Perhaps you heard about the Critical Mass event in New York 2 years ago when officer Patrick Pogan attacked one of the riders, and then subsequently lied on his police report and charged Christopher Long with attempted assault and a few other charges.

If not. I invite you to watch the video.

Well officer Pogan went to court, and was acquitted of assault and harrassment charges, but found guilty of lying on his police report about what happened. It should be noted that this case never would have gone to court if some random witness hadn’t taped it. Pogan lost his job because of the conviction. He’s no longer a cop, and apparently the judge thought that was punishment enough, so he faces no further penalties.

This is despite continuing to lie about the incident in his defense. Even after the case had started, he claimed he had given verbal commands to Long to stop so he could ticket him. He then said he was only trying to protect himself and didn’t mean to misrepresent what had happened (His police report said that Long rode right into him and knocked him down. I’m not sure how that could be characterized as a paperwork error.)

The fact that Pogan got off as easily as he did is a testament to 3 things:

1. Police unions are powerful and have very good lawyers
2. Judges almost always deliver extremely lenient sentences to cops
3. Juries hate convicting cops of crimes

I’m frankly amazed that he was found not guilty of the assault and harassment charges and surprised they didn’t throw the book at him for falsifying a police report.

Watch the video again.

Pogan has his back turned to the riders. He turns around to look at oncoming riders. 4 seconds after turning, he starts walking to intercept Long. It’s hard to imagine what offenses Pogan witnessed in 4 seconds that would motivate him to want to stop Long, but let’s pretend something happened.

He clearly doesn’t raise his hands in an effort to get him to stop, and clearly isn’t yelling for Long to stop. In the next 2 seconds he simply strides over and shoulder checks him really really hard. He didn’t stick his arm out to block the way, didn’t raise his hands to signal to stop. And he obviously wasn’t trying to defend himself as he had to clear at least 6 feet to smash into Long.

There’s not a lot of wiggle room in this video. It’s hard to imagine it could be any more clear and incriminating. Yet Pogan walks away from all of this with only unemployment as a consequence.

The reason I point to this case rather than the recent manslaughter conviction of a BART cop in Oakland, is that not only is it less controversial, but that there was almost nothing at stake here. Pogan was only on the job a week when this happened, no it’s not like they were losing a really valuable cop here. And this wasn’t a case with the potential for a life sentence. It was assault and fraud charges. While he could have faced 4 years in prison maximum, he could have been given a month in county prison segregated from the other prisoners, and I think everyone would have been happy. No one was out for blood, they just wanted Pogan to face the same justice they face. Which was clearly not what happened here.

If nothing else, this proves that cops can simply flat out lie on their reports when it’s convenient to them to do so with no consequence at all. And if they’re caught dead to rights by a video camera, the worst that will happen is they’ll lose their job. That’s a really really bad message to send to the public. It means you’re at the mercy of the police no matter what.

So let’s just assume that there are other intelligent life forms in the galaxy that are capable of interstellar space travel and are interested in contacting other intelligent life forms for whatever reason. This isn’t a safe assumption for a whole lot of reasons, but let’s roll with it to set up a best case scenario.

So given that, lets look at some of the problems:

Space is incomprehensibly large.

I mean that quite literately. Our brains really haven’t evolved to conceptualize very big numbers, or very large distances. So we can’t help but feel like a trip to visit us would be a long journey, but something relatable to other long journeys we have taken. Maybe it’s like being on a train for a whole bunch of years.

Unfortunately space is so vast that it doesn’t really work out like that. Traveling even to star systems that are relatively astronomically close, even traveling at the speed of light would take many human lifetimes. Venture out much further and there’s a good chance that the species you’re planning on visiting will have died out, or been destroyed by a cosmic event by the time you arrive.

Say that we’re lucky enough to have an intelligent life form in the middle of our own galaxy. Great news! At the speed of light it will take them 50,000 years to get here. For a little perspective, modern humans have only been around for 200,00 years. We almost went extinct 70,000 years ago. We developed agriculture only 10,000 years ago. We’ve been using radio waves for only around 90 years.

If our friends don’t live in our galaxy, then perhaps they are in our nearest major galaxy of Andromeda, a mere 2.5 million light years away. If our friends had decided to visit us 2.5 million years ago, they would have made that decision based on information from 5 million years ago. That means they would be choosing to come to visit Australopithecus or basically, bipedal apes.

But 2.5 million years ago, the only information coming off the planet earth was in the form of radiant waves of energy, the most common of which is light. Visible and infrared. What an alien race could tell about a planet from 2.5 million light years distant is pretty limited due to attenuation.

We haven’t been around all that long

So lets go back to radio. We started using it around 90 years ago, sending out ordered information content out into the universe. This surely is something that would pique the interest of an alien species. The problem is, it’s only traveled 90 light years. Since we’re near the edge of our galaxy, our radio waves have only traveled 1/1000th of the total distance into our own galaxy.

The observable universe is 93 billion light years across, but has only been around 14 or so billion years. A life form could have been intelligent for 5 billion years already, but not have received any light from our galaxy, let alone our planet. At least not light from who we are now, or where we are now. When looking over long distances, you’re really looking very very far back in time. When things are far enough away, you’re not looking across to where they are, you’re actually looking back at the beginning of the universe.

Where would they start?

How would they know where to look? At a very conservative estimate there are ten million billion planets in the universe. Even a civilization with access to vast amounts of power and very advanced technology could only reach out to planets that were relatively close.

Using the extremely flawed drake equation, there are a whole lot of advanced civilizations out there. Unfortunately, the number of planets theoretically capable of supporting them is a much much greater number.

Why would they want to?

I won’t dive too much into far out futurism, but there are also very real problems with the set of underlying assumptions that drive speculation about alien contact or visitation. It’s not at all a safe assumption that a spacefaring race would be interested in contacting other sentient life or interacting with them in any way.

Stupid physical realities!

So you have two very fundamental problems with any theorizing about alien visitation to earth.

1. The universe is very very large
2. The speed of light is as fast as anything can travel.

The combination of these 2 facts screws up a whole lot of things for traveling large distances in space, but leaves us with some pretty hard constraints around alien visitation.

1. They would have to be very close (astronomically speaking)
2. They would have to exist in the same time as us (this is sort of part of #1)
3. They would have to capable of speed of light travel
4. They would have to have access to a tremendous amount of power
5. They would have to have some reason to want to contact us

The bottom line

Given the number of stars, planets, and basic elements available in the universe, it’s statistically very very likely there are other advanced civilizations out there. And there are probably quite a few of them.

But given those 5 constraints, it’s very very unlikely they have visited us.

Now hold your horses

There are some caveats. If a civilization is capable of faster than light travel, that pretty much blows this whole thing out of the water. They may be able to bend space-time, or create wormholes. But the energy demands of these kinds of things are insanely large.

A one meter wormhole would take one years worth of energy from 10 billion stars to fuel. Bending space-time to create a warp drive to travel 10 times the speed of light would require energy equal to 10 billion times the mass of the observable universe.

So we don’t have much of an escape here.

It’s a magical world

Unfortunately there is exactly zero hard evidence of alien visitation. There are plenty of anecdotes, plenty of stories, but no real proof.

While it is possible that aliens could have visited, the odds of it having happened are vanishingly small, and it would have come at a tremendous cost, even for a very advanced race.

It’s unlikely they would borne this cost to probe the asses of hillbillies, or to fuck with our heads by zipping their spaceships around at night.

The Hardware:

The Kindle is very light and very thin. It’s hard to get a sense of it’s size without holding it, but it’s very comfortable to hold and operate with one hand. The buttons are very well laid out, and the keyboard, while tiny, serves its function well enough.

The screen is reflective only, meaning no backlight, so no reading in the dark. I view this as good thing personally as backlit screens tend to create eye-strain. It has relatively high pixel density and looks very good, if wanting for a bit of contrast.

The battery lasts a very very long time. Like really. long. Which is a major major winner. My battery lasted 3 weeks on its last charge.

The Books:

There’s a lot to cover here, so I’ll break it down into a handful of major topics: Pricing, Quality, Availability, and DRM.

• Pricing: Most books can be had for $9.99 or less, which falls right beneath my pain point for books. I have no problem paying this for books even if I tend to think it’s a little high. Why do I think it’s high? Largely because I can buy a paperback book almost invariably for exactly the same price, and I know that 80% of the cost of a paperback book is consumed in its manufacture and transport. Amazon is currently in a pissing war with Macmillan over pricing, which I won’t get into here. But understand that it actually has nothing to do with prices of individual books, but in who has control over pricing to consumers. Personally I think Amazon is in the right, but it’s not something I want to go into any detail about. I will say however that $15 for an ebook is past my pain point, and it will make me think twice before buying. more on that later.

• Quality: This has been a big issue for me, and one that really drives my opinions on pricing more than most other things. As I said in my ruminations over the iPad, of the 15 books I’ve bought for the kindle (more than I’ve read, more on that later) around 30% have multiple spelling errors or major layout problems. This is to say nothing of the non-fiction books that don’t have linked tables of contents, or linked footnotes, two of the major benefits of having e-books. I’m currently reading a book called Flawless Consulting, which as you can see costs $33 for the ebook. I bought it for the convenience, and ability to notate that the kindle offers despite already owning a hardcopy.
  The kindle edition is awful. Almost all the inset notations in the text are converted to images rather than text, which means you can’t highlight them, notate them, and they’re scanned in a low resolution so you can barely read them. Many of those inset notations scans also run into the body text, so you switch from an image to text mid-sentence. This makes the book completely unreadable on the iPhone and is extremely aggravating on the Kindle. This sort of thing is completely unacceptable, especially if you’re charging close to the asking price of the printed book. I would expect the same amount of proofing done on e-books that goes into prints, but that is clearly not happening. Publishers are being extremely lazy about ebooks, and being dragged kicking and screaming into the game. Amazon needs to be doing quality checks on its ebooks before allowing them to go on sale if publishers aren’t going to do it. This is easily the worst part of e-books at the moment.

• Availability: This was a big factor in making the decision to buy a Kindle or a Nook. I searched though my current Amazon wishlist to see how many books were available to each device. I’d say Amazon had something like 70% and B&N had something like 40-50%, and every B&N book was $2-3 more expensive.

• DRM: I hate DRM. I don’t own any DRM’d music. DRM removes your ability to lend your e-books, transfer them to another device, sell them, or buy them used. It’s a major encumbrance and potentially a major additional expense that simply doesn’t exist for print books. So why buy a product with DRM? Largely because, like music, I don’t think it’s going to last. Like the music industry, I think once we’re a few years down the road, the publishers are going to figure out that all DRM can be trivially cracked, and there’s just no putting that genie back in the bottle. As it stands, Kindle DRM can be stripped right now, and the files can be backed up to my computer and read with whatever I want. So I’m not terribly concerned about the negative effects of DRM on me. I don’t know if I need to take a major moral stand against a technology and mentality so completely compromised and so inevitably doomed. Had mp3s not fallen, I might have made a different choice, and I may very well end up eating my words, but as I see it now, DRM has a limited life whether I’m paying for products using it or not. The publishers will eventually see the same thing the record companies did: that the world doesn’t end when you send out unprotected files. Make your books cheap and really easy to buy, and people will buy them. There’s a reason Apple is one of the world’s biggest music sellers right now.

The Experience:

How the kindle will change your habits will depend very heavily on what your relationship with books is currently. It’s change my habits in some pretty significant ways.

• Reading: I read much more now. I used to read about 1 book a month or so, and now I’ve done about 5 books in 2 months. I always have either my iPhone or my Kindle with me, so I can read any time I have dead-space in my day. I hate carrying around books, so this has given me a lot more time to read, even if it’s more scattered.

• Buying: This is something that Publishers should pay a lot of attention to, because pricing matters. Before when I heard of an interesting book from a friend, or heard about one on the radio, I would hop on Amazon when I got to a computer and throw it on the wishlist along with a little explanation of where I heard about it. I don’t do that anymore. At least not for most books. Now I pretty much just buy them. A big part of that is the $9.99 or lower price. Another part is that the book is there instantly, and there for me whenever I decide I want to start reading it. Speaking as someone who spends a lot of time professionally trying to measure and influence customer behavior, this is a really big shift and a really big deal. I’m sure Amazon gets it, because I’m sure they track it. I don’t think the big publishers get it. The flip side of this is that I’m actually more reluctant to buy print editions of books now, and will generally hit the “i want to read this on my kindle” link on amazon instead. They then go into the wishlist bucket like before, but now I’m just waiting to see when the kindle version arrives.

• General Use: The Kindle is really intuitive for the most part and it just gets out of your way. While I wouldn’t mind having a clock at the top of the screen while reading, and I’d like to be able to customize screen savers without hacking it, those are not big deals. You can impulse buy books right from the kindle and have them ready to read in a few seconds. In fact while typing this, I was trying out the search function and bought a book. It cost $8. I’ll take it.

The Verdict:

I like mine a lot and I would recommend one to pretty much everyone who reads more than a couple of books a year. It’s changed the way I read books in a pretty big way. The kindle as a device is right in so many ways, it’s hard to see something like the iPad really competing with it as a reader, if for no other reason than form factor and battery life.

Publishers really need to get on the ball with ebook quality though, especially if they expect to continue charging at or near the same price as printed books. Quality control is really bad, and in some books it really makes them hard to read.

The big one is really his handling of the warrant-less wire tapping suits, and his assertion of executive privilege. The DOJs current position is expressly against Obama’s campaign promises of transparency. This is a major constitutional issue, and the only reason I can see for the administration to take this stand is that there are extremely serious and far-reaching legal implications that would put large sections of the government into lockdown as they defend themselves from the suit.

But a very close second is Tim Geitner’s handling of the financial crisis. I’m trying to stay away from the populist craziness around this, but it’s getting very hard to see any of this as anything other than handouts to wallstreet. I’m starting to lean heavily toward nationalizing and breaking up all the majors.

Eric Holder is also heading down a path that looks short sighted and stupid concerning drug policy.

There’s a lot to reasearch around these topics, and a lot to write, and I just haven’t had the time and energy lately, and honestly it’s just too fucking depressing.

She made me hate running.

Until recently I never really focused much on cardio because I just didn’t see the benefit. Now that I’m getting into my 30s my doctor is starting to badger me about heart health. So I figured it was time to try out running again.

The first few weeks were pretty brutal and my right knee immediately went into major pain mode for around 3 weeks. For some reason, my stride was really agitating my MCL. I backed down to just putting the treadmill on a 7 incline and walking at 3.3 miles an hour. I did this for about a month.

Once the knee calmed down I changed some things. I got some real running shoes, and light clothes. I figured out that long strides where you land with your heel are out. Have to land almost flat footed. Also, you have to try and pick up your feet as little as possible (without dragging them) to reduce impact to the knee. You also want your foot to contact the ground with your knee directly above.

3 days ago I finally reached a goal of running for 1 mile without slowing down. This is sort of a big deal for me as it’s something that I don’t think I’ve ever done. I repeated it yesterday as well and it was actually a little bit easier despite running it faster.

Ultimately my goal is to run 3 miles a day in 30 minutes, and I’m currently doing a little over 2 miles a day with a combination of walking and running.

I’ve actually gotten to the point where I really look forward to working out, which is a little freaky for me. Though I must say that watching episodes of the wire while I’m working out has helped a lot. Not sure I could have gotten this far in the gym.

Jindal caught a lot of crap for his just outright awful public speaking skills, and as the days crept on, lots of people wanted to get an idea of who this Jindal character is.

Well, turns out that he’s at the very least a religious nutbag.

Jindal attended what some would consider an exorcism and wrote about it in the New Oxford Review. You have to pay to read the whole thing, but a big excerpt can be found here.

It’s a pretty remarkable story, and I’d encourage you to read through it to get a clearer picture on the worldview of the people the republican party is turning to for leadership.

The whole tale reminded me of the TV show Paranormal State in which a bunch of college kids investigate supposed hauntings and perform rituals to clear them out.

I’ve long been fascinated by the mythology surrounding exorcisms. The idea of demonic possession is pretty interesting in and of itself because of the questions it raises in the cosmology of god’s creation. In order for exorcism to function as an idea within christian mythology, some creations (demons) are given dominion over others (human) which only the power of christ as channeled through a human vessel (a priest) can overcome and remove. It leads to questions about what demons are supposed to be. Are they fallen angels? Are they some other kind of spiritual entity created by Satan? Are they damned souls? And exorcism takes on a whole new dimension when it’s proposed that the possession is by satan himself.

There are also questions of agency that come to play. Why would satan or any of his agents possess someone? For what purpose and to what outcome. What does satan gain from taking possession of a girl in her early 20s? What kinds of things can satan not do that requires physical possession in order to accomplish.

Catholic mythology recognizes what a sticky issue this really is given the complex and sprawling web of canon law and accepted dogma. It’s hard to paint a picture of the menace of satan when he has little better to do than possess fat, illiterate housewives. The Catholic church is very reticent to take claims of possession seriously these days, and for good reason. Even the church grants that it’s far more likely that someone is intellectually or emotionally disturbed than possessed by a demon.

Jindal’s story, as well a Paranormal State, if taken at face value, give rise to relatively serious questions in religion. If a group of teenagers or young adults in their early 20′s can successfully exorcise demons with no specific training other than what they’ve seen in movies, one begins to wonder about the power of these demons. As a catholic you would also have to wonder why one would need priests at all if one can competently conduct spiritual warfare with essentially none of the rigorous schooling of the priests. If lay people can serve as a conduit for christ well enough to cast out demons, why do we need priests for the eucharist or confession? It sort of undermines the whole purpose of the priesthood doesn’t it?

And one wonders why when demons supposedly do possess people, they do little, other than act out cliched, ham handed vignettes to demonstrate their evilness. This largely involves cursing and saying bad things about Jesus, religion and the people around them. Is the chief purpose of possession to make humans believe the person you’ve possessed has tourette’s?

Ultimately I don’t see anything here that doesn’t strike me as dumb college kids play acting like their world is more meaningful and more important than it actually is. They created a fantasy in which for some reason, demonic forces actually care about the lives of college kids enough to intercede. Perhaps if Jindal had taken more classes in abnormal psych and neuroscience, he would have been able to understand what was happening to him and the group.

This sort of stuff strikes me a christian LARPing and I think it should be viewed with the same degree of seriousness. The fact that this sort of event is one of the bedrocks of Jindal’s faith should be disconcerting to not only non-believers, but christians as well. Casting the protective umbrella over whackadoodle christianity like this fundamentally discredits some of the core beliefs of the religion.

Errol always has interesting opinions about both film and photography, and I’m always entranced by his examination and interpretation of photography. He’s clearly clued into the power that images have on forming impressions in our brains.

If you’ve got time, check out some of his older entries as well. It’s really worth it.

I played some games online with Doug, spent a little time with the big swede and hung out on Christmas day with some friends from the dojo. Kelli and I shot our annual holiday harassment card which I will post for your amusement shortly.

I’ve picked up a Canon 5DmkII, which is pretty fantastic. I’ve done 2 shoots with it so far and by and large the transition from the 5D is seamless. I also grabbed some 16GB CF cards because this bad boy produces 25-30MB raw files. It’s no joke. Kelli got my a 24mm 2.8 lens for Christmas, and it was not a strong enough performer for landscape work. I’m going to swap it out for a 28mm 1.8.

Kelli and I are making plans to spend 10 days in May checking out DC and NYC along with Dayne and Julie from AK. Should be good times.

I’ve been tooling around for the past few days on the Hackintosh, working with the new EFIv9 boot loader. It’s actually really impressive how much stuff just works these days. I’m still got a few wrinkles to iron out regarding IONetworking to fix time machine and file sharing, but I’m pretty confident that I’ve got the issues nailed and can fix those tonight. The only real sore spot remaining these days is Firewire speeds which are about half of what they should be in 10.5. I haven’t seen anyone who has fixed this problem. You can replace the Firewire kexts with the ones from 10.4.9 and it fixes the speed problem, but then the machine will no longer sleep. I should point out, I’m only working on this because I want to play around with the new EFI bootloader, and everything (except FW) was working fine before. New EFI just lets you run a (almost) completely stock 10.5 install and use normal apple updates without fear of nuking your install.

Every once in a while I think about getting a Mac Pro and then remember that Apple wants almost 3k for a system comparable in most respects to this homebuilt $1k rig. No thanks.

Personally I don’t think Apple has cared about its desktop hardware business for a while. Almost all of their hardware innovation seems tied up in laptops and iphones.

Our hero inserts his debit card into the pump only to be told to see the cashier. He proceeds inside to wait in line. After a few minutes of watching yokel cashier fumble through her job our hero has her attention.

Me: I was using my debit card for gas and it told me to see you.

Yokel: We can’t take debit cards for gas.

Me (incredulous): Really ?!?

Yokel: Yeah see, we can’t take a certain amount off of the card and then refund……..

Our hero comprehends that pointing out that every other gas station on earth can somehow accept debit cards for gas can lead only to the dark gaping maws of hillbilly hell, then interrupts.

Me: Okay, thanks, bye.

Our hero turns to leave while the yokel continues rambling. Seeing this, the yokel raises her voice to entreat our hero to jump through her quixotic fuel purchase machinations.

Yokel: I can give you cash back on your card and then you can prepay for the….

Our hero turns back slightly, raises his right hand to silence his opponent closes his eyes and utters:

Me: Meh!

With his intentions clear, he charges through the doors in search of a more civilized time, a world in which gas stations can use plastic money in exchange for goods and services, which he finds exactly one mile up the road with the dune rats.

Fin.

The moral of our story is: Once I have said “good day sir!” I am done with our conversation. Continued gum-flapping will serve only to enrage me. I understand that your store has a stupid policy, it’s your right to have it. It’s cool. Really. But I’m going somewhere else. Somewhere that doesn’t share your stupid policy. I’m not at all interested in hearing about how we can jump through hoops wasting my time to circumvent said stupid policy. Do not waste my time trying to explain why you’ve adopted your stupid policy. Especially when I’ve already made it clear I don’t care.

Thank you for your time and understanding.

Our local conservative talk radio station is constantly playing music clips from liberal rock acts including Nine inch Nails and Nirvana, and I’ve even heard them play Rage Against the Machine completely unironically.

Do these guys not know that the music they’re using to promote their ideologies is written and performed by people who hate their worldview?

It boggles the mind.