Arguments about checks on power often elicit the claim that the checks are unnecessary because whoever is in power is clearly trustworthy and would never exercise the power without some compelling reason. This naturally makes almost no sense, because if they have a compelling reason, the people in charge of the checks will recognize this and go along with it. The claim is then made that those in charge of the checks will “play politics” and/or “move too slowly”—establishing a conflict between a leader who needs to act quickly and decisively in a crisis and some faceless committee of bureaucrats who don’t care about resolving the crisis.
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I wanted to write a satirical version of this report, but the report itself, and the direct quotes in it, read like satire to me already.
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My reactions are probably out of proportion at this stage, but Senator Dianne Feinstein drives me crazy. Her actions on the Southwick nomination were terrible, she’s way further to the right than her constituency, and then there’s stuff like this:

After a breakfast of scrambled eggs, sausage and French toast, Bush popped back for what [Feinstein] described as a frank two-hour conversation, mostly about foreign policy.

“I found the discussion extraordinarily positive,” Feinstein said. “I came away with a very different view about him.”

As for the president’s performance on the ground?

“It was a wonderful thing to see, to be candid,” Feinstein said. “I saw a warm, caring human being.”
—Matier & Ross, San Francisco Chronicle, 28 Oct 2007

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This video is the “one to twelve” pinball cartoon that used to be on Sesame Street. I recall it as being my favorite thing on the show, apart perhaps from some of Kermit the Frog’s reporting (I always loved Kermit). I remember watching the show and hoping for the pinball cartoon, and not being sure why.

Watching it now reminds me of that feeling, reminds me of the Bronx, and makes me consider the state of consciousness I had as a child. It must have been quite different to have been so fascinated by the shows I was fascinated by, and yet there’s a very strong common thread of thought from that child to who I am now. And it’s still fun to watch the cartoon…

“They” refers to the people who run this country, the political establishment—not just politicians but the various big shots who control most of the wealth and power. They’re getting away with what seems like an awful lot these days, what with continuing an unpopular and illegal war that they started on false pretenses, torturing people, imprisoning people without charge, brazenly running a surveillance state, presiding over a continuing massive transfer of wealth to the rich, stifling (and in some cases attempting to effectively criminalize) dissent… it goes on and on.
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I came out of it almost without injury and am fine, but yesterday I had my first collision with a car while riding my bike in San Francisco—a span of more than seven years of near-daily cycling.
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The story about a University of Florida student being tasered by campus police at a John Kerry speech is all over the net at this point. It’s fairly grotesque, although I think the UCLA campus library incident from last year was even worse. As then, however, one of the most disturbing things about it are the commenters who emerge to justify the violence perpetrated by the authorities.
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There’s some of this in other automobile-centric countries too, but somehow it seems worse in America. A significant proportion of drivers here seem to really hate cyclists. I have a hard time understanding it, but I’ve encountred a lot of articles recently where commentary is virulently anti-cyclist, to the point of advocating violence against people on bicycles.
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Six years ago, I first heard about the planes on SlashDot. I thought it was a hoax, someone hacking their submission system, at first. I wasn’t as accustomed to getting my non-tech news online, then, and went to cnn.com, and from there to CNN on television, to find out that it was no hoax.
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I’m reading Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs at the moment. It’s an exploration of what Levy calls “raunch culture”, the pornographization of American mainstream culture. One of her points that I think is worth examining is the distinction between sexiness and sexuality.
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Focus can achieve some rather amazing things. I was reminded of this recently when a friend of mine mentioned a linguist in Berkeley who knows (apparently to a relatively high standard) over ninety languages. Part of the key to this rather amazing feat was the fact that he spent several years in Korea doing nothing but eating, sleeping, exercising, teaching occasional classes, and being what he termed a “language monk”—that is, spending the rest of the time on language learning. Since his teaching was in linguistics, it didn’t distract him from his main focus, and he hence learned at a prodigious rate.

I was also reminded of this by the discovery of this Star Wars fan-produced lightsaber duel. With obsessive focus, people can create rather impressive creations.
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After my last post on suggestibility, I wasn’t sure whether or not I was overly gullible regarding Derren Brown’s claims.
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I’ve written more fiction in the last eight days than I have in years, with seven finished stories (some of them even too long to count as microfiction). I’ve also been working on the second draft of my science fiction novel, and on a short story that’s been in my head for more than a decade.
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I love table tennis. It’s a fantastic game, and one that I’ve loved for years. I played it a fair amount in college, which is when I became good enough at it to really enjoy it. Since then I’ve played it very little, but Metaweb has a table, and that’s reminded me how great it is.
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I’m currently reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness, which is excellent, and which I’ll probably write more posts about once I’ve finished it. Right now, I find quite striking his approach to overcoming human irrationality: he assumes that overcoming it is near-impossible and so seeks instead to avoid triggering it.

For example, he writes about how status is extremely relative, such that a family with an income of about $500K/year who live on Park Avenue feel like complete losers because they associate with much wealthier people. He then notes that they could try to rationally overcome their feelings of status anxiety (by comparing themselves to the larger population), but that this is unlikely to be effective, and his suggestion is to move to a poorer neighborhood and associate with poorer people. The irrational status comparisons will continue, but now they’ll be more favorable.
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At the Gas and Oil Exposition in Calgary, representatives of the US-based National Petroleum Council and ExxonMobil gave a presentation on how to make gasoline from human remains, projected to be much easier to acquire as climate change kills an increasing number of people.

This turned out to be a hoax perpetrated by The Yes Men, who do specialize in this kind of thing.
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After some IM discussion about the tendency that humans have to over- or underestimate risks (a topic that I’ll probably post about fairly soon) and about how our belief structures will tend to alter our risk and probability projections (a topic I touch on frequently) my friend Brian passed along links to some Derren Brown videos. Derren Brown is a kind of “magician”/con artist/hypnotist. I’d never heard of him before, but watching his videos has made me reconsider quite a bit about human nature.
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It struck me this weekend that there are significant advantages in having large extended families, not merely in standrd labor-sharing terms but also in terms of the likelihood of a greater range of experience.
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Yesterday I decided to attempt the Tuesday Guardian’s “Countdown” nine-letter anagram, which was CUPTIEMAN. I spent maybe thirty minutes on it in total during the day, getting more or less nowhere, trying a bunch of likely-two letter combinations to begin the word that didn’t help me.
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After almost five years, I am no longer working at Nimblefish. I started freelancing at Nimblefish on Tuesday 09 September 2002, so that’s four years and eight months there. I was at their current offices in downtown San Francisco from when they moved in there, and was full-time there for four years and five months. It’s difficult for me to believe that I was there that long, and difficult to believe that I’m no longer there.
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I’m making an effort to use Zipcar a little less (despite how great it is) and cycle more. Naturally, the first time I choose to cycle where I’d previously been using Zipcar, it rains.
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I’ve been doing well in eliminating “time-wasting” activities. The main one that remains is still web surfing. I’ve managed to get rid of a lot of that at work, which is good, but still do it at other times. Especially in the morning.
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Organization makes a lot of things an awful lot easier. This is pretty obvious, but what’s been surprising to me are two ancillary points: small amounts of organization can make a big difference, and small amounts of disorganization can terminate entire projects.
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