How I Waste My Precious Time

I think I forget a lot of the books I read, but if I write them down I can check back.

I just finished the quick but sometimes funny Mike’s Election Guide 2008 that Michael Moore put together. Not too deep, but still probably pretty relevant in the context of this coming election. More than a few funny moments and unique perspectives. The last chunk was just brief recaps of Democratically winnable congressional races coming up.

Previous to that I read Paul Krugman’s The Conscience of a Liberal. It had some nice recent-era history of liberal politics and made the cause of Universal Health Care seem imminently plausible and achievable. It’s great to read stuff like this, especially coming from a main-stream and well respected journalist. However, it did leave me feeling uncertain about how well I understand or could ever understand the perspective of the common man, voting citizen, TV viewer or what have you. Are people into this? Will they be easily tricked against their own interest? Who the fuck knows.

Before that I had read Noam Chomsky’s Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance. Fucking eye-opener as usual. You know, you feel like you’re starting to get a good grasp on how the world works in all its nastiness, but I didn’t consider the breadth of the details that this book covered. That is pretty overwhelming, especially when described with the nonchalance that Chomsky must have developed over decades of studying more of the same in this sphere of geopolitics.

Found a great post: How to be Creative

(via Steve Olsen)

Someone else agreeing with me that prizes at work aren’t a good idea:

Carrots, Sticks, and the Paradoxes of Motivation: “output”

(via 43 Folders.)

Whew, a big flutter of chatter in the news last week about some recent scientific findings: the gases let off by shower curtains are bad! That’s right folks: those foul, chemical-smelling, plastic-manufactory odors that you smell when you open the package of a new plastic shower curtain are actually noxious gases. No shit! Thank you again science, I couldn’t have figured it out for myself. 

I do think the way news is reported these days is ridiculous in all its forms, and one of those is definitely the portrayal of really obvious things that have now become verified by science. I admit that there could be some use to it if it helps establish some legal boundaries or something to assist the greater good, but can’t science work on something more important?

I just discovered the best feature of the Virtual Console on the Nintendo Wii: you can leave games paused infinitely just by returning to the Wii Menu. Not such a big deal for the Super Nintendo and later games with Save functionality built-in, but this is huge for NES and other games where you have to play from start to finish in one sitting. It’s like turning the TV off and leaving the NES running all day while you’re at school.

I’ve just started playing through Super Mario Bros. 3, and because of this feature I think I’ll play through the entire game. Should be fun to beat every level instead of just grabbing those Warp Whistles all the time. I’ll let you know how it goes when I finish next year sometime.

The new iPhone SDK comes with an iPhone simulator named Aspen Simulator, which is a full iPhone emulator and includes a few built in Apps including the iPhone Safari (Mobile Safari, Safari Touch?). Using this simulator is a sweet way to test how webpages look on an iPhone without using a scrunched up Safari window or an actual iPhone.

This appears to require a webserver though, as I haven’t figured out a way yet to just specify a path to an html file. Maybe it’s in the manual.

Every feel like saying this?

“Don’t say another Goddamn word. Up until now, I’ve been polite. If you say anything else - word one - I will kill myself. And when my tainted spirit finds its destination, I will topple the master of that dark place. From my black throne, I will lash together a machine of bone and blood, and fueled by my hatred for you this fear engine will bore a hole between this world and that one.

When it begins, you will hear the sound of children screaming - as though from a great distance. A smoking orb of nothing will grow above your bed, and from it will emerge a thousand starving crows. As I slip through the widening maw in my new form, you will catch only a glimpse of my radiance before you are incinerated. Then, as tears of bubbling pitch stream down my face, my dark work will begin.

I will open one of my six mouths, and I will sing the song that ends the Earth. “

I know, hilarious right? Stolen from Penny-Arcade!

Read this today, it’s connected to the way my point of view has been evolving lately. There’s also a nice bridge here between “the nature of things” part of it all and the “why are we in this predicament” view of society at large.

I’d been thinking mostly about the first half recently: it’s in our nature and an expression of life itself to do unlikely things, to pursue something bound to fail, to create something for no reason, to be (willfully or ignorantly) defiant of the odds. That was starting to be a hopeful point of view too, but as Wil points out it could be responsible for humanity’s stupid pursuit of extinction and catastrophe as if we can’t tell what’s coming.

Well that’s a bummer! Something positive to take from it: at least the remnants of civilization will have the will to push on after the rest of us die off. Of course, it’d be nice to think we could moderate things just a tad so as not to hit the finish line quite so fast.

That last video I linked too said that we were spending over half of all tax revenues on the Military!?! Is that right? Holy fuck! Can’t we just switch most of that money into space travel? The same Military Industrial Complex can build everything with the same wasteful amount of Government money, so we don’t even need to get rid of corruption to do this. At least there’d be a chance that as a side effect human Lunar and Martian Colonies would make it after Earth becomes a little less comfortable to people. Maybe they could teach us how to live in bubble cities?