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Monday, 14th May, 2012
1:52 pm	next sunday is the 3rd Draw Mohammed Day Next sunday, the 20th of May 2012, is the third annual Draw Mohammed Day, inspired by the horrid fanatic who put a price on the head of a young woman cartoonist for drawing a picture that actually didn't depict Mohammed, but in which a bunch of things falsely claimed to be Mohammed. She had to change her name, move house, and change her work because these imbeciles misunderstand their Koran and get the meaning completely backwards from what it was intended to be. It seems Mohammed had seen pictures and sculptures of people become idols which got worshipped thereby getting in the way of what the religion was really supposed to be about. He was a fairly smart man and didn't want this happening to his religion so he said that people shouldn't worship images or sculptures of him, and I'm sure he thought the easiest way to prevent that was to tell his followers just not to make them in the first place. But he didn't realise how creative his followers would be in their desire to completely miss his message and make his image holy anyway. They've now made his image so holy that you're forbidden to make it. If Mohammed was alive today he would really think this was a facepalm moment. How disappointed would he be in those thickheaded followers who think his image is so holy that it is too holy to draw! And how sad would he be that they think drawing it is sufficient reason to kill! Draw Mohammed Day is our chance to stand up and tell these idiots that they can't take freedoms away just because they can't even understand their own religious texts. The more they pull stupid stunts like that the more people will draw Mohammed. If they truly want people to stop drawing him then they need to learn to stop threatening people... become a little civilised. If you feel worried that these jerks might threaten you then post a picture online anonymously. In fact if you are worried about it then you should definitely post a picture. It is the only way to ram the message home to these nasty people. (Crossposted from http://miriam-e.dreamwidth.org/289589.html at my Dreamwidth account. Number of comments there so far: ) (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, 10th May, 2012
1:00 pm	listing dirs on the commandline -- not so simple in linux I was writing a quick little script today... well, at least it started out as a quick little script, but it needed to be able to read the directory names from an arbitrary place in my file structure. I thought, sure, the ls command is bound to have an option to restrict output to only directories, right? Wrong. This turned into quite a chase. After spending too long experimenting with various things I checked the net to see if anybody else knew the answer to what I was starting to think I was too stupid to see. It seems many other people have come up against this deficiency in the ls command. There have been a lot of suggestions to get around it. The most common is:     ls -d */ but that has three failings. It prints the entire path, lists the directories with a trailing slash (the -d option), and doesn't see hidden dirs (those that begin with a dot). It is easy to use sed to get rid of the trailing slash:     ls -d1 */ | sed 's/\(.*\)./\1/g' and a little more fussing with sed can get rid of the path, but I can't find any way to list the hidden dirs along with the normal ones. Another common solution is to use the find command:     find . -maxdepth 1 -type d This works but puts all the output on one line, precedes each file with its path, the first line is always the name of the directory being listed, and the file list is all jumbled up. I can use the -printf option of file to fix the path problem and to put each name on its own line, getting rid of the first line is just a matter of piping through the tail command, and pipe through the sort command to organise the result.     find . -maxdepth 1 -type d -printf '%f\n' | tail -n+2 | sort That took a lot more hassling than I expected. Weird. You'd think that the ls command would have something that basic. The Amiga does:     dir . dirs Simple, easy to use and understand. GNU dir command has a -d option supposedly to display only directories, but it doesn't seem to work properly. Additional: I don't seem to be able to leave it alone. Here is a weird solution that I never would have thought of: use the bash shell's wildcard expansion to do it.     echo */ This has a couple of shortcomings, but as always, sed can help:     cd "$address" ; echo */ | sed 's/\/ */\n/g' We cd to the directory that we want to list from. The echo gets expanded to everything there that ends in a slash (all the directories), then sed looks for a slash followed by none or multiple spaces (can't just be a space because the very last slash doesn't have a space) and replaces them with a newline. I'm astounded that linux doesn't have an easy solution to this. Even crappy old MSDOS can do it.     DIR /A:D /B /O:N Not very readable, but at least it does it. Additional: I have a commandline program called tree though I can't remember where I got it. I don't think it is standard on linux distros, but it has a lot of nice options, including the ability to print out a list of directories. It has one tiny failing, in that it begins the list with the name of the containing directory, but as before we can simply snip that off with tail:     tree -ad -L 1 -i "$address" | tail -n+2 Nice. Found where I got it. http://mama.indstate.edu/users/ice/tree/ It was written by Steve Baker (ice@mama.indstate.edu) with HTML output capability Francesc Rocher (rocher@econ.udg.es) and character sets by Kyosuke Tokoro (NBG01720@nifty.ne.jp) (Crossposted from http://miriam-e.dreamwidth.org/289285.html at my Dreamwidth account. Number of comments there so far: ) (Comment on this)
Saturday, 5th May, 2012
8:08 pm	The banks are stealing money again The Australian banks have been stealing the reserve bank interest rate cuts instead of passing them along to their customers as they were supposed to do. The rate cuts were meant to boost the economy by helping the people who have been supporting it. But the banks have been stealing it and making for themselves half a millions dollars per hour by pocketing it. I have been working my way through the extraordinary book by Joseph E Stiglitz: "Freefall-America - Free Markets and the Sinking of the World Economy" in which he lays much or the blame, perhaps most of the blame, on the banks for destroying the world's economy. It seems like these institutions have turned into monsters that feed upon us instead of benefiting society. And here they are, doing it again. They are stealing the money intended for their customers. We need to stop them. Sign the petition. http://act.sumofus.org/go/390 But I actually think we need to do more. We need to turn to things like PayPal and Google Checkout and Amazon Payments (and 15 others) instead and boycott the banks. Choke off their source of power and bring them back into order. (Crossposted from http://miriam-e.dreamwidth.org/289138.html at my Dreamwidth account. Number of comments there so far: ) (6 Comments |Comment on this)
8:36 am	Angela Belcher might save the world What an amazing woman she is. She and her team are growing world-changing technology, like high-performance batteries, at room temperature using non-toxic materials at low energy in an environmentally friendly way. A webpage at MIT on her and her work: http://web.mit.edu/erc/spotlights/vir-all.html Video interview with Angela Belcher the ForumNetwork (55 minutes) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-tcQgTSBLc She gave a rivetting talk at TED: http://www.ted.com/talks/angela_belcher_using_nature_to_grow_batteries.html (Crossposted from http://miriam-e.dreamwidth.org/288950.html at my Dreamwidth account. Number of comments there so far: ) (Comment on this)
8:20 am	human rights are not a luxury Defense of human rights is not a luxury; it is a requirement for progress. It prevents us slipping backward into the kind of distrust that poisons social discourse. Society needs defenders of human rights for its long-term health and survival. Unfortunately some authorities prefer to punish the messenger instead of repairing the underlying human rights problems. But covering up human rights problems is a very dangerous thing to do because of the long-term damage it does to society. What could be easy to rectify now, can become very difficult to fix later if allowed to fester. Society needs people like blind human rights lawyer Chen Guangcheng to alert it to social ills. Chen has been persecuted for years after exposing forced abortions and sterilizations. In 2010 he was released from prison after spending 4 years there on trumped up charges, then he and his family became the focus of a 19-month campaign of persecution, violence and harassment at the hands of local authorities in Shandong province. The campaign included the illegal house arrest of Chen and his family, as well as constant intimidation, surveillance and vicious beatings by local security forces. Here is the email I received from Amnesty International: Today, Chen Guangcheng's future hangs in the balance. The Chinese human rights advocate, who is blind, made a daring Houdini-like escape from house arrest in Shandong province two weeks ago -- but his future remains uncertain. Right now, the US and China are holding a high level meeting in Beijing that will decide his fate. Urge leaders to respect Chen's human rights and allow him to choose his own future. Chen, a self-taught lawyer who was imprisoned and then subjected to violence and house arrest for exposing forced abortions and sterilisations in China, made a daring escape to the US embassy [1]. Following delicate negotiations with the US, Chinese officials promised to allow Chen to live a "normal life" with his family, and he initially agreed to return home. Does this sound "normal" to you? "I don't know what's happened to my mother. There are guards inside the yard, in all the rooms, even on the roof. They've set up lots of cameras in my home and are preparing electric fences. They told my family they'd take wooden sticks and beat my family to death, so it's very unsafe." -Chen Guangcheng, in an interview with NPR. It is time for this shameful saga to end - join Amnesty supporters around the world and take action to protect Chen Guangcheng. In recent hours, Chen has expressed a desire to leave China, fearing that he and his family can never enjoy freedom under the current system [3]. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is in China today, and her presence can provide the pressure we need to ensure Chen's safety. Click here to let Chen choose his own future. Send an email through Amnesty International to China's Minister of Foreign Affairs Yang Jiechi Buzhang and USA's Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to save Chen. http://www.amnesty.org.au/action/28560/ (Crossposted from http://miriam-e.dreamwidth.org/288655.html at my Dreamwidth account. Number of comments there so far: ) (Comment on this)
Sunday, 29th April, 2012
2:08 pm	immovable ideas I was just listening to an old talk on skepticism from a 2008 episode of All in the Mind, a fascinating Australian radio program about aspects of the mind. (You might like to know that programs all the way back to 2005 are available for free download from http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/allinthemind/ ) Anyway, near the end of this episode a guy said "Nobody likes being told their way of thinking is flawed, or that their most cherished beliefs are based on myth and misconception. Add to that the fact that humans tend to like absolutes -- true and false, believer and heretic -- and it's easy to see why age-old cultural beliefs often win out over science's dispassionate, objective inquiry." This strikes me as odd. I'm always embarrassed, but relieved when I'm shown that I'm wrong about something. I much prefer to find out my mistakes so that I can fix them. Also I dislike and distrust absolutes. (I like the little joke "All sweeping statements are false." heheh ) The obsession with belief and for disregarding facts has always puzzled me. I especially find it hard to understand why people profess to know something that they can't possibly know. Do people really think that by saying it emphatically enough that they somehow alter reality to fit? This kind of behavior becomes particularly problematic when you have a dictator forcing his countrymen not to say aloud what a horrible person he is or that they want freedom. Does the dictator really think that murdering people will make everything okay? What the hell can they be thinking? Another example of this kind of warped thinking is when christians try to lie for Jesus. For example the evangelists who lie about their qualifications and on their tax returns. Or those rabidly homophobic christians who turn out later to be deeply closeted gays themselves. Really... what do they think they are gaining by lying? I've heard an economist denying the results of surveys showing that poor people are more stressed than rich people. Did he think that his belief is somehow above reality? I just don't understand this kind of thing. Surely we should be glad to find out we've been doing things the wrong way so that we can fix it and do things better. But for some reason many people think their self is somehow synonymous with their beliefs and when those beliefs are under attack they see it as a personal attack. Weird. (Crossposted from http://miriam-e.dreamwidth.org/288319.html at my Dreamwidth account. Number of comments there so far: ) (11 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, 26th April, 2012
8:35 pm	flying: chapter 10 - artist I have actually had this chapter finished for a week or more, but have been distracted with lots of other things. Yesterday I finally got around to checking it for superficial errors and posted it to my site. As always it is at: http://miriam-english.org/stories/flying/index.html Please let me know what you think. As I did last time I'll remind you of what has passed before, in the manner of television shows. NOTE: Don't read the following if you have not read earlier chapters. These spoilers will ruin the story for you. Previously on flying: Christine is a schoolgirl who often has flying dreams. She meets another girl who is able to move through solid objects, but Christine fears she is trapped in a dream because both abilities defy physics. They are pursued by people who eliminate Christine, however she is not killed, but ejected from what turns out to be a virtual world. In Crossroads, a virtual world that serves as a kind of index for millions of other worlds she is met by Webster who helps her. He takes her to Indigo who fits her with knowledge about how things really are. Now she visits the real world, hoping to find somewhere she can fit in. There she is met by Natka, an android who takes her on a walk through the forest to a human settlement. There she is given a hut of her own, and tomorrow her new friend, Liana, will show her the art she creates. (Crossposted from http://miriam-e.dreamwidth.org/288236.html at my Dreamwidth account. Number of comments there so far: ) (Comment on this)
Thursday, 19th April, 2012
8:01 pm	The Sopranos Over the years many people whose opinions I respect had told me The Sopranos was a TV show worth watching. I could never understand what was the great attraction of watching a show about a bunch of violent criminals. Finally, after all these years I watched the pilot episode. I have to say I still have no idea why anybody would want to watch it. I guess that the sort of people who are fascinated by watching a train wreck in progress might get something out of watching a lot of utterly repellent characters go about their days, but I found it nothing more than a waste of time. Sure, the production values are superb, the acting is excellent, the direction and camerawork are very good... but for what? If you make a fantastically detailed painting of a heap of steaming shit it doesn't matter how well it's painted; it is still shit. What a waste. (Crossposted from http://miriam-e.dreamwidth.org/287831.html at my Dreamwidth account. Number of comments there so far: ) (Comment on this)
Saturday, 7th April, 2012
11:41 pm	could this be what geo-magnetic reversal is? A 15 second video -- it takes only a minute or so to download, even on a slow internet connection like mine. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2o9eBl_Gzw (Crossposted from http://miriam-e.dreamwidth.org/287694.html at my Dreamwidth account. Number of comments there so far: ) (Comment on this)
Friday, 6th April, 2012
2:03 pm	The zombies are on the move again They are back again. We have to knock them down again. We can't afford to lose. If they gain total control of the net it might be almost impossible to pry their dead fingers from it. The US Congress is sneaking in a new law that gives them big brother spy powers over the entire web -- and they're hoping the world won't notice. This one is called CISPA. We stopped SOPA and PIPA. We need to do it again. This is the third time they have tried to rebrand their attempt to attack our Internet freedom and push it through under the radar, each time changing the law's name and hoping citizens would be asleep at the wheel. Already, Internet rights groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation have condemned the bill for its interference with basic privacy rights -- now it's time for us to speak out. Sign the petition to Congress opposing CISPA. When we reach 250,000 signers Avaaz will deliver it to each of the 100 brainwashed US Representatives backing the bill. It may make them think when they know how hugely unpopular this is. https://secure.avaaz.org/en/stop_cispa/ (Crossposted from http://miriam-e.dreamwidth.org/287236.html at my Dreamwidth account. Number of comments there so far: ) (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, 19th March, 2012
6:59 am	christian mass-murder Back when Slobodan Milosevic was bringing about mass murder in the former Yugoslavia I was puzzled that the media never really told us about what was happening there. We knew people were getting killed and that truly horrible things were occurring, but it was incredibly difficult to find out much more than superficial information. A light went on for me when I eventually found out that Milosevic was christian and so were his mass-murdering cohorts who had been whipped up into a bloody frenzy to kill their moslem neighbors. The media was being coy about this aspect, just as most people today still think Hitler was atheist because of the media's reluctance to admit that he was devoutly christian. Now I find out that Bashar al-Assad is an alawite, a christianised version of islam and that he has the backing of the christians in Syria. The people who want freedom and democracy and are being massacred and tortured are moslems. Islam is an awful religion (just read the koran and its repetitive exhortation to murder those who are different), but I find it worrying that christians seem to be competing with them to become the world's scariest religion. It is as if they see the suicide bombers and jihadi rage that accompanies islam and say, "Whoa! We can outdo that. We can do mass-murder!" Just what we don't need: more insane religiously inspired killing. [groan] (Crossposted from http://miriam-e.dreamwidth.org/286767.html at my Dreamwidth account. Number of comments there so far: ) (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, 6th March, 2012
10:21 am	brains It just amazes me how adept our brains are. We have this marvelous ability to manipulate symbols (which all too often gets us into trouble when we mistake a symbol for the thing it represents -- but I'm not going to talk about that here), however our extraordinary brains can do much more than that. We have superb visual pattern-matching abilities, along with very good auditory pattern-matching skills, as well as great physical dexterity. Many other animals specialise in one or other area of perceptual ability. Eagles can see much better than we can in almost every respect. Dogs can hear far better. Dolphins use their hearing to get a 3D sense of their world that we can only imagine. Monkeys can bound and swing among the branches of trees in ways that make the best athletes envious. Mountain goats can run across nearly vertical slopes with sure-footedness that is truly astounding. Seals dance and loop in water with grace that makes the most balletic among us look clumsy. Small birds fly at high speed through thickets with split-second decisions and reflexes that put them in an entirely different world of time from us. What amazes me is how we can combine things in truly mind-boggling ways. We can read strange symbols on paper and interpret them to move ten fingers simultaneously in obscure patterns to pull decorative collages of sound from strange instruments we've built. We can adeptly hold a stick containing a graphite core and drag it across a sheet of matted cellulose to create 2D representations of 3D reality. We can use these wonderful fingers to fashion astonishing tools out of glass and metal and plastic to investigate our world, building microscopic objects, living things, giant skyscrapers, vehicles that can fly faster than sound, others that zip across the surface of our Earth or on or under its waters, or even ones that travel to other worlds. We can use these fabulous, little half-tentacles to commit our thoughts to electronic memories where they live as shimmering symbols that wake similar thoughts in other minds, or run programs in the weirdest tools we've yet build: computers. These programs emulate ourselves... clumsily so far, but with increasing complexity. Soon we will give birth to another lifeform that won't be bound to our beautiful madness. What a time that will be! What extraordinary creatures we are! What an amazing time to live! (Crossposted from http://miriam-e.dreamwidth.org/286607.html at my Dreamwidth account. Number of comments there so far: ) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, 4th March, 2012
3:13 pm	Apple spin This morning I received an email from Sum of Us, who have been trying to bring Apple's misdeeds to light and bring pressure to bear so that Apple repair the problems. It makes very interesting reading. I had almost been taken in by Apple's spin. The fight to improve the treatment of workers in Apple’s supply chain is going to be a long, hard one – and it’s going to be fought on the shifting sands of PR spin, against one of the most sophisticated corporate media apparatuses in history. So we think it’s important for the entire SumOfUs community (all 240,000 of us!) to take a step back from the day-to-day and examine how the fight has unfolded, both behind the scenes and in the PR war being waged in public since we first started campaigning a month ago to get Apple to address the rampant violations of workers’ rights throughout its supply chain. How this all started Like many of you, at the beginning of this year we had only a vague idea that there might be something rotten in Apple’s supply chain. We had heard about the suicides at Apple factories, but not much else. After reading the New York Times’ exposé and listening to the This American Life episode in January, we started to learn more about how miserable life can be in the massive dystopian industrial complexes where Apple’s products are made. As Apple consumers ourselves (most of our staff owns at least one Apple product), we wanted to act. We contacted partners in China who investigate Apple’s factories, interviewing workers and former workers. We heard from relatives of Apple workers, thanking us for getting the word out. Like the letter we sent out last week from the pair of former workers, we were able to put faces to the statistics, and that motivated us to keep organizing to win improvements in workers’ lives. Apple responds Since the New York Times and This American Life reports and the launch of our campaign, Apple has gone on a charm offensive, hiring the so-called “Fair Labor Association” to inspect its factories and giving Nightline an exclusive, supervised tour of Foxconn, Apple’s largest supplier. Meanwhile, Foxconn announced a pay raise and hired Burston-Marsteller -- the PR firm that lobbied for Big Tobacco and helped corporations re-brand after the the likes of the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster, the Tylenol poisonings, and the massive Bhopal chemical spill. While disingenuous, these actions show that the company is listening, that it takes us seriously and wants to maintain its image. But Apple’s moves so far are classic “early stage” corporate responses to a campaign, where a company wants to do the minimum effort to make people forget about the problem, without spending any real money on problems that by definition require considerable money to solve. For example, Foxconn has raised wages as a PR move before – only to immediately offset worker gains by raising the cost of its dormitories and cafeterias. The truth is, Foxconn can’t afford to truly raise real wages for its workers because Apple refuses to let its suppliers earn a substantial profit – Apple had an astounding 44% profit margin last quarter, while Foxconn earned a meager 1.5% profit. As for the supposedly “independent” Fair Labor Association, who Apple has hired to “investigate”: It is both funded and controlled by the very corporations it’s supposed to be monitoring and has a long track record as a PR spin machine rather than an effective watchdog for workers’ rights. In his first few days in China, before even the pretense of interviews with workers, the head of the FLA gave glowing reviews to the press simply on the basis of guided tours conducted by Foxconn executives. He even asserted that the suicide cluster that prompted Foxconn to put up its infamous suicide nets must have been due to “boredom,” as if workers were leaping from buildings for a cheap thrill. Journalists fall for these traps all the time. So the next time you hear a positive story about Apple’s alleged steps forward in the press, remember that they may well have been suckered by Apple’s massive PR machine. If Apple makes any serious moves in response to our pressure to improve workers’ lives, we’ll be sure to confirm it with people on the ground and let you know! Keeping up the fight Thus far, we have been remarkably successful at getting the truth of what’s going on in Apple’s factories out to the media. Thanks to each and every one of you who signed, called, wrote and delivered petitions yourselves, this issue is front and center with Apple, and it’s not going away. Thanks to the credibility of a petition signed by over 120,000 people, our campaign has been featured in Forbes, the Washington Post, the BBC, Le Monde and Taren was interviewed on Olbermann. We even latched onto a silly facebook meme to help get the word out about our campaign! Three weeks ago, we delivered our petition (along with another 250,000 signatures from Change.org) to six Apple stores on four continents. Then just last week, we held a rally outside Apple’s Annual General Meeting of shareholders to keep this issue in the news, and attempted to deliver your petitions directly to Tim Cook. Around the same time, hundreds of you stopped by your local Apple store to take the issue directly to Apple employees where it matters most -- its retail stores. Many of you were told by managers at those retail stores that they’d been told by Apple’s HQ not to accept our petitions. This is how victories are won -- Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, is crossing his fingers and hoping that this goes away quietly, that people forget about Foxconn, and that the workers once again become faceless statistics. What they don’t yet understand is that we aren’t going to forget. Our basic demands In the fight for better working conditions in the tech industry’s supply chain, Apple is the 800-pound gorilla. They are the largest public company in the world, with a centralized supply chain and a commitment to a perfect final product. They have $100 billion sitting in the bank, meaning they can afford to ensure the people who make their products are treated humanely. Yes, other companies are also guilty of poor working conditions, but none has the ability to change the working conditions for millions of workers like Apple does. If Apple demands change, that change will ripple throughout the industry. That’s why we’re demanding Apple make a few concrete changes, like ensuring factory inspections are conducted regularly -- and unannounced in advance to management -- by genuinely independent workers’ rights groups. We want to see an end to illegal amounts of forced overtime, and a commitment to paying workers a living wage (before overtime is factored in). We believe employees should benefit when Apple profits from their work. And we want Apple to put in place real sanctions with teeth for suppliers who violate its code of conduct. For consumers, the additional costs will be negligible. Apple currently spends $10 on manufacturing costs -- including labor costs -- for each iPad, and $8 for each iPhone. Meanwhile, it makes hundreds of dollars of profit off each device, which has helped it achieve a market capitalization bigger than the GDP of all but 19 countries. The main difference for consumers will be a longer delay in product roll-out, as the most grueling conditions currently occur when Foxconn workers are cranking the latest iPad or iPhone. The questions is not whether you would be willing to pay more for your iPhone, but whether you could wait a few months longer to ensure that the people who make it are treated like human beings. The way forward Apple provides excellent customer service and cares deeply about its brand – but is also one of the most secretive corporations in the world and has built an organizational culture capable of blocking out the most intense outside criticism. Our job, as consumers, is to continue to keep the pressure on until Apple decides that the risks inherent in the status quo – the risks to its brand, its staff morale, and its loyal customer base – are higher than the costs of taking real action to improve workers’ lives. That’s what’s worked in past campaigns like this, and it’s what will ultimately lead to victory in this campaign. It will be a long fight, but it’s well worth fighting. If we can change the way the largest corporation on the planet treats its workers in the era of globalized supply chains, it will set a precedent that will reverberate globally for decades. Together, we’re already forcing Apple to pay attention – and we’re going to keep on fighting. Now, in case you haven't already, here are three things you can do to help us keep up the fight. Sign the Petition Share of Facebook Deliver the petition Thanks for reading, and for fighting with us, Taren, Kaytee, Claiborne, and Emma – the tiny SumOfUs team, working with you to take on the biggest companies in the world. P.S. Haven’t read enough yet? Here are some more articles and resources to check out. In These Times - Apple turns to the Larry King of Sweatshop Scandals SACOM (Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior) video - The truth of the Apple iPad behind Foxconn’s lies Mike Daisey’s Blog (Mike is the guy behind the This American Life story that brought all of this to light initially) SumOfUs is a world-wide movement of people like you, working together to hold corporations accountable for their actions and forge a new, sustainable path for our global economy. You can follow us on Twitter, and like us on Facebook. (Crossposted from http://miriam-e.dreamwidth.org/286441.html at my Dreamwidth account. Number of comments there so far: ) (Comment on this)
Friday, 2nd March, 2012
10:10 am	Dear Esther Last night I was visiting my family. I didn't know it but I was to have a truly astonishing experience. My nephew, Dan, showed me a Half Life 2 "mod" called Dear Esther. This is one of the most wonderful things I have ever seen, and I'm certain that in twenty or fifty years people will be using it as a boundary. Works will be defined as being before Dear Esther or after it. Now, I know it's not the first piece of storytelling that uses a virtual world as its stage, and I know it's not the first time someone has done something compelling with a modification to an existing game engine (game-mod), but Dear Esther is nevertheless a landmark in the extraordinary effort lavished upon it and eerie atmosphere it creates. The lighting, the modelling, the audio, the poetic dialogue, the slightly unhinged spookiness of it -- this is something very, very special... unique. Here is how good it is: Dear Esther actually makes me seriously consider installing MSWindows on a partition just so that I can interact with this amazing piece of art. You owe it to yourself to witness this milestone in history. I am so lucky I have a game-playing nephew to bring it to my attention or I would have almost certainly missed it. Here is the trailer. It almost conveys the desolate beauty of that world. (Crossposted from http://miriam-e.dreamwidth.org/286013.html at my Dreamwidth account. Number of comments there so far: ) (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, 27th February, 2012
11:56 am	Apple -- bad employers Do you use Apple products or are considering buying one of their pretty-looking machines? What you don't see is the ugliness beneath. For a couple of years workers at Apple factories in China have been trying to get Apple to end their awful work practices. Recently an online petition was launched to get Apple customers to pressure the company to become responsible corporate citizens. In January Apple announced a record-breaking 44.1% profit for last quarter and are sitting on $100 billion in cash. But the success of Apple comes at a terrible cost - shocking details have emerged about the conditions under which iPhones and iPads are manufactured, with a rising count of employees dying from suicide, exhaustion and explosions. Please read further about that and sign the petition here: http://www.getup.org.au/campaigns/workers-rights/apple/sign-the-petition Now some courageous people who worked at a factory manufacturing iPhone touch-screens and who ended up with permanent nerve damage from the toxic chemicals have written a letter imploring people to pressure Apple to fix this. Here is the letter translated from Chinese: You don't know us but you have seen our work. Until recently, we worked long hours assembling Apple’s iPhone touch screens in Suzhou, China. In early 2010, it was independently confirmed that 137 workers, including us, were poisoned by a chemical called n-hexane which was used to clean iPhone screens. N-hexane is known to cause eye, skin and respiratory tract irritation, and leads to persistant nerve damage. Apple admitted to gross labour rights violations more than a year later. If more people know about what we went through, Apple will feel pressured to change so other workers don’t have to suffer like we did. Can you share this letter with your friends, and ask them to join you in signing our petition calling for a reform of working conditions at their factories? We have been pressuring Apple, and its new CEO Tim Cook, for years to compensate those of us who were injured working for them, and demanding reform of working conditions at their Chinese factories so that their workers don’t suffer like we do. Now we need your help as customers or potential customers of Apple. You’ve already signed the petition, and 125,000 others have too -- for that, we thank you. Now we need to get the word out that the problem isn't fixed. Apple still has a lot of work to do to address our collective concerns. It has been over two years since many of us were hospitalized and treated but our debilitating symptoms continue. Rui-Qiang still can't find work because he can no longer stand for the long hours most jobs require. Jing-Chuan has to spend nearly $100 a month on health supplements. But with all of us working together to pressure Apple to change, we can make sure what happened to us doesn’t happen to others too. - Guo Rui-qiang and Jia Jing-chuan You can easily share this message with others using this page: http://sumofus.org/share/apple-message-share/ (Crossposted from http://miriam-e.dreamwidth.org/285876.html at my Dreamwidth account. Number of comments there so far: ) (Comment on this)
Thursday, 23rd February, 2012
9:16 am	Monty Roberts - The Man Who Listens to Horses I finished reading this -- a very easy read and fascinating. It has long been my belief that being cruel to animals is not just wrong, morally, but counterproductive. This book bears that out. "Conventional" breaking of a horse, which amounts to little more than a concentrated program of torture designed to break the horse's will, takes weeks of effort, during which the horse is often physically as well as mentally damaged. As a child Monty Roberts came to adore horses and wanted to understand how they communicated among themselves. He eventually learned this language -- he calls it "EQUUS" -- which is not verbal, but a system of body signals. Using that he is able to convince wild or mistreated horses to trust him. He has shown that instead of taking three weeks of cruelty to subjugate a horse, forcing it to do what a person wants, he can get a wild horse take a rider in about half an hour because it trusts him and wants to do it! How much better to have a horse be your willing, thinking, helpful partner than to be your reluctant slave? He tried communicating with deer this way too, after he found an injured wild one. With slight variations it turned out to be the same language. He has been able to befriend several deer this way. They want to be near him because they trust and like him, following him around instead of fleeing, even though they are still wary of other people. This is rivetting stuff. It gives us a hint of how we could enrich our existence by truly being guardians of this planet, with our fellow creatures being willing allies. If, on the other hand, we continue to push other species into ever more limited and constrained lives where they are allowed to survive only at our condescending whim, then we become the kind of monsters that kept human slaves, devaluing their lives and perverting our own lives simultaneously. It makes sense to treat all life humanely, not just because it is the right thing to do, but because we stand to gain immeasurably from it. (Crossposted from http://miriam-e.dreamwidth.org/285530.html at my Dreamwidth account. Number of comments there so far: ) (Comment on this)
Tuesday, 21st February, 2012
8:52 am	Wonderful news! Sam Harris' latest blog entry, Better and Better is an interview with Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler about their new book Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think. The interview is very uplifting and well worth reading. It is quite short, but packed with cool information. When the mass media get you down read this and make yourself sane again. By golly, we need more people like this! (Crossposted from http://miriam-e.dreamwidth.org/285213.html at my Dreamwidth account. Number of comments there so far: ) (Comment on this)
Thursday, 16th February, 2012
5:49 pm	Fox lies Reading an article dispelling the myths about electric cars I became amazed at how many lies have been propagated by the Fox media. I was going to say "errors" instead of "lies", however it became clear that they are not simple mistakes, but a deliberate campaign of misinformation. Especially in the USA, but also in Australia and in UK, Murdoch's repellent media machine chews up the truth and spits it out as falsehoods in the service of raping the planet and its people for money and power. An electric car, in the course of crash-testing had its battery compartment broken so that it leaked coolant and was left switched on, sitting exposed to the weather for three weeks in a vacant lot and then eventually ignited into flame. The manufacturer requires that the batteries be removed after such damage, making this kind of thing impossible... and who is going to walk away from their damaged $20,000 car and leave it sitting, switched on for three weeks anyway? Neil Cavuto said on his Fox Business show that the Volt, an electric car manufactured by Chevrolet, is "a plug-in that blows up. The battery heats up. It's killing people. It's maiming them." This a lie. Nobody has been hurt by an electric car bursting into flame. Compare this with the quarter of a million conventional cars that catch fire each year. ( http://www.usfa.fema.gov/downloads/pdf/statistics/v9i1.pdf ) Fox should be held accountable for the lies they propagate. If they had to pay hefty fines every time they lied then the general population might hold more realistic views about the world. We might finally start to actually tackle climate change, put an end to capricious wars, slow ecological destruction, treat people who are different from us (gays, immigrants, etc) with a little bit of dignity, make access to basic health care a right in the USA (like it is in other first-world nations, and like it was in USA before Nixon screwed them over). Please excuse the angry rant. I just find it infuriating that Murdoch's disgusting Fox Network can get away with so much pure evil. (Crossposted from http://miriam-e.dreamwidth.org/284943.html at my Dreamwidth account. Number of comments there so far: ) (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, 9th February, 2012
12:21 pm	flying, chapter 9... finally! My apologies that it has taken so long to get this written. One of the books I'm currently reading is H Rider Haggard's classic, King Solomon's Mines (more of his books here). A long, interesting part of that story is the journey that the characters take, and it also reminded me of something said by Joss Whedon's character Shepherd Book in the superb TV series Firefly when asked by Kaylee why he doesn't care where he's going. He answers "'Cause how you get there is the worthier part." So I wrote in more detail about how Christine gets to the next part of the story. It was only briefly covered in my notes, but doing this let me write about a number of points mentioned in my notes that I might not have otherwise been able to cover. However it took longer than I thought it would. This chapter is already the longest so far and I'm only just getting to the main point, so I decided to simply make it an extra, inserted chapter named "Earth". Oh by the way, I have added a logo at the top of the index page too (and one at the top of the "Prescription" story also). http://miriam-english.org/stories/flying/index.html It has been so long since my last chapter that this time I'll remind you of what has passed before, in the manner of television shows. NOTE: Don't read the following if you have not read earlier chapters. These spoilers will ruin the story for you. Previously on flying: Christine is a schoolgirl who often has flying dreams. She meets another girl who is able to move through solid objects, but Christine fears she is trapped in a dream because both abilities defy physics. They are pursued by people who eliminate Christine by ejecting her from the world, which turns out to be not the real world. but a virtual one. In Crossroads, a virtual world that serves as a kind of index for all the many virtual worlds she is met by Webster who helps her. He takes her to Indigo who fits her with knowledge about how things really are. Now she wants to visit the real world. (Crossposted from http://miriam-e.dreamwidth.org/284898.html at my Dreamwidth account. Number of comments there so far: ) (Comment on this)
Tuesday, 31st January, 2012
10:33 am	Yay! We won! Torture "clinics" to "fix" gays will be closed. The international campaign worked. The government in Ecuador will close the torture "clinics" that were holding young women captive to be raped, tortured, starved and beaten, to cure them of the "illness" of being lesbian. Outspoken feminist, LGBT rights, and public health advocate Carina Vance Mafla was just appointed as Ecuador's new Minister of Health - and she will be leading the clinic investigations. Yay!!! Thank you to the Ecuadoran people, thank you to tens of thousands of concerned people worldwide, thank you President Rafael Correa, and thank you AllOut for channeling this. (Crossposted from http://miriam-e.dreamwidth.org/284460.html at my Dreamwidth account. Number of comments there so far: ) (1 Comment |Comment on this)