Holy crap, someone finally made a PC interface for the Kurzweil 2xxx line of keyboards. It's schizophrenic as shit thanks to the weird-ass way of programming the K, but it works. | 0 Comments

Both presidential nominees expressed support for the government’s plans. Senator Barack Obama, Democrat of Illinois, said as he campaigned in Indiana that not acting could place the housing market in further distress.

 

What does he know, he's not an economist, and I thought he wanted to ease the tax burden on middle America? Adding hundreds of billions of dollars (they're claiming into the tens of billions and "couldbe among the most expensive rescues ever financed by taxpayers" but they've proved time and time again to severly underestimate these fuckups) to America's debt (the only possible place for this money to come from is the same sovereign wealth funds that we are bailing out, but now we'll owe it back with compounded interest) is not taxpayer friendly to any strata of society.  

 

Senator John McCain’s running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin, said at a rally in Colorado Springs that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have become too big and too expensive.

 Too big and too expensive for everyone but the American taxpayer to fix by way of more debt to bequeath to our grandkids' grandkids. Don't kid yourself, we've doubled our debt in the last 8 years and it'll be a huge fucking miracle if we don't continue that for the next 8. 

Both the Obama and Palin (don't kid yourself, Palin's the only thing McCain's got going for him at this point) promise change in Washington, claim their a threat to the status quo. But they speak out of both sides of their mouths. 

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Another reason Obama is disingenuine:

A recent example is Barack Obama, who said last year that the problem with popular culture is that it "saturates our airwaves with a steady stream of sex, violence and materialism." But only this week, he seemed to endorse one of the three. "If the economy continues to decline in the coming weeks, we should" send checks to people, he said. "This is the quickest way to help people pay their bills and get them to start spending."

At least he wants to restore taxation to sane levels. (This is from the same article as the last post, just a different enough subject.)

We are in an election season, so of course people ask who would be the least bad person to head the state in the years ahead. The answer here is not at all clear, if it is not Dr. Paul. As with the 1930s we face a choice between militaristic fascism and Keynesian-style socialism combined with environmentalism. These are two very grim choices.

Obama is the least bad person that is electable. Ralph Nader and Ron Paul would be the best leaders, because they truly believe and understand fiscal and international conservatism (starting a war is not conservative), but, unfortunately, they are unelectable because they do not squeeze themselves into the narrow, polarized values of American society. I like parliamentary democracy - it may be harder to get anything done, but at least it is more truely representative of a society than our system. | 0 Comments

You know how french fries are nasty re-heated, well, when you see them again after you've eaten them once, let me tell ya, cold fries seem like a dying mans dream of heaven by comparison.

In any case, I'll never be eating anything prepared by school cafeterias again. They were so bad the came back up in pretty much the exact same condition they went in - 6 hours later. My arms and feet started going numb if I lifted them above the level of my heart until I divested myself of the offending fries.

It's my own fault though - there's a sign that says 'Please clean the frier ever thursday night - this is not a suggestion, it's the bare minimum requirement." Meaning, of course, that on wednesday you have 6 day old grease that's been cooking fries, chicken, onion rings, whatever else they can make less healthy. By wednesday the fries smell like a melange of the aforementioned foods... but when you're starving and only have pocket change left, you make a compromise. Next time I'll just make sure to get less than 5 ounces of salad, which hopefully isn't contaminated with salmonella or escheria coli. Better yet, next time I'll make sure to not have any errands scheduled for the long day lunch break.

It's been two and a half hours since the re-emergence of the fries, and I still don't feel well, and despite having eating nothing else besides two eggs, i'm completely not hungry and the thought of eating anything more than water still makes me feel a bit queasy. Hopefully morpheus can help me with that, since tomorrow is the 7 AM class. | 0 Comments

Holy crap, I want a cake from this dude at my wedding. | 0 Comments

µstudio
Originally uploaded by nekotaku

This is how my µstudio at home is set up. not seeing huge amounts of use yet due to school and what-not, except of course as loki's bed before she gets chased off.

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I found an 'iDose' of 'viagra' here. Be warned, it's really fucking annoying, and it's nothing more than an FM synthesis trick - it's a PWM wave playing a continuous tone that increases in pitch from low to high, while that is being modulated by a sine wave at about 4 Hz (you can actually count this if you listen, but turn the volume down and don't bother with the whole thing) - this same trick is used by drum and bass and jungle and music similar - surely you've heard a dance track that has that "wub wub wub" type bass going on? This is the same fucking thing, and it's lamer than shit. The only thing at work here is the placebo effect, if at all.

P.S. doesn't work, I don't have any boner, let alone one lasting for four hours :(. Sorry USA Today, you're the Fail Whale Today. | 0 Comments

USA Today is really fucking stupid. They are talking about 'binaural beats' as digital drugs.

The only thing binaural beats can do is help stimulate certain kinds of brainwaves - and they do this by offsetting the left-right channels of your headphones by 3, 5, 8 or 13 Hz etc - which you can't audibly hear, but your brain can detect the cycle of offset and synchronize your brainwaves to the same pattern.

Drugs do affect your brainwaves, but brainwaves alone will not cause complex druglike effects, especially if you know anything about neurochemistry and the many parts of the reward systems of your brain that drugs stimulate. The article is Am-Scare-Ica at it's best. Oh no! Our children are listening to music that will put their brains into a state of zen-like meditation (and yes, I know Zen means meditation, but most people don't.) | 0 Comments

I think a lot of people missed the point in GTA:IV - all those crappy minigames you hate, the variety of wacky interfaces and systems you must learn - that is the point of GTA:IV - if you can conquer that, you can conquer any system a computer can throw at you. In the digital age, things evolve so fast there will be no more getting used to a system you use for years or a lifetime. You'll have to get used to a system you use for months, and eventually, days. However, these systems will all be evolutions of one-another, making coping with them a matter of practice. Reacting quickly to changing systems and stimuli is what made primitive man so great and caused modern man to achieve so much.

So far it's taken nature 13.7 billion years to evolve human intelligence - an introspective endeavour that demands of us taking control of our evolution and our destinies. Are you on the side of life or on the side of the inorganic? Life desires more change and more order, who are we to deny such universal imperatives? Everywhere we look in the universe there are galaxies, with their attendant stars and planets. Life, as we know it and not, will be found everywhere some day.

That demands of us constant and quick action and reaction to ever-changing stimuli, rules and interface options. That is the lesson of GTA:IV.

Though I do wish there were an option to turn off the tutorial dialogs - allow the self-starters to check the briefing if they need any help with the game controls, otherwise let them figure it out. | 0 Comments

So the class of materials the military is developing for it's visual cloaking techniques (I wish I was kidding, but apparently it's coming along) may also be useful in routing fiberoptic networks - by slowing the light, the light can be 'stored' and then sent, and they're saying they should have today's closet sized router down to the size of a fingernail by the time this technology is cooking with gas.

The more I read about quantum mechanics, the more scared and hopeful I am.

Light is made up of photons - photons are quantum. If you are manipulating light to run your computer, you have just accidentally built a near-quantum computer. Who knows, maybe it'll be so fast that the penultimate quantum computer will be a footnote in history a few years later. | 0 Comments