Tau Central

from Rebecca Walker, hypercapitalism in the world...

2009-02-01T19:21:00.000-08:00

I found something in an article I am reading for a class. This part is just one paragraph from the essay but it is brilliant. This is from "We Are Using This Power to Resist" by Rebecca Walker. It originally appeared in The Fire This Time: Young Activists and the New Feminism, edited by Vivien Labaton and Dawn Lundy Martin.

What I don't know is that even though there is no Us and Them, and we need to move beyod binarism and labels and to have compassion for all, including the heads of neinous multinational corporations and the executives at the IMF, the truth is that there is a clear line in the sand. That line ois global hypercapitalism, that line is greed, that line is human exploitation, that line is the utter disregard for the delicate balance of the earth. Either you believe that the system that ensures 50 percent of the world's resources for 6 percent of its population by any and all means necessary is leading us to annihilation one cancer case at a time, or you do not. Whether or not you are able to act in opposition to this reality in every instance is beside the point. Do you see it?

Keeping Track of Student Information?

2008-08-24T13:53:00.000-07:00

In taking classes at SJSU, I see a lot of inefficiencies in how they manage their information. Is it surprising that the schedule of classes comes out after the end of the spring semester, when they begin compiling it in the previous November? When you see the structure of their database, it is not a surprise.

Well. Is it even possible to maintain student information in a way that is helpful to students. Apparently, it is. I found this bit in a brochure for the LSAT exams. It makes me wonder why, if all the community colleges and CS and UC schools are supposed to encourage transfers between them, they do not have the same kind of service.

Law School Data Assembly Service

(LSDAS) For US Law Schools Only

The LSDAS centralizes and standardizes the undergraduate academic records of law school applicants to simplify the law school admission process (for US law schools only). Nearly all American Bar Association-approved law schools (and some non-ABA-approved schools) require that applicants use the Law School Data Assembly Service. Canadian law schools do not participate in the LSDAS and do not requirte its use.

The LSDAS prepares a report for each law school to which you apply. The law school report contains information that the schools use, along with your application, personal essay, letters of recommendation, and other criteria, to make their admission decisions. Information contained in the report includes an undergraduate academic summary; copies of all undergraduate, graduate, and law/professional school transcripts; LSAT scores and writing sample copies; and copies of letters of recommendation processed by LSAC. Canadian law schools receive an LSAT Law School Report containing scores and writing sample copies.

The registration fee for the LSDAS includes law school report preparation, letter of recommendation and transcript processing, and access to electonic applications for all ABA-approved law schools.

(For the most up-to-date LSAT and LSDAS registration information, go to www.LSAC.org.)

Desperately Trying To Avoid Studying...

2008-05-18T15:05:00.000-07:00

Arg! I am so desperate to avoid studying for the finals that I have this coming week that I am actually writing to my blog. Gadzooks!

http://landfill.bugzilla.org/complaints/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=ALL

I love this one. A new bug database. One can use it to complain about absolutely anything. At last. Now, of course, there is a question. Where does one start? Maybe I should complain about not being able to decide which complaint to file first.

In further news, what was I thinking? Apropos of nothing, here are domains that I own. What am I doing with them? In some cases, I have no idea. But there it is.

* communitytinderbox.[com/net/org]
* doctorwatch.org
* donortracker.[com/net]
* easywalkingdistanct.[com/net/org]
* ellisparents.org
* evolvelove.com
* fuelsearch.com
* ganymede.org
* globalidentifier.[com/org]
* openwebobjects.[com/net/org]
* ratedwebservices.[com/net]
* slashvote.[com/net/org]
* sorrynopony.[com/net/org]
* spiritsexpress.com
* universalhealthcarenow.[com/org]
* winemailers.com
* wykiwyk.[com/org]
* wysiwys.org

Liana's Relay Race Results

2008-03-16T11:48:00.000-07:00

excerpted from http://www.firebirdmarchingband.com/~bulletin/archives2007%20-%202008/031008.html

Congratulations to the Fremont Track & Field Teams, they opened their season last week: The boys and girls competed at the El Camino league scrimmage in Santa Clara (Feb 26th), and at the Willow Glen Invitational (Mar 1st). At the league scrimmage, called the Andy Anderson Relays, the combined girls/boys squad came in 3rd over-all. Event winners were; boys 4x600 meter relay were: Cristhian Montenegro, Saul Pacheco, Jose Manuel Gurrola and Jose Luis Gurrola. Girls 4x100 meter relay were: Tina Liu, Brittany Van Schravendijk, Aly Rajah and Keyundra Roberts. Girls 4x300 meter relay consisted of Aly Rajah, Alexa Wallin, Regina de Cesare and Brittany Van Schavendijk. The Fremont girls set a meet record, decimating the previous meet record by over 4 seconds. The individual winner of the boys’ triple jump was Peter Cabana. Although they did not win, the girls 4x600 meter relay of Alexa Wallin, Yasmine Bensidi, Liana Kiddy-Gan and Stephanie Schneider broke the previous school record by 31 seconds!

What did you give up for Lent?

2008-02-25T18:40:00.000-08:00

I was walking across campus at SJSU a couple of weeks ago and I heard a snippet of a conversation. It seems funny, but I am not sure. A woman was walking by and I heard her say:

"No, I had to call you. I gave up texting for Lent."

Gave up texting? For Lent? Where does one go with this? It seems so odd, that it is hard to identify the kind of oddness it represents. O well. Now the Internet can deal with it.

The Sound of the Voice of an Organization

2008-02-12T10:23:00.000-08:00

I realized something about how I understand systems, but I am not sure what to do with this knowledge yet.

I think that I hear the "tone of voice" of an organization when I talk to people in that organization. When I ask the questions this leads me to ask, the people in the organization almost always have no idea what I mean.

This is a trivial example. When you enter the bookstore on the campus of San Jose State University, they have wide doors that automatically open for you. When you leave, the doors are at an odd angle from the rest of the room and they are not automatic. So, what does thing say?

Perhaps it does not say much. If the people who manage this shop changed this, would it make a huge difference? Probably not. Should I argue with them about it, try to rally other students to the cause? Definitely not. But it does mean something. It expresses an attitude of disdain. I can hear it as I walk out. It says that I have already been suckered into buying these over-priced books and they have no reason to be nice to me anymore. It says "Bought your books? Good, now go away...."

So, what is there to do? I am not sure. I do not want the book store to fix the doors. I want them to be the sort of organization that would know that they should not set it up this way, that would not have set it up this way in the first place. How does one ask for that?

Maybe I want to be the kind of person that can ignore the tone in their voice, to hear that whatever they are actually saying is probably reasonable.

Global Warming - In Pursuit of Ignorance

2007-11-18T13:22:00.000-08:00

Here are two different situations. How are they linked?

Someone asked the Colorado state department that administers schools whether the schools of Colorado needed to be made safe for earthquakes. Quite a few of the schools were built when a lot less was known about earthquake safety. The answer was that they did not know. It turns out that the agency in question does not have a list of the schools and when they were built or what condition they are in. Or rather, they do not have a list of the schools in Colorado. To be more precise, they are forbidden by law from having a list of the schools in Colorado. Think about this for a minute. Why would an agency that is supposed to oversee the schools in Colorado be forbidden from having a list of the schools?

I think that part of the answer is that most elected officials in Colorado disagree about everything except that the government is evil. They do not want to be regulated or taxed and they would just rather the state government wither away and leave them alone. Sounds like Marx to me, but who knows.

Second situation. There is quite a bit of uncertainty about some of the details of the global climate destabilization that is going on and that humans are causing. There is no scientific uncertainly about whether the climate is being destabilized. We know it is. There is no scientific uncertainty about whether there changes are being caused by humans. We know that they are. Only politicians "know" otherwise, and they can close their eyes and hold the hands over the ears and yell "Nya, Nya, I don't hear you!" for as long as the voters let them. We have a satellite called "DSCOVR" that can sit at a certain point between the Earth and the Sun and tell us rather a lot about whether the amount of energy that the Earth absorbs or reflects is changing. But the satellite is sitting in a warehouse, waiting for ... what? Nothing. Except that if we have better information about the damage we are doing to the planet's climate, we may actually have to be serious about responding to the problem.

What do these situations have in common? They both show that ignorance is bliss. If a politician does not know something, then there is no way they could have made the right decision? And, if they can guarantee that nobody is able to give them that information, then they can escape responsibility for their ignorance for that much longer.

I know that in twenty or thirty years, when there are massive disruptions to our way of life from what we are doing now, I am going to feel a lot better when dottering old George W Bush explains that nobody could have known, that it is a tragedy, that "mistakes were made", and that it is a shame nothing could have been done to prevent the problems. Won't this make you feel better too?

13 Ways Are Too Many

2007-07-29T23:44:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while, I re-read the poem '13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird'. A teacher pointed me to it, a long time ago, when I was asking how to properly express abstractions in poetry. I still do not understand.

Every time I read it, a different stanza draws me in. Today I think it is number 7.

O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

Some of the stanzas are about the blackbird that flies, or the blackbird that sits, or the blackbird that casts a shadow. This one is about the blackbird that you can find, and that can give you joy, but only if you will see it.

Our idea of what we want is so much more than the thing. The idea is sharp and hard and cold. The thing we want is real and soft and sounds sweetly in our ears as we sleep and smiles at us as we wake.

Perhaps My Own Summer of Code?

2007-06-19T17:53:00.000-07:00

Realizing I have said practically nothing personal on this blog, let me preface by saying I recently quit the Developer Tools group at Apple, worked a short contract at Mozilla Co, but am now taking some time off and finishing school. I am getting a BA in math at San Jose State University.

I was taking summer classes. I thought I could get some non-math requirements out of the way. What a joke! The campus administration encourages departments to offer classes in the summer, but the real incentives (the $$$) are set up to discourage it. Many departments offer no classes. Many categories of the required classes have very few sections being offered.

I have seen more dysfunctional organizations.... Well, maybe not. It is just sad. I would really like to thank all those people who voted for Prop 13 in the seventies. You handily managed to screw up the entire educational system here. It used to be a respected model around the country. Now, it is a joke, all the way from K-12 to 4-year universities. You should be very proud of what you have accomplished.

So, after getting into two of the classes I am going to need to take, I discovered there is a new class that lets you finish all the upper division requirements. Did anyone mention this as I was asking about upper-division classes? Of course not.

At least now I have a chance to have my own little summer of code. There are definitely a bunch of things I want to work on.

I will be putting some of these apps at my "main" site, http://www.ganymede.org, and others at another "main" site, http://www.wykiwyk.com. If anyone sees anything good on these site, or anything horrible, please let me know. Thanks.

Once in a while, a tiny bit of justice. Or perhaps not.

2007-05-21T16:18:00.000-07:00

So, Paul Wolfowitz has resigned as president of the World Bank. It is about time.

Let us admit it. The fact that he got that job was a slap in the face to the American people. Here is a man who said the Iraq war would pay for itself. We all know how amazingly incorrect that assessment was. So, he was either deliberately lying to the American public, or he is really, really incompetent about financial matters.

Which one of these is a qualification to head the World Bank?

But then, something occurred to me. Paul Wolfowitz has now had to publicly own up, in some sense, to the mistakes he has made. But what was the mistake, really? He made mistakes and a bunch of his friends have collectively become several hundred billion dollars richer as a result. But then, if you have to make a mistake, that is a good kind of mistake to make.

Some mistakes make people stop returning one's calls. Other mistakes make other people so rich they could give you a house or three and not even blink at it. Do you think Paul Wolfowitz will ever run out of people to stay with when he is on vacation in Europe? Or Asia? Or anywhere? Probably not. I am sure that all those military contractors have a special place on their Christmas lists for Wolfowitz. As their earnings keep making interest over the years, do you think they will forget one of the people who made it all possible? Probably not.

I wish I could make such mistakes. I bet we all do.

The Hills Around Us

2007-05-04T11:04:00.000-07:00

A while back, I went to the Four Corners area of the Southwest. It was not my choice, but my brother was arranging the trip and he wanted to get in some rock-climbing.

The local Ute tribe had, a long, long time back, named one of the hills in the area with the moniker, "the sleeping Ute". I did not see it. I looked at the hill and could not see where it came from. One day I happened to be at the right place at just the right angle and I saw it. After that, strangely enough, I saw it everywhere I went. I could look over my shoulder to check lanes while I was driving down the road and, if I was glancing in the correct direction, I would see it.

I cannot imagine being aware enough of my surroundings to see these things without trying. If I had not looked for this shape, many times, I would have missed it. Yet, it was so obvious.

I think about the shape of the hills around the South Bay, where I live. I know that the Mount Hamilton Observatory is sitting up on one of them. That's about all that I can think of.

Flying to NY, What Does the DHS Say? :-)

2007-04-13T08:28:00.000-07:00

With thanks to http://www.geekandproud.net/terror/. I feel much better now....

Frustrated With iTunes

2007-04-10T14:06:00.000-07:00

Yes, it is stupid. On the one hand, being frustrated with iTunes is an exercise in futility. If people complain, will the iTunes developers listen? No. On the other hand, being frustrated with iTunes is an exercise in futility. What else are you going to use? Sigh.

Well, if one is playing music from one's own collection, I have found SongBird to be darned nice. And it is Gecko-based, so it is cross-platform. See? Windows apps do not have to be ugly. They generally will be, but only because they want to be.

One thing I have not figured out is how to do is listen to podcasts. I like podcasts a lot, but the iTunes behavior is amazingly annoying. It decides I have not listened to a podcast in a certain time and stops pulling it. Gee. Thanks for being so helpful, but how about letting me decide what I want to download. Not being able to schedule the downloads myself? Do not even get me started.

And downloading three at a time, and I cannot change this behavior? Now, every time the Internet is slow, my kids ask if iTunes is running. Good brand maintenance, Apple.

Hm. Well, sorry about this. There may be easy solutions to these problems. Maybe I just needed to gripe and now I can go search for the solutions. I used to like iTunes, though. O well.

Too Much, Too Personal...

2007-03-30T11:21:00.000-07:00

I am not doing very well keeping my personal blog. I have two other blogs, one on WebObjects issues and one on Mozilla issues. Most of the "personal" things lately have revolved around these, as my work situation has changed.

Well, sometimes the personal is political and sometimes the personal is financial. :-)

a very random story I once heard

2006-11-07T12:26:00.000-08:00

I do not remember where I heard or read this story. It sticks in my mind, though. It may be

from the Talmud, but I would take that with a grain of salt.

There was once an extremely wise and beloved rabbi. People came to his village from miles

around to seek his counsel. It happened that he became very sick and was near death. People

heard this and many people came to his house to wish him well, to express their love and to

pray for him.

The rabbi was sick and in pain, but he felt the prayers of those outside his house. He lingered.

He did not die. The prayers of the people who cared for him bound him to his life and made it

impossible for him to die. Many days passed and the crowd outside the rabbi's house got

bigger and more passionate in their prayers.

The rabbi had an assistant who lived with him and helped him with his studies and his

writing. The assistant also respected and loved the rabbi and knew how many people the

rabbi helped every day, and how much wisdom and love he spread. But he knew the rabbi

was in pain and that there was no chance that he would recover from his illness.

The assistant emptied a ceramic barrel from the kitchen and dragged it up to the roof of the

house. He brought the barrel to the edge of the roof and pushed it over. The barrel fell down

and smashed on the stones in front of the house with a loud crash. Everything stopped.

Everybody stopped what they were doing and looked up in surprise. The prayers ceased, for

just a moment, and in that moment the rabbi died.

Back from ... a lot happening

2006-09-10T15:49:00.000-07:00

I have not posted in a while, but then again I was slightly busy getting married. If you ever want to make an entire summer go by in a faster-than-light-speed blur, this is a very good way to do it.

Pics will be posted somewhere semi-permanent but for now can be reached at http://riskinphoto.com/clients/sr/.

In other news, the war in Iraq is sucking 1.5 billion dollars a week out of our pockets and, mostly, into the pockets of the corporate friends of GW and DC. Doesn't that make you proud ot be an American? Certainly does put things into perspective, though. Feel guilty about wasting a couple of hundred dollars on over-priced computer games? This is so small time, it is not even worth worrying about. GW is wasting several thousand of every taxpayers money as we speak. So have fun!

China and Intellectual Property: What is the Real Problem?

2006-04-19T13:50:00.000-07:00

Corporations have been complaining about the really terrible crimes that are occurring in China. Apparently, copyright and patent holders are not getting the money they feel they deserve from the poverty-stricken Chinese populace. I'm shocked! Shocked, I tell you!

It bothers them that China does not respect international standards for intellectual property protection. It bothers me that China does not respect international standards ensuring worker rights and workplace standards.

These businesses have no problem benefiting from the lawlessness of Chinese society to take advantage of cheap workers, lax or non-existent environmental regulations, and a government hostile to employee-run unions.

Yet they complain about the other side of the coin and think it is dreadfully unfair they are not getting paid for their brand names and patents.

What is wrong with this picture?

$100 billion a year justifies how much suffering?

2006-04-16T20:41:00.000-07:00

There was a show on NPR about the proposed health care funding plan in Massachusetts. The person from MA was asked why they did not propose a single-payer health care system. He pointed out that the health insurance industry made $100 billion dollars last year. That is $100,000,000,000,000.00 He explained that if anybody wanted to propose a solution to our nation's health care problem that did not include the medical insurance industry, they would have a hard time of it.

I do not think I had ever heard it put so simply.

The question that I have is this. If our current health care system benefits a very small precentage of the US, probably less than 2%, by giving them $100 billion a year, and leaves 30 - 40% of the nation with inadequate health care, causing great personal pain and suffering and causing many hundreds of thousands of premature deaths every year, is that ok?

Obviously it is. That is what we have. Every year, people suffer pain and die early because they do not have access to health care. We seem to think that this is acceptable.

It seems to me, though, that there is some point at which the pain suffered by millions of people begins to counterbalance the profit motive of a few. So, when might that be?

If 2/3 of the US had inadequate health care, and 2% was getting $100 billion a year, would that be too many people without health care? I think it may not be enough. Complicating the equation is this. We may end up with 2/3 of the US not having health care and $200 or $300 billion going to that same 2%. Would the price of health care over the last 20 years suggest anything different?

What if 90% of the US had inadequate health care? Would that be acceptable?

It is hard to say. We accept so much deceit from our leaders. We have massive numbers of people with no access to medical care and our president proposes medical tort reform. It boggles the mind. It is hard to know how to approach these questions rationally. Or does rational thought have anything to do with the question?

A Beginning, Lately

2006-04-11T14:52:00.000-07:00

When I was one, I was just begun.
When I was two, I was still quite new.
When I was three, I was not quite me.
When I was four, I was not much more.
When I was five, I was barely alive.
But now I am six and I'm clever as clever.
I think I'll stay six now forever and ever.
- A. A. Milne