tsujigiri

The editorial comments of Chris and James, covering the news, science, religion, politics and culture.

"I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day." -Douglas Adams

Saturday, November 30, 2002

I think this article, titled "Does God really exist? The agony of Teresa", is really interesting. Apparently Mother Teresa chronically doubted her faith for about 50 years.

Mother Teresa said in another letter: "The damned of hell suffer eternal punishment because they experiment with the loss of God. In my own soul, I feel the terrible pain of this loss. I feel that God does not want me, that God is not God and that he does not really exist."
   Rome's daily newspaper Il Messeggero said: "The real Mother Teresa was one who for one year had visions and who for the next 50 had doubts - until her death."

A Catholic Church official was quoted as saying "Doubt is part of the growth of holiness," adding that it is also a part of sainthood. This reminds me of a story I once heard (rumor mill alert!) about a guy who became a faculty member in the philosophy department of a Catholic University. He eventually felt that he had to come clean to his department chair and admit that he was Atheist. The chair replied, "But you're a Catholic Atheist, right?"

Does the Mother Teresa story have a similar moral? Only Catholics can be saints. No matter how many "miracles" they perform, or how "faithful" they are, or even how Christian they are, no one can be sainted (as I understand it) who wasn't on the roll books of the Roman Catholic Church. Although the title of "Saint" is supposed to indicate closeness to God, we don't have to dig far to discover its true meaning: closeness to the Church, and service to the Church. Mother Teresa had her doubts, but by God she stayed Catholic! If Benny Hin converted to Catholicism, perhaps he would be eligible for sainthood... I think he's performed more miracles than anyone.

CNN has a collection of submitted proposals for the new World Trade Center. This one is by far my favorite:

tesla coils!

I found this in the Edmonton event listings:

ALTERNATIVE BEARS (ALT BEARS) – Low-attitude, hairy gay or bisexual guys get together every Sat night for late-night swimming and snacks. Info: http://altbears.8k.com

Friday, November 29, 2002

CNN has another wartime accessory story. A WWII POW had his class ring confiscated. It was returned to him moments later by a Japanese officer who recognized him from a football game. The Japanese officer had gone to USC. Kind of interesting.

Wednesday, November 27, 2002

Fark describes this article as "Hardest Marine alive is reunited with Zippo lighter lost in Vietnam 36 years ago." They aren't kidding. He has altered my definition of tough. And this is his lighter:

Tuesday, November 26, 2002

Japan appears to be completely insane. These are some lines from Mainichi Daily News today: "A nurse who killed her best friend, sliced up her body up into little pieces with a surgical knife, then systematically disposed of her remains in the trash must be locked up for 18 years, prosecutors demanded at a Saitama court Tuesday." 18 years? I never imagined that Japanese prosecuters could be so brutal in their punishment of helpless murderers.
"A man who broke into a Kobe home wearing women's clothing was arrested Tuesday, police said. Takehito Fujimoto, 30, is the second cross-dressing thief in the past week to be arrested in the Kansai area." This being Japan and all... I wonder if his crime was breaking and entering or wearing womens' clothing...
   "Prosecutors were furious after an appeal court on Tuesday upheld a six-year prison term a lower court had handed down on a former junior high school teacher whose sex-driven torture of a young girl caused her death last year... The 35-year-old teacher had been indicted on charges of illegal confinement resulting in death. Fukumoto handcuffed the 12-year-old girl, who he had met through a telephone dating club, in his car on the night of July 24 last year, and sprayed her in the face with mace, according to the ruling. As the defendant sped along the Chugoku Expressway in a bid to have sex with her at a hotel, the terrified girl jumped from his car. However, the victim, who was still handcuffed, was struck by several vehicles. She was found barely alive but later died as a result of massive blood loss." Six years. Tough but fair.
   "Prosecutors demanded a six-month prison term Tuesday for a local government official who prosecutors say fatally abused 23 cats in a bid to relieve work stress." He should have tortured little girls; they'd let him off easier. Why is it that so many of the bizarre crimes reported on MDN seem involve Japanese government officials?
   "NAGOYA -- A couple have starved to death in a government-funded apartment here after apparently running out of money, police said Tuesday. A pet dog also perished together with the 34-year-old woman and 45-year-old man who withered away after all their money vanished. Although an autopsy will be carried out to determine the exact cause of the pair's deaths, police have ruled out suicide and no toxins were detected in their bodies. All appear to have been dead for some time. A court eviction officer sent to oust the couple from their apartment found their bodies." This scenario is a very realistic fear for me. My money always seems to be running out... I hope Canada won't let me starve...
   "Disgraced archeologist Shinichi Fujimura, who admitted to planting bogus artifacts at 42 digs across the nation, faked discoveries at two more excavation sites in Miyagi Prefecture, local researcher announced Tuesday... Fujimura's antics were exposed in November 2000 after the Mainichi photographed him planting "artifacts" at the Kamitakamori dig in Tsukidate, Miyagi Prefecture. The disgraced archeologist, who earned the nickname "God's Hand" for his knack of making discoveries at sites he took part in excavating, subsequently admitted that he had cooked up findings at 42 excavation sites since the 1970s."

I hope the Mainichi Daily News isn't the Japanese version of The Onion or something. It looks like serious news but I just don't know if all these stories are beleivable. The seemingly endless supply of pedophile teachers who exploit their students as underaged prostitutes; the cring of ross-dressing theives; the guy who stabbed a legislator for 50 dollars; ninja rapists; cars that burst into flames... MDN looks more like a crazy movie script than actual news.

This is cool: according to physicsweb.org, "Researchers have found that the band gap of indium nitride is only about a third of the previously reported and widely accepted value... A fundamental limit to the efficiency of a solar cell is the band gap of the semiconductor from which it is made... Wladek Walukiewicz and co-workers have measured the optical properties of pure indium nitride and a wide range of alloys made of indium, gallium and nitrogen. They find that the band gap can vary between 0.7 and 3.4 eV, which covers the entire solar spectrum... The team also found that alloys made from indium, aluminium and nitrogen had an even wider range of band gaps - from 0.7 to 6.2 eV. This should allow nitride-based alloys to be used in a range of optoelectronic applications from the near infrared to the far ultraviolet."

The textbook value for the bandgap of indium nitride is about 2.0eV. They remeasured it at .7eV. I wonder what other established textbook quantities might be erroneous? "The researchers believe their results to be more reliable than previous results because they used higher quality samples grown with epitaxial techniques."

Interesting poll results: According to This article from the NYT, in a recent NYT/CBS poll:

55 percent of respondents said they disapproved of the White House effort to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, compared with 39 percent who approved. Nearly two-thirds said the federal government should do more to regulate the environmental and safety practices of business.
  By a ratio of two to one, Americans said they thought that protecting the environment was more important than producing energy. By a seven-to-one ratio, respondents said that Mr. Bush believed that producing energy was more important than protecting the environment.
  Nearly 60 percent said they believed that Mr. Bush's tax cut benefited the wealthy; just over 25 percent said it benefited the middle class. Four percent said the tax cut primarily benefited the poor. Three-quarters of respondents said that the first round of tax cuts had not made a noticeable difference in their paychecks.
  Just over half said they were confident in Mr. Bush's ability to handle an international crisis, a relatively small increase, considering what the last two years have been like; 45 percent said the same thing when Mr. Bush took office in 2001.
To sum up: Americans like Bush as a person but don't care for a lot of his policies. A large portion of respondents said that their vote in recent elections was specifically "to support" or "to oppose" Bush. In closing, the following quote inspires me to ask, what the hell is wrong with old people?
In another follow-up interview, Wayne Denson, 75, a Democrat and retired optician from Kansas City, Mo., said: "I voted for him to start with but now that Bush got elected, I'd rather vote for Bush than Gore. Bush has got more intelligence."

Monday, November 25, 2002

This link was deposited here by Jim, and I felt it was way too cool to be relegated to the comments section. It is a report on the Utah Education Network's (UEN's) efforts to implement internet site access filters in public schools and libraries across the state. One of my favorite anecdotes in the report is about Salt Lake County Attorney General Neal Gunnarson, who failed to comply with a court-ordered investigation into UEN's illegal attempts to destroy/block access to the web access log files. The report also notes that Gunnarson was caught destroying newspapers in 1997 because he disapproved of an article. Illegal destruction of printed material seems to be a common theme in Utah and Mormon history. Perhaps one day Utah will finally come to grips with its own US statehood.

A vegetarian group in Tennessee requested that the governor proclaim a "Vegetarian Month." Their proposed proclamation included the following language: "Our food supply should be safe and wholesome, rather than laced with pathogens, fat, cholesterol, hormones and carcinogens leading to heart disease, stroke, cancer and other chronic afflictions that each year cripple and kill millions." The governor turned it down because he felt it was overly political. A previous Tennessee governor had declared "Vegetarian Day," but under pressure from the livestock industry, he made similar proclamations for meat industries and ended up serving beef at a luncheon on Vegetarian Day. The governor can't take sides, especially not the politically weaker side.

I was walking through the Union here (in Edmonton) last week, and I passed a row of tables usually occupied by various religious groups. I saw a sign from an angle, and I could only see the letters "an." From the font and colour scheme, I expected it would be something Vegan. As I drew closer I was surprised that it appeared to read "get arian". Shocked, I drew a little more closer and saw that it said "veget arian." When I saw that they were sandwiched between the Catholics and the Campus Crusade for Christ, I panicked and ran into the bookstore. My brush with simplistic philosophies was over. On this Thanksgiving week, I'm thankful that absolutist/fundamentalist groups are less obnoxious and prevalent here than they were in Salt Lake City.

According to The Capital Online, the Navy has confiscated more than 100 computers from Naval Academy students who are suspected of downloading MP3s. This is evidently in response to a letter sent to Universities by the Recording Industry Association of America. Says the article:

An Oct. 3 letter signed by four entertainment-based lobbying associations spelled out that Internet copyright infringement violates federal copyright laws. "`Theft' is a harsh word, but that it is, pure and simple," the letter stated. "... It is no different from walking into the campus bookstore and in a clandestine manner walking out with a textbook without paying for it."

Dare I suggest the obvious difference? When you walk out with a book, the bookstore no longer has it. "Intellectual property" is another vaccuous element of the corporate mysticism that has become the dominant religion of western society. Its sacred texts are endless tomes of legislation, deeply buried court rulings, and impenetrable contracts. The lawyers are the priesthood of the modern theocracy; only they are able to read and interpret the sacred writings. They might as well go ahead and print all legal material in latin. Its not as though having it in English does any good for the vulgar masses.

Sunday, November 24, 2002

More from Fark: The Anti-Leech Campaign has developed software (called Anti-Theft) to help curtail the of "theft" that occurs when internet users avoid seeing pop-up ads. According to the site: "A website cost time and money to run. Every time you visit a website you will cost the webmaster behind that website money as they have to pay for the bandwidth you use when downloading images, information etc. Most websites depend completely on revenue from advertising through banners and pop ups."

How dare you steal that page view! Especially since so much internet content is so useful to you! Just think where we'd be without popup ads. The internet world might be reduced to the lousy functional public forum that it used to be. You wouldn't look away from the television during a commercial would you? Of course not! You'd be arrested if you tried to steal broadcast programming like that, without attentively watching all advertisements the way we all always do. Circumvention of advertisements is exactly why the FBI confiscated and smashed every Tivo unit. And how many of us have learned our lessons through hard time when we cut out the commercials while taping a TV show?

Theft is theft. Without all those opportunistic popup ads, there's no telling how many porno sites would disappear. And good luck finding an X10 camera; good luck finding a casino that caters to minors by using phone bills instead of credit cards; good luck finding an misleadingly underpriced travel package; good luck finding fraudulent "windows alerts" about unsecured bank account numbers stored on your computer; and good luck finding that fucking Microsoft butterfly without popup ads. All of those websites sustain themselves by sucking advertising dollars out of companies -- the way leeches suck blood. If you were out swimming with your friend Billy, or TimeWarner, or XXXHotPussyWhore, and you spotted a leech on his back, would you remove it? Would you cut off an innocent leech from its only source of support? I don't know anyone -- I hope I don't -- who would do such a thing.

Sorry for such seething commentary on such an irrelevant subject. It's late and I can't get sleepy. So I'm taking it out on the idiot who launched the "Anti-Theft Campaign." He probably doesn't deserve it. The write-up was full of mispelled words and poor grammar. I should have withheld my flame-fest and instead expressed my pity for the tiny, weak minds who conceived it.

I don't often browse weblogs of people I don't know, but Strong Sad's is k_rad (rad*1000). I found it on fark.com.

James just sent me this link to an article about the "[Flesh Public Library], named 70 years ago for businessman Leo Flesh, who donated the money for the library's current location. But Net Nanny, a filter the library uses on all the children's department computers, did not care much for 'flesh' linked to 'public.'" Net Nanny prevented anyone from accessing the library's own web site from within the library. To solve this problem, they renamed the web site. Genius.

I love Net Nanny stories. I remember a few years ago there was a government study to determine the effectiveness of these systems. They found that all of the net monitoring systems allowed most porn to pass, and blocked useful sites (including the site of the agency conducting the study). Closer to home, I believe Rachael had some trouble with Net Nanny last summer, when her father surreptitiously installed it on her laptop. It prevented her from exchanging messages with Dave, because his last name is "Dick."