Very Clever, Mr. Kim -- Very Clever Indeed

North Korea has a new Twitter feed and YouTube channel, reports the Associated Press. Now some might reason that the only people on earth who have been living in a hole deep enough to fall prey to the utterly naked propaganda they see on these sites are the utterly oppressed North Koreans. And because almost none of them can actually access these sites in the first place, the sites are pointless. Pointless like a fox!

Clearly, anyone in North Korea who would spend $1 on broadband instead of on a hot meal is a counter-revolutionary stooge in the pay of wealthy Western provocateurs! So now we see the plan behind the plan:

1. Post shiny videos
2. Make lots of new friends
3. Arrest them

The Data-Centric Modus Operandi

Cross-posting from my RTI blog:

Data distribution is about observing a changing world. A system whose communication is based on this paradigm tends to become data-centric: it becomes more concerned with modeling the first-class concepts of its business domain and less concerned with managing second-class “who-told-whom-to-do-what” middleware concepts like queues and messages. Along the way, it enjoys the benefits of decreased coupling and improved reliability, scalability, and performance.

Read the rest...

For the person who has everything...

Thanks to my sister in law and the LA Times for teaching me about the latest emerging cottage industry: artisanal pencil sharpening. What will the effete Blue-State bourgeoisie think up next?

Liberty -- For Now

"Moral disapproval alone is an improper basis on which to deny rights to gay men and lesbians. The evidence shows conclusively that Proposition 8 enacts, without reason, a private moral view that same-sex couples are inferior to opposite sex couples."

-- Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker

Judge Walker struck down California's voter-approved Proposition 8, which stripped the right to marry from gay Californians, on the basis of both equal protection and due process.

This is not about the agenda of a particular political faction. It is about whether a simple majority can vote away the civil rights of a minority. Judge Walker was appointed to the federal bench by President H. W. Bush, and several prominent Republicans were represented in the anti-Prop 8 legal team and among the witnesses they called.

Prop 8's defenders have vowed to appeal the ruling.

Stop! Thief!

I recently got a new iPhone 4. It's beautiful. I love it. It's the best phone, and my first smart one. I'm sure that one day soon, my favorite thing about it will be that I have all of the information on the Internet at my fingertips all the time. But it's so new that most of the time it doesn't occur to me that I have all of the information on the Internet at my fingertips. So for now, my favorite thing is that the NPR News app frees me from my former slavery to my local affiliate's soul-defeating weekend schedule. Also, every time I pick the thing up, it's flimsy plastic case, wobbly buttons, and too-ugly-for-words user interface don't remind me what a cheap PoS I'm using. I love life's simple pleasures.

With my books, news, music, movies, and email always available, I tell myself that I can avoid wasting a ton of time. What I didn't expect was just how quickly my bar for "wasted" is changing: already, I listen to the news as I walk the two blocks to the grocery store. I read an ebook while waiting for my wife to fetch her shoes. I catch up on my RSS feeds while I sit on the train. I'm not "rotting my mind" like some TV-watching couch potato; I'm going about my daily business -- and I'm listening to NPR, for God's sake! But the space in my life for ambient thought is draining away, just the same (thanks to John Gruber for the previous link). I may not be making myself dumber with constant exposure to nonsense and dissolution, but I fear I am decreasing my capacity for wisdom by starving myself of opportunities for reflection. I learn; I react; I move on. But I (all of us) have less time than ever to synthesize and to stop and smell the poetry.

From the time we are very young, we have the opportunity to see anything, hear anything, and spend anything at a moment's notice. If we follow all of these impulses, we will soon find ourselves fat, broke, self-indulgent, and utterly trivial. The question is no longer how can I -- you can! It is rather which shall I -- and which shall I not. I can teach my children to answer the first question by showing them the value of hard work, perseverance, and a stable trade. But teaching them the second is much harder: I must teach them self-awareness, self-discipline, and to look always to their values. Those have always been useful, admirable life skills. But with so many modern temptations, and with the line between short-term help and long-term hindrance becoming so very grey, they have never been more important.

There must be a web site out there that can give me some advice about all this stuff. Perhaps I can find it with my iPhone, my precious.

Wanted: Official Poet

I learned recently that this year, for the first time, the Wimbledon tennis tournament had an official poet. My first reaction was what a delightful, whimsical idea. My second reaction was that it's so much better an idea if you don't demean it by calling it delightful or whimsical -- if you instead take it seriously.

How inspiring to think that what we do might be worthy of poetry! And how revelatory to think that we might be so self-confident and so intentional as to appoint the poet beforehand, to in effect promise ourselves and those close to us that what we do will be worthy.

In fact, let's take this as our challenge: If you find it incongruous that someone might write a poem about what you do every day, maybe you ought to be doing something else.