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PC & Defects in Reality Testing: Links

For the sake of convenience I am putting links to all the "PC & Defects in Reality Testing" posts:
Introduction
Part I
Part II
Part III: "Words Matter"
Part IV
Part V
Part VI

Part I: The Development of Reality Testing

[I apologize for the length of this post. This is a very complicated topic and the processes I describe are highly relevant to the ways in which PC damages rationality. The rest of the series can still be appreciated without reading this entire post, however.]

In order to fully understand how the ideology of political correctness traumatically interferes with the ability to adequately assess and describe reality, it is necessary to have some understanding of how it is that we learn to interpret the information pouring into our senses and create an understandable and predictable picture of reality.

When an infant is born, he has already been subject to some impingement from the external environment, though the violence of sensation has been mitigated by the mother's body and the womb cushioning him from the world. The intrauterine state of being of the unborn child becomes a template for the ubiquitous fantasy of living blissfully in union with an all powerful, all gratifying mother. At birth, the infant is violently expelled from the womb and assaulted by the world. However, his neonatal nervous system is incapable of comprehending the flood of sensory input. Infants can spend up to 20 hours a day in REM sleep, a state often thought of as being devoted to mental housecleaning, ie the brain is making connections (neural networks), discarding memory traces that do not fit with pre-existing data, and incorporating new inputs that have special (affective) relevance. During the earliest days to months, when the child is overwhelmed by sensations (internal and external) he turns to the mother, who picks him up and nurtures him, recreating a version of the protected, gratifying womb, at her breast.

Later on, during the process of separation-individuation, the child comes to recognize his separateness from the primitive, all encompassing, all gratifying mother. [I have described the process in some more detail here; scroll about half way down for my discussion of the work of Margaret Mahler.]

Once a child has achieved enough independence to recognize the existence of an external, frustrating reality, he must come to terms with the loss of his position as the (fantasied) center of the mother's universe.

He learns that he is not even the most important person in his mother's life. She prefers his father who protects and cares for the family and mediates the entire family's interaction with the environment, ie reality. It is the relationship with the father, with whom the child identifies, that forms the basis of the relationship with reality. The father is the child's rival for the affections of the mother as well as an object of love and nurturing for the child. (There are different schools of thought about what determines the eventual renunciation of the mother as the primary object of affection; this will be important in understanding the genesis of Political Correctness and I will expand on it in a future post.)

How can this developmental process, from experiencing the self/world as a blissfully, undifferentiated mass to the ability to recognize and manipulate external reality, be derailed? Since a large part of our

PC & Defects in Reality Testing: Links

For the sake of convenience I am putting links to all the "PC & Defects in Reality Testing" posts:
Introduction
Part I
Part II
Part III: "Words Matter"
Part IV
Part V
Part VI

Part I: The Development of Reality Testing

[I apologize for the length of this post. This is a very complicated topic and the processes I describe are highly relevant to the ways in which PC damages rationality. The rest of the series can still be appreciated without reading this entire post, however.]

In order to fully understand how the ideology of political correctness traumatically interferes with the ability to adequately assess and describe reality, it is necessary to have some understanding of how it is that we learn to interpret the information pouring into our senses and create an understandable and predictable picture of reality.

When an infant is born, he has already been subject to some impingement from the external environment, though the violence of sensation has been mitigated by the mother's body and the womb cushioning him from the world. The intrauterine state of being of the unborn child becomes a template for the ubiquitous fantasy of living blissfully in union with an all powerful, all gratifying mother. At birth, the infant is violently expelled from the womb and assaulted by the world. However, his neonatal nervous system is incapable of comprehending the flood of sensory input. Infants can spend up to 20 hours a day in REM sleep, a state often thought of as being devoted to mental housecleaning, ie the brain is making connections (neural networks), discarding memory traces that do not fit with pre-existing data, and incorporating new inputs that have special (affective) relevance. During the earliest days to months, when the child is overwhelmed by sensations (internal and external) he turns to the mother, who picks him up and nurtures him, recreating a version of the protected, gratifying womb, at her breast.

Later on, during the process of separation-individuation, the child comes to recognize his separateness from the primitive, all encompassing, all gratifying mother. [I have described the process in some more detail here; scroll about half way down for my discussion of the work of Margaret Mahler.]

Once a child has achieved enough independence to recognize the existence of an external, frustrating reality, he must come to terms with the loss of his position as the (fantasied) center of the mother's universe.

He learns that he is not even the most important person in his mother's life. She prefers his father who protects and cares for the family and mediates the entire family's interaction with the environment, ie reality. It is the relationship with the father, with whom the child identifies, that forms the basis of the relationship with reality. The father is the child's rival for the affections of the mother as well as an object of love and nurturing for the child. (There are different schools of thought about what determines the eventual renunciation of the mother as the primary object of affection; this will be important in understanding the genesis of Political Correctness and I will expand on it in a future post.)

How can this developmental process, from experiencing the self/world as a blissfully, undifferentiated mass to the ability to recognize and manipulate external reality, be derailed? Since a large part of our

It's genuine.

Was a bit in the news last year on the 10th anniversary.

The comments on this adblog post have a little more info.

And its bloody depressing that this image is linking to crap you don't want to look at 10+ years on....

Please note, we are not simply talking about stuff happening in China. We're talking about what can happen to an American blogger, who posts on a web site run by an American company. If said blogger happens to post in Chinese, that blog may be censored by Microsoft. You want proof? Blogger:Rebecca McKinnon, Web site: MSN Spaces, Company: Microsoft

Really! I read it on the web!

http://andyabramson.blogs.com/voipwatch/2006/01/cl inton_in_redm.html

Tapestry is open source and free. It is licensed under the Apache Software License, which allows it to be used even inside proprietary software

I saw this recently and thought how well it summed up Jobs' presentations, very funny:

http://vpwpartners.blogs.com/SNLJOBSIPOD/JOBSSNLIP OD.mov

Gates, Jobs, and the Zen Aesthetic looks at what makes Jobs' presentations so effective, contrasting with the dismal style that comes out of Microsoft.

Regardless of what you think of the products they are selling, or the cult of personality around Steve Jobs, I would recommend this article to anyone that ever has or ever will sit in front of PowerPoint or Keynote or Impress or who will give any presentation of any kind. The contrast is so sharp that I think everyone can learn something from it.

We need more perfectionists like that in this industry. This is an interesting read.

First of all - have you actually read any Chinese laws? No? You can get them in translation, and they are not really all that draconian;

*AHEM*

From the RConversation blog:

"In the final days of December, Anti became a vocal supporter of journalists at the Beijing Daily News who walked off the job after the top editors were fired for their increasingly daring investigative coverage, including some recent reporting on the recent police shootings of village protestors in the Southern China. (For all the gory details on the current press crackdown click here, here, here, and here.)

In other words, Microsoft is scratching China's back in supporting the slaughter of innocents, and shutting the mouth of whoever tries to bring that to the public.

If that's not Draconian, my friend, then I don't know what the eff it is.

You couldn't be more wrong.

A lot more information on this story can be found at Rebecca MacKinnon's RConversation.

Take the military for example: the government hires out everything to be made proprietarily

That's probably the worst example you could have possibly picked.
The military has standards for EVERYTHING.

The have specs for connectors, components, hardware.
The have specs for environmental tests, electical tests, mechanical tests.
The military has beens pushing standards forever. The first use of interchangable parts was in the military.
There is no frickin way you're going to be able to get something like an aircraft carrier built without standards.

Yes, there's a good deal of pork out there, but think it's arguable that standardization is the best thing the military has even done and they've done it well.

There are a tons of well-written, very useful military standards out there. They're been a significant boon to other industries as well. Did you know that BNC conntector on the back of your monitor is a Bayonet Naval Connector?

The problem is corruption of the system with people like the "Dukester". If the people at the top are corrupt, it doesn't matter how many standards you have.

the government hires out everything to be made proprietarily

This isn't really true. There are many, many simple things that are mil-standard items that you can just go and buy. Screws and washers would be an example. When it comes to things like an entire radar system, they're not exactly going to publish the drawings so that anyone could make it.
It think at that level however it really comes down to holding companies responsible for fulfilling contracts and having a fair award process.

Totally Absurd Patents

IP funny

Patent of the week

I am sure there are more, but it gives you a glimpse of the absurdity in patents. Some of the patents are funny too .. so enjoy :) (just don't spill coffee while reading)

> Subversion for source control.

Subversion is definitely the way to go over CVS. I've recently set it up on RubyForge and it's much more popular. Being able to actually rename files and move them around, good times. Not to mention atomic tagging and commits!

he has made changes to my code that I was not aware of until I noticed problems with certain functions

Penguin books have a podcast of their own. Normaly this only includes extracts of audiobooks, however from now until the 3rd of Jan you can download all of the novel A Christmas Carol.

I suggest you all give him a call. I already wrote him, as he is MY rep. I voted for him, since I wasn't going to vote for the other asshole. The recent redistricting in Michigan eliminated the seat of a politician who I didn't find repugnant, and now I'm stuck with this guy!

This is just conyers acting like a kook to "earn" his pay from the lobbyists.

I am wondering how this might all tie into the information back in August about a GoogleNet, if at all. http://www.business2.com/b2/web/articles/0,17863,1 093558,00.htmlOm Malik of Buiness 2.0 talked about Google buying up unused fiber-optic cable across the country as well as superfast connections on the east coast and in Atlanta, Miami and NY. He suggested that these purhcases are needed for Google to unleash a flood of new bandwidth hungry aps. Everything from digital-video to on demand tv-programming, which would tie in nicely with the AOL Time Warner deal. http://blizzardinternet.blogs.com/blizzard_interne t_marketi/2005/12/google_will_pur.html

...recent posts. Hopefully they'll be restored in due time.

Ah well, at least my fascinating StringBuffer.append() post is safe!

...they mean Linux Apache Middleware PostgreSQL.

And when they say middleware, they mean Ruby!

Why not? They've already done "Cow Piss" water. (Actually, I'm not sure if it's Coke or Pepsi that owns it...)

I reckon that, by your standards, 75% of all articles are fluff pieces.

It was on Slashdot so you may have already seen it, but perhaps this might better satisfy your curiosity:

http://playmoney.blogs.com/blog/2005/10/wow_gold_f armer.html

Shamlessly linked through my blog.

"but next it will be eyeglasses, shoes, student ID cards, car keys, fake fingernails, or someday your pre-frontal cortex" Why use fake fingernails when you can use the real things. http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2005/08 /fingernails_sto.html

Yes.. 2000+ years ago..

From http://patentpending.blogs.com/patent_pending_blog /2005/06/the_fire_truck.html

In the early days of Rome a real estate investor/ extortionist named Crassus used a team of firefighters in an effective scheme. There was no public firefighting service at that time, so when a building was on fire, Crassus and his team would show up with their water pump. Before fighting the fire, Crassus would make a very low offer on the building, and to neighboring building owners. If the owners refused, Crassus let the building burn and spread to neighboring buildings, and would later make an even lower offer. If the owner agreed to sell the property, the firefighters would try to put the fire out. Crassus became very wealthy with this scheme, owned a good portion of the city of Rome, bought his way into political office, and ruled Rome as Triumvirate with Pompey and Julius Caesar. As Triumvirate, the area he ruled was centered in Syria, and extended over a wide region. Envisioning riches beyond belief and military glory, Crassus led an expedition against the Parthian Empire, in which he was killed and his legion was wiped out.

For those who are curious, the above is not an exaggeration, as shown by this film.

As partially summarized by a Canadian blogger, "When you have finished watching this film several images will remain with you for some time to come. A woman who spent two years waiting for knee surgery and innocently asks the American filmmakers whether the waiting lists are as long there as they are here. The moment when she begins to grasp that a health care waiting list is a concept alien to most sick Americans, though sadly not health care compelled bankruptcy, is something that cannot be explained. More stories follow of addiction to pain killers brought on by wait times, of the suffering families go through, of men and women calmly contemplating death for ailments which medical science long ago conquered, but which government control has placed out of reach."

> took 8 hours to restore!

You may want to check out the comments about the "checkpoint_segments" configuration parameter here; tweaking that appears to improve bulk loading performance considerably.

PostgreSQL is doing a fine job for my database, although it's a much smaller installation than yours. Only 4M records, but, hey.

At least, in that they're filled with lots of random little suggestions on how to do things.

The O'Reilly books are incredibly useful, though - at least Linux Server Hacks certainly was; I just used hack # 99 (the RewriteMap hack) a week or so ago to do some simple load-balancing. Very handy.

the same way as in "United States killed Iraqi civilians using white phosphor"

I call bullshit. If you're going to quote "The Independent", at least be aware when they discredit and contradict their own story.

Here, enlighten yourself: http://dailyablution.blogs.com/the_daily_ablution/ 2005/11/yet_more_wp.html

Dr Stephen Edwards teaches about this in his classes. He's written an interesting paper "Using Software Testing to Move Students from Trial-and-Error to Reflection-In-Action" about his experiences with test driven design at VA Tech. You can see his home page here and that paper is the third one in the list.

I've recently been working on a BlueJ extension for PMD and he's quite active on the bluej-discuss list.

If the disease is highly infectious, and if they're on the Shinkansen (not the normal Tokyo subway line, for this demonstration), a standing sick person could aerosolize virus-infused particles into a car packed with up to 100 standing people (scroll down to the bottom). The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport posts guidelines to congestion in Tokyo subway cars; according to local sources many trains run at over 200% capacity. Tokyo subway cars are roughly the same size as the average-sized New York subway car (save for the large R143 mega-cars, which while Japanese-designed are not suitable for use in Japan). A narrow-width New York City subway car can fit a hundred people in rush hour; the comparatively smaller Japanese (who also cram more tightly into the cars) can reach 150% that capacity.

Haha couldnt resist finding this cartoon!
http://nadali.blogs.com/nadalicom/images/gates_vs_ jobs.jpg

http://playmoney.blogs.com/blog/2005/11/informatio n_and.html

Did you actually read that article? here's a sample:

Provided by the Studies Centre of Human Rights in Fallujah, dozens of high-quality, colour close-ups show bodies of Fallujah residents, some still in their beds, whose clothes remain largely intact but whose skin has been dissolved or caramelised or turned the consistency of leather by the shells.

Do you actually believe that the US used WP on civilians and that it burned their bodies beyond recognition, but did NOT ignite their clothing? Seriously?

Please look here for more information, and a debunking of the Independents slander:
http://dailyablution.blogs.com/the_daily_ablution/

Time to upgrade my Jabber server from PostgreSQL 8.0.4. And with RubyForge getting up past 3.5M records now, performance improvements are good news...

Time to upgrade my Jabber server from PostgreSQL 8.0.4. And with RubyForge getting up past 3.5M records now, performance improvements are good news...

The MiniMSFT blog you link to has a tendancy to report the negatives only. For instance, the blog post links to Wesner Moise's post regarding some VS 2005 bugs he'd found. What is not as well publicized is Wesner's next post, in which he says,

"Despite the few hiccups, I am enjoying VS 2005 and have been able to work with it productively. VS 2005 is stable and performant, and it's better to have it arrive now rather than later. The runtime is solid, and various products across Microsoft and outside also depend on it being delivered on a timely basis."

Yes, I've found a few minor hiccups in VS2005 as well. But honestly, it's nothing like MiniMSFT would have it seem. I can't speak for everyone, but VS2005 has been solid for us since RTM (we were a MS beta tester from Beta 1 through RTM), and we're very happy with its current form.

The MiniMSFT blog you link to has a tendancy to report the negatives only. For instance, the blog post links to Wesner Moise's post regarding some VS 2005 bugs he'd found. What is not as well publicized is Wesner's next post, in which he says,

"Despite the few hiccups, I am enjoying VS 2005 and have been able to work with it productively. VS 2005 is stable and performant, and it's better to have it arrive now rather than later. The runtime is solid, and various products across Microsoft and outside also depend on it being delivered on a timely basis."

Yes, I've found a few minor hiccups in VS2005 as well. But honestly, it's nothing like MiniMSFT would have it seem. I can't speak for everyone, but VS2005 has been solid for us since RTM (we were a MS beta tester from Beta 1 through RTM), and we're very happy with its current form.

First, Apple was sued by Eminem for an ad that used one of his songs without permission. Then in May of this year, they settled for an undisclosed sum. Now, Apple's latest Eminem ad has been found to be strikingly similar to an ad that Lugz did for its shoes, resulting in a cease-and-desist order on Friday.

With just a little effort, you can find game bloggers writing about real issues, rather than just hyping the next big release. The next generation of game journalism isn't going to show up on the newsstand or in your mailbox. It's already on the web. Stop complaining about EGM and its ilk and surf some game sites already! Click on some ads while you're there, because the best way to improve game journalism is to support hard-working game bloggers who are trying to make a living at it.

For some examples, check out Video Game Media Watch and follow some links. Or just read Terra Nova or Game Politics or GamesBlog or any of about a dozen other good blogs I could mention. You'll feel better about the State of Game Journalism.

...of course, that's on a rather technical web site, RubyForge. Numbers are here.

We use it to manage the RubyForge mirror system and it's a lifesaver. Check out the traffic dropoff chart that the mirrors provide (not the number of hits, the number of KB served); rsync really helps make RubyForge tick.

Lessons from Vietnam: The Credibility Gap

The MSM* was permanently changed by the Vietnam war and its aftermath, including the Watergate scandal and the Nixon impeachment. [As commenter Jon Ravin points out in the interest of accuracy, Nixon was never actually impeached, but resigned when his impeachment became inevitable.] The experiences of that time explain much of the agenda journalism of the MSM today, but I would submit that they have not only forgotten the most crucial lesson from Vietnam, but their failure to remember will ultimately destroy them as a uniquely important and powerful force in our society.

First some history; During the years of the troop escalation in Vietnam, ultimately topping out at over 550,000 American military personal, the Pentagon and the White House, still fighting the last war in terms of Public Relations, continually measured our success in the war by pointing to "body counts". Using an outdated model of war in which the media play the role of conveyors of information controlled by the Pentagon and the administration, daily body counts of enemy combatants were touted as evidence, in the infamous words of General Westmoreland, that we could see "the light at the end of the tunnel." From 1965 on, we were, according to the daily body counts, winning the Vietnam war. When the Tet offensive took place in January of 1968, the reason the public was so shocked and ready to see our military victory as a defeat was that the expectations of victory "right around the corner" were crushed. We never knew that the North Vietnamese, post-Tet, were ready to sue for peace; all we knew was that an enemy who was supposedly being decimated was able to launch a major offensive. The conclusion was that either our military and the administration were incompetent, or that they had been lying to us all along. This lead to the "Credibility Gap". No longer would our press, feeling with some justification that they had been used and lied to, allow themselves to be so gullible. From this point on , the press almost universally saw themselves in an adversarial role against the military and the Executive branch of government.

It is important to note that the Pentagon and White House were only doing what had always been done in war time. The purpose of news in war time is to support the morale of the home front and to that end, propaganda has always been an important aspect of warfare. Unfortunately for the Johnson and Nixon administrations, while the nature of war hadn't really changed, the nature of our media had. We had close to real time news emanating from the battlefields of Vietnam. Reporters could see that there were attacks not being reported, injuries and deaths of Americans being swept under the rug, and constant reports of impending victory which were easily refuted.

This is extremely relevant to our war effort today. The military realizes that we are fighting a new kind of war, which includes a significant public relations aspect on the home front. The MSM does not yet recognize that fact; they are still fighting the last war.

We are winning in Iraq and have been for some time. When

If his name doesn't ring a bell, he's a Java guru who works for Sun and wrote the 2nd and 3rd editions of the Java Language Spec. A bunch of his papers are listed here.

It's a relief that JDK 1.6 won't include any language changes (as far as I know?). Updating various parsers and whatnot to work with all the JDK 1.5 language changes was a big job, although some of the new features certainly are quite handy.

"Could it be that the "official" media, including Forbes, is simply afraid of becoming less relevant?"

I think blogging and other forms of "alternative" media has already made the "official" media less relevant. That's why TV news shows (http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/Blogs/ is an example), newspapers (http://thestar.blogs.com/ for example) and the like are all jumping on the bandwagon. They're afraid of becoming extinct.

...some of the recent changes in CVS have some Microsoft Project integration, too. GForge is pretty good at handling reasonably heavy loads. And you can even get commercial support.

I'm not affiliated with GForge Group, although I was a committer on GForge for a while.

Unable to start Steam Engine: *SteamEngine(0x12e8c8) failed with error 200: Connection Reset, WinSock Error 10054 "Connection reset by peer"

. . . which means that his "investment" is tied to the whims of the company that owns the game. If they suddenly decide that, for reasons of "game balance", they need to devalue the currency, then he's screwed.

I vastly prefer the model used by Second Life. It has a floating currency, with competing markets for exchange (although there have been some worrying developments lately in that regard). There are hundreds (perhaps even thousands) of players with a very real financial stake in the game and control over the game's market; the owning company has a very real interest in keeping them happy.

From a scan of the Agitar forums it looks like they use JDK 1.5 annotations to do a sort of design by contract thing. Annotations are a great idea for this sort of thing; I've been working annotations into PMD to suppress warnings and it makes things a lot clearer.