$15 to see John Edwards in SF

If anyone is in the bay area, it happens tomorrow, Wednesday, at noon. Yeah, short notice. I'll be going. Get your tickets here.

And the past few days all I've been doing is catching up on democratic presidential debates/speeches/etc. So here's a few for fun (none are about actual policies).

Passionate commemoration by Barack Obama of civil rights march in Selma, Alabama:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9r-XG_VJZDw
-note his change of voice to better match his audience

Passionate speech by John Edwards at DNC Feb '07:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBenj7AxOcE

people aren't catty, they're doggy

so i'm hanging out here with toby taking care of his parents' animals, a dog and a cat. we've found that the dog likes to push our buttons, but the cat is just hungry all the time. the thing is that the dog is a pack animal so it's always trying to leverage for power. cats don't really seem to care that much about whether it is more alpha than you or whatever. they just have things that they want like food or fresh water. so i think dogs are actually more catty than cats. hmmmm

youtube debates

they were good! sort of. watch them!
http://www.youtube.com/debates

toby and I think that barack answered many of the questions perfectly. he has a good understanding of the heart of each issue and is truly a good student of history. and i'm not talking about how he knows lots of facts. I mean he is good at figuring out how we got to the current status of things, and what we need to do to get to a better state of things.

however,
an important question that the democratic candidates are going to have to answer, especially to gain more widespread support is, how are they going to make Americans richer? in other words, how are they going to spur future economic developments in America.

the answer that i will be looking for is a policy that encourages and supports research and innovation. that is what has brought wealth to America, and it is what will continue to bring wealth.

the hillz r alive

pictures of vacation!

fashionable lamb


flowers in the von trapp family lodge reading room


moon at shelburne farms


bug on my leg in the field listening to some live classical music, ooo


these are some pictures from mt. mansfield

barak obama on foreign affairs

I was reading his speech on foreign policy that he has on his website. it was from April 23, 2007.

http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/fpccga

it sounds like he actually does know a lot about what's going on in the world, so that's cool. i'm not really sure about the things he suggests for the military because it sounds like he strongly supports an expansion of the military, but it sort of depends on the implementation so we shall see.

on the whole, i really like how he emphasizes how instability anywhere in the world is bad for the US. in chinese there is a saying, "you must leave every person a living road." this means, you who are at the top of the food chain, who can influence others' lives so much, must let everyone have some way they can live in a secure and stable environment. otherwise, people lose hope and become suicidal as many Muslim states are currently doing. this is a very important concept for statesmen because it indicates that one is able to understand and take into account what motivates other people.

with that said, for the last democratic presidential debate, they took people's questions that they posted on youtube. i'm not sure what questions i specifically would want to ask. what do you think?

Judge's Idiocracy

Today I finally saw Idiocracy. The film was originally released over a year ago, and played in about 7 cities. The nearest theater showing the film was 6 hours away in Los Angeles. By the time it had been released on DVD I had all but forgotten it had existed.

The film's plot runs with a futurama-like premise where a completely average and uninspiring individual is accidentally frozen for 500 years. Except in this case he awakes to find that in the future he is the smartest man alive and that the world is in an intellectual Ice Age. In a short montage, and possibly funniest portion of the movie, it is shown how the intellectually elite are eventually outbred and outnumbered as the stupid come to inherit the earth. Most of the satire in the film is blunt and comes from the outrageous evolution of commercialism and sex in the future: Fuddruckers becomes ButtFuckers, a wholesome family establishment, and Starbucks is the goto joint for a handjob. While the film doesn't tackle any of the finer nuances of theses issues, anyone watching it would be hard pressed not to see the parallels and grotesque caricatures of this future society to today's where sex, money, and instant gratification are the only values remaining.

2 oofs up. 1 boof down. Approximate 90 minute runtime.

Suburbia Sux

This is a talk by an architect about creating better spaces.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/121

first day of vacation

hey, i'm at the von trapp family lodge in stowe, vermont!

we had dinner and saw his parents and other people perform at shelburne farms.
classical music on the lawn.


toby and i were talking about memes the other day. so the selfish gene idea is that people aren't selfish, genes are, and then there are people who are like, viruses are selfish, too, and now there are people who are like, so are memes. so everyone's like, yeah, genes are like viruses are like memes. but i feel unconvinced/confused about what they really mean by that and what are the implications. what do you think?

who do us think us are

hahahahahahahaha

chicago and charlene

this is an origami charlene that toby made for my birthday





this is the real charlene. see the resemblance?


and this is the front of a card i made for toby's grandparents for sponsoring our trip to chicago.

abstinence education

there seems to be some kind of showdown in many states regarding abstinence education and abortion clinics

so i was reading this article

"To make the point, Mr. Love grabbed a tape dispenser and snapped off two fresh pieces. He slapped them to his filing cabinet and the floor; they trapped dirt, lint, a small metal bolt. “Now when it comes time for them to get married, the marriage pulls apart so easily,” he said, trying to unite the grimy strips. “Why? Because they gave the stickiness away.”"

ok, but if tape is humans, then the floor and filing cabinets are sheep and goats and maybe inflatable dolls. then your marriage fails cuz you're not attracted to humans! tape is too promiscuous anyway.

a much better example: magnets! they even have male and female sides.

can't stop reading

noam chomsky quotes!!!

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky


hoorah for wikiquote.

also, i was arguing with someone about how we should get out of iraq because we're just in there for the oil, and I wish I said this

"To gain control over this resource, and have probably military bases there, is a tremendous achievement for world control. You read counter-arguments to this, and they're worth looking at. So it's argued that it can't be true, because the costs of reconstruction are gonna be greater than the profits that will be made. Well, maybe that's true, maybe it isn't, but it's totally irrelevant. And the reason is because the costs of reconstruction are gonna be paid by the taxpayer, by you, and the profits are gonna go right into the pockets of the energy corporations. So yeah, it doesn't matter how they balance out, it's just another taxpayer subsidy to the rich."

• Source: KGNU benefit at the University of Colorado at Boulder, April 5, 2003

anyway, so i was sort of wrong about us being in iraq for the oil since it's not exactly like we could just seize them and anyway the price of oil has gone up. but at the same time, our insistence in a pro america "democratic free" government will "inadvertently" let the US have control over who Iraq is going to sell the oil to. in the meantime, defense contractors and everyone on the payroll of the military are happy; well, except for soldiers and their families. but they do get to be heroes.

foucault

he is this french philosopher who is cool

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault

i was reading this book with his interviews, and he was talking about the relationship between politics and philosophy and society. I'll have to post more stuff about what he says later.

big bang

"Starfish can be pests to fishermen who make their living on the capture of clams and other mollusks at sea as starfish prey on these. The fishermen would presumably kill the starfish by chopping them up and disposing of them at sea, ultimately leading to their increased numbers until the issue was better understood."

So I was thinking about the whole asexual reproduction thing. One starfish could potentially become infinity starfish, so it's possible that all starfish originated from a single starfish...like a starfish big bang.

AT90USBKEY

ok, i'm playing with this demo board and i just did the keyboard demo. so now i have a device that looks like a usb keyboard and when i push a button on it, it does this


usbxxx is based on the avr core with the following features
- usb otg
endpoints
- up to - low/full speed controller with kbytes on-chip flash memory
- usb bootloader
- uart/spi/ twi
and more...
enjoy your time with atmel products...usbxxx microcontroller family.

the at


welcome to hid keyboard demo and congratulations for selecting the at

congratulations to me indeed

Tubes of spacetime

A talk (good stuff starts around 4:00) on video mosaic-ing for time compression, time warping, panoramic, and 3d views. All by sliding various surfaces through the 3d volume formed by the 2d image extruded through time (an old favorite).

wireless power

oh yeah, so I read edn magazine (electronics design, strategy, news) and in the july issue they talk about wireless power. this company is cool. http://www.powercastco.com/

maybe i can work for them when i grow up!

digikey stores

so radio shack sucks these days for hobbyists, and really, not many electronics companies are interested in hobbyists. leading to there being not many electronics hobbyists, leading to little to no documentation about electronics. no good for laypeople, anyway. however, with the rise of robotics maybe things will change? at any rate, it would be awesome if digikey would set up little shops in places like...right outside my house.

another thing. what if there were shops where you could just go to with some practical problem, like how to fix/hack xyz. and people who work there would just be good problem solvers and be resourceful. it would be like modern day fortune telling. I'd just like things to be less product/consumer based. nowadays, there is an ideal gadget for everything. well, a lot of gadgets can be fashioned out of other things. it's just that the person coming up with the idea can't get any money for it unless he makes a product out of it.

oh, i just realized that make magazine is kind of like that.
but just imagine if there were make shops, and people who worked there would just make cool things all day. it's like practical artists or something.

also, hi lilian!!!

hi oof boof, wave here

look what i can do!

ps. don't eat shark fin anymore. sharks are caught, definned, and tossed alive back into the ocean: 100 - 250 million annually. on the same note. there is nowhere to get decent dim sum in st. louis during the week.

pps. what's the diff. between a scooter, moped, and vespa?

idea:
want to make a talking collar for my cat. so that you push a button or something, and it goes, hi, my name is charlene. hahaha
and maybe another one that says, i'm lost. you can call my owner at ... haha

today we went to the beach to hang out and look at the sand sculptures. Revere Beach in Boston does an annual sand sculpture competition.

http://www.fitzysnowman.com/sculptors.html

toby and i made a frog on a lily pad




here are some that the professionals made


Suspicious Fishes


The Last Nail

ideas

want to put up outliner format for reasonablyinformed

i'd like to have a firefox extension for grouped tags

like to have a new bookmarks organizer, too

hey this is me

everyone, pay attention, I am thinking.

ok, this is what I think.

I think therefore I am.

I am very profound.

I will put up some pictures to prove it.