Voder-Vocoder

Maybe I have Restless Legs Syndrome. And if I don’t, then I may be coming down with hypochondria.

I’ve completed stage two of my new painting.

Looks like crap:

(3 feet x 3 feet)

He [Jared Diamond] elaborated a bit on his book’s account of the Easter Island collapse, where a society that could build 80-ton statues 33 feet high and drag them 12 miles, and who could navigate the Pacific Ocean to and from the most remote islands in the world, could also cut down their rich rain forest and doom themselves utterly. With no trees left for fishing canoes, the Easter Islanders turned to devouring each other. The appropriate insult to madden a member of a rival clan was, “The flesh of your mother sticks between my teeth!” The population fell by 90% in a few years, and neither the society nor the island ecology have recovered in the 300 years since.

Diamond reported that his students at UCLA tried to imagine how the guy who cut down the LAST tree in 1680 justified his actions. What did he say? Their candidate quotes:

• “Fear not. Our advancing technology will solve this problem.”
• “This is MY tree, MY property! I can do what I want with it.”
• “Your environmentalist concerns are exaggerated. We need more research.”
• “Just have faith. God will provide.”

—Summarized by Stewart Brand (source)

That was Jared Diamond’s take on the impending end of things. I’ve already made that analogy.

Via Billmon, who has more to say:

Ordinarily, I’d be the last one to challenge Jared Diamond’s thinking — the man is a genius. But in this case I have to wonder if he isn’t overanalyzing things. Maybe the reason humans act so dumb isn’t because of their intellectual frame of reference, or their clan structure, or because they lack historical awareness. Maybe people act dumb because a lot of them are dumb — dumb as turnips. So stupid they have trouble each morning remembering that their shoes go on their feet. So mentally challenged they have to use crib notes to remember their ABCs. So monumentally dense they can’t even do the job of a cable news talk show host — or at least not properly. Borderline vegetative, in other words.

I took the sketchpad to work today.

Recently, I’ve noticed a trend in TV scifi. Helmets on pressure suits don’t have headlamps on the outside, they have lamps on the inside of the helmet, illuminating the face.

This makes sense from a TV point of view: You can tell who is in the suit. But in reality, a bright light inside the suit would turn the faceplate into a mirror. The actors can’t see a thing.

http://printfreegraphpaper.com/

When I got home last night the computer was off but the green light was still on. I had to cycle the power, not just reboot. When it happened again after only a few minutes, I figured that it had overheated. (1) Modern mobos have thermometers and shut off when the CPU gets too hot. (2) I had my AC off and windows open in the apartment for a few days to save energy. (After a while, you get used to the heat. And the natural layer of sweat.) (3) The computer seemed quieter than normal (this is hard to judge); maybe the fan was out.

So I went to get a new case fan. This one is much quieter than the old one that came with the case four years ago. While I was at the store, I picked up some comressed air, figuring that dust was the likely culpret. I’ll try and clean the case every time I open it from now on. Maybe I should think of compressed air a s acleaning product, like soap or windex: something I should always have on hand. Maybe I should make a point to clean every computer every six months.

I hope this computer doesn’t die in the next few minutes. Then I would have to find the real problem.

UPDATE 2005-08-15: Turn out that the power supply needed to be replaced. I’m not so competent.

Does Hal suffer from misanthropy or shyness? Maybe I just suffer from bibliophilia. Put me in a room full of people and I just say “I’d rather be reading a book.”

Whenever I hear them use the word “freedom” now, I mentally substitute the word “oil,” and suddenly the sentence is translated into perfect sense: “Oil is on the march,” “The terrorists hate our oil,” “Our heroic troops have paid the ultimate price for oil,” “Oil isn’t free,” etc.

—Tim Kreider (source)

If my boss nicknamed me Turd Blossom, I would quit. And possibly sue for harassment.

Many analysts have noted the transformation of Al Qaeda from an organization to a movement—that is, from a top-down, centrally directed terrorist group to a decentralized “franchise” operation, in which local operators like Abu Zarqawi and the Madrid bombers make their own plans and pursue their own tactical objectives.

John Robb, the systems analyst behind the blog Global Guerrillas, argues that this evolution may actually have improved Al Qaeda’s long-term survivability and operational effectiveness, even if it rules out large, complex attacks like 9/11. A highly decentralized network of terrorist cells, he argues, can use something analogous to market mechanisms to coordinate its actions—learning to avoid the mistakes and imitate the successes of other cells.

If true, it could mark the birth of an entirely new type of conflict—a “fifth generation” warfare in which the enemy not only isn’t a nation state, but isn’t even an entity—like the Viet Cong or the Shining Path or the PLO. It’s almost impossible to imagine how a security establishment that yet hasn’t learned how to fight a fourth generation insurgency is going to cope with that.

—Billmon (source)

The franchise and the virus work on the same principle: what thrives in one place with thrive in another. You just have to find a sufficiently virulent business plan, condense it into a three-ring binder - its DNA - xerox it, and embed it in the fertile lining of a well-traveled highway, preferably one with a left-turn lane. Then the growth will expand until it runs up against its property lines.

—NS (source)

If Terror is now nothing more than a franchise—anyone with a high school education, access to a public library (you don’t even need to check books out), and a grudge can start a cell—then we need to rethink how we deal with it. How do you deal with spoiled brats who throw tantrums? Ignore them.

What do these kids want? (1) They want to be on TV. (2) They want you to be afraid of them.

Will someone explain to me why Robert Novak is not in jail?