Link Sausage (again) [Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος]

I'd planned to do these about once a week, maybe less often, but basically whenever I had ten items lined up and ready to post. But a whole bunch of things caught my eye this morning, so here's a second dose of link sausage this week.

Most of us have heard of the problem facing lesbian sheep, or heard metaphorical references to it. Howard A. Landman turned it into a poem.
A UseNet classic, recently reposted to Slashdot, about places where a VAX does not belong: Watch Out For Bad Electricity Days
yesthattom started off a thread about "GNU packages I never want to see" by suggesting OpenEKG...
M&M's obsession leads to physics discovery (thanks to aiglet for pointing it out). Actually it's more math than physics (okay, okay, it's in that area where they overlap), but it was a physicist who noticed it.
The Official Rules of Calvinball (thanks to aiglet again).
Parents name their daughter Diot Coke ... in 1379. (Found on rec.org.sca, where there is followup discussion regarding what is and is not surprising about this, pronunciation, and the idea of a fortune teller saying, "... but 600 years from now, people on the other side of the world will amuse themselves by making fun of your name." Diot turns out to have been a common "pet name" for Dionisia.)
Fashion that horrifies some RABbits and amuses others: Clothing that makes you look extensively tattooed. I think it's pretty, but... (Shannon Larratt wrote a reasoned rant explaining what folks consider troubling about this.)
Another of those ideas many of us have read in science fiction and thought would be cool to have in real life is a few steps closer: subvocal speech recognition. You think about saying something but don't actually make any sound, and "sensors under the chin and one each side of the Adam's apple pick up the brain's commands to the speech organs, allowing the subauditory, or 'silent speech' to be captured." (link via Elbows)
Since I've nearly got a full set of ten items stacked up already, I'll round this out with a cat photo that's sort of an antidote to some of the cute cat pictures I've linked to in the past. (Thanks to Fred for the URL.)
Finally, thanks to speaker2animals, some skywatching news for 2004-03-22 through 2004-03-28: "a rare opportunity to see all five of the naked eye planets at the same time plus each will be paid a visit by the Moon." (text) (RealPlayer version available here.)

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I love the VAX story. Had it not been for a commenter, though, I wouldn't have made the connection between the two halves in

Then, before I could open my mouth, he rebooted it. It was Monday, 19-Oct-1987.

I dimly remember the events of that day (I was twelve), but I wouldn't have recognised it by its date.

[link] [reply]

*nod* If comments already there hadn't explained it, I would've found some way to provide a clue in my blurb.

[link] [parent] [reply]

I just read the linked article about tattoos. Now there's someone who's gone off the high side. "I don’t believe that people without body modifications are really even fully birthed and evolved humans"?! Um, yeah, right, whatever. So, in her conception of reality (cue the "What colour is the sky in your world?" question), the essence of being human is the ability to alter one's body. Right. No, fuckhead, the essence of being human is to be able to alter one's environment by externalizing one's mind. We were doing that long before we ever had the spare time necessary to even think about covering needles with plant dyes and shoving them under our skins, or poking sharp awls through dangling flaps of skin and hanging bits of pretty stuff from the holes.

The writer of that article is a bigot with an unusual prejudice. There's no significant difference between saying "I don’t believe that people without body modifications are really even fully birthed and evolved humans" and "I don't believe that people with brown skins/non-Christian religions/non-culturally-standard sexual partners are even fully birthed and evolved humans." No difference at all.

In fact, I'd go so far as to suggest that people with tattoos, piercings, and other body modifications should simply consider the Sleeves shirts and the media attention to be (as usual) yet another vagary of fashion, and let it go at that. Were any of us with Technicolour tonsures -- and fellow-travellers -- any more than annoyed when every second MTV T&A act started showing up with pink/green/fire-engine red "do"s? Or what about the recent appropriation -- yet again -- by the popular culture of everything punk? Some people have been doing that as a lifestyle for a generation now. Is that bothersome, because it's fashionable, and not a "commitment" (oh, please!) or a "lifestyle"? If any of us were bothered, we ought to re-evaluate the insides of our heads.

And so should the writer of that article.

what you said. the blind arrogance of some people just amazes me sometimes. hell, i have three tattoos, and while getting them was a pretty liberating experience that's too complex to go into here, i can't say as how they make me feel any more evolved or "fully realized".

besides, i'm pretty sure having your head up your ass doesn't count as a body modification.

And "well reasoned"??? I don't think so.

The author refers to the old saying that people with tattoos don't care if other people have them or not, and then refers to their own article as an expansion of that position....... which it most clearly isn't.

Not that the rest of the logic impressed me, but that bit was easy to pin down.

I'm in some ways more bothered by the suggestion that a person's 'truth' might be so fixed, so limited, that only permanent modifications could possibly express it. I'm about more than one thing, and when I bother to put together a 'look' it varies - not because I'm lying, but because I'm expressing different truths at different times.

I didn't say well-reasoned, and I did say rant. There's some obvious rectocranial inversion there, but there's also explanation of what's upsetting, not just shouting. (Whether anyone not similarly biased see the explanation as "valid", it still explains a mindset and point of view, and is thus useful for understanding the position even if only to understand what's wrong with it.)

ah - i misread you then, I thought you had said well reasoned - and yes, the rant does seem to express a mindset

I won't say I agree with everything in his article, but a few points:

...the essence of being human is to be able to alter one's environment by externalizing one's mind. We were doing that long before we ever had the spare time necessary to even think about covering needles with plant dyes and shoving them under our skins, or poking sharp awls through dangling flaps of skin and hanging bits of pretty stuff from the holes.

Probably not so long between one and the next. In a spiritual sense, the body is part of our "environment" as a house for the soul, and people have been altering it for thousands upon thousands of years. Think of all the "primitive tribes" that still do it as passed down from their ancestors. Early tattoos were of protection symbols. A Native American tribe used suspension in their religious ceremony. Tattooing and piercing used as a rite of passage. Et cetera.

"I don’t believe that people without body modifications are really even fully birthed and evolved humans"

Sounds like a religious statement to me, and one of the tenets of the Church of Body Modification is, to quote from their website, "It is our belief that by practicing body modification and by engaging in rituals of body manipulation we strengthen the bond between mind, body, and soul and ensure that we live as spiritually complete and healthy individuals." I am guessing he is a member. I won't argue about his being a bigot.

Or what about the recent appropriation -- yet again -- by the popular culture of everything punk? Some people have been doing that as a lifestyle for a generation now. Is that bothersome, because it's fashionable, and not a "commitment" (oh, please!) or a "lifestyle"?

Yes, there are a lot of the "old school" crowd who laugh at the kids who shop at Hot Topic using their daddy's credit cards. The saying is, "I remember when I had to rip and pin my own clothes! They can buy theirs already made for them!" There are people who won't shop there just because they feel "their scene" is becoming too mainstream. How alternative/counter-culture can it be if they offer it at the mall? On the other hand, hair dye, piercings and even tattoos these days aren't necessarily so permanent.

Look at how other people view "the armchair quarterback" or "the weekend warrior". What Larratt is saying is that this is something he takes seriously (to the extreme of a religion) and that other people should too.

If you're entitled to your opinions, he's entitled to his.
Me, I think anyone who's religious is touched in the head.

Slashdot doesn't like me. Or my ISP. Or something. It timeouts on me. So I went to google and trawled the VAX story out from elseweb.

Reminds me of something I did in 198n.

Now, there's this particular make of air surveillance resources. It runs on a cluster of PDP-11's. The sites are tightly networked, using a proprietary networking system that ties the sites really tight together.

Now, I was used to doing things on a PDP-11 running RSX -- on a normal subscriber terminal. Some of the utility tools botched the terminal settings sometimes, and the simplest way to recover was hit the reset key on the terminal. Now, for this particular experiment I was not at the central site on a subscriber terminal. I was actually at the surveillance resource, tapping away at the console terminal. Logged in at operator privileges.

The utility did its usual weirdness, and the terminal was all unreadable.

As I had conditioned myself to do, I hit the terminal reset key.

Except that on those PDP's, when you press the reset key on the console terminal, you are actually resetting the computer itself.

Did I mention that the PDP's at each site are clustered? All round me I heard the bootup sequence of the computers, and the frantic thudding of the antenna control system hydraulics hitting failsafe positions. Resetting a single computer caused every computer in the cluster to halt.

Did I mention that the different sites are tightly networked? Loss of heartbeat from one site made several adjacent sites switch to recovery mode, which severely degrades the quality of output, while ensuring the existence of output.

It took less than an hour and we had the systems up and running as if nothing had happened. I've later checked discreetly, and all archive tapes have long since been discarded. No evidence exists that we had a gaping hole in our air surveillance capacity that summer morning.

And don't forget the upcoming Transit of Venus:

http://www.chocky.demon.co.uk/oas/venus.html

Though the times are for Britain, not eastern U.S., which will miss the first third (roughly) of the transit.

Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Link Sausage (again)

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Woah, freaky.

Re: Woah, freaky.

Re: Woah, freaky.

Re: Woah, freaky.

Re: Woah, freaky.

Re: Woah, freaky.

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