Category: News Stories

In Your Latest Little Rock Free Press

In the latest Freep, on page 25, is an ad for an interesting product available at RAO Video…the entire ad is encoded, though, and looks like gibberish. At first glance it appears to be an error of some kind. But keen nerds like myself will quickly recognize that it’s a simple cryptoquote wherein all the letters are simply 3 places removed in the alphabet (w = t). The encoded message describes a device for committing technological pranks, so I was kind of disappointed.

Also in the same issue is a brief piece on Butch Stone’s new music business class at UCA called “The Music Business in America.” The title of the Freep article was “How to Make It In the Music Business and Keep the Sharks Away,” which is particularly ironic given that the course will be taught by one of the region’s more notorious sharks. Butch Stone is an interesting character: ask any prominent figure (newspaper, radio, business, etc.) and they’ll tell you he’s a powerful promoter who gets big names to come to Little Rock, and as a manager is responsible for giving the world Black Oak Arkansas and Roger Clinton[1]. Ask most musicians and they’ll tell you stories about his raw deals and promises unkept. For example, click here and phrases like “Stone skimmed money from concert beer sales” pop out out at you.

For most bands, though, the recurring story for everyone from Ho-Hum to Sugar and the Raw is that Butch comes in with a smile and a handshake, makes promises to assist them, and never returns their calls afterward.

One of the segments of the course is called “More money has been stolen with a briefcase than with a gun,” and one has to wonder if it’s a “How-To” course taught by a qualified expert.

1.) Evidence enough for high crimes against humanity.

Unhealthy Questions Redux

Perhaps the most timely example of a question that does not deserve an answer is “are we winning the war in Iraq?”

The question presupposes that we have a clearly defined enemy and objective. At least in Vietnam we had these things: the people from the North needed to be moved back up North. Success could be quantified by geographic gains, plus enemy body count estimates and defined targets destroyed. In Iraq we have a variety of ethnic groups chaotically striking at us and at each other with guerilla terrorism. You can’t fight an enemy you can’t see[1], so Iraq really isn’t a war per se.

This is where the Bush Administration’s deft abuse of language is coming back to haunt them. They’ve successfully manipulated most Americans into thinking that we’re in a war on Terror, but Terror is not an enemy. Terror is an abstract concept, so while they thought it would be a great way to scare up some cheap oil, take out a bad guy, and install a democracy, it turns out the War on Terror has gone so poorly that they have no way to answer the question of whether or not this war can be won.

So now Bush is stumbling on his words even more, because by the Iraq Study Group’s admission, the situation in Iraq is dire. He can no longer say that we’re “winning” this sham of a war, and I wonder how much longer he can stay in that position. Maybe he can successfully convince America, for whom he has set up a win-lose duality, that we can simultaneously not be winning, yet not be losing. To do that he’d have to leave the comfortable world of black and white that this administration has built its policy on, and that’s a tall order for Mr. “Fer us or agin us.”

1.) In the post-Cold War era, who would have thought that the remaining superpower could be undone by small enemy forces too small to detect? The War on Terror is roughly akin to trying to shoot bullets at a swarm of mosquitoes.

Google Maps: Pollution Detective

Rolling Stone has a great article in this month’s issue (Snoop Dogg on the cover) about hog farm waste in North Carolina. The writer, Jeff Tietz, mentioned taking off from the town of New Bern for a flight over some vast expanse of hog farms. The article pointed out that hog waste lagoons are very often pink in color[1], so naturally I thought it would be interesting to see what they look like with the aid of Google Maps. I only found a few sporadic examples, as rural areas are still relatively unphotographed in detail by Google Maps, but here’s what I dug up, using New Bern as my point of origin:

Example 1
Example 2
Example 3 (may not be a hog farm, but sure looks like one)
Example 4
Example 5

Perhaps future updates to Google Maps will reveal a larger expanse of factory hog farms there, which gives me some hope for the future that at least some environmental abuses will become harder to hide as more people can see the Earth from the sky. I’m still looking to find the massive cattle farms depicted in the Fast Food Nation film.

1.) For reasons I am not going to mention because this is a family blog; plus you might be enjoying a nice snack.

Quote of the Week

Best Buy Senior vice-president J.T. Thompson on transforming styles of management:

“I was always looking to see if people were here. I should have been looking at what they were getting done.”

Well, duh. Business Week has a great article on Results-Only Workplace Environment (ROWE), where employee performance is based not by attendance, but by performance. Mobile technology is allowing employees to work from anywhere, and places like Best Buy’s corporate HQ are actually moving away from the traditional notions of measurements of productivity. They’re smashing the time clock. It doesn’t matter if you’re in the office for 8 hours, it matters that you’ve been productive. Seems rather obvious to me, but then what do I know? I just work in web design.

Dilbert Creator Regains Voice

18 months ago Scott Adams lost his voice to a condition called “spasmodic dysphonia” wherein the part of his brain that controls normal speech was disconnected to his voice box. Other parts of the brain could connect: he could sing, for example. What he recently discovered, through his own ingenuity, was that rhyming was still possible. So he recited the words to “Jack Be Nimble” constantly and his brain started to remap itself. His speech has since been restored. A specialist in this condition said that no one has recovered from this condition, apparently until now.

Read Scott’s full blog entry here.

The Dirtiest Thing on The Internet

As you may have heard, AOL released vast swaths of private search history data to the public recently. Now some crafty geek has made that data available for convenient browsing.

AOLSearchDatabase.com allows you to query and randomly view selections from the AOL data. Although users are identified only by an ID number, you’re able to view examples of the phrases on which they have searched. Frankly, I feel pretty dirty looking at it. But like a virtual car crash, I can’t look away. It’s an utterly fascinating series of psychological profiles of average Americans. Add to that the undeniably voyeuristic thrill of peeking into people’s search histories, and you have the makings of an ethical conundrum. I’m still not entirely sure how I feel about this. Maybe I’ll take this post down later, as AOL tried to do with its data, but for now I’ll just pretend that this information wants to be free. It’s interesting to note how difficult secrets are to keep in the Internet Age.

Setec Astronomy.

Vanity Fair

I used to think Vanity Fair was People Magazine for the Upper West Side, but apparently they’re snarkier and more inventive than I thought. Inside the October 2006 issue of Vanity Fair is a fake flap you can attach to a copy of The Weekly Standard. Check it out.

Sadly, in order to get one of these, you have to buy the latest issue of Vanity Fair, which is the All Suri Cruise Edition (see, I was right – a highbrow People Magazine). I’d feel more than a little dirty buying such a thing. Maybe I can surreptitiously snag the insert from a newsstand copy. What other choice do I have?

My friend Mary took issue with my dis of VF, as she’s a subscriber. She cited the excellent photography and political articles, and these are valid points, but I think my objections are mainly that it very often covers the same topics as People magazine (Tom Cruises’ baby, Jennifer Aniston’s relationships, Angelina Jolie’s drama), but in a more artistic fashion, with better photography….however the covers are still invariably celebrities and the primary reason people buy it is to read about famous people.

They sneak in some legitimate journalism, though – and I’ve noticed that Rolling Stone has taken on a similar pattern: put Justin Timberlake on the cover, and maybe people will happen across the articles on Darfur and Iraq. I guess I can’t blame them; celebrity sells. I suppose I should be thankful that they even attempt to edify.

It’s interesting that both magazines took their names from works of social criticism. William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair was a satire on high society opportunism, and Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” addresses a woman who has fallen from high social standing. And this month both magazines sport covers of two of the most vacuous idols of our society, Tom Cruise and Justin Timberlake, respectively.

The Indeterminacy of Rules Kills Pluto

One of my favorite bits of philosophy that I learned from Dr. Churchill at Hendrix was the indeterminacy of rules. Basically it means that you can’t ever really totally define anything. There are always counterexamples. What is a chair, for example? Everybody knows intuitively but you can’t define it fully without allowing in things like stools. It’s a big problem for the field of law, and now it’s a problem for astronomy. What the hell is Pluto?[1]

Pluto has been demoted to a “Dwarf Planet.” Big deal. So he gets a modifier. Kids will still learn about him, and maybe they’ll get an early taste for the shades of grey that permeate our universe. Relativity is a philosophical concept as well as a scientific one. Science changes and adapts. That’s what separates its dogma from that of most religions.[2]

Interesting side note: the last time I mentioned the indeterminacy of rules, a Google search brought up only a handful of results. Now there are 28. It has a long way to go before it’s part of conventional parlance, but it’s a good start.

1.) We’re still wondering what the hell Goofy is. Is he a dog, too? He wears a hat and drives a car. But then so does Donald.

2.) God bless you, Martin Luther.