Friday, February 04, 2005
mp3 players for bagdad, and fixing the gay marriage issue.
http://www.crescatsententia.org/archives/2005_02_01.html#005000
Will Baude has a post called
"Admonished to draw near" which reminds me of Jay and the Americans
Come a little bit closer
You're my kind of man
So big and so strong
Come a little bit closer
I'm all alone
And the night is so long
His post is about using mp3 players for something actually useful - supreme court oral arguments.
I'm assuing the ipod is an mp3 player - at any rate these things are small, relatively cheap, have a lot of memory to store audio files.
Unlike most new technology, driven by pr0n, this market has been driven by music, mostly of the three minute hit single variety.
And music could be classified mostly as entertainment.
In the diamond age, neal stevenson writes about a notebook computer type thingy which is a teaching machine and virtual reality device. There's a plot device about millions of third world girls students turned into an army of mice, and that's a little weirder than I'm shooting for here.
But, let's say bush "wins" in iraq and afganistan, what then? A young country with lots of illiterate girls. One solution would be a peace corps - amanda and susan blogging from kazakstan gives insight to that world. But invariably that will result in beheaded or otherwise defiled corpspersons, and be labor intensive and limited.
They can be replaced by a machine. A generic massproduced mp3player could be a way to provide educational programming to girls in the third world. The koran, bible, socratic dialogs, english lessons,... content can be provided readily.
These things can store x hours of programming, and then be restocked anywhere there's net access, or sneakernet to net access.
Why girls? Because they tend to be underserved by current schooling. Maybe we double the expense of the program by giving them to boys too. But girls, given an opportunity to get an education, start having fewer kids and having higher hopes for the ones they do have. R strategy versus K strategy. (Elephants use R strategy - lots of investment per baby elephant. Spiders use K strategy, lots of baby spiders so it's ok that most of them die off.)
Maybe the funding for this comes from melinda gates foundation, where the programming on the non-apple mp3 player would have info on aids and malaria and hepatitis and so forth. Maybe it's government funded.
Can these things be subverted and used to promote fundamentalist jihad?
Of course. So it takes some faith in the "marketplace of ideas" approach to think that bringing the information revolution will be a net plus. What about batteries? I'm assuming some sort of solar charger or kinetic device would be needed.
So far, all I have is a handwaving idea. Like most of my ideas, it won't go anywhere, but ten years later I'll notice somebody somewhere has done that sort of thing independently. It could be scaled up gradually by being formalized into a business splan or grant aplication or project proposal. I think early development could be funded by the ad budgets of the companies that sell these things. The buzz about new applications for the technology would generate publicity to pay for the development cost. If actually implemented, you are reaching a whole new market of potential consumers.
update: i'm now listening to watchtower v stratton.
Ok, on to my next rant - fixing the gay marriage issue.
I've been asking this for years, but it takes on a new urgency after November.
For the fans of gay marriage:
What exactly is it that you want from gay marriage that you can't get from a well drafted partnership agreement?
Now, it may be that indeed there are a few things not reachable by a partnership agreement - but 90% or more of what you get from legal gay marriage can be handled this way.
Partnerships are well recognized, have a thousand years of history behind them, are flexible enough to handle almost any situation. Judges are going to be supportive if Ohio tries to ban partnerships.
What I'm looking for right now is a
model open source domestic partnership agreement.
Findlaw Forms probably has a few basic partnership agreements that could be customized. The purpose of the agreement is to create a legal structure for running a household. It's not about sex. You could have a domestic partnership agreement between two brothers, or three college roommates, or whatever.
The partnership then could do things - buy a house. Become the guardian of a child.
Hire an accountant and file taxes. Plan for retirement and medical care.
The fundies would have no reason to object to these arrangements, and no basis to deny them to gay couples any more than to anyone else. While I'm proposing these specificly to deal with the current controversy over gay marriage, these would be useful for anyone forming a household - other-sex people living together, other-sex people getting married. The partnership agreement there would function as a prenuptual agreement, simplifying divorce, but more importantly simplifying marriage, by spelling things out.
The model agreement would be a fill in the blank kind, easily customized.
I don't know if this already exists. I'm confident something like it does, where
"something like it" is vague and flexible.
I will hit "post", then go look for examples.
Then I think I'll walk to the store and buy some decaf. Decaf at the local store costs a lot more ($3? $5?) than regular, which is $1 for 4 ounces of a drinkable instant coffee, but I think I've been overdoing it.
http://www.crescatsententia.org/archives/2005_02_01.html#005000
Will Baude has a post called
"Admonished to draw near" which reminds me of Jay and the Americans
Come a little bit closer
You're my kind of man
So big and so strong
Come a little bit closer
I'm all alone
And the night is so long
His post is about using mp3 players for something actually useful - supreme court oral arguments.
I'm assuing the ipod is an mp3 player - at any rate these things are small, relatively cheap, have a lot of memory to store audio files.
Unlike most new technology, driven by pr0n, this market has been driven by music, mostly of the three minute hit single variety.
And music could be classified mostly as entertainment.
In the diamond age, neal stevenson writes about a notebook computer type thingy which is a teaching machine and virtual reality device. There's a plot device about millions of third world girls students turned into an army of mice, and that's a little weirder than I'm shooting for here.
But, let's say bush "wins" in iraq and afganistan, what then? A young country with lots of illiterate girls. One solution would be a peace corps - amanda and susan blogging from kazakstan gives insight to that world. But invariably that will result in beheaded or otherwise defiled corpspersons, and be labor intensive and limited.
They can be replaced by a machine. A generic massproduced mp3player could be a way to provide educational programming to girls in the third world. The koran, bible, socratic dialogs, english lessons,... content can be provided readily.
These things can store x hours of programming, and then be restocked anywhere there's net access, or sneakernet to net access.
Why girls? Because they tend to be underserved by current schooling. Maybe we double the expense of the program by giving them to boys too. But girls, given an opportunity to get an education, start having fewer kids and having higher hopes for the ones they do have. R strategy versus K strategy. (Elephants use R strategy - lots of investment per baby elephant. Spiders use K strategy, lots of baby spiders so it's ok that most of them die off.)
Maybe the funding for this comes from melinda gates foundation, where the programming on the non-apple mp3 player would have info on aids and malaria and hepatitis and so forth. Maybe it's government funded.
Can these things be subverted and used to promote fundamentalist jihad?
Of course. So it takes some faith in the "marketplace of ideas" approach to think that bringing the information revolution will be a net plus. What about batteries? I'm assuming some sort of solar charger or kinetic device would be needed.
So far, all I have is a handwaving idea. Like most of my ideas, it won't go anywhere, but ten years later I'll notice somebody somewhere has done that sort of thing independently. It could be scaled up gradually by being formalized into a business splan or grant aplication or project proposal. I think early development could be funded by the ad budgets of the companies that sell these things. The buzz about new applications for the technology would generate publicity to pay for the development cost. If actually implemented, you are reaching a whole new market of potential consumers.
update: i'm now listening to watchtower v stratton.
Ok, on to my next rant - fixing the gay marriage issue.
I've been asking this for years, but it takes on a new urgency after November.
For the fans of gay marriage:
What exactly is it that you want from gay marriage that you can't get from a well drafted partnership agreement?
Now, it may be that indeed there are a few things not reachable by a partnership agreement - but 90% or more of what you get from legal gay marriage can be handled this way.
Partnerships are well recognized, have a thousand years of history behind them, are flexible enough to handle almost any situation. Judges are going to be supportive if Ohio tries to ban partnerships.
What I'm looking for right now is a
model open source domestic partnership agreement.
Findlaw Forms probably has a few basic partnership agreements that could be customized. The purpose of the agreement is to create a legal structure for running a household. It's not about sex. You could have a domestic partnership agreement between two brothers, or three college roommates, or whatever.
The partnership then could do things - buy a house. Become the guardian of a child.
Hire an accountant and file taxes. Plan for retirement and medical care.
The fundies would have no reason to object to these arrangements, and no basis to deny them to gay couples any more than to anyone else. While I'm proposing these specificly to deal with the current controversy over gay marriage, these would be useful for anyone forming a household - other-sex people living together, other-sex people getting married. The partnership agreement there would function as a prenuptual agreement, simplifying divorce, but more importantly simplifying marriage, by spelling things out.
The model agreement would be a fill in the blank kind, easily customized.
I don't know if this already exists. I'm confident something like it does, where
"something like it" is vague and flexible.
I will hit "post", then go look for examples.
Then I think I'll walk to the store and buy some decaf. Decaf at the local store costs a lot more ($3? $5?) than regular, which is $1 for 4 ounces of a drinkable instant coffee, but I think I've been overdoing it.
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