Archive for September, 2007

Mac OS X vs. My Keyboard

Sunday, September 16th, 2007

I like Mac OS X and all, but there’s just one thing that really bugs me about the Mac - Apple’s contempt for the keyboard. I wanted to know if any of you out there know the answer to these problems:

  • In Windows or Linux, you can hit the end key to go to the end of the line you’re typing or the home to get to the beginning. This neither works on my mac laptop nor my mac mini with a pc-keyboard.
  • On any other OS, you can hit the tab key while editing a form and the tab not only goes to the text fields, it goes to radio buttons, select boxes, etc. But on Mac, these are skipped right over. Why?! Can I change this? It doesn’t matter what browser I use; I could use the same browser on all platforms with the same problem only on Mac.

These issues waste more time for me than even writing this blog! The keyboard is so fast and I want to bypass Mac’s Mouse-ocracy. As a programmer, these things are particularly frustrating!

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Posted in computers | 1 Comment »

Asimov and Animism

Thursday, September 6th, 2007

I had an idea yesterday when scrambling to make sure I didn’t lose any Mexican jumping beans from a bag I spilled. I was concerned about their safety even more than my future ability to hassle these clicking owl-heads. And lord knows I like to hassle those who can’t fight back! (just ask my baby half-brother, mwa-ha-ha)

Here’s the idea: in I, Robot, there was talk about how some little girl was treating ill her robot. She told him to do all sorts of things without considering the bot’s robo-feelings. Though there were no direct ill consequences of this (the robots are programmed to enjoy this!), the idea was that she would learn to treat other humans the same way. So, what’s the consequence of us treating objects as mere objects?

Traditional cultures had/have a worldview in which everything is alive and in which other animals are our (humanity’s) brothers and sisters. Even things that weren’t strictly living had spirits (like rocks, rivers, etc.) Is our seeing of this as all false inadvertently making us just a little less civil, a little more cold in our dealings with other people?

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Posted in animism, anthropology, nature, worldview | No Comments »

Axis 1 - Intensity

Tuesday, September 4th, 2007

A few hours ago, I took the trash out, and had to dump collected weeds out of one of the cans. It has been raining slightly the past few days, so a sort of tea was created in the bottom of the can. The smell was a concentrate of the natural smells I expect from the area, disarming me with an overpowering version of what are usually pleasant smells.

This is the component of a sensory experience that one might mistakenly see as not changing the nature of it - intensity. Louder music isn’t the same music, but louder. It’s different music. A “pleasant” smell is so often nothing but a subtle smell and the opposite with bad and pungent smells. A woman who, noticing her perfume smells good, decides to bathe in it, and your typical modern sound mastering engineer who obsesses with making music loud neglects this fact.

Oh yeah, and how good coffee tastes is well correlated with how hot it is, but that actually has nothing to do with what I’m talking about here.

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Posted in olfaction | No Comments »