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Alleged "Douchebag" Sues Author

Claiming that he has been unfairly branded a "douchebag" in the book "Hot Chicks with Douchebags," a Las Vegas man has filed a libel lawsuit against the volume's author and publisher. Michael Minelli, a 27-year-old club promoter, claims that the inclusion of his photograph in the book has subjected him to "hatred, contempt, and humiliation" and has resulted in "friends, acquaintances, coworkers, employees, and strangers alike" calling him a "douchebag."

As seen below, Minelli's photo appears on page 202 of author Jay Louis's book, which was published in July by Simon & Schuster. In the book, Louis noted that Minelli's "popped-collar, spikey-haired presence was so far beyond regular douche, so far beyond uberdouche, he could spontaneously create a new element on the periodic tables -- Douche Nine."

At the time he was photographed by Louis, Minelli was working the door at the popular "Rehab" party at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino. As first reported by Courthouse News Service, Minelli's Clark County District Court lawsuit seeks unspecified financial damages and legal fees.

Last month, three New Jersey women sued Louis and his publisher over their appearance in "Hot Chicks with Douchebags," which they claimed was "vulgar" and presented them as "females who date dubious men."

http://www.tracyfood.com/2008/11/17/monkey-catching-up/

http://www.tracyfood.com/?p=437

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/11/schneier_for_ts.html

It's been suggested. For the record, I don't want the job.

Since the election, the newspapers and Internet have been flooded with unsolicited advice for President-elect Barack Obama. I'll go ahead and add mine.

[...]

And by "revamp," I mean "start over." Most security experts agree that the rigmarole we go through at the airport is mere security theater, designed not to make us safer, but to make us feel safer by making it increasingly inconvenient to fly. TSA's approach to security is too reactionary -- too set on preventing attacks and attempted attacks that have already happened. And please, whatever you do, resist the temptation to let TSA workers unionize. Security from terror attacks should be a federal jobs program. You need the authority to fire underperforming screeners quickly and effortlessly. Three game-changing possibilities to head up TSA: security guru Bruce Schneier, Cato Institute security and technology scholar Jim Harper, or Ohio State University's John Mueller.

Although I'd be happy to see either Jim or John with it.

I don't want it because it's too narrow. I think the right thing for the government to do is to give the TSA a lot less money. I'd rather they defend against the broad threat of terrorism than focus on the narrow threat of airplane terrorism, and I'd rather they defend against the myriad of threats that face our society than focus on the singular threat of terrorism. But the head of the TSA can't have those opinions; he has to take the money he's given and perform the specific function he's assigned to perform. Not very much fun, really.

But I'd be happy to advise whoever Obama choses to head the TSA.

The job of the nation's CTO would be more interesting, but I don't think I want it, either. (Have you seen the screening process?)

Elections are decided by numbers, and the ignorant outnumber the knowledgeable, so the ignorant decide the outcome. This casts an odd light on the lengthy and detailed explanations by the hyper-informed as to why they voted the way they did. A single person only gets one vote, so it is hardly of earth-shattering importance how they voted, let alone why. Sure, a single voter's explanation may be of interest as a microcosm of what tens of millions of people were thinking. Were that only so! Alas, a writer informed enough to give a decent explanation of their vote does not represent the masses who actually decide an election.

http://www.tracyfood.com/2008/11/13/millet-beer-2007/

http://www.tracyfood.com/?p=443

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/11/the_neuroscienc.html

Fascinating:

The key to a con is not that you trust the conman, but that he shows he trusts you. Conmen ply their trade by appearing fragile or needing help, by seeming vulnerable. Because of THOMAS [The Human Oxytocin Mediated Attachment System], the human brain makes us feel good when we help others--this is the basis for attachment to family and friends and cooperation with strangers. "I need your help" is a potent stimulus for action.

This is interesting. They say that all cons rely on the mark's greed to work. But this short essay implies that greed is only a secondary factor.

http://www.kith.org/journals/jed/2008/11/18/11648.html

I've been reading (and re-reading) Joan Aiken's Armitage-family stories in occasional spare moments, and still enjoying them. Yay!

But I spent all of this past week not finishing my long-overdue deadline for work. Boo!

But I more or less finished it today. (Only about two months later than I'd originally hoped.) Yay!

But I still have a tiny bit more to do tomorrow. Boo!

But I got to come home and not think about work tonight. Yay!

So instead I got to think about my backup drive having crashed horribly and possibly non-recoverably. Boo!

But at least it was only my backup drive and not my main drive. Yay!

But if anything goes wrong with my main drive while the backup drive is broken, I'm in trouble. Boo!

But I found a suggestion on how to fix this kind of Time Capsule failure. Yay!

But it may take twenty hours to finish running the command, and I don't know whether it'll actually fix the problem. Boo!

But I had the time and energy to go grocery shopping and do laundry, both for the first time in a couple weeks. Yay! (Also did dishes over the weekend, for the first time in longer than I'm willing to admit.)

But I ended up not managing to do any editing tonight. Boo!

But I did read a submission. Yay!

But only one. Boo!

But at least I got to play some casual boardgames at Kam's yesterday. Yay!

But due to stupid mistakes and inattention, I wasted my first two turns in a game of Puerto Rico, which contributed to my losing by quite a lot. Boo! (This wasn't a tragedy; just annoying, because (a) one of the things I love about the game is how balanced it usually is, and (b) I spent the whole game aware that I was a turn or two behind where I should've been and that I was way behind everyone else, which made me enjoy it less than I normally do.)

But at least I got some decent sleep on Saturday night. Yay!

But it wasn't really enough to make up for not nearly enough sleep several other nights this past week. Boo!

But I got a few things done, or at least started, over the weekend. Yay!

But I didn't manage to email or call most of the zillions of people to whom I owe notes or phone calls. Boo!

But I'm finally getting a chance to write a journal entry. Yay!

But it's kind of incoherent and scattered. Boo!

But last week I got to go bowling (which I did quite well at despite not having bowled in years), play air hockey (which I really like), and play Dance Dance Revolution in an arcade for the first time, all for work (an "onsite offsite" gathering of the company's tech writers, which we called "Burning Pen"). And all of those things were fun. Yay!

But I spent too much of the more serious parts of Burning Pen fretting about my deadline, and trying to find spare moments in which to finish stuff up for that deadline. Boo!

But now I'm going to sleep, and tomorrow will be, most likely, another day. Yay!

• 13:05 I'm still finding it weird that "lame duck" is a technical term. #

• 09:05 Saved: How to Tell if Your Cat is Plotting to Kill You tinyurl.com/6nemms #
• 11:06 Saved: perfmon2: cpu cycle monitoring tinyurl.com/6rfusy #
• 01:36 Saved: YouTube - I Tried Emacs (Pit Party '08) tinyurl.com/4ppfma #

http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2008/11/mirrors_edge_as_pro.html

Mirror's Edge is a first person computer game in which you play an urban free-runner, leaping, sliding, and generally acting fly across the roofs of a dystopian city (see the trailer here). It looks good. In fact, it looks amazing. But, reportedly, to actually play it is even better, sickeningly better.

Clive Thompson, writing for wired.com, suggests that the total interactivity of the environment (if you can see something, you can jump on it, or off it) along with the visual cues about what your character's arms and legs are doing (they appear in shot as you run and jump) makes the game a convincing proprioception hack. In other words, it remaps your body schema so that you feel more fully that you are the character in the game. When your character runs fast, you feel it is you running fast. When you character jumps across between two buildings and look down, you feel a moment of sickening vertigo.

Research into illusions of proprioception --- your sense of where you body is in space --- has shown that our body map is surprisingly flexible. It is possible to mislocate your hand, for example, coming to believe that it is directly in front of you when in fact out at the side, or behind you (see video here). Jaron Lanier has reported on an early virtual reality experience he had that made him feel like he had the body of a lobster, with 6 extra limbs. The important feature of all these illusions is that they rely on precisely timed visual feedback. Although visual input can reprogramme our body image, it only does so when there is a tight coupling between what we see and feel. The importance is not the level of detail in what we see, but in the fluidity of the interaction. If Mirror's Edge makes you feel like you are really are doing Parkour then it is because it has the correct kind of visual feedback (your limbs, in a fully interactive world) with the correct timing.

A final thought: if a computer game really is immersive for something as visceral as free-running, isn't that kind of surprising, given how complex free running is physically, and how simple the commands used to control a computer game are? Perhaps what this is because when we automatise an action such as a run, a jump or a roll part of the process of making it automatic is losing the experience of the component parts. So, when a computer game feels like real, it is because real feels like nothing -- we just ask our brains 'jump' and the motor system sorts out the details without our any deep experience of how the jump is performed.

link Clive Thompson's report on playing Mirror's Edge
link YouTube trailer for the game

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1099

Piled Higher & Deeper by Jorge Cham		www.phdcomics.com
title: "To Profess" - originally published 11/17/2008 Order signed books by Jorge Cham and the new PHD 2009 Calendar! Get a free set of Holiday Cards! Click to find out more.

http://www.kith.org/journals/jed/2008/11/17/11645.html

A while back, I wrote about wanting an approximate date data structure, and the ability to attach level-of-uncertainty info to any given piece of data, and the ability to specify the source of any piece of information.

And a couple weeks ago, I wrote about being able to apply labels to social contacts in a folksonomy kind of way.

It recently occurred to me that those are all part of a bigger thing:

I want all data to come with metadata.

I know that in many contexts, a given database record can have metadata attached--for example, a lot of systems (including calendar and address book systems) have a "notes" field for each record. But I want metadata for each field in each record.

And I want this to be a standard part of all systems that store information.

Let's call it the Total Metadata Initiative.

Here's the situation that gave me the idea:

I had two phone numbers for a friend in my address book. One number was the newly preferred one; she was phasing out use of the other one. For some reason, though, I had left them both in my address book. The phone-number field in Apple's Address Book application is flexible; it can contain letters and punctuation and spaces as well as numbers. So in the phone-number field for the main number, after the number itself, I had typed a space and then "(preferred)"; in the phone-number field for the other number, after the number itself, I had typed a space and then "(deprecated)".

The iPhone, though, has less flexible phone-number fields. When I synced with the iPhone, it deleted the space and the parens, so the numbers appeared on the iPhone something like this: (408)-555-1212preferred.

And when I tried to dial that number, the iPhone cleverly turned all the letters into numbers and dialed them. It was also clever in various other ways, the end result of which was that I couldn't leave a message for my friend as long as that "preferred" text was part of the phone number.

So I realized that rather than the makeshift workaround I had tried (editing the phone number field itself), what I really wanted was the ability to attach a note or label to the phone number. (A note would be better than a simple label--I'd like to be able to add a comment saying, for example, "This phone number is only valid until September 5, 2009, and only between the hours of 5 and 9 p.m. on weekdays.")

I could, of course, add several sentences' worth of notes (maybe one sentence for each phone number) as a single big note in the Notes field of the person's address-book entry. ("[Number x] is deprecated. [Number y] is now preferred, as of [date].") But that's inelegant--it removes the direct connection between each number and its corresponding note.

So at the very least, I'd like there to be a single freeform "Notes" field attached to each field of each record. (So each phone number, for example, would have its own (optional) Notes field.) But really, why not go further? Allow people to optionally attach a full set of arbitrary metadata to every field. Sometimes it might be structured and machine-usable metadata (like the approximate-date, level-of-uncertainty, and source info I mentioned above); sometimes it might be freeform, like a note or a label. It might also be useful to attach links to fields--for example, Apple's Address Book app is not very good at dealing with the extremely common situation where two or more people share a phone number and/or an address. You can either put them both in one record (which means you need labels or notes to indicate which one of them a given cell-phone number belongs to), or you can give them their own separate records (which means the app isn't aware that there's any connection between them). (The app does have a great feature that lets you specify the names of people connected to a given person--you can specify spouse's name, child's name, etc--but those names aren't linked to their own records.) It might be nice to allow the user to add a "shared-by" link between person A's home phone and person B's home phone. (It might also be nice to have the app automatically notice duplication and create those links, but that's a different feature area than what I'm talking about in this entry.)

Also, of course, it's still important to be able to add metadata to the entire record, not just a single field; I want to have a Notes field that applies to the whole record as well as one for each field in the record.

When I told her about all this, the friend whose phone number had been at issue said something like, "And you could have meta-metadata for every metadata field, too!" I said that was crazy talk. But yes, you could indeed extend the TMI to apply recursively to metadata fields.

I also have vague wild-eyed ideas about connecting the TMI to another system I've been thinking about, in which anything can be labeled as a to-do item. But that's another topic for another day.

Btw, I don't claim that anything in this entry is entirely original; for example, I suspect that a fair bit of it was prefigured by features of Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu. It's been a while since I read about Xanadu in any detail, and I haven't gone back and checked.

http://lahosken.san-francisco.ca.us/new/2008/11/link-muppet-movie-game-blog.html

I've been around when a couple of the Orange Snoodites talked about philosophy of The Game. I agreed with them most of the way. They said (I'm paraphrasing) The Game is about the experience, not about puzzles. I thought, Right on. If I get to retrieve a puzzle by sticking my hand into a cold cold pumpkinful of spaghetti and finger jello, I think that's pretty darned good. I don't get to experience that working on a crossword puzzle on the bus--they kick you off the bus if you spill mushy pasta and pumpkin innards on your seat. I'm pretty sure they kick you off the bus. I haven't seen a No Pumpkin Innards sign posted on the bus, but I'm pretty sure it's in the regulations somewhere.

The Orange ones said You shouldn't worry so much about your time or your score. I thought, Right on. So much of your team's performance is out of your control; if you agonize over it, you'll make yourself miserable. Different teams approach The Game in a different spirit; comparing your "performance" to theirs might not make sense. (I'll let you decide whether my attitude here reflects my lack of puzzling skills, dot product some more sour grapes.) If your team finishes before RadiKS does but RadiKS gets cooler team photos along the way, then who has won? Two years from now when you're flipping through your photos and only have a blurry snap of the crowd scene at the after party, you'll know that RadiKS won after all.

But then the Snoodists said (again, I paraphrase) Back in the day, we didn't have all of this "application" stuff. There was a Captains List. When you wanted to run a game, you contacted the people on the Captains List and you invited them to play. And I thought, Aw $&#*, screw these jerks. They'd run games years ago. I.e., before I started playing. Who was on their mysterious "Captains List"? Probably a bunch of veteran teams. Probably not any team I could sneak onto. Grr. I didn't like this piece of philosophy, not one bit.

When I heard that the Snoodies were going to run a The Game, I figured there was no chance I'd get to play. I'd blown my opportunity. When I'd talked with them, why had I wasted time nudging them for details on The Overnightmare Game when I should have been sucking up to them, weaseling my way into their good graces?

But my attitude towards this game-application philosophy changed during Ghost Patrol. Specifically, it changed when Alexandra Dixon, Team Mystic Fish's captain, mentioned how well she gets along with Red Byer of Team Orange Snood. I'd got my history wrong--I'd thought that Alexandra had barely started playing back around the time that the various Orange Snoodites had stopped running games. But there was more overlap than that. So if there was a Captains List, maybe Alexandra was on it after all. So maybe The Orange Snood gaming philosophy is perfect after all. (Not like the Olympic games. $&#*, those jerks never let me play.)

(And it was fun hanging out with O.S. for the Scrabble runaround clue in No More Secrets.)

Now that I figure we have a glimmer of hope of getting in to this game, I'm letting myself read their blog. They're keeping a blog as they plan the game. They've blogged a little about their philosophy, and might do more of that. They haven't said how they'll handle the admissions process. I hope you get in.