perfidy

Typographical criticism, Death from Above and Frank Admiration.

While I was checking out the wayback machine to find some old perfidy, I also found some old perfidy. Apparently just months before we acquired the perfidy.org domain, it was inhabited by someone from Singapore. For most of its tenure, it looked like this:

But it seems that he got tired of that, and it changed to this:

And then he got real tired of that, and it changed to this:

And shortly after that the domain lapsed and like a cave bear claiming an empty, ah, cave, we took over. Strange things you find on the internets.

Johnny Rotten is not impressed with the Police reunion. Plus drug advice!

The other day, I detailed my son's incisive reasoning in regard to human-robot relations. Today, he made his Dad proud once more. We were down in the basement, playing around a bit, when John had a new idea for a game:

Dad, you be the cops, and I'll be the Blues Brothers.

My heart just leapt. Then, not fifteen minutes later, he picked up a stick, handed it to me, and told me:

Let's fight. You bring a sword, and I'll bring a gun.

Such strong tactical awareness in a child not even four and a half years old.

My son turned to me, and said, "Let me tell you the rules about robots." Enumerating them with his fingers, he laid them out for me:

1. Don't burn yourself
2. Keep telling them what to do
3. Stay smarter than the robots

My son has come up with a new three rules for robots. And you know, I think they are a vast improvement on Asimov's original Robotic Laws.

[wik] Later in the trip, he added a fourth law:

• Don't let the robots into the woods, they might break themselves

NASA screws pooch, hottest year in the thirties

Intrepid engineers - both amateur and professional - have come up with some prototype portable laser weaponry for when the zombies come. And one of these projects is even one you can build in your own home workshop.

At around 2:00 yesterday afternoon, I was Ralphie on Christmas morning discovering that he had not gotten an official Red Ryder carbine action two-hundred shot range model air rifle, but instead a Barrett M82A1M .50 cal semi-automatic rifle with the lengthened accessory rail, rear grip and monopod socket. And ten boxes of ammo and a range pass.

Why was I so happy?

Because I had gotten home and after some minor difficulties gotten my precious iPhone hooked up, activated, and synced.

Thanks to existing contractual obligations, the unreasoning greed of auto mechanics and the Federal government, and a wife who despite her manifold virtue was dubious of the clear and obvious need for my iPhone purchase I was not one of the geeks who waited in line on June 29th for an opening day iPhone. Instead, I was a geek who had to wait six weeks like a sucker, while review after glorious review only whetted my appetite and turned the screws on the rack of my anticipation.

But having it in my sweaty palms, I find (almost to my surprise, despite having actually wasted a lunch hour in a pilgrimage to the local Apple store to fondle one) that the iPhone actually does live up to the hype. It is literally and figuratively the Jesus phone.

I got the 8GB version, figuring that more is better in the storage department. I loaded up almost four hundred songs, a movie, three tv shows, a complete audio book college course on the Crusades, a hundred pics of the Buckethead clan – and I still have 4.3 GB left. Plenty of storage.

As for performance, playing with the iPhone I remembered a quote I read once from Jonathan Ives, the design guru at Apple – “when our tools are broken, we feel broken. And when somebody fixes one, we feel a tiny bit more whole.” It is staggering, after witnessing the ease of use and careful attention to detail embodied in the iPhone, to realize that in decades of cell phone design evolution, no one had ever come within a country mile of getting it right until now. Other phones are sun-warmed piles of dung compared to the glory of this phone.

I had a decent phone – a Motorola Razr. I appreciated above all its slenderness – if I was going to carry around a phone all the time, I might as well have one that was unobtrusive. For dialing numbers and talking to people, it was certainly adequate. I could press and hold “2” to talk to Mrs. Buckethead. But if I needed to look up another number from my contacts, I was screwed. Can’t do but one thing at a time.

Adding contacts was nightmarish, typing on the tiny number pad and being prompted at each change. Using the internet was a painful and expensive joke. The only function other than talking that I used at all regularly was the calculator.

Now I realize that the Razr was not a smart phone. But friends of mine have had smart phones, and I’ve played with them, and they are pretty much just as user hostile as mine was – just user hostile over a broader range of functionality.

In the last 24 hours or so, I’ve:

• Watched a movie, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
• Watched Aqua Teen Hunger Force (“Circus”) and the Soup.
• Gotten and replied to dozens of emails
• Talked to my mom
• Read many articles on the internets, including this one
• Listened to lots of Johnny Cash
• Consulted the weather in several cities
• Used the map function to locate stuff, and navigate there
• Set the timer for no good reason
• And, gotten Mrs. Buckethead angry for setting her personalized ringtone to “bark”

In any given 24 hour period in the last decade or so, I might have used a computer to accomplish most if not all of those tasks. But forty pounds of computer equipment does not travel well, and the wireless router in my office does not reach several miles to the nearest town – let alone fit comfortably in your pocket.

The stunning thing is that all of these tasks were accomplished gracefully, easily, even joyfully. I’ve found myself just switching between applications to watch the animations. I am a techwriter by trade, so it is perhaps disturbing to realize that this thing does not need a manual. It is that intuitive – nothing is arcane, obscure or clearly not designed to be used by humans.

Which makes you want to use all the various thingies and gadgets, because they are flat out fun to use. And so well designed, that even this website looks better on the iPhone than it does on a 24” monitor on my desk. (It also makes you crave more applications.) I knew how to access and use most of the applications on my Motorola phone, I just didn’t use them because it was entirely too much of a pain in the ass to actually use them.

All other phones are broken, and this one is not. And of the two major worries that many had – the keyboard and the battery life – I have no complaints on either score. I’m already getting pretty fast on the typing, and I’m just about to recharge it for the first time.

This is one kick ass, highly enslickened, gorgeous piece of technological gimcrackery. I recommend it highly.

From Letterman:

10. War and Peace and Steve
9. The Seven Habits of Highly Successful Steves
8. The Grapes of Steve
7. The Steves of Wrath
6. Steve Grapes Steve Wrath Steve Steve
5. Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus, Steve is From Cleveland
4. Where's Waldo? Is He With Steve?
3. Time Life Mysteries of the Unknown, Volume VIII: "Mysterious Guys Named Steve"
2. The Joy of Sex with Steve
1. The Bible (King Steve Version)

We come to the end of our educational series, “Alternate State Mottoes for Stupid States” with a state that is last on many lists, no matter how ordered, Wyoming. There is surprisingly much to say about a state that 99.83% of America’s population has wisely chosen not to live in:

• Come dig a hole in Wyoming!
• The Cowboy State. Other Village People not allowed
• WyOMFG!
• ET’s Summer Home
• Cedant arma togae
• First to make the tactical error of allowing women to vote
• Less is more. But more is more, too
• Square, but fun
• Rodeo riding is not gay
• Don’t Feed Grizzly Bears. They Eat People.
• Don’t Feed Cowboys. They Eat People.
• The other square state
• Home of the majestic jackalope
• Largely Balrog Free
• Woefully underdeveloped and tragically cowboyified
• Come for the arid emptiness, stay for the arid emptiness
• Save a horse, ride a Wyomingite
• Yogi lives in Jellystone Park, fucko
• Got Geothermal Activity?
• Join the Dick Cheney Memorial Hunt Club and bag a lawyer!
• No limit on lawyers!
• It’s Wyoming, Baby
• It takes decades of training to become a competent cowpoker
• Brokeback Mountain is in Faggotty Colorado
• In Bauxite, the Future
• Rocky Mountain Oysters, it's what's for dinner
• We Love Our Congressman
• The Diversity State, if by Diversity you mean lots of white folk in jeans and cowboy hats
• Land of a perverse number of mountains
• Like No Place on Earth. That’s not a good thing.
• Not Much, And Lots Of It
• Land of Wary Glances
• Big Fats
• A Rocky Mountain New Jersey
• The Suffering State
• With this few people, you’d think it’d be harder to find assholes
• Flat Is Where It's At
• Say “Wynot?” and I’ll pop a cap in your ass
• The Dwarrodelf
• Jackson Hole isn't as bad as it sounds
• I Live In Wyoming. Please Kill Me.
• Proving You Don't Need A City To Be A State
• Where men are lonely and sheep are scared
• 48% Government Owned
• Alice doesn’t live here anymore
• Gateway to Utah

[wik] Don't worry, your alternate motto fun is not completely dead - there are plans in the works to attack Puerto Rico and our Nation's capitol, and our crack team of researchers is looking into new and innovative ways to ridicule Europeans.

While it may surprise you, gentle reader, to hear that I am again guest posting on MO, considering that I am barely posting on this, my own website, the fact is that I have been Rossed to a large degree over the last couple weeks. The end is in sight (or at least the headlight of the oncoming train) and my time for blogging should be substantially greater in the immediate future. Unless I pick up all those freelance gigs I'm chasing. Anyways, here is the first of this week's Murdoc Online guest posts:

Greetings again, fellow Murdoc-cultists. The great and powerful Murdoc is once again goofing off, and has asked me to take up the slack with a few posts for you to educate and amuse yourself, and to productively use your time at work.

Our first topic is the troubled V-22 Osprey Tilt-Rotor, which is flying right over my head as we speak. The 418th flight test squadron out of Edwards in California has temporarily relocated to the tiny, tiny airport in Winchester, Va, only a half hour from my fastness in the wilderness. If you follow this link here, you can watch a very small video that shows some CV-22's landing and whatnot, and hear the reporter mispronounce several words.

The reason the Ospreys are in my neck of the woods is simple. They need the bad weather that California simply refuses to provide. In particular, they're looking for fog in which to test their terrain guidance systems. There's typically a lot of fog up here, so they shouldn't have too much trouble.

The Air Force version isn't scheduled to enter service until 2009, but the Marine MV-22 will be heading to Iraq in September.

I haven't actually seen one yet, they're actually flying a bit west of where I live. I am thinking of driving the boy up to the airport to see if we can catch a glimpse of one of those, and if I do, I'll post pics if I can get some decent ones.

[wik] Flash, and the video that was embedded in it, are long dead alas.
 

What did the thousands of moths who kamikaze my porch lights do before there were porch lights?

And, what did four year old boys obsess about before we invented cars, trucks, trains and planes?

[wik] The highly educated and fearsomely well-read NDR sent me a brief footnoted note to the effect that a thousand years ago, Swedes were killing each other over religion.

One thousand years ago Sweden was, in fact, in the midst a protracted process of conversion (as well as throughout Scandinavia). Until the late 12th century there were still bloody encounters between Christians and pagans. These conflicts form the backdrop of Bergman's Virgin Spring and Undset's Gunnar's Daughter.

To which I replied,

I think you misunderstood my intentions in that post. Yes, they were in the midst of a protracted religious struggle. Exactly. They were killing each other, so the issue of "trying to assimilate" would have been a complete non starter.

And, they were Vikings then, not watered down euro-weenies. It's only in the last few hundred years that Swedes (or anyone, for that matter) have realized that when your only tool for argument is an ax, all problems look like necks.

I didn't have any movies to quote though. Thinking a bit further on the matter, religious conflict is, by way of gross misunderestimation, a huge problem globally and throughout history. Most people seem to imagine that most conflicts are about greed or economics. Of course for the Marxists, that's being redundant. If not money, then power or political ideals. This may be true for some leaders. But the people - and many leaders - are not quite so cynical as we are. Many of the leaders in the Thirty Years' War certainly claimed that they were following God's will in smiting the heretics. And there is little doubt that many were convinced of the truth of their religious beliefs, to the point of motivating them to follow those leaders regardless of their "true" motivation.

In the whole world, there are only a few places, and only for the last four hundred years, that have proved even mildly immune to the temptation to go a-smiting. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine where the home countries of those recent immigrants to Sweden fall in that classification scheme.

Sweden struggles to integrate Muslim immigrants.

I haven't had time to post much lately, for which I abjectly apologize. But I have run across some interesting bits I'd like to call your attention to.

• Here's a nifty National Geographic piece on swarm behavior, or how while individual ants are staggeringly inept, ant colonies are not.
• While I certainly like the new iPhone more than Mapgirl, this guy is really down on the Jesus Phone.
• The Ministry has for some time now been trying to alert the public to the threat of robots. While humanity as a whole will certainly all experience the cold metal boot of robot domination, we probably won't all feel it at once. Among the first groups to feel the iron grip of robotic oppression might just be migrant workers. As if they didn't have enough to contend with.
• The New Yorker is occasionally interesting.
• The recent release of some old CIA documents has raised some eyebrows. And sent conspiracy types into overdrive. And it looks like we did after all try to get the mob to rub out Castro.
• Wired interviews Hans Reiser, linux guru and accused murderer.
• Times puff piece on cyberwar.
• Yes, it does.
• Mars or Bust! I think that terraforming Mars would be a fabulous idea. Of course, we need to get there first. One real advantage with Mars, is that we could use rather, uh, drastic methods in the period before we start setting the planet.

Enjoy, and I'll try to post something substantive real soon now.

Now this is my idea of a summer camp.

[wik] I wonder if they get to play with these:

My personal college experience with larval Republicans was sub-optimal at best. I was constantly called upon to explain the tactless mouth breathing of my small school's single fanatic Republican Kool-Aid drinker. Having to repeatedly agree with this idiot was painful - "Well, he's right, it's just that he said it in the worst conceivable way." At least these young Republicans have something of a sense of humor. The Alexandria, Va YR's are planning the first annual Dick Cheney Paintball Tourney, "named in honor of our Vice President and second amendment enthusiast Dick Cheney." So, if you're not busy, go shoot with, or shoot at, some young conservatives.

I completely forgot to mention, but the other day Ministry Crony and future Hugo winner EDog has a published novel now available for sale. The story in question is The Milkman, which Ian was kind enough to let me read a while back. It is fun, weird and strangely comforting. It's gonzo science fiction in an era that doesn't look overly kindly at gonzo, or science fiction. It tries to answer one of the burning questions of our time: "What’s the deal with aliens and anal probes?" And succeeds in finding an answer. Swordfights, bikers, spaceships and some embarrassing bodily functions. What more could you ask for?

Buy the damn book already, you won't regret it. You can get your greasy mits on a copy here (author's preference) or here or here.

Johno sent me another vid, which I must share. Watch the whole thing:

[wik] And... it's gone, disappeared sometime in the last nearly two decades.

I guess today is video day at the Ministry. I first saw Bjørn Berge a few years back at the Iota in Arlington (a fantastic music joint if you're ever in the DC area) and was stunned by his guitar mojo. A Norwegian blues man? Who'd a thunk. But here's an video I just stumbled across, from his new album. Forgive the annoying Frenchiness at the beginning.

[wik] Another cool thing that I forgot to mention is that he's covering a Morphine tune off their Cure for Pain album. Morphine rocks, and his take on it is cool in its own way and still somehow true to the original. Here's the Morphine vid: