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legit scary and wonderful horror dancing from India... In a Slack community I frequent someone posted a link on Exponential growth is messing with our minds - Kevin Drum, including an example of filling Lake Michigan with double the number of drops every day.

I wrote:
There's this chestnut:

In a pond, there is a growth of algae. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 23 days for the growth to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the algae to cover half of the lake?

and the surprising answer is "22 days" (the riddle phrasing does a good job of redirection)

But I think things like that are artificial thought experiments. Sort of like how square- and cube-laws means all creatures can't readily grown into much larger (and often seemingly evolutionary advantageous) sizes. I am not a biologist but I suspect algae patch growth is constrained by the linear 'surface area' of where the edge of the patch has non-covered water to grow into (In the Lake Michigan example, a 70 year lake filling project is actually half done on Tuesday and then done on Wednesday and that is clearly not a plausible volume of water to move in in a day)

We don't know what the constraints on tech growth are. I do know my phone in 2023 is much less different than my phone in 2013 then my 2013 was to 2003. Ditto my laptop and gaming system- but then again I remember frustrating years in the 90s where my PC would absolutely need a refresh every year or two in order to play recent games. And we might be well closer to that "90s PC" part of the curve for some of our AI techniques, and disruption will result.

Lately I've been thinking there's roughly similar shenanigans with a lot of thought experiments, specifically the trolley problem (and then that one where saying of course you'd jump into a pond to save a kid even if it ruined your nice shoes, but since we all haven't turned our personal finances into charity foundations we're hypocrites.) Like, the trolley problem says "if you take action, these people will die, if you don't take action this greater number of people will die" but I think it blows through one of the defining aspects of the real world - the certain uncertainty we face all the time. You so rarely face examples so crisply defined "1 person will die, 5 people will die". Instead it's like "if I wear a mask, I'm a certain amount less likely to catch COVID, and if enough people don't, this many hundred thousands of seniors will die, but some of them would have died anyway" etc etc etc

So many aspects of cultural norms that seem bizarre when you think about them too much (like human's intense tribalism) make sense when you realize they are examples of iterated behavior over time in a world that always carries a lot of unknowns.

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an ok joke but what a picture!

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Do ladies love stupid men or do they just love men who don't exhaust every opportunity to feel smart [...] "I used to think that melancholy was a vegetable" that's incredible, let's hang out more

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I hope seeing Trump naked was not for nothing.

The risk of Armageddon has risen dramatically. Stay bullish on
stocks over a 12-month horizon.

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Why do I care what's going on in the conflict between Ukraine and Russia. And I'm serious. Like why do I care? And why shouldn't I root for Russia? Which I am.

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On his canonical birthday, a nice piece on the many personas of Captain Kirk.

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What if "data" were also a verb? I data you; you data me. They data us; we data them.

In case that seems too outlandish, consider two synonymic neighbors of "data": "record" and "measure." Both of these words exist as nouns (I made a record), as verbs (We measured the temperature of the room), and indeed as verbal nouns (They found a list of measurements and recordings). The verbal forms of "record" and "measurement" make communication about the act of making records or taking measurements much easier. If we made "data" a verb, rather than having to say the National Security Agency was collecting data on our every interaction, movement, and metabolic function, we could simply say "They data us."

Data is not inert, yet its perceived passivity is one of its most dangerous properties. This is why when citizens are warned that a government or corporation is collecting data about them, so many are underwhelmed. The act of collection seems so harmless, so indifferent, so objective. But of course data is not collected and then left alone: it is used as a substrate for decision-making and as an instrument for differentiation, discrimination, and damage. The systems of data collection and use are humming with the capacity for bias, influence, action, and violence.

I'm less privacy concerned than many; for a while I thought it was a weird form of "not minding attention" but also, I'm fortunate in being on the "good" side of a lot of the lines that data collection draws. (My music/activism not withstanding.) Days slipping by. In 2020 before these days, I was finding a pleasant groove at work - focusing well, sticking to my grind. Workdays seemed a bit longer than they had before, in a healthy way. Now I still make progress but it's tougher. Interruptions take a larger toll.

I feel like I have so much less free time, even with all my band stuff set aside and my commute evaporated. When a day of coding has been a struggle, there's a temptation to just keep at it into the evening, further smudging the already wispy boundaries between professional time and personal time and space.

Yesterday, Saturday, I was honestly astonished how it go to be 2pm so quickly.

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Self-exile Day 11. Evening. Words begin playing visual tricks - there is no way that FEBRUARY and SCHOOL are spelled like that!

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Oh and RIP Kenny Rogers. If this wasn't such a stupid time you'd be getting a lot more attention. I can almost see the memes from an alternate timeline... To quote kottke:

it was really illuminating to speak all of the different sounds while paying close attention to where in my mouth they were happening. Try it!

More importantly kottke provided a link to pink trombone - a software version of a very manual speech synthesizer. (A software version of this absolutely haunting hardware...
from The Exact Moment Dogs Realized They're Going To The Vet Apartmenter - first draft of a little tool I'm building to arrange the furniture in the place Melissa and I will be moving into. She's moving from a medium-sized space for one person and I'm moving from a large-sized space for two, so getting everything into a medium sized apartment is gonna be tough.

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As for the end of religion, I defer to you on this score. But where do you fall on the issue of whether only human beings can have souls? To me, it seems chauvinistic. Can we really deny even the possibility that an animal might have a soul? And if we're denying some organisms souls, what's to keep us from denying the souls of some select human beings? All this picking and choosing who gets a soul seems to me the root of some of our greatest evils, so I'm not sure why we don't just give up and assume everyone and everything has a soul, unless it can be proven otherwise. That seems the safest approach.

High school is like a free trial on education and then once you've graduated they say, "Now if you wanna continue, pay $50,000."

On my devblog, I wrote about the cool moving elevator background in the movie "Her". I included the following GIF to show the idea, as well as a processing applet I made to play with the concept... (mouse over to change the up/down speed)

The best thing about the Earth is if you poke holes in it oil and gas come out.

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Limp Bizkit's "Take a Look Around" riffs off of the Mission Impossible theme but is stretched to be in 4/4 time, not 10/8 or whatever that 123 123 12 12 of the original is. Son, I am disappoint.
--via

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A plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. The Beatles did.

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geeks: just because your language *allows* you to do some syntacticly consise coolness doesn't mean you should. Readability trumps coolness.

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The past, the present, and the future walk into a bar. It was tense.

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eat some starbursts and all your problems will dissolve away into fruity goodness

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Forty-six percent of drivers aged 18 to 24 said they would choose Internet access over owning a car, according to the research firm Gartner.

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[Turing] suggested the Turing machine as a way to describe a mathematician. It's [modeling] the way a person solves a problem, not the way he recognizes his mother.

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Men go crazy in congregations. They only get better one by one.

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Walking around a city I'm suddenly struck by how much engineering humans can do! Seems like we should all be living in hovels and lean-tos.

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Customers don't make decisions with their neocortex, an organ that is too easy to bullshit. They decide within deeper, comforting recesses, and they rationalize when the culture demands.

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My boss just announced prizes for A. solving the most bugs and B. IDing the most bugs. He didn't specify it doesn't count if you "inadvertently" MADE the bug in the first place... I think I might be on to something.

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"YOUR CIRCUS IS BACK" does not seem like such a winning slogan for the "Big Apple Circus" when in Boston, eh?
Kjersten pointed me to a great set of photos from Boston.com's "Big Picture" who provided this explanation:

Last Monday (March 1st), people in India and other countries with large Hindu populations celebrated Holi, the Festival of Colors. A welcoming of Spring, Holi is celebrated as the triumph of good over evil. Hindu devotees and others enthusiastically drop their inhibitions, and chase each other in temples and through the streets, playfully splashing colorful paint, powder and water on each other. People also attend bonfires to commemorate the story of Prahlada, a Hindu figure and devout follower of Lord Vishnu who prevailed over his father and the demoness Holika with the power of his devotion.

It got me thinking about the UU church I go to - I went to the Sunday service for the first time in a long while, mostly because my Covenant Group had volunteered to do the snacks for the post-service coffee hour. The day before I had been explaining the church's "liberal" (mostly in the accepting and pluralist sense, but also the political) religious ideal to my friend Lena, and she asked about the symbols they used... well, I was able to take a photo of a banner with the whole smorgasbord...
Yow! Besides the traditional UU flaming chalice in the center, there's a Christian Cross, Jewish Star-of-David, Buddhist 8-spoked-wheel, Taoist Yin-Yang, Islamic Crescent, Shinto Torii Gate, and a few others, including a Wiccan pentagram. Aesthetically such inclusiveness is a bit of a mishmash I'm afraid, but still, it speaks to to the UU sense of respect for each other's journeys and the broad palette of human religious experience.

That's kind of the thing about the liberal religious tradition. The various flaovors of Fundamentalists can't all be right! But they're probably not all wrong, either. Like I quoted my fellow group member John a while back:

"You don't have to have a particular belief to go to the UU church.."
"Well what do you all believe in, then?"
"Well, we believe in going to church."

Anyway, I also like my church's Earth, Air, Fire, Water set of banners:

From a design standpoint those are pretty awesome. So the UU church can be pretty colorful, and I'm not even including one of the other design motifs, use of the rainbow (there's a set of tile plates on an outside wall, and some new quilt-looking wall hangings in the rec room) signifyin the gay-friendly "Welcoming Congregation" nature of the place.

Still, it would be cool if they had their own Holi celebration...

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I was explaining "Bcc" to a friend, and was struck by how funny it is that we call it "Carbon Copy" in the first place- typewriters ahoy!

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OMG THEY PASSED HEALTH CARE REFORM AND THE STOCK MARKET TOTALLY CRASHED THE NEXT DA- oh wait. Huh.

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The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination--but the combination is locked up in the safe.

Do you think winter is finally gone? Or is its returning hanging over us like the Sword of Damocles?

I'm doing my part by keeping a snow shovel in my car, trying to use Murphy's Law jujitsu to reduce the chance that I'll need a snowshovel in my car.

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I hate life without sunglasses, but I think sometimes in the morning it's good and energizing to walk around squinting in the sun. Is there any science behind that idea?

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It's a pity "comrade" sounds so USSR-ish and commie; on its own it has some nice implication, like "brother" but not so familial.

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For my birthday my mom got me a DVD of the Discovery Channel show "Time Warp"... good call! Never heard of it, but it is awesome, cool things slowed WAY way down.

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  AAAAAIIE! scary skimasks scary skimasks scary skimasks!!!
• ATI's classic show-off-your-videocard CGI percussion video. Heh, you know, now that full video is cheap and easy, no non-interactive video playback is going to be all that impressive to me.
• Designer Challenge: it's video of 9 chairs that can pack into a FedEx box. Most are just stools, and some are just wrecks, but a few are clever, and it's amusing to see the staff of CITY try to figure them out.

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Travelog of the Moment
So today was another day taken at a leisurely place, sight-seeing-wise, but with plenty of hiking. Josh and I headed out to Hakone, near the base of Fuji, and then went toa traditional Hot Spring. I finally got my "CharlieCard" pass via work. It's a delight just shoving my wallet at a sensor instead of carefully feeding in a ticket and waiting for it to reemerge.

(I'm hard pressed to remember how the old monthly passes were read, though... did you have to swipe them through some kind of strip reader?)

For what it's worth, I have an extra Link (T and Bus) pass good 'til the end of March if anyone wants it.

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Photos of the moment
So I've just noticed that it's pretty easy to see faces in the three sinks in the restroom at work...

Happy Sink!

Happy Sink!

Very very upset sink!

Of course the problem is once you notice something like this it's difficult to NOT see it. Too bad there's 3 instead of 2 sinks, you'd have nice "drama masks of comedy and tragedy" matched set.

Geek Quote of the Moment

Quantum Mechanics: The Dreams of Which Stuff is Made

(You have to know a bit about how weird and uncertain things get at the quantum level, relative to our mundane reality, to get the joke of it.)

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Dialog of the Moment

"I'm curious, is it strictly apathy, or do you really not have a goal in life?"
"I found that if you have a goal, that you might not reach it. But if you don't have one, then you are never disappointed. And I gotta tell ya... it feels phenomenal."
"Well I guess that makes sense, in a really sad way."

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Link of the Moment

--An absolutely lovely idea... artist Seyed Alavi has this aerial river view woven into an airport walkway's rug. I wonder if it can give you a sense of vertigo? (via boingboing)

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Tools Update of the Moment
In the endless excitement that is my tools page, I updated yesterday's new entry htmlescape so that it has an option to try and replicate whitespace in the input as HTML output, which is useful for preserving the structure of HTML sourcecode, assuming you don't want to just slap <pre> tags around it all.

Online Toy of the Moment
Surprisingly fun little A-life based game, Zombie 3 has you trying to stop an outbreak of Zombie-ism by the time-honored approach of "nuking from orbit". The city is represented in a very spare 1 pixel = 1 creature kind of way.

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News of the Moment
Slate rails against the "Activist Legislators" who are willing to overturn any constitutional principle to get the results they want...the same ones who kvetch about "activist judges".

These guys claim to love the Constituion, but apparently missed the part where just because they win an election they are imbibed with supernatural powers to make moral judgements.



So, Philly Classic 5 was a load of fun! Sold around 30 copies of JoustPong and got to talk to a lot of people about it...the reaction was very positive. Here I am with Howard Scott Warshaw, maker of the 2600 classics Yar's Revenge, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and even the infamous E.T....(he was there to sign copies of his previously unreleased game Saboteur)

So right now I'm all energized with ideas for projects...but I have a birthday party to get ready for and a house to sell first!

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Quote of the Moment

I don't believe in sweeping social change being manifested by one person, unless he has an atomic weapon.

I don't know the original context, but it reminds me of a quip I came up that I've been looking for a frame for, "____ -- the cure for incurable optimism". I think "nuclear terrorism" is about as good a substiute for ____ as any...

UPDATE: Aargh. To be taken with a grain of salt, perhaps, Al-Qaeda claims to have briefcase nukes. That combined with them calling for revenge on the USA for the Israeli killing of the Hamas leader is making me antsy. Sometimes I really wonder about what a steely-eyed, completely utilitarian analysis of the cost/benefit ratio of being so closely allied with Israel is. And I also wonder if, besides a sense of justice and attempt to make up for the awfulness of WW2, if wanting to set the stage for the events described in Revelation is behind our historical support for Israel as a standalone entity.

Though you know, some of my concern is focused on "damn, gotta sell the house before things go down"...including the markets.

The first hit on Google for "al qaeda" is a translation of the Al Qaeda Training Manual. Only glanced at it, but it's odd and creepy seeing the "inspirational" language such a thing uses.

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Lyrics of the Moment
...to the tune of Paul Simon's Cecilia

Ophelia!
You're breakin' my heart
You're makin' this dane
Melancholy--
Oh Ophelia!
It's makin' me sick
like poor old Yorrick
who I knew, who I knew

Makin' love
in the afternoon
it's my uncle
in my mom's bedroom
and Ophelia
has come undone
handing out flowers
to most everyone

Ophelia!
It's changin' my tune
All the slings + arrows
of outrageous fortune   
Ophelia
I'm worried a lot
about whether to be...
...or be not

I wrote that parody on a past crush's message board back in college. I still think that it's a little clever, and deserves better than to just be buried in my PalmPilot journal. Plus I needed some more post-Philly filler.

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Pop Culture of the Moment

Make no mistake, when the president says go-- look out, it's hammer time. It is hammer time.

...it's Hammer Time! U Can't Touch This! 2 Legit 2 Quit!
PLEASE HAMMER DON'T HURT 'EM!
Been looking at my guestbook...Osmium, as far as I know quote 677 is original to me, and it and its inspiration quote 676 were illustrated in this kisrael.com entry from early 2001. (I had made up the graphics long before that actually, and had been thinking about using them as a splash page for alienbill.com.)

Who is Bozo 13? Thanks for the vote of confidence, and yeah, I do look a lot like my mom.

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Quote of the Moment

History may not repeat itself, but it rhymes.

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News of the Moment

"Whole Body Gestalt Plastinate with Skin"

This art exhibit has been getting a lot of attention lately, probably because the British government is considering stopping it from showing there. A scientist artist has developed a method of perfectly preserving corpses, plastination, which actually has a number of scientific uses as well. The exhibit is mostly skinless people, some further cut open to reveal internal organs (including a chess player with his brain exposed.) The channel4 coverage had the most representative online gallery I've found. I think it is brilliant, both as an educational tool (showing us anatomy in a way textbook illustrations only hint at) and as an artistic piece (inviting people to ponder their own mortality and "meatness"). At work... theoretically in 7 minutes at 9am is the big company meeting. Good news doesn't happen at big company meetings at 9am. Good chance I'll get laid off.

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Link of the Moment
A talk with the author of The Phantom Tollbooth from Salon.Com. It's such a wonderful, intellectually playful book. Some of the images from the final climb up the mountain still live with me.