jeneralize

From the Xemacs user manual :

“Killing means erasing text and copying it into the kill ring, from which it can be retrieved by yanking it. Some other systems that have recently become popular use the terms “cutting” and “pasting” for these operations.”

I used to think that Internet anonymizers were the purview of child porn aficionados. But these days, it seems that thinking and writing can be construed as a criminal activity, or at least indicative of the intent to commit a crime, at least to the degree of making you someone “of interest”, worthy of getting pulled out of the lineup at the Arrivals terminal in Miama while on your way to Disneyworld with your kids.

As seen on Newsforge: Securing your online privacy with Tor

It’s not the chocolate eggs…it’s not the bunnies…it’s not the resurrection….it’s…

The Easter Beagle!

I miss ASCII art.

Element: wordasword

Description:

A lot of technical documentation contains words that have overloaded meanings. Sometimes it is useful to be able to use a word without invoking its technical meaning. The WordAsWord element identifies a word or phrase that might otherwise be interpreted in some specific way, and asserts that it should be interpreted simply as a word.

It is unlikely that the presentation of this element will be able to help readers understand the variation in meaning; good writing will have to achieve that goal. The real value of WordAsWord lies in the fact that full-text searching and indexing tools can use it to avoid false-positives.

The Economist’s 2005 edition of The Pocket World in Figures lists Lebanon as the country with the highest per-capita car ownership (732 per 1,000).

Lebanon?

But wait, it gets weirder - New Zealand ranks second, with 578 per 1,000. The U.S. ranks 12th, at 481 per 1,000, Canada 15th with 458 per 1000.

Why Lebanon? And why so many more than the other countries at the top of the car charts?

The CEO’s new Executive Assistant paused at my desk this morning and asked, in a jocular manner, “So, what exactly does everybody over here [in the engineering office] do?”

What an excellent question. Even better because M does not have a software development background - she’s not all wrapped up in the jargon and mystique and assumptions that filter everyone else’s vision. She’s the kid in the fairy tale “The Emperor Has No Clothes” - a bullshit detector. If the activities of the Engineering team and the general purpose of the company’s products and protocols cannot be explained in about ten minutes to an intelligent person who has no domain knowledge, our activities and products are probably bullshit. Or, more probably, our activities and products are so enmeshed in obfuscation and fogginess of purpose that the question is moot, because nothing effective is getting done anyway.

I’m prepping a book for Project Gutenberg: Stephen Graham’s 1922 Tramping with a Poet in the Rockies. Graham was a British journalist and travel writer; Vachel Lindsay was an American poet.

In one of their conversations, Graham teases Lindsay, a poet of the proletariat, on his membership in Oxford’s “Society for Pure English” and on his (contradictory) use of slang and vernacular. Lindsay remarks that he’d give up the slang “if I could get rid of ‘motivate’ and a man’s ‘implications’ and ‘the last analysis’ and ‘the twilight zone’ and ‘canned metaphor’ and the dollar adjectives, a ‘ten-million-dollar building’ and a ‘million-dollar bride.’”

I re-read Stranger in a Strange Land recently. As I recall, it was much maligned by the space-hero crunch-head Heinlein fans as being insufficiently crunchy and space-heroic - how dare Heinlein mention a warp drive without providing a detailed explanation of its fuel system? Where’s the obligatory galactic Bogart?

Re-reading the book, I was reminded about the degree to which Heinlein (and me, and probably mostly everybody else) expected the future to be mechanical rather than digital. I was in my early teens when I first read Stranger in a Strange Land. It was the late seventies, I’d eaten a steady diet of Star Trek (I truly believed that Space Academy would be a post-secondary option), I’d watched the boys from Apollo 11 plant a flag on the moon while I sat on my dad’s lap - the future was all about doors that opened with a “whooosh” as I approached and vehicles with mechanical legs.

What a surprise.

DocBook error:

[INFO] [147]
[ERROR] Areas pending, text probably lost in linecan now remove the process
table entry from thechild (currently in the zombie

Those of us of the Looney Tunes generation (Elmer Fudd in a metal bustier singing “I’m going to kill the waaaabbitt”) have a hard time taking opera seriously. And that’s a good thing. Opera is like wine - it’s wonderful unless there’s some wine pedant around yapping on about “an oaky sheen” and “a florescent bouquet”.

Così fan tutte played in Vancouver last night - Mozart’s opera about - get this - two guys that make a bet that their girlfriends will never be unfaithful, then dress up as different guys and seduce each other’s girlfriends, thus losing the bet, their girlfriends (sort of), and their general happiness and well-being. The fact that they’ve cruelly deceived and manipulated their girlfriends is not an issue - “Così fan tutte”, all women are the same. (more…)

“It was the kind of landscape that had a particular type of story attached to it … a story that flapped wings against the moon…

‘Der flabbergast,’ muttered Nanny.

‘What’s that?’ said Magrat.

‘It’s foreign for bat.’”

–Terry Pratchett, “Witches Abroad”

Michael Geist (in the article “Say no to Big Brother plan for Internet” in The Toronto Star) describes the “Lawful Access Initiative” rattling around Ottawa. This is the one about making it easy for the police to eavesdrop on internet traffic, forcing ISPs to store and reveal usage information about their customers (and preventing ISPs from informing their customers when they’ve revealed private data) and allowing monster TelCos to discriminate against technologies like VoIP.

Also in the article is information about MP Sarmite Bulte’s initiative to abide by special restrictions regarding public domain content, by requiring them to apply for extended license. Upshot: even if a work is in the public domain, a school would have to pay fees to use it unless the work gave them explicit permission. sheeesh.

Write letters to these jokers. Dead trees and snail mail is better than email. My letter is attached, but don’t just copy it - write your own. (more…)

This week’s readings and assignments for my Philosophy Lite course are on the topic: “Does God Exist”. Because this is Phil. Lite, we get to cut to the chase: Anselm’s Ontological Argument in eight easy steps; E.O. Wilson’s genetic explanations of religious impulses distilled into a quarter page. Can’t beat that - in my (limited) previous experience with readings in philosophy, the problem is not understanding the arguments, it’s ferreting the damn things out of the massive wodges of tortuous prose in which they’re buried.

The fondness for massive wodges of tortuous prose starts early. In Philosophy Lite, we have to write Term Paper Lite - five double-spaced pages (minimum) arguing a philosophical point. Five pages minimum. What if I am able to refute Liebniz in three-and-a-half pages? What if I can demolish Kant in a paragraph? (more…)

It annoys me that Monty Python is a pervasive social reference in my head. Nothing against Monty Python; god knows, they’ve made me laugh to the point of apoplexy many times. But now I can’t use the phrase “the means of production” without the image of Karl Marx on a game-show panel popping into my head. In my Saturday morning “Philosophy Lite” course yesterday, the mention of “Emmanual Kant” made me have to turn a giggle into a cough. (It is not cool to laugh at the name “Emmanual Kant” during a philosophy lecture.)