Jaywalking is discriminatory

Well, Tom Vanderbilt makes the case that the media are prejudiced against pedestrians.

I wonder if it's as bad in Portland, where we have lots of political support for urban planning and walkable neighborhoods.

We're not meant to kill

I just read that in World War 2, 80% of soldiers didn't shoot at the enemy. (In the excellent book How We Decide.)

Only 20% of our soldiers were able to overcome their natural instinct to not hurt another person, and shoot. I think that's excellent. It impresses me greatly that so many people, honorable people who wanted to serve their country, still couldn't bring themselves to harm another person.

The book goes on to describe how the Army saw this as a problem, and set about designing conditioning that would overcome our basic instincts of humanity. By the Korean war, they got 55 percent of soldiers to shoot. In Vietnam, the number reached 90 percent.

I believe this is a big part of why our veterans come back from war so much more damaged now than in the past. PTSD and the other mental damage our soldiers receive comes from overriding the basic human instinct to not kill another person.

It seems ridiculous to advocate for a military that's inefficient, where we have people whose job it is to kill who can't or don't. Obviously, as a hippy, I favor increased diplomacy and work to find peaceful solutions to conflicts so the military doesn't have to kill anyone.

But I think more than that, I'm intrigued by the fact that 20% of soldiers were able to fire in the past. And my impression is that the returning veterans were more able to reenter society successfully then. There are lots of complicating factors - differing political support for the different wars, new medical technology to help badly wounded soldiers survive - but I think the military's ruthless efficiency at "helping" our soldiers become ruthless has a real cost that must be weighed and noted. Our soldiers lose a part of their souls in their training. I'm not sure the nature of the debt, but we owe them something for that.

Strawberries, Pakistanis and Hermaphrodites, oh my!

Google will offer to complete your search for you. I have often enjoyed this feature, when I don't have to complete typing out a movie star's name. Although it doesn't work well for some names.

Many people have noticed recently that if you type in the beginnings of basic questions, like who, what, when, etc. you get some interesting results. That is, people are searching on Google for some pretty stupid stuff. And some pretty weird stuff.

Comic Mashups

Ryan Dunlavey has created hilarious comic strip mashups. Like X-Men meets Peanuts. Or Spy vs Spy vs Predator vs Alien.

I think it's awesome.

Copyright conundrum

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has put together a Takedown Hall of Shame - a list of particularly ridiculous organizations who sued to have content taken off websites, even when the content was clearly protected as fair use.

Some of them are pretty awesome, and it's ridiculous that they were taken down, even if briefly. Like a one man a cappella greatest hits of John Williams. Or a dubbed version of White Wedding, where Billy Idol just sings about the images in the video.

But one case involves NPR, and confuses me. A political TV ad, 30 seconds long, plays clips from an NPR story for 25 seconds, and says how bad things will be if Measure 1 fails. That seems a lot less creative, and more reasonable for NPR to say, "stop stealing our material". It is political speech, which should be protected, but why not write your own damn script and make a case instead of playing the radio clip? It seems lazy and not persuasive.

But I'm not a lawyer. Being lazy and unpersuasive isn't grounds for copyright violation. Using the whole piece you copied, destroying the market for the work, whether it's fiction or not, and the character of the use are how courts decide Fair Use. And apart from the utterly untransformative (albeit political) character of this copying, it does seem to meet all the other qualifications. (Although I'm sure NPR would argue that using NPR tape in political debates damages the market for their work.)

I'm curious to see how this case turns out. The EFF thinks that NPR is dead wrong. I don't think they're totally out of line, but I wonder how a judge will rule.

Jesus, Pope!

Seems to me like the pope is a jerk. Not a huge surprise, but after years of conversation with the Anglican church, to bypass that negotiation and just declare that Anglicans are welcome as Catholics is pretty cold.

Not to mention how unlike Jesus it is to celebrate people who are angry that the Anglicans are ordaining women and gays.

Handheld Nintendo

I do like video games. And the idea of being able to play NES games inside an old NES cartridge, with an old NES controller embedded inside? Genius.