For most of the time since buying my iPod Touch last October it’s been “jailbroken,” meaning that I’ve hacked it to bypass Apple’s propietary protections in order to install unauthorized software on it, the grounds being that it’s pretty ridiculous for a computer manufacturer to insist you can only run their software on the machine you’ve bought from them. And the iPod Touch is nothing but a handheld computer.

So that’s been great. I’ve had various programs running on it such as an ebook reader (on which I’ve read several novels), some games, a flashlight, and I can’t remember what else.

But after the launch of Apple’s Application Store on iTunes I decided to un-jailbreak my iPod by installing the latest update to the iPod firmware, meaning that I could use the store but could no longer use the free but unauthorized applications that I’d installed.

That doesn’t seem much of a loss, since the App Store is full of goodies.

• I have the mobile version of Omnifocus installed, which is a Getting It Done application. This syncs with the corresponding application on my Mac, so that I can carry around a list of outstanding tasks, categorized by project and context (e.g. “errands,” “office,” “computer,” etc.)
• I have a free ebook reader (Stanza) installed and have already read a few short stories. I’m working on a SciFi novel right now.
• I have a trial version of Remote Buddy, which turns my iPod into a remote control for my Mac Pro ( I was shocked to discover the Mac Pro didn’t come with a remote!).
• I have Twinkle, which is a Twitter client.
• Box Office tells me what movies I can’t go to see because I’m too tired after working and because we have Maia to look after
• I have a new flashlight program (yeah, it just makes the screen white and bright, but that’s very handy when I’m negotiating my way through a darkened bedroom at night).
• I have a dictionary installed (although it’s not as good as the free one I used to have).
• I have the Apple Remote program, although it only works with iTunes and I may never use it.
• Pandora is pretty cool — it generates playlists of music based on my favorite artists. It’s basically a series of customized radio stations. I’m listening to an Anthony and the Johnsons radio station right now and am hearing new music I love (I’d never heard of Peter Bradley Adams, for example, and I love his “Lay Your Head Down” from the album “Gather Up.”) I can give new music a thumbs up or a thumbs down so that the radio stations tune themselves to my tastes. So awesome!

Those are the main programs. There’s not much I can think of from the jailbroken apps that I miss!

I tried out the Wordpress app, which allows you to write to your blog, but quickly deleted it. Apart from the problem of it crashing, it also doesn’t serve any function that I can see. I can already use the Safari browser to log in to my blog and use all the admin functions, while the mobile Wordpress app offers very limited functionality. For example you can’t even edit a blog post. How useless is that!

Anyway, the app store is amazing and there’s so much free stuff that it makes my head spin.

A friend just wrote to ask whether anything was wrong, given that I haven’t been blogging here and that I haven’t been writing on Wildmind.

Actually, I’ve just been busy teaching at my local university — a six-week stint I do most years. I’ll say more about that later.

For now I just wanted to comment that I’m writing this post on my iPod Touch using the new Wordpress application. I’ve been checking the app store morning, noon, and night since the app was first announced a couple of weeks back and was excited to see that it had finally arrived.

I can’t comment too much on how it’s working given that this is my first go, but I did have problems with the app crashing when I as entering my blog details — not a promising start. But since getting past that hurdle the app seems to be working well. Now I can blog under the covers at night!

[added from my computer] Well, it seems the app doesn’t allow you to edit a post once it’s been published, so that seems like a major drawback. Actually, the idea of a Wordpress application seems fundamentally flawed given that the iPhone renders websites beautifully. I can simply use my iPod to log into my blog as I would from my computer, and then I have full access to the blog’s functionality. I’ve a feeling that a vast amount of midnight oil was burned getting this app ready for prime-time, but I’m not sure why. True, the admin area isn’t terribly well set up for blogging on an iPhone, but that’s just a layout problem. I’d imagine it would be easy enough to have a stylesheet that’s set up for an iPhone and that the website would switch to automatically when the user agent is Mobile Safari.

The Real McCain by Cliff Schecter, published a few months ago, reports an angry exchange between McCain and his wife that happened in full view of aides and reporters during a 1992 campaign stop.

Three reporters from Arizona, on the condition of anonymity, also let me in on another incident involving McCain’s intemperateness. In his 1992 Senate bid, McCain was joined on the campaign trail by his wife, Cindy, as well as campaign aide Doug Cole and consultant Wes Gullett. At one point, Cindy playfully twirled McCain’s hair and said, “You’re getting a little thin up there.” McCain’s face reddened, and he responded, “At least I don’t plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt.” McCain’s excuse was that it had been a long day. If elected president of the United States, McCain would have many long days.

Indeed.

You’ve probably not heard about this outburst, despite the newsworthiness at the time of a Senator treating his wife in such an appalling way, and despite the insight this gives into John McCain’s character as a presidential candidate.

Why was this not covered (and why is this not being covered) in the media? The story is that the media can’t think of any way to cover a story that involves such foul language because the word “cunt” makes them too uncomfortable. The Public Service Administration has a nice wee skit on the issue:

I must say that although Obama’s luster is dimming because of his capitulation on FISA, John McCain strikes me as a disastrous choice for President, given his notorious bad temper and lack of self-control — not to mention his flip-flops, which are even more egregious than those of Obama.

Yes.

Here’s an article from Games Radar (Don’t ask. No really — don’t ask) on the skewed priorities of Wikipedia.

Wikipedia’s ethos is of course that any one can add information to it and therefore the information is accurate.

We learn for example that “Knuckles of Sonic the Hedgehog fame” (who?) has more words written about him than does God*, and that “Mario’s legacy” is worthy of 444 words while Jesus’ is worthy of a mere 418.

I’d go a bit further than the Games Radar article, which merely says that “the nerds and dorks tend to have a lot more free time - and passion - than the teachers and professors.” The nerds and dorks are bad enough, but there are also the obsessed nuts. I’ve had experience on Wikipedia with an article that is dominated by a couple of people who, I suspect, suffer from obsessions that amount to mental illnesses. Now who has more energy than a nutcase? In the end the nuts end up wearing you down with their sheer obsessiveness.

The funny thing is, that even though I know that Wikipedia’s information is completely unreliable**, I still use it for instant “fact-checking.” Sad.

* “All Wikipedia word counts were gathered during the week prior to this article’s date. Due to the encyclopedia’s open source nature, numbers are always subject to change.”

** Yeah, I know, someone compared physics articles from Wikipedia and Britannica and found slightly fewer errors in Wikipedia, but the articles you read right at this moment in Wikipedia may have been significantly different ten minutes ago, and may have have new errors introduced, while the Britannica article is the same as it was. That’s what I mean by unreliable.

From time to time I think that the US is destined to collapse in the way that all empires eventually do. This mood arises especially when I read one of those surveys where some incredibly large percentage of American teens can’t find their own country on a map or doesn’t know who Hitler was, or when some equally astonishingly large fraction of the population thinks that the sun revolves around the earth or that dinosaurs were walking around a few thousand years ago.

So it’s especially depressing to come across a survey of American stupidity, which is what you can find at Tomgram, where there’s an extract of a book by Rick Shenkman.

Here’s a snippet:

22 percent of Americans [can] name all five Simpson family members, compared with just 1 in 1,000 people who could name all five First Amendment freedoms.

We’re doomed!

It’s not often I discover a website where I want to systematically read all the articles. Today I found one. It’s We’re Only Human and it’s a psychology blog by Wray Herbert.

Here’s a great sample that’s of direct relevance to mindfulness and meditation:

Those with overall greater cognitive control–the ones who monitored themselves closely and adjusted efficiently–were also the ones who were best at handling stress … the ones who spotted and corrected errors in their own mental performance were in general more calm and relaxed, even with college life’s predictable stresses. The ones who did not inventory and learn from their mistakes were beaten down by life’s pressures.

The whole question of whether waterboarding is torture is a bogus one. Nazis were prosecuted at Nuremberg and found guilty of using this precise technique. And the fact that it’s even in question that it may not be torture to drown someone shows how low the current US administration has sunk on the scale of morality.

Nevertheless, because there is a pseudo debate, Christopher Hitchens bravely had himself subjected to waterboarding and describes his experiences in some detail in a Vanity Fair article.

Since the article is entitled “Believe Me, It’s Torture” I don’t need to beware of spoilers.

Some salient points to extract are:

1. The official lie is that this torture technique involves simulated drowning. That’s like saying that giving someone electric shocks is “simulated electrocution” or hanging someone by the neck is simulated hanging.” It’s real drowning, and is torture.

2. Any information extracted is likely to be worthless because people will say anything to make the torture stop.

3. The US can no longer complain if its military personnel are subjected to this torture technique. It has given up the right to do so.

For the record, I think that Hitchens is in many ways a pompous and self-deluding ass — but he’s also a brave man.

There are some great pictures of the Apollo missions (remember them?) on Boston.com. Well worth looking at just to get a sense of the magnitude of the adventure we were capable of undertaking back in the 1960s and 1970s.

Before the Apollo pics there are some contemporary images of technology that might be used on future missions.

Compare and contrast:

Calling it “one of the worst decisions in the history of this country,” John McCain ripped into the Supreme Court’s decision to allow Guantanamo detainees access to civilian trials for the second day in a row. “We’re now going to have the courts flooded with so-called “habeas corpus suits” … Our first obligation is the safety and security of this nation and the men and women who defend it. This decision will harm our ability to do that.”

John “Tough Conservative” McCain 2008

I don’t think [we should] necessarily [close Guantanamo]. But I think the important thing is it’s not the facility at Guantanamo, it’s the adjudication of the cases of the prisoners who have been held there without trial or without any adjudication of their cases. So the frustration is not the fact we have a facility at Guantanamo, although that certainly becomes symbolic. The frustration is, is: What are we going to do with these people?

Now, I know that some of these guys are terrible, terrible killers and the worst kind of scum of humanity. But, one, they deserve to have some adjudication of their cases. And there’s a fear that if you release them that they’ll go back and fight again against us. And that may have already happened. But balance that against what it’s doing to our reputation throughout the world and whether it’s enhancing recruiting for people to join al-Qaeda and other organizations and want to do bad things to the United States of America. I think, on balance, the argument has got to be–the weight of evidence has got to be that we’ve got to adjudicate these people’s cases, and that means that if it means releasing some of them, you’ll have to release them.

Look, even Adolf Eichmann got a trial. I mean, these–we are signatories to numerous agreements on human rights, against torture, universal declaration on human rights, etc. So that means we have to do something with these people. And I hope we can move that process forward very soon.

John “Bleeding-Heart Liberal” McCain 2005.

(Hat tip to Mark Nikolas).

It’s hard to believe the sheer extent of the intellectual dishonesty that reigns in the White House these days. Bush’s repeated statements of concern about human-induced global warming appear to be nothing but a sop:

The White House in December refused to accept the Environmental Protection Agency’s conclusion that greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be controlled, telling agency officials that an e-mail message containing the document would not be opened, senior E.P.A. officials said last week.

The document, which ended up in e-mail limbo, without official status, was the E.P.A.’s answer to a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that required it to determine whether greenhouse gases represent a danger to health or the environment, the officials said.

This week, more than six months later, the E.P.A. is set to respond to that order by releasing a watered-down version of the original proposal that offers no conclusion. Instead, the document reviews the legal and economic issues presented by declaring greenhouse gases a pollutant.

White House Refused to Open Pollutants E-Mail - NYTimes.com

Somehow I find this even more shocking than the lies that got us into an unnecessary war in Iraq. It’s so freaking childish and passive-aggressive.

A four-legged fish with the head of an alligator. Cool!

And creationists complain about a lack of transitional forms!

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Fossil fills out water-land leap

I came across this interesting post today, in which an email from Bill Gates explains his frustration with trying to download a program from the Microsoft site — and it really does sound like a painful experience, complete with the usual scary messages, pointless questions, etc.

Here’s just a taster — it’s worth reading the whole thing:

So I went to Windows update. Windows Update decides I need to download a bunch of controls. (Not) just once but multiple times where I get to see weird dialog boxes.

Doesn’t Windows update know some key to talk to Windows?

Then I did the scan. This took quite some time and I was told it was critical for me to download 17megs of stuff.

This is after I was told we were doing delta patches to things but instead just to get 6 things that are labeled in the SCARIEST possible way I had to download 17meg.

So I did the download. That part was fast. Then it wanted to do an install. This took 6 minutes and the machine was so slow I couldn’t use it for anything else during this time.

What the heck is going on during those 6 minutes? That is crazy. This is after the download was finished.

Then it told me to reboot my machine. Why should I do that? I reboot every night — why should I reboot at that time?

Hey, Bill, if you’re that frustrated with the Windows experience have you ever thought of switching to a Mac?

Another shot of Maia’s great great great grandfather, Leslie Lickley. Born 1840. Died 1910.

I confess that sometimes I get frustrated with my Mac, but honestly I could never go back to using a PC. This graph shows the kind of care Apple takes. While Microsoft programs become more and more bloated, Apple are working on slimming down their applications (and the Operating System itself).

Just look at the changes in the Mail program, and in Font Book and Preview!

I was very touched by Peter Lovenheim’s piece on neighbors in the NYT today. After a local tragedy where a man killed his wife and then himself, Lovenheim decided that he wanted to get to know his neighbors better. He discusses staying over with an elderly widower and helping form a community to support another neighbor with cancer. It takes courage to reach out to people like that.

According to social scientists, from 1974 to 1998, the frequency with which Americans spent a social evening with neighbors fell by about one-third. Robert Putnam, the author of “Bowling Alone,” a groundbreaking study of the disintegration of the American social fabric, suggests that the decline actually began 20 years earlier, so that neighborhood ties today are less than half as strong as they were in the 1950s.

We’re fortunate in that the area outside of our house is a quiet cul de sac, and families with kids tend to congregate there in the early evening. So I get to talk to the neighbors. But although I know their names and their kids names I can’t say that I know any of them particularly well. There’s only one neighbor (immediately next door) whose house we’ve been into, and who have been in our house. I keep vaguely thinking of inviting other neighbors in for coffee, but never get around to it. I want to do something about that.

********

Added later: It occurred to me during the day that I’ve been struck in the past by how rarely I meet neighbors outdoors.

When Shrijnana and I returned from Ethiopia we were rather disturbed by that lack of outdoor activity, even in lovely spring weather. While in Ethiopia you’ll see people outdoors all the time, just hanging around, or walking, even miles from the nearest town, we got back and realized that our neighborhood (a condo complex of 100 dwellings) resembled a scene from 28 Days Later. You do see people outdoors, but it’s the odd person walking a dog or walking to or from their car, for the most part. And there are the gatherings outside our house, although they don’t happen ever day.

Sometimes in the evening, after dinner, we’ll go for a walk by the river that’s just behind our house. It’s delightful. But unbelievably quiet. Often we’ll see no other people at all, even on warm and pleasant summer evenings. Some people are probably having dinner, but I guess most are watching television. Or both! How sad.

Thanks to ThinkProgress for this.

Interviewer Chris Wallace: “Why would Mr. Bush leave office allowing Iran to go full speed ahead on its nuclear program and leave it up to the next president, especially if that president is Barack Obama.”

Bill Kristol said: “Honestly, if the president thought John McCain was going to be the next president, he would think it more appropriate to let the next president make that decision than do it on his way out.”

So if Bush thinks Obama is going to win, he’ll bomb Iran, but if he thinks McCain is going to win he won’t, because he trusts that McCain will do it himself.

This is just Kristol’s opinion, of course, but it was Kristol’s opinions that got us into the Iraq war (see Bill Kristol’s impeccable record of (false) predictions) so we shouldn’t dismiss him as just another talking head on TV.

Here’s the interview:

Maggie Jackson has written a book (Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age) about the calamity of us being a world of information workers who are constantly interrupted and therefore are unable to think: Shifting Careers - Fighting a Workplace War Against Distraction - NYTimes.com

What’s needed is a renaissance of attention — a revaluing and cultivating of the art of attention, to help us achieve depth of thought and relations in this complex, high-tech time.

The first step is to learn to speak a language of attention. The exciting news is that the enigma of attention has just begun to be mapped, tracked and decoded by neuroscientists who now consider attention to be a trio of skills: focus, awareness and so-called executive attention. Think of it this way: You can be “aware” that you’re in a beautiful garden and then you can “focus” on an individual flower. The last piece, “executive attention,” is the ability to plan and make decisions.

This is territory familiar to Buddhist practitioners:

Awareness = sati (mindfulness: a general awareness of our experience)

Focus = ekegata (one-pointedness: selecting one thing from our awareness and paying attention to it in a focused way)

Executive attention = sampajañña (continuity of purpose, mindfulness of where we’ve been, where we’re going, and what we need to do to get there)

Although arguably that third one could be appamada. The Buddha’s last words were appamadena sampadetha — with mindfulness, strive. The particular quality of appamada that sets it apart from other aspects of mindfulness is its readiness to act. It’s sometimes translated as “diligence” and it’s said that we should pick up our mindfulness (by means of appamada) as swiftly as a warrior would pick up a dropped sword on a battlefield.

I’ve ordered the book!

I was reading Jeff Jacoby this morning and was prompted to look up the divorce rates in Japan, and found the following list:

Divorce rate per 1000 couples

Japan: 2.2
USA:4.0
Germany: 2.4
France: 1.9
Italy: 0.7
UK: 2.6
Sweden: 2.4

It’s interesting how in this respect, as in so many others, the US is an outlier. More secular countries like the UK, Sweden, and France have much lower divorce rates, and Japan (a Shinto country) has a divorce rate about half of that in the US.

Jacoby frequently appears to inhabit a parallel universe, in which the oil companies making record profits as we pay record prices for gas is a good thing, and where price-gouging in the wake of a catastrophe is also a good thing (”Higher prices make it possible for victims to get the help they need to ride out the crisis and for the devastated region to recover as quickly as possible”). Yes, he’s a conservative, and opposed to the “reality-based community.”

So when I read the following in an analysis of why birthrates are declining — “Skyrocketing rates of divorce have made women less likely to have as many children as in generations past” I was surprised. If this is true it’s slipped by me. It seems to me that people get married and have kids on the assumption that they’re going to be sticking together. Then they (sometimes) get divorced, marry again, and have more kids on the assumption that they’re going to be sticking together. I’ve not been aware of people planning the arrival of their offspring on the assumption that they’re going to get divorced at some point. And in fact the birthrate in the US is much the same now as it was in 1957, well before divorce started to dramatically increase (around 1970).

And since Jacoby had mentioned that the birthrate in Japan had started to decline earlier than in other countries I thought it would be interesting to check out the divorce rate there. Anyway, the divorce rate in Italy (the country whose birthrate decline Jacoby highlights) is the lowest of the lot, suggesting there’s not much in his analysis. As usual.

Nice guys knew it, now two studies have confirmed it: bad boys get the most girls. The finding may help explain why a nasty suite of antisocial personality traits known as the “dark triad” persists in the human population, despite their potentially grave cultural costs.

The traits are the self-obsession of narcissism; the impulsive, thrill-seeking and callous behaviour of psychopaths; and the deceitful and exploitative nature of Machiavellianism. At their extreme, these traits would be highly detrimental for life in traditional human societies. People with these personalities risk being shunned by others and shut out of relationships, leaving them without a mate, hungry and vulnerable to predators.

Bad guys really do get the most girls - sex - 18 June 2008 - New Scientist

But there’s just one problem — many women find “bad guys” irresistible.

So it’s all women’s fault, really. If they didn’t breed with these scoundrels the world would be rid of narcissistic, thrill-seeking Machiavellis.

If the Mozart Effect teaches us anything, it’s that the results of a flawed study are always at risk of becoming a common expression, a copyrighted product, a popular belief infused with a magic that is difficult to dispel.