think or thwim

From a great Op/Ed at the Onion:

As my parents and peers, you supposedly have my best interests at heart. But over the past 80 minutes, it has come to my attention that there exists a series of films featuring a man capable of the most unbridled and elegant awesomeness, a man capable of knocking a guy out with a punch started one inch away from his enemy’s chest. That I somehow reached my twelfth year of life without anyone alerting me to this fact is beyond my comprehension and, ultimately, inexcusable…

Bruce Lee’s screen test for the Green Hornet:

You say you love me, and yet there is a man who can jump like four feet into the air and kick a guy five times before landing—and you kept it from me. That can hardly be called love.

:: Linkbunnies

This movie was released in 2003. I pointed to it when the producer released it for free through bittorrent in 2006, and now it’s available without downloading it.

When the corporation was invented in 1712 it was simply intended to be a group of people working together on a common goal for a short period of time. The lifespan of corporations was limited by law. After the Civil War the 14th amendment was passed to grant equal rights to former slaves. Corporate lawyers co opted the law and claimed that corporations deserved equal rights. In the first 20 years of the amendment’s existence, it resulted in 307 lawsuits being tried before the Supreme Court. 288 were brought by corporations. 19 were brought by black people.

It is also at Google Video.

Now corporations have essentially the same rights and protections that people have, but they don’t have the same responsibilities. Since they are not physical beings, they aren’t concerned about trashing the environment. They don’t get sick, and they don’t have to die. The lives of individual people are of no consequence. In the movie an FBI psychological consultant demonstrates that corporations meet the DSM-IV diagnosis for a psychopath. We’ve created a race of virtual monsters motivated by profits. Even the people running them are helpless when it comes to making moral decisions. If a CEO chooses what’s right over what’s profitable too often, he will be replaced by someone that will better protect the corporation’s/shareholders interests.

Economist Magazine reviewed the film when it came out. They point out that the psychopath idea is not new:

Although the movie makers claim ownership of the company-as-psychopath idea, it predates them by a century, and rightfully belongs, in its full form, to Max Weber, the German sociologist. For Weber, the key form of social organization defining the modern age was bureaucracy. Bureaucracies have flourished because their efficient and rational division and application of labor is powerful. But a cost attends this power. As cogs in a larger, purposeful machine, people become alienated from the traditional morals that guide human relationships as they pursue the goal of the collective organization.

Weber was talking specifically about the shortcomings of socialist governments, but I think you can say the same thing about our capitalist government in the US. Just like corporate CEOs, politicians who don’t play their role as a cog in the industrial-political complex have a short career.

:: Smashing Telly

BBC News is reporting that researchers at the Univeristy of Bristol have discovered Panamanian army ants using their own bodies to plug holes in the route from a food source to the nest.

Dr Scott Powell:

When the ants bump into a hole they cannot cross, they edge their way around it and then spread their legs and wobble back and forth to check their fit. If they are too big, then they carry on and another ant will come along and measure itself in the same way. This carries on until an appropriately sized ant plugs the hole.

He also said the ants stay in the same position for hours until the traffic dies down at the end of the day. Here’s some more examples of ants using themselves to form living bridges:

The guy that took this video says the ant being pulled up at the beginning just finished a 30 minute shift.

:: 3quarksdaily

Someone at the University of Massachusetts Amherst thought it would be a good idea to give Andrew Card an honorary doctorate degree. Ignoring campus protests, an online petition, and common sense, they went through with the plan on Friday. That gave the students and faculty at the ceremony the opportunity to tell Mr. Card what they think of his service to the Bush Administration.

Customarily the recipient gives a speech, but Card just sat down after he received his award.

Here are a couple of the reasons Card is so popular. From Wikipedia:

Card is known to have headed the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), whose members include Karl Rove, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Condoleezza Rice, Karen Hughes and Mary Matalin. This group is known for controlling public relations for the Iraq War.

In March 2004 Card tried to convince Attorney General John D. Ashcroft to reauthorize a domestic surveillance program, which the Justice Department had just determined was illegal. Ashcroft lay ill in an intensive-care unit when Card and White House Counsel Alberto R. Gonzales urged him to sign the papers. Ashcroft refused.

Some of the YouTube comments:

• Well that went well.
• Honary Degree for Karl Rove, anybody?
• Kinda sucks when you don’t have those pre-screened, hand-picked audiences, eh there, Andy? I wonder when ol’ George and Dick will have the courage to face a real audience.
  BWA HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

President Bush received a bachelor’s degree from Yale which was nearly honorary (2.35 GPA). They also awarded him an honorary upgrade to a master’s degree in 2001. I think this would be a good time to bump him up to a doctorate.

UMass also honored Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe with a degree in 1986. They are currently considering posthumous degrees for Adolf Hiltler and Joseph Stalin.

:: Cynical C

From math.com:

Nature is complicated and we aren’t sure of all the rules. The game of Life lets us observe a system where we know all the rules. Just like we can study simple animals (like worms) to discover things about more complex animals (like humans), people can study the game of Life to learn about patterns and behaviors in more complex systems.

This is John Conway, the creator of the game of Life, in an excerpt from BBC Channel 4
What We Still Don’t Know. The introduction is by Sir Martin Rees.

The game of Life is a cellular automata, meaning that it consists of a grid of squares that can either be black (dead) or white (living) and three rules govern the actions of each square:

1. A black cell with exactly 3 neighbors will change to white.
2. A white cell with 2 or 3 neighbors will remain white.
3. In all other cases any white cells will turn black.

There are no other rules in the game. It is programmed from the bottom up. Out of those simple rules surprisingly complex patterns and behaviors emerge. Top down programming would impose order on the system based on some grand design. The problem with top down programming is that the programmer has to anticipate every possibility and provide a rule to deal with it, which requires a very complex program and tends to produce simple, uninteresting results. That’s the way we try to manage things. In building codes, tax law, and just about every thing else we try to control, we dream up a desired result and use reams of paper trying to write rules to get us there.

Nature uses bottom up programming. Systems and the rules that govern them evolve and result in complexity. Flocks of birds, schools of fish, and colonies of ants all display sophisticated actions that we can’t predict by examining the rules that the individuals within the systems follow.

How complex do the patterns get in the game of Life? Incredibly complex. Again, from math.com:

A computer can be built inside the Life “universe”… Briefly, streams of gliders and spaceships can be used to send information just as electrical signals are used to send information in a physical computer. These streams of gliders can react in a way to perform all of the logical functions on which a modern computer is based. It would be very impractical to build a computer this way, but given a large enough Life pattern and enough time, we could run any program that runs on a computer. Several interesting special-purpose computers have been constructed as Life, including one that outputs the prime numbers.

A universal constructor can even be built. This is a pattern that can take a blueprint for some other Life pattern (or its own) and build that pattern. No one has built this yet, since it would be very large, but it has been shown to be possible. This means that Life patterns could exist that reproduce themselves. They could even modify their blueprints just as living things combine and mutate their genes. Who can say what would develop in a large enough universe of reproducing Life patterns?

There is a good explanation and a link to play the game at Math.com.

Ibiblio has Conway’s original 1970 paper about the Game of Life.

The entire show I took these excerpts from is available at Google Video: What We Still Don’t Know Part 3 - Are We Real?.

This is some amazing footage with an unexpected outcome. Kruger National Park in South Africa, September 2004.

The video is by Jason Schlosberg at negativespace.com.

:: Geekologie

Hilarious.

The Lone Ranger was my hero when I was a kid.

“When helmuts make little sense.”
- Fred

Hans Rey and Steve Peat defying death, gravity, the weather, and a security guard in Burren, Ireland. After a pub crawl the night before they got up early to ride the cliffs before the tourists got in the way.

Locals warned us of the upward drafts, that blow people off the cliffs - and sure enough the wind was picking up over night. We got an early start, and even the extra strong Italian coffee I brewed couldn’t clear our heads. Even though the conditions and weather were less than good, this was our one and only chance to ride the cliffs, so we did.

Read more here.

:: Good Shit

I’ve never seen an oasis before so this may not be anything special, but I thought it was pretty stunning.

It’s from an article in the Daily Mail:

Shimmering beneath the scorching sun of the Peruvian desert is an extraordinary sight - a tiny settlement, complete with lagoon, lush palm groves, carob trees, cafes, neatly clipped lawns, 100-strong population and even the odd swimming pool.

For thousands of years, Huacachina, otherwise known as the ‘oasis of Americas’ - there is only one - has been a beacon of green, hidden deep amid hundreds of miles of barren desert.

The city of Ica is barely visible in the distance, but it’s closer than it appears. See the aerial view at Google Maps.

From Wikipedia:

[Huacachina] serves as a resort for local families from the nearby city of Ica, and increasingly as an attraction for tourists drawn by the sport of sandboarding on sand dunes that stretch several hundred feet high.

:: JWalk