Linkstew

So this was a response to the Oklahoma City Bombing which I copied this out of the Bakersfield Californian back in 1995. It's basically not at all applicable to current events, but I figured now would be as good a time as any to post this since Oklahoma City has been coming up repeatedly in the news. I did not write this.

One day a bomb exploded and people began asking, "Why did this happen? Who is responsible?"

"Not me," said the taIk show host. "Words don't hurt people. Ideas and dissent must be protected. It's our First Amendment right."

"Not me," said the media: "We just report events as they happen. We're just a mirror that reflects society as it is."

"Not me," said the gun lobby. "Bombs don't kill people. People kill people. If we would put away criminals, they wouldn't be waIking around our streets doing this."

"Not me," said the justice system. "We don't have the time or the money to deal with every criminal. We need more prisons, more courts."

"Not me," said the Hollywood crowd. "We just give people what they want: gangsta rap, television violence, killings and gore on the big screen. It's just entertainment. People know the difference between real life and fantasy."

"Not me" said thes politicians. "We need more legislation so this won't happen again. Those responsible must be punished. Let's have a bipartisan effort."

"Not me," said the suspect, and he did not say any more.

Since no one was found to be responsible, life went on all the same.

--Randall Bergquist - Bakersfield

Atlantis looked promising, but it turns out that I heaped a little too many expectations on it. It was an exciting adventure, and it had it's moments, certainly, but it had it's flaws as well. And rather than spoil the good moments, I'll just run down some of the flaws and let you make the decision to go see it or not.

First of all, while the movie hinted at darker themes, it still backed off and catered to kids. So much more could have been done with the story, and that it came in animated form would have allowed for all kinds of neat things without having to worry about the limitations of people -- But instead we got two or three fart jokes (though one was cleverly concealed), various jokes about cleanliness, and a number of other jokes aimed at squarely at the younger audience. On the other hand, there was one memorable line which I'm still laughing at, just because it was so ridiculous.

The next problem is that there were too many characters by far, and their backgrounds didn't play meaningfully into their decisions in most cases. A few of the characters were developed beyond the others, but we were told in a moderately amusing fashion that we didn't want to know about Mole's story, and Cooky and the Secretary were just running gags, and the villain was "in it for the money". I think it's that last one that irritates me the most, actually -- While the villain in Swordfish was also after money, at least he claimed to have other goals. In Atlantis, the villain just wants money, and possible aspects of his background are just dropped on the floor. There was so much action and such thin character development that I wished they'd considered balancing things out a little more.

And then I remember that this is mostly a movie for a child, and I realize that they didn't extend the movie with character development because today's kids would lose interest and wander away. And I realize that they packed the movie with action scene after action scene after fart joke after action scene to keep the kid on the edge of his seat. And I realize that this is what Television has done to the world, and I feel vaguely ill-at-ease about the future...

And I give Atlantis a 3/5 anyway, because it had it's moments.

At this point, the story of Kaycee Nichole has been covered everywhere from CNN to the New York Times. I haven't seen anything this talked about on the web since November 7th, 2000. For those who don't have any clue what I'm talking about, I'll just link to this msnbc article, because I haven't been paying attention to this topic at all, so I actually have any useful links. I've just read what Kevin and Eve had to say about the situation. (Here are three more links about Kaycee that Eve sent me, if you want to dig deeper.) And today, with still more news on the subject being created, I finally spent a few minutes thinking about it, and this is what occured to me.

First, I'll describe how I understand the situation, because it'll help you understand where I'm coming from if I'm way off base. Girl with a terminal illness has an online journal, chronicling her fight. People read Girl's journal, feel happy when Girl gets better, feel sad when she gets worse. People are affected by Girl. Girl was an incredible optimist, who helped others see a little beauty around them. Girl dies. People around the net are very sad, but other people around the net are suspicious, and snoop around, and ask too many questions, and uncover that Girl did not exist, and as such, never died.

People believed in Kaycee as much as they believe in George W. Bush, though they'd never met her, and all they had to go on were some pictures and phone calls and a lot of meaningful words. Belief is an essential part of the world, as any avid Pratchett fan is well aware. People believed in Kaycee, and therefore, she existed, if not in reality then in the hearts and minds of readers around the world.

Kaycee existed, and Kaycee died, because people believed she did. I had never read her journal, but when I heard she died, I believed right along with everyone else. Apparently some people feel let down, having placed their belief in a fiction, and having cried for a fiction, and yet people willingly cry for books and movies all the daily.

And if you don't like that point of view, then look at it this way: People no longer believe in Kaycee, and without her belief, Kaycee is dead. Dead any way you look at it. And if she's dead any way you look at it, then being sad for her passing is a perfectly natural thing, even if the death was a metaphysical one.

The question, then, isn't one of whether or not she was real, but of the intentions of the deceiver. And as far as I can tell, everyone involved claims that no money or gifts were ever asked for. In this light, belief in Kaycee was an investment which didn't require anything other than the time to read her journal, and if her journal made the reader happy or sad, then it was time well spent. She didn't ask for any money to keep her "church" (web page) running, and she didn't ask for you to even believe in her. If you enjoyed reading what Kaycee had to say, and if she made you happy or sad, then your belief was well founded and the reward was free.

If people are this upset about the Kaycee situation, I'd love to see what'd happen if anyone ever proved The Bible to be fiction and showed a whole lot of people how ill-placed their belief was.

It seems to me that believing in Kaycee may have been an even better way to spend your belief than believing in some religious character.

I was talking to my brother on Instant Messenger earlier this evening, but when I finished, I didn't close the window. And when he went to bed, he left his computer on, and instead of setting an away message, he let his session go idle. And when that happened, a message popped up in the window saying '"Benjy's Brother" has stopped using their computer at 2:19:49, and is now considered idle.' Now, I'm not sure if it was the AIM service that sent that message, or his client that sent the message, or my Mac OS X Beta client which printed the message, but it was definately an automated message and not an away message.

"What's wrong with the message? It's gender neutral and everything!" you might be saying. Well, it's precisely the gender neutrality that's the problem. It's nice that they used the correct "their" (as opposed to there or they're), but it's not nice that "their" wasn't even the right pronoun to use. 'Their' is defined as "The possessive case of the personal pronoun they", and 'They' is defined as "The plural of he, she, or it." In other words, 'Their' is the plural possessive. In other other words, according to AIM, my brother is a plural entity. Which he isn't. Trust me, I've met him.

Why did AIM do this? Because they were trying to be gender neutral, of course. They didn't want to use sexist language, because apparently it's "bad form". It would have been embarressing if it'd said '"Benjy's Brother" has stopped using her...', and while using 'his' in that context is usually the accepted solution to this quandry, AIM chose not to do so.

What would have been a better way to word that message while staying gender neutral? Under normal circumstances, the best way to stay gender neutral is to rephrase what you were saying to be a plural statement from the get-go, instead of trying to wedge gender neutrality onto a non-plural statement. But off the top of my head, I can't think of a better way to handle the AIM case other than "his or her", because this is a complicated automated situation.

update: My roomate Keith offered up '"Chan da Man"'s computer has not responded for x hours and is considered idle.' Ah, very good, thank you Keith.

Most people probably noticed pretty quickly the error in the message, but there's a more insidious case, which is more common than I can shake a stick at. In an attempt to stay gender neutral, people will use 'they' in place of 'he' and 'she', which sounds right, because it's so common, but it isn't. It's also tricky because it happens when you're speaking in the third person. For example, instead of saying "The student asked what he should be doing", you'd see "The student asked what they should be doing". Another example would be "Each student put their coat in the closet."

This comes up when someone wants to make a general statement about a single unspecified entity. When it's a general plural statement, English is armed to the teeth with gender neutrality, and when it's a statement about a specific single entity, the pronouns practically speek themselves. But English isn't prepared to deal with statements about unknown singular entities. A solution? Figure out how to rephrase your statement as a plural statement, because odds are, it'll apply to more than one person, given that there are six billion people out there for it to potentially apply to. Alternatively, make the tradeoff between being awkward (his or her) and being gender neutral. None of these are exactly optimal solutions, as each has it's strong points and week points. Whichever option you pick, trying to use a plural pronoun in place of a singular pronoun, no matter how much you convolute the sentence (even if it's subconscious) to make it work, isn't a solution at all.

This phenomenon is known as hypercorrection. An example of this that's less complicted is the plural of octopus. It looks kind of like a latin derived word -- alumnus, for example. Both alumnus and octopus are singular, and the plural of alumnus is alumni, so the plural of octopus is octopi, right? Well, no, because octopus is a greek derived word, so it's octopuses... But that doesn't stop hypercorrection, and some day octopi might actually become the plural of octopus. And I'm not even going to comment on alumna and alumnae, other than to point out that even if octopus was derived from latin, the plural for a bunch of female octopuses would not be octopusae.

Tonight I finally got my laundry schedule back on track. I have about two loads worth of clothes, and every semester up until now I had my laundry synchronized so that I'd do both loads every two weeks. But when I got back from winter break this year, my laundry cycle got off, and I was doing a load ever week, alternating back and forth between the light and dark. I finally got so tired of the weekly chore that I just didn't do laundry last week. So tonight, I'm doing both loads of laundry, and after tonight, I'll return to my regularly bi-weekly laundry schedule.

Speaking of laundry, today's episode of my History of Technology class was moderately interesting; The topic was, surprise surprise, laundry. Well, it was more general than that, but we kept returning to the example of laundry. The actual topic was the migration of technologies to and from the house.

Way back in the day, the women of the house did the laundry (among multitudinous other things) by hand. Then, in the 1850's, commercial laundries developed because those 49er's were too busy hunting for gold to be bothered with clean clothes. The industry grew and grew, until the electric washer was developed in the early 20th century and laundry returned home. Strangely enough, though, other cultures, including France and somewhere in latin america, send their laundry out to be professionally cleaned to this day. More Work For Mother by Ruth Cowan discusses aspects of technology transfer to and from the home in American culture.

Personally, I'd totally go in to have someone do my laundry for me, assuming reasonable prices. It's a pity that commercial laundry was quelched by some aspect of the American culture, because I'd love to not have to deal with laundry ever again.

Billy, you should get to be good friends with Pill, because for the rest of your life, you're going to be stuck in this pill based culture. This Article on msnbc is very scary -- Schools demanding that parents give their children Ritalin. I wonder when it'll be revealed that whichever drug super power owns the name Ritalin is funding children's television and bribing these school officials...

Who, me? No, I'm not paranoid. Just a little bitter. Sure, I pop aspirin all the time, but I believe that they work. If someone replaced my apsirin with sugar pills, my belief would work just as well as the aspirin. Unfortunately, I can't replace them myself, because then my mind wouldn't let the trick work.

Belief is a damn powerful healer, but in this "advanced scientific age," people no longer believe in belief or other forms of healing -- they need "advanced" medicines and surgeries -- I'm just as vulnerable to this as anyone else, but I can recognize it in myself and others.

It's a shame to see pills being forced upon little billy as soon as possible. "Get him hooked on the program," the drug makers say. "Make him believe in us."

This is a good article talking about the fact that California's Power Problems aren't because Californians are Power Gluttons. My, that's reassuring. So if we're doing so good on electrical use per capita, then why are we having this power crisis? Well, a former co-worker tells me that it's because PG&E are dumbasses. More precisely, they sold old power plants and didn't build new ones. Further, he told me that if something extreme didn't happen soon, then this "crisis" is going to go on for years. Oh, that ain't good.

PG&E: Dumbasses.

What kind of conspiracy is it where bad credit is better than no credit at all? At any rate, I now find myself in that "worse credit" bracket simply because I have no credit. Heck, I couldn't even sign up for my cell phone service in my own name thanks to the stigma of no credit, and so I had to use my dad's name.

So I've spent a couple of hours today reading about credit cards, and in general, it irritates me. I was looking mainly at Bank of America, because I do my banking there, and CitiBank, because my dad came in with a credit card offer for my mom from CitiBank today. But I guess one is in my future, because as it is I have "worse credit." And besides, look at the hassles no credit card has caused me between the "PowerBook Incident" and the "cell phone incident." A credit card will make me feel dirty, but at least it should make my life easier.

Mindi, the girl down the hall who is also from Bakersfield, related this amusing story to me. Apparently, a guy called Love Line and explained that he and his cousin had slept with and impregnated his sister. Oh, by the way, he's from Oildale, which, for those of you not in the know, is basically a suburb (HA!) of Bakersfield.

So, come the next commercial break, the DJ on duty at KRAB comes on the line and says "Never, EVER, tell anyone where you're from if you're from anywhere NEAR Bakersfield. You're just going to ruin our name even more."

I was just out eating in the DC, and as I was standing in line, I noticed a couple who not only had each eyebrow pierced with a small bar, but they both had the same style. "Gee, that's attractive", I thought to myself.

So I was walking down Telegraph, and I walked by Hot Topic, and glanced in the window, and saw some Anime shirts and scrolls. This disturbed me. That is just not good. Anime does not a product for Hot Topic equal. It's just wrong! Why does this always happen to me. But on the bright side, it was mostly the "popular" Anime stuff that I don't like anyway, like Dragonball Z and Akira. Er. Yeah, Akira is good, but it's still popular, and I don't think it's as great as some people would swear it to be. But anyway, it's still wrong. Hopefully this doesn't mean bad things for the status of Anime in America.

Bad Bad Bad.

This is an article I posted to alt.music.tmbg sometime over the summer of 1998, and it has been minorly edited since then. It is an interpretation of They Might Be Giants' somewhat famous song, "Particle Man".

10/10/2001: I apologize for the presentation and tone of this interpretation. The idea that Particle Man shares many elements with Flatland should be clear despite all the opinions I tossed into the mess. Maybe some day I'll go back and revise this, but for now, tread warily.

So a long time ago I came up with this interp of this catchy song. It was a dark and stormy night, after I had read E. Abbots Flatland, and I was listening to Flood, when it hit me.

The short version: Particle man is based off of E. Abbots Flatland.

The Long Version:
As I don't have the book available, I'll have to summarize to the best of my memory.

First of all, the book is about perspectives and understanding. As I recall, the narrative opens with 2d beings observing a 1d being, which is mostly irrelevant for the remainder of the plot, except as a contrast against how the beings in the story thing. Then, a square in the 2d world is living his peaceful life, when a sphere from 3d world comes down to 2d world and takes the square up to the 3d world, where the scope of the square world is broadened. The square sees the possibilities, and asks the sphere to take him to the 4d world. The sphere of course, *KNOWS* there's no such thing as a 4th dimension, gets mad at the square, and chucks him back down to 2d.

In 2d, the square tries to explain to the other squares about the next dimension, but of course, every square *KNOWS* there's no such thing as a 3rd dimension, and so the squares ostracized their fellow square.

Sound like society in general? it should. This is a really great narrative for another view on society and it's interactions... and it even has a bit of 19th century theory on Dimensions.

Now then, on to the interp. The first thing to realize, is that two points can make a line, which is one dimensional. So, the minimum number of points required to create a two dimensional shape is 3, which makes a triangle. A square was used in Flatland, for some silly reason, but if you replace the square with triangles in the story, things begin to make more sense.... now then, the line by line.

"Particle man, particle man / Doing the things a particle can / What's he like? It's not important / Particle man / Is he a dot, or is he a speck? / When he's underwater does he get wet? / Or does the water get him instead? / Nobody knows, Particle man"

This entire first bit is about the 2d being observing the 1d being. the particle is the 1d being, who is going about it's own business and completely unaware of the higher dimension observing it. The individual bits are relatively self explanatory, and I'll save you all the effort of trying to understand my haphazard style of explaining things.

"Triangle man, Triangle man / Triangle man hates particle man / They have a fight, Triangle wins / Triangle man"

Triangle man is the everytriangle. This is not the triangle who was taken to the 3d realm, but is instead the other, mob minded triangles who don't think for themselves. He doesn't like anything that isn't him. He doesn't know about the 3d world, but he does know about 1d... and because 1d is not 2d, it is not as good, and 2d is about to stomp on 1d without incredibly much effort.

"Universe man, Universe man"

Is the sphere, the 3d being.

"Size of the entire universe man"

Consider a 3d being in a 2d world. A 3d being is composed of many 2d subworlds, basically. kind of abstract, but it makes sense to me... a universe is composed of many galaxies...a galaxy is 2d, a universe is 3d, for the sake of this interp.

"Usually kind to smaller man"

For the most part, this particular sphere didn't do anything mean to the 2d beings... he only grew angry when the triangle, who we haven't met yet, asks about the next dimension.

"He's got a watch with a minute hand, Millennium hand and an eon hand"

3 watch hands. 3 dimensional being. Groks intimately the meanings of the hands, or the dimensions, but doesn't grok anymore.

"When they meet it's a happy land / Powerful man, universe man"

When the hero triangle, who we still havenae met yet, is taken by the sphere to 3d land, the triangle understands and is overjoyed with his revelation.. and asks for the next dimension. As I've said, the sphere gets upset, and with his power, sends the triangle back down to 2d land.

"Person man, person man"

At last! Our hero triangle!

"Hit on the head with a frying pan"

This is *AFTER* the encounter with the sphere has taken place, and our poor hero is already back in 2d land. As far as any of his fellow triangles can tell, he musta been hit on the head pretty hard, because he is ranting and raving about some greater dimension than two... What an absurd idea! More than two dimensions?
hrmph.
And the other angle: Person mans revelation was like being smacked on the head with a frying pan. suddenly seeing everything in a new light..... a new world, with new dimensions to explore! too bad none of his friends believe him.

"Lives his life in a garbage can"

and so his friends ostracize him. If he's gonna keep making a fool out of himself, talking about this "3rd dimension", then we're not gonna associate with him. Sounds like our society, eh?

"Is he depressed or is he a mess?"

What *IS* wrong with this guy?
Why on *EARTH* is he so adamant about his silly ideas?

"Does he feel totally worthless?"

Then he begins to question himself. Is he really insane? Did that happen? IS there really a third dimension? is he as worthless as his friends have made out? He gives in to societal pressure and stops clinging to what he knows to be true, because it hurts too much.

"Who came up with person man?"

What a poor individual! So human, and yet so poor.

"Degraded man, person man"

Person's status in flatland has been significantly reduced since his rantings. He is now basically a joke to anyone in flatland.

"Triangle man, triangle man / Triangle man hates person man / They have a fight, triangle wins / Triangle man "

And then our society returns. Our mob returns, and sees this poor whimpering soul, believing in what he knew, and beats the crap outta him.

I love this place!