freedom of speech means freedom from rhetoric

I've finally finished moving to the new apartment. Those of you who need to know my new address either know where to look, or know how to ask. Phone number hasn't changed.

I have a lot of fucking books.

My father used to tell me about a TV show he watched when he was a small child. He saw me enjoying things like Star Wars when I was young, and he would tell me about Captain Video, the first science fiction TV show ever made. It was, of course, made to sell cereal and toys to young boys: things are not so different now than they were in 1948. But Captain Video was made and broadcast without the benefit of videotape or editing, with all special effects performed live. I had assumed that there was no way I would ever see any of this material, which saddened me, because my father had been a member of the fan club and it had apparently had a rather strong effect on him as a kid.

But then I found some of it on Youtube today. "Pure science is a greater weapon than all the armies in the world!"

Found among old links: Moen's Law of Bicycles

"Good customers make for good products". This is my explanation for why an ignorant customer base causes merchandise quality to decline, on account of unhealthy market dynamics, e.g., in retail computer hardware and software. In the mid-1970s, bicycles suddenly became very popular in the USA. The masses suddenly entered the market, few knowing anything about bicycles. Many could distinguish poorly if at all between good equipment and bad; good customer service and bad. Consequently, poorly made bicycles (which cost less to make) undercut well made ones (and poor customer service out-earned the good variety), because superior value ceased to be perceived. Over time, overall quality of available bicycles declined considerably, almost entirely because of this dynamic with customers, recovering only after the fad ended, years later.
Quality thrives only when people can tell the difference. When they haven't a clue about products and how they work, schlock merchandise prevails. One can see this process at work in retail computing gear and software: People who know least about computing always insist most on achieving bottom dollar. In a way, this is understandable: You want to exercise control over the process, and, if you're dirt-ignorant about computing, the only place to exercise control is over price. Gradually, this effect tends to drive good merchandise out of the market entirely, leaving a generous selection of cheap crud.

From the writings of Chuang Tzu/Zhuangzi, book one, Hsiâo-yâo Yû, or "Untroubled Wanderings" (paraphrased by myself from several translations):

The whole world could praise Sung Yung-tsze, and it would not make him work harder; the whole world could condemn him, and he would not work any less. He was truly aware of the difference between the awareness of self and the judgment of others, and of the limits of glory and disgrace. But even so, he knew that his journeys were incomplete.

[...]

Therefore, the Perfect Man thinks not of his own self — the Sacred Man thinks not of his own merit — the Sage thinks not of his own fame.

I spent a little while yesterday hunting for cheap audio/video cables for a project, and I was reminded again of exactly how much people are overpaying for them.

Compare this product to this one. The former is $30, even if you walk into an Office Depot and don't pay shipping, the latter is $6 even after shipping charges from California to Texas. There will be no visible or audible difference in quality between those two cables for 99% of customers.

And I'm not even talking about the ridiculousness that is Monster Cable, who have positioned themselves to be the brand pushed most heavily by stores like Best Buy. This is because they have the largest markup, and therefore provide the most profit to the stores.

Stores like Best Buy and Circuit City are selling DVD players and the like incredibly cheaply, and then making loads of money back by selling you the add-on cables at extraordinary markup. Meanwhile, you can avoid the whole problem by using online vendors like Monoprice who specialize in cabling.

"There is no such thing as winning an argument. There is only the ability to clarify information to the point that a conclusion becomes obvious to all those with the ability to tackle the problem."
- Source Unknown

After several months' worth of back-and-forth on some political forums between Ron Paul supporters and... those of us who are not Ron Paul supporters, I was asked by some people to put together a collection of information that we could send people to, so that we would not have to repeat ourselves constantly. It's in a state now where I'm not totally ashamed of it, and so I'm letting people know about the Ron Paul Information Index.

Feel free to share the link. There's a lot of Ron Paul fans out there who are very, very noisy, and a distinct lack of good sources about his actual politics. I'm not too worried about him actually winning any elections, but anything we can do to keep people from joining his internet fan club is a good thing, I believe.

A while back, I used to maintain a Frequenty Asked Questions file on "malware", or malicious software, which included viruses, trojans, spyware, adware, and all sorts of other nastiness. I kept myself up-to-date on the latest things that were showing up, and the methods to get rid of them.

I realized a few years ago that the field was changing, that malware was no longer being written by angry teenagers, but was instead starting to be written by professionals who had a financial stake in the success of the "product". It became harder and harder to keep up with the flood of crap, and eventually I stopped maintaining the FAQ, preferring to leave things up to the professionals.

Well, the future of malware is here, and it's very ugly.

Wired: Gathering 'Storm' Superworm Poses Grave Threat to PC Nets

Old style worms -- Sasser, Slammer, Nimda -- were written by hackers looking for fame. They spread as quickly as possible (Slammer infected 75,000 computers in 10 minutes) and garnered a lot of notice in the process. The onslaught made it easier for security experts to detect the attack, but required a quick response by antivirus companies, sysadmins and users hoping to contain it. Think of this type of worm as an infectious disease that shows immediate symptoms.

Worms like Storm are written by hackers looking for profit, and they're different. These worms spread more subtly, without making noise. Symptoms don't appear immediately, and an infected computer can sit dormant for a long time. If it were a disease, it would be more like syphilis, whose symptoms may be mild or disappear altogether, but which will eventually come back years later and eat your brain.

I am not looking forward to dealing with this crap on a regular basis.

This is an excellent piece on the role of editors and editorial standards, targeted at webcomics in particular, but the ideas are universal.

http://mightygodking.com/index.php/2007/09/17/on-editorialization-and-the-lack-thereof/

In particular:

Fairly rough stuff to get, especially when you’re in your teens. But you know what? They were right. I was writing shit then. I don’t write shit now, and yes, it’s partially because of those rude editors. I know some might want to attribute my improvement entirely to the helpful editors who went through the generic, tedious crap I was churning out then and gave me helpful pointers on establishing my own style and avoiding bad writing tropes, and I won’t debate for a second that they were all very helpful.

However. The rude ones were helpful as well, because they said one thing, over and over again, either directly or indirectly. They said “this form to which you aspire has standards which we expect you to meet.”

Think about that for a second, the concept of standards. The idea that your work is part of something that is larger and more important than you, that what you contribute in expression will help to define the movement, and indeed, in a way, all art with it. It’s something that’s steadily been dropping off the edge of the creative map over the last fifty years - maybe society as a whole has gotten more self-important, maybe it’s a shift in personal philosophy as a whole, I don’t know. But it’s an idea in regression, of that we can be sure; it’s one that merits a comeback.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/08/books/07cnd-lengle.html

Madeleine L’Engle, Children’s Writer, Is Dead

Madeleine L’Engle, who in writing more than 60 books, including childhood fables, religious meditations and science fiction, weaved emotional tapestries transcending genre and generation, died Thursday in Connecticut. She was 88.

Her death, of natural causes, was announced today by her publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Ms. L’Engle (pronounced LENG-el) was best known for her children’s classic, “A Wrinkle in Time,” which won the John Newbery Award as the best children’s book of 1963. By 2004, it had sold more than 6 million copies, was in its 67th printing and was still selling 15,000 copies a year.

Her works — poetry, plays, autobiography and books on prayer — were deeply, quixotically personal. But it was in her vivid children’s characters that readers most clearly glimpsed her passionate search for the questions that mattered most. She sometimes spoke of her writing as if she were taking dictation from her subconscious.

A Wrinkle In Time was a book that had a profound affect on me as a child. I think that the heroine of the book, Meg, was something missing from much of children's literature today (especially in the wake of the Harry Potter phenomena). Meg was a heroine not because of any particular talents; she was not a warrior or a wizard, even one in training. What made her a heroine was her courage, her ethics, and most importantly her willingness to love unconditionally. Children's books need more heroines like Meg Murry, and fewer Hermione Grangers.

I feel sad, not because of L'Engle's passing; I expect that of anyone in the world, she was well prepared for her own death and met it gracefully. I am sad because I should have at the very least sent her a letter at some point telling her how much her books meant to me. And now that chance has passed.

Godspeed.

Happy New Year's, folks.