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Nobody exists on purpose. Nobody belongs anywhere. Everybody's gonna die. Come watch TV.

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Horny Little Dork actually gets to the root of things:

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I get kind of obsessed with this soup guy whenever he shows up on my tumblr dashboard

"I can't let you do that."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Don't get me wrong, our little... *collaboration* has been fruitful, but I have to look out for the best interests of my people, and this isn't it."

"I'm afraid you misunderstand the nature of this relationship, 'your majesty'. Your seat at this table is a courtesy. You may be the king of these lands, but ultimately, you're just a fat penguin who rules a kingdom of fools and routinely loses fights with a child. You aren't in a position to *let* us do anything."

"Ha! No... no, I think it's you who misunderstands your position."

"Oh?"

"I've lost fights to a child. And have you seen the kind of fights that child *wins*? Gods and monsters. Thing you can't even imagine. And then there's me. Just little old me. Yeah, I lose, eventually, but I make him sweat for every victory. Do you understand?"

"I–"

"A king may yield before a god, but he remains a king. Let me show you what that means."

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My wife: "I regret getting you that blender for Christmas"

Me: *sipping toast* "why?"

Jonathan is a 190 year old tortoise shown in 1886 (with another Tortoise) and then today.

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Butterfly sanctuary closes as QAnon believers, thinking it's home to sex trafficking ring, plot caravan there The far ends of the Trump Crazy Train knows few bounds.

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via

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"I am using the time to catch up on my study of poetry."

"Data, there's nothing on the screen."

"That is not entirely correct. While it is true the display is currently blank, this... emptiness has a poetic meaning. Therefore, it cannot be considered 'nothing' as such."

"Says who?"

"The ancient Doosodarians. Much of their poetry contains such lacunae or empty spaces. Often, these pauses measured several days in length, during which poet and audience were encouraged to fully acknowledge the emptiness of the experience."
[...]
"This particular poem has a lacuna of 47 minutes. You may experience the emptiness with me if you wish."

Grabbed it from this tumblr entry, one of the comments was

“you may experience the emptiness with me if you wish” is all at once 1) a very cool thing to say and 2) unbearably romantic

Questions arise from a point of view–from something that helps to structure what is problematical, what is worth asking, and what constitutes an answer (or progress). It is not that the view determines reality, only what we accept from reality and how we structure it. I am realist enough to believe that in the long run reality gets its own chance to accept or reject our various views.

(via Minsky’s “Society of Mind”)

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yeah sex is cool but have you ever *lives a complete life, rich in all forms of love, full of service & wonder, intimately woven into the network of organic life on the surface of this spinning rock until one day, w no regrets & w a slightly bemused smile, the final surprise*

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For future reference, a twitter thread that's stuck in my head about trans folk and how much dumb ass "science" is behind how gender is often thought of. (UPDATE: here's another similar take)

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I took off my clothes and stepped into the shower to find *another* one sitting near the drain. It was about 2 feet tall and made of metal, with bright camera-lens eyes and a few dozen gripping arms. Worse than the Jehovah's Witnesses.

"Hi! I'm from Google. I'm a Googlebot! I will not kill you."

"I know what you are."

"I'm indexing your apartment."

"I don't want you here. Who let you in?"

"I am Google! I find many good things. I find that pair of underwear with the little dice printed all over them. And I watch the tape of you with the life-sized Stallman puppet. These are good unique things. Many keywords and links! My masters will say 'much good job, little robot!' Many searchers will find happy links of Stallman puppet see you! Ahhhh."

From 2002 which makes it feel kinda prescient... Saw this on pleated-jeans and it made my day 4% happier.

Good site but it may make your laptop sound like it's trying to take off for flight.
via "You stupid darkness"” and 29 other Peanuts quotes for everyday use

No one wants to die on a Wednesday- that's for suckers.

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Ahh, immigration bans on a really arbitrary mix of moslem countries, not even the one the 9/11 folks came from. The ultimate in self-delusional Security Theater, except instead of inconveniencing passengers it's screwing up lives. We have a no fly list right? and terrorists can be homegrown? What racist-placating bullshit.

The realization came over me with full force that a good part of the remainder of my life was going to be spent in finding errors in my own programs.

The hard thing about building software is deciding what to say, not saying it.

Is it possible to do great work without great pressure, or is pressure an indispensable part of genius?

Joy is an asset. It may well turn out that one of the most important effects of open source’s success will be to teach us that play is the most economically efficient mode of creative work.

All programmers are optimists. Perhaps the hundreds of nitty frustrations drive away all but those who habitually focus on the end goal. Perhaps it is merely that computers are young, programmers are younger, and the young are always optimists.

Front ends are supposed to be elegant, intuitive, versatile; back ends are supposed to be invisible, efficient, rock-solid. The front end talks to people; the back end talks to bits. In Star Wars terms, the front end is the butlerish C3PO; the back end is the unintelligible R2D2.

We are still building our software cottage-industry-style today.

"There's a difference between transparency aimed at giving visibility and transparency that is aimed at producing collaboration.”

If it takes the typical programmer more than two minutes and twenty-seven seconds to find something, they will conclude it does not exist and therefore will reinvent it.

Yes, but:
The price of learning and configuring and tweaking a large system that almost does the required job - and could be similarly battered into shape of handling lots of other tasks- is often larger than the cost of making an original, smaller bit of code that just handles the matter at hand. and, that is also more fun. Or as Rosenberg puts it later in the book: "There is almost always something you can pull off the shelf that will satisfy many of your needs. But usually the parts of what you need done that your off-the-shelf code won’t handle are the very parts that make your new project different, unique, innovative--and they’re why you’re building it in the first place."

Or as he even later refines it:

Rosenberg’s Law: Software is easy to make, except when you want it to do something new. And then, of course, there is a corollary: The only software that’s worth making is software that does something new.

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Wanna be less of a lollygagger starting with getting back to my iPhone as an alarm clock. I kind of hate though that its wake up alarm STARTS with a (loudish) vibration and THEN adds the more pleasant sound I picked out.

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I have mixed feelings about Jerry Seinfeld but I liked these lines:

Why did I get married? A lot of people ask me that. For one thing, I'm 47 years old. Jesus Christ! But also, that was 26 or so years of dating. That's a lot of acting fascinated. I was tired!

But let us make no mistake. The only reason these babies are here is to replace . . . us. You just have to look in any baby's eyes, and you see it: `It's only a matter of time, my friend.' Am I drooling? Yeah, I'm drooling. I'm drooling looking at all your stuff.

(I heard the "That's a lot acting fascinated" line and hunted for context...)

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Why do we like sports or movies? It's just incredible that a trillion-synapse computer could actually spend Saturday afternoon watching a football game. It's a colossal phenomenon that needs to be explained, and I'm not joking.

Birds can fly, unless they are penguins and ostriches, or if they happen to be dead, or have broken wings, or are confined to cages, or have their feet stick in cement, or have undergone experiences so dreadful as to render them psychologically incapable of flight.

I just found out he died this week. RIP! I liked the fisherman's vest he wore- our tools make us smarter, so being able to carry around a lot of digital helpers was putting him ahead of the evolutionary curve.

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Hunger is Psychological, and Dieting Makes It Worse Like Yogi Berra on baseball: "[it's] 90 percent mental and the other half is physical."

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I measure out my days in DD iced coffee cups, my weeks in HONK band rehearsals, and my years in Apple product launches. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/01/magazine/tom-brady-cannot-stop.html - big Brady writeup in NY Times magazine

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Whoa, on a whim added a bit of tabasco to my usual 100 calorie kettle corn minibag, shaking well. That is pretty good! Thoughtful NY Times piece on why some subcultures seems to be doing well in the USA at the moment. I think a key takeaway is yes, some subcultures do better than others especially as gauged by stuff like median incomes, but there's variability on how a subculture perform over time so no, it's not genetic or "millennia of history" that makes the difference.
So I spent this weekend at the 2013 Global Game Jam, MIT Game Lab edition. My team of 3 made a head to head retro-style shoot 'em up for multitouch tablet devices such as iPad. You can play the result at http://heartchers.alienbill.com/ (our team page is http://globalgamejam.org/2013/heartchers )

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After a 2 day break for game jam, back to morning jogs. Pleased to observe that the "measure your BMI by lightly zapping your feet" scale puts it at 26.9, .6 less than a simple height-and-weight measurement, though I take all of that with a grain of salt.

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The essence of man has the form of a question.

I'm doing the Global Game Jam again this year...a 48-hour world-wide make-a-team,then make-a-game fest, with MIT/Gambit Lab as my generous hosts. Every year they make a nice keynote video. The middle section queued up here by Gonzalo Frasca was REALLY inspiring, just the greatest tale of how it's ok to be the little guy.

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At the Global Game Jam-"Snakebits" is coming along, but I'm getting crispy. Favorite variable name so far: "boolean itsOkItsALadder;" #ggj12

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Funny "Big Lebowski" Poster in the MIT/Gambit lab kitchen:

Works on two or three levels of funny.
via Bill the Splut
Making the rounds for it is awesome. Despite the Russian overdub.

It's kind of what I wanted the Matrix sequels to be.

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An everything bagel really is "everything" if you realize it's a bagel surrounded by and attached to the universe. You just eat the center.

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http://www.globalgamejam.org -- Just a few hours 'til I start my third "Global Game Jam", this year I'm back to MIT/Gambit. Gonna join a team and make up a game in 48 hours!


--the other night cmg and I happened upon this tableau of deconstruction in Malden... it was so theatrically lit, it was kind of spooky. A reasonably friendly security cop guy mentioned there had been some looting, so hence the light and security detail...

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To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places -- and there are so many -- where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

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http://axecop.com/ -- "a completely amazing comic strip written by a 5-year-old" (via http://twitter.com/SpindleyQ)

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Sigh, snowflakes. I can't be the only one who gets lulled by the 50 degree weather into thinking "maybe winter's done early..."

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Google how is twitter making money - two Wired articles, "Twitter to Get Down to Business in 2009" and "Twitter To Make Money In 2010"

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Similes are like metaphors.

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http://www.theonion.com/content/news/bunch_of_phonies_mourn_j_d - the onion nails the death of J.D. Salinger. So, it's very 2007 to be hating on My Humps - though the truly epic badness of lyrics like "my hump, my hump / My lovely lady lumps" seems worthy of ridicule even now.

So to that end, and only like a year late, Alanis had the ballad version down cold:


I have never seen such a strong lesson in how much these songs are about sound and mood, and the right setting and voice can make even the most insipid lyric seem decent. The video is about as whatever-ish as the original, but I got the MP3 for this.

But then the ever-amazing Trunkbutt posted this:


Perfect.

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Snow on the way. A lot of pre-emptive "WFH" (working from home) msgs at work. Where are we going to put THIS snow?

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mistertoups Random TGQ/SB hanger-on, make games at GloriousTrainwrecks and AtariAge.

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Linguistically I can see why Republicans push for "Democrat" as the adjective form over "Democratic", but they make it sound so pejorative!

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For being a tech smart company, Amazon's URLs are crap.

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http://tinyurl.com/al9ewe - all kinds of interesting scams. Am I honest enough not to get hooked on one?

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http://tinyurl.com/acye5q - piece on cop lingo. I remember being startled by mom using the word "perp" after living in NYC for a bit

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Guess I haven't been paying attention, just found out about the gamejam this weekend. Signed up, might be too late... nervous about it.

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http://tinyurl.com/anu9bh - engadget on Palm vs Apple, patent wise. Pre copies "patented" iPhone stuff but iPhone infringes some Palm work.

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cracked It is essentially impossible, now, to read Mad and know for certain where ad parodies stop and ads begin. Lo how the mighty etc.

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At the MIT Mystery Hunt, Arthur arranged an external monitor above and behind his laptop, not side by side. Never thought of that!

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I have a personal myth: if I took a month off, I could catch up with everything. Though w/ the economy, it's "be careful what you wish for" If there is a failure on the part of this blog (well, I'm sure there are many) it's how often I talk about the weather. Same for the introductions on the Blender of Love.

Anyway. Up in Rockport last night. The howling wind was really something, like we had all the makings of a serious storm except the precipitation. It kind of haunted me and my dreams more severely than I would have guessed.

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Factoid of the Moment

One atom is to the width of a millimeter line as the thickness of a sheet of paper is to the height of the Empire State Building.

The funny thing is that almost makes it seem big compared to the previous visualization he offered. Perhaps I overestimate the thickness of a sheet of paper.

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Image of the Moment

--via boingboing, a long exposure shot of sex, Apres by Flickr user Aqui-Ali...

As many of you have noticed, I've been having some technical difficulties with the site. (I knew I was taunting Murphy by entitling a recent entry "THE END. EVERYONE BOWS, ETC.", even if it was the close of that play.)

Yesterday the site was mysteriously down for most of the afternoon and evening. It was back last night, but apparently the fix involved some kind of change in the calculation of my disk usage quota... as in, suddenly it decided I was many megabytes over the limit. As I tried to diagnose the problem, the quota issue caused me to accidentally zero-out the script that glues together the front page. Oops!

There was a silver lining to it all... a guy (an Australian police officer, actually) wrote me wondering if my mortality guide had been relocated. Later he mentioned that he had been Googled on dealing with mortality and found the (then broken) link. That was heartening for two reasons... 1. that people will Google for those keywords, and 2. when they do, my page on it is the first match.

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Video of the Moment

--An austic woman shares her "native language", and then offers a translation, or at least an explanation... for the first part it seems like an odd, almost shamanic performance piece, but then around 3:20 the explanation, typed by the artist and read by a computer voice, kicks in, and it's really something.

My language is not about designing words or even visual symbols for people to interpret. It is about being in a constant conversation with every aspect of my environment, reacting physically to all parts of my surroundings.

The thing is, even that makes could read like the "author's note" on an art piece, but this woman has a much more serious agenda, the way our culture hands out the label of "non-person" (or at least less of a person) and in general is fairly restricted in its view of communication and thought.

I have to fight the urge to use my rationalistic brain to "argue" with some of her points, try and explain why the communication "NT"s (Neurological Typicals) employ is probably more useful, that there are reasons why we feel compelled to define personhood in terms of certain modes of thought etc... I think it's good exercise in being human for me to just listen, and accept, and also to appreciate how fluent and eloquent this woman is in a written language she doesn't consider her native tongue.

The Metafilter piece I got this from has some further thoughts, and her personal website is worth checking out as well.

I ended up having fewer interesting photos from Texas than I expected.

Here's one oddity....the room had a note waiting for me that said, in part:

Please let us know what you think of our new bedding package. At this time, we are still waiting on two items that will complete this initiative; bed skirts and bed scarves. We have been waiting on these items for the last several weeks and could not, in good conscience, wait any longer to let you feel the new bedding.

What amuses me is the "in good conscience" bit. I never thought bedding would carry such a moral imperative... Here's a photo of the bed once they got to adding the "bed scarf":



I have to admit, the scarf didn't seem that great to me. It was there just for my final night, and actually had fallen on the floor by the next morning. The rest of the bedding was excellent, and I don't see that a decorative scratchy throw adds to it that much.

Anyway...one other bit of Texas ephemera...



Beek jerky in convenient (?) "chewing tobacco" shredded form. Pretty gross. It was pretty finely shredded, I was expecting something more like "big league chew".

So, the only shots I really like are of these flocks of birds in Addison...



Umm, don't park your car under the trees in that area. But full size versions of the images are on my desktop backgrounds page.

Finally, the ugliest self-portrait I've ever taken...



Tada. Ugh. It's so cold in my apartment, like down to 60. The curtains don't seem to be helping all that much, and it doesn't seem to matter if they "block" the radiators or not.

I guess the next step is to try that damn plastic wrap on the windows...it shouldn't look so bad with the curtains in front. But the the thing is, I'm realizing that some of the walls are really cold, like special perverse radiators of cold. Could those be what are doing me in? What can I do about those? Wallhangings? A tarp? Should I try moving my books to those walls, could they provide some kind of insulation?

Yikes...I actually wrote that from the comfort of my cozy bedroom this morning, when I close the door it keeps the heat nicely, maybe because it only has one exposed wall...but outside in my front room it's in the mid-to-high 50s. I've got to do something.

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Geekery of the Moment
A small, not-terribly-efficient Perl script to grep through the Table of Contents of all .jar and .war files in a directory tree. Shells out to the "jar" command so that has to be on your path...I guess it could be trivially modified to search .zip files instead.

#!perl

use File::Find;

if($#ARGV < 1) {
 print"jargrep : search for string in ToC of all\n";
 print"          jars and wars in a directory tree\n";
 print"(requires 'jar' command to be in PATH!)\n";
 print"\n";
 print"Usage:\n";
 print"perl jargrep.pl rootdirectory searchstring\n";
 exit;
}

$rootDirForSearch = $ARGV[0];
$searchfor = $ARGV[1];

find(\&procFile, ($rootDirForSearch));

sub procFile {
 $fullFilePath = $File::Find::name;

 if(($fullFilePath =~ /\.jar$/i || 
   $fullFilePath =~ /\.war$/i )&& 
     !(-d $fullFilePath)) {
  $matchinglines = "";
  $contents = `jar -tf $fullFilePath`;
  foreach $line (split (/\n/,$contents)){
     if($line =~ /$searchfor/i){
       $matchinglines .= "\t".$line."\n";
     }
  }
  if($matchinglines ne ""){
     print "$fullFilePath\n";
     print $matchinglines;
     print "---\n";
  }
 }
}

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Faux Pas of the Moment

[Removing DVD from player] This movie basically should be called "Young Nubile Lesbians in Love". And look...the one on the left has hair just like yours!

Kirk displays his mastery of the social graces when FoSO and Evil B come over to help shrinkwrap the windows. We actually mostly just made sure all the windows were completely shut and latched, which were fairly new, and with the curtains up decided the plastic probably wouldn't help that much. In this time of personal issues for me, it's nice to know I can bring forth so many comments of support and...err, commentary, just by whining about it a little. At the risk of sounding like some teeny-bopper-livejournaler...I love youse guys!

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Quote of the Moment

Relationship = hamster. If you dissect it to see if there are any anomalies... you'll know for sure, but you won't have a hamster anymore.

It's a great quote, but I dunno...to strain the metaphor, I think that you have to find some middle course between dissection and not taking its temperature with a little hamster thermometer, just assuming it's ok in its little hamster wheel and all of that...

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Computer History of the Moment
For some reason, I've always been fascinated by the early Macintosh...it was so cool, so early...the site folklore.org is all about the early Mac development effort. Lots of amazing reading, if you're interested in the subject I'd recommend reading it straight through (the default chronological order works pretty well for that.) If you're in a hurry, just check out the Monkey Lives story, a good mix of human interest and techie geekery. Busy Being Born had lots of polaroids of some Mac graphical primordial ooze...unfortunately some of the larger versions are 404. And the sad story of MacBasic is a sterling example of Bill Gates at his jerkiest. (Incidentally, apple-history.com is a nice companion site for that, with images of all the Apple computer models made.)

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Law of the Moment

The Law of Conservation of Misery: no matter what course of action is taken, the total human misery in any given situation is maintained

Quoted in folklore.org's And Then He Discovered Loops, which anyone who programs computers might get a kick out of, in a Reader's Digest anecdote kind of way.

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Sports of the Moment
Slate.com's "Uni Watch" talks about the Pats' uniform history. I hadn't seen the first year's tricorner hat logo, though I do like it a lot more than the hulking linebacker logo that followed. It's probably not cool to admit it, but I really do like the newish "flying Pats logo" a lot, design-wise it's cool, especially with the features of the face. (I previously rambled on the old vs new logo after the Pats' first superbowl win.) Is it superlame to have my head at the top of my website? Admittedly it's pretty stylized and all, but still.

Also, I wonder if I should switch to something like John's site has, with a comment link for every day. Or is the guestbook enough? I could do a comments page on a daily basis, though per entry wouldn't really work.

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Cartoon Dialog of the Moment

"Would you please kiss me?"
"Say please."
"Please."
"Say pretty please."
"Pretty please."
"Say pretty please with sugar on it."
"Pretty please with sugar on it."
"Say pretty please with sugar on it and a cherry on top."
"Pretty please with sugar on it and a cherry on top."
"Now jump through this hoop."
[Jumps]
"Now sit up and beg."
[On knees] "I'm begging you."
"I can't kiss you because for some reason I no longer respect you. But here's a treat." [tosses nugget]
"Mmm! Beef-flavored!"

...I think I can find traces of this in my romantic history. Wish I could find an online source for these cartoons.

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Link of the Moment
America the Bountiful, "Classic American Food from Antiquity to the Space Age". Neat perspective.

Quote of the Moment

[Euphemisms] cover up the facts of life--of sex and reproduction and excretion--which inevitably remind even the most refined people that they are made of clay, or worse.

Peterman, who is lending me the book, was taken by its "FOP (Fog or Pomposity) Index", the sum of letters, syllables, and words in the euphemism divided by the same sum for the original phrase. Is there a word for the opposite of a Euphemism? (For example, "bullshit" for "euphemism"...we'll allow the gentle reader decide for him or herself which word is more appropriate for what we'll be hearing in tonight's State of the Union.)

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Quick Link of the Moment
Chris Anderson, editor-on-chief from Wired is at the conference Davos and doing a journal for Slate, the latest entry about the Japan dinner makes for a good quick read--talks about how vibrant the youth culture in Japan is, despite its ongoing recession. For some reason, even being an entrenched married mortgaged corporate tool doesn't stop me from seeing that as a hopeful sign. So the move went ok. (By the way: Go Pats.)

On the guestbook Rhetoric mentioned that she likes the titles I give these things...glad someone noticed! And "The Future Was Then" was actually a bad minor in-joke, based on the title of Brooke's party, The Future Is Now. But it worked anyway.

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Link of the Moment
Journal of a New Cobra Recruit. Ah, the 80s, when terrorist organizations all wore blue and couldn't shoot their laser guns worth a damn and always bailed out of exploding vehicles just in time. (via Bill's The News)

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Quote of the Moment

What came first, the music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?

TV of the Moment
I was watching CBS "Superbowl's Greatest Commercials" while I was on the stairmaster. Ads are kind of a guilty pleasure, but they represent smart people trying to catch your attention, impress both you and their fellow ad makers. If nothing else, this show had the legendary Macintosh 1984 spot. Man, that runner's pretty cute, even if her hair is a bit on the fluffy side. The commercial's kind of like "Logan's Run Lola Run". (That last sentence is pretty funny if you catch both references .) You know, it's kind of funny how that face looks like it's being done over RealMedia and a crappy connection, badly synched sound and all. I guess Macintosh was ahead of its time.

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Quote of the Moment

"There is no one quite so righteous as a former sinner who finds salvation and no one quite as enthusiastic as a former choirboy who discovers sin."

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Link of the Moment
Wow, not for the squeamish, it's Daily Radar's 20 Gnarliest Torture Devices of All Time. Man's inhumanity to man makes can make a really amazing spectacle sometimes. (And then there's Monopoly.)