Virtual Illusions

New High in U.S. Prison Poplulation

Apparently we hit a new record… go us?

More than 1% of the U.S. population is presently in jail. Obviously if you are minority or poor than more than 1% or your community is currently in jail. I don’t understand how we accept that state of affairs as if it is acceptable.

For my conservative readers: We are spending $55 billion dollars a year to lock up 2.3 million people. Since we are operating in a deficit that means we continue to spend millions of dollars each year on interest on borrowing that money. With all that money consumed in the prison system it hinders our ability to build roads, fund the armed forces, have another round of tax cuts or whatever else conservatives think governments should be spending their money.

For me it’s simply inhuman to lock up that many people. Clearly the current system isn’t working and what we are doing now simply isn’t practical. We can’t just keep putting people in jail and hope that makes things better. What happens is people people who went to jail for minor things, come out hardened criminals with socialized contacts into the criminal world.

They get out and look for a job and we don’t hire them because they have the habits, demeanor, tattoos, etc of someone who’s been in jail. That’s before the we even consider the stigma of the criminal record once a background check is done or the interviewer asks about the five year blank space in the resume. Looking for a place to live and way to make ends meet they are more likely than ever to take a shady job that allows them to support themselves. With that sort of cycle it’s only a matter of time before they return to jail.

We have more of our population in jail both as a percentage and an absolute number. The argument could be made that the numbers reported for the distant second place holder, China, aren’t very accurate. Even if you accept that without any evidence to suggest it’s true you still have to contend with the fact that we imprison a greater percentage of our country than any other industrialized nation who’s data you trust.

Prisons are not the answer. They don’t make us safer, they are merely deficit spending of public safety. Eventually people get out of jail, it’s neither moral, nor can we afford to keep them there forever. When they are released they are even more distant from legal society. Their ability to change their lives are diminished and the problem that prison was supposed to solve surges again in 5, 10 or 20 years.

While there may be a temporary benefit to public safety by locking a lot of people up, it is dwarfed by the effect of reducing poverty or unemployment has on the crime rate. We need to concentrate on the longterm meaningful, humane solutions. Work on poverty and person’s ability to meaningfully employed and provide for their own welfare and there will be a much more longterm benefit to public safety.

Related Items:

• Prisons
• Death Penalty

Culture, Politics

I’m sure this will be the first of many apologies. I was hoping to write a post or at least update a page every few days, once a week on the outside. I, of course, failed. I’m sure I’ll fail again but I’ll keep trying.

I’ve been busy. I flew down to Florida for my Grandmother’s 90th birthday. We threw a party and 140 people came. My grandmother has many more friends and is much more popular than I am. I spent most of the time tending to the food and putting out chairs and similar tasks, which is fine as I don’t do all that well around a dozen strangers, much less 140.

Once I got back I went straight into a week long training class. I haven’t even really had time to  keep up with the going ons in the world, much less have something to post.

But I’m back now.  Lets see if I can keep my schedule.

Life

It’s been a few days since the questionably named Protect America Act expired and we haven’t been killed yet. No reason we should be the same wire tapping continues unabated, but now they have to go to the FISA court which never learned the word no. But it is at least has the appearance of oversight. The court could, it if felt the need, actually require some indication of wrong doing. It probably already requires something other than a fishing expedition, thus it’s too much of a hardship to the current administration.

One of the reasons the Protect America Act expired was because congress couldn’t decide whether to give phone companies blanket immunity for its past misdeeds in giving slews of data to the government, which the government was not authorized to ask for. It’s unclear whether they broke any laws but it seem clear they had a huge failure of moral judgment. I would argue that phone companies have at least a moral if not legal obligation to act as my agents to protect my data. I suspect in a few years most people will believe this but at present it’s just wacko techies who think about the implications of other entities holding your data.

Running it through from a very basic level if an entity (used here mostly as company and/or organization) asks for and you give them your information or even if they collect this data in their normal role as service provider, it seems rational that they have incurred a basic obligation to take reasonable precautions to protect that data. At the very least you expect them to secure their systems such that the Russian mob isn’t simply using their servers as data feeds.

Most people have the expectations that an entity that they have given data will attempt to protect it. In a sense they have become our agents. In accepting our information part of the expectation is the idea that they will act on our behalf to protect it. It’s a subtle point that I don’t pretend exists in law yet, but it is how the relationship is viewed by most people if they thing about it. Part of the unspoken contract between your favorite online vendor and yourself is this idea that your data won’t escape into the wild.

I’m not so naive as to think that vendor isn’t selling my data to various third parties in one form or another. As much as I wish it weren’t true, I understand that the use of my data in the entities interests is part of the deal. For that matter I encourage the use of my data in aggregate. But we have certain expectation of who the vendor is selling our data to and for what purposes.

For example I had a retailer (rpgnow.com) sell my email address to a spammer, this violates the understanding I had with them about the acceptable use of my data. As a result I no longer do business with them.

We have already begun to see along the fringes, retailers who are competing on issues of privacy. I suspect this will become more central as the years move on. We will have companies competing on their skill at being good agents for protecting our data.

Which leads us back to the Protect America Act. These companies who collect our data for the purpose of saving money, anticipating demand, allocating capital resources and other competitive advantages, have also incurred the responsibility of acting as our agents. The government isn’t coming to me with a warrant, National Security Letter or other ‘instrument’ so I can’t verify that the ‘I’s are dotted and the ‘T’s are crossed. That falls to my agents.

Those companies now want to given immunity for falling to be good agents. The government wants to send the message that companies should ignore the law and just do whatever the people from Washington in suits tell them to. Don’t worry Washington will take care of any fallout. They want these companies to act as agents of Washington rather than agents of their customers.

We can not let this happen, we need these people to have in interest in making sure they give Washington all the data required by law, but not a bit more. They must remain motivated to make sure that everyone is operating within the constraints of the law and with proper oversight. They are acting as my agents in this regard and they have a moral obligation to protect my rights in this regard.

One day the law will reflect that.

Justice, News, Politics, Tech

So I was thinking about Spirit of the Century and the world creation podcast from Thats How We Roll (Faith, Faces & Fingerprints). And I thought it was an interesting concept and was going to try it out, hopefully in the near future and the idea of the Campaign Aspects occurred to me.

(laying some groundwork) The fortune teller stunt allows a player to make an obscure fortune cookie phrase and turn it into an aspect that anyone can pay a fate point and tag or invoke as normal. What if during world creation you made a few aspects that campaign wide in scope and duration. These are things that set the theme of the setting.

Things like “Good is good and evil is evil” or “The right thing for the wrong reason” could define how good and evil interact in the setting. It’s a simple expansion the of the aspect concept to attach them to organizations. For example give the evil organization the aspect of “Wears a black hat” or “Promotion through attrition”.

Those aspects say a lot about pseudo characters within the world, but the campaign aspects are about genre conventions and the enforcement of those. I might even grab a set number of campaign aspects: One that talks to the morality of the campaign, others that says something about mood, hope/pessimism, scope, etc.

So for Nephilim Song 1924, I might have campaign aspects of: “You aren’t crazy, but you still need to be stopped”, “Conspiracies within conspiracies” and “While I breathe, there is hope”.

Some effort should be applied to make sure that the aspects really do limit and can’t carte blanch be applied to all situations, but other than that their presence should get the players to enforce the conventions of the genre.

Anyway just some quick thoughts.

Uncategorized

I just finished Captain’s Fury by Jim Butcher and I’m going to have to give it a hearty thumbs up. There were sections in the middle where I was concerned. Jim Butcher is on my short list of authors I follow, but his forte is not really action, its more politics and maneuvering. I think that’s why I love his work so much.

The middle of the book is sort of an action scene/travel log that lacks the political pressure that I look for in Butcher’s work. But the climax delivers in spades.

I’d grown a bit concerned, because his last Dresden File book, White Knight, felt like a set up book. Which I’m okay with, you do ten books in a series and occasionally you need to move some pieces around to set up what comes next. While reading the middle of this book I was made to wonder whether White Knight was a set up or if Butcher lost his touch, but I once we got passed the middle, the Butcher I’ve come to know and love was back.

With minimal spoilers the middle consists of flipping back and forth between Amara and Benard slogging through a swamp and Tavi traveling to and from (and the actual) prison break. During that whole period of time there wasn’t really any tension and no meaningful conflict. All the foes were nameless mooks, and I never really thought either group would ultimately fail at their tasks. The events had to happen for the end to come together, but it should have been edited down or some meaningful conflict added.

The beginning that establishes Tavi as a capable commander and tactical thinker was good stuff. The series has come to a place that reminds me of the Miles Vorkosigan series by Lois McMaster Bujold. At the center of both series is a crazy little bastard who finds himself in the center of trouble, always with more than himself at stake and manages to pull it out of the fire by will, audacity and cleverness. Miles was practically incapable of physical action, while Tavi is at a serious disadvantage compared to his allies and enemies (though he’s catching up). They both deal with threats which can’t just be swatted away by physical or magical power.  The more I think about it the more similarities I see between the two heroes.

Despite the hiccup in the middle of this book, I give it a thumbs up. I recommend this book and have no reservations about recommending the whole series.

Media

Came to me via my sister

For anyone who didn’t see David Letterman’s take on this : (And it’s a true story…)

On a recent weekend in Atlantic City , a woman won a bucketful of quarters at a slot machine. She took a break from the slots for dinner with her husband in the hotel dining room. But first she wanted to stash the quarters in her room.

“I’ll be right back and we’ll go to eat,” she told her husband

and carried the coin-laden bucket to the elevator. As she was about to walk into the elevator she noticed two men already aboard.

Both were black. One of them was tall…very tall…an intimidating figure.

The woman froze. Her first thought was : “These two are going to rob me.”

Her next thought was : “Don’t be a bigot; they look like perfectly nice gentlemen.” But racial stereotypes are powerful, and fear immobilized her.

She stood and stared at the two men.

She felt anxious, flustered and ashamed. She hoped they didn’t read her mind but gosh, they had to know what she was thinking!!! Her hesitation about joining them in the elevator was all too obvious now. Her face was flushed.

She couldn’t just stand there, so with a mighty effort of will she picked up one foot and stepped forward and followed with the other foot and was on the elevator.

Avoiding eye contact, she turned around stiffly and faced the elevator doors as they closed.

A second passed, and then another second, and then another.

Her fear increased! The elevator didn’t move. Panic consumed her.

“My God,” she thought, I’m trapped and about to be robbed! ”

Her heart plummeted. Perspiration poured from every pore. Then one of the men said, “Hit the floor.”

Instinct told her to do what they told her.

The bucket of quarters flew upwards as she threw out her arms and collapsed on the elevator floor.

A shower of coins rained down on her.

Take my money and spare me, she prayed. More seconds passed. She heard one of the men say politely, “Ma’am, if you’ll just tell us what floor you’re going to, we’ll push the button.”

The one who said it had a little trouble getting the words out.

He was trying mightily to hold in a belly laugh.

The woman lifted her head and looked up at the two men.

They reached down to help her up. Confused, she struggled to her feet. “When I told my friend here to hit the floor,” said the average sized one, “I meant that he should hit the elevator button for our floor.

I didn’t mean for you to hit the floor, ma’am.” He spoke genially.

He bit his lip. It was obvious he was having a hard time not laughing.

The woman thought : “My God, what a spectacle I’ve made of myself.”

She was too humiliated to speak She wanted to blurt out an apology, but words failed her.

How do you apologize to two perfectly respectable gentlemen for behaving as though they were going to rob you?

She didn’t know what to say.

The three of them gathered up the strewn quarters and refilled her bucket.

When the elevator arrived at her floor they then insisted on walking her to her room.

She seemed a little unsteady on her feet, and they were afraid she might not make it down the corridor.

At her door they bid her a good evening.

As she slipped into her room she could hear them roaring with laughter as they walked back to the elevator.

The woman brushed herself off.

She pulled herself together and went downstairs for dinner with her husband.

The next morning flowers were delivered to her room - a dozen roses. Attached to EACH rose was a crisp one hundred dollar bill. The card said : “Thanks for the best laugh we’ve had in years.”

It was signed;
Eddie Murphy
Michael Jordan

Humor, Urban Legends

So a few days ago I discovered this thread and thought the cards were really cool, but a lot of them didn’t really feel like minions to me so I decided I’d do my own. I following my stupid idea of following the path of maximum resistance I decided to design my own cards.

There were a couple of reasons to make my own cards, none sufficient to actually do it however. First was aspect ratio, the generator used in that thread generates cards with aspect ratios of 1.43, while actual playing cards have aspect ratios of 1.4. That would cut off part of the top or bottom or leave slivers along the side if printed on blank playing card stock. The aspect ratio of the image was also very wide which I thought was hard to work with.

I spent a few hours in Gimp and came up with this:

The artwork used for this particular card came from the Library of Congress Flickr collection and is in the public domain, but since I ruthlessly stole most of the artwork from sources that make their money from doing art I can’t ethically, much less legally, zip up the whole pack and post them.

Back to my point, I thought this was incredibly cool because I could see a pick up game of Spirit of the Century where the GM deals out a few minion cards, a location card maybe even a plot or two from S. John Ross’ big list. Mix with aspects and boom all you need to do is make an appropriate Big Bad that would use all those things and you’re ready to go.

Anyway, If you are interested in making your own cards here is the gimp Card Template. It includes backgrounds in gray, green, blue, orange, red, purple and black. Which I associate with minions +0 through +6 respectively.

Open the template in gimp (I used 2.2, but I don’t know if it matters much).

1. Find yourself an image and crop and/or rescale it to 600×450.
2. Select that image and hit Ctrl-C to copy it
3. Open the card template and make sure the image layer is the active layer.
4. Right click where the image goes in the template and select Edit -> Paste Into. Your image will replace the default image.
5. From the menu across the top select Script-Fu -> Decor -> Add Bevel…
6. In the dialog box uncheck ‘Work on a Copy’ an click okay.
7. In the layer tool find a text layer. Right click the layer and select ‘Text Tool’ Change the text to whatever you want.
8. Repeat step 7 for each of the text layers.
9. Most of the background color layers are turned off. Turn on the one you want by clicking where the eye icon should be. You can deactivate or delete the other background colors.
10. File -> Save As… and you’re done. You probably want to save as both a .xcf file and something more useful like a .png or .jpg file. If you want to make changes, correct typos, etc. you’ll have to change the .xcf file and export it again.

If I get a chance I’ll post the cards I created, I probably won’t post links to the artwork, because some artists might take exception and the last thing I want is artists taking good art off the Internet.

Gaming

Due to the subtitle of this blog I get a number of people who appear to be searching for the difference between the words illusion and allusion washing up on the shores of my web pages. I suspect they flail about a bit and flee, whatever they gained from their visit it was not the answer to the question that they asked.  This post is to correct that sad situation.

In definition the words aren’t too similar. An illusion is an erroneous mental representation. In a literary sense it is something that is false that appears, or people believe to be, true. “He had the illusion of faith” for example. It is a disjunction between perceived reality and objective reality.

Magic tricks are often called illusions as they hinge on the audience perceiving something different from what is really happening. Optical illusions trick the senses so that the brain perceives something different than what is real.

An allusion on the other hand is a reference within a work, usually literary or artistic, to an external work, person, character, etc. with the assumption that the audience will be familiar with the reference. The reference can be either direct or more veiled. “This task makes me feel like Sisyphus.“, would be a direct allusion to the fact that every time the task is almost done it encounters a setback.

A homage or “nod of the head” to earlier actors or directors in cinema is a form of allusion. My favorite hidden allusion was a soap opera I once saw that had a plane with the id numbers NCC-1701, the registration of the Enterprise in Star Trek. The reference to Star Trek would be an allusion, one that was lost on the people who were watching the soap opera, versus me, who was trying to take a nap in the college lounge.

So as I suggested earlier, with the exception of spelling and pronunciation, the two words aren’t that similar. In Summary:

Illusion: Cutting your assistant in half, balanced budget, your computer is secure, privacy, etc.

Allusion: Catch-22 (Joseph Heller novel), 15 minutes of fame (Andy Warhol quote), Romeo (Shakespeare character), David and Goliath (Bible story), billions and billions (Carl Sagan) more.

Culture

So looking through my log stats I saw a sudden spike in people coming to my page searching for “computers internet blog”. While I have pages that match those words, I can’t figure how my pagerank for that search would result in any number hits coming to my pages from that search, much less it being my leading search.

About half of the hits on my pages that don’t get automatically filtered out as robots have no referrers. Since, if a dozen people in the world have an actual bookmark to this page I’d be proud, I consider 99%+ of those to be bots I can’t identify. Also all the regular visitors tend to view the same number of pages as they have hits, which means they are aren’t downloading the .css file, or the picture of the moon up there, much less the little icons and other included files in making a webpage. It is possible they are all reading my page with lynx or some similar text only browser, but my browser stats don’t support that.

No, I expect half of the traffic I get that slips through the robot filter are robots. I like to know this, but it doesn’t bother me very much. It’s the referrers that I pay attention to. I get a list of all the pages with links that people clicked on to get to my page. Sometimes I can’t find them or they are hidden behind passwords but it seems likely they are real people clicking on real links pointing to pages of mine.

The other thing of interest is the search phrases reported by Google and other search engines. I assume those are also real people searching for real thing and ending up on one of my pages.

In comes the phrase “computers internet blog” which there is no way six people a day are coming to my page with that search. And I am right. A little Googling will indicate they are are a essentially a comment posting bot. In research I came across a line that a real Google referrer has much more stuff that is missing from these google referrers. From my logs the offensive referrer look like this:

“http://www.google.com/search?q=computers+internet+blog”

An actual Google referrer looks like:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=computers+internet+blogs&btnG=Google+Search

And can sometimes have much more stuff. I grepped through my logs looking for similar patterns.

grep "www\.google\.com/search\?q=[^&"]+” access.log

There were more than just the “computers internet blog” searches. I had searches for “nylons”, “golf cart used parts”, “shipper”, etc. In other words they were throwing off the statistics I trusted as human and more than just the “computers+internet+blog” as well. I considered my options and decided to give them the ax.

Google works fine using the url that the spammer is using but it won’t generate it itself. A sophisticated user who writes there own google urls might generate it but for the moment I’m willing to consider anyone who is using that url format as a robot (mostly because I didn’t see any legitimate (i.e. search items for which I have pagerank) use of that construct in my logs).

I added the following to the directory section of my config file, though it would work just as well in the .htaccess file.

SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "www.google.com/search?q=[^&"]+"  spammer

# Bad bot, no cookie!
Order Allow,Deny
Allow from all
Deny from env=spammer

The exact placement will depend on your config file. You want to be very careful with this, if you mess up the regular expression, you may be blocking people coming from google, which doesn’t sound like a winning strategy.

If you change the config file you’ll want to reload it:

/etc/init.d/apache2 reload

And don’t forget to test to make sure Google still works and the bad referrers are blocked.

Tech

About time! Okay, I’m getting ahead of myself but long ago when the idea of civil unions, domestic partnership and/or gay marriage was new I thought the state should get out of the business of deciding who’s morality should trump in deciding who can get married. I figured the state should get out of the marriage business and provide nice equal civil unions for any couple capable of giving informed consent free from duress (just like any other contract).

According to the Washington Post (Bill Would End Civil Marriage, Create Domestic Partnerships), a Maryland lawmaker has put forth a bill that would do exactly that. No one believes the bill will pass and it is just a stalking horse for a more “reasonable” civil union bill, but I’m fairly certain the state getting out of the marriage business will be the eventual end state.

If your church doesn’t choose to honor marriage between homosexuals than the church doesn’t have to perform such marriages and your priest can go around saying so and so isn’t married to so and so in the eyes of god. Then all the humane people can leave that church and join one that doesn’t get all misty eyed over the fourteenth century.

The state in the meantime can get on with what it cares about the orderly distribution of property after someone dies, appropriate defaults on who gets to make medical decisions in absence of a medical power of attorney, etc, etc.

The true art of this bill is it lays bare the lie that separate but equal, which worked so well in the civil rights era, is equally faulty in the realm of homosexual rights. It shines a light on the lie told by those desparate to have their relationship deemed special by the state. They claim that there’s no reason for homosexuals to be able to marry civil unions are just as good. If they speak the truth they will have no complaint in the state recognizing their relationship as a civil union and allowing a church to make it a marriage if they (and the church) so desire.

On the other hand if they had “misspoken” and a civil union as defined isn’t as good as a marriage under law. Than it will be only a short time before everyone’s interest is in that problem being corrected. If this law doesn’t pass, the only gain is the lie being laid bare.

In any case I’m glad a lawmaker has the guts to put forth this bill. In all likelihood it will be rejected but it needs to be part of the conversation on this issue and I’m proud my state could contribute.

News, Politics