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Category: Recommended Reading/Films/Sites

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Amazon Accidentally Increases Internet Disinformation
By Dan Klarmann on October 20th, 2009

Amazon Accidentally Increases Internet Disinformation

We have previously posted regarding the latest reprint of Darwin’s “The Origin of Species”, by Ray Comfort. If you don’t know about it, it has a 50 page forward full of untruths, confusion, and misdirection in an attempt to discredit the original text that follows. Yes, he’s trying to use Darwin to discredit 200 years of thoroughly tested evolutionary biology.

Unfortunately, Amazon.com reviews and ratings confuse it with another (reputable) reprint by the same name, as discussed in detail here:

American Culture • Culture • Current Events • Education • Evolution • Intellectual property • Internet • Media • Religion • Science • Videos • Web Site • advertising • ignorance
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Microsoft Stabs FireFox
By Dan Klarmann on October 18th, 2009

Microsoft Stabs FireFox

I’ve long been an advocate of the FireFox browser. I’ve used it since it was first announced, and rarely use IE for anything but testing web designs and browsing Microsoft’s own non-W3C compliant web pages.

One of my reasons is that Internet Explorer has major vulnerabilities via its ability to directly run ActiveX code on the machine of users without asking permission. That is, it is a hacker’s pipeline into your operating system.

Well, a few weeks ago, a Microsoft Update quietly installed the .Net Framework assistant into any FireFox browser it found. Shoved that narrow shiv of vulnerability right into the heart of the generally more secure FireFox core. When it was noticed, the savvy segment of FireFox users were outraged. Not just because it was done, but because it was done in such a way that it couldn’t be easily removed! Sure, it would let FireFox users see those rare sites dependent on ActiveX, but it would also let hackers run ActiveX on your machine!

When I found out, I first Googled to find a way to remove it using regedit and about:config (two dangerous powerful tools). But a week later, updates by Microsoft and FireFox made it easier to remove. If you have it, remove it.

Here’s one of the articles about it from ZDNet, a generally Microsoft friendly environment. This article also contains removal instructions that assume you have recent updates.

btw: If you didn’t know. FireFox spell checks all blog entry fields as you type. And you can add nifty customizable Make Link tools for easy creation of links in comments to blogs and such. Just highlight text on a page, rt-click and Make Link to copy complete link code, ready to paste.

Current Events • Featured • Internet • Technology • Web Site • computers
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Die, Caps Lock, Die
By Dan Klarmann on October 12th, 2009

Die, Caps Lock, Die

One of my peeves against propagated obsolete legacy is the caps lock key for computers. I hate it. In the 32 years that I’ve been using computers, I don’t think that I’ve ever hit it intentionally. It is where it is because typewriters used it to mechanically lock down the shift key.

But I have yet to meet anyone who types in all caps, except to indicate online screaming. Even then, it isn’t hard to hold a shift key with a pinky while typing with the other 9 fingers.

But now there is a fix! In every version of Windows since W2K, there is a secret patch that lets you convert any key to another. I’ve chosen to make CAPSLOCK into a simple shift. If I really need to lock caps, I can do it through software, or convert another useless key (e.g. scroll lock) into caps lock.

I found the magical tool in JohnHaller.com’s Useful Stuff essays: Disable Caps Lock. It’s a simple registry tweak that he found at annoyances.org (where they have full technical details).

Just download and launch the tweak. You get warnings, But it works! Just follow the directions and you’ll never be bothered by caps lock again.

Quality of Life • Recommended Reading/Films/Sites • Software • Web Site • computers
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Nader in Omaha
By Brynn Jacobs on October 01st, 2009

Nader in Omaha

Tuesday afternoon, I was privileged to be able to attend a speech by Ralph Nader, followed by a question-and-answer session and a book-signing. He was promoting his new book, Only the Super-rich can save us! If you weren’t aware that he has a new book out, you aren’t alone. In fact, his presence in Omaha wasn’t well-publicized. I managed to see this article in the local paper which alerted me to both the fact that he had a new book out, and that he was in Omaha. I was fortunate enough to be able to arrange for some time off work, and went to the 3:00 session at McFoster’s Natural-Kind Cafe. Unfortunately, I completely forgot my role as a blogger and so I was woefully unprepared to take notes or photos. So rather than direct quotes, I’ll discuss some of the main themes of his speech, as well as the question-and-answer session.

Nader was scheduled to speak at 3:00 p.m., but didn’t actually take the podium until about 3:15, largely due to the enthusiastic crowd gathered around him peppering him with questions and having their books signed. He spoke for about a half-hour, then took questions for roughly another hour. I estimated the crowd to number about 80, and it was standing-room only in the small upstairs room at McFoster’s. His speech stuck pretty closely to the themes of the book, which asks us to re-imagine the last several years. The book begins with the disastrous fumbling of Hurricane Katrina, and a fictionalized Warren Buffet aghast at the apparent inability of a former first-world country to provide relief to its own citizens. Using his vast economic resources, he marshals the needed supplies and delivers them to a devastated New Orleans. The experience haunts him though, and he decides to convene a group of billionaires to solve some of the most pressing crises confronting American democracy. Using untold billions of their own, they are able to finally provide an effective foil against the big-money interests that would continue using the system to unjustly enrich themselves.

American Culture • Featured • Politics • Reading - Books and Magazines • Social justice
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By Dan Klarmann on September 28th, 2009

Womens Rights in the 21st Century

I found a fascinating post on one of the blogs I regularly read: Weekend Diversion: An Amazing Group of Women. It is mostly about the Asgarda women of the Ukraine, a small group of (mostly young) women working for the rights of women in an environment plagued with sex trafficking and other abuses of women, Eastern Europe. There is also a video of Loudon Wainwright singing “Daughter”. Well worth clicking over to hear the song and see pictures of essentially a modern tribe of Amazons.

Meanwhile, I wondered if the United States is the only nation in which there are so many groups of women actively protesting against rights for women. Like Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum, who worked diligently to persuade women to vote against the Equal Rights Amendment, and continue to agitate to prevent any laws from passing that explicitly give women protections already enjoyed by men.

Pro Life groups are also essentially anti-women’s rights, and largely manned by women. It is basically a matter of whether the government or a women may legally decide who or what may live within her body and what may be expelled. Men already have this protection, granted by their reproductively deficient bodies allowing them to claim any foreign internal organism as a hostile alien.

American Culture • Civil Rights • Communication • Current Events • Health • Noteworthy • Reproductive Rights • Social justice • Web Site • ignorance
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By Erich Vieth on September 17th, 2009

More Quotes

I periodically post my most recently collected quotes (over the past 3 months). I just love collecting quotes, because there’s a novel in every sentence–it’s high-impact reading. I collect these from many sources, though more than a few of the following were presented to me by The Quotations Page, which I use as my homepage. Enjoy!

“I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.”
Booker T. Washington

“If you cut yourself in half and both sides lived, which side would be you?”
Anonymous on Reddit.com

“Think of how stupid the average person is, and then realize half of them are stupider than that”
George Carlin

“If a thing isn’t worth saying, you sing it. ”
Pierre Beaumarchais (1732 - 1799)

“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”
Carl Jung (1875 - 1961)

“Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting.”
Alan Dean Foster, “To the Vanishing Point”

“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”
George Orwell

“I haven’t failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
Thomas Edison, on asked how it felt to fail 10,000 times before he figured out the light bulb.

“It is a curious thing… that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.”
Evelyn Waugh (1903 - 1966)

Complexity is the problem. Moving it from hardware to software, or vice versa, doesn’t help. Simplicity is the only answer. There was a product many years ago called the Canon Cat. It was a simple, dedicated word processor; done very nicely in Forth. Didn’t succeed commercially. But then, most products don’t. I despair. Technology, and our very civilization, will get more and more complex until it collapses. There is no opposing pressure to limit this growth. No environmental group saying: Count the parts in a hybrid car to judge its efficiency or reliability or maintainability.

-Charles Moore, who is a pioneer software developer. The ‘Forth’ language he invented is still in use today, particularly by NASA

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
Upton Sinclair

“We hit Iraq because we could. That’s the real truth.”
Thomas Friedman

“Man is ready to die for an idea, provided that idea is not quite clear to him.”
Paul Eldridge

Meaning of Life • Quotes
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By Brynn Jacobs on September 03rd, 2009

Guess this author

The more things change, the more they stay the same, it seems. See if you can guess who authored this quotation on capitalism vs. socialism: (all emphases are mine)

The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil. We see before us a huge community of producers the members of which are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labor—not by force, but on the whole in faithful compliance with legally established rules. In this respect, it is important to realize that the means of production—that is to say, the entire productive capacity that is needed for producing consumer goods as well as additional capital goods—may legally be, and for the most part are, the private property of individuals. For the sake of simplicity, in the discussion that follows I shall call “workers” all those who do not share in the ownership of the means of production—although this does not quite correspond to the customary use of the term. The owner of the means of production is in a position to purchase the labor power of the worker. By using the means of production, the worker produces new goods which become the property of the capitalist.

American Culture • Campaign Finance Reform • Consumerism • Cultural Evolution • Current Events • Economy • Education • History • Human animals • Politics • Quotes • Social justice
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By Erika Price on September 02nd, 2009

Why are all the Youtube stars from LA?

Youtube was supposed to be one of Web 2.0’s shining examples of user-generated original content. In a world (in 2005) when everything worthwhile was already online and fully consumed, Youtube was supposed to provide us with a new outlet to both create and consume. I know it is hard to recall Youtube’s original intent as a creative landscape, but keep in mind that the site’s slogan was and is “Broadcast Yourself”.

Most of us don’t broadcast ourselves, or watch broadcasts of other selves. The last time I fired up Youtube, I was looking for a free way to stream James and the Giant Peach. Any cute skits or beautiful shorts I discovered thereafter were barely bonuses; they were just tasty little incidentals to be quickly forgotten. Most people go to Youtube to view unoriginal creations- movie, TV and music clips or mashups thereof.

Youtube’s most viewed videos of all time are music videos like “7 Things” by Miley Cyrus and Rihanna’s “Don’t Stop the Music”. My little sister uses Youtube as a combination DVR-Itunes-Pandora player. Nothing original seeps in unless I send it to her myself- and then it’s usually just a video of a cute animal, not a creative work.

Ah, but Youtube does have some high-caliber producers of original goodies! People who put on elaborate comedy skits with costumes, professional lighting and substantial editing. People who pull in millions of views. People with whom Youtube has formed profitable, advertising-driven partnerships. These people are broadcasting themselves. But they aren’t like “us”. They are all from Hollywood.

American Culture • Art • Communication • Consumerism • Entertainment • Featured • Films and Videos • Internet • Media • Networking • Uncategorized • Videos • advertising
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John Adams and Modern Perceptions
By Mark Tiedemann on August 30th, 2009

John Adams and Modern Perceptions

We just watched the last episode of John Adams. I got the DVD from the library and we went through it in one week, all seven installments. I have to admit, the last episode brought tears. The partnership between John and Abigail was well-portrayed and deeply moving. The older I get, the more I find the strongest story resonance with depictions of deep, deep friendships, especially those that exist between lovers, spouses, life partners. I cannot imagine losing Donna, who has become exactly that for me, in spite of the fact that I have friends of longer acquaintance, good friends, too.

The casting was incredible, the make-up superb, the writing first class.

What struck me most about this as well was the marvelously-nuanced dramatization of the fundamental differences in political philosophy between Adams and Jefferson. I can’t help but think that when Adams declared that “the true history of our revolution is lost” he must have been thinking of the initial partnership and later dissolution of like-mindedness between himself and Thomas Jefferson, whom Joseph Ellis depicts an an American Sphinx.

Adams is here portrayed as an idealist who cannot separate his philosophy from his pragmatism. In the first dozen years of the new republic, there was enormous public sentiment for France and when that country descended into the frenzy of its own revolution gone mad, that sentiment demanded that we support the revolutionaries. The irony that France supported us when it was still a monarchy and now those very people that had backed us (granted, as a move in their own war with England) were the victims of the mob ascendant was lost on most people, and apparently even Jefferson, who wanted us to embroil ourselves immediately and deeply in support of the revolutionaries. Washington—how lucky they were to have him—refused. He was a militaryman by training and he understood how to assess the chances of success and how to go about surviving a conflict in which you are outmatched. He had seen more than his share of defeat in a long career and knew well that ideology needed a strong hand to keep it in check, lest it carry you over the precipice. He refused to side with France, believing that neutrality was the only way for the United States to survive. Adams shared that belief.

American Culture • Culture • Education • Featured • Films • History • Noteworthy • Politics • Recommended Reading/Films/Sites • Writing • hypocrisy • ignorance
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The Hierarchy of Disagreement
By Dan Klarmann on August 17th, 2009

The Hierarchy of Disagreement

I found this illustration of how to order your arguments at the Starts With A Bang blog. This blog usually leads one to a first source. However, I had to do some digging to find the original creator of this image. This image is all over the web, but I think the first source is here, from the Create Debate blog in April 2008.

This image (click on it to enlarge) was created to illustrate an earlier point by Paul Graham, whose text-only posts I’ve been (occasionally) reading for years.

The premise is to always lead with your top level reasonable arguments, and never resort to the bottom layers. As Ethan Siegel (SWAB) put it,

It’s sometimes tough to decipher what the central point of someone else’s argument is, because most people don’t argue clearly and logically. But if you can identify it, that’s when you win. When someone else mucks around at the bottom of the pyramid, don’t sink to their level; stay up high. Those top two levels are really the only way to ever change someone’s mind, or to sway other intelligent, thinking people to your side.

This is an attitude that would serve us well on this site.

Communication • Education • Featured • Web Site • Writing • scientific method
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Yes, Dangerous Intersection is under contruction . . .
By Erich Vieth on August 15th, 2009

Yes, Dangerous Intersection is under contruction . . .

Dangerous Intersection is undergoing yet another face lift. I think I’ll have most of the bugs worked out within a few days, but the site is mostly functional already.

I really liked the ability to feature some of our articles (at the top section), but I didn’t like the sliding display. This new design by the same company (Solostream) uses a crossfade, which is much easier on the eyes. There are lots of other features as well, most of which will be invisible to readers but will make my life easier.

Anyway, thank you for your patience while we finish up implementing this new design, which is called “Prolific.”

Featured • Technology • Web Site
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By Dan Klarmann on August 07th, 2009

“What if Your Child Becomes Religious?”

Dale McGowan of the Meming of Life and other literary outlets has a new video out. In his latest, he questions the title question in detail before addressing the answer. Mainly he takes on “become” and “religious”, before addressing “What if”. Very reasonable and persuasive.

I met the man earlier this year, and identify with his position on dealing with an over-religious culture from an a-religious world view.

Communication • Community • Education • Language • Meaning of Life • Religion • Videos • ignorance
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Hip hop has a bad ‘rap’.
By Erika Price on August 03rd, 2009

Hip hop has a bad ‘rap’.

Whether you consume rap and hip-hop or not, you know the genres have dingy reputations. I believe the hate for hip-hop and rap blossomed in the 90’s. Rappers were actually cold-blooded gangsters at the time, people who occasionally shot one another. The music reflected the turmoil that its creators had experienced- growing up in crack-infused ghettos, resorting to crime to scrape by, and dying in a swarm of bullets even if they did finally make it out and become famous.

“I’m twenty-three now but will I live to see twenty-four/ the way things is going I don’t know,” Coolio said in “Gangster’s Paradise”, and he was by no means a Tu-pac; he was gangster-rap-lite. The depression of 90’s rappers manifested itself in loud, brash talk of guns and glory; no wonder white outsiders were scared. The violent content of 90’s rap inspired Tipper Gore and their ilk to censor and criticize with fervor, cementing rap’s image as a crude, violent genre for future gang-bangers.

Hip-hop and rap also have the reputation of being degrading to women. This present stereotype was also inspired by past trends. After 90’s gangster rap subsided, it was replaced with a money-cash-hoes mentality. In the early aughts, Jay-Z, 50 Cent and others spat mainly about their wealth, their rise from the streets, and the women that their amassed wealth could attract (Jay-Z wrote a song called “Money, Cash, Hoes”).

Women were called hoes and bitches in earlier rap and hip-hop songs, it’s true, but in the early 00’s the music seemed more intently focused on the subject. Rap and hip-hop from this period was all about the ascent into fame, and the amassing of expensive objects. One of these objects happened to be attractive women. “I’m into having sex, I’m not into making love,” 50 Cent reminds listeners in one of his most popular singles. Thus rap and hip-hop received another nasty label: it was degrading and shallow.

American Culture • Art • Bigotry • Censorship • Culture • Featured • Language • Media • Sex • Videos • music
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