2008 07 23	Interpreting Donnie Darko
	Warning: contains spoilers. The first few times I watched this film, I took the everyday scenes as being "real" and the apparent hallucinations as being under question (was time travel actually involved?, etc). But recently I've come to see it from an inverted perspective - the hallucination scenes where "real" from the perspective of Donnie and the everyday scenes where all metaphorical impressions that Donnie has of what is happening to him. Some examples: the jet engine killing him in his sleep is a metaphor for schizophrenia striking him unexpectedly in his youth. Grandma Death is a metaphor for his future and Frank, the illness itself. The deaths of his girlfriend, mother and sister and the absence of his father, etc are metaphors for his separation from his loved ones due to his illness. His sister's acceptance to Harvard is related to his feelings of everyone else passing him by as his illness brings his own life to a halt. From this perspective, his laughter at the end is a much darker moment than it seems at first. He hasn't saved anyone, but he has lost himself.

2008 07 23	Sunset
	Part of the beauty of the sunset - and the sunset is always beautiful - is the fear it inspires. Night and the view it opens into the void above cannot help but be unsettling to anyone lately attentive to the sun. The sun is warm and friendly; it informs us that the sky is blue, and if that is not the sky's entire truth, we seldom refuse to be taken in by the sun's report. We don't say, That blue is just an illusion, a trick of the atmosphere. In fact, the sky is black and space a vacuum. But at sunset we're reminded that even if we avoid saying this, it is so. The sky is black. The moon is lifeless, and the planets too, and the stars, though many, are far away and exert no influence across the light-years on our small lives. -Thomas M. Disch, The Businessman

2008 07 22	Pocket Sphinx
	Sphinx is a speaker-independent large vocabulary continuous speech recognizer released under a BSD style license. It is also a collection of open source tools and resources that allows researchers and developers to build speech recognition systems. The newest stable version of PocketSphinx is now available. This release is about 50% smaller and up to 18% faster than the previous one, and introduces a new, re-entrant and "modern" API. Link I'd like to try out this library - I just want a function that takes english audio data and returns text (using the standard set of language training data) but the docs make it difficult to find out how to do this in C (though using it through the Python binding looks straightforward).

2008 07 22	How the Man finally brought e-gold down
	The government had been after them for a while and where they finally got them to plea bargain admitting ... Conspiracy to Commit Money Laundering charge, which has nothing to do with Douglas Jackson carrying suit cases filled with $100 bills into banks in the Cayman Islands. It is failure to do "Know Your Customer" or KYC as it's known in the financial industry. ...In the US PayPal innovated by inventing that tiny authenticating payment to your bank account, which seems to be enough KYC for single purpose financial institutions such as payments and savings... KYC since it was introduced in the late 90s as a requirement has been the single most destructive concept for innovation and startups in the financial space. e-gold was the last proud hold out against it as it went so against the principles of their operations. You could pretty much open any amount of accounts that you wanted to without any real documentation. Link via Rich Collins

2008 07 22	Book: Feeling Unreal
	"Everything feels unreal to me, like a dream...I feel detached, like a stranger to myself." These are quotes from actual people, experiencing something they don't understand. What they are saying is being heard by friends, families, and physicians today more than ever before. They do not simply suffer from anxiety, or depression, and they are not schizophrenic. They have found themselves trapped in a very real and singular disorder, yet few even know its name. Their enigmatic state of mind has been studied for more than 100 years, but only recently has it become clear how prevalent and how distinctive it really is. The condition is called Depersonalization Disorder, and Feeling Unreal is the first book to reveal what it's all about. This important volume explores not only Depersonalization, but the philosophical and literary implications of selflessness as well, while providing the latest research, possible treatments, and ways to live and thrive when life seems "unreal." For those who still believe that such experiences are merely part of something else, that depersonalization is just a symptom and not a disorder in its own right, Feeling Unreal presents compelling evidence to the contrary. This book provides long-awaited answers for people suffering from Depersonalization Disorder and their loved ones, for mental health professionals, and for all students of the condition, while serving as a wake up call to the medical community at large. Feeling Unreal on Amazon YouTube videos from people with the disorder

2008 07 22	Radio Head: Scotch Mist
	Video 52min