Independence Day
Posted by Daniel Lyons Thu, 05 Jul 2007 03:28:00 GMT
This year I took the opportunity to read the Declaration of Independence with the family. There’s enough fireworks in that to satisfy me.
Politics Politics Politics!
Posted by Daniel Lyons Fri, 15 Jun 2007 05:04:00 GMT
Apparently, the only thing lower than Bush’s approval rating is Congress’s approval rating.
My General Take on Israel
Posted by Daniel Lyons Fri, 15 Dec 2006 09:16:50 GMT
Is pretty aptly summed up by this cartoon.
Four Times Annoyed
Posted by Daniel Lyons Sun, 26 Nov 2006 07:59:24 GMT
This last week I got some interesting bad news about my eyes: apparently my pupils over-dilate in darkness or semi-darkness. I have my first old-man disorder at the ripe old age of 25. On long drives at night I will have to turn the dome light on to prevent my eyes from perceiving every light source as a giant luminous splotch with an echo above or below it. This is also why I needed new glasses recently, but why I didn’t notice until I left my job and started working nights. There is no cure for this problem except time; as I age my pupil dilation should get less responsive, which will counteract this problem.
I just finished reading Demian by Hesse. A great book, except for all the cult stuff near the end. There are a number of passages that I really identified with, but the strongest was this:
“Sometimes when I ran through the streets in the evening, unable to return before midnight because I was so restless, I felt that now at this very moment I would have to meet my beloved—as she walked past me at the next street corner, called to me from the nearest window. At other times all of this seemed unbearably painful…”
I was very annoyed that I could identify so thoroughly with a character who goes on to basically endorse Anton LaVey satanism. Tsk-tsk.
I was thinking today about programming in Erlang and how much I enjoy it, but at the same time, though I enjoy my big functional languages, not one of them has a decent Mac library; most of them don’t even have decent Unix GUI libraries or web frameworks. Erlang at least has a promising-sounding web framework but I am tired of web programming for the moment. It’s so very occupational.
I became annoyed thinking about OCaml and how much I had liked it. OCaml is basically the marijuana of functional languages—you start there, and then you get into the heavy stuff like Lisp, Haskell and Erlang. Or else you remain trapped with OCaml, perhaps consuming liters of the Russian vodka of languages—C++—at the same time. “Well, it could be worse.” Yes.
I am disappointed that nobody has anything to say about my quicksort post. I suspect that one is for the ages, and in a couple years, someone will be quite glad it’s there. Nobody pointed out that I am doubling the constant factor in my partition, or that I should use median-of-three for better performance against pre-sorted lists. I expected Lance to show up and demand some merge sorts, which I haven’t coded since my second year of CS.
For myself in response to the Brick Science article, I wrote a small linked list library in C. It turned out to be about 55 lines of code, and it took me about 15 minutes to write, which reassured me after reading that the author expects 155 lines/hour. I would not expect anyone to achieve that in a reasonable language, but with C you can really fluff things up with meaningless brackets and wasted type declarations. Even Lisp, which is the most text-liberal functional language, is a factor of two or three improvement over C. I remember days at Clearwired where I was productively producing about 10 or 20 lines of Python an hour. Of course, HTML is a bit cheaper.
I have become a real dick about movies. Elitism is the opiate of the Dan, but I have tried to be conservative about which things I am an elitist about: heavy metal, programming languages and religion being the primary fields, but also somewhat about politics. I have more-or-less ejected politics as a synonym for theft, graft, stupidity, and waste, no matter the incarnation, so into the open slot I have tossed movies. My brother hasn’t helped, we have been alternating classics I have loved for some time with known-good classics of his interest, and both learning a lot. Plus now we have a lot of pretentious hatred for new movies. It’s a perfect fit with the rest of our hatred set (music and television).
I am now going to attempt to read another classic book, since I usually read about four non-programming books a year and Demian is number one for 2006.
New Voting System!
Posted by Daniel Lyons Thu, 09 Nov 2006 05:58:32 GMT
It’s called rock voting! You get the two scumbags up there and then all the voters come and throw rocks at them!
Whaddaya think!
North Korea!
Posted by Daniel Lyons Fri, 13 Oct 2006 05:42:55 GMT
Now the morons on Fox are talking about potential nuclear war with North Korea.
Of course the necessary condition for having a nuclear war is, well, nuclear weapons. And the jury’s out on whether or not they have them.
I would find this so much more dramatic and engaging if they hadn’t been frothing at the mouth about World War Three a couple months ago during that protracted Israel/Lebanon skirmish.
Foley
Posted by Daniel Lyons Wed, 04 Oct 2006 03:42:14 GMT
I generally don’t derive much satisfaction from picking on easy targets like individual politicians, but the Foley thing is just irresistable. Here are the latest sound bytes, culled from this brilliant AP article:
“[Foley’s lawyer] also said Foley was under the influence of alcohol when he sent the e-mails and instant messages.” Including the one that Foley postponed a vote for? What defense is that? “Sorry officer, I was too drunk at work to have intentionally had cybersex.” Not guilty by reason of inebriation? Does that really work? That’d be a great defense for drunk driving. “Sorry officer, I was too drunk to remember that you aren’t supposed to drive drunk.”
“[Foley’s lawyer] said Foley was molested between ages 13 and 15. He declined to identify the clergyman or the church, but Foley is Roman Catholic.” Because, as we all know, all sexual abuse has its roots in the Catholic church. This brings to mind Heather Wilson, who’s campaign position seems to be “I vote for whatever Bush votes for, unless it has to do with ethics, in which case I do whatever the godless Liberals want.” She must strike the religious right as the worst of both worlds. It looks like both parties have realized the can just take a crap on the religious right whenever they want to, because they’ll vote for the Republicans who despise them and no amount of capitulation will make them vote Democrat. I sure am glad I don’t belong to a minority that always votes for the same party and gets only symbolic appeasement (if not outright detestation) in return! <cough>
Check out this gem of a sentence:
“Mark Foley wants you to know he is a gay man,” [Foley’s lawyer] told reporters as Republicans struggled with fallout from Foley’s resignation.
I bet they struggled! Half of them have said that homosexuality is a mortal sin. To watch them pull a muscle bending over backwards to pretend that they actually haven’t been saying what they’ve been saying for the past decade to save their pedophile friend’s ass is really quite charming. I’m sure if you tried you could dig up unsavory sound bytes from all of the involved politicans equating homosexuality and pedophilia, but that would only prove the disgusting depths of what we already know.
Politics these days is like a televised game of Twister: spin the dial and find out what uncomfortable position you have to get in to keep your job for another six months! The hypocrisy here is killing me! It’s like these guys only get into power so they can have their dirty little secrets explode their careers like nuclear warheads filled with confetti and glass shards, abolishing the lives and careers of pathetic glad-handers who shared nothing with them but a meal or a photo opportunity. The only thing that will come close to the ridiculous insanity of Foley and his mindbogglingly irresponsible behavior will be the media orgy over it, with straight-faced reporters gagging, crooning and drooling at every lascivious innuendo from anyone who ever knew the moron in any capacity, just like a strung-out hooker in an abandoned warehouse full of bubbling heroin beakers. The only word that comes to mind is “unbecoming.”
So I have for several weeks been thinking, how are the Democrats going to manage to recapture any seats without a platform? Today I had an epiphany that should have been obvious: they don’t need a platform! Look at the Republicans: where’s their platform? All it takes is charisma, which in American politics seems to mean merely belonging to the party least recently disgraced. And by disgrace, I mean sexual scandals, not actual voting records or achievements in office, because our government is so vast it’s simply not possible for a good or bad president to have any tangible effect on my life. The Republican offer this election is going to be “You’ll screw up the war!” The Democratic counter-offer will be “We can’t screw it up worse than you screw-ups have, and besides, you have a guy who had sex with a boy-child!” Smells like Democratic victory to me, folks!
Wow! It’s so fucked up, it’s like a little work of art! It’s hard to even imagine how it could ever become so fucked up!
I guess this is evolution, folks!
On Clinton
Posted by Daniel Lyons Tue, 26 Sep 2006 02:58:02 GMT
Never mistake kindness for weakness.
Never mistake rudeness for strength.
Religion of Peace
Posted by Daniel Lyons Thu, 21 Sep 2006 04:07:25 GMT
A friend of mine had this to say about Islam: “The religion of peace has spent its capital. People aren’t buying it anymore.”
Today I heard a commentator say that basically what the Pope had said was that Christianity and Islam cannot connect theologically, because Christianity is assumes Hellenistic principles of reason and the reasonableness of G-d, and Islam basically rejects them altogether. Therefore, the Pope said, we should instead engage in a cultural dialogue, because that would be possible.
At about the same time as this all began I was wondering to myself if I would ever meet any of these reasonable Muslims that I assume exist. (If anyone who reads my blog is a Muslim, please email me or comment, because I’d like to hear from you.) I read Mustafa Akyol’s blog, but apart from him I don’t think I can point to a reasonable Muslim voice I hear from on a regular basis, and he doesn’t post that often.
The Pope’s take, however, meshes pretty well with my perception of the problem. American Muslims, by and large, are not rioting in the streets demanding an apology. I’m going to go out on a limb here and suppose that they support their foreign brethren about the same way American Jews feel about Israelis: their government makes choices that are sometimes hard to defend, and I have no interest in living there, but nonetheless I feel a connection to them and I support them. The reason is that we all are essentially Western. The problem we’re having is a cultural problem between West and, well, Arabia. This doesn’t make it a religious war between Christians (and Jews) versus Muslims, because most American and Turkish Muslims don’t tolerate the kind of behavior that’s common across the Middle East: honor killings, gratuitous martyrdom, and so forth.
So, my friend observed that because Islam glorifies G-d’s omnipotence over his reason, and the world at large basically glorifies power, the world is basically moving in the direction of Islam, to its detriment. My response was that, well, there are reforms taking place in Islam, particularly in Turkey, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a sort of unspoken reform going on here in America. He wanted to know about the religious foundation of these reforms. I say, that’s not our problem. Look at America. The philosophical foundations of the Constitution were eroded perhaps over a hundred years ago and yet our country marches on. I don’t care whether the foundation of another religion’s reform is sound, I only have to concern myself with mine.
I think ultimately we both agree with the Pope: this is a cultural problem. Indeed, going back to the Qur’an we find statements about the treatment of women and religious equality which are quite admirable and definitely not implemented in most Muslim nations. But they are implemented here and there are Muslims here who are happy (as much as any American is) with America. So cultural acclimation seems to be possible.
I think if we could just restrain the excesses of our culture a little bit, this problem would be greatly diminished.
Lickable Politics
Posted by Daniel Lyons Thu, 14 Sep 2006 01:12:30 GMT
Since most people vote based on color, by which I mean “red” or “blue,” I hereby suggest the creation of a newer, more lickable political party: the light blue party. Light blue is about appearances, not complex subtle things like voting records, results and “philosophy.” Light blue is about being cocksure and playful, arrogant even, with no forehead scratching, political conventions conventions or pandering to the minorities. Hell: light blue isn’t even about pandering to majorities. Light blue is about being a man, not a stuffy word-counting prissy with a million in the bank, a cheap suit and a speechwriter.
Light blue says: it’s your life, screw it up any way you want. Just be stylish while you do it.
Light blue says: the flag is so Web-1.0 it hurts.
Light blue says: why vote when you can stay at home and see the same results?
Light blue says: if you’re no good at your job, you can always run for office.
So tell your friends there’s a new party in town, and it’s the Ajaxiest party yet.
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