretty amazing," Warren said, "and all these people sure are enjoying themselves. But I just feel like I'm watching the funeral procession at the death of subtlety."

Via JJG , an article on how easy it is to implant memories , even to the point that one in four will falsely remember an incident as having happened to them one week after reading a one page story about that incident.

"And, surprisingly, the effect was stronger when people read stories about children of the opposite sex. Sanders said she had been expecting more false memories when women read stories about girls, and men read about boys, but the opposite was true. So far, she says, she has no theories as to why that happened."

This last weekend I'd been talking about how romance novels (and other genres, that was just the example I was using) use the shotgun approach to afflict their heroines with every imagineable problem in order to find a couple of things in the reader's past which would make that protagonist more empathizeable. I wonder if perhaps some of the large scale myths of oppression that we play out in this society are instilled by popular culture like that? Errrr... make that "I wonder to what extent...".

Todd checked in with the name of that group of Australian bagpipers: Brother. Aaaand, while I'm talking about that, I've set up the facilities for a few folks to write guest rants for Flutterby, hopefully Todd will provide a different perspective on the computing and interactive industry (and whatever else he finds interesting), and maybe we can get Steve, who's working this summer as an outside agitator in the Minneapolis school board race, to provide some balance from a Berkeley radical point of view.

Of course when "balance" means views that disparate usually the center gets overburdened and breaks. We can hope.

A while back Mouthorgan mentioned a book called Lip Service that advertised itself as an intelligent erotic romance novel. Well, I got it, and I disagree. It's mildly erotic, but lacks a really motivated plot and has shallow characterization. If anyone wants my copy, drop me an e-mail. But it was self-published by a in an attempt to break open a new genre. Anyway, it's been picked up by a mainstream publisher .

Oh yeah, Phrontisterion was Aristophanes name for the school of Socrates in The Clouds .

Monday morning comics-wise, you might catch up on User Friendly , including one concerning Eric Raymond speaking at Microsoft on the summer solstice , and Sluggy Freelance , and Peter Zale's Helen, Sweetheart of the Internet has been temporarily replaced by John Klossner's Mason Darrow, Non-Profit Lawyer for the summer.

A Salon interview with Spencer Tunick , a photographer who does images of naked people in outdoor urban settings, abouthis work and his recent arrest in New York.

Oh yeah, I've got at least one message (I haven't even begun to wade through this weekend's backlog) suggesting that it was Mae West and not Tallulah Bankhead. Bankhead may have been the "pure as the driven slush" comment, or I may just be digging myself in deeper. I'll see if I can find a reference once I catch up on my sleep.

On that note, I just got back from the first Phrontisterion, full reports will be forthcoming. An enlightening weekend talking about the future of interactive story, drama and fiction. Lots of interesting people. Got me back into the thinking about story mode, and in a week or three I might try reviving the idrama mailing list. Time to brush up on the McKee .

My Word's Worth this morning is a list of books Marylaine would recommend to those wanting to understand U.S. attitudes. Marylaine's Fox News column looks at why Iowa is where presidential candidates declare.

Should be a new Need To Know up sometime today, but I'm going off to Oregon to talk about interactive drama with a bunch of interested folks, I'll be back sometime Monday. Be good.

"...and when I'm bad, I'm better." Tallulah Bankhead (I think).

Frank passes along the USGS mak of recent earthquates in LA . 3 miles south of the convention center, wonder what this is going to do to SIGGRAPH...

Microsoft is trying to redefine "established behavior" for bug reporting . After Microsoft dragged their feet for a week on a bug in IIS that lets users run arbitrary code on servers, Firas Bushnaq, CEO of Eeye, publicised the bug and released it with an exploit. That sounds like any BugTraq posting to me. Those poor MS dudes are doing some serious damage control and backpedalling...

A new Topping the News catches up on this week in sex.

A new Mouthorgan , odds and ends that needed catching up on.

Via Robot Wisdom , some primate researchers think that chimps have culture . If they start saying "yeehaw", drinking Budweiser, and driving pickup truc... wait a minute... nevermind.

Cinetransformer gives you the comfort of a Dolby ProLogic equipped air conditioned movie theatre anywhere. Large expanding trucks (see the animated GIF) built to provide movie theatres to rural Mexico, complete with their own generators and restrooms.

All right, can we just stop with the Bob Dole and impotence jokes? From Salon People today comes this totally unwarranted snipe over Jerry Falwell calling Elizabeth Dole "a lovely lady" in the context of the 2000 elections: "Hey, that's a stronger endorsement than Liddy got from her hubby, Floppy Bob." (bold in the original). Now I'm no fan of "bought Bob" and his record as a politician, but medical condition jokes just aren't that funny. I suppose gimp jokes are next.

Keith Knight on parking .

Via Stuffed Dog , a report that Divx is dead . Circuit City will take a $114 million charge related to closing out the business.

Everybody's reporting this article as James Gosling claiming Unix is immune to virii . By the article's words he's saying that Unix and its variants are less susceptible, but certainly not immune. And Gosling isn't stupid enough to have forgotten about the Morris Internet Worm exploit to the sendmail buffer overflow. The issue is when you write an operating system that invites attacks; Unix at least thinks about such things on the front end.

A new Clean Sheets .

I don't know why I'm linking to this article on S/M as therapy , except that as we realize that most of conventional therapy is a bad scam to separate insurance comapanies from their money we're going to have to start looking at methods that really work, and the things that have real effects and are catalysts for real change are scary and very intense, and by their nature non-conventional.

No body piercings or tattoos for Barbie . Wonder if there's something about Ken they've been hiding from us too?

"Mattel, the maker, said yesterday that it had stopped making the Butterfly Art Barbie, which had a butterfly tattoo on her ankle, and Chelsie, a supposedly British Barbie with a nose stud."

Via the Daily Illuminator , the British Ministry of Defense is looking at a "phaser" design .

"The freeze ray works by zapping its victim with an electric current. It uses an ultraviolet laser to create a beam of light particles, called photons. These ionise a path through the air so that it can conduct electricity as if it were a wire leading to the target up to 100 metres away."

Dairy whip can be tax deductible in New Zealand , at least if your business is sex. Similarly condoms, lubricants, lingerie and such. New Zealand laws are strict enough to allow disclosure of such things to the tax authorities without getting into trouble with the "vice" folks.

Via Rebecca's Pocket comes this sad tale of a woman who claimed her lover was her husband for the sake of getting insurance coverage for a penile implant, but didn't get to the bills fast enough to hide them from her husband. Whoopsie.

Two bumper stickers that made me think this morning. The first was "live better/work union". Well, given my experience with unions, and that I live in Marin, I'm -><- this close to making a "live better/hire scab" one. The second said "Try God". Oh, believe me, I do. Intentionally. All the time. No response yet, but I'll keep goading.

Wow. I've discovered the Fujix printer. I'm currently running some pretty darned awesome looking 10"x16" (11x17 paper) 200DPI prints from 3k by 2k PhotoCD scans sharpened a bit and a little color correction done in ImageMagick, and they're gorgeous. Hopefully they'll be up in the City Cafe in San Rafael during July and August, along with Dan Herman, who's got some gorgeous pictures from Patagonia, and the black and white work of Phil Beffrey. The three images I'm moderately satisfied with so far are kind of dark and moody, and the slides themselves look almost painterly. Now I'm trying to come up with 3 more in the opposite mood (green, nature, and upbeat). Alas, many of my more recent images aren't yet scanned (I'd have loved to have some Oregon waterfalls...), I'm working on a tight deadline, and I'm trying to stay away from the soppy Yosemite shots.

The printer goes to 400DPI, but I'm having a little trouble getting it to do what I want in some modes, and I don't currently have the optics to support that for images large enough to look good in a cafe. Maybe for some pictures for my walls. Look out, Christopher Burkett , in another two decades digital technology and my slowly growing skill may yet approach... well... probably not.

One to watch: Titanic vs The Phantom Menace . Not enough real data here to show anything yet, but the graph of weekly revenues from each should be fun once we get more than 3 weeks out.

Salon asks what might happen when political ad writers do consumer products .

QOTD:

"Usenet: wisdom in homeopathic doses."
-- Paul Martin

Via FactoVision , the PlayStation II is a supercomputer under U.S. export law and so cannot be shipped to China.

The Sluggy Freelance saga continues with Riff breaking into the secret lair of Art Belal, conspiracy radio talk show host.

And in User Friendly the anti Linux thugs have brought their axe handles and baseball bats to Columbia Internet:

"Our employers don't like it when people like you interfere with their power grabs."

"You're from the Australian government?"

"Come now. We have ethics."

On weeding, gardens and otherwise, in My Word's Worth

Susie Bright on how to ruin your sex life .

Immediately obvious or not? Patent 5,443,036: Method of exercising a cat is waving a laser pointer around:

A method for inducing cats to exercise consists of directing a beam of invisible light produced by a hand-held laser apparatus onto the floor or wall or other opaque surface in the vicinity of the cat, then moving the laser so as to cause the bright pattern of light to move in an irregular way fascinating to cats, and to any other animal with a chase instinct.

In the new Comes Naturally David Steinberg looks at the new erotic photography collection Naked Libido, and has some interesting comments on photography critique as well.

DigiBio appears to be homeopathy repackaged. They say things like: "A molecular signal can be efficiently represented by a spectrum of frequencies between 20Hz and 20,000 Hz, the same range as the human voice or music" which, given the issues of noise and amplification, sounds pretty improbable unless those voices in my head are real.

Rephrasings of Clarke's Law from the Scary Devil Monastery:

"Any technology, insufficiently understood, is indistinguishable from magic."
-- Firebeard

"Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
-- Eric the Read

A new Need To Know .

Via Rebecca's Pocket : That great lover of freedom, Bob Barr of Georgia, is trying to kick Wiccans out of the military . Leave the killing for the Christians.

David Oringsderff, a 30-year Army veteran and founder of Sacred Well, the Open Circle's sponsoring congregation, tried to explain the contradiction. Christians, he pointed out, also believe thou shalt not kill. In his view, the wiccans are at least more honest: They believe everything they do comes back at them threefold, so they prepare to pay a price. "We accept responsibility for our actions and don't have the devil to blame things on," Oringsderff said.

Okay, I think Gore is a wooden loser who will run rampant over our freedoms and tax us into the ground. But that guy is nothing compared to Bush . This is the reason campaign finance laws are bad.

While I'm apparently too lazy to finish up my automated link checker, I am going to try to keep up with Marylaine's Fox Column on exploring the "why not?" stops along the back roads.

Debra rants about Phantom Menace merchandising . I may have to make my own run over to Good Vibrations in the near future:

I'm tempted to stage a silent protest over this one item. I'm thinking I'll buy one of the Jar Jar masks, stuff it, then run to a nearby bondage shop and get a blindfold and ball gag for it.

From Salon , a poorly written article on experiencing an isolation tank (poorly written because the author uses "you" to describe his experiences) that still makes it sound like an appealing way to spend a couple of hours:

An apple is a universe. And if you can't see that now, pay a visit to the void.

Via Uncle Aussie comes this article about transmitting clandestine messages in DNA . It also uses some marker information so the actual message is buried in huge amounts of noise, which is good to keep crypto attacks less effective.

The researchers proved the DNA microdot works by pasting the tiny dots over the full stops in a typed letter, posting it and then analysing the dots when it arrived back. The message was received, loud and clear.

A new Mouthorgan contends that vanity is good. Expect a rant or two on this topic...

Salon also has Keith Knight's take on Tarzan .

Salon has a neat article about the decline of chick flicks :

"What the modern movies lack -- and what the older movies, even the ones with the happiest endings, always at least suggest -- is the sense that romance is always about risk and adventure."

Clean Sheets updated, new articles in every category.

Elements 118 and 116 (118's immediate decay product) discovered .

All Gore in 2000 . To go along with GW Bush in 2000 . I suppose making a sex and violence connection between Bush and Gore would be a little too tacky? I thought so.

The overclocking wars continue. While the systems I've pointed to before go to -40, here's a two stage cooling system to get a PC to -60C , a refrigration system cooling Peltier coolers. "Next stage will be to cascade the peltiers to see if -80C can be achieved."

Brad exposes Anheuser-Busch's pandering to the gay market .

If they're not on your daily rotation, you might want to catch back up on Sluggy Freelance and User Friendly .

No new My Word's Worth this morning, so you might want to get your Marylaine fix via her Fox column .

There are some new Eric Boutillier-Brown photo diary entries. He's doing a little more color work, and his figure images are neat as always.

And somewhere when I wasn't paying attention, Need To Know updated.

A new Topping the News as well.

A new Topping the News

If you haven't checked back in on Nerve in a while, it might be worth a check. Nothing's leaping out at me, but lots of new articles.

The state of California will happily sell your salary information . First they asked for information to track the "deadbeat dads", and I didn't speak up because I wasn't one...

Interesting accident report about a midair collision attributed to the human factors of using GPS . Essentially, if pilots just plug in the longitude and lattitude of two airports, planes flying from one to the other will now be within 300 feet of a straight line between the two airports and so are much more likely to be close enough to each other to cause a problem.

The correct use of GPS decreases the average displacement of an aircraft from the centre line of its desired track; consequently, if separation procedures fail, the probability of a mid-air collision will increase (see LP 95/95). This increased risk of collision applies to both IFR and VFR aircraft in all types of operations.

Sorry about the lack of updates, I spent the day helping Catherine move out.

There's a new Mouthorgan out, that ought to hold y'all til tomorrow.

Keith Knight confronts the Star Wars freaks .

"There were times I thought I was watching A Bug's Life there was so much computer animation."

Clean Sheets is up, new fiction, new poetry, a couple of reviews, and an article on male masturbation. Haven't had a chance to read any of it yet.

Bumper sticker of the day:

Blasphemy is a victimless crime

Australia's luckiest man , although I'm sure that with a little work you could come up with similar sets of circumstances for someone in almost any country. It's amazing how the human mind looks for patterns.

Salon reports that vegetarians may have lower sex drives due to a lack of zinc in their diets. Although the "nutrtionist" quoted running the study seems to have some biases. I say there's only one way to find out, and it involves a statistically valid sample from both populations...

QOTD (on being "a proper landowning capeetaleest peegdog"):

"First Up Against The Wall When The Revolution Comes! Woohoo! So long as they promise to use latex gloves, I'm happy. :)"
--- Thorfy

Susie Bright in Salon: Lesbians on Y2K . "You mean the day when all our vibrators fail?"

My Word's Worth is on designing public spaces for liveability.

I missed the Helen, Sweetheart of the Internet update last monday. But Helen's also going on vacation for the summer. Fear not, Peter Zale has a weekly strip in Tech Republic called The Bleeding Edge.

Also, reminders on Sluggy Freelance and User Friendly if you're not keeping up on them daily.

Sorry about the lack of updates yesterday, but a day that ends with 3 hours of trading massages in a hot tub is a reasonable exchange for disappointing y'all.

Archives of neat sites posted to Flutterby , notes to webmaster@flutterby.com