Steaming Turd

Came across this amusing page today in the midst of a Slashdot thread.

Apologies to anybody who checked the site this evening, as it was returning an error instead of producing the drivel I normally have up here. Turns out my research (which I run on the same machine) had filled up the hard drive. :p

Said by Sen. Chuck Schumer: “The bottom line is, giving convicted sex offenders government-funded Viagra is like giving convicted murderers an assault rifle when they get out of jail.”

Fry: When you were a kid, what was your biggest fantasy?
Leela: To have parents.
Fry: Whatever. The correct answer is….

…to get new Futurama episodes!

The Futurama fan site gotfuturama.com is reporting that there are high level talks at Fox concerning bringing back Futurama in some form. This has even been substantiated by Billy West, voice of Fry, Zapp Brannigan, Richard Nixon’s Head, and Professor Farnsworth (among others), who mentioned on his message board that David X. Cohen, writer and executive producer of Futurama, mentioned that Fox is interested in producing several Futurama movies straight to DVD (they would also quite likely sell a license to Adult Swim to run the movies on TV). While a DVD movie will probably be much shorter than half a season of the TV show, yet cost as much as half a season on DVD, it’s probably the only way that the series will continue, so I’ll pay a little extra not to look the gift horse in the mouth.

Anyway, this is superbly good news - here’s hoping it happens

I’ve been hit with a stick by Eldan. Ouch. Anyway, it’s taken me a little while to get back to him on this, but here we go:

You’re stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be? As Eldan mentioned, there seems to be some confusion on what’s meant by this question. He used two interpretations, while another was suggested by one of his readers. I’ll answer all three.

• Book I’d most like burned: Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right by Al Franken
  If there’s anything that makes for a poor persuasive argument, it’s ad hominem attacks. If there’s anybody who uses ad hominem attacks, it’s far-extreme political commentators. As such, all of these authors deserve not to be read (that includes Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and Michael Moore, among many, many others). But when choosing a book to burn, I have to go for pure personal satisfaction here, and that means burning this gem from liberal commentator Al Franken.
• Book I’d most like saved: The Christian Bible
  The reason I make this choice is as a reflexive act against those people who attempt to purge religion - and specifically, Christianity - from their sight. Atheism is as much a religion as Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, et cetera, and deserves no special favor over any other religion. In fact, religion in general - and Christianity especially, in the Western world - has had such a huge influence on our culture that it (should be) impossible to discuss history and sociology on a grand scale without mentioning and discussing religion(s) in an impartial and academic way. The Christian Bible should therefore be seen in public places like high school libraries, right alongside the Koran, the Torah, and any other religious text you care to name. But the Bible especially deserves to be saved because it’s the only one that ever seems to come under attack in America.
• Book I’d memorize in order to save: Not The Bible
  I need to make one more commentary on the answer to the previous question. The Bible is not a book I would memorize in order to save, for what I consider a very important reason: to memorize the entire Bible, one would almost have to commit oneself to unconditional belief; and with the entire Bible memorized, there would be too much temptation to use it as a bludgeoning instrument. If there’s anything that really bothers me about the Bible, it’s not the text itself - it’s the way people use it. The self-righteous uses it to condemn their fellow man, judging those who commit abominations as being abominable themselves, instead of using it as a beacon for one’s own path in life. Mote in your eye, beam in mine, and all that. On the other hand, the sinner uses it as a free pass for everything they feel like doing but know they shouldn’t. Thus, the response to, “You shouldn’t smoke pot,” instead of being, “There’s nothing wrong with smoking pot,” becomes a guilt-ridden, “Judge not, lest ye be judged.” It’s the epitome of hypocrisy on both sides, as the self-righteous judges others instead of leaving the judgment to God, and the sinner judges others solely for judging him.

  That point made, I am brought to the actual answer to this question. I’m hard-pressed to come up with something profound, so I’ll just keep myself closer to being honest. I’d memorize Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, if I possibly could. The Silmarillion is the unsung hero of Arda, so to speak; there’ll probably never be a movie or TV series made of it, and the average “I saw Lord of the Rings and liked it, but who are those freaks in the costumes” person will probably never read it, even if they do read the trilogy itself. Tolkien viewed it as a mythology for a land that never formed a structured mythology of its own, and though it reads a bit like a religious history, there’s no dogma, no “revisionism”, and no loss in interpretation or decay from the passage of time.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character? No.
I say this with one caveat: by “crush”, I am not counting, “I bet she’d be hot if she were real.” But if I wanted to include that category, I’d have to nominate Delphine Angua von Überwald. I mean, Angua’s a cop, she’s smart, she’s blonde, she’s got huge… tracts of land, she turns into a wolf under a full moon, and when she turns back into a human, she’s naked. What’s not to like?

The last book you bought is: Real Money by Jim Cramer
By “bought,” I’m unfortunately counting, “have purchased from Amazon but they haven’t shipped it yet.” I’m a bit of a neophyte investor, and I’ve found a lot of Cramer’s advice on his TV show, Mad Money, to be insightful. (One still has to take one’s own opinion and situation into account before investing, but Cramer is right often enough that you can’t overlook him.) I’m looking more for techniques into researching stock picks and understanding how the market works, and from what I gather, this book provides it.

The last book you read: The Light Fantastic by Terry Pratchett and A First Course in String Theory by Barton Zwiebach
You can read a review of The Light Fantastic here. As for Zwiebach’s book, well, I have to admit that I haven’t read the whole thing. It is a textbook, after all, and as such requires a certain amount of effort beyond mere reading in order to understand it fully. I managed to get through several chapters before the combination of esoteric math and partial understanding of complicated subjects piled up and reduced the marginal enlightenment per page to nearly zero. However, I do plan/hope to get back to it someday with pencil and paper, to more fully understand the topic. Hopefully, by then, the state of the art will have progressed into a fuller understanding of the nature of the universe, and I’ll be able to equip myself with the tools needed to understand what the heck these people are talking about.

What are you currently reading? Research-related papers, mostly.
I do, however, plan to include Real Money, as well as two Terry Pratchett novels (Equal Rites and Mort) into my toilet-reading library in the near future.

Five books you would take to a deserted island:

1. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien - I’m perhaps cheating a bit, but perhaps not, as Tolkien originally intended LotR to be one story, and the three-volume division came about because of publisher considerations. In any case, this is (to me, anyway) the quintessential adventure story. The first time I finished reading it, I was in a sense stunned by the truly epic nature of the story I had just read. If ever there was a book I could re-read dozens of times until my eventual death or rescue, it would be this. Plus, I won’t need to bring The Silmarillion with me, because I memorized it five questions above, and if I really need to read it again, I can just burn it into some animal skins or something.
2. The Republic by Plato - I’ve never read The Republic, but if I’m on a deserted island, it’ll give me plenty of time to understand ancient Greek culture and how the passage of 2400 years has affected our culture.
3. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams - I haven’t yet read this book, and for that I should have my geek license revoked. I’d bring this along with me to a deserted island so that if I ever returned to civilization, at least I could rejoin the ranks of true nerd-dom with pride.
4. The collected works of H.P. Lovecraft - Okay, so I’m cheating a bit here as well. Lovecraft wrote short stories (to varying degrees of “short”), but to my knowledge, his entire collection has never been released as one volume. Nevertheless, I consider him to be the ultimate in modern horror writing. The greatest reason why I like Lovecraft’s stories enough to bring them along with me is this quote, from “Call of Cthulhu”:
   

   The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

5. Sync by Steven Strogatz - Yet another book I haven’t read. If I’m alone on an island, I’ll have plenty of time to observe nature in its various facets, and I’m sure I’ll see examples of seemingly spontaneous synchronicity. This book would help me know what to look for and form hypotheses about why these phenomena occur. I was fortunate enough to see Strogatz and Alan Alda in a one-on-one on-stage discussion of synchronicity (on C-SPAN), and Strogatz’s insights were at once amusing and fascinating.

Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons)? And why?
This is tough, because there aren’t many people I know who keep active weblogs. Andy is going to be one, er, victim of the stick. It’s fascinating how often I disagree with Andy on a wide variety of issues, but it’s even more fascinating which issues we agree on. Therefore, he gets the stick not simply because he keeps a weblog, but also because he’s usually so different, but occasionally not.

Birch gets the stick as well, and not just because he’s my biggest fan. He’s sort of the opposite of Andy, in that he almost always has the same viewpoint as me, but it’s fascinating (and generally surprising) what issues we disagree on. Unfortunately, while he does have a webpage, he doesn’t keep a weblog of his own. Still, he’s more than welcome to post his comments here if he desires.

And third, the stick goes to Chad. He’s one of the most unusual people I know - one of those sorts of people you think you know but probably don’t. Knowing what he reads and why, and what books he considers important, will help me to understand him a bit better, and that’s the whole point of this, right? Plus, there’s a nonzero chance that Amanda will get the stick from him, and she’s a very close fourth on my list of stick-getters. Sadly, I don’t think Chad keeps a webpage at all, but there’s plenty of room for his comments here.

Stick Path Finally, the trajectory of the stick from its start to the side of my head: Barrie unleashed the stick on the 7th of March - Amanda - scooterdeb - Brian - Karma Police - Evelio - Ivy - Suzanne - Jeff - Patricia Lockwood - Frank - Amy - Steve - Ginger - Scopylaw - AI - Jose - Eldan - Me.

In Responsum: Unmarked Nuclear Warheads…

So tonight was the series finale of Enterprise. Actually, they did two episodes tonight: one was the second part of last week’s episode where a xenophobic sociopath played by Robocop threatens to blow up Starfleet Headquarters (and the rest of San Francisco) if all aliens don’t leave Earth. The second was a future-of-the- Enterprise-crew episode in one respect set six years after the end of the other episode, and in another respect set in the middle of a seventh-season TNG episode.

The first of the two episodes was pretty good, on par with most of the rest of Enterprise’s fourth season (the part after they got rid of that Alien Nazi crap). It had suspense, emotion, and character development, in addition to being a key piece of the story of the formation of the Federation. The only cheese involved is that the speech scene near the end, while reminiscent of Kirk’s speech at the Khitomer Conference in Star Trek VI, didn’t occur on an emotional high like in ST:VI. (The ending of VI was probably the best of all the ST movies, even better than TWoK, because it carried the viewer through high suspense, all the way from the space combat scene through Scotty killing the assassin and Sulu beaming down to apprehend Cartwright. Kirk’s speech was the theatrical cigarette afterwards.) But all we got in the Enterprise episode was the evil agent on the Enterprise killing himself out of guilt, followed by a speech by Archer presumably given hours or even days later.

The other episode, however, was a seemingly half-hearted attempt by Beavis and Butt-Head to piece together a series finale. It ripped off Reginald Barclay’s holodeck fetish to some degree, since it featured Jonathan Frakes using the Enterprise-D’s holodeck to recreate what happened centuries earlier (about ten years into Archer and Friends’s service on the Enterprise), where he wanted some inspiration for how to handle the dilemma he had regarding the Pegasus incident from TNG’s seventh season. Unfortunately, the link between Frakes’s decision and all that he watched and went through on the holodeck was tenuous if not completely absent.

It also took an inconsequential plot device (interrupting Archer’s grand speech at the formation of the Federation so he could help rescue Shran’s daughter), stretched it into a huge portion of the episode, and then ultimately used that plot device solely to get Tucker to spontaneously sacrifice himself when it wasn’t convincingly necessary to do so. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge Jeffrey Combs fan, and his contributions to Star Trek have proven him worthy of an appearance in Enterprise’s series finale (he was in DS9’s as well, as Everybody’s Favorite Bad Guy, Weyoun). But the appearance here seemed token and irrelevant, and I think the episode and the character both deserved better.

Finally, it did a poor job at trying to replicate the feel of Babylon 5’s What Happened Twenty Years Later series finale. Yeah, Enterprise tried using fun tricks, like including not-so-subtle references to past episodes and/or series. But what was obviously lacking was an emotional connection to the ship, its crew, and the foundational ideas of the show - a fault of the past four years that can’t be made up for in one 44-minute episode. I mean, the TNG series finale was a classic that showed a bit about the destiny of the crew while leveraging the emotional attachment that the viewer had built up over the years. (It also showcased how tremendously much Patrick Stewart had improved as a television actor since Season 1, and yet again put him against the perennial favorite John DeLancie in his Best Role Ever as Q.) The Babylon 5 series finale, despite the hurdles the series encountered throughout its five-year run and its especially mediocre fifth season, was very touching, even including a poignant moment as JMS himself appears on camera for the only time in the series as a maintenance guy shutting off the lights on the station for the very last time.

Anyway, it’s probably for the best that Enterprise is done. The series would have been perpetually stuck in a mire of continuity conflicts and meaningless plots unless a change in management were to take place, and it seems that Berman and Braga would rather ride the series down into the dirt than admit how much they damaged the series’s potential and give up the saddle for someone else.

Oh, well. At least we get new episodes of SG-1 and Atlantis in July.

Looks like Crazy Finger Lady’s husband was in on it, too. I find it amusing how both of them have been arrested on other various fraud charges that have nothing to do with the Wendy’s case.

Birch pointed me toward this site, which takes a very facetious look at assault weapon violence. Take a look over the website before you read on, because I don’t want to spoil the experience.

Okay. On the off-chance that you didn’t “get it”, the website pokes fun at two arguments used by the anti-gun lobby. One is that guns (especially assault weapons) cause violent crime; the gag is that as long as the website’s patrons are maintaining a constant vigil over the assault weapon viewed by the webcam, it can be caught red-handed when it spontaneously causes an act of violence. The other is that the various restrictions in the now-expired assault weapons ban were illogical and pointless in terms of preventing actual violence; many of these restrictions have been criticized by the pro-gun lobby for only addressing features of weapons that possibly made them look more threatening (like adding a bayonet lug to the end).

Now, you as an individual might agree or disagree with the points the website is trying to make. However, I think the most important point made is also a more subtle one - that the entire gun debate (especially dealing with “assault weapons”) is fueled almost entirely by emotion. Few people involved in the debate have (or, at least, use) actual facts to support their arguments, though I daresay that the anti-gun lobby is far more guilty of this.

Reference the Brady Campaign, spurred by the wounding of James Brady in the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan by John Hinckley, Jr. Note that Brady was not wounded by an assault weapon, or even a semiautomatic weapon. Hinckley used a .22-caliber revolver to commit his crime. Also reference that John Wilkes Boothe was more successful than Hinckley at getting the job done, though he used a single-shot .44-caliber Deringer.

Finally, reference this Wikipedia article which covers the items banned by the expired assault weapons ban. Out of all the items banned, there are only a few which would seem to have any real impact on increasing the usefulness of a weapon in street crime:

• Grenade launcher attachment for semiauto rifles (which I think are already regulated)
• Silencers (which are already regulated)
• High-capacity clip for semiauto pistols (though this isn’t mentioned in the Wikipedia article, I think it was part of the ban)
• High-capacity magazine for semiauto shotguns
• Detachable magazine for semiauto shotguns (Note that I’m personally kind of iffy on semiauto shotguns in general)

Note that fully automatic weapons aren’t mentioned here. That’s because private ownership of fully auto firearms has been regulated since 1934, partly in response to the old Thompson submachine gun.

In Responsum: Private e-mail

In addition to the earlier stories about Crazy Finger Lady, there is actually a legitimate incident at a frozen custard stand in North Carolina where a worker lost part of a finger and somehow the finger part ended up in someone’s dessert. But now we find out that Not-So-Crazy Finger Guy, who is planning to sue the custard stand, may run into legal troubles of his own because he refused to return the finger to its rightful owner 30 minutes after the finger was severed, well within the 6 or so hours during which a body part can usually be reattached. Instead, he took the finger home and froze it to use as evidence in a lawsuit against the custard stand.

Now, perhaps Not-So-Crazy Finger Guy will get some money out of the custard stand. But I bet he won’t be spending any of it when Poor Fingerless Custard Stand Worker - who obviously wasn’t personally responsible for the misplacement of his finger in the custard, as he was probably busy screaming in horror shortly after he lost it - sues him back into the stone age.

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the FCC overstepped its statutory bounds in its efforts to mandate “digital rights management” technology in devices which utilize received digital broadcast TV signals.

The short of it is that within the next few years, all broadcast TV will be digital, with much of the content being in high-definition. This means that a person can potentially record their TV shows and rewatch them at full clarity, while still having the freedom to do things like skipping commercials. Now, this is obviously a nightmare for both broadcasters and content owners (the big networks and the MPAA, most especially), since it means they lose control over making the viewer watch TV however the content owners want. They frame their arguments around online filesharing, claiming that sharing broadcast TV over the Internet is destructive to their industry, but the real threat for them is the humble PVR - especially homebrew PVRs over which Big Media has no sway.

In order to combat this threat, Big Media lobbied the FCC (successfully) to mandate that all consumer electronics imported or sold in the US, starting in July 2005, would have to conform to a “broadcast flag” that broadcasters would activate in order to prevent the viewer from recording the digital broadcast at full resolution and then subsequently utilizing the data privately however the viewer saw fit (most notably, the ability to skip commercials is threatened).

However, numerous organizations, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Library Association, filed suit against the FCC, claiming that the FCC has no jurisdiction over devices which manipulate a broadcast data stream after the stream has been received by a tuner. The EFF now reports that the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed unanimously.

Note that the MPAA, broadcast networks, and other elements of Big Media will undoubtedly be taking this to Congress, since Congress does have the authority to impose these regulations or to grant the FCC jurisdiction. Sounds like a good time to write one’s Congressional representation (though almost nobody in Congress views these issues seriously, and those who do take them seriously do so for the most part because they have been taking the MPAA/RIAA’s money for years).

On a side note, one should note that cable subscribers are slightly more screwed. Since cable is essentially a pay-to-play service, Big Media can get the cable companies under their thumbs far more easily, which means that no governmental regulatory middleman is necessary. Note also that in some cases, Big Media and Big Cable are one and the same.