Prufhop

As part of my ongoing coverage of allusions to my favourite poem, I give you T. S. Elliot's Lost Hip Hop Poem:

Via @tristissima who knows from slam poetry.

Inconceivable!

I've been meaning to create a web image for this for a while. It should have a number of applications.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means:

Plus, fractal wrongness:

Huh?

Ezra Klein offers us this puzzling graph:

Digby explains:

Americans worship winners and they don't really care about unfair process. This is the nation that reveres the quote “winning isn't everything, it's the only thing.”
....
Similarly, the party in power is expected to do what's necessary to pass its agenda. If it can't, it is held responsible for the failure, not those who stopped them from doing it.
....
And there is another dimension to this which especially applies to the Obama administration. Since he ran explicitly on the promise to end the bickering, change Washington and create a post-partisan consensus, people see the failure of those things to materialize as a measure of his failure to deliver on his promise.

We can expect more Republican obstructionism to come.

Good recommendations

Well, I should think so.

Amor vincit omnia

A friend pointed me at this picture from a remarkable photo essay about the protests at the G20 summit.

It reminded me of an old favourite.

Reading on the iPad

I'm finding that the two most useful applications on my iPad are Instapaper and GoodReader.

Instapaper is a service for reading long articles published on the web. There's a little javascript link that you can bookmark in your browser that tells the Instapaper service that you want to read the article. The service then intelligently extracts the article content out from the navigation, advertisements, and other cruft, and makes that content available in a standard, readable format at InstaPaper.com and on your iPhone and iPad.

Over the past several years I've read more and more long-form stuff on the web, and it's always been a pain: often the articles are published in poorly readable formats, and more significantly if you find something you really want to read, you have to either read it right when you find it or keep track of the link to find it later. With Instapaper, I can find something interesting, hit the link to tuck it away for later, and know that I will read it eventually.

GoodReader is a PDF reader, and it has completely changed my relationship to PDFs. It used to be if there was something I wanted to read that was published as a PDF, I resented it: it meant either reading from a computer screen or printing it out and schlepping around the printout. This has deterred me from reading a lot of stuff. Now, I'm delighted when something is published as a PDF, because it means that I can get it immediately and I'll have it with me to read at my convenience.

Since I bring my iPad with me almost everywhere, with these two apps I know that even if I cannot connect to the internet, I always have a wide variety of interesting things to read: long and short, light and serious, improving and entertaining. Since I'm about to transition into a more public-transit-intensive lifestyle, this is a godsend.

Both applications include a simple foldering system for organizing your stuff, and after a little experimentation I've converged on a satisfying set of folders that I use for both:

• Art
• Big ideas
• Design
• Games
• Kulturkampf
• Occult
• Popkultur
• Public interest
• Technoscience
• Weirdness

I'm almost embarrassed by how much I enjoy looking at that list.

California election day

What, again?

Vote early. Vote often. Vote no.

Except for 15 and (though I resent having to vote on something that passed the legislature with a supermajority already) 13.

Mengele

Physicians for Human Rights has a new report:

In the most comprehensive investigation to date of health professionals’ involvement in the CIA’s “enhanced” interrogation program (EIP), Physicians For Human Rights has uncovered evidence that indicates the Bush administration apparently conducted illegal and unethical human experimentation and research on detainees in CIA custody. The apparent experimentation and research appear to have been performed to provide legal cover for torture, as well as to help justify and shape future procedures and policies governing the use of the “enhanced” interrogation techniques. The PHR report, Experiments in Torture: Human Subject Research and Evidence of Experimentation in the ‘Enhanced’ Interrogation Program, is the first to provide evidence that CIA medical personnel engaged in the crime of illegal experimentation after 9/11, in addition to the previously disclosed crime of torture.

They were researching ways to torture better.

How I wish I were surprised.

Tricks for Entourage on the Mac

I just learned one of these tricks from a colleague, and circulated the other two to my coworkers in return, and it occurred to me that I might have readers who might find these tricks useful as well. So if you're doing email in Entourage, read on ...

Grouping conversations

If you don’t like the way Entourage’s default “Arrange By: Conversation” sorts messages within a conversation from oldest to newest instead of newest to oldest, you can create your own custom sort.

1. From the menu: View > Arrange By > Edit Custom Arrangements... > New
2. Do the following settings:

   Custom arrangement name: Conversation (Newest to Oldest)

   Group items by: Conversation

   Sort groups by: Received | Newest on top

   Sort items within groups by: Conversation Index | Newest on top

   Default display for groups: Expanded

Instead of deleting

Since Entourage’s Trash buffer doesn’t work the right way, I simulate the correct behavior by dragging unwanted emails into a folder named ZZZ. I periodically purge ZZZ, but always leave the last few days’ worth of emails in place. I also do an actual delete of emails I’m sure about not needing again, but having some recoverability in ZZZ means that I’m much more willing to z-delete items of only transient interest.

Managing my work queue

I fell off the wagon with my personal email, but I maintain Inbox Zero with my work email. Every message I receive I file into a folder as soon as I’ve read it. If I need to keep an email “on my desk” (usually because it’s something I need to do), before I file it into its topical folder (Design, Reference, Administridia, et cetera) I click the red flag. When I want to survey what I need to do, first I purge my Inbox of anything new, then I look in my saved search for flagged items. Then when I’ve dealt with the flagged item, I click the red flag again; it disappears from my saved search, but is still retained in the topical folder.

Here’s how to create the saved search:

1. Go into the menu bar: File > New > Saved Search
2. At the top of the workspace, click on All Messages
3. Leave “Match if all criteria are met” dropdown in place
4. Click “Item contains” dropdown to switch to “To Do Flag” then switch the secondary dropdown to “Not Completed”
5. Click [Save] in the upper right of the workspace
6. Name it “Flagged”
7. (If you don’t have the favorites folder bar shown below the icon toolbar at the top) Go into the menu bar: View > Show Favorites Bar
8. (If you don’t have the folder list shown on the left) Go into the men bar: View > Show Folder List
9. In the folder list, find Mail Views at the bottom. You should see your Flagged search listed among the default views
10. Drag the Flagged search you created into the favorites folder bar below the icon toolbar, so you can find it again

Escalation

Posts on this subject are obviously fraught, so a few things up front:

• the moral question is simple: Palestinian liberation is right & necessary
• the praxis is complicated: antisemitic entryism into the movement for liberation is subtle, pervasive, and unacceptable
• the history is complicated: I have a survey of it which addresses many common misunderstandings on all sides
• I keep an index of resources — my posts and others’

Kevin Drum says what I’ve been thinking about Israel’s attack on the ship bringing aid to Gaza.

It’s also a little hard to write about since I don’t have anything original to say. A million people have already said it. Fanatics on both sides have been in control of the region for years — the hardline Orthodox population relentlessly gaining influence in Israel and Hamas terrorists among the Palestinians — both convinced that they can win if they can only provoke enough insane overreactions from the other side. Which they do with depressing regularity. Hamas’s rocket attacks are indefensible, the Gaza embargo in return is indefensible, the blockade runners in their turn were plainly hoping to provoke an overreaction that would force Israel’s hand, and the Israelis then went insanely beyond anyone’s expectations by landing commandos on one of the ships and killing more than a dozen people while it was still far off in international waters. And now, there are rumors that the Turkish navy might escort the next ship that tries to run the blockade.

In David Petraeus’s famous phrase, How does this end?

Not well, obviously. I despair.

Mine too

The Big Caption says:

Image from the Boston Globe's amazing collection.

A word about the Lost finale

I was reminded of Roger Ebert's review of The Village:

To call it an anticlimax would be an insult not only to climaxes but to prefixes. It's a crummy secret, about one step up the ladder of narrative originality from It Was All a Dream. It's so witless, in fact, that when we do discover the secret, we want to rewind the film so we don't know the secret anymore.

And then keep on rewinding, and rewinding, until we're back at the beginning, and can get up from our seats and walk backward out of the theater and go down the up escalator and watch the money spring from the cash register into our pockets.

Jimmy Kimmel's gag alternate endings were better than what we got.

Movie landscapes

Paramount Studio map of California's geographical facsimiles, fron The Motion Picture Industry as a Basis for Bond Financing, 1927

Via Warren Ellis, originally uploaded by Ambrosia Voyeur

You know, it's amazing how the English countryside looks in no way like Southern California.

—Austin Powers

The horror continues

Via Digby, I learn that the International Committe of the Red Cross confirms that the US is operating the torture prison at Bagram which the US military has been denying. Jeff Kaye has horrifying details.

Prisoners held at Tor, according to investigations by BBC, are tossed into cold concrete cells, where the light is kept on 24 hours. Noise machines fill their cells with constant sound, and prisoners are sleep deprived as a matter of policy, with each cell monitored by a camera, so the authorities will know when someone is falling asleep and come to wake them.

Prisoners are beaten and abused. According to BBC’s article last month, one prisoner was “made to dance to music by American soldiers every time he wanted to use the toilet.”

As Auschwitz was a murder factory, that's an insanity factory. Even the US military admits that most of the people held there are not terrorists. And do I even need to tell you that no one there has stood trial?

We need to let those people free, make apologies and recompense to them and their loved ones, raze the prison to the ground, salt the earth where it once stood, and send everyone involved to the Hague to stand trial for crimes against humanity, up to and including the President of the United States if he knew this was happening.

President Obama, I'm looking at you. I voted for you, and reason ^#1 was that I trusted you to do the right thing about this. I've been trying to believe that you've been slow to correct Guantánamo because institutional inertia has been stopping you. Fool me twice, and I won't get fooled again.

Elves vs Fairies

Patrick McGee, republished on Roger Ebert's blog, warns against losing a tooth on the wrong day.

Santa had a son who fell in love with the Tooth Fairy's daughter. Because Santa could not abide such a mixing of the species, he had the Fairy's daughter killed. The Tooth Fairy responded by killing Santa's son. So began the blood-feud. Elves and Fairies have fought and died by the thousands over the ages. But, most critical, is what happens on Xmas Eve. Should a child be unable to prevent the loss of a tooth on Xmas Eve, it's possible that the Tooth Fairy and Santa end up at that very house at the same time. When this happens, the resulting battle destroys several city blocks.

I should have known.

Cinco de Mayo

In the unlikely event that you saw Grindhouse, you undoubtedly recall the witty trailers for faux exploitation movies that didn't really exist. Perhaps you have heard that Robert Rodriguez was so pleased with his trailer for Machete, with the inimitable Danny Trejo in the title rôle, that he actually fleshed it out into a real movie, coming soon to a theater near you.

Well, Mr Rodriguez and Mr Trejo have a special message, just for today.

Ain't It Cool News helpfully informs us:

Rodriguez is calling this his “Illegal” trailer. You see, Robert talked Fox into letting him put together a Cinco De Mayo message for ARIZONA — given. Well, the way things are in Arizona at this moment — it is kinda insane that there is a movie that was shot over a year ago waiting to be released that is about — THIS EXACT ISSUE... but if, Danny Trejo and buddies went Revolution Wacko as a result.

So I felt I needed to share.

Colours

Randall Munroe, who draws xkcd, “a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language,” did a survey of people's use of colour names.

First, a few basic discoveries:

• If you ask people to name colors long enough, they go totally crazy.
• “Puke” and “vomit” are totally real colors.
• Colorblind people are more likely than non-colorblind people to type “fuck this” (or some variant) and quit in frustration.
• Indigo was totally just added to the rainbow so it would have 7 colors and make that “ROY G. BIV” acronym work, just like you always suspected. It should really be ROY GBP, with maybe a C or T thrown in there between G and B depending on how the spectrum was converted to RGB.
• A couple dozen people embedded SQL ‘drop table’ statements in the color names. Nice try, kids.
• Nobody can spell “fuchsia”.

What's that about SQL? It seems that a lot of his readers remembered the comic “Exploits of a Mom.”

Lots more under the link. His discussion of his methodology is pretty interesting.

Deadly karaoke

Norimitsu Onishi at the New York Times offers a mindboggling piece about karaoke and violence in the Philipines.

Mr. Gregorio, 63, a witness to countless fistfights and occasional stabbings erupting from disputes over karaoke singing, did not dare choose one beloved classic: Frank Sinatra’s version of “My Way.”

“I used to like ‘My Way,’ but after all the trouble, I stopped singing it,” he said. “You can get killed.”

The article is primarily about “My Way,” but there are some really interesting digressions ...

A subset of karaoke bars with G.R.O.’s — short for guest relations officers, a euphemism for female prostitutes — often employ gay men, who are seen as neutral, to defuse the undercurrent of tension among the male patrons. Since the gay men are not considered rivals for the women’s attention — or rivals in singing, which karaoke machines score and rank — they can use humor to forestall macho face-offs among the patrons.

There's more, though the article leaves out this important tidbit from Wikipedia:

In the Philippines it was believed that [Syd] Vicious' version was inspired by deposed dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos, where in the first part of the song Vicious attempted to imitate the voice of the late dictator.

Of course.

MRE

Ragnell at Written World has an intriguing theory about the design of military Meals Ready to Eat.

All joking aside, MREs are an incredibly social food. Most contain an entree, a sidedish, a dessert, a snack, and a drink. Only one or two of these things will be edible to you (or you've gotten the only meal that anyone seems to feel is entirely good: The Chilimac. This is an anomaly, also no good for me because I don't like the entree--everything else on the menu rocks, though), the rest will either be disgusting or something you personally hate. You can, if you're hungry enough and alone, give up on your pickiness and just eat what you get. But I believe part of the point of the MRE (or an important side effect, since the main point was probably to make a meal that you could quickly eat a little bit of, work or get into a firefight, and then eat a little more of when the action dies down without it spoiling or spilling) is to build unit cohesion by forcing you to sit with the rest of your flight and trade food pouches to build an edible MRE (unless you got the cheese omelet, then you're shit out of luck. Though you probably will attract a crowd as it is such a legendarily disgusting entree that people will want to see your face when you eat it.)

Ragnell also has some good things to say about superheroes, especially Wonder Woman.

Walk on the mild side

That Lou Reed, such a nice young man:

We chatted for a while, and she asked me what my favorite music was. I said the Velvet Underground — assuming, of course, she'd have no clue who they were. Her face lit up and she said, You mean Lou Reed's band???? It turned out she was the cleaning lady for Lou's dorm when he was at Syracuse, and she LOVED him. She said he was the sweetest of all the boys in the dorm, the most well-mannered and the kindest to her. She'd bake cakes and treats for him, and when he left college he would write to her. She said they still corresponded.

Born Free

M.I.A.'s video for her new song “Born Free” is a well-crafted, harrowing political allegory well worth ten minutes of your time. I warn you: it's scary, gruesome and, as they say, “not safe to watch at work;” if you can't watch that sort of thing, check out Jezebel's synopsis.

It's better if you see it without having the surprise spoiled. But unhappily—and of course this is the point—the surprise isn't, fundamentally, surprising. Just like Zbigniew Libera's Lego kit, it is simultaneously absurd yet familiar, and that terrible familiarity is the point.

Design

Local Gas Pump

Originally uploaded by jmspool

Note that I am sure that, considered in isolation, each of these stickers was an improvement over the information design before it was added. It's a perfect example of how incremental design leads to bad design.

Scholarship

Latke vs Hamentash: A Materialist-Feminist Analysis:

To summarize briefly an account that is richly nuanced (in fact, often incomprehensibly convoluted), Shapiro, an anthropologist, begins with the conjecture that the circles and triangles conventionally used to designate women and men on kinship charts are in fact iconic representations of latkes and hamentashen.

She argues, “(I)t is ultimately impossible for us to know whether, in the last analysis, the latke and hamantash should be considered as semiotic representations of the two sexes or whether the two sexes should be seen as semiotic representations of latkes and hamantashen. What is not, however, in doubt, is the association of latkes with the female principle and hamantashen with the male” (Shapiro 1990:3).

What is it that leads Shapiro to argue as a feminist that latkes, which have so clearly been part of the oppressive apparatus upholding the most retrograde patriarchal elements of Judaism, are a more appropriate symbol for women than hamentashen? I will argue that such an interpretation is possible only if analysis remains at a symbolic level which so decontextualizes the subject that there is no trace of the lived experience of the relevant social actors.

History

In honour of Confederate History Month I give you Fengi on Confederate History:

Again with the brazen bigoted fuckwitcha stuff.

Gov. Robert F. McDonnell, reviving a controversy that had been dormant for eight years, has declared that April will be Confederate History Month in Virginia...he did not include a reference to slavery because “there were any number of aspects to that conflict between the states.”

Here is the central truth: The South started the Civil War in order to create a slave owning, white supremacist state. How do we know this? Because they fucking said so.

Virgina's Ordinance of Secession sated it was about “the oppression of the Southern slave holding states”. In the official statements explaining their acts of succession, Georgia denounced “the equality of the black and white races”, and Mississippi proclaimed slavery “the greatest material interest of the world” while complaining about the Union “It advocates negro equality, socially and politically, and promotes insurrection and incendiarism in our midst.”

Texas was the most bold proclaiming their status “as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery-- the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits-- a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time.”

The Confederate constitution was a duplicate of American document with extra language making slavery a permanent institution. This included the following language:

The Confederate States may acquire new territory; and Congress shall have power to legislate and provide governments for the inhabitants of all territory belonging to the Confederate States, lying without the limits of the several Sates; and may permit them, at such times, and in such manner as it may by law provide, to form States to be admitted into the Confederacy. In all such territory the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected be Congress and by the Territorial government; and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories shall have the right to take to such Territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the States or Territories of the Confederate States.

This shows the Confederacy aspired to be an expanding slave owning empire. Note they specified “negro slavery”.

After the war, some confederates tried to revise history saying rhetoric about protecting the Southern way of life against Northern injustice was about vaguely defined complexities. Prior to the war, they were clear and strident that it was about white people owning African Americans as property (to be bred, burdened, traded and killed at will).

There were bigots a plenty in the North, but this isn't the issue. The South fought a war to create a racist slave empire. The Confederacy's defining - and arguably only - purpose was a crime against humanity.

The defeat of the Confederates is as much a victory as the defeat of Nazis in WWII. Both wer attempts to found a society on racial superiority and brutalized, oppressed and/or killed an entire group of people. Except Germany doesn't have state leaders whining they were only protecting a now vague “way of life”.

ADDENDUM: Offended provincials should realize people accept the diverse 21st Century South is not the Confederacy; it's part of why they think this is bullshit.

iPad

A few weeks back, I was observing a focus group of folks around 20 years old. It turns out that a lot of them bring their laptops with them everywhere. (This is no longer geeky. Hmmm.) As an aside, one of them described the iPad as puzzling, “a laptop for old people.”

Laughter behind the glass.

Take it away, Nick Sweeney:

When I was seven, my dad built me a bed, taking inspiration from a drawing in an old woodworking magazine, scavenging the wood, cutting it to fit the lean in the room. It had three drawers and cupboard space beneath for the games and toys and books I steadily acquired, as well as the growing pile of tapes for my ZX Spectrum.

Around the same time, he carved me a miniature cricket bat the length of my middle finger, notching a V, varnishing it, winding cotton for the handle grip. It’s a precious thing to me.

He has built sheds, paved patios, dug out ponds, knocked out walls, fit gas fires, tied flies — and that’s just in his spare time.

My dad is a maker.

In his twenties, my dad bought a tenor banjo. It’s a beautiful thing: ivory buttons, inlaid mother-of-pearl on the head and fretboard, vellum skin, a duster stuffed behind to keep down the volume. Looking online some years ago, I found a site devoted to vintage banjos, which told me a little about its age and history and the journey it had taken over nearly a century of existence. I told this to my dad, and he was thrilled; I printed out the pages and posted them, because computers remain a mystery to him.

Last year he told me that the screws from a couple of the tuners had broken; finding replacements was difficult, because that gauge wasn’t made any more in Britain. I registered at a banjo forum, asked for help, and within days a kind person from New York not only told me the gauge I needed, but sent a bag of screws that I posted on to my dad. They were a perfect fit. When I described how I got them, I might as well have been telling him that aliens landed in the garden and left them behind.

A couple of Christmases back, I called my parents, who were staying with my sister and her family. Could I speak to my dad, I asked? I’ll give him a shout, said my mother, but he’s been playing on the Wii with the kids from the moment they switched it on.

I finally spoke to him, surprised by what I’d heard. “Bloody marvellous, son.”

When I look at the iPad, I see something my dad could use without hand-holding to find the history of that banjo, to seek out those screws, to look at old video of Sonny Terry, to feed his glorious practical creativity, unencumbered by the need to learn the habits and quirks of computing, and not relying upon a transatlantic support department.

There’s a liberation in open things (and opening things) but there’s a far greater one in how things can open up people.

A laptop for old people. Damn straight.

Sorry, Cory. I still love ya—and bless you for fighting against DRM and in favour of sane intellectual property—but this time you're wrong. I don't want to take a screwdriver to my computer, or to read its schematics; I just want the damned thing to work properly.

3D Illusion

Via Laughing Squid, I learn of a series of beautiful, unsettling animated GIFs by Jaime Martinez.

Electric Sheep

One of the very first things I ever blogged was Patrick Farley's web comics project Electric Sheep. It's still one of my very favourite things on the web. Check it out.

Mr Farley is raising money to go pro, and I just made a contribution:

Happy Pi Day

I remember seeing this trailer and thinking, “Thank God someone made this movie, so I wouldn't have to make it in order to get to see it.”

Olbermann

I'm on my way to a you have to watch this, but I need to take the long way around.

I have spoken in praise of MSNBC's commentator Keith Olbermann before.

Now for a span there during the Bush administration, there were some lefties who looked at him like he was the second coming of Edward R. Murrow ... or like he was the crafty, witty, relentless liberal voice we now have in the form of the amazing Rachel Maddow. Having watched a bit of his show, I have to admit that this is the internet being kind to Olbermann—not in the sense that the people of Left Blogistan were too generous in their praise, but rather that the medium of the net played up his virtues. Folks circulated clips of Olbermann's best Special Comments, but it turns out watching the actual show, that most of the time it's very TV-ish in a bad way: gimmicky, full of cheap shots, and Mr Olbermann sometimes speaks in the voice of outrage at times that are forced and artificial. He plays up the outrage because he's good at it, and I mean that not as a backhanded compliment but a sincere one because expressing outrage well, like expressing anything well, requires talent, skill, and discipline. And so the internet made Olbermann look good because folks could circulate clips of him expressing brilliant outrage when it was called for, unhappily true all too often during the Bush administration.

Given a worthy target, Olbermann's outrage is awesome to behold: right, and necessary, and ... here is where his greatness lies ... delivered with subtlety and profundity to match its vigour.

I have a clip for y’all where Olbermann expresses outrage where it is warranted. That outrage is really only punctuation at an appropriate point in telling a larger story, and mighty as that outrage is, it is not even close to being the heart of his comments. You have to watch this.

It's almost fifteen minutes long, serious, searing, and not work safe—not because it will show anything offensive or embarrassing on your screen, but because it demands a kind of attention that you're not going to be able to muster at your desk at the office. Don't let that deter you. Make a date with yourself to watch it.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Good work, Mr Olbermann, and thank you.

(That I may keep it handy, here's a link to Crooks and Liars, where they have the clip, a partial transcript, and a link to Olbermann's dKos diary.)

Two of my favourite things

Who would have thought that you could have gotten David Bowie and the Tree of Life in the same picture?