This was the most interesting thing I’d read in a long time. The author obviously did a lot of research, and it’s very accurate; I don’t generally go into these sorts of articles (articles having to do with online/tech/internet related topics) expecting the writer to know more about the subject than I do, but that’s just what I got.

I have personal experience running forums, so I know that the one guaranteed way to get rid of trolls is to ignore them, and that’s essentially the conclusion the author came to. If someone goes to a Mac forum and posts a rant about how Windows is better than MacOS because “I can right click lolz” or something, and everyone ignores it, the troll will leave. If some idiot responds with a badly written, angry rebuttal, full of spelling errors (which is invariably what happens), that’s like setting out a feast for the troll.

Reading this almost made me want to write a story about these people. I found them very interesting, especially Fortuny.

I know superhero stories are often very right-wing, what with the whole vigilante/taking-the-law-into-your-own-hands thing. For example, the recent Iron Man movie: The story revolved around a superpower (Tony Stark) giving weapons to a small group of arabs, then seeing them kill their own people. Since the superpower had the means to stop what was happening, and since the situation was partially his fault to begin with, that superpower felt it was his moral duty to step in and get involved. Sound familiar?

Dark Night is more complex than Iron Man in almost every way, and its plot doesn’t boil down into direct symbolism as easily as Iron Man’s does. As I said above, I don’t think there’s an inherent political message, but I do think there are several possible interpretations of the movie that cast the actions of the characters in a political context.

The right-wing interpretation is based around the fact that the movie can be seen as characterizing the Joker as a terrorist, which in a sense would justify the current administration’s position that it is pointless to negotiate with terrorists because they’re so completely detached from reality with no logic, reason, or motive behind their action. This isn’t true, of course — terrorists aren’t like that — but some people believe it. There are many other elements of the movie that fit in nearly perfectly to this interpretation; the wiretapping of everyone in Gotham as a necessary evil in order to catch the Joker, etc.

This seems to be the popular analysis, but I think there are a few things that this interpretation misses. First and foremost is that the Joker would not exist as we see him in the movie if not for Batman. In a sense, the Joker of Dark Knight is a response to Batman’s existence. Previously, in Batman Begins, there’s a very telling conversation between Gordon and Batman, where they talk about escalation.

GORDON: But there’s a lot of weirdness out there right now. The Narrows is lost. We still haven’t picked up Crane or half the inmates of Arkham that he freed.

BATMAN:  We will.   Gotham will return to normal.

GORDON:  Will it?   What about escalation?

BATMAN:  Escalation?

GORDON:  We start carrying semiautomatics, they buy automatics. we start wearing kevlar, they buy armor-piercing rounds.

BATMAN:  And?

GORDON:  And you’re wearing a mask and jumping off rooftops. Take this guy; armed robbery, double homicide. Got a taste for theatrics, like you. Leaves a calling card.

This event fits into a wider view of Gotham and Batman that points to the conclusion that, in many ways, Batman has been disaster for Gotham. Wayne asks Alfred “Did I bring this upon [Gotham]?” The answer might be yes.

In an even larger sense, though, the Joker isn’t the problem. He’s described as an agent of chaos, inherently without direction, and that seems to be an accurate assessment of his character. There are bigger problems, more fundamental problems, that need to be dealt with. The Gotham that we see in the movie is only a few steps away from anarchy. Criminals rule the night. And as we are shown in the end of the movie, what Gotham needs isn’t a masked superhero fighting super-villains; what Gotham needs is a better police force, better law enforcement, a district attorney ready and willing to take on crime. Harvey Dent was what Gotham really needed, not Batman. The rouge vigilantes, the people who feel it is justified to break the law in order to get the bad guy, do damage to a society in the long run. Just as Batman brought about the Joker as we see him now, the international policies of the US government brought about the radical terrorist groups as we see them today, and the actions of the US do damage to the international community.

Of course, there are problems with this interpretation as well. The biggest, in my mind, is that it suffers from the same fundamental false assumption of the right-wing analysis. Namely, that the Joker represents terrorists. Terrorists have an agenda. They want something, and use violence as a means to get it. The Joker is more primal than that, and it does a disservice to the complexity of his character to write him off as a symbol for terrorism.

To make this theme, I first designed the layout with Dreamweaver and Photoshop. I then installed Apache and MySQL on my machine, in order to have a local install of Wordpress to work with. It was much easier than I expected, though still not quite as easy as making a Textpattern template (I’ve made several textpattern templates in the past, and it’s a dream to customize).

There are probably still problems with it that I haven’t caught, and I’m still tweaking everything. If you see any problems, please comment or contact me.

Around that time, in 1990, McCain was given a chance to change his mind, and eventually did. Though he initially supported the Republican governor’s controversial action to repeal the holiday, he later changed his stance and supported the recognition of the holiday. The governor continued to oppose the holiday, saying “I guess King did a lot for the colored people, but I don’t think he deserves a national holiday.” In 1992, the citizens of Arizona voted to recognize the holiday.

I wasn’t around at the time, so I don’t really know first-hand how important Martin Luther King Jr.’s contributions to civil rights, to our country, and to humanity as a whole were. I have, however, studied many of his speeches in school, and though I’ve only scratched the surface of his work I feel comfortable in saying that he was one of the most influential and important people of the twentieth century. To oppose naming a national holiday in his honor is absurd.

McCain also voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1990 (specifically, he voted to uphold President Bush’s veto of the 1990 Civil Rights Act), which lost by only one vote. To this day, he refuses to apologize for his vote. When asked earlier this year, he defended his action and claimed that the bill would have set up racial “quotas,” but that simply isn’t true. The bill had nothing to do with quotas, and everything to do with restoring laws regarding employment discrimination that had been put in place nearly two decades prior, and had only been recently overturned by supreme court cases that made it harder for minorities and women to win discrimination suits:

The act was a response to a series of controversial Supreme Court decisions made the year before. In those decisions, the court overturned a 1971 ruling that required employers to prove a “business necessity” for screening out minorities and women in its hiring practices. That burden of proof, the 1989 court said, should instead be placed on the plaintiff who alleged that his or her client had been unlawfully screened.

Both the House of Representatives and the Senate, deeming this unjust, passed bills that would restore the old law. But the Bush administration objected, insisting that a reversion to the old way would amount to forcing employers to have hiring quotas. It was a controversial and somewhat dubious claim, one that the New York Times editorial page called “an unjustified charge.”

McCain continues to justify his vote by claiming somehow the bill would have required “quotas,” and refuses to apologize for it. He has, on the other hand, apologized for his votes regarding the MLK holiday — while the fact that he initially opposed it remains, I like it that he was at least willing to change his mind. In this case, hoewver — when combined with his opposition to civil rights legislation — saying “I changed my mind” just isn’t enough.

I’m not planning on accusing McCain of outright racism, but I will keep his voting record in mind when I hear him talk about civil rights and MLK, as I think all voters should.

. . . imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in’an interesting hole I find myself in’fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’ This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it’s still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything’s going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.

From a Speech given by Adams at Digital Biota 2, Cambridge, UK, 1998. Later quoted in Richard Dawkin’s Eulogy for Douglas Adams.

There were a few problems, mainly the placement of the IV. I have a more serious medical problem — one that I haven’t felt comfortable writing about on my blog yet — so I’ve had many many IVs in the past few years, and they aren’t getting any easier. I have “small veins,” and nurses/doctors have a lot of trouble getting the IV in. And I mean a lot of trouble. I’ve had nurses give up after more than an hour of trying. This time it did work eventually, but it took three tries. Two tries in one arm (elbow and back of hand) then it finally worked on the back of my other hand.

It almost didn’t happen, though. The surgeon gave me the option to stop and re-schedule the operation after she unsuccessfully tried twice to place the IV, telling my parents that she didn’t want to “torture the poor guy.” Luckily for me, it did work out eventually and there were no more problems with it from then on.

So, for the near future I’m stuck to soft foods. My mouth isn’t numb anymore, and there’s basically no pain. Overall, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was.

This is a little personal post. I’ll have a few of these in the next day or so. I’ll be back to posting serious articles shortly.

First off, I decided at the last minute to go in and change my shirt. Originally I was wearing this t-shirt, but I realized it might not be the smartest thing to wear to an airport.

Things started off badly. There was a terminal set up for us to retrieve tickets from, only the one we used refused to print anything. When it was supposed to be printing, the screen went blank for a second, then we were given a glimpse of a Windows desktop with an application minimized, then the program restarted. We had to have the guy behind the counter print the tickets manually.

Once on the plane from Sacramento to Las Vegas, little 10 or so inch screens dropped down from the plane ceiling to show an instructional video. I know it was an instructional video because I heard the audio. The video was horribly distorted, reminding me of watching over-the-air TV with the coaxel cable only barely connected.

On the flight back things appeared to be going more smoothly. We got there early, sped through the security screening, and waited almost two hours for a delayed flight. Not anyone’s fault, just a result of the weather. After landing, however, we found that our luggage was nowhere to be found. After checking every piece of luggage, we went to an official looking office next to the baggage claim and learned that according to their records our luggage hadn’t been on our flight. We checked the luggage in more than two hours before the flight, so this was somewhat surprising. They said they would try to find the lost luggage and send it to us.

Anyway, as we were leaving I started thinking about the way the baggage is distributed. Anyone can pick up anything, and no one checks to make sure you actually own what you walk out with. It seems to me that this is exactly the sort of thing airport security should be handling. A lot has been sacrificed to make airports and airplanes safer from terrorists, but I don’t know how much overall good it has really done. The “spot checking” or whatever it’s called seems inefficient at best and borderline unhelpful at worst. From seeing videos of the 9/11 hijackers, it seems like they were well-rehearsed, almost calm, and definitely trying not to stand out. In contrast, the people that seem to be singled out for searches are the ones that are nervous, unprepared, etcetera.

Anyway, I’m no security expert, and I don’t have any better ideas, so I guess this is the best we can do for now.

Honestly, I’m surprised it took me so long to do this. I’ve been making games on-and-off for a long time now. In elementary school I messed around with QBasic. In middle school I messed around with Visual Basic and Game Maker. In high school, Flash, Multimedia Fusion, then Python and C++. That whole time, however, I never actually finished a game. I came close a few times, but ultimately got tired of the project and moved on.

Currently I have a few projects I’m working on, including more (longer) IF works, and a graphical point-and-click adventure game I’ve been toying with for months. I plan to release them all as freeware, or even GPL where applicable and useful.

Stephen Jay Gould wrote a paper called “Evolution as Fact and Theory,” and it sums up the issue quite nicely:

In the American vernacular, “theory” often means “imperfect fact”–part of a hierarchy of confidence running downhill from fact to theory to hypothesis to guess. Thus the power of the creationist argument: evolution is “only” a theory and intense debate now rages about many aspects of the theory. If evolution is worse than a fact, and scientists can’t even make up their minds about the theory, then what confidence can we have in it? Indeed, President Reagan echoed this argument before an evangelical group in Dallas when he said (in what I devoutly hope was campaign rhetoric): “Well, it is a theory. It is a scientific theory only, and it has in recent years been challenged in the world of science–that is, not believed in the scientific community to be as infallible as it once was.”

Well evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world’s data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don’t go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein’s theory of gravitation replaced Newton’s in this century, but apples didn’t suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape-like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin’s proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered.

Moreover, “fact” doesn’t mean “absolute certainty”; there ain’t no such animal in an exciting and complex world. The final proofs of logic and mathematics flow deductively from stated premises and achieve certainty only because they are not about the empirical world. Evolutionists make no claim for perpetual truth, though creationists often do (and then attack us falsely for a style of argument that they themselves favor). In science “fact” can only mean “confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional consent.” I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.

Evolutionists have been very clear about this distinction of fact and theory from the very beginning, if only because we have always acknowledged how far we are from completely understanding the mechanisms (theory) by which evolution (fact) occurred. Darwin continually emphasized the difference between his two great and separate accomplishments: establishing the fact of evolution, and proposing a theory–natural selection–to explain the mechanism of evolution.

Most anti-evolutionists oppose it on both grounds, ie: they reject both the fact of it occurring, and the theory as to how exactly it works. Some anti-evolutionists have come to understand the difference, however, and changed their arguments. They now claim to accept “microevolution” (as it can now be easily and overwhelmingly proven over observable periods of time) but not “macroevolution.”

There is still some controversy over the exact mechanisms of how evolution works. Intelligent design and creationism are not, however, valid explanations. Supporters of both generally misunderstand evolution (often drastically misunderstand it), sometimes bringing up absurd arguments that have nothing to do with evolution (”how does evolution explain the origin of life?”) or that have been answered a million times (”where are the transitional fossils?”). The truth is, neither ID nor creationism are real science. Neither is falsifiable, and both are just religion trying to masquerade as science.

Anyway, that isn’t my point. Those people are generally too far gone to save. The people I’m more concerned about are the people who still bring up the argument that evolution is “only a theory” and hasn’t been proven, and the people who don’t understand why evolution can be a fact and a theory at the same time.

The most obvious and most common misunderstanding to confront here is a misunderstanding of the word “theory.” We are talking about a scientific theory, not a theory in the colloquial sense. To quote the National Academy of Sciences:

Some scientific explanations are so well established that no new evidence is likely to alter them. The explanation becomes a scientific theory. In everyday language a theory means a hunch or speculation. Not so in science. In science, the word theory refers to a comprehensive explanation of an important feature of nature that is supported by many facts gathered over time. Theories also allow scientists to make predictions about as yet unobserved phenomena.

It constantly surprises me how many people don’t understand this. I think it is a sort of willful ignorance on their part. They can be shown all of this information and more, mountains of evidence and lengthy, in-depth explanations and definitions, yet they manage to ignore it and go put an “evolution is just a theory” bumper sticker on their SUV.

As readers of this blog may remember, I supported Kucinich in the Democratic primary (though I didn’t get to vote for him, since he’d dropped out by the time of the California primary vote). While this — as well as his earlier attempts to impeach Cheney — ensure that he stays a bit of an “extremist,” I wish we had more politicians like him.

You can watch the video of his speech in three parts (below the fold):

The idea behind TinyXP is that most of the useless junk that comes with XP is stripped out, leaving only the bare essentials. This leaves you with a functional OS that’s much smaller and faster than the original bulky XP.

Sure, it’s piracy (since you’re downloading a hacked XP ISO that bypasses registration), but I actually own a legal copy of XP. That doesn’t make using TinyXP legal, but in my mind it makes it morally okay.

If you need a really light and fast OS with a tiny memory footprint that won’t get in your way, I highly recommend TinyXP.