Farlops Industries

My History with Gizmo Wristwatches

When I was in college back in the middle Eighties, I had a Casio calculator watch. This was the expensive apotheosis of nerdery back then. In the Eighties Japan was kicking everyone's ass in consumer electronics. At the time microchips had become so cheap that towards the end of the decade, they were giving away cheap watches in cereal boxes. Smart people in the wristwatch industry--that is to say, nobody in Switzerland or the US--realized that the only way to keep the prices up was to jam more functions in the box, thus the Casio C 80 calculator watch. Walking around with this thing strapped to my wrist made me feel like Mr. Spock or Dr. Who.

Anyway, fast forward to the beginning of the Twenty-first Century.

My Xonix wristwatch, which served me very well for more than four years partially broke several months ago. Actually it would have served even longer. It's just that I broke the stem for the analog watch when trying to replace its battery. I now have no way of setting the watch but, everything else still works--the digital recorder, the thumb drive, the ear buds, everything. In our diminished expectations of product quality in these modern times, I consider that pretty good endurance. But if the analog watch doesn't work, I just can't stand to wear it on my wrist. I'm keeping it as spare parts for a friend's Xonix watch of the same model.

Continue reading "My History with Gizmo Wristwatches" »

Posted by Pace Arko at 3:51 PM on February 23, 2008

Hm, it's been a while since I've said anything

So I haven't wrote anything here for all of January and most of December. Actually I've been writing up tentative entries on the bus to and from work but nothing has jelled up into a good article to post here.

It's the digital equivalent of the horror of the blank page that all authors must face at some point. Sometimes something comes, sometimes it seems like it's all been said and said by people smarter than you.

One of the ways I think I can get around this problem is to talk about my hobbies. I have a game session coming up and that will give me a write up then. My gaming pals love my summaries of game sessions. But I could broaden this by talking about table-top role-playing games in general. (Sigh. I remember when just saying role-playing games was sufficient. But software has changed all this now.):

• I did start a couple of entries on the history of my role-playing campaign: Udra. I really should finish this up.
• I could make these histories very detailed or at least as detailed as my memory and 29 year old paper can allow for.
• I could talk about table-top RPGs in general. Commentaries of rules and variations. I've done a little of this already. For example I could talk about how to use computers to aid in bookkeeping and note-taking in game sessions. It would great to have a computerized miniatures map that would help everyone keep track of the physics. As a game master, I'd love to have this so I could concentrate on the descriptive stuff and mood.

Anyway, maybe some other subjects will come to me. I've been thinking about ways to force people to use encrypted mail and whether I want to sign up for EVDO service for example. Something will come.

Posted by Pace Arko at 4:06 PM on February 8, 2008

Narnia for Atheists?

A few hours ago a friend sent me mail about Philip Pullman's fantasy series His Dark Materials. One of the novels in this series was recently made into a movie called The Golden Compass. Apparently there is some controversy over this series, which I have not read and only heard about recently, that the books are propaganda for atheism posing as genre literature.

As an atheist, I don't quite see what the problem is. Isn't that what C.S. Lewis did with for Christianity with his Narnia series? If His Dark Materials becomes the atheist's Narnia, fair is fair.

A long parenthetical comment follows:

Continue reading "Narnia for Atheists?" »

Posted by Pace Arko at 1:04 AM on November 2, 2007 | Comments (4)

Goodbye Lola.

In early August my cat, Lola, was diagnosed with failing kidneys. The vet put her on a special diet, subcutaneous hydration and prescribe various medicines but the prognosis wasn't good. It was mostly wait and see. She was old, over 16 years old.

Years ago when I set up this site, I promised myself I'd never put lame stories and pictures about the antics of my cat. I guess this entry is a violation of that promise.

My cat, Lola, was declawed. She had spent most of her life without claws on her front feet. This was not something I chose for her; it was the decision of her previous owners. I've sometimes daydreamed about regrowing her claws. To me, claws are a defining aspect of being a cat. Without claws, Lola was just a cute, furry pillow that purred a lot. She couldn't express her displeasure any other way aside from, hissing, hiding or urinating on things.

She continued to loose weight, eating less and less, voiding less and less.

Veterinary medicine is not as closely regulated as human medicine. You only have to look at how animals are treated in factory farms to know that. I think that this is where all the controversy surrounding human stem cell therapy can be bypassed. Some people do care if animals are mistreated but there isn't really a vocal group that objects to fetal stem cell use in animals. This removes a lot of ideological barriers that slow the advance of medicine.

Continue reading "Goodbye Lola." »

Posted by Pace Arko at 3:51 PM on October 15, 2007 | Comments (2)

Soot clung to my plastic bags.

4 or 5 hours ago an apartment in my building caught fire. It was on the second floor, on the northwestern corner of the building. I'm not certain, but I think it started in the bedroom of that unit because that's where most of the flames were jetting out. At this moment, I still have no idea what caused it but, my first suspicion is that somebody was smoking in bed. Or maybe it was a candle. I don't know.

Continue reading "Soot clung to my plastic bags." »

Posted by Pace Arko at 10:06 AM on May 11, 2007 | Comments (5)

Other People's Dead Tech

One side-effect of my part-time vocation as a computer technician is that people often give me their dead gadgets and old software. Actually they don't give it to me. What really happens is that I see they are about to throw it out and that compels me to mention that there are dozens of places around King County that would take it off their hands to recycle it. They defer to me as the technician and just assume that I know what I'm talking about. They say, "Oh what a relief! I hate throwing out old printers. Here Pace! You know what to do!"

Continue reading "Other People's Dead Tech" »

Posted by Pace Arko at 11:11 PM on April 20, 2007 | Comments (3)

Loy Krathong

First, on Thursday night, I finally prepared Odinmank's data for incorporation into the MT setup on Xenon. It went very quickly. The only thing remains is for the Fish to tune a photo gallery plug-in (Why do people say "fine tune?" Doesn't "tune" mean precise adjustments?) to deal with the King of Corsica's illustrations and Odin's photos. Then we'll launch his new bloggy site.

This sort of brings me round to Loy Krathong (ลอยกระทง).

Continue reading "Loy Krathong" »

Posted by Pace Arko at 1:28 AM on February 4, 2007

Working in a coal mine, going down, down--

So where have I been these last two months? I've been extremely busy:

• Building a website for a new customer. (Yes, I know the site concerns rather dull subject matter but it pays the bills.)
• Shipping out a lot of orders, updating their site and doing lots of technical support for my new employer.
• Trying to figure out how to make this difficult bit of software work for a small doctor's office I support.
• Sundry other things--updating other sites for other customers, getting my taxes ready, holidays, etc. etc.

It's weird. For nearly a year, no serious work and then all of sudden a deluge of tasks. There are still many projects I have yet to do before things diminish to a dull roar here at the mighty, mighty Farlops Industries. Let me list them in order of priority:

1. Moving Lord Odinmank's site into Movable Type. I plan start this immediately upon launching the Dice Institute site.
2. Updating this site and this site. I will not start these until point one is launched.
3. Way back in November and over the sea, in Thailand, Odinmank launched a few lanterns to memorialize Wade.  I want to add those images and text to Wade's memorial before it scrolls off my root page.
4. Income taxes should be easier this year now that I've finally got a system in place to keep track of things. No declarations this year either.
5. A few more installments of the Udra's History.

I even worked on MLK Day and didn't even give him a post, something I've been pretty strict about. Just all of a sudden paying gigs came hurtling out of the labor dimension. I'm thinking of raising my rates if this keeps up.

Not really a coherent entry but just thought I'd keep the site fresh with something this new year. Last year was very sparse in new posts, I hope to make up for that this year.

Posted by Pace Arko at 10:31 PM on January 28, 2007

My friend, Wade, is dead.

Every one is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows anybody.
Mark Twain, Following the Equator (1897)

I apologize for the length of the following. I didn't have time to make it concise.

How do I start?

On Monday evening, October 23rd, sometime before 6:24PM, a very close friend of mine for seventeen years, Wade J. Tyler, got into an argument over a utility bill with one of the tenants he was renting a room to. This might have just ended in a scuffle, thrown punches, someone calling the cops and perhaps a few charges, if Wade hadn't owned a shotgun. As it was, it ended in a murder-suicide.

I first heard this news on Wednesday the 25th. The cops had went through Wade's address book and started calling friends and relatives. People started calling people until eventually the news reached me.

How could Wade do something like this? How could this happen?

Continue reading "My friend, Wade, is dead." »

Posted by Pace Arko at 3:53 PM on November 7, 2006 | Comments (10)

The Web equivalent of Reno, Nevada

So a friend of mine sent me an e-mail from an Internet connection near some sunny beach overseas telling me he has a MySpace page.

This drove me into paroxysms of pointless, defensive snobbiness where I told him that he has his own web site, which is much better than MySpace. But I had to relent because there are things that Friendster and all those other, centralized social networking sites can do that a personal site can't. There are some social networking tools that are hard to decentralize.

The other thing is that this circumstance emerged because of my own laziness. I had been promising him for a number of months now to get his site folding to Movable Type. This would at last give him the ability to edit pages in the way he wants. It would give the general public a chance to comment on his pages.

I tried once before, about four years back, to get him into blogging with Greymatter but it didn't work well. Greymatter is limited and in some ways harder to use. Anyway we'll try it again with Movable Type.

Posted by Pace Arko at 11:10 PM on September 8, 2006 | Comments (2)

Udra: My RPG Campaign History in Several Parts

1989 to 1994: Udra Becomes More Serious, if Schitzophrenic.

After a long hiatus, between '84 and '89, where I pretended I was normal person and denied my true nature, I met a new friend who revived my interest in roleplaying games again. To start with, his first character he built was a cleric! No one had ever, in six years of play, built a cleric in my game. This foreboded a new direction. Coming up with campaign background actually made sense now because here was a player who actually appreciated and demanded it. He wanted names, gods, local histories, heraldry, politics--he wanted the lot. He also GM'd, like myself. His campaign and style became a model for me. It was very inspiring all of a sudden.

Continue reading "Udra: My RPG Campaign History in Several Parts" »

Posted by Pace Arko at 10:43 PM on August 31, 2006

Another MLK Day

Actually this entry is sort of bogus since I'm writing it on my staging server. I haven't yet finished adjusting my new installation of MT3.2 but, I wanted to mark the passing of this day. As stated before, it's a day I care about. I think it's a time to reflect on many things, the transcendent aspects of King's message. It's about human rights. It's about political ideals. It's about embracing change. It's about personal improvement. It's about group improvement.

Posted by Pace Arko at 10:57 PM on January 16, 2006

Milk

If I were wise, I would have drunk the Kool-Aid at Microsoft years ago and taken their offer of full employment. But I didn't. At the time, it didn't feel right and I was just leery of commitment. That was probably a mistake. It wouldn't have been my first and certainly won't be my last but I think I learned from it. Next time, go with the safe thing.

Regardless, here I am five years later, searching the job sites and signing up with temp agencies again. It was interesting to work for myself these last five years but, I just wasn't working hard enough to keep my income steady. There'd be these long dry periods where I'd have to burn some of my investments to pay bills. I can't afford to do that for much longer. I'm 42 and can't mess around like that anymore.

So I am heading back to wage-slavery. With any luck some of my applications might score me something steady.

I'll still be supporting my current customers indefinitely. To be frank their needs just don't take up enough of my time to really be a drain.

Anyway, that's part of the reason why I've been quiet here on my site. I've been job hunting.

Posted by Pace Arko at 8:40 PM on November 9, 2005

Some hobbies require a lot of work

When I know exactly what to do, I am pretty good at doing something. People have commented on how intense I am when I'm focused on something. This is odd because at the same time, I'm a lazy bastard. What I've found is that when I'm unsure how to do something, or if I'm unhappy with how something has turned out, I procrastinate. My perfectionism is such that I'll spin my mental wheels uselessly searching for and examining flaws in some idea I've had before I've even tried to realize that idea. I idle and avoid that which bothering me. Sometimes this works for me in my job because occasionally a solution will come to me and suddenly everything becomes easy again. But this is a rarity. Basically the pattern is:

• I don't know how to do something, and can't be bothered to learn something new, so I shut down.
• I perversely want to get it perfect the first time so, instead of doing anything, I dither and do nothing.

Either way it leads to procrastination. In the last twenty years I've learned a few ways of breaking these feedback loops:

1. Don't try and do something all at once if you've never done it before. For people like me, this leads to overwhelming levels of detail and to shut down. Try to break something down in stages and practice a lot on little pieces. Don't rush it.
2. Don't be afraid to ask for help. This one is especially hard for me. I have a lot of silly ego all tied up in how smart people think I am. Still don't be afraid to ask for help.
3. If it isn't perfect, nine times out of ten, your standards are a lot higher than most peoples. Sometimes there something to be said for just getting something in place and tweaking it until it gets better. This relates to number one above.
4. If the fun never comes, stop doing it. If it never gets easy, stop doing it. My friend Jeff practices on his bass constantly, almost mindlessly. If he's bored, he picks up his bass and plug it into his amp. He's compulsive about it and this rewards him. He can play the bass well.
5. Anything valuable has a hurdle to climb over. The brain doesn't do music or mathematics naturally. That's why these things are hard. These things require practice, practice, practice. Native talent will only get you so far.

The reason why I mention this is because I have a few intricate hobbies, that, to be enjoyed, require a lot of work. They are fun but I'm always haunted with this notion that I could do a better job at them. What I'm talking about here is gamemastering role-playing game sessions. Coming up with plots is one thing but doing all the work to realize events in rules and statistics is something I've gone slack in over the years.

Role-playing games are my hobby and they are a lot of fun. But to a certain extent I wonder if they can also be something that can magnify other parts of my life? Maybe if I get better at doing more work before running game sessions with my friends these habits will transfer to other areas of my life?

Posted by Pace Arko at 6:34 PM on August 8, 2005 | Comments (2)

The Continuum Between the Living and Nonliving

In the course of a rambling chat session with my old, old friend, who is currently in Southeast Asia now, the subjects of some of my past entries here and some recent mail I sent to him came up, namely vitalism, atheism and my contradictory, and rather embarrassing, impulses towards a kind of historical determinism. So I've decided to start some entries where I could clarify my views and, more importantly, expose their shortcomings. It's the shortcomings that are more illuminating.

I'm opening comments on these entries so, you'll be allowed to comment and raise arguments and I'll do my best to answer them or admit defeat. To prevent comment and backtrack spam, all comments and backtracks entered will be delayed from display until I approve them. This should be within a few hours of your entry, I beseech patience. In fits and starts the comments will grow.

Continue reading "The Continuum Between the Living and Nonliving" »

Posted by Pace Arko at 10:59 PM on July 7, 2005

Atheism is not for everybody

I think it takes a certain level of sophistication and maturity to be an atheist, a willingness to accept that meaning and purpose are entirely artificial, to take responsibility for the consquences of inventing meaning and purpose, a braveness to confront all ideas skeptically.

Some of my fellow atheists keep wanting to spread the enlightment. They're saying, "If only our educational system was better, there'd be more atheists and skeptics in the world." Why? Why should we try to impose our way of thinking on the rest of world? Isn't that exactly the sort of thing we accuse religion of? It's my opinion that atheism is not for joiners. Atheism is voluntary and should only be arrived at with hard and careful thinking. Skepticism is not really enlightenment, it's more like a method to find understanding. And frankly, some people are entirely able to function without this mode of thinking.

It's not for everybody.

Posted by Pace Arko at 5:28 AM on May 25, 2005

Time wasted on vitalism

Living things are complex machines. The mind is a process that occurs with the machine of the brain. There is no magical life susbstance or mind substance. There is no division between life and death, mind and mindlessness. It's all a continuum and many things lie in the gray area. Life and mind can be created artificially or emerge from natural, blind processes.

Saying this scares some people because it implies that gods and souls aren't necessary; they're irrelevent. The religious and the mystical are left only with faith, faith in purpose and meaning. Science doesn't really say anythying about purpose and meaning.

Posted by Pace Arko at 7:04 PM on May 19, 2005

Should I shut this thing down?

The trouble with writing things here is that I want to use it for at least three different purposes:

1. As a lab notebook for web design, XML and such.
2. Vague thoughts of the future of technology and society. I suppose if I was a real programmer/inventor I could combine this with purpose one.
3. Reviews of books, television, films, music, games that I've experienced.

I seem to do better at commenting on what others have written than in intitiallizing my own thoughts. This happens all the time when I comment on threads I've read on Orkut. I've wasted some great rants there! Rants that I should have here. But I can't have here simply because the general public reads this and I have to defend my privacy. To write well, you really have to care about something.

Continue reading "Should I shut this thing down?" »

Posted by Pace Arko at 11:54 PM on April 15, 2005

Martin Luther King Jr. Day

"Don't let anybody make you think God chose America as his divine messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world. God has a way of standing before the nations with justice and it seems I can hear God saying to America, 'You are too arrogant, and if you don't change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power, and I will place it in the hands of a nation that doesn't even know my name. Be still and know that I'm God. Men will beat their swords into plowshafts and their spears into pruning hooks, and nations shall not rise up against nations, neither shall they study war anymore.'"

I've found this MLK quote recently. Funny how things said during Vietnam seem so relevent now.

Posted by Pace Arko at 10:27 AM on January 17, 2005

Walking to buy cereal in the morning.

The last few entries were sort of environmental downers. I still stick by them though. In my most ridiculous daydreams, I imagine all of humanity forcably relocated to space colonies made out of ferrous asteriods. The Earth could then be restored to something close to what it used to be before we appeared on the scene seven million years ago.

Even though I love to walk, I am not one who really likes hiking or camping. Hiking and camping sort of depresses me when I think about all the roads that had to built to the national parks just to allow people the illusion of returning to nature. How is it really a return to nature if we have to drive a car or ride a tourbus to it? How is it really a return to nature if we have very careful rules about trash disposal and land use? Douglas Adams had a bit of satire about the cumulative erosion of eco-tourists to a beautiful resort planet. This is what I think about when walk to the store in the moring to buy cereal.

Posted by Pace Arko at 7:20 AM on September 17, 2004

Journalists can't be trusted on points of grammar

So Wired has decided to stop capitalizing the word, "Internet." Like I care. Let me tell you a story:

Back in 1996, when I first started work at Microsoft, our group's copy editors passed out style guidelines for our writing. These were based on rules laid down by the Associated Press. After two decades of getting Strunk and Chicago drummed into my head, I was horrified. All the rules I had painstakingly internalized to the point of unthinking habit were overturned simply because a few journos couldn't be bothered to underline or italicize book titles while in the middle of a boring press conference or something.

Rules of style and grammar are at some point entirely arbitrary and the chief thing is to stay consistent. And just because the rules I memorized are different from the rules you have imposed on me, doesn't mean I am wrong. So I am still capitalizing when I refer to the Internet, the Earth, the Moon or the Sun. I have reasons for doing so which are just as good as yours for not doing so.

Posted by Pace Arko at 10:15 AM on August 18, 2004

Who am I really?

A couple of days ago I turned 41. So who am I? Well, using a search engine, there are things you'll discover, things that I will confess to and even some embarrassing things. The rest you'll have to discover through reading the site. Initially the psuedonym was a joke but, now I hide behind it to keep an e-mail signal to noise ratio that approaches infinity.

What do I do in real life? I am a freelance webmaster and computer technician. Four years ago, I was the webmaster for Microsoft's assitive technology site, a position I first took in 1997. I had a vision about where things were headed, felt a little arrogant about my power and thus sallied out on my own--straight into the dot com crash. Oh well.

So where did the handle, Mr. Farlops, come from? I got it from the ska band Dr. Calypso who did this tune called, "Mr. Farlops." It's a punchy little number with the frequent chorus, "Who is that guy? Mr. Farlops!" The name stuck in my head and I decided to take it as a handle and eventually as the name of my business. Well meaning friends counciled me against taking the silly name "Farlops Industries" for a freelance proprietorship but, in a crowded field, being mnemonic counts for a lot and I am glad I didn't listen.

And because his life is a lot more interesting than mine, Mr. Farlops will live on, especially in gaming environments and dodgy rants. My real name will continue to be mildly hard to discover, especially for spambots. I will continue to be the humble secretary to an entirely ficticious person, hiding behind his greatness. The Farlopsian Bubble (An expression attributed to Odin.) shall be maintained.

Posted by Pace Arko at 7:35 AM on August 13, 2004

Where I stand in the political spectrum

Often I have a hard time explaining my politics to people. Or more factually, I'd rather avoid explaining my politics to people because I often find some point where I disagree with them. Or more exactly, I often find that my ideas fall apart and fail to conform with reality. Or, perhaps because I am an old fart now, I am beginning to understand why some views that I disagree with, at least initially, continue to persist.

You see, I've come to understand that opposing sides often have a large amount of truth. How else can it be that the right and left, after endless centuries of prosyletizing and explanation, continued to be baffled that the other side remains unconvinced. It irritates me that intellectuals on both sides of the fence think they've got all the answers. I guess the only thing I can really say is that Noam Chomsky oversimplifcations irritate me slightly less than George Will's oversimplifications. I guess that makes me a Democrat. In truth what really makes me a Democrat is that I've been voting that way and have been attending party meetings for about 2 decades now.

Anyway, I find myself disagreeing, but often saying nothing except what I hope to be leading questions, with my friends about a lot things. I have friends who are more of a libertarian, annoyed, politically-incorrect, white (mostly they are white.) male stripe (I believe the trendy term for people of this ilk is "South Park Republicans.") and I have friends who are more of the "anything corporations or the US foreign policy agencies, especially the military, does is unforgivably evil" stripe. I tend to fall silent or voice vague agreements when a friend of one stripe or the other begins to froth at the mouth. I force myself to remember that all of these people are intelligent and didn't arrive at there positions without a lot of thought and experience. I know that when they froth, they are mostly right. I really can't shoot down their positions entirely.

Yes, it is true that liberalized global trade sucks if you happen to be a worker in China or Nigeria; it pits workers in the post-industrial world against workers in the developing world. Yes, it is true that global trade is a fact and can, eventually, raise the living standards of these very same workers. See what I mean? These are both mostly true yet they are odds with one another. So I am stuck. So the controversy remains. If the answers were as simple as some make it out to be, there would be no controversy.

So I sit on the fence on a lot of these issues and take positions that would probably get me in trouble with some on one end or the other. For example, I am in favor of abortion and in favor of the death penalty. I am favor of appropriate technology and nuclear power. I am in favor of a person's right to own a gun and in favor of regulation of gun ownership. On some issues, I am pretty clear on. I believe there should be much stronger separation of church and state than there is. Sorry but prayers in Congress and political figures saying, "god bless [fill in the blank]..." is endorsement of religion. But nearly everything else is a muddle of contradictory truths for me.

The Republicans are using the tired, old "Look! He waffles!" argument against Kerry. But, if anything, that makes me sympathize even more with Kerry. If you are really honest about the issues, you are forced to change your mind more than once. Anyone who tells you otherwise is not really paying attention and is dangerously arrogant. Yes, it is true that there are moments where things are devestatingly clear and in those moments we need leaders who are firm and unshakeable in their positions. But, on the flipside, it's always hard to tell when fanaticism is appropriate or not.

I guess I am a political taoist. The truth is only catchable in little pieces and it's always changing. Taoism argues that there are times for firm, unyielding hardness and order (Fanatics have their necessary place.) and there are times for vague, protean, pragmatic wafflers (Technocrats have their necessary place too.).

With that I've arrived precisely nowhere and everywhere. Sigh. Well, that's where the world really is--paradox.

Posted by Pace Arko at 4:03 AM on June 5, 2004 | Comments (2)

Flakey theological speculations

Let's suppose there is an afterlife. I don't believe there is one, but let's just suppose there is. Why do most people automatically assume this means something? What if we die and and are reborn into a world that is just as confusing and meaningless and trivial as this one? What if we are reborn into an afterlife that brings us no closer to knowing the ultimate mysteries than we know now? The existance of an afterlife doesn't necessary entail the existance of god or gods. It doesn't necessarily mean anything except that there is something about physics that requires sapience to be transferred into this new existance. Is that just natural law or did the powers that be write things that way?

Just something to think about.

Posted by Pace Arko at 11:50 PM on May 27, 2004

Comments on my district caucus

Yesterday I spent 9 hours in a crowded, hot, school gymnasium for my district's Democratic Party Caucus. It was very rewarding, inspiring and pleasently exhausting and, it renewed my faith in the system.

Continue reading "Comments on my district caucus" »

Posted by Pace Arko at 4:00 AM on May 2, 2004

Words I am getting sick of

Techie, geek, technologist, web monkey.

What, isn't computer technician good enough? I am a web server technician. I am a network technician. I am not a computer scientist, engineer or computer programmer. I have no formal training in those things. Technician suffices in describing what I do without taking on presumptive airs like technologist or engineer does. It also doesn't sound cutsey like webmaster, geek or techie.

Newbie.

What, isn't "greenhorn" sufficient? Why invent a new, cutsey word when there are dozens of perfectly good words that apply?

Smilie, emoticon.

There used to be a time in the dim past when authors of letters and tracts used politeness and nuance to avoid misinterpretation of dry humor and satire. These days people have to rely on bogus punctuation to avoid misinterpretation. If what you are writing could be misinterpreted, don't send it. Re-write it so that it makes sense and carries the exact emotional nuance you intend. We laugh at the people of 17th, 18th and 19th centuries as being overly verbose and polite, but I think this was due to the culture of letter writers that existed at the time. Perhaps it is time we rediscovered these skills.

Posted by Pace Arko at 4:29 AM on April 30, 2004

So I am on Ork now

The Fish invited me to join his posse on Ork. Frankly I did this to humor him.

I looked at what the service offers and, it doesn't have any gimmicks to stand apart from other personals or socializing services. I was disappointed because, Ork is affiliated with Google and, I expect better from Google. I like Google News, Google Glossary, Google Groups and so on because these are all components of what their main mission is: search. I liked all the refinements they've added to make search easier and more powerful. Google is supposed be search, period, full stop. Getting involved in this makes Google like--yawn--another portal clone. Adding something like Ork makes them into--shudder--Yahoo or AOL. One could argue that helping folks to find other folks is still about search but, I don't agree.

Posted by Pace Arko at 12:04 PM on January 31, 2004

He's built for the future

There's been a lot of speculation about rejuvenation and longevity on the sites I've been reading during this month. Medical technology continues to relentlessly advance--today's speculation, tomorrow's reality. So what do I think about this? More accurately, since I've been thinking about it for a very long time, what have I thought about this?

Continue reading "He's built for the future" »

Posted by Pace Arko at 6:29 PM on January 28, 2004

It's MLK day, I don't work

Today and in years past I've honored Reverend King by not working on MLK Day. As I have stated, I care more about this day more then other holidays of this country. To me it's at least as important as the Forth because in the end what King had to say, what he fought for and what happened to him was just as defining as for this country as World War II, the Civil War, the Constitution or the War of Independence. What does it really mean to be citizen of this country? What really matters? What should we be proud of? What should we fight against? What is left to be done?

Posted by Pace Arko at 11:25 PM on January 19, 2004

The new year brings in the same depressing lack of progress

On Monday I just got back from a vacation down in Oregon--watched a lot of cable television while down there. I noticed that channels seem to be subdividing into het male and het female. Or something like that. For example, HGTV seems to be more of a female sort of channel, with scrapbooking and quilting shows, as if men never do these sorts of things. But that's not really true. I mean guys (both straight and gay) can get into gardening and house repair and improvement. Some guys love to geek out about plumbing, electrics and woodworking. TechTV on the other hand seems to be pretty heavily geared towards young hetrosexual men.

Continue reading "The new year brings in the same depressing lack of progress" »

Posted by Pace Arko at 4:09 AM on January 7, 2004

Pre-thanksgiving rant

I never liked Thanksgiving food. I mean I'll eat it, but I don't like it. The trouble with t-day is that it's too close to c-day, the official Cadillac of all holidays. If I need to reduce my karmic debt with my friends and family, I have plenty of other times during the year to do that, so if I make the rounds on c-day and new years, why do thanksgiving with them? Now my opinion of t-day would be much, much higher if it just had some decent food to eat. Gimme falafel, gimme sushi, gimme palak paneer, give me lots and lots of pesto or salsa and then be thankful! Why couldn't the Puritans have come from India, Mali or Italy as opposed to the UK? I've tasted some east coast Native American food and it wasn't very hot to start with. It's like the food of the UK combined with food of the Narraganset and Wampanoag in a terrible car wreck and now we all have to suffer through it.

Posted by Pace Arko at 11:22 PM on November 26, 2003

Fame. Puts you there, where things are hollow

I've recently come to the conclusion that many people could be famous, but they consciously or subconsciously avoid becoming so. Fame, at least in part, requires time, work, risks, the accumulation of controversy and, possibly, the gaining of ill will and enemies. Perhaps I am generalizing my own experience, but the pattern seems to be we are all exposed to opportunities or novelties and then we decide to plunge in or to stand outside and watch patiently for things to resolve.

Posted by Pace Arko at 4:46 AM on November 4, 2003

The BBC reverses the polarity of the neutron flow

This just in from the Wire of Insanely Cool News, after a forteen year hiatus, the Beeb decides to revive Dr. Who.

My aunt introduced this science fiction series to me, during an evening of watching KQED, way back in grade school in the early Seventies, during the reign of Jon Pertwee. I know I said that science fiction is dead only a few weeks ago, but I'll be watching for this to syndicate on Public Television or the SciFi Network in the months to come!

Posted by Pace Arko at 1:08 AM on September 30, 2003

I don't believe in American exceptionalism

What is American exceptionalism and how come I don't believe in it? Well there are probably a lot of people who will argue with my definition, but here it is:

• The United States is not merely unique, it is special, alone among the countries of the Earth.

I don't buy this.

Continue reading "I don't believe in American exceptionalism" »

Posted by Pace Arko at 3:50 AM on September 4, 2003

Religious Mistake Number 357

Mystical experiences aren't special because everyone has them or has the potential to have them. Mystical experience is just brain activity driven by internal feedback (Trance, prayer, meditation, obssession and so on.) or environmental factors (Drugs, starvation, fatigue, pain and so on.). This means we all have the potential to turn into prophets. Since we are predisposed to impose meaning on something that has no meaning, the problems start when someone foolishly attempts to interpret a subjective experience, and a trivial one at that, and then attempts to "share this truth with the world."

Posted by Pace Arko at 10:20 PM on July 31, 2003

Yawn, yet another manifesto

If I had a 100 dollars for every rant I've seen on the Internet condemning that same network, I'd be a rich man. Yes, the Internet is full of shit. Yawn. Tell us something we don't know already. Sturgeon said that 90% of everything is crap. This is hardly news.

And I've been just as snobby about this stuff as anyone, I assure you. Everything was better back then, before the dirty masses came in and dumbed everything down. It's ironic that these statements are made right after these media are democritized and made widely accessible to people. They always smack of elitism.

But let me tell you folks something, and this is something that I said way back in 1996 when I first started working on the Internet, and I say this even now, even after the truly deserved dot-com crash, the Internet serves one key function: It provides me with a job.

It gave me my first decent, pride-instilling job. Before the Internet, I was tending rats and mice for a biological research supply company so, the Internet is a-okay in my book.

By the way, let me tell you what's annoying: A web site that forces me to page through its stunning revelation, thinking that each point will somehow register more strongly with me if I see it in stark, moody isolation. Put it all one page, dude. Scrolling is not evil despite what Jake says. And you spelled Terabyte wrong.

Posted by Pace Arko at 10:29 AM on July 7, 2003

Why I'll never go into education

People have told me on many occasions that I have talent for explanation. Some have even said that I should be a teacher. Every time I've heard this, I've rolled my eyes and sighed ruefully.

Education stinks. Barring tremendous improvements in psychiatry, psychopharmacology and pedagogy, education will continue to stink for many decades to come.

Personally, I don't want to get involved in such a hopeless cause. My own admittedly irrational perfectionism keeps me from getting involved in anything other than tutoring. If there was a hell where I was forced to be a high school teacher of physics, that would bad hell. Knowing that most of the students in my class would never come to love physics like I love it, that most of them couldn't care less, would be utter torment for me.

Mass education, the child of the Industrial Revolution, is a flawed but reasonable system by which we, with vague efficiency, produce larval workers. That's all it's really for. The basic fact is that a modern economy only has a small number of interesting jobs to pass out and it always has large number of boring jobs to pass out. Barring some massive change in the economy and society this is unlikely to change.

So education gets by with producing enough semi-literate workers flip our burgers, pick our apple crop, administer our paperwork and clean our office buildings. Most folks are unwilling to pay someone to play around doing science (And let's be honest, doing science or art is play, that's why all lot of folks are attracted to those endeavors.) because there rarely is a profit in abstract knowledge.

And so schools are fated. Fated to remain roughly as they are because they are good enough. It isn't about making us smarter or giving us the power to make ourselves smarter, it's about making us smart enough. Having said this as a responsible voter, I always vote in favor of school bonds and levies, but inwardly, I know the system is flawed and is unlikely to get better barring the radical changes mentioned above.

Posted by Pace Arko at 12:20 AM on June 13, 2003

The destruction of global memory

My friend is furious, disgusted and deeply saddened by the looting and destruction of priceless archeological and historical treasures in the Cradle of Civilization. He said:

"Do you know why there are sixty seconds to a minute, or sixty minutes to an hour, or twenty-four hours to a day? A thousand years from now, when the United States is dust or transformed beyond recognition, when we power our civilization by new forms of energy and the oil is all gone, when George Bush is the merest footnote within the briefest of paragraphs recounting the history of the XXI Century, when all the lives lost or damaged by this minor little war fade into utter insignificance, this is the only crime people will remember. This is worse than the burning of the Library of Alexandria."

Posted by Pace Arko at 11:14 AM on April 17, 2003

Why I sit on the fence

I hate being wrong about things. I so hate being wrong about things that most of the time I can't bring myself to care about controversial stuff because I fear being contradicted or disproved on some point by someone who takes a position opposite me. I don't want to look stupid. This is one reason why I don't play chess.

Continue reading "Why I sit on the fence" »

Posted by Pace Arko at 3:18 AM on April 1, 2003

Here's a thought

You know all those tools in gymnasiums? Often you have to set various levels of resistance and tension in them to fit the strength of your muscles, then you engage in all these repetitive movements. The thing that always bothered me is that, aside from building a healthier body, a lot of that energy is wasted. Why don't we hook these machines to electric generators and batteries? Perhaps I am being naive about this but couldn't we use a gearing mechanism and the force in dynamos to generate the resistance needed to build muscle tissue?

I remember when I was at the Exploratorium a few years ago. They had this bike hooked to an electric generator and a bank of lights. The faster you pedaled, the more the resistance in the generator fought back, forcing you to work harder and the more lights went on. Maybe gymnasiums could use this as a selling point--come in and excersise and charge your fuel cells at the same time!

Posted by Pace Arko at 4:22 PM on March 12, 2003

How scientists relate to buildings

So I came across this article in Wired that seemed unhappy with the security at Los Alamos National Laboratory--perhaps a legitimate concern--but it also seemed unhappy with how grubby the LANL buildings were, which isn't such a big deal. Let me explain. When I was a kid, double majoring in astronomy and physics, in university eighteen or so years ago, the things that struck me were the priorities of the professors in the engineering/science buildings on campus. One could walk by or through these buildings and see what shacks they were--peeling paint, dirty windows, hallways cluttered with boxes filled with photocopies of preprints. The machine shops where always busy and the instruments where first rate or at least adequate for job, but everything else was worn through heavy use. These scientists spent their limited resources on what mattered: gear and data. To most scientists, whether archeologists in the field or engineers at NASA, a building is a place that protects your data or instruments from the elements--that's it. You want air conditioning? Well, you'd better hope they have a server farm, because otherwise you aren't going to get it. They'll spend money on the dewar's flasks first before spending money on a masterpiece of architecture.

Posted by Pace Arko at 2:47 PM on February 25, 2003

What I am not

I ain't a libertarian

Posted by Pace Arko at 11:09 PM on February 4, 2003

MLK Jr Day

In honor of MLK day, a little Get Your War On.

Posted by Pace Arko at 12:32 PM on January 20, 2003

Not enough sleep in the last two days

Here's an idea: what if we are thinking too much of ourselves? What if the history of each human personality, from initial state to final state could be represented as a huge binary number? It would be a pretty damn good seed to use for generating pseudo-random numbers, wouldn't it? Maybe we're not god's version of televison; maybe we're just god's srand function for a software application of incomprenhensible size and unfathomable purpose.

Posted by Pace Arko at 8:54 PM on December 17, 2002

Bad news

I guess it was only a matter of time before this happened but today I dropped my laptop and cracked the screen. The system appears to boot up fine but the screen is divided into a mess of white and black patches and fault lines and the other half, clarity. Looking at various repair sites, I see that a new LCD panel runs about 399 bucks for an Inspiron 3800. Heck, I could buy a whole, used Inspiron 3800 for 500 on the auction sites.

Sigh, I guess could run the laptop as a Linux server and just use another monitor as a head when I need it. Another innocent laptop destined for RE-PC.

Posted by Pace Arko at 4:35 PM on December 12, 2002

The Other Bob

Well there's "Bob" and there's Bob. Both are very cool in my opinion.

Posted by Pace Arko at 6:01 AM on November 21, 2002

Upholstery!

I live in a dense neighborhood and not a month goes by where I don't see an old couch, an old mattress, an old futon or an old stuff chair sitting out in the street. This bugs me. Isn't there some way to recycle these things? Maybe take all the stuffing out, clean it and put it into jackets or something? Take all the wire and springs out and melt them down for scrap? Chip all the wood for particle board or paper?

Posted by Pace Arko at 2:16 PM on November 7, 2002

When Consumer Society Went Wrong

Today, I fixed my old Emerson Electric desk fan. This monster was built back in the nineteen-forties or the nineteen thirties and it really shows--solid steel everywhere and everything is designed to be taken apart and reassembled. It could probably survive a nuclear weapon detonation at 1000 meters and still work! It weighs a ton and you could probably power the drive-train of a minivan with the torque the electric motor puts out. How come they don't build consumer goods that way anymore?

Continue reading "When Consumer Society Went Wrong" »

Posted by Pace Arko at 3:12 PM on October 22, 2002

The Penny is Garbage Money!

I hate that jar of pennies I have. I hate having to pack pennies into little rolls to take to the bank. I have a little pocket on my equipment vest just for pennies and other useless change and, I make it a point to always leave my apartment with 4 pennies from my jar in hopes that I can get rid of them but, this isn't enough. It doesn't empty my penny jar.

Continue reading "The Penny is Garbage Money!" »

Posted by Pace Arko at 6:32 PM on October 14, 2002

A revised list of things that I am interested in

• Cartooning. I know I am too old to start a career in cartooning.
• Creating an compelling RPG background. Again, perhaps as 40 year-old single man, this might be highly suspect but there it is. I have the spare time--sort of.
• Building a bigger music collection in this post-MP3 era. Hopefully I won't get arrested for this.
• Doing more amateur science. I sure as heck don't want to go back to University but I can't just this science monkey off my back.
• Getting a bike to increase my mobility.

You know what I hate about Radio Shack? The fact that they always ask you for your name and address even if you are making a cash purchase. I always give them a fake name and address.

Posted by Pace Arko at 9:31 AM on June 13, 2002

A 1000 Hours of AOL Free!

Despite the fact that AOLTW knows they've saturated the US market and have got all the customers they're gonna get here, they still keep sending out those stupid disks. Just today I got the AOL 7 disk, unsolicited, in the hardmail. This time they've sent it in a plastic case.

This mortified me. How much oil and how many kilowatts were wasted in making and shipping this dreck to me? Dreck that I don't want and didn't ask for. The United States is the most wasteful country on Earth.

Posted by Pace Arko at 3:26 PM on April 24, 2002

Factory Floor is One Year and Three Days Old

I guess I should mark this occasion: One year of using the Greymatter script.

Continue reading "Factory Floor is One Year and Three Days Old" »

Posted by Pace Arko at 10:38 PM on March 25, 2002

Pre-Colonial, Sub-Saharan African History

A few days ago, Ms. Carlysle pointed me in the direction of some interesting historical scholarship namely, helping Steve Jackson Games to compile a GURPs source book on the pre-colonial history of the kingdoms and nations of Sub-Saharan Africa.

Continue reading "Pre-Colonial, Sub-Saharan African History" »

Posted by Pace Arko at 7:35 AM on February 14, 2002

One of the Few Holidays I Care About

In the same month I was born, he gave that speech. We still have a long way to go in meeting the ideals and examples, he and Malcolm proclaimed. That's why this holiday is necessary; it reminds us of how far we have to go.

Continue reading "One of the Few Holidays I Care About" »

Posted by Pace Arko at 11:01 AM on January 21, 2002

Pop Psychology

When I was a toddler, I was diagnosed as an autistic. In the many years that have passed since then, I've always dismissed that judgement as a misdiagnosis. Now I am not so sure.

Continue reading "Pop Psychology" »

Posted by Pace Arko at 10:12 AM on December 19, 2001

May I have water, no ice, please?

Maybe the folks I hang with are hipper than I think.

Continue reading "May I have water, no ice, please?" »

Posted by Pace Arko at 6:01 AM on November 6, 2001 | Comments (2)

Sometimes I do my best thinking in the morning

Just sent a dispatch off to Ms. Carlysle (Whose nom-du-geurre is Laughing Cow Cheese.) about investment in nanotech. The resulting letter was so witty I figured it would make a good entry here.

Continue reading "Sometimes I do my best thinking in the morning" »

Posted by Pace Arko at 6:31 AM on October 18, 2001

A Friend's Travelogue

Comrade Shaw has some great photos and amusing anecdotes of his travels in Turkey. Joe Bob says check it out.

Posted by Pace Arko at 3:57 PM on October 11, 2001

Reports on the Death of Irony are Premature

A few days ago I saw a Ford commercial that mortified me.

It was blatantly using the events of September the Eleventh to--get this--sell us more cars.

Apparently some people are amazed at how quickly people's pursuit of trivia has reasserted itself but, when marketoids cheapen every emotion in a ploy to sell us more stuff, it hard not to retreat into irony as self-defense.

Posted by Pace Arko at 7:48 PM on October 4, 2001

Xenophobia is not what this country is all about.

During this time of crisis, some have cited Pearl Harbor. That citation does have validity but, I'd like to remind people of another event in World War II that we should remember.

I remember as a kid being taught about the US internment camps. Citizens of Japanese descent were forcibly rounded up and imprisoned during World War II. US citizens were imprisoned simply because of their ethnicity. It was an act of fear and stupidity and it diminished us.

I've been reading news that this ugly bigotry is on the rise again. People are being singled out for harrassment and attacks by stupid, cowardly fools because of skin color, clothing or religious beliefs, real or imagined.

A lot of folks are asking themselves what they can do to help the country now. I've decided that my job is to stop this kind of hatred, if and whenever or wherever I see it, and to offer support to my local muslim community.

Diversity is strength. Anyone who attacks that, is no patriot. Salaam. Shalom. Peace.

Posted by Pace Arko at 8:05 PM on September 15, 2001 | Comments (7)

I found some words

I realize that hardly anyone reads my site and, that I am preaching to the converted but, I figured I'd point to an editorial that more or less encapsulates my views on yesterdays events.

In the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center, Pentagon and Pennsylvania, some officials and media pundits have advocated policy that is certain to haunt future generations.

Will fervor and panic drive us to give the FBI and CIA totalitarian powers? Are we really ready to go to war over this? And I mean real war, not some video game. I mean bayonets, POWs, internment camps and nightly body counts. If we start doing this, those responsible for yesterdays attacks will have won and gained the moral high ground. How are terrorists created? What has the United States done to make people that angry?

Before the United States engages in another bout of cruise missile diplomacy, let's think about the consequences that such an action may entail.

Posted by Pace Arko at 3:12 PM on September 12, 2001 | Comments (6)

Today

What can I say? It's truly horrible.

Posted by Pace Arko at 8:28 PM on September 11, 2001

The Marinara Chant

Lots of nerds have their own version of the Mentat Chant. Here is mine:

It is by pasta alone I set my mind in motion.
It is by the paste of tomato that
the thoughts acquire speed,
the lips acquire stain,
the stain becomes a warning.
It is by pasta alone I set my mind in motion.

Posted by Pace Arko at 9:25 PM on August 22, 2001

And On a Personal Note--

I just celebrated my birthday on Saturday! I'm now 38! Probably hard to jibe this site with that age, eh? Well, what can I say? "I've lead a very weird life."

Posted by Pace Arko at 3:20 PM on August 13, 2001 | Comments (1)

The Source of Farlopsian Humor

So many people ask me where I get it from. What sort of chemicals am I dowsing my brain with? Actually, I don't dowse my brain with anything, 'cept maybe the carb rush of several bowls of cereal. Actually I get a lot of it from my parent's generation. They, being the hippies they were, foolishly exposed me to Firesign Theater, Bob and Ray and Python at a very young age. By the time, Saturday Night Live and Steve Martin emerged in the late Seventies I was damaged beyond all repair.

Posted by Pace Arko at 1:23 PM on July 11, 2001

Why European Trains are Better than Ours

I ride Amtrak a lot and, from time to time, I've run into fellow passengers that were or are citizens of European countries.

Continue reading "Why European Trains are Better than Ours" »

Posted by Pace Arko at 11:55 AM on July 11, 2001

Been a while since I've said anything.

On this Independence Day, as Ivar's representitives attempt to turn our urban skies into an air raid zone, I can't think of anything profound to say. Over the years I've had complex feelings about this country. But when I think about it, Emma is the one who comes closest to my way of thinking about the States. Drop science Emma!

Actually, now that I think about it, Woody comes pretty close too.

Posted by Pace Arko at 10:55 PM on July 4, 2001 | Comments (2)

Hashing Out an Editing Process

Over the past few days, my friend and I have been sending huge mails back and forth to work out a means for him to transfer new site content to me. Hopefully we've got the details worked out.

It's sort of a moot point anyway. The server his site sits in is still partly broken so, I really can't upload the new content yet.

Posted by Pace Arko at 3:22 PM on May 10, 2001

Why the Brief Hiatus?

Well, primarily I was concerned about getting out of sychronization with a backup server in the Fish Farm. However I am now of the opinion that this fear is unjustified. Baka can just copy things again. Now the entries will continue.

Posted by Pace Arko at 1:32 PM on May 3, 2001

Everybody but me seems to be busy

This idle time between job assignments and server updates is mildly irritating to me. I need to go do something. I think I'll go build a few pages on one of those commercial services. Maybe I should go get the hardmail.

Posted by Pace Arko at 9:59 AM on April 19, 2001 | Comments (2)

Nerd subculture is no place for wannabes

Speaking as an old school nerd, it's my opinion that these attempts to attach chic to nerd subculture are unnecessary and a source of needless stress. Perhaps it's sour grapes and crass elitism on my part but, I dislike these interlopers infiltrating our ranks and attempting to make us cool. Nerds ain't in it for the cool. We like science because science is beautiful in and of itself. We like computers because they are interesting by themselves not because there's any money in it or because they'll somehow turn us into the hip rave DJs or something.

I find it ironic, now that some of us have made a little money doing the stuff we love, that we are suddenly interesting.

Some nerds are fairly lucky to be blessed by an interesting phenotype but a lot of us are chubby, pasty Joes and Josephines with weird hobbies and who are socially inept. This is price paid for high intelligence. If I had a choice between intelligence (and maybe a little wisdom) or beauty, you know which I'd pick. If this dichotomy gives some wannabes trouble so be it. Nerd subculture is no place for wannabes. We've had to accept being excluded from the in-crowd and beautiful people during our formative years for millenia so, in all fairness, we reserve the right to spill a little vitriol to keep these new parasites out.

Anyway we're caterpillars and most of us never turn into butterflies. A lot of us learn to accept this and eventually find another gentle, devastatingly intelligent, high-strung caterpillar to settle down with and perhaps raise a few more caterpillars.

Posted by Pace Arko at 7:49 AM on April 17, 2001 | Comments (1)

Here's a thought at 4 in the morning

Can the human mind cope with extreme longevity?

Posted by Pace Arko at 4:21 AM on April 8, 2001 | Comments (1)

Hip, I'm Not!

A few weeks ago someone infected me with the "All Your Base Are Belong Us" meme by way of the e-mail vector. I'm not going to explain this because you probably already know about it or will hear about it soon. However, before the multinationals catch this meme and attempt to sell stuff to us with it, innoculate yourself. It's so damn hard to be an eccentric these days.

Posted by Pace Arko at 3:45 AM on March 31, 2001 | Comments (1)

Two Truisms

1. Miscommunication and ambivalence will never be reduced to zero. People get sloppy in communicating and get sloppy in understanding. Also many times they aren't entirely sure what they want.
2. Ideals must always be compromised. There are few rules without exceptions but this appears one of those few.

Posted by Pace Arko at 6:27 AM on March 24, 2001

My own aphorisms someone told me to write down

• The Programmer's Lament: "The world is built upon endless, essential yet trivial detail."
• Another one: "Everyone wants to be special but has to settle for being unique."
• In order for the world to be interesting there must be error. In fact, this may be a defining characteristic of reality: Error only exists in reality.
• The existence of error, implies the existence of the extremely complex phenomena of evil.
• Smarter people than me, state my opinions better than I can.
• Taking a stand, means risking error. People mistake my lack of confrontation as a gentle nature. In truth, I just hate being or guessing wrong.
• In my favored endeavors, there will always be someone who knows more about them and does better at them than me. Luckily, I know things that they might not know, so it balances out in the end.

Posted by Pace Arko at 11:25 PM on March 22, 2001

Midnight Philosophy

Gödel proved that mathematics will remain forever incomplete.

The implication is that the mathematics is infinitely rich. Another implication is that all science, being ultimately based on mathematics and logic, is infinitely rich and will never be a finished thing.

Continue reading "Midnight Philosophy" »

Posted by Pace Arko at 11:17 PM on March 22, 2001

My Hopeless Love Affair with Mathematics

Or why, after many years, I still can't get over the fact I flunked complex variable analysis

I've got something to prove.

Continue reading "My Hopeless Love Affair with Mathematics" »

Posted by Pace Arko at 8:00 AM on January 17, 2001

Militant Extremists To Radically Impose Conversion (METRIC)

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

Okay.

How 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?

Continue reading "Militant Extremists To Radically Impose Conversion (METRIC)" »

Posted by Pace Arko at 9:56 AM on August 5, 1999

Interests

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.

Continue reading "Interests" »

Posted by Pace Arko at 4:32 AM on July 21, 1999