Month: July 2004

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Clinton on Bush’s 2003 Tax Cuts

Via saladwithsteve, an excerpted transcription of Bill Clinton on NPR, speaking on Bush’s 2003 tax cuts:

“And to make matters worse, we gave half of the money to the top 1 percent and an extraordinary amount of the money to the other 200,000 americans like me who paid income taxes on over a million dollars last year and I just think it’s wrong. I think it is so wrong. We’ve got national guardsman fighting over in iraq and the administration doesn’t even want to make them eligible for military health care benefits if they’re not covered by their own plans. We’ve increased the cost of veterans benefits at health centers by 500%. We’ve cut 300,000 kids out of health care programs and I’ve still got my tax cut? That’s my sacrifice in the war on terror? I think it’s bad ethics and terrible economics and it’s something we’re going to have to pay for a long time to come.”

[…]

What I tried to do was to leave my generation, the baby boom generation, with the security of knowing that their children would not have to support them instead of their grandchildren. It was a huge economic gift to the next generation of Americans. Now we’ve thrown all of that away on what I consider to be highly self indulgent tax cuts for upper income people. I think it’s selfish and I think it’s wrong. […] We should have targetted these tax cuts to middle class people and small business. They could have even been bigger. […] I would liked to seen an expansion in earned income tax credit for lower income working people. They could have been permanent. Most of this stuff is just wrong. It’s bad economics. It’s personally selfish for really wealthy people to have this kind of money. I know no pertinent millionaire in New York, and I know a lot of them, Republican and Democrat, who thinks this is right. I don’t know anybody who thinks this is right.

Music: Laika :: Shut off, Curl Up
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Art Is Not Terrorism

Steve Kurtz is a professor at the University of Buffalo and also an artist using biotech as his medium to create commentary on genetic modification and modern American food culture. When his wife died of a heart attack recently, police found scientific equipment in his home he was using to produce one of his works — equipment similar to what you’d find in any factory producing GMO foods, and even in many high school biology labs. But the police decided Kurtz was a budding eco-terrorist, and called in the FBI, who are trying to hang him out to dry.

FBI lab tests immediately proved that not only was Kurtz’s equipment not used for any illegal purpose, it was not even possible to use it as a terrorist weapon … That hasn’t stopped the feds from continuing to pursue their case against Kurtz, in yet another egregious instance of contemptibly misdirected Patriot Act terrorist hysteria run amok.

Critical Art Ensemble maintains a site detailing Kurtz’ case, and runs a legal defense fund on his behalf.

Thanks Larry.

Music: Gruppo Sportivo :: Lock Yourself Up
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grep puzzler

Here’s a puzzler for all you shell-heads (you know who you are). Normal souls, please move along — nothing interesting to see here.

OK. You’re sitting in the parent of “dirname.” Inside dirname and its children are files that you know contain the string “string.” You want a text file listing the names of all those files. You run:

grep -r “string” dirname > dirname/output.txt

One of two things happens:

1) A few seconds later you have the file listing you need.
2) The command runs forever and output.txt grows indefinitely, until you run out of disk space.

As I discovered the hard way, which of these two occurs depends on which version of grep is installed on your system. In 2.5.x, you get outcome #1. Any version prior to that, you get outcome #2. On closer inspection, it’s easy to see what’s happening — grep is greedy, and is scanning the output file even as the shell is appending grep’s results to it. Reading itself and simultaneously reporting into itself. Devilish. Fortunately I spotted my error before I overflowed the drive. And sending output to any location outside of dirname avoids the problem, of course.

But here’s the puzzler: How was this fixed in grep 2.5? grep is not doing the output redirection — the shell is. grep only knows to pass results to stdout. Beyond that is a black box. So how is grep 2.5 able to avoid the problem of infinite recursion? How was it made aware of what the shell is doing? Cue Twilight Zone intro music.

Freaky deaky, super geeky.

Music: Stranglers :: Get A Grip
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BMRC Is Dead

Before I arrived at the J-School and set up the QuickTime Streaming Server, our multimedia classes used a university streaming service called bmrc to post Real Video content. Unbeknownst to me, bmrc lost funding a while ago and they pulled the plug on their servers, breaking tons of legacy content on our site (and others). Nice. No warning, not even a how-do-you-do, just blam, you’re dead.

After a chain of emails to various departments, finally tracked down someone who knew where the original servers were located — in a walk-in closet in his boss’ office. Cool guy. I gave him a list of .rm files and he kindly yanked the server out of storage, then passed me a gigabyte of legacy video content. Spent most of the day updating .ram files to point to the new location on our own server, where they all should have been to begin with.

Every summer at the J-School is like this – go into it with my sights set on a fistful of big-eyed projects I want to complete, and it slips away with a series of stupid emergencies and fiddly things. Death by a thousand papercuts. Sigh.

Music: Tindersticks :: Don’t Ever Get Tired
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Miles Finds the Parallel Port

parallel-cashewsAmy asks Miles what he’s doing behind the printer. “Bahroo!” he answers, hiding. Miles emerges, goes to town on his pounding bench for a bit, returns to his snack dish to munch a few more nuts, then returns to his spot behind the printer. More fiddling. “Miles, what are you doing back there?” “Nnnah bazzah!” Amy heads back to investigate, finds these two cashews gingerly placed in the clasps of the parallel port from behind. He does these things with so much intention, like he has a real and definite goal, even if he is the only boy in the Little Boy Universe who knows what that goal might be. He’s surprising us daily with his dexterity and imagination.

Music: Seeds :: Can’t Seem To Make You Mine
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National Sprinklerhead Day

Never dreamed having a lawn would be so much work. We apply great amounts of energy, water, nutrients and still it goes brown, dry, splotchy. Research: Lawn mites? Enough water? Thatch? Aeration? Soil penetrant? Dude at American Soil Products suggests it’s just too old — lawns apparently have lifespans. Said it’s probably time to rip it out and start from seed (he’s not a sod fan). Not ready to go there yet (the back yard is new sod six months old, it has its own set of problems).

Decided to resuscitate the decrepit, corroded, half-working original sprinkler system — manual watering is just too much labor for our schedules. Timer works fine, but the heads are whack. Took a vacation day and dug out 12 old Champion heads, installed new Rain Birds. Better, but needs tuning. 90% of the job is locating and digging out the old heads through rocks, under sidewalk underhangs, creeping roots…

Three trips for teflon pipe tape: Once when I ran out, again when Miles absconded with a roll, and the third when a roll vanished into thin air. Looked everywhere, time running out, gave up, got in the car again. As soon as I pulled into the street, saw it in the middle of the road — it had rolled into traffic and been run over. A bit crunched, but still teflon-y enough to work.

Amazed to study the water bill for May and June — we averaged 190 gallons per day, most of that going into the lawn I’m sure. And here we are concerned about low-flush toilets and the Water Miser setting on the dishwasher. With the century’s impending global water crisis, we’ll all have desert-themed yards soon anyway. Now I see why so many retirees decided to do the yard in a quaint gravel theme — throw on a few dead pine cones for good measure and call it a day.

Music: Gong :: Bodilingus
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Abalone Feast

When I was a kid, my dad dived for marine specimens with an outfit called Pacific Biomarine for a living. At the time, abalone were plentiful along the California coast, and he would often fill up his goodie bag with wild abs as he worked. We ate abalone several times a month, though I of course had no concept how lucky we were. Dad brought me an ab iron of my own for my sixth birthday. I remember that his friend at a machine shop forged it out of slab, and that it had a glittery purple bicycle hand grip.

Today, wild abalone populations have dwindled to almost nothing, thanks to a combination of factors — human overfishing, hungry otters, and the fact that abalone squirt their sperm into open waters hoping it will land somewhere useful (talk about getting lucky!); so when populations decline, the odds of this accidental fertilization succeeding drop precipitously.

You can still buy abalone, but you probably won’t find it at your local fish market. A handful of abalone farms raise them under protected conditions, and charge $20 – $50 / pound — an endangered delicacy. Dad’s coming to town this weekend, so I decided to throw him an abalone feast as a belated father’s day gift. Called Monterey Abalone to place an order, got to talking with the guy who picked up the phone, and it turned out that his dad was my dad’s boss at Pacific Biomarine, back in the 60s and early 70s! So this guy and I probably played together as little kids a few times, though we didn’t remember each other. Amazing how threads come together.

So a box of live abs will arrive this Friday, and the question of the week is how to prepare them. There are a lot of great recipes out there, but somehow I don’t think we should mess with tradition. Tenderize, a real light breading, a bit of garlic salt, and flash fry in olive oil (or butter, if memory serves).

Dad’s gonna flip when he hears the story.

Music: Spaceways Incorporated :: Tapestry from an Asteroid
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24-Hour Poetry Party

Some online friends from antiweb run the New York-based poetry collective LitKicks.com, which has been doing cool readings, gatherings and publications for a decade now. To celebrate their 10th anniversary, they’re hosting a massive, timezone-busting, internet-wide collaborative poetry generation happening next weekend (Friday 23 / Saturday 24):

The 24 HOUR POETRY PARTY is one of the most ambitious poetry experiments ever attempted. The entire event will take place online at LitKicks.com during the course of a single day and night. Seeded with original poems, writings and koans by a number of renowned poets, participants all over the world will join in the spontaneous composition of a single epic “real-time poem” describing 24 hours in the life of planet Earth.

Music: Loop Guru :: Buruk Burang
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Jeffy for Veep

Defective Yeti’s take on the NY Post’s Gephardt gaffe. “Can’t even pronounce spaghetti…” Although I might have been more inclined to give Nancy the nod over Jeffy (Family Circus is just “simple” dumb, whereas Nancy is (was) “delightfully surreal” dumb).

Note: The above in no way reflects my opinion of Edwards. Just thought it was funny.

Music: Cream :: Swlabr
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CSS Pencils

Stunning display of just how far CSS can be taken, given sufficient patience and a little imagination: There are no images on this page. Near as I can tell, he ran a bitmap through an image analyzer to determine the value of each pixel and translated each one into a corresponding DIV with matching CSS color value. He then created PHP transforms to let you drop channels, go grayscale, etc.

I’m not sure exactly how useful this is in practical terms, since the amount of CSS it takes to create a photographic representation exceeds the number of bytes it would take to represent the image as a JPEG, but it does seem to open a lot of doors for as-yet unimagined CSS designs. You’ve got to respect him just for showing that it’s possible. Check the fawning comments.

Described this to a non-geek friend and his only reaction was “That guy must have a lot of time on his hands.” Some people, ah swear.

Music: Linton Kwesi Johnson :: Di Black Petty Booshwah