Scrappy Blog

Hmmm… apparently I have enough time to read and post to this thing approximately once a week. Oh, well.

Events: Smallest nephew broke his leg. Mother-in-sin developed spot in other breast. Finally cleaned out part of garage (which has been loaded with crap since the hurricane last fall). Saw garage storage stuff I liked at Target – and wasn’t able to find it cheaper on the web. What are the chances of that? Found a book I like for learning Java – assumes I know basic programming logic but doesn’t assume I already know C++. Ate brunch today at a place whose chef seems to think mayo is a Good Thing and found only one thing on the menu that looked edible. That’s about it…. Overworked.

Life goes on.

Watching superbowl.  Two teams, one blue, the other black/yellow.

Can’t help thinking it’s a Ravenclaw vs. Hufflepuff match…

More inspiration from , who has written a story that is a series of letters from Lucius Malfoy to Draco, while Lucius is in prison.  They read like Machiavelli (with a dash of Heinlein thrown in), and have led to a philosophical thought (I’ll just type this and then go get some advil).

I struggle with understanding the boundary between things I choose to believe because of my personal ethics versus those I’m willing to say everyone should follow.  The former should be kept as my own code of behavior, and not enforced on anyone else.  The latter, I’m willing to see laws and policing to compel others to follow them.

Examples?  Well, several of my friends are vegetarian (Hi, !) and I respect their choice but wouldn’t want it enforced on me.  I believe you should take care of your body, so I would not choose to smoke.  But I’m opposed to making smoking (of anything, really) illegal.  I believe that harming another person solely because of that person’s race or religion is wrong, and that belief is sufficiently global that I think going to war against Hitler was the right thing to do.

There’s a whole other range of things in there where I believe they’re right, but note they’re also sufficiently practical that even ethically defunct people may find value in doing them.  Makes me suspect most ethics are, at their core, pragmatic rules of thumb.  Shiv gives us an example in her story: 

If you can do someone a favour at little cost to yourself, then it should be done. Later, they may return the favour, in which case you have gained an ally. If they do not return the favour then you have discovered something whose value exceeds the cost of learning it – they are not to be trusted. It is better to learn this over a trifle, than when your life or your liberty is at stake.

Now, my ethic tells me the first line should be the truth, without having to be justified.  But, the following lines make a valuable point and could convince someone far less kind than I that gratuitous kindnesses are a Good Thing. 

The point of all this is that I’m coming to realize that the words of people I dislike can be a good measuring stick for what is personal ethic, and what should be universal.  Machievelli appears to have been an amoral putz, but he was an amoral putz who knew how to get by in the world.  If something he said also fits with my gut instinct about how people should behave, that’s probably one of those universals I was talking about…

Um… I’m unhappy with this because I think it’s missing a lot of subtle shadings of thought here, but I think the basic core is there.  I’ll go take that painkiller now…

comments on the controversy over the Danish paper publishing cartoons of Muhommed, which gets me thinking about the influence of free press, and the role of the internet.

The thing is, if no one had made a fuss, the audience reading a Danish newspaper would be rather small.  Because of the protests, the article and cartoons have been reproduced all over the world, and everyone’s been notified there’s something to look at.  There’s even a Wikipedia entry about it.

Putting it on the web pretty much guarantees the pictures can’t be suppressed at this point.  There’s always someone who will keep a cached copy and make it available in the name of freedom of the press – it’s really hard to expurgate stuff from the web, as the intellectual property lawyers have discovered.

China’s discovering the same thing with the censored search engines.  Google (and Yahoo, and MSN, and everyone else, but Google got all the sh*t for it) created censored search engines for the Chinese gov’t in which images and sites showing China in a bad light were screened or pushed to the back of the search findings.  Unfortunately, the Chinese govt’s censoring sites are so ineptly designed that I understand it’s actually easier to access Google.com than it is to access the Chinese Version in some of the big cities in China.

Because really, the internet’s pretty huge and impossible to control.  If the US gov’t hasn’t made any progress with their efforts to control things like child pornography on the web, how does China think they’ll keep subtly seditious material under control?

The alternative would be to try to block web access altogether.  But it’s pretty much impossible to be productive in today’s world of business and science without the web, so blocking the web is volunteering to be a third-world, backwards nation.

Historically, controlling the press has been an integral part of the recipe for maintaining tight control on a population.  The internet makes that much more difficult to do.  Will this change the face of global politics (slowly) over time?

I have a new scanner, which is keeping me quite amused.

Am working on compressing a stack of instruction manuals into a single neat CD of PDF files. Nice theory, hmm? We’ll see if I really finish the project, but just the half-dozen I scanned so far has made a nice dent in the huge muddled pile o’ crap that was my instructions “file”.

And of course it’s a nice excuse to sit around and surf the web in five-second intervals as each page scans…

So I heard that someone’s published a version of Pride and Prejudice – from Darcy’s point of view.  Which could be interesting, I suppose, but supposedly the thing is a series of three books (or four, I’ve forgotten, but at least three…). 

Now, how on earth could there be three books worth of story there?  Unless there’s pages of angsty internal dialog or something.

Maybe I’ll wait for someone else to read it and see if it’s recommended before I consider reading it.

Hmmm… my NY resolution was to eat more salad specifically and to eat more salad in general.  The problem is,

Now I’m Hungry All The Time.

OK, not literally all the time.  There’s a space of a couple of hours after a meal when I’m not hungry.  Or an hour.  Or thirty minutes, at least.  But I had lunch with my students at Wiess today, ate a huge salad, a bunch of raw fingerfood (tomatos, carrots, cucumber slices), and a bunch of grilled chicken that probably amounted to 4 or 5 ounces, and an orange.  It’s 2 PM and I’m hungry again.  Dinner won’t be until 9-ish as I’m in late clinic tonight.  Sigh.

Oh, well, at least I make a point of stashing animal crackers and peanut butter in my desk.  Dip their little heads in the extra-crunchy, then chomp them right off.  Such a noble end for the little beasties.

Hmmm… am realizing that the times when I’m most struck by amusing thoughts to post on my LJ are times when I’m not near a computer. Hard to write about life when you’re living it.

So will see if I can remember some of those ideas and start some threads.

Mom gave me a sweatshirt for Christmas, says “for a balanced life, you need a cat who ignores you”.

So I put on my sweatshirt this afternoon and ever since, the cat has clung to me, snuggling in my lap and doing her best to pay as much attention to me as possible.

What – she doesn’t want me to have a balanced life?

I am ridiculously pleased with various simple technologies that make it easier to do the mundane everyday stuff.  Like kitchen implements, which I’m helplessly addicted to despite the fact that I rarely cook.

So I ordered a couple of items for drying clothes that aren’t supposed to go in the dryer.  For too long I’ve been mucking around with trying to hand one item at a time over the only towel rack that drips directly into the tub; wait for it to stop dripping, then shift it to some other rack and hang another one…

Ordered two items:  one, a frame you can lay sweaters flat on to dry (here), which hangs over the shower curtain rod.  The other, a rack that braces itself so it’ll sit over the tub without falling (here).  Neither cost a ton of money, and both work just fine.  Now I can just wash all the sweaters at once, hang them, and get on with life…

Sometime you have to acknowledge the trivial pleasures in life, ’cause there’s a lot more of those than the large-scale ones…