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Random parallel, about the challenges of various kinds of intersectionality.

My friend was talking a bit about a tension between the trans community, who have been fighting a tough fight for a long while, often saying yes, masculine/feminine is the split but you can't make the categorization based on a reductionist view of biology, vs the community of folks finding a non-binary identity working for them, who would like to underplay those endpoints, and who as of late seem to be having a greater amount of cultural acceptance. Many trans folks would feel part of their identity dismissed if they were just lumped into a "they/them" bucket.

(But as my friend Sarah pointed out in FB comments, this is only part of the story/intracommunity relationship... and I'm remiss for not reiterating my view that the main, overarching point is that people should be more trusted and empowered to recognize and claim their own identity instead of deferring to any outside authoritarian force of prescriptivism (especially when attached to a fifth grade health class level of human biology or a sunday school view of society in general))

For some reason I think of that when I see a post responded to with both semi-generic "yellow thumbs up" and flesh-tone-specific hands. Well-meaning folks in the former camp say it's a generic message carrier, same shade as the generic happy face from the 60s. Other folks say no, that yellow is "default caucasian", the same way the Simpsons are drawn a culturally white shade of yellow, and would prefer more specific representation.

(Facebook is probably wise to blue for an inconic thumbs up, and then the more widely accepted yellow-if-it's-a-circle-face for all the others except heart.)

I guess lean to the former camp preferring unity, but I hate being in parallel with folks who are like "come on! we are in a more or less raceblind society"

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I'm badly needing a new pair of jeans, I'm down to like one pair and one junk pair. Melissa encourages me to avoid bagginess of the butt (now that it's clear I've inherited the "Scheinfeldt No-Ass") but... I dunno. I'm not sure I dig the feel of the stretchier stuff that seems to be the trend, but also I don't want to feel constrained.

And I know dudes have it better than gals, clothing and judgemental society wise, but...what IS it with Levi's and putting Waist/Length sizes on the back tag? That is so weirdly invasive for anyone who wants to be taller or less wide. And the fact the numbers tend to be in the same range just invites weird comparison.

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Google Cat, Touch Paw Icon, Click Anywhere, You're Welcome.

The regular early morning yell of horror was the sound of Arthur Dent waking up and suddenly remembering where he was.

I made an exclaiming grunt while still in bed this morning, Melissa was worried from the other room, but told her I was just swearing at the morning.

Anyway I think of this line a lot.

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You know, a little spray whipped cream on some microwave oatmeal is kind of terrific.

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Cool internal scans of Nintendo handhelds from the GameBoy to the Switch.

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Bananas produce antimatter, releasing one positron--the antimatter equivalent of an electron--about every 75 minutes. This occurs because bananas contain a small amount of potassium-40, a naturally occurring isotope of potassium. As potassium-40 decays, it occasionally spits out a positron in the process.

I am sort of envisioning the Star Ship Enterprise, and like Scotty and some other crew members frantically shoveling in great heaps of unpeeled bananas (fresh from the replicator) like it was coal for a locomotive. Sam Harris podcast speaking with Iain McGilchrist on
on The Divided Brain: on how the two hemispheres interact and form us, and other tangents with implications for culture as a whole.

As always, I'm incredibly intrigued by the split mind topic. I feel as if a lot of different psychological models are about this divide: Freud's Ego/Id, the conscious vs the subconscious self, the "Elephant and the Rider" metaphor, the inner-child and..uh, the rest of us. McGilchrist adds another framing: the Master and his Emissary - the Right brain being the Master that sends the Emissary out to communicate with the world.

One question is, do all these models map well to a Left/Right hemisphere split? (And in that case, what about Society of Mind like models that introduce a kind of "subsystems rousing the rest of parliament" idea?).

Before getting into this, I'd note one small pragmatic breakthrough: mnemonically, I have a hard time remembering which stereotype was of the "Left Brain" and which of the right; but now I can remember Left = L = Language, Right = R = Real, as in "keeping it real"* (and as the Chapelle Show reminds us, keeping it real can go very wrong sometimes.)

Anyway.

"Master/Emissary" would seem to be closest to "Elephant/Rider" - but McGilchrist has a thesis that our society is poorer because we've been letting the left style of thinking side gain ascendency. The second half of his book (named after the "Master and his Emissary" model) is said to point to how various cultures - the Greeks, Renaissance Europe have thrived when they've achieved a better balance. And during the podcast he takes a tangential poke at wokeness, claiming it's a left-brain kind of thing, and lacking the warmth and fundamental humanness of more Right-brain-oriented approaches.

So, assuming there's something to this split - which is a lot to grant... well, here's my best explanation as to what's going on. The Left brain can be more clever, the Right brain can me more wise. The Right brain is the seat of muscle memory and where repeated experience becomes knowledge. But - if those experiences have a consistent bias (like it may well in a society that has a lot of racist power inequity soaking through it) then the Right brain will have a broken, foul, yet self-assured wisdom. The Left brain - the part dedicated to our social interface, explaining ourselves to others - also has the tools of language and rational thought. If to the "anti-PC" folks, the Left brain - which, by chance, happens to be the political left as well - sounds shrill or vengeful, some of that is because it's engaged in trying to overthrow this very self-satisfied knowledge of the Right brain that has inequity and injustice impressed deeply into it as "just the way things are".

So I go on about this topic in part because I think it's important to my development as a more mature person. I feel it would be useful if my smarty pants Left brain could have a more solid model of what's actually going on in there. Like, if I have a flare up of temper - is that Left brain or Right brain? Or when I find a part of myself looking for a moment of distraction where that part will then impel my body to go grab a tasty snack... which side is driving that? And which side resents it?

My thought is that it's my Right brain with those more negative qualities (which is why I'm wondering if I'll tackle McGilchrist with skepticism, since he is so in praise of the Right)- also I wonder if my youthful religiosity - where the Left brain felt that understanding and acting on God's will from His Objectively True point of view was CRITICAL to keeping me from burning in hell - led me to be too cerebral, turning the Left brain into a bit of a nanny, and that my Right brain is immature and stunted and rather childlike - or perhaps, in a long-term sullen adolescence.

* At first I thought, aha, Left = L = Logic. But, that doesn't preclude Right = R = Rationality. So Language/Realness is a better split.

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The other week, my dream self came up with the following pun:

They're what Uncles have: Knee-ces

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Some really nice wooden craftsmanship! Sometimes i wish my creation mojo wasn't all virtual! John Hopkins Coronavirus map tracker.

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David J Prokopetz wrote

Wonder bread guy is out; that guy on Twitter who has his own personal murder chamber where he builds elaborate murder machines out of plywood and kitchen knives and then just uses them to pop balloons is in.

When asked to explain:


of course hipster that I am I was doing that over a decade ago:

"...and that building she's asking about isn't really haunted?"
"Buildings aren't haunted - people are!"

"gonna make a dog training school and call it harvard so people who went to harvard always have to say 'no the one for people'"

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Dipped back into TVTropes for a bit - (found a "Headscratchers" section as a link to why a Sonic the Hedgehog game has "COPE" in big letters in the background) - anyway, there seems to be a new bit of jargon since I last browsed there - "Watsonian" (i.e. in-universe) vs "Doylist" (i.e. about the artists making the universe) explanations for stuff details that don't seem to make common sense.

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We need more songs, man. Fucking songs, not hooks.

--from Simpsons Scenes That Are Just Like Movies Bill the Splut mentioned the first half of Bob and Ray has also passed on - great low-key comedy. (Like he said, "By the time we figured out we were introverts, it was too late to do anything about it.") This bit Bill shared is great:

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Frinkiac is a great Simpsons' quote finder and meme maker:

That's one of my favorite quotes, just a reminder at how out of perspective problems are when they show up right in front of us.

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A kiss is just a kiss, but a sigh is a reflex that happens a several times an hour and helps preserve lung function.

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My sousaphone roots, Euclid High School Panther Marching Band!

The 1991 Homecoming Game, by the looks of it.

"Dad? ...There's no, like, real magic in the world, right?"
"What do you mean?"
"You know, like elves and stuff. People just made that up."
"Oh, I don't know. I mean, what makes you think that elves are any more magical than something like... like a whale? You know what I mean? What if I told you a story about how underneath the ocean, there was this giant sea mammal that used sonar and sang songs and it was so big that its heart was the size of a car and you could crawl through the arteries? I mean, you'd think that was pretty magical, right?"
"Yeah. But, like... right this second, there's, like, no elves in the world, right?"
"... ...No. Technically, no elves."

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Love Blender!

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I'm thinking it's time for a real bed. (One side effect of my big breakups seems to be that for a while I use some weird ass bed - an air mattress in 2003, and then this daybed for a few years now. In twin bed mode it's too small, pulled out it's too big for the space. One mattress is firm, the other is memory foam.)

Thinking about one of those Caster or Leesa mattresses. I went mattress shopping with Amber in 2012 or so, and really don't want to go through that crap again. I sort of really hate the pressure to know what kind of mattress I want.

Anyway, the daybed is probably up for grabs. It's gonna need some deconstruction to get out of there, but it's a pretty awesome conception for a daybed - slightly rustic looking, but with pillows would make a fine couch, and side by side it's a very decent sleeper, with room for mattresses etc under. This poster was so... what's the term, influential? Not quite, but had a big impact on me when I was a kid... it came with the computer game Elite, and shows the various spaceships in the game. It's an intriguing study in what forms you can make with (I think) strictly-convex simple polygon models

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I finally wrote my pseudo-magnum-opus on automated testing, and the skepticism I often have about it. I'd really appreciate any feedback by software folks, because I really need to grow in this area, or get skilled in getting others to agree with me. The link includes this great long passage by Joel Spolsky that I want to include here:

In fact what you'll see is that the hard-core geeks tend to give up on all kinds of useful measures of quality, and basically they get left with the only one they can prove mechanically, which is, does the program behave according to specification. And so we get a very narrow, geeky definition of quality: how closely does the program correspond to the spec. Does it produce the defined outputs given the defined inputs.

The problem, here, is very fundamental. In order to mechanically prove that a program corresponds to some spec, the spec itself needs to be extremely detailed. In fact the spec has to define everything about the program, otherwise, nothing can be proven automatically and mechanically. Now, if the spec does define everything about how the program is going to behave, then, lo and behold, it contains all the information necessary to generate the program! And now certain geeks go off to a very dark place where they start thinking about automatically compiling specs into programs, and they start to think that they've just invented a way to program computers without programming.

Now, this is the software engineering equivalent of a perpetual motion machine. It's one of those things that crackpots keep trying to do, no matter how much you tell them it could never work. If the spec defines precisely what a program will do, with enough detail that it can be used to generate the program itself, this just begs the question: how do you write the spec? Such a complete spec is just as hard to write as the underlying computer program, because just as many details have to be answered by spec writer as the programmer. To use terminology from information theory: the spec needs just as many bits of Shannon entropy as the computer program itself would have. Each bit of entropy is a decision taken by the spec-writer or the programmer.

So, the bottom line is that if there really were a mechanical way to prove things about the correctness of a program, all you'd be able to prove is whether that program is identical to some other program that must contain the same amount of entropy as the first program, otherwise some of the behaviors are going to be undefined, and thus unproven. So now the spec writing is just as hard as writing a program, and all you've done is moved one problem from over here to over there, and accomplished nothing whatsoever.

This seems like a kind of brutal example, but nonetheless, this search for the holy grail of program quality is leading a lot of people to a lot of dead ends.

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There is an amusing (and by amusing I mean annoying) bug with iTunes smart playlists... if a song is only on a device because it had a certain rating and so appeared in specific smart playlists, it's difficult if then loses that rating... its ghost still shows up and automagically streams from the cloud, but anything that could carry the metadata is lost, so the thing stays on the list.

The Milk Of Human Kindness. The Grape-Nuts Of Human Cruelty. The Banana Of Human Sexuality.

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Life is an illusion, but when someone kicks you hard in the nuts, man!, is that one powerful illusion.

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Glad to see Bad Gods is still around:

(Making the rounds...)

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http://midis.atari2600land.com/ - tried to dig up this Atari 2600 MIDI music site with a remix/cover of JoustPong/FlapPing title music. More fun with jQuery! Click on the panels to make one swing around to the front.

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Breastfeeding in public is frowned upon, but I'm allowed to eat BBQ ribs in a family restaurant? It's a twisted world.

add

A very primitive braille2text translator. Unfortunately, it only does the most basic type of Braille, letter to letter translation (Grade One) As it turns out to do Braille properly, you need to translate hundreds of abbreviations and alternate characters. I was surprised I couldn't google someone doing this already... it's tricky, but you could probably get a good 90/10 solution in a day or two.

If there's any kind of interest I might try to enhance this so it can do a reasonable facisimile of Grade Two, but really I was kind of more interested in the UI of it.

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Amazing football last night! Meanwhile, in NE, Belichick decides he can run EVERY damn aspect of the team. Has he done anything on his own?

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http://harveyjames.livejournal.com/152287.html - Harveyjames' english lessons are the most amazing thing ever.

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Remember "Pillow Book" where the she yells at him for having sloppy boring handwriting? Weirdly that makes me regret my bad penmanship.

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Sigh. I suspected Microsoft was shoving yet another Update at my poor XP tablet when Firefox took minutes to load, and lo and behold...

--Saturday I joined in with EBB and her set of watercolors (much more manageable than fingerpaints, points out EBB's mama.) It's tough to put aside my doodle-centric style, or at least try to meld it with the idea of putting color on paper.

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A poem is no place for an idea.

(This might be why I like prose more than poetry.) Just Read: "The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loaca", Umberto Eco. Italian Book Antiquarian loses a tremendous chunk of his personal history after a coma, and looks over a lot of neat boyhood popculture stuff from pre-WW2 Italy (the novel has tons of interesting illustrations.) The book is great when it's about a guy coping with humor and intelligence with having forgotten so much about life that we take for granted, but eventually gets a bit bogged down. It was translated from the Italian by Geoffery Bock, including a lot of lyrics, in rhyme. Impressive, but almost makes me suspicious...

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Display Advertising of the Moment

--This great 80s relic is inside of a camera story right by my bus stop. I love the morbid undertone with "Because time goes by"... so get takin' pictures 'cause pretty soon you'll be FRICKIN' OLD! But mostly, I love how the slogan is highlighted by this: How better to note the passing of time than with an advertisement for an obsolete and discontinued type of film camera?

Just once I'd like to hear someone in a movie or TV show go "Aw nuts! She didn't give me her real number, this is one of those fake '555' numbers!"

(Or is '555' the "reality" of these shows, so the line would be "this can't be real, it doesn't even start with 555"...)

In Hartford there seems to be a cab company whose number is 666-6666. Of course, that's a bit of a relic, the area code is becoming more and more necessary, and sense of shared area code less important, in an age of cellphones.

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Quote of the Moment

"In the case of the first man to use an anecdote there is originality; in the case of the second, there is plagiarism; with the third, it is lack of originality; and with the fourth it is drawing from a common stock."
"Yes, and in the case of the fifth, it is research."

That's in the anecdote that caps "Bartlett's Book of Anecdotes", which has been my smallroom reading for months. I considered it deep synchronicity that, out of all alphabetical order, my old middle school injoke Nicholas Murray Butler made an appearance.

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Music of the Moment

--Beatbox Flute from a collection of Super Mario solos. I used to do something oddly similar on the tuba. I should post that some day... no video, alas, or rather, mercifully. (This guy is rather more clever than I was at mixing the melody around the beats.)

On that page, it's interesting to hear what melody they go into after that. I personally prefer the stage 2 "underground theme". (See this MIDI page, top right corner.) So everything is going pretty well for me in DC. Tonight I have dinner with my Aunt Ruth, her son Scott, and his wife Sandy... I haven't talked politics with them in a while, though I think they're pretty hardcore Red-Staters. Still, it's family and it's been too long since we've been together (pretty much not since my grandmother passed away 5 years ago.) Besides everything else, I think I really appreciate them as a kind of tangental link to my dad.

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Quote of the Moment

The brighter you are, the more you have to learn.

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Image of the Moment

--from The Cellar, One of the World's Hairiest Men

Philisophical Quotes of the Moment

"In physics, we can give a cold scientific definition of reality which is free from all sentimental mystification. But this is not quite fair play, because the word 'reality' is generally used with the intention of invoking sentiment. It is a grand word for a peroration. 'The right honourable speaker went on to declare that the concord and amity for which he had unceasingly striven had now become a reality (loud cheers).' The conception which is so troublesome to apprehend is not 'reality' but 'reality (loud cheers).'"

"What is the ultimate truth about ourselves? Various answers suggest themselves. We are a bit of stellar matter gone wrong. We are physical machinary--puppets that strut and laugh and die as the hand of time pulls the strings beneath. But there is one elementary inescapable answer. We are that which asks the question."

I'm reading this book "Quantum Questions: Mystical Writings of the World's Greatest Physicists" for my UU-church "Science and Spirituality" group, but despite some good stuff from greats like Einstein and Heisenberg, this is the first guy who really grabs me...most of the others get way too hung up on the old bugaboo of free will vs a semi-deterministic universe or physics and epistemology, the limits of what we can know. Game of the Moment
An exercise in misanthropy, can you make it through all four rounds of Throw Rocks At Boys?

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Interactive Quiz of the Moment
Can you spot the fake smiles? Go take the quiz, and then come back here and highlight (or hit Ctrl-A) to read the next bit:

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I was like 2 for 10 'til I thought to start looking at the eyes, then I was 9 for 10. Still, I wonder if it might be better in everyday life to take smiles at face value (so to speak).

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Article of the Moment
Great piece in Slate, Paradise Lite, on the Populist vision of Heaven. It's funny, lately I had been thinking about how non-biblical many of the things mainstream Christians, including myself back in the day, believe are.

The author missed two other representations of the "Heaven as Disneyland" view: it was beautifully parodied in Monty Python's "Meaning of Life" in the song and dance finale "Christmas in Heaven". More thoughtfully, Julian Barnes' A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters' final chapter shows how we aren't equipped to handle a heaven that's pretty much like life on Earth, but nicer, and forever...eventually, after you've devoured all history's literature, created your own, perfected your golf game so you get a hole-in-one each time, met all the historical figures you've ever wanted to...you're ready to end it. We are finite creatures, and while I wish I had more choice about by "3 score and ten years" lifespan, I found that idea as expressed in that book comforting.

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Literary Passage of the Moment

After the sixth day I woke up and it was bright. I knew I was back. I was no longer inside a loose sack but was now inhabiting a body like my own, from before; I was the same. I stood and was in a wide field of buttercups. I could smell their smell and walked through them, my eyes at the level of the yellow, a wide blur of a line of yellow. I was heavy-headed from the gorgeousness of the yellow all blurry. I loved breathing this way again, and seeing everything.

I should say that it's very much the same here as there. There are more hills, and more waterfalls, and things are cleaner. I like it. Each day I walk for a long time, and I don't have to walk back. I can walk and walk, and when I am tired I can sleep. When I wake up, I can keep walking and I never miss where I started and have no home.

I haven't seen anyone yet. I don't miss the cement like sandpaper on my feet, or the buildings with the sleeping men reaching. I sometimes miss the other dogs and the running.

The one big surprise is that as it turns out, God is the sun. It makes sense, if you think about it. Why we didn't see it sooner I cannot say. Every day the sun was right there burning, ours and other planets hovering around it, always apologizing, and we didn't think it was God. Why would there be a god and also a sun? Of course God is the sun. Simple, good.

Everyone in the life before was cranky, I think, because they just wanted to know.

I'd been meaning to write this vision of a dog's afterlife down for the longest time, and given today's themes it seems as good a time as any, better than most. Passage of the Moment

As the German biologist Bernd-Olaf Küppers puts it"...in the framework of algorithmic information theory, there is a strict mathematical proof for the assertion that we can never know whether we are in possession of the minimum formula by means of which all the phenomena of the real world can be predicted. The completeness of a scientific theory can in principle never be proved."

We can take pleasure in such concise, elegant expressions as Maxwell's formulae for electromagnetism. But we can never know whether we could express them even more concisely. Not until the day we do so.

Life will forever be open to us. We will never know that it cannot be expressed more beautifully.

The beauty in the world is growing.

He seems to be taking his time getting to his central points about the illusionary nature of consciousness, starting with Maxwell's Demon and moving into Complexity Theory.

Complexity Theory is great, and it's been too long since I've thought about it. See, total randomness is boring as is total order. Order is boring because it's too easy to describe, like molecules in a crystal. Since you can't describe truly random data in a more compact way, it contains a maximum amount of "information", but that still doesn't interest us. Complexity gets to the idea that what's interesting is how much work was done to get to the final result, and it's where all the interesting stuff in the world happens. It ties into evolution--an organism's genome is valuable because of all the stuff its ancestoral tree has experienced and how the DNA has been weeded out. (On the basis of DNA length, a Lilly would seem to be more complex than a human...)

To me, it also ties into the hacker's idea of "elegance", especially when he describes the work that complexity describes is spent in throwing the extra junk out...

Yeesh it feels good to be reading! I barely cracked a book in January.

In case anyone was wondering, today's title is a Beastie Boys' lyric. Not the laff-riot that we had yesterday for this update...

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Personal Rumors of the Moment
So I think my job might be in trouble. Despite the fact that my company made 97% of its projections last year (despite the WTC tragedy), and that the Boston office has a huge amount of knowledge about our legacy systems, rumor has it that the home office in the midwest has been looking for a justification to shut this (admittedly somewhat expensive) location down and may have sought out-placing "consultants" who will give them just that, leading to either a relocation to India (clearly suicidal, I think) or back to the midwest (just mostly suicidal).

Anyway, yesterday they opened up the large unfinished area where they keep a ton of old crap (ancient 17" monitors, some well-past-their-prime office chairs, giant old computer racks, etc) and let the employees take what they wanted. Remember in Empire Strikes Back, and the Millenium Falcon is stuck on the back of the star destroyer, and they manage to escape because they know dumping garbage is standard imperial procedure before going into hyperspace? That's what it reminded me of. (Another possible spin is that they've meaning to get that space renovated and subletted for a long while, and it could theoretically be only that. Still, I have my doubts.)

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Geek Quote of the Moment

"If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is."

via this page, which also has a quote I've enjoyed for a long time:

"Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random numbers is, of course, in a state of sin."

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Link of the Moment
Slate.com had an informative Flash piece, The Enron Blame Game. Very well done, though I wish there was a way to see a bunch of blame arrows at once. Went to Harvard Square last night to buy some Astro City compilations (great comic book about the mundane side of a world with superheroes) and after I stopped in at Tealuxe, a café offering nothing but, well, Tea. Huge rows of various teas are lined up in bins behind the counter. Last June, Habib taught me how to make

Morocan Mint Tea
In a smallish glass, put the leaves from about four stems of mint and pat them down ("garden fresh mint" said the package- it should smell fresh and the leaves should be rough.) Pour boiling water over the leaves. Stir in two teaspoons of sugar. Keep stirring to ensure the leaves don't scold. Let simmer to taste. Drink and enjoy.

I think the mint in question is Spearmint. Anyway, Bin 197 at Tealuxe is Moroccan Mint, and I think it's a fair approximation. It might be the sugar that does the trick.

Tealuxe smells great, much better than any coffeehouse. I'm not sure why, but it reminded me of the smell of this one old romantic interest's dormroom. Might've been my imagination.

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Links of the Moment
Scary funny made-up consumer goods: Unnovations
(via the Cruel Site of the Day)

Even scarier than that-- bizarre real things people are selling on E-bay at Disturbing Auctions. Both sites are really funny.
(via CamWorld)