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One thing about AIs... they don't push back when you ask for more, more, MORE!!!! As I continue my hunt for a fulltime job taking advantage of my deep UI Engineering Experience, I've taken a nightshift role as an instructor at Computer Systems Institute. We had our In-Service meeting the other day, and the topic was AI; the possibilities and pitfalls for the teachers and students of the organization.

Obviously AI should be deeply in the mind of anyone who puts something on a computer screen for a living. While I suspect we might be near the top of an S-shaped curved for performance in this generation of LLM, people will still find surprising new applications for what is available now.

During the discussion I was introduced to https://firefly.adobe.com/ - right up there with Dall-E in terms of capabilities of generating original works. (Also with a unique "Text Effects" mode (shades of the old Micrsoft Word "WordArt" feature) - an endrun around LLM's notable problems in displaying text. )

At the very least, these generative art systems are kind of a highly customized replacement for stock clipart. And there are big philosophical issues on the training material used for these systems. I don't want to wave those concerns aside, but it reminded me of when Mark Twain wrote to Helen Keller who was facing charges of plagiarism (of her story "The Frost King" which seems to have drawn from Margaret Canby's "The Frost Fairies", which Keller had "heard" but forgotten about):

Oh, dear me, how unspeakably funny and owlishly idiotic and grotesque was that "plagiarism" farce! As if there was much of anything in any human utterance, oral or written, *except* plagiarism!...For substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources.

So I wish I had better answers about what we as individuals, or society, should do in this landscape, but I suspect at the very least these systems are going to be a part of nearly every knowledge worker's toolkit.

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Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me but I am the fire.

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All I know about magnets is this, give me a glass of water, let me drop it on the magnets, that's the end of the magnets.

Middling month but with some really good songs from the series "Conversations with Friends"...

★ ★ ★ ★ ★	Let It All Go The Sei	5 Stars - This song is really somber and beautiful. The call to "let it all go wrong", reminiscent of that verse from "Hallelujah", somehow it really speaks to me, the importance of embracing the life even when it's not what we wanted.
★ ★ ★ ★	I'm So Humble (feat. Adam Levine) The Lonely Island	Finally got to watch "Never Stop Never Stopping". Weird Al-level rhymes - I love the 60s rock (doo wop?) intro and bassline.
★ ★ ★ ★	Skibidi Little Big	Saw some tumblr point mentioning how their 5 year old play this over and over skewed their Spotify end of year list... a lot of goofy fun and catchy as hell.
★ ★ ★ ★	Sin Wagon The Chicks	"Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition"
★ ★ ★ ★	Remember Me (Sure Is Pure 7 Inch Edit) Blue Boy	Old 90s from Derry Girls.
★ ★ ★ ★	RU Ready "Macho Man" Randy Savage	Macho Man's delivery reminds me of "Chuggo"
	Santa Claus Go Straight to the Ghetto James Brown	Trader Joe's has some really good music in the background...
	Saguaro Austin Lounge Lizards	Based on a true story about a jerk shooting majestic old cacti.
	Run the Track Cosha	Some nice percussion in this one.
	Wicked Game Tenacious D	Fun cover, not sure it improves on the original all that much. But I love the original.
	Atmosphere James Blake	More slow and stately and somber music.
	Christmastime For the Jews (Saturday Night Live / SNL) [feat. Darlene Love] TV Funhouse	SNL goof. Impressive how they reconstructed the old "Wall of Sound" sound.
★ ★ ★ ★	Hot In Herre Nelly	"can't believe that on the day hot in herre was recorded, nelly walked in the booth & hopped on that neptunes beat with "good gracious, ass is bodacious" & not a single person was like hey wait a minute man" --@NifMuhammad
	Up On The Housetop Reba McEntire	Solid Christmas song.
★ ★ ★ ★	It's a Big Old Goofy World Alice Howe & Freebo	Got tagged by a friend on this for obvious reasons.
	Frozen Logger (Live) Derroll Adams	My mentioned this one, the whole line - "no but a logger stirs his coffee with his thumb".
	The Season's Upon Us Dropkick Murphys	New Seasonal Classic.

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I had a dream last night about a language that had a verb tense especially for apocalyptic things, but the culture believed in endless recurring cycles, so it meant "this will happen, and/but has already happened".

Probably it comes from thinking about this quote, about Epic of Gilgamesh:

i just love the concept of a narrative foil and by narrative foil I mean a soul mate and by soul mate I mean a mirror image, a photographic negative of your insides, whole in ways you are broken, broken in ways you are whole and by that I mean your fate and by that I mean the immovable object to your unstoppable force and by that I mean a star with which you are locked in fatal orbit, doomed to meet in cataclysmic fire with open arms. the person that makes you say I could love you everywhere in all the dark places that needed love, and I could love you so perfectly we would both be annihilated. the person that is your downfall because they're your perfect shadow and you are the hero of this story but, hero, this was always going to happen, not because it's written in the stars, but because you would choose it, again and again and again

(That "again and again and again" construction and concept of choosing the other, always, is also used in the Arcade Fire "The Suburbs (Continued)"- I did a deep reading of that haunting 1m30s of music last fall.)

It makes me think of how the other day I replied to a post quoting falsely attributed to noted theologian Tim Tebow about how, like, the rise of a cashless society was a predicted by the Book of Revelation, and, you know, the endtimes are probably gonna be in our lifetime, etc.

I'm not a person of faith but I try to be mature and sympathetic and reasonably gentle about other people's. Still, I'm really bothered by how apocalyptic thinking is basically incompatible with good stewardship of what we got. So I started my reply with Matthew 24:36 "But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only." but then also pointed out that every generation seems to think that the end might be right around the corner, that even 2 verses before that Jesus was saying "Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled."

Like, I guess you really have to stretch the meaning of "this generation" to still see Revelations as a guide to upcoming events. (Honestly I kind of like "preterism" that says these events have already somewhat happened, and we're living in a post-apocalyptic world already.)

But why does it bug me so much? Why do I feel compelled to chime in?

I am now fundamentally not a big swings planner and dreamer, and so I wonder, if I hadn't grown up with the idea that eternal life was possible IF you didn't screw this one up (and endless punishment for you if you did), followed by lessons outlining upcoming Christian persecution and general world-ending, and then more secular concerns like nuclear war, climate collapse, and in between those years I was really worried about Y2K computer implosions... would I have been better at shaping my career or maybe even aimed at a family life? (You can even make a narrative of my first main partner pivoting in her head to thinking in family terms, and me having not given indication I was joining her, and that drove her to look elsewhere.)

But, of course, there's a contradiction here. I mean which one is the driving theme, immortality or finality - that my soul is eternal, so I better be uptight and act right? Or almost the opposite, that everything is coming to an end, so don't bother to build?

Something I've got to ask, again and again and again.

Speak roughly to your little boy,
And beat him when he sneezes:
He only does it to annoy,
Because he knows it teases.

I think of this line sometimes when I hear arguments how like Trans-peole and genderqueer folk or whoever just are that way to be cool, or trendy.

Also in some discussion tonight... besides obvious parallels with how society has learned to somewhat better live up to its principles of equality and justice for gays and people of color in a way it hasn't for trans... just think about left-handed people. Man, "left-handedness" is just in their head, right? Those sinister people, it's not biologically real or anything. Society was right [sic!] and within its rights [sic!] to force those sinister folks to be normal, right?

But as always, an an objective universe where we are all trapped in our subjective realities, the damn HUBRIS of "oh I understand your gender better than you do" just infuriates me.

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100 Tips for a Better Life

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True Patriotism includes accepting election results (whether you see it as losing by 74 electoral college votes, 7 million real votes, or over 50 lawsuits)

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If you tuned out of news tonight: kudos to the joint session of congress reconvening, and for many Republicans from backing down from their plans to object to various state tallies. There's still many storms ahead but the ship started to right itself tonight.

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So, yeah, leading a rally and then segueing into storming political buildings... that is pretty much an attempted coup?

One wonders what these treasonous, deluded blowhards will do on inauguration day. My favorite reads on 2010-2019... I feel like this batch wasn't quite as memorable as last decade's list but still some great stuff. Roughly grouped by genre, but also "level of impact".

• Mr g: A Novel About the Creation, Alan Lightman. The author of "Einstein's Dreams" returns with this beautiful, sparse short novel that does an amazing job of creating a beautiful creation myth that can be reconciled with both science and morality as we understand it: yes, the god presented in it loves his creation (one try of many of the universes he experimented in making, advised by his Aunt Penelope and Uncle Deva and their tie-ins with science and religion) but because of chaos and complexity, despite his omnipotence even He won't know how it turns out until the experiment is run.
• Stories of Your Life and Others, Ted Chiang. One my top three favorite sci-fi authors, easily. I read this collection's "Tower of Babylon" in 1990 and it stuck with me since - his signature is to take an outlandish fiction (the Tower of Babylon, human developmental biology as seen by the Victorians, the works of Vonnegut) and richly develop them as the truths they would make, coloring in the sketches of the concepts and making them hefty and real.
• Constellation Games, Leonard Richardson - disclaimer, I acted as kind of a consultant on retro video games for my friend Leonard on this one - but every since, I am legitimately heartbroken that that campy, Marty-Stu-author-self-insertion, 80's-Slather-Bath "Ready Player One" got tons of accolades and made into a huge movie while this one just puttered along - the story of an alien first contact as seen through a burnt-out game developer and blogger who decides to explore the history of this federation by trying the video games they were making when they were at roughly our Nintendo Entertainment System level of technological development - a space that Leonard brilliantly fleshes out as alien and weird while being familiar enough to be comprehensible.
• A Guide To The Good Life. {the ancient art of stoic joy}, William B. Irvine. I read this earlier in the decade, and it was the first book about the various philosophies designed to get people to a state of ataraxia - a state of lucid equanimity and imperturbability.
• The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, Stephen Greenblatt. Ostensibly an introduction to the earliest of atomic theories, it also served to open my eyes to the possibilities of Epicureanism - not gastronomic or otherwise sensual self-indulgence, but a wiser path of satisfaction and contentment to pick through this existentially open world, and another way to ataraxia.
• When Nietzsche Wept: A Novel Of Obsession, Irvin D. Yalom. Suggested by my therapist. Obviously Nietzsche sometimes presents ideas that are either wrong or horribly misused, but I am grateful that he set me to thinking in terms of "Tempus Fugit", not just putting up with the fate we find ourselves in but loving it, because there is no other, despite our ability to make ourselves miserable imagining "like the current condition but a bit better please". This book posits an early practitioner of psychotherapy trying to help the genius as he worked through his griefs and also his debilitating migraines.
• The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking, Oliver Burkeman - not a five star read by itself but it covered so many other topic ( Irvine stoic, Ellis rationality, Dennett's view of consciousness.... Dweck fixed mindset, mortality in general...) that maybe it could have saved me some time.
• Fear of Flying, Erica Jong-- so relatable, and so distant in terms of time and culture. i just enjoyed reading it (during a vacation in Malaysia) in a way i hadn't enjoyed reading things in a while.
• Normal People, Sally Rooney. A brisk read by a young Irish author, the first time I read it its story of a difficult on-again off-again romance among some young intelligentsia just resonated so deeply with me, with things I'd been a part of or wanted to have been a part of.
• Is it evil not to be sure?, Lena Dunham. Like I wrote at the time (drawing many great little quotes from it) I'm really fond of this genre... young and precocious and observant, mostly in the present tense, and usually romantically longing, so often written to an absent "you".

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Other good reads
(in roughly chronological order)
First Half of Decade:
Julian Barnes' Nothing to Be Frightened Of might have snuck in between decades almost - really thoughtful musings on mortality. The Last Policeman - awesome classic noir in a just-per-apocalyptic setting. 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 was covering a tiny computer program from very many angles. Art Spiegelman's MetaMaus is great for anyone who wants an inside look in the craft of comics. David Byrne's How Music Work introduced me to many ideas including how musical forms tend to be shaped by their acoustic environments, the dance hall vs the drawing room. The Advanced Genius Theory gave such a good reason to enjoy things Advancedly not scorn them Overtly... The Spell of the Sensuous explores what we lost when we took on the phonetic alphabet, and how indigenous people weave their environment into their stories. I loved the multitude of styles in the scoff book Cloud Atlas - the movie was decent too, if a bit weirdly "yellowface".

Second Half of the Decade:
Set This House in Order: A Romance of Souls was a fascinating psychological study - won't give away spoilers here. Axiomaticwas more sci-fi short stories: I've loved Egan's work ever since "Permutation City", explorations and extrapolations on quantum physics and consciousness and biotech. Bull Was a great sympathetic retelling of the story of the minotaur. Priestdaddy - I could resonate with the tale of being a preacher's kid, albeit not a catholic (!) one, by poet Patricia Lockwood. The Orange Girl - 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 of young people... Time's Arrow was a homonculus who rides along witnessing a Nazi doctor's life but played in reverse.... Love and Limerence taught me a lot about "infatuated love" and maybe not to sweat not feeling it so often, that it might just be a personality-based likelihood...

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According to reports assassinating Soleimani was presented as the obviously too extreme throw-away option to make the other options look reasonable. Note to Pentagon officials: do NOT put in a "throw-away option" of using nukes, please.

And drones, man. Remember that Mirror, Mirror episode of Star Trek, where the evil universe Captain Kirk had a viewscreen in his quarters that could just make anyone it displayed stop existing? Drones are kind of like that, a tool that Obama started using (most infamously to kill a 16 year old US Citizen) and now it's in the hands of Trump.

My favorite dozen photos from 2018. Some I find visually compelling, others are a bit more about what the content is.

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you: hey
them: what's happening
you: everything
them: cool
you: literally everything is happening
them: cool cool
you: somethings, like stones, are happening slowly
them: ok
you: other things like love or weather are happening faster
them: well, good to see you
you:

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Melissa and I have "Iron Man 3" on in the background on SyFy. Commercials are a weird alternation: Pizza, Fitness, Pizza, Fitness, Pizza, Fitness.... I guess I've been meaning to post this forever... (found on tumblr)

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Last night my company had its semi-fancy dress holiday party and I found out that dress rentals for women is now a thing. (and maybe new-ish, like the past ten years or so.) This makes a tremendous amount of sense to me. (I mean there's still a lot in what our culture expects women to wear that doesn't, but still.) Coworker was showing off his first woodworking project, a lovely World Map Table.

The media I consumed in 2015.
This year I added the trick of showing if the total for the category was higher or lower than 2014 year, and by how much. Fewer books than last year which is a bit worrisome, but meh.

As always, 4 star stuff in red, 5 star stuff in red AND bold, gray stuff I didn't like so much.

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Oh dear. Something called the "Scoop and Scootery" with a sign on the door saying "we deliver sundaes til 2am... yup" is moving in about half a block from me.

Death is only the end if you assume the story is about you.

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. An anecdote that didn't quite make the cut for the speech I gave on behalf of the family at my mom's retirement ceremony:

Being an Officer family means you have to live pretty frugally. One Christmas my parents got me a "The Farmer Says" toy, where you pull the string and a voice says "The cow says... Moo!". Except the one they got me said things like "The dog says... Quack Quack!" "The turkey says.... Oink Oink!" While this amused my parents to no end, they took it back to the store to replace it with one that wouldn't mark me for life, animal recognition wise, and there wasn't cash on hand for both. When they played it for the clerk, well, it was a case of "The clerk says... 'Am I On Candid Camera'"?

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It's weird to realize I still have the same model of dating ("commit", THEN date) that I developed in high school. On the one hand, it seems kind of natural, and conversely weird and unromantic to be juggling lots of dates with a set of people. On the other hand I think romance can and should be cultivated (not just found at first sight), and it should be ok to check things out and explore without too much fear of being morally wrong. How are grownups supposed to handle this?

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If you're not always aiming at love for forever, are you doing it wrong?

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I've got 99 problems and being a decaying organism aware of it's own mortality in a society run by money that i can't escape is one of them

detail, click for full
--Original found here

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Whatever happened to Google's "view cached version of this page"?

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Note to future self: files w/ green filenames in Win7 Explorer (from Mac-using coworker) are "encrypted"- look under Properties|Advanced

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Steve Anderson on the pros and cons of unit tests and how to do it right:

Many in our industry claim that any unit tests are better than none, but I disagree: a test suite can be a great asset, or it can be a great burden that contributes little.

Good stuff, and points out some of the reasons I have embarrassingly little interest in unit testing.

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I had a bacon mcgriddle for the first time today. It was like eating a baby angel.

--thanks JZ! (Some of the lyrics a tad racy) Besides some of the basic sounds the guy makes, its a kinda fascinating study in how to layer tracks, I might try to take a few cues from it.

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Obama has it much worse than Reagan 'cause 4 years of Carter and the was a lot better than 8 of Bush and the Neocons... So, with a decade of recording what media I've been consuming under my belt, I'm in a position to make top ten lists!

Many of these books were written before 2000... this is just a subjective list based on me first encountering them at some point over the last decade. But I'd heartily recommend any of them to nearly anyone.

1. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig. The way this book tries to reconcile the Engineer's View (detailed, analytic) and the Romantic View (general, emotional) and come up with a sense of Quality that is really the heart of Daoism is astounding. It's also a nice and very human and readable story.
2. Consciousness Explained, Daniel Dennett. This book I cited again and again. It's a tough read, but I'm still amazed at the solid Western, academic structure it uses to get around to an idea that's fundamentally Buddhist; that there's not as much of a "there there" when it comes to consciousness as we think. (Jeff Hawkins' On Intelligence is similarly thought provoking, and it's idea that the core idea of the mind is "predict and test" is actually more relevant to AI than this, but hey, I can only put ten books on this list... while I'm cheating like this I'd point out that The Mind's I remains the best easy introduction to this kind of thinking.)
3. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald. I admit that in high school I ducked reading this book and Cliff Noted my way through it. I came back to it, thanks in part to reading about Charles Schulz' love of it. Now I'm convinced that it might not make sense until you've had a big unrequited love.
4. The Mezzanine, Nicholson Baker. One of my favorite books of the previous decade was Tom Robbins' Still Life with Woodpecker, which taught me to stop disrespecting objects just because they're inanimate. This book combines some of that feeling with the thoughtful analysis of Donald Norman's The Design of Everyday Things, and maybe just a hint of "Rainman". Famously it takes place entirely during one man's journey across a mezzanine and up an escalator, but mostly in flashback over the few days prior.
5. Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About, Mil Millington. In some ways not quite as pointed as the website that started it all, this is still one of the funniest books I've ever read. Admittedly men seem to dig this book more than women (even though some of the joy is the male unreliable narrator) and it is that "comedy of embarrassment" that some people don't dig.
6. Feet of Clay, Terry Pratchett. This book is a stand-in for all the Pratchett I discovered and devoured over this decade. In many ways Pratchett is a more thoughtful and emotionally in-tune Douglas Adams. And I think this book is one of the best of the "City Watch" novels; the scene of Vimes defending the Golem was heroism at its most beautiful.
7. How Can I Get Through to You?, Terrence Real. Recommended by the couples therapist Mo and I went to after the die had already been cast. What I most took away from it is the pattern that happens over and over, where a woman is unhappy with the growth of a relationship but doesn't want to nag, so doesn't say much, and the man is blissfully unaware and satiated, and the woman's discontent build and builds until it explodes, leaving the man stunned and bewildered.
8. The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac. I guess a small theme on this list is Westerners discovering some of the ideas of the spirituality of the East; and this book has that in spades. It introduced me to the concept that "Comparisons are Odious" - a thought that sounds profoundly unsustainable until you think about it, and realize that it does represent a positive thought, and points to a different way of being in the world.
9. Jar of Fools, Jason Lutes. I read a lot of Graphic Novels this past decade, and this is quite likely the finest; a very human and warm story, written with a compassionate eye and illustrated with a nicely restrained and clean, formal style.
10. A Deepness in the Sky, Vernor Vinge. The lone sci-fi book to make the list... I actually prefer the same series' A Fire Upon the Deep and how it stretched my mind about possible idea for alien consciousness, but I guess I read that last decade. (Similarly Permutation City is a decent story that plays with the "what ifs" of putting consciousnesses into VR worlds, but I guess I read it farther back than I thought.)

Honorable Mentions: A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again shows what a master of the footnote David Foster Wallace was. D.B. Weiss' Lucky Wander Boy explored the mythology presented by video games. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was just some of the Haruki Murakami I met and enjoyed - I can't believe the author was at Tufts when I was an undergrad there, and I totally missed it. Finally, May I Kiss You On The Lips, Miss Sandra? shows that Sandra Bernhard is more than just a pretty face. Err.

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someone should do Video Game Hero: you pretend to play games with no real skill in using a rubbish plastic joystick and set to cheesy music

My Mom sent me a link to this Christianity Today review of "The Faith of Scientists: In Their Own Words", edited by Nancy K. Frankenberry.

A bit of background... my folks are ordained ministers in The Salvation Army. For those who don't know, it's not just Red Christmas Kettle, Thrift Stores, and/or Food Assistance, but a group (like the "Save a Soul Mission" in "Guys and Dolls" that was based on it) that took the metaphor of a "war against Sin" a bit overly literally, to become something that feels like the (unarmed) paramilitary wing of Methodism...

So here was my response:

Interesting... odd that with the page itself, it's almost tough to figure out the actual book they're reviewing.

My UU Science and Spirituality group hears quite a lot from Goodenough... which is funny, between that name and "Frankenberry" I'd almost think someone was pulling our collective legs... (I almost wanted to use the UK "taking the piss" but I couldn't quite use that w/o the distance of quotes, but it's a very useful concept that doesn't translate exactly.)

UUSS-types talk a lot about transcendence and emergence; there's a scientific observation about how very complex systems can emerge from relatively simple rules, how you can't really know how a brain works - much less a mind - just by a "forest for the trees" inspection of neurons, etc, and will kind of try to stake their sense of spirituality in that kind of "bottom up" approach rather than the "top down" idea of most Abrahamaic traditions.

In this country, it's kind of odd. There have been all these waves of fundamentalism, and it's those waves, much more so than the "clockmaker God" that many of the "founding fathers" embraced, that is in conflict with science. A literalist interpretation of the Bible, one that doesn't accept it as poetry or as a text rooted in and for a people who had far fewer tools to understand and analyze the world in the way that science can, is kind of a brittle thing, because if you put all your eggs in one spectacular immutable and divinely-protected basket, and then some corner of it - say, like Genesis as a 6-24-hour-day creation, starts to look unlikely, you have to adopt positions that are essentially untenable. (Either God set out to plant a lot of fossils etc to fool scientists and demand faith despite that, or it's a conspiracy of the labcoat and field researcher crowd, etc etc)

And also a faith that demands exclusivity - as many say Christianity does with Jesus "no one comes to the Father but by me" - has to explain why ITS supernatural worldview is correct as opposed to all the other ones. It was a thought like this - specifically the "problem of all those pious moslems" and the realization that, if I had had whatever the Arab parallel of my S.A. upbringing is, than I would probably be striving to be as good a Moslem as I was a Christian then - that largely provoked by crisis of faith when I was 16 or so. (Since then I've also had a bit of an interest in Christian Apologetics when it tackles this issue set.)

It's a problem a lot of the hardcore Atheists have, actually. And for them, Fundamentalist Christianity acts as a bit of a strawman. And I agree with those who point out that hardcore Atheism can be followed just as dogmatically as any attempt at "faith"

My mom response was as follows:

Hi, again, and thanks for your thoughtful response. I appreciate the carefulness of your thinking. I've never been a Biblical literalist, but neither have I felt the need to try and parse out its contents by literary definitions. If Jesus did actually say "No one comes to the Father but by me", I've often wondered (with apologies to Bill Clinton) just what the definition of "by me" is. Does it truly mean only through acceptance of Jesus Christ as personal savior does a person , or might it mean that as the mediator between God and humankind, Jesus is the judge of all humans, but that his "judgment" is not exclusively based upon a Christian confession? My bottom line is that I don't have to make that decision.....I need to live according to the light that I have been granted. And that's Biblical, too.

So, feel free to weigh in with comments, obviously trying to be respectful of other opinions and outlooks

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plowing through my "all good mp3s sorted by track #" CDs. The track 12s were good and funky, but 13-14s start scraping bottom a bit.

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Joe Jutras grows 3/4 ton pumpkins on a including "ground bone, blood and fish". Do we really want to give these things a taste for blood???

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he who teaches history is doomed to remember it --2008.11.30

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Happily transferring voice memos into ToDos etc. The iPhone really is the jesusphone, the second coming of palm.

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Live so that the evidence if your death is found in the memory stick of your digital camera --2008.12.22

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"it's raining men" - their bruised and broken bodies scattered across the landscape, denting car hoods and punching holes through awnings...

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RIP Senator Pell... sounds like a truly great politician and man.

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JZ has adopted a very teeny-bopper-ish "I know, right?" form of affirmation, half-serious, half-in jest. It's catchy! "I know, right?"

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"I think you enjoy sprint retrospective notes a lot more than I do." -Scrummaster Heather to me. She might be right-secretary mojo go go go! So, football.

The Venn diagram overlap of Star Wars and Football fans meets its apogee (block that metaphor!) in 18to88.com's Football Predictions where each team inner Star Wars character is revealed. This is the retrospective edition, seeing how each mapping worked out and suggesting new ones for the mismatches.

Slate's guide to faking your way through the playoffs mentioned Jaguars coach Jack Del Rio's motivational prop gone awry. An wood stump, an ax, testosterone-laden football players and a mandate to "keep choppin' wood" -- what could possibly go wrong?

"Chris said that everyone else had been taking a swing with the ax, chopping the wood, and he finally decided to do it, too," Rosenhaus said. "Unfortunately, the ax either went through the wood, or bounced off it, and went into Chris' foot. Chris told me it is a pretty significant injury."

I just imagine some kind of stunned silence, marred only by their punter's cries of pain. I mean, how stupid would you feel having such a goofy object lesson take out one of your players for a season?

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Quote of the Moment

We live in a Newtonian world of Einsteinian physics ruled by Frankenstein logic.

Quotes of the Moment

The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.

The adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech.

Whatever we have done with our lives makes us what we are when we die. And everything, absolutely everything, counts.

Love and trust, in the space between what's said and what's heard in our life, can make all the difference in the world.

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Video of the Moment

--"On 12/31/06, the assistant organist at Trinity Wall Street church in NYC improvised a tribute to James Brown and Gerald Ford during the morning service, combining 'Hail To The Chief' with the breakdown from 'I Feel Good'. Robert Ridgell, organ"... kind of goofy. I didn't know organists could get away with that!

I have to admit I'm not a big fan of the church organ. I guess because it's all tone and little rhythm... and sometimes there's this one rambling build up thing they do that never sounds very musical to me at all...

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News of the Moment
New Hampshire Republicans settle in signal jamming lawsuit. They claim it's the act of a few unauthorized individuals, but...man, this is just repugnant. It feels like there should be some kind of criminal charges but I don't know what they'd be, something FCC-related.

Or, not? I dunno. Freedom of political speech is such a weird issue for me. On the one hand, stifling of political expression is a pretty scary precursor of tyranny. On the other, the cost and effectiveness of mass media is such that I can't be happy about unbridled political ads.

I guess I have a somewhat dour view of the decision making abilities of the electorate, which isn't 100% compatible with some of my more typical "wisdom of crowds" anti-elitest stances.

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Bonus Video of the Moment

--Some random person just wrote me about this because of a Loveblender comment I had made... I love this, especially the horns at the end. It's a little late, but it is Orthodox Christmas / 12th Day of Christmas ... not only is the music great, but the dancing is some of the best synchronized stuff I've seen. And the visual effects make me think that Apple is taking a cue from them with their iPod promotions. Quote of a Previous Moment

I like frogs, and their outlook, and the way they get together in wet places on warm nights and sing about sex.

...I think I grabbed that quote years ago from the back page of Tufts' conservative paper "The Primary Source"...it was my .signature file for a while. It's a great quote (that I redsicovered searching my sight for "outlook" for very different reasons) so I thought I'd bring it to the front.

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Lists of the Moment
Top 10 Web Moments of 2005. A few memes, a little of this, a little of that.

BoingBoing pointed out that LA Weekly has the set of lists to end all year-end lists..if you're in a hurry, just check out the year in Monkey news. I think primates are closer to us in ability and outlook then we'd care to admit... they like to gripe about the food, have accents, find yawns to be contagious, can understand and use money and will independently invent prostitution, use ad hoc water depth testers and bridges, have boys that prefer toy cars and girls that prefer dolls, have celebrities that they like to look at, and even dig on porn.

Lots of snow today...I heard a bunch of people at work are working from home today so I guess I might as well follow their lead...

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Quote of the Moment

Of course I can't see anything! I'm standing on the shoulders of idiots.

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Javascript of the Moment

According to Patrick Mahoney of Nashua, NH, there are 292 ways to make change for $1.00.

this is where the money goes

Being a geek, I wrote a program to prove that to myself...and got 242. Turns out that's because I don't consider half dollars to be "real money". (But Patrick Mahoney doesn't consider dollar coins to be real money either, or else it would be 293.) Anyway, I had the big list of combinations, but I prefer the idea of a little computer program that does nothing but obsessively come up with different values of quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies that equal a dollar...kind of a dollar changing savant. And here it is. (It's a bit like the old SNL routine "First Citiwide Change Bank", Parts one and two: "At First Citiwide Change Bank, Our business is making change"...All the time, our customers ask us, 'How do you make money doing this?' The answer is simple: Volume. That's what we do.")

Random Kirk Factoid: 292 will always be near and dear to the hearts of people who attended Tufts University in the first half of the 1990s...that was the rank Tufts got (out of 300) for "fun" schools. Some people were bitter about Tufts' lack of fun, or something, and painted 292 on "Jumbo II", a then-new lifesize statue of Tufts beloved mascot.

Here are some pictures from Ocean Grove and Asbury Park New Jersey. I also put a larger photo gallery online.

The Asbury Park ruins are really amazing, the old casino now a total wasteland. For a while the carousel building had a small indoor skatepark, but I guess that's gone as well...

I found this page with more photos via Google, and this page of how it used to look along with some quotes and lyrics from Bruce Springsteen, who famously cut his teeth at Asbury Park's "Stone Pony".

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Note of the Moment
The latest loveblender digest is here. In doing some research (well, trying to find out when my I'd resorted to "reviewing a website" for the monthly feature) I found this ramble on the 1-year relationshipaversary for me and Mo. Criminy, I had forgotten that that had set a record for longest continuous romance in my life. I hope that doesn't bode too poorly for the future.

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Site Feature of the Moment
For some reason when I made up my best of kisrael.com lists, I kept the entries that I strongly considered but then rejected embedded in the list I was making. I decided those entries deserved a "second best" set of links, and so the best of page is updated accordingly, and 2003 "best of" and "2nd best of" have both been finished off, with a sad poem and a reindeer's butt, respectively. Also, I added a note of explanation and apology to the front page, just because I'm not sure that "Kirk's Digital Arts and Crafts", which is what those pages are full of, are really the best of kisrael.com.

Hmm. I have probably just exceeded the "gives a damn" quotient for most of my audience. Excelsior! Image and New Feature of the Moment
So, this weekend Mo and I made a snowman. I wrote up the story behind deciding to go make it for this month's loveblender ramble. Anyway, this picture I took of it inspired me to finally get a desktop wallpaper page up, with digital pix I've actually used as my desktop background. (Kind of inspired by seeing Ranjit's wallpaper page--there's one amazing shot of his dog Tikko.) Unlike most other wallpaper pages, I decided not to offer the various resolutions. Most browsers/OSes I've used (ok, Windows) seem smart enough to do the resizing automagically.

I like this lonely snowman. The red scarf tells me he's happy.

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Rant of the Moment
Do many digital camera owners actually "think" in "megapixels"? That's the usual measure for a camera's resolution, but when someone says "this camera has 2.1 megapixels" it means very little to me, but the horizontal resolution, say, 1024 or 1600 or whatever, that's something I can think about, because most of my experience in fiddling with resolutions is with monitors. (And why is 1600x1200 called "2.1 megapixels"? 1600 * 1200 = 1,920,000. Yeesh.)

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Quote of the Moment

We have apple juice champagne in Germany.

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News of the Moment
If you're the Bush administration, and you want to do something about all the news of those troubling layoffs, what should you do? cut the funding for the program reporting the layoffs of course! The really amusing thing is that his dad did the same thing when he was presiding over a stalling economy. I guess we'll all have to rely on f'd company for our layoff news.

I heard one particularly scary idea...one Republican dream? Little Georgie in office 'til 2008, then his brother Jeb should be ready to make a run. Yikes! I think we've forgotten how fundamentally weird it is for this country to be run by a not particularly qualified son of a former president. "The Republicans: this country isn't a monarchy, but we're working on it."

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Idea of the Moment
Ever wonder what would happen if you wore one of those "Hello! My name is..." nametags all the time? Scott has found out!

Man, I used to hate wearing nametags. If I had to wear one, I'd try to be cool and wear it down low or something. That's so silly. What was I thinking? "How dare you try to label me! Pigeonhole me in a box named...err, Kirk! I'm way too cool for your 'oh, everyone knows each other name and so there's so awkwardness about forgetting' games!" 553 love poems to read today to make the January issue of the Love Blender. To be honest, that's a whole lotta coal to dig through to get to the diamonds.

My free floating anxiety has latched onto Mad Cow Disease as the next thing to be worried about and for the past 2 or 3 days I've been a vegetarian. That article talks about how disgusting our meat preparation industry is.

I'm not particularly squeamish about what parts of animals I might have ingested, but hearing how they use "mechanical recovery of meat off the vertebrae"... ugh. (At least we're not like Britain, where for a long time they used solvents to get the last bits off the bone for gravies and sauces and the like.) In general, whenever you go for meat that's been exposed to the spine or brain (more likely to happen with the use of pneumatic stun guns in the USA) you're at risk for CJD. (CJD is like Ice-9 for your brain, specialized forms of proteins called prions that catalyze/teach the proteins in your head to become... more prions!)

And hearing how we feed ground up cow to our cows... man, that just seems mean-spirited. And using newer vacuum-based low temperature meat prep to save energy might not seem all that clever in the long run.

I don't think my risk factor would be all that high, even if I was eating meat.(Which is good, I don't know how long I'll be 'on the wagon'-- luckily there's a Au Bon Pain near work that has really good, generous salads.) Even with my recent trip to Germany, and a 1995 trip to England. Each bit of beef is like a lottery ticket... your chances of 'winning' CJD is very small each time (unless you're eating brains or something) but a lifetime of it isn't such a good thing.