The World

Thank You, Pandora!

Pandora often plays new music I end up enjoying. That’s its job.

Yesterday, asked to play music similar to Hayley Westenra, it completely floored me by introducing Vienna Teng’s Lullaby for a Storm Night. She describes the song this way in a YouTube video from a Dusseldorf performance:

It’s a relatively old song of mine. I wrote it when I was 17 years old, when I was taking an English class where I had to write a very long paper, and I didn’t want to write the paper, so I wrote the song instead.

This is a song about a rainy evening – a thunderstorm. The thunderstorm went on all night. It rained so hard that – because my school is a California school and we’re not used to weather – it actually flooded the whole school, so I had one more day to finish the paper for English class.

The songs on Teng’s MySpace page are even better. Topping it all off, she’s a computer scientist with a BS from Stanford.

I know where I’ll be on December 5th.

A Brief History of Time

At 4:49 am on 19 October 2005, an anonymous Wikipedia user created a new page titled “Sarah Palin.” It read, in full:

Republican Party (United States) candidate for governor for the state of Alaska. Sarah is the former mayor of Wasilla, Alaska

Sure, the first sentence is incomplete (which another editor corrected that day), the second is missing its period, and her last name doesn’t feature anywhere in the article, but she had her very own Wikipedia page.

As early as 2 November 2005 we got this telling sentence from user Tko ak:

Despite being considered a maverick by many for rebuking her own party, her conservative political credentials remain intact.

Huh! She really is a maverick!

The page grew into a full article on her governorship and beyond until 6:57 pm on 12 August, when Paul007ex added this paragraph:

Governor Sarah Palin has been mentioned as Vice President contendor (sic) by a number of different media outlets. Governor Sarah Palin has a strong online member support for her Vice Presidency appeal.

It had undergone 714 revisions in total before then. Between 12 August and 29 August (when McCain announced his running mate) another quick 187 revisions speculated on her place in the 2008 campaign, including the controversial Young Trigg edits.

And after the 29th? In just three days editors tacked on 2,364 new changes – about 2½ times the total volume of edits in the prior history of the page.

Over 6,200 more have gone through in September and October (to present).

At first I was considering creating a time lapse video of the page (as has been done before for other articles) but then I calculated that if done to scale there’d be three minutes of glacial nothingness followed by five to ten seconds of explosive change.

Pope Fixes Financial Crisis; Details at Eleven

From The Age:

Pope Benedict XVI says the financial crisis sweeping the world proves the futility of craving success and money and he urges instead that people base their lives on the word of God.

“We are seeing now in the collapse of the big banks that this money is disappearing, is nothing,” Benedict told a synod of bishops on Monday on the theme of “The Word of God”.

Let’s review.  Our government believes if it just throws $700 billion at anything that moves this crisis will go away.  The Pope just shrugs his shoulders and pontificates (literally), “I guess we’re not supposed to have money or homes.”

Who do we have to take Jerry Falwell’s role of reminding us that if only we were less tolerant toward homosexuality and feminism (and the ACLU, don’t forget), we wouldn’t have these crises in the first place?

(via BBC Newshour)

A James by Any Other Name

I stumbled on a wikiHow post titled, “How to Deal With Having a Boy’s Name when You’re a Girl.”

I enjoy particularly step four:

  1. Go back to school with evidence. Bring a page you printed of a name website, stating that your name can be a girl or boys name. Possibly bring a list of female celebrities sharing your name.

I highly doubt that showing up at school with paperwork defending your name is a way to reduce teasing.  Admittedly you’ll be teased a lot less about your name, but now you’ll forever be the girl who brought Internet research to school.  Naming such a celebrity is a great idea, but bringing supporting documentation really won’t help.

The last step may also be ill-advised:

  1. Get advice. Ask your parents, or if you’re too shy, ask the school counselor or an older sibling. Ask how you can cope with people treating you this way.

Your parents created the problem by naming their daughter James.  They may not have the best advice to give on the subject.

Do Nothing 3: Do Nothing with a Vengeance

Stephen Colbert interviewed Congressman Lynn Westmoreland on the Colbert Report.

Westmoreland is known best for cosponsoring bills to display the Ten Commandments in the House and Senate, and to allow them to be displayed in courtrooms.  Asked to name them in the interview he gets (and I quote), “don’t murder, don’t lie, don’t steal,” before giving up.

Some would criticize him.  I say: that’s why he wanted them on display in the first place!  How else are they supposed to remember all that cruft about not coveting your neighbor’s wife and honoring your parents?

That aside, this was my favorite exchange:

Colbert:  This has been called a “Do Nothing Congress.”  Is it safe to say you’re the do nothingest?

Westmoreland: Well, there’s one other do nothinger.  I don’t know who that is, but they’re a democrat.  So there’s one democrat do nothinger, one republican.

…

Colbert: Are you even a congressman if you haven’t actually introduced a law?

Westmoreland: I got sworn in with everybody else…

Besides, one doesn’t need to take action to have some brilliant ideas:

Colbert: What can we get rid of to balance the budget?

Westmoreland: Department of Education.

He has a point.  If we didn’t keep trying so hard to educate students, fewer of them would grow up to be responsible members of society, and it would be so much easier to get nothing done!

PoaT+xkcd+www+blog = Fun!

Randall Munroe, creator of xkcd, blogged about the infamous Plane on a Treadmill problem from the perspective of how people interpret the problem differently, and how that leads to chaos in Internet “discussions.”  I enjoy the summary at the end:

So, people who go with interpretation #3 notice immediately that the plane cannot move and keep trying to condescendingly explain to the #2 crowd that nothing they say changes the basic facts of the problem. The #2 crowd is busy explaining to the #3 crowd that planes aren’t driven by their wheels. Of course, this being the internet, there’s also a #4 crowd loudly arguing that even if the plane was able to move, it couldn’t have been what hit the Pentagon.

All in all, it’s a lovely recipe for an internet argument, and it’s been had too many times. So let’s see if we can avoid that. I suggest posting stories about something that happened to you recently, and post nice things about other peoples’ stories. If you’re desperate to tell me that I’m wrong on the internet, don’t bother. I’ve snuck onto the plane into first class with the #5 crowd and we’re busy finding out how many cocktails they’ll serve while we’re waiting for the treadmill to start. God help us if, after the fourth round of drinks, someone brings up the two envelopes paradox.

It somehow reminds me of a great Simpsons quote, as a group of pirates are about to bury some treasure:

Captain, what if, instead of burying the treasure, we use it to buy things? You know, things we like?

Why Come They Ain’t Smart No More

I just watched the movie Idiocracy.  Two very average people get frozen for 500 years, and when they wake up they’re the smartest people left on Earth.

I have two complaints.

First, the movie opens with a shot of Earth as seen from space.  This just happens to be exactly (exactly) the same image I use as my desktop background, so the first 20 seconds of the movie made me wonder why the video wasn’t playing.  This may be unimportant to the larger audience.

Second, it was meant to be a comedy – and it had some funny jokes – but I’m pretty sure its premise is exactly right.  The film opens with a narrative about how the intelligent couples of the world are all busy having intelligent discussions about when to have children, while hillbilly Cletus who doesn’t understand birth control has a dozen children with three different women and his family tree flourishes.

With the natural forces of evolution no longer able to remove any but the most catastrophically stupid from the gene pool, it really is a question of who’s reproducing most.  The evidence is all around us.
Comedian Greg Giraldo does a great bit about letters that civil war soldiers – 17 year old kids – wrote home from the battlefield.  He recites an example:

My dearest Hannah,

This morn finds me wracked with the fiery pangs of your absence.  I’ll bear your cherished memory with me as I battle the forces of tyranny and oppression.

Then he speculates what letters from Gulf War soldiers must sound like:

Dear Marie,

It is hot as $%^ out here!  … It is very, very hot, and I am very, very sweety (sic).  It is very, very hot out here because I am in the dessert (sic).  What else did I wanna axe you?  Oh yeah!  Don’t $%^& nobody ’til I get back!

(And now let’s pause for a moment to reflect that “‘very very hot’ Civil War soldier” was just an awful choice of search string ot use when trying to find that quote.  Now Google thinks I’m gay, with a Civil War fetish.)

The movie gets no more than two stars for being funny, but five for obliterating all remaining hope for the future of humanity.