Creepy. Funny. Interesting.

The phone has a little external LCD panel that displays the time and other pertinent information so that I don’t have to flip the phone open to check on things. Normally, this panel is not backlit in order to conserve energy, but there’s an easily accessible button on the edge of the phone that lights up the screen. When I hit the button to check the time on my phone, about forty or fifty percent of the time the digital clock ticks over to the next minute.

That’s very odd; I’m not looking at the screen for more than two seconds (max). That means, I’d expect to see the minute change about once every thirty times, assuming the times at which I check the time are uniformly randomly distributed within the sixty second interval between minute digit changes. One out of thirty is not even four percent; there’s an order of magnitude difference between the expected and observed values. I must have checked the time on with the phone more than five hundred times by now, so this is definitely statistically significant. This discrepancy leads me to the following hypothesis.

My RAZR is programmed to change the minute digit on the display when I click the button if its internal clock is within a twenty or thirty second window around the actual time at which the seconds should roll over back to zero.

If true, it’d have to have been a deliberate design decision. Perhaps people remember the time better after reading a digital clock if they see the digits change and Motorola is just helping me out? I haven’t yet thought of a different explanation.

A federal court has ruled, again, that reciting the pledge of allegiance in public schools is unconstitutional on the grounds that its words require the reciter to state a positive belief in the existence of God. I agree. The government, being made of the people, will naturally be influenced by religion, but it should avoid influencing people’s beliefs back (these are personal beliefs of mine not necessarily supported by constitutional arguments). Requiring citizens to pledge their respective troths to a country they are forced to admit is ultimately subject to God’s authority does just that.

My thoughts on this infamous “under God” phrase got me further thinking about the rest of the pledge. Does reciting the pledge bind me into supporting every aspect of America’s foreign policy? Discussing that prospect with Greg, we decided we didn’t have any desire to give that sort of unconditional support. Greg suggested something like the opening rewrite of the pledge above and I took to its message immediately.

Subsequently, however, I realized that that rewrite can be redundant depending on one’s interpretation of “allegiance” and “republic”. The rewritten version serves to illustrate a point but is unnecessary as long as one espouses the (arguably more robust) interpretation that, in reciting the (“under God” stripped) pledge, one is allying oneself with the ideals meant to be represented by the republic if not the actual instance of the republic itself.

So that’s settled; on to the fools. Interstitial comments of mine are in [bracketed italics].

The Founding Fathers believed that our Creator gave us certain inalienable rights [FACT, but what does it have to do with anything? I have been a founding member of organizations in which all of the founders believed all observational reality can ultimately be described mathematically, but that belief was certainly not a requirement for joining our barbershop quartet]. The Pledge of Allegiance simply reinforces the beliefs that led to the birth of our great nation [WRONG: the pledge reinforces a subset of the beliefs that led to the birth of our great nation, but are these beliefs also among those which the Founders felt must continue to be an absolute guide to our people and their representatives?]. It is an oath of our fidelity to our country [which also requires people to voice the idea that God exists], and I am disappointed that the court chose to rule against this American treasure [if the pledge is so precious, why did congress alter it so recently in 1954 to include the tip to God? What's that? 'Godless communists' you say? I see; so the government should be telling its citizens, its constituents that atheism is wrong.].
– House Speaker Dennis Hastert

This is an extraordinary and blatant display of judicial activism. Judge Lawrence Karlton relied on the activist ruling of the Ninth Circuit which was rendered inoperable by the Supreme Court’s ruling on this issue last year [only on procedural grounds]. This is precisely the reason we need Judge Roberts to be confirmed as Chief Justice. He’s made it clear that he puts the law and the Constitution first. And he’s made it clear that he won’t substitute his own values for the clear commands of the law [Thank God! Put him in!]
– Kay Daly, president of the Coalition for a Fair Judiciary

This history of the Pledge of Allegiance illustrates that the phrase ‘under God’ is a permissible acknowledgement rather than an establishment of religion [I know the precedent, but do you really think it's OK to 'permit' the government to make people state a religious belief they don't hold?]. If the Pledge established or tended to establish a religion, then that would have happened during the past 50 years of its existence. Day after day we have recited the Pledge from the classroom to the stateroom, from private meetings to public events, and not once has it tended to establish a religion [... and what about freely exercising one's religion (or lack thereof)?]. Today’s ruling illustrates why we need judges who are umpires applying settled law rather than activists intent on imposing their own ideology [So you'd rather a judge that imposed your ideology?].
– Mathew Staver, president and general counsel of Liberty Counsel

This is another example of a federal district court exhibiting hostility toward a time-honored tradition [Hostility? Where?] which has been defended by numerous Justices including Justice O’Connor who said eliminating such references ‘would sever ties to a history that sustains this nation even today.’ [the pledge is the only place people individually and personally choose to link their respective religious and civic lives?] The Pledge clearly acknowledges the fact that our freedoms in this country come from God, not government [Please don't tell me you just said that.].
– Jay Sekulow, chief counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice

EDIT: Oops. Forgot to mention all the above quotes come from a cnsnews.com article.

In an ongoing effort to make minions of all the world, we took it upon ourselves to enter a moment of introspection. Dictatorial control of the globe requires certain qualities of a person, and how can the self be made better if not through careful consideration of its faults? Upon peering into our souls and minds, we discovered something: we’re not that smart.

Let me offer you my perspective; Greg’s mileage may vary. Over the past several years (perhaps since senior year of college), my attention span has been diminishing (thankfully, only algebraically). I blame only myself and my lack of rigour. Nevertheless, my lacking in the powers of concentration has severely limited my ability to perform certain tasks like determining a tight bound on spatial quantum search, understanding the nuances of quantum pattern matching, or shaving.

Greg claimed to be suffering from a similar fate and, clever man that he is, suggested a solution: Chess.

He posited that the competitive spirit the game inspires would offer tangible incentive for concentrating on and rationalizing about one topic on a timescale of order greater than dekaseconds. In short, chess would, over time, reinculcate our respective abilities to think.

We started last night with a rousing (and, truth be told, embarrassing on both sides) game, mano a mano. Greg took me to town, but I feel a better man for it. Anybody willing to throw down the gauntlet is welcome; my brain can only thank you. For the record: Greg’s pretty good and I’m fair to middling.

I’ll be interested to see and hear how the world will be affected. The Royal Mail is planning to have an extra 150 lorries on the road this week. Hollywood worries that the release will seriously effect ticket sales. Some more words that end in “orries” (yes, you read that correctly: “ovarian growth worries”).

I’m particularly curious about various nations’ transportation and shipping infrastructures. Is it possible that unleashing tens of millions of books on the world all at once could overload the system? I’m thinking of some kind of phase transition in the shipping sector effecting some odd, emergent behavior: give just one too many parcels to the carriers in Montreal and, WHAM, there goes the Dutch chocolate industry. Traffic backed up at O’Hare? Harry Potter. Massive gladiolus phage? Harry Potter. Jerry Falwell consulted by White House on Supreme Court appointments? Harr- no wait, that’s all Bush.

Anyway, I fully expect some strange things to go down over the next few days whether it’s shipping related or not. So if anything happens to you, just blame HP.

Harry Potter: the new El Niño.

It was pretty freakin’ cool. The tour started with a walkabout on the grounds above the actual installation. From above, you can look down through the silo door and see the vast tower of armament looking back up at you surrounded by its various service platforms, vibrational dampers and supports. (Tidbit: the jets on the Titan II were so powerful that, if ignited in the silo, they’d shake the missile apart. Massive streams of water were injected into the jet’s exhaust flow so that the resulting steam could absorb and dissipate the energy safely.) The thing is just plain big. (Tidbit: really big.)

Once underground we got to see some of the control center and learn about the daily operations of the compound. My mom even got to turn the brass key (Tidbit: Allen and I figured out it wouldn’t really be all that hard for one person to launch the missile instead of the two that the military had carefully designed the system to require). She annihilated “Target 2″; has that woman no compassion?

But what affected me most was the whole (inter)national culture behind the installation: Mutual Assured Destruction. Peace through Deterrence.

I’m no Cold War history buff. I’m no sociologist, no politician, no philosopher. But these seem like horrible guiding principals. What about Peace through Dialogue? I understand that there are big threats in this world and carrying a big stick makes those threats a lot easier to handle. But how much money was spent on this project and those like it? What if that had gone toward education or international (or, hell, domestic) aid? Would people be so enamoured with the idea of blowing up the U.S. if we didn’t have such a gigantic military machine building weapons capable of destroying most of the rest of the world?

People say the best defense is a good offense. I say the best defense is to not have people hate you. (Tidbit: that’s a lot harder to accomplish.)

This announcement brings up some interesting questions. Will I be able to buy a cheap PC desktop and install OS X? Will some kind of Windows emulator be available (making the transition from Windows to OS X extremely easy for anyone)? Is my current hardware fated to a doom of ill support and obsolescence?

And, of course, is Steve Jobs in league with the denizens of hell?

Apparently, the first Intel Inside Mac will ship by June 6th, 2006. 666: indeed, the veritable number of the beast.

The answer, I believe, must be “yes”. How else could they gain such a legion of fanatics (in which I suppose I must count myself) if not by the means of the occult. I suppose I should not exclude the possibility that Mr. Jobs is himself the devil, but I’d have thought Satan would be better at predicting the future. Though, to be fair, all of Mr. Jobs’ false promises over the years may have been entirely intentional. It all may have been part of Satan’s tricky scheming.

At any rate, beware Apple. Their good design sense is just part of their twisted mask of deception. Do not be tempted by their sexy aluminum laptops, their vast expanses of widescreen flat panels, or their clean user interface. Every time you use a Mac, you’re communing with the lord of darkness.

I hear he’s pretty fun guy, though, so it’s not all bad.

It’s really an amazing story. Here are these kids that live in a brothel; about twenty people all living in one apartment, each family with its own little room. When their mothers work, they pull a curtain across the bed, so the children don’t see anything that goes on. The sounds, I imagine, are harder to filter out. To escape, the kids go play on the roof or in the streets, but they themselves work most of the day too: washing dishes, going to the market, cooking. These kids are like ten years old and they work long days, see there mothers abused, beaten or burned to death, (more or less) go to school, and still manage to have fun. They play games, fly kites, laugh with each other. That’s what amazed me most watching the movie; there were times these kids were genuinely happy. I probably would have withered away a long time ago if I’d grown up in similar circumstances. Maybe the ones like me already have, and we’re only left with the strongest. It really shows how resilient little kids can be in terrible conditions, but makes you wonder just how psychologically damaged they’ll end up.

Photography, for some of these kids, is their way out of their abusive, drug riddled environment – a way out of prostitution. Through photography and the monumental efforts of their teacher, many of them were able to attend boarding schools (that is, were able to leave the red light district) and pursue a real education in a healthy environment. What’s sad is that this woman spent years of her life with about eight kids (at least that’s the story of the documentary). Eight. There really needs to be massive organizational change in order to help more than handfuls of children at a time.

Holly speaks more on these issues. I’d suggest going to her site for discussion.

When people describe that certain way in which couples… discover one another, shall we say, they often use the phrase “one thing led to another, and…”. If only I could just figure out that ‘one thing’. It’s been my quest for quite some time now to find out exactly what it is because, man, I’d be golden if I knew.

Having officially given up on original research in the area, I’m opening this up to outside contributors; please advise on what you feel that ‘one thing’ to be. If some sort of ritualistic ceremony is prerequisite to this knowledge (e.g. Masonic initiation), just say the word and I’m there.