The circus is coming to town this week.
I'm excited for the kids who will go.
Some of the animals will be brought to the civic center in a little parade from the railroad station. That sounds cool to me.
There's some controversy brewing with people who want to make sure animals aren't mistreated.
A couple of articles from the local paper -
HeraldNet: Protest follows circus
and this one by Julie Muhlstein to balance things out
HeraldNet: Some animal rights groups go too far in their fight
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On the topic of treatment of animals...
I finished Life of Pi awhile back. One of the topics of that book is animals in zoos. I recommend that book for the discussion on zoos alone. The author talks about animals having defined territories in the wild (their homes) or defined territories in zoos (their homes). Then talks about the pros and cons of each.
Imagine what it would be like to be a "free" elephant being eaten by a "free" tiger vs. being a circus elephant who gets to perform, see people who are happy to see you, and know where your next meal is coming from. Not saying we don't need wilderness and wild animals, but being in the wild isn't all it's cracked up to be sometimes. At least if you are a wild animal being eaten by a pack of wolves, hyenas, tigers or other predators or dying a slow death of starvation.
I'll propose that almost no one, aside from abberent psychopathic individuals, want animals to suffer. I believe all life is precious, but we need to prioritize our concern for living things. As a human I have to admit a bias in that I believe human life to be the most precious. I hope the people that get all worked up about the circus treatment of animals still have energy to work on improving the condition of their fellow humans.
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Warning long rant ahead....
I wonder how long before passwords are a thing of the past?
Like everyone who uses computers (or imputers) as Becca used to call them I have lots of passwords. My intention this morning was to get up early, log on to my email at work and get a little caught up before I went into the office.
Last week I was getting a message every day when I logged on at work that said "your password will expire in 10, 9, 8, 7, 6 etc...days".
I kept putting it off and now my password expired on Saturday and our system won't let me change it remotely. I have to go to the office today to start work. Oh well.
We have lots of smart password monitoring programs. By smart I mean they keep track of your old passwords and won't let you use anything similar for a new password. The end result? You have a slug of unrelated passwords that no one, aside from some kind of password savant, could remember.
My theory is it's best to keep your brain as clear as possible of trivial things to remember so you can concentrate on "thinking" eg. connecting things into useful patterns. William James wrote about the advantage to our minds in making everyday things habitual, like brushing our teeth.
Imagine what it would be like if everyday you got up and had to think, "now how was I supposed to brush my teeth this week?". Tie my shoes? Was it rinse, lather, repeat or lather, rinse, repeat?
My point is I don't want to clutter up my brain with meaningless unconnected alphanumeric combinations aka passwords.
I don't get too worried about the privacy issues of having some method of identifying me as me (retinal scan, finger print reader, voice analyzer, universal personal ID card with password generator...whatever).
I don't really care to be anonymous and even if I did I don't think we have the right to anonymity. Saying we don't have the right to anonymity is different than saying we do have the right to privacy.
I don't think I have the right to interact in the world and remain anonymous. Let's say I take a bag of manure and light it on fire on your porch. I may want to remain anonymous but I don't think I have the right. Maybe I want to write a letter to the editor. Call you on the phone. I might prefer to remain anonymous but I don't have that right.
What about AA? Certainly people who go to AA meetings have a right to privacy. They aren't anonymous though, since they are physically present with other people at meetings. I'd consider an organization like the KKK more in line with a group that want's anonymity - what with the masks and all. Ditto for terrorist cells. Anonymity makes sense if you doing something legally or morally wrong and don't want to be identified by those members of society who set or enforce legal and moral norms.
I don't care if people know my phone number, address, or name; but I want to have personal information kept private (which to me means kept in the hands of those who need to know or who I chose to share that information with). I want to have my business's confidential or propriatary information kept the same way - in the hands of those who need to know.
I hope inventors come up with a solution that works better than passwords pretty soon.
We'll figure out workarounds in the meantime. A simple one is to have a superpassword ie. the ability to get into something, a computer/PDA/vault that contains the bazillion passwords to everything else.
Some people worry about that single source of passwords. Not me. Consider the possiblity that someone figures out what machine/vault contains your password list and what the password is to that machine and what form that list is in and how to convert that form into something useable.....
to log on to your Yahoo mail? Who cares?
Any access to data that's really important, that's outside of a gated area, shouldn't be accessible even if someone had a password. If you have confidential/important data online in an unsecured area you will use smart cards, or some other secondary protection scheme. A smart card generates a semi-random password based on a password you enter into it. The host computer you are logging onto can determine if that semi-random password came from that smart card.
The end result? Even if you have a password to the smart card...you need the physical device to log on. So I'm not too excited about people stealing passwords. If someone broke into my house and found my smart card...then they'd have to figure out the password to that card to use it. Anyway this is sort of circular.
Not to say identity theft isn't a troublesome issue. If you are worried about someone stealing your identity you would possibly be better served by being careful about what you throw in the trash than trying to memorize every password you have.
