Man. Myth. Morland.

Faulty shoes. Stupid faulty shoes. Supposed to be well-made. Sold their soles for $155, had the sidewalks hole them for free. Where have all the good cobblers gone?

It'll just be for a sec. Just while it's raining. Water had boorish manners, that is to say, not well-heeled.

Now I've got to take the subway home, before my feet prune. The closest station is for a line that takes longer. I haven't taken it in months, but I remember something bad about getting cold feet so I toe the line. I'm pronating like a madman.

Old commuting habits come back atavistically. Stay to the right on this staircase, to the left on that. Move to the third car of the E train, the second to last of the L. Hustle to the Thai place. Don't be a loafer.

The cute, under-age girl at the counter knows me now. I tell her to sock it to me, I don't wanna have to play the lace card. She rings up a pad thai for sole brother number one. Insteps the hipster guy while I'm waiting. He used to be wet behind the ears, corny posters of Paul Bunion on the walls of his room. Now he's way calloused.

I quick-step it home, throw my double-entendres on the couch. I turn on the television and I see Bob Dylan in a Victoria's Secret commercial. He looks like a vampire.

I don't know how much anyone pays attention to my Del.icio.us linkbar (which, of course you can syndicate in RSS), but it's been a great time-saver for me (I don't have to debate whether that great new link I've run across is worth posting an entire blog entry, links are categorized, etc). In general, even if I haven't added a full-blown entry to this here site on any given day, I'll update those lil' links on the side.

The reason I'm bringing this up right now is that I was about to post a link to Zelda Dance Party, and I need to be sure everyone sees it. In the future, when I come across early-nineties Japanese video-game coordinated dance shows, they will only appear in the linkbar. Unless they have an exceptional radness about them, or their main character is named Link, like LOZ.

I just received an annoying b.s. email from one of my credit card providers. It's pure marketing fluff, with no discernable value, the kind of email that I've been trained so hard to ignore that, once I'd gotten sufficiently worked up and decided to see exactly why it was so important to send it my way, I had to attenuate with all my might to even process it. The more I read, the angrier I got. I'm not sure why. I'd finished dinner and I was sated. I'd read through all my RSS feeds for the day, and I even had an hour or so to spare before adjourning to my private mausoleum to cleanse myself in goat's blood and engage in ethereal communion with the undead.

I shouldn't have to describe to anyone why this email upset me. It was a list of advertisements thinly cloaked as special offers / news items, as well as some well-calculated "tips" (deserving of their "quotation marks of ironic condescension") whose only purpose was to drive increased usage of a credit card I already over-use.

But this isn't my point. What really frustrated me is that there's no one to blame. This marketing campaign, this freaking "touchpoint" between me and my trusty creditor, is the aggregate result of years of minute decisions by dozens if not hundreds of people, each acting as they thought best, with little or no desire to pick on me. Yet taken as a whole, it resulted in one very upset customer, and completely sabotaged the intended result.

Now I'm not saying they should stop this program. Most people likely did not react in the same way I did, and overall it might have been quite successful. Even if there was one person I could contact and flip out on (which I probably wouldn't do anyway) one customer's aberrant emotional response, however disturbing, might not justify the cancellation of any otherwise beneficial campaign. But there isn't - I can't respond to the one person who did this, because it wasn't just one person. And I can't respond effectively to one group, because, even assuming I could somehow penetrate the corporate-relations wall, those I perceive to have wronged me are spread across departments, physical offices, and even points in time. My ultimate recourse as a customer is to cease to retain their services. I fear however that, given the scale of the offending party, my reason for doing so, even if explicitly expressed, will not be accurately recognized and thus fail to be addressed.

Large organizations function as distributed blame networks, responsibility dispersal systems diffusing culpability until any one employee's part is below some satisfactory threshold. That's one of the chief reasons for forming a corporation: to protect the agents within a company from any legal retribution stemming from actions taken by that company. The law rightfully recognizes that the collective decision-making of many is not the same as that of a single individual, and places the blame accordingly on the organization. Only in the rarest of circumstances is that indemnification challenged (see "Piercing the Corporate Veil"). It's an imperfect system, but it works.

Therefore, when you become incensed at a corporation, when you feel like pointing fingers, you are not targeting anything tangible. Your anger and actions are directed at a weird, nebulous concept of a thing, a corporeally abstract but legally well-defined entity. And while the officers of these entities - those most frequently receiving shame and admonishment - may be their public faces, there are operational aspects, such as sending out a mass email, in which they have a trivial hand and for which they are not at fault.

So I am left with a very bitter, disempowered taste in my mouth. Blaming a corporation for something this venial is as futile as blaming fate itself, though involving better branding and a sparse chance of winning a class-action lawsuit.

Good day QIS!

My name is Colonel Hubert Von Breckenmeyer IV, and I'm filling in for Morland while he's on safari in Kenya. Such glorious times he must be having! Just yesterday we received a photograph of him posing before a magnificent sunset over the Kalahari, arm-in-arm with Masai tribesmen. Hopefully he can put his violent neo-Marxist rhetoric on the shelf for a few weeks and (for once) refrain from inciting a revolution. Somehow though, I doubt it.

I recall my first meeting with the lad. Back in the 1850's, I was a Lieutenant Second-Grade in the Prussian army, the commander of a lowly garrison on the southern tip of Madagascar. We'd lose shipments of rations occasionally on account of smugglers in the area, but up until my third year stationed there it had been nothing more than a minor inconvenience. That year, however, a shipment of expensive wine earmarked for some visiting dignitaries went missing and to save face I knew the smugglers would have to be dealt with once and for all. My unit lacked the manpower and proper tracking acumen, so I assembled the best bounty-hunters in all of southern Africa. They were a rag-tag bunch of ne'er-do-wells, ruffians, roustabouts, and scallywags, but they knew how to get the job done. One of them in particular caught my eye. He stood well over six feet tall and must have weighed at least twenty stone. He could kill a man faster than he could down a fifth of rum, which was to say in under twenty seconds flat, and boasted frequently of being the first man to best the legendary Houdini himself in a staring contest. I knew then that this man would end my troubles with those pesky thieves.

And I was right! Unfortunately, he was killed in the process. His name was Arturo Clementine, and many years later Morland decided to write a biography of his colorful life, and contacted me for quotes, documents, and various other source materials. We've been friends ever since.

Ah, but enough reminiscing for now. I entreat you to test-enable the enclosed LG VX4500 phone post-haste, and return it to us via expedited delivery (perhaps using this new-fangled "air-mail" I've heard so much about). Hopefully, this shipment will not be intercepted by our mutual foes.

Warmest regards,
Colonel Hubert Von Breckenmeyer IV
Head of Cattle Wrangling / Chief Despotic Officer
Vindigo
[email address removed] (I am answering his email in his stead)
212-xxx-xxxx (likewise with his phone)

Here's a paragraph from a not terrible article on Eggers, McSweeny's et al in yesterday's Guardian:

And it is true that some reviewers, and big battalions of literary bloggers, routinely use Eggers and his fellow-travellers as a ball to kick around. It takes a few minutes to Google up this splenetic example posted on kottke.com: "Yup, lots of pressure for Dave Eggers, what with growing up affluent in a Chicago suburb, getting something close to $3m for book and film advances ... being declared a philanthropist, getting a spread in the [San Fran cisco] Chronicle and other pubs with nary a whit of criticism. Eggers, Eggers, Eggers All The Time, Love Him He's Inflatable."

This statement upset me, but not for the reason one might think (you, dear readers, are presumptuous filth and you often naively* jump to conclusions, though I must admit this tickles me, as I intentionally lead you down garden paths so that I may heighten both your sense of revelation and esteem of my writing prowess). Kottke.com is a typo, a name-squatter, an abomination. Kottke.org, the site to which they really meant to attribute the quote, is the fine blog of Jason Kottke. Jason's been blogging for six years. He's married to a founder of Blogger. He's one of only four recipients of the Bloggies' lifetime achievement award. If Jason doesn't get respect from traditional media, no blogger does.

Now my indignation here may seem disproportionate, but I have trouble reconciling the desire to quote a comment from Kottke.org with the sloppiness of failing to properly attribute it. The former validates and the latter undercuts, and they managed to do it in a single sentence. It's the abusive spouse of quotations.

Easily-corrected, factual errors like this are partly what prompted some to even start blogging in the first place.

When you meet a girl over whose blog you pore occasionally, and whom you have contacted in the past, on a Tuesday, then follow-up a random reference from the related conversation with an email exchange on Friday, then find yourself coerced into attending an event with the full knowledge that there is a very significant chance that she will be there on Sunday, keeping in mind you have only met this girl once and spoken with her for the sum total of five minutes, you have built yourself a sturdy argument in favor of your being perceived as a stalker regardless of 1) the existence or lack of romantic/creepy intentions 2) actually having inserted the caveat "I am not a stalker" into the aforementioned five-minute conversation. Of course, if I wasn't a neurotic mess and didn't care how random and socially tangential people perceived me, this wouldn’t be an issue. But if I wasn't neurotic I would be out like $200 for all the haircuts I would have gone to over the past 6.5 years instead of doing it myself. So let's call it even.

The book, incidentally, is free to download. It's even free to be used in non-commercial derivative works, like the book-on-mp3 project above.

I'd like to talk for a moment about the Subway Smell®. No, not the odor of that venerable workhorse of the commuting classes celebrating its centennial this year, but the chain of sandwich franchises saturating this great country like turkey ham on a Cold Cut Trio (in Canada, replace the "turkey ham" in this simile with "luncheon loaf" - no, seriously). Before they had Atkins-friendly wraps, before Jared Fogel made it cool not to be dangerously obese, Subway had The Smell.

Perhaps you've noticed it: a fragrant yeasty bouquet born of flour, azodicarbonamide, and hard work. It is the aroma of bread baking in a 3x3x4 see-through electric "oven" (a process co-opted for the 1991 cult favorite "Breadlander II: The Leavening"). It permeates everyone and everything Subway.

It is this scent that has allowed Subway to corner the critical "18-34 blind male" demographic. Even those of us with average or perfect vision can rest assured that not even the thickest of pea-soup fogs will preclude us from tracking down the nearest establishment with the most primal of the senses, meager and vestigial though it may be, so long as one is to be found within a two-mile radius. Were we endowed with the powers of the canine, that radius would increase quadrillionfold (this is a well-known fact). So vital to its corporate identity is this fragrance that even upon introduction of six new bread varieties, Subway's commitment to its olfactory roots was unwavering.

Those who say we are a diverse federation of independent and discordant states should take heed of the supernatural consistency of the Subway Smell. Truly the great unifier, it exhibits no difference when wafting from the quaint confines of a New England whaling village storefront or across the food court of an Oklahoman shopping mall. One could craft a national anthem on its back.

So I say to you, fellow gourmands, do not fear the ubiquity of The Smell. It is our life-preserver in strange out-of-town waters, our St. Bernard to the rescue with a whiskey barrel in the Urals of uncertainty. We can, nay, must rally around it as frightened consumers, as carb-wary omnivores, as Americans. Change is the only constant no more.

First the Italians, now the Germans. As to who has the better fashion sense, I'm undecided. One chap today did have pants I could only describe as "striped clown-jeans", but if memory serves me right the Italian groups preference for lime green was truly disturbing.

DOWNHILLBATTLE.ORG (March 24th, 2004) -- Downhill Battle, the group behind the landmark "Grey Tuesday" online protest has created BannedMusic.org, a virtual record label for sample-based music that the major record labels try to suppress. BannedMusic.org, which launches today, features a new, one-click system for p2p downloads and "The Double Black Album," a concept album that combines Jay-Z and Metallica, which the RIAA has tried to shut down.

Of note is their "one-click" system which, if you don't already have it, installs BitTorrent and starts downloading right away. Sinnovative.

Last Saturday I caught a rawk show featuring On!Air!Library!.* O!A!L! is a trio, two of which are (hottt, female) identical twins. Many a young hipster lad swooned, dreams of pair-bonding with the Deheza sisters filling their craniums, exerting almost imperceptible pressure on the undersides of their ironic mop-tops.

Falling for musicians isn't new. Whom among us would fail to be smitten by the Joan Jetts, David Bowies, or Lyle Lovetts of the world when they take the stage and blanket us with their charisma and raw sex appeal? But watching the crowd's reaction this weekend, I noticed something different. As the swooners' eyes darted back and forth between the objects of their affection it dawned on me: if the odds of snagging a star can be set at one in a million, this crowd's chances were a considerably better one in 500k.

It is my opinion that the power of irrational hope keeps a good portion of these legions of fans coming back thinking they just might get a backstage pass, a firm nipple-clamping, or a wedding ring. And this power can be multiplied by having identical idols over which to fawn. So what does this amount to? Well, the standard equation for monetizing a musical act looks something like this:

(longing of single fan) x (number of fans) = cash money

But, using any number of identical siblings N, the desperation of a single fan can be multiplexed without losing strength:

N(longing of single fan) x (number of fans) = hella(cash money)^(take it to the bank)

Since N is invariably > 1, this approach will by definition produce more profit.

Other factors come into play as well. Certain demographics are more susceptible (emo guys a.k.a. wimpsters, teen-age girls) than others, so the refined equation might look more like this, where S is the susceptibility of the target group, or "neediness quotient":

SN(longing of single fan) x (number of fans) = ? cash money

One can optionally include the "crossover appeal" modulator C as follows, though we will ignore it for the purposes of this essay:

SN(longing of single fan) x C(number of fans) = ? cash money

It doesn't take Zubin Mehta to figure out that maximizing the number of matching stars to be worshiped, combined with the proper demographic targeting, equals serious pay dirt. I would therefore like to announce my intent to create a boy-band comprised of identical quintuplets which I will raise and train from birth. If that fails, I will clone the singer from Dashboard Confessional.

*This may be the first time I've concluded a sentence by punctuating it with an exclamation mark, a period, and an asterisk - in that order. It won't be the last!.*

Changes in household income in the East Village between 1989-1999

The number of households earning:

Less than $9,999 decreased by 32% between 1989 and 1999
$10,000 to $19,999 decreased by 24%
$20,000 to $29,999 decreased by 37%
$30,000 to $39,999 decreased by 19%
$40,000 to $49,999 increased by 18%
$50,000 to $74,999 increased by 76%
$75,000 to $99,999 increased by 130%
$100,000 to $124,999 increased by 364%
$125,000 to $149,999 increased by 480%
$150,000 or more increased by 613% between 1989 and 1999

Statistics taken from U.S. Census

East Village defined as census tracts containing area between 3rd Avenue and Bowery on the west, Avenue D on the east, 14th St on the north, and Houston St. on the south.

(from an article the subject of which you have heard before and will hear again)

Not bad for a neighborhood whose avenues A, B, C, and D used to be nicknamed Adventurous, Brave, Crazy, and Dead (after the state of those who chose to stroll them, the further east, the worse). I am puzzled by those who still speak of the area with trepidation.

In Downtown 81 (aka New York Beat Movie), Basquiat walks around these here streets, and it looks like bombed-out post-WWII Berlin. Now you can swing by Zum Schneider and drop $15 on a plate of Leberkaese (essentially spam and eggs - I dare you to try and recreate this meal at home and spend more than $4). I deplore how the hood's appeal piggybacks on vestigial notions. When it was actually dangerous it was seen as untouchable, when it became merely edgy people still saw it as dangerous, now that it's safe residents and non-residents alike cling to edgy. Edgy is the marketing porridge that Goldilocks would have chosen. Edgy's not quite mainstream, but edgy won't get you knifed when a heroin deal goes wrong either. Edgy though is ultimately just another transitory stepping-stone to bland, and while you can linger longer if you have a seedy past, you can only abate the inevitable so much. Don't get me wrong, I'm not casting normative judgments here with respect to this progression, and if I were, I can't say I'd side with dangerous over edgy, or even edgy over bland. I like the whole not-getting-mugged-on-my-way-back-from-work thing, for one. It's just that it's weird seeing Molly Ringwald dress up like Judd Nelson.

What's in your friendly neighborhood nuclear plant? It just might be RED RADIATION!

Few Americans realize that uranium once intended to destroy their civilization is now helping to keep it very much alive by powering televisions, microwaving dinners and chilling beer.

Uranium extracted from Russian nuclear warheads helps supply about 10 percent of U.S. electricity, according to USEC Inc. (USU.N: Quote, Profile, Research) , which has charge of the "Megatons to Megawatts" project that has helped Russia reap profits from previously loss-making nuclear disarmament.

The Bethesda, Maryland-based company purchases uranium taken from dismantled Russian nuclear warheads under a 1993 U.S.-Russian nonproliferation agreement.

What's wrong with good ol' fashioned AMERICAN uranium? Why give those godless secularists jobs that could benefit John or Jane Q. Public? Power companies: look for the "Enriched to reactor-grade in the USA" tag when shopping at your local depot!

You know, Rocky predicted this, um hmm, yessir he did. Right at the end of Rocky IV, after his glorious defeat of Ivan Drago, when he spouted off what amounts to nothing less than a MANIFESTO FOR EXPORTING THE AMERICAN WORKER:

I came here tonight and I didn't know what to expect. I seen a lot of people hating me and I didn't know what to feel about that so I guess I didn't like you much then neither. During this fight I've seen a lot of changing. The way yous felt about me and the way I felt about you. In here there were two guys killing each other, but I guess that's better than 20 million. What I'm trying to say is if I can change, and you can change, then we all can change!

Indeed - we've all seen the powerful change wreaked by globalization and laissez-faire capitalism. This implicit endorsement of Adam Smith's invisible hand leaves very little room for a struggling uranium miner laid off because the Russians have U-235 coming out of their red sickle-holes!

Dang... where was I going with this? Aside from the Rocky quote, it's not even that funny. I did come across some highly awesome attempts to tie-in Rocky IV with geopolitics while I was trying to find a transcription of that speech though. Enjoy this choice quote from the first (and please note that the Lake Placid winter Olympics actually occurred in 1980):

There are many great qualities about this movie. It entertains, it uplifts, it instructs, and it is enjoyed my different generations and by people that are not sports fans. The movie perpetuated the pride we felt after the U.S. victory over the U.S.S.R. in a hockey match during the 1984 Lake Placid Winter Olympics. It gave us pride in America when times were frightening and gave us hope that we could resolve our differences peaceably. To me it brought back the old idea of settling things with your fists and not your guns.

Two embarrassing memories which, for unknown reasons, happen to be the two upon which I am dwelling at the moment.

One: Winter, 1995. Having just undergone surgery to repair a broken toe and burdened with a cast running halfway up my shin (my medial cuneiform bone had snapped in half and the segment attached to my big toe had sheared off from the segment still clinging to the rest of my foot - it took two operations and an equal number of surgical screws [$75 each] to bring me back to tip-top shape. The incident permanently derailed my budding jai-alai career), I asked my teacher whether I would have to accompany the entire class on our annual physics day ski trip. He equivocated, but dropped several hints that it wouldn't be worth my time. Unable to read between the lines, I went along anyway. The day consisted of sitting in the resort cafeteria until my friends were finished with their "experiments" ("Hey kids, when you went up in the lift you acquired potential energy. When you skied down, you used it up. Now go and do it again!") and then being pelted with snowballs by said same friends after being falsely accused of slinging a nasty insult. When asked later why he had insisted I join this entirely useless endeavor, my teacher shook his head and replied that even though school policy prevented him from stating it outright, he had done everything short of using hand puppets to insinuate that I should stay home. I would have been spared the events of that day were it not for my daft inability to read social cues. Conclusion: humiliation on multiple levels.

Two: Summer, 1997. Two chums and myself accompany another friend to the graduation ceremony of his old high school in Frankfurt mere hours after a long trans-Atlantic journey. My minimal enthusiasm at having to attend was augmented when I learned that the guest speaker would be one Dr. Jane Goodall, acclaimed expert on human-primate relations and all things ape. Not wanting to miss what would likely be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to hear the good doctor speak, I sat up in my chair and attenuated with perked ears as she took the stage. Moments later, I was startled awake by the appreciative applause of the audience to watch Dr. Goodall shake some hands and take her seat, acutely aware, thanks not only to a heavy fog of disorientation but also the glares of reprobation from parents and faculty alike, that I had slept through the entire speech. Willkommen zur Verlegenheit-stadt. Years later, after losing touch, I would run into the friend who brought us there and, for some weird reason I can't explain, this memory would be the first thing that popped into my head.

The work that Putnam's losing is going right to the dealer's service shops, which are on distribution for all the computer codes. According to Putnam, that constitutes a monopoly and he thinks the federal government needs to get involved. Apparently, Putnam is getting his wish, because there are two bills coming up in front of Congress that address just this situation. One bill is sponsored by Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC), while the other has been introduced by Representative Joe Barton (R-TX). Both bills would require auto manufacturers to give all relevant data to the consumer when the vehicle is purchased. This will allow him or her to determine whether to get the car fixed at an independent shop or take it back to the dealer. While the bills do allow manufacturers to withhold information regarded as trade secrets, it specifies that the information that must be given to the owners include: "information necessary to integrate replacement equipment into the vehicle; and other information of any kind used to diagnose, service, repair , activate, certify, or install any motor vehicle equipment (including replacement equipment) in a motor vehicle." The Federal Trade Commission would be charged with enforcing the law.

I have created a scotch-tasting simulator. While it may not be the most accurate of enterprises, it's amusing on a nonsensical poetic level.

I'm thinking of combining it with something zesty (passages from the New Testament? Frank Zappa lyrics?) to heighten the effect. Suggestions welcome.

I, Robot: It's a thriller. No, wait, it's a film noir murder mystery. Or maybe a wacky buddy-cop flick. Oh, sorry, it's prophetic sci-fi. Err, actually more of a straight action thing. Slash comedy. I think.

Maybe it makes sense, this equivocation of genre. The book was a collection of short stories... why not try to cram them all, at least in spirit, into the movie?

I hate you, entertainment industry. You've actually made Will Smith's casting the least of my gripes.

Cimarrones, a NYC based company recently released, Tag and Scan, a mobile phone application (written in Java) that allows people to digitally tag physical locations with text and images, presumably with camera equipped phones.

Obviously the most exciting use of this technology is to enhance the "leave your friend a drink" gimmick that some bars offer. Now, instead of having to scan a chalkboard to see if you're the lucky recipient of some kind pal's alcoholic peer pressure, you can be automatically notified by your phone as you enter.

Socialite Sale Johnson has a house there overlooking two golf courses and a pond. "It’s a totally refreshing, regenerating kind of thing," she said. "It’s a recharging of your batteries." She said Palm Beach was a nice respite from Manhattan nightclubs—which are "filled with people from Long Island and New Jersey" on the weekends—and the new money of Miami’s South Beach. She’ll go to the latter "if there’s something special like with Jay-Z, because Jay-Z’s a friend of mine," she said, "but usually I just stay in Palm Beach."

Thank you Sale for proving that if there's one thing old money will always do better than any bridge n' tunnel-er or member of the noveaux riche, it's name-dropping.

Carl Zimmer has written a fantastically interesting article in this month's Discovery magazine about the neuroscience of morality, which touches upon some of what I studied in college (big ups PNP!). While the entire article is well-worth reading and pondering, one connection is especially interesting. The subject of Zimmer's article, Joshua Greene, relates what he considers to be the dichotomous modern schools of morality:

The puzzle of moral judgments grabbed Greene’s attention when he was a philosophy major at Harvard. Most modern theories of moral reasoning, he learned, were powerfully shaped by one of two great philsophers.: Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill. Kant believed that pure reason alone could lead us to moral truths. Based on his own pure reasoning, he declared that it was wrong to use someone for your own ends, and that it was right to act only according to principles that everyone can follow.

John Stuart Mill, by contrast, argued that the rules of right and wrong should, above all else, achieve the greatest good for the greatest number of people, even though particular individuals may be worse off as a result (an approach known as utilitarianism, based on the "utility" of a moral rule.) "Kant puts what’s right before what’s good," says Greene. "Mill puts what’s good before what’s right."

He then relates certain types of moral decisions to specific regions of the brain:

The more people Greene scanned, the clearer the pattern became: Impersonal decisions (like whether to throw a switch on a trolley) triggered many of the same parts of the brain as does non-moral questions (like whether you should take the train or the bus to work). Among the regions that become active was a patch on the surface of the brain near the temples. This region, known as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, is vital for logical thinking. Neuroscientists believe it helps keeps track of several pieces of information at once so that they can be compared. “We’re using our brains to make decisions about things that evolution hasn’t wired us up for,” Greene says.

I remember hearing anecdotally that many psychologists who studied Kant wondered if he might have had significant damage to the prefrontal cortex, resulting in his hyper-rational morality and a writing style that was eccentric to say the least (the prefrontal cortex, amongst other activities, modulates context and Kant tended to produce logorrheic sentences that didn't integrate well into cohesive passages). Alas, all the supporting text I can muster with Google at the moment is this, which still lends some credence:

Second only to the schizophrenics in the habitual confabulation of senseless, artful, memorable tapestries are those with prefrontal or amygdalar dysfunction. When portions of the amygdala or prefrontal lobe of the cortex are degraded, lesioned, or decoupled from the prefrontal lobe or amygdala (respectively), existence loses some of its subjective emotional reality. Crucially, the role of emotional consequence in planning is distorted, reduced, or eliminated. The capacity to reason and to use language can remain largely intact, but the intellectual products of such individuals reflect a distorted or absent emotional context. In fact, sociopathy - in which an individual is prone to the unfeeling infliction of cruelty - has essentially the same anatomy. Immanuel Kant had a prefrontal tumor.

So it's possible that one of the main pillars of modern moral philosophy was created as the result of a neuronal aberration (this article also reacquainted me with the adjective "neuronal", which I will re-add to my arsenal of linguistic esoteria) with fairly predictable results. An aberration just extreme enough to be groundbreaking, but still close enough to the median to resonate with the general populace.

CDMA2000 1xEV-DV provides integrated voice and simultaneous high-speed data on a single carrier and allows greater flexibility in managing the data and voice mix. It supports the most advanced high-speed applications and delivers improved user experience. Release D incorporates forward and reverse link technology enhancements to the physical layer design of Release C. New dedicated channels, the forward packet data channel (F-PDCH) and the reverse packet data channel (R-PDCH), were introduced to support high-speed packet transmissions of up to 3.091 Mbps in the forward and 1.8456 Mbps in the reverse link.

That upload speed is roughly equivalent to a cable/dsl modem, and the download speed about twice that. In only a few years we'll be enjoying true broadband on the go. Oh goddess of massive untethered bandwidth, I await thine efficient touch!

Take Bittorrent, the ultra-efficient method for transferring large files (i.e. media) and combine it with RSS, the preferred standard for subscription-based blog feeds, and you get an interesting new broadcast medium. So you awake each morning, saddle up at your computer, and find fresh bootleg MP3s, videos, and rights-free television episodes. Some very smart people are working to make this a reality. Check it, yo.

It goes without saying—since all national TV stations are government-controlled—that coverage of the presidential campaign is all Putin, all the time. The speech marking the official launch of Putin's campaign, a month before the election, was broadcast live on national television. That many of Russia's newspapers regularly publish boisterously anti-Kremlin opinions is irrelevant, since television is the only medium that matters for the vast majority of the country's 140 million people. Indeed, Reporters Without Borders lists Russia 148th in its 166-country ranking of press freedom, behind such guiding lights as Afghanistan (134) and Zimbabwe (141).

Slate is posting daily installments this week of a journal by Rosemary Quigley which chronicles the events just preceding, and then recovery from, her double-lung transplant. Quite gripping. It coincides strangely with the uneasy slumber I had last night.

The kind of mortal transience so rife in this journal never fails to shake me. We're beings built for the finite, and that's a good thing, I often tell myself in the rational halogen light of my office. Death gives us perspective. It allows cycles of renewal and variation. It provides rich heiresses with their only source of wealth. But we are also built to rage against it, for it just so happens that natural selection favors creatures with a strong survival instinct over those willing to kowtow early to the reaper, noble as their embrace of the inevitable might be (martyrdom gets you nowhere suckers! Didn't you read the bible?).

So we're left with that stunning gulf between our intellect and our instinct. Not to be Clashist, but one might reduce the debate to their 1982 hit: should I stay or should I go? Head votes in favor of the latter, heart, the former. As laughably futile as this deadlock might be (for in the end the choice is made for you, and the heart, as usual, gets shafted) it doesn't mean that nothing's at stake. Sanity has some benefits.

Some people bridge the gap with faith, that lovely (safety) blanket term. I don't have it. Well, that's not true, faith is a very ambiguous word. I have faith that the garbage man will come this Tuesday as he always has, and I have faith that America will one day tire of reality television, but I don't have capital-eff Faith, the kind of belief that allows you to set yourself on fire in protest or gives you the confidence to tell the real dauphin from an imposter (J D'A in the house!). Thanks for playing, turns out you're not capable of transcendent certainty, enjoy this lovely consolation prize of tense immutable dissonance. Which means once every couple of months, you won't be able to fall asleep because of anxiety attacks.

I always loathed the idea of panicking about the petty things: why the Jones' have a bigger car, what I'll wear to the debutant ball, how to explain the presence of four dead prostitutes and a bathtub half-full of sangria to my roommate. Now I envy it wholeheartedly, because, however far-fetched it may be, there's a slim avenue of recourse. You can always slash tires, put down the fellow debutants with passive-aggressive jibes, or buy your roommate's silence. How the hell am I supposed to conquer mortality?

And this isn't cool coffee-house angst either, that kind of tobacco-smooth existential malaise / adolescent-marketing cash-cow of philosophers and writers everywhere. This is the kind of sweaty, shivering, feels-like-you're-being-held-underwater primal freak-out that people alleviate with intensive drug regimens. Were it to occur more than two or three times a year, I'd also consider medicating into oblivion.

Is it related to diet? The sporadic dreams I had after tossing and turning for hours involved anxiety as well, though less grandiose (typical "showing up to a job interview stoned" stuff - the twentysomething gen-y equivalent of "showing up to school naked") and I can't tell whether the night's collective fear came from a central source (high sodium?) or if the dreams were ripples of the earlier wiggage.

My senior year in high school my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer.* She would spend hours lying in bed, frail, nauseated. The one time I mentioned it casually to a group of acquaintances, everyone got uncomfortably quiet (I learned not to do that again, even in answer to "She's sick? With what?"). In retrospect, it was functionally similar to having a non-violent but serious alcoholic for a mother, minus the social stigma and Faulkerian overtones of decay**.

I tried not to cry in front of her, though once, just hours after her mastectomy, she tried to say something and the voice that came out was so weak and unrecognizable I failed utterly. But those emotions were different. There was no lack of fear, but it wasn't for my own well-being. For some reason, despite the awful range and severity of temperaments, I never considered and dealt with the fairly obvious implication staring me in the face. There was a surreal disconnect between what my mother was going through and what might happen to me. Maybe that's natural for a 17 year-old.

Likewise when my grandfather had a stroke four years ago I didn't think about it. I flew back home and commiserated with my family. When I visit him now, as he lies in a permanent state of near-death, I experience that same surreal disconnect I felt with my mother. I don't exactly sleep like a baby afterwards, but it's not the same primal fight-or-flight terror either. Maybe there's not much room in grief to worry about your own unavoidable fate.

So it's when I have the least to worry about that it seems to hit me. When I'm in good health, when things are relatively tragedy-free, that's when I feel it cresting like a wave. It's almost always at night, lying in bed like my mother with cancer and my grandfather without motor control. That's when it takes discipline to keep my mind at ease. Enough concentration in fact that as I drift off to sleep my guard drops and... bang. There I am back awake, trying irrationally to comprehend non-existence, things suddenly not seeming surreal or disconnected in the slightest.

I have to wonder about Rosemary Quigley. Does she have the same problem? Does she even have time in the midst of the grief? Does dealing with death as a practical day-to-day matter dull its fangs a little? Is the only way I can get rid of the anxiety to contract a terminal illness? And if you eliminate the fear, what kind of collateral damage do you inflict?

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross' five psychological stages of dying (from On Death and Dying) are commonly quoted, despite rather fierce academic debate over their validity. The final "stage" is acceptance. It sounds abysmal.

If a patient has had enough time, and has been given some help in working through the previously described stages, he will reach a stage during which he is neither depressed nor angry about his “fate.” He will have been able to express his previous feelings, his envy for the living and the healthy, his anger at those who do not have to face their end so soon. He will have mourned the impending loss of so many meaningful people and places and he will contemplate his coming with a certain degrees of quiet expectation. ... He will also have a need to doze off to sleep often and in brief intervals, which is different from the need to sleep during the times of depression. this is not a sleep of avoidance or a period of rest to get relief from pain, discomfort, or itching. It is a gradually increasing need to extend the hours of sleep very similar to that of the newborn child but in reverse order. .... Acceptance should not be mistaken for a happy stage. It is almost void of feelings.

On an entirely different note, if you're having a celebration of any sort, consider inviting me. I'm a blast at parties! Guaranteed not to bring anyone down!

*This is always how people introduce subjects like this. I find it almost offensively blunt and calculating, like you're trying to seem frank about things but your real objective is to blindside the reader. So... apologies. She's fine now, going on seven years.

**My mom had cancer for chrisakes, I get to make one poor-taste/pretensions analogy.

The wireless industry has reached that stage where intellectual property issues threaten to overshadow real technology debates. Too many bright start-ups, many facing shake-out and failing to gain significant market presence through effective sales, are turning instead to their patent portfolios and the 'Qualcomm model' of deriving revenue from other companies' licensing fees.

Actions range from the ludicrous - T-Mobile seeking to patent the word 'hotspot' - to the sweeping: Nomadix patenting the splash page mechanism that WISPs employ to redirect users to a log-in page. Last week, Calypso joined the crowd, seeking to enforce a newly-granted patent surrounding Wi-Fi/cellular roaming.

The extension of the reach and duration of IP laws, as has been underway for some time now, implicitly condones this behavior. I don't like it one bit.

I've started a page on the wiki called Wikitales for group story-writing. Please alter the existing story as you wish, or create your own. There's no intent here; be as silly/snarky/offensive/serious/sultry as you want to be.

Thwarting rich-media ads can be more technically difficult than killing pop-ups, given that video and Flash animation are commonly part of a site's regular content. But software developers say adoption of rich-media-blocking tools is on the rise. Their growth coincides with a jump in rich-media promotions.

There's an admirable but flawed rationale here: that thwarting the tools on which advertisers depend at the moment will stop them from advertising in the future. Marketers and their ad-agency henchmen never stop. They never stop looking for ways to brand their products, snare eyeballs, and convert potential customers to actual ones. They never sleep. They're like that little girl in The Ring, but with better hair.

When the ad executives starting freaking out over Tivo's ability to let viewers fast-forward through commercial breaks, the network folks came right back and said it wasn't a problem, that they'd counterbalance it with increased product placement and creative insertion of advertisers' messages into the plots of their shows. Much as I detest obnoxious flash animations, that's a far worse alternative. I don't want it to have to happen to the sites I read.

Contrary to the sarcasm of this entry's title, I wish more sites would follow suit. Many of The Big Guys (NYTimes, BBC) have been doing this for a while, and The Little Guys (blogs) invented it, so it's nice to see more Niche Players getting into it. Rival Salon did beat them to the punch though...

I watched the Directors Label Michel Gondry DVD the other night. There's a section where he explains how he saw the world when he was young: as a giant ball of cement, with a thin layer of earth laying upon it in places. This startled me, as I myself held the same view at one time. Growing up, grass and vegetation sat in front yards or street medians, always surrounded and elevated by a curb. The natural state of the world's surface was asphalt, and only on occasion were these strange green things plopped on top. Plants were placed in pots, I reasoned, were not fields of trees also in planters, albeit much larger ones?

Of course, I just yesterday realized it was the other way around, whereas Gondry went on to become a famous director.

The persistent inflow of Hispanic immigrants threatens to divide the United States into two peoples, two cultures, and two languages. Unlike past immigrant groups, Mexicans and other Latinos have not assimilated into mainstream U.S. culture, forming instead their own political and linguistic enclaves—from Los Angeles to Miami—and rejecting the Anglo-Protestant values that built the American dream. The United States ignores this challenge at its peril.

Oh god. Reading this made me very depressed, not because I agree with most of what Huntington says (or even 10% of it), but because it's another reminder of racial and cultural conflict to come. Regardless of how one feels about his specific points (some valid, many specious) or agenda (alarmingly xenophobic), the publication of an piece like this is a telling sign of friction. In an age of increasing media bloodlust, I can only imagine the frequency with which we'll start seeing, if we haven't already, articles like this, or analogous books, television specials, what have you. By the time my children (I swear I'll get this breeding thing down one day) are my age, they could very well have to contend with rabidly nationalistic political campaigns, even more ugly race schisms, and brand-new societal uber-stigmas. For the passion of the christ, can't we have a couple decades without this kind of tension? Is this just the quid pro quo for any nation which has a tradition of predicating socio-economic progress on demographic dynamism?

An ultra-pessimistic stance would state that the only way to obviate this is to eliminate racial distinctions entirely through intermarriage: mate ourselves into a nice caramel color. For ages feudal kingdoms married off members of the ruling family to foreign states in the interest of improving diplomatic relations, part of the logic being that warring with family was a measure of last resort. Will we at some point be forced to, in the words of Peaches, "F-ck the pain [of strained and odious race-relations] away"?

Volvo has unveiled a car designed entirely by women, rife with nifty improvements.

The car's bonnet is another fun feature.

The whole front of the car is moulded in one piece which can be removed only by a Volvo mechanic.

"Honestly, the only time I open the bonnet on my car is when I want to fill up washer fluid," said Tatiana Butovitsch Temm.

I wouldn't call that feature "fun" so much as "insidious". Maybe paying attention to all the IP developments whirling around the internet has warped me into an indelible cynic, but what this says to me is:

We, Volvo, own this car. And not just the design and manufacturing process - we actually have a limited claim on the very car you drive. Yes, you, the owner, own some of what you purchased in a "physical property" sense, but the concepts of the car - its workings, its maintenance, its "intellectual property" - are ours. We retain the rights thereof in perpetuity, and if you try to fix it yourself you're infringing. Now come over here and sign this expensive ten-year service agreement, jerkface.

The fact that it's included in what's otherwise a brilliant design from a brilliant project irks me all the more.

A counter-argument to this is that automotive technology has grown so complex and specific that only mechanics specializing in one particular line of cars can hope to achieve the required level of proficiency. And if that's the case, why not bring technicians who deal solely with Volvos into the company proper? Surely then they would be more able to keep up with the latest advances and newest models hitting the streets.

I don't buy that, for the simple reason that one can still be a good Volvo mechanic and Saab mechanic at the same time. Countless other professions have experienced similar fragmentation due to specialization without the same results. Imagine if you could only have your hip replaced by a manufacturer-employed surgeon, or your plumbing repaired by same people who produced the pipes. Even Apple, much as they try to discourage it economically, doesn't technologically prohibit independent shops from services their wares.

Perhaps this isn't their intent at all. Maybe "Volvo mechanic" simply means anyone acquiring a basic license from Volvo (in addition to tens of thousands of dollars worth of necessary equipment) and every service station already fixing these Scandinavian pillars of safety will continue to do so without batting an eye. I still think that preventing a customer from self-maintenance is wicked. Modern cars of all sorts have dazzling amounts of complex machinery and circuitry, leaving little hope for the automotive amateur. Chances are, if you purchased your car after 1990, you won't be going under the hood for anything other than checking the oil and refilling windshield-washer fluid (tasks which the designers of the aforementioned Volvo model made sure to accommodate through the inclusion of additional external ports - a very good idea from which other designers should learn), but it is still a dangerous psychological shift to prevent anything beyond the basic. The removal of options transforms your car into sealed black box.

One could draw an analogy to medicine, saying that while the average person is capable of dealing with stuffy noses, abrasions, and acid reflux, it would be foolhardy to have your brother-in-law come over and give you a hand with your laparoscopic appendectomy (I know this from experience). The major work is best left to the trained specialists. Same with car repair.

Critical difference: the functioning of your internal organs is not the intellectual property of Ford. To protect what it sees as a valuable technological advantage, Volvo has disallowed all procedures, even diagnostic ones, that are more than skin-deep.

Volvo deserves to be rewarded for its innovations. That's why we have patents. But restricting exploration and information limits innovation. Some great discoveries have come from specialists in one field recognizing parallels in other fields where they were mere dilettantes. A cross-disciplinary exchange of ideas, even one so astructural as letting any curious party look under your hood, has real societal benefit. And if all that happens is that some talented engineer somewhere sees a design possibility in Volvo's carburetor and improves upon it, Volvo gets kickbacks from their patent rights. Wherefore this incentive to stifle innovation?

I see this mentality running rampant today, from DRM software to overzealous patent lawyers, all in the name of property rights and protecting competition. But ideas are not real estate, bits are not atoms, and a direct legal analogy can't be drawn. Now I'm no utopian IP communist. I believe in the public domain, but I believe in intellectual property controls. I also believe the two are not mutually exclusive. We used to have a reasonably fair balance. Now it's tipping in favor of one side.

I'm reacting disproportionately to one little sentence from one little article, but I'm not over-reacting to this issue on the whole. This Volvo nonsense is just another indication that we're headed down a dangerous road.

Today marked the first heavy use of many new e-voting machines. The verdict - everthing is fine: E-voting smooth on Super Tuesday [Cnet]

Riders of the Underground will soon enjoy full wireless coverage while deep under London. Such amenities have been in place for quite some time in Japan and South Korea, and I'm surprised it's taken this long to wire the tube.

Of course, here in the states we don't worry about covering dead zones like this. Not that we couldn't do it - it's just another example of differing societal definitions of acceptable service and what it means to have a mobile phone. While the majority of Americans have a device capable of persistent service, only the younger generations use it as such.

The rewards of a ubiquitous signal are non-trivial. Consider the safety and security benefits during emergency situations.

Yesterday's Sheen/Estevez movie marathon went off without a hitch, and segued nicely into the Oscars.

In other news, I've upgraded to spring morland. Spring morland should show no immediate external changes from winter morland, but has some back-end enhancements like peppier temperament and patented quicksteppa walking technology. I was going to install the "young man's fancy turning to love" module, but I didn't have the required hardware.

Ouch. Apparently with this version the "self-deprecation" feature hasn't yet been, well, deprecated. I'll have to write a nasty letter to the developers.