absurdity

Why we laugh

language & literature, science / /

From Gene Weingarten’s “The Peekaboo Paradox: The strange secrets of humor, fear and a guy who makes big money making little people laugh” (The Washington Post: 22 January 2006):

Even before they respond to a tickle, most babies will laugh at peekaboo. It’s their first “joke.” They are reacting to a sequence of events that begins with the presence of a familiar, comforting face. Then, suddenly, the face disappears, and you can read in the baby’s expression momentary puzzlement and alarm. When the face suddenly reappears, everything is orderly in the baby’s world again. Anxiety is banished, and the baby reacts with her very first laugh.

At its heart, laughter is a tool to triumph over fear. As we grow older, our senses of humor become more demanding and refined, but that basic, hard-wired reflex remains. We need it, because life is scary. Nature is heartless, people can be cruel, and death and suffering are inevitable and arbitrary. We learn to tame our terror by laughing at the absurdity of it all.

This point has been made by experts ranging from Richard Pryor to doctoral candidates writing tedious theses on the ontol-ogical basis of humor. Any joke, any amusing observation, can be deconstructed to fit. The seemingly benign Henny Youngman one-liner, “Take my wife . . . please!” relies in its heart on an understanding that love can become a straitjacket. By laughing at that recognition, you are rising above it, and blunting its power to disturb.

After the peekaboo age, but before the age of such sophisticated understanding, dwells the preschooler. His sense of humor is more than infantile but less than truly perceptive. He comprehends irony but not sarcasm. He lacks knowledge but not feeling. The central fact of his world — and the central terror to be overcome — is his own powerlessness.

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Japanese nuclear secrets revealed on P2P network

law, politics, security, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Mike’s “That’s Not A New Hit Song You Just Downloaded — It’s Japan’s Nuclear Secrets” (techdirt: 23 June 2005):

While IT managers may not see the importance of security software for themselves, you would think they would be a little more careful with things like interns and contractors. Not so, apparently. Over in Japan, a lot of people are not happy after discovering that a lot of classified technical data on nuclear power plants was leaked onto the internet by a contractor using a computer with a file sharing app that was apparently left open to sharing everything on the machine. First off, what kind of nuclear plant contractor is putting a file sharing app on his work laptop? Also, the article notes that the laptop was infested with viruses, but later seems to blame the file sharing app rather than the viruses — so it’s not entirely clear what the viruses have to do with this story. Update: Another article on this story notes that it was the virus that made the material available via the file sharing app. It also notes that the guy was using his personal computer — and somehow this was allowed. It also details the information leaked, including inspection data, photographs and names of inspectors, as well as where they stayed when they did the inspections. No matter what, you have to wonder why the guy was allowed to use his personal computer or to use any computer for this data that hadn’t been checked first for viruses or other vulnerabilities.

From Mike’s “Security Through Begging” (techdirt: 16 March 2006):

Last summer, the surprising news came out that Japanese nuclear secrets leaked out, after a contractor was allowed to connect his personal virus-infested computer to the network at a nuclear power plant. The contractor had a file sharing app on his laptop as well, and suddenly nuclear secrets were available to plenty of kids just trying to download the latest hit single. It’s only taken about nine months for the government to come up with its suggestion on how to prevent future leaks of this nature: begging all Japanese citizens not to use file sharing systems — so that the next time this happens, there won’t be anyone on the network to download such documents.

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Your job? Waiting in line for others.

business, law, politics, weird, writing ideas / /

From Brian Montopoli’s “The Queue Crew: Waiting in line for a living” (Legal Affairs: January/February 2004):

ON CAPITOL HILL, a placeholder is someone paid by the hour to wait in line. When legislative committees hold hearings, they reserve seats for Congressional staffers, for the press, and for the general public. The general-public seats are the only ones available to the so-called influence peddlers, the Washington lawyers and lobbyists whose livelihood depends on their ability to influence legislation. These seats are first come, first served, which is where the placeholders (also called “stand-ins” or “linestanders”) come in. Since most lobbyists and lawyers seeking to rub shoulders with lawmakers don’t have time to wait in line themselves, they pay others to do it for them.

Rather than use an independent contractor, most influence peddlers secure placeholders through one of the two companies that control about 80 percent of the market: Congressional Services Company and the CVK Group, both of which have rosters of on-call placeholders at the ready. Most of the time, placeholders are asked to wait for just a few hours, often arriving around 5 a.m. to wait for hearings scheduled for 10 a.m. If seats are in great demand, however, placeholders can be asked to get in line several days in advance. Congressional Services charges its clients $32 to $40 per hour for each placeholder, and the placeholders themselves make $10 to $15 an hour. …

For the sake of logistics and appearances, the lines usually form outdoors and stay there until a few hours before a hearing. …

Today, however, most placeholders are not nimble students out to earn a little spending money but older men and women trying to make ends meet. Jim Keegan is one of the “Van Gogh veterans,” a group of placeholders discovered by Congressional Services in 1998 when they were standing in line to get coveted free tickets to the Van Gogh exhibit at the National Gallery of Art. …

Now he said he has time to pursue his interests and get paid. “I’ll probably make $2,000 to $3,000 in a good month,” he said. “That’s more than I made at my old job.”

There is a collegial atmosphere among the placeholders – if you leave to go get something to eat, you aren’t going to lose your spot – but simple tasks like going to the bathroom present challenges. During the day, placeholders can go into the Rayburn Building, but after hours they have to make their way over to the public bathrooms at Union Station. Getting sleep is also a problem. Since the lines form on public sidewalks, placeholders are technically not allowed to sit down, and though the Capitol Hill police often ignore them, there are evenings when an overzealous officer will repeatedly wake them up and tell them to stand. …

Once, a group upset over banking regulations brought busloads of protesters to a hearing, only to discover that they wouldn’t be able to get in, thanks to the placeholders. A scuffle ensued, but the placeholders held their ground.

In general, however, most staffers and politicians don’t even notice the placeholders they pass on their way to work. …

Since hearings can be rescheduled or closed to the public at the last minute, the placeholding services insist on getting paid regardless of whether their clients succeed in getting in. Keegan and Herzog’s long wait, for example, ended before they could pass along their spots to their clients: The housing hearing was cancelled because of partisan infighting, and after two days and 20 hours of waiting, the placeholders were sent home on Tuesday at 6:30 p.m.

The next morning, however, after showers and a change of clothes, many of them were back, this time to wait for a healthcare hearing before the Commerce Committee. When I arrived at the Rayburn Building at 9 a.m., over 70 people were waiting to get into the hearing, and by 10, when it was scheduled to start, there were more than 200. The line began around the corner from the hearing room and snaked past elevator banks and Congressional offices. At the front were mostly placeholders, among them a bored-looking young man with red sneakers and a hat worn sideways and a woman in her late 30s wearing a frayed sweatshirt that read “OJ SIMPSON: JUICE ON THE LOOSE.” …

Thirty minutes before the hearing began, the clients started showing up. The placeholders were identified by placards or by assistant managers who worked the line. A bald white man in his 40s with a yellow tie and an expensive suit took his spot and thanked his placeholder. (Congressional rules prohibit tipping.)

Your job? Waiting in line for others. Read More »

Why we don’t have rights from the ground to the sky

business, commonplace book, history / /

From Salon’s “Throwing Google at the book“:

Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford law professor and copyright scholar, likes to tell the story of Thomas Lee and Tinie Causby, two North Carolina farmers, who in 1945 cast themselves at the center of a case that would redefine how society thought of physical property rights. The immediate cause of the Causbys’ discomfort was the airplane; military aircraft would fly low over their land, terrifying their chickens, who flew to their death into the walls of the barn. As the Causbys saw it, the military aircraft were trespassing on their land. They claimed that American law held that property rights reached ‘an indefinite extent, upwards’; that is, they owned the land from the ground to the heavens. If the government wanted to fly planes over the Causbys’ land, it needed the Causby’s permission, they insisted.

The case, in time, came to the Supreme Court, where Justice William O. Douglas, writing for the Court, was not kind to the Causbys’ ancient interpretation of the law. Their doctrine, he said, “has no place in the modern world. The air is a public highway, as Congress has declared. Were that not true, every transcontinental flight would subject the operator to countless trespass suits. Common sense revolts at the idea. To recognize such private claims to the airspace would clog these highways, seriously interfere with their control and development in the public interest, and transfer into private ownership that to which only the public has a just claim.”

… the airplane rendered the Causbys’ rights to the skies incompatible with the modern world …

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Don’t fly where we won’t tell you not to fly

security, true stories / /

From Bruce Schneier’s “The Silliness of Secrecy“, quoting The Wall Street Journal:

Ever since Sept. 11, 2001, the federal government has advised airplane pilots against flying near 100 nuclear power plants around the country or they will be forced down by fighter jets. But pilots say there’s a hitch in the instructions: aviation security officials refuse to disclose the precise location of the plants because they consider that “SSI” — Sensitive Security Information.

“The message is; ‘please don’t fly there, but we can’t tell you where there is,'” says Melissa Rudinger of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, a trade group representing 60% of American pilots.

Determined to find a way out of the Catch-22, the pilots’ group sat down with a commercial mapping company, and in a matter of days plotted the exact geographical locations of the plants from data found on the Internet and in libraries. It made the information available to its 400,000 members on its Web site — until officials from the Transportation Security Administration asked them to take the information down. “Their concern was that [terrorists] mining the Internet could use it,” Ms. Rudinger says.

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Commanding the waves to stop

commonplace book, history / /
Author: Earth Network Editor Use: Image in pub...
Image via Wikipedia

From Wikipedia’s “Canute the Great“:

[King Canute (994/995 – November 12, 1035)] is perhaps best remembered for the legend of how he commanded the waves to go back. According to the legend, he grew tired of flattery from his courtiers. When one such flatterer gushed that the king could even command the obedience of the sea, Canute proved him wrong by practical demonstration at Bosham, his point being that even a king’s powers have limits. Unfortunately, this legend is usually misunderstood to mean that he believed himself so powerful that the natural elements would obey him, and that his failure to command the tides only made him look foolish. It is quite possible that the legend is simply pro-Canute propaganda.

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Four principles of modernity

commonplace book, science / /

From “Relativity, Uncertainty, Incompleteness and Undecidability“:

In this article four fundamental principles are presented: relativity, uncertainty, incompleteness and undecidability. They were studied by, respectively, Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing. …

Relativity says that there is no privileged, “objective” viewpoint for certain observations. … Now, if things move relative to each other, then obviously their positions at a given time are also measured relative to each other. …

Werner Heisenberg showed that if we built a machine to tell us with high precision were an electron is, this machine could not also tell us the speed of the electron. If we want to measure its speed without altering it we can use a different light but then we wouldn’t know where it is. At atomic scale, no instrument can tell us at the same time exactly where a particle is and exactly at what speed it is moving. …

If this system is complete, then anything that is true is provable. Similarly, anything false is provable false. Kurt Gödel got the intuition that traditional mathematical logic was not complete, and devoted several years to try to find one thing, a single thing that was inside the mathematics but outside the reach of logic. … Gödel’s incompleteness means that the classical mathematical logic deductive system, and actually any logical system consistent and expressive enough, is not complete, has “holes” full of expressions that are not logically true nor false. …

Turing’s halting problem is one of the problems that fall in to the category of undecidable problems. It says that it is not possible to write a program to decide if other program is correctly written, in the sense that it will never hang. This creates a limit to the verification of all programs, as all the attempts of building actual computers, usable in practice and different from Turing machines have been proved to be equivalent in power and limitations to the basic Turing machine.

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The secret plans of Libertarians revealed

commonplace book, politics / /

From The New York Times‘ “1 Cafe, 1 Gas Station, 2 Roads: America’s Emptiest County“:

At last count (by Sheriff Hopper toting it up in his head), 16 people make Mentone their home and 55 others are spread throughout the rest of Loving County’s 645 square miles of parched, salty West Texas grassland and rattlesnakes — about one person for every nine square miles. …

Yet it is modest enough, as a plaque outside the courthouse confesses: “Mentone has no water system (water is hauled in) nor does it have a bank, doctor, hospital, newspaper, lawyer, civic club or cemetery.”

And since Mentone is the only town, neither does Loving County.

What it does have is the Boot Track Café (open mornings), a post office, a gas station and the yellow Deco two-story courthouse. There are two roads. There is no operating church, although the county’s oldest building, a 1910 schoolhouse, is open for nondenominational worship. Seven children ride a school bus 33 miles to Wink in the next county.

… The material described the plans of a Libertarian faction in its own words “to win most of the elected offices in the county administration” and “restore to freedom” Loving County. The blueprint, called “Restoring Loving County,” said that land was hard to come by but that a ranch had been split up and members were in the process of buying sections.

“The people who are living there will be able to register to vote,” it said. “They must swear that they intend to make Loving their home.”

The goal, said an e-mail message attributed to a group member, was to move in enough Libertarians “to control the local government and remove oppressive regulations (such as planning and zoning, and building code requirements) and stop enforcement of laws prohibiting victimless acts among consenting adults such as dueling, gambling, incest, price-gouging, cannibalism and drug handling.”

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1,000,000 miles in 30 days

business, commonplace book, true stories / /

From MSNBC’s “Very, very frequent flyer hits 1 million goal“:

On his blog “The Great Canadian Mileage Run 2005,” [Marc] Tacchi reported on Wednesday that he had racked up 1,003,625 mileage points and spent 56 of the last 61 days in an airplane. …

The 30-year-old embarked on his venture using Air Canada’s North America Unlimited Pass — a C$7,000 ticket that allowed passengers limitless travel within the continent between October 1 and November 30. …

A typical day would start with a 10 a.m. flight to Victoria, British Columbia, about 70 km (45 miles) from Vancouver. He would fly back and fourth between the two cities about six times and then catch an overnight flight 4,300 km (2,700 miles) to Toronto.

In Toronto, he would immediately board a return flight. …

By reaching the 1 million mile goal, Tacchi gets the equivalent of about 10 round-trip business class flights from Canada to Australia, which he has estimated would normally cost about C$70,000.

He plans to redeem his travel points to take his family to Miami at Christmas, then maybe go to Hong Kong or Thailand.

When he wasn’t flying to collect travel points, Tacchi works as a contract pilot. Once a week, he flies a Boeing 747 cargo plane to Europe or Asia.

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Hulk, Willie, or Peter?

commonplace book, true stories, weird / /

From The Sun:

The Hulk's willieSHOCKED six-year-old Leah Lowland checked out a mystery bulge on her Incredible Hulk doll — and uncovered a giant green WILLY.

Curious Leah noticed a lump after winning the monster, catchphrase “You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry,” at a seaside fair.

And when she peeled off the green comic-book character’s ripped purple shorts, she found the two-inch manhood beneath them.

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A horrid legal conundrum

commonplace book, true stories / /

From The Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

A convicted murderer being held in Atlanta is refusing to sign a waiver the district attorney says it needs to release the remains of an 8-year-old East Texas boy.

Without the waiver, the family of Chad Choice cannot hold a funeral, although the boy was killed more than a decade ago.

Patrick Horn’s attorney has made repeated efforts over the past month to get the man now serving a life federal prison sentence in Georgia for unrelated crimes to sign the waiver.

But those efforts have been ignored …

Chad was shot in 1991, and buried in a shallow grave behind a house where Horn’s family lived. Horn then tormented the Choice family for years, sending ransom notes and placing Chad’s skull on the doorstep of the Choices’ home on the fourth anniversary of the boy’s disappearance.

The boy’s fate wasn’t revealed until 1996 while Horn was in Smith County Jail serving time for other crimes.

The waiver is necessary because the body parts were found five years after the boy’s death, and those remains were crucial evidence used to convict Horn.

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Terrifica, a superhero for our times

commonplace book, weird / /

From ABC News:

Terrifica, a superhero for our times For the past seven years Terrifica has been patrolling New York’s party and bar scene, looking out for women who have had a little too much to drink and are in danger of being taken advantage of by men. She says she has saved several women from both themselves and predators who would prey upon their weaknesses — both from alcohol and a misguided notion that they have to go out drinking to find a companion.

“I protect the single girl living in the big city,” says Terrifica, sporting blond Brunhild wig with a golden mask and a matching Valkyrie bra. “I do this because women are weak. They are easily manipulated, and they need to be protected from themselves and most certainly from men and their ill intentions toward them.” …

“To feel like you have to go to a bar, to put yourself out there, feeling like you have worth only when you’re married, engaged, or have a boyfriend, that’s weakness,” Terrifica says. “People are happiest when they’re alone and living their solitary lives.” …

“I really only have my utility belt. I’m not superstrong. I’m from this Earth,” she says. “I know I have to be very cautious. But the difference is I’m sober. And drunk people who are hostile are still drunk people. I have a degree of control, and my mission and purpose can usually get me out of dangerous situations.”

However, Terrifica does carry pepper spray in her utility belt, which also includes a cell phone, lipstick, a camera to take pictures of alleged male predators, a logging book, Terrifica fortune cards and — last but not least — Smarties candies. …

“Bartenders tend to be men, and they tend to be attracted to me,” she says. “Most men are. That’s part of my power.” …

Terrifica has also become somewhat of a nemesis to one alleged Casanova in particular: A man who likes to dress in velvet and prefers to be called “Fantastico.” He says that over the years, Terrifica has thwarted his attempts on numerous occasions to get to know women a little better. …

But while Terrifica has never addressed Fantastico directly, her alter-ego Sarah has. Sarah says she was seduced by Fantastico years ago.

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Borges’ animals

commonplace book, on writing / /

From Tom Van Vleck:

In “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins,” Borges describes “a certain Chinese Encyclopedia,” the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, in which it is written that animals are divided into:

1. those that belong to the Emperor,
2. embalmed ones,
3. those that are trained,
4. suckling pigs,
5. mermaids,
6. fabulous ones,
7. stray dogs,
8. those included in the present classification,
9. those that tremble as if they were mad,
10. innumerable ones,
11. those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush,
12. others,
13. those that have just broken a flower vase,
14. those that from a long way off look like flies.

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Another awful poet

commonplace book, on writing / /

Scotland’s worst poet, William Topaz McGonagall: From “The Tay Bridge Disaster”:

Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay!
Alas! I am very sorry to say
That ninety lives have been taken away
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember’d for a very long time. …

Or here’s a few lines from “Glasgow”:

And as for the statue of Sir Walter Scott that stands in George Square,
It is a handsome statue — few with it can compare,
And most elegant to be seen,
And close beside it stands the statue of Her Majesty the Queen. …

Read more at a site dedicated to William McGonagall, or just search Google. [William McGonagall]

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A wonderful postmodern joke

commonplace book / /

A postmodern joke from Disinfotainment:

How many deconstructionists does it take to screw in a light bulb?

Even the framing of this question makes a grid of patriarchal assumptions that reveals a slavish devotion to phallocentric ideas – such as, technical accomplishment has inherent value, knowledge can be attained and quantities of labor can be determined empirically, all of which makes a discourse which further marginalizes the already disenfranchised.

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Ben Jones on primal fears

overheard / /

From Ben Jones’ Benblog:

I wonder if, the same way we possibly have a residual ancestral memory of snakes eating early hominids that makes certain people fearful of snakes, if the inexplicable fear that some of us have for clowns and realistic dolls and marionettes and that horror of horror a realistic looking clown marionette, which provides so much latitude for interpretation, and hence, ubiquitous, unmitigated terror, is a residual future perception, of a world where clown marionettes eat our progeny.

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Love those pamphlet titles

commonplace book, history / /

From “American Jezebel by Eve LaPlante“, a review of a biography of Anne Hutchinson, in Salon:

If [Anne] Hutchinson had been born a man, some historians argue, she might have found a place in her society as a minister. She might have carved out a life like that of John Cotton, the unorthodox founder of Congregationalism, Hutchinson’s teacher and the man her family had followed to Boston when he was forced to leave England. On the other hand, she might have turned out like the renegade Rev. Roger Williams, another early settler of Rhode Island, who was driven out of Boston for voicing a variety of objectionable views, most notably the belief that the English had no right to claim Indian lands or subject Native Americans to forced conversions. Williams conducted a pamphlet feud with Cotton, set off when he published ‘The Bloody Tenet of Persecution,’ a tract in support of religious freedom. Cotton then put out ‘The Bloody Tenet Washed and Made White in the Blood of the Lamb.’ Williams responded with ‘The Bloody Tenet Made Yet More Bloody by Mr. Cotton’s Endeavor to Wash It White in the Blood of the Lamb.

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