graudrakon

following the revelation that goals are only achieved when they are broken into small manageable pieces I am planning all my resolutions in a "blah at least per a some-time-period" format

1. Fold at least one origami turtle everyday until done
2. Of the three books I am reading piecemeal, read a portion of each everyday until done
3. Apply to at least one scholarship every week
4. Spend a little time at least every other weekend paring down storage space
5. Submit to at least three writing contests per a month
6. Do at least one awesome/different thing every month (example: going to a beach, museum, show, or participate in one big event of some kind... I know what I mean even if I can't explain it)

and the one that isn't scheduled, get these door problems fixed at hackerdojo

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now help keep me to them

Another great Joss Whedon project, it is entertaining, creepy, and thought provoking.

Synopsis: a secret organization has the technology to erase and replace peoples personalities, providing programmable people or Dolls, so the very wealthy can buy a perfect lover, or super spy, friend, expert, ect.

It is not however Joss's best work and there are some nits I have to pick, first Eliza Dushku is not in my opinion up to the task. While a good actress her limits become apperent when so many personalities are put next to each other, all of them are just her with an accent and new costume; "funny hat acting" we used to call it, where a person has a new persona by putting on a different funny hat instead of acting different in some way.

My big nit to pick is season two however which frankly just isnt that good. Characters develop and change without reason, moral pondering and ambiguity became more preachy, the comparisons between the dolls and real people became more heavy handed and the main character went all out Mary Sue on us. It still has it's cool moments that keep me watching though.


Last I find something very appealing about the psychology of the dolls, the idea of having your personality taken away, being stripped down to just the essential pure innocent human urge "to be our best" as the dolls all dreamily say. Because ultimately we all want to be our best and it's our personality, our past, our parents, our childhood and everything we learned to be afraid of that holds us back from being our best.

Don't you want to be your best?

So I realized recently that I am a totally different person than I was a year or even 6 months ago. Namely I no longer care for learning little bits of trivia, or odd random branches of science that I wont use. In fact all of all of the "educational" shows on tv that I used to love watching be they about physics or hitler now bore me, I find their knowledge to lack any substance or depth. I only seem to care about learning that is directly applicable to life in some way. In fact most of my mind now seems to be goal oriented and a lot of my emotional state is taken up with not being happy about the rate at which I accomplish things. Whether it is a story I am blocked on or some aspect of programming I don't know yet or a book I am not finished with yet. I have in short become some weird form of type A personality, how odd.

parties at hacker dojo have a very weird atmosphere to them, first the fact that you can have conversations and go, "let me show you what I'm talking about on YouTube" or "Let me wikipedia it for you" totally changes how conversations work. Second, conversations more often then not have content, discuss relevant things that people are interested in hearing instead of just party banter. Last all the guys are on the dance floor while girls sit in the corner to shy to join in.

i find it amusing that I, a homeless person, am the only one who is not feeling the cold.

I like the environment it's where I keep all my stuff, but I don't like fear mongering, and I don't like a faction that says we aren't allowed to question them. It has always pissed me off that asking the environmental movement to stand up to scientific rigor, asking if they have considered other possibilities before jumping to a conclusion, or just asking to know more where always rebuffed with accusations like "you must be in the pockit of the oil industry", "why do you hate the world", "only a right wing crazy extremist would ask that", or "are you so stupid you actually want to know more, the truth is obvious just give us your money"

so I am rather happy that the recent "climategate" has happened. In short a hacker broke into a england based center where they collect and crunch the numbers that prove global warming happens. The hacker released there confidential files that shows that all of the data has been slanted, rigged, skewed or flat out ignored. Statements between the researchers show state that the temperature has actually been cooling not warming, that the sharp rise since the industiral revolution are because they switched measuring instruments, and that they where under orders to destroy if a freedom of information act was made to request it.

Despite republican claims this does not prove global warming is a lie, (it does proves the scientists behind it are more concerned with winning then finding the truth) there are still two other stations that support global warming. It does however mean that global warming will have to prove itself as a proper scientific theory. You see up until now the science was on environmentalists side because anyone opposing the theory was not allowed to see the date, was not allowed to do any science basically. Hopefully an investigation will liberate the data from the other two sites.

ok my rant over. The fact that scientist would completely ignore well science for there own personal gain or just to win an argument does not surprise me. What does surprise me is that a segment of the hacker community has been attacking environmentalism. Between this hack as well as a recent string of vandalism attacks against environmentalist sites it makes me wonder if the internet is slipping to the right. I am not sure how I feel about that thought.

for the quickest low down see Jon Stewarts skit on it


for the most fare, moderate, and rational view I have seen on the subject I give you what showed on the front page of the New York Times science section: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/science/01tier.html?_r=1

and for really creepy claymation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEiLgbBGKVk