The Alameda Forum is meeting tonight, and the subject is the Occupy Wall Street movement.
If you have not had a chance to look at minutes from the Occupy Oakland General Assembly, here they are. I was looking at the meetings from yesterday’s GA, and found them inspiring – not that there is anything inherently inspiring about them, but the fact that there is order, process, and consensus is inspiring to me… and something that seems to be completely lost in any news reporting on the encampments. The TV news always leads with the Dow, NASDAQ, and S&P 500 even before the headlines every day, which may not be of interest to many people, but they never say “The Occupy Oakland General Assembly met peacefully for three hours and took votes on several important issues”. I guess that kind of news doesn’t sell diapers.
There is a rally today starting at 4:00 PM, then a march at 5:00 PM. I may go to the rally, but I plan to leave by 5:00 or so, as I have other plans.
In the news, as I heard this morning, a man was shot and killed yesterday near Ogawa/Grant Plaza. It seems clear to me that the murder had only a coincidental relationship to the encampment, or maybe circumstantial: The city shut off the lights in the plaza for the last two nights, which seems negligent at best. I think Quan is trying to play the middle, but she’s not being successful; when she calls for the encampment to dissolve tonight, she adds determination to the people who are there in the spirit of protest against any and all powers-that-be. Anyone who has been at a General Assembly should understand that the only way the camp has any chance of dissolving, aside from massive police actions and arrests and incarceration for more than a few hours, is for the General Assembly to vote that it should be dissolved. Even that would only be some kind of pledge, as it’s unlikely that any OO camper will apply more than mild pressure on other OO campers to pack up.
I received an email today from “save the internet dot com” which seems to be a campaign of freepress.net. about the AT&T – T-mobile merger. It claims that a document accidentally posted by AT&T’s legal staff to the FCC web site exposes AT&T’s “lie” that they are not pursuing the purchase of T-Mobile USA in order to expand their services, but rather to eliminate competition.
Here is my response to them:
“Dear info@freepress.net,
I read the PDF, and I don’t think it says what you’re saying it says.
That is to say, from following the links, I believe you are referring to this document:
http://www.dslreports.com/r0/download/1678331~018ee90413e657e412818181a5d840ff/DOC.pdfI have experience in spectrum lease negotiations with major telecoms and wireless companies, and experience with FCC licensing and lobbying on behalf of UCSF, where I was the senior engineer dealing with 2.5 GHz spectrum issues for seven years. I understand the content of the PDF very well, and it does, in fact, say the opposite of what you say it says.
I have previously responded to your petition drive, and I am, in fact, against the merger. As a T-Mobile “Pay As You Go” customer there is NO DOUBT in my mind that I will pay at least 10 times what I pay now when AT&T takes over T-Mobile.
But misinterpreting documents and misleading petition-signers is not a way to gain respect or credibility.
Please feel free to call or write if you would like to discuss these matters further.
What do you do when you find out that your “voice” has been hijacked? If Freepress.net is trying to cause outrage at the expense of their credibility, and taking my credibility along for the ride, I think that’s something akin to slander. If they’ve made an honest mistake, then I don’t want to be associated with a group that is so careless as to send out a mass mailing that will generate, probably, thousands of petition signatures based on misguided hearsay.
As I noted above, I have some expertise in the wireless spectrum field, and I find that particular PDF does the opposite of what freepress.net / savetheinternet.com claims- it actually bolsters the case that AT&T is proposing the merger for the RIGHT reasons, i.e. providing more and better coverage to more of the population of the US, and importantly, extends that coverage to populations that are currently underserved. Please note: I’m not saying that the claims made in AT&T’s letter to the FCC are genuine, or that they reflect genuine desire to better serve these populations; rather, I’m saying that nothing in the letter backs up freepress.net’s claims.
What do you think?
I’m learning about blogs and FB.
On WP, you have a “publicize” option that does not appear on the wp.org app running at bililight.tzf.net. I assume this is one of the “value adds” that wp.com reserves for themselves. I have “publicize” turned on with identical settings for all three (even though I deleted all of my posts from bililight.wordpress.com).
I noticed that in FB, one of my WP blogs – thisonegoesuptoeleven- appears as “notes”, while the other two do not. It turns out that at some point I set FB’s “import blog” setting to the feed URL of thisonegoesuptoeleven. All three blogs have “publicize” turned on for FB, but only thisonegoesuptoeleven turns up as notes.
The features that appear on the “notes” include all of the socnet links at the bottom, like digg etc. :
· Comment · View Original Post · Share · Delete
…and of course they appear on my “wall” too when they post.
When I go to the “import blog” settings on FB, the only option is to delete the thisonegoesuptoeleven blog. Either FB prevents me from importing more than one blog as notes, or they’ve stopped supporting importing blogs altogether. I don’t want to hit the “delete” button to see which is true.
There seem to be “applications” in FB that will import blogs for you. I have not looked at those yet.
When I manually post a blog entry as an FB “note” I can’t even figure out how to include a single link to the blog! However, I can then include “Tags”, and apparently there’s one person following the “bili light” tag. Anything that is not recognized as a tag is deleted from the tags I enter, for instance, if I put “tzf” or “hyperbilirubinemia” as a tag, the note that’s posted does NOT appear to have those tags. This seems rather draconian on FB’s part.
The other blogs, with publicize turned on in WP.com but which are not “FB import” blogs, they appear on my wall with useful links:
… including the “read original post” link. But when I share a blog posting URL as a wall posting, it does not appear with that stuff:
Please enjoy my very technical new post to the Bili Light blog… I promise the next two posts won’t be so technical, they’ll be about human beings!
bililight.tzf.net
… though of course the title is click-through-able. The things I don’t like about this are: 1, no “view original post” button, (essentially the same as clicking on the title) and 2, posts that appear on my wall and not as “notes” will be less easily found by people looking for them- looking pages and pages back on your “most recent” stream or on my wall is not something I believe anyone actually does, unless they’re as obsessive as me, which is unusual.
I received an email from the whitehouse.gov mailing list today which is ostensibly from Joe Biden. It says that Obama’s told him to spend some of his stategic reserve of hot air on something called “The Campaign To Cut Waste”. He says:
“And I bet you didn’t know that your tax dollars pay for a website dedicated to the Desert Tortoise. I’m sure it’s a wonderful species, but we can’t afford to have a standalone site devoted to every member of the animal kingdom. It’s just one of hundreds of government websites that should be consolidated or eliminated.”
What the fuck, Joe? I don’t know how much they’re spending on web hosting, but if they’re spending more than about $15 a year on it, they should switch to iohost.com or any of a million other cheap web-hosting services. And I think we can afford $15 a year for the web site. Now, hopefully, there are federally-funded scientists studying the California Desert Tortoise and hopefully, they are publishing their research on the web… so I hope Joe’s not suggesting we eliminate scientific research from the Federal Budget. So, unless you’re a TOTAL LOSER who doesn’t know about the beauty and wonder of the deserts of the Western US, you would do well to pay attention to the Desert Tortoise.
“This kind of waste is just unacceptable. Particularly at a time when we’re facing tough decisions about reducing our deficit, it’s a no-brainer to stop spending taxpayer dollars on things that benefit nobody. “
Yes, that’s exactly right: when you’re making tough decisions, stop spending taxpayer dollars on things that benefit nobody… but what the hell is that supposed to mean? Wasted dollars, unless they’re literally being burned, are certainly benefiting SOMEONE! For instance, if the Air Force spends $436 on a hammer, engineers, manufacturers, and administrators all benefit. Now, who benefits from the Desert Tortoise web site? Well, restricting ourselves to HUMANS, I would say: the web designer, those to contribute research and study to the information on the web site, people in education who want to know more about tortoises, anyone who enjoys spending time in the desert, particularly the beautiful Eastern Mojave, and enjoys the wonderful and diverse habitat there, and let’s say, friends, relatives, and associates of all of the above. And that’s just off the top of my head… I could go on!
Here’s what I wrote back to our VP, Joey B.:
Actually, Joe, I’m very much in favor of a government-sponsored web site dedicated to the California Desert Tortoise. Did you know that the Desert Tortoise is one of the most important animals to the desert ecosystem? I’m guessing you didn’t, because you have obviously not looked at the California Desert Tortoise web site.
The government of the United States should not be responsible only for dropping bombs on countries that most Americans have never heard of… in fact, if you want to cut budgets, please STOP WITH THE BOMBS AND DRONES ALREADY. But helping to get people to understand the basic facts of science should be a core responsibility of the Federal Government of the US. Without an understanding of the basic facts of science, there will be less public support for science development and science education, programs which have kept the US strong throughout the last one hundred years.
A basic fact of life is that humans are part of Earth’s ecosystem – the same ecosystem that relies on California Desert Tortoise to create habitat for many other important desert species.
Save the Desert Tortoise, and save the Human Race.
And save Federal Funding for science, to save the Desert Tortoise.
Please share the wonderful, awesome Desert Tortoise Web Site!
And fuck off, Joe. 😛
Jim Lehrer outlined his “personal guidelines as a journalist” recently in a talk at the National Press Club in Washington:
“Do nothing I cannot defend. Cover, write and present every story with the care I would want if the story were about me. Assume there is at least one other side or version to every story. Assume the viewer is as smart and as caring and as good a person as I am. Assume the same about all people on whom I report. Assume personal lives are a private matter, until a legitimate turn in the story absolutely mandates otherwise. Carefully separate opinion and analysis from straight news stories, and clearly label everything. Do not use anonymous sources or blind quotes, except on rare and monumental occasions. No one should ever be allowed to attack another anonymously. And finally, I am not in the entertainment business.”
– as reported by Robert McNeil on the PBS News Hour: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/media/jan-june11/macneil_05-13.html
This post is repurposed from an email written to the Kooks and addressed to Johnny G., my dear friend, who set before me a Quest, before I embarked on a trip to the Far East, in the summer of 2009, to eat some things that I would normally not eat… which is hard to do, since, generally, I’ll eat anything.
John, you’ve inspired me.
My first lame attempt at fulfilling The Quest was at the sushi factory.
(I’m calling it that; a sushi boat place but huge, conveyers instead of boats, probably 100 booths and then a couple hundred counter seats; little stylus-based touchscreens at each booth for custom orders, that come directly to your table, on a track above the normal sushi-conveyer, on a little “shinkansen” tray train track. This includes juice boxes for the kids. Ordering a Suntory Draft from the touchscreen, about 7 seconds later – literally – a 12-year-old – perhaps figuratively but hard to tell – arrives with said draft beer on a small tray. OK, we were sitting just a few meters from the beer tap but still, uncanny how they got the beer into the glass and to the table that quickly – must have something to do with the 12-year-olds’ reflexes).
So when three small deep-fried balls with bits of oyster sauce and fish flakes on top came along, I asked the Girl From Kofu, and it was nothing other than Tako. I always say “be careful when ordering a Tako in Japan” but in this case, I knew and was waiting for my opportunity… well, kind of…
Last time I was here, about 8 years and change ago (it’s possible Toshi was conceived here, making him slightly more Japanese than Sayuri, perhaps, who was conceived in either Venice (CA) or Japantown L.A.) Watanabe-san took us out to an excellent dinner and I had my first <fresh> tako, i.e. not frozing (sic).
(In the states, it’s apparently impossible to get non-previously-frozing tako, at least in any sushi joint I’ve been to. Frozing, it seems to me, makes it more or less flavorless, rubbery, and, er, rubbery, I guess. )
So Anyway, I grabbed that Octopus by the balls: all three of them (well the plate actually), and munched upon one, whereupon I did notice a lusty expression on Sayuri’s face.
“Would you like to try one?”
“Sure”
Octopus Balls
So she did, then looked at me expectantly, as if to say…
“Would you like the other one as well, Sayuri?”
… (munch munch munch).
A Good Time Was Had By All.
…But if Sayuri will eat two thirds of it, clearly, Quest Unfulfilled.
Which brings us to Today.
Mari and I made plans to go to the Yamanshi Prefectural Museum of Contemporary Art, or whatever it’s called, and the park it sits on, which has some nice examples of sculpture, including a rather large Rodin! The Yamanashi-Jin are apparently all ga-ga about the works of one particular French impressionist, one Millet, and have a large permanent collection of his works. I don’t care for it much, myself, but it was The Plan For The Day, so I went along with it, and it was nice, but actually, in the Modern wing, there was some really nice stuff, including one that knocked my socks off (well, I wasn’t wearing any, to begin with, or else it might have). One Seiichi Ichii, a oil painting of which the title was translated “A Memory Of Tatami”. Don’t bother googling him, or it, it’s apparently ungoogleable. But all the more amazing: 1975, the guy was something that Gibson would have included in Pattern Recognition, for sure, had he known: the guy had to be some kind of super-obsessed Otaku type, pre-otaku.
Anyway… “Would you like to go to a folk-theme restaurant for lunch now?”
Who am I to resist? No one, that’s who. “What do you mean, folk theme?”
“Folk -theme style like, say, old style food like from people of Yamanshi province ate 300 years ago… it’s good! They have noodles.”
“We went to a Ramen restaurant last night”
“No, not ramen, different, like miso noodles, not like miso soup-u, but like noodles cooked in Miso, very good”
“Oh, that sounds good”
Don't say "Neigh!" to Ba-Sashi!
So we went. Just across the street from the Museum and Park. Shoes off, onto the shelves. Tatami. Sit on the floor. Maybe 12 tables in all, a couple of them are occupied by groups of Nihon-jin men, smoking. Sit as far away from them as possible. Nice color pictures on the home-made looking menu. The main courses are like ramen-bowls, but they’re little cast-iron pots, and the noodles are like Chow Fun, but in soup, like ramen, more or less. Then the “auxilliary” part of the menu, there are Ika, both cooked and raw, and something up at the top… “Ba-sashi desu” says Mari. After translation, I knew that I was moments from fulfilling my Quest, complete with pictures.
It was delicious.
Oh yeah, it was raw ,too.
I had a friend from Schenectady visit me recently, and he asked me this, “Why are fewer and fewer Americans going into science each year?” I told him that the young were impressed by the war crimes trials in Nuremberg. They were afraid that careers in science could all too easily lead to war crimes. They don’t want to work on the development of new weapons. They don’t want to make discoveries which will lead to improved weapons. They don’t want to work for corporations that pollute the water or atmosphere or raid the public treasury. So they go into other fields. They become physicists who are so virtuous that they don’t go into physics at all.
-Kurt Vonnegut, “Address to the American Physical Society”, circa 1970
I remember the apes in the great Cinerama motion picture 2001. I remember their bloodshot eyes and their fears at night, how they learned to use tools to smash in each other’s skulls. And I suppose we’re not much past that on the scale of evolution, even though we now have Cinerama. The same night I saw 2001, Dr. Nathan Pusey. president of Harvard, called the Cambridge police to his campus, and they smashed some skulls.
– Kurt Vonnegut, Excelsior! We’re Going to the Moon! Excelsior!, 1969
“I’ve been proud of my brother because of the actual innocence of his work… […] He discovered that silver iodide would make it snow and rain under certain conditions. And I watched his shock about a year ago when it came out we had been seeding the hell out of Indochina for years. […] But my brother has always been alert to the violent uses of what he might turn up, and it saddened him to find out that silver iodide had been used in warfare. […] Inventors of weapons systems, Leonardo Da Vinci among them, are not friends of the common man”
– Kurt Vonnegut, Interview in Playboy magazine, 1973
Crashing The Species 
No Humans Allowed
I’m in Maryland for training. The La Quinta here is nice, that is the lobby is kind of cheap and shabby but the room is great (for the price), with woods out the window, which opens so I can get fresh air. They have self-service waffle makers for breakfast, which I’ve never heard of before, but apparently only because I am naive in that regard; the truckers who stay here say it’s common.
It’s in a weird part of the country, it seems like a desolate wasteland to me. Nothing is built human-scale here, it’s all huge shopping centers and huge industrial parks separated by divided highways and strips of woods… Google Maps said that it could be dangerous or at least unpleasant to try to walk from the hotel to the training center, and that is true- walking here, even a mile or two, is impossible, and it would be hell on a bicycle too.
My first attempt at riding the bus to the training center was a failure. Google Maps gave me three bus route choices, two of which were unattractive (and which were Howard County local bus routes). One of them was fictitious: it had a walking route through two strips of woods and across a divided highway – six or eight lanes. The third option turns out to be Maryland Transit, and I tried to find the schedule on the Maryland Transit web site, but the “320 line” is not even listed there. It does have a trip planner, where you put in the exact same information you’d put into Google Maps, and when you hit the “go” buttton… it sends you directly to Google Maps!
My second attempt at catching the bus, this morning, was successful. It came 7 minutes early, it came from the opposite direction as shown on Google Maps, and it stopped on the opposite side of the street as shown on Google Maps. But the bus was a nice, clean, comfortable commuter bus and the bus driver was kind and informative. As a bonus I got a bus route map on the bus which, it turns out, will pick me up outside the training center tomorrow evening and take me straight to downtown Baltimore, which is where I want to go; I’m meeting my old friend Dave and the bus stops three blocks from where he works. He works at the Maryland Science Center and he’s going to give me the backstage tour of the planetarium and IMAX theater. We’ll have dinner and I’ll stay at their place for the next two nights, before heading up to NYC.
The bus driver said the reason I could not find the 320 line on the web site is that I was looking at the MTA (Maryland Transportation Agency) web site instead of the MTA (Maryland Transit Authority) web site. But then I thought about it and no, that’s not right – the web site I was looking at had all the other bus routes, and it had the trip planner that showed me the 320 line on Google Maps. But can I believe that the State of Maryland has a bureaucracy that would not be able to see the value in having all of the state-run public transportation (not even to mention the counties’ systems) on one web site? Sure. What ticks me off is that the route and the stops are misidentified. As for the reason the bus was 7 minutes early? Well, that’s easy. It’s a commuter bus that brings people from urban Baltimore to the industrial areas in the morning and back to Baltimore in the evening. As the bus driver said “no one EVER gets ON the bus out here in the morning, and the riders appreciate arriving a few minutes early, so on the drop-off end of the routes, we don’t watch the clock”. It actually makes perfect sense, and I was waiting at the wrong stop early enough to catch the bus yesterday… it was just the wrong stop!