Always say hello and thank you to security — maintain the concentration to see that they’re people who do a job rather than faceless extensions of The Man. Never roll over, but never be anything less than reasoned and kind. Remember: you’re going somewhere interesting and they’re not. I’ve been doing longhaul flights for fifteen years now, I’ve flown from London to Australia and back again, and I always, always lose an hour to just staring out the window. Being ten miles up will never lose its magic for me.
Code to Test Ratio: 1:1.4 (RSpec).
Imagine, if you will, how this would have been handled were these folks of Arab extraction or believers in radical Islamist ideology instead of your garden-variety far-right American ideology. CNN would have the cameras and reporters there, NBC would host an hour discussing the threat, and Michelle Malkin and Little Green Footballs’ Chuck Johnson would bouncing around the walls of their rubber rooms even more frenetically than usual amid shouts of “Jihad!!!!” Some of the worst damage inflicted by the events of 9/11 was the wreckage to the public’s already limited understanding of the nature of terrorism. Because ever since then, terrorism has been about Scary Brown Foreign People — despite the fact that the vast, vast majority of terrorist attacks planned and carried out on American soil are by white Americans. Oklahoma City was virtually erased from the public consciousness as an act of terrorism. Since 9/11 — in addition to the anthrax killer, who promptly vanished from public consciousness once it was determined the perpetrator was a domestic terrorist — we’ve had people arrested for planning cyanide bomb attacks, destroying abortion clinics, plotting the deaths of liberal leaders, and a variety of other would-be terrorist plots. And they received ZERO attention from the national press and the cable-TV talkers.
Over at iPhone Atlas they’re reporting that AT&T is not planning to offer a tethering option for the forthcoming iPhone 3G. Right now AT&T does offer the option for many of their 3G phones, which allows you to use the phone as a cellular modem on a laptop as part of a $65/month data plan. According to an AT&T spokesman, however, no such Phone-As-Modem plan will be offered for the iPhone 3G.
In those days, big cultural shifts were a slow wave passing over the planet, moving at the speed of postage and club nights and the occasional phone call. And they came, at best, one or two at a time. And they caught up everybody. What’s changed is the speed of communication and the speed at which new music can be experienced. So today we no longer wait for the breakers to hit every 11 years (roughly: rock, 55. Psychedelia, 66. Punk, 77. Acid, 1988). Instead, micro-movements pop up every month. Some new eddy in the hardcore continuum, MySpacey chavpop, The Fonal Sound, British ”dark folk,” the spooktronics crowd being drawn to the Miasmah label (and too many more to mention)… far more plentiful than “scenes” in the past, geographically scattered and inspiring the sort of mad group inspiration and evolution that you used to only find at the top of big New Sound cultural events.
he Singularity is the last trench of the religious impulse in the technocratic community. The Singularity has been denigrated as “The Rapture For Nerds,” and not without cause. It’s pretty much indivisible from the religious faith in describing the desire to be saved by something that isn’t there (or even the desire to be destroyed by something that isn’t there) and throws off no evidence of its ever intending to exist. It’s a new faith for people who think they’re otherwise much too evolved to believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster or any other idiot back-brain cult you care to suggest.
