Everything2 New Writeups

Alice's Adventures in Real Estate: Capitalism and the Republic in the 21st Century (idea)

2009-11-20T20:55:49Z

U.S. unemployment rate as of November 2009:

10.2%.

The percentage swells to 17.5% if you consider the underemployed. To me, this is the most damning indictment of capitalism I could ever read, as well as the socialist band-aids (socialism being the bastard offspring of capitalist and communist ideologies) we try to apply to it. Maybe I'm just incredibly stupid, but how is a system wherein nearly 1 in 5 people that want to work have no opportunities to be productive a good system? And furthermore, how is giving those same people an unemployment check or putting them on welfare a smarter solution than just giving them a paying job to perform? Surely, it would be for our collective betterment if we were all put to productive uses as opposed to just 80-90% of us? When I look at the natural resources and technology available to us, I don't see why it wouldn't be possible. The idea reeks somewhat of common sense…

Cruise ship (thing)

2009-11-20T20:44:39Z

A cruise ship is a floating hotel and resort intended to provide an all-in-one package for relaxation and entertainment for its passengers. Cruises can take days or even weeks, with lodging, games, food, and luxuries all provided on board. Many will make stops at various ports along its route to resupply and let passengers off to see the area and get off the ship for a while (by all accounts, lollygaggers will be abandoned if late for departure).

Cruise ships are among the largest ships in the world. The Oasis of the Sea, which was recently completed and will start carrying vacationing passengers on December 1, 2009, is the largest cruise ship in the world, with a length of 1,187 feet (362 meters) and a displacement of over 225,000 tons. For comparison, a Nimitz-class Nuclear Aircraft Carrier is "only" 333 meters long and the largest ocean-going vessel in the world, the TI class supertanker, is just a bit longer…

thoughts on the music industry (log)

2009-11-20T20:10:52Z

I was idling at work in between finishing one piece of documentation and starting the next, thinking of a Loveline episode I heard some time ago that featured Gene Simmons as a guest host. He was fielding music industry questions, and while in the middle of a possibly heated rant, (to paraphrase wildly) he cited the internet, and specifically peer-to-peer filesharing, as being part of the reason the music industry was failing. That opinion appears to be shared by a few other people:

Streaming music's effect on dropping album sales

Mariah Carey lashes out at major record labels for not adapting to new Internet business models, resulting in lost revenue

Cracks show in music industry over P2P enforcement

And the funny thing is, they're all correct, as far as I can tell. The music indu…

zero-sum game (idea)

2009-11-20T14:25:24Z

You might imagine adding up all the universe's resources: labor, land, raw materials, equipment, technology, knowledge, etc... into a pie. At different times, different people may have control of different percentages of this pie, but the size of the pie isn't constant. Improvements in technology can get you access to other planets, more solar radiation, deeper into the ocean or earth's crust, more efficient use of existing resources - thus increasing the size of the pie. If the size of the pie can be increased, then of course other actions can also decrease it.

This isn't to say nothing should ever be done about the relative amounts of the pie that different people control. Obviously the more parts of the pie allocated to serving a smaller percentage of the population, the less that will be available for everybody else. However, it is both a fallacy to say that society can only be improved by improving the…

Her Purple Satin Thigh (poetry)

2009-11-20T10:48:22Z

Mister Rogers pleads, "Won't you be my neighbor?"
The light of the television beams through the hazy living room.
Mom chain smokes on our battered, rickety, golden yellow felt couch
and I nestle in the nook of her legs.
My head rests upon her purple satin thigh.
Curled into my daily routine, I fall asleep before Sesame Street begins.

I awaken in my grandparent's bed.
The wallpaper is covered in mallards.
They flutter on the wall
stuck in their paper prison hoping to tear free.
A tiny, golden Pterodactyl screeches overhead.
There is a dark cave on the wall.
Red eyes beam from inside and I crawl down the bed,
then slither down the edge to the floor.
I raise my head and stare into the eyes of the cave.
It is only a puppy; brown with long fluffy fur.
It licks my hand and I giggle.
It grows.
Its fur snarls.
It growls.
Its muscles…

Small World (idea)

2009-11-20T10:25:35Z

A geek habitat; a chair within a cocoon of tech, compact, almost impacted and the contrasting sphere of influence or range of connection, both through different channels and different memes. Sound, art, linux, programming, performance, green, freak bike culture, physics and other streams blend together, or cluster into faceted flavours of making groups and individual makers.
or
Imagine building something like a stick insect to wear like a Chinese dancing Lion, perhaps with shimmering scales of recycled technology. What kinds of ergonomics are useful for non-human species? Small occupational health and safety systems at cross purposes to our own.

It doesn't matter whether Hitler was an Atheist or a Christian (essay)

2009-11-20T06:50:38Z

Much hay has been spread on the Internet over the question of whether Adolf Hitler, oft-blurted as synonymous with evil, was an Atheist or a Christian. Partisans of each view claim to glean snippets of evidence from Hitler's speeches and writings, presenting such points as a supposed slam against the views themselves. Naturally, Hitler was most likely one of the two (he was obviously not Jewish, nor was he any sort of Buddhist or Hindu or Muslim or pandeist, though some have speculated that he secretly held to some nonspecific Nordic type of belief system). But the truth is, it doesn't matter what Hitler's personal beliefs were; Hitler was the leader of a nation, a position that required the acquiescence -- nay, the very complicity -- of the people.

It was the German people, undoubtedly and resolutely a Christian people, who allowed Hitler into power and followed him into war and genocide.…

reflex bleeding (thing)

2009-11-20T06:21:43Z

"What are you going to do? Bleed on me?" "Actually, yes."

Reflex bleeding (autohaemorrhaging, if you want the precise scientific term) is a defensive action performed by some invertebrates, mainly insects of the Coleoptera order. It involves the exudation of an amount of hemolymph from the insect's body with the aim of repelling predators. Insect families known to have at least one species that reflex bleeds include Coccinellidae, Meloidae, Chrysomelidae, and Lampyridae. In some species or genera, the larvae may reflex bleed as well as the adults.

Now, most members of the Animalia kingdom use blood of some sort. If it repels predators, the particular creature's blood must have something pretty distasteful if it is to spoil the appetite of a hungry spider or wasp. Reflex bleeding must therefore involve blood with a certain je ne sais quoi (and do not want to know). The effect on the…

Severus Snape (person)

2009-11-20T06:12:31Z

Well, first off, spoilers ahead, as they say on the internet. If you are one of the three remaining people who have not read the Harry Potter series, but plan to, then don't read this.

I have written before that the Harry Potter books are occasionally marred by the presence of gimmicks and hand waving to move the stories along. And yet, there are parts of the books that are written with great authenticity and subtlety, and the character of Severus Snape is one of those high points. Throughout the first six books, the motivations and characteristics of Snape are called into question, with hints and red herrings being brought up in every book as to whether Snape is a double agent, a triple agent, or something else entirely. Snape has a pathological dislike for Harry and his friends, has admitted to having practiced the Dark Arts and being a follower of Lord Voldemort, and generally being unpleasant and angry. And yet Albus Dumbledore, the wisest of the…

Man Was Made to Mourn (poetry)

2009-11-20T06:02:16Z

What compelled Robert Burns to write so depressing a dirge as Man Was Made to Mourn? Might have been just the depressing nature of his life itself -- after all, he was a tax collector, in a broken marriage, and often visited by ill health. Still this poem was written in 1784, before his marriage, and before he had left farming for an urban life as a poet. The downright obsession with death -- particularly as conveyed through the device of an 80 year old man (more than three times Burns' actual age at the writing, though Burns himself would never reach 40) is creepy, if somewhat moving. So without further delay....

I.

When chill November's surly blast
Made fields and forests bare,
One ev'ning, as I wander'd forth
Along the banks of Ayr,
I spy'd a man, whose aged step
Seem'd weary, worn with care ;
His face was furrow'd o'er with years,
And hoary was his hair.

II.

Young…

Salacious Crumb (person)

2009-11-20T04:34:40Z

Salacious Crumb is the disgusting little monster that accompanies Jabba the Hutt in Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi. His only appearance is in this film, and it is implied that he dies when Jabba's sail barge is destroyed over the Sarlacc pit.

Salacious Crumb is a semi-intelligent creature called a Kowakian monkey-lizard, and looks something like a cross between the two namesake creatures — about two feet tall, nearly hairless, lanky, and with a beak-like mouth. He serves as Jabba's court jester, running around playing cruel pranks on the various alien guests that frequent his palace, always careful to leap back to the safety of the crime lord's dais whenever he annoys one of the more dangerous guests. He could frequently be found cackling at people for one reason or another, and sometimes perched near the Max Rebo Band when they were playing.

When Jabba acquired C-3PO and R2-D2 from Luke Skywalker, C-3PO and his 6 million forms of communication…

Summer storm (poetry)

2009-11-20T03:38:38Z

A summer storm.

Strong winds are the first warning
as dead leaves and superfluous branches
clatter to the ground.

A thunderclap.

Dust is being raised over there,
but rain that starts to appear everywhere
starts to settle it.

A flash of light.

Every bit of grass still baked,
mostly from the burning summer sunlight,
now starts to turn green.

A person stands.

He does not care about storms.
He pauses, ties his long hair back behind,
and then carries on.

A heavy rain.

Slow relief for drought-struck towns.
Doesn't cure. Only alleviates. Yet,
moisture is welcome.

A thick silence.

As quickly as it began,
it is over. No noise, no rain, no wind,
but the smell lingers...

write-protect notch (thing)

2009-11-20T01:20:20Z

In the olden days, when floppy disks were floppy and anything that ended with "megs" was but a dream, we had to deal with write-protect notches.

On 5.25-inch (and 8-inch, if you're old enough) floppy disks, in order to prevent writing data to a disk, you had to put a small sticker over a little cutout on the side edge of the square housing of the removable media. That little cutout went to a mechanical switch that determined if a floppy was, in fact, writable.

    ____________                                  
   |            |                                 
   |     __    (  <--- Write-protect notch        
   |    (__)    |                                 
   |            |                                   
   |     __     |
   |____|__|____| 
       Front

On old Double Density, Single Side floppies, frugal folks discovered you could make the flip side of a floppy usable by taking a hole punch and making a similar notch on the other side. It worked most of…

Fantastic Mr. Fox (review)

2009-11-20T00:13:02Z

Fantastic Mr. Fox is a book by Roald Dahl, probably most famous for his books Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach. The book was released in 1970, and was just recently released as a movie.

Compared to some of Dahl's other children's books, this book is shorter, and more profusely illustrated. Even for an elementary school student, it would probably be something that could be read in one sitting. Whether the content is something that is appropriate for younger ages is something that is much more debatable. The action follows the titular Mr. Fox, who troubles three separate poultry farmers by stealing their poultry to feed his family. The farmers join together to hunt down Mr. Fox, first with guns and then by digging out his den. Mr. Fox escapes, and turns the tables on the farmers by digging into their storehouses, and lives happily ever after along with some of his other subterranean kin.

That is the plot. I am somewhat curious as to how…

Humanitarian (fiction)

2009-11-19T23:06:24Z

A humanitarian, not to be confused with humanist, is someone who eats only humans. This word is used instead of cannibalism because cannibalism covers animals eating the same species. There are and have been many peoples who believe eating the heart of someone with courage gives them their courage. Cannibals who occasionally eat humans have been around since the beginning of time, but humanitarians have been around since the beginning of PETA.

One of the the influences for humanitarianism came for William Penn who called for the United States of Europe where he planned to assemble a "European Dyet."

Oprah and Bono have done great humanitarian work with Africa.

Hannibal Lecter worked for the Red Cross before he became a psychiatrist.

Eating humans is everywhere, even in this place: Deuteronomy 28:55 "53 Because of the suffering that your enemy will inflict on you during the siege, you will eat the fruit of the womb, the flesh of the sons and daughters the LORD…

If you could reset your life back 10 years, would you? (personal)

2009-11-19T23:01:42Z

I am going on the assumption that hitting the reset button means that you lose everything in the past 10 years that you learned and experienced.

In that case, hell no! Here's why:

I would be 13, horny as shit and unable to get laid, disproportional, and worst of all, still in middle school. Having very few friends, I would be the social punching bag for everyone to use. Armed with a half-developed intellect and a fantastic amount of demotivation, I would be too stupid to realize that interesting classes are the "harder" classes and hence get myself stuck in a vicious cycle of a series of easy and meaningless classes. Furthermore, I would not have the perspective necessary to choose good friends. This would be my personal hell, with Satan standing on the sidelines, raving at his perfectly decayed creation.

In the case that I could take everything that I learned and experienced with me into the past, I would still not do it, being in…

Cupcakes are a lonely thing (idea)

2009-11-19T22:16:46Z

He wandered through the house languorously. Five days more of this, five more days without her. He missed her, not the touch of her skin or the taste of her lips but the part that was essentially her. The words and eyes and smile and simply being with her. If she were here they would turn down the music and listen to the thunderstorm being played out, they'd make cupcakes to the sound of the thunder and her eyes would glisten in the flashes of lightning. But she was not there and cupcakes alone is a terrible thing.

Nevertheless, he found his feet pacing through the small green-tiled kitchen they shared. "It's only a temporary thing," she had said, soothing his disgust at the color. "We'll change it or move." It had only been four months, but now he could not imagine a kitchen of any other color.

Unconsciously he reached for the well-worn cookbook and opened it.…

Why can't you read in dreams? (dream)

2009-11-19T21:52:04Z

In FTP from my dreams someone says "you can't read in dreams".

In my dream journal, I found that I have read a book about MAPS, another whose title was INVUM which was about Hell, and various traffic signs (like STOP, and the names of streets). I have even seen signs in unknown languages I didn't understand and written down the characters I remembered. In a dream I read writing carved in trees and in another dream I saw the number 123 on two hills. Often, if a word found in a dream represents a novel place or concept, I use it as a neologism in real life.

I've also fallen in dreams, usually because I was flying and shot down... and died in other ways such as being eaten by animals.

Fortunately, I cannot feel pain in dreams.
Dying in a dream is like either going blind and waking up,
or suddenly teleporting to a new place in another dream.

So I bust the myths that people can't read in dreams,
nor live to tell a dream about dying.

…

Zuidas (place)

2009-11-19T21:10:24Z

Introduction

Zuidas literally means "southern axis". It is the business district of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and is the home of the headquarters of many of its major financial institutions.

History

The Zuidas is still under construction, and its history is quite short. The only part to be truly completed is the renovation of the Amsterdam World Trade Center, and the completion of the square in front of it. That said, a two large banks have their headquarters here, namely ING and ABN. As such, even though the long-term term plan calls for major changes to the area, it already is a business district - just not as impressive as it is planned to be eventually.

Location

The Zuidas is located in the south of Amsterdam, next to Amstelveen. It is built around one of the busiest highways of the country. Between the lanes of this highway, one of the busiest railways is located, as well as a metro…

Ladybug (thing)

2009-11-19T17:57:43Z

There are several hundred species of ladybugs (commonly called ladybirds outside the US), which comprise the family Coccinellidae in the order of Coleoptera--that is, beetles. Ladybugs are generally identified by their very VW Beetle like shape and their yellow, red, or orange, spotted elytra. However, colour and patterns vary greatly even among members of the same species, and spotless bugs as well as black bugs with orange or red spots are not uncommon. In Australia, where everything is either upside-down or really weird, they apparently have metallic blue ladybugs that dine on fungi.

Most ladybugs, and this is why we like them, are vicious and voracious carnivores with a predilection for consuming aphids, spider mites, scale bugs, and other widespread pests. Most of them will readily eat plant matter or pollen when hungry but many need a meat diet in order to breed.

In Europe and North America, you're most likely to encounter several of…

Distribution of preferences for three musical works by class fraction (idea)

2009-11-19T17:23:17Z

In Pierre Bourdieu's book Distinction, there's a figure (the text of which is reproduced below) representing the result of asking lots of people, in sixties France, about three particular musical pieces, and tries to show a correlation to social position.

Now, most people, including me, will react negatively to Bourdieu, saying That's not me!. Sure, but there are some important points here, and I don't want to conflate them:

First, and this is just a stickler aside, but:

Why the unevenly distributed hype for Well-tempered clavier and distaste for the plinkyplonk waltz?
I remember when I started to really like Bach—when I started programming, and later, when I studied some composition. It doesn't surprise me that teachers and artists hype it since they understand the principles behind it, and I'd also wager that something similar lies behind the distaste for Blue Danube, even though overexposition is a contributing factor.

Second, the main issue is that…

Trees (fiction)

2009-11-19T16:38:33Z

The Tree

I sit listening to the stories on the wind, soaking up the warm sunlight with my leaves.

I sense a small tug and look down to see my earth child swing into my lower branches.

I say my because I have watched her grow, held her when no one would, listened when

no one could, protected her when no one could. She clears my branches of the dead pieces

and climbs higher, crying and hurt I notice. She slips and I move a branch, only enough

for her to reach. She grabs it and sits, shaking for a few moments before continuing to climb

till she reaches the four braches where she lays and cries herself to sleep.

As she sleeps I remember. I remember the first time she climbed me, then years later as she

dared climb higher to the spot she lay now. The days she spent reading, or listening to me.

Understanding I was telling her a story, hearing what I said somewhere deep inside while I tell

her in…

Glasgow North-East by-election (event)

2009-11-19T16:34:42Z

The Glasgow North-East by-election was held on the 12th November 2009 as a result of the resignation of Michael Martin and his elevation to the House of Lords.

The constituency was described by UKPolling as a "grim slice of north-east Glasgow, scarred by gangs, deprivation and hard drugs" that included "some of the most degraded, deprived and crime-ridden parts of the UK" including the "heroin-ravaged Possilpark", and was therefore naturally considered the safest Labour seat in Glasgow. The seat had only been in being since 2005, when the old Glasgow Springburn constituency was expanded to include the most deprived parts of the old Glasgow Maryhill seat. Indeed the constituency of Glasgow North-East had never previously been the subject of an open contest, since Michael Martin had stood in both the 2001 and 2005 General Elections as the 'Speaker Seeking Re-Election' rather than under the banner of the Labour Party, and so neither the Conservatives nor Liberal Democrats had put forward…

The Hazards of Love (review)

2009-11-19T15:33:23Z

For years, The Decemberists were a band for whom I didn't have much patience. They wrote sweet, catchy, folksy songs that my hipster friends adored. They were fronted by an earnest, bespectacled guy with a huge vocabulary. There was nothing particularly offensive about them, but I found it annoying that reviews of their albums were all fixated on how Colin Meloy used big words like "palanquin" correctly. I always figured that a music fan that could be impressed by the word "palanquin" really needed to get out more.

But then, in the summer of this year, I encountered this album and I became a reluctant but total convert. The Hazards of Love is the greatest concept album since The Wall and the greatest riff on classic fairy tales since Tam Lin. Musically, it is folk-bordering-on-prog; it has much more richness and subtlety than I ever detected in earlier Decemberists, which I liked well enough but always found a bit twee…

mandelbulb (thing)

2009-11-19T14:31:20Z

Mandelbulbs are three-dimentional Mandelbrot fractals. They are created using mathematical renderings in a three-axis, artificially colored raytrace. The more you zoom in, the more lush detail is brought out. With the Mandelbulbs, you get an eerie, organic image that looks like a photograph of an alien world.

From Skytopia.com:

What's the formula of this thing?
Similar to the original 2D Mandelbrot , the 3D formula is defined by:

z -> z^n + c

...but where 'z' and 'c' are hypercomplex ('triplex') numbers, representing Cartesian x, y, and z coordinates. The exponentiation term is defined by:

{x,y,z}^n = r^n { sin(theta*n) * cos(phi*n) , sin(theta*n) * sin(phi*n) , cos(theta*n) }
...where:
r = sqrt(x^2 + y^2 + z^2)
theta = atan2( sqrt(x^2+y^2), z )
phi = atan2(y,x)

And the addition term in z -> z^n + c is similar to standard complex addition, and is simply defined by:

{x,y,z}+{a,b,c} = {x+a, y+b, z+c}

…