Got this from Cryptome:

At issue is H.R. 46, a seemingly harmless bill titled ‘Public Safety Medal of Valor.’ The bill sets up a federal board to award federal Medals of Valor to policemen, federal agents, and the like. But Congress, unlike many state legislatures, does not operate under a constitutional requirement that a bill’s subject matter and title be the same. And it turns out that there’s much more in this bill than just medals for firefighters. What the bill does is:

• Expand federal asset forfeiture.
• Expand wiretapping.
• Provide special additional punishments for people who use encryption.
• Federalize juvenile crimes, which are properly matters for state governments to address.

The House committee report on the bill, of course, only discusses medals for police officers ? and not any of the unrelated material which is being added in the closing hours of Congress. The unrelated, dangerous, material comes mostly from the never-passed H.R. 2448.

Crazy, no? Just another example of how fucked up the US legal system is.

Ah well, another lengthy no-posting interval.

Anyway, after some comments by people actually visiting this site, I’m working on fixing it up, tidying up the code, and finally adding the ‘musings’ and ‘about’ areas, and finally putting in some links.

The 27th of December has been decided by me to be ‘The Geekfest at the end of the (real) millenium!’ Hopefully people should be able to bring computers over and there will be much fun and gnashing of teeth.

For those of you with a codey bent, I’m working on replacing the dreamweaver autogeneration craziness with CSS goodness. I must say, Netscape really doesn’t seem to understand the idea of layout inheritance, which is a bit irritating. I’m also proud to say that I will be only using fancy software for generating really complex code now, which I will then edit the hell out of in notepad. So it’s back to notepad for HTML editing for me!

Wow, that was incoherent.

Well, I wish all a merry celebration of consumerism, and a happy real millenium!

Wow, I didn’t realise I hadn’t posted in so long.

c’est la vie, I guess.

The essay was completed, handed in, and returned to me to be modified, and it looks like it will be around 5000-6000 words.

Today is Trang’s birthday, and I’m taking her to The Italian Village at the Rocks. Large amounts of spending ahoy!

In other news, (heh, I’ve always wanted to say that…) Dr J and I have roughed out a very basic plan for my thesis.

Basically it goes:

• Summary of Barnes and Ravetz, and a comparison.
• Leading into a discussion of my own ideas about concepts.
• Followed by a study of the field of AI research, and how some of my stuff is reflected there.

My own ideas concern how we as human beings acquire and manipulate concepts. Basically, I think that a lot of the confusion about this results from the vestiges of postivist philosophy, and the idea that concept membership is a binary function.

Well, I seem to have missed the deadline on my essay. Sigh. Ah well, 3500 words in two days is pretty good in my book. Hopefully I should be able to do the last thousand or so in the next couple of days.

Hi again all. Posts are a bit infrequent at the moment, but it’s been nuts the last little while.

Stuff I’m working on at the moment:
Leveraged v2.0, my new job,
CPS, my other job,
building a new desk, harder than you might think,
and writing, writing writing, about all manner of craziness.

Sometimes it’s weird to be thinking thoughts like ‘Language is not thought’, and there being a serious chance that I could defend that as a position in academia. I won’t say much more for the moment, but I’m really looking forward to a chance to write a real polemic. I’ll probably tear it up straight away, but there you go.

If I’m being incoherent, I apologise.

Thesis update: I’m writing the first paper for my subject this session: a textual comparison of Barry Barnes and Jerome Ravetz, and how the finitism and implicit knowledge theses of the first support the craft knowledge theses of the other and vice versa.

To do at some point: Finally post something to the ‘musings’ page. Maybe I’ll post my reading option paper, and the paper I did for the Cosmology distinction course I did in year 12.

Who knows.

Again, it’s been a while since my last post…

Sorry.

Currently my academic engagement is a textual concordance of books by Barry Barnes and Jerome Ravetz on the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK). The aim is to show that some of the material put forward by Barnes can be used to underlay the somewhat shaky foundations of Ravetz’s work. Gotta hand in a writeup of this by the end of October.

I’m also reading Personal Knowledge: Towards a post-critical Philosophy, by Michael Polanyi. Still only a little way into it, but it sounds *very* interesting. It seems that he has similar feelings to me with respect to the experience of ‘discovery’.

I feel that the experience of discovery, or to use a more ‘religious’ word, revelation, is fundamental to our existence as human beings. The feeling that mathematicians describe about particularly beautiful mathematics, or that a programmer will describe about a beautifully crafted piece of code, is, I think, the same feeling as that felt by those who have religious experiences of the first magnitude. For those of us who, on occasion also experiment with mind-altering substances, we all know that you can experience a similar experience with their help too.

I think that until people who study science realise that the awe that one feels in these situations is just as important for what they are studying as for anything else, the study of science, and indeed science itself will be all the poorer.

Had an interesting idea today. Put in its most pithy form, it goes: Philosophy of science is to sociology of science as physics is to engineering. PhilSci is concerned with ideal situations and states of affairs, while sociology of science is most concerned with what actually goes on. Perhaps one day we’ll even get to the stage where the two fields will speak to one another enough to make some use of each other.

Yay /.! Here’s a cool site that compares scenes in the Matrix with scenes from Ghost in the Shell, two of my favourite dystopian movies. It does point out some of the scenes I noticed, like the shooting-the-pillar scene, but also some I didn’t notice too.

Well, It’s been a while, and much craziness has occurred since I last posted. The Olympics have begun, rocked, and ended, Shay bought a DVD player, and I’ve got a new job! (Well, the job is really Leveraged Work v2.0, since I’ll be working for Adelaide bank at Leveraged equities doing customer support, getting paid niiiice money.)

A sobering article (again from a link at /.): a letter written by a guy from twenty years in the future to himself now. Possibly a little bit extreme, but reductio ad absurdum always has been and always will be a valid argument. Link here.