Miles is way into Fisher Price’s “Little People” series — the videos, the garage, the farm, the little figures with big hands holding useful things like wrenches and pitchforks. Amy was looking into the Little People Sweet Sounds Home, and found this in the Amazon customer reviews:

… WHY is the mom of the house holding a baby bottle and has a burp cloth over her shoulder and the dad has a permanent cell phone in his hand?!?!?!!? … Why isn’t the DAD holding a bottle? Is he too busy on the phone with his clients to help with the baby? What happens when mom goes back to work and she has a burp cloth stuck on her shoulder? It might be hard to trade stocks on Wall Street when you have a bottle permanently affixed to your hand. …

Yeah, uh, that would be a problem.

Homeland security is apparently about a lot more than protecting us from terrorists. In St. Helens, Oregon, agents visited a toy store to ask them to remove a Rubik’s Cube knock-off from shelves. Turned out the Rubik’s Cube patent has expired so the “Magic Cube” wasn’t infringing at all. But why did Homeland Security care to begin with?

Virginia Kice, a spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said agents went to Pufferbelly based on a trademark infringement complaint filed in the agency’s intellectual property rights center in Washington, D.C. “One of the things that our agency’s responsible for doing is protecting the integrity of the economy and our nation’s financial systems and obviously trademark infringement does have significant economic implications,” she said.

Via weblogsky

A month ago, I was talking to someone I know well — a family member — about the election. He said he was split in his thinking on some of the major planks of Democratic and Republican platforms - for example, he considered himself to be pro-environment. But he has decided to vote for Bush in the coming election.

Throughout this election cycle, discussion of the war in the Iraq has all but eclipsed discussion of the environment. When you take the long view, the state of our air and water will have a broader- and deeper-reaching effect on the world we live in (and the world our children live in) than the war in Iraq, than Social Security, than outsourcing questions, than whether a few more or a few less taxes will improve or diminish our overall standard of living. Many changes to the environment are irreversible, or at least extremely difficult to reverse. And, forgive me for speaking in cliche’s, but this is as true today as it was on the first Earth Day — until we find a workable replacement planet and master high-speed interstellar travel, we only have one earth. And we are its stewards. No one will take care of it, or clean up our messes, but us.

I don’t think we should shut down all industry and turn America into an agrarian commune. But I do think we need to weigh every action and every industry against its long-term environmental impact. Because after this Iraq thing blows over, after we do or do not fix the health care system, after we do or do not hand out a few more dollars in tax cuts for the rich, we will still be living in our own cesspool, breathing and eating and drinking our own effluent.

Maybe people think talking about the environment is boring, or no longer relevant, or that we’ve made “great strides.” News flash: Our environmental problems have not gone away. Environmental crises are so large, so deeply enmeshed in our world and in our lifestyle, that most people have forgotten how to see them. Smaller concerns fill our heads and our front pages, while species disappear, as forests vanish, record numbers of beaches close, asthma rates skyrocket, coral reefs are decimated, mercury levels balloon, the Union of Concerned Scientists say global warming is real (and caused by humans) and on and on.

What does all of this have to do with the coming election? Simply put, George W. Bush not only has the worst environmental record of any president we’ve ever had, but he has actively worked against environmental protections in favor of profit for industry. And that, I believe, has greater ramifications for humanity than Iraq or any other issue that has consumed this campaign cycle. If there is any doubt whatsoever in your mind about whom to vote for, just forget everything else for a moment — Bush’s environmental record alone is reason enough to remove him from office.

I’m going to quote at length from a recent interview with Robert F. Kennedy, talking to Mother Jones about Bush’s environmental record.

Under [Bush's] leadership, Texas became the most polluted state in the country, with the highest levels of air pollution, the highest levels of water pollution, and the highest level of toxic waste and toxic releases. And it was 49th among 50 states in per-capita environmental spending.

…

The Bush administration consistently favored corporate interests over the environment and public health, assaulting the very idea of a common good.

…

… the right wing, who claim to be on the side of property rights, but really only favor property rights when they’re talking about the right of a polluter to use his property to destroy his neighbor’s property or the public property.

…

He did it on the campaign trail by simply saying that he was going to support initiatives to control global warming. But once he got into office, he immediately reversed that and abandoned that promise, and began dismantling our environmental infrastructure.

…

When they want to destroy the forests, they call it the Healthy Forest Act; when they want to destroy the air, they call it the Clear Skies bill. The head of the air division of the EPA was Marianne Horinko, whose former job had been advising corporate polluters on how to evade Superfund. The second in command of EPA was a Monsanto lobbyist. If you look at virtually all of the sub-secretariats and agency heads in the Departments of Agriculture, Energy and Interior and EPA, the same pattern holds. Polluters have been put in charge of the agencies that are supposed to protect Americans from pollution.

…

… one out of every four black kids in New York City now has asthma. Asthma attacks are triggered primarily by ozone and particulates, and the major sources of those materials in our atmosphere are 1,100 coal-burning power plants that are burning coal illegally. The Clinton administration had initiated investigations and prosecutions against 70 of the worst of those. But this is an industry that donated $48 million to President Bush and the Republican Party in the 2000 cycle and has given $58 million since. One of the first things that Bush did when he came into office was to order the Justice Department to drop those lawsuits.

…

The Clinton administration had classified mercury as a hazardous pollutant under the Clean Air Act, which triggered a requirement that those utilities remove 90 percent of the mercury within three and a half years. It would have cost less than 1 percent of plant revenue, and the great thing about it is that it works; we now know that when the utilities stop discharging mercury, that the fish downstream clean up almost immediately. … But this is an industry that gave all that money, over $100 million, to the president. A few months ago, the Bush administration announced that it was scrapping the Clinton-era regulations and substituting instead regulations that were written by utility lawyers, from the law firm of Latham and Watkins. Under the new rules, the utilities will effectively never have to clean up their mercury.

…

At this point, Congress is controlled by anti-environmental Republicans like Tom DeLay. Tom DeLay is a former Houston bug killer who entered politics because he was angry that his extermination business had been impacted by the ban on DDT and other pesticides, and he’s out to destroy America’s environmental laws.

…

What [Bush has] done already would have been unimaginable five years ago. He is the number-one threat to the global environment. And the disastrous impacts of this administration don’t just go to the environment, but also to our democracy.

From Salon.com, on our failure to develop alternative energy sources:

The U.S. has fallen behind other nations in development of solar power, sacrificing tremendous potential revenue opportunities while simultaneously cultivating continued dependence on foreign and domestic oil sources (remember that Bush has a lot of buddies in the oil industry).

Read much, much more at BushGreenWatch, Mother Jones’ special report The Ungreening of America, Common Dreams… or hell, just google it.

This election cycle, please take the long view.

Update: Even as I write, today’s papers underline the point. In the Chronicle, Bush would give dam owners special access (Proposed Interior Dept. rule could mean millions for industry). And at Contra Costa Times, Arnold Schwarzenegger dropped from the environmental honor roll, scoring a 58 out of 100 — more than most Republicans, but far below the 100/100 Gray Davis scored in 2003.

File under “Your body is your temple” :

Maybe it’s not news to anyone but me (this apparently hit in April), but it’s now possible to have tiny platinum hearts, stars, moons, circles and other Lucky Charms embedded directly in your eyeball, in case it turns out that that tongue piercing isn’t turning out to be the babe magnet you thought it would be. 15 minutes and 500 euros later, you’re the belle of the Face Sculpture Ball.

In 2002 the Netherlands Institute for Innovative Ocular Surgery developed an implant that can be implanted within the superficial, interpalpebral conjunctiva. The implant does not interfere with the ocular functions, ie the visual performance and motility. The implant is made of a specially designed material that can be molded in all kinds of desired shapes and sizes.

Fine print: Only visible when you’re looking to the side. So you could, in theory, get all the way through a job interview without the CEO noticing… if you remember to maintain direct eye contact.

I think I may have misunderestimated Eminem. The beautifully animated video to his song “Mosh” is an intense, five minute, dirge-like anthem — a call to arms, a call to vote, and maybe a wake-up call for the hip-hop masses, timed cannily for the elections.

Salon.com:

With his history of homophobia and his long-running beef with MoveOn supporter Moby, Eminem is an even less likely lefty hero than Howard Stern. But the just-released video for his new anti-Bush song “Mosh,” makes “Fahrenheit 9/11″ look like a GOP campaign spot, and it will almost certainly reach an audience that wouldn’t think of shelling out for a documentary.

Over at my O’Reilly blog: A few months ago, one of the instructors I work with asked me to attach a wiki to his class’ website. I’d been meaning to start testing various wiki systems for a while, and this was the perfect opportunity to dig in.

Short story: The wiki world desperately needs a product with the kind of vision, direction, and momentum of Movable Type. There are mezzo-mezzo wiki packages out there, but nothing I’ve seen yet that really nails the category the way MT does for blogs.

More…

Received a birthday gift from baald and Col a few nights ago — a Griffin PowerMate. I’ve lusted after this tech objet d’art et function ever since they came out, but had never gotten around to trying one out. In a nutshell, the PowerMate is a USB-connected dial for your Mac. An assist for controlling system or application volume, scrolling web pages, emails, documents, scrubbing video or audio, etc.
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At TV Party, a collection of articles written for Data-Boy magazine in the early 80s, direct from the heart of the L.A. punk/new wave scene. Dug-up, restored to their original luster, many of them complete with images and album covers. Tracking the rise of bands like Wall of Voodoo, Minutemen, X, Stiff Little Fingers, XTC, etc. Even though the writing isn’t particularly scintillating, it’s interesting to be reminded of how these bands smelled to the underground 20-25 years ago, rather than how we remember them.

While Wall of Voodoo has obviously made great investments of time and resources to make their concerts as polished as possible, XTC has taken the road of least resistance. Weak, bare, sloppy arrangements and performances prevailed.

Thanks baald.

Boston Globe: In a study conducted by the Program on International Policy Attitudes, supporters of W show quite a bit more slippage between opinion and reality regarding Iraq-related issues than do Kerry supporters (in other words, Bush supporters statistically believe more things about Iraq that are not true).

Kull said it is common for voters to tailor their views on particular issues to those of the candidate they favor overall, but the extent to which Bush supporters are filtering out news from Iraq that might reflect poorly on the president is unprecedented.

A University of Florida scientist has cultured 25,000 living rat brain neurons in a petri dish and hooked the resulting soup up to a grid of sensors that controls a computer. The neurons of the synthetic “brain” are interacting with each other and with the computer, forming neural patterns, and can now fly — sort of — an F22 fighter jet simulator.

When DeMarse first puts the neurons in the dish, they look like little more than grains of sand sprinkled in water. However, individual neurons soon begin to extend microscopic lines toward each other, making connections that represent neural processes. “You see one extend a process, pull it back, extend it out – and it may do that a couple of times, just sampling who’s next to it, until over time the connectivity starts to establish itself,” he said. “(The brain is) getting its network to the point where it’s a live computation device.”

and…

“Initially when we hook up this brain to a flight simulator, it doesn’t know how to control the aircraft,” DeMarse said. “So you hook it up and the aircraft simply drifts randomly. And as the data comes in, it slowly modifies the (neural) network so over time, the network gradually learns to fly the aircraft.”

This has astounding implications for understanding human brain development, for the future of artificial intelligence, and for the lowly philosopher contemplating ye olde Brain in a Vat problem. I wonder, is rat neuron soup doing battle with the Cartesian Demon?

MoveOn.org has thousands of volunteers using web-based tools to locate and chew out talk with undecided voters. Trouble is, a lot of volunteers out there doing the data-mining and pounding the pavement need basic computer support to get the job done — web questions, browser questions, etc. — simple stuff. So MoveOn is looking for tech-savvy peeps to support the non-tech-savvy volunteers over the next two weeks.

Got a bit of spare time and an innate ability to know when to tell people to trash their prefs or power-cycle their modems? Sign up to tech-support the Dem vote.

For Wired News, J-School student Steven Bodzin writes Inventor Rejoices as TVs Go Dark, on the invention of a small keychain device called TV-B-Gone, which sends out more than 200 infrared codes in quick succession to turn off virtually any television within range. The device is intended primarily for use in public spaces - bars and restaurants, stores, laundromats…

Rude? Totally. But isn’t it also rude to force others to watch or listen to TV when they don’t want to?

Responding to the accusation that it sounded like unaccountable power, Burke said, “You’ve heard about the battle for eyeballs. They’re your eyeballs [emphasis mine -sh]. You should not have your consciousness constantly invaded.

I’m actually less offended by television in public places than I am by noises that invade my home — car subwoofers, car alarms…

Altman said people who hear about TV-B-Gone start thinking about other nuisances. Friends have asked for ways to jam cell phones, shut down vehicle subwoofers and kill car alarms.

“What I really want,” Altman said, “Is Life-B-Here.”

Big storm coming tonight, Amy and I decided to do some last-minute gutter repair in the sunset before the storm. I’m up on the roof testing a new endcap with a garden hose, Amy on the ground watching the effluvium. She ducks in the house to check on Miles, he’s busy working on a puzzle. She comes back out, we wrap up in three minutes. Toss the hose down, and I walk back over the roof, returning to the rear of the house where I had propped up the ladder.

As I crest the peak of the roof, what do I see illuminated in the purple and orange light of a stormy sunset… but 2-year-old Miles standing on the next-to-top rung of the ladder, high above the roofline, 10-12 feet above the ground. Just standing confidently on that almost-top rung, smiling at me.

My heart froze. Walked up to him slowly, plucked him from the ladder, and sat down on the roof, squeezing him to my chest.

It was the most terrifying moment we’ve had with Miles so far. How long had he been up there? How did he get out of the house? How did it happen so quickly? Since when can he open the sliding doors by himself? The possible outcomes seemed horrific.

He’s always been physical and fearless, but we were totally broadsided by this one. It’s hard to describe what it felt like to see him up there - beautiful and brave and illuminated so gorgeously, but everything about it at the same time so totally wrong.

Update: Turns out he didn’t open the sliding glass door after all, but slipped through the cat door - the same cat door in which he got stuck when he was just a babe.

I’m on the brink of turning forty. Forty trips around the sun, and still, against all reasonable expectation, I walk the earth. Tempted to post a long, rambling reflection on life thus far lived - where I’ve come from, where it all seems to be going, and the first glimmers of mid-life crises. Instead, I’ll post a long, rambling reflection on the amazing party my friends threw for me last night. And when I say amazing…

Teaser: Kazoos and voice boxes, dada rants, colored vinyl, recombinant DNA, and deliciously cheesy Casio keyboard beats are involved…
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NY Times:

Earlier this week former employees of Sproul & Associates (operating under the name Voters Outreach of America), a firm hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters, told a Nevada TV station that their supervisors systematically tore up Democratic registrations.

There’s more, and it’s ugly.

Thanks rinchen.

You’ve probably seen one or another variants of the “Bush resumé” floating around — here’s one. As an exercise, this year’s Political Reporting class at the J-School undertook the challenge of fact-checking the faux resumé point-by-point. It’s a work in progress — solid work.

What’s the difference between thuggery and diplomacy? Size. Dylan Tweney referred to this great little QuickTime movie “Noam Chomsky meets Schoolhouse Rock.”

Amy and Miles were at the playground, where they met little Peter and his mother, a large Russian woman. As they were getting ready to go, Miles asked for his pacifier, and Amy gave it to him. The woman walked over to Miles, bent down to face him, and said in a thick Russian accent (you have to hear the accent in your head):

“Do not let me see you with that thing in your mouth. You are BIG MAN!”

Miles just turned two.

A man entered the next bathroom stall over from me today. I heard him undo his belt, and the buckle hitting the floor. He grunted slightly as he squatted. A few seconds of silence, and then he said in a perfectly loud voice, unaware or uncaring that anyone else might be sharing the room with him, “Okaaayyyy…” as if he was sitting down to tackle the 1040 Short Form.

Been down with flu for the past 48 hours, abdominal tectonics. Just edging out of the hole now. Spent a lot of time sleeping, but did have the chance to watch a couple of interesting movies.

How’s Your News is a project by Matt Stone and Trey Parker, but you’d never guess it — a documentary wherein the two take five mentally retarded or disabled individuals around the country in a hand-painted RV, interviewing ordinary Americans on the street, at ball games, cattle auctions, etc. Two of the participants are so disabled they can’t even speak — one just waves a microphone frantically at passers-by, a sign on his wheelchair reading “Free interviews - my name is Larry.”

Given the nature of the project, and considering who’s producing it, you’d expect the primary M.O. would be to mock the attempts of these disabled people to model the newscasters they’ve seen on TV all their lives. And yes, there are some very funny moments, where you’re not sure whether you’re laughing with or laughing at. But somehow Stone and Parker have managed to make the project respectful - they’re giving these people the chance to do something they’d never be able to do otherwise. There is no mocking here, no inside joke between the directors and the viewer. The enthusiasm and joy of the participants is genuine.

The potential for misunderstanding the point of the project is high enough that they include a printed note in the DVD case explaining that “It’s okay to laugh.”

We believe that confusion, awkward moments, and humor are important parts of living with a disability. People who live with disabilities, and those who are close to them, know that if you don’t have a sense of humor, it would be hard to get through the day.

Also rented Peripheral Produce - a compilation of entries in a Portland experimental film and video contest. My favorite piece on the disc was Matt McCormick’s The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal — encouraging the viewer to look at municipal efforts to remove graffiti — usually by covering tags in large dun-toned blocks — as themselves being unintentionally artististic. The subconscious creation of Rauschenberg and Rothko-like rectangular swatches playing off the angles of the urban environment. Sounds self-serious, and it is, a bit, but also playful and partly self-mocking. Even if the idea sounds like a joke, McCormick does a good job of showing that there is real beauty left over by the removal efforts. Very enjoyable.

Kick-ass rant by the Chronicle’s Mark Morford on the State of American Apathy.

Voter turnout, comparatively, in Italy, Spain, the U.K., or Germany? Anywhere from 75 to 92 percent, every time. The sad fact is, the United States ranks 139th out of 172 countries in voter turnout. Wave that flag proudly, baby.

It goes on, gets better. On what it would take to shake America out of a stupor that, however improbable/impossible it seems, causes it to look at the smirking face of George Bush on the television and think to themselves, “I trust that man.”

Or maybe it’s something entirely different, maybe some sort of potent, unimaginable spiritual enlightenment that looks like revelation and smells like Vishnu and sounds like harmonic convergence and tastes like Buddha and has nothing whatsoever to do with fundamentalism or Christianity or Bush’s angry homophobic flag-wavin’ God. The mystics say we’re very close. They claim the next decade will offer, to those who care to participate, one helluva transformational vibrational wallop. Possible?

Worth the read.

Thanks rinchen.

Whoa - discovered by accident tonight that GMail’s browser requirements for the Mac specify Safari, Firefox, and the Mozilla variants. Try to visit the site with Internet Explorer/Mac and you get a warning:

Gmail does not currently support your browser.

However it does let you try to sign in anway. Do so, and you get another message:

Your browser seems to be Internet Explorer, and ActiveX seems to be disabled. Gmail requires ActiveX to be enabled in order to operate.

Obviously it doesn’t require ActiveX, since it works just fine with Safari and the Mozilla cousins. So is this a case of identity crisis, or of Google make subtle stabs at MS in preparation for the coming Viking battle? Probably none of the above - they just decided not to support a dying browser on the Mac, but didn’t implement their non-support very well. Still, it’s nice to see the shoe on the other foot for a change, even if in an insignificant way.

How hard is it to get Google to forget a page it once knew well? I’m finding out the hard way.

A professor approached me and explained that a two-year-old student story on our site contained verfiably incorrect information — originally supplied to the student by the D.A. The story incorrectly labeled a person as a pedophile. Today, that person is in prison for totally unrelated reasons. And in prison, being tagged as a pedophile can bring serious consequences from other inmates. The prof was worried that an inmate might find the story and go ape on the guy.

I immediately removed the story from our site. Then we realized that Google was holding onto the cached version. Finding info about cache removal on Google’s site was tricky. You have to sign up for a special account (my existing GMail acct was not sufficient). I received a confirmation email, clicked the link in it as instructed, and was told my account could not be found, even though it had just been created. Thinking maybe they needed database sync time, I waited a day. Still no dice. Correspondence with Google on the matter took about one day per reply. Finally they suggested I create a new account. I did.

This time, when I clicked the link to confirm the account, I was taken to a page on Google’s servers written entirely in Chinese. Again, began correspondence with them on the problem. They had no good answers, seemed mystified. After more experimentation on my part, discovered that the page only appeared in Chinese in some browsers — freaky deaky.

Finally I was able to confirm the account and request cache removal. The process was easy, and I was instructed to wait up to 24 hours for the cached page to be removed. That was Oct. 7. Today is the 12th, and the cached version is still up. A man’s fate potentially hangs in the balance. And I’m again waiting for a response from Google.

A couple weeks late here… Miles turned two on September 23. So many changes in two years, so much compressed evolution. Watching his mind, body, and personality develop has been an ongoing source of fascination and enjoyment for us - we’re as stoked to have him with us today as the day he was born. Amy and I just put together Miles’ two-year photo gallery: A little bit of Jamaica, the daily yogurt festival, his recent art installations, steam trains, into the woods, rock climbing, Mega-Blocks, friends, animals, climbing and sliding, 2nd birthday… 40 images in two albums.

Much flying talk about a mysterious square bulge on Bush’s back, clearly visible beneath his suit during the first debate, leading to rumors that he may have been channeling Karl Rove through a tiny wireless earpiece. Salon has a pretty compelling analysis concluding that the likelihood is high. Mediachannel has another.

One videographer was asked by a Bush crew member what frequency his camera was on - speculation is that the question may have been a probe to prevent another episode like the one in France at the D-Day memorial event, when TV viewers were able to clearly hear a male voice speaking Bush’s words just before he spoke them. isbushwired.com explores the topic in some depth, and includes images. Networks had agreed not to shoot the debaters from behind, but did anyway.

An earpiece isn’t materially different from a teleprompter. But debaters don’t get to use teleprompters. Especially not presidential debaters. If this story blows open, the game changes.