More Amazon goodies

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I’m about to be heading to bed, but I spent a little time tonight playing around with Amazon‘s recommendation features. As you bounce through Amazon you can tell them what you own and assign ratings to items, which they then use to create recommendation pages. So far, it’s actually be fairly impressive — the more I put in, the more accurate they get. At the moment, off the top of my head, I’d say that for every 5 items they recommend, I’m likely to already own 3 of them (at least with music — the ratio for DVDs and books is somewhat less). Quite interesting.

I’ve also created an Amazon wishlist so that should anyone ever feel like spending money on me, they’ll have some suggestions. Woohoo!

More on TIPS

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One of my favorite political cartoonists, Tom Tomorrow, has some wonderfully incisive commentary on TIPS.

Facism is a term thrown about too freely, and I don’t believe we’re at a point that its use is justified — but an oppressive and intrusive government, however you want to label it, does not ride into town wearing the uniforms and waving the flags of recognizable evil. It creeps in slowly, waving the flag of your own country, and speaking the language of patriotism and duty, and at each step along the way, its actions seem plausible and defensible — until one morning you wake up and realize the gulf between the way things were and the way things are has grown so wide that there is no going back. Sinclair Lewis tried to point this out more than a half century ago, and given the current climate, It Can’t Happen Here is well worth re-reading (or reading for the first time, if you’ve never come across it before).

Another book for my reading list….

(via Wil)

Wanna join the secret police?

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Whee — just in case we weren’t paranoid enough, now our oh-so-friendly government is going to start encouraging us to report on each other. According to this report from an Austrailian news site (no big surprise that it wasn’t a US-based news site that broke the article), “…the Terrorism Information and Prevention System, or TIPS, means the US will have a higher percentage of citizen informants than the former East Germany through the infamous Stasi secret police.” Now there’s a happy thought.

(via Daypop)

It just works

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Nathan Torkington, one of the staff over at O’Reilly is documenting his experiences as he moves from a Windows-based PC to an Apple iBook. Gotta love articles that state:

I plugged in the digital video camera (editing be damned!) and it Just Worked. I built wget and it Just Worked. I downloaded VM and it Just Worked. I plugged in a three-button mouse and it Just Worked. I came to realize something: I’d been with Microsoft for so long, who are complacent and hoard their customers, that I’d forgotten what it’s like to use an operating system built by people who want it to cooperate with the rest of the world. It’s good.

(via Daypop)

Doomsday Book

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Doomsday Book is another one that dad loaned to me. A very good sci-fi novel, set in England both in the near future and in the 1300’s, as an archaeologist travels back into the 14th century to study the people of the time first hand, and gets trapped there when a mysterious illness starts infecting the people in the modern world, leaving her to deal with the onset of the Black Plague in England.

Willis does an excellent job balancing the grimness of the situations both in the past and the present with some wonderful touches of humor to help keep things from getting too distressing. Coupled with some insightful looks into both joy and despair, and you’ve got a Hugo and Nebula award winning novel. Good stuff!

Well, I’m not surprised

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Those who surf the Web using a Mac tend to be better educated and make more money than their PC-using counterparts, …tend to be more Web savvy, with more than half having been online for at least five years…are 58 percent more likely than the overall online population to build their own Web page and also slightly more likely to buy goods online, according to the report.

(via MetaFilter)

HIV-positive muppets?

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Aside from the many, many obvious jokes than can be made about this (and, admittedly, I could come up with quite a few without even trying), I think this may be one of the coolest news reports I’ve read in a while. According to an AP story on Yahoo! News, “The first HIV-positive Muppet will soon join the cast of ‘Sesame Street’ in South Africa to educate children about the deadly virus that infects more than 10 percent of the country.”

The report goes on to say that “…the Muppet will associate freely with the show’s other characters as a way to fight stereotypes and dispel myths about people living with the virus, said Yvonne Kgame of the South African Broadcasting Corp., which airs the program.”

I could easily see this as being one of the best and most effective ways to get some real HIV education out to children — and I can also, unfortunately, fairly easily assume that there is absolutely no way this would ever happen in the US. Can you imagine the uproar that would hit if news of this happening on Sesame Street in the US? Too bad, too — I think this is a great step.

Creepy, and very interesting

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A series of quotes from something I just watched:

History has shown us that strength may be useless in the face of terrorism…

These aren’t people we’re dealing with here. They’re animals. Fanatics, who kill without remorse or conscience…who think nothing of murdering innocent people.

I guess the event that really opened my eyes took place only a few days after my arrival. A terrorist bomb destroyed a shuttlebus…sixty school children. There were no survivors. [They] claimed it was a mistake. That their intended target was a police transport. As if that made everything all right. That day I vowed to put an end to terrorism…. And I will.

Don’t you know? A dead martyr’s worth ten posturing leaders.

That shuttlebus I told you about…the bomb was set by a teenager. And in a world where children blow up children…everyone’s a threat.

“…the difference between a general and terrorist is only the difference between winners and losers. You win, you’re called a general. You lose….”
“You are killing innocent people! Can’t you see the immorality of what you’re doing? Or have you killed so often, you’ve become blind to it?”
“How much innocent blood has been spilled for the cause of freedom in [your] history…? How many good and noble societies have bombed civilians in war? Wiped out whole cities. And now that you enjoy the comfort that has come from their battles, their killing, you frown on my immorality? …I am willing to die for my freedom. And, in the finest tradition of your own [history], I’m willing to kill for it too.”

“…it appears that terrorism is an effective way to promote political change.”
“I have never subscribed to the theory that political power flows from the barrel of a gun….”
“In most instances, you would be correct. But there are numerous examples where it was successful…. Then, would it be accurate to say that terrorism is acceptable when the options for peaceful settlement have been foreclosed?”
“…we cannot condone violence.”
“Even in response to violence?”
“These are questions that [we have] been struggling with since creation.”

“They’re mad.”
“I don’t know any more. The difference between a madman and a committed man willing to die for a cause…it’s begun to blur….”

…there’s a hint of moral cowardice in your dealings…. You do business with a government that’s crushing us. And then you say you aren’t involved. But of course you are. You just don’t want to get dirty.

“You didn’t have to kill him.”
“As a prisoner he would have been a focus for violence as his followers tried to free him. Now, he’s a martyr, but the death toll may be lower — at least in the short term. An imperfect solution for an imperfect world.”

Read more

All they wanted was a ride

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Okay, here’s a bizarre little situation — three women buy a beer for a guy they meet in exchange for a ride where they need to go, and end up trapped in the car during a wild police chase!

The women later told detectives they didn’t know the car was stolen and had never met the driver before. They said they had bought him a beer because he promised to give them a ride to the White Center area. They said that when the deputy started following him, Snow told them he had warrants out for his arrest, that the car was stolen, ‘and that he wasn’t going back to jail,’ the documents state.

I think I’ll stick to walking and taking the bus.