Email Post attempt

I'm attempting to set up email posting again. Just in case. This is a
trial-run.

A Week's Worth of News

So let me get started catching up on all the news I wanted to comment on over the last week and a half... beginning with an article I saw yesterday afternoon. (I should start at the bottom of my queue, not the top, but...) A former CIA agent reports that waterboarding saved lives. He goes on to say that he now considers it torture and opposes the practice, but that's really beside my point. Or rather, that kind of is my point, as opposed to the somewhat sensationalized headline the article is given ( "Ex-CIA agent: Waterboarding 'saved lives'" ). The fact of that matter is, the ends don't justify the means. I'll admit it's something of a sticky situation when you're presented with (a) brutalize an apparent war criminal/terrorist or (b) allow innocent people to die because you couldn't get the information. but as hard of a choice as it is to make, i believe it stands that you can't be held responsible for 'allowing' people to die because you chose not to actively brutalize someone. one is responsible for one's actions -- and yes, for the consequences of those actions as well, but there must be some statute of limitations.

There's an article on Techdirt posted about a month ago saying that intelligent people are typically people we are able to forget unimportant information, rather than those who are able to retain vast quantities of data. The idea is that the brain's system of recall and memory is based on pattern recognition, and that an excess of information just buries patterns. This is related to another Techdirt article that posted today saying that our brans work like Google's PageRank. PageRank scores sites based on how many other sites link to them and the score of those linking sites, so getting linked by one highly-ranked site is better than being liked by many low-scoring sites. The article says our brains do the same sort of thing when they link concepts, so less-pertinent concepts get weaker links. of course, because of Google-bombs and other site spamming, it's said Google doesn't use PageRank anymore. The article posits that our brains might be susceptible to "concept spamming" -- which I think it pretty clearly so.

New Scientist posted something about a handful of green energy sources. Nothing particularly exciting as far as I could tell, and it doesn't seem like they say how much potential these things have, but I have to say I like the idea of a kidney-battery. It's just fun.

Al Gore goty a Nobel Peace Prize. I don't really have anything to say on that issue -- I'll bite my tongue -- but what I can't believe is that Gore actually said "Co2 increases anywhere are a threat to the future of civilization everywhere." I just can't believe that Gore invoked Martin Luther King Jr. for global warming. It just feels... wrong.

Relatedly, while it's obvious that the source is not neutral, this article criticizing the whole UN global warming report makes some interesting points. Among them, "Recently a High Court judge in the UK listed nine of the 35 major scientific errors in Gore's movie, saying they must be corrected before innocent schoolchildren can be exposed to the movie. Gore's exaggeration of sea-level rise was one."

More to come...

It's a gray day.

So, I'm kind of depressed right now. I've been stressed a lot, I guess, and
that's recently expressed itself as my being particularly emotionally
sensitive. yesterday was, if not the start, the 'high point' of this
emotional sensitivity, and in general the whole day sucked.

( Work started badly. )

( And I'm not getting into my house when I thought I was )

( An now my Verizon installation is delayed. )

( Read more... )

Dysphoria

I've been feeling particularly dysphoric lately. I have plenty of things to
be really happy about -- I'm home, I'm buying a house -- but I've been under
a lot of stress and i just really, really want things to be more settled
than they are. I *really* don't like plans changing on me at the last
minute, and it feels like that's been happening continuously for a couple
weeks now. I just feel tired, raw, and emotionally drained.

I was talking to my mom and she was saying how it seems I've always been the
"always full or always empty; no half-anything" sort of person. It's funny
because it's true. Right now it feels like nothing is going to be settled
before mid-January. intellectually I know that's not true, but it
feels like it.

I'm feeling discouraged on the social -- and more precisely, the romantic --
front as well. I feel more awkward that I have since high school. Even if
I met someone, I'm afraid I wouldn't have the first clue with how to conduct
myself, which is really frustrating for a guy who (more or less) has always
been a social creature.