This blog post best read while listening to this playlist.

I keep trying to figure out how to start this blog post. I've started, stopped, pondered, and taken a shower while thinking about it off and on ever since my last post went live back in February. Unfortunately, life in the twenty-first century is.. well, being life in the twenty-first century. The laundry list of things that have taken up most of my time is unfortunately way too long: Java and log4j have cost me more nights of sleep and almost-but-not-quite migraines in the last month or so than I …

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I very much want to be wrong.

Within 180 days of 0000 hours UTC, Friday, 27 January 2017, the United States of
America will declare war once again.  That puts it at Wednesday, 26 July 2017
at 0000 hours UTC.  I do not know for sure, but countries in the Middle East
seem the most likely targets.

This seems due, in part, that the USA seems to be trying to start the Crusades
again (George W. Bush tried once).  The Trump administrations' public and
flagrant distrust, disapproval, and seeming pants-shitting-fear of Muslims
around the …

If you've been following the news for the past couple of weeks you've no doubt seen lots of hand wringing about North Korea's missile tests. To summarize, they've popped off a couple of missiles that seem to have intercontinental capability, i.e., they could, in theory travel from North Korea to the vicinity of the United States or Canada and deliver their payload. The missiles in question keep landing in the ocean, which strongly suggests deliberate targeting to prove launch and control capability as well as making it more difficult for other countries to get hold of the hardware for …

Can you remember ever having lived in a time of peace?

Seriously. Give it a little thought.

This is something I've been thinking a lot about lately, and I've reluctantly come to the conclusion that I can't think of a single period of time beyond a week or two in all the years I've been alive that I've known anything like peace in the geopolitical sense. I was born in the late 1970's with the horrors of the Vietnam War fading slowly in popular memory. Even though I was too young to really record any memories the Vietnam War was …

Mirrored from this pad at Telecomix, here are links to the deaths of multiple peaceful protestors in Syria. Much of this footage is graphic in nature, but it's also of people literally putting their lives on the line in the hope of making a better world to raise their children in. Please repost and retweet this widely.

In the past couple of weeks it's become something of a fad to post about the genre of cyberpunk becoming somewhat passe'. We now live in the twenty-first century, where much of the fiction that my generation grew up reading was ostensibly set. We don't have flying cars or jetpacks. We don't really have food pills, either, but the nutrient and protein shakes that you can buy in the cold case of just about every convenience store these days (or the frankly awful tasting energy drinks that are popular with the younger set) aren't that far off. We do have …

For many years, Alan Turing was one of the lesser-known heroes of World War II. Born in 1912, he rose to prominence at Cambridge in the early 1930’s where he was eventually elected a fellow of the King’s College. Much of his work on computability, or whether or not a problem can be solved and the most effective methods of going about it if it can, is now considered 101-level stuff in comp.sci programs around the world. At the time, however, this work was revolutionary. Turing is best known for the hypothetical Turing Machine, a computing device …