Microsoft’s support site states:

Why does the Office Button blink?

The Office Button should only blink when you have not clicked the button to view the commands. The blinking is a “look at me/click here” feature, because many people think that the button looks like a decorative logo, rather than a button to click to see commands. If you click the Office Button one time, it should stop blinking.

At this time, there is no way to turn off the blinking.

It stops blinking when you click it for the first time after installing Office. But of course, if your institution has Office and uses Deep Freeze, it blinks the first time you use Office, and then blinks again the next time you use Office after logging out. And the next time. And so on.

A side note: if you have to make your usability enhancement strobe at the user to get them to use it, it’s not a usability enhancement. It’s an obnoxious and misguided feature that should never have seen the light of day.

This sounds like a nice feature, but I have a few issues with it.

1. The feature is hidden in a tab of tracks’ properties window. I have used Rhythmbox for several years now, and after a rebuild of my rhythmdb.xml file a while ago, I had absolutely no idea why my tracks were suddenly sorted differently. After a few months of puzzlement and fruitless web searching about it, I finally came across a thread on Ubuntu Forums which helped me figure out what was going on.
2. Automatically rebuilding the rhythmdb.xml file seems to result in inconsistent sort names. I did not specify any custom sort names, but Rhythmbox specified a lot for me. However, for some reason it was inconsistent with many tracks. Half of my albums from The Knife were artist-sort-named as “Knife, The”, while the rest had no sort names. I didn’t investigate why this occurs, but I noticed it seemed to be on the basis of albums; all tracks within any given album were artist-sort-named the same, but other albums from the same artist were often different.
3. There’s no global on/off toggle for this feature. I wouldn’t mind this feature’s problems if I wasn’t forced to deal with it all the time. Disabling custom sorting altogether would be useful as I have no need for this feature.

These problems were all compounded by the fact that my library is about 125 GB and holds over 13,000 tracks. Rebuilding rhythmdb.xml takes ages.

I attempted to solve the inconsistent sorting issue by selecting the tracks with custom sort orders, going into properties for those tracks, and clearing the appropriate fields. This invariably resulted in one of two outcomes:

• Rhythmbox apparently does nothing, or possibly reverts the change immediately. Upon checking properties again, the fields seem to be the same as before.
• Rhythmbox appears save changes to rhythmdb.xml, but begins to do a ton of disk I/O, bringing everything to a crawl, and I am forced to kill the process. This occurred when I attempted to select and clear the fields for all of my tracks at once. When I started it again, it continued to thrash my disks, so I deleted the XML file and let it start fresh (I didn’t think to save a backup).

I eventually came up with a quick and dirty way to clear the fields from rhythmdb.xml using sed. Obviously you will want to quit Rhythmbox before doing this. (Mind the text wrapping…)

cd ~/.local/share/rhythmbox
sed 's/<mb-artistsortname>.*<\/mb-artistsortname>/<mb-artistsortname><\/mb-artistsortname>/g' rhythmdb.xml > rhythmdb2.xml

This will find and clear all instances of the artist sort name field which have something in them. I’m not sure what the field is for album sort order, but if you find that, you can alter the command to do the same for that field.

After this, you will want to check the new file (rhythmdb2.xml) to make sure the command did what it was supposed to. Then you can rename it to rhythmdb.xml, but I suggest you hold on to the original untouched rhythmdb.xml just in case Rhythmbox doesn’t like the new and improved one. (Restoring a backup is much less painful than rebuilding the file from scratch.)

Once I did this and re-opened Rhythmbox, I was pleased to see that MC Frontalot was no longer next to Sage Francis in my library. However, I’m a little anxious knowing that this inconsistent sort behavior will probably reoccur once I add new tracks to the library, as Rhythmbox will then make new entries for them. I could always run this command again, but I would prefer not having to do so.

Let me start by saying that I’m a touch-typist (in the sense that I type without looking), and I use the Dvorak layout on every computer I use (if I’m going to be using said computer for any more than 5 minutes).

I was always a hunt-and-peck guy until I switched to Dvorak (that’s a story for another post), but in a way, I think I still have some bad habits from before I learned to touch-type. Or… almost learned to touch-type.

For one thing, I don’t follow the standard keyboard-hand fingering. I do a lot of my typing with my index fingers. I don’t think I actually use my right ring finger for much of anything.

Here’s what the map is supposed to look like. (Original SVG source here.) I used QWERTY just for the sake of not confusing most people that don’t use Dvorak:

And here’s how I actually type. I tried to make this as accurate as possible, but it’s hard to type naturally while paying attention to what fingers I put where, so it might be slightly off. Dashed rectangles denote secondary (and tertiary!) fingers for a given key.

(As you might have guessed/hoped, I’ve never taken a typing class.)

I had been happily ignorant of my poor typing form for a long time. I mean, I’ve been peripherally aware that I don’t use the standard fingering, but it never bothered me until I started using this new keyboard, which has the keys separated into two halves (one half for each hand). The Y key was suddenly way out of reach of my left index finger, and everything seems very foreign under my hands.

Another thing that really bothers me is the space bar. As a good number of the reviews warned, the space bar is very reluctant to be pressed except in very specific places. (I was aware of this when I was shopping for a keyboard, but I simply bit the bullet and hoped for the best.) If I try to press it with my right index finger, it generally refuses to depress, which is pretty frustrating. I can use my left thumb just fine, but using my right thumb feels too strange. Using my left thumb as a dedicated space bar finger also makes my left hand feel cramped and stiff.

All this has me thinking a lot about the reason I got this keyboard in the first place (wrist pain). With my terrible fingering, I’m moving my wrists way too much, which was probably the cause of the pain in the first place, not my hand posture on the keyboard. Looks like I might need to change my approach to this problem altogether.

Perhaps a more fitting title for this post would have been:

Keyboard, it’s not you. It’s me.

Unrelated to typing, but related to my stupid computing habits: I use a 5-button mouse, which has one button on either side of the mouse and three buttons on the top. I don’t use my ring finger to press any button on it. Instead, my middle finger does double-duty between the scroll wheel and the right (top rightmost, not side) button. I suppose that’s somewhat less of an issue (how often do you find yourself needing to scroll and right-click simultaneously?).

I wrote a pair of classes to handle a 2×2 or larger grid of nodes. Each node borders 4 other nodes. For example, a 3×3 grid would look like:

0 1 2
3 4 5
6 7 8

Node 0 would be connected to node 6 to the north, node 1 to the east, node 3 to the south, and node 2 to the west. (Node connections wrap to the other side of the grid when the node is on an “edge” of the grid.) Node 4 would be connected to 1, 5, 7, and 3, respectively.

Upon deleting a node, the hole is filled by the remaining nodes. I’m probably not the first one to implement something like this, but I was kinda bored and felt like coding it from scratch.

See full article for source code and further details.

Grid.java:

public class Grid {
	private int width, height;
	private GridNode[] nodes;

	public Grid(int width, int height) {
		super();
		this.width = width;
		this.height = height;
		nodes = new GridNode[width * height];
		int north, south, east, west;
		for (int i=0; i<width*height; i++) {
			north = findNorthBoundary(i);
			east = findEastBoundary(i);
			south = findSouthBoundary(i);
			west = findWestBoundary(i);

			nodes[i] = new GridNode(north, east, south, west);
		}
	}

	public Grid() {

	}

	public GridNode getNode(int index) {
		return nodes[index];
	}

	public int[] getConnectedNodes(int index) {
		int allNodes[] = new int[] { nodes[index].getNorth(), nodes[index].getEast(),
				nodes[index].getSouth(), nodes[index].getWest() };
		int intact = 4;
		for (int i=0; i<4; i++) {
			if (allNodes[i] == -1) {
				intact--;
			}
		}

		int intactNodes[] = new int[intact];
		int pos = 0;

		for (int i=0; i<4; i++) {
			if (allNodes[i] == -1) {
				continue;
			} else {
				intactNodes[pos] = allNodes[i];
				pos++;
			}
		}

		return intactNodes;
	}

	private int findWestBoundary(int i) {
		if (isWestEdge(i)) {
			return i + width - 1;
		} else {
			return i - 1;
		}
	}

	private int findSouthBoundary(int i) {
		if (isSouthEdge(i)) {
			return i % width;
		} else {
			return i + width;
		}
	}

	private int findNorthBoundary(int i) {
		if (isNorthEdge(i)) {
			return (width * height - (width - i));
		} else {
			return i - width;
		}
	}

	private int findEastBoundary(int i) {
		if (isEastEdge(i)) {
			return i - width + 1;
		} else {
			return i + 1;
		}
	}

	private boolean isWestEdge(int index) {
		return ((index % width) == 0);
	}

	private boolean isEastEdge(int index) {
		return ((index % width) == (width - 1));
	}

	private boolean isSouthEdge(int index) {
		return (index >= ((width * height) - width));
	}

	private boolean isNorthEdge(int index) {
		return (index < width);
	}

	public void deleteNode(int i) {
		if (isEastEdge(i)) {
			nodes[i-1].setEast(i-width + 1);
			nodes[i-width+1].setWest(i-1);
		} else if (isWestEdge(i)) {
			nodes[i+1].setWest(i + width - 1);
			nodes[i + width - 1].setEast(i+1);
		} else {
			nodes[i-1].setEast(i + 1);
			nodes[i+1].setWest(i-1);
		}

		if (isNorthEdge(i)) {
			nodes[i+width].setNorth((width * height) - width + i);
			nodes[(width * height) - width + i].setSouth(i+width);
		} else if (isSouthEdge(i)) {
			nodes[i-width].setSouth(i % width);
			nodes[i%width].setNorth(i-width);
		} else {
			nodes[i-width].setSouth(i + width);
			nodes[i+width].setSouth(i-width);
		}

		nodes[i].collapse();
	}

	public boolean isAvailable(int i) {
		return nodes[i].isAvailable();
	}
}

GridNode.java:

public class GridNode {
	private int north, east, south, west;
	private boolean available;

	public GridNode(int north, int east, int south, int west) {
		super();
		this.north = north;
		this.east = east;
		this.south = south;
		this.west = west;
		this.available = true;
	}

	public int getNorth() {
		return north;
	}

	public void setNorth(int north) {
		this.north = north;
	}

	public int getEast() {
		return east;
	}

	public void setEast(int east) {
		this.east = east;
	}

	public int getSouth() {
		return south;
	}

	public void setSouth(int south) {
		this.south = south;
	}

	public int getWest() {
		return west;
	}

	public void setWest(int west) {
		this.west = west;
	}

	public boolean isAvailable() {
		return this.available;
	}

	public void collapse() {
		this.west = -1;
		this.south = -1;
		this.north = -1;
		this.east = -1;
		this.available = false;
	}
}

Usage example:

//constructs a grid with nodes 0-25
Grid grid = new Grid(5, 5);

grid.deleteNode(8);

The resulting grid will have node 7 connected to node 9, and node 3 connected to node 13.

Some limitations:

• You should of course check the result of grid.isAvailable(index) before you try to do anything with a given node.
• The grid must have at least two nodes in every row and column, unless it's okay for your nodes to link to themselves.
• I also didn't handle deleting nodes that are adjacent, so try to avoid that unless you want a mess. This was just a quick hackish implementation, after all...

If you make any improvements to these classes, please leave a comment here.

Basically, I have two integer arrays: currentLocations and initialLocations. They hold the “room numbers” of various game objects/NPCs within the game. At the start of the first game, both arrays are populated with random values:

public class GameClass extends Activity {
	private static int[] currentLocations = new int[6];
	private static int[] initialLocations = new int[6];

	...

	private void setupLocations {
		for (int i=0; i<7; i++) {
			currentLocations[i] = getRandomLocation();
			initialLocations[i] = currentLocations[i];
		}
	}
}

Then, throughout the game, currentLocations is changed (most notably, the player’s location changes). After the first game ends, the player is asked whether the locations should be mixed up. In the case that the player wants to keep the initial locations, this function is called:

private void restoreInitialLocations() {
	currentLocations = initialLocations;
}

However, in my testing, every time the game ended and the initial locations were “restored”, it seemed like the player would start a new game in the same place he left off.

The only place I made changes to initialLocations was in setupLocations(), so I was quite perplexed. I eventually thought to display the values of initialLocations in the game in real-time to track what was happening. After I did, I noticed it was quite literally holding the same values as currentLocations.

After a few minutes of thinking about it, I realized that the statement in restoreInitialLocations() was the culprit. I don’t know why it makes initialLocations into a pointer of sorts to currentLocations, but I now faintly remember, from way back when I was first learning Java, that the proper way to copy the values of one array into another is:

for (int i=0; i<7; i++) {
	currentLocations[i] = initialLocations[i];
}

That’s a lesson I hope I won’t have to learn again anytime soon!

With any programming I do, I often need to make small, frequent edits to files– this is just my style. I do the majority of my actual coding in Eclipse and/or with programs like gedit, then paste files into nano or FTP them to the remote host if necessary. Obviously I can’t compare Eclipse to nano, but strictly speaking about gedit, I’ll freely admit that I’ve always been much more comfortable with GUI text editors than with nano. Of course, once the file is on the remote host, I test the results, make small modifications to my file(s) via SSH, and re-test. I generally don’t bother to go back to the IDE and/or GUI unless I’m really stumped or I have to do some major refactoring.

A few months ago, I started an internship in which I develop software and web applications for embedded Linux modules. I was, of course, right at home with the job description, but yet I still feel a twinge of horror remembering the first day I worked on some PHP files on the development kit.

The modules we use are able to re-flash their permanent storage by retrieving a filesystem image from a host computer via TFTP, but writing to flash memory takes forever. It’s way too slow if you only need to change one line of code. Alternatively, you can FTP just the file you want to change, overwriting the old version of the file on the module, but that’s still way more trouble than I want to go through for one line of code. And so, there in my telnet session, I fired up good ol’ trusty nano… or attempted to. That’s when I found out that the only text editor installed by default on the modules is vi. The manufacturer’s prepackaged binaries do not include nano, and I was (and still am) too n00b to cross-compile it for ARM.

I had run into vi once or twice before. My wireless router (which runs BusyBox, just like our modules), also suffers from nano-scarcity. I don’t remember if that in particular was why I had used vi before, or if it was due to something unrelated, but in any case, I was not impressed with vi. I heard lots of great things about its efficiency, but I never had the patience to learn to use it. When the ratio of time spent reading documentation and memorizing key combinations to time spent actually getting stuff done reached some ridiculous upper bound, I just gave up. And in my situation back then, I was okay with that. It was like learning to fly a plane just to get to the grocery store across town. I really didn’t need it.

But later I did, as previously mentioned. So, grudgingly, I learned some vi. Specifically, I learned the key combinations to enter insert mode, writeout, and quit. That was all I needed at first, but later I found it convenient to delete all lines in the file and paste in the latest revision from a GUI. To vi’s credit, all this only takes a handful of keystrokes. I can’t seem to disable the auto-indent feature in the default settings, so it’s a little annoying to have to type :set noai every time I open a file, though I guess I can live with that. But I can’t justify learning any more commands. I’m just not convinced that it’s really worth the effort. And thus, my uneasy situation with vi continues.

Oh, and apparently, using vi almost exclusively for a few months has erased my muscle memory for nano. This feels like when I switched to Dvorak and for a few weeks was not able to type faster than 3 WPM in QWERTY nor Dvorak. I suppose I could now, as I did then, steady my resolve and embrace the overwhelming learning curve. We shall see.

I recently started writing some things in Processing. I will of course post about that at some point, but I found something that distracted me quite strongly a little while ago.

I have been looking at lots of Processing example programs, as well as open-source projects such as ones on Open Processing. There’s so much you can do with Processing in three dimensions, but the 2-D stuff is what really holds my attention. It must be the simplicity and the ability to understand the code without having to clutter my head with all the transformations necessary for pretty 3-D effects. I appreciate a program so much more when I can grasp what it’s doing.

Anyway, I stumbled upon Kyle McDonald‘s Shuffle Enumeration Diagram, which looks like this:

It might look super-complicated, but if you read the source code, you’ll see it’s a fairly uncomplicated graphical representation of a bit shuffling algorithm in motion.

From there, I was pretty interested, and was even moreso when I read that he had used something similar in a project poetically entitled Only Everything Lasts Forever. Quoted, with some added emphasis of my own:

Only Everything Lasts Forever is a very long sound composition for MP3.

It contains every sound we can distinguish as humans, as dictated by the MP3 specification (ISO/IEC 11172-3). It explores the social and political associations of sound representation, and the psychology and philosophy of noise and emptiness.

…

While the entire composition is approximately 10⁴⁵⁰ years long, the first month of the composition was streamed from a server room at EMPAC starting on Sunday March 28th 2010 at 7 PM EST.

The theoretical scale of this project struck me as something unusually large, and I decided to crunch some numbers. (Warning: Informal (though hopefully correct) math ahead.)

(Note: for the sake of my own sanity, I rounded the results of my calculations to three significant figures.)

Assuming the world population remains constant* at roughly 6.7 billion, and every person begins listening to unique parts of OELF 24/7, how long would it take for the entire composition to be heard?

10⁴⁵⁰ years of music / 6.7 x 10⁹ years of music listened per year = 1.48 x 10⁴⁴⁰ years of listening if we all worked together.

Anyway, to give some perspective, assuming the universe is roughly 13.75 ± 0.17 billion years old, the amount of time it would take for us to listen to the whole composition would be about…

1.48 x 10⁴⁴⁰ years / 1.375 x 10¹⁰ years = 1.08 x 10⁴³⁰ times the current age of the universe.

More perspective: If you wanted to store the entire composition as an MP3 with a constant 64 kbps bitrate (remember, that’s kilobits per second, not kilobytes)…

64 kilobits/second = 8 kilobytes/second
1 year = 31,556,926 seconds
thus 8 kB/s x 31,556,926 s = 2,524,455,408 kB per year = 2.35108231 terabytes per year
10⁴⁵⁰ years x 2.35108231 terabytes/year = 2.35 x 10⁴⁵⁰ terabytes total
10¹² terabytes = 1 yottabyte
thus 2.35 x 10⁴⁵⁰ terabytes / 10¹² terabytes = 2.35 x 10⁴³⁸ yottabytes would be needed in order to store the whole thing.

To put that into perspective…

the information capacity of the observable universe = 10⁹² bits = 1.03397577 × 10⁶⁷ yottabytes
2.35 x 10⁴³⁸ yottabytes required / 1.03 × 10⁶⁷ yottabytes available = 2.28 x 10³⁷¹ universes would be required in order to store the entire composition. Take that, Moore’s Law.

* I tried for a few hours to figure out how that number would look if I included population growth rate (either constant or gradually declining) in the equation. The whole effort is made cumbersome by the immensity of the numbers. I may return to this at some point, but it’s largely tangential.

My thanks to Kyle for the inspiration for this post.

Licensing information:

Shuffle Enumeration Diagram by Kyle McDonald, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 and GNU GPL license.
Work: http://openprocessing.org/visuals/?visualID=8647
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/GPL/2.0/

Only Everything Lasts Forever by Kyle McDonald, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States.
Work: http://kylemcdonald.net/oelf/
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/

You’ll see lots of layout adjustments here until I get things the way I want them. I’ve been spending all my time on other things lately, but you can probably expect some new content as well sometime soon.

Because in an under-regulated, greed-driven environment, profit always supersedes public responsibility.

Original map (public domain)

By the time I got back to my apartment my clothes were already pretty odoriferous, so I thought I might as well go take a few pictures of whatever it was that was going on.

Police had all roads in what seemed like a two-block radius closed off.

It turned out to have been a fire. It seemed as though it was pretty much over by the time I got there. It was a nice day so I took the opportunity to continue walking around taking more photos.

The garage in this photo was what was burning. No one was injured according to the local paper.

I kinda wonder if this woman was merely goosegogging as I was or whether she was waiting for someone to move the 6-inch fire hose out of her driveway.

Until yesterday I had no idea that Indiana police had bicycle patrols.

This is a fire truck parked on a train track. I guess at least it could have been used to put out its own fire if a train had happened to come through.

Panorama of some buildings nearby, just because I hadn’t put a panorama together in a while.

an interactive “generative art” application for Linux to evolve images/textures/patterns/animations through an iterative process of random mutation and user-selection driven evolution. (This process is also often referred to as “evolutionary art” or “genetic art”.) If you like lava lamps, and still think the Mandelbrot set is cool, this could be the software for you.

You get a palette of images, and you can control what the next “generation” of images looks like by adjusting the (pseudo-)randomization factors as well as choosing which images you want to hold in the pool.

Images are rendered on the fly from formulas. You can zoom, pan, distort, and infinitely scale the renderings right in the program. Renderings can be saved to PNGs, and you can also save the formulas to XML so you can reload/modify/examine them later.

A particularly curious aspect of the program is its ability to generate looping animations of images. I found this feature mesmerizing but I didn’t explore it much because it was so resource-hungry.

Zooming/panning/scaling the animations in real-time was pretty unfeasible due to the fact that any change forced a complete re-rendering of the entire palette. Though I reduced the palette to the lowest resolution and number of animations possible, it always took significantly longer to render than the still image palettes did.

To make about 600 frames of animation at 640×480 resolution required a considerable amount of processor time as well as all of my RAM (4GB) and maybe a GB or two of virtual memory. The virtual memory paging was clearly the limiting factor. I suspect that if I optimized my VM partition(s), it would have not been nearly as slow.

For kicks, I set up a 600-frame 1280×960 rendering to run overnight. It took about 12 hours all said, and nearly filled up my 11GB VM partition. I took the precaution of setting up an additional VM partition while it was rendering (not easy when it takes 30 seconds for a single keystroke to register).

(See video page to view in full-size HD player.)

The result was not really as impressive as I had hoped it would be, but it was a small milestone for my internet ego because it was the first HD video I uploaded to YouTube.

FYI, if you do use the animation feature of Evolvotron, ffmpeg is very handy for stitching the separate frames together into a video.

It may simply have been a mistake, but there seems to be some weirdness in the rays here. They’re not of uniform thickness and their spacing interval is inconsistent, resulting in subtle asymmetry.

I suspected for a while that the cover was meant to be a take on the Rising Sun Flag.

Then I happened to stumble upon the state flag of Arizona. This seems to be a closer match, at least color-wise.

Here is a frame capture from Marble Hornets’ most recent upload, Entry ######:

Here’s a capture from Marble Hornets’ Entry #23:

This is another capture, this time from what is likely to be Marble Hornets’ other account, totheark, in the video Warning:

By now you’ve probably gotten the idea.

This is the cover from The Invisibles, Volume 6: Kissing Mister Quimper:

And this is the intro to “Around the World” by Red Hot Chili Peppers, on their 1999 album Californication.

And here’s the intro to “Love You Madly”, a song on Cake’s 2001 album, Comfort Eagle.

• Morality and ethics are not culturally relative. (pp. 176-182)
• “The idea of a victimless crime in nothing more than a judicial reprise of the Christian notion of sin.” (p. 159)
• “Those opposed to therapeutic stem-cell research on religious grounds constitute the biological and ethical equivalent of a flat-earth society. Our discourse on the subject should reflect this.” (p. 167)
• “…the rules of civil discourse currently demand that Reason wear a veil whenever she ventures out in public. But the rules of civil discourse must change.” (p. 168)
• “Any honest witness to current events will realize that there is no moral equivalence between the kind of force civilized democracies project in the world, warts and all, and the internecine violence that is perpetrated by Muslim militants, or indeed by Muslim governments.” (p. 146)
• “The only thing we should respect in a person’s faith is his desire for a better life in this world; we need never have respected his certainty that one awaits him in the next.” (p. 225)
• “…there is no reason whatsoever to think that we can survive our religious differences indefinitely.” (p. 224)

However I’m undecided as to whether I agree with these statements:

• “Where ethics are concerned, intentions are everything.” (p. 147)
  
  This is from a section rebutting Noam Chomsky’s condemnation of the United States’ foreign policies as enforcements of double standards. I think I really used to buy Chomsky’s ideas (despite never actually knowing who Chomsky was until recently), but now I find myself disagreeing with him on this. I suppose that if there were really a way to gauge the true intentions of a foreign power, I might agree with Harris, but aside from that I don’t share this view.
• “It should be of particular concern to us that the beliefs of Muslims pose a special problem for nuclear deterrence. There is little possibility of our having a cold war with an Islamist regime armed with long-range nuclear weapons (p. 128).”
  
  In the margin next to this paragraph, someone had penned “iran”. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the US and Iran are currently engaged in a cold war, I do think Harris was somewhat short-sighted to all but rule it out at the time his book was published (2004).
• “Mysticism is a rational enterprise. Religion is not (p. 221).”
  
  I don’t even know what to say about this other than “…Huh?”. Harris describes mysticism as experiencing the world “free of concepts”, and tries to set this apart from religion, which he defines as “bad concepts held in place of good ones for all time” (p. 221). Holding no concepts is rationally more sound than holding bad ones? OK, sure, but I fail to see how this really means anything. In a world where you have access to rational concepts, freeing oneself of said concepts is called willful ignorance.

And I certainly do not agree with Harris’ views on torture. He puts forth the fanciful and now hackneyed scenario of the hidden time bomb and captured terrorist (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) as sufficient justification for torture “in any circumstance which we would be willing to cause collateral damage” (pp. 192-199).

I could rant for days about why torture lacks ethical standing, but I’ll keep my response short here. Torture as an interrogation technique is known to make people say quite literally anything, not excluding patent lies that only waste the interrogator’s resources, and moreover, widespread human life. I’ll give Harris a pass because he wrote this in 2004 before most of the facts were out about how horribly wrong we were being led astray, but in light of recent history the premise of justified torture is to me completely unsupported.

Of course Harris did anticipate this, but presents a murky argument to rebut it:

Assuming that we want to maintain a coherent ethical position on these matters, this appears to be a circumstance of forced choice: if we are willing to drop bombs, or even risk that pistol rounds might go astray, we should be willing to torture a certain class of criminal suspects and military prisoners; if we are unwilling to torture, we should be unwilling to wage modern war.

Opponents of torture will be quick to argue that confessions elicited by torture are notoriously unreliable. Given the foregoing, however, this objection seems to lack its usual force. Make these confessions as unreliable as you like– the chance that our interests will be advanced in any instance of torture need only equal the chance of such occasioned by the dropping of a single bomb. What was the chance that the dropping of bomb number 117 on Kandahar would effect the demise of Al Qaeda? It had to be pretty slim. Enter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed: our most valuable capture in our war on terror. Here is a character who actually seems cut from Dershowitzian cloth. U.S. officials now believe that his was the hand that decapitated the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Whether or not this is true, his membership in Al Qaeda more or less rules out his “innocence” in any important sense, and his rank in the organization suggests that his knowledge of planned atrocities must be extensive. The bomb is ticking. Given the damage we were willing to cause to the bodies and minds of innocent children in Afghanistan and Iraq, our disavowal of torture in the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed seems perverse. If there is even one chance in a million that he will tell us something under torture that will lead to the further dismantling of Al Qaeda, it seems that we should use every means at our disposal to get him talking (pp. 197-198).

I am puzzled by this equivocation of prolonged and deliberate human suffering to actions with unfortunate but clearly unintended consequences in the form of human suffering. As previously noted, Harris defines ethics as hinged upon intention, so by his reasoning the damage caused to the innocent children would be ethically irrelevant because the intent was to harm Al Qaeda. If collateral damage is so irrelevant, why not just bomb Afghanistan in its entirety to smithereens? After all, this would be in accord with our intent to stop Al Qaeda, right? And thus we can do no evil.

I was initially excited to find out that The Knife had released another album. Then I was kind of dismayed to see that it was an opera. But I still wanted to hear it anyway.

Tomorrow, In a Year is an opera based on Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species“. It is a collaboration between The Knife with Mt. Sims and Planningtorock.

The album features guest appearances by mezzo-soprano Kristina Wahlin Momme, Danish actress Lærke Winther Andersen (credited on the album as Laerke Winther) and Swedish pop artist Jonathan Johansson.

(Source: Wikipedia)

Here are some things I jotted down while listening to this for the first time.
CD 1:

1. Intro
   Sort of makes me want to pee. Sounds David Lynch-esque.
2. Epochs
   Kind of uncomfortable; meh.
3. Geology
   Monotonous. I don’t know if opera is [The Knife's] best genre.
4. Upheaved
   Like this track from about the midpoint onward.
5. Minerals
   I like this one better than the first few, which I suppose isn’t saying much. From what I can make out, someone is singing about rocks (unsurprising given the track’s title). I wish I could understand and/or appreciate opera singing a little more.
6. Ebb Tide Explorer
   Synth: good. Vocals: bland, but sometimes sounds vaguely like Ben Gibbard and/or Chino Moreno.
7. * Variation of Birds
   I like this a bit better.
8. Letter to Henslow
   The idea of a bird composing this song as a letter amuses me. However this track comes just shy of establishing the solid rhythm I really wanted to hear.
9. Schoal Swarm Orchestra
   Too ambient, too long for me.

CD 2:

1. Annie’s Box
   Very refreshing to hear some singing again after the last track. The strings are quite pleasing.
2. Tumult
   I like the last 10 seconds or so of this track, which really only serve as a lead-in to the next track.
3. * Colouring of Pigeons
   Finally something I can really get into. This track is is by far my favorite. It’s so rhythmically fulfilling. And perhaps most importantly it features Karin Dreijer Andersson singing, which I had eagerly anticipated. Beautiful.
   
   Also I thought the backing strings sound a little like some of the guitar in Pink Floyd’s “Echoes“, which only makes it better.
4. * Seeds
   I came to like the latter half of the track more than the first. Somewhat infectious throughout.
5. Tomorrow in a Year
   The title track doesn’t really deliver. I found it scattered and much too busy.
6. * The Height of Summer
   Doesn’t this sound like “Heartbeats” just a little bit? Anyway, it’s tasty.
7. * Annie’s Box (alt. vocal)
   I might like this a little better than the original. (Seems to be more conventional vocals, as opposed to opera-style.)

(Asterisks denote what I thought were the better tracks.)

I really wish I could see the opera itself. I watched the few clips of it that are available online and I got the feeling that there’s a little more going on than the music. I don’t really see how it relates to “On the Origin of Species”, but then again I think I’m missing something having only heard it and not seen it.

According to its write-up on The Knife’s site, “Richard Dawkins’s gene trees have formed the basis of some of the musical composition”. Interesting tidbit, I guess. Can’t say I could really tell. Clearly the music undergoes a lot of subtle development over time, but I think this comparison might be a little stretched.

The album was almost entirely ornithological in theme. I recently have been watching a lot of David Attenborough documentaries on birds, so I was delighted to discover this. Apparently Olof Dreijer (half of The Knife) actually went to the Amazon rainforest to study bird calls. And of course the album’s cover art is pretty obviously bird-inspired.

To generalize, I think most of the early parts of this album were too elementally raw. I realize that may have been the point for an opera about evolution, but as I said, I don’t think I fully appreciated this without seeing it as well. Still, it has its high points.

Also, Kōkakos have a beautiful call.

A relatively simple SVG I made in Inkscape. (Trying to teach myself.)

Loosely inspired by this 1927 sketch of a Philippine Tarsier:

David Lynch directed it, but didn’t write it, so the things which I don’t always appreciate the lack of in Lynch’s films, like a coherent plot, linear continuity of time, and so on, were present. And yet there were some of the things I love in Lynch films: long pauses between lines in dialogue, some scenes dominated by ambient sounds, and moreover, just plain weirdness.

The subject of the film could be said to be redemption and/or mortality. I’m not going to go into the details of the plot; suffice to say I found it quite effective. The runtime was a bit long, but when Lynch directs, that just comes with the territory.

A minor character, seen most prominently in one short scene which I’ve embedded below, reminded me much of a former co-worker at a gas station. (I’m referring to Sig, the man in the green hat and overalls in the scene.) Aside from that, this scene is a good example of the dialogue pacing in this movie. Also I think it’s hilarious.

It’s interesting to note that Richard Farnsworth, who portrayed the main character of the film (Alvin Straight), was working through terminal bone cancer during filming. In other words, he probably worked much, much harder than anyone else in the film. Sadly, he shot and killed himself about a year after the film’s release.

Album covers for Judas Priest’s Ram It Down (1988) and Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Californication (1999), respectively.

Of course, the line was: “Who buried them? Everybody died; who buried them?”, but I didn’t hear it correctly. So I made this clip to illustrate how stupid this scene seemed to be when I watched it for the first time.

Two Parts.

On the back of a house a little ways down the street from me. I guess it’s someone’s mini-balcony (?). I find it amusing.

A few buildings away from where I live.

This used to be a one-floor car showroom. The last couple weeks they’ve been doing a shitload of work on it (sawing, pounding, etc. 8-10 hours a day, 6 days a week).

The original roof’s height was about where the white painted brick comes up to on the side of the building.

Should be exciting to see what they do tomorrow (roof or fourth floor?). I’m also kind of curious as to what this is going to be when they’re done– I can’t imagine a 3-story car dealership.

They’re also redoing their parking lot (to the right), it looks like.

Addendum: I noticed today that I can see the top of the building from the stairwell window and also from my living room window (which, incidentally, is mostly blocked by the building next to me).

They seem to have finished the 3rd floor, and now they’re walking around on top of that. Still not sure what they’re going to do next.

• Anything recorded live, with very few exceptions
• …especially live tracks wherein the lead vocalist shouts the name of the song at the start of each track
• Anything with a bit rate lower than 128 kbps
• Singles with one track that I wanted and 3-5 tracks that are really crappy remixes of the track that I wanted
• Anything made by a “reunion” group, unless the band’s original members just happened to suck
• Most of Metallica’s music
• Any of Ozzy Osborne’s solo work
• Practically all of Bob Marley’s music. I had a taste for it until I learned that he refused to accept real treatment for cancer due to his beliefs. (He consequently died.) Sorry Bob, you were a fucking idiot and I will never hear your music the same way again.
• Most of Propagandhi’s music… The album Where Quantity Is Job #1 was semi-accurately titled, but Where Quality Is Job #1 was not.

Grabass_Champion and I made this in summer 2004.

(I’m the one chasing the cat with the gas can.)

This runs from about 3:10 to 3:20 in Those Shoes. It’s during the instrumental in the middle of the song.

And this is from around 4:57 to 5:06 in Hotel California. It’s during the extended instrumental which follows the last verse.

Don’t hear it yet? Here are some shorter clips to compare.

Those Shoes | Hotel California

Sounds a little like a recycled riff, doesn’t it?

But maybe I’m waxing over-analytical; it’s just a doodle on notebook paper (despite my attempts to hide the lines digitally).

Probably inspired by the likeness of Hunter S. Thompson:

This was outlined (and possibly somewhat traced) from the tired happycat meme (see below). It was sort of an experiment in manually upscaling a low-res image.

I was going to make it into a stencil to go along with some text but I couldn’t figure out how I’d do the edges.

Source:

Possible inspiration from Monty Python’s “The Meaning of Life”:

Made on an iPod Nano running some version of iPod Linux, circa March 6, 2006.

Got around to reading this over the past few days. (Warning: full post is a little image-heavy.)

As far as I can tell, it was printed in 1887. I bought it at a local thrift shop, about a month ago, for $0.75.

This is written very faintly in pencil on the first page of the book (I had to really jack up the image’s contrast to make it visible). I was really surprised when I found this. It made the book so much more intriguing to me to see that it was a 122-year-old Christmas gift for someone that has probably been dead for a good while.

Opposite the title page, under a sheet of protective tissue paper, is a beautiful graphic which I believe to be a woodcut.

The photo does not really do it justice, and will be redone when I learn how to take a non-blurry photo without flash (same goes for a couple other photos in this post).

The title page.

Publication info page; contents. I don’t know what number this edition is, but it’s obviously not the first, and I kinda doubt it’s very valuable.

One thing I noticed when I found it in the shop was the postcard tucked between pages 270 and 271.

I still don’t know what this really means, but I think it’s supposed to be a phonetic representation of someone speaking with an exaggerated Dutch accent: “Love is __?__ two hearts with the same __?__.”

Edit: OK, upon further discussion I’m starting to think this may either mean “Love is something that tickles two hearts with the same somethings,” or “Love is a nothing that tickles two hearts with the same somethings.” If you’re reading this, I’d love to hear any other interpretations you have to offer.

Publisher’s book lists in the back of the book, part 1 of 3.

Publisher’s book lists in the back of the book, part 2 of 3.

Publisher’s book lists in the back of the book, part 3 of 3.

The book is in adequately readable condition. Its binding is evidently deteriorated to the point that a few pages seem loose, but I’ve seen far, far worse in much younger books. No missing pages, only a few minor tears, dogears, faded pencil marks, etc. Here and there is a printing hiccup which made a letter or two go missing, but it’s never enough to render any words unable to be inferred.

The novel itself was a fairly good read. Somewhat predictable as to the roles of the characters, but contrarily, unpredictable as to the plot.

There were some very well-written, highly quotable passages which I enjoyed but did not keep track of. They’re certainly listed in many other places on the internets anyhow.

The writing was not dusty or flowery enough to frustrate me in attempting to comprehend it. A few times I was forced to reread a sentence or two because Hawthorne’s sentence structure waxed sufficiently long and winding to throw me. There is the occasional arcane “spake”, “wherefore”, and my favorite, “must needs” to be savored. I must admit there was a handful of old-fashioned words I had never seen, and which, in laziness, I didn’t look up.

I’m very happy to have discovered such a gem amongst the wide array of L. Ron Hubbard paperbacks littering the shelves of the thrift shop where I found this novel.

A sort of an inside joke from marching band.

Penned by a friend in high school.

Source: cellphone photo from Tanzmetall. Will post or link the original image if I ever find it.

Something I made in middle school art class. It’s from a manually scaled-up, painted-over Pluggers strip. This is my only foray into painting thus far.

I re-matted and framed this yesterday. It really isn’t worthy. That was kind of why I framed it, I guess.

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