One of the most brilliant songs ever written... so not very hopeful, and it's just... well, brilliant with some great lines in there.
Lyrics:
my mirrored room, my secret life
it's lonely here,
there's no one left to torture
Give me absolute control
over every living soul
And lie beside me, baby,
that's an order!
Give me crack and anal sex
Take the only tree that's left
and stuff it up the hole
in your culture
Give me back the Berlin wall
give me Stalin and St Paul
I've seen the future, brother:
it is murder.
Things are going to slide, slide in all directions
Won't be nothing
Nothing you can measure anymore
The blizzard, the blizzard of the world
has crossed the threshold
and it has overturned
the order of the soul
When they said REPENT REPENT
I wonder what they meant
When they said REPENT REPENT
I wonder what they meant
When they said REPENT REPENT
I wonder what they meant
You don't know me from the wind
you never will, you never did
I'm the little jew
who wrote the Bible
I've seen the nations rise and fall
I've heard their stories, heard them all
but love's the only engine of survival
Your servant here, he has been told
to say it clear, to say it cold:
It's over, it ain't going
any further
And now the wheels of heaven stop
you feel the devil's riding crop
Get ready for the future:
it is murder
Things are going to slide ...
There'll be the breaking of the ancient
western code
Your private life will suddenly explode
There'll be phantoms
There'll be fires on the road
and the white man dancing
You'll see a woman
hanging upside down
her features covered by her fallen gown
and all the lousy little poets
coming round
tryin' to sound like Charlie Manson
and the white man dancin'
Give me back the Berlin wall
Give me Stalin and St Paul
Give me Christ
or give me Hiroshima
Destroy another fetus now
We don't like children anyhow
I've seen the future, baby:
it is murder
Things are going to slide ...
When they said REPENT REPENT ...
Labels: music
Made-to-Order Babies - Motherlode Blog - NYTimes.com
The idea of the "designer babies" is not that far fetched....
The question has roared back into the headlines this month, first with the birth of the octuplets — which to so many of us seems like Exhibit A of IVF-run-amok — and now by a story in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal about the potential use of something called preimplantation genetic diagnosis to choose physical traits in a baby, like hair color and eye color.
P.G.D. was created so that parents who carried genes for life-threatening disease could be assured of having healthy children. Embryos created by IVF are tested at the three-day stage, and only those that are free of disease are transferred to the uterus. Theoretically, one could look for any gene in those embryos. And the reporter Gautam Naik quotes Fertility Institutes, a Los Angeles Clinic, as saying they will begin to offer exactly that service, allowing couples “a pre-selected choice of gender, eye color, hair color and complexion,” whether or not they were also screening for serious illness at the same time.
R seems to be the best free statistical software out there. So, I'm going to give it a try. I've used SAS, SPSS, and Stata.. I don't know how it compares to them. But, the problem is that it's been a while since I've done any stats, and I'm VERY rusty.
Oh boy.. This is going to be fun.
As poor graduate students, sometimes it's difficult to come up with the $$ it takes to get a decent statistics software or qualitative data analysis software. And, there's too much guilt associated with "borrowing" software from friends.
Today I found a meta-list of free statistical software either released under the GNU license, or are given free of charge. Here's the list: http://statistiksoftware.com/free_software.html
They have many SPSS clones listed on there. I have just downloaded PSPP, which promises to be a good SPSS clone. I'm uninstalling SPSS from my computer since I couldn't get the site license for it. And even if I did, it expires in one year, so what's the point?
Next, I'll have to download something for text analysis that's like Atlas.ti, but free. I'll post on here when I find something.
Labels: software, statistics