alex chiang: web 6.0

Snow in the mountains = fun. Snow in the towns = suck.

• shovelled a 10′ wide x 35′ long path on my driveway (consisting of snow about 1′ deep). Using an average weight of 15 lbs. / cubic foot, this works out to 5250 lbs. of snow. . .
• . . . which is 23,337.3 newtons.
• each shovel motion lifted the snow directly up for about 0.5 meters (the amount of work), which gives us 11,668.7 joules
• there are about 4.186 J per kilo-calorie (the unit we measure food in)
• so I burned about 2787.6 kcals this morning.
• according to http://health.discovery.com/tools/calculators/basal/basal.html, the BMR is “the number of calories you’d burn if you stayed in bed all day - a tempting idea for some.”
• my BMR is 1622.6 kcals

Plus, I’m coming off the flu. I’m going back to bed. qed.

Climbed at Shelf Road a few weekends ago, roundabouts the first of November or so. The weather was amazing — temps felt like they were in the mid 70s or so, and at one point, we were actually chasing the sun.

Climbing at Shelf always makes you feel like a hero, since the ratings are a bit soft. I got what was ostensibly my hardest onsight to date: some 10d whose name I can’t remember. Who knows if that grade would hold up at other locations.

In any case, the climbing was fab, the weather beautiful, and the company was about as solid as it gets. Now that old man winter is upon us, we can only dream of the halcyon days of the first of November.

Pics are here.

Continuing on with Huxley’s Brave New World Revisited is another far seeing observation about the concentration of power in the media. This section of his essay could have been written yesterday for Lessig’s blog.

Mass communication, in a word, is neither good nor bad; it is simply a force and, like any other force, it can be used either well or ill. Used in one way, the press, the radio and the cinema are indespensable to the survival of democracy. Used in another way, they are among the most powerful weapons in the dictator’s armory. In the field of mass communications as in almost every other field of enterprise, technological progress has hurt the Little Man and helped the Big Man. As lately as fifty years ago, every democratic country could boast of a great number of small journals and local newspapers. Thousands of country editors expressed thousands of independent opinions. Somewhere or other almost anything could get printed. Today the press is still legally free; but most of the little papers have disappeared. The cost of wood-pulp, of modern printing machinery and of syndicated news is too high for the Little Man. In the totalitarian East there is political censorship and the media of mass communication are controlled by the State. In the democratic West there is economic censorship and the media of mass commmunication are controlled by members of the Power Elite. Censorship by rising costs and the concentration of communication power in the hands of a few big concerns is less objectionable than State ownership and government propaganda; but certainly it is not something of which a Jeffersonian democrat could possibly approve.

Economic censorship is exactly the problem with the media today. Check out this graphic that shows the media concentration in today’s society. And for further reading, I’ve already compiled a lot of other links on my sucks page.

Aldous Huxley wrote his famous work Brave New World in 1932, and then wrote an essay in 1965 revisiting his “fable”, as he likes to call it. The main premise of his essay, that overpopulation will necessarily lead to democratic demagogues, is a bit dated in my opinion, but in making some other observations, he was fantastically prescient.

Today’s example is a passage he wrote about the concentration of power in the hands of a few:

In a world of mass production and mass distribution the Little Man, with his inadequate stock of working capital, is at a grave disadvantage. In competition with the Big Man, he loses his money and finally his very existence as an independent producer; the Big Man has gobbled him up. As the Little Men disappear, more and more economic power comes to be wielded by fewer and fewer people. [...] In a capitalist democracy, such as the United States, it is controlled by what Professor C. Wright Mills has called the Power Elite. This Power Elite directly employs several millions of the country’s working force in its factories, offices and stores, controls many millions more by lending them the money to buy its products, and, through its ownership of the media of mass communication, influences the thoughts, the feelings and the actions of virtually everybody. To parody the words of Winston Churchill, never have so many been manipulated so much by so few.

That was in 1965 folks. Things have only gotten worse since in terms of megaconglomerations and concentration of the media. It’s a problem you ought to be conscious of, and at least have in the back of your mind, along with world hunger, global warming, and people who drive slow in the left lane.

(what, you thought you would actually get answers from me? I only highlight the stupidity of the world without proposing real solutions.)

I saw Railroad Earth last night at the Aggie Theater. Good bluegrass band, fun was had by all. A bit hungover today, so I don’t feel like making a real post. So for some Friday entertainment, go read:

86 Rules of Boozing

As far as lists of funny stuff on the internet go, this is way better than the typical “you know you’re from NJ when…” or some bullshit like that.

So when I was in college, I was always disappointed when I had to purchase a new textbook because it was usually 2x to 3x more expensive than a used one. Buying a used textbook meant saving lots of money and having more money meant being drunk more often. The only drawback was that you never knew what kind of yahoo (pronounced yay-who) owned the book before you.

In my experience, it was always a drooling, mouth-breathing, semi-moron who seemed to get at a book before it fell into my grubby hands. How do I know such things? Because invariably, it was awash in a mess of ultra-flourescent yellow highlighter spewed about the pages like so much alien diarrhea.

That person likely spent a few minutes scanning the page, looking for key concepts and highlighting them, for the purpose of expedited cramming the night before the midterm. The problem is, that person probably only had about 5% of their brain engaged, since he or she was only looking for the highlights (duh) and missed out on all the context that would actually help make the concept understandable.

This level of mental sophistication is about par with moving your finger under words and silently mouthing them as you read.

Let’s look at an actual example:

They set forth what, to the best of their knowledge, is the truth about some particular aspect of reality, they use reason to explain the facts they have observed and they support their point of view with arguments that appeal to reason in other people. All this is fairly easy in the fields of physical science and technology. It is much more difficult in the fields of politics and religion and ethics.

Seriously. What the fuck was this person thinking? How will that, in any way possible, be helpful to you when you go back to study before the exam? The sheer contrast of the yellow is so distracting and disorienting that it probably makes studying harder since your eyes can’t focus on the words.

Yellow highlighters suck. A pox on them and all those who abuse them.

Sorry for the dearth of posts lately; I’ve been busy as hell. I’ll create some real content soon, but in the mean time, I’ll just point to someone else’s blog. Mixing two of my favorite things — Macs and bikes — is neat. Check out the an interview snippet here:

Bike Cranks And PowerBooks

This movie, directed by Steven Soderbergh, sucked.

I guess that people in the Hollywood orbit might think this movie is hilarious and offers clever commentary on their scene and was innovative because it brought together lots of huge stars but imposed ascetic rules upon them. For normal people, it sucks mightily. The plot plods along, and the characters are uninteresting. If that’s not a sure way to kill a movie, I don’t know what is.

A few of the reviews I’ve read online talk about how confusing the plot is because of the layers of self-referentiality. Personally, I didn’t think it was confusing at all — just boring.

There are a few good scenes, like David Duchovny’s monster hard-on, but as Charlie Munger (Warren Buffet’s partner) said at a Berkshire Hathaway stockholder meeting, “when you mix raisins and shit, you’ve still got shit.” Kudos to Nicky Katt who was one of the raisins. His Hitler-in-modern-times performance was hilarious.

Overall though, a complete waste of time (and not in the Monty Python sense, but in the if I could kill myself by shoving a crayon through my eye sockets and gouging out my brain I would so do it sense).

Very interesting article in Wired about a Roundup resistant coca plant.

Apparently, the US gives Colombia $750 million a year, part of which goes towards spraying Roundup on coca fields, the idea being that “Kill the coca and there will be no cocaine.” Until recently, the campaign seemed to be having some degree of success. But now, it seems that the Colombian farmers have used selective breeding to find a Roundup resistant plant which they call Boliviana negra. My favorite quote from the story:

“Boliviana negra is like goaaaal for the coca farmers,” the mayor shouts, jumping to his feet and yelling “goal” like a crazed Latin American soccer announcer.

The reasons for eliminating the US’ war on drugs are legion, and this is merely another data point. I don’t have a good alternative solution, but clearly, the route our government is taking is not effective.

All Hallow’s Eve in Ft. Collins. Kicked it off on Friday catching The Motet. They dressed up as Prince and the New Power Generation and rocked out two full sets of Prince covers. A truly excellent way to begin the weekend.

On Saturday and Sunday, there was a party here, a party there, and a few outings to the bars which netted some great shots. I’m not really sure what I was supposed to be, but the common consensus was the Asian Pimp Fairy. Looking at the pics, “fairy” is about right.

Pictures of the depravity