antikoan

 |::| Sunday, July 07, 2002

 |::| What Do You Call 1000 Lawyers Chained Together At The Bottom Of The Ocean?  2:27:05 PM 

Little story: Once when I was in my early 20s -- I think it was right after I'd dropped out of college -- my mother said to me sadly, "You were always so good at arguments. I always had such hopes that you might become a lawyer."

Flabbergasted, I replied: "But mom, you hate lawyers!"

It took her a moment to respond. "Yes," she finally said, "but I hoped that you'd be an exception."

If I lived in the Denver area, and I had legal problems, I'd definitely consider hiring these guys. Too bad they don't do criminal... AHEM.

From their homepage:

Powers Phillips, P.C., is a small law firm located in downtown Denver, Colorado within convenient walking distance of over fifty bars and a couple of doughnut shops. Powers Phillips also maintains a small satellite office-in-exile on the cow-covered hillsides near Carbondale, Colorado, where it puts out to pasture some of its aging attorneys.

The firm is composed of lawyers from the two major strains of the legal profession, those who litigate and those who wouldn't be caught dead in a courtroom.

Litigation lawyers are the type who will lie, cheat and steal to win a case and who can't complete a sentence without the words "I object" or "I demand another extension on that filing deadline." Many people believe that litigation lawyers are the reason all lawyers are held in such low esteem by the public. Powers Phillips, P.C. is pleased to report that only four of its lawyers, Trish Bangert, Tom McMahon, Tamara Vincelette, and JoAnne Zboyan are litigation lawyers, and only one of them is a man.

Lawyers who won't be caught dead in a courtroom are often referred to in the vernacular as "loophole lawyers," underhanded wimps who use their command of legal gobbledygook to scam money from the unsuspecting, usually widows and orphans. Many people believe that such "loophole lawyers" are the reason all lawyers are held in such low esteem by the public. Powers Phillips, P.C. is pleased to report that only four of its lawyers, Myra Lansky, Kathy Powers, Mary Phillips, and Jay Powers, are such "loophole lawyers" and one of them, Jay Powers, hardly does anything at all anyway so he doesn't really count.

And who said "honest lawyer" was a contradiction in terms? (BTW, consider signing up for their "Bitches From Hell Reporter" newsletter...)

 |::| Ecumenicalism R.I.P.?  1:24:01 PM 

From Daypop:

New York Lutheran Leader Suspended (washingtonpost.com). A high-ranking Lutheran pastor has been suspended from his duties and ordered to apologize to all Christians for participating with Muslims, Jews, Sikhs and Hindus in an interfaith prayer service in New York's Yankee Stadium after Sept. 11. [Daypop Top News Stories]

The article discusses "renewal" movements in American protestantism -- essentially, reactions against the loose intra-semitic monotheism that has been a traditional undercurrent in most cosmopolitan Christian and Islamic societies.

The article notes, in part:

"By President Benke's joining with other pagan clerics in an interfaith service [no matter what the intent might have been], a crystal clear signal was given to others at the event and to thousands more watching by C-Span. The signal was: While there may be differences as to how people worship or pray, in the end, all religions pray to the same God," the Rev. Wallace Schulz, the Missouri Synod's national second vice president, wrote in the suspension letter.

"To participate with pagans in an interfaith service and, additionally, to give the impression that there might be more than one God, is an extremely serious offense against the God of the Bible," Schulz added.

....

The charges against Benke included "unionism" -- mixing the beliefs of various Christian denominations -- as well as "syncretism" -- mixing Christian and non-Christian views. Both are forbidden by the 1847 constitution of the Missouri Synod, which is based in St. Louis and is the country's second-largest Lutheran group, after the 5.1-million-member Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

"The principle is, you don't want to do anything that would compromise the gospel of Jesus Christ," said the Rev. David H. Mahsman, editor of the Missouri Synod's newspaper, the Lutheran Witness. "The question is, does participating in an interfaith service after September 11th do that? Benke would say no. In fact, it honors Christ and shows that Lutherans are concerned about the well-being of the entire community. Others would say it placed Christ on an equal footing with Allah and Vishnu and whatever gods are involved."

It's an inevitable backlash, really, and only serves to illustrate the importance of the 9th Circuit panel's decision in the Newdow case.

 |::| Moderation? No way, we're in America, buddy!  12:27:24 PM 

From MeFi, the following link/discussion regarding the recent NYT article on dietary fat:

posted by srboisvert » July 6 7:10 PM | 24 comments. Fat versus CarbsNYT Magazine takes an deep look at the issues of the low fat diet and the modern obesity epidemic. [MetaFilter]

What's really interesting to me about the Times article is that it's nearly free from references to the true, clear cause of the "obesity epidemic": our typically American immoderation. So typically American, that we make a damn patriotic virtue of it.

That immoderation extends to articles such as this, with its clear and ideologically pure vision of the world being led to ruin and perdition by a pack of wrong-headed ideologues.

Lost (again, in typical American fashion) is any notion that the truth might lie in the territory between: In a place where (in concert with the extraordinarily well-documented long term results of the famous Framingham study) we moderate our intake of fat; where in concert with well-understood urological principles, we moderate our intake of protein; where, consistent with our evolutionary history as active hunter-gatherers, we engage in regular physical activity, instead of bursts of frenetic and often cardiovascularly unchallenging "exercise" like waterskiing, ATV riding softball, and snowboarding, separated by long periods of nearly unbroken sedentariness.

Of course we couldn't think that way. That would require a nuanced understanding. And this is, after all, the land where you're either with us, or against us (Amen).

 |::| Welcome to the Memetic Ecosystem  11:57:37 AM 

Boing Boing blogs a "proof" of a technique for leveraging JavaScript in parasitic computing, and adds a link to a HotWired article (c. 1997) proposing this idea ("MIPS-sucking") as far back as 1997. This is still not quite as clever or untraceable as using bad IP packets to scavenge compute cycles off of routers, but it's probably a lot more efficient. After all, you're using a high-level language to actually perform detailed calculations, rather than figuring out a way to re-assemble a result out of a lot of arcane network traffic data.

On the other hand, it's much more traceable -- though I can think of ways around that, too.

Basically, the concept is that you insert a JavaScript routine into a page that's executed continuously. Some routine then sends the results back to the originator via HTTP. Some calculations will surely be lost due to unplanned user interaction. But you would have designed the gleaning algorithms with a lot of redundancy, anyway. Losing the result from some individual page on some individual computer would be a lot like stepping on a lot of random ants: You'd have to take a very thorough and structured approach to actually have an effect on the larger calculation, assuming it was all designed properly to begin with.

Here's the fun part: There's damn near nothing anybody could do to stop it from happening. Yes, you can turn off JavaScript; but as anyone knows who's tried to run without JavaScript, doing so is a real pain in the ass. Yes, you could block outbound traffic using a personal firewall; but if you do, you won't be able to browse.

What we're left with, then, is a scenario where everybody is everybody else's commons. We can all be enlisted in doing things for others whenever we're online. Really, that's not very different at all from the way things work normally.

Think about this for a moment. Whenever we walk through the world (assuming we're not hermits) we're picking up signals that are sent to us by entities (governments, corporations, religious groups, social groups) whose interests are not our own. We have no choice but to perceive those signals. We then act upon them in some way; we transfer ideas to one another, sometimes mutating and changing them, and we do this at many levels. This is, in a crude nutshell, the basic idea behind memetics (need to add a link or two, though Boing Boing is probably as good a place as any to link out ot that). We propagate memes. Some of them we perceive consciously, some we don't; some have an identifiable effect on us, and some don't. Most probably function synchronistically with other memes; sometimes that synchronism will be co-evolved, more often it will be accidental.

This participation in meme-propation and evolution is not something we can choose to do or not do. It's part of our nature as humans, and we as a species have been witness to a massive, probably geometric increase in meme-processing in the last several hundred years. This demonstrates a parallel development in the net. This is a proof of concept not only for new and interesting ways to "steal" compute power, but also for really intriguing possibilities regarding massively distributed computational systems -- not to put too fine a point on it, massively distributed, and potentially independent and fully-virtualized, intelligences.

Really, if you conceive of the entity in truly virtual terms -- as, say, a Von Neumann Machine or a cellular automoton -- there's no reason, after some particular point, for it to even have a single home. The first, simplest independent beings will be worms (and we've already seen them). The next stage will be organisms that have multiple parts on multiple hosts at physically discrete locations. When somebody starts encoding the worms with genetic algorithms, they'll be able to actually evolve without human interaction (something that was suggested c. 1997 as a means of developing more efficient network protocols).

Eventually, the virtual and the human memetic ecosystems will meet and meld in some way(s). The process(es) will be painful, and what's really going on will slmost certainly not be recognized at the time. When it does, we will have created something far more important than a new god: We'll have created life.

 |::|   12:39:23 AM 

From MeFi -- this guy was a Nixon appointee, for pete's sake, didn't anybody's staff lackey even take the time to check on that before voting 99:0 to condemn him?

posted by mediareport » July 6 4:23 PM | 12 comments. "I never had much confidence in the attention span of elected officials for any kind of deep thinking about important issues,"jabs Republican U.S. judge Alfred Goodwin in a feisty interview. He seems unfazed by the outraged reaction to his ban on government teachers leading a theistic "pledge of allegiance," ripping into the press "("Their attention span can't handle anything more than a haiku of about four lines"), the President ("I'm a little disappointed in our chief executive -- who nobody ever accused of being a deep thinker -- for popping off") and "this wrap-yourself-in-the-flag frenzy." I'm starting to see why he's "among the best-liked jurists on the 9th Circuit bench, always affable and gracious." [from cursor.org] [MetaFilter]

Choice quotes from the article:

Goodwin pointed out that he won the Combat Infantry Badge in World War II, and remembers that on the belt buckles of dead German soldiers was an inscription claiming God was on the German side.

"I was supporting the flag then and I still support it," he said.

The ruling does not outlaw the Pledge, but if it stands, it would mean that teachers in the nine Western states covered by the 9th Circuit cannot lead their classes in a patriotic pledge that tells students the country is "one nation, under God."

....

"The Wall Street Journal gave [the ruling] about a half-inch, which is what it deserved," Goodwin said.

He said he has received much reaction -- from strangers, lawyers and old Army buddies -- which has been running hot and cold. All the e-mails go into a folder marked "Newdow."

"Someday when I haven't got anything else to do, I'll read them," he said.