Branden Hall has taken to summarizing the highlights of the Flashcoders list each day on his blog. This is nice, as the list is so high-traffic that it can be hard to keep up on all the Yummy Flash Goodness (or Crawlingly Monstrous Flash Evil, as the case may be).
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12:11:15 PM,
Monday 13 January 2003
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"In short, let's all act like grown-ups, because punk-ass kids get eaten by bears!"
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(8)
01:03:36 AM,
Saturday 11 January 2003
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I love Dean Allen's answer to the last question in this entry, because that's exactly how I feel about Wobble with regard to Movable Type. And that's not even rare. Developers, even developers of competing projects, consistently show respect for MT. I think that says a lot about what a good program it is, and also, I suspect, about what a pleasant manner Ben and Mena have.
I don't really have any point in bringing all this up. I just like good software.
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08:19:07 PM,
Friday 10 January 2003
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Save me, O iTunes! Destroy my eardrums and keep me awake and functional!
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06:08:04 PM,
Friday 10 January 2003
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Matisse, a coworker of mine, has just pointed me to this unbelievably cool recipe for an artificial volcano. Fun!
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(1)
05:46:01 PM,
Friday 10 January 2003
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quietly to myself, at least, every time we have a printer problem at work
"PC Load Letter? What the fuck is PC Load Letter?"
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(2)
04:22:39 PM,
Friday 10 January 2003
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Millions of Americans are suffering from Chronic Caffeine Deficiency. For just the price of a cup of coffee per day, you can help to supply the resources these poor souls need to live some semblance of a normal life. Give life. Give alertness. Give Caffeine.
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(3)
03:46:26 PM,
Friday 10 January 2003
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Hmm... that actually sounds distinctly interesting.
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(2)
02:01:28 PM,
Friday 10 January 2003
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Huh? What? No, no... I was talkin' to Kim... I said "you fuckin' die"... no, I-- we were just goofin' around... no, no, it didn't have anything to do with anything.... she said don't tou-- "anybody touches my stuff", and I said "you fuckin' die!", like that. I was finishing her part for her. You know what I mean?
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06:20:37 PM,
Thursday 9 January 2003
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She's Actual Size lists the Top Ten Excuses from The Man for Keeping Me Down in 2002.
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06:04:42 PM,
Thursday 9 January 2003
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Reader poll: have you ever Instantly Won anything? What was it?
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(9)
05:45:43 PM,
Thursday 9 January 2003
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OoCQotD: "Onion Guy, let's go feed Anton!"
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(1)
03:26:01 PM,
Thursday 9 January 2003
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The World’s First Photograph
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(1)
01:58:06 PM,
Thursday 9 January 2003
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Yeah, you heard me: Alaska!
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12:47:08 PM,
Thursday 9 January 2003
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Alaskans? Huge bags of water? The fuck?
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(3)
12:46:00 PM,
Thursday 9 January 2003
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You know you're too much of a recluse when your friends email you with things like: "Moss, you know we can always hang, Healdsburg isn't Alaska."
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05:56:22 PM,
Wednesday 8 January 2003
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For some reason, the January 7th entry on Open Brackets, titled "Onward & upward", makes me think of Martin. (Sorry, no permlinks.)
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(1)
02:22:30 PM,
Wednesday 8 January 2003
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Show and tell! That's delightful.
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(1)
02:01:56 PM,
Wednesday 8 January 2003
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Penn Jillette tells a beautiful, beautiful story about airport security.
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(2)
06:43:12 PM,
Tuesday 7 January 2003
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The fastest browser will always be the one that doesn't implement the standards completely.
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02:57:34 PM,
Tuesday 7 January 2003
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William Gibson has a blog!
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(1)
01:01:45 PM,
Tuesday 7 January 2003
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What it is.
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(6)
09:51:18 PM,
Monday 6 January 2003
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Out walking and talking with Cassie and Sarah the other day, I had an idea of an image that needed to be made, if it hadn't been already. But first, I thought I'd check Google just in case, and sure enough, there it was.
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(11)
09:45:55 PM,
Monday 6 January 2003
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Things We Want To See: Batman vs. Bat Boy
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(3)
09:42:51 PM,
Monday 6 January 2003
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And this concludes Warblog Day at m14m.net. We trust you have enjoyed this bizarre glimpse into a parallel universe of punditry and strident rhetoric.
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(2)
09:13:08 PM,
Monday 6 January 2003
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Desmond Tutu thinks we're making a mistake. And he certainly knows something about changing things peacefully.
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08:39:39 PM,
Monday 6 January 2003
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The U.S. government is making plans for a democratic Iraq. This does speak well of their intentions. At least some thought is going into leaving the country better off after the invasion than before. On the other hand, the phrase "quick takeover of the country's oil fields to pay for reconstruction" certainly has me worried.
But then there's North Korea. It certainly is an interesting case to examine, not so much because we absolutely must behave the same way towards Iraq that we are towards North Korea, but because of what it seems to reveal about our motivations. It certainly gives a lot more strength to the old "war for oil" idea. An article from Stand Down makes this argument rather more fully. On top of this, even those with no particular attachment to moral purity type arguments against war are still coming to doubt that a war with Iraq makes sense [Cato Institute, The Spectator].
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08:38:17 PM,
Monday 6 January 2003
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Iraq's and North Korea's motivations for researching weapons of mass destruction, considered on Stand Down and in the Christian Science Monitor.
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08:17:05 PM,
Monday 6 January 2003
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Aristophanes would be proud.
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08:12:17 PM,
Monday 6 January 2003
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Human cloning. After reading Shockwave Rider, I find myself viscerally opposed to it, for reasons that are very much moral purity vs. pragmatism.
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(2)
08:11:02 PM,
Monday 6 January 2003
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An article in The Economist on drug prices in developing countries. This, not Napster, is where the question of intellectual property becomes really important. The default leftist position here (as far as I can tell) is that drug companies should be required to license cheap generic versions of their drugs to be sold in poor countries. The article rightly points out that this destroys some of the economic incentive for developing new drugs in the first place
Now, this makes sense to me, but I think I want to go a step further. If we're really going to recognize this as a situation where markets just don't work, and the government needs to do something for the public good (certainly this is the sort of situation governments were made to deal with), then why shouldn't we go all the way? Rather than having the government buy expensive drugs to fund research to make more expensive drugs, why not just have the government fund the research directly, and require that discoveries be placed in the public domain? It's not like they wouldn't get manufactured after they were discovered--generic drugs do exist, after all. It just makes sense that, if you're spending public money, it's better to do it in a way that will help the public permanently.
Though of course, that entirely fails to address the original question, which is about how to get poor countries drugs that already exist, and are already patented. I suppose we could do away with patents on such things altogether--after all, the whole system only exists by the will of the people--but that doesn't feel quite just. But it's hard to say in such situations. In some sense, there's a share of injustice in freeing the slaves without reimbursing the slaveowners, but nobody could seriously object to that.
* It might also be pointed out that this amounts to coercing researchers to work for free. The standard counterargument is pragmatic: they can afford it and it's the decent thing to do anyway. I'm really not content with the pragmatic answer, but I also have the feeling that the original objection is somewhat oversimplified. Still, I should say that it's on points like this that Objectivism comes closest to deserving to be called a philosophy. Objectivism, at its best, is very much about respecting an individual's right to judge the value of their own work. Incidentally, this conflict, between a philosophically pure notion of morality (which seems Kantian to me, at least in that it demands that we treat all human beings as ends rather than means) and a more pragmatic, greatest good for the greatest number, approach to ethical questions, is the Big Philosophical Idea that's being dealt with in the last few episodes of season 5 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and also in Star Trek II and III. Neither of them come to any real conclusion on the question. They both seem to say that what I've called the more philosophically pure vision is also the more naturally human one, which is surprising in a way. They also both recognize the hope that, in the end, the purer choice will turn out to be the more pragmatic one. This same sort of desire for purity also drives the core of the peace movement. A feeling that if doing good in the world means having to kill innocent people, it just can't be worth it, it just can't work. Kenneth Patchen expresses this beautifully... there's a particular poem I'm thinking of that I'll try to post tonight. It's interesting that these two political goals should have so much in common. Certainly they don't tend to have the same followers. I, indeed, am no Objectivist, nor even a Libertarian, and I still have to write up my rant on the topic. But maybe it's not so odd after all. Followers of both ideas are so strident, so passionate, so extreme, and yet at the same time so entirely reasonable in their foundations. Both are driven by an intense love of all the particular little virtues that make a human being such a noble creature; or when they're not, they're using nothing but the most cynically manipulative of rhetoric. It's hard to know how to deal with them.
The Brothers Karamazov deserves to be mentioned here too, but I can't do it justice. Not right now.
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08:04:22 PM,
Monday 6 January 2003
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The Democrats need someone to bring their message to the stupid people of the world. Frankly, I think it's a horrible idea, but living in California I can't deny that they have an audience waiting for them.
(Oh, was that uncharitable?)
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(11)
06:40:22 PM,
Monday 6 January 2003
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Tom Tomorrow: "I wish I lived in that wonderful parallel universe so many of you apparently inhabit, in which new programs are easy to install and invariably worth the effort... but I do not. "
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06:35:32 PM,
Monday 6 January 2003
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The Guardian: "Downing Street has conceded it may have to cancel its planned mini-summit on the Middle East after Israel banned Palestinian delegates from attending it, following dual suicide attacks in Tel Aviv last night."
I've long since given up on ever deciding how to share out the blame in Israel and Palestine. There's probably more than enough to go around. Still less do I have any idea what a just solution could be. Still, it really does look like the main problem is that those in the best position to make some sort of peace just have no interest in trying.
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06:29:32 PM,
Monday 6 January 2003
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Christian Science Monitor: "Egypt dumps 'garbage people' - On Jan. 1, foreign contractors began replacing grass-roots garbage collectors."
What surprises me is how closely this resembles one of the subplots from On The Edge, the online RPG that Remi was GMing for a while last year.
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06:11:45 PM,
Monday 6 January 2003
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New York Times: "With war in Iraq looming, many in the art historical world are worried about what might be damaged or destroyed."
This is important to me. I have a longstanding, if casual, interest in the ancient history of this region. Indeed, had I not gone to St. John's, I would likely have studied Sumerology. Sumer is where writing was first invented. The earliest records of our thoughts, our deeds, our stories, the things that make us human, are found in the Tigris-Euphrates river valley in southern Iraq. From earlier civilizations, we have some tools, some sculptures, some pictures... residue of lives whose details we can only try to guess at. The Sumerians left us words. They left us history. And if we go to war with Iraq, a little more of that history will be destroyed.
I will not say that this is the most important reason to avoid a war. Human lives are at stake, and musty academic romanticism is nothing compared to that. By the same token, if there really is no alternative to war, if it has to be done, I don't really expect a few old bits of clay to keep us from it. Really, at this point, there is probably nothing we can do to save these artifacts. In the end, the affairs of the living world are more important than the remains of the dead, and maybe they are not worth saving. But perhaps they are worth mourning.
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06:06:11 PM,
Monday 6 January 2003
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