fusion

Twitter Over Blogging?

Andre — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 17:06:46 +0000

In my dealings with this personal blog business, I’ve found that microblogging suits my tastes better than regular blogging. I’m updating my Twitter account much more regularly due to the ease of creating posts. I still have an idea for a professional blog coming up, which is yet another reason for the lack of regular posts on this personal blog.

No related posts.

Traditional Monsters Play on Three Fears

Andre — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 19:09:43 +0000

First, they echo the predators who chased our ancestors. You fear the fangs of a vampire the way you fear the fangs of a wolf. That’s an external fear, a fear of the Beast.

Second, they evoke human aggression and human perversion. A vampire looks like a man and yet it is an eater of men — here’s a hunt of cannibalism, our oldest taboo. That’s an internal fear, a fear of the Best Within.

Third, we fear transformation into the Best — a chance bite form a wolf can turn you into a bloodthirsty monster, Dr. Frankenstein can reanimate your corpse with a bolt of lightening, the right combination of chemicals can turn good Dr. Jekyll into evil Mr. Hyde. We fear the monster’s capacity for evil because we can recognize it in human hearts.

From Idlewild, by Nick Sagan.

Review of Kiki Smith Art Exibition

79th Annual Commencement Exercises of Bennett College for Women

Andre — Sat, 09 May 2009 22:21:42 +0000

With the commencement address by California’s House member Diane Watson, the 79th annual commencement’s direction at Bennett College had been set. This is an important note as I cannot figure out what a House member from California has to do with Bennett (other than maybe being a black women who had it tough, as noted many times during her speech), but the unexplainable oddities of the commencement had begun. The mayor of Greensboro, Yvonne Johnson, would be in attendance and would give a speech along with Valerie Amos, Gregory Barmore, Andrew Harris and Evelyn Lowery, the four honorary degree recipients along with Diane Watson. Scheduled to last just over two hours, it was set to be quite a memorable and value-packed ceremony except for one major footnote on the program: It was going to be at the campus quadrangle — a giant field outside.

That’s right — the ceremony would be held outside on campus starting at 11:00am. With an expected temperature of 88 degrees, the giant field with no real shade from the North Carolina sun, and no real relief from the heat other than complementary bottles of water was sure to make an impact on all guests. It seemed a little strange that the entire ceremony was scheduled to coincide with the hottest, most dangerous time to be out in direct sunlight but I suppose it would have been too much to start things at 9:00 or even 10:00.

Sure, the majority of guests were not really affected much by the scorching sun beating down but nearly all of the minority white guests I noticed were sunburned. Speaking with faculty member Johnny McGee afterward, he mentioned, “I was sitting in front watching that guest Gregory Barmore’s face just blister throughout the day. He was getting redder and redder!” I do not believe Mr. McGee knew what his own head looked like as he reminded me of someone who had gotten pissed at the beach and later fell asleep in the sand.

A lot of rumors were about as to why Bennett decided on having the commencement outside when it has been held indoors the last few years, but the way I hear it is that the alumni get to decide on the location and this year they decided on having it outside on campus. Perhaps they were being vindictive.

If it were my graduation, I would be pissed off and sure to be vocal about it. In any case, you can count me out of attending next year if it will again be held outside.

A Test of Courage

Andre — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 04:14:42 +0000

It was barely 10:00 in the morning and here I was, faced with a serious dilemma which proves an individual’s leadership skills. Well, deciding one way or another probably won’t change earth’s axis if inclination but this was still one of those moments where you have doubts about whether or not it’s really happening.

I had to gather my thoughts on what just happened and stare up at the wall in front of me in order to not freak out again by viewing the awesome disaster which was unfolding in front of me.

Here’s the moment of truth. Do I go back to my desk, go back to work, pretend like nothing ever happened and act surprised and dumbfounded when someone eventually discovers what’s happened? Do I instead handle the matter myself, owning up to my problems and tackling them with little inhibition? This would be the kind of gusto that the hero of movies always demonstrates.

From where I am located in the building there are two bathroom options which are about the same distance away. One is what I call the executive bathroom. This bathroom’s wallpaper is a dark color. The stall walls are a fake dark marble. The sink has ornate decorations. There’s even a fan that’s always running and a can of mango-scented air freshener available. Using this bathroom is feeling like you’re important and the time you’re devoting in there is cherished.

Then there’s the other bathroom, the peon bathroom. Everything is older and slightly rundown. No dark colors anywhere; everything slightly resembles the tacky look of a dentist’s office. The sink is fully exposed and there’s no fan and mango-scented air freshener, so it typically stinks for up to several hours after it’s been used. I typically use the peon bathroom as it’s next to the break room and I can refill my mug on the way back to my desk. But on this day I decided to treat myself a bit to the executive bathroom just because I can.

So I walked in to find the bathroom empty. Score! It was going to be a mango-scented bliss to drop a few kids off at the pool.

Several minutes later and I was ready to flush away what seemed like just another session. And that’s when I encountered the first hiccup: the toilet began to back up. I stood in front of it in slight curiosity as this never happened before; the toilet and I had a pact. Luckily it didn’t overflow, probably due to the understanding we had.

I began using the industrial strength coiled plunger but it didn’t appear to be having any effect. To make matters worse, as I’m in the middle of frantically pluging the hell out of the toilet, somebody walks in.

I freeze until they leave again, lest they recognize my shoes and forever scar the image of me as that guy who clogged the toilet.

Now, I don’t recall what happened next as it all happened so fast, almost fast to enough to have my life flashing before me, but I think I flushed the toilet again thinking that I had loosened up any blockages and before I knew it the toilet which had always been good to me was overflowing and wouldn’t stop.

So there I was, not only standing in front of the toilet which had overflowed for what seemed like hours, but also standing in about half an inch of natural, crystal clear, smooth water (it was anything but natural, crystal clear or smooth but I’m leaving out the mental-picture-making details as it’s not important — it was mostly my own shit and I was standing in a crap load of it). This was the moment that I might’ve been waiting for my entire life: the moment where I make the choice to prove my courageousness, show integrity and fix the problem at hand; or, meander back to my desk to continue working like nothing ever happened. “What? The toilet in the executive bathroom overflowed and nobody said anything and now somebody’s going to have to clean up that mess? Nope — wasn’t me who did it. I had Mexican for dinner last night.”

OK, perhaps this wasn’t the moment I had been waiting for my entire life and it certainly wasn’t as character-defining as it sounds — it’s attending to an overflowing toilet — but it was such an awesome disaster that its resolution seemed pretty important.

As if deciding on combo meal number two instead of number one, I decided to clean up my mess and see it through no matter how much I later realized I didn’t want to. I needed to go through the series of steps to be rid of this problem.

“Has the toilet stopped overflowing water?” Yes, I jiggled the lever until water was blocked from coming down the tank. Next. I need a way to soak up all the mess on the floor.

“Paper towels will take ages. I need a mop bucket. I know there’s one in the break room closet but it’s locked. Dammit, I need to see Kevin to get the key.” So much for keeping this quiet. That’s going to be one person who knows too much.

So I walk out of the bathroom, stop in front of the door and check to make sure nobody’s making their way to it, otherwise I’d have to tackle them if they got too close. I walk over to Kevin’s office and ask for the key to the closet. “Nope,” he says, “Gabe is the one with that key. Let’s go see him.” Dammit, two people who know too much.

We go to Gabe’s office and get the key from him. During the walk to the closet Kevin asks, “What do you need the mop for?” Luckily a quick “Do you really want to know?” put an end to any further details leaking.

He opens the closet, tells me to close it back up when I’m done and walks away to leave me alone. Great, now if I can only get this yellow mop bucket to the bathroom I’ll be safe.

Not a chance.

Not even half way through the room and Steven walks in. “Hey, whatcha cleaning up?” Then Amanda walks out of the women’s poen bathroom, “You can come by and clean up my house after you’re done!” With each word I hear I pick up my pace, hopefully avoiding any further prodding from the now four people who know too much.

Got back to the bathroom. Put a sign on the door which read “Out of order” since I couldn’t lock the door. Started with the cleanup. At some point Gabe poked his head in and asked if I was alright. I had to admit to what had happened. “Oh… OK…,” and he slowly poked back out wishing he hadn’t asked in the first place. Three people who knew too much and now one who knew it all.

I had the entire floor spick and span again in no time without any further interruptions. Some of it required manual intervention with paper towels, but nothing enough to make me lose my lunch. The bathroom looked as good as new again, certainly nothing to give away any hints of the Desparado-like bathroom it was just hours ago (you know the one, it had a hidden door to the money counting room). I then wiped off the sweat on my brow and began on the mission to get the yellow bucket back to the closet without adding any further knows-too-much tallies — but not without first spraying some more mango on my way out.

Poked my head out of the door to make sure the coast was clear and raced back to the closet without bumping into anyone else in the breakroom. Mission accomplished.

There I sat, back at my desk again, with that feeling of an accomplishment under my belt but at the same time a kind of defeat. I thought we had a deal. I thought we had a deal.

All of the names except for the air freshener have been changed, it really was mango. And yes, it really happened to me.

Filter Linux Spam

Andre — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 19:36:27 +0000

No, not on filtering spam about Linux out of your inbox. One of the most exciting things that an email junky experiences is opening up their email client and seeing a high count of unread messages. One of the biggest downers is noticing that most or all of those messages are spam. The good news is that if you’re not using one of the many free email providers and, instead, use a registered domain name, there are several options available to filtering your emails automatically so you can apply the time spent reading and deleting spam every day for something more constructive — like playing squash.

The options available are split into to very different groups: those that want to filter themselves and those that want someone else to filter them.

Filtering Yourself

By far the first solution presented to filtering spam on Linux systems is the open source project Spamassassin. Spamassassin has been deployed in many extremely large mail servers, proving it can stand up to millions of messages every day. So it can easily handle the thousands of message the average email junky goes through every week even on a low-end server with minimal intervention and maintenance. With the Bayesian classifier that Spamassassin employs, it can learn what you consider to be spam and what you don’t — one junkies spam is another’s ham, of course.

Letting Someone Else Filter Yourself

This is the perfect avenue for the email junkie who’s always on the go and doesn’t have the time to administer his own custom solution. There are too many directions to cover but it basically comes down to two different methods: shifting all hosting and mail routing to a third-party service, or, shifting only the mail routing to a third-party service.

When shifting everything to a third-party service you alleviate yourself from all of the maintenance chores; the web services, the webmail software, the MTA — all somebody else’s problem. Possible solutions include Google Apps and FastMail, who will provide spam filtering, web and IMAP access and other features.

Routing all mail through a third-party is simple enough: just change the mail exchange (MX) record for your domain’s DNS. This way, all mail will first hit the filtering service and anything that’s not tagged as spam will end up in your inbox. One of the more popular services is Postini.

A Solution for Every Situation

Filtering spam in this day and age is no longer the rocket science that was hit or miss that it was not five years ago. It’s become simple enough that anyone can set up some kind of solution to meet their needs. Of course, spam filtering is a constant game of catchup with the spammers so don’t expect any one solution to rid all spam out of your inbox.

Stephen Dubner at UNCG

Andre — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 21:21:31 +0000

The dictator game is a very simple game in experimental economics that touches on the altruistic value in humans. The game is simple. You participate for the experiment and are seated in a room along with one of the people running the experiment. They give you ten one dollar bills which you are then allowed to keep no matter what. You are not the only one in the experiment, however, and there will be someone coming in next after you leave. Do you wish to give any of your money to them? If you do, you will leave with whatever is left out of the ten dollars and they will start with ten dollars — like you did — plus the amount you donated to them. You won’t get a chance to see them and they won’t see you, so it’s completely anonymous — no one ever knows of your generosity and they cannot thank you for it. Of course, there are no other people in the experiment and each participant is presented with the same choice.

On average, three dollars is typically donated proving that humans are innately altruistic.

Let’s run the experiment one more time except this time let’s change the amount you are allowed to give from -$1 to $10, -1 being that you can now take one dollar from the next person. On average the number was zero for this experiment, proving that humans are not all that altruistic this time.

Now let’s run the experiment one last time but further change the amount you are allowed to give from -$10 to $10. So now you are able to take all ten dollars of the next person an and leave with twenty dollars if you so choose. What do you think the results of this experiment turned out to be?

On average, -$1.5 dollars was chosen; the participants anonymously stole $1.5 dollars from the next person.

This was just one of the stories told by Stephen Dubner at his guest lecture at UNCG on March 25. Although he does not proclaim himself to be an economist or even to know anything worthwhile in the field, he co-authored Freakonomics with Steven Levitt — who, incidentally, is an economist. Knowing that Dubner is not an economist but rather a journalist is important to realize beforehand as the book is a record of dozens of economic anomalies presented in a very easy to understand and enjoyable fashion (the Dubner aspect of the book, I suppose).

On the whole, the lecture proved to be very interesting. Dubner was able to just appear on stage and instantly dive into an hour long lecture as if it were a comfortable conversation piece. He easily segwayed from one economic topic on to another and made the audience forget that each topic, which was presented more like a story, was on the often-boring and mundane subject of economics, which is often called the dismal science as it tries to reduce the splendors of life down to mathematical equations.

The other interesting story of the lecture was the story of Yale economist Keith Chen and his idea of introducing the notion of bartering with money to capuchin monkeys. The purpose was to introduce the idea of exchanging money for food and see if the monkeys somehow exhibited some sort of behavior that we humans could learn from.

The enclosure was separated into two main cages, one where several capuchins lived and another which was empty where the assistants would interact with the monkeys. The two rooms were separated by a gate. Every day, Chen and his assistants would open the gate to let one monkey into the empty room and give him several small plastic discs. They would then take them out of the monkey’s hands as they gave him grapes. They repeated this process for several months until they monkeys began to understand that when they give the humans two discs they receive a bowl a grapes. This was the first phase of the experiment.

Chen then began to alter certain aspects of the monetary system. For instance, they raised the price of grapes to four discs while leaving the price of bananas to two. The capuchins picked up on the price hike and went without the more expensive but tastier grapes in favor of the bananas in order to save more discs. Another incident of the price hike was the robbery of several discs. One day when the capuchin was in the empty room and presented a tray full of discs he smashed the tray backwards so that the discs flew into the other room for everyone else. The monkeys exhibited a lot of the same behaviors that humans do with money, even in hard times.

It was during this time that Chen noticed something very unexpected. He watched one of the male capuchins gather several discs from his private stash, walk up to one of the females, give all of the discs to her, have sex with her and then walk away. Chen had witnessed capuchin prostitution.

One last interesting tidbit that I picked up from the lecture was that of the realtor and pimp and the value they bring to the table. If you’re trying to sell your house, hiring a realtor to sell it will yield a smaller return on investment than a prostitute who uses a pimp. Dubner calls this the “pimpact.”

Cornel West Visits Bennett College

Andre — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 21:50:18 +0000

I was fortunate enough to attend a guest lecture by Cornel West at Bennet College on March 26th at the Annie Merner Pfeiffer Chapel. It appeared to be an open topic lecture, which started off mostly ad-lib and evolved into opines on many broad topics including US politics, the current financial system, racism, black history and other related topics.

I had heard of the name Cornel West in passing many times but it wasn’t until his guest appearances on the HBO show Real Time that I began to get to know him. I went out of my way to watch the episodes where he would appear and would be astounded by nearly everything that he spoke of. He has a very profound way of expressing new and thought provoking ideas on nearly every subject. This was the Cornel that I had gotten to know and enjoy. This was the Cornel that he put on for that particular audience. At Bennett College, on the other hand, I got the chance to see a much more relaxed version.

Bennett College is listed as one of the 103 remaining historically black college and universities (HBCUs) left in the US. They were founded before 1964 and serve the black community. In addition, Bennett College only admits women. So Cornel was in prime location for some inspirational words of wisdom. While I knew that much of it wouldn’t be too inspirational to me (I’m not a black woman) it would still live up to the Real Time Cornel that I got to know. It turned out to be inspirational in different ways for me.

Cornel West currently teaches at Princeton University under the African American Studies department, with courses directly in religion or based on religion being his primary offerings. The lecture he gave in many ways was a sermon, although there were too many times that what he was talking about was very inappropriate for church — masturbating, orgasms, sex, drugs, etc.

He did a very good job of bringing out the black perspective. Not to insinuate that he fabricated problems which affect the black community out of otherwise cross-racial and cross-economic issues, but he was able to always discover, point out and focus on issues and how they affect the black community as a whole. The inspirational aspect of the lecture came about in his advice for overcoming and moving past such issues by mainly “looking in the mirror to discover your true self and in doing so will you only then be able to realize others’ faults and look past them.” However, I did notice a few glaring mistakes in Cornel’s observations which led me to believe there were other inconsistencies with his findings.

In his talk about Obama, he likened Obama to someone who is a descendant of the slave times, grew up knowing many hardships and being part of the blues. As Obama has shattered the glass ceiling by making into the White House he has to remember about those still in the basement; while it’s a grand accomplishment, he mustn’t forget about his brothers. While he made it into the White House, it’s still just a house built by slaves. While we have records that the White House built in 1800 was done so by slaves, what about the rebuilding after the War of 1812? Further, while it’s a historic event that we are able to elect a bi-racial African-American, he is not a descendant of slaves. His mother wasn’t a descendant of slave owners and his father was from Kenya.

Cornel also insisted that when Obama won the vote in Iowa, “the people of Iowa were a little less racist that day than they were the day before.” Now, I’m no expert on Iowa by any means but isn’t it a bit of a farce to insist that everyone in Iowa is racist against black people but, considering who their choices were, they voted for Obama? Perhaps the entire state is racist. Perhaps, given a choice between someone they hate based entirely on the pigment of their skin and an old guy with a woman VP, they voted for the thing they hated the least. Perhaps Cornel sees a lot of people as possibly or potentially racist.

Many of the topics made me feel uncomfortable as they devolved into racism. Perhaps as a person who has been privileged enough to lead most of my life without racism as a forefront thought, I am unable to so easily find the racism effect in so many prevalent issues in society, so it was jarring to hear of it. Too many times it felt almost as if everyone in the chapel was about to collectively give me a dirty look in my direction. To be fair, I was in the minority as I’m a white and a male and an immigrant.

The entire lecture was very interesting in so many ways and it was awesome that I had the opportunity to see Cornel West in person. If the stage hadn’t been descended upon by half of the audience, I would’ve liked to have chatted to him for a minute.

I really liked the man before getting the chance to see him in person. Now I respect him.

Chemistry, Biology and Physics

Andre — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 13:04:28 +0000

If it smells, it’s chemistry. If it moves, it’s biology. If it doesn’t work, it’s physics. No related posts. No related posts.

Cheese’ll Cost You Extra

Andre — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 17:26:59 +0000

Beware when you’re at Ruby Tuesday and they ask if you’d like cheese on the mashed potatoes and vegetables; it’s $2 each. In other words, cheese on the mashed potatoes is $2 extra and cheese on the vegetables is yet another $2.

The plate of “chicken bella” which was $9 cost an extra $4 because they lightly sprinkled some chedder on it. What a rip off.

A Lot of Learnin’

What is the Truest Definition of Globalization?

Andre — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 20:23:10 +0000

You may have seen this already posted in a billion other blogs out on the net. But in case you haven’t…

What the truest definition of globalization? Princess Diana’s death.

Why?

An English princess with an Egyptian boyfriend crashes in a French tunnel, driving a German car with a Dutch engine, driven by a Belgian who was drunk on Scottish whisky (check the bottle before you change the spelling), followed closely by Italian paparazzi, on Japanese motorcycles; treated by an American doctor, using Brazilian medicines.

This is sent to you by an American, using Bill Gates’ technology, and you’re probably reading this on your computer that uses Taiwanese chips and a Korean monitor, assembled by Bangladeshi workers in a Singapore plant, transported by Indian lorry-drivers, hijacked by Indonesians, unloaded by Sicilian longshoremen, and trucked to you by Mexican illegals.

That, my friends, is globalization!