Immanentize the Empathy
Slashdot has a good conversation going on about the proposed Public Domain Enhancement Act. More information can be found at the Eric Eldred Act website.
Some things. One, thanks to my job I am feeling pretty burned out about the whole internet thing. I will recover. I always do.
Two, Thursday, June 5 is my birthday! W00t!!1!1!1
Three, in my more than ample free time I am attempting to put together a Flash/XML-based adventure game, reminiscent of the early Ultima games.
More later.
The tournament on Saturday was a lot of fun. Six people competed and we brought home nine medals. Photos are here , and a writeup will be following shortly.
Yes, that is the Flash photo application I created a couple of weeks ago. It still has some rough spots but it works. You will need the latest version of the Flash 6 player to use it.
Sifu Chung, the event host and organizer, told us a few weeks ago that there would be a Praying Mantis sifu at the tournament who had studied with Master Lee ‘s instructor Chiu Chuk Kai (hereafter referred to as Sigong). This instructor, Sifu Tony Chuy, studied with Sigong in Hong Kong after Master Lee came to America. All the time he was a student he had heard stories about Master Lee but had never met him.
Before the tournament started we noticed someone we didn’t recognize but who was wearing the crest of our style of Kung Fu. He was obviously looking for someone, so when he got close, Rick said “Are you from New York?”
“Yes.”
“This is Sifu Lee.”
Sifu Chuy said “Okay”, then he flinched and and his jaw hit the floor when he realized that the person he had been waiting for 25 years to meet was right in front of him.
As fun as the rest of the day was, that was the best moment.
We don’t have a lot of contact with other schools, so it is easy to forget how big the world of martial arts really is. For instance, on Saturday I watched people performing Tai Chi Praying Mantis kung fu, Seven Star Praying Mantis kung fu, Wing Chun, Jow Gar, Pak Mei and Kempo. I saw Jeung, Wu, Yang and Chen style Tai Chi,and I participated in an Iron Shirt Chi Kung demonstration. All of this at a small (though highly respected) martial arts tournament in Midland.
It is good to be reminded that we are part of such an extraordinary world.
If thou beest borne to strange sights, Things invisible to see,
Ride ten thousand daies and nights,
Till age snow white haires on thee,
Thou, when thou retorn’st, wilt tell mee
All strange wonders that befell thee…
Marc Joseph Oettinger
September 28, 1975 – May 23, 2003
Godspeed
Off to the kung fu tournament. Details tomorrow.
A couple of eagerly awaited packages from Amazon.com arrived today. First was the DVD of Equilibrium, a terribly under-appreciated movie when it hit the theaters. Watching it again…wow. It could be called derivative, but then again, name one movie in the past ten years which wasn’t.
Second, Cages, by Dave McKean. Cages is a 500-page, hardcover graphic novel. McKean both wrote and illustrated it. In a couple of weeks, when I have finished reading it, I will post a review. For right now, again…wow.
So tell me: what have you been doing lately?
My time, as usual, is not my own. Far too much to do, and far too little time in which to do it. At last count, four friends are getting married this summer. Well, eight friends. Four weddings. This in addition to a martial arts tournament, a martial arts demonstration, a holiday, a vacation and a girlfriend. Suddenly it’s September, and where did the summer go?
On a positive note, my brother just proposed to his girlfriend.
On another positive note, yesterday I figured out how to properly pleat and wear a great-kilt (for a wedding this weekend).
And last but not least, we’re-here is back !
Julie over at the Skinny Daily has an excellent post up about scars . So I thought I would chime in on the subject.
Just above my right eyebrow I have a scar. It is about an inch long and runs at a perfect 45-degree angle up toward the center of my forehead. When people ask, I tell them that I got it saving a busload of wolverines from a ravening horde of schoolchildren. Or that it was part of a rite of passage to get into one of the local churches. Anything to keep the masses amused. The truth is infinitely more mundane.
Toward the end of my college career I worked as a prep cook for the local (I kid you not) Polish-Mexican restaurant. A year of making bratwurst burritos had removed any novelty which could be found in the job and I was looking to get out.
One September morning I was chopping up the fixings for the days tacos with a knife which probably hadn’t been sharpened since Easter. Parts of the blade were as sharp as a razor; others as sharp as a stick of butter. I wasn’t really paying attention to what I was doing, so when a dull section of the knife slid across the surface of a head of lettuce and a sharp section bit halfway through my thumb, I didn’t notice until I felt air where I had never before felt air: on a bone.
Several thoughts went through my head, “fuck” being the most prominent, closely followed by “I hate my job” and “sauerkraut and refried beans are a terrible combination”.
Running the wound under cold water was astonishingly painful so I wrapped it in a wash-cloth and sat down in the employee break area. A few seconds later I opened my eyes and thought “I don’t remember tiling my bedroom”, then “I don’t remember hanging cook jackets over my bed”. Then I watched a spray of blood arc gracefully from somewhere above my field of vision and hit the wall. The full horror of the situation hit: “No, seriously. A sausage-taco salad?”, and “I have a degree?”, and “what happened?”
Later the guy who worked the dishwasher – who might have worked me over while I was passed out on the ground – said he saw me walk back to the break area, sit down, stand up, and do a face-plant into the floor. He said I “fainted”. I preferred to think of it as “temporary stress-induced unconsciousness”.
So our new manager (her first day!) drove me to the med center, where I was by far the most interesting thing to appear that morning. The doc put me on a bed and numbed my head (shaddap!) and sewed me up, While watching the needle disappear and reappear from my field of vision I had a brief hallucination that he was tying pigeon feathers to me and was going to go fly-fishing when he was finished.
So I got the rest of the day off. When I finally looked at myself, covered in blood and stiched and unexplained bruises all over my face, I felt inexplicably proud. I still had little feeling in my head (i said shaddap!), so it seemed a grand idea to hang things from the stitches. Necklasses. Earrings. Safety pins.
That evening, still decorated, I drove out to Grand Valley to visit those unfortunate friends who had not yet graduated. This was the beginning of the semester and they were participating in a “Student Life Night” where everyone tries to recruit everyone else into their [club|frat|cult]. One of the booths was empty so I grabbed an enrollment sheet and made a sign, and the “Head Piercing Club” was open for business. I got about a dozen signatures, mostly from stoned freshmen in tie-dyed Grateful Dead shirts (made in Thailand). Then The Man shut me down. Said university insurance didn’t cover stupidity.
The next morning I went in to work with a safety pin through the stitches. One of the waitresses thought I had put it in because one of the stitches fell out. Yup. Not kidding. Others thought it was disgusting, what with me mocking myself by making fun of an injury. Didn’t I have any feelings for me? Didn’t I know I was part of an oppressed minority? Why, I could get the ACLU to sue me for a hate crime! (I kid. Most of my co-workers couldn’t spell ACLU).
A few days later I had both my stitches and my job removed and began a long career at a bookstore. One of these days I will tell you THAT injury story, which is at least as funny as this one.
Had an interesting talk about the notion of absolutes over on 12Stone today, to wit: Is there such a thing as an absolute?
So: Is there such a thing as an absolute?
Without defining a specific thing as being “absolute”, we are dealing with abstract mental models. So in my opinion something which is absolute must exists wholly unto itself and have neither external influences or external dependencies. Therefore an absolute must be a closed system. Assuming the ultimate truth of the laws of Thermodynamics, the universe could be said to be a closed system. At least, from the inside it is a closed system. From the outside…well. Things get a little more complicated than your standard Venn diagram.
The set containing the numbers {1,2,3,4,5} is a closed set. From within it is exactly and only those five numbers, and the existence of the number 6 does not alter the existence of the first five. Neither does the existence of the numbers 1,2,3,4, and 5 influence in any way the number 6. Using mental models any number (heh) of absolutes can be discovered.
When trying to apply the notion of ‘absolute’ to ‘real’ things the argument immediately breaks down. Buddhist tradition has it that no single thing truly exists, because there are no things which exists completely unto themselves. A coffee cup is a combination of the materials of which it is constructed, the time involved in creating it, and the human-imposed concept of ‘cupness’. Take away any one of those things and it is no longer a coffee cup. That which we call ‘coffee cup’ is an identifiable point in a process which started at the beginning of the universe and which will (might?) stop at the end.
So where does that leave the Absolute? An absolute can be identified when the sum total of it is observable. That knocks everything out of the running except the Universe, and that must be taken on faith because, stuck in the warp and woof of it as we are, it is impossible to see it from an outside perspective. And let us not get into the religious ideas of the Absolute.
An absolute is a thing which must exist free of context.
So this whole long discussion ended up fragmenting, as online discussions often will. I have a lot to contemplate. One of the participants posted a link to a fascinating Socratic dialogue regarding free will, called Is God A Taoist? , which I enjoyed immensely.
I have just heard that Andrea and Ryan, two of the most wonderful people on the planet, now have a son, born at 1am this morning, 8 pounds, 20 inches long, happy and healthy.
Congratulations Dre and Ryan!
So tell me: What makes you happy ?
There is this guy who has stopped into the kung fu class a couple of times to observe. The first time, he just stood by the door and every time someone from the class wandered near, he would ask questions like “How does this style compare to Tiger Crane?” or “Have you ever taken karate?” This time he stood by the door and asked questions like “Have you ever heard of Leopard Style?” and “That roll you did looked like an aikido roll.” He also wanted to know if he would lose 130 pounds if he joined the class.
My answers to these questions were, in order, the following: Don’t know. Yes. No. Ah. Maybe.
Regarding the aikido question, for which he seemed genuinely interested in an answer, I told him something I picked up from the Bruce Lee interview in the Gold edition of Enter the Dragon:
As long as people have two arms and two legs, there will only be a certain number of movements which are applicable to the martial arts. Of course there will be similarities. there are very few useful ways to do a dive roll. All of the less-than-useful ways have been weeded out by attrition. There are not certain styles which are better than other styles. Whether or not it works depends on the instructor and the student. Why did you come to this class if you want to know about Tiger, Leopard, Hamster, etc.?
So I don’t know if the answers he received yesterday helped him, but he sat quietly and watched most of the class. Time will tell.
Today, down at the river, Scott and I watched a guy with a three-pronged grappling hook (like ninjas use to climb walls) dredge a section of the river just below the dam. Naturally, this caused some speculation:
“Is he hunting for a body?” “Do you think he lost his fishing pole?” “Do you think he meant to get his grapple caught under the rocks over in that deep part?” “Maybe he’s trying to snag a fish…”
The reality was much more prosaic: He was clearing the area of old cast-off fish lines and boat ropes.
Today’s reason why Internet Explorer 5 Should Be Covered in Honey and Staked Out Over an Anthill is the following:
Say you are building a fully CSS-bases website. No tables anywhere. Say the navigation requires that you have elements (anchor tags) FLOATed right. No problem so far. Now you put images inside those anchors for to create a nifty rollover effect. Looks good everywhere. Works perfectly everywhere.
??? Waitaminnit….
IE5.0 on the PC. Having an image inside a FLOATed anchor causes the image to block the mouseover event on the anchor. In other words, when the anchor is moused over, the image swaps just like it should, but the anchor is no longer an anchor. The CSS border picks up the presence of the mouse. The border (1 pixel) can be clicked on, but the area covered by the image cannot. And using document.getElementById(“nav”). getElementsByTagName(“a”)[0]. onmouseover = function() {} doesn’t work because… because… because IE5 is stupid and outdated and people who refuse to upgrade DESERVE to see broken things.
For the record, I am calling this one the “Floated Anchor/Image Mouseover Bug”.