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Pharrell

There's a new ad for the Nintendo Wii hand motion reactive system, paid for by HP Pavilion Notebooks, with Pharrell talking about his stuff. he plays pong, simply moving his hands around while talking about shit, searches through photo collections and edits soundwaves, all with hand motion. the future is awesome.

The Japanese Point of View

Have you seen the preview for Flags of Our Fathers? All I'm wanting to say is that the whole idea that he's putting out Letters from Iwo Jima at the same time in Japan and later here and vice versa is great shit.

Also, Stephen Colbert just did a very weird skit in tribute to Gloria Steinem and Jane Fonda, and I'm totally gonna rewind.

Oh Shit. "Fonda" just kissed "Colbert." and he told her "you smell good."

kick ass

In Which Our Hero Becomes Disgusted

This is my "Jay, Lauri, and Thed never post" face.

Notice the puffiness around my eyes from crying.

Connecting

So, usually this is the time where I pull up a blog and make a trite sentence or two to make sure the Blog Godz know I still cower before them, in case I get hit by a bus and go to blog hell unredeemed. I get hung up on what the message in today's bottle is going to be, an just end up stuffing a cork in it. Sometimes some of the most useful thoughts get swallowed because they never cross that blood brain barrier. This post, however, is going to be different. It is going to have the uniting theme which ties to gether all of life, which is not having a theme to tie together all of life. It is going to revel in the pulchritude of sitting sweating in an attic loft late at night before bed.

I'm Offended

Whenever I find myself becoming offended, I stop and look both ways.

Being offended might have been a useful reaction at one point in time, but what is it accomplishing now? Being offended usually deprives the object of your offense of any dialogue, and of the use of reasoning to make counter-statements.

Look how this plays out in culture. It allows you to shut off the intentions and message of someone, in order to focus on how that person's point of view has stepped on your's. It only encourages those snarky bumper stickrs that mae people angry which makes them want to respond in kind, which makes for an angry lack of discourse where sloganeering replaces dialogue.

Look how this plays out in politics. It only reinforces the divide between our left/right system, leaving everyone to believe that there really are only to ways to frame an issue. Or at least only two that have a chance of happening.

Quit being offended, even when the offense is meant to harm you. By being offended, you only help build steam for those looking to offend. And go ahead, make offense! Just make sure that you can back it up with a sensible conversation where each participant walks away with a better understanding of what the other has said.

Happy get things done day!

For this, the longest day of the year, I hope you have a very long list of things to get done. I know I do, and they aren't all loitering on the internet.

Collusion

What if the rise in nationalism is supposed to be coupled with the devaluation of the dollar, the tightening of immigration restrictions and the closing of overseas military family housing in order to prevent the exchange of cultural ideas between Americans and, well, anybody else?

There is a well documented effect of daily contact with other cultures: tolerance and communication. Sounds pretty liberal to me. We'd better stop it.

I love living in Texas. I just had a 24 hour mini vacation in Palmetto state park. No matter how poor your sleeping conditions and food, or how hard you play while camping, you always feel rested and refreshed. Unless you camp in zombie infested swamps with no flashlight. 

God Modes

A few words about the conflict between intelligent design and evolution, and what these things mean. What bothers me about the whole question is not that there is no God, or that the Religious Right is foisting it's ideas on society. What bothers me is that the Right is committing a strange kind of blasphemy.

The whole idea that the world is too beautiful for it not to have been created by God is at the heart of Anti-Darwinism. Well, that, and a profound ignorance of the recent advances in evolutionary biology. Why is God so limited that the universe can only be made, bit by bit, like some sort of cosmic sculpture? Why can't God be responsible for a dynamic universe? My thoughts on this are that one of the lines dividing sides in the culture war are two interpretations of God. The difference between sides is an almighty force, a God that is, as opposed to a God who does. A God who does, it seems, is a jealous God, and one who is demanding of mankind to hold to static ideas and practices. A God who does will have built a large universe and then placed us inside of it, to be beholden to the invisible limits that have been handed down through time and the bible.

A God that is, however, exists most clearly as the growth and change of the universe, of nature, and of mankind. The very fact that the universe is to beautiful, complex, and strange for us to imagine it arising from itself is proof, to many, that God does exist. I agree, for different reasons than the Religious Right. God is evolution. God is the different ways that we put our free will to work. God is the complexity of the universe that escapes our understanding. God is that we decide for ourselves what the right thing to do in the context of our place in the universe, and that with each world-changing discovery, we realize how much more we don't know. Ironically, I think that this interpretation of God is compatible with both Agnosticism and Humanism, which correctly assume that people exist in a physical world and that they have the free will to do what they think is right, but decide not to directly involve a God as necessary to understand the world.

I am not sure how the conflict between these two understandings of the profound will play out, but I do think that it will remain at the root of most of our other conflicts in the culture wars.

these are feet 

Economics

Why is it that Wal-Mart has figured out how to make things cheaper by low-cost high-volume sales, but software is still routinely more expensive than the computers on which they run?

For God's sake, of course people are going to pirate things if it costs 50-100 for mundane software! I have spent money on software a few times, when the price is good and the software does what I want, but then that's what free software is for.

It is economically useless for us to try and ignore geography by moving actual object all over the world at whim, but to sit on top of content, like software and media, as though they were rare earth metals.

It's getting better all the time

I have been thinking a lot about conservatism and progressivism, and what they mean in the big picture of where the race is. It occurs to me, from my point of view, that conservatism is inherently pessimistic, because of it's emphasis on what is wrong with the human condition, and why things were better in a past simpler time. I am not saying that pessimism is not a valuable tool for seeing the world, but there are a few things about this that bother me in our current world. One of my problems with this is that it takes all of the best that we have done in the past and makes it unimportant, a given rather than the collective effort of countless people. Not remembering what we have done that is good is just as bad as forgetting what we have done that is evil.

I am also concerned that this regressive tendency extends to our increasingly rich and complex interactions, and especially to our relationships to one another through government. A culture based on fear and distaste of government and addicted to it's conveniences is scary. A government run by people who stand at the pulpit talking about the inability of government to solve problems is scary. We need to talk about the good that we can do by involving ourselves and tolerating others, not relinquish our involvement to an ever expanding government publicly aimed at dismantling it's services to the it's constituents.

To me, conservatism is dangerous, in that it ignores most of what is best about humanity- our ability to change. We can be who we decide to be, each and each other. I can't conceive of a paper God which is not dynamic, but I can definitely conceive of one who is embodied in our free will, and our ability to take responsibility for ourselves.

Wackyness *IS* the motivation...

Spaceshuttle launches.

Premium Ice cream.

Fender-bender.

Politics.

Sex.

I.

PHOTODEATHDUELS always have two sides. I apologize for my earlier bias. 

Lauri and I and a PHOTODEATHDUEL!! 

Coop Labor Holiday Iwo Jima Moment 

Cognition (or me think ok, how you think you think?)

I keep seeing articles like this about multitasking. They make me wonder.

I know that the thing that IQ tests are unquestionably the best at measuring is how good you are at taking IQ tests. Is this an accurate assesment of how these people's minds are functioning? The conditions and methods of thought that an IQ test is focusing on are very different from remembering several project in short bursts of attention.

Not that one cant get overloaded, but i always feel at my best when i am working on several things at once. And I did just dandy on every standarized test they threw at me. I think we just have to think more about how to assess what people are processing, and what else isgoing on in there that we aren't accounting for as intelligance yet.

Lauri's monster friend

Sometimes all you need is a change.

Caption contest! 

My lizard has escaped. I didn't name her after 2 1/2 years, because I have always felt that names are a very mammalian trait. Now she is gone from her terrarium, with no sign of struggle. I miss the smart-alec looks she gave me, and the ruthlessness with which she devoured anything smaller than her. I hope that bearded dragons can live happily in the Texan summer of death, and that she has found a nice niche near bugs on our acre of land.  

This is Sasona Coopertive, where I live. My room at the moment is the one at he top middle, which has the number 49.0 written in it upside down. For the last few weeks, we have been renovating the space labeled "wood porch," so soon I will have a lovely garden on one sideof my room, and trees on the other. Then I will train the squirrels to do my bidding.

www.sasona.org

Getting rich through simian technology