Listing all the home page sayings

After being simply inundated by requests (eh, right), I’ve added a page that displays All the Quotes and Lyrics that show up in pseudo-random fashion at the top of the BillSaysThis homepage. And they’re in chronological order too, at no extra charge. Woohoo!

Enterprise: this show’s a keeper

Watched it, loved it, you must tune in next week. Enterprise has the goods and this time around franchise chiefs Rick Berman and Brannon Braga have put a lot of thought into setting up a seven year run. With Voyager, for example, there reportedly was internal debate right up until the beginning of the last season over whether, when, and how the lost crew would get back to Earth. Deep Space Nine had a great multi-year run with the Dominion War but this was not planned at the beginning. In this show, we are get (what will likely be) the major story line right in the first episode: the temporal cold war with the alien Suleiban as key enemies fronting for a far-future leader who we won’t get detailed information on until next season at the earliest. COOL!!!

Script Kiddies versus the terrorists

Eric Norlin, a post-modern marketing whiz and former NSA spook, explains how we can apply lessons from attacks on the Internet to fighting al Queda and that lot. He explores the similarities between a modern terrorist organization and the Internet: both are “loosely affiliated group of nodes that exhibit emergent properties.” So what damages one should have similar effects on the other and therefore distributed denial of service attacks, viruses, and targeting key nodes should have significant impact on the terrorists. Cool, post-modern fighting techniques.

Camaro/Firebird on Hiatus After 2002 Model Year

Yes, the beloved vehicles of so many teenage dreamers are going away, announced General Motors. Interestingly, nearly all of the workers at the plant which produces these cars are eligle to retire. Still, there goes 35 years of muscle car dreams but Mammon must be served and sales are down over 50% in the last ten years.

Starfleet seems to think we’re ready to begin our mission.

So says Captain Jonathon Archer in tonight’s premiere episode of Enterprise. Wow, I am so excited, so psyched to see this. Early reports are very, very positive, saying the new series will recharge the energy of the Trek franchise. Look for a report tomorrow!

Another bit of good news: Paramount gave the green light to start production on Star Trek: Nemesis, the tenth Star Trek movie; expect it in theaters in about a year. Again, early reports on the script by Gladiator writer and lifelong Trek fan John Logan are very positive, with lots of strong action and characters. Stuart Baird (the very cool Kurt Russell flick Executive Decision and U.S. Marshalls) will be directing and Digital Domain (James Cameron’s company, which also handled Lord of the Rings and Titanic) will provide special effects.

Lord of the Rings: excellent new trailer

Apple has posted a QuickTime version of the new Fellowship of The Ring trailer and if you have a highspeed web connection (or are willing to let your dial-up connection run all night), you must see it. This trailer has the clearest visuals yet of what director Peter Jackson’s Middle Earth looks like and the results are stunning down to very small details like flames running around the inside of The Ring.

Cool utility software

URL Capture from URL Toy Software, a shareware utility currently in beta testing, saves all Internet addresses in all open Internet Explorer windows and restores them on command; it can also be set save and restore on Windows shutdown and restart. I like this one and even helped edit the help file (my edits are not included in the version currently available for download).

Tribalism vs. Globalization

[Recent events engaged Jim Fitzgerald and myself in email conversation during which the basis for the following essay emerged. Most of the ideas are Jim’s thinking, elaborated, clarified, and otherwise edited by me. Still, send flamemail to me.]

The conflict between America and its allies and bin Laden and the other Islamic terrorists is really a battle between a new and an old adaptive strategy, tribalism and globalization. When the human race was young, small, widely dispersed, and challenged by basic survival, tribalism was an adaptive device that helped people cooperate to reduce risk. With tribalism you get an in-group/out-group mentality that is a liability in the current diverse and densely populated world. The Taliban represents this old adaptive model–tribal, closed, rigid–and they are railing against what are really evolutionary changes in cultural systems. When the tribes are separated with infrequent contact, everything’s ok. Maybe a few skirmishes when they do come in contact. When the tribes are forced to live together, though, life gets complicated.

Globalization, and not just in the economic sense but rather meaning the interconnection and interdependence of groups across national and other boundaries is the latest and so far highest level of human cultural evolution. In this general sense one might call it one-worldism except that few voices are calling for a single world government. This development values the diversity of individuals and encourages the contributions such diversity brings; it finally rings down the curtain on the view that just because someone does not belong to “my” group that person must be bad, wrong, put down, converted, or killed. We see remnants of tribalism in the Western nations in the campaigns of the anti-globalization protesters and our own religious fundamentalists (Falwell, McVeigh, Farrakhan), so this is not just another name for the division between fundamentalist Islamists and the rest of the world.

An anthropologist might view the world this way: Behaviors persist over the long term because they have some adaptive latent effect. Just what happens when a behavior is no longer adaptive is less clear but is most likely some transient response followed by disappearance of the behavior in the long term. Putting a quantity to the length of long term is difficult, as is understanding the nature of transient response. The transient response, historically, appears to be violence.

An anthropology professor at UC Santa Cruz once said that warfare was a form of rejection of the enemy’s cultural values. Consider current and past wars, including terrorism, in light of this assertion and see if it holds up. The reasons why we went to war against Japan and Germany during WWII are clear, but Vietnam is less obvious. We went to war against Iraq to move them out of Kuwait because we had a treaty with them and because the flow of oil is strategic to us. We went to war against Panama because they were enabling the Medellin Cartel to flood us with drugs.

Warfare between tribal groups in the distant past was probably an adaptive device as well. Cultures are conservative devices, the cultural systems of each group, and when taken as an indivisible whole constitute an adaptive mechanism for the group and preserve economically appropriate behavior. When one unique culture comes into contact with another, cultural sharing could weaken the belief system and the associated economically appropriate rituals, leading eventually to the demise of the tribe. Therefore, warfare against out-groups would preserve the integrity of the cultural system, and improve the chances for survival for the individuals in the group. With widely dispersed groups this is actually a good thing; it’s likely that different systems are required to adapt to differing economic environments, as different species do as well, so a little warfare following contact and then separation is a good thing. That said groups can and do borrow selectively from each other, which has occurred for thousands of years without always causing violence: the spread of agriculture, writing, spices, technology, and even ideas and religion as in the case of Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism.

Those cultures that accept diversity, in the most universal sense of the word, will survive. Those that do not accept diversity will be engaged in conflict and will not survive, or alternatively, if humanity does not have that capacity, none of us will survive. Thinking out loud, perhaps there will be conflict on such an enormous scale that population will revert to 2000 year ago levels with the whole process then to repeat until humanity is able to get past it.

If we don’t learn to live together in a connected global community we will destroy ourselves. That is the next step in our evolution. We hope we can do it.

p.s. An inspiring essay that touches on the topic as well is Steven Denbeste’s What are we fighting for? (http://denbeste.nu/essays/whyfight.shtml).

Jordan returns

While I might be referring to the Kingdom of Jordan’s return to a place of respect for standing with America this week, I’m actually referring to Michael Jordan. MJ apparently will announce today that he will return to the court with the Washington Wizards, the hapless team of which he has been the president and part-owner since January 2000. I have no real idea if this is a good thing or not, although it can hardly hurt a team that finished pretty much at the bottom of the pile since Wes Unseld retired, but some entertaining stats came out with the stories. The most interesting, IMO, is that Jordan has scored more points in his playing career to date than the combined total of all 16 current Wizards players, 35,265 to 34,391.

Some people are sick, others just wacky (2)

Salon reports on a Russian teen with Something up his sleeve. A new penis, to be precise, since the kid burned the original off peeing on a Russian fence. Doctors grew skin on his arm and then grafted that along with surgically rebuilt plumbing back in place. In a bad sign for the future of the human race, he is likely to get back sexual functionality and let’s just hope that doesn’t include reproductive capability. Has anyone called the Darwin Awards people yet?

Little things

Sometimes little things get to me. I’m watching the Notre Dame-Michigan State football game, of course rooting against Notre Dame, and NBC showed the ND and MSU marching bands performing Amazing Grace together. Of course they kept shifting to people in the stands, holding flags, whispering in their little children’s ears, just being Americans. And I cried again.

Some go to the deep end

Andrea Peyser writes in the tabloid NY Post that the AMERICA-BASHING U.N. SHOULD GET LOST, that “the once-shiny beacon of peace has devolved into a cancer, where all manner of anti-American lunacy is hatched. The U.N. functions as an international megaphone through which every Third World dictatorship vents its fury at our way of life.” Peyser minces no words, calling CNN international correspondent a “war slut.”

I’m not familiar with this woman’s writing but the other piece by her currently on the Post’s website is similar in attitude:

My community

Last night I went to a neighborhood meeting sponsored by the Mountain View City Council Neighborhoods Committee. I’m not sure why I went; after all I’ve lived here for four and a half years and this was my first time attending any city function. At the meeting, City Manager Kevin Duggan mentioned that a huge historical American flag was hanging in the rotunda of City Hall and today I took my digital camera over to see it. I took some nice photos and put them up here: In and around Mountain View City Hall, Sep. 21, 2001. Since this is the third set of photos, I added a new section to the site navigation as well entitled Photo Galleries.

Mountain View has a lot of public art spread over much of the town, some of it quite good. You can see a gallery of the works, with location noted for in person viewing, on the town website.

Winning the story war

Thomas Friedman, in another excellent NY Times column, explains the Hama Rules that apply in many of the Arab nations. Hama is a town in Syria that, nearly 20 years ago, was home to an Islamic fundamentalist rebellion against the Assad dictatorship. Please note that an Assad still runs Syria and the city of Hamas literally no longer exists.

TopFive today: Beer

Today’s list is The Top 16 Marketing Slogans for Dung-Flavored Beer. It was inspired by the news that a new beverage on sale in the Orkney islands off northern Scotland is a “Stone Age” beer flavored with animal dung, recovered from a 5,000-year-old pub and brewery. I rarely log these even though the daily lists are usually pretty good but this one is too much. Sample:

14. It’s *Still* Better Than Budweiser

7. Tastes Like John Travolta’s Acting

There are others funnier but also more scatalogical. Go see for yourself! Geez, I laughed more at the runner up and honorable mention lists than the top choices.

Economy: down for the long haul

Christopher Byron, writing in the New York Observer, forsees a long tough road ahead for the American and global economies in the aftermath of 9/11. Even without the tragic events, he posits, the stock markets had been heading south and would probably have reached the same levels. Now billions of dollars have vanished from the economy, in the form of business not done last week and cancelled plans going forward. The American consumer has been the hoped-for saviour in any turnaround but “Many Americans have doubtless concluded already that simply going to the store is to put oneself in harm’s way.”

Letterman Monday: Remarkable

I hope you were able to watch David Letterman’s first post 9/11 show this past Monday. As Bill Carter writes in the NY Times, it was a a remarkable hour of television. As Dave Pell writes in the current issue of his NextDraft newsletter, we are a generation of cynics, more attuned to debates over burning the flag than loving it. But watching Dave give his monologue, asking for patience as he works his way through his feelings out in full view, saluting Giuliani as the personification of courage, comforting Dan Rather through tears, was just amazing. Anyone who can keep a nightly show going strong for 20 years has a pile and a half of brains, no doubt, but Letterman’s show persona was a little too long on the sneer in recent years to attract me. But I’m sure Monday we saw the true Letterman, no persona, and I was moved and impressed. By the time Regis Philbin showed on set, I guess things were getting more back to normal if not comical and so I won’t be a convert. But for one night, for about 40 minutes, I saw amazing television.

What are the next targets?

Matt Bivens, writing in The Nation, asks if we’ve considered, really considered Nuclear Safety and the prospect of a nuclear power plant being the next terrorist target. “And if we can clean up and rebuild after the World Trade Center bombing, a radiological attack would force us to write off huge swathes of land as national sacrifice areas.”

The only good news here is that terrorists are much less likely to successfully hijack another commercial airliner any time soon, because these plants are wide open targets and crashing anything from a 727 to a 767 into one would have devastating results. And some terrorists are already thinking about them as targets.

Nuclear power plants provide around 20% of our national power supply but Bivens questions if we really need them. This article touches on the possibility only briefly but does say that we could eliminate them by reducing the demand for energy. The Rocky Mountain Institute, a prominent think-tank on energy matters, argues that “up to 75 percent of the electricity used in the United States today could be saved with energy efficiency measures that cost less than the electricity itself.”