Vonnegut on our Current Times

I fear the day when we will no longer have Kurt Vonnegut around to cast his cynical eye on current events and lets us know how it looks through his jaundice colored lenses. Case in point: this essay entitled “Cold Turkey”. It’s hard to limit myself to tasty bits to quote because the whole thing is so good and so in line with my own feelings. Here’s one bit:

Eugene Debs, who died back in 1926, when I was only 4, ran 5 times as the Socialist Party candidate for president, winning 900,000 votes, 6 percent of the popular vote, in 1912, if you can imagine such a ballot. He had this to say while campaigning:

As long as there is a lower class, I am in it.

As long as there is a criminal element, I’m of it.
As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

Doesn’t anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools or health insurance for all?

How about Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes?

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth.

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God. …

And so on.

Not exactly planks in a Republican platform. Not exactly Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney stuff.

For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that’s Moses, not Jesus. I haven’t heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere.

“Blessed are the merciful” in a courtroom? “Blessed are the peacemakers” in the Pentagon? Give me a break!

“For some reason, the most vocal christians among us never mention the beattitudes.” That sentence by itself says volumes. I long for the day when I hear of christian activists supporting a cause that bears any resemblance to something Jesus did or said, rather than working themselves up into a lather on issues that Christ was silent. In my younger days I was a bible reading sort, and I seem to recall lots of rhetoric about helping the helpless, feeding the hungry, loving those who don’t deserve it. Isn’t that the crux of all christianity? God loves you even though you didn’t earn it, so at a minimum you should pass that along. I see vanishingly little of that in modern christianity of all denominations. Anger, fear, hatred, strong-armed bully tactics – of those there is plenty. Simple love, allowing a little grace for the unredeemed, not much. This religion is a case study in cognitive dissonance.

Elswhere, he has this insight:

My government’s got a war on drugs. But get this: The two most widely abused and addictive and destructive of all substances are both perfectly legal.

One, of course, is ethyl alcohol. And President George W. Bush, no less, and by his own admission, was smashed or tiddley-poo or four sheets to the wind a good deal of the time from when he was 16 until he was 41. When he was 41, he says, Jesus appeared to him and made him knock off the sauce, stop gargling nose paint.

Other drunks have seen pink elephants.

And do you know why I think he is so pissed off at Arabs? They invented algebra. Arabs also invented the numbers we use, including a symbol for nothing, which nobody else had ever had before. You think Arabs are dumb? Try doing long division with Roman numerals.

I mourn in advance the loss of this philospher’s voice. Until that day, keep roaring against the tide Brother Vonnegut!

Thermal Depolymerization

A little over a year ago, I blogged about the thermal depoloymerization process that turns any carbon based refuse into oil. Well, the first plant using that process is online, according to this press release. It’s only doing between 100 and 200 barrels of day, but that’s all material that would have entered the waste processing system and will now be serving as energy. I think this direction has enormous potential and provokes an extreme feeling of optimism in me. What I’d like to see is that when it runs at its peek output of 500 barrels, what is the time required to recoup the bulding of the plant itself? I’m dreaming of a future where every trash dump and waste treatment system runs through this, changing our energy system from extraction based to recovery based. It could be an energotopia.

O Degrees

I’m not necessarily the most gregarious person in the world, but through luck of the draw I tend to know a lot of people. It’s kind of a joke around our house about how often we’ll walk into some off the wall place and I’ll know somebody there. Tonight we went to a soup party thrown by someone she met randomly on the Northwestern campus and damned if I didn’t know someone there. The host went to Georgia Tech and we knew that a few of the people were going to be his friends from GT. As we were walking around, sure enough I saw I guy I knew from WREK. This really does happen absurdly often and it is kind of fun to walk into some random party in a different city or a rest area in the middle of nowhere and run into friends and acquaintances.

Gavin King and Scott Stark Talk

The CJUG meeting last Tuesday was pretty good, but not as good as I was expecting. Part of it just had to do with the topics. Gavin King talked about EJB, Hibernate and the EJB 3.0 spec. Much of the talk was about the history of EJB, how Hibernate solved some of the problems and how much of what is really Hibernate type strategies will be rolled into the new EJB 3.0. That is mostly not of that much interest to me. I could care less about the history of EJB. As someone who has been using Hibernate for around a year now in ways large and small, I’d rather have had a more down and dirty Hibernate talk. It felt like a missed opportunity to have him right there and not get some tips on how to do real day-to-day work with this tool.

Scott Stark’s talk was better than I was expecting, but only because my expectations were so low. I don’t care too much about JBoss one way or the other. I may use it some day or maybe not. I was interested in the “aspect oriented” nature of where JBoss is heading, which is less as a heavy monolithic program and more as a collection of small services that can be used ala carte to provide what are needed. As he described it, these would mostly be as “decorators” on top of the communication paths.

So, all in all it was worth going to and it had a big turnout but it wasn’t what I was hoping it would be.

Seven open source business strategies

Here’s an interesting article that describes seven ways in which companies can make money from an open-sourced codebase. I’ve always said that I liked the strategy of giving away the product but charging out the wazoo for consulting from the highly knowledgable people on the development team. I know that, for example, this is how Cayenne is structured, and I presume how people that work on Struts or Hibernate make some money too. This article looks at that in a much more nuanced way, breaking down and classifying similar but non-identical approaches. Well worth a read.

Hibernate at CJUG

Tomorrow is the Chicago Java Users Group meeting with Scott Stark (CTO of JBoss) and Gavin King (chief Hibernate dude.) Tomorrow, Tuesday May 18th at 6:15 PM at 111 N. Canal Street, for those of you in the Chicago area that want to attend. Don’t eat ahead of time, there will be pizza at the meeting (yummy Giordano’s unless they have changed pizza providers since the last time I went.)

Week 7

This morning I weighed 233, down 2 pounds from last week and 13 from baseline. I had a couple of lapses, including allowing myself 3 of the big triple chocolate cookies from Dominick’s (Safeway). Man those are tasty! By and large, I’m just eating less (but not enough less to be hungry), drinking more water and water in place of diuretic caffeine laced things like diet coke and coffee, and eating less crap. When I do have the urge to snack I eat pistachios, always in the shell. That 5 seconds to get it out of the shell is the difference between eating 10 of them and 100. If there were unshelled, you could just dump a handful in your mouth – having to chew them individually actually makes the snack urge go away when you have eaten just a few of them.

iBook vs. PowerBook

JonnyX sent me this link to an interesting article comparing the iBook line to the PowerBook line. The ultimate conclusion is that the iBooks are pretty durned good, and the delta is not as big as it once was. Good to hear, since my iBook is coming regardless what the article says.

JonnyX also tells me about some guys who set up something that would communicate the IP address of the notebook every time it connected to the internet. That way, if someone steals it you can use that information to try to track them down. I believe I shall do that!

Update: As eagle-eyed readers will note, I forgot to include the goldurned link to the article! Damn Mondays.

“Windshield Wiper” Scanner

Correspondent Mike emailed me to tell me about these cool and small scanners that really do look like windshield wipers. Their web page says a Mac version is on the way. The thing has 2 megs of flash ROM onboard and according to the webpage brochure-speak can store “up to 100 pages” which you can then offload to the computer later. Highly cool!

Spotted in the Server Logs

There is one other person who aggregates this blog with Shrook. I wonder if this means we’ll both see new items appear approximately twice as fast now as I used to see them. On average we’ll have twice the opportunities for one of us to have seen the new entry and posted that fact to the central server. I’m still having crashing problems with Shrook, now related to un-marking items while I am in the marked items view. Last night doing my big collective posts of lots of saved stuff, I had it crash a few times.

Your Guide to Spotting the North American Rock Critic

Here’s a funny essay that I found randomly whilst googling for something. It’s a pissy guide to the various classifications of rock critics. These include The Indie Thug, The Zeitgeist Obsessive, The Harmless Shill and others. My favorite, because I think it is the funniest and truest to life (also the most annoying of all types and thanks to VH1 highly visible lately) is the Keeper of the Cannon. Here is the full entry for this one:

KEEPER OF THE CANON: Every so often Rolling Stone or some of the mainstream non-music magazines such as Time or Newsweek or Life will publish some sort of “Rock’s Greatest Suchandsuch Of All Time” list crammed to the gills with very, very predictable entries. Every time you see Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band or Exile On Main Street or Pet Sounds listed as the Greatest Album Ever, the Keeper Of The Canon (KotC for short) is usually to blame. KotCs are straight-up boomer rock goons, the kinds of people who still insist that Woodstock was the best concert ever and music went right down the toilet when disco and punk showed up. Certain circles refer to these types of critics as “rockists” (defined as people who measure all popular music by the standards of rock and roll, which they consider in its purest form a genre that will never ever ever be bested in a million years especially by some sissypants synth-dance), and are usually worked up into a foamy lather at the typical decrees of said rockists (“Music today is all a buncha crap! The Doobie Brothers, now there was a band!”). While KotCs are growing increasingly rare in today’s new-youth-now culture — rearing their heads mostly on VH1 specials or in five-star Mick Jagger solo album reviews — they still have enough clout in the rock journo media to keep things nice and safe because god forbid someone out there thinks there exists a band better than the Beatles (doubly so if they released their first album after 1977).

Fun Fact: On very rare occasions, you might be able to coax a KotC into admitting his grudging respect and/or appreciation of one rap album. That rap album will always be Public Enemy’s It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back.

I’ve had an essay festering inside me for a long time about the corrosive effect of the Baby Boomers and their ubiquitous music on the last 30 years of popular music. It was prompted by a very long post on SFF.net by an odd science fiction writer who claimed that no music of the last 30 years can touch that of the decade of ~1964-1974 or so. I remember the statement along the lines of “this generation (meaning mine, Generation X) hasn’t produced a ‘Love Reign O’er Me'”, to which I thought “Of course not, the goddamned original is still playing 3 times a day on every goddamned classic rock station in the US. Why on earth would we need another one? The Baby Boomers didn’t and couldn’t produce a ‘Heart Shaped Box’ or ‘I Wanna Be Sedated’ or ‘Summerland’ or ‘How Soon is Now’ or ‘Where is My Mind’ but we aren’t allowed to hold that against them.” One of these days I’ll write that essay. If I could ever turn up the original post I would. It’s hard to react to something by memory, but that post really ignited and focussed my general tendency towards simmering anger and resentment at the Baby Boomers and the way they trample all culture beneath their many feet while claiming their successors will never comprehend just how good everything was before they wrecked it. Bleh, I’m getting pissed off again just thinking about all this.

Music, RIAA, Financial Monkeyshines

Another post of stuff that I’m clearning out of my Shrook saved list, this time all about music and downloading and the RIAA. Let’s start off with the prototypical RIAA story, one that puts it all their moralizing in perspective:

Via BoingBoing comes this story of how major record companies had to be sued to actually pay out $50 million in royalties that they had collected but not disbursed. They claim it was because they lost contact with the musicians and couldn’t send them checks, but the list of those owed money includes P. Diddy, Dolly Parton, Gloria Estefan and other very hard-to-lose artists. Remember this kind of malfeasance when the RIAA talks about how downloading screws artists out of money. What they really mean is “it is the job of our member labels to screw artists out of money and we resent anyone else trying to get into the act.”

From BoingBoing (a lot of these are from BoingBoing) comes this story about a study that correlates file-sharing versus album sales and finds no negative impact. Here is the PDF of the study. The RIAA contends this study is “incomplete and flawed”. Ed Felten writes a analysis of a “grand unified theory of filesharing” which incorporates the findings from several of these studies. He breaks down filesharers into two classes – the “Freeriders” and the “Samplers.” Interesting stuff.

As if that wasn’t enough to shoot holes in the RIAA assertion of monetary losses, BoingBoing points out this story that actually sales are up. The RIAA is claiming lost sales because they are shipping fewer discs, but retailers are actually selling more CDs. The discrepancy comes from the amount of inventory on hand. Retailers are making smaller orders, selling more, and returning fewer discs via the distribution channels. This should be good for everyone because the costs go down, but this is the evidence that the RIAA uses to show they are incurring fiscal harm from downloading – one that ultimately has them making more money than they did a few years ago. As you can see, this organization is institutionally in aggregate lying sacks of shit.

Via Cult of Mac comes this story in the New York Times about the iTunes Music Store. It points out that iTunes has redefined the unit of consumption from the CD to the song, and that with the playlist sharing it allows for much more eclectic tastes to be supported than with CDs. I love Donnie Iris’ song from the 80’s “Ah Leah” but I’m not planning on buying any of his CDs anytime soon. I might be willing to pop for $0.99 for that song though.

Via BoingBoing is a link to a PDF of a report from Pew Internet and American Life Project that says that while musicians are of mixed opinions towards filesharing in general, they really dislike the RIAA suing their fans on their behalf.

When asked what impact free downloading on the Internet has had on their careers as musicians, 37% say free downloading has not really made a difference, 35% say it has helped and 8% say it has both helped and hurt their career. Only 5% say free downloading has exclusively hurt their career and 15% of the respondents say they don’t know…

67% say artists should have complete control over material they copyright and they say copyright laws do a good job of protecting artists…

Some 60% of those in the sample say they do not think the Recording Industry Association of America’s suits against online music swappers will benefit musicians and songwriters. Those who earn the majority of their income from music are more inclined than “starving musicians” to back the RIAA, but even those very committed musicians do not believe the RIAA campaign will help them. Some 42% of those who earn most of their income from their music do not think the RIAA legal efforts will help them, while 35% think those legal challenges will ultimately benefit them.

Via BoingBoing comes this link to a guy who Cory Doctorow went to school with and now is a copyright reformer who tracks the history of the music industry fighting current technologies in this PDF paper. The quote from Sousa is by itself worth downloading and reading the paper – image a stirring march playing while you read it:

These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country. When I was a boy…in front of every house in the summer evenings, you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal chord left. The vocal chord will be eliminated by a process of evolution, as was the tail of man when he came from the ape.

The history of the music industry fighting new technology because of the harm it will inflict on the status quo is long and hallowed. Before filesharing was the death of the music industry, other deaths included CD burners, DAT machines, cassette machines, reel-to-reel recorders, radio, player piano rolls, and printed copies of sheet music. One can only wonder what will be the future deaths of the recording industry.

Spanish Crash

It only makes sense that every class is the hardest one yet. This week, though, my Spanish class competely kicked my ass. There is some kind of linguistic Peter Principle at work, and I feel like I have risen to my own level of incompetence. I need more studying, that’s for sure. I only take comfort in the fact that I used to not be understanding simple things, and now I am not understanding much more advanced topics.

Freecycle

Via Gapers Block I first heard about Freecycle. It is an interesting idea – a group of people who give away stuff that they would otherwise pitch and put into the landfills. I like the idea, but balked when I see that the way you get involved – at least in Chicago – is by joining a Yahoogroups mailing list with over 2000 members and over 500 emails a month. Yikes, I don’t need that in my life. What would be good is some way to tie this in with listings on Craigslist or something that doesn’t require getting a zillion individual mails or scanning a bulging digest every day.

Geek for Change

If you are a LAMP type programmer and live around Washington DC or are willing to move there, they are looking for a programmer for the Kerry campaign. This at least assures that you have a job for 6 more months. I remember seeing a similar job posting for the Clark campaign the day before he dropped out of the race.

New Plugins

While I was in with the plugins anyway, I fixed a problem with my date that may have been causing some of you to see this page never refresh unless you manually hit reload. For some reason, my lastmodified plugin was always setting a time of 0 (Jan 1, 1970) in the heading. I fixed that, so it should behave a little more normally. I also added one that will set a cookie when you visit and will give a little “New” message for the entries that have appeared since your last visit. I’m not sure if this one works or not. I’ll know after this entry is published, I guess.

Just for Chris

I went into the writebackplus plugin code and altered it so that HTML links can be written into the comments. By default, all the less than characters get escaped unless they are followed by a “p” or a “br” (either with or without a “/” between). I added “a” as something to exclude, as well as made the regular express case insensitive. This doesn’t change old comments automatically because it does this as it writes the file but from here on out you can include links in the comments. Part of the rationale for leaving them out is that link spammers use them, but then they use the URL field of the comment as well anyway, so they still can sneak a link in regardless.