Wow, does this sound familiar …

Lithermon’s-load: A greater load than can well be carried at one time, but is nevertheless undertaken to save the trouble of another journey — a lazy man’s load. Old English lither, bad, wicked, has a secondary meaning of “lazy” in some of our early writers. 
— Georgina Jackson’s Shropshire Word Book, 1879 

(from Jeffrey Kacirk, Forgotten English page-a-day calendar, 25 Jul 2008)

I’m always very much into carrying everything in one load if at all possible, even if it means for a precarious burden. Maybe because I get so easily distracted at the other end. Or because I’m, indeed, lazy. I need to remember this word.

Filed under :: Personal :: Writing and Language
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While there’s something to be said for someone at the head of the CIA having a long history in the intelligence community, there’s also an argument that someone who’s basically a strong administrator and manager is at least as good an idea — especially when there’s so much housecleaning to be done.

And what can we expect from Leon Panetta in the CIA? It’s worth looking at the article he wrote for Washington Monthly last spring.

Fear is blinding, hateful, and vengeful. It makes the end justify the means. And why not? If torture can stop the next terrorist attack, the next suicide bomber, then what’s wrong with a little waterboarding or electric shock?

The simple answer is the rule of law. Our Constitution defines the rules that guide our nation. It was drafted by those who looked around the world of the eighteenth century and saw persecution, torture, and other crimes against humanity and believed that America could be better than that. This new nation would recognize that every individual has an inherent right to personal dignity, to justice, to freedom from cruel and unusual punishment.

We have preached these values to the world. We have made clear that there are certain lines Americans will not cross because we respect the dignity of every human being. That pledge was written into the oath of office given to every president, “to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution.” It’s what is supposed to make our leaders different from every tyrant, dictator, or despot. We are sworn to govern by the rule of law, not by brute force.

We cannot simply suspend these beliefs in the name of national security. Those who support torture may believe that we can abuse captives in certain select circumstances and still be true to our values. But that is a false compromise. We either believe in the dignity of the individual, the rule of law, and the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, or we don’t. There is no middle ground.

We cannot and we must not use torture under any circumstances. We are better than that.

Filed under :: Homeland Security
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Everyone and their brother (including my brother’s brother) is linking to this Xkcd strip over in Google Reader, so I might as well share it with those of you who don’t check out my Unblogged Bits. 

I was a wee lad (well, a teen) when the metric system became the ostensible official system of measurement in the US. And … feh. Nobody uses it for anything common; it’s been slipstreamed into food containers (2 liter bottles, 375ml booze, etc.), but when it comes to distance or temperature — well, Fahrenheit and the Imperial Gallon seem to be taken as an Inalienable Right by the majority of the the US.

Why don’t we use the metric system here in the US. First, there’s little apparent incentive, compared to the cognitive pain. It matters not to me whether the next exit is 5 miles or 8 klicks — but kilometers are unfamiliar, thus painful to actually think about. You’re only going to learn to “think” in them if … well, if that’s all you’re given. Which means that someone needs to be willing to dare the wrath of “It’s unfamiliar (and foreign), thus eeeevillll!!!” goofballs in order to make that what people end up seeing.

The problem is, of course, lack of political will. All of those interstate highway signs have been changed at least once since 1976, but nobody in Congress or the Executive saw any cause or had the guts to actually shift things over to kilometers. Federal forms (and I keep harping on “federal” because the states would never do it) don’t require height and weight in meters and kilos. All those standardized Federal tests for kids don’t use metrics where they could, either. The Feds — the only entity that could actually make it happen in this country — don’t. And so we limp along in a world gone metric, like the obstinate immigrant uncle who (ironically) never thought it worth while to learn English.

The greatest service the Founders did for us was give us a decimal currency. Otherwise, I’m sure we’d still be counting in shilling-and-six-pence increments.

Anyway, if you want to learn metric, you could do far worse than check out the above-linked cartoon. Have fun.

Filed under :: Politics & Law :: ZT & PC
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More details (no use repeating myself) over at Blog of Heroes. Will this madness never end?

Filed under :: Big Business :: Gaming :: Media Moguls
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People are, by definition, influenced to do something by incentives, and influenced against doing things by disincentives. As these NYT Op-Eds demonstrate, last year’s financial system series of collapses and crises came about basically because everyone was incented to take larger and larger risks and nobody was disincented … because the prospective disincenters (e.g., the credit rating agencies, the federal oversight organizations) were themselves disincented from doing anything about it. 

Everyone had everything to gain from shutting up and throwing another quarter into the slot machine (or not saying anything when everyone else did), and nothing to lose by letting it go on.

Until we all lost, of course.

The End of the Financial World as We Know It - NYTimes.com
How to Repair a Broken Financial World - NYTimes.com 

The most coherent description of how things went south I’ve seen, and the best suggestions for actually doing something about it (Rule #1 - When you are in a hole, stop digging). 

Required reading (not something I say lightly).

Filed under :: Big Business
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I’m a few days late with this, but it’s a fun enough meme it’s worth working it: Places (other than home) where I spent the night last year … 

• Pasadena, CA
• San Francisco, CA
• Geyserville, CA
• Oakland, CA
• Sacramento, CA
• Lake San Antonio, CA
• Villa Park, CA
• Westchester, NY
• New York City, NY
• Portland, OR
• Leiden, The Netherlands
• Mumbai, India
• Diverse points over Canada, the Atlantic Ocean, and Central Asia

Filed under :: Personal Q&A :: Travel
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So they’ve announced the new Doctor for Doctor Who: Matt Smith. His main noteworthy quality seems to be his youth, at age 26.

Cue angst, fear, and trembling amongst the TruWhoFen (as would be the case with any casting).

Me? I reserve judgment until I see him actually in the role for a bit (I was cool to David Tennant at first, too). I don’t think his youth is either a qualification or disqualification, any more than the prospects for a black or female time Lord overly-disturbed me. 

Certainly the official word is enthusiastic.

Steven Moffat, the programme’s executive producer and new lead writer, said, “The Doctor is a very special part, and it takes a very special actor to play him. You need to be old and young at the same time, a boffin and an action hero, a cheeky schoolboy and the wise old man of the universe.

“As soon as Matt walked through the door and blew us away with a bold and brand new take on the Time Lord, we knew we had our man. 2010 is a long time away but rest assured the 11th doctor is coming – and the universe has never been so safe.”

Good enough (provisionally) for me. I’m more worried that — well, it seems that at one point it was determined that Time Lords could only have twelve regenerations and so thirteen incarnations. We’re beginning to run a bit low …

Filed under :: Media - TV - Doctor Who
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Scientists claim that they’ve found some folk for whom romance lasts a lifetime, defying the clichés and “common sense.”

A team from Stony Brook University in New York scanned the brains of couples who had been together for 20 years and compared them with those of new lovers. They found that about one in 10 of the mature couples exhibited the same chemical reactions when shown photographs of their loved ones as people commonly do in the early stages of a relationship.

Previous research suggested that the first stages of romantic love, a rollercoaster ride of mood swings and obsessions that psychologists call limerence, start to fade within 15 months. After 10 years the chemical tide has ebbed away.

The scans of some of the long-term couples, however, revealed that elements of limerence mature, enabling them to enjoy what a new report calls “intensive companionship and sexual liveliness”.

The researchers nicknamed the couples “swans” because they have similar mental “love maps” to animals that mate for life such as swans, voles and grey foxes.

The reactions of the swans to pictures of their beloved were identified on MRI brain scans as a burst of pleasure-producing dopamine more commonly seen in couples who are gripped in the first flush of lust.

Grrrraowrrrr …

“The findings go against the traditional view of romance – that it drops off sharply in the first decade – but we are sure it’s real,” said Arthur Aron, a psychologist at Stony Brook. Previous research had laid out the “fracture points” in relationships as 12-15 months, three years and the infamous seven-year itch.

Aron said when he first interviewed people claiming they were still in love after an average of 21 years he thought they were fooling themselves: “But this is what the brain scans tell us and people can’t fake that.”

I can say — having long past those “fracture points,” (we’ll hit 14 years married this year, plus a bit of courting romance prior to that), I love — and am deeply attracted to (hubba-hubba!) — Margie as intensely as I was back then. Which is not to say that it isn’t possible to have a long-term, positive, pleasant relationship without being all googly-eyed toward each other all the time, but I’m glad (despite my daughter’s embarrassment) that’s the way we are.

Filed under :: Love and Marriage :: Science
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The Mars “Spirit” Rover, is celebrating its five year anniversary. It was only supposed to operate for three months.

These rovers are incredibly resilient considering the extreme environment the hardware experiences every day,” said John Callas, project manager for Spirit and Opportunity at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion laboratory in Pasadena, California.

“We realise that a major rover component on either vehicle could fail at any time and end a mission with no advance notice, but on the other hand, we could accomplish the equivalent duration of four more prime missions on each rover in the year ahead.”

Together, the rovers have driven more than 20km, and returned more than 36 gigabytes of data. This has included a quarter of a million images.

Spirit is exploring a 150km-wide bowl-shaped depression known as Gusev Crater. It has found an abundance of rocks and soils bearing evidence of extensive exposure to water. Opportunity is on the other side of the planet, in a flat region known as Meridiani Planum.

The two rovers are showing their age, but continue to push on. Because of a jammed wheel, Spirit has to drive backwards to go anywhere — but wheel scraping revealed some valuable info about minerals just below the surface dust.

When NASA manages to do something right, the results are amazing. Spirit and its sister, Opportunity, will have the Mars surface to themselves for a while, though — as both NASA and ESA have both postponed their next Mars probes due to budget issues.

See also: NASA - Mars Rovers Near Five Years of Science and Discovery 

Filed under :: Science
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So led by a comment on my Cusper post, I find that the more accepted term for the folks born mid-50s to mid-60s (self included) is the less-other-referential but still-goofy ”Generation Jones.”

American social commentator Jonathan Pontell defined this generation and coined the term naming it.^[4] Generation Jones has been referred to as a heretofore lost generation between the Baby boomers and Generation X, since prior to the popularization of Pontell’s theory, its members were included with either the Boomers or X’ers.

The name “Generation Jones” has several connotations, including: a large anonymous generation, and a “Keeping up with the Joneses” competitiveness borne from this generation’s populous birth years. The connotation, however, which is perhaps best known stems from the slang word “jones” or “jonesing”, which means a yearning or craving. Jonesers were the people who as teens in the 1970’s made this slang word popular, but beyond this historical claim, many believe the concept of jonesing is among this generation’s key collective personality traits. Jonesers were given huge expectations as children in the optimistic 1960’s, and then confronted with a different reality as they came of age in the pessimistic 1970’s, leaving them with a certain unrequited, jonesing quality.

Um, okay.

Filed under :: Fourth Estate :: Personal
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Conceived as a show-string budget, free-to-view-online mini-series during the Writers Strike, this Joss Whedon production struck Internet gold. It’s been available via iTunes since, but the DVD came out in time for Christmas … and on Amazon, it’s currently #3 in Movies & TV, #1 in Musicals & Performing Arts, #1 in Science Fiction comedy, and #2 in Superheroes. Yow!

Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog 

Overall
Story		Acting
Production		Features

Story: Can an up-and-coming super-villain achieve infamy and fortune … and work up the nerve to talk to the girl he has a crush on? In three episodes we get comedy, tragedy, and highly witty (and poignant)music …

Now in 42 minutes total run time you’re not going to get Shakespeare. Or are you? In many ways, the tale of Doctor Horrible — complete with diabolical laughter, death rays, laundromats romances, and the most obnoxious arch-nemesis super-hero on record, not to mention an Evil League of Evil — is as nuanced and layered (and well-written) as, if not the Bard, then 99% of most TV show episodes or full-length movies out there. You can watch it for yocks (at least for a while), but there are plot currents of conflicted ambition, tangled priorities, unanticipated consequences, hero-worship, anger management, media manipulation, the nature of evil, the choices we make (implicit and explicit), and the paths taken, rejected, or simply overlooked.

In other words, you could write some pretty academic-sounding papers out of this piece of apparent fluff. But you could also just watch it for its sometimes-uncomfortable entertainment value. Or both!

I’m not a huge fan of the musical form (with a few exceptions), but the tunes here do exactly what a good musical should do — advance the plot, explore the characters singing them, and be cleverly and richly structured in and of themselves. The only flaws in the tunes, in fact, is that they often cut off abruptly as the action requires, making them (marginally) less whistleable afterwards.

The tale was written by Joss Whedon, Maurissa Tancharoen, Jed Whedon, and Zack Whedon, and the music was by Joss and Jed with lyrics by Maurissa. Most of them played roles, too (as did many of the crew).

Acting: Neil Patrick Harris nails Dr. Horrible, in all his ironic, awkward, angry, tongue-tied, victimized-and-victmizer glory. Nathan Fillion similarly excels with the cheesy lines and leather gauntlets of self-centered Captain Hammer. Felicia Day’s Penny — the romantic point of contention between Horrible and Hammer — is done well, but the role is not up to either the other two.

They all, surprisingly, sing pretty well, too. (Well, Harris has sung on Broadway, but he’s not usually known for his singing.)

Production:  It was conceived on a shoestring (“low six figures,” funded by Joss himself), and the production expenditures show. None of it is detractingly cheap, but it’s all clearly low-budget. But the need for elaborate SFX in a super-villain musical is actually less than you’d think, and the camera work and direction make up for the B-movie lack elsewhere.

Features: Some good material here — one commentary track puts most of the cast and crew into “Commentary: The Musical” (which is often LOL funny, but also more than a bit self-indulgent). The normal commentary track has most of the players there, but is only fair at actually adding much to the tale. The “Making Of” featurettes are standard and informative. The fan-provided application for the Evil League of Evil are sometimes amusing, more often lame. Lacking, sadly, are the (oft-commented) out-takes.

Overall: If you enjoyed the original, the DVD makes for fine at-will viewing, complete with a chance to spot some interesting stuff going on in the background and see it all on the big screen. If you haven’t — well, the DVD is cheap, and the fun is anything but horrible. Not for kids, but good stuff for everyone else who’s looking for a witty, iconoclastic, occasionally jarring musical that you can watch in 42 minutes.

Other links:
Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
“Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog” (2008) - IMDB
Dr. Horrible - Official site
 

Filed under :: Media - TV
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We flew back from Faerie last evening, a wholly uneventful jaunt save for the irony of my pointing out the signs saying that only full-size console games or full-size DVD players needed to be pulled from luggage … at which point, the X-ray guy demanded we pull the portable GameBoy and portable DVD player from Katherine’s carry-on (they overlapped in the X-ray, you see, so he couldn’t tell what they were). Oh, and the gal who had to riffle through one of our bags to determine that the light fixtures we’d bought from Ikea weren’t bombs. Oh, and the guy who sent our 30 lb. piece of check-in down the conveyor belt first so that when he measured the two at 52 lbs. we had to shuffle the extra stuff into our already-full carry-ons. But aside from all that, the flight was fine.

The house was, for the most part, intact. I do think we had a raccoon wander through — the gingerbread house on the dining room table was partially demolished, and skittles scattered here and there. The cat food downstairs was untouched, but that upstairs was sprinkled around a bit. Most important, some of the bathrooms showed raccoon dirty raccoon prints around the toilet seats, though not much food-washing debris within.

That was it, though (helped by our latching the pantry, perhaps), so no worries there.

Oh, and then there was the cable bill. We pay our cable bill automagically via credit card each month, tickety-boo, and I’m usually pretty lax at examining the cable bill. Well, back in October, the credit card was expiring, so they sent us a letter to let us know. I called and cleared it up on 23 October (per notation on the letter). Except, apparently, the card was declined (or miskeyed, or whatever). Did Comcast send us another letter? Nope. Any phone calls? Nada. E-mails? Zilch. Did the bills get put in envelopes that looked any different from the “Everything’s okay, thanks for paying by credit card” envelopes? Nuh-uh.

So we got back home to no cable TV (and no DVR) and no Internet. And an excellent reason not to take Comcast up on those offers to take over our phone service, too, since of course we had to call them to find out had happened.

Harrumph.

Well, got that all cleared up, but in the meantime, we opened the gifts around the tree (more goodies! yay!), then, with Katherine a-bed, Margie and I watched the whole Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog DVD (I mean, the whole DVD, bonus features and all), stayed up way too late, but got to sleep in our own beds, which was quite nice.

Nice vacation, great to see the family and friends, but it’s great to be home.

Filed under :: Hi-Tech :: Holidays :: Media - TV :: Travel
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I went and ran the numbers on my quotations database, WIST, yesterday, the first time since February 2007.  I’m currently at 6600 quotations, vs. the 5100 I was at back then. Huzzah. WIST is one of my “success stories” so far as pastimes go, something I actually get to and keep updated on a regular basis.

The top ten authors (by quote count) are from, almost exclusively, dead white guys (there’s one live one): Shakespeare, Twain, Bertrand Russell, CS Lewis, Shaw, Chesterton, Emerson, Bill Watterson, Bierce, and Franklin. Still, not a bad group to rhetorically pal around with.

Filed under :: WIST
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Okay, time to do the recap of last year’s resolutions and set some new/refreshed ones for this year.

Spend more time with Kitten. Keep up the karate stuff, but also be more involved on a daily basis with her homework and other stuff. Get that time in before she decides that Daddy is (like New year Resolutions) passé. 

I think I did okay with this this year. I tried to get Katherine more involved in stuff around the house (sometimes self-servingly), I tried to stay in touch with what-all she was doing, and, of course, we maintained the karate stuff.

Get my virtual world in order. Get my blogs updated and cleaned up. Increase traffic to WIST. Get my photos caught up, including the stuff I have on other sites.

The blogs are still running on older versions of MT, but I made very significant progress on photos (using Flickr, and getting all of my 2008 photos, of which there were a plentitude, up), and got into a solid, regular rhythm on WIST, leading to a slow, steady rise in traffic.

Write. Edit. Write. No real progress with that this past year. It’s not clear to me how, amidst all the other commitments I have, how to leverage this — but it’s something I really want to do.

This one was just a general flop. It’s a matter of devotion and investment of time, and I just didn’t. Disappointing.

Be fit. Repeat the 1,500 miles, keep up the karate — and find a new Geek Diet tool. Get back under 200 by June, and to 185 by the end of the year. There are some things I can do toward that end (that are sustainable and rational); I just need to do them.

Mixed bag here. On the one hand, I did make the 1,500 miles (close but solidly), and kept up on the karate. On the downside, I didn’t find a better Geek Diet tool, and my year-end weight is actually (at 217) higher than it was last New Year.

Ditto for last year’s addendum, of course.

Well, I hope I’m being a good, supportive, helpful, loving husband. Margie still puts up with me, so I guess I’m doing something right.

So, what to do for this coming year?

I’m going to take for granted that I’m going to be an involved husband and father. No specifics I can think of to do with this.

1. Be fit: A true cliché, I know, but … Continue with the 1,500 Miles to Nowhere program. Continue karate. And … yes, start tracking calories again, convenient tool or not. 200 lbs. by 1 June, 185 by the end of the year. Next year, no question about whether 36s need to be exchanged!
2. Be photographically organized: Continue with the photography conversion and updating. All 2009 photos, four additional years at my discretion will get uploaded and online in a single place.
3. Be blogically up to date:  Movable Type to the current version and all features working once again.
4. Be genealogical: New! Get my genealogy research back up and running … one of those outstanding “projects” that never seems to quite get traction.

That’s a lot, frankly, given what seem to be constant conflicts for time. I’d say they’re in priority order, too, and my main focus will be back on #1.

I’m not putting in anything “creative” in there — writing per se is dropping off the list this year, given both track record, competition, and recognizing that I get at least some of that out through other venues. In a sense, all the items 2-4 employ some some measure of creativity (and writing), and that will have to do for the nonce.

Filed under :: Blogging :: Blogging - Technical :: Family :: Holidays :: Personal
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Or, instead, get an official warning letter in your employment file if someone sees the book you’re reading about how students at Notre Dame University defeated the Ku Klux Klan in 1924 … and decides that a book with “Klan” and pictures of cross burnings on the cover is actually racial harassment.

(via George) 

Filed under :: ZT & PC
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Very cool German ad for Saturn. No cars visible, but …

Spiffy!

Filed under :: Big Business :: Media - TV
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Welcome to 2009!

Filed under :: Holidays
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Meantime, everyone have a pleasant and safe New Year’s Eve, and we’ll see you in (yikes) ‘09!

Filed under :: Holidays :: Personal
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Dumbocracy by Marty Beckerman (2008)

Overall		Writing
Re-Readability		Info

The subtitle of the book is “Adventures with the Loony Left, the Rabid Right, and Other American Idiots,” and in keeping with that Beckerman proposes and entertainingly demonstrates how the fringe of both the Left and the Right have more in common with each other than with folks in the center:  True Believers who Know Better than You Do what You Should Be Allowed to Do, Think, or Believe. Whether lambasting Rick Santorum or Andrea Dworkin, there’s almost always a chuckle every paragraph or three.

In different chapters, he takes on extemist ideologues over abortion, gay rights, foreign policy, the Middle East, politics, women’s rights, pornography, pot, and alcohol. In each case, he shows how the folks shouting the loudest tend to have the least concern for individual freedom, instead viewing their ideological ends as justifying any means, and the cause of their personal culture war brooking no Geneva Conventions. Brainwashing children, banning speech, and criminalizing dissent aren’t tools of just one wing of the nuttery.

Unfortunately, Beckerman’s work suffers from two significant flaws, and one lesser.

First, philosophically, his assertion that there are no principles that must never be compromised is somewhat sketchy (or at least open to more serious debate than he’s willing to entertain here). Most of the specific criticisms he offers up are about the symptoms of the extremist ideological thinking, not the issues underlying the extremes. I suspect Beckerman would suggest that, given that most non-extreme people have a realpolitik ability to accept or ignore or maintain cognitive dissonance over most such issues, e.g., abortion, the extremists in the matters ought to do the same, or at least have a stiff drink and STFU about it more often. For myself, I wonder if the centrist majority is willing to allow the extremists to natter on simply to externalize (and thus ignore) their own internal debates on the subjects.

More importantly, to demonstrate how whack-job folks at either end of the spectrum are, Beckerman tends to simplify and over-summarize their positions beyond fairness, sacrificing nuance for humorous or rhetorical effect, and, in so doing, falling prey to the same black-and-white thinking that he’s lampooning. As someone who recognized (and blogged about) some of the instances he mentions, it does make a difference. Though highly footnoted, the tirades against the Left have the same sound-bite attack quality as if they came from Rush or Hugh or Michelle; the ones against the Right are similarly nuggetized and stripped of important (or any) context.

A third, weaker critique is that while Beckerman certainly finds folks on the Left to poke fun / scorn at, his natural inclination seems more toward lambasting the Right. This is paralleled by his observations on the Middle East and Israel where, as a Jew, he feels more iconoclastically comfortable ridiculing (at length) aspects of Orthodox Judaism and Israeli Jingoism than in his less pointed criticisms of Islam and anti-Israeli terror.

All that said, it’s a generally entertaining book that most people will enjoy reading, especially if they don’t mind seeing a few of their own oxen gored, and are willing to console themselves with a large drink or other irresponsible pastime. Which Beckerman would argue is how more people ought to spend their hours rather than trying to enforce rules of ideological and moral virtue on each other.

Filed under :: Media - Books
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Well, we survived visiting Sean and Robbie’s dojo — the UMAC center in Rancho Cucamonga, which practices Shorin-ryu style karate (second cousin to the Shotokan that we work in).  

It was a smallish class, being a pick-up between Christmas and New Years — three black belts plus two other students plus Katherine and me. It was also heavily into sparring for prolonged periods (cue red-faced Dave huffing and puffing like mad, while my videographing brother chortled under his breath). 

Katherine did quite well and had a lot of fun, and it was a pleasure both to practice with Sean and Robbie and to have a chance to meet Sensei Rick Duffy.

We dragged Jackie off to this event, as well as the earlier-in-the-day quick tour of the Pomona College campus, the first time we’d been back there in a couple of years. (I took advantage of the visit to nab a Juanita’s burrito).

Filed under :: Food & Drink :: Karate :: School Daze
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Mmmmmm … Juanita’s burritos …

Filed under :: Food & Drink - Restaurants
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