...nor am I out of it.

Folk Legends of the World, Untie!

Mon, 06 Aug 2012 11:49:37 GMT

Current Music: NASA -- Mars Scientific Laboratory landing

I'm currently bingeing on The Smiths because wildilocks. On Saturday I made a somewhat off-colour quip to the effect that Morrissey seemed to have been calling for a gay uprising in "Shirtlifters of the World Unite". Then, in the spirit of wasting several hours in pursuit of trivia, I plunged my head into the primordial internet abyss, the Googleungagap, and sure enough, despite the songwriter having said in interviews the year it was released that he was contrasting society's view of shoplifters and nuclear weapon-makers and that "shoplifting" referred to the re-use of cultural wealth, the internet has convinced itself that the song really is pro-gay, anti-Tory agitprop.

Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988 was the Thatcher government's knee-jerk response to mid-'80s gay panic. It aimed to prevent local authorities (including state schools) from "promoting homosexuality". Its passage "served to galvanise the disparate British gay rights movement into action", says wikipedia; Boy George and Chumbawamba released songs attacking the legislation. So, there's some appeal to the notion that this song (which wikipedia claims, citelessly, is Morrissey's favourite Smiths track) might have been the band's contribution to that effort. But "Shoplifters of the World Unite" (don't you just want to punctuate that?) was released as a non-album single in January 1987, and wikipedia claims it was recorded in (Northern) Autumn, 1986. We can safely say that the song was written in late 1986; it's clearly not a response to "Clause 28".

Clause 28 wasn't introduced until December 1987. However the internet, refusing to abandon its theory, points out that it was preceded by a private member's bill introduced by John Gifford (irrelevantly a good friend of J.R.R. Tolkien's who'd read The Silmarillion in 1957), supposedly titled "An act to refrain local authorities from promoting homosexuality". (Giffard, "the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury" — Hansard's use of this formula throughout must surely be less stenographic than aspirational — had no real problem with most of those people, you understand, but felt there was a certain class of homosexual, characterised by "exhibitionism; [...] promiscuity; [...] proselytising; [...] boasting of homosexual achievements [...and acting] as reservoirs of venereal diseases" who really did need to be acted upon. Urgently and firmly.) The net notes that this bill passed the Lords some time in 1986 but, although it was introduced to the Commons on 8 May, 1987, it was ultimately derailed by the announcement of the general election a few days later, and never re-introduced. So, is it possible "Shoplifters" is a response to this proto-Clause 28? Well, when exactly was this Act introduced?

This kind of thing should be easy to verify, but the online records of the House of Lords Journal only go back to 1995, Divisions Results to 1997, and Debates by Member to 2006. Luckily, the raw Hansard database is available — but searching for the internet's name for the Act proved fruitless. It transpires that (most of) the internet is mistaken, and that the relevant legislation is in fact called "The Local Government Act 1986 (Amendment) Bill", and Halsbury introduced it on 25 November, 1986. Additionally, as Culture Wars: The Media and the British Left recounts, mainstream media and political attention had been originally drawn to the issue as early as mid-August.

So, the evidence is inconclusive. It's theoretically possible that "Shoplifters" could have been written in response to the homophobic politics of the day (although definitely not as part of the response to Clause 28). However, given the timing, this argument is unconvincing. In this instance I choose to take The Moz at his word: "Shoplifters of the World Unite" is for the sharing of culture, not against the persecution of sexual minorities. But that's kinda cool, too.

Everting the Interwebs

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 03:25:18 GMT

Current Music: Headless Chickens -- Juice

As I tweeted excitedly a couple of weeks ago, Augmented Reality is about to make a big splash on our handheld devices. The confluence of video camera, gps and compass in the latest iPhone has made it the platform of the moment, with applications like acrossair—which displays information about New York subway travel—and the less geographically self-limiting (albeit unfortunately named) TwitARound—which displays nearby twitter users and their latest tweets in the virtual field of vision—attracting attention. This isn't mainstream yet, but it's a compelling indication of what's to come.

Holding a phone to one's face is going to become a common exercise, it seems. I can imagine something less bulky like a lanyard or a rectangular monocle (circular, once round LEDs are readily available; tethered or wireless) becoming a popular alternative. Some kind of screen-only video thingie which could be cabled up to a handheld would make a great prototype. Alternatively, anyone know how hard it would be to hack a second LCD screen—with, say, a 1.5m cable—onto a 3GS? :)

What, isn't it 19-Sep?

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 06:23:16 GMT

Current Music: Yoko Kanno -- Inner Universe

Palpatine's put the boot into the pigopolists. Watch out, Rudd!

451 Error: Unresolved Physical Storage Requirement

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 03:05:31 GMT

Current Music: Snow Patrol -- Chasing Cars

A recent article on TechCrunch suggested to me that the ability to create a personalised library on Google Books might just allow the burden of a physical library to be lifted at last. And how much better that the library would be fully searchable?

Sadly, the product doesn't quite live up to the promise: books I've searched for aren't there; few books other than some ancient public domain material include an electronic, readable copy (fewer still with no pages missing in "preview mode"); when search works at all—I've searched "my library" in vain for phrases in my print copies—the search result text (ie. the context) is very terse, or even absent; and where this text is missing, the page numbers provided are just as likely to be from a different edition of the book. (To really rub it in, different editions of the same book have different levels of "previewable" material available.) So, not a lot of paradigm shifting there, yet.

Monkey Riding?

Wed, 20 May 2009 01:47:41 GMT

Current Music: Freur -- Doot Doot (12" Mix)

OK, so the mind is what the brain does. But how meaningful is it to describe what the mind does in neurological or biochemical terms? Isn't the process by which a thing works in a different domain to the thing itself?

The brain is a physical thing, an evolved bio-mechanism, part of a process, billions of years old, by which entropy generates complexity.[*] The brain is part of the universe of atoms and genes. The mind is an ephemeral thing, a lossy information storage, retrieval and recombination engine running on an operating system called "language" (and probably other levels, Wang's Carpets-like, beneath), part of a process, thousands of years old, by which society generates culture. The mind is part of the universe of patterns and memes. Just as software is not hardware and the map is not the territory, the mind is not the brain.

I'm a dualist. Why aren't you?

[* It's really the tendency of physical interactions to increase entropy—ie. to move towards equilibrium—which generates complexity, but that doesn't sound as good.]

Channelling the Techno-Zeitgeist

Sun, 10 May 2009 04:10:42 GMT

Current Music: Silence

Dear Lazyweb,

The way Apache names its access logs is causing me grief and, because my bashfu is weak, I'm calling on you for assistance.

Specifically, the most recent access logfile is named "DOMAIN-access.log" (where "DOMAIN" is the name of the logged domain, obviously); the next most recent "DOMAIN-access.log.1"; the one after that is "DOMAIN-access.2.gz"; then "DOMAIN-access.3.gz" to "DOMAIN-access.N.gz." (Obviously, each time the standard log rotation script runs it renames all the old files—although thankfully it leaves the dates intact. And to make things trickier, it gzips everything older than the ".1" log.)

I need to send a (plaintext) stream of all of the log file entries from all of the access logfiles for the domain to awstats, but in order to do that I need to craft a single line something like this:

gunzip -dc `ls -tr DOMAIN-access*.gz` [MAGIC] cat DOMAIN-access.log.1 DOMAIN-access.log

(The actual DOMAINNAME.awstats.conf file line needs to read: LogFile="gunzip...")

So, what shell MAGIC (assuming I can't just make a giant string and concatenate it to another giant string) do I need to use to get the output of the cat to follow the output of the gunzip into the stdout stream?

[Update: A missing "-" was the problem.]

Bursting in Air

Sat, 09 May 2009 02:21:16 GMT

Current Music: In the Nursery -- Bombed

Obama's defence budget request is up 1.7% on last year in real terms, much of that in wages—plus some extra, extra treasure for his Asian campaigns, which will be funded to the tune of nearly double the rest of the budget. (If it wasn't for Godwin I'd mention Russia in winter.)

I notice that even though the total missile defence allocation is down nearly 30%, this budget increases funding for the AEGIS ballistic missile defence system by 60%, and for the high tech THAAD small-to-medium missile defence system by 25% (and the latter's completion date has been brought forward from 2011 to this year).

The missile defence allocation also includes a new $119M "Israeli Cooperative" item. It strikes me that if Gazan qassams were no longer any kind of threat (and Iranian Shahab-3s seemed a little less existential), even Bibi might be brought to the table.

Heck, it's about time [*]

Fri, 08 May 2009 01:37:34 GMT

Current Music: Underworld -- Billy Goat

High amongst my top ten movie rants is a speech about Hell, delivered in cameo by author Tom Keneally in Fred Schepsi's semi-autobiographical The Devil's Playground. Keneally's bearded and softly-spoken Jesuit uses an extraordinary analogy to explain to his captive audience what the eternal part of "eternal punishment" really meant. Google didn't know the speech, so I torrented the film, clipped and YTed it:

(According to this Phillip Adams interview with Keneally, that speech was co-written "by everyone Catholic in the crew the night before".)

C'mon theists; give it up! Hell is a memetic nightmare; and frankly, preaching that people around you actually deserve it is a hate crime.

It's fundamentally impossible to believe in a wholly benign deity designing a system where there's a fair possibility that most most people will have some friends and family who will be die and go to Hell. And be tortured there forever, and ever, and some more ever (and they're really not liking this, though Baby Jesus doesn't seem to mind), and ever, and ever, and still the burning and the screaming! Face it, hellists: you cannot believe you will ever have your consciousness reprogrammed by angels, or overwhelmed by the heavenly opiate of the presence of God, so that you can come to terms with with that, and still be you. And really, how could you ever mistake a setup like this—even at a thousand meters, in a blizzard, at night—for love?

Basically, if you believe in Hell, you believe in something harmful to the future of civilisation, and the dangerous ideas that have caused you to go so awry needs to be swiftly detached from the memeplex which compromises your religion (no doubt there'll be a lot left to love) and flushed down the memetic garbage shute after human sacrifice, burning witches and pederasty. Religions are dynamic; you can shrug off this twisted, medieval thing and still be a viable faith with a nice god that other people don't talk about behind their hands.

Oh, and Cardinal Fang can leave off his hellist hate speech about atheists. At least we don't believe in TORTURING PEOPLE FOREVER. But then, perhaps there's an explanation for that.

[* This was written, but not published, on December 5th, 2007; forgive the dated references at the end. Because I'm paranoid, I'm going to keep it friends-locked until after I get back from the States. Update: Back now. Oh, and as per my last trip over, all Americans met were lovely people—even the LDSers in SLC.]

Practical Eumetics

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 00:51:22 GMT

Current Music: Underworld -- Beautiful Burnout

So, Sol Trujillo is ~~getting~~ leaving with close to $40M from Telstra ~~to agree~~ by agreeing to retire, and the Sue Morphett thing's being called a corporate crime (albeit by the ACTU). Yet not all corporate bigwigs are morally worthless. Perhaps what the business world needs is a highly public website which collects and commemorates exemplars of appropriate and inappropriate corporate behaviour (and supports ratings on a variety of criteria, naturally). hotornotceo.com, anyone?

[Update: I need to parse spin more carefully; that $40M is his total take-home from four years at Telstra.]

Good News from the War on Webs

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 08:02:02 GMT

Current Music: Underworld -- JAL to Tokyo

Lamer Senator and Communications Minister Stephen Conroy's ever-expanding plan to cripple the country's internets (a policy supported by around 6% of Australians) has been blocked in the Senate by the independent Senator for the Murray-Darling, Nick Xenophon.

Meanwhile, British Lamer have nicked a policy from the Tories (presumably while their backs were turned) and decided to promote Open Source in the public sector.

Finally, the bumbling prosecution have had to amend the charges against those crazy kids from The Pirate Bay yet again, because they don't really understand what it is that torrents actually do.

Segue: a Cyclon Skateboard

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 13:02:14 GMT

Current Music: The Aircon

TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington, notorious workaholic and apparently one of the five most hated people on the internet, is taking some time off to contemplate his future as a tech blogger after a month under threat of death ended with someone spitting in his face at a conference. Nasty.

Speaking of nasty, what do we think of 413 and 414?

[Update: BSG Season 4.5 spoilers in comments.]

Public Service Announcement

Fri, 16 Jan 2009 09:35:29 GMT

Current Music: Underworld -- Showlder

So, XP's (I'm running SP3 v.5657) System Restore can render inaccessible Thunderbird (I'm running 2.0.0.18) mail folders created subsequent to the System Restore point.

Neither the folders nor their contents are gone but, in order to allow Thunderbird to see them again, you'll need to create empty files of the same base name as the invisible folders (which have a .sbd extension) in the same directory as the folder—preferably with Thunderbird closed down at the time.

(Yes, I know I should report this as a bug.)

Existentialist Consumerism

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 01:15:26 GMT

Current Music: TISM -- Garbage

Back in 2007, when I first noticed Hummer advertising in this country, I was incensed. I contemplated launching a "Scratch a Hummer" campaign (or at the very least a scathing LJ entry!) Now it seems GM are likely to dump Hummer. So that's good. (Speaking of junk the Americans send us, apparently the whole US FTA thing has proven disastrous for Australia. There's a surprise.)

In the anachro-future department (much more of which, over here) I've always expected the first of these to be holographic; and this rather obvious technological remix seems to have been too long coming to save the company.

The wind from the desert

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 01:36:16 GMT

Current Music: VNV Nation -- Secluded Spaces

Michael Jackson is now a Muslim.

[Update: As originally reported by The Sun, and probably lies.]

Lord British is in orbit

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 10:15:58 GMT

Current Music: Babylon Zoo -- Spaceman

Apparently it's costing him $360M for a 12-day trip, including a visit to the ISS. See what computer games do for you?

[Update: Apparently it actually cost (a mere) $30M.]

And I will show you The Man

Sat, 27 Sep 2008 16:21:52 GMT

Current Music: Revolting Cocks -- Beers, Steers and Queers

Unlike the incumbent, it looks like the insane warmonger who won the debate for Pennsylvania today needn't worry too much about Fodder for the Fatherland: the US education and fashion apparatus is clearly gearing up for the wars of the future. (And it looks like there'll even be enough armies to keep their handies in at home.)

IRL, I was the 100,012th attendee at The Boot Part One today. And lived. o_O

That "once-in-a-century type of event"

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 14:08:22 GMT

Current Music: Stockbrokers hitting pavement

Just saw the brilliant In Bruges. Currently prolonging the black comedy buzz by watching the DJI collapse. Got tins?

I Principi Di Persia

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 07:39:17 GMT

Current Music: In the Nursery -- Motive

Is it possible the Eschatonicans have decided that, with the Olympics fully occupying the Chinese, a little strategic misdirection could tempt the Russians into a border war, opening a giant attention gap through which they might finally attack Iran? After all, with a lame duck candidate, an economy under IMF audit and the possibility of losing the gold medal race for the first time since the end of the cold war, Armageddon's got to be looking good.

À propos of nothing

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 02:30:26 GMT

Current Music: Melbourne street sounds

Google news tell me time's up for Scrabulous. Does anyone use effbee for anything else?

And it seems I may get to vote against Jeff Kennett!

Is That You? Is That Really You?

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 00:49:03 GMT

Current Music: Underworld -- Crocodile

Summadayze: we're so there!

Natural is not always Good

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 07:03:58 GMT

Current Music: Stunned silence

I've just read an April New Yorker article by Collapse's Jared Diamond. (Coincidentally, I'd heard part of a radio interview with Diamond about this very article a month ago, in Perth, without getting the gist of it.) It's about vengeance, and is mostly concerned with describing the absurd and horrifying cycle of tit-for-tat revenge killing which plagues New Guinea to this day. What I found incomprehensibly bizarre—and the reason I'm blogging this—is that Diamond concludes the article with the story of his uncle, who chose not to avenge the murder of the uncle's mother, sister and niece during WWII and, Diamond claims, regretted that decision for the rest of his life. Diamond concludes by arguing from this observation that we shouldn't define vengeful feelings as bad; that instead we should encourage the acknowledgment of those feelings, and indeed attempt as far as possible—within the confines of State control—to satisfy them.

As I see it, the desire for revenge is a wholly negative emotion. Sure, it may be "natural" in that it has been bred into us by millennia as wandering barbarians, but then so are a lot of other unwelcome behavioural traits we're struggling to eliminate from our collective psyche. The lust for vengeance is a social wrong, pure and simple—and those who indulge it are acting from weakness. I'd have thought this was a fairly uncontroversial opinion, though. Isn't it?

Prince Caspian microreview

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 15:01:41 GMT

Current Music: Melbourne night sounds

Surprisingly cringe-sparse, occasionally witty, competently rendered (other than the Happy Meal lion toy) and adequately acted. All in all, a significant improvement on the first one. My big concern now though is whether I'll be able to tolerate an entire movie of Stuart Little's d'Artagnan impression.

Is that it's Art enough?

Mon, 26 May 2008 17:16:48 GMT

Current Music: Whiteslug -- Fucklove

I'd largely let the Bill Henson thing pass me by until tcpip brought it up tonight. I was amused (but not surprised) to discover Rudd's level of condemnation, and dismayed (but not surprised) that the ABC clearly feels less able to take a stand than The Age.

Two separate polls on ninemsn apparently showed an overwhelming number of respondents didn't think the works themselves were pornographic, and I'd certainly agree. But I would question whether "the Caravaggio Defence"—that this is Art, intended for a self-selected, Art-sensible minority—remains defence enough today, when the media have gone to so much effort to alarm the public about paedophilia (and the internet is now the gallery).

It seems to me that this is a bit like the Jyllands-Posten thing: we may need to make allowances for the extreme level of brain-breaking outrage our free expression might cause to our more conservative fellows, or we risk being rightly accused of crass insensitivity. Or is that a craven argument for self-censorship? I have to admit, I'm having a hard time deciding whether I stand on this one.

Thoughts?

Viva Bolívar!

Sun, 25 May 2008 16:33:35 GMT

Current Music: Aquila -- Sea and Sky

You'd never know it from the mainstream press, but Saturday our time saw the signing of the Constitutive Treaty of the Union of South American Nations, a trade bloc modeled on the EU which unites all of South America—except for the funny little colonial bits around the edges—and includes Mexico as an observer nation. So perhaps Spielberg's recent Latin American mashup was in fact insightful and topical political commentary. </heavy sarcasm>

Steve <3 Mark

Mon, 19 May 2008 15:09:29 GMT

Current Music: Bob Dylan -- Talkin' New York

I'm a poor hater; it just doesn't come naturally. So when two things I strongly dislike come together it's a good thing: I don't have to spread it around so much.

Time to monetise ileftfacebook.com.