I’m going to have to balance the slightly more serious tone of that last post with the goofiness of Hulk Hands!
These were given to my nephew Aidan, who had his second birthday party on Saturday. They make roaring sounds just like everyone’s favourite gamma-iraradiated sociopath whenever you hit something with them. Unfortunately, strange noises scare the little fella, so right now, it’s the grown-ups who’ve been having fun with this gift.
Bush said he insulates himself from the “opinions” that seep into news coverage by getting his news from his own aides. He said he scans headlines, but rarely reads news stories.
“I appreciate people’s opinions, but I’m more interested in news,” the president said. “And the best way to get the news is from objective sources, and the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what’s happening in the world.”
I didn’t know “objective” meant “hand-picked sycophants who are on your payroll”.
Keep in mind that executive managers of all stripes — from the president of the United States of America to someone who runs a day care centre — is going to need the “big-picture view” of what’s going on and will rely their subordinates to give them a short precis of what’s going on. That’s why they’re called “executive summaries”.
That being said, all news is subjective. Anything that someone tells you is filtered through their own particular worldview, which is influenced by their education, knowledge, socio-politico-complexo-migraino leanings and all those other niggly details that make each person unique. It’s not that Bush (or for that matter, any of us) want objective news, he wants news that fits his worldview. Unfortunately (or fortunately, for the disciples of Supply Side Jesus), Bush’s idea of “objective news” is probably FOX News. Hey, it says ‘Fair and Balanced’ right on the label!
The myth of “objective” news, according to Ben Bagdikian in his book The Media Monopoly, was created by newspapers in order to avoid alientating advertisers. Anyone who believes that any given newspaper is objective is a sucker and should apply to the Accordion Guy Remedial Media Literacy Course. For the low cost of just one Apple PowerBook a year*, I will tell you what to think!
Isn’t there a line in Macchiavelli’s The Prince that warns you about the dangers of surrounding yourself with yes-men and listening only to them? My copy’s nowhere near me, but I’m sure there’s a classics major among you…
(* I stole this idea from Cory Doctorow, whose plan is to keep himself on top of the tech wave by creating a religion where he is the chief cleric and adherents must buy him the latest and fastest PowerBook once a year. “I’d only have to recruit one person,” he says.)
Nerve gets it right about cats:
Attachment to a non-human mammal that doesn’t give a fuck about you bespeaks emotional damage. It’s the kind that transforms you from “alluringly quirky” to “certifiable.”
Remember, folks: Cats are not pets. They’re egg rolls waiting to happen.
Cats are but one of the fifty items on their “Unsexy List”. Yes, it’s filler written by a bunch of people who gathered in the Nerve.com employee lounge over Snackwell cookies (“they’re low fat!”) who’d be operating the fry machine at McDonald’s if there weren’t an Internet, but:
a) it’s sorta funny
b) you probably don’t want these people touching your food.
It’s very odd — last night, I stumbled across a CD of mine that the song Baker Street. Not the original version by Gerry Rafferty (Baker Street is from his 1978 album, City to City), the one with the killer sax riff by Raphael Ravenscroft, but a 1992 cover that stayed mostly true to the original, modifying it only slightly by palying it with a more “house music” rhythm (I hear the Foo Fighters have covered Baker Street, but I’ve never heard their version). While listening to it, two things came to mind:
(By the way, Accordion City is not quite like the city in the lyrics; as events like yesterday’s Kensington Market Festival go to show, it’s got quite a bit of soul.)
Wil McLean (“Half Scots, half Korean, all pimp!), who is my co-leader in our little gang known as “Asian Gang”, has posted his photos of the past couple of Kickass Karaokes on his new online album, Secret Asian Man. Here’s one with me and Dorian (who’s holding the mic up to the accordion’s sound grille) that could be a Calvin Klein ad, or maybe some kind of hipster beer commercial:
I was first introduced to Dav Pilkey’s work by a girlfriend back at Crazy Go Nuts University. She gave me a copy of The Dumb Bunnies, which Pilkey illustrated in his trademark style and is in my opinion, one of the best children’s books ever. There’s a copy right by my coffee table; drop by if you’re interested in giving it a read.
A couple of years later, I would discover that Pilkey was also a writer at the annual “Word on the Street” street fair, where Queen Street West is closed off to traffic so that bookstores and publishers of all stripes can sell their wares and authors can meet and read to their public. That’s where I discovered the “Captain Underpants” series in the form of the book Captain Underpants and the Perilous Plot of Professor Poopypants.
Yes, I’m serious. That is the title of the book, and I’m not making it up.
The Captain Underpants stories star two best friends, George and Harold, two smart kids with a penchant for mischief and mayhem, who somehow manage to hypnotize their hard-nosed killjoy of a school principal into believing he’s a superhero. Not any any ordinary superhero, mind you, but one who wears only a cape and his “tighty-whitey” cotton briefs. By coincidence and a freak accident, the principal actually gets super powers.
The real heroes of the stories are George and Harold, who not only created the good Captain, but also through their plotting and scheming, manipulate the Captain into saving the day. They’re the sort of smart kids who did poorly at school, finding standard academia so mind-numbingly dull and using their creative energies on writing, cartooning, playing pranks and getting into trouble. (Kind of like this accordion player I know…)
Through Metafilter, I found the blog Librarians Are Corrupting Kids, which led me to this USA Today interview with Pilkey, which in turn led me to his site, which contains his wonderful cartoon autobiography, The Almost Completely True Adventures of Dav Pilkey.
(You’ve got to love a guy who describes stories about his life as “adventures”!)
Cory Doctorow, being the Outreach Coordinator for the EFF — the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the good guys who campaign for civil liberties online — asked to make a mention of this important issue. The issue may seem merely technical, but it affects us all, and I’ve put it in layperson’s terms.
IEEE is short for Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a non-profit professional organization of engineers who work with electricity, electronics and computers. Their mission, as put forth on their web site, is “The IEEE promotes the engineering process of creating, developing, integrating, sharing, and applying knowledge about electro and information technologies and sciences for the benefit of humanity and the profession”. They do a lot of technical publishing, host conferences and quite often help to define standards (one example, the “FireWire” standard for high-speed computer interfaces, also know as IEEE 1394).
One standard that they’re currently working on is for electronic voting machines. Work on this standard arose from the voting debacle during the 2000 U.S. Presidential elections in Florida. Most of the work on this standard is nearly done, and the draft for it is currently out to ballot by voting members of the IEEE. Once finished and passed by the IEEE, the standard will be forwarded to ANSI — the American National Standards Institute — for final validation.
The IEEE sits on an advisory committee to the forthcoming Election Assistance Commission established by the Help America Vote Act. This means that this standard could ultimately be adopted broadly throughout the United States. The EFF summarizes: “In a very real sense, the future of democratic systems in the U.S. and around the world are implicated by this standard — the stakes couldn’t be higher.”
The IEEE working group for the voting machines created a design standard instead of a requirements standard.
(Those of you who are software engineering types are probably nodding your heads and saying “ah, I see.” I’ll explain for everyone else now.)
A requirements standard, simply put, is a document that describes what the end result should be. For instance, the requirements for a voting machine might be:
A design standard, on the other hand, describes how the end result shall be acheived. the deesign for a voting machine might be:
As you can probably tell, a requirements standard, while being more general, tends to be valid for a much longer period of time. Technologies change often, but most of the time, the needs addressed by those technologies don’t.
Simply put, they didn’t write a standard to address the problems with voting machines, they wrote one that simply says how they should be built.
Cory reports that in concentrating on the “how” and not the “what”, the standard fails to require or even recommend that voting machines be truly voter verified or verifiable. How this could’ve been missed by actual certified electrical engineers, but caught by me — a guy who failed out of electrical engineering at Crazy Go Nuts University (ranked 430 out of the 431 student in the class of ’91) — boggles the mind.
Not only did the IEEE write a design rather than a requirements standard, according to the EFF, they also followed the basic plans of current voting machines. They also say that they’ve heard disturbing things:
The EFF is concerned about this and is asking people to get involved. Go take a peek at the page devoted to this issue on their site to find out more. They’ve even provided a form that makes it very simple for you to voice your concerns about the voting machine standard.