Tim's Bloglet - Sunday 9 February 2003

Have I mentioned Calexico? Southern jangle rock meets mariachi, only morose. _
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01:08:54 PM, Sunday 9 February 2003

Al Qaeda Eggs _
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11:02:36 PM, Saturday 8 February 2003

Its not fair! For the first time in my life, I deign to enter the Car Talk Puzzler, and they don't announce a winner this week. Its an elegant puzzle... There are 23 prisoners gathered together. They are told that every day, one of them will be randomly selected and taken to a room with 2 switches that don't do anything. They must flip one and only one of the switches. They are not told the current state of the switches. In the future, there will be no contact between the prisoners. At any time, a prisoner can tell the warden that everyone has been taken to the room. If they're right, they are all given their freedom. If they're wrong, they all get tossed to the alligators. The prisoners can discuss strategy now. What is a winning, completely safe strategy? _
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07:27:38 PM, Saturday 8 February 2003

Code Orange! Code Orange! Everyone modify your behavior to operate at a level orange wariness!

When people say they want something (in this case, more warning about terrorist threats) but you can't give it to them, you simply explain that you can't. You don't do something completely stupid and worthless which vaguely resembles what they were asking for. This goes for software development as well. _
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04:17:55 PM, Friday 7 February 2003

The story we all knew was coming...

"Although continuing to solicit the public's help in locating shuttle debris, NASA officials noted that dead-end tips were slowing down the search. A report of possible shuttle debris found in Yuma, Ariz., turned out to be burned toast."

Though it must be said, my money was on it being an abondoned washing machine. _
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11:05:56 AM, Thursday 6 February 2003

Colin Powell and Joschka Fischer are rock stars. With that said, I really hope the phrase "He's put himself in deeper material breach" catches on with the general public. _
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11:58:36 AM, Wednesday 5 February 2003

Grr. Accidentally purchased lightly salted peanuts. Argh. _
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07:18:50 PM, Monday 3 February 2003

The american public has great respect for european public opinion, but contempt for its own. This is the same reason people assume I'm clever simply because of my accent, though in fact its entirely coincidental. Its an easy mistake to make, but utterly daft. Mankind throughout the world is just as ignorant, shallow and vapid as we are. I find it helps to remember where reality TV and sleazy tabloids come from. _
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04:17:55 PM, Monday 3 February 2003

As speech recognition improves, it will become very easy to find bilingual puns. _
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09:33:08 PM, Sunday 2 February 2003

Is there a Strunk and White grammer-check sort of thing out there? Something that would delete all the really's and very's out of my writing? Doing it by hand is time consuming. _
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09:30:16 PM, Sunday 2 February 2003

There is a controversy here, because someone wanted to install some obscene ugly modern art in some office building, and people didn't want him to, and he screamed censorship. No one was brave enough to come forward and say, we don't want to look at that every day because its bloody awful garbage, so they hemmed and hawed and looked embarrassed and muttered about how some people might come into the building unready to encounter art. This played into the artists hands, and he went on about the need to educate people, if you're comfortable in this world there is something wrong and you need to see something ugly and offensive to cure you and make you remember how loathsome the world is. This is related to the tendency in books and film to make everyday things look tawdry and vicious and call it insight. There seems to be an idea that beauty obscures truth, so everything must be ugly. _
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08:46:48 PM, Sunday 2 February 2003

The same author on why the shuttle should be scrapped. He points the finger of blame at pork-barrel politics. The shuttle is very expensive to operate, so the states that get the money make sure it keeps flying and is not replaced with more sensible spacecraft. I hate the US constitution. _
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05:35:09 PM, Sunday 2 February 2003

An article from 1980 about the difficulties, price overruns and general pointlessness of a space shuttle. Contains discussions of the fragility of the heat-resistant tiles and the insulation on the fuel tank. The original price estimates thought there would be 50 flights a year. There have been 113 so far. _
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04:55:49 PM, Sunday 2 February 2003

1250 pages of the far side _
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03:18:06 PM, Sunday 2 February 2003

I had a dream about buying asparagus. The stuff in the bargain bin was too dry. _
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11:00:02 AM, Sunday 2 February 2003

With modern cell phone technology, "I don't see anybody else around here, so you must be talking to me." is no longer a sound deduction. _
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06:49:15 PM, Saturday 1 February 2003

NPR is making me depressed. Neil Simon has a lovely voice. He did say "people on board the ground", but it didn't cheer me up any. Will they go to Car Talk? I'm morbidly fascinated how the Tom & Ray would deal with that. _
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10:20:09 AM, Saturday 1 February 2003

Happy Year of the Sheep! _
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11:29:40 PM, Friday 31 January 2003

The I, Robot film is in fact the I, Robot name slapped onto a pre-existing robot mystery script, with the vague idea that if its a success maybe they'll make some of the actual stories into movies. The studio had the name, and couldn't be bothered to actually make it, so they slap it on something else. Gah. Okay. Enough indignent geeking for one day. _
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10:09:54 AM, Friday 31 January 2003

"It's easier to hide an elephant than you might think," a police spokesman said. _
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02:48:48 PM, Thursday 30 January 2003

There was a woman at work who defended her on-the-clock Napster habit by saying that she listened to classical music to help her think, so it was all right. I once peeked at her playlist, and it was all country. Some pretty good stuff, actually. Classical music makes plants happy and grow better, yet it requires deep study to truly understand. People who never listen to classical music play it for their unborn infants, hoping that this will somehow transport them into a higher class. Does it ever work the other way? Was Dubya bombarded with Carter Family tunes to give him a common touch? _
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01:30:38 PM, Wednesday 29 January 2003

I couldn't watch the state of the union, and it wasn't even my knee-jerk hatred of Bush this time. It was all the people standing and clapping, the pagentry. We treat presidents like kings, like great heroes. Unaccountable to congress apart from one speech a year. I was thinking about war protesters, and how it was a shame they didn't have anyone with a voice inside the Bush administration they could contact; maybe something like a network of local representatives... _
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10:44:12 AM, Wednesday 29 January 2003

Chess and Go are divided by gender. Infuriating. I'm with Chris. Attack the root causes. This will only be fixed when children don't think of themselves primarily as either boys or girls. That won't happen if we keep them seperated. Womens tennis does more harm than good; it tells girls, yes, you can play tennis, but only against your kind. Seperate teams strengthens gender identity. I mean, its not enough, but its something. I think I should grow my hair long again. Gender uncertainty does people good. _
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04:13:04 PM, Tuesday 28 January 2003

I realized when walking around the textbook section of the bookstore that if I go back to school it should be in History. All the other books looked boring. I bought a couple books being used for history classes, on the theory that they are slightly less likely to be written by wacko loonies than other history books. Of course, going to school in History is a silly thing to do. Maybe when I retire. Hmm. Need to get a regular job first. _
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03:58:58 PM, Tuesday 28 January 2003

Its also worth pointing out that areas with lots of oil are also much more dangerous, unstable, and poorly governed. People tend to stop doing anything useful, because fighting over the oil is more productive. Because of the fact they have so much disposable income, the government doesn't have to actually serve the people. The government of a nation without oil must work to a certain degree or it will run out of money and fall, unless it funded from overseas. A country where money oozes out of the ground, however, can be controlled with complete disregard to maintaining a healthy economy, peace, order and public support. Its not that good government is impossible, but that bad government is also possible and more stable. The consumers of the exports of a rotten government are the only ones in a position to do anything about it, and have a responsibility towards it, as the British had a responsibility for the actions of the East India Company, even before it was nationalized. We have no such obligation to nations with governments that look rotten but are not being propped up. If they are in fact rotten, they'll fall down by themselves; and the dangers of thinking the government is rotten just because theory / expatriots / your government tell you so is tremendous.

To put it another way, an unpopular oppressive government needs outside support to stay in power. This can come from from political sources, like the CIA or Soviet Union or British Empire, or from controlling exports, in which case you just need to maintain as much government as necessary to maintain production. Drugs and Oil require very little government. That was the theory behind cutting off trade with Iraq. I can think of 3 reasons that might explain why it didn't work.

1) It has collapsed, more or less, and is simply holding together through force of arms. It just needs tipping over. Threats might even do it. This is the quick and easy war theory.

2) We didn't cut it off well enough. This is the hard and bloody war theory.

3) Saddam Hussein isn't actually a unpopular oppressive leader, we simply don't understand their culture / are being lied to. This is the Iraq as Vietnam theory.

As far as I know, any of these are possible. What the administration needs to do is convince people that the first is the case. _
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03:51:52 PM, Tuesday 28 January 2003

In Eliots defense, I deeply love his cat poems. He was a good poet let terribly astray by acedemic theories of poetry. I was reading a poetry anthology the other day, and I got so angry at all the greek name dropping, all the smug self-satisfied cleverness inviting annotations and getting in the way of the making of pretty noises, which is what should be at the heart of poetry. _
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02:59:11 PM, Tuesday 28 January 2003

Moss pointed to an article which called the No Blood For Oil people lazy, but he accused it of not actually addressing the argument. Can you point to anyone who makes a case that could be discredited? I thought they just waved signs and spluttered. How do you discredit a conspiracy theory? I made the mistake of listening to a radio show discussing the fake moon missions once. Evidence doesn't work. Pointing out our myriad other reasons for wanting a peaceful stable Iraq doesn't work. Asking why exactly trade in oil is such a terrible thing doesn't work.

As an excercise, I'll try to build a case. First, which side are we on? Presumably if were invading Iraq, it is to free up the oil, and bring Iraqi oil to the market. This is the last thing OPEC wants, they like the current setup of only a trickle coming out of Iraq. That means that we're siding with the consumers rather than the international oil companies. Unless the complaint is that were planning to unfairly annexing the oilfields from some french and russian companies who cut deals with the Iraqi government in order to give them to others with more influence in american politics. At this point, we've entered the realm where I just have to shrug; its all shadows and innuendo, veiled accusations without any substance. If there is credible evidence, great, come out and say it. The Oliver Stone approach of hints and nudges implying more than you know is dishonest in the extreme. I'll be flamingly furious a company with white house links gets a windfall as a result of this war, but I can't imagine they'll be that stupid. If they are, we can lynch him then.

So, we're trying to bring the price of oil down to fuel all our evil power-plants, SUVs and oil furnaces. This is then part of the ongoing attempt to break OPEC. This feels like an warmed over cold war conspiracy to me. We did in fact worry that most of the oil was falling into enemy hands, and that we were vunerable to pinko foriegners for our oil. We did try to gain control over oil producing companies, and tried to keep them out of the soviet sphere of influence. These past plans are probably responsible for the current state of affairs in Iraq. But oil was really cheap before this war talk. Russia is dying to export as much oil as it can, and is undermining OPEC badly. Why risk upsetting our current situation with Saudi Arabia? We can see what the markets think about the war; they hate it. The price of oil has shot up. So we aren't siding with the consumers either. If that was our plan, we'd be sending troops into Venezuela to "restore democracy". I'm totally on board when people say we tried to set up a coup against Chavez to keep oil prices down. But its not why we're worried about Iraq. _
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02:13:32 PM, Tuesday 28 January 2003

Has anyone ever checked to see what happens if you give people medicine and tell them its a sugar pill? _
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06:09:31 PM, Monday 27 January 2003

He had just stepped out for a bite to eat, only to return to find that a U-2 spy plane had crashed into his shop. Just goes to show, you never know. _
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06:05:36 PM, Monday 27 January 2003

Fortunately, they were sensible enough not to put the State of the Union up against Buffy. _
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05:59:50 PM, Monday 27 January 2003

I've had the War Song from Duck Soup stuck in my head for days. Whenever I listen to the news, it pops up. To war, to war, to war we're gonna go. That, and When I Was a Lad from HMS Pinafore. I grew so rich that I was sent by a pocket borough into Parliament. I always voted at my party's call, and I never thought of thinking for myself at all. (He never thought of thinking for himself at all) I thought so little they rewarded me, by making me the Ruler of the Queens Navy. _
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12:49:54 PM, Monday 27 January 2003

Ugh. Now I have to decide between being warm and having non-canned food. I don't like living 15 minutes from my parking space. Also, cold without snow is no fun at all. _
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03:48:26 PM, Friday 24 January 2003

Awful, awful happy ending lyrics to My Darling Clementine. Such evil-minded people should not be allowed near children. There are two delightful older versions of it here.
Listen fellers, heed the warning
Of this tragic tale of mine,
Artificial respiration
Could have saved my Clementine. _
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03:00:28 PM, Friday 24 January 2003

English students protest increase of maximum tuition fees to 3,000 pounds a year, due after graduation. _
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03:57:21 PM, Wednesday 22 January 2003

I only just realized that when Republicans use the phrase "American taxpayer", they mean to distinguish such people from the very poor and unemployed who in their minds don't pay taxes, or at least, not enough to count. On a related note, in England, all the prices are post-tax. This means that if you're only buying a couple things, you can have exact change ready by the time you get to the counter. This is a glorious thing. Can anyone think of a possible defense of our current setup? Also, their currency goes .01, .02, .05, .10, .20, .50, 1, 2, 5, 10, 20. This means that you can deal with each decimal point seperately. I don't know about you, but I've never been table to handle 90 cents very well. _
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09:26:36 PM, Tuesday 21 January 2003

Whoever just found my wallet and returned it anonymously and with more money in it than I remember, thank you. _
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04:44:01 PM, Tuesday 21 January 2003

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