Okay, now that’s revealing: Knitting the social fabric

Doing a lame-oid exercise for my “planning your public service career” homework, I was supposed to identify my desires. I wrote a list of things that was 3/4 of a page long. Out of 34 listed items, only 10 weren’t variations on the theme of “increasing positive social integration/connection/etc.” Of the 10, 3 were athletic (which indirectly tied in through group races, and the ideas I have for how to do the transcontinental bikeride), 3 were material (all related to housing, which indirectly tied in by wanting roommates), 2 were self improvement things (organize and calm down), and the remaining two related to my teeth grinding and playing with neat ideas.

The 24 ideas included things like: “never be alone for the holidays”, “raise a kid”, “have a boyfriend”, as well as “bring people closer together”, “engage with others in productive work”, to “Bring the U.S. to a point where we see caring for the sick, the homeless, and the hungry as our responsibility” and “increase respect for religious diversity as well as secular rationalism”.

spring course schedule

After this I would have 0 – 2 core courses to take, depending on whether I can successfully convince them that econ II would be a glaring waste of my time, and convince them to accept my rigorous analytical background as substitute for advanced stats. Thanks in large part to the work I did with Ro, regression holds exactly 0 fear factor for me. Bring it on. =) 16.5 additional units for my MA. (the schedule below represents 14 units). It’d also leave me 2 units shy of the required concentration. Woo! =)

I would like to drop Tai Chi, and take self defense, but I’d have to reschedule politics of public affairs. Sadly, rock climbing wasn’t offered, and intro dance’s 3 units just ate too much of my schedule for me to seriously consider it.

the schedule itself

Open Source voting architecture

I would love to see an open design, open source, development of a voting infrastructure. I know security nut geeks would flock to this idea. I’m almost surprised I have heard no one advocating this. Why the hell not?

If that wouldn’t lay to rest concerns about election machinery going around on the net, I don’t know what would.

Further, that would be a major boon for the open source movement.

Maybe it’s the anti-authoritarian [anti-establishment?] stripe behind open source. Hmmm.

[see also]

to keep in mind, what we want v what we want to be

A long time ago, when talking with it somehow came up that from time to time she had difficulty determining whether her attraction to a person was admiration, a desire to be like that person, or attraction, a desire to have sex with that person. I know that applies to me more often than I think is good. All those beefy guys with the hot bodies. Maybe if I spent more time at the gym, and less time drooling over them….

I’ve noticed that the more I workout, the more my desire for what I want to be, and what I actually am converge. But given its rapidity, it’s got to be due to the mutability of desire. And a general increase in self-acceptance so long as I’m working out. Perhaps it’s part of Dean Ornish’s maxim to love one’s body more as a functional unit, than an aesthetic one.

prediction and justification

So, for alot of us, it felt like 51% of the US electorate took a giant steaming dump on our values system on tuesday. And there’s some truth to that, though it’s more indirect than you may think.

This triumphal “values voter” that is splashed everywhere is dramatically overstated. And that’s something people ought to remember.

It was 22% of the motives, a bare plurality. But even more important than that is a little tidbit from psych: Humans are great at determining _what_ they will do. They suck at explaining _why_ they will do it (and presumably why they did it). I suspect the fact that Bush’s voters didn’t know the issues nearly as well as Kerry’s voters is more an indication that they didn’t care about them, rather than that they were underinformed. Asking what issue led you to vote for which candidate (especially if it’s multiple choice) is about like asking if you’ve stopped beating your wife: it’s loaded with assumptions. So not all of them deliberately took a steaming dump on our value system, many just didn’t care about it, or felt it was a minor consideration. (This is a massive generalization, I realize there are party loyalists on both sides who probably cast their vote in spite of their better judgement, and people who legitimately know, and agree with Bush’s policies, plus single issue pro-life (so long as it’s our babies, and not the citizens of other countries) voters, etc).

I’d like to back these claims up with facts, but I’m short on time so take it with a grain of salt, according to your natural inclinations.

There’s also the question of what constitutes a valid source of information for whom. Some people point to the bible as meaningful, while I, in heated annoyance derided it as a book of fairy tales (it is a little bit more than that, but not much, and again with the short on time.) Meanwhile, I view newssites (nytimes), deductive reasoning, and a few other things as valuable, while many who think the bible is solid fact would rationalize that away as liberal bias and irrelevant, incomprehensible wool-gathering.