Category: Misc

Recent object lessons leading up to my new year’s resolution:

— In one gorgeous, perfectly orchestrated, slow-motion train wreck after another, the show Trading Spouses: Meet Your New Mommy features serialized examples of well-intentioned but ultimately self-righteous individuals moving into other families’ homes with a not-so-hidden agenda to change their world views. The Christian mother wants to “bless the socks off” the Jewish family. The vegan mother wants to convince carniverous bayou-dwellers off meat in a week flat. And so on. In every case, the righteous evangelist encounters not success, but the impenetrability of both their own world-view and that of “the other.” Things seldom end well.

— Red states and blue states (I use this metaphorically; I know we’re all purple). It is still hard for me to understand how a person can have read a daily newspaper for the past four years and still want to reward the actions of Bushco. And yet I know there are lots of sane, loving, and yes, otherwise moral individuals who voted Red this year. What I consider “self-evident” is apparently not self-evident to many. Is my world-view as opaque to them as theirs is to me?

— Forgot where I heard: “The best way to lose an argument is to overstate your case.”

— Through the grapevine: “He doesn’t realize he might actually have a chance of convincing me if he didn’t come off so strident, so convinced that he’s right.”

— From a friend: “You’re just a meatsack like me. We don’t know nothin’.”

My new year’s resolution: I will be less judgmental in 2005. Less sure that “the other” is wrong. Like most new year’s resolutions, this will probably be easier said than done, but I’m going to go for it. I expect that the trick will be to “stay hard” while “going soft.”

Watch me now.

Reason Online: 4/5 of the country professes allegiance to some denomination of Christianity — hardly an oppressed minority. But every time someone or some organization decides to exchange a religiously specific phrase like “Merry Christmas” with a religiously neutral variant like “Happy Holidays,” the religious right (and even the non-religious radio right) cry foul, as if the curmudgeonly “liberal conspiracy” is now trying to extinguish Christmas itself — an “anti-Christmas Jihad” if you believe the ‘wingers. A ton of great links in this piece by Julian Sanchez.

Happy Holidays, everyone.

Reading Technology Review’s piece on Larry Sanger, co-creator of Wikipedia, discovered for the first time that Sanger is “is a professional epistemologist -— a philosopher who explores the very nature and sources of knowledge.” If it seems odd that someone who pursues truth for a living would be so intimately involved with a project that lacks traditional processes of verification, Sanger makes the distinction between “absolute knowledge,” which derives from pure reason, and “received knowledge,” which is the subject of an encyclopedia:

The sort of claims one can make in the form ‘It is generally known that….

The punchline: Sanger no longer contributes to Wikipedia, “in part because of the lingering sting of some particularly nasty revert wars” (where revert wars are epic battles raged by Wiki authors busy undoing one another’s changes, struggling for control over some point or fact).

Thanks Weblogsky

Today my oldest friend Josh, who posts here occasionally as “rinchen,” left the Bay Area for a semi-secret place in the mountains where he will sit and study Dharma with a small group of other Buddhists for the next three and a half years, mostly in total silence. Josh has been a practicing Buddhist for the past 20 years, but this retreat is total immersion.

By tradition, students don’t say much about this retreat. What I do know is that his access to modern amenities will be almost nonexistent, our ability to contact him, or him us, limited to a glimmer here and there (not by hard-core rules, but by general understanding that students are there for a reason, and that contact with the world can only distract).

This retreat is something he has wanted to do for a long time, and circumstances in his life recently provided an opening for him to follow through. I asked Josh the other day whether he felt any kind of trepidation. He responded that he was unconcerned by the prospect of being disconnected from music, news, work and the world, but that he expected to feel the bigness of being alone.

“But I have a job to do,” he said, “a task in front of me.”

“What kind of task?” I asked.

“To pray for all beings.”

Blessings, rinchen. I will miss you, and will be so happy to see you again in 1150 days.

Nutty day in the observatory.

Tonight to the Pacific Film Archive to watch a live competition: Powerpoint to the People, which opened with a loop of 100 PowerPoint slides by our friend Michael Lewy. Radically different approaches to the competition, most of which poked visceral fun at corporate boardrooms, greed run amok, “branding” of faith in the workplace, American Idol, clip art, idiotic sound effects… hard to describe the results, some of which were button-down but funny, others totally surreal, but no one left the building with any question that PowerPoint can be put to satisfying artistic or parodic ends in the right hands. Very fun, and the judges were hilarious. Interstitial presentations between the competitors were used to “clear the visual palette,” and included one of David Byrne’s PP pieces (Byrne being the most famous practitioner of what is apparently rapidly becoming the new hip display medium).
Continue reading “PowerPoint to the People”

My old friend Malcolm from antiweb has started selling Oggz — color-morphing egg-shaped squishy lights, about the size of a small ostrich egg, which glow slowly through the entire color spectrum. Strangely seductive, kind of meditative, gently surreal. An Oggz will glow for about four hours on a single charge (they come with a small charging base). Haven’t experienced anything quite like them before, although I did also see some of the color morphers by Mathmos in a store over the weekend. The Mathmos lamps are cool, but more expensive and not squishy/durable like the Oggz.

Pictures don’t really do Oggz justice, and it’s really hard to shoot decent video of them — video cameras seem to make them the Oggz look washed out as they struggle to color-correct or white balance in low-light conditions. No substitute for being in a dark room with an Oggz and a two-year-old whose face is lit up like the dude on the cover of ELO’s Discovery, naming the colors as they rotate through, trying to figure out what all the in-between-y hues are called.

Super-nice Mal sent us one as a promo; loving it so much I ended up ordering a bunch more as gifts for kids this year, though they’re also good clean fun for adults (try putting one in a fruit bowl in a darkened kitchen, or leaving one in the coat closet at a party, or using one at the dinner table in place of a candle…)

Weird coda: A man died recently when a classic lava lamp (which he left on a hot stove for unknown reasons) exploded, sending a shard of glass into his heart. Oggz don’t explode.

My knees are getting too old to bike to work every day. Driving to work is out of the question — would cost nearly $1000/year to park, and the garage fills up by early morning anyway. If a dude can ride a Segway Human Transporter 4,000 miles coast to coast (pictures), my daily commute should be cake. I’m in an almost ideal situation to ride one to campus, but they’re still not showing up on the used market for less than three grand. Starting to look like an old fixer Vespa might be in the cards (motorcycles park free — a municipal reward for not being part of the problem (or that’s how I look at it anyway)).