I just upgraded my machine at work to OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard). It is one of 4 machines that I regularly work on. I keep the passwords and PIM data on these machines synced using MobileMe. Upon the first run of the MobileMe sync process after the upgrade, I got this dialog:
So apparently I just need to guess.
Duting my initial survey of the office I now work in, I came across this box:
No sandwiches, either.
I have honestly been having a really hard time putting into words precisely how this sign made me feel. It’s been bothering me. And after literally hours of musing on and off, and several failed attempts at writing it up, I realized it was simple — I felt deeply and abidingly suspicious that there were in fact some fuses in that cabinet. And I felt compelled to tell it that okay, okay, whatever, I believed it.
I mean, why would a cabinet that didn’t have fuses in it need a sign saying so?
In fact, come to think of it, why do we put signs on things at all?
We label things when two conditions are satisfied:
For example, take “CAUTION: HIGH VOLTAGE”, and other warnings. The cost of not knowing about the high voltage is a potentially lethal shock. And electricity is invisible. Sure, let’s let people know about that.
With something like “Recycling: Plastics and Glass Only”, the cost of not knowing is recyclable materials might be put in landfill or inappropriate materials might contaminate the recyclables. And it’s not possible to know where some bucket will be carted off to without some indication. So that makes sense.
But this NO FUSES business? Granted, unless you have x-ray vision, you wouldn’t be able to tell without opening the cabinet that there were no fuses in it. But what’s the cost of someone not knowing that in advance? In order for it to make any sense, there has to be some consequence to being wrong about the presence or absence of fuses in that cabinet. So it’s possible that there used to be people who were desperately looking for fuses all the time, and they couldn’t afford the precious seconds looking for them in the wrong place. But then why don’t I see that sign on everything that doesn’t have fuses in it?
Or maybe there are many more people than I would think who under no circumstances want to see fuses. Like maybe fuses killed their parents. And that sign is just to let them know that it’s totally safe to open that cabinet without their having to confront the painful past.
Of course those two scenarios are absurd. Consequently, failing to come up with a way to reconcile that sign’s message with the two requisites for rational signage, I cannot take it at face value. The most obvious conclusion is that the sign is trying to deceive me. Because fuses were in high demand in that office, but the fuses in that cabinet were already being used for something important. So in order to keep people who would go to any length, no matter how nefarious, from stealing fuses that were already in use, someone put up a sign that claimed that cabinet had none. Crazy? Definitely. But, not as far fetched as what I’d need to believe to think that there really weren’t any fuses in there.
Maybe the sign is trying to be sarcastic. What do you think? What could possibly explain that sign? Oh, and no, I haven’t yet checked inside the cabinet.
If Marijuana Is Legal, Will Addiction Rise? – Room for Debate Blog – NYTimes.com.
I came across this collection of arguments for legalizing pot a couple of weeks ago. I have to say that while all of the essays are good, I find former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper’s essay to be the best (it’s the last one). He begins:
Any law disobeyed by more than 100 million Americans, the number who’ve tried marijuana at least once, is bad public policy. As a 34-year police veteran, I’ve seen how marijuana prohibition breeds disrespect for the law, and contempt for those who enforce it.
Katushiro Otomo’s anime adaptation of his manga of the same name, Akira, is now 20 years old (and then some). While the film sadly lacks much of the subtlety and richness of the manga, it nonetheless remains one of the greatest animated stories of all time. One notable aspect of the adaptation is that it was released with an english dubbing in the USA only six months after it was released in Japan. (This is my recollection and wikipedia agrees with me, while IMDb does not.) Not only was that unprecedented, but even now, when all of Hayao Miyazaki’s films are being brought to the US with a high budget translation by Disney, these releases trail by up to a year.
One of the downsides of the film was the original english dubbing was a little… shall we say… cheesy1. As cheesy as the animation was superlative. This much was evident when I saw it for the first time the very week it was released. After the 2nd viewing I noticed something interesting: much of the dialog was composed of the main characters, Kaneda and Tetsuo screaming each others’ names. By 1995 I’d envisioned an abridged version of the movie, nothing more than the clips of those moments stitched together. Back then, the tools to implement my vision were not really available to me, so it was just a thought experiment, but one I’d share with other anime-loving friends now and again.
Imagine my blistering irritation when I saw this commercial on Adult Swim for the animated Inuyasha… that was my idea! Or at least very close. But that was a few years ago, and by then there was QuickTime, and iMovie, and Handbrake, and really I had all the tools I needed!
So now it’s done, and amazingly, I can see something that I didn’t know would be the case when I imagined it: that The Abridged Akira completely encapsulates the emotional struggle between the two characters.
I couldn’t get my hands on the original dubbing, and the 2001 Pioneer release actually has decent voice acting2, so some of what I’d envisioned is missing. Nonetheless, I present to you… The Abridged Akira.
Big, big, big ups to my friend M who supplied the DVD and helped a lot with the initial clip marking and cutting.
Abigail Beshkin reports:
This post introduces a new category to my blog: shameless self-promotion. Self promotion because it just is. Shameless because I’ve already posted about this before. But the parody review of The Oozinator that Phil and I did almost 3 years ago has 49,689 views as of this posting, and I’m so proud! It was written, rehearsed, and shot in less than 2 hours (and yes, it shows, but it’s still damned funny).
You know, the Oozinator? The horrifically ill-conceived Hasbro super soaker which looks like a green alien phallus and shoots white gloppy ooze? Ooh, yeah, that thing.
Every once in a while I compulsively check back on it to see what people think of it. I’ve been eyeing that 50,000 view milestone (which in non-youtube fame terms is about the equivalent of your first guest appearance on a public access TV show airing in Omaha). I’m also pleased to report that we are number 3 in the youtube search results for “oozinator”, right after the first ever posted video of the actual original ad, and a much better rehearsed bit about the meeting at which the Oozinator idea should have been killed (which is also amusing). And while we aren’t one of the two coveted video results at the top of google web searches for the term, somehow we are the number 2 slot in google video search. How does that work?
Bing, Microsoft’s arguably slick search engine, however, can suck it. Our review isn’t even in the first 5 pages of web results, and we’re on the second page, 28 videos into the result grid… and that link is to some guy’s myspace page where he reposted the video! Where’s the love, Bing?
And now the video:
I watched Jill Bolte Taylor’s TED talk a year ago, after my uncle J sent around a link to an article in the NYTimes called A Superhighway to Bliss. In her talk, she recounts how she experienced nirvana while having a stroke in her left brain.
A few weeks ago the topic came up again on a mailing list, and I linked the talk to the group. I insist that you watch the first 3 minutes (out of the total 20) right now — I bet you will not hit pause.
T, one of the people on the list, and a psychologist, said that Ms. Taylor was describing psychosis, and that while we learned much from her description of her experience, to aspire to that state was to aspire to psychosis. This set me to thinking, and led me to articulate for the first time some thoughts I’d had on this topic.
I see the message of her talk as grounded in a very difficult philosophical point which relates to T’s reaction that Jill Taylor was describing psychosis. The definitions you find of psychosis all root in abnormal states of mind, in which contact with reality is lost. Well, the purely right brain experience that Ms. Taylor was having was in no was disconnected with reality. Not in the way a physicist would describe reality. Her right brain was unaffected by her stroke, and continued to be just as connected to reality as it ever was. The reality from which she was separated, and from which those with psychoses are separated, is the consensual reality that all of us with left brain dominance dwell in, in which “we” end at the borders of our skin.
Where “we” stop and the outside world begins, however, is not cut and dry. Is the air in your lungs at this moment part of you? What about the urine in your bladder which you have not yet eliminated? The digested food in your stomach? The water in the glass you are about to drink quickly becomes the cerebrospinal fluid in your brain. At what point does it become “you”?
To be sure, a human without left brain function, incapable of conceiving of themselves as individual and separate from the rest of the matter and energy in the universe, is maladapted. We have invested a lot of evolutionary energy into that left hemisphere way of perceiving reality, and it has paid off rather well, in that we can build cities and study dentistry and live longer. But we also know that adaptations which pay off in some ways can be detrimental in others. Many of the way our bodies manage nourishment were evolved when food was scarce, and are actually detrimental now. The adaptation to stand on our legs has freed our hands to use tools, but ruins our backs and our knees.
So would be the case with our development of a left brain mindset. It precedes and enables all of our thinking, but cuts us off from one another and the universe at large, prevents us from experiencing that bliss. Call it expulsion from Eden, if you will.
This is the insight of which she speaks — that the notion that we are all connected, all one, is not just some hippie-dippy way of expressing aspirations for peace and coexistence. It is in fact the unadulterated truth; and merely perceiving it at all, even if we cannot live in that state of mind perpetually, has immediate, powerful, and positive consequences for our way of viewing the world, and our actions in it.
UPDATE: my import problem turned out to be a version incompatibility issue with php and libxml2, and was a general problem with the xmlrpc API as well… Upgrading to latest versions seems to have fixed it.
At long last, I have finished migrating Terminus Est from blogspot to my own WordPress install. My old site now redirects here, please make note ofthe new address. My feed address has not changed.
The migration did not go as smoothly as one should, despite there being an importer that is supposed to handle things for you.
For one thing, the importer doesnt handle images hosted on blogger. It seems there is a plugin which might take care of it, but I didnt know that until it was too late. Fortunately most of the images in my blog are actually hosted on Flickr, so that was actually not so terrible.
The real issue, however, was that every post had its angle brackets stripped out, necessitating a manual correction, very annoying. Also for some reason it converted all of bloggers tags to WordPress categories, which is mystifying, and required manual correction as well.
I can feel my stress fading already.
Please read what the RoBeast is writing about his experience browsing the Lenscrafters site. The questionnaire they use to help you find your frames is just mind-blowing.
