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The Perseid meteor shower is back. Look to the east beginning at 10pm this Wednesday, August 11th. Also, make sure you’re looking again 4 hours later, at 2am on Thursday, August 12th.

From NASA:

The best time to look for these “traditional Perseids” is during the hours before dawn on Thursday, August 12th. Set your alarm for 2 o’clock in the morning; go outside; lie down on a sleeping bag with your toes pointed northeast. You’ll soon see meteors racing along the Milky Way.

Above: The pre-dawn sky on Aug. 12th. The Perseid radiant is denoted by a red dot. While you’re looking for meteors, check out Venus and the crescent Moon, too, near the horizon.

Can’t wake up at 2 a.m.?

Try looking around 9 or 10 p.m. on Wednesday, Aug. 11th when Perseus is hanging low in the eastern sky. You won’t see many meteors then, but the ones you do see could be memorable. Shooting stars that emerge from the horizon and streak horizontally through the atmosphere are called “Earthgrazers.” Slow and colorful Earthgrazers are a good target for city dwellers, because they are so bright.

Hmmm. Earthgrazers. Sounds like a band name or an album title or something.

I also like the fact that it looks like Perseus is hurling spears at us.

Maybe not, but this piece by Benoit Mandelbrot, “father of the fractal,” marks an interesting challenge to economists:

Isn’t understanding the market as important to the economy as understanding solid-state physics is to IBM? If we can map the human genome, why can’t we map how a man loses his livelihood? If millions can contribute a few cycles of their PCs to the search for a signal from outer space, why can’t they join a coordinated search for patterns in financial markets?

It’s an interesting set of questions. Can the economy sustain itself? Or has it grown too far in the direction of the privileged few? Perhaps if Mandelbrot’s challenge is accepted, and they generate data about the economy, they will discover that it is beyond repair, without basically tossing it out and starting over. Fractal La Revolucion!

There are some very strange statements in this article. Among them:

Sources: Al Qaeda may have made contact in U.S. recently

Wednesday, August 4, 2004 Posted: 6:23 PM EDT (2223 GMT)

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Intelligence found in Pakistan suggests that suspected al Qaeda operatives in that country contacted an individual or individuals in the United States in the past few months, according to two senior U.S. government sources.

Oh. OK. Someone has made contact inside the United States. This someone could be from anywhere, but made the contact somewhere in Pakistan.

What do I do with that? I imagine there are thousands or perhaps millions of emails, IM or AIM chat, faxes, telephone calls, and broadcast transmissions exchanged between Pakistan and the US each day. Good intelligence work, guys.

A senior military U.S. official said a computer seized from Khan contained hundreds of images, including photographs, drawings and layouts of various potential U.S. targets.

Ahh, ha! This obvious Terrorist(tm) had images of US buildings on his computer. Must be a Terrorist(tm). For sure.

Wait, I have images of US buildings on my computer. Shit….

Scott McClellan, white house press secretary, said this:

“I can’t go further into it because it could compromise some ongoing operations at this point,” McClellan said.

Ahh, I see. “Ongoing operations.” That’s the same word they use for what they’re doing in Iraq. And in Iraq, they have invaded and are now occupying the country with overwhelming — yet restrained, this is mostly low-intensity warfare we’re talking about here — US force, against significant resistance from the local people of Iraq.

The only conclusion to make is that these warnings mean absolutely nothing, and are designed to reproduce this charade of a meme: the illusion that the US government is engaged in meaningful dialogue with the people of the world (including the vast majority of US citizens).

These platitudes ring hollow as “declarations,” because the declarations have no ontological weight to them. They are meaningless, and provide only the appearance of accountability on the behalf of the US government. The government goes through the motions of saying things, but in reality they are saying nothing. They want to “protect” us by increasing the amount of armed tension in the “threatened” areas. Joy. Just like the freedom the US government is bringing to Iraq. I get it.

Except here in the US, we have cars, computers, an information flow infrastructure, and a very high level of noise.

Ethan Winer’s article is essential reading for me at the moment, as I’m currently researching the most effective and cost-efficient ways to acoustically treat my studio. So there.

I’ve recently discovered the work of Saul Newman, an Australian anarchist academic and activist. I’ve been meaning to study more about anarchism, and his work seems an OK place to start because two of his pieces address familiar points of reference in my own intellectual history.

The first article, Anarchism, Marxism, and the Bonapartist State examines some of the tensions between anarchism and Marxism, another political philosophy that is interesting to me. I haven’t read it yet, but I have a hardcopy and will work through it shortly.

The second article, Anarchism and the Politics of Ressentiment, analyzes Nietzsche’s “most venomous words for the anarchists.” Again, I haven’t yet read this article either, I just wanted to mark it here for reference.

Heh. This is a very nice piece of satire. From the article:

Now the object of this article was not to make GNU/Linux appear perfect, but instead to demonstrate that it can provide a superior desktop experience for many over the traditional proprietary operating system. GNU/Linux has millions of users and is growing because of its ability to excel in so many different areas, so the next time someone tries to tell you that ‘GNU/Linux isn’t ready for the desktop’, ask them, ‘Whose desktop do you mean?’.

The biggest point of the article is one I’ve made before: when you install MS Windows, you have an operating system. That’s it. You still have to install all the applications you will be using.

But when you install a modern Linux distribution, it comes with hundreds and hundreds of applications. This concept is alien to most users; it’s difficult to believe that you install one thing, and then after that you have virtually everything you need to operate a computer.

I listened to John Kerry’s acceptance speech last night. It was the first speech from the DNC I’d listened to, though I’ve read transcripts of most of them. I’ve said it before, I so want to believe in this guy. But this is a guy who wants to increase the size of the military (he wants to add “40,000 active duty troops”), to continue to fight this ludicrous War On Some Nouns, claiming that he can fight a “smarter, more effective war on terror.” As if changing the President will mean we can now somehow fight this unintelligible war intelligently.

There are so many things that Kerry’s can’t even get right. Like, for example, opposing “democracy” and “communism” as binary opposites. He doesn’t even get that communism — in the Marxist, theoretical sense — requires democracy.

He defends the concept of “preemptive war,” saying that he will “get the terrorists before they get us.”

He wants to continue neoliberal economic policies: “we will trade and compete in the world. But our plan calls for a fair playing field — because if you give the American worker a fair playing field, there’s nobody in the world the American worker can’t compete against.” Sounds OK, but what is a “fair playing field?” Is this what is meant by Freedom? As in Free Markets? What exactly are the global labor relations at work here?

Kerry wants to “honor this nation’s diversity,” yet he said “I see us as one America — red, white and blue.” Can’t have it both ways. This just reaffirms the danger of political homogenization that results when there is a “two-party system” and both parties are very close in the political spectrum.

So I got to thinking, where do I fit in this spectrum? Who are my political affiliates? Who are my brethren, my comrades? Republicans or conservatives are so far beyond the threshold of consideration that I don’t even need to mention it. The liberals or the Democrats are so close to the Republicans to warrant no serious consideration either. The political climate of America is strange … all we have left are the bizarre, crossbred love children of a donkey and an elephant. I think I prefer “Donkephant” to “Elekey.”

Even the progressives are swallowing the “anybody but Bush” logic that is nothing more than an admission of defeat (do the math…if one is willing to accept “anybody but Bush,” then that individual has already lost).

That leaves the radicals, the anarchists, and the Marxists. But I suppose that leaves me in good company…

Those of you who know me through my Virtual Enclosures piece will not be surprised by this. Apparently, the Patriot act has been invoked by the FBI to gather evidence in a copyright infringement case. My first reaction is that this is proof that the Patriot Act has nothing to do with fighting terrorism, but rather is aimed at curtailing the civil rights of US citizens.

Read the story for yourself:

SG1Archive.com is one of the most popular fan-run websites among the Stargate community. In addition to providing very active fan discussion forums, broadcast schedules, production news, and episode guides, the site heavily promotes the sale of the show on DVD. As of this writing, direct links from SG1Archive.com to Amazon.com have resulted in the sale of over $100,000 worth of DVDs. Many more DVDs have been sold to international fans of the show through sites like Blackstar.co.uk. Upon hearing this news, Stargate executive producer Brad Wright called the site “cool” – which Adam took as an endorsement of his work.

However, instead of thanking Adam for his promotion of their product, officials at MGM and the MPAA have chosen to pressure the FBI into pursuing criminal charges. Adam was first tipped off about the investigation when the FBI raided his and his fiancee’s apartment in May of 2002 and seized thousands of dollars worth of computer equipment. Adam later received a copy of the affidavit filed in support of the search warrant, and was shocked to discover that this document, prepared by the FBI, contained significant amounts of erroneous and misleading information. For example, two social security numbers were listed for Adam, one of which is not his. References were made to a cease and desist letter sent by the MPAA to an email address that did not exist. His online friendship with other Stargate fans across the globe was portrayed as an international conspiracy against the MPAA. And perhaps most disturbing of all, it was later revealed that the FBI invoked a provision of the USA Patriot Act to obtain financial records from his ISP. The FBI’s abuse of its powers did not stop there. When they seized Adam’s computer equipment, he was given written documentation stating that it would be returned within 60 days. The equipment that they did return did not arrive until more than 8 months later, and only then after much prodding from his lawyer. Much of it was damaged beyond repair – one laptop had a shattered LCD screen, an empty tape backup drive was ripped apart for no apparent reason, his fiancee’s iBook was badly damaged when it was pried apart with a screwdriver. The FBI’s computer crimes staff is either incompetent (at least when it comes to Macintosh computer equipment) or else they just don’t give a damn.

So here we go. A fan site, that increases the revenue of the show being promoted, is being persecuted.

The logic here is all too clear. In this case, the desire for social control supersedes even profit. This is the virtual enclosures in action.

The Stylist feature in OpenOffice writer is, in my view, what sets it apart from Word. It allows documents to stay consistent as they grow in size. This is a good thing. Once you get used to it, it’s very easy to format documents consistently as they grow in size.

There are two articles by Bruce Byfield, Part One and Part Two that explain the use of the Stylist quite well. If you are at all considering moving away from the bloatedness and inconsistency of MS Word, go read these articles, download OpenOffice, and get cracking.

Thomas Cahill’s article, War Is Good Business, Invest Your Sons and Daughters: A Thumbnail History of America’s Dark Side And Suggestions To Save The Planet, was forwarded to me on one of the listservs I’m on. It’s a great article.

I tried to google it, but it isn’t up anywhere. But it’s important enough that I decided to put a copy up on this here site. Go read it.