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The 20 most recent journal entries:
- letting farmers sell on public land direct to customers, so that the middle-men's markup now became redistributed to the farmers and the consumers. The people get good quality food more cheaply and farmers make more money -- win-win!
- letting entrepreneurs sell in so-called ABC markets (from the portuguese for "food at low prices") where the prices of about twenty basic foods are regulated, but other foods are not.
- an obligation attached to being able to use public land like this is the requirement to truck produce out to poor neighborhoods for people who are unable to reach the markets.
- schools, instead of spending money on processed crap food for kids' lunches, now get foods direct from the markets to make nutritious lunches.
- "people's restaurants" were set up where a meal costs about 50 cents. There is no requirement that customers be poor which maintains the dignity of those eating there.
- the government publishes, in newspapers, TV, and at bus stops, the going prices of basic foodstuffs, keeping the market honest.
| Friday, 17th May, 2013 | |
| 5:07 pm | help free the press This is the coolest project. The Tribune Newspaper company in USA is up for sale. They own lots of papers, including The Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, The Baltimore Sun. Scarily, Rupert Mudoch and the Koch Brothers are interested, however some wonderful people have come up with the great idea of keeping it out of those cold, clammy hands and raising the money by crowd-sourcing it. So, we have a month to raise $660 million. Can it be done? Sure. It has already raised more than $51,000 and it's only just started. Wait til the news spreads and more people find out. I could only afford $20, but if millions contribute along with a few philanthropists then we can free a bunch of newspapers and start to push back against the forces of nasty. Oh, and the money you contribute? It gets refunded if the target is not reached. http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/f (Crossposted from http://miriam-e.dreamwidth.org/309505.h |
| 9:31 am | Absolutely hilarious! Abercrombie & Fitch Gets a Brand Readjustment Someone didn't just get angry at the douchebag running Abercrombie and Fitch. He decided to do something about it. Excellent! Using an elitist's hate to screw with him while helping people out. Very nice work. :D http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O95DBxnX (Crossposted from http://miriam-e.dreamwidth.org/309465.h |
| 8:26 am | Countries are like cars The USA car is big and powerful, even now. It used to be much more powerful, but these days so many of its parts hate its other parts -- many green parts don't like the violet parts, and most of the violet parts despise the purple parts (insisting that there is actually a big difference between violet and purple). This mutual hatred has gotten so bad in some parts that the upholstery fabric has patches torn out and the bodywork in areas is bare of paint and now rusting. The hatred isn't just restricted to color though, softness, shininess, weight, and opaqueness are all sources of mutual animosity. Most of the parts have become equipped with weapons because they've become afraid of one-another. The parts shoot at each other at the slightest provocation, it seems, because about 7,000 parts are destroyed each year this way, and the car has become riddled with bullet-holes. Passengers used to like to ride in the grand luxury of the USA car, but more and more they look at it and shake their heads. It is becoming too dangerous. Part of the reason the parts have come to fear and hate each other is because of the lights. Instead of illuminating things, they've have been showering the car with red-colored sparks, which unfortunately are constantly setting fire to things and igniting weapons caches, making parts suspicious of each other. And the red color of the sparks tends to distort the light and shadow and make some colors look wrong. The USA car has another really big problem, common to a lot of cars these days. The fuel pump is supposed to pump fuel to the engine to keep it going, but lately it has been siphoning most of the fuel off through pipes to big bladders in the Switzerland car and some cars in the Caribbean group. The engine has begin to sputter and cough badly now, starved of fuel. So bad has this become that most of the USA car's movement is now mere inertia -- it is slowing as the engine weakens. Maintenance isn't keeping up with all the damage from bullets, fires, and wear either. Unlike many of the other fast cars where repair devices are fed by fuel direct from the tank, the repair devices in the USA car have to be fuelled by the parts being repaired, even though many parts don't have access to it. This had led to them turning paint and rubber and lubricant and fabric into fuel for the repair devices, worsening rust and other problems. Some time back the tires on the right-hand side blew out causing the USA car to lose a lot of speed and to veer terribly to the right. This has taken it in a big curve around so that it is now starting to head back the way it came! But the USA car's problems are nothing compared to those in the Greece car, where its fuel pump siphoned off *all* the fuel and the engine stopped completely. It was loaned some fuel by other cars, but the fuel pump took almost all that too, while blaming all the other parts, saying that the upholstery should be turning its fabric to fuel and the body should be turning its paint to fuel, and the bearings should be turning their lubrication to fuel. Those parts do, under protest, but the fuel pump continues to take most of that too! Weird! A similar thing happened to the Iceland car, but the parts there became angry at the fuel pump and started bypassing it. Syria is a pretty peculiar case. It has most of the same problems as the other cars, but added to those, the steering wheel has got a box of matches. It hates most of its own car and and is throwing lit matches about the interior almost at random. Many of the other cars think it is only a matter of time before that car is engulfed in flame. Stupid steering wheel! Doesn't it know its job is to steer? Does it think this will end well? You know, I don't understand why so many of the parts in many cars hate each other. Don't they realise they are all just car-parts? They can't all be the same because then the car wouldn't work. The weirdest thing is that most of these parts say they are proud of their car, but in reality that's a lie, because they actually hate much of their car while professing this strange, delusional patriotism. And what is it about these fuel pumps stealing all the fuel? Don't they see that they are just fuel pumps? All the fuel has to pass through them, true, but by stealing it they are choking the engine. What did they think would happen? They actually hate almost everything about their car while somehow pretending to themselves that they love it. The lights are one of the worst parts. If they produced good, clear light instead of this constant stream of inflammatory sparks the other parts might be able to see the fuel pump's theft and the damage to the upholstery and paintwork. Also parts might notice that most of the hate results from the fires ignited by the sparks and realise they don't actually need their weapons. I mean, jeez! When has a weapon saved a part from a random shot by another part? Anybody can see that the cars that don't have lots of weapons are not riddled with bulletholes and don't have lots of weapon-related deaths... or they would be able to see this if it wasn't for the sparking red lights. (Crossposted from http://miriam-e.dreamwidth.org/309016.h |
| Saturday, 11th May, 2013 | |
| 4:17 pm | headache today - finally gave up caffeine... again I've given up caffeine a few times before. Each time I get sucked back into it when having to pull an all-nighter, generally to complete some software on a deadline. Of course that's usually followed by a long period of debugging so I'm never able to sleep it off, so keep using caffeine to stay on track. Of course when the big panic is over I find I'm hooked again and need to look for a rare idle few days to allow for headaches withdrawing from the rotten drug. I've resolved to never let it happen again. I've given up caffeine this time for good. I'm sick of being held to ransom by a stupid chemical. What's the bet that some years down the track we'll find out that caffeine is not the harmless substance everybody wants it to be. Boy! This damn headache sure tells me something is not right with it. (Crossposted from http://miriam-e.dreamwidth.org/308853.h |
| 8:02 am | The bastards are trying to destroy the net again! I've quoted this directly, but cleaned up the links: "The Biggest Global Threat to the Internet" – That's how legal experts at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) describe the controversial international agreement, the "Trans Pacific Partnership" (TPP). The TPP agreement threatens to criminalize use of your favorite websites — Youtube, Instagram, Facebook, your favourite blog — and even your online comments -- that's why we're teaming up with our friends at OpenMedia to fight it. A man named Michael Froman has just been appointed as the new TPP chief negotiator. Michael Froman now has a unique ability to put this secretive, global Internet criminalization plan to an end or he could cement it into place for generations. Will you click here to send a message to Michael Froman at this pivotal moment? We must speak up before Big Media lobbyists convince him to criminalize use of the Internet. The fact is, if we don’t speak up now, legal experts warn that everyday online activities “could lead you to be cut off from the Internet, have your computer seized, fined up to $150,000, or even land you in prison.” This is happening fast — the binding agreement will rewrite national laws around the world --- 12 countries are already on board. If we can get enough people to sign this international call, we’ll put our numbers directly on display at a TPP press conference for Michael Froman and all the media to see. The question is: who will Michael Froman hear from in his first week on the job? You, or the Big Media conglomerates who see the Internet as a threat? We know these public officials feel the heat when enough people speak out at once. Let’s make sure Michael Froman has no choice but to respect your privacy and free expression online. (Crossposted from http://miriam-e.dreamwidth.org/308651.h |
| Friday, 10th May, 2013 | |
| 6:58 am | How can a bunch of very smart people be so incredibly stupid? A creepy company called Myriad Genetics has patents on some of your genes. Mutations of these genes are involved in breast cancer. It would mean this one company would have a monopoly on tests and research into detection and cures, so they could be careless in their work, and charge as much as they desired because there would be no competition or exchange of knowledge. This is a truly insane idea! Watch a short video explaining more about it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywj_a0Mu And read more about the scientific and legal ramifications: http://www.aclu.org/fight-take-back-o (Crossposted from http://miriam-e.dreamwidth.org/308324.h |
| Thursday, 9th May, 2013 | |
| 8:50 am | a wonderful use of technology http://www.upworthy.com/watch-an-ab Lenticular optical systems have been around for a long time, usually for animated images or stereo, but I've never seen them used for such a cool social purpose. I hope this spreads around the world. (Crossposted from http://miriam-e.dreamwidth.org/308141.h |
| Sunday, 5th May, 2013 | |
| 8:19 am | ending hunger is actually easy Wow! What an amazing article this is: http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/f It details the strategies and reasoning behind the elimination of hunger in Brazil's fourth largest city -- a place of 2.5 million people. The government there decided that food is a right for all citizens and that it had a role as facilitator. They took a number of very sensible steps, such as: And the price tag of all this? $10 million per year. Averaged over the population that's about 1 cent per person per day. The city will end up saving massively into the future because of this foresight. And the investment in goodwill and well-nourished, intelligent children is likely to give even greater returns. We tend to get pulled into stupid arguments of big government vs small government as if the size was the point. Surely the real point is for government to act as enablers for the whole population, not just the wealthiest segment. These days, with government stalling on real climate change action, dithering about gay equality, letting poverty gain ground, and doing pathetically little to boost sustainable energy, it isn't even working for the majority of voters anymore. It is nice to see an example of government showing they can get their priorities right, and work for ordinary people while enabling business. Bravo! (Crossposted from http://miriam-e.dreamwidth.org/307893.h |
| Tuesday, 30th April, 2013 | |
| 4:48 am | PayPal and Google try to force blogs to censor Heavens! This should be front page news everywhere. Google, who get much mileage out of their "Don't be evil" corporate motto are quietly implementing evil as standard procedure, it seems. And I can't help wondering if perhaps Elon Musk would be ashamed of what PayPal are doing. I can no longer pay for my Dreamwidth account via PayPal or Google Checkout because Dreamwidth refused to censor user content beyond legal requirements, that is, they refused to let PayPal or Google meddle in users' blogs. PayPal and Google each then cancelled Dreamwidth's account. So far, I can still use my "credit" card (actually a debit card). Read more about it here: http://dw-biz.dreamwidth.org/7022.html (Crossposted from http://miriam-e.dreamwidth.org/307475.h |
| Monday, 22nd April, 2013 | |
| 7:33 pm | can a machine be cute? Oh yes! Akiyuky has done it again -- this time a wondrous six headed LEGO machine: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYZEmPsP (Crossposted from http://miriam-e.dreamwidth.org/307415.h |
| 12:04 pm | Amazing, glorious humanity Long after we disappear I can imagine visitors from another civilisation, lightyears away, coming to Earth and digging up Jos de Vink's beautiful machines. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyxbz87J His YouTube channel is http://www.youtube.com/user/mdevink Enjoy! (Crossposted from http://miriam-e.dreamwidth.org/306948.h |
| 10:31 am | Project Gutenberg is so totally coooool!!! A recent foray out onto Project Gutenberg in the search for the book by Emile Zola, that the lovely BBC series "The Paradise" is based on, ended up netting me a wonderful treasure trove of other scrumptious information. (I love my periodic random wanderings in that forest of literature.) One that I'm especially looking forward to reading is the 5th book in the list below: Charlie Chaplin's record of his visit to Europe as a vacation, unwinding from seven years of flat-out work making films in the early Hollywood. During his trip he meets H. G. Wells and I'm really eager to reach that part. Another one that I think will be particularly interesting is Orville Wright and Wilbur Wright's account of the early history of airplanes. A E Dolbear - The Telephone A Frederick Collins - The Radio Amateur's Hand Book Archibald Williams - How it Works Babcock & Wilcox Co - Steam, Its Generation and Use Charlie Chaplin - My Wonderful Visit Derek J de Solla Price - On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices, and the Compass Edward Godfrey - Some Mooted Questions in Reinforced Concrete Design Edwin A Battison - Screw-Thread Cutting by the Master-Screw Method since 1480 E G Thomssen - Soap-Making Manual Ellen H Richards - The Cost of Shelter Ethel M Mairet - Vegetable Dyes Francis C Frary - Laboratory Manual of Glass-Blowing Franklin D Jones - Turning and Boring George E Woodward and F W Woodward - Woodward's Graperies and Horticultural Buildings G W Septimus - The Art of Perfumery Harold P Manly - Oxy-Acetylene Welding and Cutting Howard I Chapelle - Fulton's 'Steam Battery' - Blockship and Catamaran H R Playtner - An Analysis of the Lever Escapement Hubert E Collins - Steam Turbines IBM 1401 Programming Systems John Mills - Letters of a Radio-Engineer to His Son J S Zerbe - Electricity for Boys J S Zerbe - Practical Mechanics for Boys Kate Field - The Drama of Glass M Luckiesh - Artificial Light Orville Wright and Wilbur Wright - The Early History of the Airplane Radio Shack TRS-80 Expansion Interface - Operator's Manual Richard Bonner - The Boy Inventors' Radio Telephone Samuel Dibble - Elements of Plumbing Sara Ware Bassett - The Story of Silk Steam Engines (Machinery's Reference Series, Number 70) Talbot Hughes - Dress design Thomas M St John - How Two Boys Made Their Own Electrical Apparatus W A Shenstone - The Methods of Glass Blowing and of Working Silica in the Oxy-Gas Flame W H Simmons and H A Appleton - The Handbook of Soap Manufacture William Fairham - Woodwork Joints William T Lewis - Friction, Lubrication and the Lubricants in Horology (Horology is the study of time-keeping devices -- clocks.) In case you think steam engines are old hat, may I remind you that all the nuclear, coal, oil, gas, solar-thermal, and geothermal power stations in the world are steam engines -- that is, they use one method or another to heat water to steam to drive stuff (usually turbines). There are tens of thousands of free books available for you at Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org), but also don't overlook Project Gutenberg Australia (http://gutenberg.net.au/search.html (Crossposted from http://miriam-e.dreamwidth.org/306829.h |
| Saturday, 6th April, 2013 | |
| 3:46 pm | Qt5... bleagh! I was having a long, recursively difficult problem compiling a program that had innumerable dependencies. Eventually I reached a point where one of the dependencies wouldn't compile without Qt5. So, groaning, I found the download page and began the download. But when I saw the size, I was disgusted and said aloud, "You've gotta be kidding me!" It is 388 MB in size! For a GUI toolkit; just an interface system! To put this in perspective, the entire Puppy Linux operating system with windowing interface, file manager, gtk GUI toolkit, various packages like word processor, spreadsheet, web browser, and hundreds of other utilities weighs in at just over a quarter that size. Who in their right mind creates a GUI toolkit that bloated? I mean, Microsoft might, but this is happening in the Linux world. Not good. I betcha it runs like a snail too. (Crossposted from http://miriam-e.dreamwidth.org/306582.h |
| 10:10 am | zombies attack again You'd better resign yourself to the fact that you can't kill them. They just keep coming again; you can only beat them back for a little while. Now they want to expand the misleadingly titled Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). The existing act is itself a fraud and an abuse of power. It was created back in the early days of the internet and no longer is relevant (perhaps never applied) to the real world. It is the act that was used to bully Aaron Schwartz to death. Work has proceeded in rewriting this bad law so that it is less likely to be abused, but members of the House Judiciary Committee have come up with a cynical move to make CFAA even worse. Each time the monsters who would eat the internet are beaten back, they return. They are stupid but they won't tire. They will just keep coming. We need a way to stop them for good, otherwise one day they will succeed in damaging the net irreparably while we are not looking and there will be no way to undo it. Perhaps this was partly what Danny Hillis was worried about when he proposed The internet could crash. We need a Plan B at a TED talk. (Crossposted from http://miriam-e.dreamwidth.org/306308.h |
| Tuesday, 26th March, 2013 | |
| 7:15 am | getting your computer to help -- the subtle risks I've been working further on trying to create a prototype associative filing system and have been giving a lot of thought to working out ways to get the computer to anticipate the user's needs. In some sense Google already manages a version of this by keeping a record of the most common searches made by other people and offering those as you type your search terms. It also seems to speed the presentation of results by re-using those from common searches. And they definitely use other people's links to rank recommended search results. Many programs on our computers are in the very early stages of doing similar things. They maintain lists of most recently or most commonly accessed items. On the net many of us use tags on our blogs to categorise what we write (I don't). Many sites use tags to organise their content. These are all undeniably convenient, but it is the beginning of a trend that poses a subtle long-term danger, and we need to be aware of it. If we allow the computer to filter the kind of thing it presents to us based upon what is most popular then we end up with a self-amplifying, positive feedback system. Initially it can be very useful, but over time it risks stagnation. Such risks may take a long time to become apparent with Google's search engine, and might be sufficiently offset by the variety of humanity to ever be a real problem, but an associative filing system on a single machine for a single user might gradually narrow their focus so that they're almost never presented with items beyond a slowly shrinking range. Individuals would be encouraged by their computer to never step outside their comfort zone and never see anything truly new. If emotional tags were used to guide this it becomes more treacherous still. People's irrational beliefs and world-views would never be challenged and they would be presented only with data that appeared to support their erroneous views. We already have a worrying tendency to do this; we don't need our computers amplifying it. Its effect on whole societies could become quite dangerous in time. The scariest aspect to me is that its progress would be almost invisible, at every step offering genuine improvements, but over the longer term becoming deleterious. So, I need to be aware of this risk when making my associative filing system and find ways to circumvent it. My immediate thought is that novelty and humor could be used to add greater value to fresh things, but how? There must be other useful (and easier to program) strategies too. (Crossposted from http://miriam-e.dreamwidth.org/306034.h |
| Sunday, 17th March, 2013 | |
| 2:35 pm | Afganistan I woke up this morning thinking about the reasoning, propaganda, and popular perception of our waging war on the people of Afganistan. It is not the first time I've wondered why we, the most technologically sophisticated nations on Earth have taken it upon ourselves to invade, bomb, and attempt to impose military rule upon an impoverished tribal culture. I'm puzzled. I can come up with an assortment of rationales (few of which make sense when examined for more than a couple of seconds), but in the end all I can come up with is that we see ourselves as better than everybody else and that we want what Afganistan has and we will kill anybody who stands in the way of our infantile tantrum-throwing desire. So, what does Afganistan have that we would kill goat-herders for? The sleezoids who love tactics and control obviously see its position between Pakistan and Iran as a way to isolate the two, but it is hard to see that as a good rationale for pouring billions of dollars and countless lives into such a venture. It seems pretty pointless to create new generations of people who hate us enough to become devoted to our downfall, just for some theoretical political advantage... even granted that the people who dream up such looney concepts as the "Domino Effect" that dragged us into the Vietnam War have their heads stuffed so firmly up their own asses that they don't have any concept of reality. Surely even they should see the futility. The only other possibility that has occurred to me is the fact that Afganistan is sitting on top of possibly 3 trillion dollars worth of mineral resources. We've already used greed for resources as a rationale when went into merry war with Iraq "to find weapons of mass destruction", when it was an open secret that we really went to steal their oil. However it seems odd to me that we would kill the Afganis for minerals though, when it would be much easier to swindle them for it. It is a technique used to great effect so often in the past, as when Australia stole East Timor's oilfields by illegally redefining the territorial boundaries. Of course there is the point that USA, Britain, and France are the the three biggest arms suppliers in the world, and running a war that costs billions (which end up in the pockets of arms manufacturers) seems very convenient. The trouble is, it is pretend money. All that wealth used to make weapons gets either stockpiled or blown up. It doesn't achieve anything positive in the world, it takes food out of the mouths of the people that it doesn't actually kill, and it damages our economies to waste resources like that. Imagine if we devoted all that money and all those resources to something productive! ...like eliminating poverty. We could be heroes instead of despised. And we would be richer for it as well. The warmongers don't speak for us. We can't keep killing innocent people and just shrug it off. We are alienating generations of people who quite rightly hate us for it. How do we stop this stupid war? Time to stop!! (Crossposted from http://miriam-e.dreamwidth.org/305776.h |
| Friday, 1st March, 2013 | |
| 11:50 pm | a very cool computer and web bloat  I was just reading about a cool computer, the new OpenRISC System-on-Chip FPGA development board that uses an Altera FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Array).An FPGA is a chip that contains vast numbers of logic switches (gates) that can be configured by special instructions so that it can be internally "wired up" to become almost anything you want, within the limits of the chip. Many people have begun doing amazing things like getting FPGAs to become special high-speed processors (as in the board above), or emulating whole computers (Jeri Ellsworth built an entire Commodore64 inside an FPGA). Anyway, this OpenRISC computer, about the size of a playing card, looked very interesting to me, but being made in Sweden the price is given in Euros as €149, and I had no idea how that converted to Australian dollars, so I went to the currency converter site I usually check price conversions at: http://www.oanda.com/currency/conve After about half an hour the page finally loaded. The damn page contains about 2 megabytes of data. To put this in perspective, that is equivalent to all the combined text in the first 3 Harry Potter books plus half of the 4th book! That's insane! It is a case of incredibly sloppy programming. It never used to be this bad. Looks like I'll have to find a more accessible currency conversion site. The speed of my net connection is terrible at the moment. Since my satellite modem was killed a while back by a sudden lightning storm, I've been using dial-up, and of course Telstra refuse to fix the land-lines out here, so the fastest speeds I can get are about 2kbytes per second, but usually much less, around 1kbytes per second. If you'd been wondering why I hardly update my blog these days, that's one of the reasons. It is a good thing that I have so much data on my computers that I hardly need to venture out onto the net these days. (Crossposted from http://miriam-e.dreamwidth.org/305495.h |
| Saturday, 12th January, 2013 | |
| 2:52 pm | Bob Crispen... sad loss I received the very sad news yesterday that one of the nicest, funniest, most intelligent people I've known died. The world is much, much less without him. The human race can't afford to lose minds like his. (Crossposted from http://miriam-e.dreamwidth.org/305387.h |
| Friday, 21st December, 2012 | |
| 6:22 am | end of the world today... business as usual :) heheheh :D Today has a lot of easily hoodwinked folks terrified that it is all ending on this day. Ummm... is that Australian Eastern Time? Or Greenwich Time? Or USA Pacific Time perhaps? heheheh It constantly amazes me how people are able to believe stuff without evidence, and even worse, in the face of evidence to the contrary. NASA produced a video for this Saturday titled "Why the World Didn't End Yesterday". Because it doesn't have quite as much impact to say "I told you so" afterwards, they're saying it beforehand from the perspective of afterwards. http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/sc Seeya tomorrow on the 22nd. :) (Crossposted from http://miriam-e.dreamwidth.org/305096.h |
| Thursday, 20th December, 2012 | |
| 4:47 pm | local version of my blogs I've done something rather cool. :) For some time now (years) I've been backing up my LiveJournal and Dreamwidth blogs using a nice program called "ljdump". (See the LJ community about it at http://ljdump.livejournal.com ). It is reassuring to know that about a decade of posts are safe here on my machine if something should happen to LiveJournal. Dreamwidth is in less danger than LiveJournal, but you never know what can happen. Now that I'm on dialup again and can't go online often I've become frustrated with the xml format that ljdump uses to save my blog. I often find I'd like to refer to old posts, but am hampered by the clumsy xml format. Well, today I wrote a program that fixes that. It ripples through all my blog backups and creates html pages from them so they can be easily viewed locally in any web browser. This is wonderful! I'm quite delighted with myself. :) (Crossposted from http://miriam-e.dreamwidth.org/304796.h |
