(Phaysis)

If anything, the divisive issue of the “Ground Zero Mosque” has made me ill. The toxic, poisonous vitriol polluting the fountains of public discourse has stifled and killed any attempt to bring logic and understanding into the discussion. I try where I can, but you keep clicking your Like buttons and re-declaring your hatred of the Islamic Community Center at Park51. Your Facebook hate-groups, your rightist reposts, your pundit fan pages serve as a blanket to wrap yourself in, an echo-chamber, the reverberations of which support your own hateful ideologies. That blanket also muffles the voices of reason, protecting you from the cold harshness of a multi-cultural reality. While I will strongly defend your right to say what you want, I do not defend your offensive message.

There is no “Ground Zero Mosque”. It is a pan-cultural community center designed to serve the community of lower Manhattan. It’s the equivalent of a YMCA. Know what happens at community centers? Craft classes. Language courses. Alcoholics Anonymous groups. Gym sessions. Basketball games. This project will have a halal culinary school; “halal” is nothing more than the Muslim equivalent of the Jewish concept of kosher. No different than an Italian cooking school.

So if the YMCA (which is short for Young Men’s Christian Association) can set up shop in every major urban center in America, why can’t there be an Islam-based organization in downtown Manhattan?

“But it’s insensitive to the 3000 who died!” Do you know what’s insensitive? Clumping every single muslim into the same extremist group that brought those towers down. You might as well clump every christian together into the same group that dances with venomous snakes and marries twelve wives while blowing up federal buildings in Oklahoma.

Do you know what else is insensitive? Denying the needs of the underserved muslims who live in a city where you don’t live. There’s plenty of churches and synagogues in Manhattan, but there aren’t enough mosques to serve as prayer centers, a necessity for a religion that requires praying five times a day.

“But it’s next to Ground Zero!” Actually, the proposed location is nowhere near the “ground zero” pit. It’s two blocks away (in a run-down neighborhood with closed stores and vacant buildings). That’s two New York City blocks, which are absolutely huge by our mid-American standards. Are you getting it now? It’s not even close.

Do you know what is close, though? A catholic cathedral, which is directly across the street from the “ground zero” pit. There’s also an episcopal church a half block down the street. So if the christians can have single-purpose places of worship next door to “ground zero”, why the hell can’t the muslims have a multi-purpose community center two blocks away?

To deny them their right makes you a bigot, a racist, and a hateful zealot.

There is no Islamic plot to overthrow American culture. There is no End Times master plan to storm into every American home, force your men to grow beards, force your women to wear a hijab, train your children to carry bombs, or take away your HBO. You would have to be crazy to even think that. Are you crazy? You certainly sound crazy.

Listen, regardless of what your pundits and politicians of choice say (it is an election year, mind you), this country was founded on the principles of fairness and opportunity for all. Any deviation from this is a failure on our part. Our soldiers have fought and died to defend these principles, and now you want to disrespect them and diminish their sacrifice by spreading hate against a specific racial group in our society? Shame on you, shame on you.

Stop your hatemongering.

Been a few weeks; figure I should say something. Neglecting my journal in lieu of posting quick status updates on Facebook. I hate that site, because I keep going back to it, clicking “Refresh”, hoping something good pops up. Psychologists have learned all about the strength of randomized rewards, and how it can best be used to illicit specific behaviors.

Essentially, you put a rat in a Skinner box — a training environment with a paddle, food dispenser (for rewards), and electrified floor (for punishment) — and set the food system to eject a pellet after a certain number of paddle presses. If you configure the system to eject a pellet every time the rat pushes the paddle, it’ll learn to push the paddle once, get its food, and move along. If you configure it to eject after a high number of pushes, the rat will lose interest because there’s probably easier food sources elsewhere. But, if you make it eject randomly, sometimes the rat will get the food quickly, sometimes it will have to work for it, and for that reason it keeps going at it, hoping that at some point soon it will get its food.

And so it is with Facebook. And so it is with email. And so it is with slot machines, lottery, chat rooms, coffeeshops, bars, blogs, anything where chance is a component of a quick reward. The chance that someone in my many groups will say something funny, drop an important piece of info, post a hilarious picture, or provide commentary on something I posted, that keeps me going back. Keeps me hitting “Refresh” to the detriment of the rest of my life. I don’t want to say I’m sick, but there it is; I get addicted more easily than I can resist. And that pisses me off.

During my downtime the past few nights, I’ve been listening to and reading up on a pair of phenomena that involve strange radio transmissions.

Have you ever heard of Numbers Stations? These are radio stations on the shortwave band whose only job is to transmit a random-sounding series of numbers either by voice, Morse code, or noises. It is theorized that they are used by governments to send coded messages to their operatives out in the field, yet no single government will admit to using them. A Ham listener can use signal triangulation to locate the transmitting antenna, but there’s no clear way of knowing who the station serves and what its message is.

The use of Numbers Stations is actually growing even after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War (some would argue that the Cold War never actually ended). Even in this day and age of high-speed communications and strong encryption, the fact that clandestine activities still happen with this antiquated technology bears testament to the fact that this is probably the only truely anonymous form of communication.

Since the last few decades of last century, there’s been growing public awareness and concern regarding Numbers Stations, and various researchers, Ham operators, and writers have taken to the cause of documenting these stations, logging their existence, writing down the patterns of numbers, and making audio recordings for a wider distribution outside the amateur radio realm. One such collection was compiled by the Irdial netlabel of England on a 4-CD set called the “The Conet Project – Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations“. Irdial has been kind enough to release this collection for public download at Archive.org. I suggest you read the Wikipedia article, grab the collection, and take a listen. It’s chilling, haunting, and a thrill to hear.

The next phenomenon, though not as clandestine, is still sharply related to the first. Mankind has been hearing strange noises ever since the first 20-mile telegraph line. Operators would hear clicks, pops, whistles and chirps coming out of their receiver sets in between all of the buzzer noises of the telegraph transmission. What they didn’t know at the time, and what we’ve discovered over the last century since the telegraph, is that they were hearing electromagnetic noises generated by the Earth. Every lightning strike, every Aurora Borealis, every solar particle, cosmic ray, burst of energy that strikes the Earth, emits a broad range of electromagnetic noise across the whole frequency spectrum, from DC current up to visible light.

But the electromagnetic frequencies clustered within our human range of hearing (called VLF, or Very Low Frequency) are the most interesting. With the right radio receiver — essentially a large antenna to pick up the noise, an amplifier, an audio filter, and an amp to power a speaker or headphones  — you can listen to these pops and whistles yourself. Researchers have been building these radios and studying the noises for decades, making years-worth of audio recordings. Irdial published a collection of recordings called “Electric Enigma: The VLF Recordings of Stephen P. McGreevy” (also found on Archive.org), gathered by McGreevy on his outings around the Northern hemisphere using equipment he built himself. I suggest you grab it too; the sounds are incredible.

These restore my faith that, even at my age, there still might be some wonder left in this world.

Three. One. Seven. Five. Nine.

Lyrics websites — those sites that appear on the first page of search engine results when you type a song name followed by “lyrics” — have proven themselves useful to me from time to time. Since my CD collection is locked away at home, when I need to look up the lyrics to Manfred Mann’s “Blinded By the Light” [Google], I can pick a site, any site (none of which I’ll link to here since they are so widespread, yet deceivingly similar),and I’ll see that Manfred is singing “Revved up like a deuce”. Rather handy.

My problem with these lyric sites is that they are essentially traps for personal information. Every one of these sites is set up to entice unknowing users into giving up their personal contact info. Every link suggesting you “download this as a ringtone”, “send this song to your phone”, “download this song”, “share this song with a friend”, “add to library”, is a trick to get the user to divulge their cellphone number, their email address, name, contact information of a friend, sometimes even the user’s secret login details on a social networking site. If it’s data, they want it for free.

I’m wary enough that I don’t provide them with any info, but not everyone is savvy enough to catch wise to the ruse. The promise of musical rewards in exchange for a verified bit of info is the bitwise equivalent of a Nigerian 419 scam, where the victim must put up something valuable first before the deal can go through. That deal never goes through. What happens, instead, is the victim’s contact info is collected, used and sold for unsolicited advertising. What you expect is a ringtone; what you get is marketing texts that won’t stop. What you expect is to share your favorite song with your best friend; what you get is you and your bestie dumped on by a mountain of spam.

Personally, I hope my friends and family are wise to this, but that is seldom the case. And that scares me.

My final complaint about the lyrics sites is that they are predatory money-mills for their owners. They’ve figured out the formula for maximizing ad revenue and minimizing cost per click by publishing these sites in bulk. Each site has its own domain name and templates, but they’re run on the same servers by the same companies. There are centralized databases of song lyrics behind whole groups of them; the same content is served by all of a group’s sites. There are companies whose only product is an interface to return lyrics for plugging into a webpage. The lyrics now mean nothing; they are bait. They are just a draw to expose users to a page full of advertisements. Each time an ad is served and presented to a user, that’s pennies in the bank. Draw enough users, and the site owner is raking in good income. Run enough websites, each as disposable as the one before it, and you are guaranteed a heavy income for almost nothing.

Honestly, I can’t begrudge anyone their ability to make money. We all have to survive. It’s just that I see it as a cheap move, and part of me is pissed that I’ve never been able to drop my morals low enough to try this kind of income stream. Slime molds grow on any surface. I don’t see an end to this kind of business model any time soon; the model of using a shedload of cheap, disposable gateway sites to lead the user (and their wallets) to a pyramidding series of websites has been around since the early days of Internet porn, and exists in some parts in the spamming world. As long as it’s cheap enough to flood the market with worthless content on cheap websites, each referencing the other in order to bump up their PageRank on the search engines, while raking in the cash while serving advertising, then this kind of model will persist.

Raise your hand if you’re not ready for the onslaught of the workweek. Raise your other hand if you don’t want it to happen an hour earlier.

Raise your left leg if you like warm spring-like weather. Open windows are a godsend. I took advantage of today’s awesomeness to clean house. Spring cleaning? Why not.

Raise your right leg if you like pie. Pie is good. Save your fork, there’s pie! Also, today is March 14th, also known as 3/14, also known as 3.14, Pi Day. Eat pie. I should’ve eaten some pie, but I’m a nonjoiner. Actually, I had too much dinner to eat pie. So there.

You’re out of limbs to raise, so that’s all I have to say. Enjoy your levitation. You’re welcome.