On Hillary Marching On

May 8, 2008 at 4:29 pm · Filed under Politics

So Hillary has endeavored to continue on in her quest for the presidency even though it’s turned from an up hill battle to a up cliff battle. Frankly, I’m alright with that as long as she quiets the negative rhetoric and “he’ll only get the black voters” bullshit. She does still speak for some people: mostly people over 65 and anyone who’s looking for a more hardline version of universal healthcare.

Also, her continuing on does have some benefit for Obama. Even if she were to bow out now, West Virginia and Kentucky would probably be a win for her due to:

• Graying population (WV: 15.3% are over 65; National Avg: 12.4%)
• A lot of “I remember the good old days of good unionized factory jobs” type democrats with lower education levels (WV: 14.8% have a bachelors degree or higher ; National Avg: 24.4%)
• She has Methodist roots (WV 10% of the population) and does well with Catholics (WV 8% of the population)
• And lastly there’s also the potential issue of racism

In any case, if he lost those states to someone who was out of the race, it won’t look good for Obama from a publicity standpoint. With Clinton still in the race it’s less of an publicity issue, and even with those loses the math is strongly tilted in his favor, and he’s strongly lined up to win Oregon anyway.

Comments  |  Trackback url  | 

Facebook, you’re dead to me

May 4, 2008 at 9:33 am · Filed under Design & Web Geekery

During my blog hiatus, I was ruminating on a potential post about what I don’t like about Facebook. Now I don’t really need to as Fake Steve Jobs summed it up perfectly: The problem with Facebook.

Facebook seems to have missed their window of opportunity. They were on the verge of expanding beyond their main college demographic, the API was released to a bunch of bloghead fanfare, they were one of the first to create an excellent iphone version, and then came the tidal wave of crap werewolf-zombie-pirate attacks and superdumbwalls. They failed to create or encourage any form of usefulness in their product.

Frankly, I also find their site design is clean but really boring looking — kinda the opposite of myspace, busy and annoying but exciting in a way.

I’ll probably keep my account on the site — hell I still have an account on friendster, I think.

Comments (2)  |  Trackback url  | 

Endeavoring to write again

May 4, 2008 at 8:59 am · Filed under Life, Meaning, & Selfhood

Haven’t written here in a while — since February it looks like. Been a busy March/April:

• Vacation with family in Taos NM: Earthships! Los Alamos! Vistas! Kite flying! Jackrabbits!
• Gearing up for Maker Faire: New NifNaks business cards! collateral! more collateral! packaging!
• Taxes and other stuff that I can’t remember but has certainly kept my life busy!
• Listening to RadioLab podcasts! …Seriously you must listen to RadioLab.

Anyway, I’ll be writing again soon with a real post as the ache to write has been building within.

Comments (1)  |  Trackback url  | 

Matt Gonzalez’s Anti-Obama Diatribe

February 28, 2008 at 4:57 pm · Filed under Politics

Matt Gonzalez released an op-ed yesterday in BeyondChron. He points out some decent points. But I’m confused why he targeted Obama rather than Hillary (or maybe both). According to the National Journal, Obama has a more liberal record.

Obama’s not the perfect progressive liberal candidate, but Gonzalez himself is an example of the fact that a progressive liberal can’t even win — even in the San Francisco mayoral race. Frankly, my first choice in this race was for Edwards, but I’m happy with my vote for Obama.

Now with him announced as the VP running mate for Nader, his rational for this whole article makes a whole lot more sense. Nader’s campaign for president has never been about winning isn’t been about yelling “your not liberal enough!” which basically sums up Gonzalez’s article about Obama.

As a progressive liberal myself, I think these things should be said, and I applaud everyone who critiques the records of all the candidates. I’m happy to see anyone write good criticism of Obama or Clinton. However in a presidential race that looks to be close, running as an unwinnable leftist third party just to say these things is irresponsible. Nader himself proved this in 2000. As much as Gore was a pandering sycophant to the center during his campaign, Bush has turned out to be a tragedy for the interests of liberals.

The Nader candidacy may be fairly irrelevant in this upcoming election, but if getting out of Iraq is in any way important to your liberal values then every vote god damn counts against John “100 years” McCain.

Critiquing the Diatribe

Seeing now Gonzalez’s motivation for writing the article it should be obvious that it probably contains some hyperbole. I don’t have time to deconstruct it completely but I’ll take a crack at some of it.

1. The War in Iraq - Obama’s public stance here leans more towards a quick exit, but his votes have been less hardline. It would be great if he was otherwise, but the political climate has not been flavorful for hardline tactics like cutting off funds to the troops. Still he’s better than Clinton on this issue and obviously better than McCain.
2. Connection with Joe Lieberman - As much as I can’t stand Joe, Obama’s connection with him doesn’t worry me too much. Lieberman was his mentor when Obama became a Senator. I’ve heard that as a junior senator you’re basically assigned a mentor. Anyways, it’s not a surprise that he campaigned for his mentor.
3. Class Action Reform - I don’t have a lot to say here. Gonzalez may have a point but I’d like to see more of Obama’s voting recond on this issue.
4. Credit Card Interest Rates - Obama had a problem with this bill and I don’t know what it was, but neither does Gonzalez. Voting against it may or may not have not been a good vote but I believe Obama is in support of credit card customer considering his promotion of the Credit Card Safety Star Act and his policy of a Credit Card Bill of Rights. The fact the Gonzalos ignored these other measures is disingenuous.
5. Limiting Non-Economic Damages - Again Gonzalez may have a point here, but considering that this article already has a few holes I’d like to review Obama’s other votes on this issue.
6. Reform of Mining Law of 1872 - As this One Good Move commenter mentioned While Obama has stated his stance against the bill it hasn’t come up to vote yet. Still it seems like a decent bill that Obama should vote for so Gonzalez has a bit of point here.
7. Regulating Nuclear Industry - I’ve read about this issue before and it seems like the classic example of a bill getting weakened to death in the legislative process. The fact that Obama used this as a example of accomplishment is disingenuous. Point to Gonzalez here, though this topic isn’t a big issue for me.
8. Energy Policy - Another point to Gonzalez, ethanol is a waste and whomever is scientifically advising Obama on this is ignorant.
9. Single Payer Health Care - I am more supportive of a single payer system like Edward’s plan. I kinda doubt we could ever get there, and I bet Obama does too which is why he’s offered his compromise plan. I kinda don’t like that Obama has compromised this early in the game, before even getting elected, but I understand his reasoning. Also, again his plan is better than McCain’s which is basically just deregulation and tax credits. A good review of the different stances can be found in this NPR Report.
10. NAFTA - Again I don’t know Obama’s complete voting record details on this issue. I don’t completely trust Gonzalez’s summary. Obama has to be better than McCain on this issue.
11. Gonzalez’s other examples - most of his other points are decent though I never really supported the impeachment issue. I may want Bush and Cheney out but I never saw a concrete impeachable offense. The lists of reasons to impeach read more like reasons to despise them and vote them out. The war was sold using using propaganda and lies, it was wrong, unjust and possibly against international law, but none of those are impeachable offenses. The Plame scandal was the closest we got to an impeachment level offense, but there never was good enough evidence.

Gonzalez ended his article with this:

“I remain impressed by the enthusiasm generated by Obama’s style and skill as an orator. But I remain more loyal to my values, and I’m glad to say that I want no part in the Obama craze sweeping our country.”

Gonzalez if you were loyal to your values, you and Nader would sit this one out and just yell from the sidelines. As a bee in the ring, you’ll do nothing more than make Obama falter and possibly give McCain the win. And if that happens you and all the others who share your progressive views lose.

Comments (2)  |  Trackback url  | 

iPhone Most Wanted

February 26, 2008 at 9:13 pm · Filed under Design & Web Geekery

With the latest iphone update (1.1.4) offering nothing more than bug fixes, I thought I’d get around to posting my list of iphone most wanted. Many of these have been stated before, but a few I haven’t heard anyone mention.

Been said before, gonna say it again

• Copy & Paste
• Airtunes support - I wanna play my iphone tunes directly to my Airport Express
• Video capture support via the camera
• iChat - Though I don’t know how much I’d use it as I’m not as much of an AIM junkie as I used to be, but it’d be nice to have. Bonjour ichat with other local network iphones would be kinda cool too.
• Horizontal keyboard anywhere - would be great to have this for Notes, SMS, email, etc. And while your at it squish this keyboard vertically a bit more to give one more line of text visible.
• Search functionality - for email and a global spotlight which searches sms, email, notes, etc.
• vcard sending - I should be able to send my contact info as a vcard via email or even maybe bluetooth.
• wifi sync - at least for contacts and calendar
• Taking a photo for assigning to a contact should also place that picture in your photo roll.
• Email map routes to others. This should include the text list and a link to a google map.
• Save photo you get via email into your photos

Few new ideas that I haven’t heard elsewhere

• Network Printing - I’d love to print the occasional email or map directions via my networked printer.
• Clicking on the upper-left edge/wifi icon should bring you to the wifi settings screen - there are several times I’d like to easily turn off wifi so that it doesn’t ask me to join a network.
• Safari should have a larger (adjustable) cache - I hate when I load a new tab and then find out that all my other tabs are now blank. Also it should remember the previous pages info better. Come on I have over a gig free still use it!
• When zoomed all the way out on a web page a horizontal swipe should move to the next/prev tab - Since photos does this I keep expecting safari to do this.
• One The Go favorites photoset - make this work just like a music on the go playlist (which by the way I love the iphone’s on the go playlist functionality!)
• iCal event subscriptions should update directly from your iphone via the web - as it is I have to sync to my computer to get new subscribed events, which is dumb.

Things I don’t really need

• MMS - Don’t care. Sending my photos via email is more useful.

Third party apps I can’t wait for (come on release the SDK!)

• Twitter client
• Real Notes/Word-like app - ideally it would allow use of MarkDown formatting and have post to blog functionality
• To do app
• better calculator with “paper tape”
• better weather app - I want an hourly (or at least morn/afternoon/evening) forecast and the ability to see what the weather was like yesterday (great for comparison)
• RSS reader which downloads feeds so I can read offline
• a game. Hell almost any game will do. Though I am particularly interested in an iphone version of DopeWars. I can remember the stupid amount I played that on my Palm back in the day.

Comments  |  Trackback url  | 

Semantic Reclamation: Emergent Design Vs Intelligent Design

February 22, 2008 at 1:44 pm · Filed under Art Freak Culture + Science & Skepticism

Professor Ken Miller, who is famous for being the lead expert witness against Intelligent Design at the Dover Trial, has recently proposed that scientists reclaim the word “Design” from the ID movement (ie., the Creationists).

You can listen yourself to his argument for semantic reclamation here in a short discussion he had with James Randerson. I’ve also transcribed a couple of the most relevant quotes here:

ID proponents argue that we can see the hint of design in nature and they use that as evidence against evolution. And that puts scientists in a position of arguing that there is no design in nature — that nature is somehow capricious, arbitrary, random, pointless. Well there is design in nature and we should take that word away from the ID movement and define it in a scientific sense….

Yes design is real but that design emerges from the evolutionary process and the laws of physics and chemistry.

Personally, I couldn’t agree more. I really like the sound of Emergent Design. Others in comments on PZ Myer’s post have suggested Natural Design or Evolutionary Design or the longer Evolutionary Emergent Design which may work too. However, I prefer the term Emergent Design because I think it sounds better and it can contain more meaning: Emergent Design can also cover such emergent patterns such as evolutionary programming, fractals, Mandelbrot, etc.

PZ Myers, of the ScienceBlog Pharyngula, doesn’t agree with Ken Miller on this:

Look at all the flailings about over the word “theory”; lay people will hear that word being used by scientists and conclude that the creationists must have been right all along long before they get around to remapping their mental connections to design.

Another problem is of even greater concern. The word “design” carries other implications: purpose, planning, calculation. These are not present in evolution!

PZ Myer’s first argument is that it will just give creationists another means to twist our words. And his second argument is that this new use of design differs from current usage. Neither of these arguments are really valid when discussing the pros and cons of semantic reclamation.

Every time a word is reclaimed it is always the dirty word that everyone shies away from. The words are purposefully being twisted from their traditional meanings. Of course, some terms are not so much reclaimed as empowered such as Black and Gay; however, there are several examples of successful semantic reclamations:

• Punk, something or someone worthless or unimportant; a young hoodlum, becomes the proud Punk rock; and now gets transformed further to a suffix that means a style or movement characterized by the adoption of aggressively unconventional and often bizarre or shocking in both fashion and attitude.
• Queer, disparaging term for homosexuals in the sense of effeminate or unmanly, becomes the proud Queer embracing all who deviate from sexual/gender stereotypes; to now transform and mainstream even further with “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.”
• Dyke, used disparagingly by many, but like Punk and Queer it is now used proudly by the many of the same people it meant to insult.

Of course, one could point out that the hip hop cultural use of nigger, bitch, and ho haven’t really been all that successfully reclaimed. However, those terms are still also used negatively within the hip hop culture, which makes it hard for these terms to ever take on a new positive meaning.

What does this all have to do with Intelligent Design you might say? Well in this instance, Design isn’t used exactly as an insult, but it is being used as a means of attack. As a result, it has become the dirty word that scientists must shy away from. By being afraid to use the word Design, we are reinforcing the meaning that ID proponents want it to mean. We are empowering it for them not us.

Ken Miller is right. Anyone who looks at nature can plainly see pattern and design. By allowing the ID camp a monopoly on the word Design we are allowing all perceived design to be a win for the creationists. By instead reclaiming Design as Emergent Design we are reclaiming it and empowering it for ourselves.

Comments (6)  |  Trackback url  |