January 31, 2000

The spot is a narrative that brings to life the expression "like herding cats," often used in technology circles to describe the difficulty of managing the seemingly unmanageable. The tale of brave men and women moving thousands of house cats across the Great Plains demonstrates the challenge EDS meets in bringing diverging ideas, information, and technology together to improve performance for the company's business and government clients around the world.

iHate:
Study finds computer rage growing in UK:

Almost a third of people had physically attacked a computer, 67% experienced frustration, exasperation and anger and more than 70% swore at their machines.

eNuff:
I don't know about you people, but if I hear the phrase "dot com" one more time, I think I'm gonna have to kill something.

January 29, 2000

January 23, 2000

If this type of experiment works, I can foresee researchers learning to send antidepressant stimulation or even contraception or vaccines in a similar manner. We have the potential to alter the whole face of medicine, to abandon the concept of feeding people chemical treatments and cures and instead achieve the desired results electronically. Cyberdrugs and cybernarcotics could very well cure cancer, relieve clinical depression, or perhaps even be programmed as a little pick-me-up on a particularly bad day.

More evidence of water oceans keeps the hopes of exobiologists alive. Liquid water and volcanic activity make Europa a possible birth place of primitive, extremeophilic (extreme environment loving) life. Life like that found around deep sea vents on Earth which lives beyond the penetration of sunlight and thrives on upwelling chemical nutrients from the planet's interior.

January 19, 2000

January 17, 2000

January 14, 2000

Now for the first time it is possible to have genetically identical monkeys...

... you feel like
a writer facing a blank page,
and the trees may be full of rifles,
and the whole reason for crossing
the field escapes you now that
you have reached its edge,
and the rumor of a castle
on a high hill in the distance
is almost certain to turn out false.

Gerald Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh both attended art school at Kent State University at the outset of the 1970s. With friend Bob Lewis, who joined an early version of Devo and later became their manager, the theory of de-evolution was developed with the aid of a book entitled The Beginning Was the End: Knowledge Can Be Eaten,which held that mankind had evolved from mutant, brain-eating apes who are currently going insane. The theory was adapted to fit a view of American society as a rigid, dichotomized instrument of repression which ensured that its members behaved like clones, marching through life with mechanical, assembly-line precision and no tolerance for ambiguity. The whole concept was treated as an elaborate joke until Casale witnessed the infamous National Guard killings of student protestors at the university; suddenly there seemed to be a legitimate point to be made. ... Rolling Stonecalled the group fascists. But such criticism missed the point -- Devo dramatized conformity, emotional repression, and dehumanization in order to attack them, not to pay tribute to them.

"The band devolved from a long line of brain-eating apes, some of which settled in N.E. Ohio around Akron where members of Devo eventually appeared years after the A-Bomb ended World War II. By the process of natural selection they met and shared the habits of making electronic noise, watching T.V. and watching everybody else. They called what they saw around them De-Evolution and called their music Devo. It made the sound of things falling apart. Spuds yelled and threw things like beer bottles at Devo when they played. But one day in 1977 the Spuds cheered and threw fits because Spudboys in the cities realized that "We're all Devo!"

My impression was, if you wanna blow something up, hey, I'll drive, but please, no more meetings!

1. Be like your ancestors or be different. It doesn't matter.
2. Lay a million eggs or give birth to one.
3. Wear gaudy colors or avoid display. It's all the same.
4. The fittest shall survive yet the unfit may live.
5. We must repeat.

Russia has revised its defence doctrine to make it easier to press the nuclear button in an international crisis, while unequivocally declaring the west a hostile power that must be resisted.

A new national security strategy decreed by the acting president, Vladimir Putin, on Monday and to be published today marks a radical shift in Russia's view of the world. It ushers in a policy of "expanded nuclear containment" while pledging to resist western attempts to dominate the globe.

The strategic shift lowers the threshold at which Russia may resort to nuclear weapons and is the first foreign policy move that Mr Putin has taken since replacing Boris Yeltsin in the Kremlin on New Year's Eve.

Grossman brings my targets. The shots are all in the center-chest area, the "9" and "10" scoring rings. It's unsettling, yet riveting to look at these close up. The bullet holes are clustered in what seems to be a shockingly tight radius. If this were a real person, hell, I'd have blown their torso to shreds with the first few shots alone.

Grossman seems thrilled. "I would say it was head-and-shoulders above the average first-time shooter." I'm not on par with the best he's seen, he says, but I'm shooting as well as a trainee would at the end of a week of training-a week. He gestures to the target. "That would be an A. You're scholarship material. You were rocking and rolling!"

Now comes the inevitable question. Grossman grins at me. "To shoot like you did with that .45 is truly extraordinary. And you've never fired a gun before. Where did you learn to do that?"

Operant conditioning teaches you to kill, but classical conditioning is a subtle but powerful mechanism that teaches you to like it.

This technique is so morally reprehensible that there are very few examples of it in modern U.S. military training; but there are some clear-cut examples of it being done by the media to our children. What is happening to our children is the reverse of the aversion therapy portrayed in the movie A Clockwork Orange. In A Clockwork Orange, a brutal sociopath, a mass murderer, is strapped to a chair and forced to watch violent movies while he is injected with a drug that nauseates him. So he sits and gags and retches as he watches the movies. After hundreds of repetitions of this, he associates violence with nausea, and it limits his ability to be violent.

We are doing the exact opposite: Our children watch vivid pictures of human suffering and death, and they learn to associate it with their favorite soft drink and candy bar, or their girlfriend's perfume.

January 13, 2000

January 11, 2000

January 10, 2000

January 9, 2000

eIQ:
the other e. emotional IQ test

January 8, 2000

illin':
from the I-had-this-last-week-and-I-hope-you-don't-get-it department: influenza A

January 6, 2000

•(Rolling Stones, You Can't Always Get What You Want)
The real lyrics were:
You can't always get what you want.

Misheard as:
You can't always get a chihuahua. (mercy!)

•(Beatles, Lucy in the Sky w/Diamonds)
The real lyrics were:
Lucy in the sky with diamonds

Misheard as:
Lucy's getting high with Linus

The real lyrics were:
The girl with kaleidoscope eyes

Misheard as:
The girl with colitis goes by (ew!)

•(Hendrix, All Along the Watchtower)
The real lyrics were:
Let us stop talking falsely now - the hour's getting late

Misheard as:
Let us stop talking falsely now - I was getting laid

January 2, 2000

January 1, 2000

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