Mika and Mako not only have wonderfully strange similar sounding names, they are quite adpet at making a fine, humorous photoblog about thier HOT date and the way that Mako resolved the problem of The Recalcitrant Cork.

And what I love about this expose is that it is so hackish. Not only devilishly humors, it also is accompanied by Technical Notes

Thus while pragmatic and efficient, it is presented with gusto, style, grace, and humor. Indeed, hackish.

ps– and note the classic pun

From Mako:

Patenting Patenting

One relatively recent development in the field of intellectual property is the ability to file for what are called business methods patents that do not cover a thing, an invention, or a design (the tradition scope of patents) but a way of doing business.

I think it would be a good strategy for companies with lots of over-broad — and in in-all-likelihood bogus — patents to file a business method patent on the act of filing over-broad and bogus patents to use as strategic leverage or tools for litigation. Better yet, they might patent the method of filing to have someone else’s’ patents reexamined and tossed out.

Of course, there’s plenty of prior art but the USPTO doesn’t seem to be too bothered by details like that anymore.

Move over segway for the conference bike a truly bizarre cycling innovation. I have to admit it looks like it is so dorky that is is totally rad. I mean you can workout, hang out friends, and get somewhere at all once. I wonder if those cheeseball outfits come with the bike.

At the steep price of 9500 Euros, I would only hope so..

I met Mika in Brazil, Mako’s delightful other half. I just stumbled onto her blog today and she has some of the most stunningly absurb, yet totally enlightening and delightful entries. In fact, she specializes in these koan nuggets of …. you decide…

zakuro

Pomegranates are tastieee. As I picked each piece out, it reminded me of something: pulling out teeth.

It’d be difficult to trust any dentists who like pomegranates.

I have been struggling with a concept and historical method I call historical irony and below is a first stab that I wrote tonight…

Historical irony is a method of positive critique that magnifies social struggles and alternatives that surface unexpectedly and as significant despite the undeniable existence of dominant ideologies and structures of powers. Thus historical irony accentuates a central feature of the human condition, namely unpredictability (Markell 2003) which I think can be productively thought of as vital force that deflates, even if only minimally, one of the crucial features of actually existing systems of concentrated power: the desire for perfect control. In other words, at a highly conceptual level, power seeks to eliminate the ironic in human affairs, rendering a world where nothing contrary to what is expected by those in power ever happens. To state more mundanely, it is world where every large-scale bureaucracy (from the IRS to the DMV to the U of Chicago registrar) can screw you for a late bill and where the president of Time Warner can convinces us that intellectual property is God’s gift to all earthlings. Aside from being a boring (and potentially very tragic) world, life without irony is a world without politics. Thus as method that wants to affirm politics, historical irony seeks to magnify

So as it turns out, I am going for the impossible: Finishing my dissertation by June. Whether or not I achieve it, I will be a lot less available for my other passsions and pursuits, karaoke, blogging, biking, SOSHI, and most notably, wasting time.

I have a feeling my blog entries will plumment in numbers so I might as well make them as absurd as possible (since I am doing something absurd why not mimic my life) and hopefully still have them reflect on what is going on in my life.

So, I am spending more time than usual in the library and since they have recently renovated the bathrooms, the University has provided its students with the latest and not so greatest advancements in toilet technology.

Like all postmodern bathroom gadgets, the toilet detects the user through sensors, but these new ones are like extra, no, I mean EXTRA sensitive, so that with any movement of your body, the toilet flushes and with such force, that it resembles less of a flush and more like a weak geyser.

This is totally absurb. You either have to launch into acrobatics while using these state of the art toilets or use the one toilet (in the handicapped section) in order to avoid what you are trying to place neatly away.

Anway, I know this is somewhat gross but I wonder if the university can get their money back, and if they do, would they replace the state of the art for the state of the retro? Or will U of C students, especially the women, develop some really fine leg muscles from using the toilets in our library?

Why do psychiatrists feel compelled to include every “deviance from the norm” in the DSM ( the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), and by this why do they abnormalize everything?

So a group of ‘chiatrists (probably after quitting coffee or something) have decided that coffee withdrawl might be a pyschiatric condition worth listing in the DSM. Now I have quit coffee numerous times, and yes, it is painful, mentally so, but what is the point of inclduing this in the DSM?

Sept. 30, 2004 — Researchers are saying that caffeine withdrawal should now be classified as a psychiatric disorder.

A new study that analyzes some 170 years’ worth of research concludes that caffeine withdrawal is very real — producing enough physical symptoms and a disruption in daily life to classify it as a psychiatric disorder. Researchers are suggesting that caffeine withdrawal should be included in the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), considered the bible of mental disorders…

“The withdrawal symptoms can be mild or severe, but it’s estimated that 13% of people develop symptoms so significant that they can’t do what they normally would do — they can’t work, they can’t leave the house, they can’t function,” he says.”

I think one of the most fundamental incorrect premises of the DSM is that we are supposed to “function” normally all the time. Life is too rich and full of surprises in both those good and horrible ways for that to ever be the case. Now I am not one to say that no mentall illness exists (believe me there are too many literally crazy folks in my family for me to ever say that) but I wish they would stop wasting their time by putting everthing under the DSM bag and concentrate on the stuff that matters, which is also not just shoving medicines down people’s throats but that is another story…

I recently finished a brilliant book, Bound by Recognition by Patchen Markell. Lucid yet intricate, Patchen grapples with basic facts of the human condition and applies it to political theory and uses it to launch a critique againt orthodox currents in the debate about multiculturalism. Here I cannot provide a rich or even simple account of the book. But for the purpose of this entry, it is worth noting my favorite part in his analysis is about the fact of unpredictability which can be explained by two words he uses a lot, action and bound. Over and over again he argues persuasively that our actions always exceeds our intentions, this surplus is what interconnects us to other people (and other actions) in ways we could have never imagined. This in fact is what nullifies any idea of the self-enclosed, atomized individual, a zip-locked freezer safe entity of self hood. Eastern philosophy and religion has made debunking sovereign
notions of the self central to itself, while much of Western thought has traveled in the other direction, arguing for or at least an aspiring to various forms of sovereignty (the self, the social group, the nation). Using some gripping stories and accounts from classical Western literature and philosophy, he is able to skillfully deconstruct the illusions of sovereinty, and also argue the ways in which forms of injustice are often predicated on these ideas of sovereignty. Anyway, if you are into political philosophy, Hegel, Greek tragedy, multiculturalism or a good read, check it out.

So, I especially like books that seem to confirm the mundane experiences of your life. As I explained a couple of days a go, a piece of mine that was originally published in an arcane anthropology journal, made its way (and I have no idea how) to some equally enigmatic (at least to me) Linux jounral and then made it to GrokLaw. Though I fully intended that that article be confined to an academic audience (having already published other similar pieces that were less anthro-jargony), my intentions criss-crossed with someone elses and new results were born. This is what Patchen shows the unpredicable nature of our actions, makes life at once exciting, risky, joyful, and full of sorrow.

Though receiving accolades from PJ at GrokLaw and others who have written me, I also received the attention (by which I mean I received emails) from two of the more well known figures in Free and Open Source Software, easily identified by their three letter initials ESR and RMS. Both to say the least were unhappy with my description of FOSS as politically agnostic. I think part of difference of opinion can be explained by some confusion over language and terms (and arent most misunderstandings over this), but otherwise I think we just have pretty different interpretations (or perhaps more apt, different ideas over where one should interpret social life)

In the past most anthropologists never had to deal with the question of

Hackers like coffee and apparently some coffee home roasters think of themselves as hackers (or so I read on a coffe roasting mailing list today). Unconvinced, I went to this page Hot Rod Home Coffee Roasters: The Spirit of Invention and I was immediately convinced, these coffee nuts are hackers!

For some people who roast their own coffee, off-the-shelf home coffee roasting appliances don’t cut it. Either they don’t offer enough control of the roast, are too expensive, or just don’t allow the roaster (uh, the person that is) to express themselves. The homemade or seriously modified commercial roasters on this page are alternately amusing and intimidating in appearance, but whatever the case, they probably work very well. And if they don’t, you can bet they will be reconfigured endlessly until they do by their respective owners. …

I woke up groggy and tired afer a late night of dinner and karaoke to celebrate my b-day and I woke to tough-to-swallow-news. I won’t go into the horrific details but I lost a lot of data on my computer, luckily more than 90% (the most important stuff) was backed up and most of the lost stuff is in print form. Actually the only information I lost lost were quotes I planned to use in my dissertation chapters that do exist but only in “raw form” (ie in interviews and fieldnotes). Now I need to go back and pull them out. Sigh. I guess it never harms you to read through all these email lists and field notes again. It can only help.

The good news though is that my article in Anthropology Quarterly which I thought would never see the light of day (that is, it would collect dust in libraries) is now reprinted on the web atLinux Insider and was also mentioned in a really good (and long) article in GrokLaw. Given the AQ piece in the Social Thought and Commentary section, this is only fitting and I am glad to hear the editor allowed them to reprint the article.

Now I need to get my bearings, keep working on my dissertation and read the Groklaw article and remember to make a back up of my stuff at least weekly….