I spend a lot of my free time reading about religion. Most of that time is on the features that make one religion different from another. That's why G. Willow Wilson's article on why intelligent design doesn't work in Islam and Judaism riveted me.

"The God of the Bible is omniscient and all-powerful, but the God of the Torah and the Quran is omnipresent and omniparticipant. This essential difference has led some religious scholars to draw a distinction between monotheism, the belief in one God, and monism, the belief in One."

The crux of her article is that Islam and Judaism are monistic (believe in One essence), and Christianity is monotheistic (believe in one God). That is the God of Islam and Judaism is an omnipresent essence of the universe. The God of Christianity is omniscient but limited to one all-powerful being. This is why iconography is forbidden in Islam and Judaism (because God is not part of our world) but very present in Christianity (because a local God interacts directly with people's lives). These fundamental differences play a role in whether a religion endorses intelligent design (ID) or not.

I think Mormonism actually finesses this point a bit. They have a recursive notion of God that allows him to be one being that is a part of universe, but also omnipresent and apart from the universe. Perhaps that's why Mormons don't seem to be leading the charge for ID?

She goes into more detail about how these differences impact ID. There's some really good stuff in there. G. Willow Wilson is a woman of many talents. She's writing a new comic book series called Air that I really enjoyed.

David Byrne's March visit to Dallas (via Unfair Park) makes a point of mentioning the awe-inspiring High Five interchange.

I turned north on Highway 75 on what might be the mightiest and most awe-inspiring interchange I've ever seen. At least five levels of roads are stacked up, all swooping over, under and around each other as if in some mighty concrete mating dance.

Other writers have described it in more medieval terms as a bridge between castle Dallas and the fiefdoms that surround it. Regardless of the metaphor, it's hard to convey how impressive the High Five interchange to people who haven't ridden it. Even harder is to make people understand how miraculous the transformation from dysfunctional eyesore to utilitarian wonder.

This is too long to fit on twitter but I like it too much to forget about it. The word absurd was actually first used to describe irrational numbers.

I'm working my way through a book on all the people that helped or solved problems on David Hilbert's famous list of 23 great math problems.

Many times a solution only presents itself after cultural change. One of the cultural norms that had to be updated to push math forward was the idea that irrational numbers are actually useful.

There was a time when irrational numbers were avoided by mathematicians. This disdain was so strong that the word "absurd" was created to describe how useless people believed irrationals to be. From Yandell's book:

An irrational square root was called a "surd," meaning deaf, silent (expressing the attitude toward it). The word "absurd" was first used in English in 1557, according to Oxford English Dictionary, for the purpose of pronouncing the number 8 - 12 (or -4) absurd.

It's clear to us now how important the absurd numbers are for solving real problems. But for a while math stood still while the culture had to catch up.

As a kid I wanted my life to be different from the one I imagined ahead of me. I wanted to be a master jewel thief or president of a unified North and South America. As I got older the dreams got smaller. I wanted to monopolize America's garbage collection industry. Now they're more abstract. I wish I'd had a comic book like Kick-Ass to inspire me when I was younger.

It's about a high school student named Dave Lizewski who wonders why nobody wants to grow up to be a superhero. One day he decides to put on a scuba suit and fight crime. Mark Millar's writing comes across as authentic and a fresh take on what makes a superhero. The way he integrates ideas from his fans drives home the point that Kick-Ass is something that exists in our world. We should all ask ourselves why we didn't choose to be superheroes.

With every issue I've gotten a little choked up, or felt a rush of excitement. Nothing else, except All Star Superman, comes close to engaging me like this every month. Every issue so far has sold out. Issue 3 mentions that they've started hitting Spider-Man/X-Men numbers with 75,000 copies of the first issue sold. I think this could be big.

"Think peace and and you'll get it. It's up to the people...If we really wanna change it, we can change it." -John Lennon

That quote is copied from the press kit for the Oscar nominated animated short film I Met the Walrus and hits upon a trifecta of my current interests.

The first being that reality is manufactured by the words in our pens and the thoughts in our head. Take responsibility.

Second, the Oscar nominated short films, live action and animated, are top notch. I continue to believe that the French, and French Canadians, are doing the most innovative animation work (Triplets of Belleville, Renaissance, Madame Tutli-Putli and Even Pigeons Go to Heaven all come to mind). Now if they just had the writing of Pixar.

The third is this nonsense about Barack Obama plagiarizing his speeches. Change, or at least the promise of change, has been a major theme of many political leaders. I don't know how Senator Obama could speak about change in a clear and direct way without building on the tradition of leaders before him. A far more dangerous idea is to demand that political leaders constantly dance around their ideas and relinquish any ability to speak plainly and directly.

From Lewis Hyde in The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. [link goes to the free preview page that has the quote on Amazon]

Where someone manages to commercialize a tribe's gift relationships the social fabric of the group is invariably destroyed.

I have yet to read Lewis Hyde's book but I'm already hooked from the free pages on Amazon. He starts off illustrating one of the fundamental differences between the Native Americans and the Europeans that invaded: a gift culture. Native American tribes would exchange gifts of equal or greater value. The purpose being to continually gift the item to others. It created social bonds between tribes. Europeans followed a capitalist model where they warehoused those gifts and used them for production to enrich themselves.

I wonder how this fits in with Robert Putnam's research in Bowling Alone. On the surface it makes Putnam's phrase "social capital" sound like an odd match. But I realize the term social capital could refer to the gifts we exchange to build our bonds.

I really enjoy reading Grant Morrison. I can think of few writers who really grok the power of storytelling to change our reality like he does. I've learned a lot about the power of the written word from reading his comic books. What surprises me is when I come across those ideas in much older works, like the Bible.

Numbers 5:12-31 is about how husbands can force their wives to submit to an abortion if they merely suspect their wife has cheated on them. They go before a priest goes who has God curse some water before the wife drinks it. The cursed water causes her to miscarry and renders her barren if she cheated on him.

What fascinates me about this is the manner in which the priest creates the magic abortion potion.

The priest is to write these curses on a scroll and then wash them off into the bitter water. He shall have the woman drink the bitter water that brings a curse, and this water will enter her and cause bitter suffering.

The priest is literally writing out what he wants to happen. Then the ink from those words is mixed with water that the wife is to drink. The written word has magical properties here. The priest is able to alter reality by writing a new story.

To further my point about the power of perception imagine a different story with the same facts. A woman is pregnant, but not by her husband. However, in this story she tells it as immaculate conception.

Why are TV shows, network TV shows in particular, so mediocre? I think I've come across the answer in Vance Packards 1957 book The Hidden Persuaders. It's by design.

In 1955 I Love Lucy was the top-rated comedy show and Philip Morris was the money behind it. Philip Morris found their sales drop 17 percent and some believed a popular show doesn't sell products.

"...Is an advertiser better off with a less than top-rated show in order to get commercials across?" That observation was made in early 1955. [..] Were some of the resolutely mediocre shows on television that way by design, to increase the impact of the commercials?

Another TV show that was put together to sell Mogen David wine wasn't getting the job done.

[The show] was, admittedly, delighting the audience with its chilling, exciting who-dun-it mysteries. The show enjoyed a high rating but it wasn't selling wine.

The problem they decided was that audiences were too tense and that in their "emotional frenzy" they missed the wine message. It was replaced with a panel show. Wine sales increased 1000%.

Shows like The Wire on HBO obviously don't have the same problem.

I imagine Senator Dodd is feeling pretty great now. It's rare that politics provides an opportunity for one man to stand up and fight for a just cause, and win. Senator Dodd was able to filibuster retroactive immunity for the phone companies.

Despite retroactive immunity appearing to be a violation of the ex post facto clause in Article I of our Constitution most of the Senate was ready to pass it. Thanks to Senator Dodd's leadership on this we've won one battle in the war to preserve our nation's Constitution.

Something I regret not doing when I was younger is chasing after the things that I thought mattered. I either let my interest wane, or listened to the tut-tutting of others that said it was a waste of time.

I'm reading a book that examines the Interactive Fiction (IF) medium called Twisty Little Passages. Interactive Fiction is the dressed up word for text adventures. I feel as though hours of my youth spent playing these has been vindicated. I should have pushed for it to be considered Summer Reading.

...works of acknowledged literary quality, such as Robert Pinksky's Mindwheel and Brian Moriarty's Trinity...

It's neat to see a classic Infocom text adventure right alongside work created by a former US poet laureate. Moriarty's Trinity was the first time I ever came across a Klein bottle and the word perambulator.

The House of Representatives found time to give Jesus a shout out for bringing us Christmas. My two favorite parts of the resolution:

(1) recognizes the Christian faith as one of the great religions of the world;

I'm glad they cleared this up. They're a little late to the party though. I was sold on this years ago when I discovered Christianity gave us Ludwig Wittgenstein. Ludwig was a ninja with math and philosophy.

(4) acknowledges and supports the role played by Christians and Christianity in the founding of the United States and in the formation of the western civilization;

Let's get busy then and see this through. I want a resolution acknowledging the role played by the Renaissance in Western civilization. While we're at it lets give a shout out to the Golden Age of Islam since they preserved math and science for us during the dark ages. They even added new stuff like the Scientific Method and optics before they gave it back! How cool is that? I think that deserves a resolution.

I'm writing my letter to Congresswoman Johnson right now. I imagine she'll be receptive since she sponsored the resolution acknowledging the coolness of Islam and Ramadan

A friend of mine from Huntspatch is coincidentally staying at a hostel two blocks from my hotel in San Francisco. It's been years and she's still as beautiful and wonderful as ever. We shared sushi and walked around this glorious, crazy city. I'm still bathed in enthusiasm after we talked about the magic of words and manifesting your will and the rejuvenation of travel. I feel as though a fog has lifted off my spirit.

I wish Julie were here. I wish she could see me now as I see myself, in full bloom. Or maybe she already does and I refuse to believe it. I wish the darkness didn't build up inside me till my broken spirit limps into her arms looking for salvation. I wish she could've seen my friend tonight. My friend has that magic that rubs off on people who endure the South but learn to leave before that magic becomes a crushing burden. I wish I hadn't seen so much of the world alone. All that beauty and passion is an untranslatable phrase locked in my head. But if Julie had been with me she'd know it the way I do. Right now she's half a world away in Taiwan having her own adventures.

I did go through two bottles of wine with a couple co-workers at dinner earlier tonight. I blame the wine for my conversation with the exotic dancer on the street corner who told me how good I looked and that it's okay to take girls to her club. But the rest of the night was all real.

The Thoughtcrime bill that passed overwhelmingly in the House is going through committee in the Senate. The Senate bill is S. 1959.

Dahlia Lithwick writing in Slate points out "Harman's "thought crimes" bill [...] does no more than explore whether those thought crimes are a problem." She follows that up with some snark on the ineffectiveness of Democrats in Congress.

I am profoundly grateful that instead of criminalizing protected speech outright, Democrats merely form a commission that will do a study, which will in turn christen a Drive-Thru Center for Excellence, where they will someday consider criminalizing protected free speech.

I'm happy to see more media coverage for this. At best it's a waste of time and money, at worst it's a lever for rolling back protected speech. I'd much rather see Congress increase their oversight of the government agencies already studying these kinds of issues.

I'm really digging the Doctor Fate part of the eight issue Countdown to Mystery series. Steve Gerber's writing and Justiniano's art are my favorite comic book read right now. It reminds me of my enthusiasm in the early issues of Neil Gaiman's Sandman.

I came in with almost no familiarity with the helmet of fate. In this series Kent V. Nelson is a disgraced, divorced psychiatrist living in Las Vegas, NV. (Yeah, not Gotham, Metropolis, Central City, etc.) He's homeless and pulling in money from bum fights. After losing a fight he's thrown into a dumpster and discovers the helmet of fate. From that point the series has explored Nelson's past, through multiple planes of existence. The helmet allows him to alter his perception.

In issue three Nelson visits what appears to be an occult bookstore in the mundane world but is a stygian wasteland when the helmet alters his perception. Physically he never leaves the bookstore, he's only viewing it through a different set of symbols. The lady at the occult bookstore offers him a book to teach him how to use the helmet. The book is written in this Visual Basic like pseudocode. I really liked the explanation the lady at the occult bookstore offers about why that works for him:

Every era, every culture develops its own incantatory idiom, its own language for establishing contact with the unseen world. To anyone with any sensitiviy, it's obvious something has changed in the domain of magic, and the idiom is changing with it. The book I pulled for you proposes a programmatic paradigm for accessing the beyond — and the within.

I like the comparison between programmers working with an unseen world inside the computer to alchemists and magicians. Culturally Gerber is right on here. The old term Unix wizard fits this notion perfectly.

After he reads one of the subroutines, chosen by fate, he finds himself in the stygian wasteland. It's nothing but gray sludge as far as the eye can see, with a lazy river ambling by. (There is a viscious but funny commentary on consumerism as well) He sees a boy on a raft floating down the river.

The boys vernacular recalls Huck Finn. Nelson even addresses him as such, but also realizes that he's not a literal Huck Finn. He's really just a symbolic representation of Nelson's own guilty conscience about a patient of his that died. In fact it turns out this plane of existence is a symbolic representation of Nelson's conscience. The fact that Huck Finn is just a symbol is driven home by the artwork depicting Huck as an empty shell.

They float down river and Nelson struggles with the meaning of it all. In the midst of dreary grey spires they reach a crystalline complex that is built with perfect, clean angles and no curves. It's a bulwark of rationality against the dreary, crumbling spires everywhere else. Naturally it's where they are headed.

Inside he meets the King and Queen. Most likely they represent Nelson's anima and animus since Jung is explicitly mentioned earlier. They're dressed in clothes that look like Louis XIV meets Japanese Noh masks. The fact that everyone is wearing a mask or has no face isn't lost on me. The King introduces himself to Nelson:

We are the King. This is our Queen. That is our whipping boy. You will address us as "Your majesties." You will not address that at all, for that possesses no identity — no persona, no self-concept. That exists to be broken.

The whipping boy is a groveling lump of flesh on the floor that is vaguely human who jumps up and rips Nelson's face off. Nelson comes to the realization that the whipping boy is him. The King and Queen also represent him (his anima/animus). The gloomy underworld is his own creation because he's been beating himself up for mistakes he made. In lesser hands this whole sequence would have been pretentious but it's handled with a directness and a sincerity that makes it work.

You just don't find stuff like this in any other DC/Marvel comic books right now. For me this is a lot of what comic books are all about. They reflect our own world back at us with the symbols changed around. This gives us a new way of looking at ourselves and our society. Grant Morrison is particularly adept at doing this but this is different. Gerber is doing his own thing and it's excellent. I'm a little worried though. Gerber is ill and waiting for an organ transplant. I can't believe he's writing through that. I have to wonder if his writing for Doctor Fate is somehow informed by his illness. It can't be just coincidence that both of them live in Las Vegas, NV.

"Belief precedes action" is now added to the list of obvious truths I've completely missed until now.

I gleaned it from William James' speech on The Will to Believe. I'm missing something from the speech though. It felt like a fancier version of Pascal's Wager, not the clarion call to religious belief I was hoping for.

James' concludes with this quote from Fitz-James Stephen:

What do you think of yourself? What do you think of the world?...These are questions with which all must deal as it seems good to them. They are riddles of the Sphinx, and in some way or other we must deal with them...In all important transactions of life we have to take a leap in the dark...If we decide to leave the riddles unanswered, that is a choice; if we waver in our answer, that, too, is a choice: but whatever choice we make, we make it at our peril. If a man chooses to turn his back altogether on God and the future, no one can prevent him; no one can show beyond reasonable doubt that he is mistaken. If a man thinks otherwise and acts as he thinks, I do not see that any one can prove that he is mistaken. Each must act as he thinks best; and if he is wrong, so much the worse for him. We stand on a mountain pass in the midst of whirling snow and blinding mist through which we get glimpses now and then of paths which may be deceptive. If we stand still we shall be frozen to death. If we take the wrong road we shall be dashed to pieces. We do not certainly know whether there is any right one. What must we do? ' Be strong and of a good courage.' Act for the best, hope for the best, and take what comes...If death ends all, we cannot meet death better."

This is an even more dramatic restatement of Pascal's Wager. There's gotta be a good movie in there somewhere. I'm imagining Sophie's Choice meets The Screwtape Letters. Make it an action picture with a big Summer release.

H.R. 1955 seeks to criminalize thoughtcrimes

The term violent radicalization means the process of adopting or promoting an extremist belief system for the purpose of facilitating ideologically based violence to advance political, religious, or social change.

The term ideologically based violence means the use, planned use, or threatened use of force or violence by a group or individual to promote the group or individual's political, religious, or social beliefs.

There is no definition for extremist belief system.

I wonder if civil rights marches in the 1960s would count as an extremist belief system attempting to facilitate political, religious or social change.

We already have laws against murder, assault, theft, etc. I don't understand why we need laws against speaking about those things. Punish the deed not the thought.

This is not how you stop terrorism.

This bill passed the House 404 to 6 and was created and sponsored mostly by Democrats.

Genius

I haven't seen the frustrations of designers summed up so amusingly before.

Over the past year I've spent a lot more time reading and studying comic books and cartooning. The history has been far more interesting than I ever expected.

Percy Crosby creates the Skippy cartoon in 1923 and builds it up into a $3 million business by 1932. He goes after FDR and the New Deal for being communist. Then his woes begin.

By 1964 he's dead in an insane asylum after a war with the IRS and their alleged corporate proxy, the Rosefield Packing Company. The Rosefield Packing Company takes the Skippy name and creates Skippy peanut butter.

The Savage Critic has the details

Some day I'll write a virus that does one thing. It finds the person's mail app, desktop or web, and disables the "Quote entire message every time I respond" functionality.

I noticed that SB 1119 was enrolled today. It aims to clean up the state laws around red light cameras. The first point it aims to fix is a big one:

Municipalities are currently installing photographic traffic signal enforcement systems (red light cameras) based on an attorney general opinion, but have no statutory authority to do so.

It mainly focuses on making sure municipalities don't exploit this as a revenue opportunity. They can't share revenue with companies that provide red light service. They can't report violations to a credit bureau. They must conduct a traffic engineering study of the intersection to make sure it has a legitimate safety purpose. I don't see anything about penalties if a municipality ignores the law.

It also addresses some of my gripes. The written request for a hearing can be sent in 30 days instead of the 2 weeks I think I had. You can request an affidavit that the equipment is in good working order. The current process in Dallas doesn't explicitly allow for that.

Nice to see good government at work.

America, stop listening to your preacher about politics and government. They're probably great at religion and explaining where you fit in God's plan, but 55% of you are misinformed about where our government comes from.

Programming Collective Intelligence has me excited about web development in a way I haven't been for a few years.

Even got me doing stuff in python.

Love animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled. Do not trouble their joy, do not harass them, do not deprive them of their happiness, do not work against God's intent.

Man, do not pride yourself on your superiority to animals: they are without sin, and you, with your greatness, defile the earth by your appearance on it, and leave the traces of your foulness after you. Fydor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (1821 - 1881) THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV via Moscow Animals

50 years ago the USSR sent a dog into space to die in the hopes of scoring a propaganda coup. Laika was the first animal to orbit the planet. I have a hard time reconciling what should have been a great milestone in space travel, with the fact that it was created as a pointless exercise in marketing. Nick Abadzis' new book Laika covers the story in more detail than I'd seen before. Apparently he even researched the phases of the moon and angles of inclination to maintain fidelity to the story. The moon after all was the big prize in the space race.

His illustrations are wonderful. He captures a Russian character in the faces of the people. The energy and warmth of the dogs are expressed in their poses and lines. My only gripe is that I wanted more with Korolev, the Chief Designer of the Russian space program. The book starts off with Korolev being released from the Gulag and having to find his own way back to Moscow in 50 below weather. There is some nice character development here, but Korolev mostly disappears after that. It's too bad because the groundwork he lays is interesting but never really explored after that. I'd love to see a companion book go into more detail about Korolev.

I couldn't help myself. I knew the ending but it was still devastating when it came. Mankind's ability to sabotage our own greatness is a frustrating lesson of history. There is an interesting moment in Laika. Three pages carry a yellow background instead of white. They setup a key theme of the story that nothing lasts (Korolev's time in he Gulag, Laika's friendships, USSR's dominance in space). On the next page is a three quarter page panel highlighting the greatness of Korolev's achievement with Sputnik I. A moment that would be undercut by the tragedy of Sputnik II and designed by Korolev himself.

Every day, every moment is a frontier to a country that, once crossed, can never be returned to.

...But, once you understand that nothing lasts...everything's all right. Laika

The Asian Film Festival of Dallas 2007 had its opening night tonight. Justin Lin's new movie Finishing the Game was the opener. It is sort of a fake documentary about an attempt to finish Bruce Lee's last movie Game of Death. You can catch the Fist of Führer spoof from the movie on youtube. Sung Kang and Roger Fan are the stars but it has cameos from Ron Jeremy, George Takei, MC Hammer, and James Franco.

Beyond the reverence they have for Bruce Lee its clear that Eric Byler's movies or James Hou's documentary Masters of the Pillow are part of the subtext. Unlike those filmmakers who focus on subverting Asian stereotypes Lin chooses to leverage them as humor in the subtext. Sung Kang's character being cast in a "European" (porn) movie seems like a light jab at Dr. Darrell Hamamoto making porn movies with an Asian male lead to repair the Asian male's self-image. I had most recently seen Sung Kang in The Motel where he gives an outstanding performance.

I sprung for the VIP pass this year so I plan to hit a lot more movies. As usual the programming really looks top notch.

King of Kong came out this weekend and will be gradually hitting more cities. I saw this movie back in March at the AFI Dallas Film Festival and have been excited about its release ever since. It's about the fight between two guys to be Donkey Kong world champion. I have been trying my hardest to get people to make this one of the five movies they see in the theater this year.

I suppose there is a formula to documentary filmmaking where you find a subculture, look for some kind of competitive angle and then film it to its conclusion. Okie Noodling did this with people who catch catfish using their fists. Pucker Up! did this for competitive whistling. There are a number of them that involve word games: spelling, Scrabble, crossword puzzles, etc. But some of those documentaries ignore the path blazed by earlier subculture documentaries like Crumb. A lot of what makes Crumb work is the interpersonal dynamics, not any competitive drive to be the best underground comic creator. You can even see the same structure at work in a narrative movie like Little Miss Sunshine.

Which is why I so thoroughly enjoyed in King of Kong. It captures the competition and the interpersonal relationships. It covers Billy and Steve's relationships with the people around them, beyond just what they think of their gaming skills. The filmmaker does an excellent job getting these people to talk like the camera isn't there. While that might make a good documentary it wouldn't be half as entertaining without Billy's outsized persona. He wears ties with the US flag on them. He talks about himself in the third person. He frames the passion of competitive gaming in terms of the abortion debate. At times the feud is so big I felt like I was watching the Trojan War unfold. Billy is the unbeatable Achilles and Steve is the reluctant warrior Hector. It's also edited together very well to keep the story twisting and pumping along to the showdown.

Afterwards you can ruminate on the allegorical examination of American culture, aging male nostalgia for childhood, absolute truth and how to find happiness in a culture that says happiness is reserved for children. But while you're watching, and for the 10-15 minutes immediately after its over, you'll feel excited, amused, and charmed in a way that you haven't been most of the year.

I was watching Harakiri tonight when I got my million dollar TV series idea: "So You Think You're a Samurai Warrior?"

I've been trying since mid-July to find someone who will replace my water-sourced heat pump. It has a freon leak in the condenser coil. It no longer cools.

I used to leave it on anyways and pretend that moving hot air around the loft made it feel cooler. This August I just switched it off entirely. Now the 100+ degree weather has come and my willpower doesn't seem strong enough to make it feel cool anymore.

I've finally found someone willing to replace it, but it will be 7-10 weeks since it must be custom built. During that time I plan to lease my loft out to the CIA for terrorist interrogations. A week of the heat and any terrorist's willpower will evaporate too.

The Amiga computer was a dream given form: an inexpensive, fast, flexible multimedia computer that could do virtually anything.

Ars posted the first part of a history of the Amiga. The Amiga 1000 changed my life. I got it as a birthday present, a few months after my father died.

Since then I've learned that it is rare for something of excellence to persevere for very long. Evolution rewards the mediocre. The more average you are the more likely you are to breed.

Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, which I shared some love for earlier, won Best Reality-Based Work. Another title I was pulling for American Born Chinese won for Best Graphic Album - New. It's nice to see an industry award the great stuff unlike say the Oscars, Emmys and Grammys.

And my favorite writer, Grant Morrison, picked up an Eisner for Best Continuing Series for All Star Superman. I'm glad that Morrison and Brian Bendis keep things interesting at DC and Marvel.

2007 Eisner Winners

I'm back from a trip to Huntspatch for Emily's twelfth birthday. It was one of the best times I've ever had with her. One of the things I noticed is just how much more agile her creativity is.

Emily innovated her tactics in Hive and won despite my best efforts. Her use of the spider to isolate and pin my pieces was particularly novel. In Super Paper Mario she came up with a technique for flipping enemies into a new 2d orientation that I'd never thought of.

We each brought a camera to the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga. After looking over the pictures we took hers are so much better. She found much more interesting angles. She compensated better for the difficult lighting situations. Mine have a much more documentary and static feel.

I think some of it comes from the holistic school program she's been in, and the virtue of being young. Next year she starts at a Catholic school and I fear this may spark a decline since they have a different mission that is limited by what the Catholic Church allows. However, I sometimes wonder if the limits Emily has (financial resources, tools) actually stimulate the creativity.

I might do better with more limits.

I knew things were going well when a cabbie motioned me over and gave up his spot in front of city hall, and the meter had over an hour left on it. Dallas cabbies earned quite a bit of good karma with that movie.

I had prepared a bunch of notes for my hearing about a red light violation. I was looking forward to dazzling the hearing administrator with my defense.

• HB 922 had been made effective four days before my violation. It outlaws automated traffic control systems by municipalities at highways.
• I was ready to request a continuance while I sought calibration records for the red light camera to make sure it really was accurate down to 0.16 seconds.
• I was also going to get the details about traffic light height requirements in relation to road incline, I think mine may have been too low.

I had still more questions to present.

But all for naught because after about 20 minutes of waiting in the hall the hearing administrator came out and said my violation was dismissed. The disposition is "OFFICER ERROR" and I'm not liable because I was already in the intersection when it turned red.

I'm excited it was dismissed but a little let down I didn't get my Hollywood courtroom showdown.

I just caught the pre-code Stanwyck film Baby Face (1933). Turner has put out a DVD with both the censored and uncensored versions on it. I am thoroughly impressed. It's a melodrama but with a good story that was hacked up by the Hayes code for the theatrical release. It's fascinating to watch both versions and see what changes the censors wanted.

Stanwyck plays a woman who has been prostituted by her father since she was 14. After her father is killed in an accident she decides to go to New York and use her feminine assets to climb the corporate ladder and exploit weakness in men for her own material gain. If you've seen the recent French film Secret Things you've seen a watered down version of this story that plays up the sexuality, and creates an overt sexual relationship between the two women.

First off I was completely taken by surprise with the Nietzsche quotes. Mention of Nietzsche is absent from the censored version. After her father dies she goes to a German friend of hers to tell him she's got some dead-end job prospects in Erie, PA. He is upset that she would ignore her potential and not go to a big city. He starts telling her about Nietzsche's "Will to Power" (the shot of the book is absent from the censored version). But the dialogue gets butchered even more.

The following lines are cut from the theatrical release

But you must use men, not let them use you.

Look. Here. Nietzsche says: All life, no matter how we idealize it is nothing more, nor less, than exploitation.

They changed this

Use men. Be Strong! Defiant! Use men to get the things you want!

into

Be clean, be strong, defiant and you will be a success.

The censored version completely cuts out the idea that she is the stronger sex and that men can be molded to her needs. In the censored version she's told to be virtuous and clean and that men will reward her as they see fit.

Later on after she has been very successful in New York he sends her another Nietzsche book "Thoughts Out of Season." He's marked the passage

Face life as you find it - defiantly and unafraid. Waste no energy yearning for the moon. Crush out all sentiment.

In the censored version this becomes a book called "Stanley's Christian Institutions" and there is no highlighted passage. Instead it contains a letter to Lilly by her German friend. He is very upset she has chosen the wrong way (exploiting her feminine assets) and calls her a coward. He tells her she needs to regain her self respect and hopes she'll allow the book to guide her.

The movie doesn't point this out but Stanwyck's character is named Lilly. The most famous Lilly I know is Adam's first wife Lilith. The one who was made his equal (Eve is beneath Adam because she is made from his rib), and maybe created before Adam depending on which bible story you read. Lilith gets kicked out of the garden of Eden for not submitting to the patriarchy. From what I remember she goes to the Red Sea and copulates with demons and this is where we get vampires and stuff. I don't think its a stretch to see Stanwyck's Lilly as following a similar path. I suppose it's little details like this that filmmakers used to get things past the censors.

Finally Lilly has a very close African-American friend named Chico. There are two scenes where men tell her Chico needs to go (one her father, the other a VP at the bank she works at) and she is very adamant she and Chico will never part. Considering Stanwyck's membership in "The Sewing Circle" with other lesbians like Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Joan Crawford and Katherine Hepburn I wonder if her character's relationship with Chico was more intimate. The movie doesn't clarify this. But Lilly has a warmth and affection with Chico that is missing from her relationships with men in the movie. Chico is played by Theresa Harris who is great in her small role. She sings Louis Armstrong's "St. Louis Blues" in the background in a few scenes which also forms the basis of the soundtrack. Apparently the Hayes code killed off her chances of getting good roles later in her career.

The movie isn't perfect. Most of the men are kind of stupid. The censored and uncensored versions both have endings that don't make much sense. Well, the censored one makes sense if you look at it through the eyes of the Hayes code. Stanwyck is pretty good at exploiting her sensuality but nowhere near her peak in Double Indemnity.

It also interesting to compare this to critically lauded and Academy Award nominated Mildred Pierce (1945) with Joan Crawford in her Academy Award winning performance. That movie also features a woman with career ambitions who doesn't want to settle for what men are willing to hand to her. Once she transitions from suburban house wife to independent business woman her life is portrayed in a dark light. Her decisions corrupt her daughter and lead her into financial disaster. The Hayes code had their fingerprints all over this one too, and it is clear that they wanted to further their pro-patriarchy ideals even 10 years later.

I picked up a copy of W. Somerset Maugham's book The Razor's Edge from the library this weekend. I really enjoyed it but this quote stood out as particularly wicked and clever:

D'you remember how Jesus was led into the wilderness and fasted forty days? Then, when he was a-hungered, the devil came to him and said: If thou be the son of God, command that these stones be made bread. But Jesus resisted the temptation. Then the devil set him on a pinnacle of the temple and said to him: If thou be the son of God, cast thyself down. For angels had charge of him and would bear him up. But again Jesus resisted. Then the devil took him into a high mountain and showed him the kingdoms of the world and said that he would give them to him if he would fall down and worship him. But Jesus said: Get thee hence, Satan. That's the end of the story according to the good simple Matthew. But it wasn't. The devil was sly and he came to Jesus once more and said: If thou wilt accept shame and disgrace, scourging, a crown of thorns and death on the cross thou shalt save the human race, for greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. Jesus fell. The devil laughed till his sides ached, for he knew the evil men would commit in the name of their redeemer.

The author/narrator follows it up later with this explanation of why self-sacrifice is such a powerful temptation:

I only wanted to suggest to you that self-sacrifice is a passion so overwhelming that beside it even lust and hunger are trifling. It whirls its victim to destruction in the highest affirmation of his personality. The object doesn't matter; it may be worth while or it may be worthless. When he sacrifices himself man for a moment is greater than God, for how can God, infinite and omnipotent, sacrifice himself? At best he can only sacrifice his only begotten son.

I have to wonder if Ayn Rand ever summed up this idea as cleverly since it was one of her shibboleths.

I'm listening to the podcast of Bill Moyer's Journal from 5/11 when I hear these lines from recent Regent University grad Carly Gammill:

Part of the goal of many of us who are going out from this institution from here on to make it clear and accurate what it really means to be a Christian leader to change the world, which is not to indoctrinate anyone but to share the truth and to offer the truth and to rely on the truth in the way that we handle our lives as an example to others. (emphasis is mine)

I remember when it was just called "the good news" instead of truth. She also uttered this naive understanding of the law:

I intend to help further the administration of justice and to do justice. And I believe in absolute truth, and I believe in absolutes. Not grey, you know, not relative truth but absolute truth. And that's what God's word is. (emphasis is mine)

With all that truth I wonder how one can have any faith. Truth leaves no room for doubt. Faith does not exist without doubt. As the Christian philosopher Paul Tillich put it "Doubt isn't the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith." I'm beginning to wonder if places like Regent and Liberty might be forking a new religion from the Protestant tree.

Their religion doesn't seem to require faith as much as fealty to a central leader like Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson. Perhaps they're growing into an American version of Catholicism?

Pilot Japan sells a 0.25mm gel pen. When I asked why it isn't sold in the US the gist of the response was this:

Due to our marketing agreement with our parent company, and in some cases patent restrictions, we are unable to either sell or stock this item.

I was encouraged to travel abroad if I wanted this pen. The closest I've found in the American market is Pentel's Sunburst which comes in at 0.30mm. The majority of gel pens in America are an obese 0.70mm, some with inferior gel inks that spread even wider depending on the paper. Practically like writing with a marker at that point.

If information about these pens can travel the world, why not the pen? If this is a patent or marketing limitation why is nobody else providing a 0.25mm gel pen in America? I'm galled that patent/marketing limitations create a desert where there could be a market.

After books like this I lament my lack of a silver-tongued gift for persuasion. I'm robbed of the secondary pleasures of waiting for a friend to read it and hoping they feel the exuberance and tenderness I felt as I reached the end. The book is a memoir of Alison Bechdel's youth in a rural Pennsylvania town and her father's death while she was away at college. It opens with her and her father playing airplane as she recalls the story of another father and child, Icarus and Daedalus.

She circles through her story repeatedly but peels away new insights each time. Each time through she finds a way to fit the details of her life into a literary or historical narrative. Sometimes she describes her family life with passages from Proust. Sometimes her story finds resonance in Nixon's resignation. But the larger narrative that all the stories fit into is one dealing with Homer's Odyssey and James Joyce's Ulysses. A device that could be pretentious but isn't because she carries the novice reader into those stories at the same time. It also makes practical sense that the daughter of an english teacher and actress would frame her narrative with those books.

Her illustrations carry on the same narrative. A snake devouring its own tale reminds us of the narrative circles. Book titles casually appear in the background to clue the reader in to what is happening. Pop-up Video style balloons call our attention to minute details that add color to the story (is this subtext?). The image that will stay with me the longest is her and her father silhouetted by a setting sun as they stand on the porch of the family's Gothic Revival style home. She is playfully hanging off a column, and he's standing in quiet reverie watching all the colors mix.

What charmed me the most is how honestly she comes at the story of her youth, which is apparently the story of her father. She chronicles the highs and the lows without melodrama. She doesn't hesitate to offer up her own conflicted understanding. The literary devices she does use she is almost apologetic for and reminds the reader that it isn't pretension but these are the tools she was brought up with for understanding her world.

After the strength of this and fellow Eisner nominee American Born Chinese I am sure to check out the other Best New Graphic Album nominees.

North Texas competitors continue to underperform. The Dallas Mavericks finished first in the regular season and were bounced out in the first round of the playoffs. The Dallas Stars ambled through the regular season and hit a first round playoff exit.

Now comes news that five time national spelling bee competitor, and favorite to win it all this year, Samir Patel is out. Bummer. North Texas seems to have hit a slump. I blame the rain.

In a little over six months Texas has gone from 77.4% of the state in some kind of drought to 29.5%. I remember driving past fires in North Texas last Summer because it was so dry. I don't think the state has been this well hydrated since I've lived here.

As I write this yet another thunderstorm is pounding Dallas. It's been maybe a decade or more since I've been around thunderstorms this strong, especially with this kind of daily regularity. I miss the stretches of no rain that spanned for months.

On the plus side Julie and I were caught out in a storm as we walked around downtown on Sunday. That was really kinda fun. One of those moments every relationship should probably have.

Bloom points out in The American Religion that Mormonism, in the early days especially, was driven by a dialectic between the need to create the new Kingdom on Earth, but to also remain outside the mainstream. This conflict powered the growth of Mormonism.

I'm seeing this same dialectic play out in the comments on Free Republic about Reverend Falwell. Here are some relevant comments:

Hatred of Falwell by those on the left illustrates just how effective he was. The darkness hates the light.

A man is sometimes honored by the number and passion of the enemies he makes.

This is exactly what the Bible warned would happen. Right[e]ous people WILL be persecuted, even after their death.

A large number, perhaps a majority, of the comments are concerned with how their political enemies are responding to the news. Every time an outsider to their world condemns their icon they post how it renews their faith and vindicates their beliefs. Their faith would apparently suffer if they were completely mainstream and did not have a political enemy to struggle against. Yet to be the mainstream is what they want! Apparently there is no condition where both parties can win, and they can sustain their beliefs.

What surprises me is how little they seem to be celebrating specific things that Falwell did. I really haven't seen any posts praising his segregationist views, anti-homosexual views, Christian Zionism, etc. There has been praise in general for his good works but really only in generalities. That may be a fault of the the Free Republic forums. Their forums tend to only contain short snarky or pious comments and don't reward more in-depth posts. A condition that is common across all forums on the Internet, not just Free Republic.

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 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.

Credit scoring is only useful for lenders. Let them pay to clean it up.

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 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.

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]

That is from the opening of an ACM paper he wrote advocating for functional programming instead of conventional procedural programming. Functional programming took a back seat to Object Oriented programming, but in recent years it has seen a resurgence. I imagine part of this is because we've also seen a sort of return to the mainframe/dumb terminal model of computing with web servers/browsers. Of course it doesn't hurt to have Google championing functional programming with their map/reduce algorithms.

It's great to see someone willing to look beyond their own innovations (Fortran isn't functional) to find a better way. I hope I can see my own flaws as clearly.

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.

They've got a Trac site for developers. Unsurprisingly it's written in Ruby on Rails.

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.

I think what happens is that commodity prices have to be inflated because US currency can't go smaller. I think we could drive prices down if we had a new kind of currency to handle commodity pricing. Maybe this is one reason why prices go down when you buy in bulk? You're getting closer to a true price of an individual item because our currency is equipped to handle those kinds of prices.

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.

I like that. The analogy also works if you think about how big an impact a $50 loan can have in a microfinance situation, whereas in traditional banking it's a nuisance.

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

Attorney General Gonzalez doesn't seem to have the same fire in his belly.

AFI Dallas has a new website up with all the films, venue and ticket information. I've already got about 10 films on my "to see" list from just a cursory glance.

It's been a couple weeks since the Boston bomb scare. I'm staggered by the fact that nobody seems to be upset with Boston. They did a poor job assessing a threat. The idea that any kind of electronics not branded with the logo of a major consumer electronics company is an I.E.D. is an unworkable policy for assessing threats.

You won't find the needle in the haystack by making the haystack bigger. They've got to eliminate false positives and shrink the haystack. They need a procedure for scoring I.E.D. threats. Does it have some kind of antenna for remote detonation? What is the power source for detonation? Does it have a timer circuit for timed detonation? Are there explosives attached? Was the device concealed? (Presumably you want to hide your bomb so its not discovered prematurely) These details should be simple to assess either up close by someone, or by having a robot/remote controlled camera observe the device.

Heck if you can create a robot that follows sunlight or radio waves, why not make one that follows bomb scents (like bomb sniffing dogs)? They don't even have to be very sophisticated. You can use Ant Colony Optimization techniques to create swarms to sniff out bombs. I'm getting into science fiction here but I can imagine a day when large cities create swarms to roam the city looking for threats. Each robot would report back periodically through the municipal wifi network.

democamp Dallas is this Thursday (2/15/07) from 6:30-8pm at Sabre Labs in Southlake. All of the *camp events that I've been to have been a lot of fun, and frankly gotten me excited about tech again. If you can make it please sign up on the wiki.

From the written word to web 2.0, how ideas are finding new ways to spread and mutate. Web 2.0 in 5 minutes.

There are some books that have chased after me for years. They pop up in conversations with other people over and over. Details of the plot leak into my head and I start thinking about how they work. But I never read them. Then I yield, read the book and understand why the book chased me all those years.

I finally read Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card, and I wish I had read it when I was younger. I might have had the courage to make different choices. I found it comforting to find someone else who thought like me and wanted to love his friends and family but felt alienated because of his responsibilities. That closeness with the main character is what made me really appreciate the last few lines of Card's introduction to the book:

The story is one that you and I will construct together in your memory. If the story means anything to you at all, then when you remember it afterward, think of it, not as something I created, but rather as something that we made together.

Big news in the Perplex City ARG. The Receda Cube was found by astro_random. He wins the $200k prize. I have a feeling puzzles like billion to one and riemann may go unsolved.

Season two of Perplex City starts this March.

iTunes played She Wants Revenge followed by New Order. There is no way that was random. It's like iTunes thought "you just listened to the copy, now I'll play the original." I wish I understood the crazy AI they call Party Shuffle.

I picked up C.B. Cebulski's Wonderlost and I hope he puts out more issues and everyone buys one. In the first issue he tells six stories, each illustrated by someone different, about teenage love, relationships on the cusp between friends and lovers, and the moments after it all falls apart.

He writes with an authenticity that brings filmmaker David Gordon Green to mind. Although he might capture a bit more of life's humor than DGG. The stories are tight. The dialogue, narration and paneling don't have any wasted effort. Perhaps what impresses me most is I'm so caught up with the characters I don't have any time to go second guessing their behavior when they make bad decisions. I saw my own choices in life echoed in Wonderlost's characters. Sometimes that was a punch to the gut and sometimes it made me smile and get all nostalgic.

It's also the only comic book I've read that comes with a mix CD track list at the end.

You can read one of the stories, Make Up, online. Here are pages 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 .

I'm reading Rory Stewart's book The Places in Between about his walk across Afghanistan after the Taliban fell. I laughed out when I came across this entry from his stay in a small, remote village in the Ghor region.

A Bill Gates speech on American policy toward technology monopolies was being translated into Dari. The men listened intently. I wondered what these illiterate men without electricity thought of bundling Internet Explorer with Windows.

In reading it I must admit I'm jealous. In a different life I would have walked all over the world and been content.

Sometimes I think about all the time I spend reading this or writing that and wonder where did all that effort go. There must be some niche thing I'm pretty freaking good at by now.

If I only I knew what it is.

Stories like this one about hockey phenom Sidney Crosby get me teary eyed and nostalgic.

In successive games against Tampa Bay earlier this month, he scored while sliding on his side, controlling the puck while doing so, and from his knees.

I'm a sucker for movies like Miracle, The Natural, or Field of Dreams. In particular the moment in the movie where somebody transcends what people think is possible.

Youtube has some video on this. Watch Crosby pull the puck behind two defenders, dive between them, take control of the puck again and score. Then take a gander at another leaping goal that follows him into the boards. It's great to see any athlete put that much passion into the game.

There is a curious phenomenon running through the DVD market on Amazon these days. At the end of the long tail DVDs with meager popularity demand huge prices.

Matinee, that lovable coming of age story set during the Cuban Missile Crisis and chock full of movie palace nostalgia sells for between $50 and $110 these days.

But even it must bow before the pricing juggernaut that is Cinema Europe - The Other Hollywood a six hour documentary about silent film in Europe. It starts at $289 and only goes up. Of course even this is tiny before the titan of expensive DVDs the Criterion Edition of Salo. It starts around $400 and climbs into the $2500+ stratosphere.

I like to think that these prices reflect their cultural importance. Thus an Oscar nominated crowd pleaser, but culturally insignificant film, like Mannequin starts at $7. However I really don't think that's it. There's something about the passionate audience for these movies that drives up the price. I wonder if theatrical releases might see these kind of price fluctuations some day.

Almost twelve years ago I lost a drawing Kathy made. Times have come and gone since then where I've longed to look at it again and remember what it was like the first time I saw it.

The night I saw it for the first time was one of those moments that becomes a nexus point through which all memories before and after must flow. That night shines so bright in the memoryscape that other memories near it have faded. From that moment on our friendship was unhinged and a new wilder energy flowed through everything between us.

I've been schlepping decades of computer junk (RSX-11M+ manual anyone?) from city to city, and home to home. Tonight I began the effort of taking it all apart, sorting it and getting it ready for disposal. I can't believe I lucked upon an unlabeled floppy from March 27th, 1995 that had this image the whole time.

The iPhone looks great but why is Apple poisoning their brand by an association with Cingular? The Cingular CEO read his Cingular/AT&T ad from notecards during the keynote and was not enthused about being there and didn't appear to "get it." There is one more big innovation Apple could push with the iPhone.

Get the message out that American consumers don't have to buy phones from the major carriers. I recently bought an unlocked phone. While finding and buying the phone was a pain in the butt, moving my SIM card was easy. I would love to see Apple open up distribution channels for cell phones in America.

At the very least I hope they offer an unlocked version.

In an interview with the owner of the local