Opposition to Idaho House Bill 415 Part II, Party Line Boogaloo

Dear Senator Cook,

I hold little hope that this letter will make any difference in the way you may vote on House Bill 415, passed today by the House and now bound for the Senate, but I want to let you know I'm not in favor of it.

I fail to see how arming teachers, introducing more guns to school, is going to do anything to curb school shootings. Are guns the only answer to gun violence? It seems the Idaho House says yes.

I take particular opposition to the loophole teachers are offered if they use their guns on school property. A concealed carry license doesn't mean these individuals have any training in conflict resolution or communication; it just means they can carry a gun. I'd like to think we can do better by Idaho students.

Nevertheless, I am prepared to see the Senate toe the Republican Party line on this issue. That doesn't mean I have to like it, nor reward it at the polls.

Thanks for listening,

ANYTHING BUT KOKOMO!

I'm nearly 40 minutes into a homemade 2 1/2 hour documentary on Project Mercury, and am struggling to understand why they've made me watch a string of failed launches from the 1950s to The Beach Boys' 1988 song "Kokomo." And I mean the entire song.

Sure, it's explosions happening in Florida. The song, well, it's supposed to be set in Flordia, but this is The Beach Boys we're talking about.

Just prior to this montage, they used Eddie Cochran's 1958 "Summertime Blues," which fit just fine and is certainly more in time with the era.

The documentary up to this point has been excellent, so I'll forgive this Beach Boys musical sin.

"Kokomo," by the way, does not transport me to a fictitious Florida location nor into an idyll that mentions exploding rockets in any way; it instead transports me thirty or so years ago to a local pizza parlor where, as we dined, another family pumped about $100 in quarters into the jukebox and played -- AND SANG ALONG TO -- nothing but "Kokomo" the entire time we were there.

Me, every time I hear anything by The Beach Boys:

Don't Get Poop On Your Tires

Son changed the oil in the truck in the driveway, and accidentally spilled some. To his credit, he got some kitty litter to put on top of the oil to soak it up.

The neighborhood cats thank him for his contribution to their sanitary needs.

In Defense of January

I see a lot of griping online about January being the longest month.

Mostly, drivel like this:

I get it, I guess. The holidays are over. Here in the Northern Hemisphere we're full into winter, with the grey skies and whatnot. And I know a lot of people -- myself included -- are affected mentally by the grey days that make January what it is.

But there's plenty to like about January, if you're me.

It's my birthday month. Also, my daughter's birthday month. That's well and good, I suppose.

It can be cold here in January. But the sun still shines and the sky is still blue when the clouds roll out.

January is full of hope when I open the front door and startle a squirrel on the fence and I get to watch it scramble along and then leap into the pine tree.

January is full of hope when I see the sparrows bouncing around looking for and finding things to eat.

And though the holiday decorations come down, the house suddenly feels bigger without two fake trees taking up some of the landscape.

And we're that much closer to spring.

Opposition to Idaho House Bill 415

Dear Representative Wheeler,

I'd like to go on record opposing House Bill 415, and hope you will do the same.

I don't see how having more guns in schools is a solution to school shootings.

I don't see how granting concealed carry users "immunity" for using their gun on a school campus, particularly if they misperceive a threat yet discharge their weapon, is a good thing.

Idaho teachers don't want this bill to pass. Idaho law enforcement has come out in opposition to the bill. Please listen to those on the "front lines" of the issue, and do not support this bill.

School shootings are terrible events, and I know Idaho is not immune. But introducing guns to school campuses in the hands of people who while they may be trained in gun use but are likely not trained in recognizing crises, de-escalation, and other anti-violence measures, is a poor way to protect Idaho students and Idaho schools.

I also believe even a momentary lapse in judgment by a "responsible" concealed carry gun owner can result in a momentarily unattended weapon landing in the hands of students, who through ignorance or malice could possibly cause harm. Would the bill offer immunity to a gun owner who momentarily lost track of their weapon and it was discharged by a student?

Today's youth have an increasingly warped sense of right and wrong. I don't believe the House should abet this warped sense by signaling that a gun is the best response to a gun.

Those pushing for this bill have an increasinly warped misunderstanding of today's culture, thinking that answers from their bygone era are the best answers. I don't believe the House should abet this warped misunderstanding either.

Please vote in opposition to House Bill 415, and do your best to rally your fellow House members to do the same.

AI, Machine Learning, or Love Songs in Russian. Or Swahili.

This is from jnyfmg.tumblr and I think it's a good way to look at artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Star Trek certainly makes the point for universal translators having their place: They're invaluable on first contact (if you're unlucky to land on a planet whose inhabitants don't speak perfect English), invaluable in on-the-spot negotiations and such and probaly as valuable on post-first contact missions.

But to understand a society, a subject, you can't rely on it. You have to start getting that understanding in your own head.

I'm reminded of another excellent communicator: Chuck Jones, whom I've written about before.

The gist from the video in the link above:

"When you talk to Chuck, he is always encouraging you to go to the source, to study real life, to study art, and apply that to your animation. It's not just drawing funny faces."

And to Mr. Jones himself: "Reading. Read everything. It doesn't do you much good to draw unless you have something to draw. And the only place you're going to get anything to draw is out of that head."

Listen for the music. Let it touch your spirit. And always, always, fill your head.

One Last Score

They met in a back room of an ice cream parlor, knowing the shouts of the soda jerks and whirrs of the blenders would protect their speech from passers-by.

"I know you retired, Terry," Vinnie said, chasing a maraschino cherry around his tall slender glass. "But I got somethin' for ya, if you're interested."

Terry stirred his raspberry phosphate idly. "I'm not sure, Vinnie. I got a good thing going. Free lunches at the senior center every day, field trips, and Mabel, well Mabel, she's sweet on me."

"I know you're livin' the life," Vinnie said, "Got the world on a string. But Terry, you're the best. I know you got at least a dozen capers in ya. Ya just gotta dig a little deeper."

Terry sighed.

"I'll pay your AARP membership for the next ten years," Vinnie said.

"Okay, Vinnie, I'm in. One last score."

Added by a Facebook friend:

The handcuffs bit into Terry's thin, blue-veined wrists as he stood in the cold hallway at the police station. A daisy chain of young punks shackled wrist to wrist shuffled past, headed for detention, headed for a future Terry would warn them about if he thought they would listen. Kids never listened. He certainly hadn't. If only he'd listened to what his old man tried to tell him every evening after sweating out a 10-hour shift at the foundry. But Terry only saw that honest work was for suckers.

Tears welled in his eyes. His old man was long gone, but somehow Terry sensed his disappointment, his shame. He shoulda left those ruby slippers alone. He shoulda stuck to fixing bingo games and cheating at canasta and forging Social Security checks. Senior citizen rackets.

A hand hard as a wooden paddle smacked Terry upside the head, so hard his dentures rattled. When the stars in his vision settled, they revealed a pair of old eyes drooping beneath folds of weather-beaten skin. Officer Ed O'Malley, the only 90-year-old on the force. They'd run together as kids, but eventually Ed ran one way, Terry another.

"What's this, Terry? Crying because you got pinched?" Ed's voice was heavy with scorn. "You did a man's crime, now act like a man."

Ed moved on down the hallway. Terry watched him go, then straightened, the cuffs not so tight anymore, the hallway not so bleak. He may have had to make five trips to the bathroom every night and couldn't trim the hair in his ears fast enough to save his life, but he was still a man. He'd show those young punks how to take a pinch.

And more:

Warden Baum sat in his office, his fingers tented before his pursed lips, his eyes staring off into the middle distance. The phone continued to ring, but he knew there would only be questions on the other end of the line. Questions for which he had no answers.

The warden furrowed his brow. In the prison’s fifty-six year history, there had only been one officially recognized escape, and that was way back in 1977: Lenny “The Hyena” Scarpacci, so called because of his distinctive laugh. The Hyena had been recaptured within minutes of crawling through a window in the laundry. Old timers said his cackle could be heard all the way to D Block as they dragged him back inside.

Tonight, however, nobody was laughing.

How had Terry pulled it off? He had been in his cell at lights out, and the next morning he was gone. There was no evidence of a tunnel, no loose bricks in the walls, and nothing out of the ordinary. Terry’s bed was still neatly made, with razor sharp corners, a holdover from his time in the Army.

The entire prison went into immediate lockdown, and every single inmate was extensively interrogated. But nobody talked.

Terry had simply… vanished.

Warden Baum exhaled deeply through his nostrils and looked at the scrap of paper sitting in the middle of his desk. He’d read the simple message written thereon a hundred times, and it still didn’t make any sense. This scrap of paper was the only unusual thing found in Terry’s cell, sitting neatly in the center of his bed. A scrap of paper that contained only five words:

“There’s no place like home.”

OK, *Now* I'm Afraid of AI

You know, this is the kind of stuff we need, not horror shows based on expired IP copyrights like Winnie the Pooh or Steamboat Willie.

The First No Stakes Book I Ever Read

Long ago and far away, there was a castle. But not just any castle. This was the grand and glittering Castle Corona. . .

Thus begins Sharon Creech's "Castle Corona." But (spoilers) It was just any castle. Filled with just any queen or king and insolent royal children. And befuddled servants and ministers. Who are all so collectively boring you could see them starring in one of Bert of Sesame Street's "Boring Stories." As in, "Oh wow! The prince just drank a glass of water!"

I know this is a kids' book, but shouldn't even kids' books have stakes for the characters?

This may be the first "no stakes" book I've ever read.

The two orphans have a mean master. But that's about the extent of it. He calls them beetles and they have a dirt floor.

They find a pouch dropped by a king's man/thief and hide it when they should turn it in. But that's about it. Oh, it goes missing at the end, but no stakes, so nobody's really worried about it.

There's a "thief" in the kingdom, and the king and queen worry about that. But they live in an ineffectual bureaucracy where those in charge of counting can't find cows if they hide behind a bush, so no one feels all that concerned about it.

I couldn't find a single relatable character. They all felt like cardboard. And sure, a twist payoff at the end which I didn't see coming because I figured like the rest of the book there wouldn't be anything coming at all.

THROTTLE EVERYTHING!

Is YouTube throttling video play and quality if you've got an adblocker in place?

No.

It's flat out making watching its videos impossible, and the extreme latency extends to WHATEVER OTHER SITES YOU MIGHT HAVE OPEN AT THE TIME.

They don't discriminate. It doesn't matter if the other sites aren't YouTube-related or Google adjacent. You're getting latency so bad it makes you long for the wicked fast video download speeds available over dialup services.

Yes, I know adblockers are verboten per YouTube's TOS. But that doesn't give Google the right to slow EVERYTHING down.

How do I know this? I've been fighting latency for days, and it didn't matter what website I had open, EVEN IF I DIDN'T HAVE A YOUTUBE TAB OPEN. I tried all sorts of tricks with my computer, our internet signal, but imagine my shock when I turned off AdBlocker+ and WOW EVERYTHING IS LOADING BACK TO NORMAL NOW.

Google, you suck.

"Guilty, but Not Guilty"

At first, I was annoyed.

In a book called "The Sonderberg Case," is it right not to get to the case, even almost in passing until almost halfway through the book?

But I kept reading.

The case finally begins.

Then other weird things happen.

An unreliable narrator?

No, not really -- a narrator with an unreliable life.

And the plea: Guilty, but not guilty.

Then this:

"Will you ever come to understand what you did to me and to my generation? Hitler and you, you kept proclaiming it was for the future of Germany's children that you were at war with the rest of the world; for us that you were destroying entire cities; for us that you erased our right to pride, honor, and hope for centuries to come. Before his suicide, Hitler, in his will, expressed his wish to punish the German people by turning Germany into a mountain of rubble. But what you did was worse; you took revenge on us, your descendants. Because of you, all of you, though we were born long after your atrocities, we feel guilty. . . According to a Jewish saying, life is a wheel that never stops turning. Look at your life: what you did to the Jews is what you are living through now. You wanted to isolate them, you're isolated; you wanted to hunt them down, you're hunted; you made it impossible for them to live without anxiety, now you'll never live without anxiety. And you'll share the fate of your master."

I'm reminded of a story from the Book of Mormon, where a people called the Anti-Nephi-Lehies decided thwy would rather bury their weapons of war and be killed by their enemies, rather than defend themselves, as payment for the murders committed by their ancestors.

Their leader says this:

"Oh, how merciful is our God! And now behold, since it has been as much as we could do to get our stains taken away from us, and our swords are made bright, let us hide them away that they may be kept bright, as a testimony to our God at the last day, or at the day that we shall be brought to stand before him to be judged, that we have not stained our swords in the blood of our bretheren sinc he imparted his word unto us and has made us clean thereby.

"And now, my bretheren, if our brethren seek to destroy us, behold, we will hide away our swords, year, even we will bury them deep in the earth, that they may be kept bright, as a testimony that we have never used them, at the last day; and if our brethren destroy us, behold, we shall go to our God and shall be saved."

There are a lot of people out there who say they do what they do "for the children." Elie Wiesel is cautioning us to look at their methods before we consider whether what they do for the children is actually helpful.

And there are some of you reading this who'll be quick to point out the sins of the other. Well, I'm not going to. Let he who is without sin first cast a stone, because there are a lof of people with a lot of different politics out there doing things "for the children" using methods and reasons and talking points that are anything but child-friendly.

This is a powerful book, folks. Read it. Preferably in front of a mirror.

Way too Late at the Movies: Rear Window

Up until yesterday, this is about all I knew about Alfred Hitchcock's  1954 film "Rear Window":

But again thanks to YouTube Free Movies, I got to watch this yesterday. And while it's a slow burn, man does that tension build and the payoff in the last ten minutes, [chef's kiss].

I understand they made a remake with Christopher Reeve taking the place of Jimmy Stewart, but here's something to ponder: Voyeurism and post-war boredom was kind of a theme for this film, what with scenes like this:

Jeff: You know, as much as I hate to give Thomas J. Doyle too much credit, he might have got a hold of something when he said that was pretty private stuff going on out there. I wonder if it’s ethical to watch a man with binoculars and a long-focus lens. Do you, do you suppose it’s ethical even if you prove he didn’t commit a crime?

Lisa: I’m not much on rear window ethics.

Jeff: Course, they can do the same thing to me, watch me like a bug under a glass if they want to.

Lisa: Jeff, you know if someone came in here, they wouldn’t believe what they’d see. You and me with long faces, plunged into despair because we find out a man didn’t kill his wife. We’re two of the most frightening ghouls I’ve ever known. You’d think we could be a little happy that the poor woman is alive and well. Whatever happened to that old saying, “love thy neighbor”?

Can you imagine what a remake in the modern day would look like, what with things like the Patriot Act and the SEE MEE SEE MEE vibe of the Internet? Jeff would be broadcasting the whole thing for all of the Internet Weirdos to see and follow along with and they too would be very unhappy when the found out "a man didn't kill his wife," and they'd be mad if they didn't get to see it live.

But back to the film. I love that it's all on one set, a very compact story to tell. Characterization is spare, as would be the characterization of people you saw regularly but never really bothered to get to know. The love story is even downplayed when the action gets thick, with the (maybe) payoff being that they do decide to get together after, well, after.

A great film, one I'd certainly watch again. It feels timeless.

"I Almost Died, Yanno!"

What happened to you? I've been worried sick!

It was awful out there. All dark. I was hungry. A dog chased me and bit my duffel bag.

Poor darling. What happened to your clothes?

I fell down.

Oh, there, there.

Oh, it's so good to be home. Oh! Did anybody miss me?

I did, sugar.

What about the colonel? And Scotty? And Spock? Did they even care? Were they upset?

Of course they were.

Yeoman, I know this isn't the time to ask.

Ask, darling.

But after stumbling around in the dark, and here you are, all warm and loving...

Ask, Jim. Ask.

Have you got any cookies?

Whose Priorities?

Congressman Simpson, a word.

1. My priority isn't on your list.

2. I have the option to add my priority, BUT I also have to pick one of your preselected priorities.

3. This leads me to believe you don't really care about my priorities, but want me to pick from your preconceived list of priorities.

This isn't a survey; you want a rubber stamp.

No thank you.

Plagiarism, AI, and Effort

 

Posting this video not necessarily to tut about these particular accusations (though it's sad to see the Internet Historian is involved; I've enjoyed his content), but for one of the quotes from Jonathan Bailey, the plagiarism expert and author at Plagiarismtoday.com.

He hits on a particularly good point concerning plagiarism reducing writing quality:

"The plagiarism wasn’t just copy and paste plagiarism. [The author] went through and attempted to edit a lot of the words and rewrite things to make it more his own, supposedly. And the result of that type of editing is always just poor-quality writing."

He then takes it a step further, comparing the poor-quality writing to that produced by AI:

"And interestingly, this is a lot of what generative AI does, because generative AI does not necessarily understand what it’s writing, it’s just taking what it reads and gathers from the Internet and then tries to rewrite it cobbled together in a way that’s cohesive and understandable to people. So if you’re wondering why AI writing is not the best in the world, it’s the same reason this type of plagiarism produces very bad writing."

These bits come in at about 10 minutes into the video.

None of this, of course, will stop my students from plagiarizing. The utility, the reward without the work, is still very tempting. Not that I have a lot of students plagiarize -- what I see mostly is inadvertent, not on purpose, and once I point it out, they're quick to self-regulate and make things better. AI just adds another wrinkle in the writing utility train that's going to have to make us work harder.

And it all causes me to think about my own writing.

I don't want it to be boring. So I've got to try harder.

Harry Brewis, who produced the video Bailey discusses, has this to say in an interview at Vulture.com (emphasis mine):

"Now that people are aware that you can just make a computer write something, I think they’re going to raise their standards. As soon as I started asking myself, “Am I just watching trash a computer spat out?” a lot of YouTubers I used to watch became boring to me. I thought, This is interchangeable. Even if a person wrote it, I hate this. Ninety percent of everything has always been bad. And the fact that we now have to think about what we’re watching and if it’s bad in this very active way, people will be more discerning about what they enjoy. We used to live in a time when there were three channels. If you wanted to watch something, you had to buy it on DVD or you had to go through the effort of stealing it from a torrent site and finding one that wasn’t a virus. But now, it’s convenient to just keep watching anything forever. We hit that stage seamlessly without having a moment of stopping to assess the quality of what we do with that time. It used to be, you’d watch an entire anime, and then you’d have to do work to find what you’d follow it up with. Now, if you have Crunchyroll, there’s 500 million episodes and you can just keep going forever. It’s much harder to stop and reassess. In a way, the badness is so omnipresent now, people will have to actually rethink their practices in a way that is maybe better than what we had before."

There is a lot of bad stuff out there, professinally edited, mainstream published bad stuff. I don't want what I write to be bad. That's going to take effort, and that's not what most content creators want to hear these days. Effort is hard. It's long. It doesn't pay off in a span of days or weeks, but often months and years. I need to get back on the writing track and make my stuff stand out, in a good way.

Copyright Irony

A bit of irony from yesterday's Disney/copyright post.

Anyhoo, here's an authorized peek:

PUBLIC DOMAIN FOR THE MOUSE, BABY!

It's early 2024, so those who follow expiring copyrights and innocent bystanders on the Internet who don't want to be exposed to more of the drivelalia coming from both Hollywood and indie producers know one thing:

STEAMBOAT WILLIE MICKEY MOUSE IS NOW IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN.

That text doesn't nearly feel big enough to encompass the wave of crapola suddenly being sprung on a generally unsuspecting populace, but to make the font big enough to match the hype would mean making it big enough to be seen from space, and nobody wants that.

I've seen at least half a dozen horror-themed(!) takes coming out either RIGHT NOW or LATER IN THE YEAR on the Steamboat Willie theme. It's BIG! It's EDGY! It punches THE HOUSE OF MOUSE right in the SNOOT. YEAH BABY.

Even ROB ZOMBIE'S getting involved. Though as of right now, his Wikipedia page doesn't mention this film.

Except the same thing happened, what a year or two ago with the A.A. Milne versions of Winnie the Pooh and all his friends from the Hundred Acre Wood, and there were horror-themed movies involving that popular IP and all and as far as I can tell that wave is over, so it's probably good news for this current wave that it'll end flash in the pan style and we can go back to the ordinary drivelalia coming from Hollywood and the indie publishers, namely DC/Marvel superhero movies or adjacent ripoffs.

I mean, I guess I get it. Being able to use Disney's signature character -- who hasn't appeared in a cartoon short since 2013 or a feature film since, well, I guess 1983's Mickey's Christmas Carol counts as a feature -- is really stiggin' it to the man, who of course stug it to Ib Iwerks in the 1920s by taking credit for all of Iwerks' Mickey Mouse work in the first place. JUSTICE FOR UB, I suppose is how the posters would go.

I've even seen someone post the entire Steamboat Willie short to YouTube with the joke title "Hey, look at what I made."

In re-watching the short, I have to wonder if Disney's really all that worried. They do use Steamboat Willie as the logo for Walt Disney Animation Studios (or at least they used to; and likely could continue using, of course). But Diseny has a habit of making IP or buying IP and sitting on it for decades, so it's not hard to imagine those thinking they're stiggin' it to the man will get bowled over by whatever Disney is producing now.

And -- apologies to the horror folks -- but horror seems like a low bar, as easily produced by the foot as the dreck these people accuse Disney of making with their billyuns and billyuns of dollars, but that's just me.

So here's Steamboat Willie: Imagine the schlocky possibilities:

And, for fun, here's the last time this version of Mickey appeared in a Disney short:

Way Too Late at the Movies: Fat Man and Little Boy

On August 6 and August 9, 1945, bombs called Fat Man and Little Boy were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Seventy-eight years later, I work from home in my basement in Ammon, Idaho, USA, on a job that's still cleaning up the mess made from the creation of those bombs. There's ample work to do; likely to retirement and beyond.

It seems wrong, to earn a living from this destructive force, unleashed needlessly. But, as Kurt Vonnegut would say, "and so it goes."

Today I watched for the first time Fat Man and Little Boy, from 1989. I haven't seen Oppenheimer, put out last year. But this one is enough for me.

This is my favorite scene from the film -- though it's aporchyphal whether part of the Nutcracker Suite was playing during the test -- some report remembering hearing the Star-Spangled Banner being played instead. Part of me thinks that if the story were made up, the teller would have picked a more ominous or forboding piece of music for the tale.

The best aspect of the film overall is the presence of Dwight Schultz, who at the time was much more known for his role in the A-Team.

For a comic actor, he disappears into this more serious role.

Much credit to the screenwriters Bruce Robinson and Roland Joffe, who kept the story moving briskly and didn't dive too much into the minutia. And who knew Ennio Morricone did the soundtrack? Certainly a different style of western for him to consider.

Book Review: Number Go Up, by Zeke Faux

 

I wandered over to Goodreads to read reviews of Zeke Faux's "Number Go Up," and I was not disappointed to find one reviewer who accused Faux of FUD: Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.

I knew there were going to be crypto bros or at least bro-adjacent reviews of the book, and there it was in all its glory. One star.

The reviewer decried Faux's lack of looking at how crypto were helping the poors -- pretty much glossing over how crypto wasn't helping the poors at all as reported in Faux's book.

And yeah, I don't really see banks helping the poors either. Banks are a sucky system. But after reading Faux's book, I don't expect crypto is any better. In fact, with the slavery, human trafficking and fraud that appears rampant in the crypto-adjacent world, it's probably a worse system.

I can't even type out the sentence "Maybe they started crypto with altruistic motives" without laughing inside. Because no, they're in it for the money. I mean, they can say they want to help the poor, but Faux provides ample example that no, the poors are getting screwed by crypto just as they are by the banks.

We'd all be better off investing in Homer's pumpkin futures than in fake money.

If you're going to this book to learn about crypto, you're not the audience for it. Faux admits his crypto knowledge is pretty basic, and admits that for most of us -- especially those of us who FUD all over the place -- the details are unimportant. What's important are the scams, the scamps, the idiocy and the altogether terrible things that crypto are enabling.

And yes, there are frauds and schemers in regular business too; I won't deny that. But the majority of that is happening in a regulated world. Crypto, not for me.

A note on style: Each chapter ends with a "cliffhanger" for the next chapter, making me wonder if Faux attended the Louis L'Amour School of Writing.

Christmas Read: Number Go Up, by Zeke Faux

Michelle got me a copy of this book for Christmas, and it's been a wild read, cementing my preference to invest in Homer Simpson's pumpkin futures long before putting a penny into cryptocurrency.

This bit from the chapter titled "Ponzinomics" sums up a lot of what it takes to combat falsehoods in the Internet Age.

The Bullshit Asymmetry Principle: The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.

~Alberto Brandolini, Italian computer programmer