It is a truism that the Star Wars prequels sucked. (Elsewhere, I’ve commented that the franchise being sold to Disney means someone can finally tell the tragic story of Anakin Skywalker’s seduction by the dark side.)

But the issue of exactly why they sucked is complex and layered, and most of us prefer not to consider it too deeply. Fortunately, you no longer have to. You can simply get “Why the Star Wars Prequels Sucked, and Why It Matters,” a short “Polemic on Aesthetics, Ethics and Politics. With Lightsabers.”

Really, what else do you need to know?

An example? Ok, the diner scene, and how it compares to the cantina scene. The cantina exudes otherness and menace. The diner looks like it was filmed in 1950s and then had a few weird things ‘shopped in. The scene undercuts the world which Star Wars established. Or the casual tossing in that Anakin was a virgin birth, and how after tying to one of the most enduring stories in western culture, the subject is then never referred to again.

Or the utter lack of consequence of anything in the stories, since we already know how they’ll come out, and how, by focusing on characters whose fates we know, Lucas drains any dramatic tension of of the story. The list goes on and on, and if you want to know why you hated the prequels so much, this is a short and easy read, and highly worthwhile.

Oh, and you’ll learn how Lando Calrissian is Faust. So go buy it already.

One last thing. Delano Lopez? That’s a name I hadn’t heard in a very long time. But he and I went to school together.

In my post on gun control and schools, I asserted that “I worry that reducing privacy around mental health care is going to deter people who need health care from getting it.”

However, I didn’t offer up any evidence for that claim. So I’d like to follow up with some details from a report that talks about this in great detail, “ 2010/08/The-Case-for-Informed-Consent.pdf">The Case for Informed Consent” by Patient Privacy Rights.

So let me quote two related numbers from that report.

First, between 13 and 17% of Americans admit in surveys to hiding health information in the current system. That’s probably a lower-bound, as we can expect some of the privacy sensitive population will decline to be surveyed, and some fraction of those who are surveyed may hide their information hiding. (It’s information-hiding all the way down.)

Secondly, 1 in 8 Americans (12.5%) put their health at risk because of privacy concerns, including avoiding their regular doctor, asking their doctor to record a different diagnosis, or avoiding tests.

I’ll also note that these numbers relate to general health care, and the numbers may be higher for often-stigmatized mental health issues.

I started this post on December 14th, and couldn’t finish it. I’m going to leave the opening as I wrote it then: By now, everyone has heard of the tragic school shooting in Connecticut. My heart goes out to everyone touched by the events. But this isn’t the first school shooting on a December 14th. I went to a tiny school, Simon’s Rock, and on December 14, 1992, Wayne Lo murdered my friend Galen Gibson and Professor Ñacuñán Sáez. He also shot my friend Tom McElderry. I can still remember the phone call from my friend Chi, telling me that Tommy had been shot and was in the hospital. I remember being up all night, spreading what little information we had by phone, and wondering what the hell was going on. I remember that weeks later, I’d get emails from co-workers whose local papers in places like Japan finally carried the story. For years after, I took December 14th as a day off, because it was hard to handle life with that weighing on you.

It’s a sad reality that we now have enough school shootings that one of them was going to fall on an anniversary of another. (Statisticians call this the birthday problem.) It’s also a sad reality that we have enough of them that schools, police and emergency responders have plans for them.

What a fucking world.

Some people like to say things like “time heals all wounds,” but you know? Greg Gibson isn’t going to get his son back. Ñacuñán’s family isn’t going to get him back. And twenty or more families in Sandy Hook will never again be the same. I’m having trouble editing this more than a month later because of how the memories flood back.

All that to say that I have some understanding of these events, and I think I can talk about them differently than a random observer.

A lot of people are using this tragedy to say we need gun control. I understand where they’re coming from, and I disagree. We’ve had a lifetime of marijuana control, and it didn’t work. We suffered under crypto controls, and they didn’t work. Assholes who want a gun will likely to be able to get a gun whatever regime we put in place. There’s some truth to the claim that if guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns. Maybe we’d gain some ability to catch these nuts early, but maybe not. Those who say that easy availability of guns drives murder rates must do better than simply cherry picking data. What makes the US worse than Switzerland or Israel?

Yesterday, the President outlined a set of proposals including expanded background checks, and signed executive actions including one to “encourage federal agencies and state governments to share more information.” And now I find it hard to speak, and hard to remain silent.

Infringing privacy would not have stopped the events at Sandy Hook, and I worry that reducing privacy around mental health care is going to deter people who need health care from getting it. That may mean that more people will end up hurt or dead. I’m confident that no one wants that, and we need to rationally consider the tradeoff.

I also see a lot of people who are worried about gun control being so strident that they’re undercutting their own case. I agree that gun control is a poor response, and I think the NRA are coming off like a bunch of idiots. I’m trying not to be strident, just add a voice to say that even from a position of grief, it’s possible to see that what’s proposed probably will not meet the goals.

I don’t know what we should do. I do think that taking the entire TSA budget and moving it to mental health care would be a fine start.

Another fine way to proceed would be to threat model and try to judge the efficacy of the mitigation techniques. (For those who don’t know me, I spent a few years designing threat modeling tools and techniques which you can read about here.) Perhaps that starts from data on how people who use guns to hurt themselves or others get them. There’s an easy trope of “buys a gun and shoots someone.” Is that because it’s common, or because the stories are highly “available” and spring to mind? I don’t know, and in that vein, more studies of gun ownership and gun violence are probably going to help. Whatever approach to threat modeling we take should also include the hundreds of millions of guns owned by hundreds of millions of people and not misused.

We can and should do better than bringing back ideas that didn’t pass muster in calmer times. We should be cautious about trading a little liberty for a little safety. And whatever we do, we should do so respectful of the victims.

Comments are closed.

There’s a giant rubber duck in Sydney Harbor right now:

It’s apparently by Florentijn Hofman, who does this sort of thing.

My only other comment? Seattle, you’re doing it wrong. Where’s our rubber duckie?

Via “Sydney Festival Launches Giant Rubber Duck in the Harbor“, Pedestrian TV. (I believe there’s a typo, and the duck is 13.8 meters, not 138 meters.)

Absolute zero is often thought to be the coldest temperature possible. But now researchers show they can achieve even lower temperatures for a strange realm of “negative temperatures.”

Oddly, another way to look at these negative temperatures is to consider them hotter than infinity, researchers added. (“Atoms Reach Record Temperature, Colder than Absolute Zero“, Charles Choi, LiveScience and

It seems to me that this is very strong evidence for the Simulation Argument, since apparently the simulation has some integer underflow problems. The researchers have proof of concept code.

The original, paywalled article is in Science, “Negative Absolute Temperature for Motional Degrees of Freedom“.

What more do you want on a Friday?

Ok, here’s details.

Gävlebocken har brunnit:

Webbkamerabilder visade hur bocken snabbt blev övertänd och totalförstördes innan brandkåren hann fram.

Or you can check the webcam: www.merjuligavle.se/Bocken/Bockenkamera/

My friend Raquell Holmes is doing some really interesting work at using improv to unlock creativity. There’s some really interesting ties between the use of games and the use of improv to get people to approach problems in a new light, and I’m bummed that I won’t be able to make this event:

Monday Dec 17th – 7:15 to 9:15pm
835 Market Street, Rm. 619, Downtown San Francisco State University Campus

Register at www.acteva.com//booking.cfm?bevaid=234451
In advance- $15 At the Door- $20

What happens when you combine the playfulness of improvisation with
the rigor of science? The Life Performance Coaching Center which
leads people from all walks of life in a performance-based approach to
human development is pleased to host Dr. Raquell M. Holmes founder of
improvscience. Holmes has been bringing the discoveries in human
development and performance to researchers and educators in many areas
of science including biology and computing sciences.

In this exploration for scientists and those interested in creativity
and development, participants are introduced to what the
improvisational arts bring to science. Learning to build with the
contributions of others and see opportunities for improvisational
conversation helps us to take risks and discover new ways of seeing
each other and our work.

Come and play as we break down the social barriers that can inhibit
creativity, exploration and discovery.

Helen Abel, LCSW, has worked with people to develop their lives for
over 30 years as a social worker, therapist and coach. She is on the
staff of the Life Performance Coaching Center where she leads the
popular Playground series {link if available} where people learn how
to use their capacity to create, perform and play. As a life coach she
helps people access these same skills to develop creative and new
kinds of conversations with their friends, family and colleagues.

Dr. Raquell Holmes is Director of Outreach, Recruitment and Retention
at the Center for Cell Analysis and Modeling at University of
Connecticut Health Center. She helps biologists to incorporate
computing and computational resources into their teaching and
research. Community building and improvisational theater are explicit
components of the majority of her National Science Foundation funded
projects. She founded improvscience to provide scientists with
opportunities to develop skills in leadership, collaboration and
innovation. Since its inception improvscience has worked with over a
thousand professionals in Science, Technology, Engineering and
Mathematics education and research.

Apparently Twitter sent me some credits to use in their advertising program. Now, I really don’t like Twitter’s promoted tweets — I’d prefer to be the customer rather than the product. (That is, I’d like to be able to give Twitter money for an ad-free experience.)

At the same time, I’m curious to see how the advertising system works. I’d like to understand it and blog about it, but Twitter would like to maintain confidentiality around the program. They’re engaged in white-hot competition with Facebook and Google to be the new advertising platform of the future. At the same time, it’s less transparency than the exceptionally high bar that Twitter has generally aspired to.

That said with the launch of Control-Alt-Hack, my collaborators have stuff to sell and give away. (Not to mention maybe a sales bump for The New School of Information Security?) Or maybe I could promote other books that I think people should read, like “Thinking, Fast and Slow“). Does the nature of what I’m advertising change the calculus? Would advertising the giveaway make it different?

Then again, I do lots of “advertising” on Twitter already–I advertise the book, the game, blog posts, ideas I like. Does paying to bring them to more people dramatically change the equation?

Interestingly (and I think this is something that can be discussed, because it’s visible), I’m offered the chance to promote both tweets and myself.

I’d be really interested in hearing from readers about how I should take advantage of this, and if I should take advantage of it at all.

The Telegraph reports that the Gavle Goat for 2012 is up, and surrounded by guards, cameras, flame retardants, and arsonists.

Emergent Chaos has reporters on the ground internet, ready to report on this holiday story of a town, a goat, and an international conspiracy of drunken arsonists. Stay tuned!

This years goat is shown in its pre-fire state. Note the pre-positioned fire extinguishers surrounding it, along with what one might describe as an altogether insufficient fence.

[Update: It turns out that the goat is blogging this year. Mixed English and Swedish.]