Best quote I've read in a long time.

I'm sick. Terribly, horribly sick from a virus that hit me like a freight train. So naturally, I start thinking about a book about another horrifying, debilitating virus.

This is from Children of the Mind, (fourth book of the Ender saga) by Orson Scott Card:

Changing the world is good for those who want their names in books. But being happy, that is for those who write their names in the lives of others, and hold the hearts of others as the treasure most dear.

You go, "Uncle" Orson!

(I love Card's works. His work is as beautiful and poetic as Ray Bradbury's, while remaining plausible. His characterizations are masterful. If History were to do him justice, he would be as widely quoted as Shakespeare. No, really.)

Bring our Troops Home?

Senator John McCain has said that it would be fine with him if our troops maintained a presence in Iraq for 100 years. Senator Hillary Clinton has lambasted of McCain's statement, and has stated that she'd start bringing our troops home from Iraq within 60 days of her election. Likewise, Senator Barack Obama would immediately begin bring our troops home.

I respectfully submit that those who are crying for immediate return haven't given much quality thought to the problem. Senators Clinton and Obama know little about peace and nothing at all about war. First of all, if you're going to bring troops home, fine. But be consistent. If we've been in Iraq too long, we should begin not there, but in the other places we continue to occupy after war. World War II ended over SIXTY YEARS AGO. We are still in Germany. We are still in Italy. We are still in Portugal. We are still in Japan. The Korean War is long over. We are still in South Korea. When do Senators Clinton and Obama propose to bring these troops home? Hmmm?

The answer is, of course, that we are not at war with these countries. Ours is a friendly presence purely for defensive purposes. Tcha!! And the answer to why we're not at war is that our parents weren't cowardly wimps who rolled over to beg for defeat with a change of administration. They stuck with it, through real hardship both in battle and at home, their reward was victory. In other words, we're not at war because we won.

McCain is the only contender in this race that gets it (and who has a realistic chance of being nominated). To make things better you have to win. And you will never win if you only cut and run, as both of the Democrat candidates propose. And when we win, we stay, not as a hostile occupying force, but as a welcome and valued partner. Those places in which we've maintained a presence for a long time are peaceful; they are friendly towards us and their neighbors; they enjoy bustling economies; respect human rights; have democratic rule; and a general improvement in their quality of life.

Here is an alphabetical list of some places our troops still occupy overseas:

• Germany (since World War II)
  
• Greenland (since 1953 - the Cold War)
  
• Guam (since the Spanish-American War in 1898. That's before we got into the habit of giving our conquests back, so we just kept it.)
  
• Italy (since 1954)
• Japan (since World War II)
• The Azores (Portugal. Since World War II)
• Spain (since 1953 - the Cold War)
  
• South Korea (since the Korean War)
  
• Turkey (since 1951 - the Cold War)
  
• United Kingdom (since World War II)

At least one of these occupations has lasted over 100 years. Several have lasted more than 60 years. I personally "occupied" a foreign country in exactly the same fashion that John McCain has in mind for post-war Iraq. Senators Obama and Clinton pretend this is a bad thing. That's because they're clueless, and they hope you are, too.

Artificial Intelligence at Human Level in 20 years.

Inventor Ray Kurzweil predicts that machines will achieve human-level artificial intelligence by 2029, reviving the same predictions made 20 years ago for the year 2000.

Of course, this will be almost entirely accounted for by the dumbing down of humans rather than the improvement of machines.

Journalist-Bites-Reality!

The title of this blog is unabashedly stolen from Steve Salerno from his excellent piece in this week's eSkeptic magazine. I urge you to read it, read it, read it.

I'll let you in on a secret. I really wanted to be a newspaper reporter. My stepfather worked at The State newspaper in Columbia, SC (he was foreman of the engraving department... back when they engraved). I was editor-in-chief of the my high school paper for two years. I was a Journalism major, and spent a brief stint on the college newspaper.

But a funny thing happened in class... I realized that everybody around me was an asshole of the first order. See, I wanted to report the news. As Steve Salerno so eloquently points out, the business of reporting has very little to do with reporting actual news. My asshole classmates were much better suited to the business of reporting. They didn't want to report the news; they wanted to change the world. No fooling. That was the phrase bandied about.

Lou Grant was on television at the time. Everybody wanted to be Joe Rossi (or Billie Newman). Everybody wanted to inject himself into the story. I wanted to report the truth. And the truth is, most of the time things are pretty OK. Of course, that wouldn't dissuade a true reporter from reporting a crisis anyway. But that's Steve's story and I'll let him tell it.

My story is this: having realized that my prospective colleagues were assholes, I decided to quit and join the military while I thought about what Plan B might be. But that's a whole other post that I won't relate here.

Having borrowed Steve's headline, I'm going to close by borrowing some of his stats, too. Think about this the next time you watch the Disease of the Week, the Tragic Disaster, the Head-Shaking News:

• The current employment rate is 95.3 percent.
• Out of 300 million Americans, roughly 299.999954 million were not murdered today.
• Day after day, some 35,000 commercial flights traverse our skies without incident.
• The vast majority of college students who got drunk last weekend did not rape anyone, or kill themselves or anyone else in a DUI or hazing incident. On Monday, they got up and went to class, bleary-eyed but otherwise okay.

And That's the Way It Is, Wednesday, February 13th, 2008.

I am 100% Geek

Now this is just sad.

100% Geek

Is there a 12-step program for this?
In related news...
87%How Addicted to Blogging Are You?

82%

Wanna have some fun in Windows?

Then go straight to Adam Dawes' website (http://www.adamdawes.com) and pick up a copy of Highway Pursuit for free. And while you're at it, get three of the best screen savers you've ever used.

Then head on over to the Retrospec website and pick up a slew of free and excellent remakes of 8-bit classics. That's right... manic 80s gameplay, but with modern graphics. How could you possibly say no to Attack of the Mutant Camels 2??

Making Films

As I mentioned on my News & Commentary, my kids decided to produce machinima videos for their Roman & Greek history projects. In that piece I was focused on the VirtualDub software we found (it's incalculably easier than Windows Movie Maker), but I did want to comment on the process of the work itself.

Tim and his friend Adam decided to do two mini-reports: one about Roman roads and another about gunpowder. Inspired by Red vs. Blue, they would use a video game to provide the locations and characters. They chose their favorite online game, Runescape, as the world in which they'd shoot their video.

The process was remarkably like shooting a real video:

• They had to acquire equipment. Tim and Adam chose Hypercam for their screenshots, which they downloaded and installed themselves. (Michael, working on his unrelated project in another room, chose the Open Source CamStudio. Way to go, Mike!)
• They had to scout locations within the world.
  
• Tim and Adam's entire presentation was in the video, so they were very careful to chose places that were appropriate to the period that they were studying and had just the right kind of roads.
  
• Mike's video segments were used to introduce Impress/PowerPoint slides with his content, so he had a bit more leeway, and used it to find generally interesting places for his avatar to stand.
  
• They had to make sure their avatars were properly costumed.
• They scripted the presentations. That's "scripted" in the Hollywood sense. That's right, Writer's Guild, they crossed the picket line.
  
• They rehearsed. This was especially challenging for Tim and Adam. They did much of their rehearsal, etc. in separate locations, but both had to play to Tim's "camera", and had to coordinate their activities. A bad take meant a bit of jostling around to get everybody back into position.
  
• They had to deal with crowd control. Like a real movie shoot, there were bystanders or people who just didn't know that filming was going on. Occasionally a take would be ruined by someone walking up and striking a conversation.
• After "principle photography" (screen capture) they still had to edit the raw footage. For that I got involved as editor, with the kids as directors. They transferred the files to my machine and I used VirtualDub to do the editing. In practice, this was the least time-consuming bit of the work.
• When the AVI segments were written to disk, the kids took over again.
  
• Tim and Adam used OpenOffice.org Impress slides to frame and size the videos, with slides for introduction, credits, and bibliography.
• Mike's report was heavy on the slides for informational purpose... much more of a standard presentation. He broke his video into four segments that were used to introduce the various topics. (His avatar was sort of a virtual David Attenborough)

One thing I found fascinating was the amount of focus the kids brought to the task. I don't really think this was intended as a "project" by the teacher... she'd only given them two days to do it... but it grew into a project. The kids never noticed. I saw at least 6 hours of solid effort out of each of them, and this from a group for whom homework is usually a dirty word!

I was also struck by how fair the division of work was. One would scout locations while the other was looking for software, etc. They each scripted their own lines. They played to each other's strengths. It was a really good collaborative process.

Except for the final video editing (and that was in the interests of time. As I've implied, the work here sort of grew beyond their expectations), they didn't have to ask for my help. They knew what they wanted to do and did it. In fact, watching them work taught me a little about producing screen captures. I've been meaning to do some tutorials for VIC CRM and have never gotten 'round to it. They've helped me narrow my choice of tools.

I don't know what sort of History grade this will earn them, but between you and me... I really don't care. Knowledge of Roman roads will probably do exactly nothing for them in the long course of their lives. But they'll most certainly get a lot of mileage out of the videomaking skills; and the technical, team building, collaboration, and problem-solving aspects of the project have earned them an A+ in Computer Science from me.