Space Warps

Boldly go where no man has gone before!

The Space Warps program lets you see space images never seen before in order to locate gravitational lenses.  Since space is so vast, and the number of images so great, this is a really cool opportunity to be a pioneer!

Brought to you by the great folks at zooniverse.org.

Are you Libertarian or Totalitarian?

What I see as the difference between a libertarian and a totalitarian is that a libertarian, while tough on crimes which violate life, liberty or property, believes that it is better for one criminal to go unpunished than to take the life, liberty or property of an innocent person; A totalitarian believes it is acceptable to violate the life, liberty and property of as many innocent people as necessary to catch one criminal.

Of course, that is an oversimplification, but it is one good example of the difference between those who favor liberty and those who favor authority.

The difference between a libertarian and a statist is that a libertarian believes the rights of the individual supercede any state, whereas a statist believes it is acceptable to violate life, liberty or property of any number of innocent people to protect the state.

Now, observe the general atmosphere around you and determine whether you are living in liberty or in a totalitarian state.

If you just read that and thought to yourself, "A totalitarian state sounds good to me," you need to read a few more history books.  Totalitarian states rarely turn out well for anyone involved, including leaders, followers, and especially not for its victims.

If you just read THAT and thought, "How could anyone EVER think a totalitarian state is good?", well, you need to read more history, too.  And talk to a few of your friends.  I bet you'd be surprised.

EDIT:  Added, thanks to my wonderful girl, Ms. Liberty:
"It is more important that innocence be protected than it is that guilt be punished, for guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world that they cannot all be punished. But if innocence itself is brought to the bar and condemned, perhaps to die, then the citizen will say, “whether I do good or whether I do evil is immaterial, for innocence itself is no protection,” and if such an idea as that were to take hold in the mind of the citizen that would be the end of security whatsoever." -John Adams

Final Web Log

The web is dead, but the internet isn't.  Security and other concerns have driven traffic to popular, seemingly trustworthy and newer sites.  Apps on smartphones and tablet devices drive data directly from servers to the enduser's device.  It seems weird to be nostalgic for the world wide web, but there you go. 
That's where we are.

Here are a few of my favs from back in the day.  Some are still around, but many are defunct or in virtual stasis.

theeldritchcorporation (schwa)
www.schwa.com (defunct)
circa 1992ish
An art site based loosely on the concept of stickmen and world domination. My guess is that the artist just got tired of it.  It was very well done and had begun to implement newer techniques when it disappeared.

weirdlinks
www.weirdlinks.com (defunct)
late 90s, early 2ks
This guy was entertaining yet he just seemed a bit unstable.  Best links of weirdness, however, in the whole internets.

geocities
www.geocities.com (defunct)
90s and early 2ks
The best free hosting of its day.  It could have been the first social network, if only Yahoo hadn't simply been so short-sighted when they bought it out.

superbad
www.superbad.com
early 2ks-present
An art site with post-modern, random pages which are interactive in odd ways.  You could spend hours there doing nothing and be amazed that you had done it. You still can, but you won't be as amazed.  This site appears to be in stasis.

obscure store (and reading room)
late 90s, early 2ks
The only site on the list without its own domain name. This was a site started by a artist who was trying to sell his fanzine.  It lives on, somewhat, in his blog, JimRomenesko.com.

subterannean cinema
www.subcin.com
unknown start, ended 2012
A site dedicated to Subterranean Cinema.  It was awesome.  One of the oddest things was when Shane Ballard, a 22 year old iconoclast and friend of the webmaster, ran for Sheriff of a Mississippi county.  The site covered how he and his documentarian were both killed in strange and tragic deaths after the movie was released.  The site is gone, but you can visit the archive at archive.org:
http://web.archive.org/web/20020125085459/http://www.subcin.com/

Hugh's Ominous Valve Works
www.ominous-valve.com
90s-present
A totally analog celebration 'Mr. Valve', Hugh's Ominous Valve Works was almost an alternate reality. 'Ursigram'?  This site is still around, and does update, although very rarely. 

drudgereport
www.drudgereport.com
early 90s-present
Who could leave out the site that broke the Monica Lewinsky story?  Matt Drudge has probably obtained the most success of any of these pages... at least the most notoriety, anyway.

heavens-above
www.heavens-above.com
90s-present
A German site that listed when and where you could see almost any object in the sky.  Way ahead of its time, Heavens Above showed me where to look to see the MIR and Space Shuttle were docked, and each pass as they separated.  It also showed me where the MIR was as it made the final passes around the planet before re-entering the atmosphere and buring up.

webcrawler
www.webcrawler.com
early 90s-present
Webcrawler was the search engine bought out by AOL, bringing its glory days to an end.  But it was the first engine I ever used, and was the first to index whole web pages back in 1994.

news of the weird
www.newsoftheweird.com
90s-present
Another site that compiled current odd news and items from around the world that still exists and looks just like it did back then.

stories.com
www.stories.com (defunct or writing.com)
Mid-90s
This was the first place I kept an online journal, which you'd probably call a 'blog' today, although it wasn't really a web log.  I had written TONS of stuff on there when they made it a pay only site and deleted everything!  That was heartbreaking.  I think it eventually became 'writing.com'.  The domain is now a completely different site, and has nothing to do with the original site from the mid-90s.

hotmail
hotmail.com
late 90s-present
Not one of the first free email services, but probably one of the best.  It was great until Microsoft bought them out.  I rarely use it anymore, but it used to be THE standby email addy to have.

beliefnet
www.beliefnet.com
late90s-present
Beliefnet was a place where you could be whatever religion you wanted and complain about whatever you wanted.  There was a real odd sense of community there.  The whole 9/11 thing ended that.  The site still exists, but isn't at all the same.

random website
randomwebsite.com
90s-present
Want to kill an afternoon in the early 2ks?  Hit up randomwebsite.com and it was gone.  Good old Bob and his pipe will take you to the next stop on your journey.  I quit using it when the cached site began to include malicious ones.  When this happened, it probably contributed to the death of the WWW.

And then there are the ones I never liked, but became insanely popular:

google
In the mid-90s, I really wanted to start a search engine.  I saw what Webcrawler did, but KNEW it could be better.  The basic code for a search engine was released, and I started work on it.  I had neither the equipment I needed nor access to capital to obtain those things in order to make it effective.  No one around here seemed to care about the internet and when I approached someone I worked with at GE about it in 1997, he said to me, "...ain't nobody care about no dot-dot-dash-dash."
Seriously.  I still remember the stupid look on his face. 
Anyway, Google popped up and blew everyone away with the gaslighting motto: Don't be evil.  Yeah.

facebook
www.facebook.com
late 2ks-present
This isn't really an older site, but the latest in the series of blabber-about-nothing sites that has plagued the internet.  Myspace with a... well, it is basically myspace without the ability to modify your home page, without the ability to put your band's music up in a player on the page, and without any soul whatsoever.

myspace
www.myspace.com
early 2ks-present
"A place for friends"... became a place for weirdos.  But I kind of grew to like it, due to its vague similarity to geocities and other things.  At one point, Myspace was more popular than the telephone.  When they began to crack down on customization of your page, due to understandable security concerns, I lost interest.  Fox News bought it and it straight-up died.  I wonder if Tom is in Gitmo?

fark
www.fark.com
What was it about Fark?  I kind of liked fark.  It still exists, but I never got into it.  I don't know why... It was the logical end to web logging. Or was it the beginning?

reddit
reddit.com
I think I've been there a dozen times or so.  Never even got a login.

And then there are countless bulletin board forums that I've joined and liked or hated over the years.  I can't even think of one, now, which is odd.  For such a long time they were THE place to go to interact.

Honorable mention:
ICQ
Not really a website, but the ICQ client truly opened up the world.  AOL cornered this market, but ICQ was the first strong GUI, user-friendly chat and instant messenger.

Now that I've gotten into this, I realize the more I reminisce, the more sites and things I think about putting on here, so I'd better stop while I'm ahead.

To the Legislators

There is no reason (zilch, nada, zero) why a legislator shouldn't read the legislation he is voting for or against.  There is nothing THAT time sensitive, EVER.  If the bill is thousands of pages, perhaps it shouldn't be one bill, or, if it should be one bill, it should require far more debate and time to read than any so-called 'emergency' measure, which needn't be so long.

I don't need rhetorical arguments.  There is absolutely NO REASON not to read the bills.  NONE.  That is your ONE AND ONLY JOB.  You're not an ambassador who has to meet with foreign dignitaries.  You're not an employment agency finding work for workers or workers to supply industry.  You are a representative to the governing body from the people who elected you.  You're not there to have meetings with lobbyists; You are only there to vote or let the body know what the people you represent think, which your electorate have already done, in large part, by electing you.

Even if you feel like the above paragraph contains part of the job description of an elected representative, your first job is the legislation you will be voting upon.  All else would be second. 
There's NO REASON not to read the bills.

I know, you've got staff to read the bills.  You've got more important things to do; You have to meet with other people from the governing body, people from other governing bodies, donors and lobbyists to discuss the things you'll put in the bills, but won't take the time to read to make sure they are actually in there.  And other important things, like showing up for public relations photo ops.  You have to get re-elected, right?  But mostly, you've got personal business to attend to, right?  RIGHT?  RIIGGHHHT.

I know, pressing the flesh is time consuming.  And tiresome.  But not for you, of course.  You enjoy it.  The wonderful feeling of being seen and being powerful. 

Read the bills.  READ THEM... READ 'EM!!!

Why Diagonal?

Why do they give the hypotenuse and sometimes the slope (aspect ratio; ie. 16:9 or 4:3) of a tv or screen instead of giving the dimensions? Most of us don't deal with the ratios of TV screens all the time, and can't instantly tell you what the height and width of the screen will be from just the diagonal measurements. Sure, it is a simple calculation to figure the other sides of a right triangle based on the hypotenuse (diagonal measurement) when given the slope, but WHY? It is much easier to say 6.1" x 3.4" when talking about a so-called '7" screen' than to give the 16:9 aspect ratio ONLY. Maybe its because 7 inches sounds BIGGER than 6.1 x 3.4 inches?

Why We Are Ruled by Petty Tyrants

We love a winner.  We love to admire people we perceive to have done great things.  Sometimes, we love them too much.  Sometimes, we give them a free pass.  Sometimes, we pretend a rotten loser is a winner.

When we allow them to get away with something, because of our admiration, we are encouraging them to do something worse.  With each ignored imposition, we make them stronger and less likely to hesitate before making the next imposition.

Then we glorify them for it.

We make more excuses defying the logical and move purely into rhetorical arguments.  We burnish their reputations and pretend to see our reflection in them. 

Then, we become afraid of them.  After we've made them so strong, they begin to fear us less.  This makes them even less likely to be influenced by anything negative we say.  They believe the hype and start to use it against the very people who brought them power.

We live very comfortable lives, compared to any time in history.  To many, politics is an annoyance, or, worse yet, a game in which to pull for a team... or to gamble upon.  This makes very fertile ground for the petty tyrant.

He will sink his roots deep. 

By the time many realize that their hero isn't who they've been lying to themselves and other about, it's too late.  The petty tyrant now has enough roots and connections to keep your efforts to remove him or her from having any effect. 

Why is it we love the 'winner' figure so much that we'd give up our logic and individuality to promote this person?  Bottom line: We just don't want to take responsibility for ourselves.  We seek out those we perceive to be capable of taking care of us.  This is a story as old as humanity:  When a strong figure arises, we are usually willing to give up our basic rights to have our needs met.  We lionize the figure and create a mythical character who will meet our needs.

Protect the Individual and You Protect Everyone

All I hear in the morning and evening on the news networks is about how "something must be done" about the awful tragedy that recently befell grade school students in Connecticut. I agree.

There were teachers with guns in their desks when I was in grade school. Did I feel scared? Nope. Were there mass shootings in school? Nope. Were guns harder to get, then? Nope (far easier, actually). Were there more gun laws then? Nope.

In all of the recent cases of mass-murder violence the perpetrator has been classified as mentally ill and has at some point been on drugs prescribed by doctors. Did they have all of these drugs for kids when I was a kid? Nope.

All of this began to change in the early '90s. Legislation began to be passed that, although well-meaning, violated the basic core of American beliefs: personal responsibility. When you give the responsibility to care for you children to the government, you shouldn't be surprised when it messes up. When you allow government to regulate what you should be teaching and learning yourself, you fail yourself and your children.

My parents taught me to respect firearms. That's all I needed. I was an adult before I purchased my own firearm and I follow all safety precautions when handling or using the weapon. I was taught at a young age that guns were, like any other powerful tool, capable of killing or maiming.

Mental illness appears to be the foil, not what type of weapon you do or don't have. Mental illness is NOT new. There have been those with chemical imbalances in their brains since humanity has existed. Why, now, are those imbalances beginning to result in more violence?

Let's look at the system from which all of these killers have received training: school. It isn't always the things you intend to teach that are learned in school. Many times, it is the things you DIDN'T intend to teach that stay with a child. For example, I knew kids with high intelligence levels who were bullied by teachers. The child seemed arrogant and the teacher intended to teach humility. Instead, the result was that the child perceived the injustice of being correct, yet being corrected.

Then you have the peer pressure. The prison-like atmosphere of forcing children to inhabit a classroom for intolerable amounts of time while uncomfortable in their surroundings and constantly on guard against attacks from classmates causes incredible pressure on normal students. Add to this a chemical imbalance and incorrectly administered psychiatric drugs (whether it be the child failing to take them correctly or incorrect analysis by a doctor) and you create a tender box for violence.

The violence may not erupt for years. The damage done to the young, formative brain of the child can easily compound with paranoia and further self-isolation to avoid the perceived injustices committed by their fellow humans. When the breaking point is reached is not something predictable and changes from child to child. Nevertheless, the fact that a breaking point DOES exist should be established.

Recently, in China, a male armed with a knife killed 22 students in a school. Could gun laws have stopped this? Obviously not, since China has some of the toughest gun control laws in the world.

The knee-jerk reaction is to treat the symptoms, not the disease.

The disease is disrespect for the individual. The seeds of the disease are planted in childhood. All children are not the same and no one method of treating one child is good for all children. Respect for the individual and personal responsibility is the only solution to the recent violence plaguing our society and until we recognize this, we are doomed to see it repeated.