Blog: Archive for February, 2003

Mother Jones interview with John Perry Barlow, cofounder of the EFF, Grateful Dead lyricist, Mac user....

The article features a nice reproduction of the original eye-in-the-pyramid-Robert-Anton-Wilson-was-right-all-along logo for the U.S. government's “Total Information Awareness” nightmare.
Via Slashdot.

Awww.... Those wussies in DARPA have changed the TIA logo. Oh, it still has the pyramid, but now it's lost the eye beaming light onto the earth, replacing it with swooshes. I don't feel any better with the idea that Nike is monitoring all my transactions, though.

One fairly obvious prediction that I haven't seen a lot of people making is the death of cash. Oh, people have been saying cash was going to be outlawed for a long time, but if this TIA thing ever gets going, they're going to have to outlaw cash (and similar “off the books” methods of exchange) in order to ensure that they can capture all transactions.

After all, what's the point of monitoring everyone's spending habits if the “bad guys” just do their deals off camera?

Now that I think about it, though, I guess that suppression of dissension, chilling people from expressing or consuming unapproved opinions, or discouraging people from participating in activities not considered pure and patriotic probably isn't an undesirable side effect.

Also amusing: a dose of their own medicine.

Somehow, I think it's pretty scary when I need to learn about Hunter Thompson's new book via a guy in Australia.

Anyway, Graham points to an interview on Salon with HST. I put the book on my wishlist and thought nothing more of it.
Virulent Memes.

M and I went out to get a birthday card for her aunt, which we even got in the mail. Mission accomplished. While we were out, I got some cash from one of WaMu's wackily friendly ATMs, and somehow managed to miss the screen where it requested my “secret code” (as it calls my PIN). There didn't seem to be a way to go back, so I kept going forward. Had I discovered a bug by which I could request massive amounts of cash PIN-free? (Hint: No.)

It asked me if I wanted a receipt (“Sure” vs. “No thanks”), then what I wanted to do (“Get some cash”). It presented some sensible suggestions, from which I chose one, then said something fairly close to “Oops! I didn't get your secret code—enter it again and press Enter to continue.” I somehow managed to miss the “enter it again” bit (it probably doesn't help that these ATMs are positioned so that they're absolutely blasted by the sun, and thus almost unreadable without your shading them with your hand or body), and just hit the Enter key. It “Oops!”ed again, and this time I realized it actually wanted to enter the PIN on that screen, then press Enter.

With the PIN, the machine was happy, and spat out my money while proudly proclaiming “Here's your cash!”

Thinking about it, I think I was expecting there to be a password prompt that would echo a * or some other character as I typed in my PIN. Thinking more, I guess I'm pretty obviously not spending a lot of cash, and not using ATMs very much at all.

Once we'd mailed the card, we floated various other possible things that we could do other than going home, and rejected all of them. On the way home, we drove through the Colleges, and were about to pass the bookstore when I said, “Hey, let's go to Huntley! Even though we never actually buy anything, I feel like we should at least stop in every so often, because you never know....”

So we did. And damned if they didn't have a bunch of copies of the new HST book, Kingdom of Fear, on sale, for about what Amazon was charging. So I bought it, and added it to my stack.

Edward Tufte redesigns the Pioneer space plaque with a bit of magic.

Aha! M and I took a look at getting the sound to work on my new machine, which has built-in sound on its Asus P4PE motherboard. I had followed the directions in this LinuxOrbit HOWTO (thanks to DebianPlanet for the original link), and thought I had everything configured properly. But I couldn't get any sound out of it.

M was checking things over when my mom called, and while we talked, she kept poking around. Eventually she discovered that you had to unmute the card, which I knew, and that to do that, you had to adjust the volume for the PCM device, which I hadn't know. Viola, sound.

The new kernel I built (2.4.18-pre4-ac3) still doesn't know from some of the devices, though. Oh well, at least we're getting there.

Somehow it's not that reassuring when you're going in for some supposedly simple tests, and the hospital calls to verify a bunch of information, including whether you have a signed “Advanced Medical Directive” (the new name for a DNR) on file. I'm sure it's just a question on the form....

My copy of The Annotated Sherlock Holmes finally arrived yesterday! I probably wouldn't have bought this book if I'd seen it first, at least not for what I paid, but I don't really care.

I've wanted this book for nearly twenty years. I'd seen it in a catalog, and only ever having read The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes in a facsimile edition (with all the drawings), thought it would be a cool book to have. The entire Canon, along with extensive notes and illustrations. After the requisite hemming and hawing, I ordered it, but was tremendously disappointed when the shop told me that it was temporarily out of print as a new edition was in preparation. They cancelled my order and refunded my card.

Later, in college, I came across a boxed set of the Canon in paperback, and bought and devoured that, but had forgotten about the annotated edition.

Fast-forward to Christmastime in the U.K., when one of the channels showed a new film of The Hound of the Baskervilles. It was mediocre (I think it's shown in the States on PBS since, so you probably agree), but M had some particular objections along the lines of “It can't possibly be like that in the original!”

AS my Holmes books were in New York and we were in the U.K., I thought, “Gosh, we would know if we had a good edition of the Canon! What better place to find such a thing than England around Christmas?” Somewhere else, apparently, as finding any editions of Sherlock Holmes turned out to be extremely difficult.

Once back home, I started looking on line, remembered the annotated edition, and was disappointed to find that it was, once again, out of print.

I finally found an edition whose seller claimed it was “very fine” (note for potential used-book purchasers—books in my collection are very fine (read: “look like no one ever read them”); this book was, at best, “well read”), and after a brief mental debate, sprang for it. Three weeks later, I finally had it. Cool book. You think Buffy fans are obsessive, wondering at Joss's plotting? Or Star Trek fans debating the order that the controls must be operated before engaging the warp drive? You need to see this book. Ever wonder which train Holmes could have caught in order to arrive at a certain station at a certain time. Someone did. And there's much, much more. Someone should republish it, preferably on acid-free paper. But I'm still glad I have a copy.

Locus has a Best of 2002 list up, covering science fiction and fantasy novels, short-story collections, and art books.

Out of all these items, I have read one: Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt. Any question about whether I'm clued into what's going on in the SF world would seem to be answered rather definitively.

A story...

Some college students were doing laundry. They didn't have laundry baskets, but they were able to find some large garbage bags that they could put their laundry in.

On the way back, they'd had to stuff their laundry in willy-nilly, and because the bags were heavy and they were tired, they had to carry them with both hands. As they walked back to their dorms, the breeze kept blowing the loose edges of the plastic bags against their mouths and noses. They kept blowing to push them away, but the breeze kept pushing the plastic back. By the time they reached their dorm, they were dead!

Moral: Buy proper laundry baskets. Or perhaps, rent a house.

Versed has got to be the up-and-coming thing in corporate denial of responsibility. It's a drug that causes amnesia, making it possible for someone under its influence to give unbelievably heinous instructions or orders, but later completely deny—honestly—any memory of having done so.

Expect to see it appear in corporate boardrooms and government conference rooms near you soon....

Microsoft's threedegrees reminds me of some of the applications running on the PDAs in Serial Experiment Lain. Maybe I should get it running on my Windows box at work! (Hey, it's for debugging other people's Windows problems and running Web JetAdmin—it's not even near my desk. Jeez. Debian rocks, okay?)
Via slashdot.

Having just finished Code, I was happy to see a pointer (on Slashdot) to a Flash-synced slide show accompanying a talk by Larry Lessig. It's a nice summary of Code, and, sadly, reality.

(The end of the presentation turns into a bit of a hard sell for the EFF, Public Knowledge, and some other folks who are fighting the good fight, but you've already given them money, right?)

Why Nerds Are Unpopular rings fairly true. I solved the whole “what table do you sit at?” dilemma by simply not eating lunch and avoiding the cafeteria like the plague. Also, I was in the “don't mess with them, they might blow you up” clique, which helped a bit.
Again, via slashdot. (Seeing a pattern?)

Currently showing on Trio is a Channel 4 documentary series called The Secret Rulers of the World, which explores various aspects of the (largely) right-wing conspiracy theories concerning the way the world is ruled. (Google!)

Some of these people and their stories are, not surprisingly, turn out to sound a lot more sane and credible than you might expect from what little you may have heard from mainstream media sources. Randy Weaver and his daughter, famous for surviving the FBI assault on Ruby Ridge, for instance, come off as more or less just plain folks. Some of the people who “support” them, however, are really scary.

Similarly, David Icke, who has an elaborate conspiracy theory that boils down to a claim that the world is controlled by a race of 12' tall alien reptiles who can assume human form and drink human blood, comes off as a pretty cool guy. He may well be schizophrenic (he discusses the voices he heard telling him that he was the son of god and that the world was about to be destroyed by natural disasters that led to his initial humiliation and loss of his job as a UK sports announcer), but he seems like a nice guy who cares about his kids and genuinely believes in his theory and in his duty to tell as many people as possible.

The real bad guys for Icke appeared to be a loose, and, ultimately fragile, coalition made up of the Vancouver branch of the Canadian version of the Anti-Defamation League and, to my surprise and disgust, some prominent Green party members. They got Icke booted off a couple of radio interviews, probably scuppered a signing at the Chapters bookstore (by calling in a threat of violence), and attempted to disrupt a book signing at Granville Books. Why? Because they'd decided that when Icke said “12' foot tall lizards”, he meant Jews.

Even if he did mean Jews—it's clear that many of his followers think he does—wouldn't a more rational way of dealing with him be to let him talk, and to dispute his claims logically? Apparently not, as stamping on his right to free speech is far, far easier than debating him.

Watching the self-proclaimed “good guys” gleefully plot against Icke and refuse to allow any dissenting speech during a “public” meeting they'd called to discuss the “threat” that Icke posed was really disgusting, reminding me of some of the triumphs of “political correctness” on college campuses in the States.

In the end, their attempts to shut Icke up backfired, as the publicity that Icke got from their attacks resulted in lots more people hearing about his presentation and stopping by to shake his hand, offer them their support, and congratulate him for being brave enough to stick around and tell his story. The show was sold out.

I was really into conspiracy theories when I was a teen—I read every book mentioned in the “bibliography” for Steve Jackson's Illuminati game—and I can still spin 'em pretty well. But I don't have to believe that 12' tall alien lizards or shadowy Satan-worshipping bankers work behind the scenes to control the earth. Sadly, plain ol' greed, stupidity, and man's inhumanity to man can easily explain nearly every horror perpetrated on this planet. In a way, it's a shame there isn't such a cabal—it would be so much easier to fight a real enemy.

In related news, I saw a pickup truck yesterday with a bumper sticker reading

IS YOUR CHURCH
BATF-APPROVED?

That's a reference to the Branch-Davidians, of course. They also had a bumper sticker that mentioned Hitler (looked like a quote) that I wasn't able to read as we were parking and they were leaving as we got out of the car.

I thought the BATF sticker was cool, but I wasn't able to read the other sticker to know whether it was pro- or anti-Hitler. So either these people were right-thinking lovers of freedom, or right-thinking scary racists. You just gotta love southern California....

Is it me, or is it not pretty damn obvious that if Turkey invites the U.S. military to set up shop in their country for an assault on Iraq and the Bush administration's latest attempt to get blanket U.N. support for invasion doesn't go through, Turkey is going to be very unpopular with Saddam Hussein and Iraq, with which it shares a very long and poorly defended border?

Of course the conspiracy spin on that is that it's to the Bush administration's advantage to have those events happen and for Iraq to attack Turkey in revenge. As a NATO member, Turkey would be entitled to military support from all of NATO, France and Germany not excepted.

In the meantime, be sure to buy plenty of food, water, and duct tape.

Saw that truck again. This time I was able to read the other bumper sticker. It was, indeed, a Hitler quote, one in keeping with the spirit of the other sticker (and the NRA sticker, too):

For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration. Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future.

Alas for the true believers, it turns out that this quote is a myth!

I have to admit to being amused by the idea of right-wing zealots ponying up fake quotes by the ultimate right-wing horrormonger in order to stand against what they regard as a left-wing government conspiracy to take away their guns.

I'm currently reading Greil Marcus's Double Trouble, a collection of pieces loosely related by comparisons between Elvis Presley and Bill Clinton. It's fun reading, and, as usual, I'm impressed by Marcus's ability to cite obscure recordings made by almost unheard of bands way back in the early fifties, and compare and contrast them with, say, a Nirvana hit, a constructed Beatles song, or the latest electronica wonder.

In a better world (one that, arguably, we lived in about five years ago), it would be possible to start up your computer and download these disparate songs and make the comparisons yourself. Alas, in today's DMCA-ridden world, that's just not possible.

Looks like the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals isn't interested in reconsidering whether or not the Pledge of Allegiance is unconstitutional. Yeah.