Some short news bites today about "dynamism", Chinese history, and a certain Italian family based organized crime syndicate.

I ventured to the Vanderbilt library with some trepidation, fearing that I had some unpaid fine left on my account... but when I reached the checkout there was no such fine... so now I can't understand why it's been so long since I visited the place. Anyhow, I picked up two new books, one per an internet recommendation and the other just for fun and interest.

The first is by Virginia Postrel (whose blog is located here) and is entitled "The Future and Its Enemies". Provacative title... I'm two chapters into it and I'm somewhat ambivilant... her so called "technocrats" seem to be simply tupical beaureacrats and elites, rather than any new breed... her observations about the inadequacy of traditional "left-right" political designations are probably correct to a degree... I need to read more to come to any further conclusions.

The second book is entitled "Modern Chinese Warfare: 1795-1989", and is authored by Bruce Elleman. I'm also two chapters into this book, which has been engaging... perhaps because it is an area with which I have so little familiarity. I'm up to the second opium war and have already learned a lot. My only complaint is that while chinese names of people, places and groups are included using pinyin style romanization, there is no tone information, so I've had a difficult time discussing it with my coworkers...

Finally we come to that most well known of criminal orginizations, the mafia...
First I would like to say that the PC game 'Mafia' is a magnificent piece of artwork, and looks really splendid with 768 mb of RAM. Secondly, I would like to alert any readers still at NU of the existence of this mafia resource. If winterfest is still upcoming, some of these ideas would make interesting additions to the game... I'm now in the mood to round up two dozen people for a game involving two competing mob families, or perhaps the mafia versus the werewolves...

I've finally got it... an alumni email address...
pmart
at
alumni
dot
northwestern
dot
edu
I feel so...
so...
graduated.

I hate government...

But I get ahead of myself...

Tuesday night for Di's birthday, I went over to her place for dinner and cake with her and her parents. We had a nice family-style dinner, and two cakes... chiffon that Di's mom made and ice cream cake that Di bought. Everything was good... I gave Di a stuffed monkey as a birthday gift (which coincidently doubled as a nice new years gift) All in all a wonderful evening.

Until the drive home.

I'm minding my own business, it's about 2100 hours, and I'm about two blocks away from Di's house, heading generally towards my home. I approach a stoplight... it turns yellow... I'm not close enough to go through so I come to a stop. A car pulls up behind me... I notice that it's a police car, and I feel good that I didn't try to rush through the intersection. I wait as the cross traffic goes through and then the light turns green. As I'm pressing down on the gas peddle, all hell breaks loose as the blue lights behind me light up. At first I wasn't certain that the fellow was after me or simply trying to get by to some other location, so naturally I pulled over to the right as fast as I could after I cleared the intersection. Unfortunately, the copper did not go past me, but rather pulled up behind me and proceeded to blind me with a bright searchlight in my mirrors. I calmlygot out my liscence and insurace card. I waited...

And waited...

And waited some more.

You never see the officers on "Cops" take this long... I guess you need to try and resist arrest if you want any service around here...

The guy finally comes up, and asks me if I know why he stopped me... I have no idea... I say so. He proceeds to mention the name of some street I don't know and claims that I failed to stop at a stop sign. Mentally I try to access the situation... it's possible that I did a "rolling stop" at an intersection if I observed no traffic nearby and no pedestrians... but I have no idea what intersection he is talking about, and besides per my "miranda rights" I need not admit that I did anything wrong. He takes my info and then walks back to his car.

I wait...

and wait...

and wait...

Can't he turn off that freaking searchlight?

After several hours he comes back and asks me to sign the citation, acknowledging that I received it. Bah... I drive off, my driving much more of a danger to other motorists now then it ever ever is normally, due to being seriously pissed off.

Of course, the horror doesn't end there. The next day I had to go in to the office of the deparment of safety to get a tennessee driver's license and thereby avoid another citation for not having a state ID and registration. Now, I've been to the DMV in madison before on occaision, and I know that DMV employees are generally rated right around postal employees in regards to efficiency and cordiality... however, the office here was beyond the pale of human decency. The place was packed with people (it was two in the afternoon and I was taking off half a day of work to get the task accomplished), and yet there were five people working in the whole office. The place was in fact so crowded that one of the employees (perhaps fearing a riot) forced people coming to to stand outside!! Now, this was the south, but it was also january, and it was cold outside... really cold! It wasn't as if there wasn't space for them to stand inside (there was still floor space), the employee simply didn't like the asthetic of the resulting mass of humanity and preferred a more sterile single file line running out the front door and on to the pavement.

After waiting several days I finally got my picture taken... and the stupid woman at the counter threw away my wisconsin liscence! I wanted it as a souvenir...

I could continue ranting, but honestly the run around I went through getting a license plate is perhaps too painful to recollect. (needless to say, several offices had to be visited multiple times, and a ten dollar cash "payment" to a shady looking official in dungerees was required to complete the trasaction)

As a sort of thought experiment, ask yourself how long you can live your normal life without breaking a law. I'm betting that the answer is around 48 hours at most... and of course, because of the sheer volume of regulations on the books, you're likely to be breaking some sort of ordinance without even knowing it.

I want to move to mars...

Haha...

The GWB Conspiracy Generator

With this handy tool, now you too can wax paranoid like Kuccinich or offer up "interesting theories" like Dean at your next family get-together or office holiday party...

Happy Birthday!

You know who you are... :)

What a weekend...

Particularly what a sunday.

Di and I ended up checking out a new church... I don't think we shall be going back... The place wasn't that big, and when we came in it seemed more like a large small group than a normal church (everyone was sitting in more of a circle shaped setting), but besides being a bit more... if I may use the term loosely... charismatic than I prefer (there seemed to be a tendency to say the word amen after every utterance that anyone in the congregation made) I didn't initially see anything wrong with the place. We were singing some of the old classics, (and were avoiding some of the newer stuff that I'm not so fond of) and it was, if not the most comfortable service, at least endurable.

And then they started talking about "christianity"...

and not in a good way...

I got really confused for a second, but came to realize that we had stumbled upon a group that was convinced that every denomination out there were in fact essentially wrong and evil and some sort of deception... and had been that way since, oh, a generation of the founding of the church (yes, that means the first century)

Except for them of course...

And evidently they got there start in china in 1918... (I've got to do a bit more research to confirm this, but that was the date and location that got mentioned at one time in the service)

There was also a lot of reference to a particular book, and not a lot of reference to the bible...

It was kind of... interesting... a predominate theme of the morning message was how legalistic "christianity" was and how inadequate and twisted "the church" was... and yet when that wasn't the theme I could easily have imagined most of the other stuff people in the group were sharing to have been spoken at any congregation I've visited. (Of course, I haven't had much experience with certain 'mainline' denominations, but these folks were obviously not confining their criticism to denominations with strong central church government)

Anyhow, we ended up leaving before the meeting had ended since we had to eat lunch and I had to tutor in the afternoon... thankfully lunch revived our spirits, as Di made a egg plus ham plus corn filled crepe type thing, Mr. Yao made huan dun and Mrs. Yao made banana bread and pecan pastries. After lunch Di and I went to the library, and I tutored for an hour... I don't think I've mentioned the tutoring thusfar... I've been doing it since a week or two before christmas... I get paid fifteen dollars an hour for essentially just talking with this 8th grader... he's a pretty together seeming kid for 8th grade and I have a good time doing it, but I always feel a little guilty getting paid 15 bucks for it... I don't think that I've provided that much service.

Anyhow... in other news...
Over the weekend I picked up a heavily discounted copy of "Pirates of the Caribbean" at the local EB. I should have figured that something was up when I found it so greatly discounted... later I read a review online in which a developer boasted about the fact that it was not "Morrowind with pirate ships". Well, after installing and playing for a bit, I would have been quite happy if I had been able to say it was like morrowind with pirate ships... unfortunately it was nowhere near as good.... first of all, I have a big problem with any first person (or third person for that matter) 3D game that doesn't let you sidestep... that's just poor. Secondly... the game really seems dumbed down in comparison to morrowind... I feel compelled to blame disney for that. Thirdly, despite being dumbed down, it seems impossible to progress beyond the starting town, and yet in an ironic twist of fate, you must get out of the starting town before you can level up...

Pour example... the first time I played, I set sail, and immediately got sunk in a storm... started over... got out to see, got attacked by pirates and got sunk... started over, managed to sail to another island, landed and got killed by a bandit... started over, once again managed to dodge everything to make it to a port, and got instantly sunk by the cannons of the fort overlooking the port.

Just as a note, none of these problems (with the exception of the last one) were due to insufficient knowledge or skill with the game system (I don't think), but rather due to anemic capabilities of your starting character compared to the challenges surrounding you...

Now even in the very openended and non-player-coddling environment of morrowind, it's still generally possible to get from your starting point to a location that allows you to get some equipment and complete some easy quests without dying four times in a row!

Bah...

Oh yes, and one other thing... I evidently talked way to much this holiday season as my wireless bill was killer!

I love it when my dreams have conserved elements.
Thusfar I haven't had any conserved characters, (except people I know in real life, who can show up whenever they like) but I do have conserved plot elements and conserved settings. It's the conserved settings that are particularly interesting, and I shall be talking about today.

Why so interesting you ask? Well, there's something rather eerie about your unconscious being able to fashion together a believable yet totally non-existant locale, and being able to render it in convincing images. However, it's also pretty neat to be able to go back to someplace your mind took you to months or even years before.

Last night I had a dream that took place in a location I had seen before in my dreams. It was the interior of a building of perhaps a dozen stories whose interior resembled that of Harris or perhaps the music building on the NU campus. The particularly interesting feature of this building however was the layout of it's stairways. No individual stairway connected more than two floors. One would ascend a level and then be forced to walk some distance around the floor before ascending a different staircase to the next level. And the elevator didn't go up to the top few floors... so I was stuck wallking.

The particularly strange thing about this is that while I was typing the previous paragraph, images of two other locations that I've visited in my dreams came to me, despite my not having dreamed about them for some time. Quite strage...

One last thing, completely unrelated to dreams... or maybe not... the current issue of Neuron has two interesting articles, one from UW and one from UCSF. The UW article addresses brain tissue specific expression pattern differences in some number of genes between awake and asleep mice, irrespective of circadian time of day. The UCSF article relates certain olfactory neurons in c.elegans to lifespan, irrespective of those neurons' contribution to finding food and caloric intake. Both rather interesting papers, you should check them out...

Hello all,
after a long absence, I am back....

And no, I did not bring you any presents...

Well.. I did bring a new link for you... belmont club is political commentary in a voice that reminds me of a certain ceo... but with more poetry... wonderful stuff.

I won't enlighten you to my holiday at the present time, but perhaps I'll retroactively post a retrospective (yeah right, like I'll get around to that...)

I did however have an interesting experience while driving home at the end of my break... it was a "90's weekend" on the local 'alternative' radio station in nashville, and as such, I heard a song that was on the playlist of madison radio station 92.1 during my high school career... it wasn't a song that I liked at the time, the group was not one I liked ever, and overall it was the sort of song that when it came on the radio during high school I was just as likely to change stations as I was to keep listening.

When I heard it this weekend though, it sounded really good... and I could at least fake singing along to it.

Something about music heard during the heady days of adolescence...