Premature Electoral Simulation

ABC news has an electoral-calculator interactive-map thang, so I clicked on the states and allotted them according to how they went in the last 4 elections (which it shows you as you hover.) Three or four times red, you're red. Three or four times blue, you're blue. That just left (something like) Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, WV as tied twice red, twice blue. So… go back one more election to get 3 out of 5. The website doesn't show 5 elections ago, so peek at wikipedia or maybe here to see 5 rounds ago, 1988!

Unfortunately, 1988 was Dukakis's year, and he only adds WV. The others would go to McCain *IF* history is our guide (but it ain't!). Doing this completely mechanically, I look to see who won, but it produces the unfortunate TIE of 269-269. 270 needed to win. Noooo! El Courto Supremo decido againo.

Regarding the image, where it says "Hover over state for detail," that's not referring to your mouse. You have to actual ly hover over the state. The same goes for clicking the state. You need to physically click the actual state to change its color. Sorry for any misunderstanding.

Wait a sec. The Supreme Court is constitutionally prohibited from meddling in the states' elections notwithstanding the unfortunate exception of the 2000 Judicial Coup d'etat that installed Resident G.W. Bush. The decision is supposed to go to the House (or isn't it a rare "joint" session of Congress?) and be decided there. In that case, Obama wins.

OK, that tie was scary but it's just a history-based simulation. Things look better at the poll-based and contemporary-reality-based http://electoral-vote.com/ which (today) has Obama winning and ahead by 60 Electoral votes getting Ohio, Missouri, and Colorado while letting the McCainites eat up Michigan and WV. Fair trade. VA and Indiana are in statistical limbo.

It looks like the election will be fought in the midwest and Ohio River valley area and if they are sick of war, McCain's out unless they believe his new line that the war will be over soon and Iraq will peacefully accept American bases like Korea, Germany, or Japan --for the next hundred years.

Watch for VPs to be named from this area???

I hope Obama goes for the borderline states and builds a Diebold-hack-proof majority rather than gunning for Montana and so on.

If attacked by the Supremos, I also hope he won't lie down and die like Al Gore did during the Coup but will fight as they do in Mexico and other proud countries when tyrants steal their elections. I wonder if Clinton would accept that kind of treatment, or would mobilize a street-level army?

Following the election, it's time for a trial or tribunal of the lying pRes and Vice-P. To reduce the growth and cost of government, federal employees hired since 2001 should be suspended pending a review. Laws passed by the illegal government should also be suspended pending legislative review. The Supreme Court inJustices responsible for the coup should be impeached and replaced. It would be a good idea to have a mandatory retirement age or term limit on them, too. I'm not saying this should take up more than 10 or 20% of the time and attention of the new government, but it needs to be done and should not be overlooked.

Cut 'n' Paste McCain: Tired, old, recycled, and unimaginative plagiarism is so clever

Now that BitchSlap'08 is winding down after the Final Slapdowns in South Dakota and Montana, performed gently by Barack Obama to spare Hill-Rod the more painful slapdown at the hands of general election voters and Panamanian-born former (and continuing psychological) Prisoner of War John McCain, Grampa McCain has toyed with a new campaign slogan: A Leader You Can Believe In. If that sounds familiar, it may be because he stole it from Barack Obama's Change You Can Believe In. His theory is it's not plagiarism if you change one word. Other times he hasn't even bothered to change one word. Earlier, he stole Ready to Lead on Day One and splayed that across his website. He's also stolen I'm fired up and ready to go, an unregistered trademark of Barack Obama. Hill-Rod has had her people steal from Obama as well, appropriating Si, se puede (to fire up her Espanophone campaign). She's nicked a few other Obamanian lines. All's fair in love and war. Still, it tells you where the ideas are and where the dull and imaginative people are, too. Some lead, others follow. If Obama wears a track suit at his next appearance, maybe Grampa will do so, too. This could be a sign of senility. If he starts repeating lines from television commercials and thinking he's being funny, his people better keep him indoors and just feed him jelly beans and viagra like the Reagan/Dole handlers did, and hope the voters won't notice.

McCain alters Obama slogan to his own liking

WASHINGTON (AP) — The general election is now in full speed — just check out the competing slogans.
Republican John McCain has transformed rival Barack Obama's slogan of "Change We Can Believe In" into his own line, "A Leader We Can Believe In."
McCain's campaign this week posted the personalized motto on its Web site, http://www.johnmccain.com. The white, bold words are posted on a blue background above red and white stripes — a pattern similar to Obama's campaign logo.
"The choice is between the right change and the wrong change; between going forward and going backward," follows Sen. McCain's new slogan.
After Sen. Obama gathered enough delegates to clinch the Democratic presidential nomination on Tuesday, McCain repeatedly evoked Obama's slogan at a rally while standing in front of a campaign banner that read "A Leader We Can Believe In."
"He doesn't trust us to make decisions for ourselves and wants the government to make them for us. And that's not change we can believe in," McCain said Tuesday.
Obama's campaign also revised its Web site, http://www.barackobama.com.
It now says "WE DID IT" in bold, blue letters highlighted by images of fireworks.

Harvest Vehicle

Next time an ambulance drives by or comes to pick you up, it may not be to save your life; it may only be there to harvest your organs. Do you honestly think that if some big shot like Bill Clinton, Dick Cheney, or some unknown über-riche were in the local hospital in desperate need of a heart, that your records wouldn't be faked to make it appear that you had died moments before the vehicle arrived and your heart was removed? This isn't too far-fetched (or even fetched) either; how often have you read of people who were believed to be dead being found barely alive and revived at the morgue? Mistakes would be much more likely in the rush to harvest organs. You'd be much less likely to be found with a barely discernible heartbeat if your heart had already been removed and given to someone who was able to afford health care.

My gut feeling is that this idea will never get off the ground due to the creep-out factor registered not just by me but by legions of many other undead.

NY considers creating 'organ-removal' ambulance
By DAVID B. CARUSO, Associated Press Writer
Thu Jun 5, 3:14 PM ET
NEW YORK - Saving the living has always been the No. 1 priority for a New York City ambulance crew. But a select group of paramedics may soon have a different task altogether: saving the dead. The city is considering creating a special ambulance whose crew would rush to collect the newly deceased and preserve the body so that the organs might be taken for transplant.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080605/ap_on_he_me/organ_wagon

Organ-Wagon? OK, who at AP decides the web-page URL?

What's *your* excuse?

"Awesome. I saw it, too! It came out of the sun and vanished behind the Starbucks Drive-thru. The craft resembled nothing so much as the delicate first impression of steamed milk from a Starbucks latte, or possibly a cappucino. It was hard to tell from the distance and speed at which it moved, which I would estimate as 4000 miles per hour."

This illustrated fictional episode grew out of a friend's forward of my own e-mail back to me. He later said he had mistaken me for his mom because he got the message (which did include the words "love, Mom" written by a tornado-stricken person) on his iphone as he went thru the starbucks drive-thru. I responded that the iphone/starbucks tale was the new "Dog-ate-my-homework." Today I was sent a picture of the confusing establishment, which, when visually enhanced over my lunch hour, revealed new evidence of illegal aliens working in the Los Angeles basin.
Uptweak 20080609: iPhone=I.

Common disasters

It started off as a bad year for me personally, and it is shaping up globally to be a bad year of Biblical proportions.

The aftereffects of Cyclone Nargis in the Irrawaddy delta continue to be dealt with incompetently by the Burmese bakufu. Somewhere, one Myanmarese general is commending another general, nicknamed the local equivalent of "Brownie," for doing a heckuva job. Satellite photos in today's NYT show villages in which every building has disappeared, hundreds of buildings.

In China, the Sichuan earthquake's death toll has been revised upward to 80,000 from the 60,000 it was a few days ago. The current obsession is with the possibility of secondary disasters from the new quake lakes. The quake lakes are a fortuitous result of geological forces, and air strikes are unlikely to change things one way or the other. Taiwan has some lakes that were created by recent earthquakes, and Fuji Five Lakes were the result of volcanic eruptions of Mount Fuji. Since all lakes will naturally silt up and disappear over time, the creation of new lakes is a rare and special geological gift. How else can new lakes be created? We should probably just be grateful for them. Granted, there is a chance they may not be permanently stable, but give them a chance. Doing some temporary evacuations should be enough to see if the new natural dam will erode completely, moderately, or not at all when overflowed.

Although it is smaller scale by a factor of 10,000 in terms of the death toll and human impact, the tornado in Parkersburg, Iowa was of more personal interest to me. I have been to the Burmese border, but not in Burma, and went through Chengdu and Chongqing in China, but Parkersburg is near my mother's hometown and also where my dentist used to be located. It's possible that my dental records have ended up in Wisconsin or Illinois as reportedly happened to some photographs from Parkersburg, although I doubt anyone keeps dental records that long. Coincidentally, the previous record holder for Iowa's biggest tornado was an F-5 that hit Charles City in 1968, about one county away to the northeast. I can remember seeing the ruins of that one as a small child. I found some current tornado pictures here, here, here, and here --although they are small and some of these seem to go offline after 5 days.

A large series of aerial photos here shows the total destruction as winds exceeded 200 mph (320kph?)! As you can see in other pictures, concrete block foundations and even rectangular tombstones were blown away and rolled around.

It may be best for Iowans to consider building semi-underground reinforced concrete geodesic domes or, at the very least, A-frame homes.

If this goes on, will the Beijing Games be canceled by bird flu or another contagious outbreak? Perhaps another coastal American city is due to be destroyed by sea level rise and hurricanes. Miami, taken out just before the November elections, could enrage the population even if (or because) the Floridians are given generous handouts 9-11 style to try to pay them off. Perhaps it is Europe's turn? The Dutch should be offered generous resettlement opportunities in countries above sea level.

Mind-reading computer

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,146510-c,artificialintelligence/article.html
http://www.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUSN2939892820080529

It was bad enough back in the future "2001" when HAL could read lips. Now he's reading minds. MRI is not a practical input method, however. Retrofitting the acronym : Magnetic Resonance Imaging >> Mind Reading Interface. Remember the good old days of the noughties when computers couldn't read your mind and hackers and spooks couldn't hack into your thoughts and didn't know when you were thinking negative thoughts about the Dear Leader? --or negative thoughts about the computer?

Of course, there is a bright side, it's just that that's all you ever read about. Look on the dark side, and all five sides of the issue. Linguistically and cognitively, it is very interestingThe positive applications for Universal Access are pretty obvious, but beyond that it is easy to imagine an almost complete end to privacy in its last refuge, the mind.

I Want To Believe '08 (Are politicians real?)

I've had this image in my mind for a while. I think almost everybody does, although it may be at various levels of focusedness and resolution. I got onto Google Image search and dug around a little to see if someone had already done this. Of course, they had, although it took some digging to find out. The version at whatsdrivingyoucrazy.com was pretty good but a little too rough, so I decided to make a DIY version.

I was a little disgusted when my new version of MacOS, 10.5, broke iPhoto and made it much harder to browse through my photo collection. I also didn't like that my RSS headline screensaver now cycled through 3 headlines instead of 10 from Yahoo. When 10.5 repeatedly froze and locked up just by running a screensaver I ditched it and reverted to 10.4. I have the new Ubuntu running on a Fujitsu as an alternative since the Windows Vista OS still isn't multilingual and I don't want to use it in Japanese any more than I have to. MacOS has been multilingual for 6 or 8 years and Ubuntu has a few dozen languages built in, too.

Anyway, iPhoto runs, but no longer allows me to export to Facebook, Picasa, Flickr, a movie, or even as a file. All you can do is read the file name and Spotlight search for it.

Enough about Apple already. Oh, one more. I wish the fan didn't run in the computer 24 hours a day unless you manually select Sleep mode. They seem to have corrected the bug with their laptops but my downstairs iLamp still can be heard upstairs.

Anyway, I found a photo I had taken with an eerie likeness to what I was seeking, got the Obama logo, got a picture of Obama that I like, found some filters that chromiumized the logo, found the font was Arial Black as it appears (and Inner Shadow seems appropriate), and just had to throw in Dennis Kucinich. Don't stinge on the blur. That pretty much concretizes my image of the national mood (Zeitgeist Amerika) in this erection ear election year.

Below is an urban variation of the concept. Just an afterthought. In the background is a danchi, an industrial housing concept inspired by the Soviet combinats, perhaps. These images American-Made in Japan from Japanese and American parts.

Neither of these is intended for the use of right-wing headcases, BTW. All rights reserved, blah blah blah.



Uptweak:

Wall-painted animation "MUTO" by Blu>

(La Ciudad de Buenos Aires)
http://www.blublu.org/

Jan Chipchase

To me, Jan Chipchase sounds a bit like an update of the "HAL chipset." My head was spinning for a while, wondering who he was and where he was coming from, when I landed on a random blog entry from a Google image search. Traveler? International jewel thief? (No.) It gradually became clearer. His blog Future Perfect is well worth reading for its one-of-a-kind observations and insights. You could also visit his work profile, the blog of his work colleague Younghee Jung (with the superior banner design;-), this interview, or this excellent article in the NYT.

The May 12, 2008 Sichuan Earthquake (14:28 )

I thought this was an extremely moving photograph. Somehow I can't get it out of my mind. This one or something like it may be one of the images we forever associate with 2008.

This Friday May 16, 2008, photo, distributed by the official Chinese news agency Xinhua, shows a dead student's hand holding a pen tightly in the debris site of Dongqi Middle School in Hanwang Town of quake-hit Mianzhu City, southwest China's Sichuan province. (AP Photo/Xinhua, Liu Zhongjun)

There is an extensive collection of photos of the aftermath of the May 12, 2008 Sichuan earthquake at cryptome.org. Given the large number of students killed in what must have been somewhat shoddily-built school buildings, this doesn't seem to be an unusual sight, as I also found some different yet remarkably similar pictures at earthquakechina08.blogspot.com.

Not to be too skeptical or anything, but… what are the chances of all three out of three pictures being lefties? I just happened to notice. I'm not saying anyone is being deceptive, though. Hypotheses: Two to three PM could be left-hand development hour; this may have been the National Center for the Study of Lefthandedness; or rescuers may have a tradition of placing a pen in the left hand so the dead may continue to write in the spirit world. Or it may well just be a coincidence.

The Wikipedia also has a shot of toads swarming down the streets of Mianzhou, thought by many to be an eerie precursor to the quake.

VIEW-MASTER REELS (7 THREE-DIMENSIONAL PHOTOGRAPHS IN FULL-COLOR KODACHROME)

I have a bunch of these View-Master reels at home. They date from around 1948, through the 1950s when my mother collected them, to some from the 1960s and 1970s that my siblings and I bought and received, and a few more that I bought a few years ago. They fall into such categories as funnies/comics/nursery rhymes/folk tales and the like, cowboys and indians (a 50s thing, I guess), and world tour (places around the world). I think the idea was to provide a fake memory of world travel so you could save money by not going, but the designers hadn't developed scratch-n-sniff in time for this, so without the olfactory input, the illusion is incomplete. Had they been able to provide not only a 3D view of, say, an Istanbul market, but also include a scratch-n-sniff portion of the disc that would present the appropriate scent to your nose in the binocular viewer's nose-place and mechanically scratch it for you as you advanced the reel, they might have beaten that newfangled TV thing.

It's hard to believe that if a 10-year-old started buying these in 1948, they'd be 70 now, nearly as old as John McCain. I just mention that to emphasize what an ancient technology this is. But although it is ancient, it is still around and hasn't changed much. And although I keep a sharp eye peeled (ouch) for the imminent arrival of low-cost stereoscopic (or stereo, binocular, whatever you want to call it) 3D digital cameras for consumer use, they continue to fail to appear on the market. Most of the 3D cameras on the market are semi-antiques from the 1950s.

The existence of these reels provides a good excuse to mess with the film-scanning feature on my Epson GT-9700F scanner. Hmmm. "Flatbed" would be a good prompt. If the subject responds with "truck" or "mattress" you know they are not a computer(-literate) person. Here is the front of the reel folder, printed in an ancient font.


They came outta Portland. I need a camel's-hair brush. (Punctuationists will note the contrast with Camel's Hair-brush.) Pictures taken with your own personal stereo camera make wonderful additions to your View-Master reel library. Rub it in, why dontcha? I wish I could. I can't see the word "Kodachrome" without hearing the Simon and Garfunkel song of the same name, btw.

I don't remember this reel of Japan making much of an impression at the time. It's interesting that the postcard-like views haven't changed much. "Boats in Tokyo canal, Cana" seems to be a mis-print.

I lightened the disc above enough to read the front faintly.
This scan below has been lightened just in the center portion.


I do remember being impressed by the Navaho, for some reason.



Even more impressive was the story of Little Black Sambo. I remember being transfixed by the discovery that fast-running tigers looped around a tree could be transformed into a nutritious, spreadable fat compound called "Tiger Butter". How I longed to eat the famous "Tiger Butter Pancakes." I think they probably did serve me some, since my grandfather was always in the mood for a good mind-f prank.

Is Little Black Sambo racist? It may be, but I am providing it here for its value as a cultural artifact. I don't really see anything racist in the story except for the name itself, which seems to unnecessarily call undue attention to Sambo's blackness. His skin tone should be evident enough already. I don't recall reading "The White Boy Who Cried 'Wolf'" or that "Little Red Riding Hood" was actually "Little Native American Girl in a Hoodie". So I guess it's racist on that level. It's also possible that they just called people by their color in a straightforward way as in Brazil, or the modern American use of "Black" i.e. without necessarily being racist. (Black Uhuru…?) Anyway. I am much more concerned about "Popeye" on the Cartoon Network. The Popeye program shows children that black people always have a bone through their noses, and collectively attempt to cook Popeye or his romantic interest "Olive Oyl" in a large black pot. I don't think this is what we should be showing pre-schoolers in 2008, and I have to change the channel and would never want my kids or any other kids see it. They also have insulting stereotypes of Native Americans on Popeye. I don't remember seeing insulting Asian stereotypes but it's probably an oversight on my part.





Of course, all of the View-Master literary adaptations suffered somewhat from being reduced to seven stereo photos with about 5 to 8 words of description under each one. Think of it as a haiku (actually closer to tanka) or short-short-story version, a cultural expression of mid-20th-century America. Or an early attempt at a DVD, with text instead of audio. It did have the advantage of being three-dimensional!

Click on any of these for a larger version. It has been formatted to fit your screen.

Postscripti:
Speaking of smell, they smell alot like old super-8 film. Hopefully that is not explosive.
Later discs ("reels") are no longer from Sawyer's, Inc. out of Portland 7, Oregon, but belong to Fisher-Price out of New York. VIEW-MASTER is a trademark of Mattel, it seems.

Hill-Rod speaks (but…)

I heard an inspiring speech by the Reverend, er, Senator Obama this morning (Japan time). I had already resolved to turn off the TV if Clinton were to appear, but being a liberal, I gave her a second chance. She appeared, flashing her clown face, with the scary mean gray version of the Bill-Rod prancing about the stage as well.

"Not too long ago, my opponent-" [click]

Positive and Negative Influences in the World

This news is over a month old, but still notable. A survey of world public opinion in 23 countries found Germany and Japan to be the countries which are seen as having the most positive effect on world affairs. The United States was roughly even with North Korea, having a few more friends but also a few more enemies. The United States also falls behind Brazil, Russia, China, and India as a benevolently-viewed power, but ahead of Pakistan, Israel, and Iran.

The full report or summary report can be viewed at World Public Opinion, BBC, or GlobeScan.

The question was:

Please tell me if you think each of the following countries are having a mainly positive or mainly negative influence in the world.

Some other highlights:

When asked for their views of their own country’s influence in the world, Japanese citizens are the most modest of those polled, with only 36 per cent saying Japan is having a mainly positive influence. Americans come next with only 56 per cent saying the US is having a positive influence. Conversely, fully 91 per cent of Chinese citizens and 78 per cent of Russian citizens say their country is having a positive influence.

In total 17,457 citizens in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Costa Rica, Egypt, El Salvador, France, Germany, Ghana, Great Britain, Guatemala, Honduras, India, Indonesia, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Lebanon, Mexico, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Panama, the Philippines, Portugal, Russia, South Korea, Spain, Turkey, the UAE, and the United States were interviewed face-to-face or by telephone between October 31, 2007 and January 25, 2008. Polling was conducted for the BBC World Service by the international polling firm GlobeScan and its research partners in each country.

Howard Zinn podcast, talks and speeches

Last week before Golden Week started I was in the train listening to a Howard Zinn podcast from Progressive Podcast, called "You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train". It was over an hour long, and I never got to the end, but I was struck by the relatively charming and humanistic speaking style of Zinn as contrasted with the more Noam Chomsky, for example. I am looking forward to hearing the rest of it on some boring commute soon. I think I mentioned in a post or the sidebar before about the online availability of A People's History of the United States, which I am glad for since I gave my copy of that big heavy book to a friend before I moved to Japan. I thought there might be some video of Howard Zinn on YouTube, too, and there is a lot more than I thought.

Results 1 - 10 of about 3,410 from youtube.com for Howard Zinn. (0.27 seconds)

3,410?

The TRS-80 (and…me?) in March 1978

It took me a while to recognize the context of this photograph. Well, I'm still not sure. The person who sent it to me attached a date (1978 March), which allows me to reconstruct a playlist of the popular music of the day as I attempt to recover the memory. That doesn't really help much.

I guess it shows some high school students with a local programmer friend who later moved to Vegas. He is evangelically helping us write a BASIC program for the TRS-80. It seems to be a formula for the calculation of the volume of a cylinder or cone. I don't remember this, but it looks like one of the few meetings of the Science Club which I started. Incidentally, in our first Science Club meeting, investigating ESP, we set up a code which allowed me to appear to claim powerful psychic powers (hint: "What is it now?"=diamond, "What do you think?" = plus, "Now what is it?" = circle, etc.). That mindf_ck had blown them away until we de-briefed them.

The TRS-80 was $400 or so. Accessories could cost much more. We were lucky that the science teacher had the school bought one, probably shortly after this. There were about 2 of us who knew how to use it. I remember writing a little algorithm to calculate the Golden Mean. Another program I wrote searched for and printed prime numbers, indefinitely. Just type RUN and let it go. A video game I wrote had a castle tower with a cannon that fired at an approaching tank. Shots from both followed proper parabolic trajectories (it seemed important) in the 128x48 block screen. Weirdly, the spaces for each letter were also like a "pixel" we could turn on and off. All software we wrote was saved to cassette tape! The BASIC programming software was written by a little company called Micro-Soft, I think. Somewhere out in California two guys named Steve were starting another computer company called "Apple". Apple was considered more expensive but even the TRS-80 could set you back $8000 in some configurations.

Universities were still using punched cards and mainframes. I took a few classes like that. Remember dropping out of a COBOL or FORTRAN class in 1982 when I was broke. I had already switched from astrophysics to computers to sociology before trying some anthropology and deciding on Linguistics and Psychology. I stayed enrolled in Japanese even though I had to drop the other classes I couldn't afford with a part-time job. I remember saying that I would get back into computers when you could get the Library of Congress in a computer the size of a book. I didn't use computers much from the 1980s (except for data entry at work) until 1994.

I don't feel too nostalgic. Actually it makes me feel a little sick. I like the present. I don't often look back so it is strange and interesting to do so. The Java applet TRS-80 emulator link below is awfully interesting, though. I wonder if that would run on a cell phone?

TRS-80 links:
http://www.trs-80.com/
http://www.old-computers.com/
http://www.computerhistory.org/
http://www.gameasylum.us/trs80.html
http://oldcomputers.net/index.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80

Here are Jeff Vavasour's TRS-80 emulators including ones that let you run TRS-80 BASIC programs in a Java applet in your browser. There's a software library including Lunar Lander (completely text based). This is weird, but it is nice to see 1970s-style BASIC level 1 programming kept alive.
http://www.vavasour.ca/jeff/trs80.html

Before writing anything, some of us will need to review the commands.
http://www.vavasour.ca/jeff/level1/help.html

Distrust for American injustice system

On Sundays The Daily Yomiuri has a news centerfold from The Chicago Tribune (in the cellulosic carbon-based physical version of their newspaper). Their columnists are all depressingly reactionary and have repeatedly proven to be not worth reading, with the notable exception of Leonard Pitts, who should not be missed. This week's column was on the spot, as usual. Apparently he is syndicated by Knight-Ridder from the Miami Herald -- where this article appeared as Where is Justice? I found the column I read in the paper today available online at freep.com (Detroit Free Press). The piece was given different titles at different newspapers.

How can one trust justice system?

BY LEONARD PITTS JR. • KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS • MAY 3, 2008

I want you to tell me how I can trust the justice system.
Mr. Attorney General, the question is for you. And you, too, Ms. Police Officer, Madame District Attorney, and Mr. Judge. It is also for you, Mr. and Ms. Average Citizen.
…
Somebody tell me: How can I trust the justice system?
You will think this is about Sean Bell, the unarmed black man who died in a fusillade of 50 bullets from New York police on what was to have been his wedding day; the shooters were acquitted last week. But the question isn't about Bell, at least not solely.
Rather, it's about the fact that the justice system so often seems to have less justice in it where black people are concerned. It's about Amadou Diallo, shot at 41 times -- hit 19 -- by New York police while reaching for his wallet. It's about Rodney King, beaten to pieces by L.A. police for a traffic violation. It's about Arthur McDuffie, beaten to death by Miami police for a traffic violation.
It's about Jeffrey Gilbert, bones fractured by police who broke into the Greenbelt, Md., apartment of his girlfriend and pounced on him as he lay nude in bed because they mistakenly thought him a cop killer. It's about L.A. police manufacturing and planting evidence.
It's about my son, stopped by police for driving with an "obstructed" windshield -- he had an air freshener in the shape of a Christmas tree dangling from his rear-view mirror. It's about studies documenting the enduring racial bias in our justice system so that, for example, blacks account for 13% of all regular drug users, but 35% of those arrested, 55% of those convicted, and 74% of those imprisoned, for drug possession.
And it's about knowing the foregoing will be greeted with blithe indifference by those who find it convenient to believe the unjust treatment of blacks is somehow excusable, understandable, merited or required.
I need no lectures to remind me that good people inhabit the system; my cousin is a federal prosecutor. Nor do I need any lectures on the heroism of cops; I've ridden with police, been protected by them, and yield to no one in my admiration for those who do that job with honor.
So save the lectures, just give me an answer: How can I trust a system whose biases against people who look like me are simultaneously well-documented, yet happily ignored by those who resemble me not at all?
The question matters because without trust, the system doesn't work.
…
People don't participate in systems they don't trust. They don't come forward, they don't testify. So criminals go uncaptured and crimes go unpunished. Yet some black people apparently find that preferable to participating in a system they believe is rigged against them. I don't agree with them, but before you condemn them, ask yourself: Would you play in a game refereed by someone who hated you? What's the point?
In games as in life, you may not like an outcome, but if you believe it was fairly derived, you can at least live with it. Small wonder black people often find it difficult to live with this system. Last week's acquittal will do nothing to change that.
So I'm serious. Somebody tell me how I can trust American justice. Somebody tell me why I should even try.

LEONARD PITTS JR. is a columnist for the Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla. 33132. Write to him at lpitts@miamiherald.com.

War is Over -- if you want it

A West Coast union shut down the ports for one shift of work. They didn't seem to mind risking their livelihoods, but their employers squealed like hungry pigs.

U.S. dock workers skip work to protest Iraq war
By William Yardley
Published: May 2, 2008
SEATTLE
West Coast ports in the United States shut down for a day as thousands of longshoremen failed to report for work, part of what their union leaders said was a one-shift protest against the war in Iraq.
Cranes and forklifts stood still from Seattle to San Diego on Thursday, and ships were stalled at sea as workers held rallies up and down the coast to blame the war for distracting public attention and money from domestic needs like health care and education.
"We're loyal to America, and we won't stand by while our country, our troops and our economy are being destroyed by a war that's bankrupting us to the tune of $3 trillion," the president of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, Bob McEllrath, said in a written statement. "It's time to stand up, and we're doing our part today."
About 25,000 union members are employed at 29 West Coast ports, but the protest took place only during the day shift. A spokesman for the main West Coast employers' group, the Pacific Maritime Association, said it appeared that about 6,000 workers did not show up for work, which meant that about 10,000 containers would not be loaded or unloaded from about 30 cargo ships.
…
Union leaders said that the association had rejected their request weeks ago for the one-shift work stoppage on Thursday, but that local longshoremen continued to promote the protest. It went forward, the union leaders said, despite a demand on Wednesday by an independent arbitrator that they instruct members to go to work.
In many cases, dock workers were joined at port entrances or at rallies by other groups protesting the war or frustrated by economic issues or immigration policies. Some rallies seemed almost like street fairs, with booksellers setting up stands and supporters of the presidential candidate Ralph Nader carrying banners.
On the Seattle waterfront, members of the United Auto Workers and the Service Employees International Union mixed with self-described socialists while many of the scores of police officers on the scene ate box lunches and petted their horses.
…
Rebecca Cathcart contributed reporting from Long Beach, California, and Carolyn Marshall from Oakland, California.

It is a good first step but not sufficient. Americans can stop the war immediately by demanding it. It actually could be done by a small percentage of the people who were willing to go to the wall or to the barricades. In a city of a million, 1% of the population (say, Dennis Kucinich or Mike Gravel supporters, for example) would be a small army of 10,000 people, more than enough to block access to the headquarters of Halliburton, Kellogg Brown and Root, City Hall, the airport, the ports, the roads, rail, etc. Shut down every port, every airport, half the Fortune 500, major road and rail lines, many city governments, and I guarantee you something will happen. It would not be business as usual, pacify the people, war on. Peaceful, non-violent organizing, preferably including law enforcement and the armed forces is what I am talking about. If workers take democratic control of their workplaces, that would be even better. Such a movement requires a leader, a Martin Luther King -like figure, to coordinate and direct it. I think Kucinich, Gravel, Ron Paul, or Ralph Nader could have been (or could be?) that person. I see zer0 chance that Clinton or Obama would do what it takes. A reasonable demand would be to see a few 747s a week coming home, starting with the Reserve and National Guard, and no new forces going out. Even at a pace like that, 1000 soldiers a week, it would take 3 years to withdraw 150,000 soldiers. A more radical demand for five hundred soldiers a day returning would be on course for a one-year withdrawal.

With no leadership, no draft, a volunteer force, a low-intensity conflict, and for other reasons including the impending elections, the will is just not there. The war goes on and on. It disgusts me and most of the world. I just hope that the people's gamble on waiting for the elections to Help America Vomit will prove to be the right choice and not just lost time, money and lives.

Update: I think I may have stated that too negatively. There is, of course, majority support among the American public for withdrawing US troops from Iraq. Among some sub-populations, such as union members, that support may be over 75, 85, 95%, and deep enough that they are willing to go on strike for that principle. If they have the resolve to go on strike for one shift now they may be abe to strike for a month or more at some future time. If joined by, say, the national teachers unions, so that come September, virtually no schools or universities were able to conduct classes, and other unions, so that no major city had garbage collection and so on, government action to meet the public demands and pacify the unrest would be forthcoming. I think they would have to start the withdrawal.

Intelligent life on earth: evolving, devolving, or revolving?

I recently watched a re-broadcast of the 1972 film Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. This may have sensitized me to the news story (which came to my attention via Posthuman Blues) of orang-utans using spears to attempt to catch fish as well as learning to swim. This, in turn, is reminiscent of recent reports of chimpanzees in Senegal using spears to catch and kill bush babies, their own primate brethren and preferred lunch, which they eat in a sashimi-like raw form, un-barbecued, having not yet played SimEarth or Civilization to the point where they realize the importance of acquiring the Fire technology.

But it is not just spear technology that our primate brothers are excelling in these days. Another recent report found that rhesus monkeys had the ability to estimate arithmetic sums visually only a little worse than university students. Before you hire a rhesus monkey to do your taxes, consider the fact that human intelligence (at least as measured by IQ tests) has been rising for decades, in a mystery known as the Flynn Effect. The accelerating pace of human evolution, 100 times above baseline levels, is probably not sufficient to account for changes in IQ observed over time frames as short as 10 years or less (unless a whole lot of people at the very bottom of the IQ scale are winning the Darwin Award, and the death rates are not high enough for that).

It strikes me that the documented rise in human IQs and the anecdotal rise in animal IQs are related. Some of the proposed explanations for the rise in human IQs are the increasing complexity of the environment, which surely applies to the novel use of tools by chimps and orang-utans. It may also be a case of them acquiring tool use by observing human use of similar tools. Alternatively, the explanation could be some kind of environmental toxin or virus which causes runaway growth of brain cells. It's better than the inverse!

(I've sometimes wondered what the affects would be of an epidemic outbreak of Information Thirst Virus, which would cause painful sensations if a person were not continually consuming information and learning. As far as I know this premise has not appeared much in science fiction as has, say, the perhaps overexploited premise of Flowers for Algernon.)

Interestingly, rising primate IQs (as measured by scientists at APE CONTROL) was part of the story in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, too. One report has Ape IQs rising by 3% a month, which alarms some officials, who have pre-knowledge of the coming fate of man (from Zira and Cornelius), but which is brushed off by another as "Productivity has also improved by 3%!"

(Pssst! Notice the orange jumpsuits apes were forced to wear, a motif appropriated by the Bush administration for their large-scale violation of human rights.)

I myself have seen many examples of animal intelligence. Just this last week, I watched a cat quickly scurry across the four lanes of traffic in Bunkyo-ku's Hongo-doori after carefully waiting for the rush of passing traffic to quiet down to nothing and pause in the pulse of changing lights. It wouldn't take many years or generations of (dead) cats to evolve that ability. I remember being similarly impressed at stray dogs in Taipei obediently sitting and waiting for the traffic lights to change before trotting across the street, mingling with pedestrians and scavenging around for food. Crows here in Japan seem to know which days are garbage days and wait for it to be put out, then using their visual abilities to identify tasty-looking bits of trash (through the transparent bags we need to use here for easier waste sorting) and then tearing strategic holes to pull out what they want. But my most indelible memory is of a zoo in Sumatra (or possibly Java). I came across a not-very-big old-style concrete cage about the size of a living room with iron bars around the outside and bars (the iron kind) inside for the orang-utans to swing on. Adult orang-utans are very large, shaggy, and intimidating, especially when they swing forcefully. I think they may be basically gentle, however. They have very amazing long fingers and very human eyes --more human than human, perhaps. A man was reaching out across a little fence which kept us back, and offering an orangutan a lit kretek cigarette. The orang-utan accepted the lit cigarette gracefully, and several of the orang-utans were offered and accepted kreteks. I was also a smoker at that time and offered a kretek and a Marlboro, as I recall, and the Marlboro was briefly drawn on and then thrown to the ground in an interspecies gesture of disgust. Kreteks have more tar and nicotine and are also sweeter, of course. It seemed appropriate to me that, if the orang-utans (Man (orang) of the Forest (utan)) were to be kept as prisoners, they at least deserved the simple pleasure of a cigarette accorded to most POWs. Anyway, the appreciation of smoking was somewhat amazing in itself, as you generally do not get that in your cat, dog, or typical barnyard, zoo, or wild animal. However, what really impressed me was the way the orang-utans carefully pressed the kreteks against the cold steel bars of their cage, and gently rolled them to cool all sides of the smoldering tip to prevent it from burning too quickly and being wasted between drags! It reminded me of similar techniques practiced by connoisseurs of other valuable smoked herbs. Ever since, orang-utans have been my favorite animal, and one I respect and consider very nearly human.

Before coming to the conclusion that the rising tide of human saturation of the earth's environments is lifting all boats of human and animal IQs universally, consider the dialectically opposite proposition. Aren't humans reducing biodiversity, clearing and simplifying habitat, and driving species like the Baiji dolphin and other intelligent species to extinction, thereby dumbing down the entire planet? (not to mention the effects of television) Or do these two effects (smart-up and dumb-down/extinction) cancel out and just add up to some kind of rotation of dominant species, e.g. reptile, cetacean. mammal, insect, etc.?

I don't know, Dave. There is not enough information.

Well, wouldja, Dick?

This little bit of found internet detritus to the right somehow appeals to my juvenile sense of humor. It is the t-shirt that must be worn by every member of the audience if cardiological cyborg and bionic VP Mistercheney ever emerges from the secure-undisclosed and attempts to give a public speech rather than retiring with Halliburton to Dubai as expected. I wish I had had this t-shirt in high school. But I didn't. Still, it reminds me of my homies and I (and "homies" wasn't really a word back then) in high school, who fashioned ourselves as I.O.N.S. (International Organization of Nuclear Scientists) and, donning lab coats and t-shirts emblazoned with our code-names "F" "U" "C" and "K", (and o+f+f in smaller letters), and while sitting together in formation in the lunchroom next to the teachers' table, were severely castigated berated scolded by the school principal and forbidden from appearing with each other on school grounds in direct violation of our fundamental rights of free association as guaranteed under the U. S. Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yup, those were the days. A brief loving look back and WTFWWT moment as captured in the original unretouched photograph:

Embedded QR codes

Just to amuse myself, I was going to look for the building in Tokyo that most closely resembles a QR code (similar to my "Look Down!" campaign focusing urbanite awareness on subterranean infrastructure human access portals (STISHAPs, formerly "man-holes")). Then I realized that there are so many other forms in the urban hiker's environment. I started noticing QR codes and trying to imagine softer implementations -- like the failed subliminal monkey I did earlier.

One that I came up with was the i-go game board version. It looks a little sloppy, but at least it scans flawlessly and could be worse. I didn't find many short-cuts in making it, though, so I don't think I will mess with it again. Physically following the QR as a plan and photographing it would be easier than digitally making it, if only they made i-go boards that big. This isn't a url; it is just a 13-letter string.

Other graphical ideas I was chewing over were QR code in a worm-eaten leaf, QR code in a torn shoji paper screen (though it presents a few problems), QR code in a torn red (Chinese-style) lantern, and QR code in fallen cherry blossoms. Feel free to steal one of these ideas if you are a graphic artist trying to survive in advertising. I am sure these ideas are out there in the One Mind even if I haven't seen anything like that yet. I look forward to somebody coming out with a QR code generator that automagically embeds the QR code in the image or pattern of your choice.

I'm still getting used to the sensitivity of this technology and what counts and where and why readability drops off.

Since it uses data compression, humans will probably never develop the ability to read QR codes without machine assistance, unlike Braille. The advantage will go to the machines -- but I have a hunch QR codes will find various applications in human-to-human communication and be ubiquitous, although there may be a better technology around the corner. If it breaks through into popular culture we will see it more in stencils, quilts, cakes, tattoos, and clothing designs.

Another smirking loser for America = McCain!

McCain ranked 894th out of 899 in his graduating class at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis. I have long thought that what the country really needs right now is a dumb old stubborn white guy with a bad temper who has never had a real job other than killing foreigners and dumping one wife for the rich heiress wife. Oh, yeah, and the Senate and that stuff. Washington insider. How did that Keating Five thing work out for ya? Suck up to any nutjob preachers lately? (start creepy voice-over) I am so fired up and ready to go… on day one… with whatever functional mental abilities that remain. And there are some. Bomb! Bomb! Bomb! Iran!

McCain: older… stubborner… dumber… americaner… warrier… angrier… meaner… hotter-headed…

If you liked Bush, you'll love McMore of the McSame!

McCain: Making the McWorld Safe for McNamericain McDemocracy.

WARNING: Looking at this picture closely or for extended periods of time may result in unwanted symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Viewer discretion is advised.

McCain engaged in bombing, killing innocent people

Tonight I heard John McCain on TV talk about being "engaged in bombings which could have or did kill innocent people." That caught my attention, but it turned out that he wasn't reflecting on or repenting for his past war crimes bombing Vietnamese civilians from 35,000 feet, but was trying to insinuate some kind of slur against Barack Obama for some acquaintance of his who was once a member of the Weather Underground. I haven't had a whole lot of time to keep up with news -- particularly this kind of news, which I would normally skip right over, but it seems that neither Obama nor the former Weatherman (which Obama has been cordial to and has not condemned and denounced as is the custom) have been bombers, whereas Johnnie has been a mad bomber, both literally and figuratively.

McCain will have a lot more to answer for than that. I can see that he is already getting the old man pass that Reagan used to use. You can take many of the lines Jellybeans Reagan used to use and try to imagine Carter or Mondale or Papa Bush using them and you know they would be laughed off stage. Conversely and perversely, Obama is getting hit with the scary-black-man construct where everything he has ever done is seen as ominous explained further here:
Old Man McCain
Grandpa McCain
I especially appreciated this post originating from Cogitamus.
and just for fun, Younger than McCain

Image by News Corpse.

Reforming the American Presidential Nomination System

In the past, I have mentioned the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which would have states agree to cast their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote. It seems like the minimally necessary reform to the presidential election process -- assuming you accept the elective dictatorship model of democracy practiced in the Republic of Armed Desire.
What about the Presidential Candidates nominating process currently going on? It may be worthwhile to take a good look at it and think about changes at this point in the four-year cycle.

The process seems to have a few flaws. Some of the proposed solutions would actually make the system worse. A series of rotating regional primaries and caucuses would give the regional candidate an advantage. We should try to have all different regions of the country at all different times, both early and late, not just one region at a time.

Similarly, holding a large number of primaries (and caucuses) on one day (super-duper Tuesday) was also a Very Bad Idea, exactly the opposite of what should be done, because it created a large pool of voters, voting on one day, who could not be reached individually but only by television advertising, robo-calls, and cash-heavy campaigns. We should try to spread them out, have the candidates focus on one or two or five or ten at a time, not twenty on one day.

I don't think the proportional representation is a problem, but the number of superdelegates could be reduced. Also, the party convention should be held soon after the last primaries and caucuses. If the Democrats are going to use super-delegates as potential tie-breakers, they should be defined by some clear rules. Sitting members of the Senate, House, and a few similar folks from each state (state governors, speakers, etc.) seems reasonable. The resulting number might be 200 or 400 rather than 800.

I propose that a decision be made as to how long the process should be allowed to last at the outside. Suppose five months, possibly six, is reasonable. We have 50 states, DC, and some territories. Ten vote every month (or a few more). If you wanted to micro-manage it, you could spread the 50 states(+ DC and some territories) over the 150 days and give each one a "No-earlier-than" start-up date. Have an average of one state every three days (Wouldn't CNN love that?). You start with the small states and power up each month. By the end of May, beginning of June, the intra-party thing is done. It's summer. Have your convention and get into the general election campaign.

The best thing is that there are enough votes cast in February to overturn January, even if January votes 100% for one candidate. As time goes on, the size of votes scales up, so that each state has a chance to throw its weight around in proportion to its weight. If small states come too late, they would be demotivated. Big states can still tilt the system dramatically right up until May unless candidates have already dropped out by then. This system would have been ideal for 2008.

There could be a conflict deciding which states are "small", since you could use the census, electoral votes, or the number of party delegates. I suggest going generally by the census. States would then end up in 5 quintiles. Here is how it might look:

In January, WY, DC, VT, ND, AK, SD, DE, MT, RI, HI, and NH would have their caucuses and primaries. These 11 states all have 3 or 4 electoral votes, for a total of 36. Maybe for old time's sake, we could let NH go first, even though they are the biggest of this group. Sorry, Iowa, you are to big to really belong here (believe it or not, ranked 30th, between the second and third quintile going from smallest up). One disadvantage is that there is a bit of regional clustering in this approach, in the Montana-North Dakota-South Dakota axis of boredom, and the NH, RI, New England thing. But there is Delaware and DC in there for a little variety. Three regional clusters, really, which is not unfair at all, but it would be nice to get more of the south and southwest represented early on.

In February, ME, ID, NE, WV, NM, NV, UT, KS, AR, MS, and IA would have their caucuses and primaries. Although Iowa is the biggest in the set, maybe they could go first so they get the attention they grew accustomed to in the late 20th century. I threw 11 states into this set, too, just to get Iowa in there.They have 4 to 7 electoral votes each -- about 57 total. There are plenty of sunbelt states in this set.

March would have the medium-sized states voting: CT, OK, OR, PR, KY, LA, SC, AL, CO, and MN. They wouldn't be able to completely overturn the combined votes or January and February, however. These ten states all have 7 to 10 electoral votes (2000-2010) and about 74 electoral votes. Populations are from three-and-a-half to five-and-a-half million.

In April you would get WI, MD, MO, TN, AZ, IN, MA, WA, VA, and NJ. These states have 10 to 15 electoral votes and populations between 5.6 and 9 million people. They have about 113 electoral votes in this group.

In May you would have NC, GA, MI, OH, PA, IL, FL , NY , TX, and CA, These states have populations between 9 and 37 million, and electoral vote power from 15 to 55. I think there is a total of 256 electoral votes in this group!

If American Samoa, N. Mariana Islands, US Virgin Islands, and Guam haven't voted yet, they should vote now. Have the convention in June, not August 25-28. <-That was an almost guaranteed way for the Dems to waste the summer. They should not have taken that chance. All of these dates I have proposed in this plan are the earliest possible dates. I mean that the states would be free to go later, but not earlier, in order to participate in their party's conventions. The penalty? I guess cutting the delegation in half (oor more) as the Republicans did might be a deterrent. Maybe that's not enough, though. The party really doesn't want the campaign to get scrunched back into the previous calendar year. This is just the nomination I am talking about, not a real election. I only refer to the electoral votes because the populations will change, and the parties' delegate rules and numbers will change, but the electoral votes are stable for at least a decade and don't change all that much in one decade. The delegate numbers are very roughly proportional to the EV numbers. I don't think a proposal as logical, simple, straightforward, and clean as this could ever become law, especially since it makes the big, populous states wait for the smaller ones to go first. (Little states would like it more than the big states.) The usual actual result of negotiations around this kind of thing is wormier and more sausage-like.

Update 2008-04-27: FairVote has been exploring several variations of reform of the primary process, including the "American Plan" and the "Delaware Plan", which have some similar conclusions to mine. Be sure to read "Who Picks the President," regarding the 2004 campaign, available as a DOC or PDF.

• More money was spent on television advertising in Florida during the period covered than in 45 states and the District of Columbia combined.
• More than half of all campaign resources were dedicated to just three states-- Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
• Iowans are the most coveted voters in the country.
• 18 states saw neither a candidate visit nor recieved a cent of spending on TV advertisements.

Acquitted

As hard as it is to believe three detectives can pump 50 bullets into an unarmed man in New York City, it is much worse to find that the legal system can find no fault with that act.
NYT.

April 26, 2008
3 Detectives Acquitted in Bell Shooting
By MICHAEL WILSON
Three detectives were found not guilty Friday on all charges in the shooting death of Sean Bell, who died in a hail of 50 police bullets outside a club in Jamaica, Queens, in November 2006. The verdict prompted calls for calm from the mayor, angry promises of protests by those speaking for the Bell family and expressions of relief by the detectives.
Detective Michael Oliver, who fired 31 bullets the night of the shooting and faced manslaughter charges, said Justice Arthur J. Cooperman had made a “fair and just decision.”
Justice Cooperman delivered the verdict in State Supreme Court at 9 a.m. Describing the evidence, he said it was reasonable for the detectives to fear that someone in the crowd that night carried a gun. He added that many of the prosecution’s witnesses, including Mr. Bell’s friends and the two wounded victims, were simply not believable. “At times, the testimony of those witnesses just didn’t make sense,” the judge said.
Several supporters of Mr. Bell stormed out of the courtroom, and a few small scuffles followed outside the courthouse. By midafternoon, there were no suggestions of any broader unrest around the city. Mr. Bell’s family and fiancée left without making any comments and drove to visit his grave at the Nassau Knolls Cemetery and Memorial Park in Port Washington.
The verdict comes 17 months to the day since the Nov. 25, 2006, shooting of Mr. Bell, 23, and his friends, Joseph Guzman and Trent Benefield, outside the Club Kalua in Jamaica, Queens, hours before Mr. Bell was to be married.
It was delivered in a packed courtroom. Mr. Bell’s family sat silently as Justice Cooperman spoke from the bench. Behind them, a woman was heard to ask, “Did he just say, ‘Not guilty?’ ” Detective Oliver and the two other defendants, Detectives Gescard F. Isnora and Marc Cooper, were escorted out a side doorway as court adjourned.

QR Codes

Recently I have been monkeying around with QR codes a little. I have always liked codes, even bar codes, in a way. I wasn't interested in QR codes, though, because, first of all, I didn't use my cell phone for internet. Using your cell phone for internet is like eating a gourmet dinner through a small straw. I am sure there are some good applications like translation, GPS, other services, but I have a cheap service and just want to text message, e-mail, and take pictures with my phone. Sometimes I use it to speak to someone. too. Secondly, I had the impression that it was just for advertising, for a print ad to cause you to go to their site and waste your bandwidth charges there.

Years have gone by and I still didn't know what it was. I heard it was coming to America, and was the same codes they use here in Japan. I read the wikipedia article about it, found an online QR code generator via malcolmhall.com, and realized I have both a reader and encoder in my phone. Hey, there's a OCR scanner in there, too. It sure doesn't work. The online encoder and the one in my phone seem to create different version, using a different amount of error correction and redundancy, I guess.

I got kinda obsessed with it for a while. Something about the chunky pixelation. (Chunky Pixelation would be a good name for a band. They would be an electronic 70s punk-funk-chunk six-piece out of Philadelphia if only they did exist.)

Something about watching the phone convert it is cool, too.

Code Monkey up there is FUBARed, unreadable. I overdid it. Found the limit. You could maybe take a black magic marker, fix it up a little, and get it to scan. It is my school email address. I was trying to blend it with a picture of me and still have it readable, but I was having trouble and searching my hard drive, found some 2002 desktop pictures from the Iowa Primate Research Center (I think it was) and used that instead. I like the way it came out -- useless.

The one on the left is for the wikipedia qr code page. It works. In the right column is a chalk-and-charcoal filter photoshop version of the blog that scans well and looks better IMO, too. This crystaline-looking one was a dud, reaability-wise.

Looking at the bottom range for smaller sizes, this 23-pixel square gif contains "Blues Tea-Cha". My phone is able to scan it from the screen with no problem. Text takes less space than URLs.

Where have I been?

It's funny that when I have free time, as during the recent holiday, I don't do much blogging. Instead, I turn to constructing a massive to-do list, which does include blogging, but at a lower priority. Free time is actually busy time for tackling my on larger projects, while blogging is a smaller project better for tiny slivers of time. Too busy or too free both reduce my blogging.
Well, I don't usually post posts about the frequency of my posts. I will move from the spring vacation to the busiest time of the year.

What have I been doing? Not traveling. Flying kites. Making kites. Out of garbage. Bought a new bike. I want to say "Specialist" but the brand name is "Specialized". Driving in to Tokyo, surprised that it sometimes takes under an hour, faster than the train. Moving shelves out of my office to the third floor of our house. Fixing up the third floor to be a study. Taking pictures. Facebook and other totalitarian imaginary friend anti-social nutwerx. Tried to buy an Asus EEE PC for ¥19,000 but the store ran out. Mac OS 10.5. Broke my iPhoto. Will go back to 10.4 which remains on the internal HD. Various other things. And now my work is getting busy again.

Update: Oh, yeah. I also transferred 20-odd tapes in the obsolete "Hi-8" format (dating from 1995 to 2005) to the hard drive of the DVD/HDD video recorder, from which they will be burned as DVDs. DVDs are easily scratched and becoming obsolete as well, but still a better archival option that the Hi-8 tapes. I got some little screwdrivers and dismantled the old video camera to remove a jammed tape. I think the flaw was entirely with the tape, since it also almost jammed the newerSony which replaced it. I also notices how the old Sanyo recordings were much better quality than the Sony. We also have a small HDD DV camera now that I never use. I never look back at old tapes although I have to admit that after 10 or 13 years, they are getting interesting. I generally just capture small segments of cellphone video these days.

Charlton Heston is dead

You can pry his gun from his cold, dead hands now, you damn dirty ape!