Echoes of Fascism: violent right-wing intimidation tactics are resurfacing in Japan

"Facts are stupid things." --Ronald Reagan

How to make Ramen Noodles a microwave

"The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in time of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality." --Dante Alighieri

From Welfare To Poverty: "welfare reform" has gotten people off the welfare rolls, some of them even got jobs, but it hasn't helped most of them escape poverty

Charisma Man

"I always wanted to stay anonymous. At first, I didn’t even give my name to the Criminal Investigation Division. I just burned a copy of the pictures onto a CD, typed an anonymous letter, put them in a manila envelope, and handed them to an agent at CID. I said, “This was left in my office,” and walked out.

But about an hour later, this little short guy named Special Agent Pieron came to my office and started grilling me about where the pictures came from. It took him about half an hour before I gave it up...

That was one of the most nervous periods of my life. I was constantly scared. I started getting paranoid. I kept my gun with me at all times. I took it to sleep with me... I would lie there in bed with both arms behind my head and my left hand inside the pillowcase, gripping my nine-millimeter with the safety off. I would just listen..."

In an Aug 17th interview, Noam Chomsky mentions an interesting Program on International Policy Attitudes poll on the US budget in Feb 2005, as an indicator of just how far from the mainstream the Bush administration and Congress is:

"What's happened is that both political parties are pretty far to the right of the general population on a host of serious issues... If you take a look at popular attitudes on international affairs, on international crisis, on who should take the lead on the so-called "War on Terror", on domestic issues like healthcare, on and on, [the public's attitudes are] just radically different.

One of the most striking examples was the major study of public opinion right after the Federal budget was announced in February of 2005, the Federal budget of the Bush administration. There was a major study by the Program on International Policy Attitudes, the most respected polling institution. Public attitudes were almost exactly the opposite of the budget.

Where the budget was going up the public wanted it to go down, by large majorities: military spending, supplementals for Iraq and Afghanistan, and so on. Where spending was going down the public wanted it to go up, also by very large majorities: health, education, welfare, renewable energy, support for the United Nations...

[But] the results [of this poll] were apparently not reported. A friend of mine who does database searches checked carefully and couldn't find a single report in any American newspaper of very dramatic information: information that says the public is completely opposed, radically opposed, to the Federal budget, meaning public policy. And the same has been true on occasion after occasion. Now that's a serious problem within the United States."

Word of the day: cloy

To disgust or nauseate with excess of something originally pleasing

"I am posting this (and it is long) because I think our society needs a huge “Wake-up” call.

As a shelter manager, I am going to share a little insight with you all...a view from the inside if you will... All of you breeders/sellers... should be made to work in the 'back' of an animal shelter for just one day.

Maybe if you saw the life drain from a few sad, lost, confused eyes, you would change your mind about breeding and selling to people you don't even know... that puppy you just sold will most likely end up in my shelter when it's not a cute little puppy anymore. So how would you feel if you knew that there's about a 90% chance that dog will never walk out of the shelter it is going to be dumped at? Purebred or not!

About 50% of all of the dogs that are "owner surrenders" or "strays", that come into my shelter are purebred dogs. The most common excuses I hear are; “We are moving and we can’t take our dog (or cat).” Really? Where are you moving too that doesn’t allow pets? Or they say “The dog got bigger than we thought it would”. How big did you think a German Shepherd would get? “We don’t have time for her…”. Really? I work a 10-12 hour day and still have time for my 6 dogs! “She’s tearing up our yard…”. How about making her a part of your family? They always tell me “We just don’t want to have to stress about finding a place for her…we know she’ll get adopted, she’s a good dog”.

Odds are your pet won’t get adopted & how stressful do you think being in a shelter is? Well, let me tell you…your pet has 72 hours to find a new family from the moment you drop it off…sometimes a little longer if the shelter isn’t full and your dog manages to stay completely healthy…if it sniffles, it dies. Your pet will be confined to a small run/kennel in a room with about 25 other barking or crying animals. It will have to relieve itself where it eats and sleeps. It will be depressed and it will cry constantly for the family that abandoned it.

If your pet is lucky, I will have enough volunteers in that day to take him/her for a walk. If I don’t, your pet won’t get any attention besides having a bowl of food slid under the kennel door and the waste sprayed out of its pen with a high-powered hose. If your dog is big, black or any of the “Bully” breeds (pit bull, rottie, mastiff, etc…) it was pretty much dead when you walked it through the front door. Those dogs just don’t get adopted.

If your dog doesn’t get adopted within its 72 hours and the shelter is full, it will be destroyed. If the shelter isn’t full and your dog is good enough, and of a desirable enough breed…it may get a stay of execution…not for long though. Most get very kennel protective after about a week and are destroyed for showing aggression…even the sweetest dogs will turn in this environment. If your pet makes it over all of those hurdles…chances are it will get kennel cough or an upper respiratory infection and will be destroyed because shelters just don’t have the funds to pay for even a $100 treatment.

Here’s a little euthanasia 101 for those of you that have never witnessed a perfectly healthy, scared animal being “put-down”. First, your pet will be taken from its kennel on a leash…they always look like they think they are going for a walk…happy, wagging their tails. Until they get to “The Room”, every one of them freaks out and puts on the breaks when we get to the door…it must smell like death or they can feel the sad souls that are left in there, it’s strange, but it happens with every one of them.

Your dog or cat will be restrained, held down by 1 or 2 vet techs depending on the size and how freaked out they are. Then a euthanasia tech or a vet will start the process…they will find a vein in the front leg and inject a lethal dose of the “pink stuff”. Hopefully your pet doesn’t panic from being restrained and jerk…I’ve seen the needles tear out of a leg and been covered with the resulting blood and deafened by the yelps and screams.

They all don’t just “go to sleep”, sometimes spasm for a while, gasp for air and defecate on themselves. When it all ends, your pets corpse will be stacked like firewood in a large freezer in the back with all of the other animals that were killed…waiting to be picked up like garbage. What happens next? Cremated? Taken to the dump? Rendered into pet food? You’ll never know and it probably won’t even cross your mind…it was just an animal and you can always buy another one right?

I hope that those of you that have read this are bawling your eyes out and can’t get the pictures out of your head…I do everyday on the way home from work. I hate my job, I hate that it exists & I hate that it will always be there unless you people make some changes and realize that the lives you are affecting go much farther than the pets you dump at a shelter.

Between 9 and 11 MILLION animals die every year in shelters and only you can stop it. I do my best to save every life I can but rescues are always full, and there are more animals coming in everyday than there are homes.

My point to all of this.. DON'T BREED OR BUY WHILE SHELTER PETS DIE!"

"At a law school Supreme Court conference that I attended last fall, there was a panel on "The Rehnquist Court." No one mentioned Bush v. Gore, the most historic case of William Rehnquist's time as chief justice, and during the Q. and A. no one asked about it. When I asked a prominent law professor about this strange omission, he told me he had been invited to participate in another Rehnquist retrospective, and was told in advance that Bush v. Gore would not be discussed.

The ruling that stopped the Florida recount and handed the presidency to George W. Bush is disappearing down the legal world's version of the memory hole, the slot where, in George Orwell's "1984," government workers disposed of politically inconvenient records."

From Has Bush v. Gore Become the Case That Must Not Be Named?
(Thanks to Jesse)

Photographers in NYC are arrested and harrassed just for taking pictures.

"These arrests for 'taking pictures' usually come in the course of police officers doing their job, arresting someone else, and they don't want to be photographed arresting someone, so they charge the photographer with obstructing justice, or disorderly conduct, or they throw them to the ground and then charge them with resisting arrest. A Reuters photographer who was photographing police was charged with 'obstructing traffic.' It's getting ridiculous."

America is #1 ?

"The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr." --Muhammad, Sunnah (c. 630)

San Francisco journalist jailed for not handing over video to the government. More from Slashdot.

"There's an old story about a young man who cornered a world-famous violinist and begged to be allowed to play for him. If the master offered him encouragement, he would devote his life to music. But if his talent was not equal to his calling, he wanted to know ahead of time so he could avoid wasting his life. He played, and the great violinist shook his head. "You lack the fire," he said.

Decades later the two met again, and the would-be violinist, now a prosperous businessman, recalled their previous meeting. "You cahnged my entire life," he explained. "It was a bitter disappointment, giving up music, but I forced myself to accept your judgement. Thus, instead of becoming a fourth-rate musician, I've had a good life in the world of commerce. But tell me, how could you tell so readily that I lacked the fire?"

"Oh, I hardly listened when you played," the old master said. "That's what I tell everyone who plays for me -- that they lack the fire."

"But that's unforgivable!" the businessman cried. "How could you do that? You altered the entire course of my life. Perhaps I could have been another Kreisler, another Heifetz--"

The old man shook his head again. "You don't understand," he said. "If you had had the fire, you would have paid no attention to me." --Lawrence Block

"A bizarre biological discovery about punning was made by a German surgeon named Forster in 1929. Dr. Forster was operating on a patient's brain to remove a tumor. Whenever the surgeon manipulated the spot where the tumor was located, the patient would start with whatever words the doctor had just uttered and make a series of puns about his own brain surgery. He didn't mean to do it; he couldn't help it. The surgeon had discovered the spot in this patient's brain that made him pun. Since then the rare disorder of compulsive punning has been called Forster's Syndrome. It is a physical affliction a bit like epilepsy." --Kathryn Lindskoog

More than 100 years ago, a French sociologist named Émile Durkheim did what nobody since has been able to do: He explained the mind of the suicide bomber.

That, at least, is the contention of numerous scholars and authors whose resurrection of Durkheim's ideas has been gaining traction within the field of terrorism studies...

"Durkheim's genius lay in identifying suicide as a social or political act, rather than as something genetically determined or some psychological impairment," Weinberg says in a telephone interview. "I realized the same thing worked with Palestinian `martyrs.'"

"I came over here because I wanted to kill people."

"The truth is, it wasn't all I thought it was cracked up to be. I mean, I thought killing somebody would be this life-changing experience. And then I did it, and I was like, 'All right, whatever.'"

"I shot a guy who wouldn't stop when we were out at a traffic checkpoint and it was like nothing"

"Over here, killing people is like squashing an ant. I mean, you kill somebody and it's like 'All right, let's go get some pizza.'"

The next time I saw him, in a front-page newspaper photograph five months later, he was standing outside a federal courthouse in North Carolina, where he had pled not guilty to charges of premeditated rape and murder. The brutal killing of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and her family in Mahmudiyah that he was accused of had taken place just three weeks after we talked...

from Encountering Steven Green

"I get all my ideas in Switzerland near the Forka Pass. There is a little town called Gletch, and two thousand feet up above Gletch there is a smaller hamlet called Uber Gletch. I go there on the fourth of August every summer to get my cuckoo clock repaired. While the cuckoo is in the hospital, I wander around and talk to the people in the streets. They are very strange people, and I get my ideas from them." --Dr. Seuss

"The right to take photographs is under assault now more than ever. People are being stopped, harassed, and even intimidated into handing over their personal property simply because they were taking photographs of subjects that made other people uncomfortable. Recent examples have included photographing industrial plants, bridges, and bus stations. For the most part, attempts to restrict photography are based on misguided fears about the supposed dangers that unrestricted photography presents to society...

The Photographer's Right is a downloadable guide that is loosely based on the Bust Card and the Know Your Rights pamphlet that used to available on the ACLU website. It may be downloaded and printed out using Adobe Acrobat Reader. You may make copies and carry them your wallet, pocket, or camera bag to give you quick access to your rights and obligations concerning confrontations over photography."

The Photographer's Right

Also see Travel Photography and the Law

"I felt like poisoning a monk." --Umberto Eco on why he wrote The Name of the Rose

"The English department [of the University of Ibadan] was a very good example of what I mean. The people there would have laughed at the idea that any of us would become a writer. That didn't really cross their minds. I remember on one occasion a departmental prize was offered. They put up a notice: Write a short story over the long vacation for the departmental prize. I'd never written a short story before, but when I got home, I thought, Well, why not. So I wrote one and submitted it. Months passed; then finally one day there was a notice on the board announcing the result. It said that no prize was awarded because no entry was up to the standard. They named me, said that my story deserved mention. Ibadan in those days was not a dance you danced with snuff in one palm. It was a dance you danced with all your body. So when Ibadan said you deserved mention, that was very high praise.

I went to the lecturer who had organized the prize and said, "You said my story wasn't really good enough, but it was interesting. Now what was wrong with it?" She said, "Well, it's the form. It's the wrong form." So I said, "Ah. Can you tell me about this?" She said, "Yes, but not now. I'm going to play tennis; we'll talk about it. Remind me later, and I'll tell you." This went on for a whole term. Every day when I saw her, I'd say, "Can we talk about form?" She'd say, "No, not now. We'll talk about it later." Then at the very end she saw me and said, "You know, I looked at your story again, and actually there's nothing wrong with it." So that was it! That was all I learned from the English department about writing short stories. You really have to go out on your own and do it." --Chinua Achebe

"The war correspondent gets more drinks, more girls, better pay, and greater freedom than the soldier, but at this stage of the game, having the freedom to choose his spot and being allowed to be a coward and not be executed for it is his torture. The war correspondent has his stake - his life - in his own hands, and he can put it on this horse or that horse, or he can put it back in his pocket at the very last minute. I am a gambler. I decided to go... in the first wave." --Robert Capa, on D-Day

Roberto Matta

Lyonel Feininger

Hans Bellmer

“For years, I photographed dead bodies"

Letizia Battaglia

Why judging cameras by megapixels is misleading

How to Sleep Comfortably on a Hot Night

Don’t Read This Post (or the Kitty Gets It)!

The Ian Knot: 2 minutes of practice make for faster shoelacing

10 Rules for Writers

1. Verbs HAS to agree with their subjects.
2. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
3. And don’t start a sentence with a conjunction.
4. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
5. Avoid clichés like the plague. (They’re old hat.)
6. Be more or less specific.
7. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are (usually) unnecessary.
8. Also too, never, ever use repetitive redundancies.
9. No sentence fragments.
10. Don’t use no double negatives.
11. Proofread carefully to see if you any words out.

"... So, I had a double life. In the summer I was a teenage messiah with an old Harley Davidson and cowboy hat and cowboy boots, and during the rest of the year I was taking walks with an old man who I had literally run into. I knocked the wind out of him and he said with a thick French accent, "are you planning to run like that for the rest of your life?" I said, "yes sir, it looks that way," and he said, "well, bon voyage." The following week I met him again. He had a long name but he asked me to call him by the first part which to my ears was something like Mr Tayer.

He had no self-consciousness whatsoever. He had leaky margins and he was falling into lovingness with things all the time. He would fall to the ground in the park in ecstasy to look at a caterpillar with his long gaelic nose raking the ground. "Oh Jean look, a caterpillar! What does a caterpillar become, uh? Moving, changing, transforming - metamorphosis. Can you feel yourself to be a caterpillar? What is it to be a papillon, a butterfly? The butterfly is within you! What is the butterfly of Jean in ten, twenty, thirty years, uh? I replied tentatively, "I think I'll be flying around the world meeting different peoples and helping them to be what they can be." This question was my adolescent initiation.

He was something. He had all kinds of strange ways of relating to reality. He'd talk to trees and rocks, addressing them tu, toi, thou. We would lean into the wind and say, "this same wind was once sniffed by Jesus Christ. Alexander the Great - very interesting, Genghis Khan - not so good.(laughter) Here it comes, Jean d'Arc - be filled with Jean d'Arc! Be filled with the tides of history - same molecules." People followed us around, not laughing at us but with us. He created a kind of conversational gestalt. He would look at you as if you were God in hiding and I would leave my littleness behind when I was with him.

We walked together twice a week for a year and half. The last time I saw him was on April 7th 1955. He was very pale. He went off on this extraordinary riff about spirals. It began with a talk about the floor of Chartres Cathedral and brains and intestines and galaxies and evolution. He said, "Jean, the people of your time at the end of the 20th century will be taking the tiller of the world, but they cannot go directly, they must touch upon every people, every culture - you must do that Jean. It will be a great field of mind, we will be turning the corner on the human race."

He said, "au revoir Jean," and I said, "goodbye Mr Tayer, I'll see you on Tuesday." My dog Chicky didn't want to go and was whining. The next Tuesday he didn't come. For eight weeks I went to meet him but he still didn't come. He had died that Easter Sunday but I didn't know it. Years later in graduate school somebody handed me a book without a cover called The Phenomenon of Man. I read it and the words were very familiar. I asked where the cover was and my friend showed it to me with the photo of the author. Mr Tayer had been Pierre Teilhard de Chardin."

From an interview with Jean Houston

Bush Jr molests German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who shrugs him off.

Embarrassingly offensive.

Why isn't this all over the mainstream news?

Imagine if Clinton had done this during his Presidency.

Improving Your Writing from PigDog

Nick Kushner

Why I hate programming competitions

Confessions of a Textbook Editor

Copy What You Like

Why Perl is a Valid Choice

Six things I also dislike about Ruby (and four that I don't)

Polyphasic Sleep (Day 3)

I managed to awaken just fine from my last couple of naps, which I took more or less on time. But now, at a little after 7am, I'm starting to feel pretty sleep deprived. I feel tired and drowsy, and am finding it difficult to concentrate on reading.

Now I am beginning to see the wisdom of making the attempt to switch to a polyphasic sleep schedule when one has absolutely no other commitments. Unfortunatley I have quite a lot of work to do in the next couple of weeks.

I hope I won't crash from lack of sleep or be reduced to a non-functional state, but it may be inevitable the way this is going. I've actually gotten about 6 hours of sleep in the last 24hrs, which is about 4hrs less than I usually like to get, but twice as much as what I'm aiming for. So this is likely going to get much worse before it gets better.

Polyphasic Sleep (Day 2)

Napping for just 45mins was no problem this time, since I didn't even feel the least bit tired or sleepy when the time case. Anyway, I'd only managed to doze off for a short time, and my nap was interrupted by a phone call. I also managed to spontaneously get up one minute before the alarm was set to ring.

Polyphasic Sleep (Day 2)

I think I should rename this "The Oversleep Chronicles", because yes, I overslept again. Set my alarm for 10:30am, got up at 1pm. This time I have no excuse. The alarm went off. I walked over to it, turned it off, and went back to sleep. The room outside my bed just felt so cold, and my bed felt so warm and cozy, and my mind was so groggy.

I just didn't have the determination to stick with it despite the inevitable discomfort. But now I do. There'll be no oversleeping next nap. I also think I'm going to try napping in my clothes, as some other polyphasics have recommended, so there'll be less disincentive to get out of bed.

Polyphasic Sleep (Day 2)

Well, ok. So I overslept. But I blame my alarm clock!

I got pretty drowsy at around 4:20 am, so instead of waiting 'till 5 like I'd planned, I decided to take my nap a bit early, and set my alarm for 5:05 (since I'm planning to stay awake in 6hr blocks, I decided to get 45mins of sleep each time, for a grand total of 3hrs per 24hrs). Anyway, I awoke not at 5:05 but at 7:39, oversleeping almost 3hrs. But my alarm clock was still on! (though it wasn't beeping when I awoke)

I'm pretty sure this alarm does not go off by itself. So it should have still been beeping when I awoke, though I can't be certain. Plainly it either malfunctioned or I did. I don't remember it beeping, and I certainly did not turn it off. So it must have gone off, if it worked, and I must have slept through it. And if it didn't work then I'm happy to have only overslept 3hrs. Well, the vibrating alarm I bought yesterday should be arriving in the mail any day now. So hopefully that'll manage to wake me, and do so without disturbing those around me.

For now I'll just treat this as my core sleep and try to proceed with my other naps as usual. The question is when to take my next nap. If I hadn't overslept I'd take my nap 6hrs later at 11am, except that I was trying to move my schedule up a bit to be in sync with school, so maybe at 10am. But now I only have 2hrs 'till 10am. I think I'll still nap then, otherwise I'll have totally screwed my schedule up.

Polyphasic Sleep (Day 2)

My second nap was more of a break than a real nap. I did loose consciousness of where I was, but when I came to I felt that I hadn't really slept, just concentrated intently. But in retrospect, I think I did get some sleep, and my initial analysis of the period as "not really sleep" was simply confused because I was half asleep at the time. I also managed to wake up after 20 minutes without aid from the alarm clock, which I'd set for 30 minutes.

I took my nap a little early, at 11pm instead of at midnight, since I'd realized I really hadn't thought things through when I'd started, and had made no effort to synchronize my nap schedule to my school schedule. So the earlier nap is an attempt to remedy this.

I feel relatively refreshed, compared to the drowsiness I'd felt immediately before the nap, but I expect that the effects of sleep deprivation will start to occur within the next twelve hours, as I've only had 6 1/2 hours of core sleep plus an hour of naps in the last 24hrs, compared to my usual 10hrs of sleep. Still, I'd stayed up 'till 7am last night, so maybe I won't really start to feel it until sometime around then.

By the way, I feel I should mention there is something that makes my own situation rather unique compared to other polyphasic sleep experimenters. Over the last several months I've been using a light therapy lamp and a negative ion generator to treat seasonal affective disorder.

I don't know (and I don't think anyone knows) how using these devices is going to affect me while attempting to switch to a polyphasic sleep schedule. Exposure to bright light is supposed to affect the production of melatonin and help to regulate one's diurnal rhythms.

The general advice for people who have trouble getting up in the morning is to use the light boxes just as you wake up for about one hour to one half hour. But what do you do when you're waking up four to six times per day instead of just once, and napping for just 20-30mins at a time instead of getting a full night's sleep?

If I keep using the lamp once in the morning it might make it harder for me to switch to a polyphasic sleep schedule. But if I try using it for a few minutes each time I awake then I'll be in completely uncharted territory. Who knows what effect that will have on my body chemistry or mental health? It might help me adapt easier to the polyphasic schedule. Or it could really mess me up. Or it might have no effect. I simply don't know, and I don't think anyone does. There's been relatively little research in to polyphasic sleep, little research in to light therapy, even less research in to negative ion therapy, and absolutely no research in to combining all three. As far as I know I'll be the first one trying this combination.

This gives me pause, but I think there are many much riskier things in life (like getting in to an automobile). So I think I'll stick with it for now, and leave my therapy regimen the way it is. Later, I might try slowly adjusting the light regimen to be more in tune with my polyphasic schedule (assuming I succeed). Changing the light regimen right away may in fact help me make the adjustment to a polyphasic schedule, but it compounds the unknown factors in my particular situation. Combining all three of these factors is risky enough in itself. There's no need to make it potentially worse by messing with the schedule of light I get during the day as well as the amount and schedule of sleep.

Anyway, I think I'll take my next nap at around 5am. 'Till then.

Polyphasic Sleep (Day 1)

After reading up a bit on polyphasic sleep, I thought I'd give it a try.

Normally, I like to get about 10 hours of sleep a night. A completely polyphasic schedule would mean adjusting to getting only about 2 to 3 hours of sleep a night (about 20 to 30 minute naps, taken 6 times per day).

The main disadvantage, according to those people lucky few who've actually succeeded, is that you're out of sync with the rest of the monophasic world. This is a not a huge deal for me, at the moment, since I really don't have many people I want or need to interact with at this point in my life.

For me the main question is how I can manage to sneak the necessary naps in with my normal school schedule, and if I'll be able to force myself to stick to the routine, which is very unnatural for me. Also, I'm not completely dedicated to making this work. This is more of a try it and see if I like it sort of thing.

Anyway, I've decided not to quit the monophasic schedule cold-turkey, like many people recommend. Rather, I'm going to try easing in to it.

So, last night after staying up pretty late (7am), I set my alarm for a 30 minute nap, and passed out. I woke up at 1:30, six and a half hours later. So much for that. But, when I started to feel drowsy again after eating, at around 6pm, I did manage to wake up after 30 minutes, thanks to putting my alarm clock far across the room and imagining myself getting up and doing something when it rang (though I can't remember what that important thing is now that I'm awake).

This nap wasn't all that restful, as I couldn't stay fully asleep the whole time. I noticed I did immediately enter a hypnagogic state upon lying down and closing my eyes, but I drifted in and out of real sleep several times, especially as I became analytical of what I was experiencing in my sleep, rather than just letting it happen. And I also noticed that I'd get excited when I started thinking about being asleep or awake, as that would get me thinking about the polyphasic experiement, and the excitement would force me awake again.

After I awoke I did feel kind of groggy and out of it for about half an hour. Now I'm feeling almost completely awake and alert, with just a barely perceptible residual groggyness. So this is how the start of the experiment is going. I think I'll actually see if I can sleep every six hours rather than every four, because I've heard that having to break up one's day in to just four hour segments can be annoying. So my next nap should be at around midnight. Will try to check in then.

Logic Mazes (aka "Mazes with rules")

Energy Drink Ingredients

Polyphasic Sleep

Great article and even better thread on what math is actually useful for programming

Lessons learned from IFF, a flexible file format from 1985

Sergey Goldgaber

"Most people I've met have read the Design Patterns book by the Gang of Four. Any self respecting programmer will tell you that the book is language agnostic and the patterns apply to software engineering in general, regardless of which language you use. This is a noble claim. Unfortunately it is far removed from the truth.

Functional languages are extremely expressive. In a functional language one does not need design patterns because the language is likely so high level, you end up programming in concepts that eliminate design patterns all together..." Functional Programming For The Rest of Us

Polish Movie Poster Gallery

The pride of the peacock is the glory of God.
The lust of the goat is the bounty of God.
The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God.
The nakedness of woman is the work of God.

William Blake

"I had to do my research. I checked the schedule for the ceremony and realized that I would be speaking just before the senator got his award. And that's when the idea for a preemptive strike began to brew in my little stressed-out brain. What if I tore McCain's speech apart before he even opened his mouth?"

Word of the day: ductile

1: capable of being drawn out or hammered thin
2: easily led or influenced
3: capable of being fashioned into a new form

"I learned to be like a ship's rat, veined ears trembling..." --Anne lamott

Bush may have signed a law that didn't pass, violating the Constitution.

"The Gods have become diseases." --C.G. Jung

"He created an illusion and lived his days and nights within its confines. That illusion was his Japan. He found in Japan the ideal coupling of the cerebral and the sensual, mingled and indistinguishable, the one constantly recharging the other and affording him the inspiration to write.

He came at a time when virtually all foreigners were here to instruct, pontificate and lord themselves over the Oriental upstart; yet he himself came solely to learn, to fossick, to discover what his temperament had taught him was beautiful and potent in the human spirit. Fresh off the ship in 1890, he wrote of the Japanese to his friend and subsequent biographer Elizabeth Bisland, "I believe that their art is as far in advance of our art as old Greek art was superior to that of the earliest European art-groupings. We are barbarians! I do not merely think these things: I am as sure of them as of death. I only wish I could be reincarnated in some little Japanese baby, so that I could see and feel the world as beautifully as a Japanese brain does..."

Lafcadio Hearn: interpreter of two disparate worlds from Japan Times

Word of the day: fossick

Australian & New Zealand: to search for gold or gemstones typically by picking over abandoned workings

Stephen Colbert from Comedy Central headlined the White House Correspondents' Dinner recently, thoroughly roasting Bush (who was sitting just a few feet away) in front of hundreds of reporters and assorted dignitaries. He didn't spare the press:

"But, listen, let's review the rules. Here's how it works: the president makes decisions. He's the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put 'em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know - fiction!"

Bush and the audience were squirming throughout the whole thing, with just a few nervous giggles here and there when Bush was targeted. Afterwards Bush mutely shook Colbert's hand and quickly left.

The next day the event was all over the liberal blogs, but the mainstream media only reported on Bush's own performance with a Bush impersonator, completely omitting mention of Colbert, who was the headliner at the show. Even the New York Times, that "bastion of liberalism", didn't so much as mention Colbert's presence.

Editor and Publisher did justice to the event here

Media Matters has analysis of the lack of critical mainstream media coverage of the dinner and a comparison with past White House Correspondents' Dinners.

CSPAN's video feed of the dinner

Some other videos and transcripts of it here.

This reminds me of a recent "die-in" protest that was held during Hillary Clinton's speech at our school. A couple dozen students layed down to symbolize the dead in the Iraq War, in protest of Clinton's hawkish pro-Iraq War stance. A reporter for one of the student papers saw a man photographing the protestors and went over to ask him who he was... turned out he was a photographer for the New York Times. She asked him what he though of the protest. "Think?" he answered, "I don't think. I've learned to stop thinking on this job a long time ago."

"We are rarely surprised by media coverage about recreational psychoactives. Most can be lumped into the broad genre of sensationalist exposé about the terrible dangers of drugs designed to titillate teens and frighten parents. The ABC News special "Ecstasy Rising", first aired on April 1st, 2004, stands out mostly because of the very high contrast with the typical news stories about the illegal use of psychoactives. It also stands out because it represents a real effort to document some of the serious failings in the government's 'war on ecstasy' and some of the collateral damage that it has caused."

From a review of the special at Erowid.

Shaman by Richard Marchand

Bruno Schulz

A facinating photo-travelogue by Iraqi-American Usama Alshaibi, who returned to Iraq after 24 years. Since he's originally from there, and has lots of family there he got to see Iraqi society from a perspective pretty much impossible for a westerner to get these days. He also has a trailer for his documentary about the trip, called Nice Bombs, but honestly the photos are much more revealing then the trailer. However, there's also a great interview with him here: part one and part two.

Fake TV News

What do Jean Baudrillard, Peter Greenaway, Michel Houellebecq, David Lynch, Bruce Sterling, John Waters, and Slavoj Zizek have in common?

They all teach at The European Graduate School

Sufism and Psychiatry

Sept 11th comics at the Library of Congress

Luke Brown

Dean Chamberlain

"Francis Crick, the Nobel Prize-winning father of modern genetics, was under the influence of LSD when he first deduced thedouble-helix structure of DNA nearly 50 years ago.

Crick told a fellow scientist that he often used small doses of LSD then an experimental drug used in psychotherapy to boost his powers of thought. He said it was LSD, not the Eagle's warm beer, that helped him to unravel the structure of DNA, the discovery that won him the Nobel Prize."

"Inside a moment, centuries of June" --Emily Dickinson

Moths gathered in a fluttering throng one night
To learn the truth about the candle's light,
And they decided one of them should go
To gather news of the elusive glow.
One flew till in the distance he discerned
A palace window where a candle burned -
And went no nearer; back again he flew
To tell the others what he thought he knew.
The mentor of the moths dismissed his claim,
Remarking: "He knows nothing of the flame."
A moth more eager than the one before
Set out and passed beyond the palace door.
He hovered in the aura of the fire,
A trembling blur of timorous desire,
Then headed back to say how far he'd been,
And how much he had undergone and seen.
The mentor said: "You do not bear the signs
Of one who's fathomed how the candle shines."
Another moth flew out - his dizzy flight
Turned to an ardent wooing of the light
He dipped and soared, and in his frenzied trance
Both Self and fire were mingled by his dance -
The flame engulfed his wing-tips, body, head;
His being glowed a fierce translucent red;
And when the mentor saw that sudden blaze,
The moth's form lost within the glowing rays,
He said: "He knows, he knows the truth we seek,
That hidden truth of which we cannot speak."
To go beyond all knowledge is to find
That comprehension which eludes the mind,
And you can never gain the longed-for goal
Until you first outsoar both flesh and soul;
But should one part remain, a single hair
Will drag you back and plunge you in despair
No creature's Self can be admitted here,
Where all identity must disappear.

excerpted from Conference of the Birds by Farid od Din Attar

"Otto Rank paces in excited anticipation as members of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society file into Freud's waiting room at Bergrasse 19. Eleven present, counting himself. He cleans his round steel-rimmed glasses, checks again to be sure he has an extra pen. Soon he will know if Freud is going to admit his great debt to Nietzsche..." --Dramatization of Freud's 1908 Nietzsche evenings

"What's happening is something completely new in the history of the hemisphere. Since the Spanish conquest the countries of Latin America have been pretty much separated from one another and oriented toward the imperial power....

For the first time, they are beginning to integrate and in quite a few different ways... Now they want to control their own resources. In fact, many don't even want their resources developed. Many don't see any particular point in having their culture and lifestyle destroyed so that people can sit in traffic jams in New York.

Furthermore, they are beginning to throw out the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In the past, the US could prevent unwelcome developments such as independence in Latin America, by violence; supporting military coups, subversion, invasion and so on. That doesn't work so well any more. The last time they tried in 2002 in Venezuela, the US had to back down because of enormous protests from Latin America, and of course the coup was overthrown from within. That's very new...

The IMF is essentially the US Treasury Department. It is the economic weapon that's alongside the military weapon for maintaining control. That's being dismantled.

All of this is happening against the background of very substantial popular movements, which, to the extent that they existed in the past, were crushed by violence, state terror, Operation Condor, one monstrosity after another. That weapon is no longer available..."

Noam Chomsky on the Hopeful Signs Across Latin America

"Democracy means that when there's a knock at the door at 4 am, it's probably the milkman." -- Winston Churchill

"You don't know your man. I will tell you plainly, you're warming a viper in your bosom."

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"Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote." --Ben Franklin

(Image by Signe Wilkinson)

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt
--Umberto Eco

"There can hardly be stranger wares in the world than books: printed by people who do not understand them; sold by people who do not understand them; bound, reviewed and read by people who do not understand them; and now even written by people who do not understand them"

"If it were true what in the end would be gained? Nothing but another truth. Is this such a mighty advantage? We have enough old truths still to digest, and even these we would be quite unable to endure if we did not sometimes flavor them with lies."

"A handful of soldiers is always better than a mouthful of arguments."

"The great rule: If the little bit you have is nothing special in itself, at least find a way of saying it that is a little bit special."

"It is no great art to say something briefly when, like Tacitus, one has something to say; when one has nothing to say, however, and none the less writes a whole book and makes truth ... into a liar — that I call an achievement"

"We do not think good metaphors are anything very important, but I think that a good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on."

"If you are going to build something in the air it is always better to build castles than houses of cards."

"Why are young widows in mourning so beautiful? (Look into it.)"

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

"For Dan Halbert, the road to Tycho began in college--when Lissa Lenz asked to borrow his computer. Hers had broken down, and unless she could borrow another, she would fail her midterm project. There was no one she dared ask, except Dan.

This put Dan in a dilemma. He had to help her--but if he lent her his computer, she might read his books. Aside from the fact that you could go to prison for many years for letting someone else read your books, the very idea shocked him at first. Like everyone, he had been taught since elementary school that sharing books was nasty and wrong--something that only pirates would do..."

The Right to Read by Richard Stallman

Pavel Filonov

6000 intriguing people you want to meet online before you die
Ok, well, maybe more like 20... but it's a start.

The great appear great in our eyes
Only because we are kneeling.
Let us rise!

--Loustalot, 1789

Motto of the day:

Lege, lege, lege, labora, ora, et relege

An old alchemist maxim translated as:

Read, read, read, work, take, and reread.

"I have received, Sir, your new book against the human race; for which I thank you... No one has ever used so much intelligence to try to render us Beasts. When one reads your works, it stirs a desire to walk on all fours."

Voltaire upon receiving the Discourse on Inequality from Rousseau

116 houseboats in Amsterdam

Word of the day:

sinecure: A position or office that requires little or no work but provides a salary.