Mark Pilgrim elucidates what is so upsetting about the Apple iPad to people like us who grew up tinkering on their computers, in Tinkerer’s Sunset. Our children are going to grow up in pristine computing jails that both legally and technically thwart attempts at tinkering.
January 29, 2010
January 23, 2010
The Phylomon Project merges my main area of interest (web publishing, generally; WordPress, specifically) with that of my wife (zoology). It’s an open-source real-life-animals Pokémon-esque card project, using user-submitted art. I love it.
Keith Olbermann: Are Massachusetts voters racist?
Keith Olbermann
This has to be one of the most absurd things Keith Olbermann has ever said:
“The Republicans and the Tea Partiers will tell you what happens tonight with Scott Brown tonight, whether he wins or comes close, is a repudiation of Obama policies, and surely one of Obama’s policies from the viewpoint of his opponents is that it’s okay to have this sea change in American history, to have an African-American President. Is this vote to any degree just a euphemism the way state’s rights was in the 60s?”
Keith Olbermann
Let me see if I understand. Obama’s race isn’t a fact, but a policy? That doesn’t make sense… unless you’re trying to imply that people who vote against Obama’s policies are necessarily racist. See, now they’re not just people who disagree with him. They disagree with him on everything, including whether or not his racial makeup should preclude him from the presidency.
Nevermind that Obama carried Massachusetts 62% to 36% in the 2008 presidential elections. They’ve all suddenly turned back their clocks to the 60s and are voting to spite black people.
Man, fuck you. Not everything is an epic struggle with menacing undertones. Sometimes we just have shitty presidents that promote a shitty agenda, and people vote for the person who campaigns against that agenda.
January 19, 2010
The Washington Post: FBI broke law for years in phone record searches
The FBI illegally collected more than 2,000 U.S. telephone call records between 2002 and 2006 by invoking terrorism emergencies that did not exist [...]
And this is what they’re admitting. They would declare that a request was an emergency, and then they’d make up the emergency after the fact.
Eventually, FBI officials shifted to a second strategy of crafting a “blanket” national security letter to authorize all past searches that had not been covered by open cases.
The officials who implemented these policies should spend a long time in jail. The law provides a sentence of up to 10,000 years in jail for these crimes. I’d settle for a decade.
January 12, 2010
Google is rethinking their decision to operate a filtered search engine within China:
We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.
This makes me feel so much better about open web advocate Chris Messina recently joining Google. Maybe things are going to turn around, and Google will rediscover their roots and re-embrace their corporate motto.
January 9, 2010
Tina Daunt: The Secret History of Kubrick, the Blog Theme That Changed the Internet
The combination of the elegant and versatile WordPress and the ground breaking Kubrick made that possible, turning the democratization of publishing from an idealized concept into a concrete reality.
This well-written piece makes me almost sad to be putting Kubrick out to pasture in WordPress 3.0.
Alice in Wonderland Syndrome
Last year, I stumbled upon an article about something called Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, a temporary neurological condition during which the brain incorrectly interprets signals coming from the eyes and delivers a time-, size-, or shape-distorted view of the world. I was stunned as I read more, as I periodically experience this effect!
Alice in Wonderland Syndrome (AIWS) is named after Lewis Carroll’s novel Through the Looking Glass. In one scene, Alice eats cookies that change the size of her body, causing her to alternately be too small and too large for her environment. AIWS is temporary, and many report that it is more common after waking or when exhausted. Some experience their body changing shape (uniformly or just certain parts), and others feel that the objects or the world around them have changed size. Some even experience temporal disturbances, like feeling like they’re moving really quickly or really slowly.
Here is how I experience it.
It almost always happens to me when I’ve just woken up or when I’m very tired. Darkness can increase the chances of its onset. Reading can also be a factor. The most common scenario, by far, is that I’m tired, it’s dark, and I’m reading something up close for a long time. It’s as if my brain becomes uncalibrated for the 3-D world. This happens maybe four times a year, and each episode lasts between 15 minutes and two hours. Except for when I wake up with it, I can always feel it starting to come on. It is a variable effect, both in its onset and in its disappearance. Its severity varies.
My disturbances are of micropsia — I feel that the world around me has shrunk. The effect varies with distance away from my eyes. Standing in a large room, I feel as though I could reach out and touch all four of the walls without moving my body. If I try, my arm seems to stretch out for many feet and almost reach the wall (in reality, it may be 10 feet away). If I look down, it’s as if I’m looking off the top of a skyscraper. My feet look small and far away. My legs converge like two railroad tracks stretching off to the horizon. These two effects (the walls looking close, but my limbs feeling long) are hard to reconcile. Everything is distorted, like I’m viewing it through a wide angle lens.
This still from Disney’s Alice in Wonderland film is a fairly close representation of what it looks like when I look down.
Alice in Wonderland Syndrome
Normally I have excellent distance vision, and can read things very far away. When I’m experiencing this syndrome, I have to bring things in very close to read. At close distances, things appear almost normal. I can read text if it’s within two feet, and it looks almost normal-sized about 8 inches from my face. I’ve attempted to trick my brain out of the syndrome by focusing on an object close up, where it appears almost normal, and slowing moving it backwards. It doesn’t work.
Moving around is a bizarre experience. It seems as if I can span any distance in a step or two, so when I try (and it takes more steps) it seems as if I’m moving in slow motion. In fact, due to my distorted view of my body, the entire experience almost feels out-of-body. There’s a sense of haziness or blurriness. Despite the strangeness of it, I don’t have much trouble walking around. I’m not dizzy or clumsy.
The surest way to make it go away is to sleep. Otherwise it’s just a waiting game. The effect wears off more slowly than it comes on. At the end of it, things just feel a little distorted. Sometimes it’s hard for me to know when it’s gone, since I’ve spent a while in this distorted world that even a diminished distortion seems like a massive improvement.
It’s not frightening or all that inconvenient. It’s just strange.
Always a enjoyable read, Timothy Sandefur absolutely nails the problem with “hope” as a slogan: Learned helplessness in the age of Obama.
hope is what you do when you are out of all other options, and can do nothing other than wait for someone else to come along and solve your problems for you
January 1, 2010
Bruce Schneier on what is probably the most important lesson of the last decade that we failed to learn:
Despite fearful rhetoric to the contrary, terrorism is not a transcendent threat. A terrorist attack cannot possibly destroy a country’s way of life; it’s only our reaction to that attack that can do that kind of damage. The more we undermine our own laws, the more we convert our buildings into fortresses, the more we reduce the freedoms and liberties at the foundation of our societies, the more we’re doing the terrorists’ job for them.
December 19, 2009
70-Minute Video Review of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace
If you’re a Star Wars fan and hate George Lucas for ruining the “prequel” movies, you owe it to yourself to watch this brutal and hysterically funny takedown.