Simple, effective

It is time for an accountability moment.

Watch for Weirdness on the Right

McCain is certainly running an odd campaign. Mr. Straight Talk Express, Mr. Not Beholden to the Religious Right, is navigating the sociopolitical waters rather haphazardly.

Remember how Catholics are supposed to vote en masse for the Republican party because they only care about abortion & gay marriage? Well... McCain now has Bill Donohue (I mean the Catholic League) up in arms by seeking out and receiving the endorsement of one Pastor John Hagee, whose views on the Roman Catholic Church make Fernando Vallejo's look nuanced. Hagee is a freaking loon of titanic comedic proportions:

[The wall chart behind him is a crazy artistic masterpiece.]

McCain may be shooting himself in the foot now, but he still has a lot of runway to pull up his campaign before November, and can still count on the terrorist-in-chief to play the terrorism threat scale like a kindergarten xylophone. I wouldn't put anything past these folks: although it's crazy talk to say that 9/11 was planned by the government, they certainly took advantage of it. Just in case, I think we should all be mentally prepared for a very noisy October Surprise.

Themepunks coming?

Thirty months ago Salon.com serialized the first third of a novel-in-progress by Cory Doctorow: Themepunks. Set mostly in the near future in the dire swamps of Florida, the work is sprinkled with post-post-industrial economic upheaval, technical and medical wackiness. I enjoyed it a great deal, but kept anticipating for the rest: it left me hanging. Last night, kept awake by cold remedies, I browsed the contents of my ebook repository, popped open my copy of the first installment, and tore through it (nighttime cold relief my aching back). Since I keep up with Mr. Doctorow, I knew it hadn't been released, but wondered, so I searched, and lo: it will apparently be released 1 Jan 2009 by Tor (hardcover, 416 pages, ISBN 0765312794). That's too long to wait.

I am an inveterate Cory fanboy. Of course I'm hooked on BoingBoing, where Cory provides the best posts and I always read the excellent columns he produces. His books and short stories never come out often enough for my tastes, and his podcast has gone sadly silent. He'd better get cracking and turn out more stuff or one of these days I'm going to have to dust off the slash fiction I wrote featuring him and Jack Valenti.

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Update: Cory is publishing a book based on this work called Makers for release in November 2009, serialized weekly starting now at Tor.com.

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2nd update:Makers has been published, and is available at craphound.com/makers. Cory's best work yet, highly recommended.

Spooky

I finally got to read Spook Country, William Gibson's latest novel (a delay due to last year's municipal strike). By far his most politically relevant to date, it is set in the recent past, combining spyjinks, geek chic, nouveaux ethnic groups, and his usual theme of "lowlife meets high-tech". I especially enjoyed seeing my adopted city illustrated so vividly. The plot, while mundane, does not fail to surprise: strong characterizations and interesting plot devices keep the story humming along nicely. Without spoiling it, there is a satisfying tie-in to recent world events and reactions to them.

Wilson disappoints

After gushing recently about Robert Charles Wilson, I was thrilled that Axis, the sequel to his Hugo-winning novel Spin, had been reserved for me at the library. I dug in, and... well... it really disappointed; this one won't be taking any awards. Spin had big ideas and great plot tension, but Axis got all wound up and didn't really go anywhere interesting, with slightly wooden characters, a retread plot, and a maguffin that was a total letdown. Better luck next time, Mr. Wilson – maybe a sequel wasn't such a great idea.

Honestly, at times I was a bit confused, thinking I had already read it because it was so similar to Charles Stross's Missile Gap. It had the same lost-continent-on-another-planet shtick, the same weird things popping up out of the sand, and the same pointless roadtrip seasoned with marital strife. But Charlie used those elements to fashion a good story.

Naomi Klein connects the dots

I recently picked up Naomi Klein's No Logo – a seminal work by all accounts, and although I tried, I found myself impatiently paging through it, looking for the fresh insight that I had always heard it offered. All I saw were things I already knew about the effects of corporatism and globalization, and the negative effects these trends are having on our health and communities. I realized that the reason these concepts didn't seem very interesting was because they have become such an understood part of our culture's understanding of our new economy that it has become completely internalized. If I had read this in 2000 I might have helped trash a Starbucks in Seattle; today it feels like history.

The Shock Doctrine, on the other hand, is very much in touch with the concerns and mystery of the times. Klein explains how the neoliberal/neoconservative revolutions of the past 25 years, from Chile through Iraq, are traced to Milton Friedman's Chicago School. She explains why governments resort to torture, and long after shock therapy had been thoroughly discredited in psychiatric medicine, it was being applied to economies throughout the world to enable a mass transfer of wealth to the already wealthy elite, undoing the socialist movement of the early 20th century. Klein introduced the concept of disaster capitalism: whenever a disaster strikes (whether accidental or engineered), corporations put plans into operation to raid public treasuries and public trusts while the public is still in a state of shock; she also warns that huge industries have emerged to deal with these catastrophes, and are dependent upon continued disasters for growth. Klein argues that our societies need to become educated to resist this type of manipulation so the next time something bad happens we won't surrender to corporate greed.

Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón produced this short film to introduce the concepts and arguments used in the book.

Ms. Klein's work is having a real impact on our society. No Logo is credited with inspiring the Battle of Seattle; The Shock Doctrine is just beginning to filter into our mass consciousness, and I look forward to the effect it will have on our polity.

Serbia on a downer

Last year, Montenegro voted to break it off with Serbia. Last Sunday Kosovo decided to call it quits as well. Serbians are so upset they decided to trash their own country, and today I watched people marching through downtown Vancouver in protest, waving flags and chanting "Kosovo is Serbia" and holding signs saying "Kosovo = Québec", fearmongerimplying that if Canada recognizes Kosovo as an independent nation it will encourage Québec to secede. I didn't see any pictures of Radovan Karadžić in Vancouver, but they certainly were in evidence in Belgrade.

Call me bemused. Serbians are doubtless annoyed that it doesn't have Albanian Kosovars to kick aroundmurder anymore. But they should look at it on the positive side: next time they can have the thrill of an invasion and then throw another genocide. Even at the best of times nationalism looks like a load of hooey, but these guys really take the cake. Greater Serbia indeed.

Faux News parodies itself

A comedian decided to speak his mind at the end of a Fox & Friends segment, saying "What is Fox News, it's just a parade of propaganda, isn't it? It's just a festival of ignorance." He rambled on a bit, and the flustered host responded "you get all the news you can at Fox News," and then cut to a teaser for the next story: a promo for Captain Kirk's Guide to Women, with four buxom models.So there you have it: that's all the news you can get.

Jaded

I find myself increasingly inured to the constant stream of animal cruelty cases ( slaughterhouse this, research lab that, teenage kids the other). My own intermittent vegetarianism is about gastric distress, and not about a conviction that animals don't deserve to be eaten: I don't see that. I consider it largely unnecessary, but not unethical, to eat animals. It is wrong to torture them. But why is it happening, and who bears responsibility for this?

Watching something like this video doesn't lessen my opinion of humanity – I have few illusions on that score. But it does strike me that our orgy of corporate greed, demanded by a billion avaricious investors intent on an ever larger return on investment, impels people to torture animals in this manner. The meat produced from downed animals is declared unsafe for human consumption, but the market's appetite won't stand still for safe and ethical practices. The cows' last hours of pain are stupidly cruel, but the people that are paid $8 per hour to brutalize old, dying factory-farmed cattle must suffer psychological problems, as must their families.

So, an aged cow screams; substandard meat is served to hungry schoolchildren; a worker becomes increasingly jaded to inducing eye-rolling bleats of agony; an extra eight percent of profit allows a better return on investment to a private equity fund managing the assets of the increasingly rich (but ever unsatisfied) ruling class, which eats free-range orgasmic Kobe beef and congratulates itself on being so very responsible.

Are you getting enough return on your investment? Maybe it's time to re-balance your portfolio. Call now.

Podcasts I like (again)

I've written this before, but there have been some additions.

• StarShipSofa: scifi short stories by a (sometimes long-winded) man with a lovely Scottish brogue
• Escape Pod: scifi short fiction
• Pseudopod: horror short fiction
• For Whatever Reason: keeping up with Tim & Nanette
• Paris Djs: mix music of various genres
• Bootie USA (not quite a podcast, but what the heck): mashups
• Cory Doctorow: short stories and talks (sadly very quiet of late)
• Radio-Canada: La Première à la carte: Quotidien et commentaires de la première chaîne du Radio-Canada
• Radio-Canada: Le bulletin national: Le quotidien à dix minutes, chaque heure
• RFI: Le journal en français facile: Le quotidien à dix minutes, chaque jour

I have been rather remiss on listening to the news ever since I lost my old iPod. Although I like the shuffle, it makes it difficult to find a particular track.

Why is this man smiling?

He is smiling because he is winning. His vision for free software is taking serious hold. It is possible to live a productive digital life using only free software, and I pretty much do (damned "free" Flash player).

When he wrote "the prospect of charging money for software was a crime against humanity" at first I thought it was just baseless, humourous hyperbole, but upon reflection I came up with a different perspective on it. Software allows for automation. Human effort is expended to create software to solve a particular problem, and the human is compensated for that. But should the method for achieving that result become "property"? And whose "property" will it be? Almost certainly, that "property" will belong to a corporation. And corporations are not human. They are legal "people" (emancipated by the U.S. Supreme Court) but they are immortal, amoral, and their true role in our society is incompletely understood. Without the mechanisms provided through free software, and because of the structure of copyright (dictated by corporations), that "property" will almost certainly not be made available to anyone but other corporations able to pay for it. Being immortal, they enjoy many advantages humans do not, and humans cannot reasonably compete in certain areas.

Stallman is a clever guy. He figured out how to do a jiu-jitsu move on copyright to give people an economic model to put software in the hands of other people and organizations (yes, even other corporations). He invented copyleft, a way of enforcing the continued sharing of software, and did it in such a way that corporations couldn't cut it down without sawing off their own arms: copyleft is based on copyright. Without his invention, there would be no practical alternatives to corporate tools made by corporate tools.

This week's happy news

• We have a carbon tax! Today is a happy day to live in British Columbia.
• Oil closed at $100.01 per barrel today; so much for "just a fluke". Maybe this will prompt thirteen more people to take the bus. Food will be more expensive, but maybe we don't have a right to fresh out-of-season fruit from another hemisphere.
• The house displayed some spine, even if the supreme court sold us out on spying.
• Kosovo declares independence. Why the hell not? Infinite secession is a potential cure for nationalism.
• The tide is beginning to turn against abusive end-user license agreements.
• The government is further expelled from the bedrooms of Texas.
• Scientology further restricts the availability of its crazy course materials. On the other hand, this stuff is high comedy.

Not just for lovers

Valentine's Day in North America is understood to be for lovers, and that is very nice.  In Latin America it is also Friendship Day, which I think is even nicer.  Not to knock love, familial love, romantic love, all of those forms, but friendship is special and deserving of a special day.

Despite the risk of breaking into a chorus of Auld Lang Syne, today I'm thinking of everyone I love, and all of my friends, because every one is special - new and old, near and far.

The Perseids

I picked up Robert Charles Wilson's The Perseids and Other Stories because I had enjoyed Spin (which won the Hugo), The Chronoliths, Blind Lake, Darwinia, and Bios (but not so much A Hidden Place). I started reading it without reading the jacket copy as is my custom: I usually prefer to avoid spoilers. It fit with his usual gloomy themes; imperfect characters (especially the men), loss, and cracks in reality. His plots skate the edge of despair, and these short stories were no exception.

As worked through the book I realized that they were all tangentially interrelated, beyond the setting in Toronto: centered around a book store and a few recurring characters. Mr. Wilson is an American who has lived in Toronto since 1962, somehow without actually becoming Canadian until last year. But with this book he definitely makes his mark on the Canadian science fiction canon. I never knew he was Canadian (his books are not usually set here) but it always had a slight out-of-country flavour, a certain remove when discussing society. His remove goes beyond nationality, however, and puts the human condition in a smaller context of a larger, hostile universe.

Generational zeitgeist

Each generation has a defining moment: an event that freezes the generation forever, and they never really recover. The Gen-Xers had 9/11 which "changed everything" (presumably the Planck length, the speed of light in a vacuum, and the entire Pantone colour chart), the boomers had JFK, the Greatest Generation had Pearl Harbor, and the Jazz Age had Black Tuesday.

A generation never really recovers from these moments: they remain haunted and controlled, their initial reaction taking two decades to wear off, by which point they (over)compensate in the other direction. The collapse of the Roaring Twenties gave birth to the New Deal and the middle class; the Greatest Generation was mobilized to change the world, and they didn't stop until they had; The boomers first exploded with idealism, but then shed it like a raincoat and spawned a culture of greed the likes of which the world hadn't seen in a hundred years; Gen-Xers panicked and handed away their government, their rights, and their money to corporate raiders.

What happens twenty years after the last "nodal point" is anyone's guess. I retain hope that democracy can be renewed, that the government can be nationalized from the private equity which now controls it, and that social responsibility can be defined as more than consumerism. I hope that time is now, and I don't think there's much danger of overcompensation. To the contrary, the current trends are far too dangerous to be allowed to continue.

Superior software

In preparation for the imminent arrival of a new toy, I set upon installing open source firmware for our router. I bought the router, a Linksys WRT54GS, specifically because it is "hackable" – runs Linux and has had a nice selection of software adapted for it. I was a little anxious, knowing that I'd have to quickly configure it to get the internet back online, and hoping that I wouldn't screw it up and have to run to the store to buy a different router.

I crossed my fingers, did a rosary, held my breath, and installed the firmware. It worked, and not only did it work: it maintained all of my previous settings and worked exactly as it had before, but now with a huge number of extra features and configuration options. What a nice surprise: in the past, installing firmware always trashed my configuration – even when it came from the manufacturer. The extra features are really cool, and the configuration tools are much better.

Okay, so I like open source, big deal. What really surprised me here was that open source gave a better product than the supplier gives. Hardware manufacturers haven't really embraced open source software yet, except as invisible software utilities hidden behind a sealed plastic case (source code redistributed only begrudgingly). Yet the open source firmware for routers (such as X-Wrt) and mp3 players (Rockbox) is arguably much better than the stuff the manufacturers put on the devices in the first place. Actually, software for devices like residential routers is deliberately crippled to protect the lucrative, inflated business device market.

One of these days a hardware brand, someone like VTech or D-Link, is going to decide to take full advantage of these tools and contribute to their development. They'll save a lot of costs, sure, but more importantly they'll sell to people who want to do whatever they please with their devices.

Heroic veterinary measures

Going to the vet can break the bank. Most pet owners have noticed that veterinary care has become unbelievably expensive in the past twenty years; the technologies once only available to humans are now routine for animals. Now that these procedures are routine, your vet is likely to make them seem mandatory. Yearly vaccinations, veterinary cardiologists, tooth cleaning... the services are always on offer, and when you decline, the vet takes a long hard look at you. "What a cold heartless bastard," their eyes say, and the respond quietly, "of course it is your decision, but it really is very important for the health of your pet."

It's hard to say no to these offers. Hepatic function tests. Electrocardiograms. Cancer screenings. Asking "how much?" is discouraged; pet owners are just supposed to nod and hand over the credit card at the end of the visit for whatever the vet has decided to charge. At some point you have to say no just to preserve your own financial health; nobody is required to purchase heroic or luxury medical procedures for pets.

When our previous dog Rocco was struck by a car, the vet at the emergency clinic was upfront about his chances for survival, his chances for recovery, and our options. He didn't volunteer the price for the treatment he was proposing: cranial reconstruction and a week of intensive care. We didn't really entertain the thought. It wasn't easy to let go, but it was the right thing for the dog, and for us. Thankfully, he didn't add to our grief by pressuring us into the wrong decision. For ninety minutes at the emergency clinic we paid $500; if we had tried to save him, he probably would have been semi-paralyzed for life (if he survived), and we would have spent over ten thousand dollars.

Two recent articles cover this trend, and a retired vet has written "How to Afford Veterinary Care without Mortgaging the Kids"; some excepts are on his website. Many times the vet is not necessarily on your side. It is easy to argue that many painful veterinary procedures are doing no favours to the pets, either.

Democratic primary ballot

I voted online in the Global Presidential Primary today run by Democrats Abroad (available in Spanish). It was very convenient, if a bit slow to respond (yet another crappy client-side Java application). As a computer scientist, I don't trust electronic voting – I know just how hard it is to write a bulletproof system. Hell, it's hard enough just to write a system that works most of the time. But the good news is that since most places now use electronic touch-screen voting systems, my vote is probably no more vulnerable than if I had cast it in person. When people started floating the idea of web-based voting back in the 90s we thought it wouldn't happen because the security and authenticity concerns were too formidable. Little did we know that the bar would be lowered so far that it wouldn't seem to matter much anymore.

Breathtaking

Cynthia McKinney has announced that she is running for president on the Green Party ticket.

It doesn't get much better than this.

They fight the artists

The RIAA constantly gives the line that they're fighting for the artists, the little guys, the creators. But really, they are fighting for themselves: the Big Four recording companies. Though they sometimes find a favoured artist to shill for them, they are transparently anti-artist: they want to lower the royalty paid to songwriters from 13% of wholesale (about nine cents) to 8% (about 5.5 cents).

Why? Because that way the "recording companies" can keep more of the money. This, at the same time that they slash their promotional budgets and the Internet eliminates their former costs of actual disc production. Basically, they now operate as a protection racket: they don't actually do anything anymore but stand between artists and distributors like iTunes and Napster, take their cut & screw over artists financially, and prevent "illegitimate" music from getting on the radio. Pimps give better economy in their service to prostitutes.

The recording industry is at arms because file sharing threatens their business model, not artists or the quality of the art. Just ask 50 Cent: "What is important for the music industry to understand is that file-sharing doesn't hurt artists." It sure does hurt the recording industry that feeds on artists, though.

Why should we care? Because the recording companies (and movie companies) are willing to destroy freedom of expression for all of us (and hurt our democracies, too) just to prop up their dying monopolies. They can only do it if we allow them. If you're Canadian, it is not too late: help stop the Canadian DMCA.

Cheerleader of the Apocalypse

Peter Watts is one of the most delightfully pessimistic authors I've ever read. His breakout novel, Starfish, gave me temporary serotonin depletion before it energized me with vicarious grim satisfaction. The cozily hopeless ambiance of inescapable doom continued in the next three books of the Rifters trilogy (yes, it is a four-book trilogy, okay?), but evolved from a self-pitying wide-eyed hopelessness into a grimly enthusiastic, squinting near-nihilism which... somehow... strangely... never failed to lose hope. It is precisely my cup of tea, and I recommend it to anyone who is interested in the environment, natural disasters, biology, software, and the evolution of geopolitics. Mr. Watts is Canadian, and used to work at the Vancouver Aquarium, and many of the settings are familiar: Vancouver, Toronto, Sudbury.

His stories are grounded in real bioscience – and he provides wonderful notes and references in the appendices. Some of his pessimistic predictions about the timeline for weird bioscience, climate change and various enviro-disasters has been, if anything, optimistic.

"I thought I had years before this stuff caught up with me." _{(Footnotes to ßehemoth)}

His fourth (fifth) novel, Blindsight, is a deep-space adventure with a fun take on the nature of consciousness. And vampires. Good stuff.

All four (five) of his books (and many short stories) are available for free download on his site (which is awesome, shiny, rich & deep). I have donated twice to his tip jar (which he dedicates to the care and feeding of his cats); although I bought the books the first time I read them, I subsequently gave them away, but when wanted to read them again I could, so I really appreciate that he puts them online.

Clean out Canada's mailboxes

Canada Post has an easy service to eliminate junk mail: fill in a form, put it in your mailbox, and Canada Post will put a pretty red dot on your mailbox and refrain from stuffing your box with unread crap. Obviously Canada Post doesn't want to promote this service, as they make a lot of money on it, and they're a "for-profit" government corporation (Margaret Thatcher would be proud). To fill the gap some nice creative types started the Red Dot Campaign to encourage Canadians to reduce waste by eliminating this avalanche of painted pulp. What a beautiful example of citizen activism. I've been printing a few copies of the enrollment form and putting them in the mail room, where people have been snapping them up. Hopefully soon we won't have fifty Best Buy flyers drifting across the floor of the mail room every week.

Print this book

I recently read the novel Roo'd by Joshua Klein: a near-future thriller that explores themes like body modification, poverty, and runaway corporatism. Although I had printed it in nearly invisible double-sided 4-up I was engrossed as I squinted at the pages on the poorly-lit bus. Although it was not without flaws, it ranked in my personal top 5 for the past year, and comes highly recommended, especially for code-heads of a literary bent. I would compare it favourably with Neal Stephenson and William Gibson, with some of the humour of the former and dark characterisations and settings of the latter. The author, a software developer, released the book for free download under a Creative Commons license. I gave the author five bucks, which is a damned sight more than he would have gotten through a publisher. A publisher probably would have made him change the title, though – I guess they're still good for something after all.

Procrastination pays off

I've been wanting to replace my aged Auditron for a whlie – it was great while it lasted but eight years is a long time for technology. I've been somewhat torn between the Squeezebox and the Sonos, and the price of the Sonos (got a grand laying about?) pretty much left me decided – the Squeezebox was it.


Yesterday we took a little road trip south to the Great Satan and I thought I'd pick one up while I was down there. Surprisingly, neither Best Buy nor Circuit City carried them (stupid of me not to check, but impulse buys, like impulse trips, are better left unplanned). So today I went to the website to find out where I could buy one, and discovered there's something better on the way: the Squeezebox is incorporating the best elements of the Sonos in its recently announced Squeezebox Duet.

There's no telling when it'll be in stores, but after waiting four years to listen to OGG and FLAC files without turning on the computer, I'm sure I can wait another few months.

The Whore of Babylon

I've been a fan of Fernando Vallejo since I saw Our Lady of the Assassins. After that I dug into several of his books, and when I ran into La Puta de Babilonia (ISBN 970-37-0326-7) I snapped it up. The opening paragraph gave me a frisson of delight:

La puta, la gran puta, la grandísima puta, la santurrona, la simoníaca, la inquisidora, la torturadora, la falsificadora, la asesina, la fea, la loca, la mala; la del Santo Oficio y el Índice de Libros Prohibidos; la de las Cruzadas y la noche de San Bartolomé; [...] la que reprime a las demás religiones donde manda y exige libertad de culto donde no manda; [...] la corrupta, la hipócrita, la parásita, la zángana; la antisemita, la esclavista, la homofóbica, la misógina; [...] la puta de Babilonia, la impune bimilenaria tiene cuentas pendientes conmigo desde mi infancia y aqui se las voy a cobrar.

My loose, unprofessional translation:

The bitch, the great bitch, the greatest whore, the hypocritically pious, the loan shark, the inquisitor, the torturer, the fabricator, the murderous, the ugly, the crazy, the bad; she of the Holy Office and the Index of Forbidden Books; of the Crusaders and the eve of St. Bartholomew; [...] she who represses other religions where she has power and demands freedom of worship where she does not; [...] the corrupt, the hypocritical, the parasitic, the shiftless; the anti-Semitic, the slave, the homophobic, the misogynist; [...] the whore of Babylon, the unpunished two-thousand-year-old bitch has been screwing with me since my childhood and now it is payback time.

It was highly satisfactory as a polemic, and for a fellow traveler it was enjoyable to sit back and enjoy the outrage of a highly informed, deeply knowledgeable and extremely articulate critic of a vain, useless, and obsolete institution. However, the opposite of love is not outrage: it is indifference, and Vallejo remains in the orbit of the Vatican's dark star, obsessed with the enemy he would destroy. I would prefer to let the RC church hang itself on its own rope, as it seems to be doing a pretty good (if sometimes frustratingly slow) job of it.

Journalism in exile

Jon Talton is a decidedly unhappy journalist. He heaps scorn in the way I only could if I had been practicing it for 27 years (and if I had more talent for it). He writes lovely articles about growth boosterism, poor land-use decisions, and do-nothing politicians. I find it unsurprising that he has a hard time writing for today's neurotic Happy McNews media outlets – it's not the sort of stuff around which real estate agents and car dealers want to hawk their wares. So here's a professional journalist who has to write outside of the mainstream media in order to say what he really thinks... the era of the powerful, relevant newspaper with real opinions is completely, resolutely past.

Jesus Takedown

The NFL is going after churches for copyright infringement for showing the "Super Bowl" on a large-screen TV. As much as I favour the elimination of organized religion, I really wonder what the hell the NFL thinks it is achieving by pissing off their fans this way. Have they learned nothing in the past ten years about pointless copyright enforcement actions which garner bad publicity? This is much like when the ASCAP went after the Girl Scouts for singing songs around the campfire. My hope is that those devout Christians have realized that this "sport" is a vile gladiatorial spectacle with no appropriate role in their lives, and leave them starving.

You see, choosing one's battles unwisely could make one look like a greedy bastard. The Immanuel Bible Church's 200 members are unlikely to fork over cash for a special use permit. The NFL's argument that large groups "shrink TV ratings and can affect advertising revenue" doesn't hold water: what exists there is a counting problem, not a viewership problem. I fully support treating churches like any other business (including taxing the holy fuck out of them), but most people don't feel that way – so the NFL has bought itself some really bad publicity. Hopefully it will prompt some pious souls to sit out this year's mammon-fest.

Quants: powered by VBA

So here's a scary thought: quants, the wiz4rd5 behind our brave new automated markets, write their masterpieces in VBA. That's right, the "unthinkably complex financial instruments" that journalists have been gushing over for the last few years are written in Visual Basic for Applications, Visual Basic's lead-poisoned little brother. [As if Visual Basic isn't dumb enough already.]

William Gibson made the job sound so sexy back in 1997 with Idoru. It's hilarious that in real life they're a bunch of physics nerds with Excel spreadsheets. Knowing this makes me want to ensure my retirement by implanting a thimble-sized piece of gold in my abdomen. I'm constantly astonished that anything, anywhere, ever works at all.