December 14, 2018
Been thinking about this famous Simpsons line in the context of how I'm noticing everyone is very quick to use emotional judging to get to a stance of "this is good and I'm for it" "this is bad and I'm against it" rather than more finessed categorization; for understanding that everything exists because of some kind of set of cause and effect, and usually meeting some kind of purpose, but maybe a purpose that doesn't align with our own. (I think this "emotional judging" goes against Buddhism's suggestion that we not attach so freely, lest it lead to suffering.)
I mean, that's what a "s'pose'da" is, right? "This should not be!" and yet - there it is. From whence "should"? Going to "how it should be" can be used to deny personal responsibility for preference... I mean you can often trace it back to a lot of "well, we should make choices now to make outcomes like this less likely in the future, preferring rather a common-sense-derived set of preferred outcomes", but most people just go with their gut and-or defer to authority of one kind or another.
Anyway, is the line this teacher is using one (or similar to one) teachers actually used, or was it kind of made up for the show?
Sigh, in the interest of fairness- damn it to hell, NJ Dems, don't gerrymander too, you jerks.
Cracked has some thought experiments, mostly old stuff but some kind of new. I think how some of them - especially "which has more value, water or a diamond, when only the former is essential for life" and "would you ruin a $50 pair of shoes to plunge and save a drowning kid, but not send $50 to a foreign kid-saving charity?" only make any kind of sense if you throw away context. In most contexts, a diamond will gets you lots of water. In context, a drowning child is a problem at hand with a finite and bounded and satisfying solution, while sending a check involves chipping on a corner at a huge problem without resolution.
Noticing that brings me to this idea of how I'm a "cruxian", that I care about things in broad strokes and am relatively insensitive to nuance - basically, my brain is much more attentive to how things interact with their context. I'm blind to things like the mostly-internal excellence of a well-constructed symphony, say... not to mention a bit faceblind, maybe since the specific contours of any given face don't change how it interacts with the world (unless the personal is at the far ends of the beautiful/ugly spectrums)
Today's Nancy is on point.
Man. I feel bad for not being a better hermit crab parent over the years. They are so orderly!
With the rise of phrases like "horny on main", I feel like the word has recovered something it lost in, like, the 80s with 2 Live Crew's song - like it's kind of useful to playfully talk about expressed sexual desire without being too gross or too judgemental.
December 12, 2018
Time for humans is such an odd beast - it marches inexorably forward, yet loops back on itself in the form of days of weeks and seasons in years. In experimenting with visual representations of it, I thought back to my old hooptime illustration, showing the idiosyncratic way I place a week in physical space (like when making simple day-of-week calculations)
Back then I mentioned and illustrated my even stronger sense of the course of a year - again counter-clockwise, with January at the top, and looping back:
Of course a simple loop doesn't display a forward progression of time, so for grins today I stretched out the loop into something that also expresses the movement into the future:
(It's not entirely dissimilar from repeat until death, my attempt to animate Christa Terry's ingrained visualization of an upward spiral of years.)
You can see the full p5 version here.
I'm still very interested in the topic of how different people visualize time, and speculation on what influenced that (clockfaces, calendar pages, whatever) If anyone has an idiosyncratic time-space mapping I'd be delighted to try and make an illustration of it.
"It's judgement that defeats us."
--Colonel Kurtz, Apocalypse Now. I have been thinking a lot on judgement lately; wondering if it's just a form of unnecessary attachment, this incredibly goofy need to develop a gut feel "am I for this or against this" on every topic that crosses our path.
One of the best Vine compilations ever. Man what a brilliant medium that was.
My recent devblog post on repeatable random colors in javascript is slightly more clever than sometimes plus I get to quite John von Neumann: "Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin." (At my first programming job Paul Morville made a small sign of that, since he thought my protests along the lines of "this code can't POSSIBLY be doing that" had a whiff of that "from structure, chaos"...)
I "won" my group's "Ugly Sweater Contest", but mostly because I sang the Imperial March as I took the runway. #cargurus
