Excerpted from the lyrics of “Jean the Birdman” by David Sylvian.

He wears a crucifix
His mother left to him
It’s wrapped in chains around his heart
Rusted and wafer thin
Don’t count on luck son
All the angels sing
Don’t need to check a weathervane
We all know what tomorrow brings
Life is a cattle farm
Coyotes with the mules
Life is a bullring
For taking risks and flouting rules
Who needs a safety net
The world is open wide
Just look out for card sharks
And the danger signs
Heaven may stone him
But Jean the birdman pulls it off

From : Not Even Wrong

For the last couple days students at Princeton have been protesting the Republican’s plan to invoke the “nuclear option” and stop Democrats from filibustering a small number of Bush’s judicial nominees. This protest has taken the form of organizing a “filibuster” in front of the Frist Campus Center at Princeton, which was underwritten by Senator Bill Frist (Princeton ‘74). Today Edward Witten and his wife, physicist Chiara Nappi, have joined the protest. I can’t tell what Chiara is reading from, but Ed is using a bullhorn to regale the crowd with passages from Introduction to Elementary Particles by David Griffiths.

Does anyone else ever have the impression that you’ve just woken up and have been living in some dreamy haze running on some kind of autopilot for the last however long?

It happens to me more than I care to admit. I’ll be standing around smoking a cigarette, and all of a sudden feel like “I’m back! What the hell have I been doing! Have I screwed anything up while I was cruising along there?”

I don’t know what it is, maybe the first signs of some deep seated psychological issue I’ll have to deal with when it come crashing full blown into the forefront when I’m 40 and can’t stop naming the paint speckles on the walls. The beginning of some sort of dis-associative personality disorder? Who knows.

Maybe it’s just me constantly thinking about stuff not immediately in my surroundings, leading me to fuzz out what actually goes on around me unless it someone does something to really snap me out of it and get my attention. I know my ex used to complain I tuned her out all the time, but now I realize that was probably because deep down inside I knew she was a crazy sociopathic automaton sent here by some alien race to really show the full breadth and scope of my emotional joy/pain response, and thus my subconscious mind must have been trying to prevent her evil alien voodoo from working. (An effort, that while valiant, failed. Unfortunately.)

I also think it may have something to do with the sheer overload of information we deal with in our lives. Now don’t get me wrong, information overload is both my job and my hobby. I love it. Google is the all knowing oracle as far as I’m concerned. I don’t know how I would live without it, I just know that I would know a whole lot less. I mean, I can’t even remember the last time I wanted to know something, but couldn’t find it on Google. Can you?

I used to be addicted to TV when I was a little kid. I think primarily this was due to my parents choosing to severely limit my TV intake, thus triggering the notorious child response of “if I can’t have it, I want it oh so much more” that also typically leads college freshman from sheltered homes to a downward spiral of S.T.D’s and booze their first year. My parents didn’t mind me occasionally drinking, or smoking plants besides tobacco, thus I never went crazy with either until much later. However, they didn’t like me watching TV. I couldn’t watch G.I. Joe ever, which I am still to this day thankful for. But any time I would go over to my grandparents house, I was GLUED to the TV the entire time there. It was summers full of MTV and the occasional lap up and down the street on the skateboard.

Now though, TV is immensely boring. Even interesting shows on the Discovery Channel and such are boring, simply because just sitting and staring doesn’t seem like it’s doing enough. I need to be clicking, constantly chasing down references in the content I’m digesting and getting a broader view on things. TV, for obvious reasons, doesn’t provide such ability, and thus doesn’t sustain my attention for very long.

Anyway, I guess what I’m getting at is that all of this culminates into me leading a life where my internal narrative is pretty much driven off of information I’ve read, and not so much things I’ve actually done, or places I’ve gone. I don’t know how many times in conversation you will hear me say “I read this article that said…” or something to that effect, but it’s bound to be a lot. And I can only assume that such symptoms must be shared by an increasing amount of people in our society as it becomes more and more information saturated. This is most obviously demonstrated I think by the popularity of blogs. What is it about reading about someone else’s life, someone who you very well may not like or be interested in at all if you met in person, that is so appealing? The anonymity, the voyeurism involved? A combination? It ultimately doesn’t matter though, because I’m certainly hooked. Along with many others.

It marks quite a turnaround. Remember when “home” pages with pictures of cats and all sorts of useless information about your life was a favorite bitching topic of those who believe the Internet should contain only information that is useful, and that by throwing all this crap out there, we harm the signal to noise ratio? Whatever happened to that school of thought? Blogs are essentially just slightly fancier home pages. But for some reason, a big change has come to pass and they have blow up into the next big thing. (Or have they have jumped the shark already?)

Jumped the shark or not, why the change? Is it possibly a desire for intimate personal connection that the modern world has stifled? I don’t have any answers. Only questions.

Anyway…my incredibly short attention span seems to have burned itself out on this train of thought. So I’m off to go dig up some more useless trivia, and read about the lives of people I’ll almost certainly never meet.

I read about this over at AntSaint.

I don’t normally do these things, but I like operating systems, so I couldn’t resist.

I’m happy with the analysis, however, I don’t understand it saying if I answered all the questions I might get better results, because I did answer all the questions…I even went through it twice to make sure.

The View Askewniverse - Kevin Smith geeks out on ‘Sith’

Kevin Smith gives his take on Episode III : Revenge of the Sith.

It contains spoilers, so be warned.

I just got done watching Gigli, starring Bennifer. I actually really liked it, despite all the shit talking that was done about it. Does that make me lame? I actually really find myself liking Ben Afflect in most movies. I mean seriously, what roles has he played that suck? Not many, I even liked him in Paycheck.

This one in particular I found myself thinking “there you go Ben, it’s not like Chasing Amy this time. Oh no, the lesbian chick actually does jump the fence for you in the end just this once… And J-Lo is totally hotter than Amy anyway…”

I really liked Jersey Girl too. But it was a Kevin Smith flick so it can’t really be that bad.

Class 29 - The Making Of the U.S. Navy Seals by John Carl Rote
Quiet Killers - Silenced Weapons in War and Espionage by J. David Truby
13 Cent Killers - The 5th Marine Snipers in Vietnam by John J. Culbertson
A Sniper in the Arizona by John J Culbertson
Violence of Action by Richard Marcinko
Rogue Warrior II - Red Cell by Richard Marcinko
Rogue Warrior - The Real Team by Richard Marcinko
Rogue Warrior - Destination Gold by Richard Marcinko
Rogue Warrior - Operation Delta by Richard Marcinko

These are all books my boss at one point or another, read, and brought in to share with us. He used to be a sniper for the police, no shit. He still likes to read about it too…obsessively. He can literally tell you everything you never wanted to know about how to tear someone’s head of with a 50 caliber round at 500 yards. It’s crazy twisted, but I think he may know literally everything about any firearm manufactured since the end of WW1. And he knows a lot about weapons before that as well.

I’ve read a few of the Rogue Warrior books…they are pretty entertaining in a vapid, violent way. At the very least, they provide a view into the mind of someone who happily kills for a living, and is dead certain he is right and the enemy is wrong, always.

Anyway…this post is totally pointless…but I just had it pointed out to me that I have a rather odd collection of books above my desk for a programmer. It’s not my fault. It’s just a backdrop to the environment, like those motivational posters. Only instead of being like “There is no ‘I’ in ‘Team!’”, it’s more like, “I used to shoot people, and know all about it….enjoy your work day!”

Check out this rather interesting developement. From one of the most interesting blog’s I’ve come across so far : Preposterous Universe

From the post:

One obvious side-effect of the decline of high-energy physics in the U.S. is that we will be attracting fewer talented scientists from outside the country. But why limit ourselves to such indirect measures? Now the Department of Commerce wants to make it much more difficult for foreigners to get research done in the U.S. The idea is to require a special license for each foreign national who will be doing research with an “export controlled instrument” — a vague category that depends on what country you’re from, but might include things like powerful computers. So if your Chinese grad student wants to use a supercomputer to model the growth of structure in a cosmological simulation, they will have to wait until a license comes through, which will probably take a few months.

Here’s an email from Judy Franz, Executive Officer of the American Physical Society, to physics department chairs (of which I am not one, but it’s being forwarded around). This change would make many foreign students and visiting scientists into second-class citizens, and further diminish the reasons anyone might have to come to the U.S. to do research.

It really does just keep getting better and better.