Fugu Talk

My favorite charity at this very moment is Amnesty International. Just because in a recent mail solicitation from them, I saw something I’ve never seen before – a check-box to opt out of their address-sharing program. To make sure I wasn’t imagining it, I checked their web site and it’s there, too:

Coincidentally, this arrived shortly after I complained to the ACLU about their address-sharing program. They also have an opt-out option – the inconvenient kind, where you have to write in. As with commercial enterprises that make money by renting or selling your address, this is par for the course for non-profits, although Charity Navigator does use it as a rating criterion. With the ACLU, it seems a bit hyprocritical, considering their stances on consumer privacy in areas such as medical patient databases. Their privacy statement (and a blurb in their newsletters) reassures:

We may also share the Voluntarily Submitted Data of members and donors who are U.S. residents with other non-profit organizations and publications (“Sharing Organizations”), but never to any partisan political groups or to groups whose programs are incompatible with ACLU policies. 

But that’s terribly vague. For example, at one point during the presidential election I found that MoveOn described itself as “non-partisan” on its web site and yet had a Top Ten Things You Should Know About John McCain article that included a factoid that McCain was one of the richest members of Congress, failing to  note (besides “so what”) that several Democrats were ahead of him on that list, including John Kerry and Ted Kennedy (and Jay Rockefeller, no surprise).

While procrastinating on some work, I decided to dump my WordsEye101 images into an iPhoto album and export the set into a QuickTime movie. Here’s the result on YouTube – the conversion filtered out the dissolve transitions from the original, but I think it still looks OK.

I was unable to stomach watching the entire Jim Cramer interview on The Daily Show, so I may have missed parts where Jon Stewart didn’t look like he was kicking a dog. 

I actually agree with much of Stewart’s criticisms – Cramer’s show more than any other on CNBC has been hyping investment like it was ESPN, and for a self-professed business news network, CNBC went along for the ride as willingly and unquestioningly as anyone else. I won’t  go as far as Stewart to say they’re in bed with the financial institutions, but with their big-money adoration and CEO fawning, they sure look like the want to be.

But while Cramer is more exuberant than anyone else on his network, it should be noted he states repeatedly in his show and in his books that no one who’s unwilling to spend an hour/stock/day should trade individual stocks. Sure, he may be hyperbolic when extolling stocks, but he’s probably hyperbolic when ordering fries – that’s his personality. It’s pretty depressing to see him subdued. Stewart, on the other hand, while he said both of them were snake oil salesmen but his network advertises itself as such, looks hypocritical when he drops his satirical shield and expresses moral outrage. He stated his attacks weren’t at Cramer personally, then showed some clips portraying Cramer in a bad light, and then when Cramer tried to defend himself, Stewart chastised him with “this isn’t about you.” Now, how many people get their news from his show? How often has Cramer been a guest (I’m actually not sure, but I know I’ve seen him on the Colbert Nation). Stewart is as late to this story as anyone else. And after CNBC started shows hosted by John MacEnroe, Donald Trump and Howie Mandel, who could really take them seriously? In a comedy show, moral outrage is best expressed as mock outrage, or mock not-outrage, as finely tip-toed on The Colbert Nation.

Lately, I haven’t been sure that “bonus” meant what I thought it meant, so I checked the definition on YourDictionary.com:

anything given in addition to the customary or required amount; specif.,

1. payment over and above salary given to an employee as an incentive or reward
2. a government payment to military veterans
3. BRIT. a dividend to insurance policyholders; also, an extra dividend to stockholders

And they also have  a “legal” definition:

In the last few weeks I’ve become more adventurous with WordPress and tried out some plugins. I’ve found these three to be particularly useful:

• WordBook – automatically publishes notifications of new blog posts to your Facebook wall
• WP_UnityObject – allows embedding of Unity web players in blog posts
• wptouch – displays the blog in an iPhone-friendly format when viewed from an iPhone, like this:

Serenity is the by far the leading vote-getter in NASA’s contest to name the Node 3 addition to the Space Station, though Joss Whedon’s Firefly/Serenity fans may be concerned about write-in’s from Colbert Nation supporters.

This being NASA, I think they should take in account not only how cool the Serenity spaceship looks (especially on the Blue-Ray disc I just bought at the Circuit City meltdown), but also a highly-underpraised aspect of the Firefly/Serenity universe – it’s quiet in space! Almost all sci-fi shows from Star Trek to to Star Wars to Babylon 5 to Battlestar Galactica (old and new) feature a cacaphony of engine’s revving, lasers (sorry, phasers) blasting and guns blazing. 2001: A Space Odyssey showed it could be done quietly and scientifically correctly, and Joss Whedon did it again, without playing the Blue Danube.

But I feel obligated also to point out a highly-undercriticized aspect of Joss Whedon’s sci-fi vision – where are all the Chinese? I’m accustomed to the lack of Asian representation in Hollywood, but this is supposed to be world spawned from a great Anglo-Chinese alliance in which everyone swears in Chinese and knows how to use chopsticks. There are so few recognizably Asian characters in the series and movie, I was startled to see an Asian face in the bonus features on the Blue-Ray disc (I guess that was a bonus!).

Joss Whedon’s shows are among my favorite (still not sure about Dollhouse…), but they do have “written by a white Hollywood screenwriter” stamped all over them, much like Paul Haggis screenplays and half the shows on the WB. In contrast, take Battlestar Galactica – the fleet is visibly mixed-race and led by a Latino, and it’s no big deal. Even the Cylons have gender and racial variety (just don’t call them toasters!) Hmm, for the next Space Station addition, I hope they name it Galactica.

One of my projects is showing signs of life – a revival of Hyper Entertainment‘s HyperBowl. Check out this teaser content, running in the Unity 3D webplayer, on HyperBowl3D.com

This weekend, thanks to Daylight Savings Time, I instantly moved ahead in time one hour. After watching Lost this season, I was disappointed the experience wasn’t accompanied by a blinding flash of light. But it did make me think of some time travel stories that have made an impression on me:

• This year, of course, it’s Lost, that somehow keeps a story that looks like it’s going to veer out of control moving along and constantly suspenseful. The biggest mystery – did the writers plan this all along or were they making it up?
• A Sound of Thunder – the original Ray Bradbury story, not the movie. Gives the “butterfly effect” a whole new meaning.
• Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure
• Timecop – when will Van Damme receive his lifetime achievement award?
• The Robert Heinlein story in which a man travels back in time and fathers himself
• The Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode in which the crew travels back to Roswell
• The Star Trek: Next Generation episode in which Data’s detached head is unearthed
• The Futurama episodes that riff on the previous three
• The Terminator
• The Sarah Connor Chronicles – it’s got enough going on that it deserves to be separated from the movies

After several failures logging in to my T-mobile account in Safari, I tried Firefox and it worked. Belatedly, I googled for the problem and found this report that says T-mobile doesn’t support Safari. A huge telcom can’t test more than two browsers? In this economy, they can’t hire one more QA person? Are they still waiting to see if this Mac thing will take off? Or are they peeved at the exclusive AT&T iPhone deal? I guess I should be relieved they don’t just support Internet Explorer, but now I have to install Firefox just to pay my phone bill!

Ok, that title is overlay dramatic. I hope. But I read the 1996 Java white paper recently and noticed the conspicuous absence of Lisp in its comparison with other languages.

Of course, not every language can be included. No Ada, for example. And it makes sense to just list languages in common use. But Smalltalk? Maybe Smalltalk is chosen to represent the closest thing to a design goal for Java, but Lisp would match up just as well in the table (except maybe for security), and I’m under the impression that Java team came largely from a Lisp  background (Jim “Emacs” Gosling, Frank “Lucid” Yellin…), and I highly doubt they said, “forget Lisp, what we really want is something like Smalltalk”. I can only surmise that Lisp was too tainted by the AI crash to even mention. It’s sad – as if by omission they declared Lisp irrelevant.