A few weeks ago I got to visit Neoteric and check out the Nintendo Wii that he has been obsessing over... It was immediately obvious to me why Cartman had so much trouble waiting for the Wii to be released that he decided to cryonically freeze himself.

The Wii is simply fun, even in spite of the crude graphics. The act of actually performing the action the game simulates has a huge impact on your emotional reaction to the activity. I bowled almost exactly as poorly as I do in a real bowling alley, and I haven't had more fun playing tennis on a computer since the wheel controllers on the Atari 2600. I immediately decided that I had to have one for Christmas. I told my family. Unfortunately, several million kids across the country had the exact same revelation at the exact same time, and apparently Nintendo only made about 400,000 of them for post release North American sales during the holiday season, so enter the crazy feeding frenzy. I won't be getting a Wii this year.

Its worth pondering whether this is a good thing. One of the reasons that the Wii makes sense is its $250 price point. I'm not enough of a gamer to drop $600 on a next gen system. I've always waited a few years for prices to go down. However, the main advantage of the Wii is the controller, which could be duplicated on one of the more advanced systems. One of my roommates owns an X-Box 360. The graphics are immersive in their own right. Oblivion is possibly worth the price of admission if you are a technologist. You walk around in this world and every leaf on every tree and every blade of grass is individually drawn and independently moving with the wind. The world is so detailed and engrossing its like reading Tolkien.

When I imagine combining the two it strikes me that the fidelity of the Wii controller might not be up to the standards of the more advanced systems. A number of my friends have been scratching their heads about the use of IR as well as two kinds of Accelerometers. This article at Ars explains the situation. The accelerometers simply aren't accurate enough to handle drift, so the IR triangulation is also needed to gain context for pointing activities. They can capture motion, but they can't capture absolute positioning or absolute orientation.

That fact hasn't stopped people from over reacting and playing the games as if they were real. The fact is that none of these gam... [ Read More (0.4k in body) ]

Not bad... apparently a couple years old now, but timely nonetheless.

-k
cool and merry xmas to everyone at and users of memestreams

YouTube - Charlie Brown Christmas - Performed by the Cast of Scrubs

I fear that in the next century we will have many more Muslims in the United States if we do not adopt the strict immigration policies that I believe are necessary to preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States of America and to prevent our resources from being swamped.

This is an official communication.

GOP Rep is a bigot

noteworthy wrote:
Decius wrote:

You're kidding, right? I don't mean to suggest a causal relationship.

Really? In a recent thread, Scott asked:

Where is that great leader with vision and fortitude and resolve? Cuz I can't imagine things much more fucked up than they are now.

And you replied:

Be careful what you wish for. You'll have him, but things aren't near fucked up enough yet.

That sounds at least a little bit like suggestion of a causal relationship.

I'm not saying that you get interesting times by wanting great leaders. I'm saying that great leaders aren't something you should generally pine for because they usually come under the worst circumstances, and in fact it is the circumstances that define their greatness. This is an observation on America. Wishing for great American leadership is the same as wishing for great American catastrophies. The Space Program is the only real exception I can think of but in reality that was the height of the cold war. America meets a critical prereq for this observation in that it actually is a nation with an actual national idenity that doesn't excude any of its citizens.

Iraq is a different story. Its already fucked, and yet that leader hasn't arrived, because Iraq is a map fantasy and not a nation, and there is no natural leader for it. No one cares about Iraq. Iraq is three nations. Each of those has their great leaders already, but their leadership is never really appreciated but in retrospect, and there is no end game here. There is no stable state without a brutal dictator binding the unbindable by fear. If you wanted Democracy there you'd have to bring in a sort of benevolent dictator who was still ruthless, but taught people to see themselves as servants of a nation rather than as servants of him and his sons. Pinochet. Then you could slowly boil in democractic reforms until things reached a state where you could walk away and it would be fine. You can't just fucking whack the dictator and set up a polling both and expect everyone to buy into it. Nation building is hard and it requires long term thinking.

Perhaps we should be pulling out. Perhaps we can't install a dictator on our own watch, and we can't be the dictator either, because we're not local, as Britain proved over and over and over again. We have to be able to pretend it wasn't our fault that it happenned, while brokering the arms deals on the back end that put our particular bastard into power.

Of course, thats who Saddam was supposed to be. He fucked it up. Thats why they wanted him out. Because he was their boy, but he didn't boil in the democratic reforms as promised. He got greedy.

Maybe the real reason we're down there is to send a message to our own dictators that they have a long term job to do and they better not fuck us.

RE: Does Iraq need more debate?

Decided to spend the evening combing the War Nerd's archives. This post from the summer of 2002 is, in a sense, a far more accurate perspective on Iraq than anything that anyone else, including Stratfor, had to say.

So we're gonna go back into Iraq now, to clean up the malpractices from our first cool, clean, surgical operation. And of course that's gonna fuck things up about a hundred times worse. This time they have to get rid of Saddam...

No Saddam means crazy Kurds, crazy Shiites, scared Saudis, angry Wahhabi loonies, desperate Palestinians...it means we go right up close to the ol' hornets' nest and hit it again with a big, big stick.

Boy, it sure is hard to predict what'll happen then, huh?

That's IF the abu Cheney clan of the desert oil wells is dumb enough to really do it, really send in 250,000 troops to take Iraq. Militarily it'll be a joke. You could do it with a battalion of SAS. Those Iraqi soldiers were surrendering to camera crews. That's the easy part.

The hard part is making up a new happy Western Iraq. Won't happen; can't happen. Anybody who ain't thick as two planks knows that. So will they do it? Are they really that dumb?
...
Bush Sr. was head of the CIA, man -- he was a serious person. Bush Jr. is like the Second Coming as comedy. He isn't somebody you have to take seriously.

eXile - Issue #145 - War Nerd - Iraq 2: Here Comes the Dumb-Ass Sequel - By Gary Brecher

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh have successfully directed adult stem cells from mice to develop into bone and muscle cells with the aid of a custom-designed ink-jet printer.

Boing Boing: Inkjet printing with live stem cells:

The Army has just updated its counterinsurgency manual; it includes an appendix on "Social Network Analysis and Other Analytical Tools".

FM 3-24: Counterinsurgency

If you are wondering who these criminal sex offenders that legislators are jumping up and down to defend you from are, you might look no further than this case:

Accordingly, while I am very sympathetic to Wilson's argument regarding the injustice of sentencing this promising young man with good grades and no criminal history to ten years in prison without parole and a lifetime registration as a sexual offender because he engaged in consensual oral sex with a 15-year-old victim only two years his junior, this Court is bound by the Legislature's determination that young persons in Wilson's situation are not entitled to the misdemeanor treatment now accorded to identical behavior under OCGA � 16-6-4 (d) (2).

Yes, thats Georgia. And, God forbid this person might use a website when finally released from prison! Won't somebody please save us from these people!!@

The Volokh Conspiracy - Ten Years in Prison for 17-Year-Old Who Had Consensual Oral Sex with 15-Year-Old:

The Sunday NYT features a story on the Christopher Soghoian case [2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7].

For theater on a grand scale, you can’t do better than the audience-participation dramas performed at airports, under the direction of the Transportation Security Administration.

Of course, we never see the actual heart of the security system: the government’s computerized no-fly list, to which our names are compared when we check in for departure. The T.S.A. is much more talented, however, in the theater arts than in the design of secure systems. This becomes all too clear when we see that the agency’s security procedures are unable to withstand the playful testing of a bored computer-science student.

I guess Matt Blaze hasn't had much occasion to be impressed with his charges since he left industry for academia:

"If a grad student can figure it out," he said, "we can assume agents of Al Qaeda can do the same."

Blaze does offer a nod to the FBI, who gave the green light to his paper, Signaling Vulnerabilities in Wiretapping Systems.

Theater of the Absurd at the TSA

In a discovery that has stunned even those behind it, scientists at a Toronto hospital say they have proof the body's nervous system helps trigger diabetes, opening the door to a potential near-cure of the disease that affects millions of Canadians.

Heh, not only Canadians. If there is, in fact, hope for a cure for diabetes I imagine it will have a substantial impact on average life expectancies in the western world.

Diabetes breakthrough