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May 03, 2007

I am not a number, I am a free man!

So, I'd hoped to avoid it, but I realize now that I'll look very dense if I don't at least acknowledge it.

There's a certain string of hexadecimal digits spreading like wildfire through the blogosphere. If you speak the incantation aloud, it casts the magic spell "Summon AACS Lawyers", who give you a cease and desist notice.

In the event I get one, this article will disappear, and be replaced by a copy of the notice.

But here's the various news:


  • Digg was deleting posts containing the incantation, and, as I understand it, banning users who posted it. The users rebelled, and Digg decided "T'hell with it. We're gonna back our users." So yay, the users win. One of those huge popular web2.0 things turned out to not just be a corporate shill masquerading as a countercultural free-for-all. Of course, if Digg gets shut down by the AACS, I kinda wonder how the users will react.
  • Google received a cease and decist letter, demanding they remove all links to the magic incantation. Google, whose motto these days has sort of drifted from "Don't be evil" to "Don't make waves" may well do as they're told, but some friends of mine helpfully suggested that Google write them back demanding that they provide every single URL they want expunged.
  • The AACS is basically threatening everyone they can find. Isn't it weird how a business model can become "Scare the hell out of your customers and try to hurt them," for a business other than a bondage club?
  • For that matter, a business model of "Create a product consumers do not want and which does not give them any value, which, in fact, reduces the value of a product to the consumer, and then use legal threats to force them to buy it anyway," does not sound very capitalist.
  • Ed Felten, over at Freedom To Tinker (look left) says that the AACS will probably realize this is stupid, pointless, and making them look cartoonishly evil, and will eventually give up. Though he also reminds us that, every once in a while, big businesses will sue the hell out of you for no reason other than spite.
  • Here's a question: the root of the magic number thing is not simply that AACS claims to "own" this random number which they picked out of a hat. It's that they claim that the number is a "circumvention technology", which is illegal under the DMCA. See, under the DMCA, it's not just illegal to sell a bootleg copy of something, it's not just illegal to make a bootleg copy of something, it's illegal to even possess any sort of device which could hypothetically be of some use in creating a bootleg copy of something -- in fact, it's illegal to even talk about how you might go about making such a device. That said, this magic number is the key which decrypts HDDVD movies. Its purpose is to allow the player to play the movie. Is using the number whose purpose it is to make the movie viewable in order to make the movie viewable really circumvention? Should I worry about the fact that I carry around the key to my house, because that key could unlock my front door?
  • In addition to the number of note, AACS claims that a number of other magic numbers are also theirs. They won't tell us how many, and they sure as hell won't tell us what they are. Math teachers of the world: be careful. Next time you ask your students to multiply 367 by 72, you may be unwittingly asking them to produce an illegal number.

I'm not going to post the infamous string of hex digits. And, just to be clear, we're not talking about some kind of magical code. It's a number. Like 7. Or 42. Or 790,815,794,162,126,871,771,506,399,625.

Deep Thoughts

By Ross at 10:24 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

March 08, 2007

Economy of Scale

As you may know by now, there was some news recently about A guy dying of a toothache because he didn't have insurance. I hadn't been planning to comment, because, hey, it happens. Even at my most financially destitute, I could have swing $80 for a tooth extraction, but it's entirely possible that I'd have fallen victim to the same fate, not because I couldn't afford health care, but because I'm stubborn and don't seek medical assistance for anything less serious than dismemberment.

And it does seem to me like those least able to afford health care seem to want the most out of it. A few years back, I was with someone who was, I think I have mentioned, crazy. It seemed like once a week, she went to the hospital because she had some minor complaint that, had it been me, I'd have just toughed through. In fact, she left a voicemail for me a few days ago, and one of the things she was proud to report was that she'd been in a car accident a few months ago, and therefore was now getting a disability check.

Anecdotal evidence is, as we all know, the best kind. Many of my friends have absolute faith in capitalism, and overlook the fact that all of the nationalized health care systems in the world are far more efficient than the private US system. Heck, even the nationalized US system is far more efficient (Medicare is one of the most efficient medical systems on the planet. In fact, it's one of the most efficient anythings on the planet). Anyone who tells you different is plainly and simply mistaken (or lying. Some of them are lying. Not all, but the last time I tried to be nice and pretend I believed they were all honestly mistaken, a conservative friend insisted I was being naive, and that, beyond the easily mislead sheeple, all the "real" conservatives knew these were lies, and pushed them because oppressing the proletariat is good for the rich capitalists, and, via the magic of trickle-down, therefore also good for the oppressed proles).

But anyway, you can believe that the masses should pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. You can believe that welfare is inherently paternalistic. You can believe that private charities should be responsible for taking care of the poor rather than the government (That, as it turns out, is provably false. Until fairly recently, the government didn't get involved in taking care of the poor, it was left to private charities, mostly the churches. Poverty was a lot higher back then. Not just a little higher. Not lower.) You can claim that welfare moms are all deadbeats who pop out babies in order to keep those checks rolling in at the expense of good honest working folk (This is also false, but, hey, anecdotal evidence). You can claim that you don't beliueve the poor are lazy and stupid and deserve what they get, but that the system rewards laziness and stupidity and therefore unless we stop giving the poor a hand, they'll never learn to take care of themselves (That's got some truth in it; a perpetual problem of systems like welfare and unemployment is that you lose the benefits as soon as you start to pull yourself up, rather than once you've finished pulling yourself up). You can claim that privitizing everything will be good for everyone. But.

Medical benefits are hard to come by and getting harder. They will continue to get harder to come by. This is not the fault of the government. This is not the fault of the poor. This will not be improved by more privitization. This will not be solved by litigation shields which allow insurers to savagely roger their customers to death without feat of being sued for it. This is not the fault of deadbeats who insist on expensive procedures when dying would be a whole lot cheaper. It's the fault of the fact that they need to make money. And they're failing to do so (Several major health insurers are in some bad financial places right now). They're failing to do so for a lot of reasons. None of them can grow big enough for the economy of scale to really help them out. They all have to waste resources competing with each other. They all have huge administrative machines that are lubricated with pure money. And, of course, health insurance is an inherently losing game: they wager you'll never get sick, or at least that you'll die quickly and without much fuss, you wager you will. Everybody loses. Monopolies make things efficient. Competition makes things honest. You can't have both with private industry.

You can, if you like, suppose that a government monopoly would be corrupt, evil, power-mad. Hey, why not? But everything you can say about a government monopoly, you can say about a private one. The converse is not true. Once you've got a government monopoly, profit is out of the equation. A private monopoly has a good reason to be corrupt and evil: it wants money. It can also be corrupt and evil for abstract cartoonish reasons like being bent on world domination. Only one of these applies to a government monopoly, and, frankly, it's the one I find a little more believable. I'm all for capitalism in the 99% of cases where we can suffer some inefficiencies. All I'm saying is that if you've got to have a monopoly, I think a government-run one is a better idea.

And when it comes to health care, we need a monopoly. We need universal coverage.

I said in the beginning that I hadn't planned to comment. Maybe you're wondering why I did. The thing I didn't tell you before about why January was rough for me is this: I have diabetes.

It's a serious but very controllable disorder. So long as I keep it under control, it's unlikely anything bad will happen as a result of it. It means that I have to watch what I eat and I have to exercise more, which would have been true regardless of this condition. It means that I have to take a pill every day, and I have to poke a tiny little hole in myself a couple of times a day to test my blood sugar. And I have to see a doctor every three months.

For the rest of my life.

My insurance covers almost everything. So I don't have to pay most of the $300 dollars a month that my medicine costs. I don't have to pay most of the $150 that a doctor's visit costs. I don't have to pay the $100 that test strips cost.

For about three years, I did not have health insurance. I managed to get away without seeing a doctor for that time, though it was pretty hard the last time I threw my back out. Actually, I pulled a muscle in my foot about a week before my coverage started, and that was a lot of fun let me tell you.

Money was tight for me during that time. In an emergency, I coulda swung $80 to have a tooth pulled.

But I couldn't have swung several hundred bucks every month for medication.

Last night, I got the invoice from the hospital, for meeting with a diabetes educator who was very helpful in showing me how to not end up going blind, having a heart attack, losing my legs, and y'know, dying of diabetic ketoacidocis. My insurance covered it, of course. But if this had happened a year ago, when I was self-employed, living from check to check without any insurance, I could not have paid this. I could not have swung $500 in hospital bills. I could not have swung whatever they'll charge me for my followup visits.

So, as I was saying. I have type 2 diabetes. It is a serious but very controllable disorder.

Unless you don't have insurance, in which case it is a death sentence.

There's your anecdotal evidence.

Deep Thoughts

By Ross at 11:43 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

January 08, 2007

Read This 2

I swear, what kind of country is this?, Leonard Pitts Jr.

So, as you may have heard, we've got a new Congress. The Washington Post had a very poorly thought out picture of Speaker Pelosi on the front page of the Style section which will probably be a future IT.

You may also have heard that a certain congressman swore his (not actually legally mandated) oath not on the traditional bible, but on Thomas Jefferson's Quran, prompting speculation that Thomas Jefferson owned a Quran.

Anyway, this is all little more than a historical footnote, as it wasn't really an oath required by law, and it's not like lawmakers haven't been sworn in on other things before. Pierce took the presidential oath of office on a law book. In fact, at the same time as Congressman Ellison was being sworn in on a Quran, a representative from Hawaii was being sworn in on nothing at all.

But, as always happens, a couple of people went apewire. In an act that threatens to turn "macacanated" into a word, Rep. Virgil Goode (R-Va) macacanated Ellison by launching a tirade about how we need to tighten immigration laws to stop muslims from being elected by the will of the people. Ellison is a native-born American. I'm guessing he's a third or fourth generation native-born American (Admittedly, I haven't looked into it).

The most mind-breaking attack, and the reason I am pointing you toward Mr. Pitts's article, is that of Roy Moore, who, despite his name sounding like it, is not a Wild West-era Texas Hangin' Judge, but rather the Alabama judge who causes all that commotion a while back over a big rock with the ten commandments engraved in them.

He claimed that freedom of religion demanded that Ellison be blocked from using a Quran (Quick precis: "<Roy_Moore_Voice>In America, we have freedom of religion. In Islam, you don't. Therefore Islam is incompatible with America</Roy_Moore_Voice>"). The argument isn't too far afield from the ones that (my dad tells me) were made when Kennedy was running for President -- that a Catholic would be bound by his faith to do whatever the Pope told him to, Constitution and the good of America be damned. Which is not a bad argument for limiting positions of power to atheists, but no one's making that argument (well, except for the atheists, but they've got a vested interest).

I think I'm with Pitts on this one: "Moore's argument refutes itself so effectively he must have been drinking when he wrote it."

Pitts goes on to talk about the "strain of intolerance" that hides out inthe American spirit. I think he's missing something important, though. This doesn't feel like real intolerance to me. It doesn't feel like real bigotry. Why? Because it's too flavor-of-the-weeky. It's not really that we've got a deep-down hatred of muslims, or even that we're all secretly waiting to reveal our prejudice against the abstract "Other". Right now, it's Islam that piques our fear. It used to be Communism. And so on and so on. Actually, I think America's been pretty good on the actual longstanding-prejudice front. You don't see "No Irish Need Apply" signs any more. We've stopped systematically erradicating our aboriginal population. We've got one or two longstanding racial problems, but we've kept them on a comparatively low simmer, nothing like the many years of institutionalized oppression in South Africa. Nothing like what went on in Europe in the early 40s. Real prejudice, real bigotry, is something very deep and longstanding. It's the way your grandmother uses the "N-Word", because she's been using it since she was a little girl and her daddy always used it -- and she can't even quite compute that it's wrong to use it. That's why they're so insidious and hard to get rid of -- they're burned in, and the people who have them don't even feel that they're wrong.

No, I think that prejudice and bigotry are just convenient labels for what we're really very susceptible to: Insane Fearmongering. We weren't raised this way. And we know things oughtn't to be this way. Some folks justify this (Roy Moore did) by trying to say that these are special circumstances -- that as it happens, we're at war with Islam right now (We're not, of course, but the people doing the fearmongering either think we are, or want us to think we are), so it's "justified in this special case". That's totally bogus, of course, but it's telling to me that they think they need this justification. Real racists don't feel the need to excuse or apologize for their racism. They may try to "scientifically" prove the white man superior or the black man inferior (Watch one of them try it some time, it's pretty funny), but they'll always start from the assumption that they aren't making an extraordinary claim, that their racist beliefs are obvious and inherently good. I don't think I recall ever having a notion of a person "becoming" a racist before -- racists were racists because they'd been raised that way. Now, though, we have people who weren't raised that way, people who never had any problem with this culture and this faith before, who, one day in September, half a dozen years ago, suddenly developed an unjustified distaste for a certain religion. What we have here is people who quite clearly understand that they are standing in the face of what we as Americans are supposed to believe in -- they present this sort of prejudice as a necessary evil (Actually, read that last clause twice, once with the emphasis on "necessary" and once with it on "evil"). That is, they know it's wrong, but they feel like they have to do it anyway.

I'm not sure which is worse, now that I think about it.

Deep Thoughts/Politics

By Ross at 01:15 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

November 03, 2006

Atlantis is sinking; where's my ZPM?

So, unless you've been living under a rock, you know by now that a little while ago, former presidential hopeful (some people who are not me would say "former presidential winner") John Kerry commited what might generously be described as a bit of a faux-pas by superhero Incredible Understatement Man. Basically, thanks to a missing word, Kerry answered the long-standing question: Given all the hot water the Republicans have been in over the past month, what will the Democrats do to blow this oppertunity?

What he said was:

Education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, and you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq.

What he meant to say was:

Education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, and you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't, you get us stuck in Iraq.

Now look, I think it's pretty obvious that Vietnam Veteran John Kerry did not actually mean to insult our troops. Aside from the fact that doing such a thing is rather counter to the man's general political views, it would be such a ridiculously dumb thing to do that there's no concievable political advantage in doing it. Even if you did believe it, no one with any political saavy at all would get up and say "That Hitler chap had some nice ideas," because there is no way that saying this would help your political carreer (Well, okay, there are probably some isolated communities where calling someone a "Macaca" would actually win you votes). This is why politicans lie so much -- because if they got up and said what they really thought, no one would elect them. And, again, that's if he actually thought that our troops were dumb. Which he doesn't.

This is part of a concept we cynical folks call "Hanlon's Razor": Never attribute to malice what could be equally well explained by stupidity.

Now, Fred Clark, one of the most reasonable and levelheaded thinkers in the blogosphere says that Kerry's intention was perfectly clear and that anyone who claims otherwise is being dishonest to score political points. Well, I agree at the end of the sentence, and disagree at the beginning. I do think it's obvious that Kerry wasn't trying to call our troops stupid, and I think that's obvious, and I think that the people saying otherwise break down into the usual two groups: liars and dupes-of-the-liars.

What I disagree with is that it was in any way obvious what he was trying to say. Those little words are important, and it wasn't until I heard the "corrected" (or "retconned") version of the quote that I understood how what he said could have been meant as a direct insult to the administration.

Those of you who aren't comfortable with shades of gray will no doubt be saying at this point: "But how could you think he wasn't insulting our troops if you didn't see how he could be insulting the administration? It's got to be one or the other!"

As usual, it doesn't, and that is the lie that the pundits are selling America: that if you don't buy that he was slamming the administration, he was obviously slamming the troops (Of course, the perrenial lie of this group of pundits is that the two are one in the same, which makes for some interesting metaphysics)

In fact, what it sounded for all the world like to me, this quote in its original form, was a morally neutral warning that was bizarre in that it was being delivered in the mid twenty-aughts rather than in the late ninteen-sixties. What it sounded like, to me, was a line out of Hearts in Atlantis (The book, not the movie. I haven't seen the movie, but as I understand it, whatever its merits, it only covers about a quarter of what's in the book; the book Hearts in Atlantis is an anthology of linked stories. The film is based on the first story, "Low Men in Yellow Coats", about a guy who can read people's minds. The actual story "Hearts in Atlantis" is about a bunch of college kids during the Vietnam war, who become obsessed with playing a card game amid the social upheavals of the period. Well, okay, it's about a lot more than that, but I'm already way off track. The salient point for this discussion is that the protagonist is in college, and he spends so much of his time playing hearts that his grades are suffering). Our hero comes home for some holiday, and his grades are bad enough that falling out of college is a real possibility, and his brain-injured father channels Forrest Gump to drop on him this little bit of wisdom (Heavily paraphrased on account of my copy of Hearts in Atlantis is not ready to hand): "Boys who don't do well in their studies are dying in Vietnam."

That's what Kerry's comment sounded like to me. Not an insult, not "If you're stupid, you join the army", but a very direct warning: "If you get thrown out of college, you will be drafted." Let's face it, getting drafted can't be much fun. I think most people would agree that one of the things most praiseworthy about our troops today is that they all chose to serve our country.

And that's what made the whole thing seem surreal to me. Because people aren't getting drafted, and they did away with college deferrals anyway.

"But," one of you says (you know who you are), "That's just a silly thing for it to mean. Why didn't you reject that interpretation out of hand and assume he was insulting our troops instead?"

Well, obviously, I did reject that interpretation. It didn't make sense in context. Neither does the suggestion that Kerry wanted to call American troops stupid. But this was enough to convince me that what he meant was not in any way obvious from what he said. And I find it troubling that the folks in power are advocating this (with apologies to the many fine people in a certain Baltimore suburb) "Dundalk attitude" that looks, desperately, for any possible derrogatory meaning in a vague sentence, then assumes it's true, because they like the idea of kicking your ass for talking shit about their momma.

Because if you don't pay attention to Hanlon's Razor, someone's going to get cut.

Deep Thoughts/Politics

By Ross at 02:25 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

October 31, 2006

The 30 Year Old Virgin

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-10-30-abstinence-message_x.htm

Turns out that the administration wants to include folks all the way up to the age of 29 in their "abstinence-only" agenda ("Abstinence only" being code for "Not taking any responsibility for your own sexual health and comfort").

I have all kinds of angry and reasonable reactions to this, but there's this one little silver lining that I want to share with you:

Civil disobedience has never looked so damned good.

Deep Thoughts/Politics

By Ross at 05:25 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

October 07, 2006

So cute, yet so evil

Courtesy of http://wendy.seltzer.org/blog/archives/2006/10/06/coming_soon_kitten_with_a_eula.html

A company called Allerca will be, in the near future, selling cute little kittens. What could be wrong with cute little kittens?

Well, these have been genetically engineered. Now, my first thought was "Eeeagh! Genetic supercats with superhuman cat powers that will enslave us all!" My second thought was, "I for one welcome our new kitten overlords."

But it turns out that this is genetic engineering used for the boring old purposes of good, not evil. These cats are hypoallegenic. Finally, science has invented a cat which will not inflame the allergies of unfortunate cat-allergy-sufferers.

But every sliver lining's got a cloud. We've got CUTE LITTLE KITTENS (good), we've got KITTENS OF SCIENCE (good), we've got HYPOALLEGENIC KITTENS (good). That's plainly too much good in one place. Fortunately for universal karma, the fluffy goodness is exactly balanced out by the fact that we've got one other thing: we've got KITTENS WITH A EULA (Eeeeevil! Eeeevil from the Dawn of Tiiiiime!)

For yes, dear friend, if you click on their convenient Buy-a-kitten link, you are presented with their clickware license, whch explains that:

1. These kittens have a dominant hypoallegenic gene, and could pass it on to all their progeny. This is why they will not sell you a cat that hasn't been neutered, so you can't breed your own.
2. You are not allowed to let the cats out of your house, where they can interact with inferior mundane mortal cats.
3. You can not sell or give your cat to anyone else (excepting family members). You can not buy one of these ubercats as a gift. If you tire of your cat, you cant give it to anyone else.

That third one there gets rid of what we call the right of "first sale", that little thing that lets you divest yourself of your own property in the way you see fit. You see it a lot with software licenses, but there's some legal debate as to whether they can actually do that. Could you imagine buying a car or a house, and being told you were not legally allowed to sell it again later?

I can imagine the scenario: Johnny had a cat that he didn't want to keep. He tried and he tried to give the cat away, he gave it to a man going far, far away. But the cat came back, he didn't stay away; he was sitting on the porch on the very next day. The cat came back, he didn't want to roam; the very next day, he was home sweet home. And he brought his lawyers.

Oh, any my third thought?
Doctor Who: New Earth

Deep Thoughts

By Ross at 04:02 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

June 30, 2006

He thinks I'm pretty, he thinks I'm SMART

I don't subscribe to the local newspaper, being one of the newer hipper generation who finds it grossly inefficient to deliver the news in the form of several pounds of dead tree, most of which is news and advertisement you don't personally need.

I, of course, get most of my news from The Daily Show With Jon Stewart. But, since it seems impossible to avoid it, I do, several times a week, get The Baltimore Sun's free sampler. I don't usually read much more than the first page headline, but for whatever reason, I read the entire article today.

Close as I can work out, this was a reprint of an article more than two weeks old, so it's hidden from The Sun's free archives, but here's the Univerity of Maryland's faculty newspaper article on the same subject.

Quick Precis: A University of Maryland professor -- an efficiency expert no less, so I keep imagining him as Frank Gilbraith -- has, after four years of trying, finally got himself a street-legal Smart Car. That's the tiny little magic car you may have seen Inspector Clouseau driving in The Pink Panther.

But, and I realize that without the original article, it's going to be hard for you to follow along, I notice some strange things about this story:

  • The reason it took him so long to get this car is that it doesn't meet emissions standards. If you've got a car that is amazingly fuel efficient, but it's not environmentally friendly, doesn't the one cancel out the other?
  • Professor Robinson notes that the car does not come with a print manual, only a DVD, which will not play on his computer. My gut reaction: Damn you region encoding!
  • But to me, here's the ultimate irony: This article about a car whose major selling point is that it's well tiny was Continued across five pages!

Deep Thoughts

By Ross at 02:50 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

February 15, 2006

Poddrama Roundup

Previously, on AMOV, I talked a little about dramatic podcasts.

Well, this past weekend, I drove up to see my beloved. This is why my not-really-random-ten and my silly picture of the week haven't been posted this week (And they're not gonna be. It's not really easy to come up with a funny picture every week without spending way more time on it than I can really afford, so I'm just going to add last week's to the queue and develop myself a little stockpile).

But the reason I tell this story is that it's a very long drive up to see my sweetheart. Now, I always used to enjoy long drives, and when my girlfriend is at the other end, they're even better. I fill those long hours on the road with the help of my tiny little Rio Cali MP3 player (The Rio Cali is a cheapish solid-state MP3 player which I endorse half-heartedly. Of the cheap MP3 players I have used, it is the friendliest to use, gets great battery life (It ran for the whole eight or so hours of the round trip on a single triple-A battery that was only half-charged when I left), has a good screen and backlight, is expandable via SD card, and supports playlists. On the other hand, it's not MSC compatable, can only be loaded with music via its proprietary software, and, absent a playlist, it adds files to its default playlist in a first-fit order (The technical term for the order you end up with is "no meaningful order", but that's not really descriptive of what you end up with. If you add five files, then delete the second one, the next file you add will be the second one in the resulting playlist. For the sake of convenience and on the advice of John Cater, I will from now on describe this order as "tharglian"). So it's a mixed bag.).

So I packed it full of dramatic podcasts and listened to...

  • Desolate Metropolis: I'm not sure what to make of this. It's a very modern-art-y sort of play -- and you can tell it was written as a stageplay and not for audio. It might well be very good but I'm too gauche to appreciate it. On the other hand, it might, and this seems rather more likely, be utter tripe designed by someone who's trying to sound artsy. But I have a hard time telling with modern art.
  • Blood (episodes 1-3): This is a professional production, with all the goodness that implies. It's pretty well put together, but it's not easy to follow. But it's not easy to follow in a kind of lovecraftian-this-is-meant-to-be-beyond-mortal-comprehension way. So it's successful, but is this really a good thing to be successful at? But it's good enough that I actually tried to understand, rather than just giving up.
  • The City Burns At Night: Lightning Bug Films, which is apparantly some kind of proper production house, churned out this noir-style production. It's not bad, and they've really captured the classic-age radio feel. On the other hand, the production is a little rough. The laugh track, though allegedly a "live studio audience" sounds artificial, and the recording quality leaves something to be desired. The story isn't great, but it's no worse than radio drama of the period they're imitating.
  • Forever Fifteen: I only listened to the first chapter of this. The production is pretty good. It's a slightly amateurish Anne Rice-style vampire novel. Personally, I think this school of Harlequin Vampire Story is almost as tired, cliche, and generally unimaginative as the faux-Tolkein that makes up most of modern fantasy or the faux-Gibson that makes up most of cyberpunk, but folks who like that sort of thing are liable to like this.
  • Other World News:Something in the vein of The Twilight Zone meets The Name of the Game, supernatural stories pursued by tabloid journalists. It's not bad, though at times, the actors seem to be showing off; a lot of the characters are affecting voices that don't really seem right for the characters.
  • This One Time: A now-defunct radio show out of Bard College. Production is very good, and it kinda reminds me of some of NPR's offerings. The scope of the show varies wildly. To give you an idea, the third episode is college students telling their vacation horror stories. The second episode is a physics professor discussing the practicalities of doing theorhetical physics (It seems his PhD thesis relied on work done by a computer program which, years later, turned out to have a critical bug that invalidated all his findings). The first episode is people telling the stories of how they lost their virginity.

So that's the current roundup. I just found a short series of Doctor Who dramas which I'll comment on once I've listened to them. As always, suggestions for new stuff is welcomed.

Till next time...

Deep Thoughts

By Ross at 03:45 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

February 10, 2006

Read this

Abortion is one of those subjects that has always made me uncomfortable. Even my discomfort with the subject makes me uncomfortable. Not being a woman, I don't feel qualified to speak on the matter. But then, if I say "This is a women's issue and men shouldn't involve themselves," I'm not sure that's a healthy attitude either, just because it sounds too much like a way to trivialize the issue, saying "This isn't a Real Issue; it's some little Women's Thing," which is bad.

Anyway, one of the biggest issues I've had in my own mind is that I've got a very low-level aversion to the notion that there are people out there who consider abortion to be just another form of contraception. It's much easier for me to accept abortion as an unfortunate necessity in cases of rape, incest, even contraceptive failure, but when I consider the case of someone just saying "Eh. We won't bother with a condom; She'll just have an abortion if she gets knocked up," something at a viceral level just squicks me. I have always known that my squickage is not a good basis for legal and ethical policy, but low-level squicks aren't really responsive to reason. What I really needed was an equal and opposite base reaction to put my concern to rest.

I finally get it. It's right here: Mike the Mad Biologist: Forced Childbirth Versus Pregnancy Shouldn't Be Punishment

Pregnancy should never be punishment. No one should be forced to give birth to a child who doesn't want to. And, for that matter, no child deserves to be forced to be born to a parent who doesn't want them.

That's it. Not going to rail about politics. Not going to talk about what's wrong with the other side. Not going to go on at length expounding and reasoning through things. Read Mike's article. This is now the beginning and the end of the argument for me, the question that silences all the others in my own mind. Whichever side you're on, think about that question: should pregnancy be a punishment?

Deep Thoughts

By Ross at 01:28 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

February 06, 2006

New Fronts in the War On Science

It has already been extensively documented what I think of Intelligent Design, but I'll say it again: As a person of faith, I am deeply offended by the assertation that faith and science are incompatible, and I am deeply troubled by a faith where God is defined by a set of cheap parlor tricks. And I am even more deeply offended by the assertation that my faith is somehow lacking because I don't buy into this perversion of both science and religion.

But it just keeps getting worse, doesn't it? Creationists are going after the Big Bang. Insisting that "theory" be added to every mention of it because "The Big Bang is not proven; it is just an opinion."

Here's the thing. I don't agree that evolution and religion are incompatable. But I can at least understand how someone might hold that belief. But the Big Bang is even less incompatible with faith. Mr. Deutsch (You know, I am not quite sure how that's meant to be pronounced, but I have a theory that I like. Because he is one. Possibly the Biggest One In The Universe [.5 points]) suggests that "It is not NASA’s place, nor should it be to make a declaration such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts intelligent design by a creator.”

Where does the Big Bang theory say that? Where does it say what caused the Big Bang? See, evolution makes a good choice for IDers to pick on because it explains where human beings came from, and it's an explanation that does not require a divine being (Neither, of course, does it preclude one). It explains a series of natural processes which have resulted in there being humans. The Big Bang, on the other hand, does not do this. There is no "First there was something else, then these processes caused the universe to exist." The Big Bang theory starts with "And then the universe started existing." There was no time or space before the universe started existing, so it doesn't make sense in terms of the theory to talk about something "causing" the universe to happen, because there weren't any things around to cause it beforehand. For that matter, there wasn't even a "beforehand", because time hadn't started happening yet. It doesn't say the universe could or could not have come into existence without a God -- it makes no claim as to what triggered the creation of the universe, and instead makes it very clear that there can't be a scientific explanation for what actually made the universe start existing.

All the Big Bang theory says (well, actually, it says quite a lot about the complex details about which order various things happened in, but for the sake of this argument, I don't think they matter or have anything to do with the creationist ire) is that the universe had a beginning. That it came from somewhere (or, well, actually, from nowhere), and hasn't always existed in its present form. So, let's see. You've got a theory which says that "At some point in the past, the universe came into existence, and there is no natural process pre-existing the universe that could have caused it". Or, if you prefer, In The Beginning, there was nothing, then the LORD said "LET THERE BE LIGHT" and there was light.

This conflicts no more with religion than the theory of universal gravitation conflicts (After all, it gives an explanation for the mechanics of how gravity works that goes beyond "God does it").

And as usual, you don't have to take my word for it. The Catholic church accepted the Big Bang theory decades ago. There are Islamic scholars who find the Big Bang to be in keeping with the version of creation told in the Qur'an. Hindu and Buddhist scholars have even come up with models which allow for the Big Bang. Evolution is incompatable with a certain kind of (IMHO very naieve and small-minded) faith structure. The Big Bang is not incompatable with ANY KIND of faith structure, at least, not one any sane one.

I think it's time to start asking what the creationists are really trying to accomplish. It doesn't have anything to do with faith. It must be something else.

Deep Thoughts/Religion/Intelligent Design

By Ross at 02:27 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

February 01, 2006

Time now for... *BRRRRRING*

[4 points]

I'm not really sure why it didn't occur to me sooner.

I think I've mentioned, or at least implied, that I'm kinda interested in audio drama. Books on tape. Golden-age radio drama. A Prarie Home Companion. Big Finish. That sort of thing.

Now, I had made one or two half-hearted searches in the past, but it wasn't until someone added the penultimate paragraph to the tvtropes.org article on Radio Drama that something occurred to me that should have been obvious.

Podcasts. Surely, the podcasting phenomenon must be a free, limitless supply of drama in audio form.

Podcasting, for those of you who aren't very hip, is a new fad made possible thanks to the explosion of cheap reasonable-quality home digital recording and playback. The basic idea is that you record something to a handy digital audio format (that is, MP3), and stick it on the web, often through some kind of syndication format (that is, the same kind of format as this here blog), so that users can download that audio to their portable audio players (one well-known brand of which has the word "pod" in its name, hence the term "podcast") and listen to it. Some people think there's an important and meaningful distinction between "Just sticking a bunch of MP3s on your website" and "Podcasting", but every time they try to explain the difference to me, I fall asleep.

Anyway, podcasts are, for the most part, so far as I can tell, a way to stick all the trappings of listening to the radio -- hit-or-miss DJs and commercials -- back into your music experience even though such things have been obsoleted by modern digital music players. You hear neat stories about 14 year old girls from Pittsburg whose podcasts display ridiculously good taste in music, and that's all very cool and sure to enrage the RIAA.

As you can guess, I quickly found that paragraph I wrote about four up there to be overly optimistic. As I said, most podcasts are "Here is me introducing some songs I like." Most of the rest are "Here is me reading my blog". Some of these are indeed quite good. Not most, of course, since free publishing always demonstrates Sturgeon's Law (90% of everything is crap). But some are. Still, even the 10% that's good really has very little to do with what I'm interested in.

I looked long and hard to find me some proper audio drama podcasts. And now, I've exhausted my supply. So, gentle readers, please point me at whatever you've found, to help me fill this audiovoid.

Now, I should point out that there is some stuff out there. For one thing, I've found several people rebroadcasting vintage radio drama. The folks who are into Old Time Radio are sort of pathologically generous. I mean, you can get a boatload of stuff for free, and if you're willing to pay a pittance, you can get several lifetimes worth of the classic stuff; I shelled out about $30 for approximately 800 episodes of a particular radio drama. You read that right. Eight Hundred. The first season of the new Doctor Who is supposed to come out in the US pretty soon with an asking price of $100 for thirteen episodes. So when I say this stuff is cheap, I mean it's cheap. Like matchsticks (Ever price matchsticks at your local supermarket? If you bought a box of matches, you end up paying, I once calculated it, about 1/20 of one cent per match).

And there is some original stuff. There's just not much. At least, I think there's not much. The internet being what it is, there always ends up being lots of stuff you just haven't found yet. Heck, I haven't even tried usenet yet. So, folks, I'll show you mine, in the hopes that you find something interesting. You, in turn, can hit the comment buttons at the bottom of this article, and show me, well, yours.

Here's what I've found (oh, and don't let my cynicism turn you off anything. I'm just cynical like that):


  • Sean Kennedy Chronicles: Tales from the Afternow -- this is what got me into the whole shebang. It's well produced, even if the story itself is a little rough in places. Toward the end, I kind of lost my ability to tell whether this was still a work of fiction, or the author's paranoid conspiracy theory rantings. Uneven, but listen to "Rachael's Mutt" and "Open Your Eyes" before you decide to dismiss it.
  • Darker Projects -- These guys make a combination of original and fan fiction productions in what they call "a darker shade", though, frankly, to me, it sounds like a bunch of really cheerful kids who have to keep telling us that they like goth culture because we'd never suspect it otherwise. "Night Terrors" is a Twilight Zone-esque series where all but one of the twist endings were so obvious that you'd almost think it was a parody (It turns out it's man [2 points]). Their Quantum Leap production is a pretty good yarn, with the worst Dean Stockwell impersonation you could imagine. The fellow they have playing The Doctor in their Doctor Who series is quite good though, sounds like a sort of cross between Peter Davison and Simon Jones. The production values are middling; all the actors are fairly good individually, but there's no real sense of them acting "off" one another. I know this is a tough thing to do when there's no studio for them all to be in at the same time, but more professional productions manage it somehow. I blame post production. Oh, and no one in their ensemble can fake an accent and do anything resembling acting at the same time.
  • Children of the Gods -- A serial novel about... well, I'm not sure yet. I've only heard the first episode, which consisted of 99% expospeak as the narrator gives us a detailed history of the very very generic sci-fi setting. Production values are weak, but beggers can't be choosers, and for all I know, it gets much better in the next episode.
  • SITFUSO -- And we have a winner. SITFUSO is a sketch-comedy show whose masterminds include Charles Daniels, the author of the "Alternative" Doctor Who program guide. Something in the vein of Python or The Goon Show. Amateurish, but lots of fun.

Now, while I am steadfast in my cynicism, I want to point out that while none of these are "professional" grade productions, they're not crap by a long shot. Could I do better? Probably not. But, well, watch this space. I think I gots me an idea.

So, what have I missed so far? I've listened to just about everything I've found, and, well, I've only been at it for a month. Come on gang, step up.

Deep Thoughts

By Ross at 10:19 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

January 11, 2006

Sometimes people mistake me for...

Courtesy of Hainsworth.com...

So, MyHeritage.com has this thingy wherein you can upload a photo of yourself, and they'll use Sophisticated Image Stuff to work out what famous people you look like.

It's neat, if a little fanciful. So I'll wait here while you go try it out.

You back? Good. Get anyone good? No, me either. For what it's worth, I tried it with two pictures, and here's who it thought I looked like, in order by confidence:

  • Olusegun Obasanjo
  • Kim Jong Il
  • John Major
  • Sania Mirza
  • Milton Friedman
  • Roy Orbison (Okay, I do kinda look like that picture of Roy Orbison)
  • Brad Pitt
  • Cesar Franck
  • Amrish Puri
  • Bruce Lee
  • Richard Nixon
  • Sonny Rollins
  • Jacques Chirac
  • Anton Bruckner
  • Yehuda Levi
  • Ole Bull
  • Hector Beriloz
  • Carl Neisen
  • Henri Philippe Petain
  • Russel Crowe
Here's the $6 question: Who's more troubled by the similarity: me, or Brad Pitt?

Deep Thoughts

By Ross at 01:08 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

December 27, 2005

Old News

Cultists disrupt traditional values

Judea, AD 1 // Visiting foreign dignitaries caused some controversy this weekend in a meeting with King Herod. Three visiting kings, who have asked to remain anonymous, claimed that an infant child born recently in Bethlehem is the true king of the Jews.

When questioned about the purpose of their visit, the dignitaries explained, "We three kings of orient are. Bearing gifts, we come from afar." Sources close to the administration report that King Herod has dismissed the kings as "A bunch of Wise Guys."

The infant, Jesus of Nazareth, has already gained a strong grassroots following, particularly among members of area livestock unions, who claim the child is the son of God and the fulfilment of ancient prophesy. The Roman governor could not be reached for comment, but is allegedly "very concerned" that this new cult may be developing "Weapons of Divine Wrath-related program activities."

The parents of the child have thus far refused to allow Herod's Messiah Inspection Teams access to the child, further fueling fears about their intentions, and speculation about possible links to other radical religious groups in the region, including the sect led by John The Baptist, whose whereabouts are still unknown despite massive search efforts throughout the holy lands.

But the emerging cult, who have taken to calling themselves "Jesus Freaks", claim to be committed to total pacifism, and are interested in nothing more than giving each other gifts in honor of their leader's birth. However, not everyone considers their message of peace to be quite so harmless. Well known political commentator Punditus Maximus has written a series of scathing scrolls in which he accuses the cult members of engaging in activities incompatable with traditional Roman family values. In his most recent work, "They do WHAT to their penises?", he claims that their decision to celebrate the birth of Jesus in December is a shameless attempt to undermine Roman tradition. Accusing the cultists of waging a "War on Saturnalia," he calls for a wide-scale boycott of any store where shopworkers use the new greeting "Happy Holy Day," in place of the traditional, "Lo, Saturnalia." Boycott is, of course, a Gallic word meaning "To feed to lions."

In what may be a related story, King Herod has denied rumors that there are any plans for a "slaughter of innocents" and suggests that parents of infant boys contact their local magistrates for important information related to a new anti-terrorism program known as "No Child Left Alive".


----
[DISCLAIMER: The story you have just read is made up. Any similarities to real events are totally... Well, okay, they're all intentional. But they're just here for the sake of making a joke. If anything sounds suspiciously parallel to actual news stories, that's just because I thought it was funnier that way. Fuck em if they can't take a joke]

Deep Thoughts/Religion

By Ross at 10:27 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

November 27, 2005

Survival of the fittest

Courtesy of Mike the Mad Biologist.

You know, for a long time, I didn't really understand why evolution "mattered", from a pragmatic standpoint. I mean, yes, it's always better to be right than to be wrong, but what with evolution taking many many times the human lifespan to do anything remotely interesting, it seemed like it might be very good at answering abstract hypotheticals, and not very good at doing anything practical. Not that there was anything wrong with that, since I happen to be a big fan of abstract, impractical intellectual pursuits. But, so far as I could tell, if you wanted to disbelieve in evolution, the worst that would happen is that those of us who are actually interested in reality would make fun of you, and that would be so far as it went.

And this is one of the problems that those of us on the reality-based (that is, "right") side of the argument face: evolution is a pretty complex subject, and most people who aren't in the relevant field only understand its most basic parts. And one consequence of this is that it doesn't seem like there's much at stake.

I suspect that fewer people would be fooled by anti-evolutionary pseudoscience if they understood what the principles of evolution really were (or, for that matter, what science really is).

So here it is, here's why it matters: Avian flu evolution. If evolution doesn't happen, then we have nothing to fear from the avian flu. Flu vaccines can be developed only by understanding how viruses evolve.

I see a lot of very angry, very wrongheaded bumper stickers these days of the form "You CAN'T be a christian and believe in (thing the religious right disapproves of)!" as if they were declaring themselves the sole arbiters of God's will. These bumper stickers piss me off.

But what the hell. I'll say it: You CAN'T be a creationist and believe in vaccines.

Well, actually, you can. It's not logical, but it's the way things are. See, most of the people on that side of the argument don't really have a systematic way to structure their beliefs. They're just a random assortment of facts. They don't believe in evolution, and they think those of uis who do are doing Satan's work. But they won't bat an eyelash at benefiting from things that can only work if evolution is true, because it's advantageous for them to do so. This is one of the reasons we need theologians on our side in this argument: they don't believe in rationality, so a logical argument isn't going to work (at least, not in the usual way).

But it's a place to start. It's a thing to bring up. When a creationist friend mentions their concern over avian flu, tell them that creationism precludes the possibility of an avian flu epidemic. It's a place to start.

Deep Thoughts/Religion/Intelligent Design

By Ross at 12:58 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

November 16, 2005

I Wish I Had Said This

Mike the Mad Biologist once wrote an article entitled "I Wish I Had Said This". And now, thanks to him, so have I.

Confessions of a Lasped Creationist IDer, itself a commentary on this, reiterates the point I keep making: Intelligent Design isn't just bad for science, it's bad for religion.

And more, he says some of the things I haven't gotten around to. This goes beyond ID. I'm getting steadily more and more annoyed by the tacit acceptance that my side of these arguments keeps showing for one of the fundamental claims of the other side.

Namely, the bit where they insist we're all atheists.

I keep seeing it over and over again. In the evolution debate. In the gay rights debate. In the school prayer debate. The people on the other side say "God says this," and the people on my side come back with, "Well, we respect your beliefs, but we don't think we should rely on God in matters of public policy." In other words, "Okay. I'll grant you that God is on your side, but that shouldn't matter."

Folks, this is a losing argument. For one thing, we're not fighting on equal grounds. They keep accusing us of atheism and we keep letting them. We're also not going to win over any converts if we keep saying "God shouldn't matter." We need people of faith on our side -- we need people to stand up and say "No, you are wrong about the will of God. You don't know the mind of God, you're just usurping Him to promote your own agenda." We are just as mistaken to try to attack a religious argument on purely non-religious grounds as they are to attack a scientific argument on purely religious grounds.

When we win the evolution argument isn't when we make those simpleminded religious fools realize there's no God. When we win is when we make people of faith realize that evolution isn't a treat to their faith. When we make them realize that you can too believe in God and trust in evolution. When we make them realize that science isn't about denying God, or looking for ways around God, but about finding out how this universe that God made for us works.

We're not doing our part. We're saying "God is not on our side, but choose us anyway," when we should be saying "God is too on our side." We're granting that it's either/or, when it's not. Science does not ask nor answer theological questions -- science can no more disprove God than it can prove Him. Religion does not ask nor answer scientific questions -- and when some people try to pretend it does, we really ought to call them on it.

I'm just glad I'm not the only one who's noticed.

Deep Thoughts/Religion/Intelligent Design

By Ross at 12:25 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

November 16, 2005

IFComp 2005

Okay, so I somehow overlooked the fact that The 11th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition started on October 1 of this year, and finished today. But I guess it's my duty to advocate it all the same.

The Interactive Fiction competition is an annual even sponsored by the denizens of rec.arts.int-fiction. It started back in the mid '90s to encourage the writing of short text adventures, and has (for better or worse) sort of become the centerpiece of the text adventure community.

That's right. I said text adventures (though we prefer the term "interactive fiction"). People still play those. In fact, people still write those. In fact, there were 36 entries in the competition this year, and there are still more games released that weren't entered in the competition. I'd go as far as to say that the IF community is one of the most prolific and consistently talented indie-game communities.

And these aren't your father's text games. We've been at this for a good twenty years now, and we've gotten good at it. Thanks to the tools that exist today, even a novice can produce something fairly professional (Which is not to say that you don't need to be a programmer. Some of the less advanced systems will make this claim, but writing a game -- any game -- requires the kind of systematic thinking that not everyone is good at. It has nothing to do with knowing where to put the semicolons, but it has everthing to do with thinking like a programmer). Gone are the days of a two word parser where you have to get the phrasing exactly right (well, most of the time, anyway). Gone (well, most of the time, anyway) are the days of random, plotless dungeon crawls without any sense of character or narrative, and puzzles with no motivation. Authors of these games are half writer, half engineer, and some of them are very good at it.

Also, you can play them on your PDA. Some people like that.

It's no longer strictly true that these games don't have pictures -- many of them don't, but an increasing number of IF games are illustrated, but these images are in addition to the text, like an illustration in a novel -- sometimes even approaching the level of a graphic novel.

But yes, Virginia, people still write text adventures -- even in this day and age where polygon counts and framerates are king. And I actually find it a little strange that people find this hard to understand. Is anyone surprised that people still write books even though the moving picture has been around for over a century?

And we're getting some media attention. No less a publication than The Wall Street Journal recently ran a piece on Interactive Fiction.

Why, there are even people who think they can make money on Interactive Fiction (They're wrong, of course, except maybe in the cellphone market. If your further meanderings mention Howard Sherman, I'd suggest you avoid his games: they're crap. And the claims he's made about the sales of his games are almost certainly misleading. If his claims are correct, he's sold 100,000 copies of his games, and at $20 each, that's a better way to get rich than helping Nigerian businessmen smuggle money out of the country).

Anyway, there was, as I mentioned, a competition. Somehow, I failed to notice this year, but a bunch of people didn't, and I think it says more about me being all hung up in my own life than anything else. This year's winner was Vespers by Jason Devlin. Tied for second were Beyond by Roberto Grassi, Paolo Lucchesi and Alessandro Peretti, and A New Day by Alexandre own Muniz. Congrats, guys.

Now, as previously mentioned, I've sold out (if you don't believe me, check those Google ads at the bottom of the page. And if anything sounds remotely interesting to you, please click on it.). So I'd be remiss if I stepped down from my bully pulpit without mentioning that a few years ago, I myself took second place in the IFComp. The page for the game I did it with is here. So if you're looking for a game to vitalize your own interest... Well, actually, mine might not be the best game to start with (It's not really representative of the format, and it's got some bugs that I can't fix, having lost the source code in a crash a few months ago). But it's a game to start with, and I even built a self-installer for it.

>POST ARTICLE
You can't do that yet; you haven't come up with a clever one-liner to end it.

If you seriously do want to get into IF, a good place to start is with the collected works of Adam Cadre, who happens to have written several of what I consider the best IF games ever written. http://adamcadre.ac/if.html

But there's a lot out there, and I haven't really kept track of my own favorite games in years. You can Google for yourself to find some good ones. Here's just a few links to get you started:

The Interactive Fiction Archive: This is the beginning and the end of where all IF comes from. The official clearinghouse for modern IF.
Baf's Guide To The Interactive Fiction Archive: A huge index of all the games on the archive, most of them with reviews.
Grand Text Auto: A blog frequently about IF and related things, and the thing on my blogroll that I was checking when I discovered that the comp had ended this year.
ifMUD: A MUD (Technically, though for our purposes, just a chatroom with props) frequented by folks who like IF -- discussion rarely stays on that topic for long, but if you want to find some people who can point you in the right direction in real-time, this is the place to ask.

Deep Thoughts

By Ross at 08:33 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

November 11, 2005

But you don't have to take my word for it...

[2 points]

So, a little while ago, I posted this: The design IS intelligent. My premise was simple and threefold:

1. "Intelligent Design" is bad science
2. "Intelligent Design" is bad religion
3. "Intelligent Design" isn't actually all that intelligent of a design

But, of course, all I can say doesn't mean a whole lot to your average creationist intelligent design proponent, because they've already decided that I am:

1. Too deeply invested in the massive conspiracy of scientists to hide all evidence of the One Truth
2. An atheist
3. Possessed by Satan

None of these things are true, and I'm offended that they think that. But, well, reason is not the strong suit of ID proponents. In my last article, I referenced a few people even smarter than me, but I doubt their opinion counts for much either. Maybe this one won't either.

But guess who else agrees with me.

The Vatican.

No, really.

THE Vatican has issued a stout defence of Charles Darwin, voicing strong criticism of Christian fundamentalists who reject his theory of evolution and interpret the biblical account of creation literally. (Martin Penner, The Austrialian)

That's right, folks. The Church back in Rome says that Evolution is perfectly compatible with the Bible. The mechanics of how the universe got created are outside the scope of the Bible. Science is about how; religion is about why. Incidentally, the Church also accepts that the Big Bang theory is completely in keeping with the Bible. Maybe it was just where I came from, but when I was younger, that used to be the hot topic between "believers" and "unbelievers".

So, maybe this helps, maybe not. I suspect that most of the folks on the ID side of the debate don't really recognize the authority of the Vatican, but I'd like to hope even they couldn't accuse a Cardinal of atheism with a straight face.

It's not supposed to be religion vs. science. We're the ones who made it that way. Maybe when I get the nerve up, I'll try to speak to why we made it that way. But it's not the only way, and it's not the right way. I've said it. Cardinal Poupard said it. For that matter, St. Augustine of Hippo said it: we want to understand what it is we believe. When we turn our back on the inconvenient bits of science, we stop trying to understand the world. God created an awful lot of world. Seems kind of rude of us to ignore it.

Deep Thoughts/Religion/Intelligent Design

By Ross at 05:10 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

November 06, 2005

It's the end of everything

Yes. Yes. To hold in my hand, a capsule that contained such power. To know that life and death on such a scale was my choice. To know that the tiny pressure on my thumb, enough to break the glass, would end everything. Yes. I would do it. That power would set me up above the gods. And through the Daleks I shall have that power!
-- Doctor Who, "Genesis of the Daleks"

Suppose you had the power to destroy the world. I'm not saying you asked for it. You just sort of happened upon it. And now it's yours. What would you do?

Because the power to destroy the world has been found. It's here: plotpatents.com.

Boing Boing and GrokLaw have reported on the fact that a clever little law firm has come up with a clever little idea. They've applied for a patent on a plot.

I've hung out in various fandoms over the course of my life. Many of these are slightly, well, crazy places. One of the phrases you hear from time to time fits the formula of "The producers of [object of fannish obsession] should sue! That episode of [show other than the object of fannish obsession] ripped off the plot of [episode of object of fannish obsession]!" They say this a lot, partly because they don't know better, but mostly because they don't care, and don't really expect anything to come of it.

Because: it's not illegal to rip off someone else's plot. You can't copyright a plot. You can't own a plot. For that matter, very few people actually invent new plots. This isn't because people lack creativity or invention, but because plots are fairly simple creatures. Depending on who you ask, there are only between ten and thirty distinct plots. Shakespeare didn't invent any of his plots.

Patents are a good idea, or, at least, they were. Giving the inventor a decade or so to make his invention commercially viable is a great way to (a) encourage people to invent and (b) encourage people to not keep their inventions secret. But as the rate of technological advancement increases, we start running into problems: things that get patented these days stand a good chance of being totally obsolete by the time the patent expires. But that's not really the point.

The point is, that the purpose of patents is right there in the constitution. It's to encourage invention. But that's not what they're being used for. They're being used to stifle invention. And in this case, it's the end of everything. With just a few patents, you could completely sew up all of creativity and make it illegal to compose any art without a license for the next couple of years.

And, of course, that's their goal. Well, not to actually stop people from creating, but to force people to pay them to do it. Which means that only those who can afford to will be allowed to. Nothing new under the sun. Ever again.

This can not be allowed to happen. It shouldn't happen, but how much can we really expect from the Patent Office? The folks who work at the patent office can't seriously be expected to have the range and depth of expertise to handle everything that comes at them, as evidenced by some of the recent software patents. These are very dedicated people who work very hard, but can not possibly keep up. Which means that, especially with the weight of Money behind them, some plot patents are liable to slip through at one point. At which point it's game over.

Pity. I rather liked having an imagination.

Deep Thoughts/Politics

By Ross at 03:31 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

October 24, 2005

Eppur si muove

I'm kinda foaming at the mouth just now. I have to think a lot more before I have some solid concrete thoughts on this, but I ought to blog it, because those whom it concerns directly, well, can't

My gf just read me the text of this article, as it's the high school she attended not so many moons ago...

Daily Record - Local News - Blogging ban provokes a debate over cyberspace

Reader's Digest Version: If you go to Pope John, you are not allowed to blog. Not on school time. Not on your own time. If you are a student and they catch you having a blog, you will be suspended.

So, the first thing I'm going to point out is that this is a private school, so a lot of the usual legal objections don't apply. Of course, pretty much all the usual moral objections still apply.

One of the many great things about the way we've set up our country is that its public schools could not pull a stunt like this.

Maybe you're having a hard time understanding why this is a cause for concern -- I'm not even all up in arms on a First Ammendment basis. It's not like that. This time, it's not even about freedom of speech. It's about overreach. To illustrate my point, here are some things that they could equally well suspend you for doing (these are not, to my knowledge, actual offenses at Pope John, but there is no legal reason they couldn't be):

* Wearing clothes which violate the dress code. Not at school, but, say, at the mall with your parents on a Saturday.
* Watching an R rated movie in your living room on a school holiday
* Working on Sunday
* Having sex with a member of the gender of your choice outside the bounds of holy matrimony
* Reading an unapproved book on your summer vacation
* Listening to that heathen and devil noise called "Rock and Roll"
* Having an unacceptable Body Mass Index (Pope John High School: No Fatties)
* Living in an orange house.
* Proposing, on your own time, that the Earth goes 'round the sun, and not the other way around

I half-salute their intentions; who doesn't want to keep kids safe? But me, I happen to think the school's control over the lives of its students should extend no further than the final bell (excluding school sponsored extracirricular events). (Cliche time: Shouldn't what the kids are doing on-line be their parents' call? I am very troubled that if I wanted a blog, and mom wanted me to have it, my school could veto it.)

Think about it, won't you?

And remember, Thoughtcrime is death.

Deep Thoughts/Religion

By Ross at 10:22 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

October 20, 2005

Six of one, half a dozen of the other. Be seeing you.

By request, my results at politopia.

Deep Thoughts/Politics

By Ross at 10:23 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

October 13, 2005

The more you know...

I love a good parody.

Boy do I love a good parody.

I also like good theology, even if I disagree with it.

World O'Crap has reported
on Hairy Polarity and the Sinister Sorcery Satire, a sort of big budget Chick Tract about the "very real dangers of sorcery and witchcraft."

This is not good satire. It is not good theology. And at $2.50 a copy, it's not even a good value.

The material basically writes itself. This is a 32-page piece of propaganda designed to teach our children that magic and sorcery is real, and that it's dangerous and evil and you should not read or learn anything even tangentially related to it. World O'Crap has already taken it to task more than enough, and I wouldn't bother restating the obvious (except to