The Illustrious Process known as Democracy
Somewhere between many the process of voting and many PBR’s I have come to liken the strange custom of “I voted” stickers to similar adhesive products furnished by doctors, and dentists and various other incentives to induce children to be proud of health related activities.
I am not amused.
However, I am greatly amused that a friend of mine who did not get a chance to vote somehow acquired an entire roll of “I voted” stickers and plans to distribute them in some sort of self-promoting party atmosphere. Would that a similar gratification bypass existed in lieu of a dentist appointment.
This does amuse me.
I am happy that my team won. However, I somehow feel disheartened by the sensation that this was once again the election that was “too critical to vote for a third party” for the nth time. I dislike teams, I dislike games that pretend so hard towards realism that they are, and I am highly critical of the fashion in which politics are little changed from those hard fought political battles enacted on early grade-school playground recess.
People are people, and often continue to be people despite the advancing tide of adult delusions of maturity.
For those few that might understand: I wanna go to the fire station.
Stephen Colbert's Bush Roast
Written transcript of the speech. As well as video’s
The first quarter of part one is just introduction for Colbert and the last portion the “press conference” video is eh, but most of part 1 and all of part 2 is well worth watching. The transcript doesn’t quite do it justice. Seeing Bush sitting right next to him adds to the burning thrust of the jokes.
Notable excerpts from the transcript:
bq. "Now, I know there are some polls out there saying this man has a 32% approval rating. But guys like us, we don’t pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in “reality.” And reality has a well-known liberal bias."
and
“I stand by this man. I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things, he stands on things. Things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message, that no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound — with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world.”
Read!
Edit — May 5th
Apparently ABC News trained there camera on bush during this segment. Some interesting expressions were noted. Pictures of Bush during Colbert’s Speech.
The mainstream media remains enthralled by the Bush + Impersonator act, ignoring the main show. Just because reporters are everywhere, just because news is available 24/7 in real time with satellite feeds, embedded reporters and the kitchen sink in no way removes their ability to ignore anything they choose. No matter how much news is presented, something is ignored.
Institute for Applied Autonomy
A couple of weeks ago I made it out to a conference in which a few members of the Institute for Applied Autonomy got a chance to speak.
There basic concept is they are trying to be the DARPA equivalent for the common protestor and activist.
They are friendly to the RTMark method of viewing the world.
They were sparked in particular by attending a DARPA conference in which they viewed such excellent military technologies like “Self Healing Minefields”
What dear reader asks, is a self healing minefield? This excellent description explains. Or perhaps the simple explanation would be better. What exactly is a wounded mindfield? A wounded mindfield is one in which sections of the mindfield have been disrupted and no longer act as a working “area denial munition.”
Translation: Some poor sap got his leg blown off trying to walk through the mindfield, and now the military needs to fix the resulting gap in the mindfield.
What then does a “self-healing mindfield” do? Short answer? The mines talk to each other and can move. So when a mine blows up the other mines shuffle in closer to the area that was “wounded.” Actually they probably don’t shuffle, they hop.
… I’ll let you draw your own conclusions about my opinion on this …
So what did the Institute of Applied Autonomy do with this information? They made txtMob to enable the common protestor with the tools to communicate, coordinate and intelligently respond in hostile environments.
Translation: It lets protestors be as coordinated as the police.
Anyway, watch the video, it’s amusing. Some of the other applications are pretty entertaining/interesting as well. A robot for distributing subversive literature, a robot for writing political graffiti, a camera mapping system to allow for travel in cities following a route with minimal camera coverage. I recommend the videos for each of the projects, they are pretty entertaining.
The Prisoner
Prisoner: Where am I?
Number Two: In The Village.
Prisoner: What do you want?
Number Two: Information.
Prisoner: Which side are you on?
Number Two: That would be telling. We want
information, information, information…
Prisoner: You won’t get it.
Number Two: By hook or by crook we will.
Prisoner: Who are you?
Number Two: The new Number Two.
Prisoner: Who is Number One?
Number Two: You are Number Six.
Prisoner: I am not a number. I am a free man.
Number Two: Ha, ha, ha, ha….
Of late I have been entertaining myself by watching The Prisoner. Definitely an interesting show. Some pretty cheesy effects and lots of 60’s camera zoom effects, but definitely some pretty interesting social commentary.
It’s about this spy who resigns, is kidnapped, and wakes up in “The Village”, as “Number 6.” “Number 2” wants to know why he resigned and what information he knows and each episode is filled with questions about how to escape from the village, how to undermine the people in charge of the village, and determine who is in charge and who is a fellow prisoner.
The interesting social commentary comes from the fact that within the microcosm of the Village most of standard social games appear to exist. The question of who are the prisoners and who are the wardens seems to really be about society as a whole. In fact that is what most of the questions are about authority in this show.
Anyway it’s definitely a very interesting show, and well worth watching.
Subway Bag Searches
New York Starts to Inspect Bags on the Subways
From the Constitutional Amendments :
Article [IV.]
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
It was mentioned at one point in time that the purpose of “these” terrorists is to attack “our” way of life. What better way for the terrorists to do so, then by causing our government to attack our own way of life in the cause of maintaining our safety. And all at the behest of it’s own people.
Is terrorism the actual attack on a culture or simply the catalyst which causes a society to destroy itself?
Google Privacy Issues
I was reading this forbes article and it made me curious about customer habit datamining. Customer habit datamining is of course the process of trying to identify what sort of customer a person is by there buying/reading/viewing habits. Specifically to determine what would be best products/services/information to provide for the customer. Amazon of course does it’s bayesian based book suggestions. They maximize the probability of next item to purchase from what you have purchased and viewed already with what everyone else using amazon has done. Tivo of course does the same thing. Google even does it for it’s adwords by maximizing the advertising market value of a keyword against the page it is on.
The concept of Google doing this type of targeted marketing across all of it’s services seems to terrify people however. Cries of 1984, Big Brother, and the ensuing multitude of corporate dystopian futures ring throughout the air. As well they should. That data is our informational identity in the modern world. A ghost psyche if you will. It falls back on the dangers inheritant in people knowing your true name in cultures that believed in some types of magic, of voodoo dolls, and photographs that steal a persons soul. A modern cause for an ancient superstition. Once aquired by someone it could be bought, sold, traded, used to impersonate, advertise to, convict, and a whole host of other worries and fears, both rational and superstitious.
Yet at the same time many of the potential services available from something else being able to predict your next action are useful. People around the world depend on eachother for many of these predictions. From common interests in books, topics for study, potential friends, and even significant others, people use these predictions from others all of the time. Really it’s a question of trust, of intended use, and how much privacy you personally want.
I’m really rather curious how much information can be datamined if you only have temporary sessions of personal information. Imagine if your time online were split into maybe 1 hour blocks of habits, but was then stripped of identifying marks like ip addresses, logins, passwords, other sites cookies, and the like. I wonder how much would still be possible to extract. How quickly you could classify a person in order to make meaningful suggestions, but still obey their want for privacy. Imagine if every person online using google had a temporary cookie each hour assisting their journey across the web. Imagine if people could set how long google could remember you to scale how identifiable you were against how how much assistance you wanted? It would certainly be an interesting research topic for clustering and classification. Could you identify what type of person a user was in 20 minutes?
Anyhow, it’s late, and my own personal predictions about myself is that I will soon fall asleep at the keyboard, assuming it isn’t apparent I have already done so by the more disorganized sections of this essay.
