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I've been doing "doodle of the day" as a way of saying Hi on my work chat...

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From military historian Bret Devereaux: Understanding the War in Ukraine. The invasion was planned months ago, Putin was never going to negotiate, NATO had limited options before the invasion.

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of all the realms we could have swam in, we got this one. there are realms where you can slice and eat fallen stars like apples, where you can steal pain with a kiss, or enter dreams through a blue door, but we got this one. this one, with its bread and its dirt, and its poems.

I enjoyed Janelle Shane's "You Look Like a Thing and I Love You" - about the limits and possibilities of how we're doing AI these days. Her AI Weirdness blog has lots of examples of fun projects she's tried, the book mentions transitioning an AI from making metal band names to ice cream flavors and she says

(There's only a miiinor awkward phase in between, when it's generating things like this:)

• Swirl of Hell
• Person Cream
• Nightham Toffee
• Feethberrardern's Death
• Necrostar with Chocolate Person
• Dirge of Fudge
• Beast Cream
• End All
• Death Cheese
• Blood Pecan
• Silence of Coconut
• The Butterfire
• Spider and Sorbeast
• Blackberry Burn

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Knowledge is never free, you pay attention.

Luckily, as humans, we join together and can get some of our knowledge wholesale! Like science, for example.

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This aligns with Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind" Moral Foundations theory- one part of which is saying there's been a left/right split along these lines going way back in history across different cultures.

There's no such thing as expertise. It just doesn't exist. The expert is full of shit.

I've been thinking about this, in the context of a quote I can't find about "guys so dumb that they think smart doesn't exist". Or about a Quora I can't find about what it's like going up against an elite fencer - that the match is over before you know it. Or (I think Nick Hornby - dang I am usually better at relocating passages than this) on playing against a retired pro football player in his amateur league, and when they saw the player on tv they derided his speed and kicking strength, but in that context of that league he was inhumanely fast with a cannon for a leg.

So, one the one hand, it would be stupid for me to be in denial about how much better elite professionals can be - but I don't have a knack for absorbing that lesson, because of my fixed mindset that intuits that people never change that much, or at least, not often. So everything just feels lucky, plus a bit of practice - but I know that's a distorted view.

Maybe Adams' view is more true for intellectual stuff? Like you can get muscle memory for physical tasks, but there's no real equivalent for the intellectual stuff, that the more complex a set of ideas gets the more of a house of cards it becomes, prone to collapse by some unforeseen, out-of-the-model force?

Stein quotes Libertarian billionaire Charles Koch:

If you believe, as for example Hillary does, that those in power are so much smarter and have better information than those of us in the great unwashed out here have--that we're either too evil or too stupid to run our own lives, and those in power are much better--you have what Hayek called the fatal conceit and William Easterly called the tyranny of experts.

The "so-called experts always get it wrong!" is the rallying cry of a certain type of populist. Joel Stein's point, though, is that there's the Meteorologist Fallacy™ you get stuck on the day they get it wrong, and don't notice how often they get it right:

Meteorologists are getting better at predictions, making the Meteorologist Fallacy™ even more ridiculous: three-day forecasts of high temperatures are now as accurate as one-day forecasts were in 2005, making a huge difference to people involved in aviation, commercial fishing, and last-minute three-day vacations.

And when I pause to look around me- most folks I know would be hard-pressed to make a decent cottage, never mind what it must take to build a skyscraper with toilets that can flush 40 floors up. Expertise clearly exists; the only question is, it what fields might it not apply, or where intellectual expertise starts to be used as a cover for more basic agendas.

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Oy, speaking of trying to take down the "so-called experts" - Flat-Earther Mad Mike Hughes died in a homemade rocket.

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Happy Mardi Gras!

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Lipsitch predicts that, within the coming year, some 40 to 70 percent of people around the world will be infected with the virus that causes COVID-19. But, he clarifies emphatically, this does not mean that all will have severe illnesses. "It's likely that many will have mild disease, or may be asymptomatic," he said. As with influenza, which is often life-threatening to people with chronic health conditions and of older age, most cases pass without medical care. (Overall, around 14 percent of people with influenza have no symptoms.)

A big part of the key is going to be resist panicking. Be brave, be ready, we will get through this if and whenever it comes around. It's going to spread so widely because it is not as deadly - not to be blase about who gets hit, but this isn't germ-pocalypse.

But jeez, neither government nor the free market has done well with vaccines - not enough concern from voters, not enough of a clear path to near term profit. SARS was a warning shot, and we blew it off. Gruber recommends this overview of what happened in NYC w/ Amazon HQ2. And while the deal might have been a net good for the city, the author is in suport of a bigger scale picture, with this as a blow against a kind of crony capitalism that emerges when businesses pit city against city. (Like they do for sports franchises.) It feels akin to unionization; that local politics need to be bolder in not being such suck ups, and that cities presenting a more unified front of "look, we'll be accomodating, but we're not going to suck up to you to an enormous degree" would be a huge improvement. (Ritholtz points to Apple and Google as companies that have done well for themselves moving into NYC w/o big ol' sweetheart deals.)

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where have all the music visualizers gone - ? I'd love one for my phone (when it's sitting perched on its wireless charger, at least)... I found one app that did ok at it, ProjectM Music Visualizer, but the UI was rough in terms of picking playlists and preview and now it seems pretty crashy... Visualizers were such a nice artform.

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facebook is doing to boomers what working in a mercury-vapored hat factory did to 19th-century laborers

hey teens you don't have to respect adults if they're shitty. it's insanely easy to get old now, it's not like back in the day when being forty meant you had survived The Long Winter or whatever the hell.

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funny to think about that in terms of moral foundations theory. When asked what's more important to teach kids, liberals tend to say kindness and conservatives tend to say respect.

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Some good analysis of Blank Panther, especially its villain (almost, anti-villain) Killmonger. if it wasn't for overthinking I'd hardly do any thinking at all

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Marched in the Pertinent Political Puppet Parade.

Did you know Boston has a puppet lending library? Oh sweet, One Second Everyday now does GIFs!

Man, 1.2 Mb... I guess GIF has never been a very efficient medium...

"There was so much time spent on finding anything to do but actually writing. One of my favorite examples of this is when we were all sitting on the couches in the writer's room looking at a photo album on the projection screen of us just sitting on the same couches the day before. Mike came back from editing and saw what we were doing and sighed and went into his office. It was quiet and then I think Alan said, "He doesn't even know this is our second time looking at this album.'"

Man, sounds like the writing process was kind of a microcosm of the show itself... I am going to miss it so much. Drowsing in bed, about 20 minutes before I had to get up, the phrase "the last days of my 30s" entered my head.

Welp, guess I won't be getting back to sleep.

I feel like I'm going to be more compelled to do that personal timeline software I've been thinking of; charting out where I've lived, who I've loved. There's been a lot of life here in these 4 decades, I don't have too many regrets, but I do wish I could visualize it better, memory can be -- not elusive, but uneven.

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http://www.slashfilm.com/the-tobolowsky-files-ep-29-the-classic/ A friend points out hearing Ned Ryerson the Insurance Salesman from Groundhogs Day talk about out Harold Ramis approach to directing that great film is a good way to mark his untimely passing. (I kind of didn't realize he was also Egon from Ghostbusters)

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"A pomegranate can be an HTTP resource, but you can't transmit a pomegranate over the Internet."

Pleased to be able to name drop the author of the book members of my new team were already deeply into.

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Slate on the new Gay Denialism. I think the really insidious thing is the truth that Hannon et al do sport, and how one twist of assumption changes the whole core of the their message. The assumption they make is "gay behavior is wrong". From there, a truth like "most people aren't 100% gay or straight" takes on a completely different meaning, because it's a slippery slope to thinking "so people can easily choose how gay to be and it's about the same choice for everyone".

I do feel that homophobia leads to less intimate same sex friendships, though, which is sad. And it has some roots in "gay as identity" thinking; people are homophobic, and if being gay is all-or-nothing, they will go out of their way to make sure they're on the "right" side of river.

Such a morass of truth and lie, good intentions and bad.

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http://annyas.com/screenshots/warner-bros-logo/ Warner Brothers Logos! Dig the design work.

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

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I don't have any solution but I certainly admire the problem.

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Stegosauruses: If those crazy things can have sex, well by god, so can you.

spartakiada - "a mass gymnastics display, which was held every five years at the Strahov Stadium in Prague, Czechoslovakia, when the country was under Communist rule." That is the coolest radically uncool thing I've ever seen.via 22words

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if you got synesthesia i taste bad for you son

Today on my own version of "Hey, Remember the 80s?" it's -- Kronoform watches! Man were these things awesome. They were Transformer-ish, but not offically Autobot or Decepticon or anything... they were just a cool way to bring a toy into school, since hey, you can have a watch, right? (Sigh. Kids these days. They'll barely know what a watch was, we've evolved from pocketwatches to wristwatches back to big pocketwatches that can also radio call anyone in the world and watch tv and play all your records and stuff. Not a bad trade-off, actually.

I think this is the one I had, "Scorpia" (according to this list of different types. I think it was so evocative for me because it seemed "real" in a sci-fi way; I mean, people-ish robots aren't watch-sized, but a robot scorpion totally would be -- and it wouldn't have to have a full AI, you could just give it the equivalent of a robot's brain and have it do some spy work or something... or maybe just frighten the bejeebers out of your teachers. One of the loveliest things about the web is how easy it is to research random trivia from our pasts. Lately (maybe because of someone making the reference to how it's always "spider-man" never "spider man" or "spiderman", or maybe because of rumors of a "gritty" reboot of the movie franchise - I don't think it needs to be gritty but I kind of wished they had avoided the Villain Potpourri in the last film) I was thinking about old Spider-Man covers.

It turns out Coverbrowser.com is an awfully good site for quickly browsing huge swaths of comic covers, though Sam Ruby's site was useful for pointing out which of the series were a bigger deal...

Anyway, I remember seeing a cutting from this used on, like, curtains or something at my cousin's house. I always thought it was funny to include such a scene of defeat, but I guess it's part of the whole Peter Parker thing.


This cover they used as a promo in other comics I was reading at the time (probably Transformers?)


Finally, this one was my screen wallpaper for sometime in the late 90s. It just seemed kind of cool...

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Heh, Handre's video game "fan art" http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=89035 vs. original box art for Atari ST's "Alien Syndrome" http://www.coverbrowser.com/covers/atari-st-games#i7

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One difference between iPhone and Android: does a PDA/game non-phone version of the latter (like the iPod touch) sound appealing to many? And like I said, Android is kinda fragmented, but iPhone is likely to offer me a clean upgrade path for a long, long time.

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Because the problem with object-oriented languages is they've got all this implicit environment that they carry with them. You wanted a banana but what you got was a gorilla holding the banana and the entire jungle.

If you have referentially transparent code, if you have pure functions-- all the date comes in its input arguments and everything goes out and leaves no state behind-- it's incredibly reusable.

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I heard about a computer science department where in the tutor's office they had a stuffed animal and the rule was you had to explain your problem to the stuffed animal before you could bother the tutor. "OK, Mr. Bear, here is the thing I'm working on and here's my approach--aha! There it is."

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http://unrelatedcaptions.com/ - strangely compelling

--From a brillaint collection of fake but eerily authentic looking movie novelization covers.

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Dentist this morning. Had a small cavity. Man, in an age before dentistry, tooth decay must have been a real object lesson in the corruption of this world.

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Seeing a snuggling couple at the bar, each with ash Wednesday foreheads... kind of creepy in its own way. Random webfun: if so inclined, and your browser has a Google search box with autocomplete, go through each letter of the alphabet and post the first thing that shows up. (Which isn't quite alphabetically "fair", I realized; the lists actually are alphabetical, but sorted with all the capitals coming before any lower case letters. Which I guess tends to bias the results for things that I've cut and paste to search on, since generally I'll skip pressing shift. (unless I'm WRITING IN ALL CAPS FOR NO APPARENT REASON.))

ASPI
BORDERS BOOK BACK BAY
Chris Hansen saying "why don't you have a seat over there"
Dasepo Girls
Eudaimon
F-18
Gary Weiss wikipedia
Harrison Bergeron
I hope you still feel small when you stand by the ocean,
James Bonfield
K B toys
la perla
MAP OF NORTHERN EUROPE
NOTHING TO SEE HERE, RESUME YOUR NORMAL DAILY ROUTINE
Obama's hopeful change speech
PGR4
Quake Wars
Requiem, the mysterious and much-debated final episode of Dungeons and Dragons -
Samosas
Talbol?
UMA
VDEL
WE DON'T DIE WE MULTIPLY
xbox 360 mercenaries
youtube seau
Zoroastrianism

So, post a comment if you feel like doing the same.

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Video of the Moment
Mike Huckabee on SNL -- There's something unsettling about the forced-smile populism of politicians on SNL. You know there are probably strict limits to the jokes being made, but still, it seems like a weird length to go to to prove your "just plain folks." Still, this bit made me laugh.

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Political Commentary of the Moment
And consider how modest the administration's standard of success has become. Can there be any doubt that they would go for a reduction to 100,000 troops—and claim victory—if they had any confidence at all that the gains they brag about would hold at that level of support? The proper comparison isn't to the situation a year ago. It's to the situation before we got there. Imagine that you had been told in 2003 that when George W. Bush finished his second term, dozens of American soldiers and hundreds of Iraqis would be dying violently every month; that a major American goal would be getting the Iraqi government to temper its "de-Baathification" campaign so that Saddam Hussein's former henchmen could start running things again (because they know how); and "only" 100,000 American troops would be needed to sustain this equilibrium. You might have several words to describe this situation, but success would not be one of them.
--Michael Kinsley, Defining Victory Downward: No, the surge is not a success.

I just finished Karen Armstrong's "A Short History of Myth". (I was supposed to read it for my UU Church's Science and Spirituality group, but then the Florida trip came up, so I read it in the airport and the first leg of the flight and wrote this.)

So her final chapter argues that the West is really hurting from its lack of mythology; that logos, thought/reason, has reigned surpreme for a long time, and while in many ways it has made life better for the people of those cultures, it hasn't been providing the ultimate answers that those people, neurotic and confused as we are, need.

She seems to especially criticize the attempts to reconcile rationality with myth, claiming that these were paths tried and found wanting in Judaism and Islam, but that Protestant Evangelicalism carries on the hopeless and painful struggle.

That certainly rings true with my interpretation of the tradition I grew up in. I've heard it said that if Christ has not literally risen from the dead, if other events are allegorical instead of literal, if the Bible has not received special divine protection in every verse, than the whole game is up. (Actually the Bible verse is "And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain" (1 Cor. 15:14))

That's a very brittle kind of spirituality to have, if you take the obvious literal reading of that line.

And then, even within Christianity, there are things I've been taught that only now do I realize aren't considered fundamental Christian tenants. Armstrong argues that the Orthodox, for example, haven't embraced the rationalist doctrine, are content with a great deal of Mystery, don't buy into the whole original sin idea, and maybe God would have come to us in the form of Jesus even if Adam hadn't sinned. (On the other hand, when confronted with someone looking to pick a rationalist fight, they'll mention this annual Easter candle lighting miracle that takes place in the Holy Land. Given that the person channeling the miracle is searched to not have any lighting implements before going off in secret but that self-lighting candles have been known for a long while, I'm a little skeptical.)



(remake of an old comic of mine)
So, I'm struggling to understand how people accept things that are mythically true, but not factual "reality". I guess it's harder to do in a highly connected world. Historically, you experience myth by soaking it in as your immersed in your culture... but when you start to notice that other peoples believe other things, your own beliefs might start seeming arbitrary. Maybe even evil! Decartes was driven to hunt for first principles when he noticed he couldn't know if his whole external experience was really the result of a demon trying to trick him. (And I know I started to stray from my Protestant heritage when I started realizing that if I had grown up in an Islamic tradition rather than as the son of Protestant ministers, I'd probably be just as fervent about a totally different belief.)

Armstrong thinks that we look to find our myths in cultural figures, like Elvis and Princess Di. And maybe retell our mythologies in great art, like Guernica and "The Wasteland".

Maybe the purest modernist mythology we can have is science fiction. By telling stories of the future, we can escape our paranoia that the stories aren't "really real", because they sit in the realm of Might Be rather than Was. (For the record, this is also the explanation I gave for preferring "space" Legos; cars in the present and castles in the past don't have little dots all over them... but the spaceships of the future might.) Of course, this is slightly more true for Star Trek than Star Wars, the latter just seperating itself by being "a long time ago in a glaxy far far away".

I dunno, just a thought. It certainly puts the hard core fan in a new light. Maybe the overweight fanboy in the full Klingon regalia, browsing memorabilia at the local convention is really a shaman for the modern age.

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Trying to channel pre-new-job nervous energy into straightening the apartment. The problem remains the same: pick a task, finish a task even when I the task takes me to a different room where other tasks start beckoning. Ideas of the Moment

Once you're alive, you become very hard to model."
"Once you've been educated, you become very easy to model

Via the book "Smartbomb": Will Wright made the Sims, one of the most popular computer models ever, and and professor John Hiles builds computer models of how dangerous people might react to events in the news.

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Sketch of the Moment

--Sketch by Ksenia, inspired by some guy on the subway. It's scanned from a folder for her artwork she was carrying around.

Quote of the Moment

There is no certainty; there is only adventure. Even stars explode.

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Advice of the Moment
Peter Langston presents Ten Tips from the Programming Pros back when he was a programmer for Lucasfilm's game group in the 1980s--they came up with some great games like Ballblazer and Rescue on Fractalus, and a lot of the advice is still useful today, and even for non-game programmers.

Link of the Moment
Oh for cute! 15 years ago Paul Middlewick 'discovered' this elephant in the London Tube Map (the "Real Underground" flash movie link on that page is pretty cool) and now people have spotted have more animals on the underground. My mom's coming into the home stretch of her 3-year stay in London, it'll be nice to have her back stateside, animals or no.

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Observation of the Moment
When a cat won't live houseplants alone, but ignores a piece of lettuce accidentally dropped on the floor...is it just being ornery?

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Music Video of the Moment
Sterogram's music video "Walkie Talkie Man" is making the rounds (but was unavailable before). As LAN3 says: "Here's a pretty inventive music video. A mix of stop-motion, live action, and knitting." Chutzpah of the Moment

"Two men who have sat on juries in notoriously litigation-friendly Jefferson County, MS, filed a lawsuit against the TV program 60 Minutes, claiming that they were defamed in a segment about Mississippi juries' generosity. Anthony Berry was on a jury that gave out $150 million in an asbestos case, and Johnny Anderson was on one that awarded $150 million in a diet drug case, and both say the 60 Minutes segment made the juries seem so extravagent that they must be getting kickbacks. The two men's lawsuit (filed in Jefferson County, of course) asks for more than $6 billion."

Now THAT is chutzpah.

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Image of the Moment

--Erich and Elfriede Roihl, August 16 1941. Elfriede recently passed away after a long struggle with alzheimers. Erich's unwavering love for her over the decades is really clear. This photo was taken on their wedding day...it was wartime in Germany, it's interesting to try to read the emotional undertones of the photo.

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Slashdot of the Moment
Heh, my alma mater Tufts got mentioned on Slashdot, some students were acting as spam relays for $20/month. Online Toy of the Moment
This is one of the coolest online clocks I've seen, though it's a bit too busy too use regularly. (humanclock is pretty cool as well.) (via Bill the Splut)

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Cartoon of the Moment
Sitting in the backlog since August...I've been a fan of Too Much Coffee Man for a long time. The site doesn't have my single favorite cartoon, which goes into the ritual and worship of the coffee pot, but the archive is pretty generous. He's at turns heroic and and playful. (But tying into the time piece theme is this cartoon, which has the strip's more typical sense of existential wackiness.) I've e-mailed back and forth with the artist Shannon Wheeler, back when the site was in a rougher state to talk about some broken links, nice guy. Go out and buy one of his books. Joke of the Moment

When I was younger I hated going to weddings...it seemed that all of my aunts and the grandmotherly types used to come up to me, poke me in the ribs, cackle, and tell me, "You're next."...They stopped that crap after I started doing the same thing to them at funerals.

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Quote of the Moment

"His code is 'write only'. It might work, but you have no chance of understanding or modifying it, you might as well burn it to CD."

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Club Quote of the Other Moment

"Yeesh, you can really see where they dyed those black jeans, under the blacklight."
"Well, yeah, but it kind of fits with the 80s theme, as long as it's not coffee or pee stains I think I'm doing ok."