inspecting an introspection

In this blog post I’d like to take a look at two lines from Green Day’s American Idiot. You can come along for the ride if you like.


Don’t want to be an American idiot,
One nation controlled by the media.

Now on the surface this is basically saying, “Man, Americans are dumb because they listen to whatever they are told on TV/radio etc.”

But there’s another level to what it’s saying which I think was totally unintentional. These lines also imply that anyone who listens to the song and is influenced by it is also an idiot. “One nation controlled by the media”? What media is more controlling—sorry, influential—than rock?

If it was intentional, then I have to commend the sense of irony inserted into the song. But on the other hand, how smart is it to insult your entire fan base? I really don’t see them as being capable of that kind of subtlety based on the fact that their previous albums have mostly expounded on such deep themes as the fact that nothing good is on television, what it feels like to get wasted, and how incredibly bored they are.

The more amusing implication of this line applies to the band itself. The following songs gripe on and on about the evils of Bush and his agenda. Well let me ask you one question, Mr. Billie. Where did you get these ideas? Could it be from the…. gasp media? No, of course not…. you came up with them by thinking really really hard about it. (coughcontrolledbythemediaserge) I’d like to posit a theory: one good indication that things are going well in a country is when the punk rockers are all complaining.

It doesn’t seem like it at first, but it appears that American Idiot is actually a very introspective song. “Don’t want to be an American idiot….” A little late for that, sorry.

two phrases I do not understand:

• I could care less: This phrase is usually used to express complete indifference. However, if you are totally without an opinion, you cannot in fact care less. You can’t care less than zero. So the phrase means the opposite of what it is usually used to express.
  


• Extra virgin olive oil: What exactly are we talking about here? “Not only is it 100% pure olives, but the olives didn’t even mess around a bit when they were teenagers.” Huh? It doesn’t make sense.
  

I’d like to end with a reminder that any time you are going to get rid of some of your clothes, you should keep that in mind the last time you wear them, because you can get them as dirty as you want without considering the consequences.

reason #27 why google is brilliant

A while ago I was musing about Blogger. I noticed something was different about them when they dropped the requirements for having a “Oh, look, Blogger is cool” button on your site. In addition, they are one of the only free Blog services that doesn’t let you pay for it if you want to. (LiveJournal offers paid accounts, and Xanga offers the worst of both worlds: advertising AND bugging you to get the ‘premium edition’)

So anyway, why doesn’t Google want money from bloggers? My theory: to them, what bloggers provide is worth more than money to them. Think about it—most free blog sites have to charge for their servers and bandwidth. Google is different; they have a huge pipe and the most powerful supercomputer known to man available to them.

So what does Google, whose stated goal is to organize the world’s information, need? Well, the one thing their supercomputers can’t provide—intelligence. Computers can’t determine the relationship between pages without help from humans. The fact that humans like providing this valuable information to Google is extremely convenient.

one hit wonder

Adobe Acrobat: it sucked in 1995, and it sucks in 2005. OK, Adobe, you did well with Photoshop, good job—but have you thought to quit while you’re ahead? You’re just making a fool of yourself with Acrobat. Seriously!

I mean, when Apple can come out with their program Preview that is a million times better than yours at viewing a file format that you invented I think it’s time to reconsider things.

....geez. And people say Linux programs have poor user interfaces. To date I’ve never seen a Linux desktop program with a worse interface than Adobe Acrobat.

the noise of carpet

What do all these phrases have in common?

• Switched On


• Space Age Batchelor Pad


• Transient Random – Noise Bursts with Announcements


• Mars Audiac Quintet


• The Amorphous Body Study Center


• Refried Ectoplasm


• Emperor Tomato Ketchup


• Dots and Loops


• Aluminum Tunes


• Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night


• The First of the Microbe Hunters


• Sound-Dust


• Margerine Eclipse

First one to get it without Googling wins three points!

to keep the numbering right

Nothing to see here, move on.

Dang it!

watch out

w00t—I am now a licensed driver. I got marks off for steering control on every single time except for one, but I still passed.

fun with the snake

My first Python program implements the simplex method of solving linear constraints equations.

Wheee…. Operations Research sucks, but Python can be fun.

Do I live a sad life?

for great justice

I found on Wikipedia an alternate translation of All Your Base:

    A.D. 2101
    The war has begun.

    Captain: What was that?!
    Chief Engineer: It appears someone has planted bombs.
    Operator: Captain! We have an incoming transmission!
    Captain: What? Who?
    Operator: I'll put it on the main screen.
    Captain: You! You're...
    CATS [with sarcasm]: You seem to be preoccupied, gentlemen.
    CATS: With the kind cooperation of the Federation 
          forces, all of your bases now belong to us.
    CATS: Your ship, too, will soon meet its end.
    Captain: That's... impossible!
    CATS: Thanks for coming out this far. You have made it too easy.
    CATS: Make the most of these last moments of your lives.
    CATS: Ha ha ha ha ha...
    Operator: Captain...
    Captain: Operator, give a launch order to all ZIG fighters, now!
    Captain: We have no time to lose. It's up to them.
    Captain: All our hope for the future is in their hands.
    Captain: Godspeed, ZIG fighters! 

For some reason, it’s still funny…. I don’t quite know why.

attention, world:

If a piece of software doesn’t work, it doesn’t help to just tell someone ‘Hey, your software, it doesn’t work.’ You have to let them know why.

Thank you; that is all.

mmmmm

Why does putting fizz in drinks make people happy?

scrapbook

I love my wife!

the Ninja Burger difference

Try dining at Ninja Burger, where they ‘Guarantee delivery in 30 minutes or less, or we commit Seppuku!’

In other news, I have to admit that Van Halen is actually kind of cool. Under the right circumstances, of course.

catch-up

I keep getting asked what’s happened with the job I got offered at Northrop in December. Here we go:

---

I started at Northorp a little over a week ago now. It was an interesting experience working there. My first day was all just finding out how complicated things were. I had to get an account
approved to get on my computer, then I had to get an account for
Internet access, an account for email, an account for the payroll
system (who wouldn’t believe it was me; I had to get them to call my
boss to vouch for me), and I found out I couldn’t install software
without getting it approved first.


Anyhow, I was supposed to work there 20 hours a week. Unfortunately, I
have class every day of the week, and on MWF, it ends after noon. It
took me an hour and a half transit time each way, so on those days I
would only be able to work 3 hours and travel 3 hours. This made me
really start to rethink working there. I went in on Thursday and told
them that I would have to drop down to only working Tuesday and
Thursday, and if that wasn’t going to fly then I would be ok just leaving.


Over the weekend I gave it more and more thought, and I decided that I
would rather they just tell me that 10 hours a week on those two days
wasn’t enough. Of course, once I realized I wanted that, I knew the
best thing to do would just tell them I was going to leave. I’m pretty
convinced that my prospects here around Biola are good enough to keep
me going.


I told them my reasons for leaving were just about time, but as it
turns out that was really just what got me thinking about it. The
whole atmosphere was really what made me want to leave once I had
considered it. If it were really a place to work that encouraged
creativity and free inquiry, I think the time issues I had could have
been worked through. But Northrop just isn’t Google. It’s too much for
me; I value freedom and creativity far above job security, as crazy as
that sounds.

---

An astounding bit of irony: before leaving for my last day at Northrop, I downloaded The Cluetrain Manifesto for reading on the train and bus. I’d looked over it before, and it seemed quite self-important and pretentious. I’d recently seen it recommended by a site that I respected, so I thought I’d give it a look. The thing about sites sounding self-important is that it’s often a good idea to
take a closer look at them. If they live up to their pretentions, it will be worthwhile, and if they don’t it’s usually obvious before too much time has been wasted.


I love this one: “Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy.”


Anyhow, it’s an interesting piece. I’m not sure they can quite live up to the great big deal they make about what they are saying, but there is definitely a huge point to be made. The main idea is that corporations try to seperate their employees and their customers by their ‘corporate firewall’—by which they mean much more than just a bit of software but a culture that filters every attempt at communication between employees and customers to make it policy-safe and effectively void of any humanity or actual content.

The point resonated quite soundly in me after my experiences at Northrop. The book features a lot of the same points being repeated over again, but I’d venture to say there’s definitely something to what they are saying. The marketplace is changing, and the Internet is making the old way of doing things deadly. Anyhow, a good read that challenges assumptions.

lunar

Happy and prosperous new year!

writing

Sometimes I feel like Neo:

warehouse keeper

This is really sad. I know for a fact that when I was in eighth grade, I could get to something like the 25th level of Sokoban. Now I can’t even get past the 4th level. Chalk it up to mental weariness or maybe just having my mind slowly drained out of me by formal education—it could be blamed on a variety of things.

instead of going insane or failing,

In a heroic last-ditch effort to make my Operations Research class interesting enough to pay attention to, I’ve decided to do my assignments in T_EX. That way, I may end up learning something useful.

There’s some pretty funny stuff you can find if you look up T_EX:


Though well-written, TeX is so large (and so full of cutting edge technique) that it is said to have unearthed at least one bug in every Pascal system it has been compiled with. TeX runs on almost all operating systems.


Knuth offers monetary awards to people who find and report a bug in it. The award per bug started at one cent and doubled every year until it was frozen at its current value of $327.68. This has not made Knuth poor, however, as there have been very few bugs and in any case a cheque proving that the owner found a bug in TeX is usually framed instead of cashed.


[...]


TeX has an idiosyncratic version numbering system. Since version 3, updates have been indicated by adding an extra digit at the end of the decimal, so that the version number asymptotically approaches π. The current version is 3.141592. This is a reflection of the fact that TeX is now very stable, and only minor updates are anticipated. Knuth has stated that the “absolutely final change (to be made after my death)” will be to change the version number to π, at which point all remaining bugs will become features.

bluesocket

At Biola University, the campus wireless network is protected by the Bluesocket authentication system. Basically all traffic is blocked until you visit the login page and enter your ID and password. (Heaven help you if you don’t know what the URL of the login page is…. It tries to redirect all traffic to that page, but it only works about half the time.)


This morning, I was sitting in my mind-numbingly dull Operations Research class, and I came up with a way to automatically log on to the system every time your network is brought up. (If you think that sounds boring, try not to think about what the class is like when you do pay attention.)

Here it is. It works on Macs and Linux.

Maybe it’ll be useful to someone. Under Linux, you install it by adding a line to your /etc/network/interfaces file. Under Mac OS X, well, we’ll just see if André figures that one out. If it’s useful to other people I might put an installer together so you don’t have to mess with things manually.

fame

Wheeeee—I’m on Biola’s Computer Science page. That’s me on the right demonstrating the advantages of GNOME on tycho in the Alcove where I set up the Linux network with André and Joel. Notice the requisite hand motions; all very crucial to purveying the intricacies of our lab setup.



(We named all the machines after Marathon characters)

FROGBlast the vent core.

flash of inspiration:

I realized why the English switched to the metric system. They got too confused saying things like ‘pounds per pound’ and the like. You can’t have your weight measurement be called the same thing as your currency; it’s absurd. And they thought money is more important than weight, so they went metric.

(The folly in this will be apparent when you realize that money is not, in fact, more important than weight—you can survive for a while without money, but if you have no weight, you will soon be gone. Still, since the result was them switching from the Imperial system to one that expedites computation, they can be forgiven for such a major miscalculation.)