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Posts published by “centaur”

What do you know? Al Gore DID invent the Internet.

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Well, not really. But then, he never claimed he did - he claimed that, in Congress, he "took the initiative in creating" it. And what do you know? According to the "father of the Internet" Vint Cerf, he did.

"No other elected official, to our knowledge, has made a greater contribution over a longer period of time ... As far back as the 1970s Congressman Gore promoted the idea of high speed telecommunications as an engine for both economic growth and the improvement of our educational system ... Our work on the Internet started in 1973 and was based on even earlier work that took place in the mid-late 1960s. But the Internet, as we know it today, was not deployed until 1983. When the Internet was still in the early stages of its deployment, Congressman Gore provided intellectual leadership by helping create the vision of the potential benefits of high speed computing and communication ... No one in public life has been more intellectually engaged in helping to create the climate for a thriving Internet than the Vice President."


I suppose this is old news to most people. But I still got a chuckle when I ran across this site yesterday ... and learned that the "Al Gore Invented the Internet" story was cooked up by a historian and reporter and blown out of proportion by the media, and in the end is a bigger fabrication than what he actually said on March 9, 1999:

I'll be offering my vision when my campaign begins. And it will be comprehensive and sweeping. And I hope that it will be compelling enough to draw people toward it. I feel that it will be. But it will emerge from my dialogue with the American people. I've traveled to every part of this country during the last six years. During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.


Now is that "a whopper of a tall tale in which he claimed to have invented the Internet," or a simple statement that was grossly distorted? You decide.

-Anthony

Canoe Exceeds Expectations

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Here's a draft from the past (11/30/05!) that never got published for some odd reason... probably because I was packing up for the move to California. Regardless, this is an abbreviated recollection of our date at Canoe.

Somehow, in our first three years worth of dating, my then-fiancee, now-wife and I had never been on a traditional "date" date. We'd gone dancing and had coffee, made each other dinner and eaten out dutch, climbed Stone Mountain and went canoeing, even slept on top of a building together to watch the sunrise - but never a "traditional" guy - asks - girl - out - for - dinner - at - a - nice - restaurant date.

Clearly it was high time.

SO, we made a night of it and dined at Canoe, and it exceeded all our expectations.

Sandi looked stunning in a red and black floral Puimond corset (from Madame S) and matching black flowing dress (from JC Penney's, proving you don't have to shop in San Francisco for style). I did my best to match in a red turtleneck, black leather jeans, and long leather coat from Stormy Leather, but Sandi was clearly the star of the show in her elegant ensemble and long flowing hair.

Canoe itself is in Vinings on the banks of the Chatahoochee, and riffs incessantly on its name: a fish-and-game heavy menu, canoe-shaped ceilings, and even little wooden paddles to stir your tea. As I recall, we both had fish; while the menu has no doubt changed I had something like the peppered Alaskan halibut, which now comes with mushrooms, sugar snap peas and giant couscous, and Sandi had the grilled salmon, which now comes with wilted baby spinach, spaghetti squash and carrot saute. I don't remember precisely whether this is what we got, but from the ingredient list alone these are "high schema" Sandi and Anthony meals, and I seem to recall the giant couscous being really delicious. Of course memories can be inaccurate, but I remember it being tasty.

The service was similarly stunning: the waitstaff was very attentive, our tea was rapidly refilled, and no-one gave the goth couple from San Francisco guff over her tight corset and his long leather vest coat. (OK, technically we were living in Atlanta then, but we had gotten engaged in San Francisco at a goth / industrial / fetish dance club, and a few months later we moved out here. The point is, while we looked very formal and very sharp, we didn't look very Vinings, and they still treated us wonderfully).

And I'd say more, but I now remember why this post didn't get posted: we took pictures, and I'm pretty sure they all went missing for some reason. Ah well.

It was still a fantastic restaurant, and exceeded our expectations.

Go check it out!
-the Centaur

A little better…

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The feed is improving. Corrected ordering, titles, added escaped summaries, fixed date format and got a temp ID up, plus fixed some of my own Python problems. More in a bit...

-the Centaur

I know Atom Fu

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Show me.

Seriously, Fanu Fiku now has a nascent Atom feed. The atom.xml feed produced by fiku.py has some validation errors but the feed seems to read fine in my first newsreader tets.

Hopefully before the next issue goes up I'll be able to correct the blog title issue and make the validation problems go away with the help of the Feed Validator and the Atom Standard.

Once I get it running, I'll post a bit more about what's going on under the hood in fiku.py to make this happen.

Till then, fellow fanu, remember to believe...

-the Centaur

Return of the Donut

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Once again, Happy Donuts eases the pain.



So I'm out in Silicon Valley visiting friends and hitting the old haunts. Upon my arrival I snarfed an In-and-Out Burger, perused books and storyboarded the next half-dozen fanu fiku pages all in the Mercado shopping center, near where my old buddy Z used to live. Then today I prowled the Mountain View crossroads at California and Castro - scouring the vast stacks of the even-larger-than-I-remembered BookBuyers used bookstore ...



... dining at a local middle eastern joint ...



... finding gits at Global Beads and the East West bookshop ...



... and finally parking it in the Books Inc. cafe to get started on drawing next week's page. However, jetlag, a growing sore throat and a menton shortage conspired against me, and I eventually decided to cash it in.

But not before one last trip to Happy Donuts.

The home of "the big donut" is as I remembered it - a vibrant place with a plethora of laptops, numerous lauging posses, and deep conversations of computer implementation. Though, truth be told the same things were going on at a lower volume level at the Books Inc. cafe - but that shuts down at midnight, whereas as of 1am Pacific Time Happy Donuts seems to be just getting started. Even now, an hour later, seven laptops are going, a couple is digging into a vibrant conversation about politics and civilization and culture and personality types, and a posse of digerati are reminiscing over the interesting characters who have dotted their social surfing.

As my Sandi points out, we both run ourselves ragged - not because of the rat race itself, but beyond it: we are both creative people and want to produce, not just consume. But for me, production by itself is difficult; if I go home or back to my hotel after a long day of work all my mentons are drained and I just want to take a nap. But just like taking a walk can rejuvenate me at work, a change of scenery can rejuvenate me at home; and nothing does it like a bookstore run followed by curling up in a cafe for some drawing, writing, or reading.

And it doesn't even have to be a quirky independent bookstore. Consumer culture is not entirely useless: as my friend Gordon points out, a good store captures something important in its Snow Crash three-ring binder: the flower floating in the globe of water on the warm wooden table in front of the local artist's stage at every Border's in America does not quite have the charm of the performance space of your independent bookseller, but if implemented to spec it has a damn good shot at creating a great place for people to think, meet, talk and share . In fact, I find the carefully-designed frappucinos at Barnes and Nobles beat most independent baristas on sheer yumminess, even if the space in which your independent delivers his iced mocha makes up for its slight bitter taste with a whole helping of local charm. Your mileage may vary, of course, but the point remains: what one man can do another man can do, and at least in this case one man can create a great place for me to think.

But even then, after a few hours, my energy seems to run out, and if I head back to the ranch I'll soon find myself in dreamy slumber. Which is a good thing ... unless I have something to do, like trying to get out a page or break my weblogjam. And that's where Happy Donuts comes in - the last best hope for keeping oneself awake until the page is done, or in this case, the essay. Silicon Valley tends to roll up the streets a little earlier than Atlanta, with a few exceptions, but this ends up a good thing, as it drives people far and wide to Happy Dounts for their caffeine-sugar-wireless fix. And Happy Donuts doesn't rest on their laurels: they work it, providing a huge number of donut varieties and other foodstuffs and tables and powerstrips, all for your working/surfing/chatting/dining pleasure.

And it works - so well, in fact, that I feel compelled to visit every time I come to the bay, and am rewarded each time by getting SOMETHING done while I'm here. And because it keeps working, I keep comin. As one lady in the digerati posse said to her friends on their way out, just a few moments ago: "Thanks. This was a good idea. I'll be back tomorrow."



Mmmmm. Happy Donuts does ease the pain.
-the Centaur

Serenity Crashing to Earth

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Well, Serenity has lost half its take:


Serenity rustled up $5.4 million in its second weekend for a 10-day tally of $18 million. The $39 million space western's 47 percent drop was precipitous but solid for the genreā€”such similar pictures as The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and The Chronicles of Riddick each had greater falls. However, they were generating much more business, and, at its current pace, Serenity is aiming for a final haul of around $28 million.


Did none of the (other) browncoats wish to see it more than once?
-Anthony

The Lesson of Serenity Valley: You CAN Stop the Signal

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Well, Browncoats, time to admit it: we've lost another battle.

Despite a huge grassroots marketing campaign, in which I and every other rabid fan donned our browncoats and begged, borrowed and cajoled all our friends into the theaters to see Serenity, Joss Whedon's attempt to resurrect his failed TV series Firefly, it nonetheless got off to a dismal start, earning just over ten million dollars in its first weekend of release. Universal Studios, to their credit, claims not to be disappointed: "The fan base turned out ... over $10 million is a lot of business for a niche appeal picture, and I think the ancilliary will be spectacular." But honest fans know better: Serenity failed to change the course of last week's critically panned Flightplan as it led box-office receipts back to the slump after September's hopeful rise.

Now, I don't know the future; it's certainly possible that Serenity could become a sleeper hit, make back its money, and convince Universal Studios to give it its fan-desired and possibly-deserved sequel. But I have to face the facts: Serenity didn't break a record. It didn't break number one. In fact, it didn't even really help the box office, which went into a slump. And all I keep hearing ringing in my ears is something I never heard spoken aloud: a snark from a reviewer of Serenity, mystified by the reception the fans gave the movie:


Suffering through, I mean watching SERENITY is like starting at the 84th episode of a convoluted and silly sci-fi soap opera. Sure, fans of Joss Whedon's cancelled TV show "Firefly," upon which this movie is based, are certain to love it. Our packed audience of rabid fans burst into thunderous applause when the words "Feature Presentation" came on the screen. Various characters from the series got similar but smaller accolades. As a non-fan, it made me appreciate the wisdom of TV executives who aborted the show.


Emphasis mine.

So, time to hang up the Browncoat, review the losses of the war, and rethink things. Clearly, science fiction and fantasy can survive on screen. Star Trek, Doctor Who and the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy were all resurrected. Despite everything working against it, Babylon 5 survived, spawned a sequel, and several TV movies. Even children's books like Harry Potter made it to the screen, in increasingly successful segments. How, how do they do it? I don't pretend to know. All I do know is that it's possible for an indie filmmaker to graduate from ultra-low-budget fare like Evil Dead and Bad Taste to films like the record-setting Spiderman (Sam Raimi) and the Oscar-winning Lord of the Rings trilogy (Peter Jackson).

And that it's possible for indie filmmaker George Lucas to go on from American Graffiti and THX-1138 to create the beloved classic Star Wars, a saga that will be told and retold a long, long time from now in galaxies far, far away.

Who's your master now, Joss?

-the Centaur
P.S. Remember, while you're falling into that airshaft, that loss of a hand is only temporary: all you need to do is invest in a new sharp black wardrobe and rebuild your lightsaber and you can not only get back in the game, but ultimately win (though your chances of redeeming Lucas are dubious). In the meantime, your friends will be waiting for you on the sanctuary moon, standing in line for your next picture with a Browncoat on over our Wookie suits.

End of an Era

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At last, the renovations are complete! 5 King's Tavern Place is now on the market!



It's a 2 bedroom, 2.5 bath two-story townhome in the Westover Plantation complex, with new fridge, stove, microwave range hood, dishwasher, carpet, walls, ceilings, faux finishes, light fixtures, doorknobs, and ceiling fan pulls.



You name it, we fixed it.



Kudos to Sandi for her wonderful job faux finishing it AND managing all the subcontractors. And kudos to Bolot Kerimbaev for his superb job taking all these wonderful pictures.



"Minutes from downtown! Recently updated! Formerly inhabited (that is, ready to move in, folks). Contact Kelly Carnahan for more information about viewing this property at 770-491-1494 or townhomes at yahoo.com!"



-Anthony

Accountable to the People

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It's time for a change. This kind of thing cannot go on:


Mayor Ray Nagin urged people to cross a bridge leading to the dry lands of the city's suburban west bank ... [but] evacuees who tried that route ... were met by police with shotguns who refused to allow them into Gretna, a nearby town on the other side.


We're not talking about refugees from a faraway land, desperately trying to reach the land of opportunity on leaky boats. Never mind why were we trying to stop them; these are our people. And our government has locked them in a box without food and water, refused to let them leave, and refused to let anyone deliver help.

It's time for a change. It's time to throw the bums out. And I don't mean the Republicans - I mean anyone in our current government who thinks that their high position means that they're "in charge" and they get to "make the decisions".

Well, you don't. We do not live in a dictatorship; we live in a democracy. You are not the owner of the organizations you control: you are their stewards. You are accountable to the people and the situations we live in as they're actuallly happening, NOT to some idealized image of what world you'd like us to live in. We have to break the hold that "one king rule" thinking has on our publically accountable institutions.

DO as you wish with your own stuff. If this was your house, or your personal business, or your wardrobe, you'd be well within your rights to make whatever stupid decision that you wanted, and to deal with the tragedy that resulted.

But government is not personal business; heck, even business isn't business: the leader of a corporation isn't an "owner in charge" but a hired hand beholden to the shareholder's fiduciary interests. Our businesses all too often forget this, imagining that managers need only pay lip service to their duty; the leaders of our governments cannot be allowed to forget this, as lip service is not clearly not cutting it.

Leaders! Only through some magical thinking could you imagine that it's acceptable for police could turn away refugees from a disaster, or that somehow providing relief services would make things worse. And we've had quite enough of magical thinking, thank you.

We've loaned you your power.

And now we're going to take it back.

-the Centaur

Wikipedia: Putting the “free” in free encyclopedia

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Today's Wikipedia featured post is about anarcho-capitalism, the idea that we should do away with a compulsory state in favor of a society of individuals freely entering into contracts, which would subsume the role of the state while respecting each individual's sovereignty.

While I personally am not convinced we should give up on the umbrella of state as long as we live in a rain of competing states, hostile ideologies and national disasters, the anarcho-capitalist Non-Aggression Axiom and its corollary, The Prohibition of Initiation of Force, are two maxims I try to live and judge by.

Interestingly, though, I think the Wikipedia could be seen as a product of an opposite stance, that of the free software movement, whose ultimate goal would be to eliminate software as property through a compulsory government which disallowed certain kinds of contracts.

Certainly that's not very anarcho-capitalist in its reliance on the state. However ... the minds behind the GPL aren't dumb guys (with a few exceptions), and the GNU General Public License is a great example of how anarcho-capitalism and free software can work together.

In an anarcho-capitalist world, everyone that drank the GPL Kool-Aid would get the whole benefit of the free software world; people entering into non-free contracts would lose out because the "hidden costs" of enforcement built into our traditional intellectual property law would be spelled out, in the open, in the contract.

And if people actually saw what intellectual property law really cost them, no-one would swallow it.

-the Centaur

The Loyolian

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Alternate host for the emergency page is the The Loyolian, which hopefully will have more information soon.

-the Centaur

The Interdictor: Super Human

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So it's confirmed: the Interdictor, a blogger slogging it out live in New Orleans under end-of-the-world conditions, is actually superhuman:

"On another note: I've just been told that we're being monitored in Iraq! To all the troops there, from one soldier to another, we're hanging tough here and you hang tough too. No matter what you're hearing, we love you guys and want you to know that we know how hard you've got it. Stay strong! "


That's right ... with corpses in the streets, dodging gunfire, keeping his blog running on diesel fuel, the Interdictor takes time to shout out to our soldiers in Iraq to let them know "how hard they've got it." And you know what? The soldiers in Iraq sure do have it hard ... but it takes a hell of a human to stand up and say so while his own world has collapsed into armageddon.

More power to you, man.
-Anthony

This Explains a Lot

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Never stop learning. That's my motto: the more you know, the more you know you don't know. That's usually an accumulative process: the more you learn, the more you can learn, and the faster you can learn it.

But in the magical fairyland known as IT, some people seem to actively destroy knowledge, creating more confusion wherever they go. We've had a word for it for a while - FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt). Now we have an explanation, at least analogically - the uncertain world of vaporware and project requirements must be quantum, yeah that's the ticket, and we've just discovered that Quantum information can be negative:

Even the most ignorant cannot know less than nothing. After all, negative information makes no sense. But, although this may be true in the everyday world we are accustomed to, negative information does exist in the quantum world ... What could negative information possibly mean? In short, after I send you negative information, you will know less. Such strange situations can occur because what it means to know something is very different in the quantum world ... Negative information turns out to be precisely the right amount to cancel the fact that we know too much.


Really I don't want to be a typical popularizer abusing quantum mechanics for my little analogies ... long before the concept of negative information appeared, the philosophical concept of defeasible reasoning captured the idea that in most real-world situations learning new facts can force you to give up previously held conclusions. Certainly this is true in any scientific revolution, where switching from the Ptolmaic to the Copernican world view or from Newtonian to Einsteinian physics required throwing out vast amounts of knowledge.

But the next time I encounter a confusing cloud of fuzzy figments surrounding the slippery, unfocused requirements of the latest vaporware, I want to believe I've encountered negative quantum information, dang it.

-the Centaur

Hell Freezes Over

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At last, Apple has released a multi-button mouse. After years of bravely thinking different(ly) and enduring consequent public ridicule and lemminglike adoration, Apple released a Mighty Mouse with not one, not two, not three, no, with FOUR, count them FOUR buttons:
Here would go an image of my new Mighty Mouse. But by the time I got to the Apple store, you got them all. So there isn't one. Next time, if you want an image of my new mouse, leave one for me. Until then, please enjoy this ascii art of the new mouse I don't have:

------------(o )

Thank you.

The center ball is the new scroll wheel, PLUS left click, right click AND "innovative" squeezy buttons on the side, just like the squeezy buttons on the side of my Kensington Mouse-in-a-Box Optical Pro attached to the Blue Slab of Coolness, except the "less innovative" Kensington distinguishes squeezes from the left or the right. Ah, the price of "innovation". But I digress.



Or do I? The neat thing about the Kensington is that the side buttons look like highlight accents on the mouse: if you don't want to use them, you'll never know they're there. There is a tension between providing powerful features and clean design: the clutter of obvious interface features can be intimidating, confusing. I believe it's far better to have a clean design that doesn't clutter the user's view with features, and to make the power user features "just work" the way you want them to. While I haven't seen any user interface studies specifically examining this question, it does seem consistent with research I recall having read about about human attention (we can directly perceive or "subitize" only about four items at a time) and novice users (who can be confused and put off by cluttered interfaces).

Apple has done the same thing that Kensington did: the mouse appears to have only two buttons, the main surface and a tiny scroll ball for panning and scrolling inside documents. Beneath that shiny surface, however, are sensors that allow the Mighty Mouse to tell its left from its right (at least on its top surface). However, in its default mode, both the right and the left button respond as left buttons, so the default experience of novice users is the same. Out of the box (ha ha) the Mighty Mouse provides Mac users with the experience they have come to expect - but if you are a power user, and presumably you are if you dashed in to the Apple store to scoop up all the Mighty Mice they had before I could get one, you bastards, then you will know to go to System Preferences and set your right mouse button to respond to the right. This is where the excellent Ars Technica review both gets it and doesnt get it:
The debate over one-button versus multibutton mice has become extremely heated at times and has roots going back for almost as long as mice have been around. Proponents for both sides claim that their mice are "easier to use" and promote productivity, although I am not personally aware of any extensive human-computer interface (HCI) studies done on multibutton mice that have come out in their favor.

However, regardless of the results of various usability studies, the tech world refuses to relent and geeks around the world demand the versatility of the multibutton mice that they've come to know and love, just not from Apple.

With all due respect to the reviewer, who really hit the nail on the head with his review, this particular dig at two-button mice misses the point. While I, too, have not tracked down any studies specifically testing one vs. two button mice, user interface studies generally show that more complicated input procedures that require people to actually, like, learn things generally kick the ass of input methods designed for novices. (This one reason why I regularly get schooled in Starcraft by people who know the hotkeys, or why my friends David Cater and Henry Crutcher can program rings around me because every possible configuration of input devices on their computers does something useful for them. But I digress.)



Or do I? I certainly FEEL far more efficient browsing the web on the Blue Slab of Coolness because I can right-context click and save files or view source of a page without performing a context click than I am on the Grey Slate of Smoothness, which only has a one-button trackpad and requires a key-and-mouse dance to get the same functions. Or, to compare Apples to Apples (ha ha), I definitely feel far more efficient using my iLamp with its third-party three-button mouse than I am on the Grey Slate, which feels like a step backward.



(In fact, compared to the Toshiba Satellite's slick programmable animated trackpad ...



...the Powerbook's simple grey slate seems like something out of the Stone Age:



... especially when you think how easy it would be for the animated trackpad and Apple's grey slate to be combined. But, again, I digress.)


Apple's genius of late has been to show that the true solution is NOT "either novices or experts" but is instead "BOTH novices AND experts". Apple's new mouse is not a one button mouse or a two button mouse ... it's both: a four-button mouse that looks like a one button mouse from the perspective of novices, but is fully programmable. Apple is one of the most GUI-focused operating systems that exists that "just does the right thing" for novices, but it's now layered on top of Unix so that the most hardened hacker can crack open bash, Emacs and Perl to get his job done. As the Ars Technica review notes:
When you press both buttons at the same time or simply depress the top half of the mouse, it left clicks. I consider this to be a very important point, as much of the recent debate about this mouse has revolved around whether it would be a good mouse solution to package with new Mac products in the future, therefore having to still "just work" for those who desire the one-button simplicity and not confusing those people when they start seeing unexpected contextual menus popping up. I think it would be very difficult to accidentally right-click this mouse, as most one-button users simply click on the left side with their index fingers or click in the center, which would still yield a left click.

SO maybe there AREN'T user interface studies that will definitively show that one button mice {kick the ass of | suck compared to} two button mice. But now Apple has shown you don't have to accept that Hobson's choice ... you can get both. And since Apple has now given users the means to choose (spiced up of course with Apple's marketing mojo and the distinctive Apple innovations like that micro scroll ball which enables you to pan and tilt anywhere in large documents in programs like, oh, PHOTOSHOP or something - talk about playing to your core audience. But I digre-WHAM-thud). Ahem.

Since Apple has given its users the means to choose, we no longer need to wait for studies - we can let the market decide.

And I decide a two-button mouse will make me feel better ... as soon as I can snatch one from all of your fast little hands.

-the Centaur

Reward the Goodness

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So Captain D's now has lighter fare. For those who don't know me, I am the "Captain D's Guy". The restaurant was founded the same year I was born, and I imprinted upon it at an early age when my mom would drop me off there for lunch while she shopped at the grocery store next door. Even now, I still eat there twice a week - sometimes even twice a day.

Flash forward ten years. My uncle Joe died of heart failure when I was in college - and my dad had quite the history of heart disease himself - so even though I'm adopted I figured it was time to start looking ahead to beat the family curse. I decided to focus on baby steps: going for a walk once a week, or ordering one less piece of fish for lunch, or switching from fries to rice. This was difficult, but over time the "baby steps" approach worked: I went from walking to running to the Peachtree, and from the three piece fried fish dinner to the two-piece broiled grill with veggies. It took another ten years, but I eventually DID manage to lose the college fat and bring the cholesterol (which never was bad, mind you) under control.

Fast forward to now. I'm developing a "your money is your voice" philosophy: I choose to shop at Whole Foods, and will soon choose to switch to a hybrid car, NOT because I'm a granola health food environmental nut but instead because I think there is value to healthy food choices and fuel efficient cars and I'm willing to put some price premium on doing things a better way. Hopefully if enough people think like me, businesses will notice, and will apply some of that crackerjack capitalist ingenuity to making me happy in a healthy, environmentally conscious way.

SO I was pleased to see that Captain D's has indeed adopted lighter fare. In addition to the broiled lunch special I've been eating all this time, they've added low calorie, low carb and premium grilled selections which target any kind of health diet you so choose. And you know what? Surprise, surprise - they're some of the tastiest meals on the menu. And this is speaking from someone who loves fried fish: it's great to have something that tastes good be good for you, for a change.



Go check it out.
-the Centaur

Anthony Francis, Famous Quack

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This never fails to crack me up:

Anthony Francis: Seventeenth century quack physician and alchemist. Claimed ability to dissolve gold into a universal remedy.

- Wedeck, Harry E.
A Treasury of Witchcraft: A Sourcebook of the Magic Arts., p196. Avenel, New Jersey: Gramercy Books. 1961.


If only I knew all the things I've been doing...

-the Centaur

Football vs Videogames: A good question

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Alright, I'll bite: Why are we upset about videogame violence if regular sports also cause violence? Simply because videogames are new and different? Or, because they are the banner of a new generation, they are "safe" for an older generation of politicians to attack?

Clearly high school sports violence isn't something new, and few people would consider banning it. How do we educate our public and politicians about how to think properly about things that are new and different?

And by "properly" I don't mean "agreeing with me" --- reasonable people can disagree about the possible dangers of things like videogames and still remain reasonable --- instead I mean testing ideas against evidence, putting things in their proper context, and applying values formulated as universals, which means that in general you do NOT toss a call for ban or investigation onto the publicity trail of every pseudosensation that swims down the stream, but take a measured ... dare I say "conservative" ... attiude towards any call for government regulation.

-the Centaur