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This morning I took part in a "Bike Bus" in Cambridge, folks from School of Honk played music for the weekly neighborhood bike troop of a local elementary school...

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I was surprised to see this photo of Lana Del Ray at the Met Gala because I thought she was dead.

Turns out I thought it was Amy Winehouse who sang "Video Games"

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The Ringer: The Greatest Diss Tracks of All Time, Ranked

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My sweet tooth is driving me nuts.
Reminded me I really missed Extra "Dessert Delights" gum, especially the mint chocolate flavor.

I'm not the only one... here's a petition to bring them back

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To invading germs, you are a jungle full of hungry tigers. To your gut bacteria, you are a warm orchard of perpetual bounty. To your eyelash mites, you are a walking fortress and a mountaintop pasture. How many generations have you hosted? What do they name the wilderness of you?

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via

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Death is a tragedy until you realize lack of Death is also a tragedy.

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Who doesn't love a copy machine?

"Ok, we just got our second shot, Sarah how you feeling?"
"Freakin' GREAT"
"I feel mixed, but then it occurs to me that I almost always feel mixed."

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.

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Dean.

Shot in "Portrait Mode", added "Dramatic Cool" filter, then on my laptop I got rid of my thumb behind his head first with a clone tool to replace the thumb with reading material, and then by making a grayscale layer copy behind and erasing bits of the front color layer. I wish I had better Photoshop mojo but I think this came out ok.

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Work in progress... Melissa was mildly impressed by my ability to freestyle cut block letters

If tacos can fall apart and still be delicious and worthy of love, so can you.

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When he is falling into a bottomless pit to his death, Mario says "waah" - whereas Waluigi says that constantly. Waluigi is constantly, painfully aware of his own mortality and he deploys that awareness as both lament, cry of defiance, and justification for his actions.

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Part of Trumps diabolical talent in marketing is coming up with catchy nicknames for his adversaries- I feel his history in reality tv and the recent tax-record revelation of his unparalleled financial losses is an opportunity... "Biggest Loser" Trump has a nice ring to it. (Or maybe "billion dollar baby"? eh, not negative enough)

CAESAR: Render unto Caesar, that which is Caesar's. Unless Caesar was lending it to you, in which case just render it back later. And if Caesar gave it to you, then it is yours, and not Caesar's, in which case there is no need to render it. Those things which were not Caesar's in the first place do not need to be rendered unto Caesar, but instead should be rendered unto those whose they are. Except in the sorts of conditions Caesar just described.

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TFW you realize there's, like, less than one month before that "serious spring cleaning, for reals" will no longer be spring... (I go with meteorological seasons, which are much more tuned to the human condition and school year than the astronomical ones...) So, people don't like "passive-aggressive" behavior, though I think it's often preferable to "active-aggressive". Also, what about the "aggressive-passive" activities? Like, furiously hammering water? My second favorite time-playing video of all time:

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Sometimes love is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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Blender of Love via Daring Fireball, using neural networks to better scale up images:
http://engineering.flipboard.com/2015/05/scaling-convnets/
What's interesting to me is what the failure modes / "artifacts" will look like - it seems like they'd have the potential to be weird, and almost "conceptual" - like the "sun tanning beds" example; the zoom on what seem to be dots on a pillow, it almost feels like the algorithm didn't reproduce the actual dots, it generated an image of a smaller number of similar dots. To me that seems reminiscent of how our minds tend to encode things via summaries, and then construct more detailed "recreations" on demand. (Which I think is how dreams can be so vivid and real-feeling, yet generated from bits and pieces of neural sparks.)

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Oh, I hadn't realize they were using Neural Nets to play Atari games:

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To learn to talk only the necessary: it takes around two years to learn to speak but it takes a lifetime to learn to shut up.

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I'm hearing a lot of 'destination, destination, destination' here. I need to hear a lot more 'journey, journey, journey' out of you.

Like I mentioned, the other big adventure I had this weekend was meeting and holding my umm-niece, a new little girl I helped her mammas make.

Here very first photo-- I love the light in this one.


Getting to hold her...


After a while she seemed a bit skeptical of all these photos...


This was one of the 5 days (2011.07.07, 2013.03.16, 2013.05.04, 2013.05.08, 2013.05.13) I missed, as of this site's 5000th entry on Sep 8 2014... Synchronicity: I hadn't worn this shirt for months, randomly pick it to wear today. RIP Maurice Sendak...
See also this nice, newly unlocked piece about Art Spiegelman's visit with him from the New Yorker in 1993. Also I just found out about his time on the Colbert report... funny stuff!

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There are ALWAYS easy answers. It's just that they're wrong.

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You cannot kill time without injuring eternity.

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You can rationalize anything. It's good mental exercise. It allays guilt. Plus it clears your conscience. So yeah, rationalizing is good.

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http://funprogramming.org/ - Program for Fun. Maybe the Profit comes later, but it's ok if it doesn't.
--On Mother's Day a Mother/Daughter portrait, EBSO and EBB2.

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New Blender of Love is here

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There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

--from a Slate piece of a comic artist quitting the Internet (tougher to find reference art!) and the current break-neck pace of the publishing industry.

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Pretzel M&M's?!?
--I know it's a repeat, and I know the focus wasn't perfect, but I wanted to give a better sense of this zoom effect... and even this is 50% shrunk.

Here is the full image in its 8 Megapixel glory.

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Rushhour Construction on Route 9 Westbound - because one lane should be enough for anyone.

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A Java project with javadoc painted as "Documentation" and not just "reference" is hopeless. JAVADOC HAS NO PEDAGOGICAL STRUCTURE PEOPLE!

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Looking forward to the Star Trek film tonight, got some great press, but just to be a dork I am wearing a Chewbacca "Chewie" retro T.

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http://www.slate.com/id/2217905/ -minor movie spoiler, but a retrospective on when 'Trek had a really thoughtful study in the use of torture Continued from yesterday and Monday... So, like I mentioned, this Midwest Surplus Retailers catalog is written in an annoying "best beer buddy" style. Sometimes it's just ordinary retail, but something about this disclaimer at the end of their about page rubs me the wrong way.

I do my best to make sure the correct photo, price and copy are shown. But...sometimes I make a mistake. In the event of any such mistake, I reserve the right to charge the correct price, to ship the correct item, or to correct the mistake. However, you will be notified at the time you order and...I beg your pardon.

I find the first person voice really annoying in that last sentence because of how it relies on some kind of assumptive sense of chivalry...companies shouldn't be looking for that kind of first person politeness!

Oh, who knows. Maybe I'm just the wrong demographic, that this guy is to people who voted for George Bush what "J. Peterman" is for my latte-swilling crowd. And while their site is still kind of junky, its JPGs oddly compressed and its layout forever stuck in the mid-90s, it looks to have some decent prices. (though I've seen some PDAs etc in "electronics" that are complete ripoffs...)

Now, Hell, I'm half tempted to buy some hiking poles.

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Toy of the Moment
Roadkill Stuffed Animals. Flattened viscera was never so cute!

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you probably wouldn't believe how much money i just lost. oh well! at least I dig my iphone's "pinball" ring with vibrate on, physicality Ex-Coworker Humor of the Moment

Yeah, I think people are just getting stuper. Stupider.

Scott: Oh, lunchtime already?
Kirk: Gee, too bad they don't have any clocks or watches in Scott-land...err, oh wait, that doesn't quite work, does it?

Rob had a great story about his friend, ex-marine, who was in the Peace Corps in Africa...showing people how to dig wells and all that stuff. A neighboring tribe was known to raid the group he was working with, so he taught his folks how to lay an ambush and set traps and basically kill a bunch of 'em and send the rest running. Which wasn't such a bad thing, that other tribe totally had it coming, but you know, it was the Peace Corps, so he got kicked out.

--from the probably-forver-unpublished Rob Database I was keeping at my last company. Unfortunately most of it was either too context-sensitive or tasteless to really make sense here, but Rob was one hell of a funny guy. Animation of the Moment

--Multi Lock On. According to this page, the early text says, "If you cannot open the door, break it" and at the end "If you cannot open the door by pushing... try to pull it open." Animated GIFs really are the flipbooks of our time.

Exchange of the Moment

Do you think Death could possibly be a boat?"
"No, no, no... Death is 'not.' Death isn't. Take my meaning? Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You can't not be on a boat."
"I've frequently not been on boats."
"No, no... What you've been is not on boats.

Finally that got released on DVD, watched with FoSO and SOoFoSo..."I've frequently not been on boats" has been on my mind ever since.

2019 Update: In the comments for this entry Mr. Ibis mentions wanting a shirt with "I've frequently not been on boats", and Kay did just that, home printed white on a dark blue. I had mine for YEARS. Links of the Moment
This slashdot article, Emotional Bonding with Space Probes (about how the operators of Spirit and Opportunity might feel when the probes finally run out of juice) had some interesting links off of the main article, including The Grand List of Overused Science Fiction Clichés which is pretty amusing. Also, Moving Relationships is on how people tend to attribute automobiles with personalities, especially in terms of reliabilty and safety.

Come to think of it, I haven't been singing to my car (which I do for the good -- err -- "carma") enough lately.

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Milestone of the Moment
Signed the Purchase and Sale agreement for my house. No easy turning back now! I have to get cracking on an apartment, I think I'll need one by June 11, any suggestions?

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More Thoughts on Living Spaces
So I looked at some apartments today.

It's weird. One place in Arlington was really nice (except for some oddly femmy wallpaper choices) but it was a little farther from Alewife/Cambridge than I wanted. Another was much better placed, had mostly decent floors, but some ugly wood panelling and over all wasn't quite as nice. And for some reason, given my self-proclaimed ability to be comfortable in almost housing setup, I almost feel...bad, or guilty, or just weird, preferring the nicer interior to the better location.

Or...something. I dunno. One undercurrent of a factor is a place that will be attractive to, or at least not scare off, potential future romantic interests. And also I guess having less tolerance for college-looking housing might be some mark of gradually maturing and refining tastes.

Oy. I hate growing up. Riddle and Games and Link of the Moment
So BoingBoing.net recently posted a reference to an old Straight Dope column about the unanswered (at least in the book) Alice in Wonderland riddle,
"Why is a raven like a writing desk?"
(My favorite answer, though I didn't get 'til the answer came to me about 30 seconds after I had admitted defeat, is Aldous Huxley's "Because there is a B in both and an N in neither.") In the ensuing conversation, some pointed a reference to some interesting party games based on similar principles...including "Plenty Questions", credited to Ranjit, a bit to my happy surprise. The games were a column in a now defunct web column Word & Stuff; I think it might be worth reading through the archive.

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Icons of the Moment

--How To Care For Your Floppy Disks, from the Beagle Bros. Online Museum. Beagle Brothers were a very funky little software company, noted for their catalogs' retro stylings, alas mostly for Apple II (I was an Atari 800XL and C=64 guy).

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Essay of the Moment
Paul Graham continues to write beautiful essays of intense meaning to the modern geek. Slashdot just linked to the latest, Hackers and Painters, identifying the activity of the latter being most similar to that of the former, as opposed to engineering, mathematics, or architecture. Interesting comparing that to the book "Masters of Doom" I'm really into now, about the guys behind the true breakthrough games.

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Dialog of the Moment

Mr. Wensing:What do you want on the pizza?
Larry: Hmm... I want chicken if they have it.
Mr Wensing: Oh, okay, I'll go order it now.. I'll see if they have chicken, and if not I'll get the pepperoni.
Ross: So basically, you're going to get pepperoni, and then just tell Larry you asked and that they don't have chicken?
Mr. Wensing: There you go... now you're beginning to understand the key to marriage.

He clarified that Mr. Wensing is head of the math department at good old Euclid High School. Link of the Moment
Kind of like Am I Hot or Not meets WWWF Grudge Match, it's WhatsBetter.com, an attempt to bubblesort everything in the universe, by displaying images of things two at a time and having people pick which one is better. (Don't be flattered if you get a lot of "100% of people agree with you"...often you're the first or second person to have voted on that particular pairing.)

Judging by View All Items By Rank, we have scientifically determined that female models and Star Wars characters are some of the best stuff out there.

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Quote of the Moment

There is no 'I' in 'TEAM' -- unless I say it like Antonio Banderas in 'Zorro,' all manly and breathless. Then it sounds like 'TIM,' but then it gets me all hot, so that's still a problem.

Geek Link of the Moment
ZZZ online is a neat "latest inventions" website. I liked last week's, which featured a mode of transportation for certifiably insane people, like something out of a G.I.Joe cartoon. The entire archive might be worth clicking through, if you're bored, a gadget-geek, and/or obsessive-compulsive.

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Quotes of the Moment

"Of all the thirty-six alternatives, running away is best."

it looks like at one point it made the rounds. It reminds me of an old favorite quote:

"He who fights and runs away lives to fight another day...but that's not why I ran away."

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Geek Joke of the Moment

I have a quantum car. Every time I look at the speedometer I get lost...

I was really amused when I found out Volkswagen Quantum is a real car, so maybe somewhere out there there might be a "Quantum Mechanic".