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Last night in Arlington phone cameras could pick up the Northern Lights even in this horribly light-polluted land

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Summons

Keep me from going to sleep too soon
Or if I go to sleep too soon
Come wake me up. Come any hour
Of night. Come whistling up the road.
Stomp on the porch. Bang on the door.
Make me get out of bed and come
And let you in and light a light.
Tell me the northern lights are on
And make me look. Or tell me clouds
Are doing something to the moon
They never did before, and show me.
See that I see. Talk to me till
I'm half as wide awake as you
And start to dress wondering why
I ever went to bed at all.
Tell me the walking is superb.
Not only tell me but persuade me.
You know I'm not too hard persuaded.

Daring Fireball reported on the farewell of the iPod Touch. I remember being blown away by how slender the first generation was - like Gruber says, it was hot on the heels of the first iPhone, but the thinness of the iPhone-minus-the-phone-part was a glimpse of the future of Apple form factors: in 2007 it was astonishing that a capable web browser could work on the thing.

Of course this closes the door on the iPod in general. I write about getting one in 2004 - ripping my supply of CDs into my own library actually kept me stuck with Apple ever since. (And I still don't quite get the appeal of streaming... owning music, but selecting it by the single song, is musical nirvana to me.)

But my favorite was the iPod Nano I bought in 2007:
It was such a perfect minimalist piece of hardware... just thick enough to fit a headphone jack, that terrifically satisfying scrollwheel, and a nice little screen to help with navigation.

Every once in a while I get the urge to try to be less online, go back to the less-connected time before the iPhone, maybe go back to the simplicity of a PalmPilot... But at the very least my pockets would be full of an iPod, a camera, a PDA, a regular cellphone... not to mention needing a GPS for my car...so just wishful thinking.

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Thinking about how the Bible's Numbers 5:11-31 provides instructions for abortion (albeit I case in case of suspected infidelity). And that Matthew 5:17-19, Luke 16:17, and John 7:19 refute the idea of NT stuff just putting aside the old law. (And there are other Bible versus supporting the idea of life showing up later via breath, and/or after being knit together in a womb, not this moment of fertilization or conception non-sense as a measure for personhood.)

Of course, I'm not gifted with faith myself and lean towards the agnostic, and I know we live in a culture that has many different religious traditions. If as a culture we can't tell folks they must sign up as organ donors, because bodily autonomy is that important, then we can't force a woman to accept a clump of cells as something worthy of taking over her body for the better part of a year. It is none of your business, you are not a hero by making this decision for them. Some reading I was doing touched on Pascal (of "Pascal's Wager" fame) - he was really an interesting character, hanging with both ascetics and libertines, and very thoughtful.

Glyn Hughes' Squashed Philosophers offers an interesting compression of his "Thoughts" ("Pensées")... I wanted to jot down some that really jumped out at me, and some reactions.

3. Those who are accustomed to judge by feeling do not understand the process of reasoning, for they would understand at first sight and are not used to seek for principles. And others, on the contrary, who are accustomed to reason from principles, do not at all understand matters of feeling, seeking principles and being unable to see at a glance.

This really gets into the left brain / right brain type stuff I've been looking into lately. Finding the balance between feeling and thinking is so tough.

122. Time heals griefs and quarrels, for we change and are no longer the same persons. Neither the offender nor the offended are any more themselves.

Interesting point on the "you can't step in the same river twice" type thinking... and our relationship to our past and future selves. There's continuity, but not quite identity.

233. Yes; but you must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked. You are in the game. Which will you choose then? Let us see. Since you must choose, let us see which interests you least. You have two things to lose, the true and the good; and two things to stake, your reason and your will, your knowledge and your happiness; and your nature has two things to shun, error and misery. Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God exists. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is. [...] Now, what harm will befall you in taking this side? You will be faithful, humble, grateful, generous, a sincere friend, truthful. Certainly you will not have those poisonous pleasures, glory and luxury; but will you not have others? I will tell you that you will thereby gain in this life, and that, at each step you take on this road, you will see so great certainty of gain, so much nothingness in what you risk, that you will at last recognise that you have wagered for something certain and infinite, for which you have given nothing.

The famous wager. My main problem is that it seems to imply that there's only one bet to be made, where some of my loss of faith came from realizing there were so many other people making the same wager on other religions. To be fair, later in the work he does address comparative religion, a bit. I don't find his outlining of why Christianity is not just unique, but uniquely unique, quite convincing but I appreciate how he grapples with it.

148. We are so presumptuous that we would wish to be known by all the world, even by people who shall come after, when we shall be no more; and we are so vain that the esteem of five or six neighbours delights and contents us.

After working on my blog for 20 years (and currently toiling on tools for the small Atari homebrew community ) - I feel called out. Or seen. One of those.

320. The most unreasonable things in the world become most reasonable, because of the unruliness of men. What is less reasonable than to choose the eldest son of a queen to rule a State? We do not choose as captain of a ship the passenger who is of the best family.

This law would be absurd and unjust; but, because men are so themselves and always will be so, it becomes reasonable and just. For whom will men choose, as the most virtuous and able? We at once come to blows, as each claims to be the most virtuous and able. Let us then attach this quality to something indisputable. This is the king's eldest son. That is clear, and there is no dispute. Reason can do no better, for civil war is the greatest of evils.

I've always been kind of interested in monarchists. I'm certainly not one of them, but they make stronger cases against people advocating "meritocracies" than I previously realized.

358. Man is neither angel nor brute, and the unfortunate thing is that he who would act the angel acts the brute.

I think it's the certainty of angels that is the problem.

433. After having understood the whole nature of man. That a religion may be true, it must have knowledge of our nature. It ought to know its greatness and littleness, and the reason of both. What religion but the Christian has known this?

So, sometimes I have to realize I don't know enough about different religions to mount a full argument, but parts of his reasoning seem misguided to me.

Christianity has a lot of different faces - it's a weird amalgamation of "Unknowable, Ineffable Sky God" and Gods walking among us as flesh - and a few things in between. So there's definitely a temptation that its heterogenous nature is what enables it to be the unique "all things for all people" - but then I know Hinduism has an even richer set of different flavors. (not to mention a sense of scale of the history of the Universe that's a bit more in line with what science points to.)

599. The difference between Jesus Christ and Mahomet. Mahomet was not foretold; Jesus Christ was foretold. Mahomet slew; Jesus Christ caused His own to be slain. Mahomet forbade reading; the Apostles ordered reading.

In this thought and others I seem Pascal as taking a lot of things at face value; like he seems to implicitly be accepting that HIS holy texts have received divine protection and can always be taken at face value.

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Random Videogames-ness:
About 5 years ago, Rocket League, a video game about acrobatic car soccer, came out:

What's interesting how this game is the clear successor to one of the very first games to use a dedicated microprocessor, Exidy's 1977 "Car Polo":

(I think that game might have an option for AI controlled opponents? Which would really be pretty impressive for the era!)

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My mom sent me a NY Times Magazine issue w/ a really beautiful tribute to Weird Al (centered on the concert tour I saw with Liz and Sophie last summer, specifically the performance the day before we saw it)

The article is surprisingly meaty - Weird Al really is crazy wholesome, there's a kind of Mr. Rogers energy behind the goofiness. He has really meant a heck of a lot to LEGIONS of nerds. (Also the article really examines how even the goofiest of lines has been lovingly poured over for exact rhyme and meter.)

For me, he was the crucial gateway to getting over myself enough to bring pop music into my life - as a kid I felt it was critical that I live the life of a smart person, and since smart people liked classical and jazz, why, that's what *I* liked, of course. But since Weird Al was *making fun* of the music, I could appreciate it - and eventually, pop-music itself. And that has enhanced my life greatly. I needed some new headphones and when I was perusing the options at Best Buy I discovered Skullcandy Crusher Wireless Immersive Bass Headphones. These have powered built-in subwoofers and sport a physical lever that goes from "Not Quite Enough Bass" to "WAY WAY WAY TOO MUCH BASS" - like you're at the restroom at a dance club and the pile of dancefloor speakers is just on the other side of the cinderblock wall.

I'm a tuba player, and I don't know if my affection for bass springs from that, or if it's a special case of how I like things that are easy to "read" without paying attention to nuance. Research supports the idea that Bass makes you feel powerful, so I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say bass-y head phones (especially combined with my "Psyched" mix at work) is a form of self-therapy. (More on our love of and response to bass.)

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We should pass a Woman's Heartbeat law: if a woman has a heartbeat, you can't tell her what to do with her goddamn body, ever.

More fun with AI, this time generating new ice cream flavor names

• Triple Bun
  
• Holy Lemon Monster
• Cookies & Red Hot Lover
• Vanilla Nettle
• Sundana Rainbow
• Team Cherry

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'Marisa Tomei' is an anagram for 'It's-a me, Mario'

I was thinking about the allure of Facebook. Previously I attribute it's dominance to a combination of "stream/wall" (ala Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram) with real identities, a strong bias to guide you to connect with people you know in real life vs anonymous internet strangers. But there's something else: the "also commented on X's post" notification. I just now posted a second comment on friend's post on feeling blue and the seemingly masochistic desire to watch or listen to sad stuff there, two passages relevant to the topic (this passage and the Mr. Blue thing it links to) and it feels great that I know people interested in that topic will get a nudge and probably see what I put there. Old school web forums have this feature but they don't have the stream that brings content front and center, or the "real world friend" aspect. (Heh, I remember when I would read Usenet on an old academic account, I had a perl script that would scrape and find me continuations of threads I had participated in.)

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gerrymandering: the game

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mid-re-siding, my house looks armor plated.

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Remember when we cried as kids and our parents said that they were going to give us something to really cry about.
We thought that they were going to hit us, but instead they destroyed the housing market.

Random question: when you get a response text that's a bare "K", do you find that neutral or faintly negative? (Or positive?) A few people I text with seem to treat it as at least neutral, but for some reason when not followed by a "!" I tend to see it as disapproving somehow.

I think I just need to recalibrate my own reading, but I was wondering how it was for other folk.

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http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n10/seymour-m-hersh/the-killing-of-osama-bin-laden Most likely Osama Bin Laden's final compound was a prison of sorts, not a covert HQ.

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Counterpoint: http://www.vox.com/2015/5/11/8584473/seymour-hersh-osama-bin-laden

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Nice comic version debunking the "millions for spilling hot mcdonalds coffee on yourself" lawsuit urban legend

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It's not that often that I hear a song and know it's gonna hit my 5 star list. This whole Mark Ronson "Uptown" thing of funk combined with Mystikal's Pigmeat Markham-like roar... terrific.

NECESSITY: Hello?
INVENTION: Happy Mother's Day!
NECESSITY: Thanks dear.
INVENTION: I made you something!
NECESSITY: (sighs) Yes. I figured.

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every-human-in-star-wars-is-really-a-humanoid-bee I think I have found a new band home... last night I had a little strolling Honk with the JP Dunster Road Honk Band... it felt really good to be tuba'ing with a group again.

(Man, Honk and Pep and Marching Bands are so much more fun than Concert Bands and Orchestras! If I had seen some of these as an option maybe I wouldn't have had such a long Tuba dark age...) There's a browser port of Wolfenstein 3D (a classic PC game from 1992 or so) -- fun! I wrote about it at my UI dv blog. This is a soldier sprite from the game:

And check out this cool walk through with Wolf3D creator John Carmack.

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http://photooftheday.hughcrawford.com/ - wow, a polaroid a day, every day, from 1979 'til 1997. Wow. (in 2023 I made a better version to view the image below: toys.alienbill.com/alleyoop-loop/)

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$8.5 billion for Skype? Man, and I thought Ebay got ME to overpay for stuff...

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http://is.gd/7IaG3I - Secret Service Twitter!
--via gifanime. Man, I just love stuff rotating.

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Java Geekery: I had forgotten how sorrowful Eclipse's debuggery is. Free hint: if I'm looking at a standard collection, I'm interested in the values stored therein, not the plumbing of the List object.

I do not fear death.
I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear. I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. What I am grateful for is the gift of intelligence, and for life, love, wonder, and laughter. You can't say it wasn't interesting. My lifetime's memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris.

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http://www.slate.com/id/2217899/ - on "nuke porn". Man, that EMP "side effect" stuff can still give me the heebie-jeebies.

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http://learning2share.blogspot.com/2009/04/search-term-jugheads-hat.html - Archie comics' Jugheads hat explained - not just a goofy crown!

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Real Life:
Subverted in Buddhism and Hinduism, in which not coming back from the dead is considered the greatest superpower of them all.

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Random Science Fiction idea: if everyone got themselves into cryogenics at death, and resurrection was known to be possible but expensive, life would be about trying to set up enough rich descendants, and having them like you, to bring you back.

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APPLE UI FAIL: if you're gonna tell me "some of the playlist files could not be found" TELL ME WHICH GODDAMN FILES CAN'T BE FOUND- you need a "Details" button, FFS. Oy. A Sunday I kind of set aside for Stuff I've Been Meaning To Get Around To... Pay bills! Work on packing! Shared "what are you reading?" sidebar! Patch up that Java game engine! Catch up on correspondence!

Where to begin?

Why, reading TV Tropes of course.

Yesterday was Miller's annual-ish Grunt Hunt puzzle event at the Cambridgeside Galleria. My team came in third out of six or seven, not bad considering 3 of us were newbies and the fourth was me -- I don't have a terrific mind for puzzles.

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Defacement of the Moment

--Joe D makes money better, or at least funnier.

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Anecdote of the Moment

Sir Laurence Olivier is on tour reading the sonnets of Shakespeare. The house is hushed. He begins: "Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments--"

A guy stands up in the back row of the last balcony and hollers, "HEY, LARRY OLIVER! SING 'MALAGUENA'!"

Unaccustomed as he is to being heckled, let alone heckled nonsensically, Sir Laurence stops. Waits a moment. Begins again:

"Let me not to the marriage of true minds--"

"HEY, LARRY OLIVER!" cries the guy in the back. It is clear he is drunk. "SING 'MALAGUENA'!"

It's not as though Olivier has any need, generally, to have a squelch prepared. Rather than dignify this guy with a response, he pauses again, pointedly, and then, again, begins:

"Let me not to the marriage--"

"HEY!" the guy screams, "LARRY OLIVER! SING 'MALAGUENA'!"

Olivier can no longer rise above this. "Sir," he says, and the richness of his voice is to the coarseness of the heckler's as Armagnac is to Mountain Dew, "in the first place, my name..." He hates to have to say this. "...is not 'Oliver,' it is Olivier. In the second place, and more important, I am not here to sing. I am here to read certain sonnets by William Shakespeare.

"And in the third place..." Somehow he can't forbear to make this point as well. "...'Malaguena' is an instrumental. I couldn't sing it if I wanted to. So, if you don't mind, 'Let me not--'"

And the guys stands up and hollers, "WELL, SHOW US YOUR DICK THEN!"

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pentomino I thought you said "back from brunch with Mom. mom crepes". Creepy!

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young (and cute) Mediterranean-ish gal at the local coffee house calls guys "love" and "darling". Bet I'm not the only guy tipping her well.

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procrastination as a competitive sport. No one would get around to telling people not to make the "but they never get to start it!" joke(s)

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I prefer sunglasses but sometimes worry I'm not absorbing spring and summer The other day I managed to mildly impress some of FoSO's friends by having the words "stumblebum" (as in the phrase "haha, look at those stumblebums!") immediately at hand as three beleaguered Toronto players almost ran into each other while failing to catch a Red Sox foul ball in deep right. It was such the right word for the action.

So, hooray vocabulary!

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Quote of the Moment

We live in a world in which people are beheaded, imprisoned, demoted, and censured simply because they have opened their mouths, flapped their lips, and vibrated some air. Yes, those vibrations can make us feel sad or stupid or alienated. Tough shit. That's the price of admission to the marketplace of ideas. Hateful, blasphemous, prejudiced, vulgar, rude, or ignorant remarks are the music of a free society, and the relentless patter of idiots is how we know we're in one. When all the words in our public conversation are fair, good, and true, it's time to make a run for the fence.

I saw this as collected in the book "What's Your Dangerous Idea?", which is based on the Edge.org forums. The funny thing is, by the time it made it to book form "Tough Shit" got bowdlerized to "Too bad". I've done an extremely bad job of keeping track of my 401Ks over the years. It's hard to keep track of that stuff, especially when rollovers take time and sometimes get stuck. And then when companies fold and merge...ugh.

There should be a rule: every document that lists, say, your name for a given 401K account should also list the damn company it's associated with!

Anyway.

FoSO pointed out that it might be helpful for the sidebar writers to have a link right there, as well as a reminder what their login is, so there's a new link on the sidebar, which should give the idea that it is something people can edit as well.

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Politics of the Moment
Slate on Bush's terrible, terrible management style. I see this as a strong rebuke against idealism and for pragmatism.

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Palm Cleanout of the Moment

While in NYC, Ksenia and I stopped in the Neue Galerie. I thought Egon Schiele's stuff was amazingly modern... this self-portrait is from 1910, but looks like... well, the 1980s, but still. I also learned about Nazi Germany's "Commission for the Utilization of the Products of Degenerate Art", which I guess would confiscate and sell these works for hard currency.

Historical Reconstruction of the Moment

--CNN reports that Scans reveal Tutankhamun's face. Kind of creepy! I like the eyeliner. Hmmm... "chubby cheeks", "overbite", "weak chin", "pronounced, sloping nose", "elongated scalp"...maybe I'm related!

Music Video of the Moment
I woke up with a bit of a tune ssticking in my head...took me a while to realize it was this little ditty from Hey, Hey 16K, kind of a tribute to the early 8-bit home computers, UK-centric though, so it's interesting to see what they had and we didn't...WARNING, catchy little tune. I kind of liked the knuckle cracking simulator by the same guy.

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Quote of the Moment

You know, kids, Drew's head is just like a piñata. If you hit his head enough times when he's sleeping, candy comes out. Well, first blood, then candy. Keep hitting.

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Introspection of the Moment
So I've been trying to use this time for some introspection, taking the experience of divorce to try and learn more about myself. Here's a thought that just crystallized: for me, roughly speaking, nothing is sacred. Which ties into me not having a sense of privacy, maybe it ties into not having made a big deal about my romance with Mo.

Lately I've been trying to figure out where this view came from, why my sense of "this is sacred, untouchable" is so much less formed than with some other people. Maybe it's the church I grew up in? The Salvation Army has a pretty terrific roll-up-your-sleeves approach to religion, very non-mystical. We don't take communion, don't baptize with water; you're expected to establish your personal, unmediated relationship with Jesus Christ and then get to work being a member of the local church community, taking part in the big metaphorical and literal war against sin. Relative to, say, the Catholics, there's a lot less mystery to it. And I always got to see behind the scenes anyway, as a child of the ministers, and then as a member of the band and active participant.

But there's so little sacred in my life...not even stuff like my divorce or the death of my dad is taboo for the occasional macabre joke. (Which he would likely would have appreciated, he had some similar inclinations to dark humor himself.) I try to be respectful of other people's "sacred spaces", with varying levels of success. I think my strongest sense of the sacred and spiritual comes out in this passage from Henry Miller's "Tropic of Capricorn": (pardoning the sexist language.)

There are no "facts"-- there is only the fact that man, every man everywhere in the world, is on his way to ordination. Some men take the long route and some take the short route. Every man is working out his own way and nobody can be of help except by being kind, generous, and patient.

Kind, generous, and patient. That's what I aim for, but sometimes my own way to ordination is slow and painful itself.

Maybe I need to get better at setting up sacred spaces, at drawing certain boundaries, at following certain rituals. I dunno!

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Geek Note of the Moment
This is the first kisrael entry from my new cute iBook. From my living room, no less...I went ahead and got my wireless mojo working again. And sitting on the couch and hitting the Internet is what this laptop is all about for the time being.

It's a little intimidating being such a newbie all over again. Mac definately is a bit different of a paradigm...more "app" based than window or even document based, I guess I'd say. I still need some time to form my final opinion. In the meanwhile, I think I will be more able to empathize with my mom and other non-techies I help out from time to time. (Or maybe I'll be worse..."look, I learned this in a day or two, why can't you??" Hmmmm.)

It has been a long time since I've had a new laptop. I mean a long time...I bought this one great Tandy 1100FD laptop in 1991 or 92...it had no hard drive, and an odd (but readable) gameboy like CGA screen, but with a very decent text processor hard-wired in, so I was up and running very quickly. I used it to take notes in class, which made me something of a freak back then, but hey...I had notes I could read afterwards. In 1995 I bought a cheapie "Mitac" laptop, 486, 16 shades of grey...ran Windows 3.1 ok, and I could use its little track ball to do diagrams (as well as school logos.) I used Mo's 1999 VAIO and her much more recent Dell, but that's about it.

Ok, this is a really boring entry. But...it is on my new laptop, and that has got to count for something, right? Right?

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He Asked Her Name and For A Light
This was the city of broken dreams and glass.
He was against the wall and the war.
She had high hopes and boots.
She aroused suspicion and men.
He bought her story and a beer.
She dropped her cigarettes and a hint.
They left together and their fears behind.

--A poem I half found and half wrote at
this Words & Stuff page on "Zeugma"

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Link of the Moment
Atlas Comics presents The 25 All-Time Greatest Covers of American Comic Books. Click on each one for a larger image and a description of why it was chosen. Some interesting choices there, with a big emphasis on some of the patriotic covers that came out during World War II. The page of rejects is kind of amusing, no commentary though, I suppose most of them speak for themselves. Went to Summer Shack last night. Had the mackerel...the whole mackerel...holy mackerel! You can see the face and everything! Entertaining, but too much work, you have to watch out for the bones and all.

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Game of the Moment
Speaking of fish...it's the Insaniquarium!. Feed your fishies and collect the coins they poop out. More fun than it sounds. Addictive, in fact. (thank Bill for any resulting addiction)

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Quote of the Moment

I'm gonna leave this world the way I came into it--dirty, screaming, and torn from the woman I love!

Running down to Ocean Grove, New Jersey to help my mom pack away some stuff in preperation for her trip to England. Not sure if I'll be able to do an update tomorrow or not.

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Zen Koan of the Moment
"Does this banana
have buddha nature?
I don't know but
it's mighty tasty!"

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Link of the Moment
memepool is one of the more well known 'blogs out there. I want to like it more than I actually do; I find its tendency of linking random words to be a little much for a site that's nothing but links.