You are planning to backpack around the world. Why? To experience the world? Then do so.
Amen to that. Once, I went to Italy with an open attitude and no strings attached, and met a ton of people, went to several local parties, drank wine and exchanged dirty jokes with local students at a traditional renaissance celebration, etcetera.
On the other side of the spectrum, I remember american couples in restaurants, huddled and reading USA Today, feeling alienated because they could not burst through their own bubble, unable and/or unwilling to 'connect'. In one extreme case, a group of ragazzos lit up cigarettes after their meal, and an american couple abruptly asked for their check and left in a hurry. Watching this spectacle, I lit a cigarette of my own, and when the couple turned to leave, they man caught sight of me, pointed and said "Oh look, honey, there's another one". We all looked at each other, rolling our eyes and winking, even the waiters.
Then there's people that complain about prices in Europe, as in "We paid fifteen dollars for breakfast at the hotel". Sure, if you want eggs, hashed browns, bacon/sausages and OJ, but how about going to the stand in the park and getting an egg, cheese and ham crepe for a couple of euros? Or going to the market and buying goat's cheese, sun-dried tomatoes pickled in olive oil, cold cuts and a baguette?
Of course, not everybody's like this, but what I'm trying to do here is support your point: tech will only anchor you to home, so cut the cable and free yourself from your moorings. That said, portable music is good for long train trips, and don't forget the supreme discomfort of airline travel, so I would take a player along.
Then, with an open attitude, instead of bringing home pictures of tourist attractions, maybe you can bring back pictures of yourself at a party in Florence, where brazilian punk was playing and somebody taught you the basic moves of capoeira. Moments like these are fleeting, while the castles and cathedrals will be there for a very long time.
There's a guy from my hometown we call The Brain. Once, he and some friends planned a long trip through Europe, and check out what he did, it's amazing:
Online, he made arrangements to buy a diesel car in northern Europe, as well as sell it in Spain several months later, at a profit. And so, The Brain and company crisscrossed Europe for months with a few tankfuls of diesel, then had a bit of spare cash to show for it at the end.
With careful planning and a moderate sum of cash, you could give yourself this luxury that'll give you much more freedom of movement, therefore the ability to visit more places in a smaller amount of time.
...but, as always, subjective at best. I still have a G5 iMac, and many of the apps on the list are useless to me, as they're specifically for the Intel processor. However, these lists are informative in that they help to become aware of potentially useful apps to any mac users out there.
That said, here are a few apps the guy neglected to mention: - Claris Filemaker http://www.filemaker.com/. Hands down, the best database software out there, for the Mac or any other OS. - iWeb http://www.apple.com/ilife/iweb/. Ridiculously easy to use, yet web pages still come out clean and looking pretty good too. - DVD Studio Pro http://www.apple.com/finalcutstudio/dvdstudiopro/. Isn't this still the industry standard for assembling DVD structure and navigation? - Visual Hub http://www.techspansion.com/visualhub/. For its' ability to convert video files in any format out there into any other. - Disk Warrior http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/. In the extremely isolated cases of ever having to need it, this is the single most important life-saving app out there.
Oh, and an honorable mention: Mac The Ripper. Site is down, but you can check out their forum http://www.ripdifferent.com/.
There's a series of posts up this thread that touch on the subject, yet I want to separate my post from that particular context and start fresh from another angle.
Why were the american cultures 'discovered', while they had no inkling of other cultures across the oceans, nor their place in the panoramic view of the world?
Because they were not seafarers. The question I keep repeating to myself is: Why was that?
The reason why the ancient phoenicians, greeks, etc, set sail, was gigantic and in front of their noses: The Mediterranean Sea, which represented the shortest way between two points of commerce in a concave land: a straight line. Same with the norse people: The Baltic Sea.
Middle eastern cultures also developed seafaring capabilities, spanning the area from India to the eastern African coast.
Much more intriguing are the chinese, as their land is convex with respect to the ocean, so there is no obvious short term advantage to develop seafaring capabilities, yet they did have a majestic fleet of immense junks for a short period of time, during which they were gazing waaay over the horizon, and with noble intentions to boot.
In fact, it seems that in every region of the world, for one reason or another, civilizations set to the oceans with commerce and/or conquest in mind, yet excepting the colonization of islands in the Gulf Of Mexico, once settled, the pre-columbian people seem to have completely lost whatever sea legs they ever had. The Gulf Of Mexico is concave, commerce between Yucatan, Veracruz and Florida seems like an obvious thing. Olmecs, Toltecs, Mayans, Aztecs, among others, inhabited the general basin area, yet while they navigated lakes, rivers and fished close to the coast, show no evidence of technology for longer term sea travel. What the hell happened? Why that gigantic, eventually fatal blind spot?
Maybe, just maybe, it's because of the fact that the Gulf Of Mexico, for half of the year, is smack in the center of hurricane alley. Maybe the Mayans, for example, tried and had their fleet decimated one time too often, then completely scrapped the endeavor. Yet I've read nothing on the matter, I've never stumbled upon pre-columbian academics even discussing the matter, so if anybody knows or has any ideas, please post! Thanks.
First and foremost, I am categorically not a fan of US foreign policy, as it is myopic, petty and/or inhumane more often than not.
That said, the iranian government has, in succession: 1. Threatened to destroy a nation. 2. Turned itself into a global focus point for nuclear rethoric and chest-thumping. 3. Declared the triumphant launch of an ICBM equivalent.
WTF are they thinking? It's almost as if they're screaming at Cheney-Bush Inc: "Lookee here, fuck us up! We'll give you excuses to do it!" Can't they keep their zipper closed until there's hope for dialogue in 2009, once the jug-eared goon squatting in the White House moseys on back to his ranch in Texas or Paraguay or wherever? Are they itching to have their country and population brutally victimized? Then again, remember how they used children as suicide soldiers during their war with Iraq back in the eighties. Are they itching for an excuse to turn off their oil spigot, generating a global economic crisis, enriching the texan oil robber barons in the process? Remember that whenever there's a crisis of this sort, Chevron, Texaco and Shell invariably end up reporting their highest quarterly earnings in history.
As the cherry on the putrid cake, both sides in this fiasco play the religious card, the impending fulfillment of prophecy as some sort of implicit fact and key policy element.
All the world is threatened to get caught in the crossfire. Just another in-your-face scenario that reiterates the urgent need for alternative energy sources, as decentralized as humanly possible.
A few years ago, during the months leading to the first wave of spam attacks, I started receiving a lot of chain-letter emails, along the lines of "send this message to ten (or twenty or whatever) people you know, and something wonderful will happen to you within the next week". Sometimes it was some.pps with a bogus Dalai Lama message, sometimes just a selfish attempt by the superstitious to score points with some fortune deity. One time, to my astonishment, it was just a list of email addresses upon addresses, hundreds of them, no message included, being sent and resent by who knows what idiots. One fed up guy replied to the original sender and to all of us hapless sendees, ripping the sender a new one, it was a sight to behold.
Once I switched to Gmail, I was much warier of giving out my address, emphasizing "Do NOT send any crap, okay?" It worked for more than a year, but then I started receiving another kind of chain-letter email, of the scaremongering urban-legend variety, you know the type, a nameless friend of a friend of a friend went drinking, ended up bedding a hot chick, then woke up two days later in some hotel room, blind and missing his corneas, or a kidney or whatever. Or another round of.pps files, this time smearing political candidates or explaining electoral fraud step by step, calling upon you to do something immediately about it, such as, you guessed it, "resend this email to ten (or twenty or whatever) people you know". The result is that I'm getting flooded by spam again, but thankfully the Gmail filters seem to be holding up quite well.
It's email abuse, pure and simple, but they don't see it that way, as they think they're doing a public service. Even the top brass of the company I work for, as well as members of my family, read this crap and resend to as many people as possible it with no attempt towards keeping private addresses private, and probably even pat themselves on the back about it.
Out of this dunghill, I have to admit there was a true gem once. I got this outraged email, sent to about a hundred people at once, by this guy who went to the supermarket late at night to buy a carton of milk, found it easy to go the wrong way in the empty parking lot, and got fined by the traffic cops within private property. He went on a rant about it, and at the end attached the fine in jpeg format, as irrefutable evidence of his victimization at the hands of "the pigs". I mean, there's something so Lebowsky about it. I'd betcha The Dude would have a Hotmail address!
Buy now and in 30 years you could own prime Nevada beach-front property!
The beach-front property will last for the several minutes it'll take for the waters to recede, and even then, just on the western facing slopes of the Sierra Nevada and Cleveland National Forest, maybe you could do a pay-per-view special from there.
Considering how litigation-happy that particular church is, you might have considered posting that anonymously.
Yep, I can visualize the civil court system at work here:
"Your honour, in the case between L Ron Hubbard's Church Of Scientology (plaintiff) versus FormOfActionBanana (defendant)..." It would kind of make the whole point of parody moot, wouldn't it?
I live close to the San Diego area, where one of the local weathermen dedicates a page to explaining local weather conditions and forecasts http://www.kfmb.com/weather/index.php. The guy bases his reports on simulations run at a computer at the Scripps Institute in La Jolla and on NOAA information http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/sgx/display_special_produc t_versions.php?sid=SGX&pil=AFD, proving to be close to 90% accurate in the years since I discovered his web page. However, I don't know if weathermen in other cities are as thorough, but I will say that since I discovered the guy, I haven't used The Weather Channel or any other weather page, except when he's on vacation (and he does take about six breaks a year).
I've been told that psychologically they're better equipped for long endurance in confined spaces as well.
This is a fascinating and complex problem. I would also give special consideration to people who practice yoga, meditation and other such techniques to maintain spiritual (read psychological) balance. In long term missions such as this, military-style discipline might definitely not be enough.
In fact, anything that will decrease the psychological impact of being in a confined space for so long, such as artistic inclinations and skills, might also be a very large plus, as there's going to be a helluva lot of free time while in transit. A long trip might be the perfect opportunity to, for example, develop those watercolor techniques and take them to the next level (Kubrick realized this while making 2001, remember how Dave sketches his fellow astronauts while they are in suspended animation), write that treatise on medieval english literature, or maybe finish that novel bouncing around in your head for years! I for one, really like the idea of fully rounded individuals making the trip, all cosmonauts/astronauts/taikonauts should have a bit of the Renaissance in them.
Finally, as monotonous surroundings make for a mild to intermediate case of sensory deprivation, a strong affinity for music would be welcome, having a challenging mix of music blaring from the speakers will increase the level of stimulation. The spacecraft will at least have to have a killer home entertainment system, with a ridiculous amount of movies and tv shows also on hand, with the latest being constantly broadcast from Earth to the ship. When I say the latest movies, I mean something like free pay-per-view, only with an even better twist, movies still in general release, or even giving the voyagers' exclusive access to upcoming releases. In a nutshell: a geek's dream!
Nights are Long in Antartica, and pregnancy is Not An Option.
Interesting you should bring up Antartica. Remember how several years ago a female scientist discovered a lump in her breast during the winter, and was evacuated at first opportunity, at high risk for all involved (the fuel could have frozen in the ducts), for immediate medical treatment. What contingency plans are there if and when, a couple of months out on the way to Mars, a female crew member inspects herself while in the shower and finds a lump that wasn't there before? For this to happen while it is impossible to return in at least two and a half years is a terrifying prospect.
On the lighter side, if they opt for mixed-gender missions, another very real possibility is that the womens' periods might become synched after a few months, and for several days a month, you could cut the tension in the air with a butter knife. The guys are gonna be banished to the fucking engine room for days on end. In fact, mission planners might opt for hormone treatment to suspend women's periods altogether. Libido decreasing medications might be a controversial solution, but a solution nonetheless.
To use a simple example, I'm quite fed up with the layman asking why I use a Mac, when it's "not compatible with, say, Word or Excel", then when I let them know that Excel was originally for the Mac, and all Office apps are available for Mac, and the files are cross-platform, I get blank stares and "Ummm...I didn't know that". And yet they still have an "opinion".
"Yeah, but I like Yahoo Messenger, or MSN, or whatever". There's Adium. "Ummm..."
I'd like to see third party vendors create Mac hardware too.
Apple tried that during the wasteland years of the nineties (post- and pre- Steve Jobs). They were called clones, and from what I remember, the very first thing Jobs did when returning to Apple was axe that arrangement with third party manufacturers, due to 'quality concerns (not up to par)'.
For starters, I enjoy computer games every now and then.
That's one of the few issues left standing today. Another very specific example is US government standards, let me explain: My wife is a translator, working on a Mac, and she had to do a series of jobs for the Justice Department, which only accepts files in the WordPerfect format. Since there hasn't been a WordPerfect for the Mac since the mid-nineties, she got stuck and had to work elsewhere, on somebody else's PC, not a comfortable arrangement. Considering that this has been the lone compatibility issue in the years she's been working as translator, she prefers the Mac by a long shot.
Here's a bit of third-party Mac database software that has no peer in the world: Claris Filemaker, which I use every day. Sure, there's a version for PC, but it's not quite as astonishingly great as the original Mac version. Here's another: DVD Studio Pro.
The list of Mac feats is long and distinguished. Four years ago, I got a brand new Mac installed in my office, then called the tech guy to ask what the particular configurations should be to connect to the internet, as he had done none. The guy said "Click on the Safari icon". I said "But it's not configured". He said "Click on the Safari icon, it's a Mac, c'mon". I did. Within thirty seconds, I was staring at the Apple homepage. I was impressed.
BTW, I've been a Mac user since 1989 (B&W screen! No internal hard drive! Diskette slot!), and I've come to this conclusion: Switching from PC to Mac may be perplexing, but switching from Mac to PC may be infuriating.
I find it distressing that it took three pages in this thread to touch upon this point.
A friend of mine took an economy trip to India, and once there, the opportunity arose for her to go to the Himalayas, but to get there, she had to dig into a part of her bank account she hadn't counted on. Stuck in this dilemma, she called her mom for advice ("I gotta pay the rent when I get back, light, water, etc...", you know the drill), and her mom said: "Honey, you're going to be paying bills the rest your life, but you're probably going to be in the Himalayas just this once". On that cue, my friend went for it, and she now describes the excursion as the best and most spiritual experience of her life.
When I was a university student, the opportunity arose to go skydiving, and even though I couldn't afford it, I tightened my belt for a while before and after (ate only fruit, bread and water more nights than not, parked the car for a few weeks and took the bus instead) and went out and did it anyway, a forty-five second solo freefall, even passing through a cloud!
I know that $25k is a helluva lot of money compared to the cost of the experiences I write about above, and that the sweepstakes company will take a lot of deserved flak for not including the taxes on the prize, but goddam it, look at the payoff if the guy does it! To be in a zero-G environment for a prolonged period of time, looking down at the Earth? He might be in debt for a couple of years, but he's also gonna be transformed in unimaginably positive ways, it's a childhood dream come true!
If nothing else he could write a book about the experience and recoup some of the expense.
That might take some time. In the short term, it's definitely worth a couple of appearances on talk shows at least (I'm thinking this is even Oprah material), giving him a prestige worth a salary increase or even a new, better paying job elsewhere. I haven't RTFA, but from what I'm getting, this guy, instead of being creative and gutsy and really making the effort to go for it, is thinking linearly (with horse blinders) and thrown in the towel. If I did that under similar circumstances, I'd never be able to forgive myself, I'd see myself as failing a supremely significant personal test and opportunity.
Hmmm... high irony alert, I believe, especially since it's posted as AC. That's okay, I'll bite.
If somebody wants to say Jesus Saves, well they should just go out and say it, much more succint than giving the technical coordinates of a versicle. Why be cryptic when you don't have to be?
The first person that unfurled a banner with John 3:16 during a sporting event did an original and good-natured thing, but that was at least a couple of decades ago, so that by now we've seen it a thousand times. It's become a cliché, more or less like 'The Wave'. The banner could have said Where's The Beef? for twenty years running, it would be obnoxious.
The fact that a banner we've seen a thousand times cannot be ripped a bit, without generating a tsk-tsk response for my "not appreciating the good news", is the clincher, a certain attitude of being beyond reproach that insinuates "You criticize this piece of cloth with painted letters on it, you criticize Our Lord". An extraordinary position on a method to take, if you think about it.
Though, I suppose it could get annoying if everyone did it.
Not necessarily. If this catches on and forgetting commercial and practical considerations for a moment, think of the possibility of turning this into a sort of urban art piece/performance, with the world as interactive mosaic. And then, Phase Two will begin: hunting for easter eggs in Google Satellite.
You could get a bunch of people together to line up their cars in an open field, spelling out a huge message. I can imagine some people will probably propose to their girlfriend/boyfriend through Google Satellite. Setting off a bunch of differently coloured smoke flares simultaneously might look cool from space.
Here's a good one: trace a huge figure by lining up naked people lying on the ground!
...the only alliances Apple makes with Microsoft are those alliances that they absolutely MUST make..ie...MS Office.
Back in the eighties, Apple commissioned Microsoft to design a spreadsheet app, which was eventually named Excel. Microsoft requested from Apple its' source code to seamlessly integrate the application with the Mac OS desktop environment, and Apple complied. Microsoft then insidiously used the source code to backward engineer (and I do mean backward) the Windows desktop environment.
It didn't take long for Apple to realize what had happened, so they compiled the evidence and filed a lawsuit, which they won in the mid-nineties, after years of litigation. As part of the compensation deal, Microsoft was forced to buy a large amount of Apple stock ($500 million is the number that pops into mind), an investment that is now worth billions.
To sum up: Apple got burned and won in court, Microsoft lost in court and made a ton of money via the fine or penalty or whatever it was supposed to be, while both Excel and Windows went on to rule the world. Sheesh, even when these guys lose, they win.
Couldn't resist to place an entry from the Bullwer-Lytton "literature" contest:
As the fading light of a dying day filtered through the window blinds, Roger stood over his victim with a smoking.45, surprised at the serenity that filled him after pumping six slugs into the bloodless tyrant that mocked him day after day, and then he shuffled out of the office with one last look back at the shattered computer terminal lying there like a silicon armadillo left to rot on the information superhighway.
Exposure to foreign content (most films in original version with subtitles on TV for example, as in Danemark) is another key.
Interesting point! I once heard it said that a general measure of the cultural level of a society is the ratio of dubbed-subtitled foreign films. Which brings me to a curious contradiction, as the french are acknowledged as purist film buffs who still reject dubbed films, yet as we all know, cling to their language with great zeal. Does the subtitle purism exist in just in a city like Paris, or is it a nationwide mindset?
It's not difficult to learn other languages, it just requires effort.
You missed two crucial elements here, my good man: exposure and practice.
I once travelled alone through Italy and France for a couple of months, and before I knew it, I was having conversations in Italian, not fluently of course, but enough to get by and then some (I got invited to a couple of parties, etc). If I had travelled with a friend, I would have spoken my native language (Spanish, similar but not identical to Italian by any means) with that person instead of making the effort to connect with the locals, so in a way, necessity became my crash course, and I was astounded by how fast I'd picked the language up.
Similarly, I went to France right after that and it took me about a week to begin constructing my own proper sentences, even though my accent must have been grating to french ears, but the effort was appreciated and on a couple of occasions I was treated to drinks in bars, courtesy of parisians! It was a super cool exercise.
However, sadly and predictably, about a month after I returned home I'd forgotten most of what I learned during my trip.
Similarly, my now wife lived in Germany for a year, and a couple of years after she came back to her hometown, she'd forgotten most of what she spoke exclusively for nearly a year. She recently took a refresher course with immediate results, but now that the course is over, she doesn't have anybody to practice with, so she's forgetting it again! Getting rusty, so to speak.
On a humorous note: I once met a guy from Chile who'd been living in the US for a couple of months. He hadn't picked up English very well yet, but he also hadn't practiced his native Spanish, so I tried to have a conversation with the guy and quickly realized he spoke no languages! Half an hour later his Spanish had fully returned, so I got to witness the language part of the mind (so to speak) in action at point-blank range.
Most High School students in the US may take a language course, but while in Europe you drive a few hours and find yourself exposed to the stimuli of a foreign language, in the US there is a sort of language isolation, except for Spanish in the southwestern states, Florida and a few major cities, but many latinos in the US prefer to speak English anyway, and if they speak in Spanish it's like a sound in the background for most white folks, so there is neither much stimuli nor incentive for the average US citizen to be bilingual.
OK, my point is this: take an average US citizen who thinks it difficult to learn languages, place him/her in a european-like environment, and that person will become adept at languages, sooner or later, to his/her astonishment.
And actually studying different languages is quite fun.
Well, from what I've heard, in Western Europe it is de rigueur to speak at least three languages. It's not even admirable in countries like Switzerland and Germany, it's a standard requirement.
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You are planning to backpack around the world. Why? To experience the world? Then do so.
Amen to that. Once, I went to Italy with an open attitude and no strings attached, and met a ton of people, went to several local parties, drank wine and exchanged dirty jokes with local students at a traditional renaissance celebration, etcetera.
On the other side of the spectrum, I remember american couples in restaurants, huddled and reading USA Today, feeling alienated because they could not burst through their own bubble, unable and/or unwilling to 'connect'.
In one extreme case, a group of ragazzos lit up cigarettes after their meal, and an american couple abruptly asked for their check and left in a hurry. Watching this spectacle, I lit a cigarette of my own, and when the couple turned to leave, they man caught sight of me, pointed and said "Oh look, honey, there's another one". We all looked at each other, rolling our eyes and winking, even the waiters.
Then there's people that complain about prices in Europe, as in "We paid fifteen dollars for breakfast at the hotel". Sure, if you want eggs, hashed browns, bacon/sausages and OJ, but how about going to the stand in the park and getting an egg, cheese and ham crepe for a couple of euros? Or going to the market and buying goat's cheese, sun-dried tomatoes pickled in olive oil, cold cuts and a baguette?
Of course, not everybody's like this, but what I'm trying to do here is support your point: tech will only anchor you to home, so cut the cable and free yourself from your moorings. That said, portable music is good for long train trips, and don't forget the supreme discomfort of airline travel, so I would take a player along.
Then, with an open attitude, instead of bringing home pictures of tourist attractions, maybe you can bring back pictures of yourself at a party in Florence, where brazilian punk was playing and somebody taught you the basic moves of capoeira. Moments like these are fleeting, while the castles and cathedrals will be there for a very long time.
There's a guy from my hometown we call The Brain. Once, he and some friends planned a long trip through Europe, and check out what he did, it's amazing:
Online, he made arrangements to buy a diesel car in northern Europe, as well as sell it in Spain several months later, at a profit.
And so, The Brain and company crisscrossed Europe for months with a few tankfuls of diesel, then had a bit of spare cash to show for it at the end.
With careful planning and a moderate sum of cash, you could give yourself this luxury that'll give you much more freedom of movement, therefore the ability to visit more places in a smaller amount of time.
...but, as always, subjective at best. I still have a G5 iMac, and many of the apps on the list are useless to me, as they're specifically for the Intel processor. However, these lists are informative in that they help to become aware of potentially useful apps to any mac users out there.
. Isn't this still the industry standard for assembling DVD structure and navigation?
That said, here are a few apps the guy neglected to mention:
- Claris Filemaker http://www.filemaker.com/. Hands down, the best database software out there, for the Mac or any other OS.
- iWeb http://www.apple.com/ilife/iweb/. Ridiculously easy to use, yet web pages still come out clean and looking pretty good too.
- DVD Studio Pro http://www.apple.com/finalcutstudio/dvdstudiopro/
- Visual Hub http://www.techspansion.com/visualhub/. For its' ability to convert video files in any format out there into any other.
- Disk Warrior http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/. In the extremely isolated cases of ever having to need it, this is the single most important life-saving app out there.
Oh, and an honorable mention: Mac The Ripper. Site is down, but you can check out their forum http://www.ripdifferent.com/.
There's a series of posts up this thread that touch on the subject, yet I want to separate my post from that particular context and start fresh from another angle.
Why were the american cultures 'discovered', while they had no inkling of other cultures across the oceans, nor their place in the panoramic view of the world?
Because they were not seafarers. The question I keep repeating to myself is: Why was that?
The reason why the ancient phoenicians, greeks, etc, set sail, was gigantic and in front of their noses: The Mediterranean Sea, which represented the shortest way between two points of commerce in a concave land: a straight line. Same with the norse people: The Baltic Sea.
Middle eastern cultures also developed seafaring capabilities, spanning the area from India to the eastern African coast.
Much more intriguing are the chinese, as their land is convex with respect to the ocean, so there is no obvious short term advantage to develop seafaring capabilities, yet they did have a majestic fleet of immense junks for a short period of time, during which they were gazing waaay over the horizon, and with noble intentions to boot.
In fact, it seems that in every region of the world, for one reason or another, civilizations set to the oceans with commerce and/or conquest in mind, yet excepting the colonization of islands in the Gulf Of Mexico, once settled, the pre-columbian people seem to have completely lost whatever sea legs they ever had.
The Gulf Of Mexico is concave, commerce between Yucatan, Veracruz and Florida seems like an obvious thing. Olmecs, Toltecs, Mayans, Aztecs, among others, inhabited the general basin area, yet while they navigated lakes, rivers and fished close to the coast, show no evidence of technology for longer term sea travel. What the hell happened? Why that gigantic, eventually fatal blind spot?
Maybe, just maybe, it's because of the fact that the Gulf Of Mexico, for half of the year, is smack in the center of hurricane alley. Maybe the Mayans, for example, tried and had their fleet decimated one time too often, then completely scrapped the endeavor. Yet I've read nothing on the matter, I've never stumbled upon pre-columbian academics even discussing the matter, so if anybody knows or has any ideas, please post! Thanks.
First and foremost, I am categorically not a fan of US foreign policy, as it is myopic, petty and/or inhumane more often than not.
That said, the iranian government has, in succession:
1. Threatened to destroy a nation.
2. Turned itself into a global focus point for nuclear rethoric and chest-thumping.
3. Declared the triumphant launch of an ICBM equivalent.
WTF are they thinking? It's almost as if they're screaming at Cheney-Bush Inc: "Lookee here, fuck us up! We'll give you excuses to do it!"
Can't they keep their zipper closed until there's hope for dialogue in 2009, once the jug-eared goon squatting in the White House moseys on back to his ranch in Texas or Paraguay or wherever?
Are they itching to have their country and population brutally victimized? Then again, remember how they used children as suicide soldiers during their war with Iraq back in the eighties.
Are they itching for an excuse to turn off their oil spigot, generating a global economic crisis, enriching the texan oil robber barons in the process? Remember that whenever there's a crisis of this sort, Chevron, Texaco and Shell invariably end up reporting their highest quarterly earnings in history.
As the cherry on the putrid cake, both sides in this fiasco play the religious card, the impending fulfillment of prophecy as some sort of implicit fact and key policy element.
All the world is threatened to get caught in the crossfire. Just another in-your-face scenario that reiterates the urgent need for alternative energy sources, as decentralized as humanly possible.
A few years ago, during the months leading to the first wave of spam attacks, I started receiving a lot of chain-letter emails, along the lines of "send this message to ten (or twenty or whatever) people you know, and something wonderful will happen to you within the next week". Sometimes it was some .pps with a bogus Dalai Lama message, sometimes just a selfish attempt by the superstitious to score points with some fortune deity.
.pps files, this time smearing political candidates or explaining electoral fraud step by step, calling upon you to do something immediately about it, such as, you guessed it, "resend this email to ten (or twenty or whatever) people you know". The result is that I'm getting flooded by spam again, but thankfully the Gmail filters seem to be holding up quite well.
One time, to my astonishment, it was just a list of email addresses upon addresses, hundreds of them, no message included, being sent and resent by who knows what idiots. One fed up guy replied to the original sender and to all of us hapless sendees, ripping the sender a new one, it was a sight to behold.
Once I switched to Gmail, I was much warier of giving out my address, emphasizing "Do NOT send any crap, okay?" It worked for more than a year, but then I started receiving another kind of chain-letter email, of the scaremongering urban-legend variety, you know the type, a nameless friend of a friend of a friend went drinking, ended up bedding a hot chick, then woke up two days later in some hotel room, blind and missing his corneas, or a kidney or whatever.
Or another round of
It's email abuse, pure and simple, but they don't see it that way, as they think they're doing a public service. Even the top brass of the company I work for, as well as members of my family, read this crap and resend to as many people as possible it with no attempt towards keeping private addresses private, and probably even pat themselves on the back about it.
Out of this dunghill, I have to admit there was a true gem once. I got this outraged email, sent to about a hundred people at once, by this guy who went to the supermarket late at night to buy a carton of milk, found it easy to go the wrong way in the empty parking lot, and got fined by the traffic cops within private property. He went on a rant about it, and at the end attached the fine in jpeg format, as irrefutable evidence of his victimization at the hands of "the pigs".
I mean, there's something so Lebowsky about it. I'd betcha The Dude would have a Hotmail address!
Sounds like an extremely long shot, but considering odds vs payoff, it still warrants extremely close scrutiny.
Buy now and in 30 years you could own prime Nevada beach-front property!
The beach-front property will last for the several minutes it'll take for the waters to recede, and even then, just on the western facing slopes of the Sierra Nevada and Cleveland National Forest, maybe you could do a pay-per-view special from there.
Considering how litigation-happy that particular church is, you might have considered posting that anonymously.
Yep, I can visualize the civil court system at work here:
"Your honour, in the case between L Ron Hubbard's Church Of Scientology (plaintiff) versus FormOfActionBanana (defendant)..." It would kind of make the whole point of parody moot, wouldn't it?
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka!" but "That's funny ..."
Actually, I'm kinda partial to that other classic: "Who ordered THAT?!!"
I live close to the San Diego area, where one of the local weathermen dedicates a page to explaining local weather conditions and forecasts http://www.kfmb.com/weather/index.php. The guy bases his reports on simulations run at a computer at the Scripps Institute in La Jolla and on NOAA information http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/sgx/display_special_produc t_versions.php?sid=SGX&pil=AFD, proving to be close to 90% accurate in the years since I discovered his web page.
However, I don't know if weathermen in other cities are as thorough, but I will say that since I discovered the guy, I haven't used The Weather Channel or any other weather page, except when he's on vacation (and he does take about six breaks a year).
I've been told that psychologically they're better equipped for long endurance in confined spaces as well.
This is a fascinating and complex problem. I would also give special consideration to people who practice yoga, meditation and other such techniques to maintain spiritual (read psychological) balance. In long term missions such as this, military-style discipline might definitely not be enough.
In fact, anything that will decrease the psychological impact of being in a confined space for so long, such as artistic inclinations and skills, might also be a very large plus, as there's going to be a helluva lot of free time while in transit. A long trip might be the perfect opportunity to, for example, develop those watercolor techniques and take them to the next level (Kubrick realized this while making 2001, remember how Dave sketches his fellow astronauts while they are in suspended animation), write that treatise on medieval english literature, or maybe finish that novel bouncing around in your head for years! I for one, really like the idea of fully rounded individuals making the trip, all cosmonauts/astronauts/taikonauts should have a bit of the Renaissance in them.
Finally, as monotonous surroundings make for a mild to intermediate case of sensory deprivation, a strong affinity for music would be welcome, having a challenging mix of music blaring from the speakers will increase the level of stimulation. The spacecraft will at least have to have a killer home entertainment system, with a ridiculous amount of movies and tv shows also on hand, with the latest being constantly broadcast from Earth to the ship. When I say the latest movies, I mean something like free pay-per-view, only with an even better twist, movies still in general release, or even giving the voyagers' exclusive access to upcoming releases. In a nutshell: a geek's dream!
Nights are Long in Antartica, and pregnancy is Not An Option.
Interesting you should bring up Antartica. Remember how several years ago a female scientist discovered a lump in her breast during the winter, and was evacuated at first opportunity, at high risk for all involved (the fuel could have frozen in the ducts), for immediate medical treatment.
What contingency plans are there if and when, a couple of months out on the way to Mars, a female crew member inspects herself while in the shower and finds a lump that wasn't there before? For this to happen while it is impossible to return in at least two and a half years is a terrifying prospect.
On the lighter side, if they opt for mixed-gender missions, another very real possibility is that the womens' periods might become synched after a few months, and for several days a month, you could cut the tension in the air with a butter knife. The guys are gonna be banished to the fucking engine room for days on end.
In fact, mission planners might opt for hormone treatment to suspend women's periods altogether. Libido decreasing medications might be a controversial solution, but a solution nonetheless.
That old canard is getting very tired.
To use a simple example, I'm quite fed up with the layman asking why I use a Mac, when it's "not compatible with, say, Word or Excel", then when I let them know that Excel was originally for the Mac, and all Office apps are available for Mac, and the files are cross-platform, I get blank stares and "Ummm...I didn't know that". And yet they still have an "opinion".
"Yeah, but I like Yahoo Messenger, or MSN, or whatever". There's Adium. "Ummm..."
Tired old canard indeed.
I'd like to see third party vendors create Mac hardware too.
Apple tried that during the wasteland years of the nineties (post- and pre- Steve Jobs). They were called clones, and from what I remember, the very first thing Jobs did when returning to Apple was axe that arrangement with third party manufacturers, due to 'quality concerns (not up to par)'.
For starters, I enjoy computer games every now and then.
That's one of the few issues left standing today. Another very specific example is US government standards, let me explain: My wife is a translator, working on a Mac, and she had to do a series of jobs for the Justice Department, which only accepts files in the WordPerfect format. Since there hasn't been a WordPerfect for the Mac since the mid-nineties, she got stuck and had to work elsewhere, on somebody else's PC, not a comfortable arrangement. Considering that this has been the lone compatibility issue in the years she's been working as translator, she prefers the Mac by a long shot.
Here's a bit of third-party Mac database software that has no peer in the world: Claris Filemaker, which I use every day. Sure, there's a version for PC, but it's not quite as astonishingly great as the original Mac version. Here's another: DVD Studio Pro.
The list of Mac feats is long and distinguished. Four years ago, I got a brand new Mac installed in my office, then called the tech guy to ask what the particular configurations should be to connect to the internet, as he had done none. The guy said "Click on the Safari icon". I said "But it's not configured". He said "Click on the Safari icon, it's a Mac, c'mon". I did. Within thirty seconds, I was staring at the Apple homepage. I was impressed.
BTW, I've been a Mac user since 1989 (B&W screen! No internal hard drive! Diskette slot!), and I've come to this conclusion:
Switching from PC to Mac may be perplexing, but switching from Mac to PC may be infuriating.
How about a restaurant that serves Aldebaran liqueurs and Ameglian Major cow?
Personally, I'd go for a nip of the ol' contraband Romulan Ale.
I mean, we're talking about a trip into space.
I find it distressing that it took three pages in this thread to touch upon this point.
A friend of mine took an economy trip to India, and once there, the opportunity arose for her to go to the Himalayas, but to get there, she had to dig into a part of her bank account she hadn't counted on. Stuck in this dilemma, she called her mom for advice ("I gotta pay the rent when I get back, light, water, etc...", you know the drill), and her mom said: "Honey, you're going to be paying bills the rest your life, but you're probably going to be in the Himalayas just this once". On that cue, my friend went for it, and she now describes the excursion as the best and most spiritual experience of her life.
When I was a university student, the opportunity arose to go skydiving, and even though I couldn't afford it, I tightened my belt for a while before and after (ate only fruit, bread and water more nights than not, parked the car for a few weeks and took the bus instead) and went out and did it anyway, a forty-five second solo freefall, even passing through a cloud!
I know that $25k is a helluva lot of money compared to the cost of the experiences I write about above, and that the sweepstakes company will take a lot of deserved flak for not including the taxes on the prize, but goddam it, look at the payoff if the guy does it! To be in a zero-G environment for a prolonged period of time, looking down at the Earth? He might be in debt for a couple of years, but he's also gonna be transformed in unimaginably positive ways, it's a childhood dream come true!
If nothing else he could write a book about the experience and recoup some of the expense.
That might take some time. In the short term, it's definitely worth a couple of appearances on talk shows at least (I'm thinking this is even Oprah material), giving him a prestige worth a salary increase or even a new, better paying job elsewhere. I haven't RTFA, but from what I'm getting, this guy, instead of being creative and gutsy and really making the effort to go for it, is thinking linearly (with horse blinders) and thrown in the towel. If I did that under similar circumstances, I'd never be able to forgive myself, I'd see myself as failing a supremely significant personal test and opportunity.
Hmmm... high irony alert, I believe, especially since it's posted as AC. That's okay, I'll bite.
If somebody wants to say Jesus Saves, well they should just go out and say it, much more succint than giving the technical coordinates of a versicle. Why be cryptic when you don't have to be?
The first person that unfurled a banner with John 3:16 during a sporting event did an original and good-natured thing, but that was at least a couple of decades ago, so that by now we've seen it a thousand times. It's become a cliché, more or less like 'The Wave'. The banner could have said Where's The Beef? for twenty years running, it would be obnoxious.
The fact that a banner we've seen a thousand times cannot be ripped a bit, without generating a tsk-tsk response for my "not appreciating the good news", is the clincher, a certain attitude of being beyond reproach that insinuates "You criticize this piece of cloth with painted letters on it, you criticize Our Lord". An extraordinary position on a method to take, if you think about it.
Though, I suppose it could get annoying if everyone did it.
Not necessarily. If this catches on and forgetting commercial and practical considerations for a moment, think of the possibility of turning this into a sort of urban art piece/performance, with the world as interactive mosaic. And then, Phase Two will begin: hunting for easter eggs in Google Satellite.
You could get a bunch of people together to line up their cars in an open field, spelling out a huge message.
I can imagine some people will probably propose to their girlfriend/boyfriend through Google Satellite.
Setting off a bunch of differently coloured smoke flares simultaneously might look cool from space.
Here's a good one: trace a huge figure by lining up naked people lying on the ground!
John 3:16
Rest assured, if and when Google announces a flyby over a United States city, this one will rear its' obnoxious head.
...the only alliances Apple makes with Microsoft are those alliances that they absolutely MUST make..ie...MS Office.
Back in the eighties, Apple commissioned Microsoft to design a spreadsheet app, which was eventually named Excel. Microsoft requested from Apple its' source code to seamlessly integrate the application with the Mac OS desktop environment, and Apple complied. Microsoft then insidiously used the source code to backward engineer (and I do mean backward) the Windows desktop environment.
It didn't take long for Apple to realize what had happened, so they compiled the evidence and filed a lawsuit, which they won in the mid-nineties, after years of litigation. As part of the compensation deal, Microsoft was forced to buy a large amount of Apple stock ($500 million is the number that pops into mind), an investment that is now worth billions.
To sum up: Apple got burned and won in court, Microsoft lost in court and made a ton of money via the fine or penalty or whatever it was supposed to be, while both Excel and Windows went on to rule the world. Sheesh, even when these guys lose, they win.
Exposure to foreign content (most films in original version with subtitles on TV for example, as in Danemark) is another key.
Interesting point! I once heard it said that a general measure of the cultural level of a society is the ratio of dubbed-subtitled foreign films.
Which brings me to a curious contradiction, as the french are acknowledged as purist film buffs who still reject dubbed films, yet as we all know, cling to their language with great zeal.
Does the subtitle purism exist in just in a city like Paris, or is it a nationwide mindset?
It's not difficult to learn other languages, it just requires effort.
You missed two crucial elements here, my good man: exposure and practice.
I once travelled alone through Italy and France for a couple of months, and before I knew it, I was having conversations in Italian, not fluently of course, but enough to get by and then some (I got invited to a couple of parties, etc). If I had travelled with a friend, I would have spoken my native language (Spanish, similar but not identical to Italian by any means) with that person instead of making the effort to connect with the locals, so in a way, necessity became my crash course, and I was astounded by how fast I'd picked the language up.
Similarly, I went to France right after that and it took me about a week to begin constructing my own proper sentences, even though my accent must have been grating to french ears, but the effort was appreciated and on a couple of occasions I was treated to drinks in bars, courtesy of parisians! It was a super cool exercise.
However, sadly and predictably, about a month after I returned home I'd forgotten most of what I learned during my trip.
Similarly, my now wife lived in Germany for a year, and a couple of years after she came back to her hometown, she'd forgotten most of what she spoke exclusively for nearly a year. She recently took a refresher course with immediate results, but now that the course is over, she doesn't have anybody to practice with, so she's forgetting it again! Getting rusty, so to speak.
On a humorous note: I once met a guy from Chile who'd been living in the US for a couple of months. He hadn't picked up English very well yet, but he also hadn't practiced his native Spanish, so I tried to have a conversation with the guy and quickly realized he spoke no languages! Half an hour later his Spanish had fully returned, so I got to witness the language part of the mind (so to speak) in action at point-blank range.
Most High School students in the US may take a language course, but while in Europe you drive a few hours and find yourself exposed to the stimuli of a foreign language, in the US there is a sort of language isolation, except for Spanish in the southwestern states, Florida and a few major cities, but many latinos in the US prefer to speak English anyway, and if they speak in Spanish it's like a sound in the background for most white folks, so there is neither much stimuli nor incentive for the average US citizen to be bilingual.
OK, my point is this: take an average US citizen who thinks it difficult to learn languages, place him/her in a european-like environment, and that person will become adept at languages, sooner or later, to his/her astonishment.
And actually studying different languages is quite fun.
Well, from what I've heard, in Western Europe it is de rigueur to speak at least three languages. It's not even admirable in countries like Switzerland and Germany, it's a standard requirement.