Is It Time Yet?
I
Do not
Want to step so quickly
Over a beautiful line on God's palm
As I move through the earth's
Marketplace
Today.
I do not want to touch any object in this world
Without my eyes testifying to the truth
That everything is
My Beloved.
Something has happened
To my understanding of existence
That now makes my heart always full of wonder
And kindness.
I do not
Want to step so quickly
Over this sacred place on God's body
That is right beneath your
Own foot
As I
Dance with
Precious life
Today.
The Gift, Poems by Hafiz, translations by Daniel Ladinsky
Claire Wolfe at Loompanics - Is It Time Yet? Or is America still at the awkward stage? Yay! Loompanics put up Claire's article that I read in the paper catalog a while back. Ignore the "by Russ Kick" below the title and have a rollicking good time.
Ron Paul's Texas Straight Talk - Tax Cuts Benefit All Americans: Dr. Paul tells us why we should support GW's modest tax cut.
Beyond the deceit, however, is the unmistakable Washington mentality so clearly exhibited by the assembled politicians. One Member told the audience with a straight face that the Bush proposal needed further study to "see who gets what." In the surreal world of Congress, your income presumptively belongs to the government, which decides what members of society deserve federal largesse. Any income you get to keep is generously "given" to you by the federal government. Tax cut proposals are studied to determine the "cost" to government, and opposition is rallied with the cry "we can't afford it." Perversely, this mentality is touted by politicians who claim that tax cuts are fiscally irresponsible. They endlessly repeat the lie that Reagan-era tax cuts caused deficits, when in truth it was the inability of Congress to control spending which ballooned our national debt. In fact, 1980s tax cuts increased federal revenues, because economic output expands when government takes less. To hear big spending, pro-tax politicians claim they represent fiscal responsibility strains the limits of believability.
Jerry Pournelle's Current View - Tuesday, February 20, 2001: Well now I'm curious. I'll have to watch his page closely over the next little while. This page will likely move here next week. [pournelle]
And I have come to some conclusions about global warming and CO2 levels that may surprise some readers. Stay tuned.
Stephanie Relfe - How to Know Your Life Purpose: Ms. Relfe actually does a pretty good job of living up to the title. Her ideas originated with R. Buckminster Fuller and E. Edwards Deming. A good read. [carnatic]
Precession is "the effect of bodies in motion on other bodies in motion". When you get into motion, with others who are in motion, focus on adding value, doing more with less, changing systems and achieving synergy. Then watch the blessings come in!
Leonard Horowitz and Joseph Puleo - Healing Codes for the Biological Apocalpyse: this book is recommended by Ms. Relfe. It contains an analysis of the Bible revealing "six electromagnetic sound frequencies that correspond to the six missing tones of the ancient Solfeggio scale." This scale supposedly has healing properties. I decided to check it out, which gave me a reason to learn about Java's sound system. This article doesn't reveal all six frequencies, but a quick Google search found them at http://www.bwgen.com/list/1999-12.htm. They are 396Hz, 417Hz, 528Hz, 639Hz, 741Hz, & 852Hz. I wrote some code to play them in response to the numeric keys. It sounds like the first four notes of "I'm Getting Sentimental Over You" followed by two tones that straddle the fifth note of the song. My Java code lags the keyboard by too long to be much fun to play with. I need to learn about mixers and amplitude controls to make it work well. The code so far is at http://billstclair.com/Tones.java.html. Tested in JDK 1.3 on Windoze 2000.
The Sydney Morning Herald -
Kiddie cocaine: what's hitting the new generation 
: How long will
it take for people to realize that the problem with "overactive"
kids is that it is completely unnatural for a child to be cooped up in
a classroom. [grabbe]
Opponents claim a conspiracy between the drug's manufacturer, psychiatrists and ADHD support groups has led to Ritalin becoming widely and routinely over-prescribed in a way that unnecessarily changes children's characters and places them at risk of potentially damaging side effects.Includes a cartoon showing two people sitting at a table. One is reading a newspaper (R) and the other is eating a sandwich (E). The newspaper reader talks first:At the same time, the availability of the drug has bred a booming black market in which children sell their Ritalin to high school and college students to be crushed and snorted as the latest recreational drug of choice on campus.
R: Apparently lots of American kids are dosed with Ritalin.E: What do they suffer from?
R: Being American kids.
Robert X. Cringely at InfoWorld - Bobby wonders if Intel is dissing Java and if Intuit will live up to its name: There's a rumor going around that the Sun's Java VM doesn't work with the new Intel Pentium IV. No more specifics about exactly what doesn't work.
I managed to install PGP 7.0.3. All that I had to do was quit all my applications. Windoze installers always tell you to quit all applications, but this is the first time I've had one fail because I didn't do so. It appears to work. I could decrypt/verify an old message and sign/encrypt and decrypt/verify a new one. It now supports the new Advanced Encryption Standard (Rijndael) and Twofish. It also now has continuous entropy collection, which should make the random key generator more secure. Passphrase caching is shared amongst all the components. You can disable the sharing or all passphrase caching.
