The Millennium Shrimp

So, our secretary here at work bought an Asus eee pc for her daughter. It’s pink. It also doesn’t come with Java pre-installed(?!)The 4G models come with Java, but the 2G models don’t. So,I installed Java for her. That was about two months ago. Then her daughter screwed something up, so she re-installed the distro, but couldn’t get Java to work. It’s probably one of the more convoluted installations I’ve gone through on a modern Linux distribution for a relatively common software package.

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I never realized that passing men were a part of traditional Albanian society. Although, I guess they wouldn’t really be passing men, since their families know they aren’t biological males and they have to remain virgins. But other than that, they are biological females who chose to live as men, and were treated as such by their surrounding society. It’s the type of thing you read about in the anthropological literature, for some small, obscure tribal group that stopped practicing it around about the time of western contact. Still, it goes to show the deep and profound isolation that Albania has been in for most of it’s history.

Got an interesting email this morning:

Dearest beloved one,

I am Mrs. Evangeline Wells, a citizen of United Kingdom, a widow to late Frederick wells. I am 61 years old, suffering from long time cancer of the breast, from all indication my conditions is really deteriorating and it is quite obvious that I would not live more than three months, according to my doctor and from all indication regarding to my medical analysis, the cancer stage has gotten to a very bad stage after the series of breast surgery conducted by the specialist .all the efforts made to put a resuscitative measure was to no avail, my doctors confirmed that my tendency of lasting long is not Transparent.

I love machine translation!

Another interesting factoid - the reply-to address was at Live.com. Is this part of Microsoft’s post-Yahoo internet strategy?

It’s titled Anathem. According to this post on Boing Boing this morning, it comes with a CD of “Spooky, wonderful music.” What does Anathem mean? The original poster at Boing Boing left this blurb from the book in the comments section:

Anathem: (I) In Proto-Orth, a poetic or musical invocation of Our Mother Hylaea, which since the t[i]me of Adrakhones has been the climax of the daily liturgy (hence the Fluccish word Anthem meaning a song of great emotional resonance, esp. one that inspires listeners to sing along).

Unfortunately, it isn’t released until September But you can pre-order it on Amazon today. Amazon recommends pre-ordering it along with Saturn’s Children by Charles Stross.

I still need to get a hold of Halting State.

That’s why I only drink Coca-Cola!

Subject: DON’T BUY PEPSI IN THE NEW CAN! Don’t buy Pepsi in the new can. Pepsi has a new ‘patriotic’ can Coming out with pictures of the Empire State Building , and the Pledge of Allegiance on them. However, Pepsi left out two little words on the pledge, ‘Under God.’ Pepsi said they didn’t want to offend anyone. In that case, we don’t Want to offend anyone at the Pepsi corporate office, either! So if we don’t buy any Pepsi product, they will not be offended When they don’t receive our money that has the words ‘In God We Trust’ on it HOW FAST CAN YOU FORWARD THIS ONE?

I used to do “reply all” to the people who would send me these things (because someone is wrong on the internet!). Here’s the snopes page on this particular email rumor.

MySpace, though, is the anti-thesis of government. It’s about freedom.

Indeed. It’s about giving the technologically inept individual the power to suck total *ss on the intarweb, because Geocities never made it easy enough back in the day.

[Edited for family friendly-ness]

Evidently Murdoch (of Faux News fame) is unhappy that Myspace is loosing prominence relative to Facesplat 

I’ve finally gotten around to reading Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game series. I read Ender’s Game Wednesday evening and Speaker for the Dead last evening. This morning I was mucking about on the Canton Repository web site and found this article on the Foxfield Preserve, a new nonprofit nature preserve Cemetery. One quote in particular resonated with me:

“We’re considering the slogan, ‘Become a tree,’” said Maupin with a laugh. “For us nature buffs, that sounds pretty good.”

The Lusitanian Pequeninos would agree with the sentiment. But hopefully it’s a more metaphorical metamorphosis than the Pequeninos’. The article also points to the increasingly religious nature of environmentalism…
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How do we define what it means to be human? I like John Hawks answer.

From John Hawk’s Weblog

It is our history that connects us to our distant relatives, not our genes. Even with a close relative like a twentieth cousin, there is a decent likelihood that you will share no genes at all because of your shared kinship from your most recent common ancestor. By the fiftieth generation, it is a virtual certainty. You are a genetic stranger to your ancestors…

Only history defines humanity, and will continue to define us no matter what we become in the future… History is additive, inclusive — not subtractive.

…You can see why this answer to the question may be unsatisfying — it is not predictive. You can’t take our shared history and make a prediction about the human future. You can’t predict which genes or traits two people may share. You can’t take this notion and apply it directly to a fossil hominid to tell whether it is a human.

But I don’t see why that it is a weakness. The fact is, you can’t place a statistical confidence interval around humanity based on a gene or a trait without leaving some people out. Unless the confidence interval is so wide that it includes some non-humans — and it is not hard to define “human” in a way that leaves out many children but draws in Kanzi, the stone-tool-making and logogram-using bonobo. Our shared history brings us close to Kanzi, too — but not the human part of our shared history.

What’s that you say? $19.95 (or $19.99 - hat tip to dowski.com on the multiple prices) is too much for a “personal” relationship fostered by a talking Jesus doll? Well, we here at the Millennium Shrimp (not just another food blog!) have got your back. You can get one on eBay for roughly $13.00. Evidently Walmart and Target carried these dolls for $14.97 last fall.

And evidently they sold out…

Ran across this article in the NYT that featured the experiences of Jo and Tim Pannebecker from Bluffton with equally shared parenting.

Equally Shared Parenting