Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Strawcat's LiveJournal:

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Friday, May 29th, 2009
1:54 am	What do you think ... of the DOG O MATIC? http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1183016/Is-Dog-o-Matic-owners-best-friend.html While some people think it is cruel to subject animals to this device, I think that apart from any consideration of its supposed cruelty, it seems to create an alienating barrier to what would otherwise be a healthy part of maintaining the human-pet relationship through normal routines of direct interaction. I have to wonder what will be next - putting the dog onto some giant enclosed hamster wheel so that you no longer have to walk them? If people are more interested in convenience rather than fostering a healthy relationship between them and their pet then maybe they shouldn't have them in the first place. (10 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, April 5th, 2009
8:22 pm	Privacy and Anonymity on the Internet      The expectation of privacy in everyday life is nothing out of the ordinary. We usually take for granted that we’re not going to be asked for identification when we buy something at the grocery store, that the postal post office is not going to verify that the return address on the mail we send is valid, or that our mailman is not going to read our mail. The ideal of privacy on the internet, however, is generally regarded to be somewhat quaint. E-mail is notoriously unprivate: since messages are sent as unencrypted text that usually pass through several relaying hosts before they reach their destination, administrators of any of these hosts can easily eavesdrop on this information (Eklund). Web servers can log the unique IP address of the users who access and exchange information on them. This information can be used to create market surveys that are sold to corporations, or to persuade ISPs to release personal information about the user associated with the IP address (Eklund; Palme, 2002). Another threat to privacy is that ISPs are able to create identity profiles on their users based on their internet activity (Eckert and Pircher, 2001).( Read more... )
Friday, November 7th, 2008
2:00 pm	Quick opinion on Prop 8 The whole situation is pretty sad. I don't think voters realize the full significance of what they've done. Especially in those places where people fought to have rights recognized that govern the way they live fundamental aspects of their private and personal lives, and succeeded in the highest courts, only to be forced to go back to square one by those who aren't even personally affected by the outcome. Go ahead and do this with matters of taxation and government spending, but it is an atrocity even for the matter of gay marriage to be reversible to the extent of potentially flip-flopping indefinitely. Imagine what it would be like if after the courts first decided that women had the right to vote in federal elections, the outcome of a referendum reversed the ruling shortly before the next election. It seems to transform the optimism of civic progress into an apathetic uncertainty of how long the incremental achievement of the minority by patient self-advocacy will last before it will once against be undermined by propaganda pitched at a susceptible majority, as swiftly as marking an x on a slip of paper. My heart goes out to the thousands gays, already married or planning to be, who are forced on this long-overextended roller coaster ride of hope and fear orchestrated by the tyranny of the majority. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 1st, 2008
7:48 pm	Spirituality and Society at Crossroads As society became increasingly liberalized, technological, and compartmentalized in its functions, there developed a growing chasm between the shrinking domain of religion, and the secular. This development is widely championed as an indicator of social progress, reminiscent of Enlightenment-era attitudes. In some ways, particular reforms and assurances may have been necessary to organize and maintain a more complex, interconnected and multicultural world. Separation of Church and State purports to prevent the political process from being co-opted by narrow, dogmatic interests and the same thing could be said about attempts to preserve the integrity of scientific methodology. Still, in other ways, secular interests have co-opted many societal arenas and functions that were once holistically-centered and integrated with spiritual values, by foisting paradigms of further compartmentalization and modes of atomistic and reductionistic thinking, especially upon marginalized and traditional peoples. In the guise of "foreign aid", technologies are exported that promise greater wealth (at least in the sense that wealth is defined within the mindsets of the exporters), but instead destabilize local systems that are sustainable and replace them with unsustainable systems that increase dependence and subservience to developed nations. In Bali, for instance, a highly complex agricultural system that had operated for at least a millennium was intricately connected to the traditional water-based religion, where the distribution of the limited water available was controlled by priests through rituals attuned to water and pest cycles, which facilitated cooperation among farmers and allowed for the optimal function of the whole system. When the Green Revolution came to Bali, social capital, such as trust and cooperation, was eroded away in the interest of monetary profit, which depended upon competition and pushing the role of the priests to the sidelines. Productivity gradually fell each year, despite the imported crops being specially engineered for high yields, as water and nutrient cycles were controlled in ways that ignored traditional ecological wisdom. The old rituals still continued, but remained divorced from their integrated and practical significance. It was ultimately the emphasis on a purely secularized, technological approach at the expense of the previously integrated units that led the failure of the Green Revolution and the disenfranchisement of local populations in this region, who eventually wished to return to the old way of life. In many societies, health, healing and spirituality were intimately connected. Physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being were of unified concern and often treated together by the same experts. As we came to conceive of the body as a machine separated from, if not devoid of soul, major advancements in medicine promoted the proliferation of much data, information and knowledge which both resulted in numerous specializations and compartments required to organize and advance the complexity of this knowledge within each sub-field. The mind, now often treated as an epiphenomenon of brain function though conceptually severed from the whole of being, could also be delved into by specialists who could be further classified depending on the emphasis of their approach. The reductionistic models of "chemical imbalance" promoted by pharmaceutical industries in characterizing and treating common 'neuroses' like anxiety and depression fail to account for the social, environmental, and more holistically-situated factors often involved, nor can it account for the the sharp rises in these ailments that are more likely to be intertwined with the kind of alienation that has resulted from the broader fragmentary scheme. More broadly, the issue is exacerbated when psychiatrists attempt to treat problems codified into little conceptual boxes packaged strictly as psychological disorders but are often actually broader than the narrow confines of their field permit. Problems brought to psychiatrists frequently have existential or spiritual dimensions that the secular practitioner is seldom willing or able to delve into. The same dilemma must also confront the physician from time to time when the reality of death and dying suddenly sinks in after patients are steeped in a culture of death-denial throughout the course of their lives. Now we see a doctor for our bodily ills, a psychiatrist for our mental ills, a councilor for our emotional ills, and a spiritual adviser or chaplain for our spiritual ills with few opportunities to address, let alone trace the interconnections between our broken fragments of self, that were originally closer to being an indivisible whole. And so too has our society shattered into divisive fragments that are often needlessly at odds with each other. Today, when we conceive of what the religious and the secular mean for each one of us, when we are asked about our beliefs and values, it is often framed as a mutually exclusive choice, in which we must place ourselves in one diametrically opposed camp or the other. As the secular camp gains dominance and the religious camp starts to wane in many parts of the world, increasing scrutiny and skepticism are shed on those who would side with the religious camp. It is seen as a way of life that is of little practical significance and written off as irrational. And given that the reach of spiritual influence and discourse is often limited to semi-private happenings of this or that church or temple, whose rituals are sometimes divorced from their original context and viewed as "empty" as the post-Green Revolution rituals in Bali must have seemed, it is no surprise that religion, by the secular, is seen as pointless folly. And as a backlash reaction, some of the religious grow more fundamental, more persistent and dogmatic within this polarized arena of confrontation, fueled by the fears of losing more ground. Edicts and ancient guides for prudent living are taken to literal extremes to the point of having moral jurisdiction in the lives of non-believers and more moderate practitioners, and when met with resistance, force their way into politics in spite of purported church-and-state separation. This furthers the polarization and widens the chasm, setting in motion a positive feedback loop. Ultimately, the decoupling of the spiritual with the mundane has created a schizophrenic breakdown in the collective consciousness of society, leading to manifestations of self-delusion, cognitive dissonance and ultimately alienation within individuals who identify with both the religious or the secular camp. (12 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, March 20th, 2008
4:21 pm	LJ Strike planned Just as a semi-addendum to my last entry, it looks like because of some of the recent unsettling changes there's a 24-hour LJ "strike" being planned for Friday, March 21st. I have mixed feelings about this. It also evokes many questions. Hasn't the new administration already demonstrated that they don't care much about what we think about their policies by implementing them in secret and ignoring user and adviser feedback? If their revenue is already spoken for, is one day of inactivity enough incentive to even get their attention? Would a longer strike period be more likely to be make a difference? Although there are casual users like me who probably become a participant by 'deault', are the majority of users even capable of not posting or commenting for more than a day? :P What do you think about all this? Do you support the cause? Will you participate? Just in anyone still isn't sure what this is about (because I got flak for assuming most people were aware of the contents of the URL I linked last time), here are the main reasons for the strike: * It's about free and ad-free LiveJournal accounts being abolished for new members, ignoring the advice from the newly-formed Advisory Board. * It's about LJ staff trying to sneak this decision in under the radar, and when people found out, telling the users it was done 'to make the signup process less confusing'. * It's about LJ staff failing to apologize for trying to hide the facts from view and for lying about the actual reasons for their actions. * And finally, it's about the latest decision to hide certain user interests from the list of Most Popular Interests, some of them being fanfiction, bisexuality, sex and depression. This decision was not announced or explained in any way. Users found out for themselves. Plus, some even MORE background in case you're still scratching your head ;) http://beckyzoole.livejournal.com/394838.html http://beckyzoole.livejournal.com/395310.html (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, March 14th, 2008
4:35 pm	Livejournal, from social community to profit machine As Brad outlines the history of LJ's need to find a balance between revenue generation and maintaining a growing community, we see that a simple pattern emerges. The changes in ownership can be characterized by a gradual succession of larger/richer corporations with progressively more ambitious agendas that co-opt our community as a better profit machine than its predecessors. There isn't anything novel or unusual about this; if LJ can be considered a commodity, it mirrors the history of most other products. When ever an entrepreneur is innovative enough to conceive of ways to produce and sell a product more efficiently than the current producer, everyone is better off if this person can buy out the means of production and take over, at least in theory (in practice, it's usually the consumer who gets the short end of the stick, they just don't always realize it because cutting corners tend to be manifested in gradual or subtle ways that are not immediately apparent). The main reason the current owner will be persuaded to accept the offer is because it is predicated on the buyer's projection of future profits exceeding those of the seller. There are problems with conceiving and treating LJ purely as a commodity, though. This is because it is a social community, which complicates things. When Brad points out that "freeloaders" are contributing much of the content that paying members are paying for, he illuminates the special nature of value within LJ. Unlike most commodities, this value is not reducible to whatever the producer adds through the production process, but rather it is 'decentralized' and distributed through its base of consumers by means of sharing. Increasingly, the urge to make a bigger, better profit machine out of LJ seems to exacerbate rather than facilitate its function as a community, but a lot of people are unwilling to leave because it is difficult for them to place a monetary value on what they would give up if they looked for greener pastures. There is a certain non-substitutability at stake where you have an interest in maintaining your ties with particular groups of people. I think that the extent to which the owners of LJ externalize the mutual social benefits when thinking of ways to maximize profit, is the extent to which they undermine the original spirit and purpose of this place as a community. I think I need to make it clear that I realize that LJ is also a service and there are costs associated with providing this service, which is why at the outset, I recognized the need for finding a balance and between revenue generation and maintaining a community. But it seems that where we see a community that runs on basic services, certain corporations see an investment in a commodity to the expense of other considerations. Can you think of other ways that LJ differs from a commodity? (5 Comments |Comment on this)
12:22 am	*yawn* http://dsp-psd.pwgsc.gc.ca/Collection-R/LoPBdP/BP/prb0019-e.htm (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, January 30th, 2008
3:04 pm	Who likes House? Every time I watch "House" (which is not very often), it feels like the episode I'm watching is one that I've already seen before, when actually it isn't. That's because the plot is essentially the same, and all they do is replace the patients and their 'mystery disease' with new ones. Basically House and his colleagues are stumped about the patient so everyone gets a bit frustrated and they tease and make fun of each for a while. But House always has the advantage because of his unique hobby of playing mind games with everyone. So, he'll mess with his colleagues' minds until they get fed up, and then do the same thing with his patients. At some point someone realizes that, "oh yeah, we're employed as *doctors* so maybe we should return to the task of figuring out what the mystery disease is". Numerous hypotheses are proposed, and debated, because House always disagrees with his colleagues as to which one is correct. There's only one way to find out though, and upon testing the patient, it turns out that no one was correct. It’s back to the drawing board. Everyone is stumped. Frustration ensues. Rinse and repeat the cycle a few times. Only now the stakes are higher because the patient's condition has worsened! It therefore becomes paramount that the hypotheses are good ones. Bets are made, temporary alliances and schisms are formed, and deceptive and possibly unethical strategies are employed to try to get at the truth. One would think that as the patient's condition worsens and House's fallibility is demonstrated again and again, he would be more cautious in his approach, but actually he just gets more arrogant about having the correct idea and will employ riskier procedures to prove it. By the end, he's *so* sure that he's right that he makes a life or death decision, and lucky for him, he's finally made the right choice. House gets to keep his job and his colleagues grumble amongst themselves and the episode conveniently ends before the patient is presented with a $300,000 medical bill from countless inappropriate tests, procedures and treatments. (17 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, January 18th, 2008
3:05 pm	Otherkin is to furry as Scientology is to science fiction. Discuss. (10 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, December 20th, 2007
10:18 pm	Name change Just in case anyone is wondering, the account, "botcat" has been renamed to strawcat, courtesy of dongstyle_ltd. Current Mood: thankful (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, December 16th, 2007
9:33 pm	Polar Express The Polar Express is still the most frightening movie readily available in the Christmas season. All the waxy-looking CG children with soulless eyes, creepy expressions and jerky movements are sure to disturb you more than any other poorly CG'd zombies that might stand out in recent movie memory. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
5:24 pm	The Problem of Unspecified Purity Dear Ivory, I have always wondered how the consumer is supposed to interpret the popular slogan that your soap is 99 44/100% pure. While many people will be impressed by seemingly high numbers that do not appear to designate anything specific, the more conscientious consumer will have to ask, "99 44/100% pure what?" The most intuitive assumption is that Ivory soap is 99 44/100% pure soap. If 99 44/100% = 99.44% (I'm not sure; I've never seen a percentage expressed in that way), this means that Ivory's soap is made up of 0.56% non-soap. In other words, Ivory soap contains 5600 ppm impurities. This may not mean anything at first, but if you consider that tap water only contains 150-500 ppm impurities, the advertisement of unspecified purity appears result in the opposite to the intended effect. If I were choosing between brands of vanilla ice cream, I would be a little concerned if one brand claimed it was 99.44% pure vanilla ice cream, because then I would have to wonder, "Just what kind of impurities would I be putting into my system if I were to eat this stuff?" since the ingredients of the ice cream would compose 99.44% of the product, which would be listed, and the 5600 ppm of mysterious unknowns may be unlisted. I would feel safer choosing the "100% pure vanilla" even if they're not particularly rigorous about defining their terms. I would also prefer a brand that made no claims at all about purity. But this is probably not what you mean. What you probably mean is that your product contains 99 44/100% active ingredients (or cleaning power) and the remainder are things like fragrance. However, this does not seem to be the most obvious definition of purity, and most people who seriously contemplate the matter of unspecific purity would sooner jump to the previous, unsavory conclusions. (20 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, November 22nd, 2007
11:26 pm	Free Market Environmentalism and its Criticisms Okay, I don't usually post papers related to school here (what kind of place would LJ be if everyone did that constantly?), but as this is 1) my first attempt to do research on an economic issue at a fully academic capacity and 2) has to do with a subject I have some interest in, I have decided to share this. Keep in mind that since this was written for a second-year course, there isn't supposed to be much original commentary, and the level of conceptual rigor pertains only to theoretical generalities. There are a lot of aspects I'm not satisfied with, but it will have to do. And now, BEHOLD. ( Read more... ) (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, November 4th, 2007
1:25 am	Cathartic Balance Despite all my criticisms of the movie, Bourne Ultimatum (some of which I share with Dong),I thought that it had what I would call a good cathartic balance, which is rare in action films. In such films, villains kill heroes, neutral parties, or other people who we're supposed to care or sympathize about. The feeling that these characters don't deserve death conjures a sense of indignation or injustice and we focus these feelings upon the perpetrators. Then, to release these tensions, the heroes kill the villains and other people we're supposed to dislike, in order to bring about a sense of catharsis, thus restoring balance so that the film can have a 'happy ending'. This is a simplification meant to explain the concept, as it's fairly easy to quantify deaths and not other kinds of dramatic crests and troughs that can occur especially in other genres, but the phenomenon seems fairly basic and fundamental. Now, in some cases, this formula is so central to the plot, or it basically *is* all there is to the plot, that the writers really want to hammer the point home, and some overkill or overcompensation may occur. The heroes may get a little carried away and become as indiscriminate in their killing as the villains, or the people they kill don't seem to deserve it. In the case of civilians, this can often take on amusing dimensions, such as during a car chase, or when a hero is racing through traffic causing many potentially fatal car accidents when rushing to the rescue of a damsel in distress. A lot of films, surprisingly enough, get away with this because the suspense developed for the plight of damsel is just substantial enough that we convenient forget about the faceless car accident victims. Also, if we feel sympathy for the downfall of a character that was supposed to be marked as a villain, the balance may be compromised. Although their plans may have had to be put to a stop, it may not have been necessary to end this with their death. Often, the only reason a villain dies is because in a final moment of desperation or stupidity, they do something which leaves the hero with little choice but to kill them. This seems contrived and also might hamper the kind of catharsis we are meant to feel. Overkill may also occur in the case of villains, as the viewer may begin to become weary from the constant death, with each additional one having diminishing returns, but this is a less of a problem since the viewer may already be somewhat desensitized to character death in general, especially if the writers don't do a good job of establishing the likability of particular characters marked for death. Ironically, if a villain kills an annoying or stupid character, it may actually have positive cathartic value for the viewer! In the Bourne Ultimatum, death is used sparingly, and occurs only when necessary, or when the victim makes a poor choice. Furthermore, the choices to kill or not kill seem believable from the standpoints of the characters. So yeah, good balance. It's a shame that the movie ends unclimatically, in a way that seems to undermine not only the plot, but renders meaningless the central quest of the entire trilogy. I've decided to be vague to prevent spoilers and also because I'm too tired to go into detail ;) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, October 13th, 2007
11:46 pm	Since balinares nudged... (..hey, neat, I can have lj-user tags in the subject line.) The other day I received an "LJ nudge", which seems to be subtle hint that I haven't posted in too long a time and some readers are getting antsy. Aside from general busyness, one of the reasons I haven't written much is because few things that I would consider interesting have happened! I think it's particularly telling that I would deem an automated notification to be more worthy of an LJ response than the events of my life that had preceded it. So, for a short while I fretted, "oh, what ever am I going to write about now that my loyal readers are on to me and my negligent ways?" but then it just so happened that I actually had an eventful day today. Namely, the trip to Hecla Island Provincial Park. ( Read more... ) (11 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, May 13th, 2007
3:14 pm	Alright, I'm back now, with lots of stories and pictures to share. I've actually been back for a week but have been procrastinating about the big post I promised. I'm in a quiet and uneventful phase right now, which is probably a good thing since my 'vacation' didn't really feel like a vacation, and prolonged the great stress I had suffered throughout the year. To make things even more quiet, MSN apparently hasn't been working properly, as people seem to be ignoring me but claim that I didn't message them first, or that they had been trying to message me but receive no response, or the message bounces back to them. Rather than compromising my e-social life, I must do what I had been reluctant to do for some time: uninstall and upgrade MSN. Newer versions of MSN run sluggishly and appear garish. Edit: The all new Windows Live Messenger doesn't look that bad, except that it has advertising galore. The problem still continues here though, and it seems to disconnect me every 30 seconds. I also tried Pidgin, which is one of those all-in-one programs, however messages on the MSN account continue to be dropped. It must be my internet, I'm told, but if so, why isn't AIM doing this too? (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, April 15th, 2007
10:17 pm	Gone for a while So after a particularly difficult and stressful semester, I'm finally leaving the country in several hours to start my vacationing in Costa Rica. It is my first real vacation in a very long time and I'm both nervous and excited. I go from Winnipeg - Chicago - Miami - San Jose and back again the same way. Even though my uncle will meet with me in San Jose, I've never traveled alone before, and it has been many years since I've been on a plane, hence the nervousness. But I expect to have lot of fun exploring rainforests, beaches and volcanoes. I've always wanted to see tropical forests up close in person and it looks like I'm finally going to get my chance. I don't think I'll be updating my LJ while I'm away, but I'll be keeping a written journal as well as capturing my journey photographically, so expect a nice long photo-report about my adventures when I return after May 5th. I'm going to try to get some sleep now, but since I've been sleeping like a night owl and I have to be at the airport around 5 AM, I doubt I'm going to get much rest. (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, April 14th, 2007
10:27 pm	From a well-hidden comment, far far away... Increasingly people seem to want to attack this broad category they've lumped together to call "religion" with sweeping criticisms that insinuate a wide variety of all-too-human ignorances and evils, despite the diversity of world traditions, sects within each of those, and a whole spectrum of ways that different kinds of people can practice their faith of choice. Extreme cases remain in memory, while the more modest positives are filtered out, and everyone else becomes guilty by association to this broadly constructed concept...and all the while, the vast majority of practitioners are no different in their day-to-day conduct from the typical, rational person. I've become increasingly skeptical of one common approach used to vindicate oneself from the charges of sweeping generalization or "simplism", which is to create a dichotomy between "organized" religion that comes from a historical tradition of being shared from one generation to the next, and so-called spirituality which is supposed to be more individualistic and thereby freed from this kind of 'authoritarianism', but I think this only leads to another kind of simplism, as one can then simply divert their blame to the one side of the distinction, while claiming that all the nice consequences that we have observed are actually the result of spirituality totally divorced from religion. This dichotomy now seems to me to be moreso a mental construction than an accurate reflection of what's actually happening when cases of both the "good" and the "bad" faces of the phenomena emerge in people. One reason is that the former type of religion is often the bridge to genuine mystical experience, an ideal pinnacle of so-called spirituality, and also that if one were to look closely enough, one is hard-pressed to discover an instance of spirituality in a person that evolved independently of some aspects of some religious tradition, and that the person was in no way influenced by encounters with other people, each with their own sets of metaphysical principles or fundamental precepts, which these critics could also call "dogma" that they criticize in the case of religion, if they were to be consistent. Just how tenacious or subtle the persuasions of these dogmatic influences depends on the tenacity or subtlety of the person, not the tradition out of which they emerge. (Comment on this)
Thursday, March 29th, 2007
6:19 pm	Be warned, 300 Rant 300 was, at times, a frustrating movie to watch. The stylistic violence seemed overrated and didn't adequately compensate for the continuous sense of embarrassment that the non-violent parts engendered. ( Read more... ) (18 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, March 8th, 2007
2:01 am	Come for the scenery, stay for the comedy Those who are like me, and found SoaP to be a big let-down, may find what they're looking for in The Wicker Man, the newer remake. I can't remember the last horror movie I saw that was so amusing. A lot of it has to do with the story being so ridiculous, but it's Nicolas Cage who actualizes the potential for comedy as he fully immerses himself in the silliness of this world with a wanton, frantic sort of goofiness, taking every opportunity to exploit and thereby reveal each absurd nuance. When he's not having completely random hallucinations for no rhyme or reason, or bumbling around knocking things over and being chased by bees, he might be kicking little girls in the face, or mugging a women for her bear suit so he can infiltrate the annual fursuit parade as part of the local matriarchal festivities. Indeed, if one is going be going on a paranoid rampage, what better place to do it but in a quaint, old-fashioned village run exclusively by women. "Bitches! You bitches!!" It's almost cathartic in a twisted misogynistic sort of way. Most of the hilarity doesn't come until near the end of the movie, but the beautiful rustic scenery should tide you over until then. (2 Comments |Comment on this)