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Holy Christ on a cracker! The ultra fundies are at it again. Now they want to remove porn from hotel rooms. "There's porn in hotel rooms?" you say. No, not in the nightstand (there's a Bible there) and no, you can't get complimentary strippers. They want to get rid of the porn that's hidden deep inside the Idiot Box. The Boob Tube. The TV. That porn that you can't get unless you turn on the TV, go through 10 menus, choose the right one and put in a PIN to get. The porn you get charged megabucks for. From the article:"These are places that you take your family -- these are respectable institutions," said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council. "Anything that brings porn into the mainstream is a concern. It just desensitizes people." Someone needs to make these Fundies hip to capitalism, and soon. Do they actually think that hotels are making all their money SOLELY off of families blowing in for one night on their way to Grandma's? Of course they aren't. They're making their big bucks off of business travelers - companies with huge accounts that send their guys out to Wichita, Kansas to consult the owners of Wichita Widgets for 2 weeks in June without their wives or their families, who have nothing better to do once they get back to the hotel than to WATCH PORN because, heck, they're guys in Wichita for two weeks without their wives or families. There's also the Cheaters and the Escort Service Clients and the People Who Want To Go To A Hotel To Watch Some Porn. Sure, there's families. There's families with Mom and Dad and 2.5 kids on their way to Grandma's or enjoying 3 glorious nights in Sandusky so they can visit Cedar Point. But if you're doing things right, your kids shouldn't be glued to the tv with the remote in one hand traversing the PPV menus. Surely 2 adults (the Christian Family Rule) stuffed in a room with their kids can manage to keep their kids from seeing a little T&A on the tube. Luckily, the heads of Marriot and Hilton aren't going to bow down to the Insaninites. "In-room movies are a revenue stream," he [Roger Conner of Marriot] said. "This is a business matter." Amen. The Fundies have the right to NOT patronize any hotel they want. They have the right to tell other people to NOT patronize the hotels. They even have the right to set up Web sites telling people all about Clean Hotels. But do they have the right to tell the government to tell the business owners how to run their business? Fuck no. Now, if you excuse me, I have to go take a cold shower. And it's not because I was just watching porn.

There is a problem facing society, but no one is willing to talk about it. Virtually every journalist, television reporter, and blogger has personally encountered this problem, and yet – silence. The problem is the metric system. Not just the metric system, but the US customary units as well. Basically, in order to be useful, a measurement system must:

1. Have well-defined units that everyone agrees on.

2. Give people the ability to measure things and understand quantities.

Neither system really meets both of these criteria. The metric system, although it meets the first point, fails miserably on the second. The US system fails the first point semantically, and does a really poor job on the second point.

Allow me to illustrate:

Scenario 1: The news has just reported that a 4,081,440 - foot wide asteroid is heading toward the Earth.

Scenario 2: You just heard on the radio that a 695,622 km² area of the ocean has become an oxygen-free dead zone.

Now, think quickly – how do you react to this news? Do you panic? Do you relax, secure in the knowledge that the asteroid will burn up in the atmosphere and the dead zone will clear up in the spring?

Nobody knows! What the hell is a kilometer? How I measure something be that many feet wide, when I only have two feet, and neither one is a foot long anyway?

Now imagine if we had a new system in place:

Scenario 3: The news has just reported that an asteroid the size of Texas is heading toward the Earth, and you just heard on the radio that a area of the ocean the size of Texas has become an oxygen-free dead zone.

We need to standardize on a new set of units that actually reflect what is in use today. I am not the inventor of this system, but I would like to codify it and propose a name: the Journalistic System.

The Journalistic System is actually in use today—just open up a newspaper or turn on CNN. Below are some common units. Later, I will post my completely empirical and scientific method for determining and naming units, and some conversion tables.

Area

• Football Fields. “The new convention center covers 3 football fields of space.â€?
• Manhattans. “A remote island twice the size of Manhattan.â€?
• Rhode Islands. “The wildfire covers an area the size of Rhode Island.â€?
• Texases - “An asteroid the size of Texas.â€? (note: in this case, we are talking about the cross section)

Volume

• Grains of Sand. “The transistor is thousands of times smaller than a grain of sand.â€?
• Olympic Swimming Pools. “Each day Americans eat enough barley to fill 20 Olympic swimming pools.â€?
• Earths that Could Fit Inside. “Jupiter's Great Red Spot is so large that 3 Earths could fit inside.â€?

Data and Information

• Number of Songs. “This portable hard drive can hold 20,000 songs.â€?
• Libraries of Congress. “The database for this particle accelerator holds as much data as the Library of Congress.â€?

Food Energy (calories) and/or Fat Content

• Big Macs. “The new salad, with dressing, is equivalent to 3 Big Macs.â€?

Width

• Human Hair. “The stress cracks were thinner than a human hair.â€?

Mass

• Empire State Buildings. “The new oil platform will weigh more than the Empire State Building.â€?

Tumors

• Currently undecided. Multiple units exist - size of a baseball, size of a tennis ball, football, bowling ball, peach, orange, grape, etc.

Population

• Chicagos. “At this rate of population growth, it is like adding three Chicagos each year.â€?

Money

• Starving Children Meals. “What you spend on a cup of coffee could feed a starving child.â€?
• Cups of Coffee. “What you spend on a cup of coffee could feed a starving child.â€?
• Inner-city School Teachers. “The cost of the war is enough money to hire 2000 teachers for our inner-city schools.â€?

If anybody reading this is a liberal youngin', eyes ablaze with the fire only a passion for social justice ignites, extremities tingling with the desire to get out there and CHANGE THE WORLD, I have a bit of advice for you. Don't get a public service job. At least not over the phone. At least not right away. Give your do-gooder feelings some time to settle in, establish residency, maybe get themselves a library card and learn directions to the nearest UDF. I've been working at a phone-oriented public service job for almost a year now. There are good days and bad days, but not a day goes by that doesn't find me thinking thoughts more at home in the head of a flag-waving soccer mom, her banana-yellow hummer coated with camo-colored ribbons and a big fat W, most decidedly not in the head of a proud'n'loud liberal bisexual atheist feminist trying to worm her way into a career in public interest advocacy. E.g.: "Jaysus. If you can't AFFORD mortgage payments, don't buy a HOUSE, then come crying because you can't PAY." It's offending my better nature even typing that, knowing what I know about predatory lending practices and the effects bad education and mistrust of authority can have on someone making an honest effort to establish a family and equity. But there it is. You listen to the general public's complaints all day and you begin to resent their ignorance, their bitterness at how life's treated them, their lack of the social niceties my mommy taught me growing up in suburbia (would it kill people to say thank you? Or, hey, just don't scream obscenities at me. I'd settle for that.). The ringing of your work phone begins to rank higher than a colicky baby or dentist's drill in your continuum of Sounds That Make Me Want to Poke Out My Eye. My inner liberal's voice, though still the voice of reason and still retaining control of the whole operation, is at times shut out by this disturbing newcomer, this person who just wants to shout "Shut UP! You're so STUPID! GAAAAHHHHH!!!!!" Maybe that's showing my age, too, even calling it liberalism. I had a friend, younger than I by about four years, get very upset when I called him a liberal and not a progressive. Apparently, progressive : liberal :: feminist : suffragette. It just doesn't apply anymore. But I still believe in breaking the cycle of poverty and ignorance. I believe in civil liberties and ye olde "I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." I believe in live and let live. This is liberalism still, to me. So how about it, kiddies? How do we get that shameful inner voice to simmer down, or go away entirely? How DOES a liberal age gracefully into her late twenties, as life and reality make awfully destructive inroads on increasingly tattered beliefs? Your thoughts, please.

Recently I have felt that I have not been reading enough. I already feel that I have become very stupid since I graduated from college, but now I feel even dumber. My job is simple and under stimulating, so I really don’t have anything to keep me from becoming slightly less intelligent each day. Anyway, I just wanted a short introduction to why I am doing this, not a personal bio on myself which I am assuming you could care less about (I know I wouldn’t). So….I have decided that I want to read the entire top 100 list for BOTH fantasy and sci-fi novels. I also think I would like to watch the top sci-fi movies. Now, mind you, I realize that this is quite a lofty goal seeing as how I have 200+ novels and some amount of movies ahead of me. And recently I have also come to realize that there aren’t a lot of authoritative lists of the top 100 novels in either category. I have found a few on the internet but I don’t know that I agree with the lists. I understand that these lists are all rated on someone’s opinion but I feel that it would be much better if we could come up with some way to create a rating system to make it a little more scientific. Anyway, I am rambling. Basically through this blog I want to do three things: 1^st: I want to read and review the ‘supposedly’ top 100 novels in both lists (here is the link to my lists, if you wanted to follow along. Top 100 sci-fi novels: http://home.austarnet.com.au/petersykes/topscifi/lists_books_rank1.html Top sci-fi movies: http://home.austarnet.com.au/petersykes/topscifi/lists_film.html Top Fantasy novels: http://www.geocities.com/area51/cavern/6113/t100256.txt). These are the best lists I could find, and actually my friend gave me the Sci-fi list. Anyway… 2^nd: I want to create a rating system to neatly rank the novels so the rankings are a little less opinionated and a little more scientific. It is science fiction. I am still playing around with the ranking topics but I think that basically it will fall into these categories: -Overall readability (if you can’t get through it, it doesn’t matter how good it is), -Story quality (is it just cut and paste basic plot or is it creative and different) -Originality quality (have you heard this story before) -Character believability (do you feel for the characters, sympathize with them, love/hate them, feel part of the story because of them) -Overall effect of novel (does it compel you to continue reading the series? 3^rd: I want other people’s opinions of my rating and possibly other people’s ranking of these novels so we can create an authoritative list. Also, if people have novels they want to add to the list (both of these lists aren’t exactly updated regularly anymore and don’t include newer books) that would be awesome. Well, I think that’s it for my first post. It would be really cool if people wanted to participate. Please leave me comments!

YouTube is incredibly popular. Add in other services like Google Video, and you have a genuine phenomenon. People are marching in droves to the web to watch video. Why is online video taking off now? Part of the answer must be because most people have broadband now. I doubt that is the main cause, though. YouTube has made three main innovations:

1. Making it incredibly easy for users to contribute videos
2. Making a central location to find video clips, with lots of good ways to find them (browsing, searching)
3. Giving the Internet a way to link to videos, and giving television clips a way to exist on the Internet.

The first two points are fairly clear, but the third could be the most important. That last point can best be explained by thinking about who who really benefits from YouTube. The users that post video and now have access to thousands of viewer obviously benefit, but I would argue they are not the big winners, because they don't usually make a lot of money from their 15 minutes of fame. The real beneficiaries are the commercial TV stations and production companies that find their content pirated on YouTube. Piracy is always a big concern, but it seems that long, full-episode videos do not work very well-not so much because of bandwidth but rather usage patterns. In my experience, most people bounce around YouTube and similar sites looking at a moderate number of shorter clips, rather than sitting down for an evening and watching Schindler's List. So the majority of the commercial content seems to be clips from shows. Shows that can be broken down into smaller segments see the biggest benefit. Comedy Central and Cartoon Network are two very good examples of commercial producers with content perfect for this medium. Let me illustrate. Before there was any good way to get video off the net, you might have seen this conversation: Person 1: Dude, did you see the Daily Show last night? Person 2: No, I missed it. Person 1: Oh man, they had this guy on who built a UFO welcome center, it was hilarious. Person 2: Oh, okay. Person 1: Uh, yeah, you really would have had to see it, but it was funny. [Person 2 wanders off unconvinced, with virtually no chance of seeing the clip on repeats] Fast forward to the rise of peer to peer filesharing: Person 1: Dude, did you see the Daily Show last night? Person 2: No, I missed it. Person 1: Oh man, they got on John McCain's campaign bus, it was hilarious. Person 2: Oh, okay. Person 1: Yeah, here, let me see if I can download it. [Person 1 types in "daily show" into p2p client] [P2P Client returns list of gibberish, everything from "Mr Show" to "Daily Ripz MPEGZZ.avi"] Person 1: Uhh... [Person 1 tries more searches, finds a video named daily_show_mccain.avi] Person 1: Here it is, this is hilarious [daily_show_mccain.avi is really porn] Person 2: Yeah, I have to get going... Fast forward to now, with the advent of YouTube: Person 1: Dude, did you see the Daily Show last night? Person 2: No, I missed it. Person 1: Oh man, they got this Senator who's raving about how the Internet is a series of tubes, it was hilarious. Person 2: Oh, okay. Person 1: Here's a link to it - or - Person 1: I have it posted on my Myspace page - or - Person 1: just do a Google search, there's a link to it on every blog. - or - Person 1: Just look for it on YouTube Person 2: That's hilarious! I love the Daily Show. I'm going to watch it more often now and purchase the products of their advertisers! Now here's the part where we get to two signs that traditional commercial content producers just don't get it. First sign: some of them are scouring these video sites, demanding videos be taken down or threatening lawsuits. I could see maybe going after whole episodes or whole movies, but those don't really work that well in the medium anyway - anyone both bored enough, cheap enough, and with low enough standards to watch a whole movie streamed like that isn't going to give you money any time soon anyway. Second sign: Most of them have never bothered to even put their stuff online. Even though Cartoon Network and Comedy Central have video clips you can't easily link to them, blog about them, stick them on your Myspace page, etc. In a lot of cases, you can't even search - you have to go to their home page, click on whatever weird name they came up with for their video clips section, then browse through lists of clips. This is the third innovation on YouTube and virtually every video content producer has missed this for the past 10 years. Almost every attempt to put video online has been difficult to use, hard to find (doesn't show up in searches), locked into some crappy format intended to deter copying, etc. They never really worked as part of the web. Online video has always felt forced, tacked on to the web rather than integrated into it. I can understand how so many web sites, TV shows, and video producers did not realize this before YouTube, but at this point it's pretty clear. Yet even now very few traditional video content producers are doing this! If Cartoon Network and Comedy Central made clips from their shows available, somewhat permanent, easy to link to, easy to put on blogs, etc... they could get a similar benefit and drive traffic to their sites as well. That is not to say that simply dumping a channel's clips on the web would be enough to unseat YouTube. Keep in mind the first two innovations-a successful online video site must make it easy for people to add content and interact, and it must have a wide breadth of content as well.