Why I Support A Gas Tax
Oil is a finite resource and as it runs out, gas _will_ be $5/gal someday, it's only a matter of when. The only responsible objective is to find an alternative. I support a gas tax because I'd rather use that money _now_ to help find alternative fuels and clean up the mess we've made, rather than give it to the Saudi's so they can build the "world's biggest island":http://www.thepalm.ae/ and the "world's tallest":http://wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=38413 "building":http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6781.
I do think it's .. ironic that American's have paid Bush's tax to the Saudi's 10 times over by now in increased gas prices. A link between oil money and terrorism is at least as viable as a link to drug money. But our government doesn't put that in commercials. We pay the expenses for both sides of our war in Iraq.
I've gotten several emails from people over the last few days about boycotting certain gas companies. One mentioned $46 billion dollar net losses for oil companies if the US didn't by oil for one day. Needless to say I won't be buying any gas that day (I don't drive a car). But the rest of America will. Because they have no other option. And we never will have any other option as long as the gas flows cheaply. Gas for $1/gal is immoral, in my opinion. We need find better things to spend $46 billion/day on, and hopefully better people to give it to.
Star Wars Via Telnet
This is pretty cool if you're a geek and know what telnet is. The entire movie "Star Wars in animated ASCII":telnet://towel.blinkenlights.nl. These people have too much time on their hands.
In The Future, Everything Is Recorded
Jamais Cascio gives an interesting "presentation":http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail375.html called _Participatory Panopticon_ about some of the ways in which the ability to record and archive everything will change our future. He specifically mentions something that's been a little dream of mine, a camera embedded in your glasses that can take a picture of what you see. Although in his version, the camera also records and automatically archives everything you see and can display it back to you right from the same glasses. It becomes a searchable record of everything you experience.
Interesting thought. As he mentions, all the pieces of this technology exist now or will shortly. He mentions some sort of camera that exists now that can be embeded in glasses and is constantly recording. You can hit a button at any time and it will save the last 30 seconds of what you saw. Combine this with pervasive wireless networks, GPS and facial recognition software. He mentions a Colossal Storage claims they will have a 10 petabyte drive by the end of the decade, enough to store a year's worth of uncompressed video.
The world will be a different place then. How, for instance, will photography change when you can always go back and get the "decisive moment":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Cartier-Bresson#The_Decisive_Moment? Cascio theorizes a bit more on what the world is like when everyone is recording everything all the time. People will come to rely on it as their memory. People without it will be at a disadvantage. Public officials will have a harder time keeping secrets.
I agree though that the user interface for this archive of everything is a very difficult problem. The Star Trek computer has to be the Holy Grail, right? The "Minority Report":http://lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?104 one is pretty cool too though.
Rumsfeld Getting Smacked Around
"This one":http://www.betterbadnews.com/35 is great. Rumsfeld's former stenographer tells of her days working under "Roomie", as they called him. My favorite part is where she talks about smacking him between the shoulder blades with the back of a brush, nothing kinky ya know. If you haven't checkout out "Better Bad News":http://www.betterbadnews.com/ yet, this one may be my favorite, that I've seen so far. Funny, under the protection of satire, yet still hits so close to home. I like how they reference actual news stories too. 100% half true, most of the time.
None Dead, Several Injured, In Virginian iStampede Event
I'm not sure who organized "this event":http://www.wwbt.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=WWBT/MGArticle/WBT_BasicArticle&c=MGArticle&cid=1031784465955, but they tried to give away 1000 iBooks for $50/each at the fairgrounds in Richmond, Virginia. If you watch "the video":rtsp://mgs.mgnetwork.com/wwbt/video/081605ibookrush.rm it seems like they decided who got them by who could run the fastest across a parking lot to get in line. Sounds pretty crazy, babies pulled from trampled strollers, grandmas and old guys in walkers being knocked down and trampled. Seems to be very effective at getting fat people to run though. Never seen so much fat moving that quickly.
1,434 Days And Still No Sign Of .. Who Was It Again?
Today I happened across "The Church Militant":http://thechurchmilitant.blogspot.com/ and noticed, aside from the interesting mix of "News Babes" pictures and transcripts from Catholic mass, he had an interesting sidebar stating the number of days since Sept 11, 2001.
First, it struck me that it had been a very long time and we still hadn't found the guy who started the whole thing. No, not him. Not him either. The guy that orchestrated the 9/11 attacks, according to the 9/11 commission. Then it struck me that I couldn't remember his name, the guy Bush pointed attention away from to steer it toward Saddam. We we're all like, that's silly, you can't just make it true by saying it. It wasn't Saddam, it was... Hmm, it worked.
So, if the lesson is that you can make things true by just saying them enough, you'd think it would be much easier to do when the truth corresponded with actual reality. So maybe we're just not saying it enough? (Just so it gets said, America was not attacked by Iraq or Saddam Hussein.)
In the end I had to get some help from Google cause I couldn't remember. Do you remember? Well, it doesn't matter anyway, I don't even think they're looking for him anymore. Interestingly, his "FBI Most Wanted listing":http://www.fbi.gov/mostwant/topten/fugitives/laden.htm doesn't even mention 9/11.
Reclaiming Tolerance
Thank God someone was able to "write this":http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2005/08/10/notes081005.DTL&type=printable. I've been wanting to write a similar article for a while. Mark Morford steals the words from my mouth a couple times, but generally writes a better article than I would have done. Read the whole thing, but here's some excerpts.
"But I am perhaps most intolerant, not of Christians per se, not of faith, certainly not of radiant self-defined spirituality, not even of organized religion, though I do fully believe more independent spirits and raw human souls and moist sexual licks have been lost to its often narrow-minded and cosmically rigid brainwashing techniques than have ever been saved. But hey, that's just me.
"I am most intolerant of, well, of those who allow such intolerance. Of those who would, based on their narrow views of sex, God, love, hope, war, the mind, the Earth, soil and animals and air and water and fire and love and spirit and drugs and guns and dildos, work to legislate those neoconservative beliefs, codify them, make them the law of the land, force their regressive beliefs on everyone else under punishment of violence and beatings and prison. I am, in short, intolerant of intolerance.
...
"Let us take the rather flaccid word tolerance and pump it full of Ecstasy and medical marijuana and sake and real divine love and fancy book learnin', turn it on its head and spin it like a bottle and reclaim it from the neocon Right and turn it into, say, giddy outrage. Or radical reconsideration. Or ecstatic rebellion. Or wet conscious electric pointed awareness. Is this not a better way?"
Perhaps in interesting contrast is this quote from an AP "article":http://apnews.myway.com/article/20050805/D8BPJK0O1.html on Bush and his recent approval ratings.
"He's a man of character," said Cheryl Cheyney, a school bus driver from Cumming, Ga., and a Republican. "He's very honest in the things he says. I agree with his belief system, the way he believes in God and is not afraid to show it. That's very important to me."
Am I too tolerant of Cheryl? I can respect someone that is not afraid to stand up for what they believe in. I guess I think it's her right to be a naive and blinded moron if she wants. We all live in our own world to some degree. But George Bush was elected to represent *me* as well, and I consider his "religious" beliefs to be a repugnant and immoral political maneuver, preying on the fears of the uneducated with the same vile, salacious greed and lust for control as televangelists.
Perhaps "Faith" is what scares me. The idea that you should believe something, just because. Because why, I'm not sure? Isn't Faith the thing you must believe without evidence? Why must I? Because everyone else does? Because the ancient religious text says it's the unaltered word of God and it says if you don't believe it, you'll burn in hell? I guess once you've made that "leap of faith" it becomes very easy to loose your way. Compound that with feeling obligated to only associate with other people that share this delusion, and the social pressures to conform can become quite intense. As they look at the world, from within this box, the freedoms of those who don't share this delusion make them fearful. This happens wherever organized religion becomes dominant, be it the Middle East or Alabama. This is also why delusions like "Saddam attacked us first" are so comfortable for them. They're used to believing in things with no evidence.
I just don't know what I can _do_ about it. I think "yelling and waving signs":http://derekgulbranson.com/2004/07/20/this-isnt-working-anymore/ is inadequate. Running for public office seems extreme. Ignoring it is much less stressful and leaves me a happier person. I post comments on the blogs of bigots. I give money to progressive organizations. I post articles on my blog and let my opinion be know whenever discussion happens. But I can't spend my life with the stress of "the dark and violent road down which this nation seems intent on careening like an Escalade on meth" on my shoulders. I'm too sensitive.
pt vs. px
I just noticed if I use pt (points) instead of px (pixels) for the units of font-size in my CSS, the font appears the same size on both my PC and Mac. My powerbook has 96 pixels per inch, so text frequently looks really, really small. I guess pt is relative to the physical screen size rather than being tied to pixels. Anyway, so will everyone in the world please start using pt instead of px for font-sizes. Thanks.
Proof That Color Is Subjective
Here's a "great example":http://www.echalk.co.uk/amusements/OpticalIllusions/colourPerception/colourPerception.html of how our perception of colors is completely relative to the surrounding colors. Illusion #3 is pretty amazing.
A Most Ironic New Name for Creationism
The new name for creationism is most ironic, I must say. Am I the only one that sees the irony? Intelligent Design? It's like they were sick of looking unintelligent so they decided to come up with another name, but the best they could come up with was to just put the word "intelligent" in the name. Not a very intelligent name.
How does one "teach" Intelligent Design? Point out everything uncanny about the world and say, "See, doesn't it seem like there's some 'intelligence' behind that?" Evolution has fossils and now "amazing digital organizms":http://derekgulbranson.com/2005/08/06/digital-organisms-refute-intelligent-design to study. What does Intelligent Design have for science students to study? Intelligent Design is an opinion, a faith, not a science. It's the exact kind of thing science was created to save us from.
I used to look around the world and think, there is no way that all this could have just _happened_. We go from hydrogen atoms all the way to buildings and societies, and our only explanation is just random mutations and time? I guess the more I learn about the world and how it works and the evidence behind that, the more start to feel like the world really is that crazy and amazing, no "Giant Spaghetti Monster":http://www.venganza.org/ is needed.
Creation was the only theory we had before we had science. The Church inflicted death on anyone that came up with another theory. I think it wasn't until the 1800's that the Catholic Church finally let Galileo out of hell for saying the world was round. So, I wouldn't look to the religious right for answers about the true nature of the universe. It's not very open source or democratic over there. Just lots of being offended and fearful when someone poses ideas that threaten their house of cards. Anyone that believes things don't evolve is an idiot. Evolution happens, you can debate when/how/where/what, but you can't just say it doesn't happen.