Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

There's not a ton of new stuff in the BME newsfeed, but especially for IAM's rapidly growing transgender community, this story about an Indian eunuch who recently won a mayoral election but has been denied because of his gender may be interesting.

In other news, I thought this tattoo removal story (well, transcript) really sucked. Not because I have a problem with tattoo removal, but because this woman said that having her children's initials tattooed on her leg was a “negative image” and would damage her career (she owns a restaurant with a number of tattooed employees) — although she does say that her children were hurt by the decision. So ignoring the specifics, the larger statement she's sending is that she cares more about her restaurants stuck-up customers than she does for her kids. Nice.

I was reading one of the latest issues of BURST magazine (a Japanese magazine that regularly covers tattoos and body modification in general), and I came across the ad you see on the right. You've probably seen similar ads in American magazines as well; the companies selling bulk jewelry at rock-bottom prices. There's plenty of them on the internet too.

Anyway, as the person who named and helped develop surface bar technology (with Tom Brazda of course getting the primary credit), it really annoys me to see companies selling what are basically glorified curved barbells. A surface bar travels parallel to the skin for its entire length, and then turns abruptly and exits the skin perpendicular to the skin at that exit point. The bars you see on the right are not surface bars and they will not heal as well as the real deal.

It sucks because then people try them, assume they don't work, and never really figure out how to do proper surface piercings. With a little common sense, they're not hard to do well… I do find it rather disturbing that even though there's an obnoxious article* on the subject plastered on the top of the surface piercing section, people continue to send in un-viable piercings that will simply reject and scar. There's no need for that!

I made a “short-list” of the things I have to do before the end of the week, in order to prepare for the trip to London in a week (lots of filming, interviews, suspensions, meets, Gumball 3000 stuff, etc.):

• Add a newsfeed gateway on IAM so people can submit stories. I'll then also be able to set some people as “approved” so that their stories are automatically added to the feed, so hopefully the newsfeed can be maintained even when I'm not around.
• Add a newsfeed editor for the local machines. While I'm perfectly happy manually editing the database, it's not reasonable to expect others to do so, and people need an easy way to be able to fix errors in that database when I'm not around.
• Add a full BME control tool for the local machines. Again, I'm perfectly happy running all the maintenance tools from a command prompt, but for other people to maintain things while I'm not around, I really really have to build a central GUI that controls it all.
• Finish the IM bot for the BME authorisation module (that is, the tool that messages you when your membership is about to expire).
• Write a contingency guide for BME and IAM. That is, a list of all the known problems (crashes) and how to fix them. This includes everything from server crashes to problem users.

I also have to write a complete BME operations manual, but I don't think that'll get done before I leave this time… So fingers crossed that I make it back alive. Assuming I do, I'll have an operations manual done before the Gumball rally, so on the slim chance that something terrible happens, everything will keep running even without me.

Anyway, on to the regular news. If you're not interested in that type of commentary, you can stop reading now; there's no more BME stuff in this entry.

In April 1980, Gregg Easterbrook wrote an article criticising the danger inherent to the Columbia space shuttle… His fears were proved correct a few years later when disaster struck. He's just written a new article for TIME called The Space Shuttle Must Be Stopped — “it's costly, outmoded, impractical and, as we've learned again, deadly”. We're also seeing a series of stories on how NASA repeatedly ignored and silenced warnings. First, I think we need to stay focused on space research. I think it's essential… But…

Ultimately here's what I'd like to see:

• NASA's budget increased to about $100 billion a year. If we shift over some of the military spending I believe that's a viable number that can be achieved with little to no tax increase.
• NASA's primary goal would be to offer large research grants to private corporations such as Scaled Composites, Bristol Spaceplanes, The da Vinci Project, and Armadillo Aerospace.
• Any patents and research from these grants would be publicly shared with some limitations on their enforcement. That is, the companies would be permitted to profit to some extent, but ultimately the research would belong to all of humanity.

Most importantly I think we need to make sure that NASA remains a civilian organisation. My greatest fear in all of this is that space research moves over into the military sphere. What monsters that would unleash! We must ensure that the universe belongs to all people, not simply to those who'd subvert it into a tool of war.

Now I'd like to focus on two stores that I believe deserve your attention. The first is on the ownership of voting machines. This absolutely incendiary article makes a strong circumstantial case that voting machines in the US are rigged and owned by the powers that currently control America. Seriously, this is a big deal if it's even remotely true. What if there really are no longer democratic elections in the United States? If that's not grounds for violent revolution, I don't know what is.

In a related story, faking the voice of the people, the CSM looks at the recent phenomena of “fake” letters-to-the-editor being submitted in mass to newspapers. Let's not kid ourselves — people want to agree with their neighbours. It's a lot easier to say “yeah, ok” than to say “no” to something that you feel is the majority view.

Seriously, think about the implications of the above to stories.

They are a very big deal, and a direct threat to democracy and freedom.