I deleted Second Life for a while, because it was making me depressed. Too much possibility and too little interesting.
But I went back and found some interesting. Some political stuff, a writer’s group, a few cool places. Some things I found today:
Yes, a sci-fi sofa. And:
Not only do you have to buy the windsurfer, but you have to buy the surf, too.
…to me anyway.
From: ibakri1@albawaba.com
Subject: HOW WOULD YOU USE MY FUND TO HELP THE LESS PRIVILEDGED
Date: September 6, 2007 3:52:53 PM PDT
Reply-To: alchbak4@aswan.ccIt is a great honour to write you, after several hesistation.I do not want to say much, but My Name Is K I Bakri, i will definitely tell you more about myself and we get to know each other definitely once i get your reply. I have been diagnosed with Ideopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis, which is a terminal disease ,and i have no chance of surviving. I am writing you for your cooperation in fufilling a last wish i have, as i lay on my death bed.
My wish is distributing my last wealth which i have kept in a diplomatic box with a security company.The Diploamtic box contains a huge sum of money, i would reveal to you later, i want you to stand on my behalf and collect the box and help in the distribution of the wealth to the less priviledged.
I expect your response if you can perform this task, as there are several people dying and suffering all over the world abd i feel that my widows mite can change things a little..
So, How can you help the less priviledged with my funds?
Can i count on you?Best Wishes
K I Bakri
Went geocaching.
My GPS somehow marked the wrong spot, so I spent about 45 minutes bushwhacking. 
It was a multi-cache (find the first one at the marked coordinates, and that will tell you the real coordinates), and I only found the first. But someone else got it today, and was the FTF (first to find). O well.
Afterwards, I went to the thrift store up in Ballard (the cache was in Discovery Park… as far as I know), where I ran into a guy who was very intent on telling me that he had found a router that was actually an AMD K6 inside the box, and that he was going to try and install unix on it, put an industrial-grade wi-fi antenna on it, and get a line-of-sight to a neighbor who needs an internet connection.
He explained it in great detail. GREAT detail. And then he went into politics, with a little bit of a thing about how the courts and legislature have managed to separate US currency from being governmental purview, or something, and that the income tax doesn’t need to be Constitutional because of it, and so forth.
I love encountering these kinds of people in mediated form. But in person, it’s a little too much.
The stock guy came by and heard us talking about this stuff, and offered his own chorus, about how the government can track you with a GPS phone, etc…. Router Dude says, “It seems this store attracts radicals!”
Later, as I was leaving, I noticed an old AV cart (the cheap piece of steel that your elementary teacher used to put the filmstrip projector atop), and while I was waiting for a price check, there he was again: “This place attracts radicals! har har!” I said, “I have a friend who says she used to think she was radical, but now she knows she’s just European.” He totally missed it: “Yeah, Europeans are so much more informed…”
Oh well. Nice guy, though, if maybe turned up to 11.
But! Standing in line to pay for the AV cart, the woman in line behind me was looking through her stuff, deciding what not to buy. She shows me a DVD of Roy Orbison’s Black And White Concert, and she asks me, “Is this any good? I saw it back there, and I’ve got it, but I don’t know if I should get it again. Is it good?”
“Uhm, yeah, it’s good. But you have one already, right?”
“Yeah, but I was just trying to figure out if I should get this second one. Do you want it?” She offers it to me.
“Well, no, I’ve seen it… If you have it already, why do you need another one?” By this point she’s looking at Greatest Hits Of The 80s Volumes I – III, three CDs.
She asks, “Are these good artists? Should I buy these CDS?”
I’ve paid at this point, and I tell her, “They’re terrible,” and walk away.
What other way is there to judge someone at first glance?
Judgements are all subject to revision, of course.
I just answered this Featured Question, you can answer it too!
So two nights ago I rented the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie, because I was in the mood for some adolescent bizarro humor.
ATHF isn’t supposed to make sense, and it doesn’t. I was a bit disappointed because it’s not nearly as funny as one would hope; it really only ‘works’ in episode-length increments, like on cable TV. The funniest thing about it is the intro, which you can watch by following this link. Note that it’s totally not safe for the workplace.
If you think that’s funny, congratulations! You don’t need to rent the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie! (But you will, anyway.) If you don’t think that’s funny, then congratulations! You can safely ignore the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie!
I have to return it today, which is why it’s on my mind, and thus, why I just ‘blogged about it.
Everything I do lately feels like a distraction from the essential meaninglessness of my life.
I go through these phases.
Please, though: Distract me further.
OK, so you remember the electoral college? Every state sends delegates to the ‘college,’ which then votes for the President. The number of delegates is determined adding the number of Representatives and the number of Senators (which is always two), and historically, all of a state’s delegates vote for the same candidate.
This means that, for instance, if you’re a candidate and you win California, you’ve succeeded in getting a huge chunk of the electoral votes necessary to win (55), whereas if you win Wyoming, you’ve only got three votes. This means that people in Wyoming say, “What the hell? California gets all the respect, and we get nothing!”
When this system was being worked out, the addition of the number of Senators to the number of Representatives was included to give the needs of less-populous states like Wyoming more of a voice in the election.
In third-party politics, there’s been a real whine about the electoral college, because it means that not only does it give a winner-take-all approach to most states’ delegates, but it also completely wipes out their influence, leaving them only in a spoiler role. So right after the 2000 election, a lot of Greens (ahem) wanted to reform the electoral college. A lot of Democrats also found themselves hating the electoral college, because one corrupt Supreme Court decision led to Florida’s electoral votes being assigned to Bush, despite there never having been a satisfactory count of the ballot votes.
That was seven years ago. TODAY… The Republican party in California is running an initiative to transform California’s electoral votes into a proportional system, reducing the winner-take-all power of that state to influence elections. By the same token, they’ll be reducing California Republicans’ power in general elections, as well. So they’re determined to take a hit for the national-level party. A bit of self-awareness you really have to admire.
Basically: The Republicans are doing what they’re good at doing, and that is running the board.
What interests me about this is that many Democrats are now complaining about this, because it’s obviously a ploy to give more power to the rural red states, which will never, ever, go proportional. (Aside from the weakened power base, how do you fairly apportion THREE votes?)
So here’s digby talking about it, and she’s right to point out that this issue has probably been raised more to annoy than to reform, and it probably won’t happen. But as some commenters (ahem) have pointed out, it could be a golden opportunity to run similar initiatives in other states, such as purple states along the Mississippi, and Alaska where the Libertarian party would love to have representation in the college.
But I predict there’ll be continued whining, and not much else. The Republicans have opened up a new world where the national party is willing to sacrifice the state party’s power in order to win, and the state party is going along with it. (Can you say, ‘on the ropes?’) The Democrats could run similar initiatives in other states, and eventually we’d end up with an electoral college that represents America.
My modest proposal: Run initiative campaigns in various states. Where possible, run two concurrent initiatives, one to turn the electoral college into a proportional system, and another to enable fusion voting by smaller parties. They will be carefully worded to allow for each other. The proportional system will lose (in most cases), but fusion would probably win, especially in releif against proportionality. More voices kick ass against the Two Party, and we can get back to governance.
Orion Magazine: Unplugged Schools: Education can ameliorate, or exacerbate, society’s ills. Which will it be?
[..]THE HEALTH OF OUR CHILDREN’S INNER LIVES, their civic engagement, and their relationship with nature all would be improved if schools turned down the thermostat on that technologically overheated aspect of American culture. Schools dedicated to that task—we might call them “unplugged schools”—would identify the values associated with technological culture and design curricula and an environment focused on strengthening the human values at the other end of the scale.
The most obvious thing schools can do in this regard is give children experiences with the real things toward which symbols are only dim pointers. Unless emotionally connected to some direct experience with the world, symbols reach kids as merely arbitrary bits of data. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but to a second grader who has held a squiggly nightcrawler in her hand, even the printed symbol “worm” resonates with far deeper meaning than a thousand pictures or a dozen Discovery Channel videos.
[..]
In Europe, recognition of the benefits of being in the wild is behind one of its fastest-growing educational movements: forest kindergartens. They originated in Denmark in the 1950s but only recently began to attract attention because of their rapid expansion throughout Germany in the 1990s. These multi-age, year-round outdoor classrooms are designed to foster a love and knowledge of nature, while using the forest to encourage children to imaginatively create fantasy play worlds. Few full-blown forest kindergartens have been created in the U.S., but they have inspired a number of schools to establish forest weeks or weekly forest days. And, of course, where there are no forests, prairie weeks, pond months, or desert days can serve as well.
A SECOND IMPORTANT COMPENSATION would move in the opposite direction of nature—toward the conscious investigation of the tools that mediate our lives. With “magical” black boxes so integrated into our lives that they have become nearly invisible, unplugged schools would disintegrate technology, first by surrounding young children with only those tools whose working principles are visible and understandable and then by gradually bringing more complex, opaque technologies, from radios to eventually computers, into the educational arena—not just as study aids but objects of study.
‘Blogged so I’ll follow more links later.
Knoxville rejects Nazis and Klan. Go read. It’s funny as hell.
