Well, the seventeen year cicadas have come to Bloomington. This particular batch is evidently called Brood X (X as in 10, though at the moment I think "X" might be more appropriate).
They are everywhere at the moment. I can still walk without stepping on them, but if they get worse, I may not be able to. The trees are covered with them - some of the trees on campus had one on each leaf. Very scary looking little insects. I described them as a cross between a fly and a cricket - with the size of the latter - with big red eyes. The eyes are probably the scariest part. Scarier than their appearance are the sounds they make. The air is filled with this almost mechanical whir. They also make a more ordinary (though slightly annoying) buzzing sound when they move their wings (they aren't always flying when they do that). They seem rather stupid, by the way, which makes them all that much more disturbing somehow.
(I found one blogger from IU who has some good pictures of them. I especially like his picture of cicadas on a tree, though.)
I saw most of Frontline tonight. They discussed George W. Bush and his faith. Lots of odd and contradictory things said and implied, both by the writer (one Raney Aronson) and the interviewees. Definitely thought-provoking.
Aronson is evidently not certain, but seems to lean toward Bush being quite genuine in his faith. Aronson definitely believes his religion has had an impact on his policy.
What, of course, I find so fascinating about it, is that Bush and I both espouse very similar religious beliefs - at least in the fundamentals - though that leads to very different political beliefs. Of course, we have some, one might say, doctrinal differences, that contribute to that gap in political beliefs. Though I should note that large doctrinal gaps between those who otherwise agree on essentials are nothing new, nor are political differences arising out of them. What seems to have pushed the issue to the forefront though is the so-called "Evangelical Movement" (by which I am thinking more the political entity than the religious one) and some growing divisions there. Of course, I identify myself as evangelical and yet I find that I disagree, evidently (I haven't actually seen numbers), on so many major political issues with the vast majority of others who also identify themselves as evangelical. Why this is important may not be immediately obvious to everyone, but it raises some issues both political and religious (the religious ones being a greater concern for me I think) that I find slightly unsettling. I want to write more on this later, but not yet. Hopefully you will see more from me on this topic soon. Meanwhile, go track down a copy of tonight's episode... (Or just read the transcript.) [Video is now available for this. - Ben, Oct 1, 2004]
I heard about this from our resident elf (Justin/Earendil) but I thought it was kind of useful, so I decided to post it here. Sojourners has an article on being Christian, pro-life and progressive (a.k.a. politically liberal) called "No Place to Stand." I might not agree with every word of every one they interviewed for the article, but, on the whole, the place I find myself as well (the parts about trying to decide whom to vote for were particularly apt).
Microsoft released some code as open source (under the Common Public License). Blows my mind... More good things coming out of Redmond. Maybe, they will get the idea about open source yet.
Something I have been up to lately, is creating another multi-author blog for my sister and company. Technically I am an author and all, but we will see where that goes. You could view it as a competing blog, but you would be wrong. It seems to be taking a more literary tack. It's called The Voice of Cassandra - I know how pretentious right? But it's a good name, if you think about where it came from... Anyway, I call it Cassandra for short. It has a more literary tack than this publication. Oh, and I hope to change the sanguine color scheme for something more worthy of a site named after Cassandra. Maybe something in a nice Poe black...
Alternet, that reactionary voice of would-be progressive politics, has an interesting article regarding the flawed study about Ecstasy published in Science and then later retracted. Makes me think about my own responses to loaded issues such as research on the effects of illicit drugs. Perhaps I am not skeptical enough when I have no incentive to disagree with the outcome, though admittedly, coming out of a referreed publication, one is not inclined to be too skeptical, not anymore than usual anyway (which depending, may be fairly skeptical). And, of course, it should definitely make one think about how politicians use such research in defining policy.
Just as Frederick Douglass said about slave owners, the lives of those who perpetrate offenses against others are damaged just as th lives of those against whom they are perpetrated. The New York Times has an article about the now infamous young woman whose picture we can now all recognize. That was one of my first thoughts about these pictures - imagine how they have destroyed the lives of those Americans involved. It makes me wonder what brought them to this point? And it makes one wonder what has happened to others in the military in Iraq. Pacifists often point to the damaging effects of war on the psyche of participants. Unfortunately, we will have another generation of combatatns to examine. I will leave it as an exercise to the reader (as we say in mathematics) whether the prize was worth the cost - your opinion may differ from mine.
Some of us have known for some time that the United States considers torture (and similar techniques - called "stress and duress" evidently - that do not technically qualify as torture under current definitions) acceptable practice. They have practiced some of the milder forms of these kinds of practices in Guantanomo Bay and elsewhere for some time. Although I can not find a citation, I seem to recall reading in 2001 admissions by officials in the U. S. (I unfortunately do not recall what was said on the record and what was from anonymous sources - which I admit I am usually wary of) that such practices were taking place, whether practiced by U. S. forces (in the case of "stress and duress") or on deported persons by other nations with U. S. knowledge (in the case of torture).
One well known practice the U. S. has engaged in is to "render" prisoners to countries that are known to practice torture. Many persons have implied or stated on an anonymous basis that the reason for this practice is for the purpose of getting information out of the suspects. The Washington Post reported on the practice of rendition and other abuses in December 2002. The most well known case was that of Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen, former MathWorks employee, who was deported from the United States while on a layover in New York on his way back to Canada. He was sent to Syria, his birthplace, onstead of Canada; in Syria he was detained for several months, and he claims he was tortured. Arar has recounted his experiences, and even the Washington Post reported on his story. And there have been many other less known examples.
Human Rights Watch has written up a timeline of allegations about detainee abuse (though as I said, I seem to recall allegations from even earlier).
Thus U. S. has made it clear on many occasions that the Geneva Convention is considered to be an obstacle to be avoided. Their insistence on prisoners not being prisoners of war was entirely about that issue. And in February of 2002 one official, Prosper, went on record as saying that the Geneva Conventions were outdated.
I do not know or claim to know the state of affairs in Iraqi prisons. Based on past indicators one would expect to see a pattern of abuse. I am open-minded, however, as to the real state, and would like to see more documentation. However, it will be no schock if there is a pattern, as the U. S. has already made it clear that they will do whatever is necessary in their opinion to extract information from prisoners - even ones that may be innocent, and even regardless of their citizenship. (I should note that I do not think the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld would mean anything. These practices could have been stopped by persons other than Rumsfeld - and especially by the President himself.)
I have to admit I have not been as vocal on this issue as I suppose I should have been (or intended to be). As defense, all I can say is it is a difficult subject to broach. Most persons don't like hearing about such things. And much of the documentation is hazy. And, as we have seen as a result of the reports about abuses in Iraq, some persons seem to find this acceptable. You can count me as going on record saying, I do not.
Alright, I am like tripped out on lack of sleep so don't hate me too much when you read this...(like what kind of excuse is that, anyway?)
In politics all the players think everything is monochrome: Good, bad; you, us; right, wrong. Whatever. Give me numbers, ranges, tradeoffs, reasoned discussion. Can the posturing, name calling, and motive reading. It's the last one that has been ticking me off lately about the stuff coming out of the liberals and progressives - of which I consider myself to be. And I know I do it too, even if I would claim a certain co-blogger of mine might do it alot more.... :) As a good revolutionary I always had to do that, thouh I think I have always unconciously rebelled when others did it (good liberal hypocrite that I am - but then you can usually count on hypocrites to speak the truth; that's the irony of it). But maybe there is a better way.
I think all radical liberals have to struggle with the balance of indignation at injustice committed against individuals and the love you have to have for the first part to matter. I and many of my intellectual colleagues have maybe spent too long on the wrong side of that fine line. Too much hating going on. That was supposed to be the domain of system-loving conservatives (i.e. those who love status quo more than people). I think I am trying to get us to stop hating Bush & Co. so much and do something. And by do something I don't mean get a large group together and yell about how bad things are or how enlightened we are. We have to talk, but civilly, even with those who don't deserve it. And I know that's hard because I can't even talk civilly with those I agree with for the most part (hey, Justin). [Well, actually I belive I speak the harshest with people I trust precisely bevause I do trust them. So I guess if I seem to hate you that's a sign of acceptance... But anyway, a discussion for another time.] Let's get off of our self-righteous trip and really start practicing what we preach. Spread the love, man. Even to G. W. Bush. Mind-blowing I know. We need to remember all the trash we do, like supporting repression of workers, polluting, and hurting animals, and just generally being apathetic. (That is, sorry for the non-religious here, a very Christian point of view. But useful nonetheless, I would claim.)
(Man, makes me want to go work for an NGO over there... For a few years I have had this fantasy of doing something dangerous but good and pacifist, like work for some NGO in a war zone. Man, that would be hard, but I guess if you want to really show that you mean what you say, that is a great way to go. Not that we should be all about proving ourselves to everyone, but... Okay anyway now I am rambling.)
Man, what is the point of this vertiginous missive, other than don't write when exhausted (as it makes one both too honest and disorganized)? Well, first, let's all stop sounding like panicked jerks, and speak the truth in love. Don't let them get by with trash, but be careful not to be vitriolic or self-righteous. (On the other hand, don't get so fed up that you start defending them, like I have been doing lately, ugh.) Second, man, let's figure out a way to be really useful [seriously, I expect to see comments on this one - what can we do that will really help people].
And will people please regularly remind me I don't believe in politics!?
Classic... I guess the new version of the Nautilus, the file manager for the Gnome desktop, implements what is called the "spatial metaphor." What does this mean? Well, according to an Ars Technica article, and if I understand it correctly, it means that instead of all folders opening in the same window, when someone opens a folder it will open in its own window; these windows will each have unique positions on the screen and will feature window memory so that their position and even the position of the scrollbars in the window will be remembered for the next time the window is opened. So why is this funny? Well, anyone who has ever used a GUI besides the ones to show up in Windows or any of the X window managers will probably remember this ground breaking feature. I am, of course, an old Amiga user which did basically precisely all of this and did it quite well. The Mac worked basically the same way too. Actually, I find it odd that this seems to be getting such a surprised reception, as you could even do something sort of like this in Windows, if you went through My Computer instead of using Windows Explorer, and I am pretty sure there were some popular file managers under X that did this. So what am I missing? Anyway, I am not complaining, I think this is an okay way to handle file management, and I don't think anyone is claiming this is new (although it seems to be getting that kind of reception). I do however think it is funny that we are going back to what we had in the mid-1980's. (And especially considering that while I liked the way the Amiga GUI handled windows, I thought Windows Explorer was a slight improvement and it was pretty much the only interface feature of Windows I ever liked....)
Sometimes, I think the best way to promote American security and defense is to simply stop being the largest and best. As the saying goes, the tallest blade of grass is the first to get cut down. Why do we want to be a superpower again? If we really wanted to be safe, we would start by making sure that there were people bigger and richer than us. Encourage the European Union to expand and grow and unify; beef up Russia and India and Brazil. It won't be the end of the need for defense, but it would make it much easier. (Did you know there are some countries with no military? Probably because nobody wants to invade them. Not to suggest we will ever be that, but still, something to think about.)
This is kind of fun: Scoble, the guy I wrote a post about the other day made a post about an article Chris Pratley, a guy at Microsoft, who had made a post about patents and open source. Most readers picked up on the open source part and spent many, many long posts arguing about it. I argues Pratley had missed the point with open source (see my first comment on Scoble's site), but I think originally I overestimated to the extent that he did so. The really fun part though, is that Pratley actually wrote a repsonse, showing some surprise (ah, such naivete) which responded to some of the arguments including mine (he actually responded to several of my points - I feel so special). At first I though Pratley was just another MS drone (I know MS has some good people, but they also have some, well, drones), but he definitely impressed me with his calm and reasoned response, showing that both I missed the boat a little, and that he hadn't missed it as much as I had thought. It was an interesting look inside of an MSer's head though. His most recent post makes it clear he isn't really all that interested in continuing the discussion though, so I don't think we will see any more on this particular topic. I hope that it caused him to give a few extra moments thought to the advantages of open source, though (even though he already knows plenty of those).
I have to admit, my Mac laptop from work is growing on me. The hardware is alright for one thing (big screen, light, easy to carry, CD and DVD writer, acceptable - if short - battery life, built in wired and wireless networking). The software is the real kicker though, and I am not thinking of the legendary Macintosh interface which I find to be inferior to a good KDE or Gnome setup. No doubt the OS is easy to use for system settings though; for example, I can nearly transparently switch between different wired and wireless networks (though becuase of how IU is setup I occasionally have to connect to a VPN but all that takes is two clicks). What is nice is having a professionally designed and programmed interface over a real kernel (well, there are a few quirks though - this isn't Linux or FreeBSD), so I still have UNIX-like environment for the heacy duty tasks. I know some people don't think that is a good thing, but believe me if you develop at all, or just used to being able to just use grep to search through file contents without having to go to some lousy GUI search interface, this is invaluable.
Oddly enough though, my favorite thing to do with my new laptop is play with iTunes. The biggest drawback and advatage of iTunes is how everything is centralized. It has a central music library which enables you to manage music rather easily. Of course, if you don't want iTunes to run your music, that is somewhat of a drawback. What you get from it, for example, though is the ability to make a bunch of different playlists easily - more about that later. Also, it is easy to browse through the music files. And it is very easy to rip CDs - a couple clicks, basically.
The playlists are the interesting part though. I have ripped a significant though small subset of my CDs, and created various playlists for different types of settings, e.g. I have one called "Struggle" with lots of stuff from Star Wars soundtracks, Beethoven pieces, and other random classical music, or one called "Melancholy" which has everything from "Ordinary World" to "Binary Sunset" from Star Wars, with a Moby track or two thrown in. And I can think of some other odd music to throw in there. The thing is, if I am careful, it sounds very natural. It is something I have always thought about doing - I always joked about doing an "Ultimate Mix" radio station ("The greatest hits of all time - literally."), this is the first time I have been able to conveniently do it (I could do it to an extent with Winamp but it was more cumbersome). And I was right - it works. Music need not be grouped by genre (as classical radio stations have known for years - opera and Gothic music are much farther apart than Pop and Techno).
