Affirmative Civility

DCCCD, or at least El Centro, responded to the Virginia Tech shooting with a memo to students about Affirmative Civility:

Some welcome overtures would be smiling, nodding, shaking hands, asking a friendly question, high-fiveing, offering a generic greeting such as hey, whats happening, etc. The key to affirmative civility is that each of us is willing to assume responsibility for making the first move not waiting for someone else to speak first or smile first.

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Fundamentalism

Harold Bloom in The American Religion (1992):

Fundamentalism, the great curse of all American religion, and of all religion in this American century. Fundamentalism […] is an attempt to overcome the terror of death by a crude, literalization of the Christian intimation of immortality.

As Bloom puts it all religion comes from our apprehension of death. I guess this is why science is so lousy at explaining death. I wonder what comes from our celebration of life?

CIC*TRIPLE ADVANTAGE 877-4816825

CIC*TRIPLE ADVANTAGE 877-4816825 may you rot in hell.

Recently I went to Experian’s free credit report site to get my score. Despite my best efforts to the contrary I’m now subscribed to their $12.95/month credit monitoring service. Unsubscribing can only be done by calling an 877 number and sitting on hold apparently.

I would like to add that their credit monitoring service only exists because they do such a poor job of gathering accurate credit information. They want me to subsidize their poor credit reporting. Unbelievable.

Useful Redundancy

On the daily puppy they post pictures of cute puppies. They also have ratings and comments for each puppy. The ratings I’ve seen end up between 10 and 11 (the highest). The comments all use varying degrees of hyperbole to describe how cute the puppy is.

The ratings and comments seem redundant to me, yet I bet people wouldn’t enjoy the site as much without them. (I always browse them) Why is that? I see the same kind of redundant chatter on many websites (digg comes to mind). I wonder if this fills the same role as small talk in the real world? I guess any web site looking for an audience needs to provide opportunities for this kind of chatter.

The Golden Compass

The first unfinished movie footage from the Golden Compass has been posted. I teared up a little bit with excitement. The scene of Iorek running without his armor looked really good.

The narration in the clip is a mess. It describes the story in only the blandest terms. Chris Weitz’s mention of freewill is the only clue into the big journey the story takes. I wonder if they’re still not sure how to pitch the story to American audiences.

John Backus

Sometimes it seems like we’re quick to forget the great engineers and scientists who make our world possible. More people know who Anna Nicole Smith is than say Jon Postel. I’ve been really pleased to see all ink spilled on the passing of John Backus. While I knew about Fortran and BNF I didn’t realize how bright and forward thinking the guy behind them was.

Conventional programming languages are growing ever more enormous, but not stronger. Inherent defects at the most basic level cause them to be both fat and weak…[via Scott Rosenberg]

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OpenCongress

I’m surprised I haven’t seen more about OpenCongress in the sites I read. It is one of the better Congressional resource sites I’ve seen. I can’t wait for the next release which will include the ability to tag bills, and follow the Congressional calendar.

It nicely bridges the gap between official government items (votes, bills, hearings) and public discourse about those items. Most sites like this play one side or the other.

Commodity Currency

What if we used a different currency for commodity items like toilet paper or Coke. So instead of paying $1 for a Coke you’d pay say 500 credits. Or think of it as 50 yen for a Coke.

Price is a crucial piece of information for the consumer. Commodity pricing in America loses detail because our currency doesn’t work well for discriminating products at the low end. But if you could price two items as 2000 credits and 1800 credits, instead of each being $2, you’re adding more detail back into the price. That detail just can’t be reflected with our coarsely grained US currency.

Where Have you Gone Lysander Spooner?

Recently I’ve been fascinated by microcredit, and currency exchange. In the quest for more knowledge I was talking to someone who actually has a masters in finance. I threw out the analogy that banking is to microfinance as Newtonian physics is to Quantum physics. The idea being that the laws of finance change when the dollar amounts get small.

He wasn’t fully sold on it because fundamentally risk modeling is the same for big and large. But he threw out the idea that Newtonian physics might be used to describe finances of $1m and up, whereas microcredit finance would be more like an electron cloud with probability describing the electron’s movement.

Sharp tongues of revolutionary heat

I’ve been researching the PATRIOT Act which naturally leads me back through US history and similar cycles of radicalism. While pausing on the 1920 Wall Street Bombing and the later Palmer raids I came across this excellent quote. Then US Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer had his eye on the Democratic presidential nomination and tried to fire up support for him with this gem:

Like a prairie-fire, the blaze of revolution was sweeping over every American institution of law and order … eating its way into the homes of the American workmen, its sharp tongues of revolutionary heat were licking the altars of the churches, leaping into the belfry of the school bell, crawling into the sacred corners of American homes, seeking to replace marriage vows with libertine laws, burning up the foundations of society.From 9/16: Terrorists Bomb Wall Street

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