miriku.com

in semi-chronological order:

• Welcome to the Jungle
• To the Jungle
• We Got Fun
• Fun and Games
• We Got Everything
• Everything You (i think this one is really great)
• Everything You Want
• We Know the Names
• Know the Names
• Money Honey
• In the Jungle
• The Jungle
• Bring You To Your Knees
• I Wanna Watch
• I Wanna Watch You
• I Wanna Watch You Bleed
• Watch You Bleed
• We Take It
• Take It Day by Day
• Day by Day
• It’s the Price
• Price You Pay
• Very Sexy Girl
• Hard to Please
• You Can Taste
• Taste the Bright Lights
• Bright Lights
• You Won’t Get Them
• Free In the Jungle
• My Serpentine (or)
• My Servant Teen (depends on who you ask as to what he’s actually saying)
• Hear You Scream
• You Scream
• It Gets Worse
• Worse Here Everyday
• Learn to Live
• Live Like an Animal
• Where We Play
• A Hunger
• A Hunger For What You See
• You Can Have Anything
• Anything You Want
• Take It From Me
• To Come Down
• So Down
• Jungle Baby
• Bring You Down
• Down, Yeah!

i don’t think cats are capable of understanding right and wrong in the way we anthropomorphize them to be able to. i doubt dogs are too, but i’ve spent much less time with them.

we often say things like “he knows he shouldn’t be up there” or “he knows he shouldn’t do that” after catching the cat sneaking into some place we don’t want him to be, and that word choice implies that the cat is doing something consciously immoral. however, it’s probably more accurate to say “he knows that if i see him up there i’ll forcibly remove him / squirt water at him”. the cat isn’t aware of the right/wrong of his actions, just that he needs to weight the pros and cons of this action against the risk of you getting out bed, walking over, and squirting him with water

btw, this is totally hypothetical and not at all related to loki waiting until i turn off the reading light before leaving the room and jumping up on the kitchen counter.

so let’s say you’re reading/watching some fantasy thing and you hear the phrase “dark magic”. yes, it’s cheesy, but you inherently understand what it means: someone is using a magic ritual that will give him power while hurting innocent people. an unfair magic ritual. it’s inherently understood as morally bad.

now, let’s turn that around. think of the phrase “dark mathematics”. doesn’t work, does it? the brain automatically goes “no, that’s stupid, mathematics is amoral, it’s how you use it”.

so why does magic have an inherent morality while mathematics doesn’t? what about other words?

• dark physics – no
• dark engineering – no
• dark science – maybe
• dark experiments – yes
• dark acts – very yes
• dark programming – lolno

so the rule appears to be “things that are understood as implying action are inherently moral, things that don’t, aren’t” even when the logic makes no sense (programming, after all, is in fact an action, ditto chemistry).

not really going anywhere with this one. i came up with the phrase “towers where adepts practice dark mathematics” while in the shower, thought it was hilarious, pondered why, and needed to write it down in over 140 characters.

just a series of facts i picked up from reading the summaries of the proceedings (this is not a summary of the trial)

- george washington was sterile. this made him a more popular choice for president since he couldn’t have a “dynasty”

- old testament jews practiced legal polygamy

- as part of the “not legal be gay in public”, people were arrested for having too long or too short hair, pretending to dance with someone of the same sex, and in one case, for being two men discussing opera.

- from the above, gender roles used to be enforced by the government

- for a period of time if an american woman married an asian she would have her citizenship revoked, and not gain the husbands. since asian men were never allowed to gain citizenship, the wives became effectively stateless

- from the above, marriage was and is used by the government as a punitive measure to enforce 2nd class status

- till 1975 federal government was not allowed to hire homosexuals for state posts

- the vatican is on record saying “Allowing children being adopted by gay couples would do violence to these children. Their condition of dependency would stunt their full human development”. this implies that in the eyes of the catholic church homosexuals are inferior and not ‘full humans’

one thing i did know but want to reiterate: it’s amazing how blatant it is that “protect” is a fake word. protect children, protect marriage. that word has a specific meaning: you ‘protect’ from evil, you ‘protect’ from criminals, you don’t ‘protect’ from learning about someone else who you respect and value as a fellow human being

it’s also very telling that prop 8, the anti-gays, are actively attempting to block the inclusion of pro-prop 8 ads, including ones they themselves wrote and shot. almost like they are ashamed of them (legally, speaking of course)

i love it when the vatican goes ranting that nature shouldn’t be spiritualized, forgetting that religion is just an arbitrary replacement for the sense of wonder we feel at nature.

well, conceptual replacement anyways. nature is real.

kotek na p?otku, originally uploaded by miriku?.

also, testing flickr’s “blog this” functionality

stephen hawking, in a lecture is saying that the human race has ‘entered a new stage of evolution’, in that we are now taking control of our genetics directly. yes and no, his point is entirely accurate and valid, but his word choice is wrong. people abuse the word evolution because it’s the only one they know to describe change (perhaps ‘improvement’) of a population over time.

look, you wouldn’t say “bob has entered a new stage of walking, he has a bike now”, you would say “bob doesn’t walk places as much, he now bikes”. similarly we’re no longer evolving, we’re now doing something else. coin a word, or just say ‘custom designing ourselves’. evolution requires natural selection and that force nowadays has very little effect on humans, in a world with health care and birth control.

we can’t understand the future by simply blindly shoehorning our reality into outdated concepts and terms. so yes, partially this is me just being a stickler on word choice, but partly we also need to be aware that we shape our thinking in terms of things we know, and there’s no reason to give people wrong conceptions on what’s going on.

tSS – like beasts fucking, sketch

in one of umberto eco’s collections of writings he mentions seeing a man in a restaurant who during dinner would loudly talk on his cellphone about large (iirc mafia-related) business deals. the man’s intention was to communicate that he was an important person of significant power. eco then points out that the man got one thing precisely wrong: an important person would never be interrupted during dinner.

power is about being able to do what you want, when you want to, not simply being responsible for greater and riskier things.

i recently thought about this upon receiving a random internet alert. i spent a large chunk of my life thinking that to be more technologically advanced you need to be more hooked up, with all your programs reporting status updates to you constantly. in reality this does not empower you, just scatters your attention.

instead, i’ve now actually made an effort to disconnect myself and hide things away from myself. i have enough trouble concentrating without a periodic ‘beep’ that, upon investigation, will inform me that someone has become the mayor of a new eatery in foursquare. my phone and computer have no twitter/facebook/rss alerts at all anymore, instead i read those when i feel like it using web browser bookmarks. my phone now receives nothing that makes noise, except calls which still require immediate attention unfortunately.

my only exception is emails that go to my work account show up in my computer dock. that’s a work obligation. nothing else does.

technology should never interrupt you. technology should politely wait for you to look in it’s direction, then quickly, clearly, and efficiently say to you what it has to say, and when done move back and wait on the side.

if there is one thing that programmers can almost uniformly be accused of is coding for the best case: wanting to write programs designed around all things behaving correctly every time.

one random facet of this is the assumption that crowds and their voting can be trusted to behave in a productive way. let’s say you have a website where people vote on who is the best poster / reviewer / uploader / whatever, and rewards them in some way. simple to implement, simple to test, and you’re done, right?

well, never underestimate the willingness of crowds to behave maliciously. getting 1000 people to do a prank on a system like that is trivial, and it’s even easier to get one person with a bunch of zombie machines all over the planet.

attacks like this are really common: websites raid amazon review / recommendation pages for fun, 4chan obliterated a “person of the year” TIME poll, and twitter “trending topics” seem to be raids more often than not.

the last one in particular strikes me as funny. businesses are now using personal hash tags to let people talk about them using hashtags, and in some cases display the results real time in the lobby or on their page. i’m astounded at this. all it takes is one message board post asking everyone to twitpic porn to the hashtag and voila, instant PR disaster.

always program for the worst case, not the best case. unless you have some method to block them, assume that at any point in time there are thousands of bored suburban teenagers who would love to abuse any ranking system you have for laughs.