11:31 pm - Understanding the Global Financial Crisis

I've found these resources to be completely invaluable to understanding the current global financial crisis, the terminology and the economics in plain language:

The Crisis of Credit Visualized - A quick 11 minute overview of the whole thing.

This American Life #355: The Giant Pool of Money (05.09.2008) - Explains sub-prime mortgages and mortgage backed financial instruments.

This American Life #365: Another Frightening Show About the Economy (10.03.2008) - Explains commercial paper and credit default swaps.

This American Life #373: The New Boss (01.30.2009) - Act Three explains the Keynesian theory behind the recent economic stimulus package.

This American Life #375: Bad Bank (02.27.2009) - Explains bank balance sheets and toxic assets.

Current Mood: anxious

12:00 am - Insane Geek Auction

I just splattered all over twitter about the Charity Auction at Linux Conference Australia to Save the Tassie Devil.

The scene. Several hundred Linux geeks descend on the elegant Wrest Point Casino and eat fabulous food, drink free booze, and make small talk about programming fighter jets, configuring firewalls, hacking kernels, and building robots. Fisticuffs over which distro is preferable seem to be at a minimum.

After a delicious 3-course meal, a scientist gives a speech about how the Tasmanian Devil is doomed to extinction within 25 years due to a completely mysterious wasting disease.

Devil Facial Tumor Disease is completely insane. There's almost nothing else like it known in any creature anywhere. It is a cancer. But it is a cancer that spreads from one animal to the next directly. It isn't like where certain viruses spread and cause a predisposition for cancer. The cancer cells from one creature actually infect the next creature. The DNA of the cancer cells is NOT THE DNA of the infected creature. Every Tassie Devil that has this cancer, has a cancer with identical DNA, a single sick devil started this disease with its crazy mutant cells. Apparently the devil's have VERY similar DNA from one individual to the next which is why these mutant cancer cells are not being rejected by the infected individuals' immune systems. This is literally zombie kinda shit, an infected devil bites another devil and it develops the infection. Anyway it's terrible and we all felt bad.

So there was to be an auction to help raise funds for research into this disease.

Running the auction was Rusty Russell, the founder of Linux Conference Australia. He introduced Bdale Garbee, former Debian project leader and well known Linux hacker.

Bdale had a story. He and his wife were taking a vacation in New Zealand and by completely random chance she took a photograph of a waterfall that turned out beautifully. She didn't use any special equipment just a 5 Megapixel point and shoot camera like most people bring on their vacations.

Then on another vacation by random chance they were in Washington DC and were planning to go to The National Gem and Mineral Collection. Unfortunately, it was too crowded. So they went to see an exhibit of Nature photos instead. Bdale's wife, Karen, got info on how to submit photos to the exhibit. She submitted her waterfall and it won the Art in Nature award for 2008.

Karen Garbee's photo, "Waterfall" is now in the Smithsonian.

And a poster-sized, signed and numbered limited edition print of that photo is what was to be auctioned.

The bidding started at $100 and started going up by increments of $100.

The bidding stalled around $2000.

Rusty was about to end the bidding when one of the conference staffers gave him the "stretch" signal so he started rambling. Word then came up to the stage that Linux Australia would, if the bidding went over $2500, match any bid up to $10,000.

Someone then immediately bid $2500.

The bidding stalled again.

Then Flame of the Geek My Ride project offered that if the bidding went to $3000 the winner would get to have his Queensland GEEK license plates officially transfered to their vehicle for 1 year.

Mary Gardiner, who runs the paper review committee of the conference said that anyone who pledged over $3600 would get a seat on the review committee. A joking addendum to this was that over $4000 and that person could refuse to be on the committee if they wished.

Then Linus Torvalds (who had been at the conference all along but keeping a very low profile) sent word to the stage that if the bidding reached $3500 he would replace the linux mascot and logo Tux with the Linux Conference Australia 2009 mascot Tuz (a Tassie devil wearing a penguin beak over its nose).

Somewhere along the line (things were getting a little chaotic by this point), someone suggested that Bdale offer to shave his beard if the bidding went over a certain amount. Bdale seemed extremely uncomfortable with this. He told a story about how he had started the beard as part of a bet in College and that his wife of many years (the photographer) had only known him beardless for a few weeks when they'd first started dating in college.

There was some general confusion as to whether Bdale had consented to any kind of offer for him to shave his beard or not but in the midst of the confusion arjen_lentz offered to shave his own head along with Bdale.

The bidding remained stalled briefly until someone stood up and was about to make a bid just as several others came to the stage to make a further pledge. The bidder was prevented from bidding until the pledge was sorted out.

The new pledge would match up to $4000 if and only if the bidding reached $4000 AND someone else pledged to match up to $4000. Matthew Wilcox did this second match, saying that he would bring the money from the pass the hat up to $4000 from wherever it happened to be. So now a $4000 pledge would send $16000 to charity.

ETA: See comments below: It was apparently Monty Taylor, of the Drizzle fork of MySQL, Michael "Monty" Widenius, the original author of MySQL, who offered the initial 4000 pledge and it was apparently 4000 Euro, rather than AU$4000. All other amounts in this post are AU$.

Now the bidding started up again and hit $5000 and at some point a coalition of about 15 people banded together, not seeming to care who would end up with the photo or the license plates, and bid on the condition that Linus Torvalds be the one to shave Bdale Garbee's beard.

They took the upper hand of the bidding at $7500. Then they bid themselves up to $8000. Then when they heard that the LCA matching limit was $10000, they bid themselves up to $10,000.

They won with a final bid of $10,500 sending over $28,500 to charity overall.

Only a room full of geeks would: Form a coalition to win an auction rather than just letting an individual win and then privately donating. Value a celebrity hacker having his precious beard shaved off more than physical ownership of a beautiful work of museum quality art. Engage in one-ups-manship of adding seemingly valueless pledges to the prize pool. Figure out how to collectively come up with well over $28,500 (factor in the Euros and it's over $35,000) for a charity they'd just discovered in under an hour.

After it was all over, I walked back up the hill to the accomodation.

Current Mood: ecstatic

01:59 pm - Lowery delivers

( I knew it would be ok. )

Conservative Preacher Opens with Support for Environmentalism, Separation of Church and State, and Global Justice

Help us, oh God, to remember that we are Americans,
united not by race, or religion, or blood,
but to our commitment to freedom and justice for all

When we fail to treat our fellow human beings
and all the Earth with the respect that they deserve:
Forgive us.

Lord, in the complex arena of human relations,
let us make choices on the side of love, not hate
on the side of inclusion, not exclusion
tolerance, not intolerance

01:09 am - Deeply Moving

The podcast for Democracy Now for Monday 19 Jan 2009 has already been published. It is a pre-inaugural Martin Luther King Jr. day special broadcast.

The entire episode is Dr. King in his own words. It is all speeches and NONE of them are the I Have a Dream speech. It is all speeches from later in his life including an amazing one that he gives condemning the Vietnam war and predicting that the legacy of the Vietnam war would be the US militarily meddling in countries all over the world and suffering serious blowback consequences because of it. It also features the speech he gave the night before his assassination.

You've heard choice quotes from both these speeches. But I at least had never heard them in their entirety.

They Are Amazing.

I'm really serious that you should download this MP3 and listen to the whole thing carefully and attentively. Do this sometime before the end of Monday. You've got the day off and it is too cold to do much else while you eagerly await the end of the Bush administration. Use that time to listen to this.
( Read more... )

Current Mood: impressed

04:49 pm - Finding the Time to Experience Time

meggyn just posted details of our 40 Day Sadhana that we did back in August/September. My daily meditation is more of a no-mind Zen style of "just sitting", but for the 40 days of this Sadhana we shared a more intentional meditation with a specific spiritual goal (self-acceptance). This Sadhana was from the Kundalini Yoga tradition and we learned it at a great open house at the Yoga studio in our suburb.

One of the most interesting experiences I had on this particular meditation was that I gained a new feeling/understanding of time. In my current meditation I simply meditate for as long as "feels right", but for those 40 days we used a timer. On most days we set it for 11 minutes. During those eleven minutes there was nothing I could do to change how long it would take. I couldn't breath faster or breath slower. I couldn't chant louder. I couldn't think harder or less hard. I had to completely surrender to the passage of 11 minutes. And some days it felt like a long time and some days it felt short, and knowing empirically that it was exactly 11 minutes every time really opened my eyes to how mental state affects the experience of time but not its passage.

And really this is the only thing we can ever do to time. But when I'm not being as mindful I certainly try to change it! Maybe I rush whatever I'm doing so I can get to the "good stuff" faster, and in rushing I make mistakes and end up slowing down. Maybe I spend all my thoughts on the next thing I'm going to do instead of on what I am doing. Maybe I move slowly towards and unpleasant task, only prolonging the experience of unpleasantness. Maybe I think that if I only go faster I can get that 2 hour task done in 1 hour. I rarely stop fighting time. I rarely stop to simply let time be the length that it is.

Spending 40 days experiencing the length of 11 minutes with nothing else to distract me was an important reminder about how time works. It turns out that you don't actually have to DO anything in order to make it through 11 minutes of sitting, inevitably you will. And there's pretty much always time in the day to carve out 11 minutes to be mindful of that fact.

Current Mood: mellow

09:32 am - How To Meditate Without Dying

A big misconception about meditation is that you're supposed to "Not Think". You can't really stop your mind from thinking (unless you're dead!). The key is to not grasp on to the thoughts but to let them flow freely by without judgement, worry, or care.

Imagine you're watching a stream. And say a duck or a stick catches your attention as it floats past. Normally you might follow the stick or duck as it goes down the stream, moving your eyes and turning your head and watching it until you can't see it any more. Now you're not watching the stream anymore, you're watching the stick or the duck. Every day we do this with our thoughts. What if you just watched the stream? Something floats past and you notice it as part of the stream but you don't dwell on it, it floats out of view and you don't try to hold on to it. Even if the thing that floated by was a big ugly piece of trash you don't get upset that it interrupted your view of the stream, you accept it as just another part of the stream.

That's what meditation can be like. You just let your thoughts stream by. You don't worry about them, don't analyze them, don't try to remember them, don't try to hold on to them, don't try to follow them. Just let them be had. Some days you'll have a flood of them during meditation, things you have to do will pop up, things you're worried about will pop up, random discomforts you're feeling, itches you want to scratch. Other days your mind will be more quiet, more passive. Neither of these days is better or worse than the other, they are simply different states of the stream. And if you happen to give in to grasping some of your thoughts, maybe you break your pose and scratch that itch, or maybe you start to actually think about making plans for that thing on your todo list, notice that you've done that and forgive yourself for it, to dwell on guilt about grasping a thought takes you further out of your meditation than grasping the thought did!

Current Mood: peaceful

11:03 pm - LAX->MEL round trip for under $1100 round trip

A friend of ours from Canada was saying that one of the problems with North Americans is that we are all CERTAIN that for everything there is the "obvious" (wrong) way to do things and the "secret insider" (right) way to do things. We all have a penetrating fear that we're getting duped or ripped off or laughed at because we don't have the secret insider knowledge that lets us do things more cheaply or more enjoyably. And we're certain that everyone other than us knows these secrets. I think it's driven by the overwhelming number of pointless choices available to consumers in America (the cereal aisle, my god, the cereal aisle). Her observation was that here in Australia there's just one way to do most things, there's rarely a way to game the system, and no one really tries to do so. You never feel like you're being ripped off and you never feel like if you knew some secret lingo that you could get a real steal. Basically if there's a choice it is between the obviously shoddy cheap option and the obviously quality expensive option and there's no haggling.

But, North American that I am, I've spent the last day desperately trying to find the "trick" to getting my friends to Australia for cheaper than $2000 round trip and I've figured out what the shoddy way to do it is! You can visit us (from LA) for under $1100 round trip!!!

Remember, once you get here you've got free lodging from us in our luxurious guest room and we'll cook for you occasionally too (and right down the street is a place where you can get a delicious healthy Moroccan meal for AU$5, and another place that has delicious fresh raw salmon sushi rolls for AU$2.40)!

Because you all live all over the US, I'm basing these prices on departure from Los Angeles. Round trip tickets to Los Angeles from Chicago are around $280 (tax included) from Northwest. They're between $200 and $300 from most places in the US. The prices I'm quoting include taxes and fees and stuff and are in US dollars unless otherwise noted.

The dollar is going up right now so it's a great time to come spend money in Australia!

The Normal (Expensive/Convenient) Way

The Adventurous (Cheap!) Ways

Los Angeles -> Honolulu -> Sydney -> Melbourne

Los Angeles -> Fiji -> Sydney -> Melbourne

The Slow Boat - Los Angeles -> Sydney -> Melbourne

10:16 am - Barack Obama - The Next President (Yes We Can) by Rory Miller

digg it

Current Mood: excited

03:26 pm - HOWTO: Mash Up (Twitter, TwitterMail, LoudTwitter, RSSFWD, Facebook, LiveJournal)

I've just connected a pretty cool bunch of web services to solve a pretty simple problem: I want to be able to quickly and easily and cheaply use my cell phone to let my friends in Chicago know where I am and what I'm up to. I want people to be able to spontaneously decide to join me when I'm wandering around the city having fun.

For instance, tomorrow (Thursday) I'm going to go to Blues Festival and wander around. I'd love to be able to send out messages to friends and let them know when I get there and when I move from one part of the fest to another. And as a side effect I'd like to have an archive of all those little updates that'll form a picture of my days, a quick easy replacement for blogging.

Twitter - What are you doing?

Everyone who is interested in my status updates should join twitter.com and follow me. If you register your cell phone to receive updates from my twitter feed you are done.

Current Mood: geeky

10:55 am - Vote for Rory : LAST DAY FOR TOP 25

this is your reminder to vote for Rory today!

Seriously folks, there are 16 hours of voting left.

Rory is in 10th place. She needs to finish this 16 hours in 10th place or better. So she could get disqualified at any moment because she's right on the edge. Please everyone go give her a vote. She's fucking amazing and deserves to be heard. Getting to the final round of this contest could really help her musical career.

She just finished making and uploaded her new video which features a song she just wrote. If she makes it into the next round then people will vote on the new video. Don't let their work recroding the new video go to waste! vote now!.

Signing up is REALLY quick and easy and they really don't spam you. Famecast has almost no annoying ads. Once you sign up then in the future voting for her again takes literally 5 seconds.

It's REALLY important to me to help Rory make it as far as possible in this contest. This is the ONLY thing I'm spending time away from work and moving on. Please help! Please spread the word.


( new video below the cut )

Current Mood: giddy

12:31 am - Mystery friend.

Who are you corngrrl? We can't friend you back if you don't give us some clue as to how meggyn and I know you!

Oh. Duh. I remember, there is a clue, we share a birthday! Sorry. Friended back.

vote for rory

Current Mood: curious

09:26 pm - Embed Rory's Video!

*phew* We made it out of Chicago. We're in New York City!

I'll relate the whole harrowing tale but for now just know that the stress is starting to melt away and that'll only continue as we continue our journey and eventually settle in.

In the mean time, I wanted to let everyone know that Rory is still kicking ass on famecast. She still needs your vote (which means signing up for an account and voting for her) in the second round which is going on right now.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: relaxed

09:50 am - Garage Sale Now

Kedzie and Fullerton.

My Stuff.
meggyn's stuff.
Maggie's stuff.

Buy it today and tomorrow!

02:51 am - Vote for Rory!

My sister has a video up at famecast.com with her new band.

She's currently ranked 20th8th out of over 200 entries but the voting just started. If she stays in the top 50 she'll move to the next round. Voting in this round ends September 20.

I know it's a little bit of hassle to create a famecast account in order to vote but my sister would really appreciate your help in getting to the next round!

There's links to a few more of her songs and her mailing list at her (placeholder) website.

( Video below the cut )

Current Mood: busy

06:42 pm - No worries

"No worries" is this hugely common phrase in Australia. They say it as often as I say "no problem" or "you're welcome". It has about as much meaning (but sounds to my foreign ears sooo much more compassionate).

I've noticed in the last few months lots of my American friends saying it a lot (heaps!) in LJ or chat.

Did I just miss that this phrase is very common in the US? Is it a regional thing that hasn't hit Chicago yet? Am I just clueless to its ubiquity unless I hear it with an accent?

Or are you all just having me on because I'm in Australia and it's fun to throw Australian slang at me to point that out? If so, good on ya mate!

Ta for letting me know.

Current Mood: curious

03:46 am - Doing Math

I'm so sure I just spent the last 2 hours doing condiment math and now it is nearly 4am my time.

All to conclude that 1,000,000 of a small thing is really a lot. Not intractably a lot, but more than you think a lot.

(Read through all the comments. The mathy bits are scattered throughout.)

Current Mood: sleepy

11:01 am - 80 jobs?

Why doesn't the state of Indiana just go shoot 80 people from Michigan or Wisconsin or Illinois and take their 80 jobs?

(Sorry for two posts from slashdot in a row but they both really screamed general interest to me.)

Current Mood: cranky

10:57 am - Bored?

Put down tetris and solitaire and minesweeper and do some science with your spare brain cycles.

10:56 am - Brain Reclamation

You know how sometimes you pose a question to yourself and you can't figure out the answer and so your brain (without your consent) just kind of slices off a piece of itself to be reserved for quiet contemplation of the question until an answer comes forth. Every once and a while out of nowhere you'll remember that you still don't know that answer and it still bothers you. It doesn't bother you enough to go ask anyone or to discuss it or to seek the answer, it just bothers you enough to keep thinking about it. And that piece of your brain is thus forever useless for other tasks.

Well I just got one of those pieces back in the shower (that's usually where it happens). This one has been occupied for about 6 or 7 years.

There's a Babylon 5 episode in which someone gives Londo a poison. He makes a long speech about how the poison comes in two parts. Both parts are harmless alone but if you've eaten the first part ever in your life then later in life the second part will kill you. He says it's an old school way of assasinating someone. It's a wonderful metaphor and a great plot device, but I always wondered: what's the point? To Londo this is highly threatening, the guys says the second dose could be delivered at any time in his food or drink and this freaks him out. But why does this freak him out more than the same threat made about a single dose poison? Why does this poison make things more scary? I mean maybe it's because it would pass some chemical detection that detects poisons but any 26th century poison detector could be programmed to detect this substance as well, couldn't it?

Every poison detector except one. The one that is centrally relevent to Centari culture. The Centari use food tasters. If the food taster dies then the food was poisoned. If he lives then the food is safe to eat. Unless the poison comes in two doses and the food taster is only exposed to one of them!

All this time I thought that that plot device was just the writer stretching to create an interesting scenario....but really the writer was showing a keen understanding of the cultural history of the Centari imperial aristocracy.

Now that I think about this it might have been really obvious to everyone else. Like maybe they even set it up by having the revelation about the use of food tasters in the same episode. Heck maybe the antagonist even explained this and I just missed it. I don't have the episode to review, I just have the nagging memory that I was confused/annoyed by it at the time (and ever since).

Imagine the things I could use this piece of my brain for now that I have it back!

Current Mood: hungry

12:25 am - Misc Thoughts

Misc Thoughts:

Every time a news story mentions that Fred Fielding is Bush's main lawyer in this whole subpoena fiasco I think of how ironic that would be if Fred Fielding were in fact Deep Throat. But sadly, he isn't.

The first Die Hard movie was really a very significantly deeper than I'd have guessed. It's got so much about the cultural shift from the cocaine-addled self-centered reagan 80s (as completely personified by the schmucky co-worker) to the progressive high tech globalized post-communist 90s (as exemplified by both the Japanese-owned corporation and the German criminals....man we were REALLY culturally obsessed with the Japanese and German economic threat in the late 80s).

The key metaphor of the movie seems to pit three forces against one another: 1) Bruce Willis, the intuitively brilliant luddite who wins because he's smart and independent enough to break/bend the rules the right way (but he's also not a maverick, he does a lot of stuff kinda by the book when it makes sense to do so, he's not really the kind of loose canon cop that Mel Gibson is in Lethal Weapon, he's a skilled cop in an incredibly abnormal situation) 2) Criminals, the methodically brilliant technologists who almost win because they're smart enough to game the rules, to understand the rules and break them to their advantage 3) Other cops who are completely incompetent because of their blind and ignorant adherence to systematization/rules. The other cops follow rules even when they don't understand what is happening. The movie is all about smart creative anarchy beating moribund bureaucracy and it is also about how globalization and technological revolution could bring great reward or great danger or both (depending on whether we're smart or complacent) but none of it will ever replace the importance of human creativity and individuality and soul (Bruce Willis, his wife, his cop buddy outside, the limo driver all have creative and compassionate soul in a way that the schmucky cokehead coworker, the inept cops/FBI, .the criminals, the corporation, the computer system do not).

Then there's the whole midlife crisis working class man estranged from his successful corporate executive wife angle. I'm still contemplating that one because the movie runs dangerously close to lame macho cliche but I think actually side steps or deconstructs or questions that quite a bit and gives us something different than the cliche. I'm still not sure I get the point though. It's especially interesting to watch their relationship "evolve" through the three movies, we only ever get bits and pieces of the story, we don't REALLY know why they're so estranged. The way they handle it in the third movie is I think actually very redeeming in that he isn't saving her, he's saving himself. It's clear that saving her twice hasn't helped their underlying issues, but maybe after saving himself they can work it out.

The second movie was pretty lame and I don't have much to say about it other than that it had good thematic followup of going from a movie about the transition from the 80s to the 90s to a movie about the 90s seeking its identity as a new decade. The reference to Grenada was nice for reminding us that the 90s came entirely out of the 80s. I also found it interesting that while he was basically completely on his game in the first movie, constantly improving his situation until he could make the big win....in the second movie he kept fucking up over and over again, trying to do the right thing but not really pulling through until the end.

The third movie was just a totally fun wild ride. So over the top that it was HILARIOUS (I love the comedy in all three movies). The passing reference to the 1993 WTC attack was pretty haunting. And the 5 gallon + 3 gallon, make 4 gallons puzzle put me right back in 4th grade when they gave us IQ tests.

I'd only ever seen the first one before this week.

I really want to go see the new 4th one now.

Current Mood: energetic