the change I wish to see in the world

I would like to see the entire human population be able to ask about, discuss, and vote on things to do.

This implies several preconditions that the entire human population must have:

Adequate nutrition and freedom from toxins

A healty adult human of whole mind is the consequence of a host of material prerequisites. It comes as no surprise that the absence of these material needs during the development of the mind can substantially impair its function. These needs are remarkably simple to meet given modern technology. In what can only be considered a colossal failure of morality, some two billion people suffer from some form of malnourishment today.

• Humans that are deprived of nutrition, particularly at a young age, are prone to a constellation of neurological disorders that limit their ability to think and communicate. This sort of developmental handicapping cannot be reversed by current medicine or social practice, and therefore needs to end.
• Humans that are exposed to environmental toxins suffer from a variety of developmental maladies that are also permanent.

Heath care sufficient to be free of illnesses that impact their ability to communicate, cogitate, and choose.

While much health care extends individuals abilities, a basic level of lifetime preventative care is the most significant variable in illnesses’ tendency to cripple decisionmaking.

Freedom from abuse

Humans subject to slavery and other forms of abuse suffer permanent neurological consequences that make them particularly subject to unethical forms of suasion.

Access to communications technologies that allow freedom of association.

Humans expend a good deal of effort in limiting individual freedom of association. Assotiation is an important prerequisite to community participation. Communications technologies have already enhanced association in ways that are difficult to suppress through social action; bringing these technologies in a distributed fashion to all will help minimize the effects of sequestration and segmentation tactics.

Energetic resources

Individuals must be able to cause material changes in their environment in order to “do” anything. Lack of access to energy resources keeps many communities from enacting changes that have already been discussed and agreed upon.

Dooce, easily the best ‘domestic writing’ among the writers whose feeds this nesting-happy yuppie reads, bridges the gap between my own gratuitously cerebral ass and her limbic take:

[…] and you can’t wait to get back home so you can read the new research on intracerebral aneurysms because THAT IS WHAT GETS YOU HOT. I‘m not saying that there’s anything wrong with that, but normal people? Normal people want a bag of Doritos and a ball rub and they’ll roll over satisfied.My time would be better spent reading literature, but this is so much more fun

Although, upon reflection, I empathised strongly with her take as well. I’m a total sucker for shows like that, and I have a hard time avoiding emotionally identifiying with even the most crudely drawn character. I have also pined desperately for a chance to read, for example, corticolimbic mechanisms in emotional decisions rather than continue at the social gathering I am in.

But Odin’s Day was better.

Today was better. I put together a spiffy little frog dissection workbook, and the kids seemed to get into the class. The highlight of the day was experiencing the reactions of the teenager when I pulled her frog’s skull and eyeballs out of her specimen, cracked it open, and showed her how tiny his brain was.

I got reminded that I’m asking some hard questions, and shown the tested reading level of my students. I definitely need to make my teaching more accessable to them. I haven’t been so acutely aware of my lack of Spanish knowledge as in this class.

However, there’s at least one student who is going like me – she’s five grades ahead in her reading level, but she’s getting straight D’s in school. I am trying to think of ways to challenge her and the three other students in my class who seem to want to excel. If anyone has ideas for that that don’t amount to tracking, let me know.

But Odin’s Day was better.

Today was better. I put together a spiffy little frog dissection workbook, and the kids seemed to get into the class. The highlight of the day was experiencing the reactions of the teenager when I pulled her frog’s skull and eyeballs out of her specimen, cracked it open, and showed her how tiny his brain was.

I got reminded that I’m asking some hard questions, and shown the tested reading level of my students. I definitely need to make my teaching more accessable to them. I haven’t been so acutely aware of my lack of Spanish knowledge as in this class.

However, there’s at least one student who is going like me – she’s five grades ahead in her reading level, but she’s getting straight D’s in school. I am trying to think of ways to challenge her and the three other students in my class who seem to want to excel. If anyone has ideas for that that don’t amount to tracking, let me know.

Last Post

Afore I come back, most likely. Here are two papers – my term paper for Writing, written to be accessable to the general public, and my term paper for Psychology, written to be accessable to my professor. The first is Media in Mind; the second is The Topology of Semantic Memory. Both have some rough edges, and are in the dreaded PDF format; more polished web-accessable versions will arrive when I’m back from the Danish wilds.

snap!

Kate Sandler gives an extraordinary rebuttal of an intemperate essay about the recently dead.

Loving families

I now have a loving family I adore, yet there was a time when I could have sent this postcard ( from Post Secret).

Britannica: The Old Guard

Britannica is the oldest English-language encyclopedia, published since 1768. The first edition was printed in Scotland, and was an instrument of the Enlightenment that fomented there.

The former Editor in Chief of the Britannica does not have a high opinion of Wikipedia; he calls it “the Faith Based Encyclopedia”. Wikipedia offers a “random page” feature; Britannica does not. I used it to choose 5 articles, and attempted to find the same, or a similar article in Britannica. I’m not providing links to any of the Britannica articles because it is behind a paywall and I’m accessing it via reverse proxy.

The first random page was “Cahoots”, an album put out by a band called The Band. Wikipedia features the album, reviews, a picture of the album cover, and a link to an article about The Band itself. Britannica has an article for The Band that mentions “Cahoots”. It has no links to reviews, but there are two ‘interactive’ shockwave elements that look like they’re from the CD version. Both come out strong on this one; Wikipedia has more links to other sources, but Britannica has more media.

Next article was Hillsdale, New Jersey. Wikipedia features a map that shows the borough’s relationship to its county and New Jersey as a whole, GPS coordinates, demographics, and links to the official site along with other map and photo information. Britannica mentions it in its entry on New Jersey. Wikipedia took the prize this round.

Then came the Chislehurst Caves, which are abandoned mines in Chiselhurst, England. Wikipedia has two paragraphs about them; one about their history and another about their mythology, with two links, one to the ‘official’ page, and the other to an English guidebook’s opinion of the area, which itself runs to over a page. Wikipedia again.

The page on John Murray Gibbon was a brief two-paragraph discussion of the Canadian historian, and his advocacy of folk arts. There was no information on him in Britannica.

Wikipedia has a paragraph or so page on Dollis Hill, an area of London, England. It describes its location, how it got its name, and famous residents and visitors. Britannica mentions the Dollis Hill house when discussing the borough of Brent.

While both Britannica and Wikipedia show a strong Anglo-Saxon bent, Wikipedia is clearly the more useful reference source, if only for its extensive linking to other reference sources. That seems to obliterate the argument advanced by the Britannica editor – that it was a bad thing for the unwashed masses to be able to change anything – the level of trust you need to click on a link is really low, and it’s obvious (and rapidly remedied) when that trust is breached.

I am a horrible person to have on a tech support line

Here’s the context. I have a SuperDrive in my PowerMac G5 2GHz that intermittently fails to read certain data CDs. It has essentially no problem (aside from shitty error recovery from read failures) reading DVDs. It has no problem reading CD-Rs. But it does have a problem where it gets locked in seeking for the start of the disk, and seeks over and over again for minutues before ejecting. It does this on bootup, before the OS is loaded. These CDs work flawlessly in Vika’s 12″ PowerBook G4. I do not have any original media for this machine anymore.

Now, I make bupkus. Of that bupkus, Apple Corporation receives more than what the Catholic Church would have asked of me were I not an apostate. I paid $200 to get the extra-special care package, and I spent more money than was strictly rational to get this tower.

I am invariably wildly irrational with people who walk through a script without understanding the context, ask me to do things I’ve already tried, and then don’t know enough about the boot sequence to recognize that a drive error before the root partition is found is not the fucking OS’s fault.

When I beg him to at least note the fact that data CDs placed in other drives don’t run on this drive, he refused. I suggested that while Apple did not see fit to actually require any product knowledge, they surely required him to be able to type.

We went back and forth like that for a while. Eventually he put me on hold having not typed anything. After 10minutes, someone else comes on the line, and I made an ass of myself carrying over my frustration from the last conversation.

Finally he agrees to a replacement. I ask him if I can pay extra to have a better drive than the one I started. He said there was no way to do that.

I guess it’s time to install Linux, and see if I can wean myself off of Apple hardware.

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Conclusion: The replacement drive arrived. It works flawlessly. Thanks for making me waste three hours of my life proving that my drive was dysfunctional, Apple.

funniest. cat and girl. ever.

Tom Tom Club