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Who was this guy? How does he fit into the McDonaldland Pantheon? How did the hamburger beings' heads evolve such that "Mayor McCheese" and "Officer Big Mac" have horizontal burgers for heads? (And this beyond the usual sketchy metaphysics of a food product involved with production for consumption of and enthusiastic marketing for itself and peers.)

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hacker burns through glucose reserves over a year and gives himself seizures. - I didn't realize such a thing was possible, but I've always been a little dense about the body-mind relationship, like when I was startled to realize I played head to head falling block puzzle games better when I sat up vs when I was reclined, even though I thought I was equally focused in both postures.

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"Negroes always love our hometowns," he said. "Even though we're always from the worst places. Only white folks got the freedom to hate home."

For better or worse, the speaker is from the projects of Cleveland.

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"Deserve is a bullshit term," her yoga instructor boyfriend said. "None of us deserves anything. We get what we get."

Armed with a new laptop I decided to try and gather all my saved files in one place - random junk, old photos and projects and programs and what not- gigabytes and gigabytes of it.

It's weird how much there is in life, and how much of it we forget!

As I think about curating this giant heap, I think of something I wrote a few weeks back, apologetics for my nostalgia :

Again, I celebrate myself and my past, sometimes to an unseemly degree. But that's all I have, you know? I think about stories of old folks on their deathbed who, like, wish they had had more sex and what not - or to put less juvenile-y: deeper, better relationships, that sort of thing. And there's not a lot glamorous about my life and my loves or my history in general - it was good, and I did the best I could with what I had then, the same way I'm doing what I'm doing now, though now I have a little more insight to what drives me at fundamental levels. But, glamorous or not, it was mine.

Of course, in this time of quarantine, certain videos or photos take on this stupid sense of foreboding...

But going over the old material... it's a way of reclaiming my past. As it all slips into foggy memory, it's tough to remember that those were real times, as real to me then as my now is to me now.

I just thought of the case of Joël Aubin, a man knocked down with Alzheimer's at the unbelievable age of 38. Even as his mind was dissolving, there was a a certain Pearl Jam song he was fond of citing, and I'm playing it now: I Am Mine...

I am mine, you are yours. Try and enjoy it and cherish that as much as you can. Even the broken pieces have something to show you.

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The belief that a loved one has been replaced by an imposter is called Capgras delusion. It was first identified in 1923, when a psychiatric patient claimed her husband and children were "the object of substitutions."
[...]
One of the most interesting aspects of Capgras delusion is the element of love. Usually it is not a stranger who has been replaced, but a beloved. In the 1990s, psychologist Haydn Ellis and others theorized that Capgras delusion is the result of your mind recognizing a face without feeling the love that you normally associate with that face.

Love is how we know we are in the right time.

A few folks' entries in Cracked's 15 Ways To Instantly Spot (And Skip) Horrible YouTube Videos cover something that has been bugging me for a while - #15, #10 ("TOTALLY AUTHENTIC" shocked faces), #7, and #5 (The "I-badly-need-your-views" face). I wonder if there's a "generating clicks in Youtube 101" video that has explained why "put a big face or figure prominent in your thumbnail" explicitly, if people are just copying others, or if the effect so obviously improves the stats that it's just obvious.

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Been thinking about how leggings (generally for women, maybe sweats for guys?) are taking over from jeans - It can be a nice look, but the way I don't get it makes me feel old :-D (Also I wonder if the future everyone looking like Shakespearean reenactors...)

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A student learns of metaphors and similes

If you're worried what others are thinking of you, you'd be surprised how seldom they do.

Russian Warplane Flies in 'Unsafe' Manner Near U.S. Aircraft The start of the War With Russia, or maybe just revenge for "Top Gun".

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Of course, we know that humans are political, but we still often assume that our political actions come from thinking about beliefs and desires. Even in election season we assume that voters figure out who will enact the policies they want, and we're surprised when it turns out that they care more about who belongs to their group or who is the top dog.

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Nice debut for BABAM! - the Boston Area Brigade of Activist Musicians, a loose affiliation of like minded players from various bands for last minute but worthy events and big umbrella gatherings.... today we supported the rally to get Somerville's Retirement fund divested from fossil fuels - a real loser investment these days no matter how you slice it.

(I was having a water bottle crisis where it somehow flooded by hip pack... I gotta stop carrying stuff during gigs :-) (local copy of video) David Letterman on 33 Years of Late Night I really like his attitude about what he was doing.

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There's a lovely, mischievous pleasure drinking cran-vodkas in the flower-bedecked yard of your high school English teacher, years after the fact. (Along with trying to work up the guts to call her by her first name, now that you're "allowed" to.)

RIP Mrs. McLaughlin.

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At the 1991 EHS Prom:
Beyond Hope of Regeneration: My Life with BASIC BASIC was an ok little language, but more importantly the 80s had this culture and hardware encouraging kids to try it out...

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I don't agree with all the choices, but I think the idea of presenting a software canon is a worthy one

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http://www.twiddla.com/ is a pretty cool free shared whiteboard site... Do you know why trees can act as CO2 sinks? Because they fairly literally make themselves out of thin air (plus a few minerals from soil) That's kind of amazing! Many people don't have the right mental model of that process, and kind of see trees as solidified dirt, but it's air and water.

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A man walks into a bar. He walks into it again. And again. And again. There are thousands of him now, confused & screaming.

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http://kotaku.com/i-am-stereoblind-but-the-3ds-lets-me-see-the-world-as-484508038 -- A stereoblind man sees 3D for the first time ... on a game boy. Bittersweet story!

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Kids Say the Creepiest Things!

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For me, a movie is like a machine that generates empathy.

So almost 20 years ago I did a small programming challenge with my Freshman roommate Rob... we came up with a simplistic bidding game (a slightly simplified version of a card game) and we decided to write programs and see whose program would do better at it. Each program had the values 1-10 and it could use each value once, and then they would bid for the values 1-10 coming out in random order.

Ideally, you would write a program that would know what it was holding, and what was left on the pile, and what the opponent still had available to bid, but Rob and I both punted and just mapped a static ordering. If I remember correctly his program was a bit better than mine.

I realized that the "static ordering" method meant some patterns would be more successful at the games then others, and I made up a "survival of the fittest" game of it in QuickBasic, but it didn't get very far in figuring out the "champion". I then thought it would be cool to fight ALL the permutations against all the other permutations and graph it out, but I couldn't think of a good way of generating all the permutations. So I wrote this email to my Computer Science 101 professor asking for help. (The email is a little tough for me to read now, just because it's such an ugly mix of faux humbleness and precociousness. And even beyond my aparent love for Unix style 8-character usernames.)

The good-ish news is that, in the 20 or so years since then, I have the tools (both mental and computer) to write a solution for the problem in a few hours. (Using a simple brute force method to count from 00000 to 99999 or so, and then seeing which of those numbers were "legal patterns" using each digit from 1 to 5 once.) The result looks like this:



It's kind of nice and fractal-y. In running it I learned the straight forward, bid what each thing is worth pattern (12345) is the best bet, winning 104 out of 120 battles. It ties with 12345 (of course) 13542 23145 32415 42351 and loses to 12453 13425 13452 14352 21453 23415 23451 23541 24351 31452 32451. You can see it on the top horizontal line, with red indicating a victory for the horizontal player, blue meaning a loss, and gray a tie.

I also generated the version with 6 bids:. Plotting that shows the pretty fractal-ness more clearly, though my crude algorithm takes a little longer to show at first. (It's 720x720. The next size up would be 5040x5040, which is higher rez than monitors I have handy.) It has a pleasing irregular quilt-like quality

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Make love when you can. It's good for you.

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I feel that the right technology can solve any problem, including us.

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We are born between feces and urine.

One of mu favorite parts of Portal 2....

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The people that you work with are, just, when you get down to it, your very best friends. They say on your deathbed, you never wish you spent more time at the office- but I will. Gotta be a lot better than a deathbed!

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This next test applies the principles of momentum to movement through portals. If the laws of physics no longer apply in the future, God help you.

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When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back! Get mad! I don't want your damn lemons! What the hell are these?! Demand to see life's manager! Make life rue the day it thought it could give Cave Johnson lemons! Do you know who I am? I'm the man who's gonna burn your house down! WITH THE LEMONS! I'm gonna get my engineers to invent a combustible lemon that BURNS YOUR HOUSE DOWN!

--I hadn't heard much about the CURTA Calculator, possibly the pinnacle of pre-electronic handheld computing devices, but you can get this nifty poster here.

It reminds me of high-end photography equipment. (Incidentally, in the slashdot story I think I got this from, they were talking about how rare really high end 80s-90s film stuff is going to be-- too expensive to build replacements for as everything shifts to digital...)

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"['Left Behind' et al.] boils down to this perverse parody of John 3:16: 'God so loved the world that he sent it World War III.'"
--Yehezkel Landau, via slacktivist One of my great pleasures as a professional programmer is when I come up with an idea for a cleverish tool that makes someone else's life better, and am able to implement it in a hurry. This little "colorfade" script does just that, giving you the rgb hex values for fading a color into white, black, or any other color. I'm sure it's been done, but hey, I like it.

For a nice sky effect, bump "# of steps" up to 100.

from color:	#
to color:	#
# steps:

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http://www.slate.com/id/2217147/ - Golden Girls as an underrated sitcom.

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My friend Jane mentioned that she finds Twitter as a bit isolating. It got me thinking to how it compares to say Facebook, which I've been noticing seems much better at fostering feedback (which attention whores like me so crave.) I think some of its a semi-technical/semi-social aspect of how FB invites others to comment on everything, and other people can see those comments... in comparison, Twitter is people shouting (sometimes directed at each other) from their little fiefdoms, even though all the shouts get aggregated.

I think Slashdot was a similar social/technical win, with people's comments on a story showing up in a big public common area, 1 click away from the very front page.

Kate pointed out that Twitter is badly in need of a conversational threading model - some of its competitors have that, but that's not enough to overcome Twitter's early mindshare lead.

I'm worried that this site isn't as engaging as it was, that the "some ramble thought followed by 2 or 3 items with text" format was a bit superior, but the Twitterish/Tumblr-ish hybrid approach really is more true to what I was doing back on the Palm in the 90s. It also fits more easily into a busy life.

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I want to market an extra-rough brand of kleenex called "grindstone".

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Word of the moment: pulchritudinous (hint it doesn't sound like what it is)

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Working with size limits of company logos at work, I'm amused to think of H+R Block's logo as a single green pixel stretched .

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Attn Paul McCartney: because even if "no one really watching us", the road is still dirty and uncomfortably firm and gravel-y! Duh. Last night I mentioned that there was a time I didn't cuss, and EBSO went REALLY? and I thought that that was a little sad. (I'm sure it bums out my mom as well. The one time I heard her drop the S-bomb (I think we had somehow locked ourselves out) it was a major jaw-dropper.)

With my Sunday School upbringing I really didn't swear until seventh or eight grade. And I remember going back to upstate NY from Cleveland, and Dylan saying that my new found swearing didn't sound right or was a bit forced, as if I hadn't quite developed the knack.

In theory I like the idea of holding off on swearing 'til I really need it, but then I would want to make exceptions for a bunch of humor that relies on it. (It's kind of like how every once in a while I get the idea it would be cool if I became something more like a "Silent Bob" type, where when I finally do say something it has great import, but that's so not my real style .)

There's an idea that swearing is a different "kind" of language, that it involves a different part of the brain than regular speech. It kind of amazes how, if that's true, there's something about swearing that transcends particularities of culture and language. Does a Ned Flanders saying "dang it!" instead of something worse mean his brain is structured differently? Like is it the same phenomenon with a different vocabulary, or is the raw energy of the need to exclaim more tempered in the more civilized person?

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Video of the Moment
--Legends of the Superheros, (new video, posted one from I Against Comics) -- wow. Just -- so bad. So campy it goes so far down into bad it swings around to good. And then right back to bad. (The last minute with Adam West reprising his Bat Man role is not too bad.) PLUS -- now we know where that Six Flags guy came from!

Another Sunday on EB's home refurbishment project in Rockport. This day entailed packing lots of chairs into those transportable storage containers (a lockable shed-like box up with stuff, then the storage company carries it away to a nice climate-controlled place for the interim.)

EvilB working away in the chair stockpile

And by lots of chairs, I mean lots of chairs, some in various states of disrepair (including a few missing their wicker seats, which I consider the "assless chaps" of chairdom), but each now wrapped in those cheap furniture blankets you can buy at U-Haul.

Why his folks' place has quite so many chairs was never quite clear. "Maybe I had a shortage of chairs growing up," joked his mom.

Sure, we may scoff now, but it's clear that this storage container will be their key to weathering the upcoming Great Chair Famine of 2012.

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Sounds of the Moment
Boingboing posted some fascinating Audio Illusions. The first link, Shepard's ascending tones, is especially amazing... the tones definately seem to be getting higher and higher, but if you press "play" as it soon as it ends you realize you're back where you started! It's about as exact an aural equivalent of Escher's Ascending and Descending as you could hope for.

T-Shirt Slogan of the Moment

If the world hates you, remember it hated me first.

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Cartoon Weirdess of the Moment
Yesterday I was at Ksenia's folks' house and her youngish brother was watching Boomerang, this channel with lots of old cartoons. I got to see snippets of Yogi's Ark Lark, the oddest, most vaguely sacrilegious mainstream cartoon I've seen in a long while.

"Yogi Bear and Boo Boo, joined by Magilla Gorilla, Wally Gator, Quick Draw McGraw and others, help Cap'n Noah in his quest to rid the world of environmental dangers while travelling around in a flying ark."

Modern cartoon casts and religious archetypes are kind of a weird combination...it reminded me of that folded out Disney mugbox a girlfriend of mine had as highschool locker decoration, where a stylized Mickey arm and glove seemed to have clear and obvious stigmata...I thought "Mickey Christ" was a bit much then too.

Those Hanna-Barbarians!

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Blue Law of the Moment
This morning I thought to pop into Trader Joe's to pick up a bit of beer for a BBQ later, since I was in the neighborhood. I thought that the statewide prohibition on booze sales on Sunday, not just modified to allow sales after noon...

I just don't get it. For better or worse, we live in a convenience society. While in general we probably have more convenience than is good for us, arbitrary restrictions on that convenience need a good explanation, and paying homage to one particular religous tradition (as opposed to Jewish, Moslem, or I guess Seventh-Day Adventists) isn't sufficient. (I hate the counter-argument that goes like "c'mon, can't you give it a rest and give up the booze for one day/half-a-day?" Well, unless you have a good explanation for what that day should be, no. A similar argument, I guess, Hi Bill, is sometimes made for liquor store workers...and while I have sympathy for workers, it's not clear why that kind of worker should be singled out.)

I dunno. Maybe as an extremist moderate I should support what sounds like a not completely barking mad compromise between people to whom the restriction is symbolically important and...well, nearly everyone else. And the Wikipedia entry on Blue Laws claims that "the ubiquitous 'weekend' is also a result of blue laws", so maybe historically there's something to it. (Ever since seeing some bumper stickers pointing out the role Organized Labor has had in weekends and the 40-hour workweek, I'm kind of... I dunno, nervous about the alternate universe where that never happened.)

Saw the new Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie last night. Not half bad! In particular, I thought the casting/characterization was right on, especially with Zaphod, who for the first time didn't feel 2D to me. They actually showed towels being useful, rather than just talking about it. Also, at times Ford and Zaphod feel actually a bit alien, especially early on, rather than just "people in space".

They skipped many great lines from the book, which is to be expected, but weird when they left in the line's setup in to advance the plot. I was half-tempted to yell "WHY DIDN'T YOU KEEP IN THE LINE???" sometimes, but overall I liked it.

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Review of the Moment

I think it was about five months ago that Press editor Alex Zaitchik whispered to me in the office hallway that Thomas Friedman had a new book coming out. All he knew about it was the title, but that was enough; he approached me with the chilled demeanor of a British spy who has just discovered that Hitler was secretly buying up the world's manganese supply. Who knew what it meant--but one had to assume the worst.

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New Site Feature of the Moment
Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed a new solution to the "what should I title the sidebar now that it's not just "Dylan and Sarah's Pointless Sidebar"--whoever has last made an entry gets to name it. Good idea? Too confusing? I kind of like it, though I agree with someone who pointed out that the comments link would be nice at the top...but I can't figure out how to make it fit on the same line as the title, and it's confusing if it comes between the title and the text. As always I'm open to suggestions.

Come to think of it, is "xyz's sidebar" the best formuation, given how the feature will change? What about "sidebar by xyz"? "xyz's aside"? "xyz gaiden"? (Sounding like a Japanese fanboy with that one...gaiden is Japanese for "side story".)

So big day yesterday...I won an auction to get an Mac iBook at a good price, and I also got a bid on the house. Not a done deal, still gotta haggle over the price, but a very good sign.

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Dirty Joke Link of the Moment
NOT SAFE FOR WORK. The page is layered with Porn ads, and the video itself is Cartman telling a REALLY raunchy but very funny joke: The South Park "Aristocrats" clip...Kyle's reactions are hilarious. I guess it ties into some upcoming Penn Jillette / Paul Provenza movie.

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Site Update of the Moment
In order to prevent a repeat of the goofy faux pas I made yesterday on the comments section (I think I goit it subconsciously mixed up with my webmail system and typed the "recepient" rather than my own name in the blank for "name") I've fiddled with its UI a bit...now the textbox for your name comes after, mirroring where it shows up on the display. It definately works better for me, and since I leave more comments here than anyone, I guess that's a reasonable target, as long as it doesn't confuse everyone else. Game of the Moment
Talk about deconstructing a text! Trigger Happy lets you wrestle with philisophical implications of literature, space invaders style.

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News of the Moment
Funny, I can't find much on news.google.com about the "10,000 Iraqi Soldiers Killed" figure NPR was mentioning...a lot more than were killed in the last Gulf War, even though the over all forces on both sides were about half. That's...a lot. And who knows how many of them were forced to fight, and how many of them were fighting to defend their homeland, not the regime itself. Worth it over all? I dunno. (Though Peterman seems to be right when he mentioned the idea floating around that Iraq was partially happening to let us 'gracefully' depart Saudi Arabia without seeming to lose too much face to the extremists who have demanded that.) One thing I do think I know, it sounds like it's too bad our "we're soldiers, not policemen" troops don't have more "less lethal" weapons for dealing with crowds in Iraq. This can't be look good even to Iraqis who support us, even if the crowd was hiding some people with guns. Update: Gowen points out that all of these numbers are suspect. It's really going to be hard to know what the numbers actually were with the two wars.

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Quote of the Moment

"Destiny. My destiny! Droll thing life is--that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself--that comes too late--a crop of unextinguishable regrets. I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of a tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary. If such is the form of ultimate wisdom, then life is a greater riddle than some of us think it to be."

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Found Poetry of the Moment

"I would rather be SLAUGHTERED for BEEF than forbidden to bid on your ITEMS!"

I always thought E-bay feedback was kind of odd, with people gushing praise and loading up on "+" signs after the letter "A" like there was no tomorrow, even for rather mundane and unremarkable transactions. But this guy seems to have turned it into a bit of a Dada- (or Kibo-)esque artistic form. Frankly, I think it would be funnier with few more "A+!"s. (Via BoingBoing.net) So, the "Word Fugitives" column in the June Atlantic has the neologism for what I'm going through now: a karmaclysm. From unemployment against the backdrop of the stock market swooning, to relatives breaking limbs, to various minor medical maladies, to a series of cold gray rainy days..ugh!

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News of the Moment
Jeez. I've been hearing a bit about how the administration is hellbent on an Iraq Attack. What bugs me most is how this is barely making a ripple in the public news, how even NPR is reporting it not in terms of "is this a good idea" but "when's the best time", and whether we can muster up enough regional support.

I started a thread on this in alt.fan.cecil-adams. It's been coming up with a few interesting opinions.

Also, you should check out a well-researched article on Saddam Hussein from The Atlantic. The entire text is there online, though I don't know for how long. It's both oddly sympathetic while not backing down from looking at his incredibly brutal methods; basically, he's a smalltown, hometown-boy thug made good. (A decent summary plus an interview with the author is available from Antlantic Unbound.)

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Quote of the Moment

Radio Shack: You've got questions. We've got cellphone plans.

On the other hand, they did have the little doohickey I need to hook up my Atari 2600 to a coax-only television... Wow. Put in a marathon session on blender ii yesterday. I wanted to get it so people could submit new poems using the new system before the end of the month. There's still a lot of development work I have to put it in to make the front page picks and new digest, but over all I'm happy with where I managed to get it.

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Link of the Moment
When I was in high school, MegaMan was one of my favorite game series. The MegaMan Matrix is a great worship site for this group of games (after a while it became known for a long series of not-too-innovative sequels.) Part of the appeal was that every time your character defeated the 'boss' of one of the boards, he got that boss's weapon. But more than that, I think I liked the character design, these tightly drawn and animated characters of a bio-cyber- future. You can see what I mean on the BubbleMan stage page (from MegaMan 2, arguably the best in the series.) It had a 'sea' theme, and all those creatures fought against you. (Not shown are the tiny tiny (yet explosive) microfrogs "Kero" released from his mouth... I loved those things. Worth hunting down this game ROM and an emulator.
Anyway, I decided to see what Mo and I would look like as Mega Man characters. (An idea blatantly borrowed and enhanced from the top line of seanbaby's hostess page.) I'm pleased with the result.

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Factoid of the Moment

Ted Turner is America's largest landowner, with nearly two million acres, or the rough equivalent of the land era of Delaware and Rhode Island combined.