Argh! If the good Lord had wanted us to think in binary, he wouldn't have given us 10 fingers. That's all I have to say about that.

Bill, a friend from high school, is currently living and working at Disney in Japan. He's been posting occasional chronicles of his Japanese adventures online, and right now he has a picture on his site that, at least in my mind, makes him look exactly like he stepped out of a TinTin comic book.

While looking for a picture of TinTin to compare with, I was a bit shocked to come across this image and this image. Turns out that some of Herge's early works had something of a racist, colonialist slant on things. This in itself does not entirely surprise me. He was a product of his times, and at the time Belgium was still a colonial power subjugating the Congo.

What surprises me is that I remember reading some of the TinTin comics as a kid and not picking up on any of this. The same thing happened Little Black Sambo, by Helen Bannerman, which I remember reading in a storybook that was handed down from my mom. LBS was actually one of my favorite stories, partly because in the end the family uses the melted butter made by the running tigers to make a big batch of pancakes -- my favorite childhood breakfast food. I was shocked later in life to realize that some people considered the story racist because of the names of the characters. This had just never occurred to me as a child. (The story itself is actually not really that racist, and it seems likely that the names were picked more for their exotic ring than because of any racial agenda. The illustrations are a bit more questionable, perhaps, but still not grotesque. Apparently other editions were published in the US with more stereotypical illustrations.)

I think this points out what an artificial construct racism is. Kids aren't born understanding it, and it is only after society exposes them to it that they can comprehend what it means.

Stupid Corporate Tricks, Part II

I'm still trying my best to remember the new cell phone number I received when I switched from Sprint to Verizon. Then I saw this in today's Business section:

WASHINGTON - The Federal Communications Commission can create area codes specific to mobile telephones, a U.S. appeals court ruled, rebuffing a challenge by Sprint Corp.

[...]

Sprint argued the FCC plan could allow the agency to inconvenience current wireless customers by forcing them to switch their 10-digit phone numbers for entirely new ones, while landline users kept theirs.

I had no idea the cell phone companies were so worried about people having to change phone numbers. Why it seems like just yesterday I heard them yelling and screaming about what a bad idea cell phone number portability was. Despite being told by the FCC to make this happen in the mid-90s, the cellular industry has been whining and dragging its feet for years. As Stewart Alsop makes the point:

Question: What do Andrew McBride and Muhammad Saeed al-Sahaf have in common?

Answer: They're both loyal lackeys of corrupt administrations willing to say anything in order to justify their existence.

Muhammad Saeed al-Sahaf is the now infamous Information Minister of Iraq who insisted that the Iraqi army and government had control of Baghdad and were massacring coalition troops right and left. "I triple-guarantee you, there are no American soldiers in Baghdad," the minister was quoted as saying just as Americans were entering the city.

Andrew McBride, on the other hand, is a lawyer for Verizon Wireless, the largest cellular operator in the U.S., and for the Cellular Telephone Industry Association. McBride has taken on, somewhat enthusiastically, the job of justifying the cellular industry's base interests as being the most desirable for consumers. He was quoted as testifying in court to the following point of view: "It's very speculative to say this [number portability] even offers consumer benefits."

Get your story straight, guys! If you're so convinced that it will hurt consumers if their numbers change, why have you been so busily fighting cellular number portability for the last five years? Sheesh.

My younger brother is buying a house. My friend Aaron just bought a house. Layne bought a house. Another friend from work is buying his second house, after tearing his apart and rebuilding it for the last four years.

Meanwhile I'm still sitting here waffling about whether I'm going to at last settle down in Nashville, go live the hip urban life in Boston, head back to my old haunting grounds in DC, or just maybe go find some sort of job that lets me travel to interesting places like Lithuania, Siberia, or South America. So instead of making hard decisions about this stuff, I sit here in the middle of the night listening to the best of the 40s, 80s, and 90s on MP3 and plagiarizing blog passages about atom bombs. I lack direction, so I avoid thinking about it by wasting time on things that don't matter.

Joshua wrote:

When an atomic bomb goes off, there's a massive release of energy; an explosion of light so intense it vaporizes steel, turns concrete into glass and boils the water out of aquariums from miles away. There's a nanosecond pause after the explosion, where everything is exactly like it was a moment before, only a million degrees hotter. Then everything does what comes naturally: it explodes. That's the part you usually see.

Read the rest. It's chilling.

Chasing Cats

This weekend was the kickoff of the Cat Fish Out of Water city art festival. To help increase awareness of the Cumberland River watershed, the Cumberland River Compact is coordinating the placement of 51 giant catfish throughtout the city.

After getting my oil changed today, I took a detour to Centennial Park. I walked around the American Artisan festival. Then I noticed my first Catfish:

Catsup, by Trey Mitchell, sponsored by (of course) McDonalds

So then I hiked around the park a bit and found three more:

Spider Cat, by Kern Studios/New Orleans, sponsored by Rock Harbor Marine

Classic Black Catfish, by Margaret Krakowiak, sponsored by Vanderbilt University

Speed Catilac, by Susan Rainey, sponsored by Andrews Cadillac. Above one of the exhaust pipes, it says "Body by Fisher!"

According to the map, it looks like there may be three others in the park that I missed.

Stupid Corporate Tricks

In U r sakd: Is there a nicer way to fire?, The Economist describes how most of the staffers at a British company were fired by text message on their cell phones:

There are, Paul Simon once sang, 50 ways to leave your lover. There may be fewer ways to sack your staff, but most are unpleasant — though rarely as nasty as the method chosen last week by Accident Group, a firm that specialises in personal-injury claims, after Amulet, its Luxembourg-based parent, ran out of money.

Accident Group’s 2,500 staff received a series of text messages on their mobile phones, telling them to call a number.

There, a recorded message from the company’s insolvency administrators at PricewaterhouseCoopers informed them that, ‘‘All staff who are being retained will be contacted today. If you have not been spoken to you are therefore being made redundant.’’

The new CEO of VodaFone evidently saw this story in the news -- a clause in his contract prevents him from being fired by "electronic mail or any other electronic messaging service."

Everyone else ( link, link, and link) is getting transferred to this spiffy new version of Blogger. But mine looks the same as always. I think I have software envy.

Random Wednesday Happenings

After a number of false starts, I finally met up with an acquaintaince from high school in Maryland who moved to Nashville with her husband last year and is now randomly running for city council! We hung out for a few hours at a Chili's out in Hermitage, which is so far outside of my normal downtown Nashville orbit, it's scary. We gabbed about all the old band gossip, who's now living in strange foreign countries, what we've been up to for the last ten years, etc. Got them interested in the UFO club at Flying Saucer. Now I'm not just drinking my way to fame, I'm helping spread the word!

I might end up using my pickup truck to help them move sometime in the next few weeks. And two weeks ago I made a run with a friend to drop a load of brush at the city composting center. I'm actually starting to feel like I'm doing my part to live up to the pickup truck image.

On an unrelated note, I just got the missing pieces that let me use the new phone as an MP3 player -- which is pretty cool. I loaded about three hours of music onto it, and can listen skip-free while carrying the phone around. The headphones even have a button that will mute the music and let me talk if the phone ring. I'm starting to feel better about the small fortune I had to shell out to get this thing. I'll be even happier when I get all my assorted rebates and refunds back.

Tomorrow and Friday I've got a professor from the university I visited for a week in November coming to see how I do my job. I think he's going to find that it's much less exciting and glamorous than he thinks.

"The presentation on P.T. Barnum was especially helpful." - Farouk Bakoh

It's not too late to register for the The Third Annual Nigerian Email Conference. Sessions this year include:

• Keynote Address: Dr. Hamza Kalu's adds some historical perspective in his keynote address: "From Postal Scams To Email Scams: We Have Come a Long Way Infant Child.
• Debate: Attend a lively debate between Lady Mariam Abacha and Mr. Godwin Oyathelem. Topic: "The effectiveness of using all UPPERCASE characters."
• Economics: A round table discussion: Is email now Nigeria's top export?

Registration is, of course, via a confidential money transfer.

Link via MacInTouch

And now, from the "Greek to Me" department...

I'm currently taking what I consider to be the first "hardcore" computer science class I've taken since I started working on my Technology Management degree. (I took a database class and a networking class, but I don't consider those to be hardcore since I already knew a lot about those topics.) So in this accelerated summer session, I'm getting to read scintillating material like:

Each check bit operates on every data bit whose position number contains a 1 in the same bit position as the position number of that check bit. Thus, data bit positions 3,5,7,9 and 11 (D1, D2, D4,D5,D7) all contain a 1 in the least significant bit of their position number as does C1; bit positions 3,6,7,10, and 11 all contain a 1 in the second but position, as does C2, and so on. Looked at another way, bit position n is checked by those bits S_i such that Σi = n. For example, position is checked by bits in position 4,2, and 1; and 7=4+2+1.

Riveting stuff, no? I can't wait until Hollywood gets ahold of it.

I'm starting to remember why I majored in English.

Culture Shock

West coast habitue Margaret Berry is currently perambulating through the South, enjoying its unique ways and culture. She writes:

We crossed the border into Virginia late last night and spent two hours this morning trying to find a place to get an Internet connection. Finally we found WebCity. I'm currently sitting in a dark room with five guys who've been talking about how much ammo they have stored, how much they got paid for not killing that one guy, and so on, for the last hour.

Pretty Colors

This weekend was Fan Fair, Nashville's annual country music festival. That means lots of traffic and tourists, but also occasional fringe benefits like fireworks you can watch from your kitchen window.

(And other than a quick grocery run, that's about the most exciting thing to happen to me this weekend.)

Tracy posted a scary cat picture, which inspired me to post my own example of feline photography. In this case, the cat thinks I'm nuts.

On a totally unrelated note, there seems to be something malfunctioning badly with permalinks to blogspot blogs. This is the second time in the last day or two I've tried to use a permalink, only to have it not work. Very odd.

I can blog from my phone now -- expect an increased number of pointless posts from boring meetings. Like this one.

New Phone

Some of you may remember my little cell phone mishap back in October. Since then I've been lugging around a massive prehistoric phone that required an extra set of suspenders. I've had my eye on one phone in particular, and this week I finally broke down and bought it.

So my new Kyocera 7135 arrived today. It was hideously expensive, although I managed to get $130 in rebates from Verizon. But it will supposedly work as a phone, Palm, and MP3 player. So if it lives up to its billing, it should be worth it.

The phone does a million things and it's going to take some time to figure it all out. But I'm already comtemplating how to blog from the phone. And I've managed to hit 88 lines in Tetris.

Happy Blogday to Me

While republishing my archives after one of Blogger's periodic barfs, I realized that this blog just turned one year old on Monday.

Croatoan

Layne, of Plain Layne, has mysteriously evaporated from the Blogosphere, taking her entire site with her and leaving only the cryptic message "Take very good care of you." Layne is one of the most expressive writers out there. I've only been reading her blog for a few months, and our only direct contact has been to e-mail and comment back and forth a few times. Yet it's like a close friend has suddenly vanished.

Several people written about this, including Gudy and Daintily Dirty. DD's post is especially thoughtful, pondering on why we blog and the strangeness of feeling connected to someone you only know from a few electrons flying through the ether:

Maybe taking down her blog was what she needed to do. Does she owe us anything? Do we owe each other anything as bloggers? I guess that depends on what you want back from your readers. Are we friends? If so, I would never disappear without saying good-bye and letting people know why I was leaving. It feels like a betrayal of a friendship to do otherwise. If Layne comes back, I will be less likely to invest much of myself into that relationship, and maybe that's what she wants, readers less invested in her life.

[...]

Maybe I shouldn't care that a blogger I came to consider a friend has disappeared, but I do. I wish her well and hope the decision she's made is one that will bring her more happiness and a fulfilling life.

I'll add my voice to the chorus in wishing her well and hoping that she's ok.

I wonder what it would take to get 100%

We were trying to figure out how well the new spam filter on works on our office e-mail system. So my friend sent this message. Note that it only got a 73% spam rating.

-----Original Message-----
From: Some other guy
Sent: Thursday, June 05, 2003 2:57 PM
To: A. Coworker
Subject: [SPAM: 73%] Herbal remedy

Hot sexy teen virgins loading inkjet cartridges just
for you.

Out inkjet cartridges have only the finest herbal
supplements that enhance and boost your printer's
natural tone.

Robin Hood, in reverse

The Washington Post reports on a study showing how Bush's tax cuts benefit the very rich the most, and the middle class the least.

Three successive tax cuts pushed by President Bush will leave middle-income taxpayers paying a greater share of all federal taxes by the end of the decade, according to new analyses of the Bush administration's tax policies.

[...]

Citizens for Tax Justice found that for the lowest fifth of taxpayers -- those earning below $16,000 -- federal taxes would fall 10 percent between now and 2010, while federal taxes for those in the second quintile -- earning between $16,000 to $28,000 -- would fall 12 percent. At the other end of the scale, the decline for the top 1 percent of taxpayers -- those making $337,000 and up -- would be 15 percent.

In contrast, for taxpayers earning between $45,000 and $337,000, the decline would be 7 percent, less than half the cut reaped by the very wealthy.

[...]

Figuring out whether tax policy benefits the wealthy or the poor is a hotly disputed subject. Liberals favor a progressive tax system in which households pay higher tax rates and a higher share of their total income as they climb up the income ladder. By that measure, the Bush tax cuts have made the tax code less progressive. By 2011, the poorest taxpayers' after-tax income will have risen only 0.3 percent, according to the Tax Policy Center, while household income for the richest 1 percent of taxpayers will have jumped 8.6 percent.