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One of my favorite books is Douglas Hofstadter's"I Am a Strange Loop", which picks up some threads from his more famous "Gödel Escher Bach" but also reflects him coping with the death of his soulmate wife. Hofstadter is trying to see if his ability to have conversations with Carol (based on his earlier history of a proven, high-fidelity ability to predict just what she would say) could in a way BE her living on in his head and heart - in a philosophical (and not merely poetic) way, or if that was just a consoling bit of wishful thinking.

In talking about mind and consciousness, he constructs a playful physical metaphor of the "careenium" - a bouncing-magnetized-pinballs thought experiment of how we come to model the world in our own craniums - a model rich enough to include ourselves as a model doing the modeling, and so on and so on.

Googling to try to remember the term "Careenium", I found this page explaining the concept and comparing it to GPT. One challenge you run into if you collaborate with GPT is that's it's not doing a great job of modeling the problem at hand in its virtual head: its model of the world is fairly static, and a conversation with it (as impressive as it is! Especially if you've played with the previous fruits of AI over the past decades) is just a probabilistic word journey through that static space.

In some ways it's right there in the name: GPT means "Generative Pre-trained Transformer", and the problem is the "Pre" - and earlier "Transfomers" were notably worse at keeping track of what was just said in the dialog.

I guess the implication is if GPT had greatly increased abilities to update its own model on the fly, if that process was more organically bootstrapped and ongoing, it might be a better candidate for "true" Artificial General Intelligence and even consciousness...

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The inside of the Weiner Mobile

In Wordle today, I was a little annoyed when I had 3 guesses in a row for the one blank I was missing. I checked and it turns out there were 6 5-letter words that matched the pattern I knew, so "in revenge" I made a new page of wordle off-by-one-letter families.

like if you have _EARS or _ILLS you're hosed, each has 12 possible values (bears dears fears gears hears nears pears rears sears tears wears years and bills dills fills gills hills kills mills pills rills sills tills wills)

ODDLY ENOUGH, 40 Years Ago Today, exactly, word was published of me getting a "superspeller" award, some fundraiser for the American Lung Association. Which seems weird to me because spelling really has not felt like a strong suit for me for some time.

I've farted. I just thought I'd let you know. I was going to sit here silent and look at you. Then I thought, nah, I'll tell you about it.

This documentary cements it... I guess I like John but ultimately Ringo is my favorite Beatle.

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A brain doesn't store memories like files in a computer​--​it reconstructs them on demand with electricity and swirling chemicals. We call this process *remembering* but it's really *assembling*.

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Sometimes we're responsible for things not because they're our fault, but because we're the only ones who can change them.

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We can only ever understand anything by comparing it with something else that we think we already understand better.

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Moving a lot as a child helps you identify how old you were when things happened in your life as you can associate age ranges to specific houses.

Mama C has had some surgery so it seemed like a good time to make an mini-adventure day for Cora and Uncle Kirky...

With [...] enough [...] ellipses [...] you [...] can [...] make [...] a [...] true [...] quote [...] of [...] almost [...] anyone [...] saying [...] anything!

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A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any other invention with the possible exceptions of handguns and Tequila.

I like the UK Magazine "Retro Gamer", I pick it up from Micro Center every once in a while. Two games mentioned in the latest issue I looked at... Caving for BBC Micro is a variant on the old SF-Cave game - hard to get a feel for the physics from the video but I like the way it draws the bumblebee-like path.

And then I'm intrigued with a Sega half-court 3p-on-3 game I hadn't heard of, "Hard Dunk":

The angle isn't one I'd seen before for this kind of game, but the magazine says the gameplay is a bit crap...

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Lifehack: Pretend You're Good at It. It's like an effective placebo for real life!

Sort of like making the Dunning–Kruger effect work for you. Sadly for people who value realistic self-appraisal, underestimating your own limitations is a great strategy (see: our current president.)

(As David Brooks said, "'Know thyself,' the Greek sage advised. But of course this is nonsense. Truly happy people live by the maxim 'Overrate thyself.' [...] Each of these people is a god of self-esteem, dwelling on a private Olympus.")

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Our 71-year-old President with an approval rating well below 50% is throwing a parade for himself, but please tell me more about how millennials all want 'participation trophies'.

Snow / Work from Home day. Heating up a can of Progresso Light Vegetarian Vegetable soup. The name seems a little redundant. I know it's not, really, but its earnestness makes me feel guilty for eating it with beef jerky.

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from Slate's Exercise Advice for Flappers, in Gorgeous 1920s Prints
Time lapse of hundreds of sunsets

via

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Are we all gonna be climate refugees? Boston Eastern Savings Bank has an ad that has what I thought was a chaingang song in the background, something like "Work, work". Turns out it's a US Army running cadence "Hard Work". I kinda dig it.

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The true spirit of the Olympics, watching and judging physically glorious men and women, whilst covered in crisps on the sofa.

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Weeding out some old laptops. I think the one Windows machine I might keep around is this kind of awesome Thinkpad X41, a decent size screen with a builtin Wacom tablet. (I say decent size to differentiate it from my dinky and ancient netbook-ish tablet, the Fujitsu Lifebook P1510D)

One problem is at the moment I can't get it on the Apple Airport wifi. The equally old laptops have no problem; I think the problem might be the "ThinkVantage" crapware that tries to "help" "manage connection profiles". Man, that was such a stupid era of OEM Windows builds... Windows XP was pretty decent at making wifi connections on its own.

Sigh. This circa-2005 windows sysadmin hat barely fits.

Interesting to notice that this is the first time in my life I've fully switched to Mac. Probably a little overdue!

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Cleaning out old Windows. laptops. Lordy, forgot how dumb XP was w/ USB drives; let me scan whole thing to "Autoplay" that for you... and to safely stop the drive, I'll put this tiny icon on the task bar to let you "Safely Remove Hardware" after navigating 2 or 3 levels of menus, there.

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Frankly I feel all of Shia LaBeouf's antics are just a long game ruse to distract us from his hilarious name. #neverforget http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-astronauts-more-badass-than-any-action-movie-hero/ - man, astronauts are awesome. Too bad we don't have more of them.

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Oh, and Arlington is fine, power-wise.

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from something awful

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The Nor'Easter from Space

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Y'know, it's less the drama of the snow event that bugs me, and more learning to accept that we will be living with big honkin' piles of snow for so many months.

        He is brilliant, yes, but evil.   
So evil I despair of comprehending him.  
This man doesn't want to murder his 
father and possess his mother: he wants 
to murder God and possess the cosmos.  
He would tear the earth from its 
foundations and throw the oceans from 
their beds, pausing only to lick the salt 
from his fingers.  His strength is the 
strength that extends beyond sanity.
        I know not the origin of these 
desires.  As a child he would dream of 
shaping the hills by the clapping of his 
hands, the nodding of his head.  Entire 
nations would be his plaything, all of 
literature a decoration for his room.
        As he grew, so did his imaginings.  
He saw himself capturing souls in glass 
bottles, of folding the sky into quarters 
and using it to wipe the sweat from his 
forehead.  He planned to suck the 
atmosphere into his lungs in one breath, 
to still storms with a word.  He studied to 
distill a dream that could cause a 
nightmare to bolt from its sleep.  He 
searched to make the atoms cry out in 
pain.
        And now, what more is to be 
said?  His rage grow every day.  I knew 
him once, he recognizes me no longer.  I 
will gaze at him, and tremble.

--I wrote this in college. The first 5 lines (up to "cosmos") I found on Usenet, but turn out to be from the "Illuminatus!" trilogy, which I have just read for the first time.

The whole thing is not as good as the original passage, but hey.

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Definitely digging workflowy.com/ - its core is just hierarchical bullet lists w/ zoom-and-breadcrumbs but it nails focus vs "forget me not"s

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Ironically enough, "The Illuminatus! Trilogy" is the first Kindle book I run into with "Due to publisher restrictions, copy is not allowed for this title." when I go to copy and paste a sentence or two.

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"If there were more bloody noses, there'd be fewer wars."

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I Seem to Be a Verb.

--from If we don't, remember me., a rather brilliant tumblr full of these finely crafted, high-def, minimalist animated GIFs, each sculpted from a still or scene of some great cult classic film, and each accompanied by a well-chosen quote from the same film. (via my buddy johnksawers)

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The explanation for beer as treasure, woman-are-obstacle theme of beer ads? It's really aimed at 16 year old boys sneaking brewskis and dodging mom...

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Man. The new Gizmodo/Gaker(?) UI is so bad. It might make some kind of sense on an iPad, but for anything with a scroll bar, it stinks.

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You know, that great + kind of important Chrysler/Detroit Eminem ad had its legs chopped by that oh-so-meta-and-ironic iced tea puppet spot.

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Sea-Monkeys mail-clerk appreciate odor-free letters because they waste less time shooing the bees and process the mail faster.

-- annoying that the Sea-Monkeys ordering is still 60s-era...

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http://www.sea-monkey.com/pop_images/smfarm/smfarm.html - I really wish I knew why "the first story ever about the Sea-Monkeys Farm" book is called "The Reluctant Raccoon"- not sure if it's worth $18 to find out...

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4:20! Time to make a joke about marijuana.





--Like I posted yesterday, Harveyjames may be the best teach of English to Korean students ever. Man, that sounds like it would be a cool classroom. Plus, I admire how in the first panel there, he manages to draw a feminine Becky, mostly via a kind of girly swayback stance.

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Chamillionaire's "Ridin' Dirty" is sorta spoiled after the car crash by the guy who says "Damn! I done spilled my drink." Twice. In case you missed it. See, he was drinking!

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I love the Dell laptop power bricks with built-in notched strap. Less pretty but more functional/packable than Apple's.

--This Non Sequitur panel ("ask not what the buttah can do fah the lobstah, but what the LOBSTA can do fah the BUTTAH") stuck with me. It seems like a valid culinary point, besides the JFK reference (I find the JFK quote a little over-rated. FDR's "fear itself" quote seems a lot more useful to me.)

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Doing that guy thing of reading about WW2 military vehicles. Sounds like the Sherman tank was the TIE fighter of the conflict.

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http://www.speaker.gov/blog/?p=1683 - chart of job loss, the recessions of 90, '01, and now. Yikes.

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Concept (and title) of the moment: "all cats have asperger syndrome"

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I've "shazam"d 2 cool songs w/ chicken instrumentals: MIA's Bird Flu, Kraak+Smaak's Keep on Searching. Chickens: Not Just For "In The Mood"

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Visited the Mapparium today, a goofy little Boston treasures, a 3-story-tall glass globe of the world- crazy fun acoustics. Recommended

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http://tinyurl.com/cusswow - a half hour of every swear on the Sopranos in rapidfire succession. Hypnotic. Whew. I swear too much. Rockport Rocks! Rockport Rocks!

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Politics of the Moment

If America's Cold War presidents had adopted Bush's strategic post-9/11 strategic outlook, they would have attacked the Soviet Union at some point during the long standoff, on the grounds that Communism was the "root cause" of many problems. If Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill had thought the way Bush did while planning the strategy for World War II, they would not have formed an alliance with the Soviet Union in order to beat Nazi Germany, because Communism, especially Josef Stalin's version of it, was evil, too. They might even have declared war on both Russia and Germany--and, in their high moral dudgeon, suffered catastrophic defeat.

The great divide in thinking about American foreign policy these past few years is not so much between Realists and Neoconservatives; it's between realists (with a small r) and fantasists. The split lies not in what is desirable over the long run but in what is possible here and now. It is a debate about not so much what America should do as what it can do--bout the limits of American power in the post-Cold War world, about whether there are limits, about the way the world works.

So, a while back (yeesh, five years ago!) I made up some business cards to "help with my job search". (and there were a few more alternate ideas) Now, I never really used those cards much professionally... there's just not much of a call for them.

Tangent: Actually, I attended a mandatory job search seminar, and it strikes me that a fair chunk of the recommendations haven't really applied to my past searches. Details like the "thank-you note" and things of that sort, though the way they hammer home "networking" is certainly appropriate. I guess either some of that doesn't apply as much to techie jobs (or any professional career that has its own headhunters?) or in some ways, jobs are considered more disposable than they used to be. There's a fine line between "seeming eager about this job" to "appears stark raving desperate".

Anyway, while I've never had much call for personal business cards (I'm often hard-pressed to get rid of the company ones, even when I was doing business travel) there have been a few times where I started talking about this site in some social gathering, and the person seemed reasonably interested (or was polite enough to fake it) and I thought it would be useful to spell out the URL as an invitation for them to check it out later. (Especially since a lot of folk have trouble spelling the name.) So I came up with something like:



The design was influenced by the trouble I remember having getting the sheets to line up in the printer, I shied away from the edges, and/or made the design repetitive so overlap wouldn't matter. I'm still not 100% satisfied with the placement, but I guess the bigger question is this as nifty a concept as I think it is, or is it just irredeemably dorktastic? I'm also open to feedback on the layout.

One nice thing vs. the old designs is that it only has semi-permanent info about me, without city or techie skills I'm trying to emphasize. Also, I feel more comfortable about doing this with my own domain, as opposed to some livejournal URL.

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Link of the Moment
My PDA situation is in a state of flux. One ToDo I had on an old device was to google up "Hathor / Ra Blood Story"... I guess it must be this tale about how Hathor, Goddess of Love, got her start as the wrathful Hathor-Sekhmet, Goddess of Destruction, by the power of a field full of beer: (beer red-tinted to look like blood, go figure.)

Then she laughed with joy, and her laughter was like the roar of a lioness hungry for the kill. Thinking that it was indeed blood, she stooped and drank. Again and yet again she drank, laughing with delight; and the strength of the beer mounted to her brain, so that she could no longer slay.

At last she came reeling back to where Ra was waiting; that day she had not killed even a single man.

Then Ra said: "You come in peace, sweet one." And her name was changed to Hathor, and her nature was changed also to the sweetness of love and the strength of desire.

That's a cool story.

Washington DC Fun Fact: Iced Coffee just isn't that popular around here. The Krispy Kreme has it, but they don't have it much in their morning workflow, by the looks of it.

I wonder...is it a regional thing? If so, is it more unusual that New England likes it, or that this area doesn't?

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Quote of the Moment

"You can only drink 30 or 40 glasses of beer a day, no matter how rich you are."

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Image of the Moment

--via the Cellar, Iraqi Firefighters fighting a pipeline fire

So I was standing in line in Dunkin Donuts and I noticed a reasonably attractive woman in a jogging suit standing in front me. "She's cute," I thought, "too bad about the birthmark on her head." I glance out the window and see a guy, and he also has a birthmark, but much bigger. Finally the woman's companion shows up, and I wonder if he's related to her, because same birthmark as her, both much smaller than the guy's outside.

Duhhr. Anyway, Happy Ash Wednesday, all you Catholics out there.

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Comic of the Moment
So last October Miller ran the fourth grunthunt, a team-based afternoon of puzzles, mindbenders, and randomness. I joined Sawer's team, the Majestic Golden Blowjobs of Heaven. We came in third out of three, but it was close. One bonus challenge was to do the following task involving two stuffed turtles (Cozy and Drowsy) the gamekeepers brought:

construct a 2-minute puppet show or a mini-comic starring two turtles (cozy and drowsy) incorporating 3 of the following: (mouseover for captions)

• "excuse me, you don't have any legs. 'k, bye!"
• a musical interlude (if performed) or a daring rescue (if drawn)
• an awkward moment
• looking for halloween costumes
• martha stewart

I chose 2, 3, and 5 for my comic, STACKIN' TURTLE ACTION COMICS!



Sports of the Moment
Yesterday was the NFL Pro Bowl, which I happened to catch the last half or so of. It turned into a wild game, the final score looked more like a college basketball result, 55-52. (If anyone cares: The NFC was down by 18 at one point, but the AFC kept fumbling and throwing the ball to the other team, so the NFC won it by 3.)

Anyway, now that the football season is over, someone on mefi dug up this old Salon piece In Defense of Football. It pretty much sums up why I like the sport, though I'm sure that has as much to do with me sitting though so many games in high school in college as part of the marching band.

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More Football and Nostalgia of the Moment
I've heard more about the Arena Football League lately, mostly because they have a new team, the Philadelphia Soul, owned by Jon Bon Jovi, who in turns is buddy-buddy with Patriots coach Bill Belichick. I guess they've been around for almost 15 years, unlike the short-lived XFL. I dug up a list of their current teams with logos as well as the historical list (guess the teams don't always have long shelf life.)

Team names for obscure leagues has always interested me, I used to create fictional teams for a "CyberWar League" when I was a kid (including associated cities and ideas for theme-based rivalries.) I've always liked logo and presentation design. A few years ago I tried transcribing some of my old designs into Paintbrush, here were some of my favorites:
UPDATE: in today's comments LAN3 points out a similarity with my artwork and the old Atari game Cyberball, which was probably a strong inspiration...though I think I envisioned the "CyberWar League" as being teams of robotic gladiators (or sometimes just tanks) fighting it out. If you follow that link, you'll see a screenshot with some letter-based logos similar to my own...I'm not sure when I started trying my hand at it. This Cyberball Site is also a good site about the game.

Of course, making logos and/or backstories for fictional teams is about the geekiest thing I can think of, but I'm still tempted to make up a page collecting my old ideas...

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News of the Moment
How comfortable would you feel if you were on a flight and the pilot asked all Christians onboard to raise their hands? I'd be kind of worried he'd turn out to be a "Look out below, we're goin' to Jesus! Yeeeeehaw!" type. Or someone who really didn't like those infidels on his plane...

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Resource of the Moment
LAN3 was looking for a player for some obscure video format, and we googled up FILExt.com, a very deep reference for every file type you can think of. (See also: file-extensions.org but it doesn't seem as complete.)

I don't care what other geeks say, that file extensions are a lousy way to label filetype, that metadata deserves it's own little doohicky instead. In practice, I think it works out really well, and lets a file be one thing of content rather than one thing plus another metathing...very convenient for web stuff especially.

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Political Smudge of the Moment
You know, I don't like that Kerry's the front-runner. He reminds me too much of Dukakis, the whole Massachusetts politico vibe. I think all he really has going for him is the way his military service record stacks against Bush, and I think that stories gonna get played out well before the election.

Admittedly, I think he has more going for him in a national election than Dean, but I still think Clark (with his military authority) or Edwards (with his general friendliness, something which actually wins elections) would be a better bet. I guess a Kerry/Edwards ticket might be the best I can hope for. I've noticed that so far, "yesterday's" comment link seems to be about or more popular than today's link. That might indicate that my new layout isn't good, with the comment link at the top of the entry next to the title...perhaps people start looking for a link at the end of what they've just read, and the first thing that comes to eye is the comment link for the next day. Hrmmm.

I noticed one of the CNN channels has a big colored box with "Threat Level Orange" on it, 24/7. That can't be healthy.

I spent a big part of yesterday browsing the archives at therosser.com, the blog of the little brother of a girl I went with in high school. I have this delusion that I was a huge influence on him, though considering he was in third grade at the time, he mostly remembers that I was huge (a lot taller than him (of course) as well as the rest of his family for the most part) with giant shoes. He's an interesting guy though, finishing up his Senior year at my high school alma mater. Anyways, in the finest blog tradition he's borrowed some quotes and links from me, and I'm now sure to return the favor, like today's Image of the Moment...

Image of the Moment

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Quote of the Moment

The only truth in the universe is that there are absolutely no truths, not even the one about there being none.

Muse
O trumpetman, unswallowed song
your yellow-down bluesound dogface to confound,
sing sweet what you knew aloud,
          sing your very funeral shroud-
                    the death of you, you know?
          Known to now.
Sing.

O saxman written on your reed
history shades of black and awhile,
purr the pregnant, poignant prose and call me home.
          purple-rich tone at home and roam
                    you're ash in the kingdom
          rubbed to sooth word-struck wounds
Soothe.

O drummerman solid boatsman mighty armed
steadfast slip over cymbal stream and
scythe in your hand, you can.
          back bone of a notion
                    spine of the time
          fertile ground for the sound.
Sail.

Breathe as the trumpetman breathes.
Blow as the saxman blows.
Beat as the drummerman beats.

--A poem I wrote in college, I should look up the season. I think the instructor (Peter Richards) thought it was about the best that I produced that semester, but to me it seems a bit contrived. The discrepancy between other people's idea of which poems of mine were best and my own is one of the reason I consider myself mostly a prose guy.

Incidentally, I found a stash of old papers and things I had saved, so there will probably a bit more of the selfindulgent navel-gazing on this site for a while. I'll try to keep it lively.

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Quote of the Moment

If you could understand it, it wouldn't be poetry.

Link of the Moment
I took all the good quotes from the final months of my KHftCEA journal and put them in my Random Quote Generator. Everything above 955 or so is new. I think it's worth clicking through.

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Joke of the Moment

It is ridiculous claiming that video games influence children. For instance, if Pac-man affected kids born in the eighties, we should by now have a bunch of teenagers who run around in darkened rooms and eat pills while listening to monotonous electronic music.

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Rant of the Moment
Watching "Stupid Behavior Caught on Tape". These shows are great mild lower brain entertainers. But one thing that I think is a bit of a fraud is that they feel free to modify the sounds for the individual clips. "Wacky" punchups, fine. Music, fine. But if you're not paying attention, you assume the sounds are real, but many are completely manufactured.. I'm not looking for journalistic excellence here, but this is borderline fraud. I could just hear some producer-- "Hey, we need to hear the car as it falls down the cliff.. otherwise the audience just won't feel it. Wouldn't that be funnier if the javelin line judge who gets hit with the javelin screams, kind of an 'aaaaargh', as we play it again and again? Let's draw in some electrical sparks, there aren't enough in there." Same with the "Dangerous Police Chases" series- ever notice it's always the same damn "voice in the helicopter"? But they play it like he's really there, reporting on the action as it's really happening.