This has me in a bit of despair. Sometimes it's truly difficult not to give in to nihilism. A news story like this solidifies my conviction, but I don't want to make this man a martyr. I don't know anything about him other than his profession, and probably neither did whoever killed him.
I don't watch television, including the news anymore, but nearly every blog post in my google reader today was about that. So I'll assume you've already heard about it. I simply don't have anyone else to rant about it to. :-/
Something else was in my google reader today, too, and it's important.
Abortion is universally illegal in Chile, with no exceptions. We should learn from others' mistakes. from here.
"So what do women in Chile do in these circumstances? If they have money, they go to private clinics or doctors who practice abortions in safe, sanitized conditions. Or they may even pay for an air fare to the United States or a country where abortion is legal. Most, however, resort to unsafe clandestine abortions performed by people claiming to be midwives or doctors, paying anywhere between $500 and $1,000. And then there are those who concoct homemade solutions, using celery sticks, clothes hangers or knitting needles to provoke the loss of the fetus.
Of course, many of the women end up in the hospital. And that’s when doctors are faced with a dilemma: Should they preserve their patient’s confidentiality and privacy, or turn them over to the police as they are legally bound? Few call the police. Nonetheless, about 200 women have been arrested for having abortions in the past few years and are now on parole. A dozen are imprisoned."
Do these people have any idea what they are advocating for? Have I been taking crazy pills?
I got my first ever marriage proposal today: "Amanda, I want to marry you!"
"Maybe when you're older, George."
George is an adorable 4-year old boy. The son of a student. He's probably my favorite young kid. I guess my usual blanket statement "I hate kids" isn't strictly true. I get really annoyed when people say, "I love kids," as if they're dogs or a food or something. What a gross generalization! I'm starting to realize that kids are people, and every person is different, and some are great and some are average and some are assholes.
A few months ago, the same boy asked me, "Amanda, are we married?"
I said, "No, George, why do you ask that?"
He said, "Because we're happy and being married means being happy."
I'm a cynic, but god. How fucking cute.
p.s. name the movie the title of this post comes from and I'll give you a brownie.
UPDATE: Problem solved. The original security email was, in fact, from facebook. They changed my password and everything is right with the world....sigh.
So, my facebook account was disabled. Today, I think. Earlier today I received this email:
And now when I try to log in to facebook, I see this:
Clicking the "faq" tells me that my facebook was deactivated because I violated the terms of use. Maybe my profile picture was a copyrighted image. I did change the spelling of my name to a phonetic mis-spelling. Does that mean I was impersonating another person? Was that huffington post article about celebrity breast implants considered "pornographic"? Or is that what happens when your account gets "compromised"?
I didn't reply to the email asking me for my first teacher's name. Facebook was acting strangely yesterday. Like fb chat would suddenly be open, when I'm always offline because I hate that feature. And the status message I posted last night mysteriously and suddenly disappeared. I thought I had mis-clicked.
What do you think? Should I reply to the "facebook team" email? Should I fight to get my stupid social networking profile back? Should I bask in a simpler life uncorrupted by silly online stalking?
After a bout of probable depression in which I predictably lost interest in my usual activities, I am back to watching movies again. And there are a couple I wish to tell you about.
1. Synecdoche, New York. It's a Charlie Kaufman movie, so obviously it's fucking weird. It stars Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Catherine Keener (both of whom I love) and a few other recognizable faces. Synecdoche means referring to the whole of something by referring to a part of it or vice-versa. Like "mouths to feed" to mean "hungry humans" or "ivories" for "piano keys" etc. It's fucking weird, but I recommend it. I can't even begin to tell you what it's about. It's about living, and what that means, and it's about a guy who makes a real-time play about real-life people in an actual-size model of New York in a warehouse in New York. It's about a play starring hundreds or thousands of people, none of whom are extras. You should watch it.
2. Bedrooms and Hallways. Less cerebral, more gay. Okay, so gay movies are, more often than not, terrible. For several reasons, I'm sure, but the one I can readily make up on the spot is that sexuality is still an unfortunately controversial issue that large studios don't want to cough up lots of money to make movies about. So the production values usually suck and all that. That's Hollywood, at least. I think some of the best gay movies I've seen have tended to be foreign. Which brings me to this movie I watched today. Let me tell you who's in it. I'll point out that nearly everyone in this list is a) attractive and b) a great character.
Lord Cutler Beckett from POTC:AWE and Mr. Collins in the Universal Studios (bad) Pride&Prejudice (Tom Hollander) Dr. Owen Hunt from Grey's (Kevin McKidd) Edward, Black Prince of Wales from A Knight's Tale (James Purefoy) Gareth from Four Weddings and a Funeral (Simon Callow) Fanny Farrars Dashwood from Sense and Sensibility (Harriet Walter) Elizabeth from the BBC (good) Pride and Prejudice (Jennifer Ehle), and Elrond/Agent Smith/V (Hugo Weaving) [playing a seemingly straight-laced, smugly high-maintenance, surprisingly sexy, sexually aggressive gay man (who has sex with Cutler Beckett).]
I love watching movies in which all/most of the cast is recognizable, not because I know everyone's name, but because I have seen everyone in some other movie I like.
ADDENDUM: JESUS H CHRIST the fucker goes hetero in the end. I hate those movies. The rest of the movie is excellent, though.
"Of course I am playing tricks with the idea of luck, putting the cart before the horse. It is no accident that our kind of life finds itself on a planet whose temperature, rainfall and everything else are exactly right. If the planet were suitable for another kind of life, it is that other kind of life that would have evolved here. But we as individuals are still hugely blessed. Privileged, and not just privileged to enjoy our planet. More, we are granted the opportunity to understand why our eyes are open, and why they see what they do, in the short time before they close for ever."
Personally, I think this amounts to needing to needing to scrape off a van-gough early (ie not famous) painting in order to use the canvas for another painting. Can't this be moved or something? It needs to be demolished for the subway? What?
This is one of the coolest sites I've seen, at least in a long while. I didn't watch every video, but came damn close to it. They're all really clever and most of them are pretty funny. I feel like some of the videos are familiar, though, so it's possible this is old news to you all and some of the videos have been posted here already . . . I know I've seen Fireworks before, and you will recognize the Coinstar commercial, I'm sure.
This is ridiculous. Here's the transcript (I don't think context is too necessary).
I received this to start:
On May 10, 2009, at 4:36 PM, Dustin wrote: I ran across these recent articles about the bailouts One, Two. Although I am not all that familiar with the author, I feel that his paper relates the general consensus of the alternative viewpoint quite well. These articles just barely scratch the surface and should be used as a jumping off point for further research.
I believe in freedom of thought, but seriously, send that to anyone who's remotely knowledgeable in economics and you are just going to get a laugh. I was composing my response to his email while reading the article and at some point I threw up my hands and said fuck it, this is going to take forever. The saner among you won't need the econ knowledge to appreciate the mile-wide breadth of the article and inch-deep explanations given.
So instead, I wrote this:
On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 12:45 AM, David wrote: I would love to pick the articles apart piece by piece, but the fact is that whoever wrote this doesn't have the slightest actual knowledge of economic history or why certain events took place.
Seriously. Some of these conclusions are totally backwards. The articles mention actual events, but use them as backwards causality or false inference.
His response:
On May 11, 2009, at 12:56 AM, Dustin wrote: If you do not want to explain yourself, could you point me to some sources that you trust that outline the paradigm that you support. Thanks!
Sure! okay, he wants to know more about economics during the great depression. I can supply sources!
On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 1:00 AM, David wrote: A lot of the current system came out of the Great Depression, including the general consensus of how the Fed should act. A good place to start is a book by John Galbraith called The Great Crash. obviously a lot of his book is oriented around black tuesday, but it gives a lot of back story as to how the Fed got to be the way it did. From there, it might be worthwhile to look into the fundamentals of international economics (bretton woods, smoot-hawley etc) though I don't have a particular recommendation as to a secondary or compiled source.
honestly a lot of the stuff in the article could be refuted by just looking at data.
Instead:
On May 11, 2009, at 1:41 AM, Dustin wrote: I'll buy you lunch if you can refute just a handful of the quotes, financial numbers or other facts, I'm sure there must be a couple easy straw men you could knock down in there somewhere!
Opinions are one thing, we're all entitled to our own, but to simply say you could refute something with ease, without actually doing so is intellectually lazy at best. I already know you don't know about the real system, the secretive elite round table groups and think tanks, i.e. the bilderbergers, club of rome, The council on foreign relations, etc... If you didn't even recognize most of their names, how would you know of their membership, their agenda, and the power they wield over the market place?
Anyway, in the meantime I will attempt to prove many of the points the author made and expand upon them by simply using offical government or think tank documents and speeches etc...
Oh, here's one, let's start with Ben Bernake's speech at Milton Friedman's 90th birthday party(which I watched live on C-Span when it happened btw) where Bernake essentially apologized for the great depression on behalf of the federal reserve by wrapping up his speech with the following line:
Let me end my talk by abusing slightly my status as an official representative of the Federal Reserve. I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression. You're right, we did it. We're very sorry. But thanks to you, we won't do it again.
(Note the irony) The speech itself covers all the details of course, and if you want to debate Bernake's redition of events, by all means, have at it.
Anyway, it's getting late, I'll shoot you a few more goverment docs in the coming days.
Night!
Wow. Lazy huh? Yeah, I'm lazy for spending four years studying a subject and then not wanting to waste my time refuting THE INTERNET. Especially when GenReg is burning up.
So I chose to ignore the insult and respond to what I think is a pretty reasonable and short explanation:
On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 10:26 AM, David wrote: Bernanke was right to apologize for the Fed's actions during the great depression. a lot of their actions were counter to what should have been done. however, to infer that that somehow meant anything but a lack of knowledge on how to act (macro econ is still a mostly gray area) is silly.
I'm not talking about refuting the stuff about the illuminati. of course i cant refute that if i dont know about it. I was talking about the causal inference as in the above. You heard bernanke say something like that and adapted it to your knowledge of the situation.
Friedman was a pioneer in macro (along with names like Galbraith, Keynes etc) and it seems appropriate to thank someone for their work in such an important field. Im not sure its rational to instantly infer that he's talking about some secret society.
NEGADOG!
On May 11, 2009, at 12:41 PM, Dustin wrote: I wish it was easy to understand and explain the Illuminati, but its not. There is nothing I can really say to help you see it more clearly, but I can point you to books that are considered to be excellent primers amongst the alternative research crowd, many of which are written by members/servants of the Illuminati.
What do you know about Edward Bernays? I've attached his well known book on propaganda.
How about Zbigniew Brzezinski? I must admit I wasn't very familiar with the guy until I saw this clip during my research of the events of 9/11 several years ago.
At that point I just laughed it all off and decided to not respond.
So there you have it. People really do think like that.
This isn't even about censorship. It's about a man who personally possesses way more power than he knows how to responsibly use.
"I'm not going to serve you because something about you offends me" doesn't fucking work. Especially not if you're a 911 dispatch. But equally well if you're, oh, I don't know, a Catholic pharmacist. Or a homophobic gynecologist, or what the fuck ever.
now, ive never gotten a really good scam or phishing email. i get the russian penis or watches emails, or at least i used to.
but this really takes the cake. hes right, i did smile. his awful attempt at scamming me my money did amuse me, and i did not have to give him my phone number or place of employment.
Of recent, I've been fascinated by the oddly developing state of the nation's power grid. The interest started some time ago as I'm sure you'll all remember this event once reminded: Nor'easter Blizzcon '03. Apparently all you need to take down the entire Ohio-Maine power network is get a plant to go offline, and get the operator to fail to restart the machine after introducing new data. "Would you like to restart now or later?"
When one plant shut down, power was diverted to the affected (or is it effected?) area by bringing online hydro and nuke plants, certain high-voltage lines (the kinds that are so high they have to go to a transformer station that can take up a city block of space OR MORE!!!11!ONE!1) got destroyed by some trees. Since these lines were offline, they had to divert around them, eventually tripping automatic controls in place. Eventually, large areas were dropped from the grid, instantly reducing demand and causing the voltage to overload nearby systems, which, as they failed, only continued the problem.
One sec, I think I need to hear the explanation for why the Modest Mouse song Lives has those lyrics "It's hard to remember..."
ANYWAYS...
My HeroThe interest in the electrical system was added to when Leigh Tesfatsion came to talk about her paper regarding the way power is traded in the U.S. Can't hurt that it was agent-modeling that helped investigate the issue.
It's all very interesting stuff, I assure you.
A little while ago, Maria was almost affected (or is it effected?) by the huge internet outage orchestrated (probably) by some lame-ass phone workers who had been laid off.
So flash forward to today, and this (via) is sitting in my Reader inbox.
Your new best friend!I'll let you play with that for a little bit. If you click on the "Power Plants" tab you can see the "East Lake" generator near Cleveland that was one of the factors causing Static Shock to visit the northeast.
But check out the "The Grid" page and you'll get where I'm going. Compare that map to some on this website of internet backbones. Pretty similar, huh?
So I think all of this interests me because I have interests in a lot of the background elements of these networks. I love map making as anyone who remembers my prototype webpage that essentially geo-located where I took certain photos. It was all in static html, but what more do you want from an essentially proof-of-concept idea?
Add in a model which can be easily implemented in an agent-based paradigm.
Give it a human-like network quality capable of cascading failure (geeze it just feels like that should have a movie about it), and you have a winner.
Most importantly though, make the graphs fucking awesome. I mean even the bad ones on the backbone page are pretty cool. I'd love to have been able to design ANY OF THESE.
Saving the best for last, I'm always drawn back to this image. An econ prof showed it once in class as a demonstration of excellent data representation.
Awesome.
So, for those of you that made it all the way down here, here's some crazy delicious videos I've been jonesin' on lately:
It wouldn't surprise me if I were the last person here to find this, but I just came across it a few days ago. I didn't even know some of these ideas even existed. People were/are/will forever continue to be cuckoo.
So, today I took a poll (via pharyngula, of course) about whether homeopathy can cure the swine flu. My answer ("no") was greeted with possibly the most passive-aggressive "thanks-for-voting-in-our-poll" message I've ever seen:
My Hero
Your new best friend!
