Gusalmighty.com: A Leaded Perspective

First Facelift

It isn't quite as good as botox but the blog got some facelift loving. Some friends of mine are putting together a blog of their own that looks to be a sure hit and I'll be talking more about them once they go public. I've been privy to some of their preparatory dialogue and have seen their site in a pre-release stage. It looks pretty slick and it was just enough impetus to get me to dive into the CSS here to shape this place up.

I have to say that I think it looks pretty good. Big thanks to Ignatz Mouse for feedback on some of the colors. I'm hoping that it is all balanced and readable; your feedback on this is of great importance. Please let me know what you think. There is also a good chance that I missed something as well, so if you find a page with garish reds (I use red as a test color to see what effect is has. I don't actually know what I'm doing so I tweak a setting and reload the page to see what it looks like), let me know. I already caught one bit where a background color obscured the text and fixed it, but there are likely more problems.

I don't have the illustrative skills to conjure up some bunker love imagery, but I did try to aim for a color scheme that reflects the beloved Superfund Silver Valley. It's primarily a gray color scheme with hints of green, or at least that is what is should be. Again, feedback is essential here.

Another bonus: the constant reloading of the front page to see what effects my changes had have put my page views through the roof! This blog has been getting about 6 hits a day (that's one every four hours!) lately, but as you can see, I've really set a new standard.

Now that school is letting up, hopefully I can keep working here. I've said it before and I'll say it again, I would love to have someone else post alongside me here. I feel like I'm dancing in the middle of the room all by myself here.

Come volunteer!

More Japanese failures: Cell phone on the train

Yesterday I ran into a bit of Japan that I tend to do a fairly good job of avoiding on the train ride home. The Japanese like rules and tend to follow them simply because they are the rules as opposed to because the rules serve good purposes. It seems as if the concept of the letter of the law was as far as they got in judicial theory and failed to develop the critical perspective of searching for the spirit and intended purpose. As a result, the rules that are there don't really need a particular justification; they deserve to be followed simply because they are the rules. There is no need to question them either.

As you may know, cell phones in Japan are a big deal. People live on the cell phones here. Lately the interconnectivity of text messaging, email, and web browsing on the phones has alleviated the problem, but the disruption caused by people, often young adults and teenagers, yakking on their phones really achieve social crisis levels. Many people adopt a very conservative phone stance, cupping one hand over their mouth so as not to disrupt those around them, but enough didn't that trains especially enacted rules against using phones.

Commuter trains don't really enforce it; there is just an announcement and some signs and PSA posters that remind people that it causes others discomfort (there are also nice PSA signs that remind us to give up our seats to the old and infirm. Always 'cutely' illustrated too.). On the longer distance trains, the seating carriage is enclosed in seperate doors with alleys (I can't think of a better term to describe the little hallways between doors) that house the entrances and washrooms. The carriages are better insulated and not as noisy or cold, but because they are quieter and not as crowded (long distance trains have forward facing seats, often assigned on the ticket, as opposed to bench seats running along the wall), the rules say we should move to the alleys when we have to talk on the phones.

Of course I do not do this, as I feel that I am above the rules and only suckers follow the rules. No, of course that isn't my reasoning, but I don't move to the alleys partly because they are noisy and cold and partly because I take care not to talk loudly when I'm on the phone. I've noticed it is a natural tendency for many people to talk louder on a cell phone especially, as if the volume you speak somehow aids in the tranmission clarity of your message. I've learned that the phones do a more than adequate job of picking up your voice as long as it isn't a whisper; just speak in a low volume conversational tone and no one on the other end will know. I tested this plenty. Plus my phone calls aren't more than two or three minutes 90% of the time and its hardly worth the effort to get up and move to the alleys. I'd make more of a distracting commotion moving around that my voice does on the phone.

So anyway, to get on with my story, there I was talking to my wife on my home, just to give her the vital information about my arrival time and to get a brief update on the baby's status, speaking in low non-distracting voice when an employee passes by and notices I'm holding a plastic electronic device to my head. He interrupts me and tries to tell me to go to the alley but I ignore him and finish up my conversation. He tries to explain to me that I can't talk on my phone in the seating carriage and have to move to the alley (and he made a good effort in English, to his credit). But I asked him if it was accceptable to talk to one's neighbor when they sit next to you, and he conceded that was within the rules. I then explained to him that I use the same if not quieter voice when I talk on the phone, hence there shouldn't be an issue. He still felt that I should move to the alley, but I was finished and went back to reading my book.

So here is my gripe. The rules were made because people were being a nuisance on the phones. I take care not to be a nuisance. There are NOT any rules about loud obaachans who talk across seats and aisles to each other, laughing and providing running commentary on their lives and the passing scenery for the duration of the trip. Nor are there any rules to prevent children from running around and playing in the carriage. I've been distracted from my reading, music, and sleep by these culprits far more often than from phones, and I usually am pretty good about blocking stuff out. In my mind, the rules should be focused on reducing distractions; if it isn't distracting, the rules don't apply.

The train employees just don't see it that way. It sounds like a piddling matter, and I suppose at the end of the day it is. It didn't upset me enough to get riled up or anything, but it was annoying that I got singled out when I was making the effort to not cause a ruckus. If he hadn't seen the phone in my hand, he never would realized that I was even talking on it. But such is the variety of life in Japan.

Comments and discussion are welcome

Amorphous Hydra Enemy

I'm reading "In Athena's Camp: Preparing for conflict in the information age" these days and was immediately struck by their analysis. It's an older book, published in 1997 but stemming from RAND papers from the previous five years or so. (I actually have 3 or 4 tomes in this vein and am reading them in chronological order.) It's very prescient though and essentially predicts a future conflict like we are currently waged in with Al Qaida.

One of the big themes is that of networks vs hierarchies. Immediately we see the relation to Al Qaida and the US power command structures. The big question (or one of, at least) that needs to be asked (because the current trend is to assume an answer that is far from assured) is can the US win the fight? We all want to defeat terrorism, but we all want to be able to fly like Superman too. I absolutely believe that we can build a world where the solutions offered by terrorism are not competitive with solutions offered by other courses of actions, but I'm not convinced that can come about by direct violent conflict. I'm actually kind of afraid that direct violent conflict will actually serve nothing other than to ensure that the conflict endures ad infinitum, like a stock market bubble that runs out of control.

The internet came about because of AM radio. Wait, back up. In the 1950s, U.S. military commanders began to worry about the susceptibility of hierarchical communication structures to decapitation. They went to the engineers and they came up with the AM radio system that used a dispersed noded system to ensure that no matter who or what or where got hit, there would be a way to get communications from point A to point B. I'm paraphrasing this history based on what I remember from George Dyson's history of computing and evolution of intelligence "Darwin Among the Machines" and my memory isn't so great because I have sleep apnea, so go read his book for accurate details. But anyway, from this, the ARPAnet evolved and we all know (or should know) the rest.

The Internet is the network that everyone knows the best. You may not know how incredibly resistant the network is to attack though. A few months ago (maybe over a year now), there was a very serious attack aimed at one of the 6 super-nodes on the internet. If I remember correctly, this attack pretty much took this node offline. The cool thing is that no one noticed, at least no regular internet users. Of course the technicians in charge of the node noticed; that's how the story got out. But the internet didn't suffer noticably at all. Such is the power of a network.

No matter how powerful the force that one can focus on a network node, its just too dispersed to cut out completely. Military assault on terrorists networks will not eradicate the threat of terrorism. Direct violent assault may have its place in the total arsenal we bring to bear on the terrorism problem (which is essentially a criminal problem at root), but it just doesn't have the power to do the whole thing.

So what do we do? We can use the Internet as an example here as well. The direct frontal assault on an Internet node didn't work, but every so often we do see large portions of the net brought down by virus attacks. To translate this kind of thing into the terrorism network, think of virus as a mentality to go on strike. If this mentality takes root in a group of people and spreads, everyone walks off the job and the company grinds to a halt. Same thing with terrorism. If we can develop a different way of thinking that spreads throughout the populations of terrorists and would-be terrorists, they can and will make choices for action that is non-terrorist.

So how do we do that? First we need to find out why people are becoming terrorists, or put a better way, why people are becoming the types of criminals who's primary aim is to do as much damage to civilian targets of the enemy as possible. We shouldn't accede to terrorists demands but we most definitely should seek to remedy any fundamental problems that contribute to people choosing to become murderous and suicidal sociopaths.

Basically we have to build a world that is good enough to make would-be terrorists happy. Because it seems fairly clear to me that the reason people choose to become terrorist criminals is because that offers them a better life (or at least a better outlet) than the lives they were living before.

Until we see a GREATER effort put into this type of collective endeavor, I don't expect to see any major improvements or advances in the war against terror. And if the reliance on military tactics ends up contributing to the expansion or creation of terrorist-producing environments, we are actually making things worse.

Short sighted on shortness treatment?

Last July, the USFDA approved pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly's application to administer recombinant Human Growth Hormone (rHGH) to healthy children who happen to be in the bottom 1% of their age group for height. (Okay, this is a bad pun, but unavoidable. Can't really describe them to be in the top 1%, can I?) I find this to be a horribly disturbing action that speaks volumes to the deficiencies in our society.

Maybe I'm not being fair and I just don't realize how hard it is being short. This isn't entirely true, as I was kind of short in middle school due to my unfortunate combination of being younger than everyone else in class as well as hitting puberty at a later age than average. But even my shortness at that time wasn't anything compared to the 1% of kids who want this stuff. According to the Washington Post, some of the kids are smaller than kindergarteners when they are in second grade and suffer during gym class because they are so small. These are people who are predicted to grow up to be less than 5' tall.

rHGH has been given to people suffering from natural deficiencies in their ability to produce the hormone, but the new ruling clears the path for kids who have no abnormalities or disfunction to receive treatments. These treatments can cost up to $40,000 a year and can require 6 injections a week, just to gain up to 4 inches in final height. Improvements are not guaranteed and some people don't respond at all.

This whole issue is disappointing. I know its kind of naive to expect children not to pick on short kids, but just because kids seem naturally inclined to be jerks doesn't mean we should abandon efforts to educate them. The hypocrisy of it reeks: can't have genetic manipulation of our DNA but we can subject children to these kinds of chemical interventions without running afoul of God? C'mon!

The health risks aren't clear either. In the 1950s, women who received hormone therapy to stunt their growth got messed up reproductive systems as a bonus. Of course there is no reason to assume that rHGH is going to cause problems, but there is no reason to assume that it won't either. It's safety has been established in problematic patients so far, but we don't what effect it could have on an otherwise perfectly functioning system. Overloading a body with more HGH than it makes could drive the natural mechanisms to shut down, for instance, forcing the kids to continue the treatments much longer than otherwise would have been necessary. HGH is needed all through life, just in lower doses. It really isn't a growth hormone as much as a metabolizing hormone, and thus is needed all through life.

Our nation's fixation with physical attributes and our willingness to invest massive sums of resources in the pursuit of some media-inspired ideal form is disheartening. Of course people are welcome to do whatever they want in life, to pursue a life of crass consumerism and superficial materialism till the cows come home. But shouldn't we ask for more? Shouldn't we strive to become a society more at ease with who and what we are inherent of our own rather than one that seeks to destroy (a process that consumption relies upon)?

Elderly Welfare

I read yesterday that the average annual bill for prescription medicine among the retired elderly is about $3,100, and some people have annual bills of over $13,000 for medicines necessary to keep them alive. For anyone other than the filthy rich this is a staggering amount of money, all the more so when you consider that old people don't have earned incomes. I can sympathize with their call for federal prescription drug benefits to help ease this burden.

But although I sympathize, I'm not sure I support such a call. I don't know if I like the idea of using tax dollars to buy drugs for old people, especially when we don't use tax dollars to provide basic health benefits to the general non-elderly population and the law prevents us from buying particular recreational drugs as we may desire, even when these drugs are just plants and fungus. I'm not trying to turn a cold shoulder to old people here, but it just doesn't seem to be appropriate.

I like old people. I think they are pretty cool and I wish the nation as whole took greater pride in and care of our older generations. Their experiences over the last century are unique in the history of the universe and it is a shame to not capitalize on their wisdom and experiences more. Old people are a national treasure, a resource to be cherished and honored.

But when your time comes, your time comes. The human body isn't supposed to last for a 100 years, especially considering the stress we put it through in the environments we live in. Bodies wear out, plain and simple. I don't think it is the best idea to use our collective financial resources paying for kidney dialysis and hypertension pills.

This is a difficult opinion to hold though becuase it feels so heartless. I think that part of it rests with our collective fear of death and shame associated with the passing of a life. Death is a nasty thing, hidden away and treated as an enemy that we have to combat with the aim of conquering. This leads us to despise death instead of embracing it as the final chapter of the incredible rollercoaster ride of life. Death is inevitable, and if we recognize this and life our lives with an eye to it, we may instill a new sense of purpose and accomlishment, not to mention better health habits.

In a nation of overweight, diabetic, underexercised, smoking couch potatoes, the idea that we should spend our tax money on financing life past its due date strikes me as wrong, as a way of running away from facing up to moral responsibility and a perpetuation of the nasty habit of focusing on treating the systems instead of teh causes of a problem.

I'm not suggesting that we shouldn't offer health benefits or insurance coverage to people. I DO support that idea. I'd even support providing chemical crutches to people below the average life span. But once you beat the odds and pass the average age, no more subsidies and welfare. Life with dignity and allow the nation to collective invest in the next generation, providing benefits for children and those still in the prime earning and caregiving years.

But if my opinion on this would be adopted by a majority, it would have to be accompanied with a sense of respect and gratitude to the elderly, for we are choosing to force them to continue to provide for themselvse long after they have given of themselves to others. It's a tough position to take, and I am not really excited to hold this opinion, but I can't help it.

Then again, maybe shunting some of the billions (that is thousands of millions) of dollars we spend on building weapons would solve the problem. I'd be happiest if this were to happen, but the realist in me knows that the (current, at least) powers that be would never concede to the value of that.

Take note: America's place at the top of the mountain of knowledge may be past

WiredNews notes that the new security environment enacted by the Justice Department of the United States is decimating our research labs nationwide. Our ability to attract new students for research training has been blocked by 20% and research into particular pathogens or other areas of scientific interest are being curtailed, much of it voluntarily in response to DOJ requests. But some of it is being shut down by administrative fiat or indirectly due to the restrictive hassles imposed on researchers who want to continue their research.

Classic Form VS Function decision that yet again errs on the form side. These regulations might look like a good idea but they don't help at all. The research momentum that the national scientific community loses is far more damaging than any potential threat that may be incurred from the research. Even more telling is that while the risk that research could provide info that someone could use to hurt others, that risk is miniscule compared to the absolute and guaranteed damages we take in restricting our research activity.

I haven't really laid out my ideas about human inventiveness yet, but I feel that we've made mistakes in the past by doing things simply because we can instead of thinking about if we should. Just because a door is unlocked doesn't mean we should open it and wander around on the other side. While these attempts by the DOJ to secure us are nice attempts to get us thinking about the needs of researching particular areas, it makes the same kind of mistakes by ordering us to lock every unlocked door we find. We need a better sense of balance and a long-term outlook that treats each case on its own merits. If the current freeze on research keeps up, we'll find that the research is going on elsewhere. The end result is that the research still happens, only we lose our competitive edge. Perhaps not a bad thing, though...

Hungry for Change, Thirsty for ....?

I was listening to James Burke today on my way home and he pointed out that the modern embracing of change and instability is exactly that, a modern invention. Historically, indeed up until little more than 100 years ago (perhaps your grandfather's grandfather's era, if you are my age), a person died in pretty much the same world they were born in. Even such famous keyframes in human history, like the Protestant schism or the Copernican revolution, actually took quite a few years to sink in. Even the impace of Columbus's introduction of the New World to Europe really didn't get felt by most people for quite a while (unless you were one of the Native Americans who suddenly died from an exotic disease, I suppose).

But with the Industrial Revolution, things really began to take off, going faster every day. We've become so accustomed to changed, we've built our economy on planned obsolescence of the most powerful machines we've ever built and advertisers entice us with ads such as "Beautiful because its new." If it isn't cutting edge, we dont' want it. "It's so 80s" became "It's so last century" became "It's so last year." Retro used to mean a generation or earlier, but now you can go retro by wearing your high school fashions at your college graduation.

I wonder if we've become blinded by the new and shiny waiting on the horizon though. We've come to accept, check that, expect things to not last that we no longer manufacture anything of quality. We've turned into a disposable society in so many ways, with so many associated drawbacks that I don't really intend to go into here. Obviously though, without a quality and efficient system of recycling, we just eat up our resources faster and faster this way as well, ever accelerating down the roadway to an ecological collapse.

But redemption is ours for the taking, and it doesn't really involve any sacrifices at all. Instead of embracing the newest thing, we need to instead choose to value quality. How about innovation in efficiency and longevity? Innovation in making things last longer, stronger, cheaper, with fewer materials. We've moved halfway in the right direction, by turning our technological finesse to making things cheaper and easier, but we end up making things so cheap that we don't bother keeping them longer than a hangover. And sure, you can get 5 year lightbulbs and other assorted stuff, but why can't we come up with a car that won't break down, clothes that don't wear out? Or maybe we are trying to do this, and I'm just impatient.

Maybe what I'm trying to say is that I wonder if we shouldn't be emphasizing refinement of what we have instead of gladly playing along in a system of single-run product lines.

Ignoramus Historicus

These idiotic protests at the G8 summit in France need to fucking grow up.

They seem to think that being violent equates with protest, but it doesn't. The best I can come up with is that they see throughout history outbreaks of rioting and violence in response to oppression and other undesirable situations. But they fail to comprehend that those historical instances of rioting, from the French Revolution (perhaps earlier as well) up to the L.A. riots following the Rodney King verdict were not organized planned expressions of protests but explosions of human pressure flowing from a systemic violation of their lives.

The violents morons who trash McDonald's (and in the link above, a bus stop) aren't responding to violations of lifestyle by the objects of their destruction. These vandals are just ideological punks who most likely view major summits and conferences as opportunities to do battle with the economic, social, and political currents running through the world. They see trashing a big name outlet as some kind of warfare, as though it makes a statement or difference.

It pisses me off, because the complaints against, say, globalization or neo/pseudo-ImperioColonialism between the developed and developing world are very legitimate and worthy, and in need of being addressed by the powers that be. But these concerns don't play to the strengths of the status quo, and as thus will never be picked up unless there is popular support. This support will never materialize as long as Mom and Pop Smithers equate anti-globalism sentiment with violence and destruction.

If the people smashing windows at these events really wanted to express themselves in a subversive manner, go make up a Fight Club homework assignment and seek to educate (and thus liberate!) the masses to the problems. Throwing a chair through a Starbucks window isn't a statement, its childish. If someone would spend 15 reasoned minutes talking about why they think Starbucks as an entity is bad (and if they can't express that sentiment in 15 minutes, I'd have to say they don't really know what they are fighting for). Write some letters to the editor of a local newspaper. Attend (or organize) community meetings on the subject. Hell, start a fucking blog and talk about the problems and solutions (the latter is really the important thing).

Just stop fucking up the opportunity to argue against these issues, like you are doing when you get spastic like this.

On Communication

(I had a great entry last night get gobbled up when my browser crashed, but since I was a bit loopy from a long day with little sleep and a couple beers from dinner, its probably for the best. Still, it sucks when you write something and it disappears into the ether like that. Anyways....)

Here is a neat little article that Edward Tufte wrote up analyzing a PowerPoint presentation given by underling engineers at Boeing regarding the issue of insulation foam impacting the shuttle wing. It's interesting for its implications regarding the shuttle, but I found the analysis regarding the actual use of PowerPoint even more intriguing.

On a different page, Tufts writes:

In corporate and government bureaucracies, the standard method for making a presentation isto talk about a list of points organized onto slides projected up on the wall. For many years,overhead projectors lit up transparencies, and slide projectors showed high-resolution 35mmslides. Now "slideware" computer programs for presentations are nearly everywhere. Early inthe 21st century, several hundred million copies of Microsoft PowerPoint were turning outtrillions of slides each year.