... even though I really, really want to:

In Myanmar, food aid only at the junta's behest
Wealthy Burmese who want to donate rice or other assistance have in several cases been told that everything must be channeled through the military. This angers local government officials like Tin Win who are trying to rebuild the lives of villagers. He twitched with rage as he described the rice the military gave him. "They gave us four bags," Tin Win said. "The rice is rotten - even the pigs and dogs wouldn't eat it."

The UN high commissioner for refugees delivered good rice to the local military leaders last week, but they kept it for themselves, Tin Win said, and distributed the water-logged, musty rice. "I'm very angry," he said, adding an expletive to describe the military.

For the ruling generals, who have been in power for over four decades in Myanmar, the driving motivation of handing out assistance is to show that they are in control and the benevolent providers for the nation, analysts say.

Everyone, do what you think you have to to help these people. Here's a link to the Red Cross's efforts. But I'm afraid it's not helping. I haven't found out how to help out the victims of the China Earthquake, but obviously that's a lot less people who need help.

Sigh.

-the Centaur

Labels: Philosophy

Yet another wacko has popped up with a scheme to control on other people's lives to make himself feel happy:

Chef Wants To Outlaw Out of Season Vegetables

Celebrity British chef Gordon Ramsay said restaurants should be fined if they serve out-of-season fruit and vegetables. "I don't want to see asparagus in the middle of December. I don't want to see strawberries from Kenya in the middle of March. I want to see it home-grown," he said after raising his concerns with Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

"Fruit and veg should be seasonal. Chefs should be fined if they don't have ingredients in season on their menu," he told the BBC on Friday.  ... "There should be stringent laws, licensing laws, to make sure produce is only used in season and season only," he added.

I'm not going to bother going on about how this would have killed my hardworking father's business shipping produce had such a law been passed in America.  I'm going to even devil's advocate for a second.  The outcome he wants ... eating foods in season prepared locally ... is actually a good thing.   Eating foods that are in season creates variety.  The "local foods" movement takes this further, reducing the cost to ship vegetables.  For example, the excellent Hopland Inn serves food from only a hundred or so miles away, and Google's Cafe 150 is named after the maximum radius of its ingredients.

But many other things we like to eat are NOT local, are NOT in season, and are NOT Gordon Ramsay's business.  Everything he is complaining about is phrased in terms of what he wants to see, and he wants us to pass a law, enforced by people with guns who will come to take your money, to enforce his whims in the presence of no concrete harm?

Ah-ah-ah.  I don't think so.

Tongue in cheek, what is it about Britain that breeds this kind of totalitarian control mindset?  They don't have a recent history of dictatorship, but everyone from Alan Moore to George Orwell to P.D. James keeps writing stories where England goes to hell in a totalitarian basket.  But I guess if I had the experience of these English writers, with springloaded Gordon Ramsays popping up everywhere calling for stringent regulation of everything from seasonal fruits to the proper time for tea, I could see myself popping out a dystopia.

-Anthony

(ObDisclaimer: I have no evidence that Gordon Ramsay is not a nice, decent, humane person, nor do I know that England is populated by an army of springloaded Gordon Ramsay clones popping up everywhere with random totalitarian proposals.  Those were jokes, in case you were wondering; almost all the people I've met from the British isles have been nice).

Labels: Philosophy

These words. This pen, this page. The writer, writing. The reader, reading; or perhaps a speaker and a hearer, or a typer and a computer, a screen and a viewer. Sharing these words.

Information, encoded into substance. Matter, patterned across space. Processes, persisting through time. Agents, taking patterns in, processing them, putting patterns back out: generating, interpreting, recreating information in relationship to its encoding, each sufficient to recreate the other, from the letters to the sounds to the ideas and back again, signs invoking each other in any combination: symbols. These words.

But what of the inspiration behind them? The motivation to write them? The matter that makes them? The patterns behind them? The persistence to hear them? The insight to perceive them? The processes that manipulate them? The rules behind the processes? The laws? The physics? How do they connect, so that I can ask "What is?" and I can answer ... with these words?

-the Centaur

Labels: Philosophy

Rayethon has developed the Klingon agonizer!

Run Away, The Ray Gun Is Coming:

In tests, even the most hardened Marines flee after a few seconds of exposure. It just isn't possible to tough it out. This machine has the ability to inflict limitless, unbearable pain. What makes it OK, says Raytheon, is that the pain stops as soon as you are out of the beam or the machine is turned off.

Actually this is better than a Klingon agonizer, which required direct contact:

Agonizer

An agonizer was a small device worn on the belts of Imperial personnel in the mirror universe, used to inflict pain for minor transgressions. [Agonizers] needed physical contact with their victims to be effective. In the primary universe, the Klingons also used a similar device...

Rayethon's "Silent Guardian", in contrast, is a beam of microwaves that penetrates the top layer of skin and stimulates nerve endings up to half a mile away.

Take that, Kang!
-the Centaur

Labels: Hard Science, Philosophy