Now I know that there are plenty of months that have 31 days in them, but for some reason, March seemed unbearably long. I don’t know if it’s simply the fact that it’s Lent and like the good brainwashed Catholic that I am, I feel like I’ve been sent into exile to the Desert, bandying words with the Devil himself.

Maybe I can use the excuse of working too many night shifts in a row. I have never gotten used to the idea of working at night then going to sleep during the day. I suppose there was a time in high school when I did precisely just that, except that I never really did it more than two days in a row, and I wasn’t responsible for other people. But, I seriously had a mental meltdown yesterday.

Maybe mad cow disease is already catching up to me.

So I remember looking at my calendar this month and making sure that Wednesday night/Thursday morning was the last night shift I had to do before being off. I remember staring at it repeatedly because, honestly, it seemed to be far less work than I am accustomed to. (Not that I’m complaining, mind you!)

So, since it appeared what was effectively a three-day weekend, I decided to head back up to Los Angeles. Now, having only slept five hours after finishing up a shift at 7am makes this a little dicey, so I waited until after rush hour to make sure that (1) I wasn’t too drowsy and (2) so I wouldn’t have to drive through the horrendous amounts of traffic between S.D. and L.A.

All is well until I get to Oceanside. Now, despite leaving after 7pm, there was still a bunch of traffic after the 5/805 Merge, so it took me a while to get there. That’s when the uncertainty set in.

All of the sudden, I am gripped by the feeling that maybe, just maybe I actually had to work another shift this night. Of course, the only copy of my schedule I have is online. Luckily I have my laptop on me, and I hope to God that I actually saved the pdf onto my hard drive. I get off the freeway since I have to get gas anyway and boot up. No dice. Futiley, I try to look for a wi-fi hotspot, but I guess downtown Oceanside is not the place to be for that sort of thing.

So I throw caution to the winds and drive on. There’s no way I’m going to head back home just now because I have this nagging feeling that I may just be failing my responsibilities.

By the time I get to San Onofre, I am yelling at myself for my general incompetence, deriding myself for my constant self-doubt and the inability to be sure about anything. My fears of the future grab me at the same time, and at this point I am just drowning with anxiety. I can’t handle this. I feel like I am diving straight into disaster. That I’m going to be a lamb thrown to the wolves, a perfect, idiotic sacrifice. Woe is me. That sort of thing.

Now I guess to be therapeutic about it, I should get into my fears and uncertainties, but frankly, I find it creepy to think about. Mostly it involves not being able to handle my job, and getting yelled at and torn limb from limb by my supervisors, and just feeling terrible and generally suicidal, but writing it down doesn’t do justice to the sense of impending doom it inspires within me. I don’t know, maybe you can just add generalized anxiety disorder to my growing list of psychiatric diagnoses.

Anyway, I am in the throes of an anxiety attack, flogging myself with rapidly building self-hatred. I can’t stand the fact that I am always so uncertain, always unable to make a decision. Maybe it won’t kill me, but it certainly might compromise my ability to keep someone else from dying, which is no good particularly since a huge part of my job it to keep people from dying.

So my wish: to be more decisive.

Unfortunately, this really doesn’t help me as I cruise through the O.C., and eventually I just hop off the highway, looking for a CompUSA that hopefully has their demo computers hooked up to the Internet.

Luckily, after much wasted driving around, I find myself in Tustin where there is a CompUSA with computers that have Internet access. I look at my schedule one more time, confirm the fact that, yes, I have the next three days off.

Feeling like such a dumbass, I play around with one of their Macs that has an M-Audio keyboard, and it happens to be running GarageBand. So I picked some random percussion loop, then chose a string instrument and tried to come up with something on the fly. Then from there I switched to the piano and tried to harmonize with the strings. Totally random shit, but I felt a whole lot better for some reason.

And, for triteness sake, I decided to take my lesson from that little impromptu jam session: you may not know what you’ll come up with, but once you have it, that’s all you’ve got to harmonize with. Or, maybe more vaguely: life is uncertain, the best you can do is try to come up with a decent counterpoint.

I, of course, am still quite anxious and worried about my future. Perhaps it is time I get me some happy pills or something.

I just watched “‘V’ for Vendetta” yesterday and found the veiled references to the Bush Administration highly entertaining. The idea in the movie of hundreds of thousands of people marching to topple a corrupt government was very moving, and juxtaposed against the real protests in Los Angeles which are actually continuing today, I find it even haunting.

All sorts of crazy stuff is going to happen this election year, as Republicans who are trying to get re-elected are trying to placate their (often xenophobic, racist) base, and I wonder if they realize what sort of storm they are going to unleash. As many a tyrant throughout history has learned to their dismay, you push the people too hard, and eventually, they will push back.

And to all those doomsayers who believe that a totalitarian future is in the cards for us, their claims given credence by the fact that in five years the Bush Adminstration has successfully pissed on and made invalid large parts of our Constitution, I say, fuck that.

While it’s true that ignorance and a cowardly desire for security will have (and has had) a good number of people embrace the latent fascism of neoconservatism, I think recent history has too many examples illustrating that totalitarianism necessarily falls apart.

In my own lifetime, I have seen Ferdinand Marcos toppled by the unarmed masses clogging the streets in the People’s Power Revolution, the modern prototype of (relatively) peaceful revolution as willed by the People. I have seen the Berlin Wall fall. I have seen the Soviet Union collapse. There was a time during the Clinton Administration, however brief, when we were not at war. A veritable Pax Americana which I thought would last for at least a few more years, and which may have lasted if the Supreme Court had upheld the will of the people and selected Gore instead of W. (I can’t help but feel that September 11 would’ve gone down differently if we had real leaders at the helm instead of the bunch of incompetents we’ve got now.)

I remember the optimistic ebullience of the early years of the Clinton era, before the reactionaries used their dirty tricks to get back into power. That was hope, in 1992. I do not think it is coincidence that the dot-com boom and Information Revolution occurred during this era, and while people are more apt to remember the bust that followed, you cannot deny that that era has made a permanent mark on history. The World Wide Web was born, the Internet was made available to the masses. Google went online, revolutionizing the accessibility of information. And in this same era, the Human Genome was sequenced. We made new strides in controlling the scourge that is AIDS.

These are the fruits of Freedom, peace and prosperity, and I refuse to believe that we are so short-sighted that we do not remember history this recent.

Tyrants beware. History is on our side.

And I cannot for the life of me understand anyone who criticizes “‘V’ for Vendetta” for its political message. How in hell does an American, in good conscience, defend a fascist totalitarian regime, even a fictional one? How does an American not stay true to his Revolutionary roots, and recognize that tyranny must be overthrown?

I suppose the question lies in the balance between freedom and security. But the Founding Fathers of the United States made their stance on this explicit:

Any people that would give up liberty for a little temporary safety deserves neither liberty nor safety. —Benjamin Franklin

The man who would choose security over freedom deserves neither. —Thomas Jefferson

If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or your arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen. —Samuel Adams

Give me liberty or give me death! —Patrick Henry

I know whose side I’m on.

I was walking through the Science Fiction and Fantasy section of the Borders in Glendale when a totally random thought occurred to me. I think what brought it to my mind is the question: what is the cause of evil? I was flipping through random fantasy novels where characters are neatly pigeon-holed into Good or Evil, and clearly in the real world nothing is that obvious.

And since I was born and raised Roman Catholic, I had no choice but to go back to my roots, and when you look at the Genesis and various apocrypha regarding Lucifer, it becomes quite clear that the first and the second sin is Pride.

I think that Islam makes it even more explicit that this is the sin of Iblis, and I think John Milton catches this sentiment very well in the line from Paradise Lost: “Better to rule in Hell than to serve in Heaven.”

So Satan’s rejection of God is the first sin: a sin borne of Pride, of thinking that you understand the pattern of the Universe better than anyone else. And so is Adam and Eve’s disobedience with regards to eating the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Some argue that they thought that they could usurp the knowledge of God themselves, once again demonstrating the attitude that they think they know better than anyone else.

And I think that this is a pretty accurate depiction of where Evil comes from: the unbending, insolent insistence that you of all people know exactly what the right thing to do is, and that everyone else is dead wrong.

You see this kind of sin well-evident in some Christian fundamentalists who insist that they hold the only key to salvation and that everyone else is just damned, not to mention their Islamic fundamentalist counterparts who will actually kill other people in the name of God, which is the ultimate blasphemy if you ask me. You see this level of arrogance in the Bush Administration, who, despite continuous setbacks and failures, simply refuse to admit that they made a mistake and that they are wrong.

The irony is that this kind of sinful pride is exactly what Jesus Christ rails against in the Gospels. He constantly mocks the Saducees and the Pharisees who insist that they are righteous and uphold the laws of God and would rather destroy Christ and his followers than admit to the possibility that there are other ways. Sometimes I can’t help but wonder if Fundamentalist Christians and greedy Republicans who claim to be Christian simply read a different Bible than I do.

Now maybe it’s misleading to call this sin “Pride” since the term actually has quite a few connotations in English. After all, you are supposed to be proud of yourself and your accomplishments, right? And it’s equally misleading to use the term “Shame,” which, while related, has a completely different connotation in English.

In Tagalog, the word hiya, while commonly translated as “shame,” probably better encompasses what I’m trying to say. One can also translate hiya as “shyness,” or perhaps even “humility.” This relates to a common Tagalog phrase that is used to deride another person: walang hiya, commonly translated as “without shame,” but probably more accurately meaning “without humility.” I know you can say the phrase “without humility” in English just as well, but it simply doesn’t have the negative connotation that walang hiya has. Being walang hiya is considered a definite character fault.

And so I can’t help but agree that Pride itself is the cause of all Evil in the world. As soon as someone begins to believe that they are the end-all, be-all of all answers, that they havev the Final Solution™, all sorts of hell breaks loose.

Which touches upon a pet topic of mine: the mistaken identification of Faith with Certainty. I remember this lesson well, which was given to me in high school by the Jesuits. Faith is not Certainty. Faith is about Doubt. If you cannot experience Doubt, than you cannot have Faith. Faith is never about knowing exactly what is going to happen next. It is precisely about not knowing, and perhaps about being afraid of the future, and yet still trusting to God that whatever needs to be will happen.

Or, to put it more succinctly, if you think you know all the answers, then what do you need God for?

And notice that it has nothing to do about everything turning out all right. Some of the most Faithful men and women in human history have outright been violated and massacred, and yet I do not think this at all degrades the nature of their Faith in God, nor God’s Faith in them. It all comes down to Jesus praying in the Garden at Gethsemane (Matthew 26:39): “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not what I want, but as You want.” This is the core of Faith, to put your life in God’s hands, even if it might mean being tortured and killed for doing what you think is right.

The Fundamentalists and religious extremists, the terrorists and the Bush Administration show none of this character of humility, and frankly, every time they talk about God, I feel they are outright blaspheming.

But what do I know.

Interestingly, the only Fantasy writer I’ve read who explicitly uses the Sin of Pride as the Source of All Evil is J.R.R. Tolkien. Now, this is probably not surprising since he was Catholic. Morgoth is clearly his interpretation of Satan. But it is interesting how many of his characters fall in The Lord of the Rings. Saruman starts believing more in his own craft and wisdom than in his mission for the Valar. Denethor trusts more to the foresight he gleans from the palantir than he does in the strength of his own people. Boromir is undone because he thinks that he can actually wield the One Ring against Sauron. All these people fall from grace because they think that they know exactly what the right thing to do is, trusting to their own devices instead of understanding their context in the world. Sauron himself falls precisely because of the folly of his own pride, unable to countenance the idea that his enemy would send such humble folk as hobbits into his land to destroy the One Ring rather than try to wield it against him. Then of course there are the Sins of Pride committed by both Elves and Men as depicted in The Silmarillion: Fëanor’s doom-laden Oath to retrieve the Silmarils at all cost in defiance of the Valar, destroying anyone in his way, even if it meant killing his own kin, and Ar-Pharazon’s attempt to land in Aman with the thought of wresting immortality from the Valar.

Now I lie, the two other major fantasy series that I’ve read Memory, Thorn, and Sorrow by Tad Williams and The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan likewise touch upon the Sin of Pride as the Source of All Evil. However, Williams’ world of Osten Ard is essentially a transcription of real-world human cultures to geography resembling Middle Earth, although his character of Ineluki the Storm King, who defied the rules of Nature in order to destroy his enemies at the cost of the lives of his kin and his own soul, is rather interesting. The Creation of the Sword Sorrow seems to be a rather nice allegory to the creation of nuclear weapons, although I would not accuse Williams of being intentionally allegorical. (The same allegory charge has been made with regard to Tolkien’s One Ring, which he vehemently denied.) And while Jordan’s story of the Westlands has become mired in such complexity far rivalling and far more tangled than Tolkien’s lucid intricacies, Sha’itan is simply a very thinly veiled version of Satan himself.

Then there is Ursula Le Guin’s completion of her Earthsea Cycle with The Other Wind. Le Guin prefers to keep Evil more realistic, and never relegates its Source to a single focal point like how most fantasy writers do. And given the Taoistic aura of Earthsea, Le Guin is more interested in discussing disorder and imbalance, from which both Evil and Good may arise. Still, the greatest source of disorder and imbalance in the world is again caused by a transgression of Pride, with Wizards attempting to obtain immortality by cheating the Dragons, and ending up perverting the very nature of Life and Death instead.

Now I don’t claim to be a holy person myself. The judgements I render are the judgements of a flawed person. And I realize that there are plenty of problems with living continuously in a sea of uncertainty. Sinful pride is unfortunately often confused with simple confidence, and without at least some confidence, it is extremely difficult to live in this world.

Interestingly, science itself however agrees with reality as being, by its nature uncertain. Despite Einstein’s wishful thought that “God does not play with dice,” the elucidation of the principles of quantum mechanics as embodied by the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle makes it quite obvious that it is not within our abilities to determine the exact state of reality. We can’t even be completely sure about things in completely theoretical realms, thanks to Gödel’s theorem of incompleteness.

Which simply leads me to this conclusion: Beware of anyone who is too sure of themself. Healthy amounts of doubt should be considered a virtue (although I agree that radical skepticism has its profound limitations.) Anyone without doubt should be watched closely, since they are likely to commit quite Evil acts in the name of Good.

Of course, even in my lifetime, it has become obvious that not enough people understand or even know history to prevent it from repeating itself. (As George Santayana notes: “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”) But I suppose all we can do is hope.

My dream (heh, that sounds really bizarre and grandiose but there it is) is to write a blogging engine that is centered around entries written in a custom XML language and transforming it to XHTML and RSS via XSLT. The only real reason I’d like to do this is because I spent an awful amount of time learning XML and XSLT back in the day and I think it would let me do things that I otherwise am not able to do easily without massive amounts of perl kludgery.

Eventually I built a kludgy blog engine that rendered only static pages using perl scripts and Makefiles (which was not a big deal since I didn’t have access to CGI on my ISP webspace anyway.) Then I moved to a real webhost, and figured I might as well try to get my money’s worth.

To that end, I succeeded in welding on comments using an existing perl script written by Phil Ringnalda (despite the fact that my webhost does support PHP, except that I didn’t want to mix scripting languages), but eventually I abandoned my homebrew and went with blosxom.

But the idea of writing entries in valid XML (that is, being able to use existing tools to check syntax) still stuck with me, except I couldn’t figure out how to write a plugin to do it.

So I had another look at the annotated version of Blosxom 2.0 and I think I figured out which lines actually read the entries (lines 366-372):

use vars qw/ $title $body $raw /;
if (-f "$path_file" && $fh->open("< $path_file")) {
     chomp($title = <$fh>);
     chomp($body = join '', <$fh>);
     $fh->close;
     $raw = "$title\n$body";
}

At this point I imagine I would insert some XML-parsing code to grab the title and this would suffice to allow me to use a custom format for my entries.

But to go further, in order to use XSLT to do the templating, I’d probably have to write a plugin to intercept interpolation and what-not, but that is probably getting ahead of myself.

Kevin Scaldeferri, who is now maintaining Blosxom 2, has an unpublished plugin that allows you to write entries in XHTML, so it would probably be good to see his code before I simply hack the base code of Blosxom.

Watching this on cable right now. The soundtrack is awesome. It sounds like a cRPG soundtrack, like an early Final Fantasy. I dig the electronic underpinnings that, while echoing the disco feel carried out of the ‘70’s into the early ‘80’s, also reminds me of the sound chips of the early microcomputers/personal computers like the SID chip of the Commodore 64 and the more primitive sound generators found in other 8-bit classic machines like the Atari 400, the Apple IIc, and the Nintendo Entertainment System.

Incidentally, the music magazine XLR8R has a short article about chiptune, also known as bit-hop, or 8-bit, or video game remix, and discusses how this is a still a living scene.

Anyway, back to “Ladyhawke”. It’s a real archetypal story—two lovers are separated by evil magic, cursing the man to be a wolf during the night, and the woman to be a hawk during the day, never both being human at the same time. The curse was enacted by an evil bishop, who lusted after the woman, and swore that if he could not have her, then noone would. That’s when the young thief (played wonderfully by Matthew Broderick) happens to wander into this fairy-tale. I dig it.

Reading random blog posts, I find this sentence incredibly sad:

You know that something is wrong with you when one of the only high points you can think of in the last 10 years is when someone convinced you not to kill yourself. —from messages in a klein bottle

I suppose I should always remember that life could always be worse.

Then again, it could also be a lot better, too. (To steal a line from Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin and Hobbes)

Issa reminds me about Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, whom I actually randomly met in the U.S. when she was still a Senator, trying to push extraordinarily broad suffrage—where even Filipino Americans who have long been U.S. citizens would be allowed to vote. I remember parts of an interesting conversation with her daughter, which would be quite typical amongst people in their late teens, but which has interesting undertones in someone involved in politics, in fact, whose family has been a political dynasty. (Like George W Bush, GMA is the daughter of a former president.) We were discussing how it is that our parents have so much say in our destiny when it comes to choosing what we end up doing in our lives. In my own case, for example, it is no accident that I ended up in health care. Both my parents are in health care, and so are almost all of my aunts. I swear it wasn’t until I was almost in college that I realized that there were other careers available out there in the world. But I wonder about what that means for someone who is part of a political family. Do you feel inexorably driven to do the same, to seek the power and the responsibility of leading?

Now I don’t know about GMA—she really strikes me as a bad photocopy of our own beloved W—someone out of touch with the Will of the People, who nevertheless clings tightly to the position of power they find themselves in, by fair means and foul. I remember scenes of GMA’s inauguration intercut with scenes from W’s inauguration (and considering the amount of security and armed guards present in Washington, D.C. because of the unprecedented magnitude of protesting, it was kind of difficult to tell which one was the third world country—I use the term because it tends to be synonymous with rampant corruption.) And I had a bad feeling about it all. It’s all turning into something like Marcos-lite, except I have serious doubts that the CIA will helicopter her to Hawaii, too.

Which reminds me how there is little mention of this particular front of the War on Terror. After all there are some U.S. Marines involved in the ongoing standoff between the Philippine Armed Forces and the Mindanao separatists. The basis of this front is because the separatists are Islamic, and a few of them actually are funded by AQ. Of course, no one ever mentions the fact that the separatists have been Muslim since the Middle Ages, and have been fighting a war against Western imperial aggression ever since the Spaniards came to town.

But I just wonder how much more the Filipino can stand of tyranny. I know that there is a strong cultural drive to believe in hierarchies and to respect power and that this results in few people wanting to rebel, but when the vise squeezes so tightly that you really don’t have any freedom at all to live a semi-normal life, what happens then? I am constantly reminded of a quote from JFK: “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.” I think this should serve as a warning to GMA, and probably to W and the neocons, too. If you really believe in Freedom, you’ll understand what this means, and why tyranny will always eventually be overthrown.

Mabuhay ang himagsikan, mga kapatid!

Shel Israel asks a very Zen-like question: what is web 2.0? I don’t know, but that’s my personal definition of web 2.0: server-based applications, which Steve Yegge briefly discusses in his article discussing programming language choice and Paul Graham mentions (in 2001, mind you!) in his article discussing programming language popularity.

What I mean by server-based apps are services that we use that rely on the processing power of the server rather than the client (your desktop computer). For example, Amazon.com, or Google and their multifarious spin offs (Gmail, Talk, Maps, et al), or Friendster/Myspace/Facebook/etc., del.icio.us, the list goes on and on, but I’m not that inured in the Brave New World yet. (Ridiculously, I’m actually quite conservative when it comes to technology—mostly, though, I think it’s laziness. As they say, if ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right?)

The ironic thing is that in some ways, we were in this exact same position in the pre-microcomputer (AKA pre-desktop computer) era, reliant on server processing. Sure, cel phones, and even mp3 players have much more processing power than the first microcomputers (my very first computer, the Commodore 64, ran on a 1 MHz CPU and only had 38k of RAM free—in contrast, my cel phone has at least a couple megs of RAM, and my PDA which I never use has a much faster processor than my first IBM compatible computer which ran at 33 MHz) but ultimately, if you think about it, they are really just like dumb-terminals of the mainframe and minicomputer era. All you need is a browser (and an Internet connection)—you could be running on a wristwatch for all that it matters.

We have plunged headlong into an era where it kind of doesn’t matter whether you’re running Windows, Linux, or Mac OS X, unless we’re talking about games. The only people who probably sad about this work at Microsoft. It will be interesting how they adapt to the Brave New World—being the behemoth they are, I’m pretty sure they’re going to adapt.

But, yeah, if you want a less vague idea of what is meant by Web 2.0, I think that’s what it is, although it would be interesting if I ran into some counter-examples.

I have always been someone who backs the underdog and have very little use for the de facto Establishment. I am, perhaps, overly idealistic and at times unreasonably dogmatic, but this instinct has driven many of my trivial and not-so-trivial decisions. For example, OS choice: so it was that I decided to run with Linux in 1998 sucked into the Open Source hype, then Mac OS X in 2002, still attached to GTK and GNOME apps. I had long grown weary of Microsoft and their works. Browser choice: I continued to use Netscape, then Mozilla, then Galeon, then Camino, eschewing the bug-laden, unfixable mess that is IE (and while IE on the Mac is much nicer than its Windows counterpart, it is now ancient) I continue to be a resolute Dodger fan, and can’t help but find the Cubs endearing. And I chose Pediatrics as my specialty, because I want to help those who can’t help themselves—that is the nature of children, for one thing, and I feel that pediatricians tend to work more with underserved populations: minorities, immigrants, the undocumented.

And I did not vote for Al Gore in 2000 election, because he was decidedly not the underdog (that, and the electoral votes of my state were clearly going to go to Gore anyway, and I wanted to see if a third part candidate could get the requisite 1% of the popular vote in order to get federal matching funds.) Again, with regards to politics, I supported Howard Dean in the 2004 election, and I was happy that Al Gore lent him his support, despite the fact that success did not materialize.

But Al Gore is a different man now. I read an article on American Prospect Online about what Al Gore is up to these days and I got a little teary-eyed. This is a guy who groks the future, and I’m kind of sad about the momentum we have probably lost with regards to the Information Revolution.

I think I’ve probably written about this somewhere before, and I’m pretty sure I’ve gotten all the timing wrong, but I can’t help think of the dot com boom as part of the Clinton legacy, and the subsequent bust was the direct result of reactionaries (the erstwhile neocons) manipulating the markets (since the economy probably started going all to hell when the memory chip market collapsed in the mid ‘90’s, taking the nascent economies of Southeast Asia with it, and pulling Japan down like an albatross—partly thanks to the insane policies of the IMF, but we won’t go into that), then tarnishing Clinton with the whole retarded impeachment thing. (A blowjob? And we’re not impeaching this Bush bastard for turning America into a police state and essentially pissing on the Constitution?)

I still find it interesting that the technological capitals of the country with regards to biotech and information systems, namely Silicon Valley and Boston, are liberal strongholds, and that the neocon surge basically sucked the life out of these places. At least on the West Coast, Silicon Valley and the entire state of California was essentially neutered by Enron, who scammed us out of billions of dollars by manipulating the energy markets, incidentally costing Gray Davis his political career and allowing the Terminator to take the helm. And now that the Republican Party has a stranglehold on the federal government, naturally the flow of money is going to places like Texas instead.

When I start thinking about this, I can’t help but feel that W’s administration really did allow OBL to attack NYC, which is yet another liberal stronghold, but I suppose this is for the conspiracy-theorist to dissect. Where the hell is OBL? Why haven’t we caught him yet?

But anyway, back to Gore. It pisses me off that people make fun of him for claiming to invent the Internet, despite the fact that he never said any such thing, and Gore did lend significant support to what would eventually become the Internet. Man, this guy was prescient. And now that he is unfettered by the “centrist” DLC mindset (which basically supports simply lying face down and letting the neocons violate you), he is a guy who is holding to his principles, and using new technology to promote his goals.

Which leads me back to the notion of futurology, which touches upon a culture’s vision of the future. As I mentioned before, ever since the dot com bust, American futurology no longer trusts to technology, which is in stark contrast to, say, the ‘60’s, when JFK set off a whole new age by trying to get to the Moon, resulting in technologies that have made all our lives better. Or, say, the ‘40’s, which saved the world from Fascism, not to mention pull us out of the Depression. Instead, we have a society that has a lot of people championing such non-scientific ideas as Creationism, distrusting biotechnology completely (this despite still trusting the beef industry even as they continue to downplay Mad Cow Disease), and wanting to stifle the anarchy that makes the Internet what it is with censorship and surveillance, and also trying to destroy the remix culture which includes Hip-Hop. Hell, we now have a state in the Union that has completely abolished abortion, assuring that the days of sepsis due to coathangers will return. Instead of heading into the future, we as a nation are trying head back to the Dark Ages.

If Gore had stood his ground and took the reins of the presidency which was rightfully his, would we have avoided this backslide into medieval times? Would we even now be heading out to Mars, saving lives with cloned organs grown on organic matrices, or expanding the reach of freedom of speech by infiltrating closed societies like China with a vengeance by spreading our information technology? Would we be a step closer to Vernon Vinge’s Singularity, instead of running from it with our tail between our legs?

Then again, I think of the resurgence of Mozilla. Netscape had to die so that Firefox could live. Since the Information Revolution is such the paradigm of our age, I wonder if this is a useful analogy for the resurrection of American ideals. Certainly the aforementioned article makes it seem that Gore had to crash and burn before he could rise to his current role. Perhaps that’s how we will regain control of our Nation as well, and return to the principles of the Constitution that not only makes our country great, but simply makes our country what it is.

Now, granted, a good number of my friends are artists, so that is what my ideas are informed by.

Reading this post about how artistic integrity has no place in web design, which in turn is a response to this post regarding rules for how to design web sites got my mind churning a little.

There comes, I suppose, at time in every aspiring artist’s life where they must decide to sell out and make some money, or stay true to their vision and perhaps starve, or at least end up working some really crappy, non-art related, soul-sucking job in order to pay the bills. But in an industry where part of the value is artistry, I’m not so sure selling out to the Man is the best strategy available, since we all know what sorts of monstrosities committees and corporate shills are capable of, and which they insultingly try to pass off as “art.”

You can get anyone who has ten fingers on each hand to type in HTML and CSS, but the value of a designer is inevitably their vision. Like it or not, this is what you pay for. Same thing in any high-profile design industry. Landscaping, architecture, automobile design, computers. You don’t need designers to clean up a vacant lot, put up a building, make a car, or put together a box, but they get hired to help do these things because of their vision. If you don’t want vision, why the hell are you hiring a designer? I’m sure it would be ultimately cheaper for you to learn some rudimentary HTML and CSS and do it yourself. Or use some free, open-source software to simply point and click and get your site running. Many of the better hosting solutions have these thing in place. Or even buy some proprietary package to run your generic shopping-cart site on.

My thoughts then stray to the impending 30th birthday of Apple. The Times Online recaps Apple’s rollercoaster history. The article brings up the idea of artistic vision and its value and alludes to the idea that this is the secret behind Apple’s ability to survive as a company and actual make money. As Macheads are wont to say, Apple doesn’t just sell a computer, they sell an experience. It is innately human to be moved by beauty, and I think this is what motivates many people who buy Macs. Realistically, the technology itself is really not very advanced (although I suppose with the new Macs running on Intel, this is changing), and while I do think the user interface is superior to Windows, this would probably not be enough to motivate people to buy Apple over a no-name Windows/x86 box.

I think something similar occurs with regards to cars. I mean, do you think Porsche and Ferrari would even still be in business if they simply concerned themselves with making the fastest cars possible, damn aesthetics? Or if they just made normal cars, not these high-end machines that they create? Design matters, and design requires vision. Simple as that.

But, my point: don’t sell out. Especially in a completely virtual world like the web where everything can be disassembled, cut and paste, moved and copied here and there, as a site designer, you don’t really offer anything unique except for you vision. That is, in my mind, your only salable commodity. You can teach a 9 year old to code in HTML and CSS, but there’s absolutely no way to teach vision.

Bizarrely, as I’m trying to sew closed a gaping wound across a toe, MTV plays the following songs:

• James Blunt “You’re Beautiful”
• Ne-yo “So Sick”

Which nicely echoes some of my wistful sentiments about loving, and losing (or usually more accurately, never getting a chance.) Weird time and place to be reminded about it, but there it is.

And naturally my thoughts stray to a particular woman whom I haven’t really thought of for a while.

In truth, I don’t really know her. She seems like a really nice person. Realistically, someone who would be cool to hang out with. But it’s funny, the things that are beyond conscious control. She is so overawingly beautiful to me that I totally freeze up when I’m around her.

And I don’t have any illusions of getting with her. She has been with someone for a ridiculously long time, practically married, and probably they soon really will be. I am interested in getting to know her though just as a friend, but I guess you could say that biology or chemistry or whatever is in the way.

Ridiculous and not a little sad. Ah well.

Wiser folks will say to just be yourself. I am being myself. I mean, what if being yourself is all about freezing up when confronted by beautiful women?

I had thought that I had written something about some long time ago, but I guess I haven’t. (Although I must admit, I don’t really feel like digging through my entire blog archive.) I admit, I haven’t watched “Nausicaa” in a while, but I think my favorite Miyazaki movie is “Spirited Away”.

OK, I admit, I haven’t exactly gone through Miyazaki’s entire corpus, but any movie that brings me to tears is good shit in my estimation.

I’m not sure what it is about this movie. Maybe it’s the way it skewers the post-modern age. The background set for the whole thing is essentially a ruined amusement park. Think of Disneyland being abandoned and left for the grass to grow all over it. There is something ironically bittersweet about this. For me, especially, considering my rather unhealthy obsession with all-things Disney. From the age of 3 until I was 21 years old, I went to Disneyland at least once a year, and maybe more. But this is a whole ‘nother excursus.

Then there is the character of Haku, who is basically a river spirit whose river has been paved over, with apartments being built over it, a fate worse than even the concretization of the Los Angeles River. (Someday I will post my somber photos of the beautiful bridges that cross the Los Angeles River. Maybe.) …. Man, after a few glasses of wine, I’m in a freely-associative state. From what I understand, before the Spanish and the Arabs came, my ancestors’ religion was animism, the idea that nature is infused with the supernatural. The idea of a river spirit would probably come quite naturally to them. Seriously, though, I wonder what the Los Angeles River thinks of its completely concrete state.

One of the more bittersweet scenes, for which there is not much more exposition of, is the train scene. Again, the whole motif of a ruined Disneyland is brought to the fore. All the train tracks are actually underwater, as if there were an accidental flood. But I wonder where all those shadow people are going? Who are they meant to represent, if anyone? I suppose Miyazaki purposefully left it ambiguous, allowing one to project. For example, my thoughts immediately stray to the people-of-color who keep the ersatz world of the Disney Corporation sparkling, without whom Orange County would sink into a morass of disorder and filth. It’s interesting that Miyazaki made his featureless people shadowy instead of ghostly-white. I think that’s what my mind picks up on and amplifies.

(Before anyone accuses me of complete insanity, the reason I’m writing about this is because the Cartoon Network showed “Spirited Away” tonight.)

Maybe the other thing that it taps into is the part of my life I was in when I first watched this movie. My brother and my sister had actually come out from California to visit me in Chicago, and we went to watch it at the Landmark Theaters on Clark and Diversey. (And, wow, I am inexplicably suddenly home-sick for Chicago. OK, not home-sick, but I still haven’t figured out the word for longing for a place that isn’t home, except that the longing is the same kind of longing as homesickeness. Anyway.) Going back even more years than that, me and my siblings discovered anime about the same time (first Sailor Moon, then Ranma, then Tenchi Muyo, then god-knows-what), and I guess anime saved me from a dark part of my life, when I was getting over my break-up with my first girlfriend, after she cheated on me by sleeping with someone.

Anyway, the point is, when I watched the movie tonight, I cried. True, I was on my third glass of wine, but still, weeping is weeping. The part that really got me is when Chihiro realized why she remembers Haku—it’s because when she was a little kid, she fell into the Kohaku River (that is, the river that got paved over, with apartments built on top of it) and she was saved by the spirit in the river, which is, of course, Haku, and that part really made go all teary-eyed.

Man, I’m such a pussy.

Anyway.

As for that excursus regarding Disneyland: After a while, the Disney Corporation simply just started creeping me out. I suppose it was in college when I came to a growing awareness at the perfidy of corporate culture, and how committees screw up creative design. (Nevermind the fact that at this time, Disney was coming out with really shitty movies, and I was embroiled in dealing with PCN (Pilipino Culture Night) which is all about creativity being trampled by committees, but that is another story entirely which I have no energy at all to write about.) Anyway, by my senior year in college, I actually ended up writing a history paper deconstructing Disneyland as a paen to American Imperialism. (Ironic, isn’t it, that right now we are embroiled in the most screwed up Imperial misadventure of all time, completely ignoring the lessons learned from Vietnam and the U.S. colonization of the Philippines.) I could never really get into Disneyland the same way, nevermind the fact that the admission price was already over $50. (I am forced to recall a Damon Wayans comedy skit—”$32.50, what, is Snow White gonna suck my dick? For $32.50, I’ll fuck one of them dwarves. Dopey is gonna be sleep and grumpy tonight!” Sorry, all I can say is I’m drunk.) I remember the last time I went to Disneyland, and it was truly an alien experience. They have since built on top of the parking lot, with such curious atrocities as the California Adventure and Downtown Disney. The exits off the freeway and even the freeway itself have completely mutated from what I remember from my younger years.

I guess it’s a lesson in growing old.

I’ve got to tell you (like you don’t know) that getting older just plain old sucks.

I was just thinking, with regards to my post about paternalistic societies and how some people keep using word that word, and I do not think it means what they think it means. What is probably even better for Empire building is a maternalistic society.

Population growth is, common-sensically, controlled by women. If a woman doesn’t want to have a baby, there is very little that you can do about it. You may try outlawing abortion, you may figuratively or even literally put a gun to her head, but, ultimately, it is up to her whether or not that child is going to be born. All a man does is provide half of the genetic material, really.

My definition of a maternalistic society is one in which women outright control the ability to reproduce. Meaning, women determine marriage situations. To put it more crudly, women control the pussy. While a lot of this seems to be common sense and is in fact what already really happens, paternalism does compete eminently. For example, the attempts at out-lawing abortion, the ability of men to coerce women by using economic means, or even the subtle cultural coercion induced by making being single somehow aberrant. So a pure maternalistic society would not have the paternalistic interference.

The beauty of a maternalistic society when it comes to Empire building is that it naturally selects the males who get to be cannon-fodder. In a maternalistic society, if you are not good husband and father material, you’re not going to get to marry nor procreate (give or take some human error, of course.) And if you are neither married nor have children, you’re prime for going to the front of the enemy lines, brother. Meaning that the genetic lines that are bad fathers and bad husbands literally get eradicated.

Of course, this has its downsides. The bad fathers and bad husbands may also be good warriors and more likely than not to be aggressive, and so you end up whittling down the genetic material that makes your warrior class.

But nonetheless, this actually still is more efficient for growing a military than a paternalistic society is. In a paternalistic society, every man tries to reproduce, and ultimately this either ties down otherwise excellent warriors or perfect cannon-fodder into a family structure, or results in hardship when the family unit becomes incomplete, either through death or abandonment. (Not to say that single mothers aren’t capable parents, but I can only imagine it’s pretty tough to be doing the job of two people.)

When it comes to maternalistic societies, I can only really think of one Empire (which was rather successful in its day) that comes close to this kind of pussy-control: Spain. Since it was a wholly Catholic Empire, it was pretty difficult to procreate without being married and have offspring who retained your social status. Moreover, so-called spinsterhood was actually considered virtuous—there was nothing wrong with joining a convent and never knowing (in the biblical sense) men. And while we often think of machismo and the other trappings of a paternalistic society when we think of Spain, I think any wholly Catholic Empire would operate more along the lines of a maternalistic society than a paternalistic one. I don’t know, maybe I ‘ve just romanticized ideas of Queen Isabella (who may have been the more influential part of the monarchy), or think about how the maternalistic lock on reproduction is what drove Henry the VIII to break away from Catholicism. In reality, I don’t think there is a purely matriarchal society (anymore than there can be a purely paternalistic society) but I think it all comes down to who controls reproduction rights.

This article is retarded. It discusses the evolutionary advantage of a patriarchal society, with definite disregard for the value of human life. While it is true that a rapidly growing society tends to overwhelm less rapidly growing societies, this article completely disregards the reasons—both biological and economic—why population growth slows. My feeling is that the natural tendency of populations is to grow rapidly. And while we have, for the most part, in industrialized nations, made the specter of starvation less prominent (although we all know people in the U.S. who are citizens who are starving), what we have not gotten a handle on is the cost of generating children.

The article discusses the idea that social conservatism—which generally encourages procreation—tends to take root in societies whose birth rates decrease. This is simply an application of game theory to population growth, and is probably true to an extent. The premise is that social conservatives reproduce faster, and what’s more, children tend to select the social strategy of their parents. This idea is questionable, because, biologically speaking, you can generate more children as a male by spreading your seed far and wide and without dealing with the vagaries of marriage. And certainly, while the children of Republicans tend to—one way or another—eventually become Republicans, this is a statistical argument based on popular poll data, and it questionable whether this can truly be extrapolated into the future—the adoption of a particular social strategy not only depends on what your parents chose, but must be analyzed in the proper context of the current social situation.

Anyway, ultimately, it is more expensive in an industrialized nation to raise a child. Hence, developing nations grow faster than industrialized nations. But also, even in an industrialized nation, families with six children are by definition unable to provide the same resources to their children that families with two children can. Fact of the matter is that the majority of social conservatives are not multimillionaires, and when pitted reproductively against families with similar income with fewer children, I doubt being in a family of six kids versus being in a family of two kids is all that advantageous. Also, in a family of six kids, all other resources held equal, especially in a socially conservative milleu, it is less likely that the combined income of both parents will exceed the combined income of parents with a smaller family. In a socially conservative setting, the mother is generally encouraged not to work, resulting in a significant decrease in income.

My dispassionate analysis is simply this: all other parameters being equal, bigger families tend to be more resource-strapped than smaller families. The average family may succeed in sending their two children to college (which in itself is no mean feat and already requires significant financial sacrifice), but the two average parents who attempt to have six or more children will most definitely be hard pressed to provide the same for all their children, and in an industrialized society such as ours, an advanced degree seems necessary for economic prosperity, statistically speaking.

In other words, I don’t buy it.

We live in quite a different world than Roman times. The human race is completely interconnected, and covers almost every square inch of this planet. Territorial expansion is simply more difficult. And, perhaps unexpectedly, it seems that the more asymmetric the warfare being conducted is, the more futile it becomes for the aggressor to achieve their expansion. We may have nuclear weapons, but I suspect that nuclear weapons are a poor method for trying to expand territory.

Then again, maybe he has a point. When Americans went on their Pacific Ocean-bound rampage, slaughtering Native American in their way, white people were definitely growing faster than Native American populations. In contrast, Filipinos are still on the exponential part of their population growth curve, and while the asymmetry of casualties during the Filipino American War are obvious (possibly as high as a million Filipinos versus a few thousand Americans), and the status of the Philippines as a satellite of the American Empire continues, ultimately, the Americans were unable to territorially dominate the Philippines. (Economic and cultural domination is another matter.) The imperial engine faltered again in Vietnam—again, the asymmetry of warfare and of casualties is obvious, and yet the Vietnamese prevailed. This imperial failure is likewise manifest in the misadventure in Iraq.

Ultimately, it comes down to this heartless equation: in order to create an industrially advanced society, you need to maximize your labor output. Maximization of labor often means that both man and woman need to work. This was already true with the Industrial Revolution in England which spread throughout Europe. Once you do that, you have the recipe for declining birth rates in hand. And in an industrially-advanced society, resource-wise, it becomes more and more expensive to raise children, so the cycle reinforces itself. And, again, rather heartlessly (and resonating with the article’s disdain for the value of human life), think of the asymmetry of casualties in the imperial misadventures of the U.S. The resisting state always experiences vaster casualties than we do, and yet the resisting state tends to prevail. Sure, part of this is our distaste for genocide (which is usually the only way to win a territorial war), but probably the other issue is how much we quantitatively value the life of an American. Just from a purely resources-oriented analysis that does not take into account the inherent dignity of all human life, it becomes extraordinarily costly to send one’s children to be torn apart limb from limb.

We go back to the Romans: it is interesting the way their patriarchic society dealt with militaristic needs of their society. Since the rich and the wealthy were likely not very willing to send their children off to war, what happened was that the Germans—recently assimilated into Roman society, generally poorer than the average Roman—become more and more the bulk of their military strength. Some will point out that this contributed to the destruction of the Western Roman Empire. (After all it was the German Odoacer, who was a general of the Roman Army, who deposed the last Western Emperor.) The point of this is not to encourage xenophobia, but similarly, in the U.S., many people involved in the armed forces are people-of-color, who tend to be poorer than their white counterparts. It becomes that as the ruling classes show less and less committment to their military (which is clear considering that Republicans would rather have their tax breaks instead of properly funding the armed forces), and as the ruling classes make it more and more difficult for those who are poor and otherwise disenfranchised (Germans in the time of Rome, people-of-color in our present) to succeed economically, this probably sets us up for creating a class of people who have no loyalty to the current nation-state.

With this in mind, and using the Roman Empire as a metric, one can’t help but wonder if the American Empire is in its decline. The advocacy and adoption of paternalism as espoused by this article is likely merely a manifestation of reaction to this trend, and it bodes ill, because, truly, it seems that paternalism is only really useful in an Empire’s growth and expansion phase—except in societies that experienced other cataclysmic changes, reversion to such a growth pattern has never saved any failing Empires.

Then again, we live in a Brave New World, where it is somewhat pointless and unnecessarily expensive to achieve territorial hegemony, when economic and cultural hegemony can be had a one-tenth the price. I doubt that the old rules apply in our post-modern, post-industrial world. Instead, I much rather prefer my vision of territorial expansion.

Now I haven’t read Harry Potter and the Half-Blooded Prince yet, but I stumbled upon the concept of the Horcrux randomly following links. The concept is familiar to any J.R.R. Tolkien fan, and clearly, there is at least one way known to create a Horcrux.

Requirement: active volcano

Outline: using the active volcano as your forge, create a ring that anchors your existence to the material plane. Extra points are awarded for having it linked to the rings that you gave to your enemies.

Now it is well known that the One Ring was created for the purpose of controlling the Seven Rings of the Dwarf Kings and the Nine Rings of Mortal Men Doomed to Die, but it is not often explicitly mentioned that it is the One Ring that anchors Sauron’s soul to Middle Earth.

Since he forged the ring in the Second Age, he was killed at least twice (once during the destruction of Numenor, and once in the Battle of the Last Alliance) and yet his soul would always return. This is in contrast to the passing of other Maiar such as, for example, Saruman, who, being rejected from the Undying Lands, had nowhere else to go. (Of course, besides Sauron and Saruman, the only other Maiar we meet are Gandalf, who physically sails back to the Undying Lands; Radagast, whose fate is, I believe, unknown; Melian, who returns to the Undying Lands after the death of Thingol; and the unnamed Balrog that lived in Moria, whose fate after Gandalf kills him is also unknown.) True, since they are Maiar and hence immortal, it is unclear how necessary a Horcrux is for them. However, it may be necessary to hold on to their physical form, which themself could be slain. (For example, Sauron’s multiple defeats, Gandalf’s death on the mountains of Moria, the death of the Balrog, the slaying of Saruman—of these only Sauron had a known Horcrux, and regarding Gandalf, it is described that he was actually sent back to Middle Earth by the Valar. At least Melian and Saruman never seem to return to Middle Earth in physical form.) But I am losing myself in tangents here.

Anyway, I think that the One Ring allows Sauron to manifest a physical form. Once created, without it, he lives only as a disembodied spirit. This is similar to how Voldemort exists—dead but not dead.

Hmm. I don’t know. Is the Ring a Horcrux or not?

References:

• Rings of Power
• Middle Earth - History
• Encyclopedia of Arda: Melian

But I think we all know this already. I was perusing an article entitled On having layout, and I am appalled by absurd inner workings of IE. Man, screw this madness. Designers should design solely for pure CSS and XHTML. There is a quote in there that I find incredibly disturbing—is this just something that folks who design for IE subscribe to, or is this philosophy applicable to software engineers who design Windows software?

Software-bugs are the result of human errors and lack of completeness and logic during the creation-process. It’s a fundamental human shortcoming, for which a lasting cure is yet to be found. Any attempts to correct buggy software without recreating it from scratch, will inevitably lead to even more and more complex bugs finding their way into the software, because of the same human shortcomings.

All software that rely on other software — including Operating Systems (of course), will also rely on its bugs. Thus we get a cascade of bugs from all involved bits of software, which makes even the thought of finding bug-free software completely absurd.

While I agree that there will never be such a thing as bug-free software, I think it is dreadful to purposefully code relying on bugs. In a world where open APIs (if not outright open source) are available, there’s no reason to stand for such madness. If you are a developer and the expected behavior fails to match the spec, you should stand up and demand a fix. I think it’s sad that people who are dependent on MS software simply accept the trash they are given.

So I went to the new Tommy’s in San Diego on Clairemont Mesa Boulevard between the 805 and the 163. It, like the Tommy’s in Hollywood (on Hollywood Blvd.), has an indoor sit-down place to eat, unfortunately essentially resembling an In-n-Out.

For those not in the know, Tommy’s is burger place that specializes in chilli burgers, specifically. The original site was on the corner of Rampart Blvd. and Beverly Blvd., part of the infamous Rampart Division[wikipedia entry], and now part of the (relatively) recently defined Historic Filipinotown (just adjacent to the rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods of Echo Park and Silver Lake) This site was (and I think still is—I haven’t been there for a long time) just a “ramshackle shack” (as described by the official text), little more than a corner stand. I remember going there as a little kid, when me and my parents used to live nearby on Benton Way just north of the 101. The site near where my parents’ current house is now, in Eagle Rock (yet another rapidly gentrifying neighborhood of L.A.), is also near a famous Tommy’s site. This one is open late into the evening, and is where lots of people of would hangout at 3am when everything else is closed. This too is really nothing more than a shack, although it does have a drive-through and a place to sit outside. I didn’t really miss it until I moved up to Northern California. While they started putting up In-n-Out’s (another famous Southern California burger joint) in the Bay Area when I was up there, Tommy’s was (and is) exclusively Southern Californian, specifically L.A. (at least until they opened one up in Barstow—about an hour north of San Bernardino and two hours southwest of Vegas.) This one in S.D. is only the second one not in L.A. It doesn’t have the nostalgic feel that the Rampart one and the Eagle Rock one have (and which the Hollywood one also lacks), but at least it tastes good.

Bah. Another reason why I distrust all this stuff-it-into-a-database business. On one of my last posts, I think I may have missed a closing quotation mark, or maybe a closing angle-bracket. Which will understandably make the rest of the post unreadable. Unfortunately, because I am using the built-in text-editor for Wordpress, the editor decided to url-escape everything after the mistake. While I was able to extract meaningful text from some of it, some of it simply fell into /dev/null, never to be seen again.

Maybe it wouldn’t have munged it like that if I had used an external editor—although I don’t know. I wish there was a way to have it not munge up my posts, even if I did make a mistake.

And since I’m in no mood to switch to another blog engine right now, and I don’t have the time or wherewithal to complete my own XSLT based blog engine written in perl, I think I’m going to try mucking around with XML-RPC, the Metablog API, and perl or maybe even Ruby and see if I can’t just use good ol’ emacs to write my posts in XML, including all the metadata and what-not, and just have a script extract the metadata, transform my custom tags to XHTML with XSLT, and send everything to Wordpress. I know it sounds ridiculously complicated, but the way I rationalize it is that if I ever get my file-system based blog engine running, I can just drop it in. (Right.)

The other thing is that I can simply reverse the process—use XML-RPC and the Metablog API to extract all my Wordpress posts, then reconstruct XML post entries by combining the metadata and post text. Voila, an instant migration tool to my blog engine.

Man, I’ve gotta stop blogging about blogging.

After reading these suggestions for the improvement of Mac OS X, I can’t help but think of the manager in “Fight Club” who asks “Can I get this icon in cornflower?” Cosmetic changes, while entertaining, do not an OS major revision make, and can sometimes even break it. Now I’m no Cocoa guru, but if the APIs are exposed, maybe what would be more reasonable is for someone who is not necessarily Apple write a viable Dock or Finder replacement (and at least for Finder, I believe there are already a few around, although the best ones are not free, either as in beer, or as in speech.) Why does the OS itself have to contain millions of bits and pieces that are not essential to an OS?

Then again, maybe I’m just used to a more open-source kind of world, where the inevitable response to such a suggestion post would be to “write it yourself!” Linux, my OS before Mac OS X, is, in the final analysis, the cobbling together of various individual pieces of software, some essential, some less so, some mere entertainment, and some completely useless and non-working. In an open-source world, it’s not the vendor’s responsibility for allowing you easy access to ephemeral, superficial customization. (Although, contrary to what many Linuxheads may claim, I do think that it is the vendor’s responsibility to release a working user interface—even if it’s not a GUI—that allows you to administer your system out of the package, which was not always the case for some of the distros that I experimented with.) If the source is open (which is in fact the case for the Mach Kernel and BSD Subsystem that comprises Mac OS X, but which sadly does not apply to Aqua) or in the very least, if the APIs are open (which is, I believe, the case for Cocoa), you should just write it yourself and not ask that the other thousand users who like the OS should be burdened by your personal preferences.

The vagaries of consciousness? Or quantum mechanical effects?

From Boingboing, this article discusses a neat trick of being able to slow down or stop the second hand outright. The question is: is this just a glitch in the core visual systems of the human brain? Or is this quantum uncertainty acting in a macroscopic context?

Coincidentally, I am reading Chronos by Etienne Klein (who is, however, no relation to Felix Klein, the inventor of the Klein Bottle, nor to Oscar Klein, the co-creator of Kaluza-Klein Theory.) which discusses this very thing—whether our experiences of time—subjective time—are merely artifacts of our cognitive hardware, or whether the weirdness we sense is really our interaction with quantum mechanics and in fact reflects physical time. Is our role as the quantum mechanical Observer what creates time? Are we the actual “engines of time”? Would time not exist if there were no Observer? (Although, I suppose, nothing would exist if there were no Observer.)

With these thoughts at hand, I thought I would add a snippet of lyrics from the Police:

A connecting principle Linked to the invisible Almost imperceptible Something inexpressible Science insusceptible Logic so inflexible Causally connectible Yet nothing is invincible —The Police “Synchronicity I”

From the New York Times regarding the Alan Moore, the artist of the comics from which the movie “V for Vendetta” is based:

Mr. Moore found the accusations deeply insulting, and the 10 hours of testimony he was compelled to give, via video link, even more so. “If I had raped and murdered a schoolbus full of retarded children after selling them heroin,” he said, “I doubt that I would have been cross-examined for 10 hours.”

I am, ultimately, an idealist. However, I can understand that there are limits to trying to achieve utopia. There are physical laws—thermodynamics, relativity, quantum mechanics—that make certain things impossible. But when someone tells me that something is impossible because of the recalcitrance of human nature, I call bullshit.

Human nature can be educated. If human nature was not malleable, we’d all be sitting up in trees fearing the lions roaming the savannahs and picking lice off each other. If human nature was not changeable, we would still commonly practice such barbaric acts like slavery and human sacrifices. The progression of history proves that human nature can evolve positively. Human nature cannot be what limits the attainment of utopia. Anyone who says otherwise is probably evil.

As I mentioned previously, I find myself conflicted about having my blog posts live in a database. And, really, I don’t see that much difference between a blog post and a generic XML file. (As I mentioned, I wish I could write posts in XML.) I feel that blog posts, like generic XML, don’t map naturally to a relational database, particularly if you want to have fine-grained access to individual elements. Matt Liotta and Chris Preimesberger discuss the possible performance problems you might run into by trying to store XML in an RDBMS, and how a more elegant solution lies in native XML databases that can be queried in more natural (at least for XML) XPath and XQuery instead of SQL. As the name implies, XPath (which XQuery utilizes) has a lot in common with file-system paths. Consider that the browser’s location field is better suited to handling a file-system path than a query written in SQL (and file-system paths are in fact how most blogs are queried—whether by date or category, regardless of whether the blog engine stores posts on the filesystem or in a database.) And, especially in a shared-hosting situation, I don’t know if a database really gets you all that much more performance than simply dealing with the file-system. Then again, considering that I don’t find hierarchical categories all that useful, I don’t know if paths are all that great either, except for accessing specific elements in an XML document. Decisions, decisions.

Interestingly, as I am debating the merits of various blogging solutions, Robert Thomas “beau” Hayes Link posts to the Blosxom Yahoo! Group and basically asks what blosxom’s fate is. (Interestingly, I don’t know if he intentionally meant the pun by using “wither” instead of “whither.” Get it? Blosxom. Blossom. Wither. Whither. Anyway.)

In my mind (correct me if I’m wrong), blosxom seems to be the prototype for the filesystem-based blog engine. (Whereas solutions such as Wordpress, Moveable Type, and Typo embody the relational-database-based blog engine.) And basically, the idea that is Blosxom has been ported to Java (as blosjom, which incidentally comes built-in with newer versions of Mac OS X), to Python (as PyBlosxom), and to Ruby (as Sakura, Lily (both of which have documentation in Japanese which, unfortunately, I don’t understand), and Blosxonomy (also unfortunately right now, I can’t get the blosxonomy site to load, although it is also featured on the Ruby Application Archive and on Pete Freitag’s blog.)

I guess Ruby really is the “next new best thing.” In my search for more filesystem-based blog systems, I stumbled upon Flare (strangely, it seems that blogs running Flare [1][2][3] are using Kubrick-like themes, looking a lot like the default style of Wordpress 2.0) While Flare is yet another complex blogging system built on a relational database, what is interesting is that you can use a quasi-filesystem-like database like KirbyBase. Text files here we come. Of course, I’m not sure if it addresses my other wants, but we’ll see if we can’t shoehorn this onto my Dreamhost account and play with it a little bit.

I find myself missing emacs, which is clearly a sign of pathology. The silly thing is that I clearly don’t use even 10% of its features. It’s pure nostalgia. Emacs is the only editor (aside from Vi, I suppose) that I’ve been able to run consistently on all the platforms I’ve blogged on—Windows, Linux, Mac OS X. (Yes, I’ve blogged while using Windows, but only as a stop-gap measure.) I haven’t really ever used emacs for something that I couldn’t do with whatever basic text editor comes with the OS (Notepad, GNU nano, Textedit.app—although, interestingly, of these OSes, emacs comes preinstalled only on Mac OS X—in many Linux distros, you actually have to manually install it. Of course, these are the distros that favor Vi—emacs vs. vi is probably one of the oldest computing holy wars around.) I suppose there is something masochistically perverse about having to type CTRL-X CTRL-C to quit. (I still remember the first time I was faced with an empty emacs buffer in 1994, and I had to bug my UNIX guru college roommate to help me regain control of my machine—an already old-at-the-time 486 running at a paltry 50 MHz. Don’t laugh, I’ve computed on machines running at 1 MHz. Machines that you can actually play some pretty neat games on.)

OK, so maybe emacs is not the sort of thing you associate with the adjective “simple,” but my blogging style was primitive. I would type out an entry—an HTML fragment, really—using emacs, save it to my hard drive, run make to have a perl script properly link my blog posts in chronologic order, then have xsltproc iterate through my HTML fragments, generating static HTML pages, which I would then rsync to my webhost. Once you had the Makefile written, it was all pretty automatic (although not without bugs that I never stomped out.) With the help of another perl script on my webserver, I was actually able to add commenting (which, thankfully, the spambots never seemed to ever mess with.) Using XSLT actually allowed me to implement features that I haven’t really reduplicated yet on either blosxom and now on Wordpress. One thing that I thought was neat, for example, was that I could type a hypertext link on the main page and add commentary which would then show up only on the sidebar. (See the first iteration of my blog.) If my markup didn’t have a comment, then it would just yank the title attribute, and if it didn’t have that (which is actually frowned upon), it wouldn’t matter. The other thing that I was able to implement using my kludgery which I was unable to duplicate as elegantly on blosxom were asides, that is, a sidebar mini-blog. Also, I thought the index pages were kind of neat, too—each of my posts would have a synopsis that consisted of a sentence or two. I never implemented excerpting, though, because I never found an elegant way to mark it up. The other thing lacking was being able to break down the index page by month.

Switching to blosxom, my entries became even more primitive. Under my kludgery, each blog post was actually a valid XML document. I even had a semi-complete DTD for it. Under blosxom, each entry is an unholy alliance between a plain-text file with some magic key words (for example, meta if you were using the meta plugin) and HTML markup interspersed. Not that it was a big deal, but I thought it was kind of inelegant that you couldn’t error check your markup by running the file through a validator. This may seem like overkill, but if you start inserting some sophisticated markup into your blog posts—embedded tables, even definition, or ordered lists—markup errors can cause some head-bashing bugs that aren’t easy to fix. I suppose I could’ve written a simple script to just strip the title and the meta tags, and send the rest to the validator, but, I dunno, it just seemed inelegant. What can I say.

In blosxom, I missed some of the features of XSLT. I even created a kludge for blosxom that let me write my markup in pseudo-XML, even though all I was doing was parsing the markup with regular expressions, which we all know is fraught with peril. [1][2]

·But I liked the simplicity of letting posts live in the filesystems. There is something that freaks me out about stuffing text files into a database. I just don’t feel that blog posts naturally fit into an relational database. There aren’t really any natural uniquifying keys, except for maybe the time stamp, but who really searches by time stamp?

I like how a file system naturally enforces uniqueness. You can’t have two blog posts with the same slug in blosxom, unless they reside in two different categories. This is something that I don’t think can be trivially error checked.

But, ultimately, what I want is to be able to address a file system with XPath. While the ability to have two identical slugs, just posted in different categories, may be a feature for some people, I can’t imagine how this would work in reality. How would two posts with the exact same slug be not in the same category? Ultimately, I don’t think hierarchical categories are all that useful. What is more useful are tags, mainly because a blog post can be tagged with multiple designations. So, ultimately, I would probably just have posts live in one directory, with tags encoded in the XML files themselves. This makes the search algorithm perhaps more inefficient. Instead of doing a straightforward file system seek, I am forced to parse (at least partially) every file in the directory to find the tags that I am looking for. If I ever get my own blogging engine off the ground, I will need to profile this.

And while timestamps live in the file system itself, and rsync pretty much takes care of keeping them real—those who still use ftp clients to upload web pages know how inconsistent preserving timestamps can be—I would feel more at ease sticking the timestamp into the file itself as more XML metadata. The main reason for doing this is so that you can freely edit old posts without disrupting the temporal flow of your blog. This is the mindset involved in several blosxom plugins, which either store the timestamp in cached metadata files, or stick them in the file itself, albeit without XMLish/SGMLish markup to delimit where they live. The cached metadata (which are basically just serialized perl hashes) is probably the most efficient of these methods, the infixed metadata (with or without angle-brackets) the least efficient. Unfortunately, the infixed metadata is probably also the most user-transparent. While time stamps can be rather cryptic, they are ultimately human readable and human parsable. In contrast, not too many people can readily interpret a UNIX epoch date-and-time (which is how it is stored in the cached metadata, and which is the true representation of date-and-time for a computer, although most OSes provide ways to look at it in more human-readable form.) This, on the other hand, becomes another question of processing efficiency. Converting human readable timestamps into UNIX epoch seconds and vice versa eats quite a bit of processing cycles. Is infixing the epoch seconds as XML not the “right-thing” to do?

Anyway, yeah, I don’t know why I’m obsessed with using XSLT. I suppose it’s the amount of pain I underwent trying to learn the stupid thing. I’m not sure I could write such a stylesheet now. But XSLT has saved me a great amount of time. Back when HTML 4.0 with tables for layout were in vogue, misplaced closing tags in my templates (i.e., themes or skins) were the bane of my existence. The fact that XSLT could be validated as XML made templates easy to debug, and I’m not sure this ease of debugging is quite as present in the hybrid file format that blosxom uses (although the theme plugin has made it more so) and definitely not so in PHP, which is what Wordpress and many other tools are written in.

I’m not quite sure the world exactly needs yet another blogging engine, but I would like one that doesn’t need to use a relational database.

So now I’m trying Bleezer which is written in Java. Ah well, no Cocoa for me, I guess. But, this, on the other hand, has a lot more features, many of which I will probably never get to use. Neat.

I’m testing out Blog Thing which is a simple Cocoa app that supports the Metaweb API. Ah, the wonders of the Web (version 2.0)

ADDENDUM: Hey it works! Hmm, it apparently doesn’t let me type HTML directly however, which is unfortunate, because I’ve gotten used to doing this while I was still blogging using my mish-mash kludge consisting of a Makefile, perl scripts, and XSLT [1][2][3][4] Well, at least the web-based text editor lets me do what I want to do. Time to find another desktop blogging client.

Again, perusing posts about computer systems implementation, I come upon the debate between “the right thing” and “worse is better,” I can’t help but think about the way natural selection works.

The reason why I think intelligent-design is dead in the water is because natural selection has engineered things that are clearly not “the right thing” (using the connotation as described in the article I cited—i.e., a definition limited to systems implementation.) The one that comes to mind easiest is the way the human retina is designed. For those who haven’t taken anatomy, the retina is the light-sensing organ that sits in the back of the eye, which basically converts photons into action potentials, that is, electrochemical nerve signals that are the lingua franca of the brain. It works pretty much like how film (or, to be more modern, a CCD) works. But the bizarre thing is that the light-receptive neurons transmit their signals to higher-level neurons that are actually in front of them, meaning that the light-receptive neurons are actually partially obscured by a tangle of neurons. Clearly, a sane engineer would not do this, and, in fact, in other organisms, this is not the case—a more sane design that puts the light receptors in front and the higher-level neurons behind them was implemented instead.

Now, mind you, both implementations do what they’re supposed to do. You and I can still see all right even though we have a “worse-is-better” implementation. And clearly, evolution also demonstrates that this isn’t necessarily the optimal design, because other organisms have the saner “right-thing” implementation. I just can’t wrap my mind around the idea that a sentient being would actually implement sight both ways. But what do I know, maybe God has a sick sense of humor.

But back to “worse is better” and evolution. There are clear reasons why natural selection might favor the easier implementation, the biggest of which is entropy. In the design of organisms, more features does not often give one a selective advantage.

The simplest example is antibiotic resistance. One would think that all bacteria would evolve antibiotic resistance since it would ensure their (individual) prolonged survival. But, thanks to thermodynamics, there is cost for harboring an antibiotic resistance gene. Just by sheer kinetics alone, a bacteria that has such a gene will not replicate as fast as an antibiotic-sensitive species. This fact alone has probably saved us despite our continuous abuse of antibiotics. What probably happens (no one has proved this experimentally) is that the antibiotic-sensitive species simply reproduce quicker and outcompete their antibiotic-resistant brethren for nutrients. Hence, we can live infection-free lives despite constantly using triclosan-containing handwash.

Hence, the reason why some organisms have sane retinas and why we have ass-backward retinas: if we have evolved from older but similar implementations of life, the laws of thermodynamics would favor tinkering with the design instead of completely reinventing it. So maybe somewhere deep in the evolutionary past, some stray cosmic ray reversed the way retinas grew in the eye in some organisms, and since this did not create a significant selective disadvantage, both implementations co-exist.

What my last post gets me thinking about it the reason why emotion is necessary for proper human thought, and I think the reason is the fact that life is filled with uncertainty. The irony is that the scientific method has come to this exact same conclusion, formalized physically as Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and mathematically as Gödel’s Theorem of Incompleteness, and it really isn’t until recently that the selective advantage of emotion has been discussed in a scientific manner.

I think what emotion allows us to do is process uncertainty properly. And I’m not just talking about using intuition. I’m talking about being able to handle mathematical unknowns, which I think is a uniquely human characteristic. A simple way to think of this is that emotion allows us to (subconsciously) quantitatively weigh unknowns. Is this variable important or not, for example.

Now, whatever tricks we program into our machines, we can’t quite really get computers to do this yet. A computer program will generally halt until the answer to an unknown variable is known. In advanced microprocessors that can handle pipelining, you don’t have to calculate absolutely everything before the program can run, but if one thread needs an answer and the other thread that will provide it hasn’t finished calculating it yet, the original thread will just hang there until there is a value available.

I don’t think we’ve gotten to the point where we can keep a program running even if the answer to a particular variable is yet unknown. We can program in various tricks to allow a program to not need that value until it has been calculated, but pretty much all programs will crash if you feed it an undefined value. But in stark contrast, human beings handle and run with undefined values all the time. I mean, how often have you been in a situation where you knew the value of all the variables involved? Where you have absolutely no uncertainty in what is going to happen next? This is, like, never, and I think our ability to emotionally weigh unknowns is the only thing that keeps us from freezing up all the time. Without the ability to emotionally weigh unknowns, we would never be able to make decisions (and interestingly, this is exactly what happens to people who have their emotional subsystems disconnected from their reasoning loop—they can’t make decisions to save their life.)

There is an idea out there that the way we handle uncertainty is through quantum mechanical means. Every undefined value is simply a wave function that hasn’t collapsed yet, and our brains are just gigantic quantum computers that somehow figure out the state of reality through the collapsing of wave functions. I’m not sure if we really need to get quantum uncertainty involved in human emotional reasoning. I think that the brain still does things mechanistically. Since the brain is the product of millions of years of evolution, it is probably programmed with various default values for certain things. What allows us to learn, however, is the fact that the brain is also a storage system and a pattern recognition engine. Maybe the brain does hyperthread like a microprocessor does, and has threads that hang until values are calculated for various unknowns. The thing is, the brain doesn’t need a correct value to continue processing. All that matters is that there’s some kind of value returned, and maybe sometimes that value is simply the default value that is genetically encoded. This works because evolution has fined-tuned our systems to gel very well with reality, even if our consciousness loop isn’t really aware of how it works. The reason I bring up the storage device and pattern recognition engine analogies is that because of these functions, the brain doesn’t have to rely on genetically-derived defaults. What probably happens is that the brain will recognize it is in a situation it has never encountered before, will search its stored memories to see if there’s something even remotely similar to this situation (and since reality tends to be more monotonous than not, and since evolution has fine-tuned our thresholds for monotony and uniqueness to correspond roughly with reality, chances are the brain will find a match. Then again, some of us can go through life associating things rather freely) and it will use this previously calculated value as a default instead. The thing is, since we are constantly, literally, second-by-second being faced with decisions and interactions and reality in general, we quickly build a very rich database of memories. (And, by the way, it’s no accident that we really don’t reach our peak intellectual function until a couple decades of absorbing reality.) With every successful match with reality, the associations strengthen. We learn.

(As another aside, I think the challenge for a successful Turing Machine is being able to handle Gödelian incompleteness with the aplomb that the average human being does.)

Where does emotional processing come in? Well, it doesn’t require us to handle all this decision making in our consciousness loop. The memory retrieval and pattern recognition probably occur at a relatively low level. What makes us differ markedly from a computer is that the consciousness loop doesn’t need to actually know what the exact value the brain has retrieved. Instead of transmitting a full, high-level, fleshed out picture of the data these subsystems have retrieved and/or calculated to the consciousness loop, the subsystems just have to emit emotional signals. Remember that axon transmission times are pretty slow, often measured in seconds (this is in contrast to computer devices, which frequently measure signal transmission rates in milliseconds, microseconds, and nanoseconds.) Emotion enables us to function effectively in real-time. Imagine if you had to make all decisions at the conscious level. I can tell you that this wouldn’t work very well in the emergency room or on the battlefield.

Wow, this post is going to be extraordinarily geeky. By clicking on various links, I stumbled upon some very well thought out posts regarding the inexorable programming language clashes that in reality actually affects the average Net dependent webhead in ways that may not be readily apparent.

Obviously that last paragraph is going to need some explaining.

What I mean to say is that, how many Netizens really think long and hard about the ramifications of XML, the evangelical drive to implement XHTML and CSS, the prevalence of Java and Flash, the rising eminence of AJAX? The fact that the pioneers were CGI scripts running in perl? And yet these various geeky behind-the-scenes technologies are what define the experience of the Web.

But, really, the posts aren’t so much about that. What Steve Yegge writes about is the rising pre-eminence of Ruby which for all you non-geeks is the newest shiniest programming language that is coming into its own on the web thanks to the framework known as Rails. But a good chunk of his post also discusses the recent history of languages from which almost all webapps are built, which happen to include Java, Perl, and Python as well. And while Python has been around for probably as long as Perl has been, it just hasn’t gained the amount of popularity that Perl has.

The post also touches upon a common phenomenon in the technosphere, which is that the technically superior technology tends to get killed or at least overshadowed by something that frequently does not work as well and is much uglier. Hence, the famous VHS vs. Betamax debate, the old Mac vs Windows culture wars. Netscape vs IE. The list goes on and on. In his other post which expands on the first one, Yegge also talks about Java vs. Smalltalk. And now we enter the realm of programming language choice amongst web-developers. Originally there was Perl vs. Python, but now Ruby is racing to the forefront.

What interests me most, though, is Yegge’s discussion of culture. While his discourse lives within the rarefied confines of web development, it actually describes how or why memes in general live or die.

Memetics is sort of a new way of looking at an old phenomenon, which is the transmission of human culture. The meme is a concept discussed by Richard Dawkins at the end of his book The Selfish Gene (with a big shoutout to Mr. G, my biology and chemistry teacher in high school, who first introduced me to this book.) Bear in mind this was written in 1989, when not as many people owned personal computers and even fewer people had online access. In any case, the meme is a cultural equivalent to the gene. And when further analyzed through computer science metaphors, whereas a gene is a compact piece of software (wetware?) that provides a specific function in the ongoing process known as life, the meme is a similarly compact piece of cultural programming that can provide useful functions such as things as fundamental as how to raise a child, or how to cook, or slightly more technologically advanced such as how to read and write, something even more complex like the scientific method, or some other things perhaps less useful, but maybe more sublime such as blogging or webapp development. With the prevalence of the Internet, the daily exchange of memes can be quantifiably tracked—especially with existence of such things as del.icio.us and the meme is almost a palpable thing—well as palpable as anything can get on the Internet.

Anyway, the reason why I ventured off on that excursus is because what Yegge is labelling as “marketing” is perhaps how culture gets transmitted in the first place. This is one of the things that makes us uniquely human, something we’ve been doing long before the rise of the Internet, hell, before the existence of Capitalism, and even predating the existence of alphabets and syllabaries.

The reason why the technically superior technology rarely wins is because human brain function does not operate by mathematical logic alone. Various authors have been writing about a new way of understanding human brain function, the foremost being Antonio Damasio [Wikipedia entry] who, among other works, wrote the book Descartes’ Error which discusses the long-standing fallacy of trying to separate logic and emotion into two disconnected subsystems operating in the brain. Other pioneers in this field include Elkhonon Goldberg and Oliver Sacks [Wikipedia entry] who have both written popular works that discuss current research delving into neuropsychobiology, the upshot of which is that what we consider normal human reasoning does not exist if emotion is disconnected from the system—a fact that can be attested to if you know someone who has an autistic spectrum disorder, or probably rarer, bizarre focal brain lesions that specifically wipe out right brain function while leaving the left brain intact.

In other words, what Yegge seems to call “marketing” is really the transmission of memes using both channels of reason and emotion (and I realize that I am partaking in the very fallacy that Damasio describes by separating them out like that.) In fact, he specifically discusses how Perl won over a lot of people precisely because of the touchy-feeliness of the Perl community, and how it seems that the Python community is alienating a lot of people by being more aloof.

Man, this totally sucks. It’s 1:30 am and I can’t get to sleep. Of course, this means that now I am screwing around with the new blogging engine. As you can tell from the header, things aren’t exactly fixed quite yet, and probably won’t be tonight this morning unless I decide not to sleep at all.

I’m hoping that this insomnia wears off soon. I do recognize that it is one of the cardinal symptoms of major depressive disorder, but we’ll ignore that red flag for now. It is doubtful that I’ll have normal sleeping hours any time soon, since I’m starting shift work on Thursday, guaranteeing that my sleeping hours will be even more screwed up than they already are. Ain’t life a bitch?

One would be hard pressed to convince me that anti-immigrant sentiments are not synonymous with outright racism. The arguments that immigration foes posit are specious at best. The whole, “they’re taking our jobs” idea just doesn’t fly. I really don’t see too many white people lining up for a back-breaking season of crop harvesting or signing up to clean out rich people’s toilets. These aren’t jobs that white people want, although in a lot of cases, they are jobs that need to be done. A more informed argument is the idea that we have to discourage them from taking these jobs because it only encourages rich bastards to pay workers poorly. There is a lot of truth in this. The problem is that (1) it doesn’t directly address how we can get the rich bastards to pay decent wages and (2) it doesn’t address the economic pressures that drives people from developing countries to find jobs in the U.S. And, realistically, I just don’t see people voluntarily paying top dollar for their lettuce and tomatoes just so my black and brown brothers and sisters can have a living wage, undocumented or no.

So, in summary, in my mind, anti-immigration basically means the same thing as racist asshole.

The people involved in the Minuteman Project make me sick. Not that I condone violence, and not that I think drug dealers are great people, but I think it will be funny when the Arizona border eventually explodes into all-out war—eventually, the Mexican Mafia and other drug traffickers will have just about enough with these ignorant-ass dumbfuck gringos and they will start shooting them, international incident or no. And, clearly, the Mexican government will probably be mostly powerless to do anything, and because of the prison industry’s investment in the War on Drugs (and the resultant slave labor that bullshit drug charges gains them), I doubt that the U.S. government will be all that interested in escalation. Not to mention the fact that the U.S. government is currently embroiled in a fiasco in the Middle East and will probably be unable to muster troops to handle such a border mishap.

And for once in a long time, the Catholic Church is finally standing up for what is right. Faced with the prospect of a federal law that makes aiding and abetting undocumented persons a crime, Cardinal Roger Mahoney has basically given the U.S. government the equivalent of the middle finger. More like this, please. Because we really shouldn’t be asking the question “who would Jesus deport?” That’s right, all you self-righteous hypocrites, you really ought to know that Jesus loves Mexicans a lot more than your lily-white racist ass.

I seem to be experiencing blogorrhea right now. Ah, nothing like insomnia.

Pondering the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, I can’t help but think about predicting the future.

Now, in reality, I’m pretty sure this is impossible, given Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and Gödel’s Theorem of Incompleteness, which I think even the occult is forced to comply with.

But if a fortune-teller were to tell me that my life will end unhappilly, with me being friendless and alone, and that this fortune-teller was known for always predicting the future correctly, I wonder what I would do? Would I, like the coward that I am, just end it right then and there and blow my brains out? Or would I, like the masochist I am, tough it out anyway, vowing to try to change my fate, even if it is utterly hopeless?

(And this reminds me of a message I once got from a Ouija board, which implored me to “Fight Fate.” I’ve always wondered what this could mean. Without knowing what my Fate is, how can I fight it? I mean, even if I am able to avert some major life-changing event in my life, or decide on a course of action completely antithetical to what I’m doing now, how do I know that it wasn’t fated for me to do so? There was, also, a second part to the message from the Great Beyond, which was “Rhyme Saves.” I haven’t even begun to ponder to what that could mean, since I haven’t really come to grips with the first part.)

Heh, I guess I always get philosophical at 1am. But I am once again forced to utter the trite cliché—it’s all about the journey, not the destination. Just because you know where you’re going doesn’t mean you know exactly how you’re going to get there. I guess. Anyway.

I guess you could say that “Time after Time” is one of my most favorite songs, and I have different cover versions of it attached to various memories. For example, the version by INOJ is attached to the summer after graduating from college, when I tried lingering in the Bay Area, but then ended up going home in defeat. Now that was an extremely depressing time. This was also the time when A and E (whom I mentioned in the previous post) finally actually got together, and I remember hanging out with them and feeling superfluous and stupid. Ah memoreez.

Anyway, I actually didn’t run into the Everything But the Girl version until a few years ago, so this version reminds me more of Chicago. And, for some reason, the Native American casinos in San Diego County. And time travel.

I don’t know, this version of this song just makes me wonder about the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, in which every choice you ever make causes the world you’re in to branch off into parallel worlds, with each branch representing the outcome of a particular decision you’ve made. Whenever I hear this song, I wonder if there is a version of me somewhere in the multiverse much more happier and fulfilled than I am. Sometimes I think that knowing such a version of myself exists is all I can really hope for in this particular branch that I’m experiencing.

I thought I had mentioned this before, but I can’t find it in my blog archives. In any case, I swear it seems like sometimes my iPod can read what mood I’m in. On my 2 hour trip back from L.A., it kept pulling up all these down-tempo, super-chill, and melancholy, reflective songs, and while this cheesy song by a Filipino American group may not really fall into this category, it is attached to a somewhat melancholy memory.

Me and some of my friends from college decided to take a trip to Vegas our senior year during winter break. (I remember having to stay behind to try and rustle up some letters of recommendation for medical school from professors who surely had no idea who I was. While everybody else drove down to L.A. then to Vegas, enduring various adventures involving a flat tire, I caught up with them by plane.) I was hopelessly infatuated with my friend A, but she already had her eye on my friend E. I remember wallowing in mawkish despair the entire trip. A bottle of Crown Royal figures into the story somewhere. There’s also the somewhat amusing episode of me going down to the casinos completely blasted out of my mind to play the slots. I was so drunk that I didn’t even notice I was dropping coins onto the ground instead of into the coin slot until a casino attendant came by and pointed it out.

Anyway, after the fact, I realized that this was when A and E, I think, really first hooked up. The memory I have attached to it was the drive back from Vegas to L.A. We rode in two cars, and A and E were in the lead car, while I was in the car behind, and somewhere between Baker and Barstow it started snowing. I remember watching the car they were in wistfully while this song was playing.

I dunno, I guess it’s stupid. But I think I may never have gotten over that episode. I don’t know if this is a healthy way to think about things, but the way I look at it, I think it’s much easier to deal with and process specific terms of rejection. Like if she thinks you’re an asshole, or there’s something she can’t stand about you, or if she just doesn’t think you’re attractive. I mean, I can speculate, and maybe all these things or none of these things are true, but I just remember this general sense of insuperable hopelessness, like, there was absolutely no way I could grab her attention. I mean, I just seem to always wallow in the friend zone, and I remember feeling like there was absolutely nothing I could do about it.

As time goes on, I’ve experienced a few more rejections, and really, nothing has every worked out. I realize that a good part of it is self-imposed. I have a seriously rough time trusting people in general, and as I grow older, I find it harder and harder to make friends, much less with trying to pursue romantic relationships. I just can’t seem to open up and let people into my life, and what is worse, it seems like I’m losing touch of the people who are already in my life, close friends and family included.

As B has warned me, I’m setting myself up for a self-fulfilling prophecy. If, ten, or maybe even five years from now, I find myself friendless and alone, I suspect I will have no one to blame but myself.

Christ, this is extraordinarily depressing. And yet, like many times in my life, I find myself just staring hopelessly in anticipation of the impending train wreck.

Now I’m not an MMORPG’er (for the non-nerds out there, MMORPG is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game. Dungeons and Dragons ported to the Internet with pretty graphics.) This is not because of some inherent virtue. I might be very well have become one if I had a little more free time in my life or if I had started taking amphetamines, since God only knows I can’t really sacrifice anymore sleep than I already do. But that is another rant.

But I disagree with this screed about MMORPGs (the World of Warcraft specifically) and think some of the issues are wrong headed. A lot of the ideas are infused with ideas from libertarian and Ayn Randians philosophies, which I think are rather flawed. While I don’t like the government digging through my shit, and think that a small government is more ideal than a big government, I really don’t buy the myth of the rugged individualist. Human beings have evolved to be social creatures. Without the adaptation of socialization, our ancestors would’ve been rendered extinct by clearly superior predators like lions and tigers and wolves. Without socialization and altruism, we wouldn’t’ve ever gotten to the point where we could’ve developed weaponry, and without weapons, we ain’t shit. And, finally, if human beings didn’t need other people, then we wouldn’t be dependent on sex for procreation. End of story. But anyway.

The idea I most disagree with is “skill > time.” While I do agree that giftedness and creative genius will never be surpassed by a million monkeys typing randomly on a million keyboards (hence, the reason why a “man-month” is a myth) I do think it’s bullshit to think that hard-work and determination can’t ever surpass skill (so maybe I’m not talking Einstein-like genius here, I’m talking more like IQ 120-130, but chances are, you ain’t Einstein) This idea is, after all, embodied in a rather old fable—the Tortoise and the Hare.

The other thing is that skill really does get better with continued experience. Maybe not in the linear fashion that occurs in RPGs. True, you don’t accumulate experience points. But it is quite obvious in, for example, surgery, where they have actually studied this closely, that the guy who has done ten thousand herniorrhaphies will generally be better at it than the one who has only done one thousand. Now does this mean one is a better surgeon than the other? No, not necessarily, after this is only one type of surgery, and the techniques necessary to perform different surgeries vary greatly. The realm of such skills is actually very circumscribed. And is there such a thing as a born surgeon? I seriously doubt it. I doubt there are people who by the age of 3 are skilled at doing exploratory laparotomies. Advanced skills like these are quite obviously learned. And you have to be taught these skills. You can’t hope to just walk into an operating room, pick up a scalpel, and start cutting away and think you’re going to do a stand-up job.

So I guess the moral here is that, unless your talent truly exceeds two standard deviations from the norm, you are probably not going to get very far without hard work. If I wanted a safe bet, I would easily put my money on a hard worker rather than someone who had some moderate skill in something. The hard worker can always learn whatever needs to be learned. The guy who thinks he has some skills is more likely to give me attitude. And he or she is probably going to be less adaptable, relying on his/her skill. I think one will find that prospective employers also tend to think this way.

Going off on a tangent, I think that’s what’s wrong with the libertarians and Ayn Randians I’ve met. While your premises might be right if you possessed the brain of Stephen Hawking or the dexterity of Kobe Bryant, believe me, you ain’t that good. Statistically speaking, you’re probably going to fall within two standard deviations from the mean, and that isn’t that big of a spread. And when the differences aren’t that big, your inherent talent isn’t going to be that important. You really shouldn’t buy into the myth of your inherent superiority.

Anyway, that’s my own rant for the day.

Just been watching Chris Rock’s routine “Never Scared.” I like how he describes how affirmative action actually works:

I don’t think I should get accepted to a school over a white person if I get a lower mark on a test. But if there’s a tie? Fuck him! Shit, you had a 400-year head start, motherfucker!