What?

Tell me this is a joke. This is a joke, right? My joke-o-meter must be off. This is a joke, right? Right?

Two Towers Protest. Because Tolkien's title isn't sensitive to the delicate feelings of a post-9/11 American audience.

Wha?

Funny, Hollywood doesn't normally go around changing film titles when a car bomb exploads in Bali, or Israel, or Ireland. Which leads, regardless of the joke (or not) stature of the preceding, to this question: What makes the US's pain so damn special?

Me and Maps

I'm a nut for maps. Don't ask why, although, I think I get why, now, after all these years. Wanna hear it? Being as you're my captive audience I'll just nod your head for you..."Oh, goody, you do? That's so sweet." Here goes. I love maps because they do two things that are integral to how I deal with the world:

1. They provide [literally!] a birds-eye view of a set of information.
2. They do it all in a little-itty-bitty package! So compact, so neat, so tidy! Just metric OODLES of information waiting for my fingers to come a-questing way-o.

And I, personally, am all about expressing the highest layer of understanding in the minimum number of bytes. Perfect match.

So, Faz puts up a link to these map collections at the Library of Congress, and I just about died. Seriously, tunnel vision, white light, Edgar Cayce yelling "the water's fine", I kid you not.

So, wondering what to give the El Sid as a gift? Wonder no more! Maps! Topo maps! Reproductions of antique maps! Street maps! Tube maps! Surficial Geology of Alaska maps (oh, wait, got one of those already)...Karta Ledovitago moria i Vostochnago okeana, from 1844, which includes the Russian Far East and Alaska, Diego Gutierrez's 1562 Map of America, Rio Colorado of the West..., drawn by F.W. von Egloffstein, 1858... Maps, maps, be they large or quite dinky!

Excuse me, I need to go lie down.

You're Joking. You're Not Joking

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/09/30/national/main523711.shtml

"The TSA was created in response to the terrorist attacks. Congress set a Nov. 19 deadline for the agency to hire, train and deploy screeners to replace those working for private security firms."

"Federal screeners are now working at 160 of the nation's 429 commercial airports, the TSA said. Some of the 160 airports have federal screeners at all checkpoints and some have them only in some terminals."

"The federal screeners are [magically - sidra] supposed to be more attentive than the private screeners, Stempler said, and the remaining private screeners probably are doing better work because they hope to get better-paying jobs as federal screeners."

How condescending can you get? Oh, yeah, private screeners have a goal to work toward now. Now they have motivation. So, they'll work "better" and no more bomb-carrying idiots will get on a plane. All because they have a god-damn goal. Wups, I'd better re-check that bag, the scout from the Feds is supposed to be in the terminal today! Gotta look good, this could be my big break into the majors!

Give me air. Not that these people should want to a good job because they have, like, a work ethic, y'know?

The Right Words

"Their names we cannot list,
so many they are that lie
under the eternal guard of granite.

But know you who hear this,
No one is forgotten,
Nothing is forgotten."

-- Olga Berggolts


SINGAPORE: Three Singapore-based expatriates dead and five missing.
AUSTRALIA: Thirty dead, 113 with serious injuries and at least 160 missing.
BRITAIN: Nine dead, eight yet to be identified and 13 missing.
INDONESIA: Nine dead, 195 wounded.
BRAZIL: Two missing.
CANADA: Three wounded, one missing.
CHINA: One injured.
DENMARK: Two hurt, three missing.
ECUADOR: One dead.
FRANCE: Seven hurt, three seriously, and four missing.
GERMANY: One dead, 10 wounded and seven are missing.
GREECE: One hurt and one missing.
HONGKONG: Two British members of a Hong Kong rugby team killed, seven other team members missing.
ITALY: Six hurt.
JAPAN: Nine injured and several missing.
THE NETHERLANDS: One dead, two hurt and four missing.
NEW ZEALAND: One dead.
PORTUGAL: One missing, two hurt.
SOUTH AFRICA: One hurt, 19 missing.
SOUTH KOREA: Two missing.
SWEDEN: Three hurt, 10 missing.
SWITZERLAND: One dead, five hurt, two critically.
TAIWAN: Four missing.
UNITED STATES: Two killed, four hurt and five missing.

Novel Writing Month

I've decided not to sign up. Wait! Only because I wanted to start the novel early. I'm still aiming for a Nov 30 end date, but, since I started early I can't officially be in the contest. I'm OK with that.

But Sidra! It's only 2 weeks! You've been sitting on the novel outline since the end of August. Why crumble now?

Simple. A novelette I haven't mentioned before is done with the Nth draft -- maybe one more pass before I send it off for this quarter's Writer's of the Future contest. And it's the real reason I haven't been straining my tether on the novel. I've been knee-deep in a different genre.

I can write more than one short story "at once", sort of, but major revising on a novelette, and major new work on something four times its length? When I've never done anything as long as these before? No thanks.

But, it's now time for My First Novel™, or more properly, My First Novel With An Outline And More Than A Snowball's Chance Of Finishing™. MFN™ is probably an easier acronym to remember, though.

Things That Make Me Twitch

In a good way.

1. The Rosetta Project: http://www.rosettaproject.org:8080/live/ "a broad online survey and near permanent physical archive of 1,000 of the approximately 7,000 languages on the planet. "
2. The All-Species Foundation http://www.all-species.org/ "a non-profit organization dedicated to the complete inventory of all species of life on Earth within the next 25 years"
3. Project Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org "...to make information, books and other materials available to the general public in forms a vast majority of the computers, programs and people can easily read, use, quote, and search"

Learning

A very interesting review about an even more interesting-looking book landed in my lap this morning. Thanks, Kim! A Mind at a Time tackles why we have trouble learning, some times for all of us, lots of times for some of us.

One thing leapt out at me from the review (keep in mind I'm reading a review, not the book, at this moment), that I want to tease out:

"Instead of having children adapt to school, Levine urges schools to make accommodations for the rich variety of minds they face. Schools, he says, should reduce the amount of memorization required (many, many children have memory difficulties), not insist on speed at the expense of thoughtfulness, allow students multiple options for evaluation (not just traditional tests) and recognize that treating kids fairly does not mean treating them all the same way."

Which I agree with completely, by the way, while acknowledging the sheer impossibility of complete per-student customization of the teaching and learning experience. I do think a happy medium, better than the one we have, can be achieved.

What struck me was the parenthetical remark that many children have memory difficulties. We do? Did I? I have no idea, and of course from this it's not clear exactly what "memory difficulties" means, in the context of this book's discussion.

There's really no way to try to assess this, but...have we always been this way? Or might there be an organic element at play, causing it? Like...oh, chemicals in the water, too much TV, not enough nurturing between the ages of 2 and 2.175 years, alien abductions, government mind control, etc., etc.... You know the drill.

Just a thought.

Globalization

Navigating the Ethics of Globalization, with, as a bonus, interesting parallels between Austro-Hungary's behaviour prior to WWI, and the US's response to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Very, very interesting.

"There is a strong ethical case for saying that it is wrong for leaders to give absolute priority to the interests of their own citizens. The value of the life of an innocent human being does not vary according to nationality. But, it might be said, the abstract ethical idea that all humans are entitled to equal consideration cannot govern the duties of a political leader. Just as parents are expected to provide for the interests of their own children, rather than for the interests of strangers, so too in accepting the office of president of the United States, President Bush has taken on a specific role that makes it his duty to protect and further the interests of Americans. Other countries have their leaders, with similar roles in respect to the interests of their fellow citizens."

"We have lived with the idea of sovereign states for so long that they have come to be part of the background not only of diplomacy and public policy but also of ethics. Implicit in the term "globalization" rather than the older "internationalization" is the idea that we are moving beyond the era of growing ties between nations and are beginning to contemplate something beyond the existing conception of the nation-state. But this change needs to be reflected in all levels of our thought, and especially in our thinking about ethics."

Carefully considered and well-written.

thanks for the tip, SC!

Opera

I've never been to the opera. I like listening to it. Now that I live in Southern California again, close to opera buff Janis, we...are...going...to...The Opera™. (Having a Kirk-pause moment it seems. *clears throat* There, it's passed.)

Anywhoo, at some point later this year, actually February of the next, we will see Fidelio (Beethoven), Otello (Verdi), and Therese Raquin (Tobias Picker), at the San Diego Opera. Cool, huh?

Not all at once. Sheesh, don't look so worried.

Why, we'll be just like yogurt! Cultured and everything!

Thanks

T&M: Thanks for the birthday present!

Clinton, Britain, and Iraq

From the Scotsman, Oct 3 2002:

Bill Clinton gave his full and unequivocal backing to Tony Blair on Iraq yesterday, declaring that the Prime Minister was the only man who could unite the world against Saddam Hussein....

Mr Clinton appeared to give his reluctant backing to military action as a last resort, but stressed the UN had to be given the chance to secure the return of its weapons inspectors to Iraq first....

He also said he wanted to see "regime change" in Baghdad, but that this should come about in "non-military ways"....

Mr Clinton argued the first priority should be to defeat al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, something he claimed should have been completed before the focus was turned on Iraq....

Mr Clinton admitted the US did not do enough to support international organisations. In a blunt warning to Mr Bush, he said: "You can't have an integrated world and have your say all the time. America can't dominate and run the world in that direction."

Gosh. That just sounds so...so...so darn sensible. You go, Bill.

Zope is Zope

Today I installed Squishdot on a 2.5x implementation of Zope. This product took more time to download [and downloading took approximately .0001 seconds] than it did to get it up and running. [Bear in mind that Zope was a previous install and I knew it already worked.] Squishdot's a slashdot-similar weblog tool, hence the name.

I'm genuinely impressed. By contrast, I was looking at the install of WebGUI we have to toy with, here [I have lots to toy with, here], and being vaguely dissatisfied with the User Content Submission System, so I modified that code to produce something more weblog-gy about 2 weeks ago. I keep detailed docs on what I do, and a work-blog is a reasonable format, thus this had immediate use for me. It's all in case I get hit by a bus tomorrow. No need to summon me in a seance just to ask what the status of my last projects were.

Either interface and back-end is fine for someone like Sidra At Work(tm) -- a simple work log, no threading, no discussions, basically no bells, whistles, or ding-a-lings (patent pending), so it's not like the up-and-running time makes a big difference. It's my job.

But the ease of gearing up Squishdot is certainly a plus when we're looking at interfaces [the average poster and a blog/project's manager] for use outside the MIS department.

Happy Birthday, Good Twin!

From the Evil(tm) one.

[Being a twin means learning the "you cut, I choose" strategy for sharing very early on in life. Not a bad thing, IMO.]

Harry Potter Letter Campaign

I've just been informed of a letter-writing campaign to promote the casting of Jason Carter (imdb() ref) as Sirius Black in the upcoming third Harry Potter film, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. For those non-HP-book-readers, one thing of relevance to you is that SB does appear in later books as well.

For more information, visit the campaign itself.

Why is This a Big Deal?


From Reuters

A divided Senate will begin a fifth week of debate on Monday on legislation to create the department, as Democratic and Republican negotiators try to strike a compromise on a dispute over labor protections for the 170,000 workers that would fall under the massive proposed agency.

"I'm for workers rights ... but in the name of national security this administration, future administrations, need flexibility to put people in the right place at the right time in order to protect America from an enemy which still wants to hurt us," Bush told political donors in Denver.

Okay. What is the big deal? I mean, what is so special about the Department of Homeland Security [I mean, aside from the facist name, initial legislation creating it passing at warp speed with little to no oversight, and general Bad Idea-ness(tm), IMO] that the anticipated 170,000 workers to be employed there should be denied certain labor protections already enjoyed by other government employees?

The implication in Bush's remarks is that the Homeland Security Dept is the only government agency with a chance of "protecting America".

What is this, the Army? Because if it is, let's be up front about it.