It's quiet now...

...Wind is still/As the sun goes down on Locust Hill...

— The Silver Hearts, Locust Hill

My copy of No Place jes' got here from CD Baby. Oh happy day...

Drafts, draughts

Jes' finished an IETF draft. Time for a draught.

Spec'ing crypto protocols is bad for you. Need Arkell.

Odd .oggs

Happened into Steam Powered Studios following a link on Fafblog a bit back. Found it a kinda fun place to troll for odd .oggs. Can't say I found anything that's completely blown my mind as yet, but thought I'd pass it on, anyway. (grizzled miner mode) Thar might be gold in them thar hills... I think... (end grizzled miner mode)

Aside from what's in their archives, I really like the look of what these guys are doin'. Don't actually know much about studio work (I can just handle Audacity without injuring myself), but I think I might have just found one of my next careers.

And hey, the studio band's got a French horn. That's gotta be a good thing, right?

So very full of it

Back in the pseudoscience files, I'd always sorta assumed that Behe, author of the really quite silly Darwin's Black Box was, actually, basically a mostly honest guy.

I know, I know. Silly me. But, really, that was my impression. Looked at the book, thought it was among the more embarrassing collections of mistakes a man could make, but always sorta assumed he made them, after a fashion, mostly in good faith. That's to say: sure, he's already convinced his favouritest deity musta done it all, so he sorta sees what he wants to see, and disregards the rest, to quote Simon and Garfunkel. So if he's dishonest, at the very least, in the fashion of a lotta people who believe things because they want to, any lies would be the relatively subtle ones about emphasis and significance such folk tend to tell themselves.

Turns out, however, I was wrong about that. And he's just as slimy a quote-miner as Gish or Hovind..

I'd go on a short 'well, it ain't like ya could exactly do something like this by accident' rant, but I think the linked piece kinda speaks for itself. You couldn't. And Behe's busted.

Pure and simple

This (PDF) is an excerpt from something I produced not terribly long ago. Said I'd try to post a little more of works in progress; this is the first.

I'm cheating a bit, posting this first, in that in that it isn't really a going concern: I wrote it a few months back, and the book to which it belongs probably isn't going to happen for quite a little while, now. It's an odd notion of mine that, while I'm quite sure I could pull this off now, I don't quite want to. Got another thing on the go—much more mainstream, and definitely not a kid's book—that I figure I should do first, before I pigeonhole myself too thoroughly in this genre.

Still, it was exactly what I was looking for. Fantasy brushed with twilight, pure and simple.

The freedom archipelago

The Medium Lobster tells you all you need to know about Guantanamo and the rest of the lovely archipelago.

On the same general subject, I noted with something a little like amusement (sans any actual laughing, since torture and detainment are really only so funny) this morning one of those strange same-planet-different-worlds things via Google News... the news stories collected on the Amnesty International gulag comparison thing had two general sorts of headlines—either: 'Amnesty backs away from Gulag comparison', or 'Amnesty stands by Gulag comparison'.

Curiously, the meat is the same in all the stories however: the Amnesty USA chief did say that no, Guantanamo and the rest of the extended system now attached to it don't do the same things to people as did the Soviet gulag (no starvation, for instance, and no forced labour)... but like the gulag, people are literally and apparently intentionally 'disappeared' into the system, and no one outside knows where they are. And there's torture.

The other comment that seems to have been used to justify the softened headlines in some press (so far in US and UK press, so far as I've seen) and brought the 'Amnesty still pissed' headlines in most of the rest of the world—the fact that the Amnesty USA executive director (one William Schulz) couldn't actually say with certainty that Rumsfeld himself or anyone else at a high level of the administration approved the torture and beatings...

And what we get from that is the headline Amnesty USA-'Don't know for sure' about Guantanamo...

Riiiight. That's the headline under the circumstances, fersure. And sure, they're 'backing away' to say that oh, okay, it's not exactly like the Gulag. 'Cos hey, Guantanamo has no salt mines, I guess.

Let's sum this up: An arm of the US govermnent is (a) torturing people. And (b) subjecting them to indefinite detention (explicitly so, actually, since they've been clearly and fairly publically saying that they don't actually have enough to bring these folks to trial, and are thus looking at new ways to keep them locked up notwithstanding that minor problem). And running (c) a constellation of prisons into which they're disappearing people, in a fashion Pinochet might have recognized...

And yet, somehow, the story is: 'the US government is not starving people or working them to death'.

Well, good. Goood. Nice to see we're keepin' the bar set nice and high.

Our miniature culture vultures

Our four-year-old's demanding weekend schedule took me to entirely too much live theatre and dance these past few days for me to spend any time on the net. That and the lawns and gardens (finally got 'round to cutting the back lawn, and just in time... in another week, I mighta needed a chainsaw) meant a very busy weekend. So no posting, lately.

Said it before, I'll say it again: if it weren't for our kids, I'd have no cultural life to speak of, really. Good thing they've got taste.