On What I Believe

I believe in the self-sufficiency of the Human Meat Machine. I believe that we, the Extraordinary Flesh Machine Corps, make our own way in this wholly wondrous universe, and that all the wonders we wreak are our own, as are our atrocities. I believe that the Amazing Flesh Computer every one of us is equipped with is a mighty tool, a tool mighty enough to decide and to deduct, to discern what is Right from what is Wrong. I am proud when I or my brethren in Meatship use this tool to correctly discern this difference and act accordingly, as this is a decision made under our own Computational Power, and I am sad when this tool fails somewhere in this process and mistakes are made; I therefore believe that our existence is cheapened by the supposition that a set of moral commandments, handed down from on high, coupled to the promise of eternal doom and despair should we stray, is necessary to keep us moral.
Atheism is not an absence of belief. It is not the anti-belief, at least not for me. I do not believe in nothing. I believe in Meat Machines, self reliance, emergent systems, science, and evidence. My belief is strong, and it gives me comfort, pride, and peace of mind. And sometimes it gives me grief, when I have to struggle with the stupidity that has still not been eradicated, but I never have to struggle to reconcile my system of belief with what is happening, because all of this is contained therein.

Tinkering, tinkering

So, while switching to the new-fangled customizable layout I thought I'd change the look of this place completely. So far, I like the new look, and I definitely like working with the new layout in the background. As with nearly all things Google does, the interface is straightforward and good. It doesn't afford me the kind of control manual editing would, but as you can tell from my post frequency, I don't really want to put that much time into this (and the little time I do put into it better be spent posting), so I'm really grateful for this.

Lord, send brains. Oh Lord, we need them so.

I can't fucking believe that a site like cbsnews.com is incapable of fucking telling "its" and "it's" apart. It boggles my fucking mind.
Dear Lord, this fucking place is going down the shithole. I think I need to work harder on getting off this fucking dirtball before everything goes fucking sideways. I'll be at the cornershop buying more, stronger, deadlier smokes and booze.

Google won't believe me that I'm hep to the jive

Google is my tool of choice. I use it. If I need to find information, Google will do it for me. But the way it handles language preferences really bothers me. For starters, when I want to access google.com I get redirected to google.de ("Silly user! You presume to know where you want to go!"), which is also set to "search for German results only" by default. Now, my English is for all intents and purposes as good as my German, so in order to get the best search results possible I, of course, set it to "all the web" instead of just German language results. It's then that I find out that, while now English (and Russian and similar, too) results are now displayed, Google still feels it has to account for my Germanity by somehow ranking results in German higher than those in other languages (Gee, thanks. I was really worried I'd get results in some unintelligeble goobledigook when I hit the "all the web"-button); Looking in my personal Google preferences, I find that I have the "search for any language" button enabled. It infuriates me slightly that the site doesn't seem to honor that, and skews the results in favor of German sites, which is usually not the result I am looking for. So I choose English as my language of choice, which is of course not the best thing either: Now my results are skewed towards the English language (which gives me better results due to the prevalence of English on the web, but still), and it also removes the "Search for German results only" option from the search page, which is really bothersome for when I do want to find something in German.
I find this way of Google to pretend it's giving me results in "any" language while it's actually only considering anything that isn't German as second-tier results bothersome and more than a little condescending: I didn't choose "any" language to feel cosmopolitan while still secretly wishing I never get to see anything in a scary language I didn't grow up with. I actually want to see the top websites that contain the terms "rainbow brite tentacle xxx triple penetration". Even if it's just to go "huh" when the top three results are in French and Hungarian. Because I want software to do what I want it to, not what it thinks i actually want it to.

tags: google searching rant

That is how they get information. For true!

This is the most fucking awesome post about the most recent "security measures" due to the latest "terrorist plot":

Intelligence about the Hair-Gel Bombers was extracted through torture in Pakistan, as in "Please stop electrocuting my testicles! What? Only if I reveal a -- OWWWWWW -- terrorist plot -- AAAAAAHH? All right -- SCREEEECH! -- the terrorists will be blowing up a plane with, with, oh man, I don't know, hair gel! Yes! Hair gel!"

Boing Boing is my most favourite place on the web and I'm totally gay for Cory Doctorow's brain.

tags: boingboing security paranoia terrorism awesome