(it's quinns all the way down.)

5-25-02

harlan ellison will pay $5000 to anyone furnishing information leading to the arrest and conviction of citizen 513.

i found the naughty preposition, which was one of my favorite poems when i was a child:

The Naughty Preposition
Morris Bishop

I lately lost a preposition:
It hid, I thought, beneath my chair.
And angrily I cried: "Perdition!
Up from out of in under there!"

Correctness is my vade mecum,
And straggling phrases I abhor;
And yet I wondered: "What should he come
Up from out of in under for?"

5-24-02

my own anti-news round up:

today has just been all about the "no-duh" moments in the news. i saw a study that suggested rubber bullets may be dangerous, and another than baby talk may teach babies how to talk.

in other shocking news, wage slaves die earlier, creative geniuses tend to be moody ... and cognitive therapy is equally effective to anti-depressant drugs in treatment of, well, depression. this last piece of common knowledge has been presented to the shocked public on several occasions, including 3 years back by the end of science guy who went on npr to explain (among other things) the scandal that both have somewhere around a 60% success rate. he was really giving prozac a kick in the teeth by noting that it wasn't a higher success rate than many of the classes already in use when it came out, such as the tricyclics. of course, any first year pharm student can tell you the big deal was that prozac caused fewer side effects and could be taken by a wider range of people, which was the point- not some wondrous efficacy. and any first year psych student could tell you that the marriage of cognitive therapy and pharmaceuticals raised chance of successful depression treatment closer to 80%, which is why they are most often prescribed in tandem. but then someone fucking with statistics to make a perfectly well understood state of affairs in the medical or scientific community look like a terrible flaw is about the height of anti-news.

---

i discussed the history of china and the mongol hoards with cory tonight, which was very fun. i need to put that in the list of essays i really have to write someday soon.

5-20-02

fun news day.

hahahhahahahahhahahahahahaahahahahahah danny mentioned that now under the dmca the marker is an illegal circumvention method. and i keep thinking of this week's ntk...

the government wants to either take down or log users of things like globeXplorer. because apparently that will help somehow. the good quote: As one satellite company owner put it, "This is the age of transparency, and the Earth is one big photo op." of course, in the age of transparency logging users is no real problem either.

i know this isn't popular, but i like the age of transparency. i still think the best way to jam the government is for us all to hand over all of our personal data. at once. in varying formats.

5-19-02

joey devilla gets pictures of my new house online before i manage it. figures.

ok, i really wanna say a lot from my thoughts from the emerging tech conference, and from reading emergence, but i got the stomach flu instead. it's over now, but i just want to ask one question about etcon: why no girls? i mean, to a scary degree. 80's rpg cons were more gender balanced than etcon was, and i have no idea why that should be. that, and i think like one black person at the whole conference. are we seeing the emergence of another mostly white good 'ol boys network? is this just what recessions do? honestly, i feel a little bit of panic. there were ideas and principles there that shouldn't stay locked up our ivory asses....

remember kids, it doesn't count unless we take the whole world with us.

5-15-02

just showed my gate crasher joke badge to an o'reilly guy, now feeling guilty about putting him in an awkward position. still, they've created their business and this conference in the environment of people like the freenetworks guys, who are passing passing around the message at right. can anyone really complain that i am taking them up on it? i suppose they can. the question is very microcosm of the problems being discussed at this conference- they can complain, but can they do anything about it in a system like this?

someone said earlier that no one blogs anything but the happy conversationy stuff, no one blogs awkward or sad moments in their lives. does this count as an exception?

5-13-02

i'm at emerging tech.

best part of emerging tech is the accordion guy, ripping on the according doing "hey joe" ...now he's improving blues about lo sing his vc funding....

...and through the medley to the lapdance is always better when the stripper's crying.

4-23-02

i told danny yesterday that what google does is too important to be a company. it could be a government institution at the least, but too important for that as well. it should be a protocol- distributed, unmanageable, permanent.

i have no suggestions for implementation. it was simply a flash of lightening- that if google goes away or becomes corrupt a serious blow will have been dealt to the future.

well, not paul ford's future.

4-22-02

good to see these guys on the case- they look like they have their shit together. The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories.

and yoz, you are my hero.

mailed to me from danny, care of What She Really Thinks:

The Palestinians are a brutally oppressed people--and Israel is a nation under siege. The deaths of 400 Israeli civilians since the start of this latest intifada are senseless and tragic and maddening--as are the deaths of 1500 Palestinians during that same time.

And if you read that last bit and vehemently disagreed with half of it, and are already composing a response in your head to explain why the side with which you are aligned is morally superior to the side with which you disagree--well, that's kind of the problem at this point, isn't it?

-- Tom Tomorrow.

i really, really liked that.

4-21-02

saw the fkb today. it is a wonderful feeling when your friends turn out to be everything you'd hoped for and more.

gilbert, whom i love and adore is even more lovable and adorable for his natural talent with the sonic transducers and accelerometers.

4-19-02

danny has noted that running agsatalite on my laptop as root is probably a bad idea, be then probably not as bad as mentioning that i do it here.

i still need someone to write me a publishing app. i'd like to turn my widdle ickle world inside out- i'd like to have an open source publishing agent that take everything i do, as i do it and publishes it out on the web. then reports it to google. i'd also like to encourage everyone else in the world to do this, as it will save humanity and be the next great growth of the species. of course, not everyone agrees with me, alas.

israeli solders numbering palistinian captives... there are some things one should not do, and numbering the flesh of your prisioners is pretty top of the list. this put two questions in my mind- 1) does this occur to the israelis because they heard it somewhere, or is it a naturally occurring thing because when you are sorting through this many people, a numbering system re-emerges as a good way to handle them? and 2) would history have seen jewish suicide bombers in nazi germany as justified in their actions?

it has been very strange to watch israel descend into this, and i have watched very very closely.

this is a note i feel compelled to add after my discussion with yoz. it is 5-14-02, btw. i mean no revisionism: the israeli thing fascinates not because it is the worst thing going on right now, but because i am wondering how far a society can go into the formulaic madness that all human societies seem to be capable of under the total scrutiny of the rest of the world. i believe that this path has never in human history been so well documented and commented upon at the time as this one. there are a bunch of genocides/potential genocides going on right now, as there usually is. but this one is uniquely public, uniquely open to analysis and for me, uniquely near my normal field of vision. i suppose the other reason i am so fascinated and so condemning is that i am at heart pro-israel, and therefore at heart horrified by watching it wrestle with madness.

i wonder what makes a social structure begin to repeat the actions of a group which tried to destroy it 60 years prior. i wonder, as i always do, what prepares the collective human psyche of a nation to engage in genocide. i remember a moment when i realized it was too late for israel, they were, as a nation gone- beyond reaching until long after it will be all over. i was listening to a diplomat discussing the pullout from the racism conference. i had been warning anyone who cared they were capable of this, vectoring towards this, but listening to that man speak all the urgency in my mind went quiet. it was replaced by a shaky little voice that just said "you will be so sorry, and no one will be left to forgive you." what a harsh way to fall off the victim's high moral ground.

this leaves to my generation in america the task of coming to terms with directly funding a genocide we watched go down in the media, without ever lessening our support for the people who were executing it.

if, someday, i can wrap my mind around genocide i suspect there will be nothing else i can't get.

4-18-02

starting working at the crucible yesterday and today. doing pottery and glasswork and so on is such a relief- the non-ambiguous land of true scarcity. i make a pot, there's a pot. just the one. there will always be an effective limit on how many pots i can make and decorate, and no more than one of each will exist. scarcity is relieving this way, it should be everyone's hobby.

the artificial economies built up around non-scarce and nearly non-scarce resources does my head in sometimes

4-16-02

i'm going to pretend nothing happened.

two birds with one stone: maybe we can go back to the moon and get off the fossil fuel kick all in one go. i still don't get how power transmission back to earth would work.

shannon thinks if we got rid of scarcity then we'd get rid of any reason at all for people to be nice to each other, and everyone would just spend their time making more war and genocide, not less. it's an argument i've not heard before.

he claimed it was simply part of human nature, to which my reply was: "ok, we change that part of human nature then." i think he finds me chilling this way. but why should we treat violence differently from diabetes?

1-15-02

i am a ways out from my last post here.
since then my mom decided to learn czech and i regarded some of european rituals of death. i have no links, i've not had much net connection.

i'm thinking of leaving my career again. i keep trying to leave the computer industry, and i keep hearing jack's voice in my head saying "once you start down the dark path, forever shall it dominate your destiny." sigh. maybe i can become a professional artist--- danny says i'd make a helluva business woman for an artist.

i've been learning about socialism, unions and such in america from the oral tradition of song... mostly utah phillips. but i've also been reading about mao zedong, and wondered how anyone could see socialism as a fuctional system. it runs counter to laziness and automation, which means it will always be wasteful, and therefore outcompeted by systems that reward finding ways of only having to answer a question once.

bare with me, the rambling is feeling a bit sad. i keep fearing i may try to write poetry again. if i do i promise to restrict to love poems.

poetry is never a good sign.

12-15-01

ecommerce has died for me... my main use these days of amazon is affinity stuff audiogalaxy and my local library catalog. they target stuff at me fantastically, i've rated over 500 items to help them build a profile on my brain, but they've lost the ability to convert the debit off my card and into their account.

if capitalism were a technology, i'd be foretelling it's failure as a standard- too closed, too slow, too bloated. i don't know what will replace it, but i bet it isn't socialism.

speaking of inefficiency and economic systems- here's a duh study suggesting that while war and closed economy often go hand in hand, globalization may some day literally make war obsolete. when we all build each other supply lines, who can afford war anymore?

this is one of those moments that leaves me going damn- we are living in the future aren't we? reality is just a state of mind, and states of mind are just states of physiology.

12-11-01 ....africa on my mind.

i owe kaindu a packege. i get so excited when i hear from majorie. i want so much to go back see the tribe again. danny and i want to sponsor their language, kaonde, for the rosetta project. someday i will scan her letters and put them up here.

zambia can't seem to avoid any plague of the modern world- now it's got a smog problem to rival my home town. some central southern african nation just can't get a break.

south africa got a break, kind of. then again, kind of not. lately i listened to one of the prosecutors in the truth and reconciliation process (who testified against botha) and to the more visceral accounts of the truth about truth, and how hard reconciliation actually is.

truth and reconciliation is the kind of t hing i like a lot- i don't believe much in punishing, just transparency. i want a speaker for the dead, not a eulogy. i suppose because i simply don't believe in bad people or good people. but even the people that pulled for the trc seem to think it was the best of a set of horrible solutions. i listened to paul van zyl (in a south african accent danny got me hearing as sinister) talk about how he would discourage other places from the model south africa followed, because amnesty to the people who commit human rights abuses is too much for a national psyche to live with. i guess sometimes things happen that are too bad to forgive, and the people who did them don't want to be forgiven. i don't know a way around this, but i am almost sure that how wounded and hemorrhaging south africa is, both in what i hear and the little bit i experienced in the summer- i believe it would have be worse had events been allowed to take their "natural" course. then again, maybe if one side had managed to massacre the other one could argue they would no longer have to live side by side in pain.

maybe africa just doesn't get breaks.

12-??-01

i am behind in everything these days. there's a desperation to being behind and a strange comfort. guilt is more comfortable than boredom.

it's winter here. summer in macquarie island, which has one of my favorite web cams. this means that i'm not depressed any more, and theoretically neither are they. i have an odd reversal of SAD, and i'll be at my most vibrant until about mid spring next year, when- if i follow the pattern of the past- it will all come crashing down to the point where i am struggling for the will to live.

danny suggested we get a lightbox and keep it off.

i'm posting this mainly to get on ted's good side. and so i know where it is later. i like the bit about it the study being too limited to measure the power of God. that grant will be sooooo... fun to write.

12-5-01 (posted late)

i saw robert anton wilson last night- i felt shy, and i didn't ask anything. besides, my questions about how it's different to write with a partner versus writing alone seemed really pedestrian next to the questions from the contingent that thought that queen elizabeth turned into a lizard at night and consumed her servants.

11-08-01

i really hate proprietary software these days- but not for the reasons RMS would approve of. i hate it because it doesn't work well and there's no one to mail when it all goes to hell, because i can't go and see if my problem is in the bug database or if there's a work around. and for all that i have to pay money. all this amateurish software stuff has spoiled me terribly.

geek corps: these guys have my number way too much. danny said he would take me to their booth this week. he was doing this to spend more time with me, but if i'm winging my way to ghana soon for a 4 month stint this plan will have backfiled.

been learning about shareholder activism. as danny says, there's always ways to hack the system. now, to figure out how to automate it.

i've been learning the buried history of the american labor movement- amazing stuff. i should embellish some stories on here sometime.

i still think money is as bad as any obsolete technology. i need to find some interesting fridge economist mailing list to join. because clearly i don't get enough mail.

10-26-01

yesterday was my old friend art's birthday. we haven't really spoken in a long time. when we have, it's been with the muted conversational content that ex lovers and old, betrayed friends have, where the person and the idea of the person have come into conflict. i hope he had a good birthday.

i really really really really loved this story. if i was still teaching, i'd make the kids do reports on it, and get into trouble. it is magical mp3ness.

go to www.audiogalaxy.com. search for alan moore. slowly sink in to the drawl spiralling into incoherence. don't make the mistake people make with illuminatus and try to follow along- just go along with it until the olfactory hallucinations kick in.

automated civil war barometer - very foundation. very psychohistory meets perl script. we need to play around with more of these.

10-24-01

i've been thinking about heroes. i like my heroes life size and human, because we have a world to save and we have to do it with what we realistically have to work with. i'm sick to death of the lie of hard work, or the lie of genius.

i believe that most interesting things happen because of 1% inspiration, 5% hard work, and 94% wittering, self doubt, luck, hope, hope lost, giving up, getting bored giving up, trying again... people with no advantage over me, no difference, and any day i could wake up to find myself as one of my heroes.

these are my heroes right now:
danny hillis- for long now, and the simple loving voice in which he talks about great things.
alan moore- because he's very very good at writing and being interesting and human about it.
ani difranco- for falling apart and back together again though the same albun, performance, sentence, etc...
marcia kadanoff- because she is a struggling artist of business,and as such has taught me a redeamability to its culture. and because i once heard her exclaim with a sort of exacerbation that it was like these VCs didn't want to grow businesses, all they were interested in is money.
danny o'brien- for being quiet and funny and lazy and for accomplishing so much between naps. and for admitting to haddock he married me.

10-19-01

and now this:

danny received this around sep 10th. there is still a vile little part of my brain giggling.

10-18-01

danny and i yesterday had a long talk about why we still use the instruments of the monetarists, even though nobody believes they work. as near as i can tell the answer is that economics is a black art beyond what man is supposed to dabble in. we seems sometimes to see all scaled up logistics like that, and macroeconomics is just a scaled up logistical exercise of the logistics of resource sharing. we are living in the realm of dynamic logistics undeniable these days and other than network engineers i think we are almost to a man in denial of it. the macro issues we face in a massively connected world are more in the realm of mathematical modeling of complex systems then they are of cultural or ethical questions. even if we all agreed on what to do next it remains that we are possibly beyond the human neural capacity to cope with the number of variables converging in our new globalized world. i found what douglas engelbart's doing these days as a beyond the weblog way to approach this issue. bootstrap seems kind of a complexity org the way the long now foundation is a time org.

i lay in bed last night thinking about mailings of anthrax, bombing afganistan with food and ordinance, and other forms of pot shots. it's so far beneath the real problems presenting themselves at this point in human history as to be baffling. it's like we're approaching the singularity at the same time we are still flinging our own shit at each other. there's a new study by the american physio accoc. that suggests it might be because of the boys, but i don't buy it that much. it's too easy to overcome much of these influence by too many people. i think it plays far less of a role in humans than in less complex mammals, or at the very least is very plastic and highly affected by other as yet unknown processes.

i believe the next great change in what it means to be human will be self awareness. i think the self awareness we have now is rudimentary, distorted and sporadic. barely more than a worm's, plus language. we think the mere concept of "i" is self awareness, i think we are painfully wrong. self awareness is a looking inward so far that you see out again. for a moment i glimpsed some small scope of this reading about acetylcholine, the neurotransmitter implicated in memory among other things. i realized that at that moment acetylcholine in my body was carrying information about itself, as it is as i am writing this. i understood in some rough way how i was working while i was working. there is a mastery of choice and perception that lies before us, if we don't fuck it up. we at our present state cannot predict or understand anymore than proverbial homo sapians could have comprehended wordplay. i guess though that's what singularity means.

latest experiment i would do if i had an fMRI back at the house: selecting the favorite picture of the subject in a series based on the responses int he brain of test subjects. then maybe building the most aesthetically pleasing picture from components- the idea is that if we had strong real time deep in the brain imaging we could heuristically build interfaces on the fly to technologies and learning materials. we could do so much that way- enhance our learning and productivity processes more directly.

danny says my vision of the future is scary to most people. i guess it is. most people would cease to exist as they are and change into something else. but that's nothing new, it's just they'd know it this time.

9-21-01

i'm still really bad at this. but at least i'm including a random image.

From the Guns, Germs, and Steel school of thinking: a study of frost. GG&S was the book that launched me into a 8 month nihilistic quasi-suicidal fit. also, it kind of threw around some bad anthropology, but it was obviously good enough to bring me close to giving up on the human race. the frost thing isn't quite so sweeping, but is the kind of random thing that supports my belief that the fundamental difference between people is their luck.

i've tried to avoid saying much about 9/11, but i will link to robin's page- i liked it the most of everything i read. i liked its ambivalence. i also put up a dumb little page of things i liked. i'll feel better if we all ignore it.

everything you believe is physical. this is so much more important than i've figured out the words to explain.

i finally looked at they rule, and i lost hours.

i fell bad for posting this here since danny asked me for it, but hey, i *did* find it first. otoh, as i believe we are the entire cross over readership of each other's pages i imagine there's no reason he can't post it too. namu amida budtsu, RAW style. does it count when i type it?

9-3-01
like fuel cells? this looked interesting. it's not the clean clean power everyone screams about, but we won't get that. we'll get things along the way to that.

i have seen the Quinn's disease thing. maybe someone down there saw my site. how will i ever know?

what website would you use to save the earth? i've been trying to apply in my mind the cathedral and the bazaar to how we could build a different kind of movement. like, everyone saving little earths in their spare time.
god, that sounds stupid. oh well. i have been.

i'm really looking for someone to help with dumbcode. then i will try to relaunch it. damnit. if you love it, will you help it?

random association:

ani difranco is brilliant. anyone who can pull off the rhyme: what waste of thumbs that are opposable/to make machines that are disposable is either a genius, or dave green, or both.

i'm trying to decide if i'm poly-normal or poly-fi.

i still live in silicon valley. i still hate it.

right now, i'm thinking about moving these places

hawaii
new mexico
illinois
portland
arizona (not pheonix)

i'm back in portland for a week as of tomorrow evening. if you want to ping me while there, try my phone. 408 391 7113.

now that i've decided to write my essay about israel, i can't figure out how to start it.

how do you like my pointless and quiet whining now?

8-30-01
my husband put up oblomovka, so i feel pressure to do the same thing. well not really, but i'm trying to get my thoughts together and a scratchpad seemed like the best place.

this isn't really a weblog, it's a scratchpad. i'm trying to organize my thoughts in one place, and this is it. i don't care if anyone ever sees it, so don't send in your spelling corrections if you do. please, don't.

at random... here's my window on the world. i've been actually trying not to look out of it lately. news seems to throw me into a near suicidal depression. nevertheless, my remains my homepage on every browser. i guess yahoo has my number. note the defunct reminders to update dumbcode that make me feel guilty every other day, and the investment losses i have in my one small mutual fund.

been thinking a lot today.... trying to come up with a website that will save the world. trying to figure out how to record my kaindu experiment. trying to name the banned books website. trying to figure out how to put together a better lifestyle site for westerners that want to make a lighter footprint on the world.

mostly trying to figure out how to get a momentum to do anything.

i should probably tell the story of africa soon.