2012 August❮❮prevnext❯❯

Making the rounds, This Is How Olympic Divers Really Look While Diving

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Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.

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"The Lord works in mysterious ways" is another way of saying "Thinking hurts".

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A stranger with your door key explaining that I am just visiting / And I am finally seeing / Why I was the one worth leaving

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http://007.lucklaboratories.com/ - if you like James Bond and/or infographics this is for you! Electric Sheep has a sketchblog!:

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Life can't be all bad when for ten dollars you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for ten years.

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As a programmer, you should be afraid of code, and eliminate as much as possible.

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"penultimate" is my absolute second favorite word ever

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http://www.quora.com/Jobs-1/Whats-something-that-is-common-knowledge-at-your-work-place-that-will-be-mind-blowing-to-the-rest-of-us A quora on Surprising insider knowledge for various industries...

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"It's never been nower."
--http://twitter.com/TheTweetOfGod

Hauled out the Lego when EBB and his brood came over.... my collection is pretty immense but sadly underutilized... I might need to break it up and share the wealth, though it's maybe even tougher than giving up books!

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My idea for a new Olympic sport: swimming tug-of-war. Brilliant, right?
--via Bill the Splut

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http://popwatch.ew.com/2009/10/23/lego-reality-show-one-brick-at-a-time/ - I was just thinking a Lego Builder reality show would be pretty sweet, and somebody had the same idea... did anything come of it?

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Not sure what equestrian event I'm watching but it looks like it's on a giant London-themed minigolf course.

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North Carolina decides it doesn't need that fancy "science" stuff in making policy. Dear lord! As @Todd_Roy put it put it,

"Oh this? Its nothing, just a picture of 2 perfectly round concentric circles that ur brain will refuse to see."

Crazy. Sometimes I think the state of the art in optical illusions has really advanced over the last decade or so. I think computers (and to a lesser extent the internet) are to blame, or thank, in part.

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"[apple crunch]"
"Isn't it hard to eat lying down?"
"Nah Romans did it."
"That's not a good reason. And why did you have that answer ready so quickly?"

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http://kirkdev.blogspot.com/ - my notes from the trenches on porting from Java-based Processing classic to processing.js

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Gold medal for NASA in the 563 billion meters

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First world humans are basically well fed apes sleeping under a shady tree. In order to get us to take anything seriously you need to beat us with a proverbial stick...

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Not only are tuba players known for having the biggest horns, tuba playing is all about use of the mouth and fingers.

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You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out God hates all the same people you do.

--Man, Groucho was such the master of the art of the deadpan reaction. Via BB, who also pointed out a Part 2 and mentioned that there's more out there... Come to think of it, our brains in normal life provide many illusions "optical" and otherwise...


Similarly, I have this wooden puzzle at the office:
That folds into a 3x3 cube (but is devilishly difficult to fold correctly) but looks like it's much much bigger than that, I think.

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"Sometimes, R2D2 just has to turn a screw. Sometimes Kenobi has to die to disable the tractor beam. Be patient with me."
--http://twitter.com/unclesamkent

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http://www.spaceflavor.com/Cube_Prefabricated_Home_Live_Work_Loft.html love the ideas behind this tiny box living space.

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http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/106129 wait, those Easter Island heads have bodies extending into the earth? Wikipedia seems to confirm...
from a BoingBoing theory on Christian Fundamentalists and their distrust of Set Theory... man, most of us can't hate something so abstract!

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Kinda liked this from-the-trenches view of coding for the various video game consoles from the mid-90s on.
Wow. See also:

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Listen to your broccoli, and your broccoli will tell you how to eat it.

Denis Medri does Star Wars High School -- so clever. (His deviantart page seems a little wonky, this source has some easier to get to versions...)
I love Leia and Han w/ "The Falcon"... last night we watched "Brick" which is a direct mapping of Dashiell Hammett-esque speech and drama onto high school. It's funny leveraging the semi-univeral high school experience and accompanying tropes that way.

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2008, 2012 Republican VP picks: doublin' down on the crazy!

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Wheaties: Breakfast of Champions. Dinner of Losers.

Ben Wakeling wrote:

A child's skull, before their milk teeth fall out. This is freakier than all the Alien films combined.

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Just finished "Just Cause 2" on Xbox 360. So much prettier than it needed to be. Realizing all my favorite AAA games are based on Havok physics.

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http://www.thisismyjam.com/kirkjerk -- "A Little Less Conversation, A Little More Action Please"... such a good mashup

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blender of love digest

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Don't grieve. Anything you lose comes round
in another form. The child weaned from mother's milk
now drinks wine and honey mixed.
God's joy moves from unmarked box to unmarked box,
from cell to cell. As rainwater, down into a flowerbed.
As a rose, up from the ground.
Now it looks like a plate of rice and fish,
now a cliff covered with vines,
now a horse being saddled.
It hides within these,
till one day it cracks them open...

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Talking with Kay, I realize that seasons provide the anchor for my sense of time; 3 months ago is abstract, but "late Spring" means something.

Despite me not digging New England winter, this might make me feel better about not having to moved to San Diego or wherever; I've always given lip service to "it's good to have distinct Seasons" but maybe it's more crucial than I realized.
--from the shooting of the movie "Metropolis", via 45 Behind The Scenes Photos That You've Probably Never Seen Before

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Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious.

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My new concept for a labor-saving device: the Self-Jousting Windmill! #kickstarter

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Is life too short to be taking shit, or is life too short to be minding it?

--via 22 words

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[Writing and reading are] like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can't stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.

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She is leaning on one arm on the back of my chair, her hips canted forward; her shirt rides up, showing a chevron of sleek tummy, a demure ring at the navel.

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Coding around obscure and bizarro IE9 timing-related bug symptoms (like the guts of the page missing) by having page render as IE8. #FML We were helping my buddy JZ and his family move. He seemed to spend a lot of time handing this down from and putting things up in attics.

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So, a few weeks ago I did a book purge. Amber helped me scan all the ones I'm getting rid of, which was an important part of the letting go process for me, so that the titles can be gone but not (electronically) forgotten.

Anyway, the books you see at this link: http://www.librarything.com/catalog/kirkjerk/thedump
Are free to a good home. Limited time offer. Limit 8 or so to a customer. Preference given to people we don't have to package up and mail things too...

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I don't like that "Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan" is an anagram of "My ultimate Ayn Rand porn." I love it.

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Rom says unemp shld be 4%. I was Sec of Lab last time it was 4%. We got there by raising taxes on rich and investing in ed and infrstructre.

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http://www.thisismyjam.com/kirkjerk -- I have on my bizness socks, that's how you know, aw yeah, it's bizness time!

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The shocking truth is that we're only as free as our genes are pliable in the slosh of our developmental millieus.

--Forget where I saw this...
--from The Profound Programmer. Kind of a web 2.0 version of "Demotivators". (Eclipse is an free editor for the Java programming language that luckily I don't have to use right now... and of course "99 Problems" is a reference to a Jay-Z's hip hop work.

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At Boston #dataviz the creator of http://livecoding.io showed it off- like a slicker faster jsfiddle -- see also http://vimeo.com/36579366

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I think the last day of the Olympics should have all the gold medalist compete in a game of dodgeball. That way there's an ultimate champion.

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There's kids in the pool playing Marco YOLO. If they drown I'm not saving them.

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http://theprofoundprogrammer.com - more true to the coder's life than Demotivators, even... (warning, swears!)

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Wait, whose iced tea did they give me? (@Flour at Fort Point)
--A tantrum supercut, via bb. Cathartic! Lots of swears though.

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What I say is that, if a man really likes potatoes, he must be a pretty decent sort of fellow.

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I've said it before and I'll say it again... Alka-Selzter + Emergen-C is awesome.

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http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/08/23/waste-creativity-and-godwins-corollary-for-technology/ good waste vs bad waste, "civilizations are defined by the resources they can waste", the singularity vs the collapse Wow. This morning my weight was below 200 for the first time in 8 years or so.

It feels like a validation of my lax variant of South Beach, and props to those folks: they really have a feel for what it takes to suppress cravings that sabotage so many good intentions about eating well.

The cornerstone of my new "Way of Eating" (that term being a hangover from my days on Usenet's alt.support.diet meant to encourage thinking in terms of a permanent shift in "W.O.E." rather than a temporary "diet") is my daily lunch of a Wendy's Baja Salad (no tortilla chips, no dressing) and all the sugarfree gum I want -- mostly those weirdly awesome Wrigley's "Dessert Delights". I used to have a sweet tooth that was notorious in the office, but now-- I'm not even tempted. It's weird; it's not willpower, it's not needing willpower.

So in trying to figure out what's really at work here (in part because even though I don't mind the same lunch every day, I don't love that it's (low grade) red meat chili, and I might not always work near a Wendy's) -- I think the most likely suspect is the beans in the chili. Reading about them, they're thought to be a good source of protein, and slow to digest, so they keep blood sugar levels stable and thus less craving-riffic.

So between that slow digesting beans and the tasty gum, the cynical summary of that is this: the main way for me to achieve weight loss that doesn't tap into my finite reserves of willpower is to fool my body into thinking it's CONSTANTLY snacking all afternoon long.

Ah well. Whatever works, right? Last night we watched "I ♥ Huckabees" -- its tale of a married couple of Existential Detectives (Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman) and their battle for a holistic, everything is meaningful world view vs a French rival's jaded, almost nihilistic everything is meaingless outlook , all in rapidf-fire David Mamet/Aaron Sorkin dialog is probably about to be come a new favorite of mine.

Probably my favorite quote from it was

"There's no such thing as nothing."

but Amber liked the part about "How am I not myself?":
Earlier that day, I had heard part of a radio interview with David Eagleman, who just wrote the book Incognito: the secret lives of the brain that talks about a model of the self that I happen to subscribe to; that internally, it's kind of like a multiparty political system, with each party wanting what it thinks is best for the whole, but with a lot of disagreement about what are the priorities that should be first attended to.

So I suspect I have a different feel about "How am I not myself?" than some people. My answer is more like "Well, I'm not that much of a self"... vs an interpretation of the quote that's wondering how someone could be "untrue" to a monolithic, essentialist "myself".

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A billion dollars from Samsung to Apple? More than the money, it's the validation of the strangling patent system that I hate.

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The function of freedom is to free someone else.

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http://twentytwowords.com/2012/08/21/al-rokers-hilarious-response-to-savannah-guthries-holy-spirit-joke/ - Al Roker does the best dead pan ever.

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Is there a name for things you're oddly dreading starting? Oddly in the sense of you're pretty sure you'll enjoy it once underway?
via

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Kirk has at least the strength of one man!

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http://www.thisismyjam.com/kirkjerk -- "Digital" by Goldie/KRS One. Found the original (non-remix) on a Newbury Comics compilation. Great drum and bass breakbeats.

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http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/05/17/biodegradeable-urn-lets-you-go-green-even-six-feet-under/ - I really like the idea of this burial urn that lets you become a tree (in part) after you die...
Spy Pond, Arlington
Instagram's "Lo-Fi" filter is becoming my favorite. I kind of like the idea of having a signature look for this stuff, and Lo-Fi simplifies and makes thing pop a bit, allowing more focus on form and shape, which I think is more important to me, style-wise.

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http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/ digging this site reviewing branding/logo makeovers.
retro fixie at alewife

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THOSE ARE NOT VALETS. DO NOT LEAVE YOUR CAR WITH THEM.

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Just got email thinking my one resume reference of Ehcache means I'm an expert qualified to author a new book. Pity buyers of that book!

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http://jasonsantamaria.com/articles/stealing-sheep -- for those gettin' to 40 or thereabouts, the inspiring late start of font master Frederic Goudy

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Take away alcohol and stupid, and the world would require about 90% fewer cops.

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My code would be good if I knew how to write it!

Cracked.com had this photo, from this Atlantic feature on the fall of the Nazis:

The description:

A U.S. soldier stands in the middle of rubble in the Monument of the Battle of the Nations in Leipzig after they attacked the city on April 18, 1945. The huge monument commemorating the defeat of Napoleon in 1813 was one of the last strongholds in the city to surrender. One hundred and fifty SS fanatics with ammunition and foodstuffs stored in the structure to last three months dug themselves in and were determined to hold out as long as their supplies. American First Army artillery eventually blasted the SS troops into surrender.

Creepy Indiana Jones lookin' scene!

Curly: Do you know what the secret of life is? This. [holds up one finger]

Mitch: Your finger?

Curly: One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and the rest don't mean shit.

Mitch: But what is the "one thing?"

Curly: [smiles] That's what you have to find out.

via Coding Horror who use it to explain "Curly's Law", an emphasis of only doing things one time.

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http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/08/30/paul-ryans-speech-in-three-words/ Kudos to Fox News for allowing such a negative editorial! "Ryan's speech was an apparent attempt to set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies and misrepresentations slipped into a single political speech."

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Geekery! I'm releasing a new javascript library, geared at sounds for browser-based games: http://lowlag.alienbill.com/ lowLag.js: responsive html5 audio "a simple wrapper for low-latency, high-compatibility, html5-friendly audio"

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$25 to United for an "excess baggage" charge. Hm, I think that used to be called just "any baggage"... #bravenewworld

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--via

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Everything has its time, and everything dies.

2012 August❮❮prevnext❯❯