i prefer pi

Facebook has rolled out support for work-based networks now — if you’re an employee of Accenture, Amazon, Apple, EA, Gap, Intel, Intuit, Microsoft, Pepsi, PWC, or Teach for America, that is. Should I join? The box sits there on the front page, beckoning me to submit. Just when I thought that I’d put a proper distance between her and myself, her siren song draws me back.

An e-mail I received from my grandfather this morning:

In the last few months, Psalm 63 has rapidly become one of my favorite psalms, thanks in no small part (I think) to this arrangement of it by one of the worship bands at church. I feel pretty confident asserting that it’s the best (only?) rock-ska-billy setting of scripture in existence.

1 O God, you are my God,
earnestly I seek you;
my soul thirsts for you,
my body longs for you,
in a dry and weary land
where there is no water.

2 I have seen you in the sanctuary
and beheld your power and your glory.

3 Because your love is better than life,
my lips will glorify you.

4 I will praise you as long as I live,
and in your name I will lift up my hands.

5 My soul will be satisfied as with the richest of foods;
with singing lips my mouth will praise you.

6 On my bed I remember you;
I think of you through the watches of the night.

7 Because you are my help,
I sing in the shadow of your wings.

8 My soul clings to you;
your right hand upholds me.

9 They who seek my life will be destroyed;
they will go down to the depths of the earth.

10 They will be given over to the sword
and become food for jackals.

11 But the king will rejoice in God;
all who swear by God’s name will praise him,
while the mouths of liars will be silenced.

Follow along with me, if you’d like.

1. President Bush gives this speech at Tuskeegee University.
2. It languishes for a day or two, until Engadget pulls some excerpt out, giving it the headline “Bush: government research developed iPod”.
3. People go crazy.
4. Slashdot runs the story this morning (and when I say “runs the story”, I mean “excerpts the excerpts and adds some bullshit commentary”), with the headline “U.S. Government Developed the iPod,” adding the verbiage (see above) “President Bush claims that government research developed the iPod.”
5. And lo, an aphorism is born, just like “everyone knows that Al Gore claimed that he invented the internet.”

Sometimes I hate the internet so much.

If you’d like to read President Bush’s actual remarks, he said:

Here’s another interesting example of where basic research can help change quality of life or provide practical applications for people. The government funded research in microdrive storage, electrochemistry and signal compression. They did so for one reason: It turned out that those were the key ingredients for the development of the Ipod. I tune into the Ipod occasionally, you know? (Laughter.) Basic research to meet one set of objectives can lead to interesting ideas for our society. It helps us remain competitive. So the government should double the commitment to the most basic — critical research programs in the physical sciences over the next 10 years. I look forward to Congress to doubling that commitment.

Clearly taken out of context, clearly an attempt at humor, and clearly not a claim that he was responsible for the development of a popular piece of consumer electronics.

I had a dream last night wherein I was only paying $2.40 for a gallon of gas, instead of the $2.91 that I paid yesterday. How weird is that?

I desperately want to relate the mornings up here to Galadriel, saying that they’re “beautiful and cold and terrible as the dawn,” but comparing the morning to the dawn? That just doesn’t make sense. At any rate, they’re beautiful and cold and warming. It was 35 yesterday at this time, but it’s up to 44 today, which will be a welcome respite from having to wear Under Armor, a thermal, a long-sleeved shirt, and a running jacket.

I turn twenty-three and a half today, which, if I’m not mistaken, was roughly how old Dimitri was when we first began to room together. In September of 2002.

Jason Scott of textfiles.com recently delivered a presentation at Notacon entitled “The Great Failure of Wikipedia.” He posted the audio to archive.org last weekend (which, in internet time, might as well have been 1996), people blogged about it, and someone transcribed it, but I only got around to checking it out last night. It’s a fascinating dissection of politics, game theory, and human nature intersecting internet idealism.

I used to take care of articles pertaining to A&M, and I largely wrote the article on President Gates as it exists in its present state. At the time, I’d drunk the Wikipedia Kool-Aid, and I expected an army of magnanimous editors would quickly be dispatched to correct any errors or faux pas that I made. In fact, I can look at the page today, and despite the fact that some 45 edits have been made in the past 21 months, at least one minor factual error has persisted. I check in every now and then to see if anyone has caught it. I also used to take care of the article on Texas A&M, but in the lapse of my vigilance, it has (repeatedly) exploded into a horrid spew of PR copy, and I haven’t mustered the energy or resolve to clean it up again.

A few of you have asked why I don’t update very often these days. The long and short of things is that, somewhere in the last two years (and especially in the last six months), the Internet stopped being a place for me, a wide and wild frontier, and became a technology. I use it, like I use the microwave or the internal combustion engine or the inclined plane, but I don’t have a particular attachment to any of those technologies either. My life would involve more physical exertion if they didn’t exist, but they don’t fundamentally alter what it means to be human. I don’t really use the Internet at home, as I get plenty of it at work, and I actually sit down at my desk and write letters to people by hand on paper and send them through the mail. So it’s not instant — what’s the hurry? Nothing that I create will last forever.

Several years ago, archivist Jeff Rothenberg noted that “It is only slightly facetious to say that digital information lasts forever–or five years, whichever comes first.” In the book of Ecclesiastes, old Solomon said much the same thing some twenty-nine centuries ago. Our life, our state, is transience — here for a moment, fading the next, largely without novelty or noteworthiness. Even those whose names we record and whose lives and deaths we study are still dead.

Except one.

Sartre was wrong, or at least, incomplete.