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
December 7, 2018
BABAM Takes Music To The Streets from Julia Maruca on Vimeo.
A great fallacy of the world is this:
that every opinion must move to purpose.
I think it's akin to the perpetual dissatisfaction Buddhists warn us against; we ask why merely think and categorize when we can feel and judge? How else would we be brought to right action? Why strain our selves looking for all the pluses and minuses, the reasons and results, when we can just collapse into a single thumbs up thumbs down?
I was delighted by this mural inside the Rosebud near Davis Square-
"Al Cass FAST" was my favorite valve oil even back in Cleveland - the rocketship and the way it proudly displayed its hometown really appealed to me, along with the"ODORLESS / WEATHER CONSCIOUS / DOES NOT SEPARATE" copy on the bottle, from an era when products sold themselves as much as facts as feelings. According to Wikipedia
[Al Cass] was the manufacturer and creator of the "FAST" valve/slide/key oil combination for brass instruments, which has been considered the industry standard since inception. It was developed after 18 months of R&D at the request and final approval of Dizzy Gillespie.which is super hip.
"If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish."
--David Foster Wallace
"There is no art without resistance in the material."
--William Morris
I've been digging using old school (but touchscreen) e-ink Kindle - but they still have the disadvantage of not letting me use the color coding for highlights I did when the app on iPad mini was my main reader. Also it's less easy to copy and paste quotes onto my website and Facebook. Both of these problems are somewhat mitigated now with what might be a new feature (or not?) where the device can email you a nice PDF and CSV with your notes.
Meanwhile, in Italy, anti-Vaxxer government sacks all 30 members of the health expert board. Oh btw here's a the CDC advisory about a measles outbreak there.
I remember when I was a teen reading about Jim Hightower - "America's #1 Populist" - and thinking that conceptually populism sounded pretty cool. I have no idea if Hightower is "that" kind of populist, but my positive feelings about that are swamped by concerns about the anti-expert sense of "truthiness" that can run things.
Anytime Chris Hill or some other apologist for Trump reminds me "elections have consequences" I'm going to remember this period of Republican lame-duck state legislators furiously working to limit the powers of the incoming leaders.
"We were like two ships passing in the night, yelling obscenities and setting fires in a desperate attempt to sink each other."
--http://twitter.com/Probgoblin
Really bummed about Tumblr. I was always a little surprised when encountering people who mostly thought it was for porn, since it was pretty easy to avoid. For me tumblr is more of a gathering place with a pro-Social Justice vibe. I guess some of its sub-communities are based on shared horniness, but it was easy for me to curate a collection of folks posting stuff I found interesting on the regular. More visual than twitter, more dialog based (and less self-absorbed) than Instagram, less special-topic than Reddit, and not "folks I already know" than Facebook.
Jerks at 4chan can continue to be as alt-right and pornish as they want, I assume. From a culture war standpoint this stinks.
https://kirkdev.blogspot.com/2018/12/shape-detection.html Shape detection is on the iPad! As seen on the Newton circa '95 or a '63 Lincoln TX-2... (and I suppose CAD programs have been doing it all along, but still.)