datacombs

Just finished A Scanner Darkly By Philip K. Dick. Like most of his stories, it’s interesting philosophy, unfortunately mixed with bullshit folk-psychology ramblings about split-brain research. Also, in a spate of synchronicity (a favorite of those folk psychologists) I found a link to this R. Crumb interpretation of Dick’s experience.

I’m also reading Hero with a Thousand Faces for the first time. If I didn’t know better, I’d think it was humor. His reliance upon those same folk-psychologists and psychoanalysts to relate the mythological elements to our everyday life definitely dates the work. Would have been enough to identify the common patterns in stories, that alone is interesting.

It’s also interesting noting the number of SF writers who have deeply religious rebirths, or end up creating their own religions.

So, thanks to a posting on Slashdot, I found out that ElcomSoft, the employer of Dmitry Sklyarov, creates spamming tools. Not only bulk e-mail programs, but also spiders to harvest the web for e-mail addresses and maintain current lists of good e-mail addresses. So, we all know that the DMCA is bad, but maybe this is a case of Karma coming around to engage in some much deserved ass kicking.

Duck and Cover

I hate you! No, I love you! Wait, we’re out of money! Give us more.

I definitely have to hand it to the Bush propaganda crew.

This advertisement is a great example of the growing rift between the “right” and “left” in this country. You can also see great examples of this by scanning Slashdot comments. In the following comments are a few modified versions if anybody needs translation.

“I’m not a security threat: I’m Canadian”

According to The New York Times, companies are increasingly incorporating in offshore countries like Bermuda to lower taxes.

Seems that President Bush and Kenneth Lay go way back. From this stack of documents at The Smoking Gun. A couple of interesting things though. Apparently, Enron had some positive involvements in green energy, and almost no class action suits ever go through to completion.

The Emily Chesley Reading Circle featuring the many inventions of Michael Flannigan. Found on Fark!

A collection of Lego Mindstorm projects including a Rubik’s cube solver and Towers of Hanoi solver. Also some great mechs. Wouldn’t it be ironic if the fearsome mechs of the BattleTech universe (and no doubt eventually ours), were inspired by kids toys? Hmm, now that I think about, that’s kind of redundant.