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Just a quibble, ChatGPT and its ilk don't 'hallucinate', they 'confabulate'...

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For grins I put on the version of "The Office" from India, which Hulu thought was in my wheelhouse. Interesting to see the free mix of languages, and then all the cultural references I don't get, like "12:00" jokes against Sikhs, all in a context that is sort of familiar, having seen the same setup in the US and UK versions. (Strong multiverse vibe)

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Thinking about you while staring at my butter dish.

(curious about source)

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from this brilliant tiktok

There is a clear and present danger that American democracy will not withstand the destructive forces that are now converging upon it. Our two-party system has only one party left that is willing to lose an election. The other is willing to win at the cost of breaking things that a democracy cannot live without.

Oy. It's not enough that elected Republican Presidents haven't needed to actually get more people voting for them since 2000, thanks to the EC - Republicans are pretending that 2020 had fraud, and working out ways to make their own fraud to get Trump back in.

The amount of horseshit about January 6 here is astounding. "Oh just a peaceful walk in the park by well meaning citizens". No - it was righteous anger stoked by people willing to believe any lies that tell them they didn't just lose, who don't understand that in democracy there is always give and take.
Depending on how you slice it, Biden won by 40,000 votes in swing states, or 7 million votes nationwide. Trump has lost over 50 lawsuits (with 1 trivial win) because the type of widespread vote shenanigans he claims just didn't happen.

Trump fans, it's time to follow your own advice about how feelings don't matter, and accept that Biden will be the next president, fair and square.

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He was coughing something terrible. And he was splitting blood all over, his whole chest was covered. And I thought to myself, "Jeez. The worst is yet to come." Because see, he's gonna feel lonesome. Because when you die, you die by yourself. No matter what. Now, what can we do to help? So I reached over, and I grasped his hand and I gave it a squeeze to assure him that he was not alone. He acknowledged my presence by squeezing my hand. And then he died.

Stan Wolczyk was a platoon leader station on the American island of Attu off the coast of Alaska... I took this quote from a brief video "Comforting the Dead" at The National WWII Museum in New Orleans. (He then talks about bracing for his own death after growing cold after being wounded in combat, but he survived.) Also, he originally hailed from Cleveland!

Lots of things wrong with America--but Hitler ain't gonna fix them.

I saw this magnificent man swim out and bring some people off the sinking ship and bring them back in to shore and to me he was the picture of heroic beauty.

I think back to "A River Runs Through It" use of beauty... it's a shame about whatever cultural forces make its use in a masculine context stand out so much.

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RIP Carol Spinney...


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?

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Sigh, in the interest of fairness- damn it to hell, NJ Dems, don't gerrymander too, you jerks.

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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) THIS SPACE LEFT UNINTENTIONALLY BLANK

advent day 14
advent day 14

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your body is mortal, and by the time you die, you'll be glad to be rid of it.

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Sunglasses Can Make You Happier TLDR: there's a feedback loop where having a happy or sad expression makes you feel that way for reals, squinting is associated with being unhappy, ergo, sunglasses can prevent that loop. I KNEW IT. I just feel so much more relaxed with 'em.

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Star Wars as postmodern montage...

advent day 14
advent day 14

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http://www.xkcd.com/1146/ :

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It is terrific that the Apache module that can correct "off by one" URL typos is called "mod_speling".

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Man plans, and god laughs.
Like the ant and the grasshopper.

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Re: the shooter. The other day I saw a photo of a tasteless costume, a guy w/ orange hair, in an orange jumpsuit, and a sign that said "too soon?" Honestly, I had forgotten that Batman shooter. I know that the psychopaths who would commit this kind of travesty might be beyond our comprehension, but if they're doing it to be noticed or remembered, they won't be.

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Republican Horserace... Now that's a fun (animated) infographic!

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http://mediamatters.org/blog/201112120005 Fox News lies so hard, they can't even draw a simple graph. My brain often has a specific "flare stack", a burn off of (hopefully) extra mental cycles. Like, before and after I bought my car, I was intensely into a few automobile blogs. Lately, though, its been how gosh darn awesome the iPad and iPhone are.

I'm always on the lookout for things that justify or explain this obsession. The link Amber posted the other day on devices as literal extensions of our brains. And that helps explain the iPhone I think -- for example I get a little rush of dopamine when I use the Todo app to keep myself organized or jot a memo to preserve a bit of information or make a datebook entry to nudge me at some future moment. It's not a new phenomenon for me, I got the same thing with the Palm Pilot, but the iPhone absolutely upped the ante with Internet connectivity and general slickness.

So an important part of the "brain extenstion" explanation of the iPhone is the portability/pocketability; if it's going to be part of my mental whole, it needs to be at hand pretty much all the time. (Not ALL the time, much like I'm often (clearly) not engaging all the parts of my brain all the time.) But the iPad doesn't have this excuse: sure it's nice and portable, but no more so than a small laptop. So why does it feel so much better than a laptop, while being a bit less capable in may respects?

Amber's article explains that too, I think...it talks about how people who "talk with their hands" aren't just talking with their hands, they're probably thinking with their hands as well. (For that matter, speaking is more a form of on-the-fly thought assemblage than we usually acknowledge--) The physical body becomes the medium of computation. And iPads allow for a deeper physical communion than a keyboard and mouse or keyboard and touchpad. (And more so than the iPhone, even, since the throughput of the larger screen is that much greater.) A barrier to the closed loops as "gadget as extended nervous system" is knocked away, and the result is an almost tangible sense of pleasure at our newly enhanced and extended brain.

We tend to think of ourselves as beings of pure mindstuff (or soul or what have you) inside a bodily shell, but our bodies are part of us, and iPads tap into that in a way few other products can hope to. And connectivity to the Internet is another part of that... iPad eases the way to the groupmind that is the modern net.

The whole app model reflects this. Frankly, interesting computer applications are few and far between. I look what I install on every new PC I get - browsers, paint programs, text editors, IM, programming environments (even cool ones like Processing) -- it's not very interesting, all the action has moved to the browsers. iDevices get past that though, and suddenly apps are interesting again. I would look askance if a bank or entertainment website insisted I use a special application on my Windows box, but with the iDevice, it just kinda makes sense... and it has to do with how the whole iThing seems to transmorgify into a new device, and so that whole eye/brain/hand/screen loop has a new toy to play with, without the klutzy old keyboard or intermediary, one-removed mouse, or other distracting windows to interfere.

TOMORROW: how Google's CR-48 laptop gets it wrong, wrong, wrong.

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My buddy Beau is doing a Salvation Army virtual kettle - I split a few hundred tween Boston + Cleveland- HUGE need these days!

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"Brownies in the kitchen!"
"Alright, You talked me into it, I'm off-"
"He twisted your rubber arm, eh?"
"Well, I like Brownies more than I like dignity."

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anti-ghost architecture - I love stuff like this. Plus: ghost-diagrams!

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First few real flakes of snow, near Arlington T stop. Damn.

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Are cats impressed by our ability to use lights? When I come home to a dark house are they all "Behold! It is Kirk Dispeller of Dark!"?

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Dance like it hurts, Love like you need money, Work when people are watching.

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There can be no finer damnation of the Microsoft Engineering Mentality than the way they embed SQL Server DB backup metadata in the dumpfile - including the full path of the file, so if you want to put the db on a slightly differently configured machine, you are hosed. AARGH!

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Oh, but the NAME of the database has to be entered by hand. Seriously, MS? What am I not seeing here? Yesterday I stopped at a combination Long John Silver / Taco Bell, in part because I hadn't seen that combination before. (KFC seems to be the usual Taco Bell pairing.) I realized I have this secret hope of finding an American equivalent of Nordsee, this brilliant German fastfood chain, offering a big variety of fish sandwiches on interesting breads.

Alas, it was not to be. Small Long John Silvers seem to offer just fish-and-chip variants and a few salmon or shrimp based dishes. I had a rice bowl with salmon and ginger, which was passable, but still.

(Of course I tend to fetishize any restaurant I liked but can't get; "wow, Little Caesars, that crust was great, and so cheap" (that one is still true for me) "Man, Subway-- where they bake the bread! Amazing" and even "Wendy's...wow, you can get like an actual baked potato, that's terrific.")

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Funny of the Moment
As I've probably posted before, Superdickery has some great suff, but the caption on this Hulk comic panel (PG13) made me laugh out loud for like a minute.

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Passage of the Moment
I read Scott Adams' "Stick To Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain" a few weeks ago, but there's one anecdote that keeps coming back to mind... he's stuck in a tiny, rarely-used dressing room, and keeps surprising AV technicians who duck in to use the bathroom, not expecting anyone to be in there. This happens three times, and the final guy tried the "just here to wash my hands" ploy... Adams writes

It made me wonder what I would have done in their situation. I think I would have gone for the hand-washing fake, possibly mumbling something like "Just ate an orange." This lends the suggestion of both cleanliness and fresh citrus to an otherwise awkward situation.

Sometimes that's the best you can do.

I think of this every time I eat an orange now, pretty much.

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Had the sleepy logic thought that there weren't too many times I slept in a freestanding, owned home; apparently I forgot owning a house

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Sometimes it's tough to admit that a quiet home office is better for focus, that TV/Radio would serve as a distraction seems like a failure So there was snowing and shoveling yesterday.

It's that time of year that always makes me questions if these latitudes are truly fit for human habitation.

Yeah, sure, there's kind of "Kum Ba Yah" we all get, the smiles and friendly greetings we give each other as we pass as a shoveler and pedestrian, but really it's just a big mutual sympathy thing.

And then there's the people enjoying themselves on cross country skis on my damn street. Is there a polar (har-har) opposite of Schadenfreude? Suffering in the joy of others? 'Cause that's exactly what I get.

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Accident of the Moment

--Yesterday morning (before the snow) there was a fender bender on the MBTA - the injuries weren't serious, but if I was in a neckbrace on a stretcher, the last thing I'd want to see is their "Charlie on the MTA" mascot giving me a big thumbs up...

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Camp Stories of the Moment
Switching gears to more summery times, Felisdemens has a brilliant list of personal experience DOs and (mostly) DON'Ts For Girl Scout Camp (modeled roughly on The 213 Things Skippy Is No Longer Allowed To Do In The U.S. Army list that was making the rounds awhile back)

Here's a sample:

• do not "put death curses" on people you don't like.
• when another camper is bitten by a chipmunk, do not tell her that rabies shots are administered to the eyeball.
• Do not tell other campers that the only way to keep earwigs from laying eggs in your brain is to make Play Doh earplugs and let them harden in your ear canals.
• If anyone wakes up with a pentagram drawn on their palm, we know that it was you and not "the curse of the werewolf".
• Do not tell the counselors that you heard that there is a chemical in bug repellent that causes birth control to stop working.

She's like the Wednesday Adams of Upstate New York... so much cooler than my own YMCA camp rules.

This business trip is running into a bunch of technical issues.

Bleh, looks like I'm going to be staying an additional night and half day.

GEEK POINT: The way Oracle JDBC drivers didn't have seamless support for reading a CLOB as a String until a few years ago is a crime against programmerkind. There's no reason a general developer shouldn't have always had the option of not thinking about that, it should have been abstracted away from the get go. Grrr.

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Video of the Moment

--Note to self: get into making electronic music, at least enough to codify those basslines you invented all those years ago in highschool.

"See I lived through hardtimes before,  people talkin bout these is hardtimes.  HARDTIMES was waaaay back, and it was...they didn't even have a year for it, just called it 'hardtimes'.  It was dark ALL the time.  I think the sun came out on Wednesday.  And if you didn't have your @$$ up early, you missed it!  So I happened to be out there one Wednesday, and the sun hit me right in the face, and I grabbed a bunch of it - rubbed it all over myself.  Cuz shyt, I ain't have nothin else.  Said 'Shyt, I might as well have some sun on my face.'  And, as time went on, I remembered it was Thursday.  I said, 'Damn, that sun was a bytch.  That's why they didn't want us to have none of it.'  Cuz it cheer u up inside, you see. 

.........

....you didn't ask to come to this muthaf#*%@, and you sure can't choose how to leave.  Cuz you don't know when u gon go, so don't take this shyt serious.  You better have some fun, and plenty of it.  Cuz when the shyt old and you ask for a recharge, it's too late.  So all I can say is, keep some sunshine on yo face."

Last night Comedy Central was replaying a tribute to Richard Pryor from a few years ago, with a lot of old footage. (Ironically, the tribute was called "Richard Pryor: I Ain't Dead Yet, #*%$#@!!"). It ended with this monologue. I cold only find it one place online, and even then I had to dig through the internals of Google's cache, but I kind of like this font-astic version of it. Dedication of the Moment

To the most precious and adored things in my life: Jonathan and Peter. If I can leave you nothing else, at least let me leave you the dedication in this book.

Oh and, incidentally, the way things are going I probably will be leaving you nothing else, okay? Bite the bullet, lads.

He's the guy who made the still very funny Things My Girlfriend and I have Argued About page, and now he's written two funny novels as well.

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Note To Self of the Moment
Self: your first initial is K. K is also the first initial of your girlfriend. Plus, there are a bajillion other things in your life that "K" could stand for. Therefore, if you are going to write a remind on your hand to remember to bring the Karaoke stuff for the company party, you might want to write something more than just that letter.

International News of the Moment
Just in case you websurf here before checking the 'real news' sites, it looks like Saddam Hussein has been captured. Big boon for Bush, hopefully will help the situation in Iraq. Though like Mo pointed out, if I had to choose I wish they had nabbed Osama instead. (Or as my Aunt then called him, "Osama Bin Forgotten")

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Game Feature of the Moment
On the game's 10-year-anniversary, GameSpy had a weeklong set of Features on the Game 'DOOM'. Man, that was such a great game...I wish they'd port it to a major current console.

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Quote of the Moment

Every hour wounds. The last one kills.

Bad News of the Moment
Pro-Life, Anti-Choicers legislators in Georgia have come up with a scary new tactic. They put forth a bill where a woman seeking an abortion would be forced to get a "death warrant", after which a guardian for the fetus would be appointed. The guardian would be authorized to seek a jury trial before the "execution" was permitted.

Yikes. It's such an irritating tactic...ingenious and disingenuous at the same time. It's not like Georgia doesn't have laws against killing people. They're trying to do an end run around the central debate, which is and has always been "does the fetus count as a person?", by pretending that it's obvious that the answer to that is yes, but the law was lacking in some other way.

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Homebody Geekiness of the Moment
Ranjit knitted this Moebius Strip. It's practice for this Moebius Scarf project that he might do in the future. (Wondering what's a Moebius Strip?) And the thing is, he didn't just make a small scarf and connect the ends with a half twist, that would be too easy. He says it's "basically like building a spiral staircase on a circular foundation, except in this case the foundation has only one side so the staircase grows in both directions--- kind of breaks my brain thinking about it."

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Kirk's Geekiness of the Moment
Human Beatbox -- I AM NOT ALONE. Includes tutorials. I think it sounds a lot better when you use a microphone... Oy. I really started to feel down in the dumps yesterday. It's a real time of anxiety. Peterman said "yeah, great time to be alive, huh?" but the thing is, it is a great time. At least in general. Despite it all: layoffs abounding, Bush is pulling us out of the ABM treaty (yeah, great terrorist defense that'll be), Israel and Palestine exploring life as hell in handbasket, wondering if Osama slunk away, that American Taliban punk (click here for his posts to Usenet from 1997 ... doodoo@hooked.net??) predicting biological attacks this weekend... (I guess they found a terrorist guide to fitting in: remember, deoderant on the body, not the clothes, get a good cover story, wear your watch on the left wrist, learn the difference between perfume and aftershave since "if you will use the female perfume so you will be in big trouble.")

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Old Sorta Funny of the Moment

> Two males got mad in a traffic accident on the downtown
> interstate and got out and took turns shooting to death
> the guy who was involved in a fender bender with them.

Huh?
"I'm gonna shoot him! <BLAM!> There, he's dead."
"Ok, my turn- <BLAM!> Ha- dead again!"
"Gimme my gun back. <BLAM!> There, I killed him again."
"Sucka! Gimme that! <BLAM!> He's dead."
"Yup. <BLAM!> I killed him."

I dunno Vic, this is pretty extreme, even by your standards.

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Link of the Moment
Salon talks with the author of the book about Sputnik's effect on America. Man, 1957 was a bad year...this guy reels of so many details that have been generally lost in the mists of American pop culture short term memory. (Salon had a Premium-subscription interview with Kurt Vonnegut the other day that wasn't as good as I would have hoped.)