Matthew Rasmussen's journal of journals on various topics of interest, published here, there or somewhere since 1999.
The management is not responsible for lost or stolen towel cards. Should your towel card be lost or stolen, you will no longer have access to towels.
A Question for the "Yes on 1" Campaign
File Under: /culture
What's to prevent individual teachers from discussing homosexual issues now?
I get it. You don't like gay people. You don't know any gay people. It's not that big a deal, in real life.
The fact remains that if I like a girl I have the right to marry her, without any "seperate but equal" rejiggering. How could I, as a decent person, deny that right to someone else?
(Question 1 is a Maine ballot initiative to outlaw gay marriage.)
>HP: 0
Building the Shack, Part 8
File Under: /sketchbook/shack
Walls went up today.
Clamped a strip of wood to a floor joist. Lifted the west wall into place, levelled it, and clamped it to the strip. Screwed the wall into the floor frame.
Lifted the north wall into place. Secured it to the west wall and floor. Removed strip and clamps from the west wall.
Repeat for the south wall.
Managed not to fall down the banking hauling the east wall into place. Attached it to the other walls and floor.
Roof next, if I can find the materials.
>HP: 0
Building the Shack, Part 7
File Under: /sketchbook/shack
Scrounged some bricks and began trying to level the ground. Laid stakes at a desired level.
Big rock on the spot I selected. Started digging it out. Planned to get under it and tip it flat, then fill around it again.
Rock turned out to be bigger than expected. Afternoon was disappearing.
Found the "bottom" about 3 feet down.
Tried to tilt it with a plank. Wouldn't budge. Kept digging out around it and retrying. Realized I'd only uncovered the narrow end of a long, flat boulder. Gave up and filled the hole back in.
Decided to bring the floor frame itself in and see how low it could sit on top of the boulder's edge.
Repacked the dirt as much as possible.
Worked out the lowest point the floor could sit. Levelled the floor frame using the ledge as a fulcrum.
Set four sets of four bricks crossways to act as feet for a plank on the banking (east) side.
Levelled and packed the dirt, and laid a line of bricks under the west side.
Drove additional stakes to keep the east plank and bricks in place. Cut a second plank to fit north and south sides. Dug and set them in place.
Secured the floor to the planks with 3" screws, toenailed in alternating directions. Partially filled the inside with dirt.
>HP: 0
YouTube Captioning: Morning Musume - Kanashimi Twilight
File Under: /web/caption
More at YouTubeCapper.Blogspot.com. Create your own here.
However, due to time constraints...
>HP: 2
>Awesome. Silly as their videos, and insipid as their music may be, though, you've gotta admit, these girls are really damn cute.
>Oh yes. I had fun doing this. I admit it. Molestery, molestery fun.
Class in America: The "Good Schools" Myth
File Under: /culture
The day's favorite American euphemism for deliberate class stratification, "good schools," is back, this time from Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times. This one is doubly insidious because liberals are still comfortable saying it aloud. I bitchslapped Kristof's fellow white-flight New Yorker Malcolm Gladwell when he took this same call up a year ago, and since nothing's changed, I'll refer you to my post from that time, Malcolm Gladwell's Good Teacher/Bad Teacher Delusion.
Snip:
Don't blame students; don't blame parents; don't blame underfunded schools; don't blame distending class sizes, don't blame school funding being tied to local property taxes; don't blame artificial testing requirements devouring classroom time; don't blame required special education skewing dollar-per-student vs. results numbers wildly below magnet and parochial schools; don't blame the flight of your upper-middle class into homogenous neighborhoods.
>HP: 0
UI: R. Clayton Miller's 10/GUI
File Under: /web/design
Problems:
1. You just doubled the amount of space I need between myself and the monitor.
2. Multitouch allows for more kinds of interaction: true! However, this interface steals ALL of them away from use by the applications.
3. Left and right sides of the screen aren't discoverable. Might as well be top and bottom -- i.e. bottom of the screen for application launching (call it a "dock") and top of the screen for context-specific options (a sort of "bar" of "menus").
4. Linear spatial overload of windows is no better than two-dimensional spatial overload of windows. Labelled zoom-all-the-way-out cheat no better than Expose and application switcher.
5. Where does file management fit into this scheme?
Lukas Mathis calls 10/GUI "one of the most dramatic reimaginations of the desktop user interface I've seen in a long time" but on examination it's an incremental hardware update with no real interface breakthroughs. Keyboard + mouse has gone on for far too long, as has the W.I.M.P. interface. A better direction would be a tactile multitouch surface which can be anything it needs to be, including a keyboard (for any language), coupled with a GUI that represents tasks and actors rather than objects in a space. 10/GUI does nothing about window and document clutter, squinting, scanning large lists, or making the computer's workings and status an organic part of its presentation. The video may be a slick investors' reel, but shows no real progress.
>HP: 1
>Cute name (see tenugui). But a very poor idea, for many reasons. Suffice it to say, I'm already frustrated with the number of 'gestures' I need to use to get my iPhone to work right. I have no interest in being forced to use a multitude of gestures to do various things.. two fingers for this kind of movement, three fingers for this kind of movement... it's horribly unintuitive. And besides, how are you supposed to type with this touch pad in the place of your keyboard?
Building the Shack, Part 6
File Under: /sketchbook/shack
Framed the rafters and cut a ridge beam.
Still figuring out roofs. Went through a lot of revisions.
Used rise over run rather than angles as much as possible. Some bad math early on.
Pine a pleasure to cut on the tablesaw after all that rock-hard oak.
Rounded rafter ends a motif from early on in designs. Mirrored it with the ridge beam.
Might drill a hole and hang a lamp/planter/bird feeder off east and west ends of the beam.
Need to level the ground and lay a brick slab next. This is moving outside the workshop. Quixotic.
>HP: 0
Building the Shack, Part 5
File Under: /sketchbook/shack
Framed the west wall.
Nailed a strip of scrap into the gap at the foot of the door to maintain dimensions while working.
More cross laps. Picturing the shack something like a three-walled card house, with the east (picture window) wall bearing less of the load of the roof than the other three.
House painters walked off with a roll of tar paper I was planning on using for the roof, so back to the drawing board there.
Rafters next.
>HP: 0
YouTube Captioning: Jungle Girl: Chapter 1, Death by Voodoo!
File Under: /web/caption
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NOT ENTIRELY JOAN CRAWFORD
PUFF McMANMUSCLE
GOMER PYLE
DICK COCKY and WET STAINES
ONIONHEAD KLINGER and the BLACKFACE KID
DAVID DUKE
Production
GAS
FOOD
LODGING
"Ow!"
"That's my line!"
"No."
"See? Lying guards."
"Don't put that in my head."
"I'm here now!"
Chapter Two
A NIGHT ON SPLASH MOUNTAIN
>HP: 0
Retired Addiction
File Under: /housekeeping/addictions
Underworld's Second Toughest of the Infants album
Velvet smooth electronica with teeth.
>HP: 0
Panorama: Rainbow
File Under: /sketchbook/panos
Sennebec Lake, Union, ME, looking towards Appleton.
Stitched together in Hugin from 25 camera phone pictures. Miller cylindrical projection.
>HP: 0
Panorama: Bald Mountain, Camden, ME
File Under: /sketchbook/panos
And Penobscot Bay, from Ragged Mountain.
Stitched together in Hugin from 21 camera phone pictures. Fisheye projection.
>HP: 0
PAUSE
File Under: /housekeeping
>HP: 0
What Should We Do With Polanski?
File Under: /psychology
The more I read about the Polanski case, the harder I find myself leaning toward witch hunt, but I'll remain on the fence. The pertinent data seems to be as follows:
Statutory rape is based on the assumption that a woman under 18 can not make rational decisions about her sexuality when confronted with an adult. This may be true. The US says that this girl could have in 5 years. Britain says she could have in 3. Other countries differ in either direction. In my opinion, the US is closer to the truth. Whatever the case, it's difficult to argue sanely that the crime is equal to that of a forced sexual assault against an adult woman.
On the question of force, we have two pieces of evidence. Less valuable are Geimer's recollections of her feelings at the time, which, as hard as it is to accept, were nearly useless when recorded 30 years after the fact. More damning is the application of methaqualone to the girl's drink -- at the time a popular grey market recreational sedative.
There is no pattern of action, unusual for a true sexual predator. Polanski has received no allegations of sexual misconduct in the years preceding, nor in the years since. His pregnant wife had been murdered eight years before the incident. Polanski has now been married for the past 20 years. A settlement was reached, Geimer has dropped charges, and wishes to see the whole thing forgotten.
But America can go a bit nuts when a crime involves sex, especially with a minor, even while lingering over its American Eagle ads. It can resemble a kind of ritual flagellation, and if that's the case no one deserves to be flogged for our own sins. As I said, I'm reserving judgement on Polanski, but there's a whiff of inquisition about this.
>HP: 0
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