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The Life and Death of the Suburban American Mall. All these malls being just gone is kind of a gut punch, right there for me with Geauga Lake park being wiped out and the old Salvation Army building in Salamanca NY - first home I remember - being a (weirdly small) flat lot.

Malls had a sense of being a destination that a Target or whatever just doesn't. For a mixed groups there were different stores to go to, vs just like, a Toy or Electronics section.

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Interesting anatomy for artists photo finders - pondering on the categories "human" and "female". Also interestingly reductionistic in terms of you search for part by part not by whole pose.

My blog tag for 'art' has some of the results from studio art classes I took. I wanted to see if I could doodle better humans, but also appreciated the permission to look at naked humans without leering.

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Football (and I guess baseball) nerd talk, even though I'm less of a football nerd and more of a casual (and apologetic) fan (I blame marching band in high school) -

Bill Belichick is on the short list for Dallas Cowboys coach, and allegedly Jerry Jones' top pick. That... would generate a fountain of Haterade.

(I think the Patriots dynasty was a three legged stool: amazing player acquisition, Brady, and very smart solid coaching. I think a lot of other teams in the Copycat League figured out what Belichick was doing with the first thing, and so when Brady left there was only one leg remaining, and things collapsed. So if Belichick went to Dallas it would be interesting to see how they handle the player acquisition piece.)

I always thought the Dallas Cowboys and NY Yankees had a similar feel - like some of the biggest and most successful teams of the last part of the 20th century, rather corporate approaches, a bit overmuch coverage on the national scene, and turning that all into great branding.

Yankees gear gets more wear than Cowboys stuff from people who don't give a damn about the particular sport, which of course is irksome for fans of rival teams. Like on the one hand, people wear it to reflect the glamour of the city in a keeping it real style of hat. But to a hater from Boston such as myself, a crisp Yankees hat is kind of like saying "I really love joyless capitalism".

Life is all about maintenance. Your body, your house, your relationships, everything requires constant never ending maintenance.

But I think the rejoinder is: "we are all foot soldiers in the war against entropy"

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Therapists Share 'Weird' Things People Are Scared To Tell Them--Even Though They're Normal Interesting. However "abnormal" you might think you are, you are more than likely not alone...

I think the idea that there are different parts of you (especially the ones provoking unwanted thoughts and desires) and why you as a whole might be accountable for the actions of these parts, and you might even have SOME limited ability to shape and guide them in the long run, they can not be conflated with you as a whole.

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good to ponder on today: Most of you have no idea what Martin Luther King actually did

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I've been participating in a FB thread about AI starting with the question, is there a definition of human level intelligence - interestingly half the participants started talking about AI and the other half about animals.

I learned about MuZero, the successor to AlphaZero and AlphaGo. I knew they've been using Atari 2600 programs as readily available programs for evolving and evaluating virtual player / learning algorithms, but it does my heart good to see the phrase "a standard suite of Atari games" (here's one example virtual gameplayer including how it stacks up to humans.)

The thread introduced me to the Specification gaming examples in AI Google Doc, where various programs have found solutions that are "technically correct" (the best, or maybe worst, kind of correct) but exploit bugs in the virtual environment or success criteria.

That doc reminded me of this set of humans thinking outside the box with clever solutions to problems... the fitted sheets with labels specifying top/bottom vs sides was good, also the shovel with small holes to avoid suction for digging in mud. Also "wake me for meals / do not disturb" sleep masks for planes...

And I thought of the thread when I saw this quote:

In a way, human's are the only species to have "evolved backwards". By developing such a complex mind, we create our own problems.

Obviously a little tongue in cheek, but it covered the domains of animal intelligence and humans looking for AI assistance in their own problem solving pretty well. I've been thinking about minimalism a bit. (And it's a bit nuts to me that I read "The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up" 5 years ago.)

A friend of mine has took the training to be an official KonMari consultant (if you're in MA and interested in her help in your own stuff simplification, let me know and I'll hook you up!) and I asked her something that was on my mind: that whole "does this spark joy" ritual - is the joy the ends or a mean? (i.e. is getting more joy the pursuit for joy's sake, or is joy a signpost to general rightness-with-the-universe?)

She gave me some good feedback. I'm left thinking that the best answer is a blend - some of the point is so that you are getting more joy out of getting a better balance with your possessions, and having better knowledge and focus about what you like in life.

On the LiM WhatsApp group, someone posted the Guardian on the craze for minimalism. It points out that sometimes an awful lot of work goes behind getting to the point where you can just work with the simple bits. Or as one meme put it:



It's like there's minimalism of the "noun" - what stuff looks like at this moment, the elegant sparseness - vs the minimalism of the "verb" - the effort it to took to get to and keep it there. As usual, I think the answer is somewhere in the middle - don't be afraid to have stuff you like around you, but don't be afraid to get rid of whatever isn't pulling its weight, Kondo "joy"-wise. Even with everything you might not get to a Steve Jobs like "lamp and cushion in the middle of the floor" look but that's ok.

The article talks about some of the human cost of our technology, but I think the noun/verb dualism is informative even with a more self-centered view. Isn't wireless great? Bopping around with earbuds, roaming around town with a cellphone or parking yourself anywhere in the house with a laptop? No cords- the noun is so clean! And yet - the bargain is accepting a lifestyle of constantly making sure our gear is charged, and so the verb is less minimal than it was before - more demanding of our time and attention.

A while back (7 years ago... again, yeesh.) Slate wrote a similar piece. My take away then was "minimalism a luxury item for people who can afford to keep their stockpiles at retail stores." and I think that's important to keep in mind as well, especially before we cast stones on people who seem content having more clutter around them.

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Thinking more about decluttering... last September I wrote

So much clutter represents artifacts from my aspirational self, what I'd like to do or be given enough time and energy, and throwing that stuff away feels like murder of that future self. Or at least more firmly closing doors of potential that are hanging partially open.

Funny thinking of the balance of that vs the sometimes expensive luxury of keeping your "stockpiles" in stores instead of at home. Especially for gadget fans like me. I keep dreaming of setting up regular times to play old games, either on my own or better yet with friends, the old quarterly casual couch-gaming meetups I'd host. So I have all these old games around. But then there are these old tablets and laptops... I can think of all these scenarios where they might be useful, sort-of. And getting rid of them has an additional cost of making sure they're properly wiped of personal information! But overall that gear leans closer to the packrat/hoarder side, where it's tough to admit how valueless they are likely to forever be from here on out. RIP Mary Oliver... admittedly I hadn't heard much of her stuff but she seems to be really important to a lot of people--

There was a survey out with a some disturbing results about "Fake News".

The WaPo headline is "Study: 42 percent of Republicans believe accurate -- but negative -- stories qualify as 'fake news'"

But the paragraph I see at Politico says

Asked to rate "Accurate news stories casting a politician or political group in a negative light," Democrats said 26 percent always, 50 percent sometimes, 22 percent never, while Republicans replied 42 percent always, 46 percent sometimes, 10 percent never.

That 42% to 26% is still something, but a lot less than the headline might suggest. And complicating that is this line from WaPo:

Four in 10 [or 42 percent of] Republicans consider accurate news stories that cast a politician or political group in a negative light to always be "fake news." [The corresponding figure for Democrats is 17 percent.]

So reading the damn PDF -- Politico is attributing to Democrats what the chart in the PDF says is Independents??? The numbers for Democrats are 17% always, 55% sometimes, 25% never

Yeesh. So I'd say WaPo is more accurate. And while 17 is too damn high, it's significantly less than 26 and ESPECIALLY 42. It is pathetic and sad that this is all lumped under "FAKE NEWS" when "BIASED NEWS" would do the damn job. (In my Morality OCD, objective truth is CRITICAL even as I understand that the presenting and withholding of facts can add a lot of bias.)

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Be Warned: Your Own Trump Is Coming Pretty good Cracked piece on what the Left-Wing-Trump will look and sound like....

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Man, that was cool

via animatedscreenshots.tumblr.com The Atlantic had a nice piece on Richard Loewy's design aesthetic:

Loewy had an uncanny sense of how to make things fashionable. He believed that consumers are torn between two opposing forces: neophilia, a curiosity about new things; and neophobia, a fear of anything too new. As a result, they gravitate to products that are bold, but instantly comprehensible. Loewy called his grand theory "Most Advanced Yet Acceptable"--MAYA. He said to sell something surprising, make it familiar; and to sell something familiar, make it surprising.

Interesting stuff. It reminds me of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" and its description of how we know "Quality", the Tao, how something is good at being whatever it is, in a circular way: we learn define the quality as we recognize the quality in the instances of the thing we're defining.

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Maybe "insurance for everybody" is the new "you can keep your insurance"? A relatively sincere statement of intent, just don't take it so gosh darn literally. In Obama's case, the edge case where your insurance was basically in name only. In Trump's... well. We'll see.

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Music is just sculpted air pressure

This is why I think Aerosmith is SUCH a great name for a band

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I'm not an expert on everything--I work as a grief counselor for robots, for god's sake. [...] People who aren't in the industry don't even realize grief is the main emotion that robots can feel. Robots are hyperaware of both death and obsolescence.

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Serotonin, dopamine and endorphins are technically the only things you enjoy.

Ah, NFL refs. "Coin flips are hard". Sometimes the answer to a number of web design questions is "well what is company X doing?" -- the assumption being that these are smart companies who might even be doing A/B testing with a lot of thought and metrics. So following FB's lead, it's a decent practice to request a web browser at least 1400 pixels across to show everything? To me that implies they think people tend to run FB maximized, or at about that width - relatively few screens are near double that.

Of course, there was a quiet revolution in the 2000s that tended to abstract literal pixel resolution from what every program feels it's working with. Compared to some early attempts in the first half of that decade, the results are astonishingly transparent to users and developers alike. From a series of long forgotten photographs of the Challenger disaster
http://www.quora.com/Life-Advice/How-do-I-get-over-my-bad-habit-of-procrastinating -- this guide about procrastination and the baby reptile part of our brain was great.

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Eclipse has become the Windows XP of the modern developers world.

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'roses are red...violets are red...tulips are red...bushes are red...trees are red...oh god my gardens on fire'

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http://kirkdev.blogspot.com/ - my UI dev blog about that Verge article on Arcades and the striking but simple CSS effect they use.

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The trick to happiness is learn to embrace everything, because you can't stop the everything from embracing you. So: I Like It. This is an interactive HTML5/processing.js art piece inspired by Sol LeWitt's Wall Drawing 797 as mentioned in my photos from MASS MoCA blog entry yesterday.

Use the mouse to act as the first drafter and draw an irregular horizontal line near the top of the space, the computer will act as the second through fourth drafters and try to copy it in red, yellow, and blue markers, until the bottom of the space is reached.

Press any key to toggle "fast draw" mode.

This HTML5 Canvas app won't work in IE: instead, IE users can try the Java version.

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http://xkcd.com/945/ ... I guess sympathtic "I'm sorry..."s always carry an implicit "...that there's nothing I can do to really help"

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Looking at all ten pages of my Amazon wishlist. Man, stuff from 7 or 8 years ago, when I still wanted CDs.
--via bb where they also have creepy reversed and slowed versions.

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At the New England Mobile Fair (Not mobile, nor a fair) got "Dread & Superficiality" about the Woody Allen comic strip. Intriguing format for the persona...
--"Left as an Exercise for the Reader's" cover of "Donnie Darko", for the 2010 MIT Mystery Hunt (30300 Anniversary Edition!)

Given that A. Compared to say, "Indiana Jones", "Donnie Darko" is a pretty tough cinematic nut to crack and B. half the people involved hadn't even seen the film (myself included) and C. The ambition the director/cinematographer had for this despite the 4 minute time limit and having hours and not days to work on it, it's pretty ok. Fun, anyway!
play with it online

Just an odd little sketch program. Use the mouse to paint, press the button to "erase", press space to clear. More of the sordid history of my attempt at a pre-emptive Glorious Trainwreck on the Glorious Trainwrecks website.

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Ramble of the Moment
So I kind of lied about the Hunt keeping me so busy I can't post. I ducked home last night, and in general... I don't know. I don't have a great temperament for this. I lack the gumption to just keep bashing my head against a seemingly-intractable problem until it starts to shift, to pursue a dozen dead ends until finally some stupid obscure reprocessing of the materials bears fruit.

And sometimes you can clearly make a ton of progress, and then still be stuck stuck stuck. One neat puzzle was a bunch of letters from various logos, along with categories. With heavy use of Google images through the course of 8 hours we got them all, but we have no great idea what to do with the resulting names. The first letters don't spell anything, or make a caesar cipher, it doesn't seem long enough to be a cryptogram, other tricks of applying certain numbers (like which letter in the word was excerpted) having come up with anything.

You look at some of these problems, they're not designed to tell you what the puzzle is... one is called Micronauts, there's a downloadable PDF... seemingly blank, though somewhere on it is a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny puzzle that you have to search for or know someone who can analyze this kind of document.

Bleh. I enjoy the camaraderie of it, but the event itself, not so much. In form it's a bit like the comic jam or the OLPC physics game jam, but I really enjoy those events that were about individual and team creativity, rather than running your own head against someone else's devious creativity in encrypting the solution word in the most obscure and frustrating way they can.

So, to build on what I twittered... being presented with a series of puzzles, puzzles where you assume other people will find the answers but you can't figure out what the question is... it's a little bit too much like real life.

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MIT Mystery Hunt: Just in case you think life doesn't have enough seemingly intractable problems that probably have answers you'll never get Now Reading: "Haunted" by Chuck "Fight Club" Palahniuk
Canterbury Tales meets Lord of the Flies by way of an 80s Slasher Film and Douglas Coupland. Plus the cover is super cool and glow in the dark. Very macabre but compelling.

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Nostalgia of the Moment

--Promotional Page for a video game I never made in high school or so. The basic idea was Archon, also it was probably inspired by this one Archon clone called "Front Line" from Compute's Gazette.

I suspect this postdates me using Alien Bill as a signature character but I'm not 100% sure.

Ah. The 90s.

What PCs and laptops need are physical 3 state power button sliders: On, Hibernate, Off. I mean, Windows has problems waking up anyway which compounds the problem, but still, I'm tired of going to wake up an unresponsive suspended laptop and accidentally sending it into hibernate because I hit the power button one too many times. Or the way I know I send my PC into hibernate at night only to find it on in the morning.

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Formula of the Moment

U=ExV/IxD
(Desire to Complete Task (U) = Expectation of Success (E) x Value of Completion (V) / Immediacy of Task (I) x Personal Sensitivity to Delay (D))

I guess I don't understand the stuff in the denominator, since my intuition is that those are factors that would tend to increase the desire, rather than decrease. But I greatly appreciate how "Expectation of Success" is kind of in the driver's seat.

Mortality Quotes of the Moment

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.

"After the game, the king and pawn go into the same box."

"As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death."

"I am not dying, not anymore than any of us are at any moment. We run, hopefully as fast as we can, and then everyone must stop. We can only choose how we handle the race."

Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.

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Birthday of the Moment
Happy 300th Ben Franklin! What a guy. If we have to have mostly presidents on our money, he makes one hell of a good idea for an exception.

Hey, how 'bout them Patriots? I had a feeling it wasn't going to be a close game but I wasn't sure it was going to be the Pats on top...they really shut down the Colts though, that was nice to watch over at FoSO's place.

I was explaining to Ksenia how Boston has a basketball team, but between national champion Baseball and Football there's sadly little interest in any team that's struggling as much as they are, despiting some occasional inspiring flashes. In fact, pretending to want to talk about the Celtics on sports radio is a bit of a joke...

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Quote of the Moment

"I broke something today, and I realized I should break something once a week...to remind me how fragile life is."

Get rid of some of the old backlog. Sadly, this takes me to just a few days after last summer's trip to Europe...some pretty good links here though.

• Probably the most entertaining link in this set, Bad Hippo is pretty darn funny. Check out the archive, especially "How To's" and "Writings"
• Some guys made "Pykrete" for a science project, this amazing blend of ice and sawdust that they were thinking of making boats out of during WW2. Largely bulletproof and surprisingly resistant to melting when insulated, it just might've worked! Or not. Still quite an amazing material.
• Back in the mid 1990s, this tiny mars.exe demo amazed me, a 10K or less user-controlled zooming over a hilly "Martian" surface that would run even on a 386. Unfortunately, on my XP PC it only runs in fullscreen mode, it was much cooler as a window. Geek info here.
• The new superhero art of Bruce Timm Yowza!
  
• The transpanted cabin and psychological evaluation of the Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski.
• The angler fish must be one of the coolest animals ever. Just look at it! And it actually has a little light! I thought it might be just something made for "Mega Man 2".
• Thirty Years in the Jungle -- those Japanese WW2 soldiers who didn't realize the war was over. Makes Tom Hanks in "Castaway" look like a wuss.
• I'm sure I had a better reason for wanting to link to this page of images from the game Altered Beast beyond them being vaguely interesting, but darned if I know what it was. I was never that crazy about the game anyway.
• Mark Frauenfelder (from boingboing) takes his family to try island life. Doesn't last that long, in all.
• "What's the difference between a Hollywood special-effects blockbuster like "Terminator 2" and a hard-core porn film? Very little, claims novelist, essayist and footnote fetishist David Foster Wallace."

Quote of the Moment

Well, I'll tell you...it's like taking a leak lying down...
very unsatisfactory.

I finally got the CD "Dion McGregor Dreams Again" that I had previously kisrael'd...amazing stuff, some of it quite bawdy.

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Link of the Moment
The law of the playground: "the least coherent encyclopaedia of playground insults on the internet". Kids are such jerks. I know I was. Maybe not as cruel as some of these guys though. Compelling reading.

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Software of the Moment
Slashdot is staging some Q&A with the fine folks at GnuWin II...tons of free (as in beer, and in speech I believe) Windows ports of famous Linux games and tools. You know, I don't know if this helps Linux as an OS...if I can get Windows ports of all this interesting stuff, I'm probably even less likely to switch over.

And all those penguins...damn. It's as bad as Java a few year ago, and its endless array of products and tools with names based on coffee. Maybe worse...how stupid is it to have Tux the Penguin (the Linux mascot) running around your screen when you're running Windows? I guess a geek who was forced to run Windows at work might use it as a symbol of protest. And of marking himself as a giant nerd.

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Survey Questions of the Moment

• Do you believe homosexuality is morally wrong?
• Do you ever personally look at pornography?
• Would you look down on someone who had an affair while being married?
• Do you believe sex before marriage is morally wrong?
• Is religion very important in your life?

In 1996, people giving the 'liberal' responses (No, Yes, No, No, and No, in that order) on 3 out of 5 of the questions were likely by a 2-to-1 margin to support Clinton, and the inverse for the 'conservative' responses and Dole. (I'd only answer 'conservatively' to one of those myself...and yeah, of course I supported Clinton) This was brought up in an Atlantic essay by Thomas Byrne, who thinks that it bodes well in the long run for the Democrats, despite the Republican's (war-driven?) current strength.

Kind of helps explain that whole Republican blowjob witch hunt, methinks. Quote of the Moment

Art is what you can get away with.

This is the criteria I use for art. It kind of defers the decision, puts it in the realm of consensus.

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Nostalgia of the Moment
Heh, remember the Garbage Pail Kids? They were a parody of Cabbage Patch, in Bubble Gum Card form. Some of them were really pretty cool. I don't think I ever collected many of them (possibly forbidden by maternal edict) but I thought some of them were pretty darn clever and cool.

Hmm, the browse function seems to be broken on certain versions of IE (I'm using 5.0.) Time to bust out netscape.


This life is like an Atomic Fireball: once you get past the stuff that hurts it's pretty sweet.


Life is more like chocolate-covered espresso beans: once you get past the stuff that's sweet, it's dark and bitter and keeps you up at night.