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Oct. 27th, 2001
Peaceful sleep
Oct. 27th, 2001 10:34 am
I dreamed of being in a caravan travelling a great wilderness trail, down a tree-covered mountain pass. As we continued our descent, the sky opened up again, brisk and autumnal, almost seeming more broad than the horizon could hold...
The plain below, compared to the mountains, seemed level as a lake.
The wind made strokes across it, as if drawing poems in a calligraphy of curves and lines on a vast canvas of green...
No wildlife on the ground was visible at this distance, but I could feel the area was vibrant with activity just beyond the scope of my sight.
Basic cruelty by those in power seems to be an element of human design. (Fortunately I've encountered a few exceptions.)
In 'The Glass Teat' Harlan Ellison recounts a story he says he got from Mattel insiders involved in product testing. A doll was made that upped the ante on the usual wetting and crying, making the reactions a bit more interactive. When rocked gently or given a bottle it would gurgle and coo, but when treated roughly or spanked it would cry.
The test children quickly learned which stimulus would provide which reaction, and also quickly decided which was more fun. Soon the only response coming from the dolls were cries as the children found new ways to trigger them.
Apocryphal, I know, but consistent with what I've seen.
Yes, you don't often see little girls torturing their dollies, but those dollies don't cry. There's something about a victim begging for mercy that seems to throw some malignant switch in homo sapiens.
It reminds me a little of the Stanford Prison Experiment. A good overview with pictures and some short video is here.
Briefly, in order to study some aspects of prisons volunteers agreed to play guards and prisoners for at $15 a day for 1-2 weeks. A hallway and some small rooms in the Psych building were made into a "prison" with CCTV monitoring. The students were arbitrarily divided into two groups by a flip of the coin. Half were randomly assigned to be guards, the other to be prisoners.
"Our planned two-week investigation into the psychology of prison life had to be ended prematurely after only six days because of what the situation was doing to the college students who participated. In only a few days, our guards became sadistic and our prisoners became depressed and showed signs of extreme stress."
In 'The Glass Teat' Harlan Ellison recounts a story he says he got from Mattel insiders involved in product testing. A doll was made that upped the ante on the usual wetting and crying, making the reactions a bit more interactive. When rocked gently or given a bottle it would gurgle and coo, but when treated roughly or spanked it would cry.
The test children quickly learned which stimulus would provide which reaction, and also quickly decided which was more fun. Soon the only response coming from the dolls were cries as the children found new ways to trigger them.
Apocryphal, I know, but consistent with what I've seen.
Yes, you don't often see little girls torturing their dollies, but those dollies don't cry. There's something about a victim begging for mercy that seems to throw some malignant switch in homo sapiens.
It reminds me a little of the Stanford Prison Experiment. A good overview with pictures and some short video is here.
Briefly, in order to study some aspects of prisons volunteers agreed to play guards and prisoners for at $15 a day for 1-2 weeks. A hallway and some small rooms in the Psych building were made into a "prison" with CCTV monitoring. The students were arbitrarily divided into two groups by a flip of the coin. Half were randomly assigned to be guards, the other to be prisoners.
"Our planned two-week investigation into the psychology of prison life had to be ended prematurely after only six days because of what the situation was doing to the college students who participated. In only a few days, our guards became sadistic and our prisoners became depressed and showed signs of extreme stress."
Superior! Quien es mas Macho? is a two-player card game using an ordinary deck of playing cards. Although not necessary, it is fun to think of the card game as being a wrestling match -- the cards are the various maneuvers each wrestler performs and the suits represent "styles" of wrestling (Clubs= Martial Arts & Brawling, Spades= Throws, Power Moves & Grappling, Diamonds= Acrobatics and Jumping, Hearts= "Personality" moves such as appealing to the crows, cheating, posing and posturing).
( You know you want to play. )Login again....
Oct. 27th, 2001 06:20 pmThe infamous "fast server cookie not sticking" bug is finally fixed. Basically, the history was like this:
-- it worked
-- moved code around and broke it
-- fixed it in CVS
-- fixed it manually on the site
-- clobbered it on the site
-- (still fixed in CVS)
-- updated back from CVS, so it's fixed again, for good.
Check that you're hitting sheila or gerald. If not, go login again.
-- it worked
-- moved code around and broke it
-- fixed it in CVS
-- fixed it manually on the site
-- clobbered it on the site
-- (still fixed in CVS)
-- updated back from CVS, so it's fixed again, for good.
Check that you're hitting sheila or gerald. If not, go login again.