The Iron Yuppie

I pulled a very standard Dave move not too long ago. Actually, it's so standard, that I feel like I should patent it or something. It'll be my own personal business process, one that I can charge for every time I see a company going down this route. I had some shelving to install from Ikea (generally cheap, but quite functional store). I thought I had taken care of all the measurements and gotten everything right, but when I got down there, it turns out I had forgotten to measure the depth. Normally, this would not have been too big a problem, but I had not yet taken out my existing shelves, and there were two potential options to buy. Whenever there are two potential options I naturally always choose the wrong one and then am forced to return it.

In some ways, I act very much like a branching algorithm on a chip. Rather than drive all the way home, to figure out what the correct measurements were and then drive back, I always buy the good with my best guess, and then take it home. Of course I got it wrong and had to return it, but if I guessed right, which I had a 50/50 chance of doing, no returns. It seems I fail at guessing though much worse than 50/50. I think I need to improve my guessing.

I've wanted a car game for the longest time that perfectly replicated real crash results... I don't know what game this will be a part of (or even IF), but wow:

Car Crash

All they have to do is add machine guns and flame throwers and I might as well quit my job.

D

Small comment today on the FCC. Here's the first of what will likely be way too many fines about ridiculous statements: FCC Fines Howard Stern For "Blumpkin" Discourse - March 19, 2004 As you know from my previous blatherings, I really don't care very much about what people say. But at the same time, you can be fired for any reason whatsoever. HOWEVER, the FCC making a statement about what can and cannot be on the radio does seem a bit absurd to me. Why should my taxes be used to take something that I enjoy off the air?

Clear channel was well within their rights to take Howard Stern off the air. But it is clear that they would not have done so if it had not been for the FCC threatening to take away their options to buy new licenses. To me, this does not quick reach the point of censorship, where people are being ceased from speaking because what they are saying. Mr. Stern can go and say whatever he would like wherever he would like it without being arrested or detained… just not over this particular medium. But it certainly does point to the antiquated-ness of the FCC as a public decency organization. Do we really have so few options today that we can't go look at something else if we don't like what we read or see? I have yet to see a convincing piece of data showing me that Howard Stern or other broadcasters that push the envelope have caused any harm (irreparable or otherwise) to our society. Free markets are so much better for cleaning up this type of thing (if it needs cleaning up at all). With that, I find listening to the on-going discussion on the Howard Stern show to be very interesting, and I’ll certainly be a subscriber to satellite radio when he moves over.

Speaking of which, those ads on the local radio stations about how bad satellite radio is are absolutely HORRIBLE. Who were the ad wizards who came up with that one?

D

A friend of mine passed this along to me recently: Onfolio. The basic summary is that it's a single place in which you can store and search all kinds of data as you're browsing around the web. The problem is, of course, that you have no idea what you wanted to save until some time after you passed by it. I've actually seen some pretty cool technologies come down the pipe that allow searching through histories and e-mail that you've seen for whatever you remember. That's so much more useful. The way that it seems to me that all our minds work is that we put some random marker on data that we come across and only using that flag will help us to get it back. So if I have a conversation at lunch that I want to reflect back on, and I remember that we talked about wearing a green shirt today, that's what I'm going to need to put search by. Which is exactly why I think the manual folder creation that Onfolio provides will not really work for all but the anal.

I've been listening with great interest to the coverage of Harry Blackmun's papers over the past week. Actually, "listening with great interest" is actually probably a bit weak. "Fucking riveted" is probably a bit closer to the truth.

NPR : Justice Blackmun's Papers

There's actually so much here, I don't know what to write about. First, Nina Totenberg's delivery is impossibly elegant and refined. Her delivery alone brings what would otherwise be the driest of text to life in such a rich way that the justices are practically speaking through her velvet voice as though she were their personal medium. Though I'm obviously an outsider to the subtleties of the case, in each subject she brings such life and attention to the most basic details. Without such a beautiful interpretation, I wonder if I'd even be able to pick it up at all.

Second, I’ve always wondered if people in power actually were aware of how many people they affect. For example, in my fairly large company, I know that people think about the customer all the time, but they absolutely underestimate how many people out there use the products that they make. I've also known that those with their finger on the proverbial button knew how many lives they held in their hand. Could people who merely write these opinions understand that they have such amazing power as well? Time and again in these documents, the justices are supremely (pardon the pun) aware of the weight that each of their words carry both for the case at hand and for history. Extensive discussion is made of the interpretations and methods people will use to get around the decisions, and whether or not to close loopholes. It’s as though the Heisenberg principle was at work, but the particle actually KNEW someone was watching it and wanted to put on a special show for the people who bothered to look.

Third, in some relation to the point above, not only did the justices know that they were being watched, but that they were actually writing the way that law would be interpreted for hundreds of years. The scope of that responsibility just boggles my mind. It’s like you decided to get a tattoo that would color the country’s backside for two hundred years, long after you were dead and the rest of the country was old and wrinkly. But the below text, which mostly came from the opinion itself (!), struck me dumb:

Kennedy made minor changes to respond, and added some more language, declaring that "the timeless lesson of the first amendment is that if citizens are subjected to State sponsored religious exercises, the State disavows its duty" to leave that sphere of life to the individual. Leaving religion to individual conscience, wrote Kennedy, is "the mark of a free people."

Courtesy of GoldsteinHowe.com and Nina Totenberg

I actually have goose bumps, just from typing it. I don’t know whether to just stand their awe-struck, or applaud or both. That people in such power would actually understand the affect of their power, and act in such a selfless way gives me new hope for humanity. Sorry, when I read this kind of purity of spirit, I get all gushy. Please go and listen to all of them and gain new faith in the human race.

D

Couple of funny posts today:

Avatar High - No idea if it comes with a sim-psycho-analysis for how bad you screwed these people up later in life.

Warthog Launch - Anyone want to explain to me why the most simple games are also the most addictive?

D

Not that we haven’t already been beaten by mechanics in many many ways, but I’d like to point out that these two videos from Sony's dancing robots and Honda's ASIMO show just how bad we’re going to get our collective asses kicked by machines. I mean, if they’re able to build this much logic in today, imagine what computers will be like in 10 years. Jeez, those dancers look as good as humans in a lot of respects. How much further is this than being the next Roomba that looks around your house for dirt and moves a vacuum cleaner (or has a vacuum cleaner built in!)? I’m not saying that humans will be made obsolete, but I really don’t think people understand how much these machines are going to affect our everyday lives. What’s to prevent a machine from measuring our body language down to the nanometer to tell whether or not we’re happy/lying/tired and reacting based on that? The level of input and reaction of machines will absolutely dwarf the human mind. And, since we're just basically big inputting and reacting machines, when the correct things get wired together, you'll see some human looking robots that are far more perceptive and "human" than we will ever be.

D

Well, Marge Schott passed away. For those who don't know who Marge Schott is, she was the primary owner of the Cincinnati Reds for about 15 years from 1984 to 1999 where she was known for such gems as:

"Hitler was good in the beginning, but he went too far."

The funny part about this (and many of the other things she said) is that, logically, I understand exactly what she was saying. You can practically hear her father uttering these words, and they echo 50 years later. Some night, when she was 12, her father sat across from her at the dinner table reading the De Newspaper (or whatever the newspaper of the day was) and commented how much he liked what Hitler was doing with the local train stop. In her mind, Hitler did do some good things such as rebuilding the German economy and infrastructure. What she neglects to recognize is that it is possible to do good things without bad things as well, and the two do not necessarily offset (good + bad != neutral). But she just segregated these things in her mind, and had no concept of how other people would understand it. Maybe I'm giving her too much credit and she was just a big racist jerk. But I doubt it.

She was suspended from baseball for a year after saying this comment. It goes back to my earlier point about people having the ability to say anything they want at any time (thanks to free speech), but that does not mean what you say does not have repercussions. I think our society is better for the diversity of opinion and speech, but it means that if you speak, you suffer the risk of being hoisted on your own petard.

I guess the only reason I mention this is I just feel bad for her complete lack of social understanding. That, and it reminds me to worry about my own tendencies to miss the subtler forms of social communication, and that I'll fall into the same boat as her. I doubt it'll ever be anything about Hitler, but I definitely have foot-in-mouth-itis.

D

The U.S. population (and probably the world) has such a wide range of people. From complete morons, to partial morons, to self righteous pigs, to elitist bastards who think they are above it all (that would be me). As example #1, I encourage you to check out the excellent Smoking Gun website where people wrote letters about the Janet Jackson breast thing. (Courtesy of the Smoking Gun)

A very small sampling (all punctuation is verbatim):
"i am anything but a prude i have owned a strip club and later a adult site but this isnt about 1st admendment rights this is just pure lack of respect for american families and decency"
Perhaps you should have thought about that before you opened a GODDAMN STRIP CLUB.

"I don't consider myself to be a finatic,but i do fear the wrath of GOD if our country continues it's moral decline... GOD'S hand of protection has been on this country for a long time,but i feel he is slowly starting to pull it away"
First, I've never been a grammar nazi, but this woman seems to be not only avoiding the grammar rules, but actively attempting to repeal them through this letter (which I can only assume is a subtle form of civil disobedience). Second, God has better things to do than watch out for this, or any other country. Trust me on this one. Countries come and go... God could care less if we stick around.

"The commercial showing a horse breaking wind in the face of a young woman was far more disturbing. How about the 4 day erection that was mentioned during a Viagra commercial."
FOUR day erection? HOW DID I MISS THIS COMMERCIAL? Look, I'm all for solving erectile disfunction, but is a pill a short time before it's time to get bizz-ay really that bad? Do you really need a hard-on for 4 days? I mean, that's just painful. It's like the opposite of those old Tampax commercials... "You can't swim, you can't play sports, you can't ride a horse ..." As an aside, I absolutely love the term “breaking wind”. It’s so Victorian.

But my absolutely favorite is this one... I won't even reproduce it here for fear of reducing the impact:
The Smoking Gun: Archive

And, thanks to the archival policy of our federal government, we’ll be able to read about “Madonna humping a football” well into the 22nd century.

D

Subtly Simpsons My word the Simpsons are genius. You always knew that, but this site does a lot of research into the quotes that you may have missed. (via Lockergnome)