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Listening to the BBC News podcast for 2008 March 10, they have a fascinating debate between the host and a deaf parent, where the deaf parent, Tomato Licci (sp?) argues with real vigor and tremendous intellectual dishonesty, for his right to pay to have an IVF embryo that is deaf, versus requiring that IVF-created embryos of deaf parents be screened for deafness.

His key argument?  Deafness is not a disability, since there is deaf culture, and he wants his children to be part of that culture.

The host responds quite nicely but logically that obviously it is a disability, since you cannot HEAR, while certainly a hearing person can learn to sign.

The parent just retreats to arguing about discrimination and the horror of calling the inability to hear a disability.

I would like to actually hear an argument about whether parents should be allowed to choose to have disabled embryos engineered for them, regardless of the disability.  There are certainly those out there that would love to be able to choose to have a child that never became an adult.  Is that right?  Is that just?  I don’t know the answer to that.

I love the band, I love the music.  I even went to see them live recently and would gladly pay for a high definition DVD of the performance, if they ever make one, it was that amazing.

But this extremely slow film, even at 2x fast forward, still manages to express in an hour what should be about a 5 minute short film, and even then it would put me to sleep.  Avoid.

I woke up this morning after an unusually vivid dream in which I was at a tech conference and stumble upon a demonstration of a new immersive 3d viewing system where you sit down at a table that has a set of glasses with flat semi-transparent screens for lenses, attached to a swing arm (think Pixar’s Luxo Jr lamp) so it can minutely track your head’s rotation and position.  On the table were special sheets of plastic paper that the display could understand the position of, and map showing you data as if it was on the paper.  Bending and wobbling the paper even produced nice distortion of the data, and if you bent the paper too much it would sometimes fail to fully faithfully reproduce the right distortion of the virtual paper.

There was no eyestrain, and although the imagery produced was of fairly large pixel-size, the width and depth of perceived field was nearly the entire size of an office desk.

I threw this together for myself, so it could use a lot of improvement, but it gets the basic job done.  Up until now Rikaichan ignored the ALT text for images.  Many many japanese sites provide fully detailed ALT text describing their image buttons, making it much easier to navigate the japanese web (especially E-banking and Commerce sites) if you can tell before clicking what a button is about.

PLEASE improve this!  Currently if the button contains a lot of text, I just brute-force translate it word-by-word.  A much better solution would be to hook in google-translate, or display a popup containing the original japanese so the user can roll over it and have rikaichan translate that text bit by bit. Download Rikaichan with ALT Image support.

These days I have heard a lot of decent concerned people called traitors simply for thinking about what is right and just in a time of fear-mongering and propagandized news.

It is a serious word, with a meaning that people too clearly forget.

AT&T joined with our government to illegally spy on us all.  I will not bore you by reminding us all what it means when the state and corporations unite against the public.  Suffice it to say that those senators that voted to immunize AT&T from prosecution are traitors to the founding principles of the United States.  Of course they would not have to make a vote on such a simple issue of principle were it not for George W. Bush leading us down a road to illegal spying, but that is the least of his crimes, and to talk it up belittles his far greater crimes against humanity.

Like, for instance, that while many other nations actually do have representative democracy, we prefer to let college students with no voting history pick our presidential candidates.

Amazing animated comedy, apparently in production since 2004, that I had never even heard of until I saw an interview with one of the creators on television, along with a short (tremendously funny). clip.  http://plusheads.com/ or you can find a lot of it on Youtube.  Some of the segments are only in Japanese, but those are the ones where the comedy is mostly universal language-less humor anyway.

As an aside, though I still can’t go to the movies in Japan and reliably fully understand the dialog, somehow comedy seems to usually use narrower  subset of the language that I DO mostly understand, to my happiness and amazement.

A picture is worth a lot more than a thousand words apparently, when it comes to assessing competency and leadership, says the economist in new research that will just reinforce that suspicion that there is a reason that some people just instantly rub you the wrong way, even before they open their mouths.

Clearly SEC filings should include the driver’s license photos of all the company’s executives.

SMAP (the Japanese pop group) has a weekly show where they have famous guests come and talk to them. Often the guest is foreign woman. One member of the band (always the same one) just about always dresses up as a woman, often as the guest.

Tonight was a french woman with the last name Barkin, apparently the designer of the Hermes “Barkin” line of bags. Unfortunately I know these bags cost several thousand dollars.

So I ignored most of the interview, although it was nice background noise since she was speaking french the whole time. At the end, she gave two of the members of SMAP the Hermes bag bearing her name. One of the guys asked, quite seriously and respectfully toned, do you think it would really be alright for a guy to use this bag? At which instant she grabbed the bag, threw it on the ground, jumped up and down on it a few times, then went off to her own bag, grabbed a few hardcover books, stuffed them in. Grabbed a handful of printout papers and stuffed those in. Manhandled the bag a bit more. Punched the bag a few times. Stuffed it in his hands. There she says, use it like this.  I admire her attitude, but frankly only in Japan is she correct.  I have seen guys on the subway carrying bags far far more feminine than the simple solid-colored rectangular things she gave them.
The other guy then opened his mouth to say something, at which point she grabbed his bag, stepped on it a few times, smashed it around in her hands, punched it, and handed it back to him.

The band has several more members, but only those two had received her bag.  The cross dressed one was sitting moping on the floor, having not received anything. She goes over, sits down next to him and says what’s wrong? They translate his response to her as that lately he is often sad and cries. She jumps up and goes back to her bag, and they say what? what? And she pauses and says “J’ai des pillules” (I have pills).

Awesome.

The world question center’s 2008 question: what is something you have changed your mind about? Has very interesting answers from a wide range of thinking people. Here are all the answers on one long page, and some of my favorites: On Cultural Relativism’s foolishness, the nature of memory, the obligation of scientists to enter politics, the biological drive to divorce and I have only managed to read half of them so far.