Author: Aaron Weber

Hackers and Civilians

You can tell a programmer from a regular person by the way they ask and answer questions. Programmers give answers and ask questions like computers do: technically correct, but often totally irrelevant and beside the point.

For example, if you ask a regular person “do you know where Hynes Convention Center is?” they’ll try to give you directions. Programmers are likely to say “Yes.” They may occasionally elaborate, and describe the location. If they give you directions, they will have strange and often frightening details, such as longitude, cardinal direction, and the amount of time it will take, depending on whether you are travelling by African or European swallow. Or, in a meeting designed to tell new employees of a large corporation about insider trading laws, they will ask questions which do not apply to them (“If I were a foreign resident, what would the tax implications for…”) or will pick at inconsistencies in the ways that the rules are explained, despite the fact that the rules themselves are consistent.

It can be infuriating until you realize that these are the people whose thought process is what makes your world tick. They are able to see things in a way that you don’t, are able to imagine all the corner cases, the exceptions. Things that you take as common sense appear to them as arbitrary rules which have to be learned, because, frankly, that’s what they are. They’re just aware of it more than you are.

Flaming Plame

Well, the Plame thing is really getting picked up by a lot of people. Billmon has a great take on it: it looks a lot like a coup, honestly. The CIA is fighting the White House using the Justice Department.

Once, the Economist apologized for implying that Bush was actually elected, and noted that he was appointed, given that the election was too close to call. Today, an editorial there apologizes for defending any of the Bush team’s economic policies:

Underlying some of this column’s cheer these few weeks past has been an assumption that President George Bush and his administration were not as stupid, short-sighted, parochial and economically illiterate as they sometimes appear. Buttonwood now realises that this was a mistake and retracts this view as hopelessly optimistic and naive. Over the past couple of weeks, the risks to the world economy and financial markets everywhere have risen as the full force of their economic myopia has visited itself on the world stage.

Franken-Fries

Is bioengineering the greatest thing to happen to our environment, or the worst? A very well-written article that really looks at the issue from a number of angles, including several I hadn’t thought of before.

I read “The Botany of Desire” recently and that, along with this article, makes me wonder seriously about the way that we treat our earth. A few small changes in agricultural policy in the US and Europe would really go a long way toward improving things. For example, if you offered tax breaks for organic certification, not tax breaks to buy extra fertilizer and pesticide. If you quit subsidising the agricultural-chemical makers and started helping the smaller farmers. Big farmers would still exist, of course, but it’s the small ones need help anyway. It’d be good for the third world too.

It makes sense, it’d be less expensive, it’d be better for the environment, and it’d be better for the economy. It’ll never happen.

I can tell you’re lying…

Finally beginning to hammer on the lies and the lying liars who tell them. As the song goes, “Lies, lies lies lies lies lies lies.”

Maybe it was that I just had peanut M&M’s for lunch, but it makes me sick to my stomach when I see how we’re colluding in our own deception. A friend of mine had this to say:

I have always had trust in our country. I know that sounds retardedly patriotic. But I have always felt lucky to live here and now they have taken that away. And it pisses me off. This is my fucking country too you fucking assholes. QUIT FUCKING IT UP! What is going on with the people that we are letting this happen? Do people not realize? I had faith in the people at one point too.

More motorcycle stories

Two motorcycle stories:
They’re resurfacing Memorial Drive in Cambridge, and at 35 miles an hour I hit the line between the resurfacing-in-progress and the old road. There was a bump up, maybe an inch or two, sharp corner. I felt the front wheel land a lot sooner than the back wheel. Absolutely terrifying.

But then someone on a Honda Interceptor nodded at me, so that was cool. I like Hondas. I like some of the Suzuki bikes, too– the sportbikes that don’t look all overdone– but I don’t know if I could ride anything that wasn’t a Honda. Their original slogan for US sales was “You meet the nicest people on a Honda.”

And today on the way to work, thinking “oh man, the season has got to be over, it is cold cold cold” there was a whole group of kindergardeners, holding on to a rope and being led by a teacher, that saw me and started pointing and saying ‘motorcycle! motorcycle!’ and I waved, and they waved back. It was pretty cute.

Annals of Incredibly Bad Taste

Spoiled kids and trashy funerals. This trumps the ghetto prom and the ghetto wedding that people sent to me.

The baby stuff especially is egregious– it’s one thing to have a particular style, like the ‘ghetto’ images or like an import-car tuner. That, people make fun of because they look down on your culture or sub-culture at least as much as because it’s in actual poor taste. But the kid’s toys just scream “I don’t spend any time with my children and I spoil them to compensate,” as well as “I have no taste.”

Life is, indeed, a crapshoot.