Death Penalty

I'm generally against the death penalty.

It's not necessarily that it's wrong to kill someone that deserves it; that doesn't sound like the ultimate evil to me. I just don't think the US judicial system is accurate enough to make that determination — or anything close to it. It's definitely a working system, just not accurate enough to inflict death. When the system learns it was inaccurate (which it does with alarming frequency), it releases the convicted from prison. You can't give someone their life back if you execute them...

It's just not worth it. We're wrong too often.

That said, there are some things for which I would vote in favor of the death penalty, but as far as I know none of them are even against any law.

1. People should be executed (after a fair trial) for going 80% of the posted speed limit. In an unposted speed zone, you should go 60 miles per hour. I suspect the usual excuse for going 45 in a 55 (unposted) is not knowing the speed limit. Well, in my system it'd be safe to go 55 just in case — or risk certain death in traffic court. Why someone would go 45mph in a posted 55mph zone is a total mystery. I like to assume it has something to do with engine trouble, but that would mean some 10% of the cars on the road are unable to go 55mph. I find that somewhat unlikely.

Let me put it another way: I lose about twelve minutes (and that's generous) on each trip to and from work, five times per week, fifty-two weeks per year. (I have carefully measured the difference at 3am numerous times.) I generally sleep for about six hours per night, so that works out to an approximate loss of 5.78 days of my life to people drifting around at 45mph in 55mph zones. I want my entire week of vacation back assholes. Die.

2. People who come to nearly a complete stop and then enter the marked turn lane deserve death. What the hell do these people think those other lanes are for? (Parking would be my guess.) In my system, people would be too afraid of slowing traffic to risk it. They would get out of the way and then stop every time!

I'm sure there are many more, but those were the two that really leaped out at me while I was driving to work this morning.

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Fog

This morning, on the drive to work, there was a dense layer of fog for a short part of the drive. I usually dislike driving in fog, but I welcomed it this morning. I'm really tired of the drive and it added some variety. It hurt my eyes a bit, which got me thinking.

What is it about fog that hurts my eyes? I'm pretty sure it's my brains. Brains are pretty good at spotting shapes. In fact, they're so good at it that they start to spot things that aren't actually there at all. Spotting things that aren't there is known as apparently known as pareidolia (from the greek for amiss image, if the wiki can be trusted). I was spotting all sorts of dangerous things that weren't there.

Then I started unspotting the real ones. Apparently, when my brain got tired of spotting dangerous things that weren't there it over-corrected and started turning real things into things that shouldn't be there and that didn't even make sense. Then back, which seems to come in waves.

I think it's the waves that hurt my eyes. It's at least partially psycho semantic I suspect, but also partially not. I'm reasonably sure that as my brain spots and un-spots things that do and don't exist that the focal depth of my eyes keeps rapidly changing. I think that's going to produce an achy feeling no matter what.

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I'm Blogging!1!!

I couldn't think of anything to put here so I asked on my chatroom.

Ripper asks, "What are you feeling right now?"
Ripper asks, "What song is on the radio?"
Ripper asks, "What's your favorite color?"

And on that note: I'm not really feeling anything except the tyranny of my cable company. There's nothing on the radio, nor my feed from proton. I think I'll start that up actually. I'm completely obsessed with blue. I don't really think about killing myself.

Nichus says, "blog about the use of the word faggot."

And concerning faggot, this Ann Coulter thing has caused quite a stir. I work in a pretty rural area and there was a great deal of discussion about how you can't use the world faggot "anymore." Evidentally, it's considered offensive "now."

Ripper says, "Sweet, now I really don't need a blog because my thoughts are entered for me."

That's correct Ripper.

Bojo says, "dev blogs are interesting."

(Bojo maintains a dev blog nobody reads...)

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Huh, that was easy

It is ridiculously easy to get a blog going I guess. Huh. I'm going to publish this unfit thought just because ... well, that's the name of the game I guess.

I'm basically pretty sure nobody will ever read this post, but ... if you are, and you're wondering how much effort it took to set this up ... the answer is: 0 effort. Try it. I signed in using my google account (although, I zoomed into the iframe to make sure they weren't just storying my password in mysql and laughing at me).

The interface is really slick. I even added a myopenid server redirect to the header of my blog in just a couple seconds and used http://unfitthoughts.blogspot.com/ to log into jyte. magic.