Darwin Redeemed: For the good of the species, no one should sell this man a helmet.

Slam The Spam: Being a spammer is bad enough; it's probably best not to draw attention to yourself and claim to be a victim when you are taken to task for it. Bernard Shifman did and was promptly turned into a world famous Moron.

Speaking of spam, the other day I got this one -

Date: Mon, 17 Dec 01 18:37PM EST
From: "Roni*"
To: dzot@usa.net
Subject: Zoila Donati's resume

Hi! How are you?

I send you this file in order to have your advice

See you later. Thanks

- along with an attachment named Zoila_Donati's_resume.doc.com. I have to laugh. First, I am not stupid enough to click on an unsolicited attachment (like I might have asked someone named Zoila Donati for his/her resume and not remembered it?). And even if I were, I would not be stupid enough to click on an unsolicited attachment that was an executable program (that's the .com part). Good grief. Naturally my virus scanner revealed a hidden worm. Idiots.

Geekology: Two articles caught my eye recently having to do with life in high-tech (aka Geek Life).

The first is actually quite serious and has been bopping around the web for the last week or two, but I just got around to reading it. It seems in Silicon Valley and some other high-tech centers there is a marked increase in autistic children. This article in Wired supposes the answer is that autism is often linked with the sort of single minded creativity that is required to succeed in high-tech jobs (prototypically: software development) and that autism is what happens when the mind develops those capabilities to the exclusion of the other basic human faculties. The reason it has become more prevalent is that in past times people with just a little autism were often loners or outcasts and did not reproduce at the same rate as the general population. The growth of high-tech has changed those people from loners to folks in high demand and that has placed them in a position have kids more readily. The genetic predisposition gets passed on more often. Not exactly a mind blowing conclusion: that good and useful personality traits can be horribly detrimental when the DNA doesn't get it right, but it's very interesting when put in such a familiar context.

On a more light-hearted note, we have this story of the rise and fall of Wizards of the Coast, a company that had a huge gaming hit called Magic: The Gathering. Similar to the book/movie Mosquito Coast, the founder attempted to build the perfect utopia in the middle of the jungle. In this case it was a geek utopia in the middle of the commercial jungle. The cruel world took care of that short order, but it's an entertaining story nevertheless.

Like Sands in an Hour Glass: I cannot tell you how tempted I have been to get a game console - Playstation, GameCube, XBox - but then I remember how much computer games ate up of my young adulthood. You think it might be a nice diversion, and then one day, you realize you have been playing Civilization for 15 hours straight. In your underwear. With a full bladder. Home of the Underdogs is a site devoted to the then-slick-now-retro games of that time. What's really scary is that some of them are now free downloads. Must...stay...away...

At Least She Avoided the Woodchipper: Fargo, the weirdly gruesome Coen Brothers movie has just claimed a real life victim. Amazing. The sheriff on the case makes the perfect comment, "I haven't seen the movie. I don't need to, I live here." You sure do, buddy, you sure do.

Bad As I Wanna Write: First, I want to quote a passage from Apple Pie wherein Alex has an encounter with philosophy textbooks:

Clarity and readability did not seem to be high on the agenda of the various writers...each subsequent philosopher seemed to leapfrog the previous in the weight and density. There were lines like, “Negative dialectics continues in the face of the solid intrinsic ontology of dehumanization.” Sentences like that blur the distinction between highly educated deep thinkers and schizophrenic street people.

Now read this summary of the Bad Writing Contest sponsored by the scholarly journal Philosophy and Literature.

Life imitating Art imitating Life.

If It Makes You Happy: Another great issue of my favorite print mag, Forbes ASAP, has hit the stands this one with a series of terrific essays on The Pursuit of Happiness. The divine P.J. O'Rourke offers a comic one, Andrew Sullivan offers a brilliant one, Lance Armstrong (the only truly heroic sports figure I know of), George Plimpton and others chime in. Definitely worth buying if you don't want to stare at the screen to read it.

Doh! A Deer: I am sick and tired of people calling me callous because I don't go all weepy at the sight of the deer that infest this state. (You people know who you are.) Every time I drive down Dexter-Ann Arbor road in the dark - and it gets dark at about 3 PM these days - I'm mortified at the prospect of one of them jumping out of the bushes and damaging my luxurious 1993 Camry (180,000 miles). Well, at least one person agrees with me. Deer are responsible for more deaths in North America in one year, than bears and cougars have been for the entire century. And despite all the auto collisions and hunting, there are approximately as many deer now as there were when settlers first arrived. Fight the power! Eat venison!

Sony vs. Taliban: I've intentionally not posted items relating to 9/11/01 or the Afghan War for reasons I've mentioned before, namely you can get that info anywhere on the web - or TV, or radio, or the newspaper. But I couldn't let this little anecdote pass without mention. It is a description of a message sent to Jon Katz, a writer for Slashdot, which is prominent techie site. In it, a young Afghan who had been living under Taliban rule in Kabul until the Northern Alliance took over describes how delighted he is that he can listen to music again. Says a lot.