2014 January❮❮prevnext❯❯

"should old acquaintance be forget, especially in Chicago where it's still twenty thirteen..." "how do you like living in the past Chicago???"

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Instagramming food is how we say grace now.

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Now that I've quit smoking for about 9 months I can smell way better. Earth smells kinda weird honestly.

Dogs like to poop in alignment with Earth's Magnetic Field. SCIENCE!

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Rocking, 'walking' gyroscopic cubes Speaking of science... I always thought gyroscopic forces were weird and mysterious. If -- when, rather -- I become a mad evil overlord, my robotic minions (cleverly and disarmingly disguised as retro-style "Companion Cubes") spontaneously LEAPING UP in blatant disregard of intuition about Newton's laws of action and reaction will mean you should probably start running on your puny human "pushing off against the ground" legs. Ancient Greek's 6 Words for Love -- I often still feel weird about use of the word "love" for all sorts of different types of feelings and relationships. Funny that the language of Shakespeare does such a rough job of it. My usual media roundup. Far fewer movies on video is the main change. I guess I watch more of those when I'm going steady for longer. Usually.

Better than expected stuff in red, All time favorite in bold, not so good stuff in grey.

So, "all time favorites": Gravity 3D, but in IMAX. It's a bit hokey, but the majestic expanse of Earth are half the key to placating my inner child astronaut.

Bookwise, "Cloud Atlas" was a stylistic tour de force, I love how it built and then deconstructed itself. "Spell of the Sensuous" talks about what we lost with the rise of phonetic alphabets and more. "Dirk Gently" is just amazing in how well it holds up, how fresh it still seems.

In Comics, Harvey Pekar's Cleveland is a beautiful tale of a city I love, James Sturm's America: God, Gold, and Golems includes "The Golem", maybe the best baseball story every told, The Infinite Wait is a great and very personal set of autobiographical tales by Jula Wertz

In video games, Saints Row IV was an astounding melange of super heroism and goofy action, and GTA: San Andreas on iPad was what I wanted GTAV to be more like.

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"'NO NO NO NO' - the guy who invented folding chairs watching a wrestling match"
--http://twitter.com/famouscrab Why marketers fear the female geek. I like explanations of the world like this one, that refer more to a law of unintended consequences rather than presuming that it's large scale bad intentions that lead to ugly situations, like we have now with the extreme gender-splitting and "hardcore us vs everyone else" culture building.

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Blender of Love The other day I posted about those cube robots that could hop up on their own. Turns out a variant of the technology is here already, for iPhone users... http://www.cycloramic.com/ -- you set the thing upright on a flat surface, and it uses the phones built-in vibrate motor to spin around 360 degrees... it's uncanny to see in action. So here is all but the first part of January of my 2013.

I don't know if people will find this interesting or not, but it really let me relive a year that had a lot of ups and downs.

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'Daddy, I had a bad dream.'
You blink your eyes and pull up on your elbows. Your clock glows red in the darkness -- it's 3:23. 'Do you want to climb into bed and tell me about it?'
'No, Daddy.'
The oddness of the situation wakes you up more fully. You can barely make out your daughter's pale form in the darkness of your room. 'Why not, sweetie?'
'Because in my dream, when I told you about the dream, the thing wearing Mommy's skin sat up.'
For a moment, you feel paralysed; you can't take your eyes off of your daughter. The covers behind you begin to shift.

Songs I added to my collection in December... ones in red are especially great.

• As It Comes (The Exploding Voids) My favorite German group is finally making videos... I've loved this song for years. One of my all time favorites, such an eloquent expression of detachment and again, in a short little piece.
• What It Is About (The Exploding Voids) Another song by them that's really growing on me. (despite the little typo in the text of the video.)
• Go Where the Love Is (Edie Brickell) Very sweet song, used on the sound track to "The Way Way Back".
• Michael Jordan vs Muhammad Ali (Epic Rap Battles of History) One of the top three they've done. I love the way they captured Ali's flow: "Ooh here comes Jordan / Big tongue wobblin' / FLyin' through the air like a big dumb goblin"
• Barnacle Bill (Oscar Brand) I've heard of this song for years, ever since I heard my dad answered a speaker at training school (seminary) who was asking "Who is that knocking at my door?" with "It's Je-sus Christ the Savior"
• The Monster (feat. Rihanna) (Eminem) Good modern sound.
• Worried Man Blues (Woody Guthrie) Some of the oldest sheet music I own is this song, from my elementary school days. Very fun to sing along and harmonize to.
• I Need My Girl (The National) Not sure why this song was featured on "The Mindy Project" but it's great.
• Sleigh Ride (The Ronettes) Ronnie Spector was on public radio a lot this holiday, and the Wall of Sound is just terrific.
• The Man With The Bag (Kay Starr) Another nice big band holiday sound.
• My Thang (Regrooved by DJP) (James Brown) Funky remix. I was studying up on "It's Your Thing", and supposedly this song used the same bass line, but the presentation is way different.
• The Dinghy Song (Ruth Wallis) Another from that old Dr. Demento tape a friend made for my dad when he was sick; kind of fun and raunchy.
• Dang Me (Roger Miller) My mom reminded me of that old "Dang me, dang me, they oughta take a rope and hang me..." that I remember singing as a kid.
• No Rain (Blind Melon) Someone mentioned their coworker had the opening bars of this as a ring tone. One of those 90s songs that I kind of liked but wouldn't have bought a whole CD for.
• Fighting Man (DJ Pone & Drixxxe) Sought this out after Shazam or SoundHound managed to name it behind this extremely weird Simpsons spanish dub.
• Put 'Em On the Glass (Sir Mix-A-Lot) NSFW video. Kind of a sequel to "Baby Got Back". Notable for actually having nipples in a pop music video.
• Hallelujah Chorus (Bruce Kurnow) I wanted a version of Hallelujah Chorus and kind of like the twang in this one all harmonica version.

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http://www.xkcd.com/1314/ Today's xkcd reminded me of this quote:

Photography isn't about the pictures. Pictures never come out right. It's about the adventure.

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Re: global warming and the cold weather 'Liberals keep telling me the Titanic is sinking but my side of the ship is 500 feet in the air.'

You are what you love, not what loves you.

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I didn't learn how to shave from my father either. Which turns out, I think, not to be so strange. One of the the things about manhood I learned from my father is that it's a solitary experience, a land of silences and understatements, a place where a lot of important things have to be learned alone. Whereas womanhood, a lot of the time, is a thing you get to share.

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But then, this is one of the fundamental contradictions of parenthood-- the unending necessity to teach you children lessons that you yourself still have not learned.

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http://kirkdev.blogspot.com/ On my devblog, a little ramble about smartwatches, now that I have a Pebble. Trying to decide if I really like that it just does a few things well, or if I'm just saying that...

Everyone knows history is written by the winners, but that cliché misses a crucial detail: Over time, the winners are always the progressives. Conservatism can only win in the short term, because society cannot stop evolving (and social evolution inevitably dovetails with the agenda of those who see changes as an abstract positive). It might take seventy years, but it always happens eventually. Serious historians, are, almost without exception, self-style progressives. Radical views-- even the awful ones-- improve with age.

cancer isn't funny unless it is a funny comic about cancer, like a clown with cancer or something

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Clown sittin there in chemo. He gotta pump the stuff into his veins by hand. It honks every time he squeezes bag.

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a clown wheezes as he tries to stay involved in a pie fight, but he has to pause for breath. He is a sad clown

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'Look on the bright side, now you're thin enough to fit into the clown car' oh man guys I went a little dark there

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Clown resolutely shaving off bright red tufts of hair before they fall out to the tune of 'Yakety Sax'

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Clown ends call with insurance after finding out his treatments are not covered anymore with sad honk.

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'The good news is the tumor has shrunk by 30%.' *happy honk* 'But we still have to operate.' *sad trombone honk*

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During surgery a lapel flower squirts water over doctor. 'Clamp that! STAT!'

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IV connected to an upside-down seltzer bottle.

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one clown tosses a bucket full of meds at his suffering friend clown

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(all that via http://mightygodking.com/2013/08/02/really-twitter-is-so-much-better-than-facebook/ ) Say it, don't spray it, Colts player Andrew Luck...

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The bunny who thinks 'I don't like this garden' is experiencing a thought and not a garden.

It says he made us all to be just like him. So if we're dumb, then god is dumb, and maybe even a little ugly on the side.

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You know, after years of "what are we going to call the first decade of the 2000s once we can't say 'this decade'?" it feels like "the aughts" is winning out. Neat and funny stuff, looks like they made some digital bipedal skeletons with virtual muscles and then let them evolve to learn to walk:

Flexible Muscle-Based Locomotion for Bipedal Creatures from John Goatstream on Vimeo.

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FWIW it's worth I've been moving most of my middlebrow food buying from places that have calorie counts clearly displayed. doesn't stop me from being constantly a bit shocked by the calories in most panera bakery goods, though. The Dragon hiding in the USA:


See more map animals here Thoughts I've been having lately:

My mom and I were corresponding about an old vacation video I had recently unearthed, and when I talked about my discomfort at being such a graceless, attention-seeking adolescent, my mom wrote:

I so wish you could be more understanding of your adolescent self. That's the real key....you were an adolescent and your actions then belong to that stage of development. You've grown into maturity with so so many positive attributes that were somehow cooked together from those years. Plus, you've carried into adulthood a lot of the creativity and risk taking that many adults leave behind.

I've been thinking a lot about my "creativity and risk taking". In most ways, I'm not much of a risk taker, because I live in this weird fear of being held account to some authority, sometime, somewhere, some voice that will point out "YOU CHOSE POORLY AND NOW THINGS ARE BAD AND YOU SHOULD FEEL BAD". So, I don't proactively choose much. And I don't judge much, or at least not casually, because then I'd be responsible for an opinion that could turn out to be wrong. I guess to the extent I seem like a risk taker, it's in not really caring if I got put into certain categories by other people... I've always had more interesting things to worry about than if I was a dork, that battle was probably already fought and lost. (Or won.)

There's that (often misattributed) quote by Marianne Williamson "Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure." that I've been mulling around. The thing is, on an abstract, intellectual level, I know some things are impossible. You can take the series 1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 +.... for as long as you want, even forever, and you will never ever get to 3. The AI research Marvin Minsky mathematically proved (citation needed, couldn't find a good reference) that a type of neural network some other folks were working on would never, ever be able to differentiate certain types of visual patterns.

So how important is the impossibility of things to real life? Should I try to just label it a meaningless, abstract theoretical? Do I use the concept as too much of an excuse to continue my life's pattern of being a local optimizer, preferring to build in small steps rather than make grand sweeping changes?

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relevant cartoon from http://tumblr.tastefullyoffensive.com/post/73422091488

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On Valencia Street, I look out the window at the hipsters on their fixed-speed bikes. The tight clothes, the tiny hats -- their major struggle as a generation seems to be reducing drag. As if success in life requires being ever ready to slip through a narrow opening.

Cool quote, though I'm a little mixed on hipsters as a term these days.

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http://kottke.org/14/01/the-sum-of-all-positive-integers Good lord. 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + .... ends up equalling -(1/12). If you ever wanted to make a philosophical argument that math doesn't describe our world, start here. From a series of long forgotten photographs of the Challenger disaster
Interesting. I am now "Dropbox Guru" status with 48 Gb "for the next 24 months". Sounds like a sneaky way to get me to pay in 2016.

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http://mentalfloss.com/article/29713/11-insane-features-normal-human-anatomy holy crap we are all bioluminescent? this space left intentionally blank this space left unintentionally blank A restless night for me last night, but my dad made a cameo in one of my dreams.

He was standing in a pavilion near a ferris-wheel type ride I had just been on. The dream was half-lucid; I remember kind of arguing with the narrator of dream, trying to mentally persuade the dream powers-that-be to let this scene linger; it felt like it had been a long while since I had seen him.

I went up to him to drink him in visually as much as I could. He had some sort of obscure gadget in front of his face (some of my coworkers are into Google Glass, maybe it was dreamworld parody of that.) I looked at his face closely; his eyes were a little blood shot. He didn't have much to say but I told him again and again how much I miss him, and then those dream powers-that-be had their say and the scene was finished.

The world has changed a lot since the late 1980s, and so have I, and I wish he was around to interact with both.

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Map of Europe Showing Literal Chinese Translations for Country Names...

(from 40 Maps That Will Help You Make Sense of the World)

AVOID your partner fantasising about other people during sex by shouting 'It's ME by the way!' every couple of seconds. @PyrrhicBuddhism

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http://wvpublic.org/post/hell-you-west-virginians-raw-response-water-crisis-goes-viral To me, this is what laissez-faire capitalism looks like.

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RECREATE the thrill of The Lotto by not guessing someone's phone number and then giving them two quid. (via @Swissss)

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Sometimes I wonder if an attitude of presumed (semi-)foiled belligerence would be a better way of dealing with the world. "C'mon world, send some jerk to cut me off? Is that all you got! Pah!" "WELL BOO-HOO my editor crashed and took an hour's work with it" "A drippy nose and fatigue-- NICE TRY! IMMA GET THROUGH THIS"

On the one hand, it seems like a nice way of Murphy's-Law-Jitsu: there's no situation so bad it couldn't be worse, be grateful it's not worst. Real cynics are either pleasantly surprised, or just having their expectations met... maybe I could actually enjoy challenges rather than just seek validation.

But then, I guess this way paranoia lies. Also assuming everything was out to get me might give me an unreasonable chip on my shoulder, assuming everything I got was all my own two feet and my own two fists, make me think I hit a triple when I was born on third base.

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http://www.cracked.com/photoplasty_771_39-innocent-gestures-that-will-make-people-overseas-hate-you/ pretty decent list of cultural differences, I always dig knowing about the little differences. I think I like the concept of degrowth, though I'm not sure how to balance it against populations' tendencies to rise.

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Man, biggest existential downer game ad ever.

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Dance like nobody's watching - psych! We were all watching. where did u learn those dope moves we're insecure now

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Inspiring ad about a deaf NFL player now in the Superbowl. My weight, over the past 15 years:

I'm nearing the 190 milestone. I did this a year and a half ago, and I admire my optimism from 2006... oh, I'll just lose 40 lbs then, talk to my doctor.

So I'm proud of myself for reigning this in-- and over the past 3 or 4 months (including the holidays) I've lost 10 lbs, which isn't that impressive but the 5:2 fasting that powered it feels like a sustainable plan.. (It's always social eating that gets me; when I'm in hermit mode, my laziness helps me make better decisions.) Still, even though I'm 35 lbs less than my all time high... somehow it doesn't feel all that different. I can't swear that I feel that much better, or look all that different... it feels like more of a numbers game.
Global Game Jam @ MIT kick off last night. Too many dudes w/ beards and glasses. I think I need more interesting glasses.

There is no such thing as a failed experiment, only experiments with unexpected outcomes.

Yesterday I finished up Global Game Jam 2014. Working on a tiny team, we made more of a toy than a game:
Seething Sea-Things It's entirely encoded in Unity, which was a first for me... the other programmer on the team (and who originally pitched the general idea in the team formation part) Andrew Grant was an excellent and patient teacher-- his tolerance for being interrupted with questions was superb. Thoughtful NY Times piece on why some subcultures seems to be doing well in the USA at the moment. I think a key takeaway is yes, some subcultures do better than others especially as gauged by stuff like median incomes, but there's variability on how a subculture perform over time so no, it's not genetic or "millennia of history" that makes the difference. Reasons I love Boston #712: Morning Edition just mentioned that polling suggest 1/3 of Bostoner residents would want the death penalty for the Boston Marathon bomber. Nationwide, the # is like twice that. Both numbers are too high, but the nationwide number is disgusting.

We shouldn't be barbarians. Putting him away in obscurity--and making guesses about the now removed influence of his brother--to ponder what he did is probably a more appropriate punishment than "martyrdom", and the inevitable "SAVE DZOKHAR" campaigns that would result. All the Best Visual Effects Oscar Winners:

amazing to stop and think how long ago some of these movies were made.

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I think I've posted similar before, but the "outsiders" view of the Super Bowl is great.

2014 January❮❮prevnext❯❯