2018 May❮❮prevnext❯❯
- All This Money (Injury Reserve) This month's sole 5-star, saw on an Apple Ad - very confusing video 'til I realized that, uh, it's not the original artists lip synching in the video.
- Pynk (feat. Grimes) (Janelle Monáe) Sexy and sweetly gentle.
- Solidarity Forever (Pete Seeger) Some people in my band find war songs problematic, so I like this one that's lefty friendly but grabs the melodya and harmony. Why should the devil have all the good tunes?
- Lazy Sunday (feat. Chris Parnell) (The Lonely Island) Oldie, but you know, it has a really good sound.
- Be Water My Friend (Melodysheep) Used in background at "Liquidity, Inc" at the ICA- I like Bruce Lee's philosophy.
- Runaway (feat. Pusha T) (Kanye West) Aw jeez Kanye.
- Freaky Friday (feat. Chris Brown) (Lil Dicky) The excuse for a bunch of white college lacrosse players to shout the N word is not a good look, and the song is not unproblematic, but I love how this song has artists trying to catch each other's cadence.
- The Titanic (Pete Seeger) Not quite the lyrics I grew up with, but nice to hear.
- Signifying Monkey, No. 2 (Bruce Jackson) Not a song... kinda the roots I hear Mohammed Ali drawing from...
- September (Earth, Wind & Fire) Taylor Swift's cover reminded me that I didn't have the original...
- I Will Always Love You (Dolly Parton) When Taylor Swift covered "September", they said the complainers probably thought Whitney Houston originated this song. I've been on a very low key Dolly Parton kick lately.
- Melissa (The Allman Brothers Band) I wrote "Sweet Melissa" when I meant "Sweetie Melissa", and she wondered if it was this song...
- Give It Up Or Turnit A Loose (James Brown) Who doesn't love James Brown...
- Tic Tac (feat. Lambo) (UNIIQU3) Goofy club stuff. My Booty so Fresh, they call me Tic Tac!
- Peace Like a River (Paul Simon) Mention as a member of the 4 AM collection/
- Get Up, Stand Up (Bob Marley & The Wailers) School of Honk is starting up this song, so I wanted to know it better.
- Give It Up (Youngr x Endor) (Youngr & Endor) Nice R+B clubby stuff.
--Josh Dahl says "This image is amazing. It should be used all the time. It applies to every situation. Use it far and wide." "COME Friends.... Let us go AWAY from this dumb place"
Two quotes I wrote down then:
I'd rather have questions I can't answer than answers I can't question.and
Universal consent is not what makes for moral truth.(Another idea I got from listening to it again is Goldstein's concept of "mattering", how important it is to us and our philosophies. And how religion can be like "mattering cheesecake" - full of the rich fatty deliciousness that are evolutionary line was so craving, but now kind of a bit too much... )
I got to thinking about this one problem I've heard Sam Harris describe, where our sympathy / compassion is a bit broken, that we are demonstrably more likely to respond a picture of a single suffering child then a picture of her and her brother, and even less to, say, their whole class of suffering kids. It's a bit of compassion fatigue, but I think it's more that we are more stirred to action to correct an outlier of injustice than take up arms against the way the world is. I think in some outlooks that stress Moderation as a virtue, and how things find their own path, this seeming contradiction is less paradoxical than it first seems.
astronaut.io explore the lonely internet, an endless slideshow of videos (ones up loaded with generic auto-generated number names) that maybe you'll be the only person looking at, ever.
Tattoos and babies aren't permanent like people say, both can be destroyed with lasers
Almost 90 today? Yeesh.
I am getting so frustrated with the low quality of iPhones voice to text transcription. Probably Never enough to make me switch, but boy is it annoying... I can say the word quote to put a " there butwhat do I say to end the quote? we are barely at the Atari 2600 level of voice interface...
People who can't distinguish between etymology and entomology bug me in ways I cannot put into words.
On FB my college roommate Rob pointed me to this guide to Siri/voice-to-text "markup" commands
Heh, CarGurus is #1 largest car shopping website in the USA. Not bad for a site that is so hard to pronounce :-D It's nice being with a company doing so great - (though honestly it's not the tech that's winning the battle, it's being more on the side of the car buyers)
He returned, indignant. "I mean it. Where is it?"5 years ago I wrote "You know, I think I have trouble feeling that in general, though I don't think it's the fault of the people who love(d) me."I sighed. "Okay, fine," I said. I padded across the floor and went to the closet where I barely reached--certainly no stretching--to the top shelf and produced his favorite pale green bottle. I handed it to him and became serious. "But will you at least try the new one?"
"I'll try it," but I knew he wouldn't .
I explained the situation to him, doctor to patient. "Look. This will be better for your skin because it will remove more dead epithelial cells. I mean, I know it's just lotion, but there have been advances." I emphasized the word "advances," knowing that Dennis is wary of advances.
"Fine," he said, "I'll try it."
I was somewhat annoyed by his resistance to change, and I also felt like he was still angry with me for hiding his oily lotion, so when we crawled into bed that evening I said, "Are you pissed at me for hiding it?"
"Yes," he said, like a child who was very mad at having his blocks taken away.
I smiled and nestled against him. He kissed my shoulder. I'd never felt closer to him because I did know that he was mad and yet it didn't matter: He loved me enough to be mad at me and not then have to reconsider the entire relationship.
So now - I feel like this resonates for me less in a familial way but in what I was taught about the divine; screw up too badly and eternal punishment awaits. I'm over the literal belief in that, but a deep anxiety-tinged concern about in line with a universal sense of what one should do still resonates.
Been talking with EB, who thinks the hope for an overarching objective moral framework is misguided; everyone does their moral reasoning based on their subjective view, one impressed on them by their culture and then later firmed up by their experience and growth.
On the one hand, parts of that are undeniable; you aren't going to be able to convince anyone of anything if it's too far outside their current landscape. And yet I don't quite believe that our attempts to convince, to mature the moral reasoning of ourselves and others, is totally dependent on hopping from one lily pad of subjective belief to another.
If someone says to another "It's wrong that he treated her that way", that person's not meaning "in my current moral calculus, that was wrong" or "in the shared overlap of our moral outlooks, that was wrong" or even "in the weighted average of every moral landscape of people that you and I would find reasonable, that was wrong". It's just wrong. ("R, O, N, G, *wrong*" as Mr. Pawlowski, my 11th grade math teacher would say)
My reasoning is that there is a sense of objective morality there - as Rebecca Goldstein says, "Universal consent is not what makes for moral truth." so even if the Nazis had triumphed and killed everyone who didn't agree with them and there wasn't a single morally reasoning creature left who demurred, that would not make them morally correct.
But - I do think people are useful guideposts to what might be most likely universally true. Or, maybe it's even more subtle than that - weirder in an emergent way, in the Taoist way "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" pointed me to.
Human morality doesn't pre-exist humans doing moral and immoral things, just like the platonic ideal of a chair wouldn't have pre-existed humans selecting or making items to sit on. Instead, in a dang near impossible to put into words way, the boundary of actual chairs (or moral acts) and our interactions with them build up a transcendent guidepost of what chairs, or moral acts, "should" be - the only meaningful guidepost to the discernment of what is of higher and lower quality.
(EB pointed me to Plato's The Form of the Good which got further to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance than I expected - but if this lay summary of Plato's forms is a guide, I'm not sure if Plato sets out where the forms come from. The form of the idea chair only emerges from actual chairs. Plato says the forms are eternal, but I don't know if he means into the past or merely the future.)
And it might be virtue is objective, but still only applicable in relative ways - you can compare two outlooks or put them roughly on a scale, but there is no ultimate singular virtuous ruling.
So in short, if EB is right, I don't see how we escape an existential relativist landscape. No way to tell someone they're wrong in a meaningful way, just hope to point out internal contradictions and hope they're wise enough to accept that, or make a pitch that "sure your moral system is decent, but here's one that's a bit better, and hopefully your current moral system is at least strong enough to recognize that superiority..."
But, getting back to the original Burroughs passage; even if I find EB's outlook rather dour, and almost postmodern (not that everyone's entitled to their own facts, but they are entitled to their own value judgements), it might free me a bit to be more relaxed that it might be true, at least reminding me that I don't believe there's singular judge waitin' to get me in the end - and that even without Objective Virtue, people are still keepin' on keepin' on.
I said: 'Imagine that you were on the threshold of this fairytale, sometime billions of years ago when everything was created. And you were able to choose whether you wanted to be born to a life on this planet at some point. You wouldn't know when you were going to be born, nor how long you'd live for, but at any event it wouldn't be more than a few years. All you'd know was that, if you chose to come into the world at some point, you'd also have to leave it again one day and go away from everything. This might cause you a good deal of grief, as lots of people think that life in the great fairytale is so wonderful that the mere thought of it ending can bring tears to their eyes. Things can be so nice here that it's terribly painful to think that at some point the days will run out.'This book has an odd number of parallels with my life, from the late-revealed name of the titular character ("Veronika"), to a boy coping with the early death of his father, to a tendency to write letters for future reading, like I am with my super niece
You sat stock still on my lap. And I said: 'What would you have chosen, Georg, if there had been some higher power that gave you the choice? Perhaps we can imagine some sort of cosmic fairy in this great, strange fairytale. Would you have chosen to live a life on earth at some point, whether short or long, in a hundred thousand or a hundred million years?'
I think I sighed heavily a couple of times before going on in a harsher tone: 'Or would you have refused to join in the game because you didn't like the rules?'
CAESAR: Render unto Caesar, that which is Caesar's. Unless Caesar was lending it to you, in which case just render it back later. And if Caesar gave it to you, then it is yours, and not Caesar's, in which case there is no need to render it. Those things which were not Caesar's in the first place do not need to be rendered unto Caesar, but instead should be rendered unto those whose they are. Except in the sorts of conditions Caesar just described.
TFW you realize there's, like, less than one month before that "serious spring cleaning, for reals" will no longer be spring... (I go with meteorological seasons, which are much more tuned to the human condition and school year than the astronomical ones...)
"Nothing comes to my desk that is perfectly solvable. Otherwise, someone else would have solved it. So you wind up dealing with probabilities. Any given decision you make you'll wind up with a 30 to 40 percent chance that it isn't going to work. You have to own that and feel comfortable with the way you made the decision. You can't be paralyzed by the fact it might not work out."via The Atlantic's longish article The Presidency Is Too Big to Succeed, how expectations for the office, along with the supporting infrastructure and how Congress has ceded so much power, make true success impossible.
Still I think Obama's point is true for many of us in the trenches as well. Challenges are- duh- challenging, and most truly easy things will have already been dealt with.
Good lord Facebook, what kind of short attention span theater is Kirk's April Moments? "Hey kids, remember April? Man! Seems like just yesterday! Or at least, 10 days before yesterday"
The Boston Public Library has digitized all their M.C. Escher prints:
Man, did books of his stuff leave a big impression on me as a teen.
- Triple Bun
- Holy Lemon Monster
- Cookies & Red Hot Lover
- Vanilla Nettle
- Sundana Rainbow
- Team Cherry
'Marisa Tomei' is an anagram for 'It's-a me, Mario'
The scope of it is amazing. Here's a GIF showing how its map compares to other games, older and newer. There is just so much landscape with so much in it - it's probably hard for someone who hasn't played this kind of genre how much there is, just what an expansive bit of world building it represents.
And just to think of it as an engineering project - 300 devs, 4 years - it's so much larger than almost anything else I can think of! It's almost amazing that it makes a profit.
two more "Run" videos
#2226 Life in a zero-G or microgravity environment (like on an orbiting station or a spaceship that is not maneuvering) offers many challenges. When you're exercising on the treadmill or just sitting at a work console, you need to strap yourself down with elastics and velcro. Exhaled CO2 silently pooling around your head is a constant threat if the air circulation system isn't perfect. And if you lose momentum in a large open area, like thanks to air resistance, it can be nearly impossible to get moving again. The solution to all of these is clear: astronauts should always wear old-school propeller beanies at all times when not in their helmets.
"Boy With a Propeller Beanie" (1948) by Guy Pène du Bois
The problem isn't to learn to love humanity, but to learn to love those members of it who happen to be at hand.
Beautiful - Old memories, accidentally trapped in amber by our digital devices. I have a folder that's a snapshot of the files on an old Windows Desktop (back when I used to use that as temporary storage) - it has the most random stuff in it, and is a slice of life I'm loathe to give up.
It's terrifying that these two things are true at the same time in this world: computers drive cars around & the state of the art test to check that you're not a computer is whether you can successfully identify stop signs in pictures.
Keytar Bear got injured on a motorcycle turn and is out for the summer Nuts!
Keyless Cars Have Killed More Than 2 Dozen People Since 2006: Report
1. My ancient Scion beeps at me if I am in the driver seat with no seatbelt. Why is it so much smarter about "oh a driver is there!" than these systems?
2. Why don't cars have CO detectors on their interiors and exteriors?
Awesome. Anti-Vaxers are keeping us from a lyme disease vaccine. F'in brilliant.
I attended a UUSS church that weathered or a horrible interpersonal storm that was very very likely affected by the mood-altering aspects of the disease. This sucks.
Blender of Love
I'm very Team Laurel, and have to put the widget way to the side to hear Yanny. On the one hand, yay me, that's objectively more accurate, on the other hand, dang, I'm old and don't hear high sounds as well as I used to. But there are other anecdotes that support the idea my subconscious attention is much more bass-centric too, not surprisingly.
Think the Laurel or Yanny thing is weird?
— George Aylett (@GeorgeAylett) May 17, 2018
You can hear the words 'Brainstorm' or 'Green Needle' based on which word you think about. Try it.pic.twitter.com/7TrS9XNhNR
(2019 UPDATE: there is a "correct" answer to Brainstorm/Green Needle, at least an original intention: this is a toy of "Brainstorm" from the cartoon "Ben 10")
"He knew my daughter Jennifer because Trump has this horse show thing down in Florida, and he went up and talked to Jen and was being super nice," [Bill] Gates said. "And then, about 20 minutes later, he flew in by helicopter to the same place, so clearly he had been driven away but he wanted to make a grand entrance in a helicopter.""When I first talked to him, it was actually scary how much he knew about my daughter's appearance," he added. "Melinda didn't like that too well."
[Watching a video] Awwww noooooo not an ad! I thought all content waaas freeeeeeee and I just paid with my privacy!
Minty is just cold spicy
And so, without intending to adopt any sort of triumphalist attitude toward sports, I became that most despised of figures in the eyes of the diehard: a fair-weather fan. For most of my life, this has been a heavy shame. I have muttered shy apologies to friends for not standing by the hometown teams, even as most of them failed to escape the vortex of mediocrity.. As a guy who used to change sports cities a lot, I always thought it was good karma to develop an affinity for the local team, just so you're rooting with your neighbors.
But I'm done apologizing. In fact, I'm pretty sure that I'm right and everybody else is wrong. Rooting for winners is more than acceptable--it's commendable. Fans shouldn't put up with awfully managed teams for decades just because their parents liked those teams, as if sports were governed by the same rules and customs as medieval inheritance. Fans should feel free to shop for teams the way they do for any other product.
What I think is really weird is that it's not enough to dig your guys, but the other guys have to be bums - Peyton Manning was probably not as much of a clutch player as Brady, benefited form the dome, etc etc, but he also took a delightfully nerdy approach to the game and didn't have Evil Hoodie helping him out - but it kinda wasn't ok to like him over our hometown Ugs-wearing pretty boy.
Or- true blasphemy here - the Yankees have assembled a great and likable and youthful team and are spending like 2/3 the cash the Red Sox are this year. The teams are roughly tied atop their division. This should be great! But it's all "our cave yay, your cave boo!"'
I'd dig the tribalism more if the local flavor of a team showed up in anything deeper than maybe the business owners who own 'em (and often extract way too much in terms of tax and financing breaks from politicians who would have a lot of angry voters if the team drifted for another deal)
And/or if we had a proper league system with relegation - if the bottom 2-4 teams in the NBA were fighting to stay in the top league, and the top 2-4 of the next league down would get to come on up to the big leagues? That would be brilliant.
La Croix tastes like when my foot falls asleep
Weird that Jordan Peterson's whole thing is lobsters, but he never suggests making men less violent by closing their hands with rubber bands
Is it weird that I have a favorite guitar chord. Or more specifically is it weird that my favorite chord is the open fourth position version of D sharp diminished minor7th?I wrote back
Tuba players don't have so much use for chord, but by far my favorite piano chord (which honestly I tend to use as a high percussion sound, with the tonic below as a bass drum) is the first three notes of the blues scale, which is "Cm add(4)" according to this scales-chords.com chord-namer pageThe ScalesChords site has a set of interesting tools.
Good description of issues in "Fixed Mindset" (the left)
I do wish I had less Fixed Mindset. My only problem with this chart is that it makes kind of yes/no; in reality it's a bit of a spectrum... any learner's potential isn't unlimited, at some point it's delusional to think you have infinite potential. (Also, one way improvement in real differs from this idea and, say, leveling up in video games is that backsliding is very, very possible.) Also, practice needs to have a feedback loop, ideally with an independent and wise mentor, otherwise you might just be getting better at doing it wrong.
Still, it would be great if I had better intuition for the joy of getting better, rather than just the knack of finding interesting low-hanging fruit and sure wins.
"Not at any time. I've never joined any organization--not even the ones I've organized myself. I prize my own independence too much. And philosophically, I could never accept any rigid dogma or ideology, whether it's Christianity or Marxism. One of the most important things in life is what Judge Learned Hand described as "that ever-gnawing inner doubt as to whether you're right." If you don't have that, if you think you've got an inside track to absolute truth, you become doctrinaire, humorless and intellectually constipated. The greatest crimes in history have been perpetrated by such religious and political and racial fanatics, from the persecutions of the Inquisition on down to Communist purges and Nazi genocide.--Saul Alinsky, author of "Rules for Radicals" (emphasis mine)
Fleshing it out, it raises the question is this possibly contributing to a single universal morality, or like with languages are we forever trapped in different mutually incomprehensible languages and dialects? If there is a universality, is it like Esperanto? An attempt to take bits and pieces of some of the more dominant language and find consistency? Or maybe a universal morality would have to be like Chomsky’s Universal Grammar - which is not a grammar in the common sense, but the lower level “hardwired” sense of primitives like nouns vs verbs that make learning actual grammar possible. (Given my previous recognition of how I have a strong sense of "should", an anxious compulsion to never be out of alignment with knowable-but-not-fully universal morality, driven by a subconscious fear of eternal punishment if I screw up too badly, it's kind of weird to think through the universal morality / universal language parallels)
I've always been rather ambivalent about meritocracy--and not just because I'm a beneficiary of England's class system. During my spell in New York I enjoyed shocking people by telling them that the word "meritocracy" had originally been coined for the purposes of damnation rather than praise. They would always dispute this until I played my trump card: my father, Michael Young, invented it.Interesting take given the whole Atlantic The 9.9% is the new American Aristocracy article making the rounds, and making me rethink some of my assumptions. I guess I'll be back to the correct answer is "it's complicated". You can never fully evaluate merit, you can never remove chance and circumstance on the path from merit to reward, you never want to fully disregard talent in terms of providing opportunity.
He coined it to describe a nightmarish society of the future in his 1958 bestseller The Rise of the Meritocracy. In my father's view, equality of opportunity is a snare and a delusion since it makes it less likely that equality of outcome, the "hard" form of equality he believed in, will ever come about. If everyone starts out on a level playing field than the resulting distribution of wealth, however unequal, will be regarded as legitimate. According to him, a meritocratic society is no better than an aristocratic one since it is just as hierarchical. Indeed, it is considerably worse since the richest segment of the population don't suffer feelings of guilt. Unlike those who have inherited their wealth, they think their good fortune is thoroughly deserved. In my father's book, a work of fiction that purports to be a Ph.D. thesis written by a sociology student in 2030, the absence of noblesse oblige in the meritocratic society of the future eventually results in a bloody revolution in which the workers overthrow their new masters.
This is pretty awesome:
Worth checking out the 20 minute "making of" on the artist's page - I remember making spaceships and what not on graph paper way back when, and his idiosyncratic way of doing the vectors reminds me a lot of some the DIY 3D I used to play with (and aRTSeroids, while 2D, used some of the same "fake looking like a vector screen" effect.)
Was talking about me not understanding the popularity of streaming - having to always pay rent for your songs, and relying on a good constant internet connection - when we live in a wonderland of being able to buy nearly any music as a single w/ EB, who pointed out "Music collections cost thousands and takes time, renting music costs you a pizza, and gives you a larger selection". Which I guess makes sense.
He pointed to the article Subscriptions for the 1%, which is bit more focused on news, and paywalls, and how the law of "you get what you pay for" may create an ugly divide.
I guess there's a parallel with news and music in the 80s: individual articles are like the catching singles on the radio. Paying for a news source is like investing in an LP. Google and Facebook are the record companies playing kingmaker and getting rich themselves.
Honestly I'd love a bundled deal for, like, NY Times, WaPo, WSJ, and Boston Globe...
Such mixed feelings watching Cavs/Celtics - Cleveland my old hometown, Boston my new one, enjoying the concept of Lebron (not a popular view in Boston :-D ), liking the young team of the Celtics, thinking that either team is at risk for getting mauled by whoever wins the Western Conference...
Did you eat a tire, that's on fire? Because that's what your breath smells like.(The answer was no I guess that's just what string cheese and cherry coke zero must smell like. I regret nothing.)
Nothing I know matters more
Than what never happened.
I follow a few retro-nostalgia tumblrs and was surprised to see this beauty, my mom and I had this in the '80s
Love the look of the case art! And the whole LCD aesthetic was pretty cool. This game had solid play, epecially given the limitations... (via Twentieth Century Kid)
But via io9 ,it's StarWars.Com's Making Lando's Millennium Falcon and these concepts... (Odd that some of the designs are "mirrored")
I love the idea of exploring the Falcon used to look, before Han made his modifications or just got it banged up. It was tough for a kid in the 70s or 80s to understand Leia when she asked "You came in that thing? You're braver than I thought", because the Falcon's asymmetrical design just seemed hella cool. The prequels made everything shiny and new looking (though it's hard to know how much of that was just iffy CGI) but still - this was the chance for the designers to show just how cool it used to look.
The final new old design kind if "fills in" the old mandibles, which is too bad because it removes this fan theory about how the Falcon worked as a cargo vessel:
(This use explained why the ship was so fast - mighty engines freed of their massive burden...)
I think for the new ones my favorite design is "21" since it emphasizes the cargo role (though again, might not be suave enough for Lando...) "27" reminds me of the old McQuarry art, "12", "20" and "29" are clear attempts to crossover with other ships in the series. Over all I don't like that ones that make the old Falcon look like it has more engines than the Han's later "hot-rodded" edition.
I also like the idea of hot-rod decorations:
Though it reminds me of how 3CPO's was sporting an intriguing red arm for most of "The Force Awaken", in fact they hung a lampshade on it ("You probably didn't recognize me because of the red arm") but it was magically fixed by the end of movie, for who knows what reason...
Also from io9, Sesame Street Has Already Lost Its Lawsuit Against The Happytime Murders - this sucks. The had a "red band" trailer before Deadpool 2, and they really do play it up like it's some weird fringe spinoff from Sesame Street or at least the muppets - and it's really, REALLY raunchy and kinda gross and sexual stuff - so if they're using the slogan "No Sesame, All Street", I am kinda startled the judge said they "hadn't demonstrated that moviegoers were confused or that sponsors or parents were complaining".
God knows I'm not much of a prude, but this look is totally muppet, and people are going to be confused, and parents are going to get irritated.
(UPDATE: it's made by Jim Henson's son. It kind of feels like a smear campaign against the Muppets(tm) now owned by Disney...)
Just imagine taking a gorilla and putting it in gorrila costume then and setting it loose in shopping mall