Keyboard and Otherwise, Accessible Client Scripts

Posted on October 31, 2000 by Pace Arko

As I said, there a many reasons why I don’t use DHTML on this site. However since the world at large continues to use the suspect stuff, the least I can do is provide examples of how to design client scripts that are accessible. So much DHTML can only work with the mouse and so much of it doesn’t clearly communicate its state to the users with screen readers. I hope to answer that here and give examples of good script design that others should follow.

The Bobby accessiblity tool iconCurrently the document models of Netscape and IE are very different. As such, I try to give an example for both.

Some browsers, like Lynx, Opera and Internet Explorer allow the use to access page elements like form controls and anchors with the keyboard. This is good because some Web users, perhaps someone with a visual or motor impairment or someone using cell phone, can’t use a mouse.

Here I wrote a script for IE that allows the links and form controls bounded by a DIV element to be accessed by arrow keys, which are a little easier to reach and find for someone using a headstick or cell phone.

Example: Assigning New Keystrokes to Links and Form Controls

Some text outside the DIV

link outside DIV

Example: Keyboard Accessible Table of Contents

The next one is a keyboard accessible, expandable table of contents element. You may have seen variations of this on many sites. Unfortunately many of these are not keyboard accessible. Not only that but many of them have images that change as the element changes and this change in state is not mirrored in a non-visual way.

So I decided to write one that was keyboard accessible and would inform users with blindness when the element’s images changed state by swapping TITLE attributes along with swapping images.


If you can read this text, your browser doesn’t support scripting or your scripting is turned off. To navigate this site without using the script-based table of contents, please visit our site index.

Example: Swapping Style Sheets in Internet Explorer

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On the Morality of Superhumanly Intelligent Artificial Organisms

Posted on May 22, 2000 by Pace Arko

Let me explain what I mean by that title. I don’t mean to ask if the creation of superhuman artificial intelligences is a wise decision or not because a lot has already been said about that.

Also I am not going discuss or argue about whether it’s even possible to create life, sapience or superhuman intelligence artificially except to say that I believe it’s merely an engineering problem. If you disagree with this, well, I guess this rant really isn’t relevant to you.

A short clip from Terminator2, the T-1000 experiences motor control faults.

I put this animated GIF into this article a decade after I wrote it because the T-1000 remains the best example of  just how blurry the line between biology and engineering can get.

What I am going to examine is what kind of moral character will these beings have if they come into existence.

Asimov’s Laws

Cover of the Fawcett-Crest edition of Asimov's I, RobotThese you’ve probably already heard about, even if you haven’t read much science fiction. Back in 1939, Issac Asimov, imagining a future filled with artificial creatures, came up with 3 simple yet extremely powerful rules that governed the behavior of all artificial sapient beings in many of his stories. These rules were built into the hardware of each of his robot’s brains. In fact, the brains were designed in such a way that tampering with these rules damaged the brain itself.

This is analogous to building the human brain so that the anatomy of limbic system (the organs of memory and emotion), the cerebellum and neocortex are different. Imagine if your brain was organized in such a way that it was impossible for you to think in certain ways or perform certain actions.

This is analogous to building the human brain so that the anatomy of limbic system (the organs of memory and emotion), the cerebellum and neocortex are different. Imagine if your brain was organized in such a way that it was impossible for you to think in certain ways or perform certain actions.

This is probably what Asimov had in mind. His robot brains must have had a sub-organ that experience couldn’t remove. The removal of this sub-organ would render the rest of the brain inert.

Cover of Wired Magazine, with Bill Joy's now infamous warning.A month ago one of the founders of Sun Microsystems wrote an article in Wired about possible threats to the human species from advances in robotics, bio-engineering and nanotechnology and I felt compelled to say something here about it.

I’ve made it a point to follow developments in nanotech ever since a good friend told me about it in 1987. I read Engines of Creation back in 1989 so I’ve been following news in this area for a long time. Despite that, I should make plain that I am certainly no expert on the subjects. I am not a molecular biologist, chemist, software engineer or neurologist. I’m just a rabid fan of science and make it a point to be well informed.

So in this sense I am jaded. Bill Joy isn’t saying anything I haven’t heard already a zillion times on the Internet and the scientific press. Many of his arguments echo similar arguments made by Kirkpatrick Sale and Joseph Weizenbaum. Joy himself was rather shocked to discover sections of the Unabomber Manifesto resonating with his own thinking.

Then again on the other hand, his essay was, I think, a needed counterpoint to all the utopian thinking about this stuff. I think the techno-libertarian set oversimplify things. Sure, they give a few needed kicks to some sacred cows but they don’t have all the answers either.

Posted in Science and Engineering, Science Fiction, The Future | Comments Off on On the Morality of Superhumanly Intelligent Artificial Organisms

Zip the commercials!

Posted on February 22, 2000 by Pace Arko

Book cover of Pohl and Kornbluth's Space MerchantsAdvertising is everywhere these days. It’s becoming like that Pohl and Kornbluth story, where advertising was even on the wallpaper and toilet paper. I think it’s gone far enough. I think people should be allowed to pay more for no advertising at all. Think about it. You pay for cable right? Wouldn’t you be willing to pay a little more not to see any ads on cable at all? Maybe we should demand that. Maybe we should demand to pay more not to see ads before movies–or “prominent product placement” in movies. Maybe there should be a movement towards paying more not to plagued by ads.

Until then, we have to engage in all these tricks to avoid ads. We zip through the ads on rented movies. We zip through the ads on stuff we record off the cable. I hit the mute button constantly when watching TV. Seeing ads without any sound robs them of a lot of their power.

How to block those damn banner ads!

And you can do the same thing on the Internet. There are banner ad blockers that people can add to their browsers to prevent banner ads from loading or displaying. To find one for your browser and system, visit Junkbusters (The code of Internet Junkbuster has since moved into SourceForge and many improvements have been added. Go take a look!). They have a list and advice. Their Internet Junkbuster proxy is free and does lots of great things to control your electronic wake. There is also a more user-friendly version of this technology called Guidescope.

You can also use style sheets to hide banner ads on your site, if you are forced to display them. Just use IMG {display: none;} and then set up a class with the rule {display: inline;} for your images. Your images just call the class and are displayed. Of course this only works for browsers that support style sheets.

A client-side script to stop those annoying popups

Cover of Adbusters Magazine #7Bothered by those annoying popups on “free” web hosting sites? Do you wish you had something to stop them from bothering you?

Some browsers and some browser plug-ins allow you to adjust your browser’s security depending on where you are. For example, you can tell some browsers to shut off page scripting and Java support while in some particular location. For example, a site or even a whole domain. These browsers and browser plug-ins will switch scripting and Java back on once you leave that domain or site. Take advantage of that. If you have that ability at your disposal, you’ll never be plagued by popups or branding watermarks again. Of course the drawback is that, in shutting off the popups, you shut off everything else, included scripts you may want to see. Oh well.

Another thing you could try is to fight fire with fire.

The problematic ThirdVoice annotation tool

Photo of police threatening protestors in Seattle, 1999.

I was at the WTO demonstration in Seattle. It really was as bad as all that.

ThirdVoice would actually be a neat idea if it was done better. I loaded it the other day and tried it out. I saw a few neat things that people said about sites but, mostly I saw junk notes–spam, I guess you could call it. It is a neat idea to be able to annotate sites with your own personal notes (sort of like writing notes in the margin of a book). It is also a neat idea to be able to comment on specific passages or objects in a site and have that commentary be seen by other people. But there are two problems to be dealt with:

  1. How can site owners control what people plaster messages on their site. Should they be allowed to? Is it graffiti or useful, constructive commentary that shouldn’t be silenced?
  2. How do users of ThirdVoice filter all the useless junk annotations to get to the useful comments?

ThirdVoice claims to be improving the software so that it will somehow answer these two problems. Until then, Michel van Baalen, Christian Graham and others offer page scripts that block or other wise disable ThirdVoice.

Actually, savvy guy that I am, I heard about the idea of Web annotation long before ThirdVoice claimed to have invented it. There’s a server based tool called CritSuite that was invented by some folks over at The Foresight Institute. I read about it in a newsletter in ’96. They posted their first annotation in ’97, nearly two years before ThirdVoice made their claim to be first.

CritSuite behaves like ThirdVoice except it isn’t client-side and as such it doesn’t depend on which browser you’re running. It’s truly interoperable and can even work with Lynx! Also since CritSuite is currently being run and supported on servers that belong to a non-profit organization of scientists and engineers, that is, Foresight, I have better assurances of the quality of the annotations and notes. Also the notes can be moderated and the application is open source, which means you can download the code, tweak it, compile it and run it on your own server! How’s that Third Voice? If you want to boycott ThirdVoice, yet like the idea of Web annotations, try CritSuite.

Maybe a better way of doing site annotation is allow the Web author maintain control by running the service on the site. There are already some applications that do this.

Addendum: Since I wrote this in late 1998, things have changed. Web annotation technology has continued to progress yet it still remains deeply problematic.

Free, junkmail-blocking e-mail

Still from the movie Twelve Monkeys where Dr. Peters confronts Dr. Railly.

“I think, Dr. Railly, you have given your ‘alarmists’ a bad name. Surely there is very real and very convincing data that the planet cannot survive the excesses of the human race: proliferation of atomic devices, uncontrolled breeding habits, the rape of the environment, the pollution of land, sea, and air. In this context, isn’t it obvious that ‘Chicken Little’ represents the sane vision and that Homo Sapiens’ motto, ‘Let’s go shopping!’ is the cry of the true lunatic?”

There are a few things you should know to prevent your e-mail box from being filled up with unsolicited bulk e-mail:

  1. Always use spambot braking strings when posting your e-mail address in public places, like Web pages, Usenet posts, chat room profiles and so on.
  2. Even then, use free, Web-based e-mail addresses when posting your mail address in public places. As unsolicited bulk mail builds in frequency, you can always discard the account, get a new one and tell you new and old friends where your new account is–the spam can rot in your old account.
  3. Never tell anyone your mail address if you cannot easily change it.
  4. Protect the privacy of yourself and others by putting all addresses for group mailings on the blind carbon copy (BCC) line, if you mail client supports it. This way if anyone tries to group reply, they can only reply to you. Always ask your friends to do the same when they include you in group mails.
  5. Set up a white list in you mail client or with your free web mail service if they allow it. A white list automatically routes all mail from friends on your contact list to the inbox and all mail from addresses not your white list to a suspicious mail folder for you to check over later.
  6. There used to be a wonderful free mail service called MessageTo. It died in the dot-com crash. What I am waiting for is an open source version of this thing so I can install it on my own mail server.
Posted in Security and Privacy, The Future | Comments Off on Zip the commercials!

Background for Chumbe Bandia

Posted on February 21, 2000 by Pace Arko

What is the Industrial States Trust?

In Chumbe Bandia, the Industrial States Trust, or simply, IT, is the name of an alliance of economically powerful and highly technological countries who, before the war, ruled the global economy. Most of the world’s multinational corporations had their head offices in these countries. Their sphere of influence contained most of Africa, India and South America. Over past forty years, in this timeline, the military, economic, environmental and political policies of this block has alienated a significant portion of the global populace.

What is the Bioregional Progress?

This alliance originally started as a political philosophy espoused by certain eco-terrorists, labor agitators and, later, militants fighting against colonial rule. In several ways the ideology corresponds to that followed by the Unibomber, the Khemer Rouge and the Shining Path. Its strange mixture of totalitarian socialism, xenophobic nationalism and deep ecology drove revolutionaries to overthrow governments in the developing world. Before the war, the sphere of influence of the BP bloc contained Europe, North Asia and a growing portion of the newly independent North American counties. It should be made clear that even though Bioregionalist thought contains several strongly anti-technological themes, the BP nations are unafraid to use any technology to achieve their ends, and invest heavily in military research.

What is the Commonwealth of Independent States?

This loose alliance arose in response to the polarizing of the world between the Industrial Trust and Bioregionalists. It is a small number of neutral counties in the regions of Australia, Oceania, North America, Europe and Asia.

What does Zombie mean?

The Czech loan word, robot, doesn’t exist in the world of Chumbe Bandia. In this world, the meaning of the West African word, zombie, evolved from its origins in African myth to mean the same thing as robot means in our world. In Chumbe Bandia, zombie means exactly the same thing as robot–a machine that does the work of a human being.

Why is game called Chumbe Bandia?

Chumbe bandia [pronounced choom-bay bahnd-ee-ah] is Swahili and it means, literally, “creatures of a synthetic nature.” I was the closest I could come to finding an expression, after combing the African language sites, that meant something similar to the expression artificial life without using loan words. The Era Chumbebandia might be best translated as the Synthozoic Era

Who is Shango and What is Shango Station?

Shango is a sky god among the Yoruba. Sometimes called the “Lord of Lightning,” he is known to be god of victory and male virility. As such he is often found as a nickname on military hardware such as tanks, planes, smart bombs and powered exoskeletons.

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Chumbe Bandia

Posted on February 21, 2000 by Pace Arko

“Entry 64

“Things are quiet now and I have a few to jot a note in my diary before before they send us to Prep. Warden Mausa says it’s another sample mission?just routine. That’s a patent lie though. If these things were routine, they wouldn’t send political prisoners to do them.

“Like I said before I hate Prep. They strip you naked, dunk you in chemicals and flash burn your body hair off. Then they shoot you full of every antibiotic known to medicine, stuff you in an itchy paper jumper, shrink-wrap an environment suit on you and finally send you to the airlock where your gun, armor and tools are waiting. After that it’s a mile hike up ladders and stairs to get to the surface. And that’s just to go up to the surface. Coming back, if you come back, is worse.

“The funny thing is they haven’t confiscated my diary yet. They know I have it cause it’s impossible to hide it in the cells. I guess they feel it will keep me diverted or perhaps they think I will forget how to read. It’s hard to guess what the Directorate thinks.

“The Directorate says it’s just trying to win the world back and that humanity is hanging by a thread and, as such, harsh measures are needed. That’s it. Gaurd’s here. Hope this isn’t my last entry

“Mweli Msisi
Shango Station
22 CB

“Entry 137

“It’s hard to remember things. For the politicals, they routinely administer drugs and surgery on them to?I won’t say destroy?to edit?memory. They’ve got this chemical, administered by medical microbots implanted in your brain, that’s supposed to render the brain more plastic. They try to wash away what they don’t want while at the same time rending the brain more receptive to learning new things.

“I can’t even remember my parents now. They died in the early stages of the way. This diary is the only way I have to remember things. I suspect now that they tamper with it while I am away on sample missions or when I am at learning sessions. Did I just write this? Or did I just fabricate the memory that I did in order to rationalize what I see here?

“Mweli Msisi
Shango Station
22 CB

“Entry 651

“Where to start? How to describe the end?

“It began as a dispute over mineral rights in the frozen waste of the Polar Continent. At the time, Earth was divided into three political groups: The Industrial States Trust, The Bioregional Progress and the Commonwealth of Independent States. The dispute became a shooting war. Considering the amount of money the BP and IT alliances spent on defense over the past forty years, it was only a matter of time before someone attempted to use weapons of mass destruction. It began with plague weapons being used by the BP. The IT retaliated with nuclear and kinetic weapons, which the BP answered in kind. Civilization began to fall apart but, the governmental and military command structures managed to remain intact on both sides even though the populations of many nations were reduced to a tiny fraction of their pre-war numbers. This was possible because the automated factories kept pouring out war materials despite repeated bombardment.

“It was then that the IT introduced the Hunters. The First Global War was 6 years old. Hunters were simple zombies, not much smarter than insects, that were produced by small, mobile factories called Mothers. Hunters had a very simple goal: Find and destroy the enemy. Or at least find and destroy those who could not identify themselves as friendly with the correct, ciphered, control signals. A new arms race began as each side invented smarter and tougher creatures and smarter and tougher countermeasures.

“And so things went for another two years.

“It was then that we began to find new varieties of war zombies whose origins didn’t seem to correspond to any known enemy design. By then it was already too late. They were beyond our control. The Era Chumbebandia had begun.

“Now, as I sit in one the endless vaults of Shango Station, the Reign of Humanity appears to be over.”

–Excerpted and translated from the diaries of Mweli Msesi, Enlisted, of the 43rd Army, Territorial Defense Forces, Industrial Trust.

This is your typical humans versus the robots story but with a with a twist. It takes place in an alternate history where Africa, not Europe, rises to global dominance first. Not only that but technical advances occur more rapidly in this history than in our history. The people of this world built computers and gene manipulation 300 years earlier than we did.

Rules for Chumbe Bandia

I would prefer if you use GURPS or the Hero System if you want to give me a character. Those are the point based systems I know. Before you even start thinking about point totals though, you’d better write up a detailed life history first. This game is about psychological themes and melodrama not about power gaming a set of statistics. The rules are going to be an extremely abstract concept in this game and I plan on being quite arbitrary. If you wanna just run around and kill things go play StarCraft or Quake or something.

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What I Have to Say About Music

Posted on February 21, 2000 by Pace Arko

Or, how a young man was warped by endless exposure to college radio

When I was a kid I really couldn’t make up my mind about music. Like a lot of kids, I was a knee-jerk nonconformist and as such couldn’t possibly mellow out enough to admit that I liked the stuff that my friends were listening to. No, I had to be different (even though I didn’t viscerally realize what a paradox nonconformity was). So I vehemently pronounced my fondness for European classical music while all my friends were rocking out to the Led Zeppelin and Earth, Wind and Fire. I was determined to like a kind of music my friends would hate.

It was then that I discovered punk and the new wave. Initially my reaction was negative but, once I discovered that most of the kids I knew hated it, I just had to like it. Silly, huh? I became one on those irritating legions of kids who scoffed at anything they put on MTV. Kids have a hard time being relaxed about stuff. It’s probably because they don’t really know what their opinions should be so, they grab any fleeting thing and immediately, and loudly, deify it. I was like that. Sometimes I still am.

The KCMU promotional sticker. I first got this way back in the late 1980s.I was lucky to live in a town where they had this excellent radio station that played all the stuff that I wanted to hear. They played all the stuff that other stations wouldn’t touch–hard core thrash, hip hop, dub, ska, power pop, etc. I made it through university and the Reagan years by listening to this station. I still listen to this station. Despite a few close calls and some controversy it has remained true to its roots. I am watching this station closely to make certain Paul Allen doesn’t pervert it into a vehicle to buy respect for his silly museum.

I didn’t buy a lot of vinyl back then mostly because I couldn’t afford to (I saved everything to pay for school.). Besides, one of the central ideas of punk was that music was temporary. Why buy a record when you would get sick of it in a few months anyway? As such I didn’t really participate in the CD revolution until well into the nineties. I didn’t even have a stereo set. I didn’t start buying music CDs until I bought a computer that could play them. Now they have my favorite station on streaming live on the Internet. That means no matter where I go in the world I’ll always have it to listen to and share with friends!

Anyway now that I am an acerbic geezer, I am very pleased that my musical tastes are still eclectic and maybe even hip. The Music of Superheroes

What do you think is rousing stuff? Ever since discovering the stuff back in the middle of the Eighties, I’ve always loved the South African musical genre labled “township jive.” Actually this label is used to lump together several things: kwela, tsonga, shangaan, mbaqanga, maskanda and others. Basically you recognize township jive when you hear it. It has fast, agressive bass beat with a sort of loping melody. It often begins with a intentional “tuning up sound” often on electric guitar, violin or saxophone which then launches into a dense, driving rhythmic melody. The tunes or short and fast or long and fast. Apparently SA DJs don’t believe in the three minute standard for pop songs. The best stuff has lots of non-traditional (by Western standards) instruments. Violins, accordians, concertinas, pennywhistles and horn sections.

Actually most of the music pouring out of Africa these days is worlds better than most of the stuff here in the States. I don’t know, music sounds better to me when I don’t understand the lyrics.

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Role Playing Games in Twenty-first Century

Posted on January 12, 2000 by Pace Arko

I’m a hardcore nerd and, as proof, I relate the following history:

The title page of Ultima Nasty a dungeon adventure written by Greg Lowney, David Griffith and Jim Sather.

The cover of Ultima-Nasty a dungeon adventure designed and written by my high school friends in Seattle, 1980. i was there at the creation of this deeply warped reply to Monty Haul gamemasters.

I starting playing Dungeons and Dragons back in high school the late Seventies, just as the hardbound rulebooks were coming out. Around the same time, a friend of mine wrote his own versions of ADVENT and Rogue (known to some as Nethack.) which we all played on one of the local university’s mainframes he rented time on. And of course I went to a lot of science fiction conventions during those days.

I played RPGs with friends steadily until about 1983. Then friends moved away or moved on to less nerdy pursuits and university was taking up too much of my time. It wasn’t until late in 1989 that I met some new friends who re-introduced the hobby to me and I’ve been playing steadily ever since.

Things had changed quite a bit since 1977. Role-playing games and much of the rest of nerd subculture had grown into a multimillion dollar industry. It was even making some waves in the crowd of art geeks.

The box cover of the D&D basic set. I started with this in 1978.Along with many other games like chess, go and Monopoly, all aspects of role-playing games had been infiltrated by computers. Many of the old war and strategy games (Like Diplomacy, Squad Leader and Snits Revenge.) friends and I used to play had evolved into things like Warcraft, Zork, Warlords, Civilization, Wolfenstein and their ilk.

For those that favored plot over mere combat, there were now RPG campaigns run in e-mail discussion lists and site bulletin boards. They took a long time but it truly was collaborative story writing. I used to do a lot of this on Compuserve before the Internet was introduced to the general public.

For people who still preferred to do their RPGs live, a wide variety of bookkeeping software emerged to reduce the clerical load. For example, these tools generated maps, NPCs, plot hooks, terrain descriptions and so on.

Everquest and Asheron’s Call, which are the direct descendants of ADVENT and Rogue, (Incidentally, are one of the few things on the Internet, aside from pornography, that are making any money now.) are excellent example of were things stand now.

Hmm. need to put that Stan Mack cartoon here. Science Fiction conventions.

Posted in Games, Personal | Comments Off on Role Playing Games in Twenty-first Century

Militant Extremists To Radically Impose Conversion (METRIC)

Posted on August 5, 1999 by Pace Arko

Or, why I decided to form a terrorist cell to serve a sadly neglected cause

Okay.

Screenshot of Metric Marvels educational cartoonHow many of you remember when they promised us in grade school, back in the Seventies, that they’d convert this country over to the metric system by the time we were in college? Remember that? Remember the “brave new world” they promised us? How, at last, we’d finally be in congruence with the rest of the world? How many remember those little Schoolhouse-Rock-like educational cartoons they had every Saturday morning? The ones where they had those superheroes who represented each of the metric units? Remember those?

It was deep in the oil embargo and gas line panic, when the United States was finally getting a much needed wake up call–when we desperately needed a reality check. The bold promise was made to convert everything to the System International (the metric system).

What happened?

Where is this promised conversion?

A photo of Jimmy Carter, my generation's version of Woodrow Wilson.It all disappeared in the delusional escapism that voted out the disturbingly prescient reality of Carter and voted in the Warm, Vapid Cowboy of the Eighties. I was in high school at the time. All around me, I saw everyone abandoning the vision. People still using the old measurements in casual speech. The complaints were rampant. The back-sliding evident everywhere. They put a few token metric measurements on cereal boxes and made a few metric socket wrench sets and then smugly forgot the whole thing.

Remember when nearly all Japanese and European cars had speedometers that only had increments in kilometers? Now they are all in miles! They are pandering to the idiots in this country!

Remember when NASA destroyed that space probe bound for Mars a year or so back? It was because the engineers and scientists got confused by using two measuring systems–a confusion that should not have existed in the first place! Converting back and forth increases the chance for error. If we only had one system in this country that chance would have been eliminated!

WHAT HAPPENED?

WHY ARE WE STILL USING “MILES” AND “POUNDS” IN CASUAL CONVERSATION?

Think about it. The excuses offered by engineers (The ones who should know better! The ones who should have been in the vanguard of the revolution!), in their attempts to rationalize their lazy attachment to a measuring system that should have died with nineteenth century, are the worst! They show how pervasive and virulent the mental cancer is!

The gradualists have had their chance. They coddled the foot draggers for decades now.

The dream was corrupted and compromised. The slackers and no-nothings won!

Well I say this has gone far enough!

It is time for a cleansing of memes. This country’s collective mind needs a purification and purging. Radical change is needed! Overnight. Cold. No handholding and no mental crutches involving two measurement systems!

It is time for harsh measures!

Photo of a metal meter stick. Go metric or go home!I propose a radical front. Those like minded comrades should join with me in setting things straight! Extreme acts may be necessary to wake this nation out of its complacency. The captains of industry must be forced to deal with us! The government must be brought to heel! Acts of sabotage and vandalism may be needed!. Boycotts and strikes will be called for! I propose that anyone who so much as even breathes the words “ounce,” or “inch,” or “Fahrenheit” should be maimed at the fingers! Any engineers caught designing any pieces of technology in round increments of the old system should be violently executed on national television as an example to the others! All evidence, save that of historical interest, of the old system will be destroyed! All measuring devices based on the old system must be broken down and the materials recycled. There shall only be one set of units in this country. All the cereal boxes, all the pop bottles, all road signs, all floppy disks–everything will measured by one system! There shall only be one standard of tools in every mechanic’s workshop! By sabotage, we will make it too expensive for them not to convert!

The fires of change shall be fueled by burning yardsticks!

WE WILL NOT STOP UNTIL THE STREETS OVERFLOW WITH THE MILK AND GASOLINE SPILLED FROM THE SMASHED TANKS AND CARTONS OF THE OLD ORDER!

WHO IS WITH ME?

*Yes, the pun is intentional.

**Please note that some browsers are unable to properly display the <SATIRE> element.

Posted in Personal, The Future | Comments Off on Militant Extremists To Radically Impose Conversion (METRIC)

Thoughts to Spur Discussion

Posted on August 5, 1999 by Pace Arko

Or, what few, vapid ideas Mr. Farlops could think of to spur discussion in his bulletin board.

History is not a fractal and history is not a cycle. History is an infinite landscape that always changes, and while looking self-similar in parts, never repeats. Progress doesn’t lead to some final resolution. Progress replaces old problems with new ones.

The world continues to shrink. There is an idea, currently fashionable in some quarters, that the world should balkanize into tiny little microstates and bioregions. I thought this was an idea that failed and died with the Middle Ages. We must move on to grander things. I think I’ll see a global government within my lifetime. Some folks hate the idea of a global government but, they are ignoring all the trends moving in that direction. I think a global government will solve some of the problems that have been vexing us for most of this century. Of course it will create new ones in the process but, everything is a mixed blessing. I think it will be more positive than negative.

A color photo Bill Burroughs in full gangster mode.

“I am getting so far out, one day I won’t come back at all.”

Why is cool always associated with youth? The great blues artists get cooler and cooler as they get older and older. William S. Burroughs got cooler as he got older. He showed us that there was alternative to the artist dying from suicide at a young age–just get older, grittier, more psychotic, cynical and paranoid as time goes on–die old and testily with an unfinished agenda. That’s truly cool.

Y’know what I think would be really nifty? What if we could power the human body with solar energy? Instead of eating, we could just lie in the midday sun for a few hours and be good to go for the rest of the day. We’d still have to eat and excrete a little bit, if only to add to and replace the materials our body needs to repair itself but, think of it! If we were solar powered that would dramatically lessen our impact on the environment. A good 60 to 80 percent of the farmland in the world could be allowed to go wild again. Our sewage bill would be much smaller. Cooking would become a true art form as opposed to a skill needed to survive.

We’ve been too big for this planet for thousands of years now. Hunter-gatherers of ages past were responsible for mass extinctions all around the world. Our environmental record has never been very good. What we need is a backup copy of the Earth while we learn to stop trashing this one.

Why is battery technology so backward? Like cathode ray tube technology, which is over a hundred years old, it seems stuck in the nineteenth century while the rest of electronics seems hell-bent shrinking to quantum dot size. Why is that?

I read someplace that noise, that is truly random noise, can be thought of as a maximally complex thing. If you imagine noise as a collection of dots in phase space, you can map an infinite number of connect-the-dots pictures onto that collection. Basically you can get nearly any coherent pattern out of noise if you apply the right filters. If you imagine an in infinitely complex thing, the thing you wind up with looks like noise. This makes me wonder about that new SETI project found at the SETI@home Web site. The project works like this:

  • All the computers that participate download recordings of radio telescope data from the SETI site.
  • Most of these recordings appear to be random, cosmic background noise
  • The participating computers process this data, using sophisticated mathematical filters in hopes of finding a non-random pattern.
  • A set of criteria, criteria I wish I knew more about, is then used to determine if the pattern may be of artificial origin. For example, say we find radio pulses in a sequence of prime numbers. No astrophysical process that we know of generates prime numbers so, that pattern is a good candidate for artificial origin.

Maybe you see where this is headed. See, if noise can have an infinite number of patterns mapped onto it, isn’t there a possibility we may fool ourselves? Wouldn’t the aliens, if they wanted to talk to someone, be a lot more obvious about it?

Posted in Miscellaneous, Personal | Comments Off on Thoughts to Spur Discussion

Interests

Posted on July 21, 1999 by Pace Arko

Music

My musical tastes tend towards the eclectic. Perhaps a good expression to use in characterizing them is “college radio.” The stuff you hear on college radio at 3 in the morning gives a good example of what I listen to. Pop music from Africa is horrifyingly cool. Also, despite being a geezer, I have a special fondness for politically driven rap music and the atmospheric/electronica/techno music pouring out of Europe. Good friends have recently introduced bhangra music to me and I’ve always been a big fan of ska.

Science and technology

I’ve always, always, always had an inclination towards the scientific. I’d like to believe Huygens’ enlightenment ideal of the world being my state and science my religion. I read the latest advances voraciously. Among other fields, I’ve focused on mathematics, molecular biology, physics, cosmology, neurology and occasionally, artificial life and intelligence. I am an ardent skeptic, atheist and a big fan of James Randi. Open minds are great just make sure your brain doesn’t fall out.

Science fiction

I don’t read science fiction nearly as much as I used to. I think it’s kind of a dead genre. Recent developments in computers, cognitive science and chemical engineering have made even the most lurid of tales too conservative for what is actually to come. Even physics is getting a little too weird.

Role-playing games

Upon discovering this pastime in high school, back during the days of the Great Personality Cult of Gygax, I immediately fell into addiction with it. To this day, despite many of my peers growing up and moving on to more passive forms of entertainment, I guiltily waste hours of my fast disappearing time in playing these games. I still try to rationalize it many ways–the godlike, creative urge to build worlds, the exploration of alter-egos, tribal story telling, improvisational theater, interactive literature, psychodrama–but in the end I can’t shake the feeling that I’m is a middle-aged adolescent who refuses to give up playing “let’s pretend.”

Editorial rants

If you read the site, you’ll see I love to rant and nitpick about things that seem trivial and hopelessly obscure. These things raise hackles no end. From matters like “Why the Extroprians simplify things too much,” to “The global market needs a global government or, how free-market worshipers will find a new set of regulations to whine about.”

Other Interests

I am a mercurial sort and seem to prefer being a generalist than a specialist. What happens is I occasionally express great curiosity in a thing, learn what I can about it and then discard it as uninteresting. As such my head is a huge trash heap of trivia. I seem unable to focus myself long enough on anything to become particularly successful at it. If my life has a purpose it appears to be to soak up knowledge and eat curries. Perhaps this is a prelude to greater things, but veteran Pace-watchers aren’t laying any money on it. In times past, I’ve has toyed with making animated films, puppetry, writing, scratch model building, cartooning and improvisational comedy. Now it’s computers and Web development, this appears to be persisting so far.

Posted in Personal | Comments Off on Interests