originally rejected it for having "52 Design Errors"... they thought a family game should last 45 minutes, have easy to understand rules, and a CLEAR WINNER. <I>And they were right</I>.<BR>

disappointed in this as I was in the error-correcting modem, the magnetic

when I saw a similar Windows error message.

Does trying to get on with life disrespect the people who have suffered such loss? Or does stopping everything let the terrorists 'win' an even greater victory?<br><br>

Aw, man. I was worried this whole terrorist thing wasn't really sinking in. And maybe it hasn't, but my old neuroses seem to be giving me another fling. An everpresent twist in the gut, but mostly I find proof in the stirring of the bowels. (Yeah, yeah, you don't want to know the details...funny how it's so hard to find language for it.) <br><br>

of state terrorism.

Shit Creator</a>. The joke is, it's even a bigger waste of time than it looks. You enter all these detailed parameters (weight, consistency, age, etc etc, a whole page worth), it tells you there's an error, you proceed anyway, you wait for 15 seconds, it 'calculates', then gives your picture of poo. The thing is, and I'm not sure if Lucy realized this, it's totally ignoring the parameters you select. Every time you reload the final page, it shows you one of several random pictures of poo. The huge array of parameters and the "working" timer page is just to get you to waste more time, and the random picture convinces you the controls are doing something.<br><br>

most poignant. (I used it to name a mix tape for the romantic interest as well, but she had me change it so it wouldn't prove problematic for her steady eddie boyfriend.) The Grapes are thinking a snippet of a prose poem I came up with. Orange's thought seems especially apropos these days, but it's not: I've been afraid of (in roughly this order) eternal damnation, nuclear M.A.D., Y2K, EMP blasts, mortality, and now nuclear terrorism. The mushroom thinks it's being deep.

An Israeli friend recently informed me that the UK fought the Islamic terrorist attacks by burying the criminals with a pig. Apparently the Islamic belief is that if ones' body is buried with a pig (because they are considered unclean) their soul will go to hell.<br>

I did a little research into this subject matter and found it to be basically true. (at least for certain fundamentalists) This got me thinking. If we put a baby pig on every airline flight then all suicide terrorists would abort their missions as they would not want their souls to go to hell.

a new <a href="http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/printedition/calendar/la-000081342oct12.story">CBS sitcom</a> about the romance between two former spouses of WTC victims</a>? Also, going on with yesterday's using pigs to stop Islamic fundamentalist terrorists, a piece on <a href="http://www.israelinsider.com/views/articles/views_0108.htm">Sexual fantasies of a suicide bomber</a> that talks about the relationship between

sex and young male terrorists, from August.<br><br>

Peterman mailed around a this link: <a href="http://www.rencrafters.com/links/stayingcalm.shtml">Treatise on Staying Calm in the current situation</a>. The guy points out that most of the likely terror attacks (biological, chemical, nuclear) aren't going to be that effective, and what to do if you are involved. It's actually pretty reassuring, and the guy sounds like he knows what he is talking about.

I have never known a period in this country where terrorism was not an active consideration of how we live our lives. Israelis used to joke that in Alaska they have to deal with the snow, and in the Middle East we deal with terrorism. That is part of the weather here. In the sense of how you balance daily life with fear and caution, Israel is the world expert.

Afghanistan and Uzbekistan on a map...then the terrorists will have won.

With all these terrorist related troubles, it might be hard to remember that environmental concerns still linger. <a href="http://www.dhmo.org/">Ban Dihydrogen Monoxide Now!</a>

So the Northern Alliance <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/11/13/gen.war.against.terror/index.html">took Kabul</a> as the Taliban skedaddled. I think the Taliban <table align="right" cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0><tr><td>

Speaking of translations, I beginning to think "The Foundation" would be a better translation of "Al Qaeda" than "The Base". And not just for the possible Isaac Asimov <a href="http://www.marsearthconnection.com/attack3a.html#foundation">Foundation Trilogy</a> connection. Also stuff like Knight Rider...they had the <a href="http://users.aol.com/ashah70685/Ajay1.html">Knight Foundation</a>, right? I think "The Foundation" more clearly tells us how they see themselves, and fits in well with the idea of them as kind of terrorist Venture Capitalists. <i>(Asimov connection link via <a href="http://thoughtviper.com">Bill the Splut</a>)</i><br>

Bush is <a href="http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20011213/ts/bush_missile_defense_41.html">pulling us out of the ABM treaty</a> (yeah, great terrorist defense that'll be),

<a href="http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/abc/20011213/ts/walker_011212_1.html">biological attacks this weekend</a>... (I guess they found a <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A14348-2001Dec8.html">terrorist guide to fitting in</a>: remember, deoderant on the body, not the clothes, get a good cover story, wear your watch on the left wrist, learn the difference between perfume and aftershave

On the one hand, it's appalling to make a terrorist incident where thousands died into a game. On the other hand, you have to admire the chutzpah. And really, is that much worse than the <a href="http://www.funny-funny-pictures.com/killosama/index.html">flash games like this</a> or the "Come Mr. Taliban, Hand Over Bin Laden / Daylight Come and We Drop Da Bomb" <a href="http://www.madblast.com/binladen.htm">flash video</a>?<br><br>

<a href="http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2002/01/02cobra.html">Journal of a New Cobra Recruit</a>. Ah, the 80s, when terrorist organizations all wore blue and couldn't shoot their laser guns worth a damn and always bailed out of exploding vehicles just in time. <i>(via Bill's <a href="http://www.thoughtviper.com/new/news.html">The News</a>)</i>

Continuing through the backlog, on August 12 I grabbed this link to a salon.com piece, "Life from <a href="http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2001/08/10/yassin/index.html">the terrorist point-of-view</a>." Both sides in that area, they really know how to run a country! As time goes on, they seem to deserve each other more and more.<br><br>

I'm not sure if I buy the "one cannot defeat what one doesn't understand"--after all, we hope to defeat the terrorists without fully understanding them--but I think it's a good thought anyway.

that Zacarias Moussaoui asked for flying lessons, but without the takeoffs and landings <a href="http://slate.msn.com/?id=2066080">is an urban legend</a>. The other is that last weekend's spate of Terrorist Threat reminders may have been a <a href="http://slate.msn.com/?id=2066134">response to 9/11 recriminations</a>, i.e. a Bush and company smokescreen. Not that there isn't an ongoing level of threat, but it's a little reassuring as we finish up the holiday weekend.

What an odd reinforcement for the old goal of the "paperless office"! Also, I find a little hope in how not only did the towers not instantly topple as the terrorists had likely expected, but the plan was almost not much more successful than the 1993 bombing.

It's official, <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2002/US/08/18/terror.tape.main/index.html">al Qaeda kills cute little puppies</a>.

Best science link I've seen in a long while: <a href="http://www.gladwell.com/2002/2002_08_05_a_face.htm">The Naked Face</a>, a reprint of a New Yorker article. The amount of information we send through our faces (both voluntarily and involuntarily) is <i>astounding</i>. Not only that, but evidence suggests facial expressions generate emotions, it's a two way street. By approaching the problem from an anatomical angle, these guys have made great strides...and what they've learned might well be useful in counter-terrorism and other law-enforcement activities. I wish I was better at that kind of thing!<br><br>

<IMG SRC="/journal.aux/2002.08.29.ferris.jpg" width=103 height=125></td><td valign="bottom">In Antwerp they have a <a href="http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_649330.html">ferris wheel for cars</a>, but they're worried about terrorism...

Is <a href="http://www.uzinagaz.com/index.php?entry_point=wtc">NY Defender</a> an interactive political cartoon about the hopelessness of the struggle against terrorism, or just a little joke game in really bad taste?

     nuclear weapons fall into the hands of terrorists.<br>

Then there's the war. Yet again, we are really going to war. Maybe it'll go ok, modulo a spike in oil prices, a worse recession, ever-deepening hatred of the United States, future terrorism, all that, but we don't know what we're gonna do with it after. You know, Iraq is not stupid, once you factor out Saddam's thuggish worldview. Sometimes they play us and International Opinion like a violin. (And you know, I haven't heard much about the fact that Iraq stopped the inspections when it was clearly proven that the inspectors were <i>spies for the US</i>. We're convinced we can get away with anything.)

for ever-increasingly-devastating terrorist attack isn't there, and my

much <i>more</i> likely to get hit with terrorism if we attack

<a href="http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/10/15/1034561150956.html">the death of over 180</a> by a terrorist blast? I mean, heck, a lot of those people were Australians...and they're white! I guess heaven forfend we look at anything that distracts from our war against Iraq...that whole "War Against Terrorism" is so 2001 anyway. Hell, that's only like 15% as many who died in WTC. Hardly bares our attention. They should just send in Paul Hogan.<br><br> Guh.

<a href="http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.11/nukes.html">new detection technologies</a>. For what it's worth, here's my prediction: sometime in the next 20 years, there's going to be a large terrorist bombing in a major city, or maybe several simultaneously. Only then will a system like the type described in the article <i>really</i> be enacted, and life will become a bit more police-stateish. And I think there will be some level of security for a while after that, and not that that many will even be killed, but life isn't gonna be much fun.<br><br>

So they <a href="http://www.voanews.com/article.cfm?objectID=6E265619-BC75-4A9A-AABC543BDE70F7BC">made some arrests in the Maryland sniper case</a>. This morning the morning talk programs were proclaiming it over, while the newsier slant was playing it more cautiously. And not to sound like any kind of conspiracy nut, but some elements of this seem almost too easy. And what's up with 'We have caught the sniper like a duck in a noose' quote that the snipe was all hot for the police chief to say? I'm surprised those talk programs didn't play up the idea that that could be some coded message to terrorists.

<a href="http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,837058,00.html">this one pegs the meter</a>...how a measured weakening in the Earth's magnetic poles may cause 'em to flip, and in the meantime, the stuff that protects us from the solar wind may be MIA. In the <a href="http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/11/10/0539200&mode=nested&tid=134">slashdot discussion</a> I got this from, they point out that it could be happening "in the next 1000 years or so", but still...the number of things like global warming, pollution, and nuclear terrorism that make me not want to worry about longevity treatments or bother with cyrogenics...or want to hesitate before having kids...keeps going up.<br><br>

The physicist says: "The law of conservation of mass holds, after accounting for experimental error."<br>

Ugh. Salon wonders if the next wave of terrorist attacks could be

Counterpoints: I think this articles idea of promoting a mutual standdown misses the way that there's been so much water under the bridge, they might feel that any 'spectacular attack' going into the future is 'justified'. Plus, the logic is if you seem to be able to be pressured by terrorism, that might lead to terrorism being seen as more of a useful, and therefore more widely used, tool.

So they busted some <a href="http://www.suntimes.com/output/terror/18dallas.html">guys from Infocom</a> for possible terrorists. While I don't think it's the same Infocom who made all those text-only games in the 1980s, it brings to mind some funny ideas...<br>

Denis Boyles from The Modern Man's Guide To Life. Sometimes I wonder about if it's still a good idea, like as an emergency preparedness thing in case of a big terrorist attack.

"<a href="http://www.proft.org/tips/conv-terror.html">Conversational Terrorism</a>" is a bit strong of a name for this page, but it does offer many different techniques (with examples!) for railroading your way to victory or at least stalemate in almost any argument.

I've been thinking about anxiety. You know when I get most anxious? It happens sometimes after I manage to lose myself in a movie, book, or video game...I start thinking along the lines of "huh, I've been really into this lately, it's like the outside world doesn't exist" and that makes me start getting <i>meta</i>-worried about the job market and big terrorist events, my two current neurosis-fodders. And that "worry I wasn't being worried enough" is much worse than my usual baseline concern.<br><br>

under two statutes: a state anti-terrorism law and one prohibiting the

(Personally, I think it's just structural failure of a very aging spacecraft, and that the way up would seem like a more likely target for terrorism than the way down. Hopefully they'll be able to investigate and reach a conclusion.)

<a href="http://slate.msn.com/id/2078162/">Salon pro-hawk piece</a>, arguing that a war in Iraq won't make our Al-Qaeda issues any worse than they are. Has some solid points, though also some I disagree with. (When he asks "Iraq is a distraction from what?" that's simple; from keeping a closer eye on our border and ports, from the general smaller scale action of tracking down the individual terrorist cells.)

Another <a href="http://www.cyberglass.co.uk/assets/Flash/psychic.swf">webpage that reads your mind</a>. Amazing! The Dept. of Homeland Security should get this technology and use it to weed out terrorists!

Business 2.0 argues <a href="http://www.business2.com/articles/mag/0,1640,47135,00.html?cnn=yes">maybe we aren't as bad off as all that</a>, economically. The comparison of numbers to the Reagan years is interesting...though more of the general bad mood is justifiable if you think that a getting blown up my a terrorist is worse than getting nuked by the Soviet Union. (The former is more likely to have an event, the latter had a lot more potential for total global catastrophe.)

"The Euclid fire appears to be an isolated incident unrelated to terrorism," Bush said. "But next time, we might not be so lucky. That is why we, as a nation, must do everything we can to drive out Saddam Hussein and his ilk. By confronting terrorism head-on, we can once again live in a nation where we don't jump every time a dryer buzzer goes off."

My old home town is in the news! <a href="http://www.theonion.com/onion3906/terrorism_not_likely.html"> Terrorism 'Not Likely' Cause Of Fire At Local Laundromat</a>

Fiscal prudence? The keystone of today's 'conservative' agenda is a dedication to tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans, even though doing so will increase the deficit. That's short-term thinking at its worst. Because of those tax breaks, the faltering economy and the war on terrorism, some economists estimate we'll have deficits of $300 billion a year for the foreseeable future. The next generation of Americans will bear the burden of that debt.

More murmurings of <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2003/US/03/12/sprj.irq.iraq.secret.surrender/">folks in Iraq's military who would like to "pre-surrender"</a>. Woo hoo, at this rate this should be finshed by the end of Q1! And there's simply no chance there's gonna be any terrorism back home. And the easter bunny's gonna be here to welcome back our boys.

I'm trying to think of what our country's practical definition of terrorism vs. waging war is. Obviously, though we won't admit to it, some part of the working <i>definition</i> involves "we don't conduct terrorism"--so, any operation we undertake is, by likely definition, not terrorism. The only other reliable differentiators I can think of is purposefully killing a dozen civilians as your primary target is terrorism, killing hundreds of civilians as "collateral damage" is war...it's all about intention, you see.

Plus, traditionally war gives a bit more warning, terrorism relies more on surprise. Given our military's "shock and awe" approach, I think we've lost the difference that terrorism is meant to terrorize and war isn't.<br><br>

Oh, and terrorism is cheaper and more resourceful in some of its tools. This and the lack of warning are the only way we have of calling ramming a speedboat into a US Cruiser "terrorism"...I mean hell, the people on the boat thought they were at war. Also, it's not like surprise is exclusively the domain of terrorism, individual battles in normal war often rely on it as well.<br><br>

I mostly mention this because "we don't negotiate with terrorists", but we kind of hope Iraq will see the force we're presenting.

And for me, some doubts still remain. We always thought the war was going to be somewhat easy, and the peace rather hard. And the jury is still out on if in the long run, this makes us more safe or less safe--hopefully the lack of major terrorist activity in the meanwhile, despite calls by clerics and others to have just that, is a positive sign.

<a href="http://www.plinko.net/404/">404 Research Labs</a>, everything about the error you get when the webserver can't find the file you want. Includes the helpful tip of making sure your custom 404 page is bigger than 512 bytes, otherwise IE5 might decide to show its own custom page instead, the jerks.

<font color="white">neo being the sixth singularity, or rounding error, or whatever he was; given his newfound power to shut down the robots in the "real world", maybe each Matrix is built "inside" the old one.</font>

All in all the situation isn't as bad as it could be. The fact that terrorists are picking softer targets and haven't conducted a jaw-dropper attack since 9/11 indicates that some of our efforts are paying off. I wish all this stuff wasn't happening right before our trip, but overall I'm confident the odds are in our favor. And if not...well, I've had a pretty good life in all. From a global and historical perspective, I've been way up the high percentiles. (My one request would be that my collective family friends and/or fanbase (heh) try to keep the Love Blender going and find a permanent way of archiving this site...)

The main point I disagree with is that an increased risk of retaliatory strikes doesn't mean that terrorists feel they lost a friend in Saddam; even if they found him loathesome, they might not want to see ANY arab leader taken out by a big Western army.

I've learned a couple of things that make this switch-off more palatable. One is, most things on the web will be there in a couple of hours when I get home. Two is, I don't get that much important e-mail during the day (and thanks to my antispam whitelist, I can postpone deleting the spam without the good stuff getting buried.) Three is I should stop being less dependent on CNN.com anyway; ever since 9-11 I was craving any information about possible terrorist activity (and a few years before then, it was information about what Y2K was going to look like...I'm a bit neurotic) but knowing about any event 15 minutes before word gets around the office isn't going to help me that much. Finally, I want to be trustworthy. Someone in a professional position should be able to be counted on to stay on target. It's cheesy, but I printed "TRUST" in a big font on a sheet of paper and put it on the old cube wall: corny, but it helps.

Slate.com had some decent pieces on it. <a href="http://slate.msn.com/id/2086315/">This overview</a> points out some possible limitations</a> that PAM would have (because terrorists aren't rational actors as we understand the term), an article on <a href="http://slate.msn.com/id/1001932/">how the principle of dumb market participants works</a>, and then some places where you can <A href="http://slate.msn.com/id/2086316/">see it in action</a>.

Saddam Insane, Osama the Dirty Terrorist, and Massive Headwound Uday...some of 'em even talk.

President George W. Bush commented on the topic claiming that the sun may be in league with known terrorist group Al-Queda. President Bush attempted to stare down the sun in a show of bravery when his eyes were severely burned due to over exposure to UV rays without blinking. Later on today, President Bush will be launching a "Shock and Awe campaign" directed towards the sun to send the message that the United States does not deal with terrorists...<br><br>

nothing, statistical error almost. So something must be

So, obviously, the elevated terrorist threat level is on everyone's mind. I keep finding myself heading over to <a href="http://drudgereport.com">Drudge Report</a>...new news really does show up there more quickly, it was talking about the California Quake about 15 minutes before anyone else online.<br><br>

They linked to this <a href="http://www.azcentral.com/php-bin/clicktrack/print.php?referer=http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/1222terrortargets-ON.html">rather stark and scary story</A> from the LA Times via azcentral.com. <br><br>

<a href="http://slate.msn.com/id/2093015/">Slate piece on Qaddafi</a> (Kadaffi, Ghadaffi, Daffy Duck, whatever) has a side note putting Osama Bin out of it and describing a generally better situation. That doesn't make the current terrorist threat go away, still it's vaguely comforting to read.)

Man, between the flu, the California quake, and this...those terrorists are attacking us on all fronts!

<a href="http://www.jtnimoy.com/itp/balldroppings/">BallDroppings</a> is a lovely little toy...draw lines that the dropping balls will bounce off of, musical tones result. (I had some trouble when I first tried to run it, if you get an "insufficient video memory" kind of error, try decreasing the number of colors your computer is displaying.) Fun to play with, plus you can tweak many of the settings (read the webpage for details.)

<a href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2003/12/29/national1426EST0580.DTL">news article</a> in question, are amused by the concept of consulting an almanac as a possible suspicious activity in terms of terrorism awareness...but the main image

of a terrorist thumbing through a copy of "The Old Farmers Almanac" is what gets all the yucks. Now, there are so many forms of reference out there, online and otherwise, that it does seem a little odd to be picking on almanacs, but it's also clear that the alert bulletin is refering to a <i>different</i> kind of almanac. So by picking on this "straw man" of Farmer's Almanac, they miss a more serious point about what constitutes suspicous activity this day and age...is an olive-skinned guy trying to figure where in Boston he is with one of those big yellow road atlases going to raise eyebrows these days? Should it?

On the other hand, LAN3 sent me this interesting counterpoint <a href="http://www.dissentmagazine.org/menutest/articles/wi04/berman.htm">A Friendly Drink in a Time of War</a> which represents an argument that Iraq is a liberal, anti-fascist war. It makes some points, but what it comes down to for me is: I'm a moderate, and both the right wing reasons (fear of WMD, President Jr's revenge, "that's where the terrorists are coming from") and the left wing reasons (lets make the world better for these fine oppressed folk) are too extreme for me, that this article kind of suffers from the fallacy of the excluded middle. (And the namedropping at the begining was pretty disingenuous.) I guess one thing I don't know enough to argue about is this: how many other "grotesque dictatorships" do we ignore in the name of political expediency, or just because they don't interest us that much? How unique was Saddam? I suspect less unique than this article would imply, and by that arguments, we should "liberally" charge into all corners of the globe.

Condolences to Spain, the terrorism they've suffered is

<a href="http://www.thepoorman.net/archives/002403.html#002403">idea for a Bush campaign ad</a>. Not for the easily offended. But what's really funny, or scary, is when you read this <a href="http://www.tnr.com/blog/campaignjournal?pid=1440">New Republic Journal Entry</a> and realize that the parody has to be that much over the top, because the original ("John Kerry's Plan: Weaken Fight Against Terrorists") comes so close to being a parody of itself. But mostly, I just like saying that I'm from "Saudi Taxachusettsstan".

Now, counterterrorism officials say one of their biggest concerns is how U.S. actions such as the war in Iraq are motivating new recruits bound by a common goal: to destroy Western secular society.<br>

</blockquote>ar on terrorism could spawn new enemies". </i>

I don't know the original context, but it reminds me of a quip I came up that I've been looking for a frame for, "____ -- the cure for incurable optimism". I think "nuclear terrorism" is about as good a substiute for ____ as any...

in a piece called <a href="http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/start.asp?P_Article=12487">Why terror?</a>, by Bhikhu Parekh. (Looks like that link might become subscription only after a while.) I think one thing we're <i>lousy</i> at is putting ourselves in the philosophical shoes of Islamic fundamentalist terrorists. Yes, they're inarguably evil, but when you begin with some of the same starting assumptions they do (mostly religion based, which is why some people point to religious faith itself being a problem) it's a rational and almost justifiable evil, not just being bad for bad's sake. And many in this country will not acknowledge that. Some of that refusal is justified; almost any behavior that seems to reward terrorism is suspect. But we're so fond of the stick that we tend to forget about the carrot, act as if you can't address some of the problems the terrorists draw their energy from while simultaneously showing little mercy in the pursuit of the people planning to strike.

The <a href="http://www.news-journalonline.com/NewsJournalOnline/Opinion/Editorials/03OpOPN62051504.htm">poems being censored for being "un-American"</a> is one of the most jaw-dropping stories I've read this week. As <a href="http://www.thoughtviper.com/newest.html#new">Bill the Splut</a> put it, "What's the Eternal War on Terror about again? Oh, right, <i>they hate freedom.</i>"<br><br>

So we're back to thinking about terrorism (one of the reasons I wanted to get my house sold sooner rather than later, frankly.)

What I'm also dreading is the Republican spin after any attack. "The terrorists want to disrupt our elections, just like in Spain! They want you to think that we can't protect you! If you vote for Kerry <i>the terrorists have already won!</i>" and people taking that thinking seriously.<br><br>

S'funny how the stock markets have all pretty much ignored the summer terror warnings. I don't konw if it's because they're all skeptical about it, or the decline in oil prices are that much more captivating, or what. (I pay more attention to the stock markets than I should. It's not healthy for me to feel that my fortunes are so closely tied in with the markets when the relationship is pretty distant overall.) <br><br>

"Thailand" is a short story in the collection "After the Quake". (Of course, Islamic terrorists have taken that kind of equality too much to heart.)

Say what you will about Bush, he's the president strictly thanks to the rounding error we call the Electoral College. In a direct count of votes, even the Florida mess wouldn't have mattered one iota.<br><br>

<li><a href="http://www.newsgaming.com/games/index12.htm">September 12th</a>...a software "toy world", a somewhat heavy handed but interesting interactive political cartoon about the futility of fighting terrorism with cruise missiles...

Slate on <A href="http://slate.msn.com/id/2103748/">Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror</a>. It's astounding how our culture--starting at the top with our political leaders--completely oversimplifies our enemies. But of course, even a liberal politician can't try to express a more nuanced opinion because he or she would be accused of cuddling up with the people who want to see us hurt badly. I think the most interesting, though maybe not most important from a policy standpont, idea in the article is that Moslem countries don't grok seperation of church and state (not that our President is that hot at maintaining the divide either) so they assume any rightwing christian crap from a religous bigwig carries huge weight here: "So every time Falwell inveighs against the 'terrorist' Prophet, the hate might as well be coming directly from George W. Bush."

And it's true; both candidates are for the corporation, and I do agree with Nader that ultimately the corporation is the major evil. But in my mind, Bush is the immediate obstacle. He is a collection of disasters for America. What he does to the English language is a species of catastrophe all by itself. Bush learned a long time ago that certain key words, 'evil, patriotism, stand-firm, flag, our-fight-against-terrorism,' will get half the people in America stirred up. That's all he works with. Kerry will be better in many ways, no question.

<dd> Have a core engine that drives everything and uses the rest of the system as an API. Think Unix's philosophy of "do one task and do it well"...this guideline comes from stuff I'm dealing with at work. They've developed these APIs, but the APIs are so tightly integrated with the logging and configuration, it's sick. For example, they made a wrapper to a Castor routine that converts an object into an XML representation. You would think that if your central program says "make me an XML representation of this object and put it in such and such a file" it would do just that, right? But no. See, it goes ahead and checks the configuration on its own accord, and then might or might not do the conversion. And whether it tries or not, or if it succeeds or fails with some error, it will do so SILENTLY, catching any exception that occurs, because heaven forfend that the main program has to worry its sweet little head about everything collapsing underneath it...

Tip of the day: Take a screenshot of an error message, and set it as your desktop background. Move all your icons to other places on the screen so it looks like there's two of each. Move your taskbar to another side, or top of the screen. Log out of your computer and shut down. Then take it to a tech support guy and tell him how you get this error message every time your machine starts up that won't go away, and how there are two taskbars running and you have problems starting some of your programs. See how long it takes them to figure it out.

I decided there should be a name for this: <i>your "Dooplegoogler" is the person or thing, more famous than you, and with a similar enough name that Google searches for you are thwarted.</i> Now, the Costello fan can arrange to search for both full names, but I live in fear of the Scottish National Church (aka "Kirk") having a big terrorist incident at its Jerusalem chapel, because then I might be totally lost on like the tenth page of a Google search.

... Had this been an actual emergency, we would have fled in terror, and you would not have been informed.

No answers can be found, and no amount of questioning will bring out those answers. We may continue to ask, but as Brown notes, one thing Wiesel's writing suggests is "that arguments justifying God in the face of evil are not only inadequate, they are diabolical." Any answer cannot come from man, but from God himself. This is what Moshe the Beadle had tried to tell Wiesel when he was a young boy in Sighet, before the terrors of the Holocaust destroyed his life. Moshe said, "Man raises himself toward God by the questions he asks Him...That is the true dialogue. Man questions God and God answers. But we don't understand His answers. We can't understand them. Because they come from the depths of the soul, and they stay there until death. You will find the true answers, Eliezer, only within yourself!" There can be no end to the questioning, even if there are no answers. To expect answers is a mistake, as Wiesel learned from the Wandering Jew, who told him, "When will you understand that you are living and searching in error, because God means movement and not explanation." That is his final discovery. His relationship with God does not depend on answers. We pray to Him. He handles those prayers in His own way. We can agree or disagree with that way. It's all very simple. In one of his prayers in The Six Days of Destruction, Wiesel writes, "We do not demand answers, God. But if this is the last page of the human chronicles, assure us that we had the right to ask." If we ask and accept God's answer, even if He answers in silence, then we will have reached the level of Elie Wiesel's relationship to God.

A <a href="http://www.boingboing.net/2004/11/02/vote_save_error_9_ph.html">boingboingn story</a> on a Santa Clara voting machine saying <blockquote class="quote">

<center>Vote Save Error #9<br>

More exit poll respondents -- about 22 percent -- called "moral values" the election's most important issue then cited the economy, terrorism or Iraq. Those expressing this sentiment backed the president overwhelmingly, 79 percent to Kerry's 18 percent. Bush did similarly well among the 19 percent who identified terrorism as their top issue.<br><br>

This confidence thing is a big detriment; I think the biggest part of my urge to slack isn't laziness, it's fear: fear that I'm up against one of the those problems that's going to totally kick my ass and I won't know what to do. (And be taught, once again, that I'm not as smart as I assume I am, I'm sure that enters into it.) And sometimes those avoidance techniques get me to ignore what potentially helpful feedback the system is providing. Google can be a great help, both in its web-crawling and Usenet-archive incarnations, sometimes just an error message can be the link to someone whose posted a solution or workaround. Or at the very worst, tell me that it's a problem someone has faced before.

Oy, terror in London. I guess what I find most distrubing about it is, in general, London is pretty careful about this stuff, after years of "The Troubles" and the IRA.

<A href="http://slate.com/id/2123010/">the motivation of terrorists</a>. It has more to do with classic struggle for homeland liberation. The implication at the end is interesting...the uprising in Iraq isn't just "Insurgents vs the USA", it's "Sunni Insurgents vs the Shiite government / USA partnership".

Fortunately there is a happy ending to this. My nose finally realized the error of its ways...the smell wasn't from the window, but from my desk...two little plants that Ksenia had brought over during a move were kind of sitting there making their own gravy...the stagnant water in the plastic tray they were sitting in had a kind of brackish pungency to it.<br><br>

Past few days I've been checking out the New Orleans coverage, comparing it to 9/11. I guess since it is regional there isn't the general sense of dread and "could it happen here, now?" Still it makes me think at some point there might be a major terror incident, something WMDish, and it's going to be some mix of the two...a major city becoming a ghost town, a general sense of fear or even panic.

<a href="http://www.snopes.com/rumors/pershing.htm">Pigs could be Kryptonite for Moslem Terrorists</a>, though I suspect this would be a gimmick of limited practical use in the long run.

Awwwk! Parroty error.<br>

Taher Masri, a former Jordanian prime minister, told the Los Angeles Times that the attacks demonstrated that the U.S. invasion of Iraq had begun to seriously destabilize the Middle East. "Iraq was not the source of terrorism [before the invasion]," Masri said, "but now it has become exactly that."

Slate.com had some articles about the changing landscape in DC: Bush's new line about <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2130295/nav/tap1/">I Was Wrong, but So Were You</a> replacing his "We're always right" approach, and a Christopher Hitchens <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2130293/nav/tap2/">about gullibility</a>. The final paragraph of that article is the most relevant, because it's the first to pose the question, usually begged, was invasion was the best and/or only way to keeping Saddam and his desire for WMD in check? I still hold that cranking up the inspections and giving them military teeth would have made for a safer regional and global situation. We're now obligated to stand guard at a house of cards that we ourselves made. There was human suffering under Saddam, there's human suffering with the war and terrorist incidents after Saddam.

But, and maybe I'm kind of naive, but I'm not all that fired up against the wiretapping as I might've expected myself to be. Maybe it's kind of a sort of dumb trust in the system, or just general anxiety about terrorism, and/or the idea that "well it won't likely bother ME...", but I I'm guess more flexible about the balance between seurity measure and personal freedoms.

It's a very good interview, wellworth the time, though I wonder why things like climate change and terrorism don't enter into the discussion more.

For example, given the premise, 'all fish live underwater' and 'all mackerel are fish', my wife will conclude, not that 'all mackerel live underwater', but that 'if she buys kippers it will not rain', or that 'trout live in trees', or even that 'I do not love her any more.' This she calls 'using her intuition'. I call it 'crap', and it gets me very irritated because it is not logical. 'There will be no supper tonight,' she will sometimes cry upon my return home. 'Why not?' I will ask. 'Because I have been screwing the milkman all day,' she will say, quite oblivious of the howling error she has made. 'But,' I will wearily point out, 'even given that the activities of screwing the milkman and getting supper are mutually exclusive, now that the screwing is over, surely then, supper may now, logically, be got.' 'You don't love me any more,' she will now often postulate. 'If you did, you would give me one now and again, so that I would not have to rely on that rancid Pakistani for my orgasms.' 'I will give you one after you have got me my supper,' I now usually scream, 'but not before'-- as you understand, making her bang contingent on the arrival of my supper. 'God, you turn me on when you're angry, you ancient brute!' she now mysteriously deduces, forcing her sweetly throbbing tongue down my throat. 'Fuck supper!' I now invariably conclude, throwing logic somewhat joyously to the four winds, and so we thrash about on our milk-stained floor, transported by animal passion, until we sink back, exhausted, onto the cartons of yogurt.

Finally, the whole "shut up because this is a time of War!" thing is Orwellian to a scary degree. Even if we weren't actively engaged in Iraq, we're still in a "War Against Terror" that HAS NO FORESEEABLE CONCLUSION. Assuming a retired general is a civillian, I don't see how there comments go against our nation's sacred tradition of civilian-bossed military forces.

I think he's a bit too pessimistic, I think the eternal vigilence the endless "War Against Terror" requires is going to be a pain in the ass, and there may well be tremendous acts of destruction in the future, but I don't see it as the "end of enlightenment civilization". <br><br>

Heh, vaguely related to today's ramble: a surprising link among the villains of several large-scale terrorist attacks: <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2142772/">they're all a big part of gym/workout culture</a>. Kind of disturbing on a few levels.

I've hit my first plateau the past few days, with (what I think is) weight loss less than the plus/minus error of my scale. Also last night with my UU Covenant Group, for the most part I ate pretty well (couscous, a few small drumsticks, green salad, and strawberries) but the calories are more guesswork than I like.

Well, I don't have much to say about that. Obviously his death bodes well for the situation in Iraq and a victory for people who would like to see peace and stability there, but I don't know <i>how</i> well. Sometimes the government downplays the importance of individual terrorists, like when it can't manage to track them down, times like this it talks about how this could change the tide there.

I don't know what your "cause" is and barely care, but I'm willing to work against it, <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/asiapcf/07/11/mumbai.blasts/index.html">you terrorist blowing civillians up motherfuckers</a>. Burn in a dozen swine-infested hells, assholes, and go jam whatever book you call holy up your ass.

I wonder how that quote fits into the often asymmetric "war against terror." "We" can't quite ever look like "them", because we're a society, and they're a small group. But their power to guess our responses and then work horrific misdeeds to shape those responses gives one pause.

<b><geekness level="severe" type="artsy"></b>My first attempts were a simple program that let me select the sections by hand, but that was error prone, and annoying, and too much work in general. I tried a few more approaches, "averaging" the pixels over a series of frames (which, as expected, led to a big blur in the middle), an odd "voting" system where a pixel becomes the color it is the most often (left odd color sparkles all over the place, because of how I broke up the R/G/B information) until finally I made up a kind of primitive AI filter that could take a guess about whether or not a scanline currently had text on it (counting the areas of sharp contrast.) The end result still needed some hand-tweaking in picking out extra frames to import and rejecting 1 or 2 that could fool the heuristic, but it was much, much easier than what I tried to do originally.<b></geekness></b>

So, big terrorism scare, albeit one that seems to have been foiled.

But of course, I'm just alternating between my subjective concerns, and thoughts on architecture, when its the human tragedy that makes the day what it is. 3,000 people... less than first feared, but still. 3,000 lives stopped over the course of a few hours. It's deeply disturbing to try and put yourself in their shoes, the doubt and confusion and fear. And of course the uncertainty might be one of the hardest parts to try and duplicate in empathy; we now know that the airplanes are going to be turned into missiles, that those towers are doomed to collapse, and can only really see the tragedy as the biggest event in a series of engagements between the West and Islamic terrorist.

Thank goodness it has struck such a blow against terrorism, huh?

Of course, until and unless there's a major terrorist incident in the USA, it's difficult to absolutely criticize our ham-fisted Middle East policy, but on the other hand, until there's a clearer demonstration of how Iraq ties into that, and how removing Saddam unambiguosly helped, it's hard to know that it's worth the expense.

<table><tr><td><IMG SRC="/journal.aux/2006.09.17.errormsgeyes.jpg" width="300" height="310" ></td><td valign="bottom">--<a href="http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=3062">The Girl With Error Msg Eyes</a>, an avatar in the game "Second Life", is one of the creepiest things I've ever seen, on both a visceral and cerebral level.</td></tr></table>

From that Bartlett's Book of Anecdotes... still hit and miss, but I liked learning how Jean Baptiste John, a general during the French days of the Terror who later became King of Sweden had a secret tattoo "Death to all kings." (Maybe just a rumor though... a lot of these anecdotes are a bit suspect.)

Prior to this, I also mixed up how many hours back to go for, say, California time... I have little problem recalling that the country has 4 timezones, but before this "3 hops back system" it was easy to make what computerists call a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fencepost_error">fencepost error</a> and subtract 4 instead of 3.

So problem solved, right? Well sure, but take my manager out of the equation, and I'm potentially beating my head against this error message <i>for hours</i>. Well, frankly it just couldn't be done, not by me in the time frame I had allotted, and not without working up a damn profound knowledge of some sections of my company's product's infrastructure. And that was <i>after</i> I gave up trying to fix my local code, figuring that the problem was most likely there.

"Super Monkey Ball" ignored it. Or seemed to... through trial and much error I finally figured out it's press <i>and hold</i> of the Plus button. That's irritating! The button serves no other use during the game, and it's not in place where it's likely to be pressed accidentally. So why do that? What possible benefit is there in making people think "this button does nothing"?

At first I was concerned, even as I heard the packages (still not fully described in the media) were harmless, I thought it could be terrorists sizing up our response times and reactions, like some of the question marks around that <A href="http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/01/23/mercury.spill/index.html">LA Subway mercury spill</a>. But now I'm more concerned for our nation's backbone, and lack of common sense. People: an attack is going to happen someday, somewhere, somehow. Hopefully it will be contained and localized, but people will die. Chances are it won't be you, or even someone you love. We need to have appropriate levels of concern and purposefully work to have responses commiserate with the scares we face in the meanwhile.

"Then the terrorists will have won" was the overused gagline from 5 years ago, but it still holds true. Taking our new grimmer reality in stride and learning to prosper and relax even in that (along with doing everything appropriate to prevent future attacks) will be the real victory in the War Against Terror. Turning some electronic graffiti into a citywide clampdown ("the war against liquids" to be joined by "the war against lite-brites") won't be.

Wait, didn't he get the memo that it's all just a slice of THE war, the war against terror?

Boston PD: Putting the 'error' in 'terror.'

<a href="https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=line+rider&search=Search">Youtube has a lot of these videos</a> but I'd urge you to play with the toy yourself (even though it takes a lot of dedication and trial and error to get results anywhere near these.)

What do you all think? What do you find interesting about this site? Are you in it for the links, the quotes, the anecdotes, keeping up with me because you know me in real life, the randomness, some of each? At the very least I think I'd like this site better if it more closely mapped into the interesting stuff I run into as I run into it, even at the risk of having some days more full than others. (Which was probably the benefit of the Palm; it was always there.) Be frank; if something strikes you as annoyingly self-indulgent or just is part of the appeal, let me know. I probably won't really see the "error of my ways", but still.

Huh, one weird problem with the new system... after some empirical experimentation and tracking down some red herrings, I realized that on my new serve any query string ending with the string "perl" would come up with a server error.

I even forbid myself, agreeably to the old laws of our Junto, the use of every word or expression in the language that imported a fixed opinion, such as <I>certainly</I>, <I>undoubtedly</I>, etc., and I adopted, instead of them, I <I>conceive</I>, I <I>apprehend</I>, or I <I>imagine</I> a thing to be so or so, or it so <I>appears</I> to me at <I>present.</I> When another asserted something that I thought an error, I denied myself the pleasure of contradicting him abruptly and of showing immediately some absurdity in his proposition; and in answering, I began by observing that in certain cases or circumstances his opinion would be right, but in the present case there <I>appeared</I> or <I>seemed</I> to me some difference, etc. I soon found the advantage of this charge in my manner; the conversations I engaged in went on more pleasantly.

Gentlemen, here's the scenario: As you are flying home from Moscow--having told the world you will never deal with terrorists--hijackers, posing as reporters, seize Air Force One. They vow to kill a hostage every half-hour, including your wife and daughter, until you release a murderous Russian general. I'll start with Senator Obama. Do you negotiate with the hijackers in the hope of saving lives, or do you flee into the bowels of the craft, then pick them off, one by one, with makeshift shanks and your bare hands?

Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.

Then I found this guy who <a href="http://anerroroccurredwhileprocessingthisdirective.com/2007/11/10/exploded-ipod-still-works/">encased his iPod in a block of resin</a> -- and it still works! (Not the touch dial, but through the port exposed at the bottom.)

This 500 page volume isn't an exposition of science. It's a bumper book of jaw-dropping facts transformed into a jaunty narrative by a professional writer. There is almost no attempt to explain anything that could be called a scientific principle or to show what follows from it. Newton's universal law of gravitation gets a paragraph; thermodynamics is covered in a footnote. And a number of errors make one wonder whether its author always grasped what he was told. Peter Medawar once epitomised a virus as "a piece of bad news wrapped in protein." Bryson calls it a memorable phrase but by misquoting it as "a piece of nucleic acid surrounded by bad news" robs it of both sense and wit.

Earthquakes are one of the four Japanese terrors; the others are fire, thunder, and father.

I guess I shouldn't cast <s>dispersions</s> aspersions <i>(thanks Mom... interesting error to make, "dis-" would seem to be a good prefix for the term) </i>upon the dead until we know what happened, but the only fatality was the driver of the train that (I would think) is most suspect for being at fault, in that it rear-ended the other one. Even with signal failure, shouldn't a driver be able to deal with situations like this? "Gee, that train in front of me is barely moving, maybe I should slow down or stop or something...")

'Fatal error: Could not create socket'"

"Why-? I mean like why me now? Do I have to prevent some huge terror thing?"

how many college bands are going to be named "terrorist fist bump"?

Republicans think every "war" can end up as neatly as WW2: "in Iraq", "against Terror" "on Drugs". They are wrong and they are a danger.

A parade of <a href="http://gizmodo.com/5023924/iphone-app-review-marathon-liveblog">reviews for iPhone apps</a> along with a <a href="http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/09/22/the-top-10-top-10-ip.html">Top 10 "Top 10 iPhone flaws</a> metalist. And <a href="http://technologizer.com/2008/09/18/errormessage/">the Computer Error Message Hall of Fame</a>.

October is such a bad month. Do other people get that too? Even apart from the current financial terrors, it just consistently seems to be an ugly season for me. A lot of the deaths in my family this time of year. Almost ten years ago today I wrote a note in my Palm Pilot's datebook to see if the young romance of Mo and I was still around, and it was around 5 years ago that she was deciding it wasn't what she wanted. just in general this time has a sense that things get worse, fortunes falling along with the temperature.

Whew! Which viewpoint to adopt... personally I think our country gets into trouble when it embraces the first one. One man's evil guerilla terrorist is another's freedom fighter...

5 year low for the Dow. Good news: well we haven't suffered through a recent giant terrorist attack. Bad news: so what's our excuse? (Bush?)

NPR is economy, economy, economy, terrorism, economy, economy, sports. I think the CNN/foxnews/Internet cycle is an amplifying force.

I am not in favor of immortality. I believe death for humans is the way of getting rid of accumulated errors - as in trial and error. Without death, the old folks would start to gang up on the babies (the new trials). Immortality → immortal mistakes.

<a href="http://yorksranter.wordpress.com/2009/06/07/accidential-guerrilla-part-2-strategy/">Terrorism as an "autoimmune disease"</a>; their strategy is to provoke over response. Those "terrorist will have won" jokes were right.

<a href="http://x-entertainment.com/updates/2009/05/30/25-at-the-dollar-tree-part-1/">At The Dollar Tree</a> - "Help Spider-Man erase the jumbo errors of the world!"

Maybe I just fixed my iPhone's ability to place calls ("call failed" errors) by calling it from a different phone?

On XP, making a mp3 disk for my car was as easy as dragging files, Vista makes coasters unless I use Windows Media Player. (heh, reminds me of the mid-90s, where "buffer underrun" errors would make, like, $25 coasters.)

It not infrequently happens that something about the earth, about the sky, about other elements of this world, about the motion and rotation or even the magnitude and distances of the stars, about definite eclipses of the sun and moon, about the passage of years and seasons, about the nature of animals, of fruits, of stones, and of other such things, may be known with the greatest certainty by reasoning or by experience, even by one who is not a Christian. It is too disgraceful and ruinous, though, and greatly to be avoided, that he [the non-Christian] should hear a Christian speaking so idiotically on these matters, and as if in accord with Christian writings, that he might say that he could scarcely keep from laughing when he saw how totally in error they are. In view of this and in keeping it in mind constantly while dealing with the book of Genesis, I have, insofar as I was able, explained in detail and set forth for consideration the meanings of obscure passages, taking care not to affirm rashly some one meaning to the prejudice of another and perhaps better explanation.

C# Compiler sucks ass through a straw, especially in terms of locating errors. My opinion of Visual Studio is through the basement.

<param name='onError' value='onSilverlightError' />

Wow, if only every terrorist was as clever as the guy who left his apartment AND getaway car keys in the would-be carbomb.

Amber hammers with stronger blows; fewer blows=fewer chances to mess up. I use more blows, compensate for small errors. This difference probably mirrors how we cope with life in general.

Obama's "We can absorb a terrorist attack." is controversial?? He shoulda said "if they hit us again we're hosed"?? Hint: "We'll do everything we can to prevent it" immediately follows.

--from the NY Times correction July 17, 1969, right after Apollo 11 launched and a few days before it landed on the moon...<a href="http://www.regrettheerror.com/2009/07/20/a-timely-times-correction-from-1969/">via</a> -- <a href="http://www.regrettheerror.com/">regrettheerror</a> seems to be a blog about this kind of thing.

#html5jam -sad lessons learned: processing.js can't do inheritance, collections, good framerates (except for chrome), or good error messages

<a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2304311/">http://www.slate.com/id/2304311/</a> -- Rick Perry, aiming to turn the War on Terror into a War of Religions.

The other week I posted on Facebook and Google+ about something a friend had claimed, that the night sky was mostly full of distant but visible galaxies, not local stars. This is incorrect. One of my buddies confirm the error of his thinking pointed to the photo above. It's also <a href="http://spluch.blogspot.com/2007/01/size-comparison-of-andromeda-galaxy-and.html">posted here with some deeper explanation</a>. The photo is a composite, i.e. the sky never quite looks like that even with a great telescope, but it gets the idea of what we're missing with our naked eyes.

Even beyond the permanent marital law National Defense Authorization Bill gets us, it makes the dumbass mistake of treating terrorism as war.

So iPad connected to Windows offers oddly half-assed file system support; deletes failed w/ misleading error. Feel disempowered, but they probably don't care much because they want everyone trusting The Cloud anyway.

Those are my practical reasons for disliking TDD. In theory too, it fails: its been mathematically demonstrated that any sufficiently powerful testing setup is as as prone to error as the thing being tested...

Black holes happen when reality has an overflow error: you put too much stuff in one place, and it breaks both the stuff <i>and the place</i> with gravity.

5. At the risk of offending, and admitting that all I suffered on April 15 and after was a few days of inconvenience and a feeling of safety around public spaces: Boston is a resilient city, but this was a small event by most standards of terrorism. (Actually I stand corrected: I just checked and it was "only" 3 people killed but 260 injured to various degrees. I thought it was fewer) It is great that we hunkered down and showed our willingness to lock down to help catch these asses, but the scope compared to what is possible, even likely, in the future, or to the past (the WTC, the 2004 Madrid bombings or even Newtown) is limited, and we should adjust our putting ourselves on a pedestal accordingly.<br>

The only trouble is ... with each step south it grows harder to ignore the fact that the scriptures - let alone Catholic dogma - are full of the mot grotesque errors of fact and logic. Why should a revelation from a perfect, loving God be such a dog's breakfast of threats and contradictions? Why should it offer such a flawed and confused view of humanity's place in the universe?<br>

Errors of fact? The metaphors had to chosen to suit the world view of the day; should God have mystified the author of Genesis with details of the Big Bang, and primordial nucleosynthesis? Contradictions? Tests of faith - and humility. How can I be so arrogant as to set my wretched powers of reasoning against the Word of the Almighty? God transcends everything, logic included.<br>

We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.

<a href="http://www.salon.com/2014/11/17/reza_aslan_destroys_biblical_literalism_the_gospels_are_absolutely_replete_with_historical_errors_and_with_contradictions/">Reza Aslan vs Biblical Literalism</a>. Last night at my UU Science and Spirtuality I went on kind of a minirant, about how Literalism and Fundamentalism is just one of the most self-centered, unempathetic, pig-headed ways of being; you're so convinced of your truth/Truth that you totally dismiss (at best! Too often you get violent or at least condescending) the equally fervently held truth/Truth of all the other religions and doctrines. And not only that, according to Aslan, not even your own church's founders were so intent and insisting Truth = truth.<br>

So, congrats terror dudes. On the one hand, organizations are going to be less likely to show images of Mohammed - but companies were already censoring that, out of politeness or fear. But millions and millions of people are going to google up those Charlie Hebdo covers and have a good look... people who had never heard of the magazine before.

NERDALERT For some reason this grails error made me laugh out loud:<br>

Lets hope the "Freedom Caucus" doesn't get much more power. They're willing to trash the economy with their debt ceiling terrorism.

This has been a bad week for the United States, folks. France was directly attacked by terrorists and its response was to promise to house 30,000 Syrian refugees; we weren't and one branch of our government fell over itself to put the brakes on accepting a third of that number. France is defying the very organization that attacked it while we, on the other hand, are doing exactly what that organization hoped we would do. We're being the cowardly bigots they hoped we would be, and as loudly as possible.

<a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/11/robert_lewis_dear_is_one_of_many_religious_extremists_bred_in_north_carolina.html">North Carolina as the hotbed of religous terrorists in this country</a> I'm keeping this like around for the next time someone argues all the religious terrorists are Islamic.

The realization came over me with full force that a good part of the remainder of my life was going to be spent in finding errors in my own programs.

The realization came over me with full force that a good part of the remainder of my life was going to be spent in finding errors in my own programs.

<a href="http://gawker.com/video-shows-unarmed-black-man-pleading-with-arms-raised-1784004594">Video Shows Unarmed Black Man Pleading With Arms Raised Before Getting Shot by Police</a> - Hands up, don't shoot. Mercifully, not a death, and maybe "just" an error from an itchy trigger finger? Still... Racist, Barney Fife BS.

The philosopher Roland Puccetti once observed that the existence of separate spheres of consciousness in the normal brain would explain one of the most perplexing features of split-brain research: Why is it that the right hemisphere is generally willing to bear silent witness to the errors and confabulations of the left? Could it be that the right hemisphere is used to it?

Rudy Giuliani: <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/15/politics/rudy-giuliani-donald-trump-9-11-terror-attack/index.html?sr=fbCNN081516rudy-giuliani-donald-trump-9-11-terror-attack1018PMStoryLink&linkId=27695577">"Under those eight years before Obama came along, we didn't have any successful radical Islamic terrorist attack in the United States. They all started when (Hillary) Clinton and Obama got into office"</a> Between this and "Obama founded ISIS", Republicans are deciding to double down on Big Brother-esque rewriting of history.

Ahh, immigration bans on a really arbitrary mix of moslem countries, not even the one the 9/11 folks came from. The ultimate in self-delusional Security Theater, except instead of inconveniencing passengers it's screwing up lives. We have a no fly list right? and terrorists can be homegrown? What racist-placating bullshit.

Dammit, thanks to Islamic terrorists and alt-right dingbats - also terrorists - it's going to be harder to enjoy watching the Blues Brothers drive the Bluesmobile through the parted crowds and then over the bridge making all in the Illinois Nazis jump in the water. <br>

"He who says, "Better go without belief forever than believe a lie!" merely shows his own preponderant private horror of becoming a dupe. He may be critical of many of his desires and fears, but this fear he slavishly obeys. He cannot imagine any one questioning its binding force. For my own part, I have also a horror of being duped; but I can believe that worse things than being duped may happen to a man in this world [...] It is like a general informing his soldiers that it is better to keep out of battle forever than to risk a single wound. Not so are victories either over enemies or over nature gained. Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf. At any rate, it seems the fittest thing for the empiricist philosopher."

</blockquote>There's then a second question about the use of force but I felt this bit alone was containing at two errors, or at least massive presumptions:<br>

I kind of hate that while the primary task remains legitimate sorrow for every victim of the tragedy and their communities, the secondary task is sorting out does this support or undermine my worldview viz a viz Guns Culture is a Serious Problem VS. We Gotta Watchout for Islamic Fundamentalist Terrorists. (And to repeat, more sacrifices to our <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2012/12/15/our-moloch/">great god Gun</a>)

18. Admit your errors freely and soon.<br>

Take back the House in November. Then take back the Presidency in 2020. The worst thing we could do is pretend that these are givens. I never, ever, ever thought that this piece of shit could sit in the Oval Office. I was so humbled by my error. Therefore I assume he could take it again - I know he could - unless we accept the threat as real.<br>

I was an officer with the CIA Clandestine Service and worked undercover on counterterrorism and intelligence all around the world for almost 10 years. The conversation that's going on in the United States right now about ISIS and about the United States overseas is more oversimplified than ever. Ask most Americans whether ISIS poses an existential threat to this country and they'll say yes. That's where the conversation stops. If you're walking down the street in Iraq or Syria and asked anybody why America dropped bombs, you get: "They were waging war on Islam." And you walk in America and you ask why were we attacked on 9/11, and you get: "They hate us because we're free." Those are stories, manufactured by a really small number of people on both sides who amass a great deal of power and wealth by convincing the rest of us to keep killing each other. I think the question we need to be asking, as Americans examining our foreign policy, is whether or not we're pouring kerosene on a candle. The only real way to disarm your enemy is to listen to them. If you hear them out, if you're brave enough to really listen to their story, you can see that more often than not, you might have made some of the same choices, if you'd lived their life instead of yours. <br>

renovation work is essential. sometimes things collapse and burn and break and have to come back. it's not a terrorist attack, it's renovation, an accident, but we have so much evidence, history, carefully documented everything on one of the most studied places in the world.<br>

An early 1980s Sunday School class about the subject, including an illustration of a Christian in front of a firing squad along with other terrors to come, left me with an indelible association of Christianity with future horrors, especially if you don't act right (all the Jesus acceptance and born-again-ness) and even if you do. Which then fed into a disdain I still carry for "pre-tribs", folks who think the Christians get swept away to their eternal happiness before all the shit goes down, because God must love us too much to let that happen to US, right? (I have bitterness when pop-religion seems to sugarcoat the source material - the way a "Grampas looking down from us in Heaven right now, Timmy" view seems more grounded in consoling hopefulness than the actual scriptures - my church's 11th and final doctrine was "We believe in the immortality of the soul; in the resurrection of the body; in the general judgment at the end of the world; in the eternal happiness of the righteous; and in the endless punishment of the wicked." I realized that that view of a bodily resurrection and a judgement at the END of the things is more caught in "Man of Constant Sorrow"'s final verse ("as I lay sleeping in my grave") than most of the songs I had been singing in Sunday School... and so I'm both envious of and sometimes a little disdainful of folks who have a softer, gentler form of Christianity, even as I realize I can't be sure their view is less reliable than mine harsh one - it's certainly more pragmatic and psychologically sound, whether or not it feels like wishful thinking to me.)<br>

<blockquote class='quote'>Crowds had gathered beneath the television monitors. Clark decided that whatever they were looking at, he couldn't face it without a cup of tea. He assumed it was a terrorist attack. He bought a cup of Earl Grey at a kiosk, and took his time adding the milk. This is the last time I'll stir milk into my tea without knowing what happened, he thought, wistful in advance for the present moment, and went to stand with the crowd beneath a television that was tuned to CNN.

Alright, you probably knew this was coming... in the words of Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist - Playin' the Cello:<br>

<blockquote class='quote'>From error to error one discovers the entire truth.

<blockquote class='quote'>As for those who so exalt incorruptibility, inalterability, I believe they are brought to say these things through their great desire to live a long time and through the terror they have of death. And not considering that, if men were immortal, these men would not have had an opportunity to come into the world. They would deserve to encounter a Medusa's head, which would transform them into statues of jasper or of diamond, to make them more perfect than they are . . . And there is not the slightest doubt that the Earth is far more perfect, being, as it is, alterable, changeable, than if it were a mass of stone, even if it were a whole diamond, hard and impenetrable.

<blockquote class='quote'>"On Sunday, July 5, a report on Ghislaine Maxwell during FOX News Channel's America's News HQ mistakenly eliminated President Donald Trump from a photo alongside then Melania Knauss, Jeffrey Epstein and Maxwell. We regret the error," Fox News reportedly said in a statement to CNN's media reporter Oliver Darcy.

<blockquote class='quote'>Animator Chuck Jones once quantified the exact margin of error on one of his most famous jokes: Wile E. Coyote, when falling off a cliff, had to hit bottom exactly fourteen frames after he disappeared from sight. "It seemed to me that thirteen frames didn't work in terms of humor, and neither did fifteen frames. Fourteen frames got a laugh."

Look at movie making. We've been making movies for a hundred years. Haven't we figured out the creative process yet? No! We haven't. You can take a great director, a great cast, and still make a totally shitty movie. Versus in building, largely speaking, if you take a great architect, a great engineering firm, and a great general contractor, you're gonna arrive at a building that works. You may make minor mistakes but the basic structure is going to be sound, unless someone makes a completely negligent error. In movie making, in music, in software things fail all the time. Even when good people who know the techniques of how to build things get together and work on something, they still end up failing.

That line has challenged my thinking for a while, but Wright introduced me to a concept to fight back a bit - the existence of <a href="https://www.simplypsychology.org/fundamental-attribution.html">Fundamental Attribution Error</a> - as humans we are highly predisposed to overemphasize the character of someone and deemphasize the circumstance and context of the situation. (Unless of course it's someone we like doing something bad, or someone we dislike doing something good - then it's just a matter of circumstance or coincidence!) <br>

<blockquote class="quote">233. Yes; but you must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked. You are in the game. Which will you choose then? Let us see. Since you must choose, let us see which interests you least. You have two things to lose, the true and the good; and two things to stake, your reason and your will, your knowledge and your happiness; and your nature has two things to shun, error and misery. Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God exists. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is. [...] Now, what harm will befall you in taking this side? You will be faithful, humble, grateful, generous, a sincere friend, truthful. Certainly you will not have those poisonous pleasures, glory and luxury; but will you not have others? I will tell you that you will thereby gain in this life, and that, at each step you take on this road, you will see so great certainty of gain, so much nothingness in what you risk, that you will at last recognise that you have wagered for something certain and infinite, for which you have given nothing.</blockquote>

<footer>asha bandele and Patrisse Cullors, "When They Call You a Terrorist"</footer>

<footer>asha bandele and Patrisse Cullors, "When They Call You a Terrorist"</footer>

<footer>asha bandele and Patrisse Cullors, "When They Call You a Terrorist"</footer>

<td>Uplifting Hip Hop, nice instrumentals.<br>Mentioned in Patrisse Khan-Cullors' book "When They Call You A Terrorist" as an empowering performance.</td>

So combining that tweet dialog with "divided brain" thinking: siding with the "rational" brain, despite its emotional immaturity (frustration and willingness to confabulate when things "don't add up") is a form of radical, wide-ranging empathy. The rational brain is more about the exteriority - the surfaces where we connect - than our own murkier interiorities. It says the most important reality - the best place to draw our values from - is consensus reality. Rationality has error-correcting mechanisms and - in theory - the rationalistic brain is better posed to take other viewpoints into account (even though it also seems more likely to throw temper tantrums when its assumptions and desire to control the world are being challenged! Recognizing the source of that anger is a newer insight for me)

Update... later in explaining why people make this kind of error he does say

<span class='star4'>Why Buddhism is True</span>, <span class='star3'>Tao Te Ching</span>, <span class='star4'>Situation Normal</span>, <span class='star3'>The Water Dancer</span>, <span class='star3'>Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain</span>, <span class='star3'>The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning</span>, <span class='star5'>Don Giovanni</span>, <span class='star4'>You Look Like a Thing and I Love You</span>, <span class='star3'>Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You</span>, <span class='star3'>Probably Impossibilities</span>, <span class='star3'>The Vanishing Half</span>, <span class='star3'>The Big U</span>, <span class='star3'>When They Call You a Terrorist</span>, <span class='star3'>Tuck Everlasting</span>, <span class='star4'>No One Is Talking About This.</span>, <span class='star4'>Deacon King Kong</span>, <span class='star3'>Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It</span>, <span class='star5'>The Master and His Emissary</span>, <span class='star3'>The Body Is Not an Apology</span>, <span class='star3'>The Decameron Project</span>, <span class='star3'>Frankenstein</span>, <span class='star3'>How to Change Your Mind</span>, <span class='star3'>More Die of Heartbreak</span>, <span class='star3'>Quiet Pine Trees</span>, <span class='star4'>God Human Animal Machine</span>, <span class='star3'>Several People are Typing</span>, <span class='star4'>The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven</span>, <span class='star3'>Rationality</span>, <span class='star2'>Jumpers: A Play</span>, <span class='star4'>A Carnival of Snackery</span>, <span class='star4'>Ishmael</span></div>

Objectively, no one wants to invade or destroy Russia, there are not and have never been plans for a NATO conquest of Russia. Russia had a good deal: they got to sell their petroleum and defend their territorial integrity with their aging nuclear arsenal. Invading Ukraine was a stupid strategic error made by a declining power that does not understand <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Tragedy-Great-Power-Politics-Updated/dp/0393349276">The Tragedy of Great Power Politics</a>

[Philippines Governor] Governor-General Forbes found time for other pursuits. "I get up leisurely when I feel like it, write in my journal sparingly so as not to run into the error of being too voluminous, and play a few hands of cards to iron the crinkles out of my mind." In the afternoons, Forbes would spend "an hour or so" reading newspaper clippings, but he would stop at four to "take a ride, or play polo, according to the day." "I have let the great world sweep by," he purred.

phrase:""

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