No Maps for These Territories

This has been up for a while now, but I thought I’d share it.

dowcloses, my twitterbot. It posts every day what the DOW closed at, in case you’re a masochist and like to watch the decline of your net worth.

It was a quickie project that I did in Python, my new favorite language.  I’ve been a C programmer my whole life, and I’ve dabbled with Java and perl when necessary, but nothing really grabbed me.  Python is like no language I’ve used before, it really works with my head.

For a long time it dawdled along as a scripting alternative that lots of programmers just knew as “that language where whitespace matters”, but now that Google and several other big boys are really endorsing it, it’s getting more momentum, and I couldn’t be happier.

If you’re a programmer, and you use perl for your daily scripts, I can’t recommend Python highly enough.  You can pick it up over a weekend, it’s insanely powerful and fast, and easier to use than any language I’ve ever tried.  Honestly, it made me feel giddy with power, I was so used to programming being a struggle that I’d just assumed that’s how it would always be.

I’m doing a large scale project at work in Python now, and I’ve written several scripts to do web scraping, a la my twitterbot, or interacting with amazon through boto, and each and every time, I get up and running in a fraction of the time it used to take.   Python is badass.  Give it a shot.

My camera has a “time lapse” feature which I’ve been eyeing ever since I got it.

I bought a tomato plant holder from Home Depot that proved unable to hold the weight of the tomato buckets I put on it, so I decided to build my own tomato stand, which should hold four five-gallon buckets of dirt no problem.

A construction project?  What a perfect way to test out the stop motion!  I left the camera running while I figured out how to build a 6-foot tomato-hanging cage, and it came out pretty well.

I gotta say, stop motion is damn fun.  Now I need to find more stuff that I can record.

I had high hopes for actually getting around to cleaning up this blog before heading to Japan, but it doesn’t look like that’s actually going to happen.  I’m heading out tomorrow morning.

I recently changed my blog to run on Wordpress, instead of Blogger, and I think that move might have destroyed the old RSS feed and created a new one.  Is anyone out there actually reading the new RSS feed?  Were you reading the old one?  Let me know in the comments or email.

The plan here is to try to post pictures and/or videos every few days from Japan while I’m there and see if I can keep a better documentation trail than I normally do for trips.  I usually just take a crapload of pics and then look at them again in a few years and wonder what the hell everything is.  Maybe my blog can act as a better video diary.

If anyone’s been to Japan and has cool things to suggest I do, or you’ll be there in April when I’m there, let me know.   I’ve got quite a list of things to see, but I’m always interested in more.  What I’d really love to see is lots of live music.  If you’ve got some good venues, definitely give me the skinny.

Anyway, I’m outta here.  Next time I blog I’ll be posting from 16 hours in the future.  I’ll send pictures of jetpacks.

I just watched a great set of videos about why you should never talk to the police for any reason.

Here’s the first one, by Professor James Duane, giving a background on the law and a bunch of different scenarios where even if you’re innocent, anything you say just makes your life worse. Then, there’s a second video, by a cop, about exactly why the law professor is correct. It’s a nice set.

(Don’t let the fact that Professor Duane talks way too fast annoy you, you just have to ignore it and focus on the good stuff, he makes some really great points.)

I find this particularly interesting because I’ve been interrogated by cops and various security professionals several times in my life, and I’ve found myself doing exactly what he describes here, talking way too much to try to convince them that I’m innocent, or embellishing the truth if I’m trying to get out of something. You always, always end up saying the wrong things, or going a bit too far in your earnest desire to help prove your innocence. I’ve always regretted it in retrospect.

The primary point that he makes is that the 5th amendment is NOT just for criminals to protect themselves, it’s also for innocent people to protect themselves from the system. Anything you say that is false, even unrelated to the case at hand, is ammunition against you. And even the fact that you talked to them at all, even if everything you said was 100% fact, can be used against you if the cop misremembers what you said.

At the end of the day, absolutely nothing you say to the police helps you, it can only hurt you, and that’s a very interesting thing to keep in mind. Innocent or not, your words are ammunition against you. The only way to win, is not to play, as I learned from WarGames. Don’t ever talk to the police.

This race has gotten more bizarre by the day. Generally speaking, Hillary Clinton only has two possible paths to the nomination:

1) Get Michigan and Florida seated with the completely ridiculous and unfair assumption that she should be allowed to take delegates from an illegal vote, where candidates had agreed to not campaign, and Obama wasn’t even on the ballot. Every time she argues for this option, it blows my mind. She might as well say “I’d really like to be allowed to cheat, if that’s okay with you guys.” The result of this would be the division the party and alienation of many Democratic voters.

2) Get to the convention and convince superdelegates that she’s the better candidate, despite losing the popular vote and the delegate count. She’s already started saying that she has the support of “white Americans”, which is a surreally racist tact for someone who talks about how hard it is to be a woman running for president. Yeah, it’s hard to be a woman, but it’s cool to say that white people don’t want to vote for a black guy. Nice. The result of this would of course be the division of the party and alienation of many Democratic voters.

So seriously, what the fuck is she doing? You hear these news reports of people saying that she’s fought such a hard battle that she deserves to run it to the end, despite the impossible odds. Why? Because she’s a woman, she should stay in because we PITY her? When every day, her campaign divides the party, and lets McCain sit back fat and happy and watch the disaster unfold? What kind of argument is that?

The only realistic tactical reason I can see for her campaign continuing right now is that she thinks that she can force her way into the VP position by being just popular enough that Obama feels he has to take her in.

I really hope that doesn’t happen, they’re completely different candidates, and she stands for all the stupid bull-headed politics as usual nonsense that he’s supposed to oppose. Her position on that absurd and short sighted gas tax cut perfectly showed this to be the case, that she would pander for votes against the advice of every economist and rational human who understands supply and demand curves. You might as well put a band-aid on a slit throat.

Drop the fuck out already, and let us get on with the process of trying to dethrone the politics of fear that have crippled this country for almost 8 years.

This is a fantastic video about how society deals with change by creating cognitive “heat sinks”, which I’d never really thought of in those terms before, but makes perfect sense.

Clay Shirky goes over how we reach periods of societal change, and lose ourselves in mindless excess of things like alcohol, or sitcoms, and then start to tap that stored wealth of cognition and slowly bring ourselves to the next societal level.

I highly recommend checking it out, it really helped me solidify my thinking about how we create “relief valves” in our minds where we passively consume in order to spin unused brain cycles, it’s not just sitcoms, it’s professional sports, it’s religion… we’ve got these heat sinks built up all around us, just waiting to be tapped. Otherwise, we would completely combust as a society.

The trick is to recognize your own heat sinks, and start to tap them to do something, instead of nothing.

His bit about someone asking him “Where do they find the time?” about Wikipedia really hit home for me, I’ve always been a firm believer that we have huge, HUGE amounts of free time that we fritter away. It confuses me when people ask me where I find time to play games to review on Noobtoob every week, and take Japanese classes, and do any number of other things - what’s interesting is I still waste probably 40 hours a week on cognative heat sinks. Maybe more. I certainly don’t feel like I’m making the most of my time.

We have to give ourselves permission to have these escape valves, of course, you can’t be creating and contributing all the time, but whenever I force myself to take a couple percent of my spare brain cycles and actually DO something, I always feel better for it. And I think the direction we’re going is really exciting, a whole new generation of kids are coming up who don’t think of entertainment as a passive medium. I just need to learn to think like them and ditch my baggage.

Lawrence Lessig, most well known for founding Creative Commons, and writing about free culture, has endorsed Obama, with a very well made and convincing video, here.

Also rocking my socks this week is a music video taken from the original source material of Obama speaking in New Hampshire on the night of the primaries.

If you haven’t watched that speech, I highly recommend it, if it doesn’t quicken your heartbeat a bit, I think you’re probably dead inside.

I’m going to quote a bit of it here, that really stuck with me:

“We’ve been asked to pause for a reality check. We’ve been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope. But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.

For when we have faced down impossible odds, when we’ve been told we’re not ready or that we shouldn’t try or that we can’t, generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes, we can.

It was the call of workers who organized, women who reached for the ballot, a president who chose the moon as our new frontier… Yes, we can, to opportunity and prosperity. Yes, we can heal this nation. Yes, we can repair this world. Yes, we can.”

That’s been a rallying call of mine, throughout my life, and to hear it repeated in such a positive and powerful way by a politician, it really gives me hope. As long as people have told me I can’t do things, I’ve always responded that “Yes, I can.” And it turns out that quite often, just believing that makes it possible. It’s a truly American credo, one of belligerence and hope combined, one of confidence and exuberance and forward thinking. That was a damn fine speech.