According to Bruce Sterling, in another five or ten or howevermany years, we'll all have tossed aside our Finnish camera-phones and iPods to wrangle Spimes. And he just may be right.

I had completely forgotten about his Viridian design movement until today. Its goal is to design and implement a world where we can live technologically without choking to death on our own filthy waste, and where we can do this in a sexy way consumers will gobble down like dick. It's worth checking out.

This is cute.

It's a little plastic children's toy, depicting a happy little airplane flying into the happy little World Trade Centre.

The toys came in an assortment purchased sight unseen from L&M Import in Miami and included the toys depicting the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the twin towers, whistles and other small toys, said Luis Pedron, Lisy's national sales manager. The invoice said the toy was a plastic swing set.

"I hate to blame the importer. He probably did not know what he was getting. He brings them in 40-foot containers. But whoever made it knew exactly what they were making," Pedron said.

Pedron said Lisy did not notice the small plastic figurines until two people complained, but there is no mistaking what the toys represent: At the bottom of each is the product number 9011.

"When we found out what happened, we recalled them immediately," said Pedron, who said the toys do not reflect the company's view. "I was offended by them."

I want one! Unfortunately, it's going for $510 on eBay at the moment, and there are nine days left to the auction. Good old eBay.

The toy has a button on the side that makes the plane spin around.

The eBay page makes a big deal of announcing there are no safety issues with the toy. It is suitable for ages 5 and up.

As if we really needed another. Some kind of "top Pentagon analyst" is under investigation for allegedly spying on us for Israel, passing on in particular secret information about the administration's Iran policy.

According to the Toronto Star, the analyst worked for Doug Feith, #3 man in the Department of Defense, and arrests could be made early in the coming week.

There are slightly more than a handful of people in Feith's office who specifically work on Iranian issues.

...So it shouldn't be too hard to work out who this chap is.

The New York Times has a story.

The Pentagon analyst who officials said is under suspicion was one of two department officials who traveled to Paris for a secret meeting with Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian arms dealer who had been a central figure in the Iran-contra affair.

...And I've no idea if that's really relevant to anything, but it should make the suspect even easier still for any interested party to finger. If anyone's actually interested at all.

The Washington Post has a story.

The investigation has been underway for more than a year. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and top Pentagon lawyers were informed of it some time ago, officials said. But many other senior Pentagon officials expressed surprise at the news when it was first reported last night on CBS.

...

Even so, the case is likely to attract intense attention because the official being investigated works under William J. Luti, deputy undersecretary of defense for Near East and South Asian Affairs. Luti oversaw the Pentagon's "Office of Special Plans," which conducted some early policy work for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

A law enforcement official said that the information allegedly passed by the Pentagon suspect went to Israel through the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a pro-Israel lobbying organization. The information was said to have been the draft of a presidential directive related to U.S. policies toward Iran.

We already knew Feith and his Office of Special Plans were liars; I guess now we know some in that circle are crooks, too.

MSNBC says: "'It's a big deal.'"

If the senior official is charged, it would be the biggest Israeli spy case since U.S. Navy intelligence analyst Jonathan Pollard was arrested in November 1985. Pollard is serving a life sentence despite frequent requests from Israel to release him.

Naughty Israel! Maybe now the US government will consider pulling its tongue out of Israel's anus.

I had you going for a minute there, didn't I? You and I both know that'll never happen.

CNN seems to give the story top billing on its website at the moment. And they make it sound rather more important...

The suspect could have been in a position to influence Bush administration policy toward Iran and Iraq, the senior official said.

CBS apparently broke the story, and their account can be found here.

CBS sources say that last year the suspected spy, described as a trusted analyst at the Pentagon, turned over a presidential directive on U.S. policy toward Iran while it was, "in the draft phase when U.S. policy-makers were still debating the policy."

This put the Israelis, according to one source, "inside the decision-making loop" so they could "try to influence the outcome."

The case raises another concern among investigators: Did Israel also use the analyst to try to influence U.S. policy on the war in Iraq?

With ties to top Pentagon officials Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, the analyst was assigned to a unit within the Defense Department tasked with helping develop the Pentagon's Iraq policy.

Well, well. We'll see how this develops.

T-shirts have a great and terrible power over human souls. I have proof.

Not long ago, I bought a T-shirt from the Achewood shop, as I was so pleased with the hoodie I'd bought there before. I ended up with a charcoal-coloured version of this baby here:

CONGRATULATIONS
A²=B-1
YOU ARE THE
EQUATION OF THE WEEK

Cute, isn't it? Agree, agree without thinking!

Every time I wear this T-shirt out, someone insists not only on noticing it (which is acceptable), but bringing to my attention exactly how much they've noticed it, and infusing it with some kind of numerological significance. I was on a bus; two teenaged girls were sitting opposite. I had my headphones on and was listening to the Violent Femmes. The girls leaned over and tapped me on the foot to attract my attention, and then said to me, 'We really like your shirt, but we don't get it. Does that make us stupid?' Another day, I was at an International House of Pancakes, and the server asked me where I got it. I was going for a burrito at the HUB on campus, and the guy at the register said 'You have to tell me about that shirt.' And my calculus class made me write the URL for Achewood up on the board.

It's just a shirt. There isn't any kind of story to it. There's nothing to 'get': the equation is completely without significance, and there isn't a punchline. The shirt is exactly what it appears to be, nothing more, nothing less. The shirt is in fact much like life.

Perhaps this fascination with my shirt is akin to the fascination with Christ.

Back to blogging!

I finished up all my summer obligations on Monday. I'd been teaching integral calculus, the second quarter of the U of Washington's three-quarter calculus sequence. It was a bit depressing: while some people did well, lots of people did, as it were, not so well, and they did not so well in ways that really bugger belief. I think that a fair number of people just didn't have the kind of math background necessary to do a course in calculus: most especially, they were terrible at algebra. This fits in with a general pattern I've noticed, through my time as a TA. People get into the UW with good grades and high test scores and try to jump right into calculus and still don't really know how to do simple algebra. We're not talking finitely-generated abelian groups here; we're talking simple simple, high school algebra. Nobody has ever taught these kids how to do math. (Their grammar's really weak, too.) The impression I'm left with is that high schools now are, by and large, even bigger jokes than they were when I was a teenager. This is quite sad.

More worryingly, lots of people seemed to have a lot of difficulty with slicing arguments. Every problem in integral calculus essentially works in the same way: take your problem, slice it up into little chunks or rectangles or cross-sections, solve the problem for each chunk or whatever, add up all these infinitesimal solutions to give a global solution. We used this sort of argument in every single application of integration we considered. It's a general template that should make integration problems really really easy to set up, and yet a lot of people never seemed to 'get' it. They'd write down the formulae that popped out in the end, but they'd have endless difficulty using them because they didn't seem to think about where these formulae came from. I probably didn't do a very good job explaining this because it just seems so natural to me, but even so...

They weren't picking up on the underlying logic.

Let's be honest: most people will never use any kind of (remotely) sophisticated mathematics in their lives. They won't have to find roots of polynomials. They won't need to integrate trigonometric functions. They won't need to optimise. Basic arithmetic will suit them just fine. But the habits of thought they could pick up from basic and well-designed primary- and secondary-school math courses would be invaluable. It's not the content that's most important for the average hominid, but the technique. The most important thing someone can pick up from even a cursory study of mathematics is the ability to differentiate between sound and faulty logic, or reasonable and bullshit arguments. It's so easy to learn these habits of rigorous thought by doing mathematics; everything in mathematics is so clean, and it's so easy to separate the wheat from the Chalabi. Mathematics is a wonderful, ideal playground for the exercise of the rational faculties, and once the habits of logical thought are ingrained, it becomes almost trivial to import them into real-world problem-solving and decision-making.

Mathematics trains people to be rational entities.

Or it should. America seems to be failing miserably at this.

Americans just don't know how to think. It's really the only conclusion one can reach, especially if one has been paying any attention to politics. This whole Swift Boat Veterans for Utter Bullshit thing, for example. Or Ann 'the Man' Coulter, who still apparently has some kind of career. Or this ghastly Michelle Malkin creature, peddling on the basis of shoddy dishonest research a book defending the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, who tried to imply on cable television that John Kerry's wounds in Vietnam were self-inflicted. (At least the host smacked her down for that one.) Or listen to any single thing President Bush has ever said in his life. It's all bullshit. The right wing (I'm generalising, of course) in America isn't offering up any kind of rational, defensible argument in its own favour, but simply pouring thick liquid bullshit like foul, foul syrup all over everything in sight. You can't debate people who work like this. You can't ever win. What else can you do but try to marginalise these people and exclude them from the discourse, and what kind of way is that to run a democracy?

This country is so fucked.

If only people learned more math...

Fixed the toilet just now.

Having a thesis advisor has indeed given me powers beyond those of mortal men.

I'll actually post something reasonable soon, after I finish grading these damnable finals. As soon as I'm done with that, I get a whole month off. Mmm.

I have a thesis advisor!

That is all. You may go about your business.

...is playing here in Seattle tomorrow at 7pm, at Pier 62/63. Apparently tickets are still available for $32...I wasn't actually planning to buy one, though. It is the Pier...You can hear it all if you hang around on the waterfront nearby, for free, with a view of the Sound and the Olympics. (Although not, admittedly, the performer.) I experienced Bjork that way last summer. Although the Bjork show was just mad...Everyone wanted to see her. Ticket-holders were lining up the morning of the show, practically camping out for spots.

Probably the easiest way to insinuate oneself into this concert would be to cross over the Bell Street bridge and make one's way south along the waterfront.

I suppose I could just buy a ticket, but I'm so very, very lazy...

Here is my sofa; boy howdy, is it ever new!

As you can see, the hedgehogs and Warren the Penguin have taken to it instantly. Who can blame them? It's just...so...deep...

Soon I will practice sitting on it.

It would appear that we Americans are pumping even more shit into the air each day than moderate pessimists had thought. From the AIP's latest Physics News Update (#696, possibly not on the web yet):

THE MASSIVE NORTHEAST BLACKOUT of a year ago not only shut off electricity for 50 million people in the US and Canada, but also shut off the pollution coming from fossil-fired turbogenerators in the Ohio Valley. In effect, the power outage was an inadvertent experiment for gauging atmospheric repose with the grid gone for the better part of the day. And the results were impressive. On 15 August 2003, only 24 hours after the blackout, air was cleaner by this amount: SO2 was down 90%, O3 down 50%, and light-scattering particles down 70% over "normal" conditions in the same area. The haze reductions were made by University of Maryland scientists scooping air samples with a light aircraft. The observed pollutant reductions exceeded expectations, causing the authors to suggest that the spectacular overnight improvements in air quality "may result from underestimation of emission from power plants, inaccurate representation of power plant effluent in emission models or unaccounted-for atomospheric chemical reactions." (Marufu et al., Geophysical Research Letters, vol 31, L13106, 2004.)

I re-read the Watchmen graphic novel today, and one aesthetic point struck me like a limp squid to the back of the skull. The Big Thing at the end is horribly, obscenely vaginal. It was really very disturbing indeed when I realised...

I direct you in particular to #8, page 11, and then #12, page 6. I rest my case.

Now speculate upon connections between Cthulhu and Freud's vagina dentata. And then don't tell me about them.

I fucking hate Seafair. The damned Blue Angels are buzzing my house again. Why can't they fly blimps? Or zeppelins? Zeppelins could buzz my house any day.

I recently read The Gnostic Religion by Hans Jonas, which is not only interesting in its own right, but a positive Velvet Goldmine for anyone interested in the fiction of John Crowley. Jonas seems to have been a significant source of imagery and theology for Crowley's Ægypt books; and Crowley's fiction should prime one to plow through Jonas' account. It examines Gnostic transcendental religion in the first centuries after Christ, both in general and with specific accounts of the Valentinians, the Manichaeans, and an extremely rude man named Marcion, among others...

One fault I can find with Jonas is that he deliberately downplays many times the outrageous, picaresque, or grotesque qualities of the Gnostic myths (as opposed to the Gnostic theologies) so as to treat them in more symbolic and academic terms. This is unfortunate if, like me, you have no real interest in theology of any sort, but a very powerful interest in exotic manifestations of the human imagination. Tastes vary.

Jonas taught me that I am definitely no sort of Gnostic at all; while I find their myths and their beliefs far more interesting and far more engrossing than those of orthodox Christianity, Gnostic acosmism is a big turn-off for me. (And then there's my whole not believing in the supernatural thing, but we can ignore that if we treat all religion as philosophy in allegorical clothing.)

The heart of the Gnostic conception is--or seems to me, based on my limited reading so far, to be--this: we are strangers in this world. The powers and principalities that govern this world are not our fathers, not our Gods, not to be worshipped or obeyed. We come from Outside; we are children of a transcendent, alien God, and, like him, our spirits have nothing of this world in them. We are trapped in the body and in the world, the dominions of hostile and unsympathetic forces, and the Gnostic revelation aims at setting us free to return to the Realms of Light beyond. That seems to be the essential content of the gnosis, in its various factional forms; the Old Testament is often regarded as a work of the Demiurge who rules over the material world, and is thus positively anti-divine, while Christ, in Christian Gnosticism, absorbs traits of the more general Gnostic Messenger, sent down from the Realms of Light bearing seals of great power to pierce through the celestial spheres and slip past their jealous Archons to bring us the Call to awaken...

The Messenger walks among us, but is not of our kind: he or she or it has knowledge and power beyond ours, the knowledge and power to defy Fate itself. The Messenger passes through worlds and generations...

This Messenger is, essentially, Doctor Who.

As a mathematician, though, I end up being more of a Platonist. Mathematics often feels more like a process of discovery than of invention; and if it is true now, it has always been true, and will always be true, and its truth is independent of the physical world or, indeed, of the knowledge of its truth. Mathematics is the exploration of an ideal world. Or that's how I think of it, anyhow, to keep myself from feeling as if I'm just jerking off into my own mouth all day long. So it's back to the Renaissance and the Hermetics for me now...

On an utterly unrelated note, here is a piece of software called the Hog Bay Notebook. Oink.

Good news! O excellent, splendid news! A King County Superior Court judge has ruled that Washington's (state) Defence of Marriage Act violates the state constitution.

Washington state's Defense of Marriage Act, which limits marriage to one man and one woman, violates the state Constitution, King County Superior Court Judge William Downing ruled today. Citing the rationale of state Supreme Courts in Massachusetts and Vermont, Downing wrote, "The Court concludes that the exclusion of same-sex partners from civil marriage and the privileges attendant thereto is not rationally related to any legitimate or compelling state interest and is certainly not narrowly tailored toward such an interest."

The suit was filed by Lambda Legal and the Northwest Women's Law Center on behalf of eight same-sex couples denied marriage licenses in King County. The case was the first of its kind to be filed in Washington since Massachusett's high court ruled in favor of same-sex couples marriage, and its outcome will have legal and political impact beyond this state.

Gay couples have been able to wed in Massachusetts since May.

The Washington suit contends that this state's law, passed by the Legislature in 1998, violates the state and federal constitutions' guarantees of equality for all citizens.

Another article here.

SEATTLE -- A King County Superior Court judge in Seattle ruled Wednesday that gay couples can marry, saying that denying their right to do so would be a violation of their constitutional rights.

"The denial to the plaintiffs of the right to marry constitutes a denial of substantive due process," Judge William L. Downing said in his ruling.

The decision is stayed until the state Supreme Court reviews the case, said Jennifer Pizer, lead counsel for Lambda Legal Defense in the case. The stay means no marriage licenses can be issued until the high court's decision.

"That's totally standard. If it turns out the appellate court disagrees, there would be that much more confusion and difficulty," Pizer said.

"Really the main point is that Judge Downing saw the couples in the court room and he's recognized that they are full and equal citizens of Washington. No more and no less."

Hot off the presses!

Last night, Ronald Reagan appeared to me in a dream. He was young and spry, and dressed as a line-dancer, in a horrid pinkish shirt, a string tie, a cowboy hat and boots. He was sitting on a rocking chair on a wooden deck, strumming an acoustic guitar. In this dream, Reagan spoke to me...

He told me how happy he was, running his abortion clinic; and how happy he was that Jesus had made him queer.

Was this just a dream? Or a message, from beyond the grave? Is the pneumatic essence of Reagan queerly aborting babies in Heaven even as we speak? This is clearly a matter for theologians.

I've slept on it. Although it was horribly bourgeois of me and I may in fact now be an official class traitor, I think I did the right thing in buying this sofa.

This sofa, right here.

It's so comfy! It's deep enough for some really intense slouching. The fabric does that thing, you know? Where you can brush the fibres in different directions and it'll change colour slightly. I played tic-tac-toe on it while I was giving it a test-sit at the shop. It's hotter than Hell, in a sexual sort of way. I can sit upon it proudly for the next 25 or 30 years; and when one considers such grand and sweeping vistas of time, the price seems to dwindle into insignificance. Is $60 a year too much to pay for the total rapturous comfort of my ass? I think not, sir. I think not. This is a sofa for the ages. This sofa is a celebration of all that is good and noble in the human spirit. This sofa will keep my butt off of the floor, and possibly bring it closer to God. Sofa, I salute you.

Now what shall I name it?

I just bought a $1500 sofa.

Am I out of my fucking mind?

I'll tell you in the morning, after I sleep on it.

What I really, really hate is when people attempt to pass themselves off as knowledgable sages who ought to be taken seriously when they spout off on something that they clearly don't know a single damned thing about. This is what really pisses me off about the LaRouchies, and makes them so much viler in my eyes than all the other nutjobs out there. Wilfull ignorance is not reserved for the lunatic fringe, however: The New Republic publishes it regularly, as pulled from the anus of Gregg Easterbrook. The man clearly does not know anything at all about physics. Now, there are a lot of people who don't know anything at all about physics, and, while that's a shame, I can live with that fact. Most such people take a variety of simple steps to prevent this lack of knowledge having any major negative consequences for their fellow humans; steps like, just for example, not writing magazine articles about physics. Not this Easterbrook, though. Oh no. He decided to write an article about Stephen Hawking changing his mind about black holes. Instead of actually learning anything about Hawking's work or about black holes, or about physics in general, Easterbrook decided to insult Hawking and pooh-pooh all of modern (i.e. post-18^th-century) physics, like some kind of mediaeval peasant with a torch and pitchfork trying to form a one-man mob. Brad DeLong has given him a solid rogering already.

I don't know much about politics or economics, and I like calling people names; therefore, based on Easterbrook's example, I should be a political correspondent.

The President gave a speech today, but his skin was so red and blotchy I just couldn't focus on the words coming out of his mouth; all I heard was a sort of Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmooooooooooooooooooorrrrrrrrrgh sound for about 15 minutes, after which I wandered off in search of nearby cookies. I like cookies, especially ones with cinnamon. The speech seems to have garnished mixed reactions here in Washington; I interviewed myself about it for quite some time at an imaginary tea party, and I launched into a furious tirade about the mumbo-jumbo, poppycock, and quackery on display, circulated by the likes of "Alan Greenspan," if that is his real name, who speaks of money one cannot see or touch, money neither of coin nor of note; hundreds of billions of dollars, clearly just a made-up number, for what pocket could contain such a sum? And deficits. Something about deficits. I think that was in the President's speech too, unless it was a dream. This "electrical money" is clearly against all laws of God and Man and an abomination, and all right-thinking persons agree with me, because I'll punch them in the mouths if they don't, so help me.