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The death of Angela Chao - Mitch McConnell's billionaire sister-in-law drowned in a submerged Tesla when the doors wouldn't open - she had time enough to make a desperate but futile phone call. The irony is her sister was Transportation Secretary under Trump, helping deregulate car manufacture.

Combination of blame on touch screen UI, driver confusion, and doors you'd have to remove a speaker panel and pull a wire to manually open.

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Today I learned about "Chesterton's Fence" - "a simple rule of thumb that suggests that you should never destroy a fence, change a rule, or do away with a tradition until you understand why it's there in the first place. The principle assumes that fences have a purpose, were carefully planned, and cost time and money to erect."

Got into a mild debate about that with a friend who leans prescriptivist and looking to authoritative while I lean descriptivist. How I put the case there:

"Hadn't heard of Chesterton's Fence, but I like the coinage - I usually put it "everything that is, is that way for a reason". BUT - A. when a rule no longer fits a large group of people, you should go meta, and find out why the rule is failing so many, rather than presuming its reasonableness. B. Especially in a society that stresses the potential and responsibilities of the individual, you also need to ask "Cue bono"? There is always a decent chance that the rule one is asked to abide for is not for the benefit of oneself. (An a fuckton of rules that spiral into a "well that's just normal" Ouroboros of self-justification)"

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Boeing whistleblower found dead in US Looks like Putinism is spreading here.

via Modern Russia as a mafia setup. Mafia Gangs aren't good at complex production or even maintenance, which helps explain both some the ineptitude of the Army there, as well as how devastating sanctions there could be, since they do so little homegrown stuff.

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I pray body dysmorphia is real cause otherwise I look really really bad

Happy (?) Work From Home anniversary to me.

It's like being in the ocean when the waves are really rough and high. They knock you over and you find yourself on the floor of the ocean with your face in the sand. The sand is getting in your nose and your mouth and your eyes and the waves are holding you down. But then the wave recedes and you stand back up and you walk until the next wave comes in and knocks you down and the same thing keeps happening. And each time you just stand back up and after a while it seems to you that the waves are getting smaller and smaller.

It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.

Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate.

All disciplines have crucial testing thresholds, thresholds that ask us if we are serious or ask us if we want to turn back and do something else.

Every marriage is probably the meeting of two equally compelling stories, if they can be but told properly.

To find out our partners' desires, we must sustain a conversation with them that helps to bring those wants and desires to light. Sometimes we have to do this even when they are afraid of discovering them themselves. The deep, abiding fear is that we will stumble across the desire in them that wants a life different from the one we are capable of giving them.

The café in Edinburgh where J. K. Rowling wrote now has a small plaque on the wall outside to explain who sat there with such private, unsung courage. Most likely the place in which we sit and struggle to bring our work back to life will have nothing to commemorate it except a little window in our own memory that opens onto the small stage on which we appeared during difficult times.

Perhaps each of us should go back with actual plaques and place them in cafés, on walls or in office cubicles with little notes of private courage for the inspiration of others. "This is where I kept my faith alive during very dark days," "This is where I found the courage to leave my marriage," or "This is where I realized that I couldn't have everything I wanted and so felt the freedom to request what I needed." Such puzzling, intriguing and inspirational signs everywhere might bring us to an understanding of the constant enacted dramas occurring around us. How every chair and every corner holds a possibility for redemption. The plaques that said things such as "This is the table where I gave up on my ideals and took a very large bribe" would be equally instructive for the reader.

There is no path that goes all the way.

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Two podcast episodes on procrastination:
one was Alie Ward's Ologies: Volitional Psychology (PROCRASTINATION) with Dr. Joseph R. Ferrari - one repeated phrase was "everyone procrastinates, but not everyone is a procrastinator", that only 20% of adults are truly chronic procrastinators. I was surprised he didn't take more of a spectrum. He also claims that time management is a myth....(also can I say he has a delightful voice for a doctor, a bit like a toned down Dr. Marvin Monroe on the Simpsons - but I also appreciate that the Ologies podcast has written transcripts available.)

For the 80% of us, or whatever, Adam Grant's WorkLife had The real reason you procrastinate, including some talk with Margaret Atwood. This podcast said that the challenge is primarily emotional - that procrastination is very often veering from negative feelings of insecurity etc - but didn't veer away from some Time Management advice.

WorkLife also gave another word to the rational-aware/emotional-intuitive split I've been thinking so much on lately: "Should Self" vs "Want Self". I think in this model, the Should Self has logic and language, and so can outthink the Want Self... though clearly Want Self has its own tricks. (Grant introduces the concept with Atwood using two names for herself: Margaret who does the writing, and (based on her childhood name) Peggy who does everything else. Peggy lines up with the Should Self, roughly, but the metaphor doesn't seem to quite hold up IMO.

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I want to make an infomercial where it's not clear what the guys selling. Like hes demonstrating how powerful this vacuum is by sucking up a bowling ball but then he starts showing you how strong the bowling ball is by dropping it on some knives but then hes showing how the knives havent been damaged at all by using them to cut through some shoes and it goes on and on for two hours then just loops back to the start while a number flashes on screen the whole time and if you call it it just echoes whatever you say back to you.

Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural. A truly unnatural behaviour, one that goes against the laws of nature, simply cannot exist, so it would need no prohibition. No culture has ever bothered to forbid men to photosynthesise, women to run faster than the speed of light, or negatively charged electrons to be attracted to each other.

This also reminds me of Star Treks "Kiri-kin-tha's First Law of Metaphysics": "Nothing Unreal Exists".

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Christians and Muslims who could not agree on religious beliefs could nevertheless agree on a monetary belief, because whereas religion asks us to believe in something, money asks us to believe that other people believe in something.

I guess we can call this "moneytheism"

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There was an image in "Sapiens" that rather exaggerated the difference between Chinese Explorer Zheng He's flagship and what Columbus was sailing, but the difference was still impressive:

Harari uses this difference to argue that China not setting out an making a worldwide empire (unlike the European powers) is an issue of cultural temperament and not technological disadvantage.

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During World War Two, BBC News was broadcast to Nazi occupied Europe. Each news programme opened with a live broadcast of Big Ben tolling the hour – the magical sound of freedom. Ingenious German physicists found a way to determine the weather conditions in London based on tiny differences in the tone of the broadcast ding-dongs. This information offered invaluable help to the Luftwaffe. When the British Secret Service discovered this, they replaced the live broadcast with a set recording of the famous clock.

(Warning - high risk of sophomoric philosophy in the most literal (as in, concerning when I was a sophomore in high school) sense ahead)

The multiplicity of religions is a big part of what drove me from Evangelical Christianity - or as I put it then "The world has a billion devout Moslems. Here I am, sweet talkin' son of a preacher man, trying to be a good Christian, but if I had been the sweet talkin' son of an Imam, wouldn't I be trying just as hard to be a good Moslem?" (This was before Wikipedia so I wasn't even sure if Imams could have kids, but you get the idea.)

The way Christianity was presented to me as uniquely True - "No one comes to the Father but by Me" (John 14:16) - meant that it had some 'splainin' to do. God "letting" all those other religions happen just didn't make a lot of sense, and hits that "God is all knowing, God is all loving, God is all powerful, whence evil?" (Epicurus) conundrum pretty hard. (That "well, As the stars are above the sands, so our God's ways above ours" (Isiah 55:9) always felt like a cop-out!) Later, when I see ecumenical and cross-faith outreach, and hear politicians calling for unity among "people of All Faiths" (and leaving out Freethinkers and Skeptics) -- it was hard to parse that without being dismissive of their intellects and skeptical of their intentions.

That was the early days of my almost-OCDish need for me to only embrace that which is likely to be objectively verifiable as true, or to clearly demarcate my level of uncertainty about it, the "known unknown" factor. And so I shared Vonnegut's view "Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile" and I demanded an adherence to Objective Truth take priority over adherence to God, even.

And so years passed. I became aware that my faith, while not fundamentalist, had been pretty brittle, and maybe I'd lost something leaving it behind. I tried to find that in the UU, which in its liberal New England form seemed to offer the fellowship without demanding sacrificing skepticism, and maybe provide insight into those other religions, and the commonalities in the human experience they might all share. I've kind of drifted from them as well (save for a "Science and Spirituality" reading group I still attend) - but I think I have found much of the sense of community and purpose in activist Band music (heck, the School of Honk meets Sundays, takes to the streets with horns, and constantly invites people to join them - very Salvation Army like!)

So this morning's new thoughts: (ironically I was going to say "revelation", but only to the sense of my subconscious mind bringing some thought to my narrative self...)

Lately, I see more references to Jonathan Haidt's "Mortal Foundations" theory; that historically - maybe even biologically - there's a split, with liberals concerned much more strongly about the foundations "Care" "Fairness" and "Liberty", and conservatives concerned about those things, but adding in foundations of "Loyalty" "Authority" and "Sanctity" - which are values that many liberals also dig, but as means to other ends, and especially not as law-giving principles for their own sake.

(Maybe the single most telling question in the Left/Right 20 Questions Quiz is "Which lesson is more important to teach to children: Kindness or Respect?")

Pondering in the shower this morning, I just realized how Moral Foundations theory explains the promotion of Faith - it's just a clear signal that you're on the same page of all those conservative foundations: "Loyalty" to the group, accepting the "Authority" of the church and other systems in that tradition, and the whole "Sanctity" of not asking so many damn questions, kid. In some ways, the more outlandish the claim, the bigger the opportunity to signal adherence- the BUG (of extreme unlikelihood and contradiction of experience and sense data) is a FEATURE (of believing it anyway.)

If you read "The Righteous Mind" you do hear Haidt talking about his Jewish Liberal roots but sounding like he finds the extra-facets of the conservative set of foundations as worthwhile - maybe in some ways superior. Certainly they are time-tested and intuitively they would seem to build stronger and stable societies. I guess it comes back to the terms "conservative" and "progressive"; the 6 foundations might be good for stability, focusing on the 3 though gets you a society that's ready to make progress, and better live up to the idea of fairness for all.

You don't need to leave your room.
Remain sitting at your table and listen.
Don't even listen, simply wait.
Don't even wait. Be quite still and solitary.
The world will freely offer itself to you.
To be unmasked, it has no choice.
It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

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Blender of Love

MAKE YOUR OWN THERMOMETER!

Here's how to save money by making your own thermometer. It's easy and fun--and a good activity for when you're forced to stay in bed!

You will need:

• 16 quarts of fine-grained sand
• 1 gas jet
• 1 glassblower's mask and gloves
• 1 50-ton glazier's oven with a 400°F. capacity
• 2 pounds of untreated mercury
• 1 gallon of sealant
• 1 lithographic printing press
• 12 quarts of red ink
• 12 quarts of black ink
• 1 quart of orange juice

Heat the sand and treat it to form glass. Hold the glass over the gas jet and shape it to form a thermometer. Be sure to wear your mask and gloves. Bake the glass in the oven at 350°F until it is done. Insert the proper amount of mercury and seal tightly. Run the thermometer through the printing press and print the numbers and notches on the side. Drink the orange juice. You must be thirsty.

Total cost: $152,000

Use it in good health!

I had this book as a kid, and reordered it near the end of my recent bout of persistent cold. It's one of those things you don't think of for years, find again, and realize how many details have stuck with you...

Seems like these two were the power couple of kids reading from the 80s up until "Harry Potter" - he was the editor of "Bananas" magazine, and she was editorial director of "Dynamite", a magazine dear to my heart (especially when it had the flip-title Arcade issues) and then he was the author of the "Goosebumps" series...

Did one do as one intended? And were people glad one lived?

(No, I'm not going to become a Scientologist, I just saw this quote on Cracked's 16 Most Alarming Dating Site Profiles Possible and liked it.)

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this is what my iPhone thinks I sound like,( tapping left recommendation button, center button, middle button)

I love you so much fun and I have to be a good day to be a good time to get a new one

the fact I can see it as an excuse for the next few weeks of a sudden it was the best of the year and I don't think that I have a great way of the year

I'm at a time when you are so much for a long way in hell of an old lady at my job to do that in my room for a long way in hell

The dentist mandated night guard makes me dream of trying (and failing) to eat potato chips. Glamour!

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Almost 7 and enough light to see by; Daylight Savings is the time where I feel winter is beat.

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The DST downside: so easy to stay up late, but even easier to forget that the wake up time will make that a zero sum game. I'm banking that "Add a drop shadow" is the designer's equivalent of Portlandia's "Put a Bird on It!" Via via sean ragan's art i like page, which states:

These delightful illustrations are redrawn from Larry S. Todd's story The Warbots appearing in the now-anachronistic Body Armor: 2000 collection edited by Joe Haldeman and published by Ace Science Fiction in 1986. Note the resemblance between Todd's early walkers and the armored fighting suits of Kow Yokoyama's Maschinen Krieger universe.

That page has a few more, and slightly larger images, but as a kid I loved these first three the most (after the mechs get all nano-tech looking and blobby.)







There's a lot of other interesting stuff on ragan's site.

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http://mightygodking.com/index.php/2012/03/05/the-politics-of-star-wars/ - Star Wars' roots in Nixon and Vietnam. (And how Americans always think they're the good guys.)

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Your solemn ass from the cow counties, who don't know the Constitution from the Lord's Prayer [...]

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Blender of Love Digest
--how 1950 might cure traffic, accoring to 1925. via 22 words with a bigger version and more commentary.

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Maybe Charlie Sheen is just the Andy Kaufman of out time. Which says something about Sheen. And our time.

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The headline you won't be reading: "Millions saved in Japan by good engineering and government building codes". Buts it's the truth.

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With the earthquakes etc coworkers suggest that, given the Mayan 2012 thing, 2011 is the new "party like it's 1999".

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Looking at my iPhone txts to 90999: "Haiti" "YES" "flood" "yes" "REDCROSS" "YES". Hint: txt up, give $10.
--I always wanted this kind of look for the Honda Civic Hatchback I had in the 90s or my current Scion xA... that, or just mad hydraulics to go jump, jump down the street.

via Archmage's Friday Pix, always a nice weekly read.

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Might have 2 job offers to consider. Better than 0, but HATE big decisions, polling friends. Consoling myself with new found Coconut M&Ms.

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I like my women the way I like my coffee: detrimental to hippocampal neurogenesis, but conducive to short term memory and attentional control.

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JZ suggested going out and laptopping in a public cafe etc as an easier route to productivity than home-officeing... gotta try it.

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Snacks are of course incredibly important, nay, essential to the roleplaying experience. Being part of a balanced diet, it's essential to have representatives of all four basic food groups: sugar, salt, fat, and caffeine.

Interestingly, these are usually combined into the pairs (sugar, caffeine) - cola or other caffeinated fizzy drinks - and (salt, fat) - pizza, potato chips, other assorted snack foods. The pairing (sugar, fat), while perfectly valid - e.g. cakes, doughnuts, ice cream - is not seen anywhere near as much. And its counterpart (salt, caffeine) is just too bizarre to contemplate.

And then there's (sugar, salt) and (fat, caffeine), which we don't even want to think about.

Now I really want to think of a good salt-caffeine mix.

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http://stuffunemployedpeoplelike.com/ - thanks cmg. Lots of dead-on stuff. I got nothing to say about Spitzer right now, 'cept, damn, $4,300!?!

No, wait, one brilliant quote:

For its members, Emperors' Club isn't a whorehouse. It's a whorehome--

HAHA! From Slate's coverage So You Want To Open a Brothel.

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Map of the Moment

--Thomas Jefferson's plan for an America that never was, from Strange Maps a brilliant website Kate pointed out the other day.

Did you remember to push the clock forward last night?

NPR had this Tufts professor Michael Downing who, judging by the title of the book "Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time" isn't too crazy about the change. But his argument seemed to be based on the expected energy saving, which he thinks just aren't there.

I'm willing to grant him the energy issue, even (or especially) if that's Congress' stated justification for fiddling with the change. But I think it's silly not to admit that 90% of the feeling for DST is a personal preference thing. Do you like an hour of "extra" daylight after work, or are you more annoyed at the risk of having to get up while it's still dark? (Downing also seemed to indicate that it's a feelgood PR ploy not just on more light in the evening, but of Spring "starting" earlier.)

On NPR he mentioned some other factoids, like how New York City was one of the forces keeping DST alive as an idea past the war, even as the farmers hated it... that NYC retailers found their sales increased with the additional evening light.

I wonder if Downing would be OK with a permanent change to the equivalent of DST, if it's the biannual shift that bugs him, or he just wants more light in the morning.

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Image of the Moment

--Han Solo & Mr. Chewbacca from Eric Poulton's Steampunk Star Wars series. Only 4 images thus far (he just added the Death Star: Massive Solar-Orbiting Electro-Mechanical Analytic Engine, Mark 6) but some really fun ideas. (Wikipedia's Steampunk definition dwarfs my 2001 explanation...)

Geek Humor of the Moment

[On the programming language Perl:] "You promise people answers to all their questions, but you're not ready for a real relationship. You like to guess what people want, but tend to jump to conclusions. When other people would say 'what, really?', you've already gotten out a ball-peen hammer and a tub of beeswax."

The kind of weird part is for me that I hadn't heard of 6 of the 25 entries. Oh well. Kind of harkens back to the old Shoot Yourself in the Foot lists from way back when.

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Geek Product of the Moment
Top 10 Geek Watches...I really like the first one,the Fossil Frank Gehry Watch, which uses the same kind of rounding that people use when telling the time, or at least the way they used to before digital watches...

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Geek Quote of the Moment
"He gave her a look that you could have poured on a waffle."

...maybe not a sterling example of geek quote, but from a geek site. Exchange of the Moment

>> <POINT>
>> Microsoft has no excuse for not producing brilliant products. It has
>> enourmous resources at it's disposal, and anything less than secure,
>> reliable, pristine products is by design.
>> </POINT>
>
> <REBUTTAL>
> Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by
> stupidity.
> </REBUTTAL>

<SURREBUTTAL>
Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
</SURREBUTTAL>

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Passing of the Moment
It's the fifth anniverary of the peak of the NASDAQ, herald of that whole dot com thing. Damn, damn, DAMN but I miss those days. I had dinner with Rob Baum, a coworker of mine from Event Zero, my dot com adventure. (Relative to a lot of people, it was pretty mild, but still.)

Rob is such a funny guy. For some reason I find it really easy to start comic riffing with him.

Condolences to Spain, the terrorism they've suffered is awful. (Originally I wrote "unspeakably" awful...but I think we have to be unflinching in our willingness to talk about it and take appropriate action.) I wonder if if it will end up being the Basque seperatists or Al Qaeda... it probably doesn't mean anything, but it is kind of odd how the date is exactly 6 months, half a year, from 9/11. I suppose another disturbing tidbit is how the police were already on high alert, having caught those two guys with 1,000 lbs of explosive on February 29th, but this precisely orchestrated series of bomb attacks still happened.

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Geekery of the Moment
Sawers sent me an interesting hardware hack with a description that gets pretty deeply into the 6502 assembly code that was generated: Super Mario Clouds. He hacked a Super Mario Brothers cartridge to leave nuthin' but the clouds, which is kind of poetic. The artist, Cory Arcangel, has a homepage with some other stuff, including the amusing on several levels I Shot Andy Warhol.

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Game Review of the Moment

Jeff: Yea, truly this is the Game of all soccer games.
Tom: That's a bit like saying Home Depot's Midnight Blue is the best paint to watch dry.
Jeff: Your dislike of soccer, and soccer games, is noted.
Tom: I cite Jonathan Chait's New Republic piece from July 2002: Soccer is the sport of "shaggy athletic misfits." Chait reminded us that A) no non-soccer-playing country has ever lost a war to a soccer-playing country, and B) people have been saying soccer is the American sport of the future for going on 25 years. Face it, man: You love a slow, boring, pinko sport.

Very funny sarcastic reviews.

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Article of the Moment
Guardian on Don Norman, who wrote the book "The Design of Everyday Things" (formerly the Psychology of Everyday Things, ironically, it turns out that it wasn't a very good 'design' to title your book so it had a clever acronym like "POET"). He's getting into more of the emotional and aesthetic side of things, rather than the strictly utilitarian. I suppose my strict utilitarian aesthetic could use some work, though I still have a strong dislike for most "ornamentation for the sake of ornamentation." (Except for gargoyles.)

Of course, iPod is a tremendous example of how design and group identification can outweight some other concerns, like cost. AIM Chat of the Moment
Talking about Internet Porn Ads, raunch filter engaged, highlight text with your mouse to read, or hit Ctrl-A:
kirk: You know, maybe I'm jaded, but "girls who crave giant cock" catches my attention less than would a "girls who are hoping for a 4 to 6 inch dick...just like yours!"
ranjit: heh -- i never thought of that!
ranjit: on the other hand, how many people would pay to see "BARELY LEGAL GIRLS FUCK PASTY NEBBISHES?"
kirk: "horny sluts want it in their face...from self-effacing pseudo-literati guys who did ok on their SATs!"
ranjit: SEXY RUSSIAN LADIES COME TO USA SEEKING PORN ADDICTS!

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Ramble of the Moment
(This Ramble enhanced with selections from Presidents Day coloring pages from whitehouse.gov/kids.)
So, yesterday was the 3 year anniversary of the highpoint of the Nasdaq. By coincidence, in trying to use Google to spellcheck "Schadenfreude", which was the May 10 2000 Dictionary.com Word of the Day with this example of ussage:

If self-replicating e-commerce baby tycoons get on your nerves, it's schadenfreude time. It's true that the Nasdaq rebounded after its staggering loss Tuesday. Nonetheless, what AP described as "the most volatile day ever for U.S. stocks" left a distinctly bearish aftertaste.

Man, what an understatement. Another year of this crap, and I'll have been employed in bad times for as long as I was in good. Unless of course you believe this is the aftermath of a 20 year boom, or even of a 200 year one, in which case things have been good for so long who knows how bad they can get.

Chester Arthur

And what a time President Junior and company has provided for us. This whole UN Resolution thing is so funny, and it follows the pattern set with congress giving carte blanche to the administration last October, and then acting surprised that they're using that. We kind of tried to dupe the UN into signing that last resolution, arguing that it wouldn't neccesarily lead to war. Yeah, right; is it any surprise that they won't sign another one, given the fact that they don't think war is a good idea? It's as if we're prancing around saying "look--you wanted war! You wanted war! Look what you signed! Now let's really go for it."

Warren Harding

NPR had some commentary by Norman Schwarzkopf's personal briefing officer for Desert Storm that gave me pause...this might not be "another Vietnam", but something Somalia-esque is a posibility. If we're out to "get Saddam", then what incentive is there for him and his supporters not to go all out with the chemical and biological agents on our soldiers, or worse? To not fight to the bitter end in the streets of the cities? (That commentary also brought up the distraction factor making North Korea a bit bolder about selling nuclear material, or Al Qaeda more likely to mount a big strike.)

John Kennedy

Geez, I hate it when it gets to a point where I say "Man, I hope the hard core conservatives are right on this one", because, as some leftish leaning thinktank guy on the Daily Show pointed out, backing down from where we are now might, amazingly, be worse than getting on with it, and other countries think that. I have to confess my bellyaching on Afghanistan and some other military movements wasn't entirely justified...I mean, we've done a suck job of support after the fact, anad we didn't actually get Osama or anything, but it was a qualified success in some ways. Damn damn damn, I hope these guys know what they're doing.

Whatever happened to having a "humble foreign policy"? Oh right, 9/11 changes everything.
Six month anniversary of WTC. This morning I heard that "The Sphere", featured in my 1999.09.11 photo, was already recovered, and is going to be the centerpiece of a new memorial. Admittedly, I loved the fountain that was under it more than the sculpture itself, but it's great to know that the core is back. The artist is said to have mixed feelings about the new memorial.

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Oddness of the Moment
There's a "typo-squatter" domin, goggle.com (as opposed to the deservedly famous google.) I know of three people who made this typo on Saturday (Leslee, my mother-in-law Janis, and my Aunt Susan) and then had to figure out when their favorite search engine got so garish, and why it wasn't returning any useful results. None of us had heard of this site before. Ranjit came up with term paraSites for this type of shenanigans-puller, which is a great phrase that works in at least two different ways...

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Quote of the Moment

"Well, one day I was at the Institute of Advanced Study, and I went to Gödel's office, and there was Gödel. It was winter and Gödel had an electric heater and had his legs wrapped in a blanket. I said, 'Professor Gödel, what connection do you see between your incompleteness theorem and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle?' And Gödel got angry and threw me out of his office."

I guess the quote isn't that amusing outside of its context in this Slate.com article on Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which points out how often that principle is abused by the would-be literati. Wow. Not much to say these days. Probably too much time wasted playing videogames instead of wasted hanging around the web. (But, as always, time enjoy wasting is not wasted.)

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Quote of the Moment

Love was a terrible thing. You poisoned it and stabbed at it and knocked it down into the mud-- well down-- and it got up and staggered on, bleeding and muddy and awful. Like-- like Rasputin.

I've had romances like that.

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Ramble of the Moment
Yesterday I started counting "1 2 3 4 2 2 3 4 3 2 3 4 4 2 3 4". That's the pattern people use to use for counting measures of rest in band. (Tubas sometimes get a heckuva lot of rests.) I haven't counted in that pattern for a long time.