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Made this the other day, more background on my devblog

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Just finished re-reading Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning" for my science and spirituality reading group

I found myself moved and a little weepy, though I can't pinpoint on a reason why, any singular epiphany gained or tragedy observed. Optimistically it's just some kind of emotional growing pain.

One summary I'm making for myself: **the meaning of everything is something drawn out, not uncovered or handed over. It is a creative process; it is cooking and not merely foraging.**

(I guess this ties in well with the philosophic theme I've been exploring lately: *everything of value is emergent*; all value is merely potential until it has arisen out of connection and interaction. And similarly value and meaning can never be bestowed from on high; it is a bottom-up process and not top-down.)

But meaning so developed isn't just "made up", which is one accusation my inner-skeptic will use to challenge it. Whatever our meaning grows into, it must have its roots in whatever concretely IS.

Faith then is a matter of accepting the truth of meaning that has grown for oneself, even if it lacks definitive validation. It's putting aside the nagging worries of "oh you just made that up" and accusations like "well you could have said anything".

I need to grapple with this some more. See how it plays with other themes I've been embracing; the idea that there's a (forever uncertain!) objective ultimate Truth, even if its presence is only implied from the sense of directionality, (better/worse) that we have which is necessary for us to reason our way about any two competing smaller truths.

(And also to reconsider: my disdain for concepts embodied in phrases like "Well that's My Truth". Does that idea, which never seemed resistant to accusations of "just making it up" -- especially since it seems to cover objective empirical reality as well as subjective senses of how things should be -- become more palatable for me if I frame it as "well, that's the Meaning I've grown about it"? Is it just semantics or what are the crucial differences?)

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Sometimes the other men invented amusing dreams about the future, such as forecasting that during a future dinner engagement they might forget themselves when the soup was served and beg the hostess to ladle it "from the bottom."

This anecdote stuck with me from the first reading - the idea being at the concentration camps, any thing of substance in the watery soup (such as peas or potato) were at the bottom, and so the server had some control over what was given to the other person.

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To draw an analogy: a man's suffering is similar to the behavior of gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the "size" of human suffering is absolutely relative.

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Does this not bring to mind the story of Death in Teheran? A rich and mighty Persian once walked in his garden with one of his servants. The servant cried that he had just encountered tered Death, who had threatened him. He begged his master to give him his fastest horse so that he could make haste and flee to Teheran, which he could reach that same evening. The master consented and the servant galloped off on the horse. On returning to his house the master himself met Death, and questioned him, "Why did you terrify and threaten my servant?" vant?" "I did not threaten him; I only showed surprise in still finding him here when I planned to meet him tonight in Teheran," said Death.

(He notes that some concentration camp inmates adopted a practice of deliberate passivity. I recognize that urge in myself, though I'm not sure the "I don't want to be responsible for things going worse" is a healthy way to be:

The camp inmate was frightened of making decisions and of taking any sort of initiative whatsoever. This was the result of a strong feeling that fate was one's master, and that one must not try to influence it in any way, but instead let it take its own course. In addition, there was a great apathy, which contributed in no small part to the feelings of the prisoner. At times, lightning decisions had to be made, decisions which spelled life or death. The prisoner would have preferred to let fate make the choice for him. This escape from commitment was most apparent when a prisoner had to make the decision for or against an escape attempt. In those minutes in which he had to make up his mind-and it was always a question of minutes-he suffered the tortures of Hell. Should he make the attempt to flee? Should he take the risk?

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"Was Du erlebst, kann keine Macht der Welt Dir rauben." (What you have experienced, no power on earth can take from you.)

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And in another paper she expressed the hope that logotherapy "may help counteract certain unhealthy healthy trends in the present-day culture of the United States, where the incurable sufferer is given very little opportunity to be proud of his suffering and to consider it ennobling rather than degrading" so that "he is not only unhappy, but also ashamed of being unhappy."'

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I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility sponsibility on the West Coast.

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But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue.

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From this one may see that there is no reason to pity old people. Instead, young people should envy them. It is true that the old have no opportunities, no possibilities in the future. ture. But they have more than that. Instead of possibilities in the future, they have realities in the past-the potentialities they have actualized, the meanings they have fulfilled, the values they have realized-and nothing and nobody can ever remove these assets from the past.

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When you stop laughing, that's when the trouble begins.

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Especially now as we hear the yaps of anti-Maskers, it's so weird that the USA which makes SO much hay about personal liberty - is so uptight about child rearing, like relative to the Germans.

But then, when I think about the practice of applying this level of liberty to USAian kids, like what demographics have the least amount of interventionist parenting, I tend to think of images of neglect, not hands off support.

I dunno. It's easy for a progressive like me to start thinking about the USA in the same way I've heard Brazilians disparage their own country. We can be so advanced in some ways and such yokels in other.

(On facebook, a friend pointed out this goes in hand with Germany having a stay-at-home-parent presumption, which complicates it a bit)

One of the things I miss most from my old job was a certain slack channel - "#foolish-idea-friends" (channel name changed to protect the guilty.)

The heart of the slack channel was an ever-growing number list of foolish ideas - concept pitches. A few basic rules were established from the outset: no criticism of ideas were permitted... just because an idea was foolish didn't mean it was "bad"... ideas had to be original as far as we knew to get a number (later a habit of bringing in ideas from elsewhere with the tag "#SEFI" (for "someone else's foolish idea") instead of a number)

One of the fellow pioneers of the channel had written bots to scrape the ideas (one Foolish Idea was to make a "best of" book) and sent me a list of my 1000+ contributions. I had done over a quarter of the almost 4,000 the channel was up to upon my departure!

FIF #600 gives an idea of what the channel was most often used for:

• #600 categorization system for f-i-f; semi-serious but possibly outlandish proposals, less serious proposals just for a laugh, ones added quickly to grab a big number, thinly veiled complaints about stuff in the office, general-joshing on each other, other meta-stuff

So, I read through all my entries and here were my very favorites, in roughly descending order of how much I liked 'em:

• #1500 new html6 attribute: onlick. Like onclick, but you know, for licking things. Steve Jobs said "We made the buttons on the screen look so good you'll want to lick them." and I think modern web browsers should be ready for this.
• #321 formation of a committee to determine the plausibility of "aggressive passive" behavior; for example, furiously hammering water
• #212 A Street Fighter-like game but with the characters from Peanuts (Snoopy, Charlie Brown, etc)
• #1465 Trying to declutter but Marie Kondo is too pile-centric or mumbo-jumbo-y? Arrange all your possessions in a long straight line ordered by how much you want each item, make a perpendicular line at the cut off point, and discard everything to left. DONE AND DUSTED.(Note, you may still have to dust, especially around those shelves where the cluttering items used to sit.)
• #1576 If you have a device or thing in your life you really like and use a lot, like a laptop or iPad or video game system or something, have a loved one wrap it up so you can open it christmas day and think about how much you like it.
• #823 A service where university professors will adopt your child so they can get free tuition at that university
• #2565 A post-mortem service to excise and preserve specific body parts for rhetorical purposes. For example, a wedding finger for a loved one to keep, or a middle finger to send to a person you despised in life, or maybe your whole butt for a hated organization to kiss. The body part can be cremated, preserved in resin, or bronzed.
• #2226 Life in a zero-G or microgravity environment (like on an orbiting station or a spaceship that is not manuevering) offers many challenges. When you're exercising on the treadmill or just sitting at a work console, you need to strap yourself down with elastics and velcro. Exhaled CO2 silently pooling around your head is a constant threat if the air circulation system isn't perfect. And if you lose momentum in a large open area, like thanks to air resistance, it can be nearly impossible to get moving again. The solution to all of these is clear: astronauts should always wear old-school propeller beanies at all times when not in their helmets.

Some of my ideas I'd like to see for real:

• #1368 every damn smoke and carbon monoxide detector should have a small lcd or e-ink screen that will you tell you its status. no more of this stupid "let me communicate through infuriatingly intermittent chirps". i mean seriously
• #1474 a film crew/biography service that parents can reserve for their young kids. Every year for your unbirthday (6 months opposite your birthday) they come and do a "day in the life" taping, as well as have their writers talk to you and write up what's on your mind and what your life is like
• #3470 make tombstones out of wet cement and let people at the funeral scratch in their final messages to the deceased
• #887 All light switches should have a tiny LED to show if it's on or not. (In some rooms it's obvious, but when the light switch is on the other side of the closed door...)
• #1471 an app to help remind you to keep in contact with friends you don't see regularly. Enter your friends names, and how important they are to you, and it will create a queue of people and nudge you when you should send a "just saying hi" message
• #1588 First Class Deluxe Junk Retirement. Trying to declutter, but stuck with stuff with sentimental value, and/or with no second-hand value? First Class Deluxe Junk Retirement will come to your house to pick it up, take a photo and send it to you, and then put it in a special mausoleum landfill. For example, my "Euclid High School English Departmental Award" medal with ribbon, from 1992. I will never do ANYTHING with this, right? And yet it's weirdly hard to get rid of. Ditto my heavy duty Varsity Jacket with built in cape/hood.
• #1438 One of my best FIFs ever - ok - so our cat has a "food puzzle" where you put kibble in a bunch of little plastic obstacles so the cat can't just chow down, but has to work a bit for each piece. It's meant for exercise, I guess, besides the mental stimulation factor, but it would be MUCH better if you could pour the kibble into some kind of little home base thing and then have little robo mice, each carrying a single platter that could hold just about one piece of kibble, and the cat could chase each bit, knock it to get the kibble, and then it would go back to the home base to get another piece...
• #355 see-through lids for toilets so you can ensure all the material was whisked away instead of leaving it as a gross surprise for the next person, and without aerosolizing the gross stuff either. (Or possibly a sophisticated sensor system to take of reflushes automagically)

Of course, some FIFs I ended up doing for real:

• #1073 learn that little 'waiting' step b-boy dancers do right before they launch into something truly impressive. but never do a fancy move, just do the step over and over
• #768 Make an MP3 of silence or someone going "that's the end!" and name the tune early in the alphabet, so when iOS has decided it has run out of audio to play and for some reason starts playing "all songs alphabetically" you don't get blasted by Michael Jackson going "A B C, easy a 1 2 3" ALL THE DAMN TIME
• #1515 out of churros? try this delicious salty, sweet, crispy, chewy dessert: take a chocolate from the front desk (preferably dark or choc w/ caramel) and put it between two tortilla chips!
• #2758 new drink: Apple X-Cider -- take one cup of company cider, drink while sucking on an Atomic Fireball candy

Some of my thinly-veiled complaints:

• #270 default slack avatars that are flash GIFs that trigger epileptic seizures so users have a moral and possibly legal obligation to change them
• #391 gamify gamification! every scoring rule you invent for whatever you are gamifying gets you a G.G. Star!
• #485 Start postfixing updated versions of functions etc with "New". This is super great for sites that have "New" and "Used" cars, so people get to enjoy making up heuristics like "if the New is a prefix, it's probably about new cars, but if New is a postfix, it's probably just a later version of a previously existing function"

Sometimes I just went for the gag or pun:

• #2718 Luggage with face detection that is also delighted to see you as it swings around the baggage carousel and can express that- makes you feel loved after a rough flight and helps you locate your bag. The name of this wonder-product? "emotional baggage"
• #432 pave a road with bad intentions, see where it gets you
• #2190 market an extra-rough brand of kleenex called "grindstone"
• #2793 football uniforms made out of really stretchy material so if a defender grabs you by the uniform you can just keep on running. Bonus: if defender is really strong and heavy and manages to hold on, comedy as you get flung back to him like a rubber band.
• #2567 Along with surgery to reduce snoring, surgery to increase snoring but it comic ways - giant long snort on the inhale, descending whistling tone on the exhale.
• #38 alcoholic drinks mixed with aspirin and gatorade to get a jump on your hangover the next day
• #250 a bumper sticker that wards off cops by saying "don't worry i've driven MUCH drinker than this"
• #2560 combine "Now & Laters" candies with "Atomic Warheads" and call them "Apocalypse Now & Laters"
• #2714 make a 60s/70s mashup cover group called "Earth, Blood, Wind, Sweat, Fire, and Tears."
• #711 Find that butterfly whose wing flapping is causing tornadoes on the other side of the world and STOP IT, FFS

And finally, a few I sort of liked but didn't make the other lists:

• #235 phone cases marketed by how they feel- texture, weight, etc- more than how they look after all you are mostly just looking at the glass screen, but how they feel to your hand whether out or in your pocket is important all the time
• #413 A Todo App that indicates items have been there too long by overlaying them with subtle cobwebs... you can even swipe them away to indicate progress on the task or just out of frustration
• #193 conduct a social engineering campaign to change social mores so it's ok to react when people are in the bathroom stall next to you: cheering them on if they make a particularly impressive sound, sympathizing if it sounds like they're having problems, etc
• #1055 Micro-Time-Zones. All clocks in a timezone are set to the nearest minute based on the current Longitude. No more stupid bumps when you cross certain state borders!!!

Anyway. This is the single piece of company culture I'll most miss from my old place, and I think I have a FIF in there about launching new colonies. I'd really recommend it for any big slack organization.

Oh one bonus I almost missed:

• #1593 Make years start on March 1. This will have 3 big advantages:
  1. meteorological seasons now line up year - starting with March/April/May spring, June/July/August summer, the school year starts with Sep/Oct/Nov Fall, and then Dec/Jan/Feb Winter 2. September and October now fall on their appropriate Latin numbers (7 and 8)
  3. NFL season is no longer this weird ambiguity springing from regular seasons and playoffs of one "season" being in different years

On my devblog, retracing some steps of archivists digging into the history of Spacewar! , the first programmed video game. I think I've finally answered a long-stand question I had about collision detection in that game.

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The consolation of mortality: we can rest assured that finally - finally - upon death our personal knowledge of the big problems of the world will descend to meet our personal ability to fix the big problems of the world.

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Courage is knowing it might hurt and doing it anyway.
Stupidity is the same.
And that's why life is hard.

Compare with:

There is a fine line between genius and insanity; I play hopscotch.

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"The unborn" are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don't resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don't ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don't need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don't bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn...You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without re-imagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus but actually dislike people who breathe.

Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn.

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And I'm as old as you! [...] Tuba - it's like the fountain of youth, but you blow into it, because that's how brass instruments work.

"He knew my daughter Jennifer because Trump has this horse show thing down in Florida, and he went up and talked to Jen and was being super nice," [Bill] Gates said. "And then, about 20 minutes later, he flew in by helicopter to the same place, so clearly he had been driven away but he wanted to make a grand entrance in a helicopter."

"When I first talked to him, it was actually scary how much he knew about my daughter's appearance," he added. "Melinda didn't like that too well."

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[Watching a video] Awwww noooooo not an ad! I thought all content waaas freeeeeeee and I just paid with my privacy!

I forget if I knew Thomas "Biff Tannen" Wilson played tuba:

Also if you have any questions for Tom Wilson:

Albert Camus is known to most as an existential writer and philosopher. But to me, he was much more. To me, Camus was the best damn table magician that ever lived. When I watched Albert handle a deck of cards, roll a franc across his fingers, or vanish a Gauloise, it didn't bother me that we were living in a random, godless universe. As a matter of fact, I liked it.

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Kind of hip to be in 2 of the 10 Bands to Checkout at Somerville Porchfest (w/ Rev Dave at Porch-i-oke, and School of Honk) - now if I can successfully help the Somerville Art Council to keep their map site alive through the day I'll have a three part triumph.

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Delightful Robot Heist puzzle game that I helped playtest.

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when you feel sad just remember that the English language has a dedicated verb for sending people links to a Rick Astley music video

tools as the cause of, not the solution to, all the web's speed problems Daring Fireball is more concerned with speed of user experience, I'm more concerned with speed of development, but there's a lot of overlap. Extent of my ambition today:
1. Finish the "comfort food" gaming I've been playing, "Saints Row the Third"
2. Watch Godzilla in IMAX

Two Luchador-related thoughts on SR3:
1. Hulk Hogan did the voice of "Angel de la Muerte"? His flat, underacted reading is kind of perfect.
2. Eddie "Killbane" Pryor (the Luchador main villain) has multiple references to a nickname "The Walking Apocalypse" which is a great bit of poetry.

I wish there was a way to know you're in the good old days, before you've actually left them...
...Someone should write a song about that.

Warning: loud and swear-y:

--via

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Digging http://www.tunefind.com/ -- identifies incidental music used on shows. Helped me find out "Infinity Guitars" by Sleigh Bells on Girls... Oddly, despite being at the Louvre and the Arc de Triomphe and the cabaret, it wasn't a super-photogenic day.

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At the risk of sounding like "un poseur" -- ubiquitous cheap baguette and very good inexpensive table wine is a nice way to live.

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Hooray for FC Porto... your fans were making a hell of a lot of noise around the Arc de Triomphe tonight!

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Motown Single Ladies:

--via gifanime

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BK sending out squads w/ coffee backpacks

- distributing samples by Copley

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Drop Shadows Suck. --Spike Jones, "Shiek of Araby", though mildly cut off...

Some explanation:
So growing up I loved the less-goofy "Canadian Brass" version of this song. It starts with an almost spoken-word verse:

Over the desert wild and free
Rides the bold sheik of Araby.
His Arab band at his command
Follows his love's caravan.
Under the shadow of the palms
He sings to call her to his arms:

And then of course a chorus that is (almost) shared with the Spike Jones version:

I'm the Sheik of Araby.
Your love belongs to me.
At night when you're asleep,
Into your tent I'll creep.
The stars that shine above
Will light our way to love.
You'll rule this land with me,
The Sheik of Araby.

I've always liked this and its hint of unrequited longing, even if it was a bit stalkerish (interesting how the Spike Jones version kind of flips the stalker aspect.) But just recently I found out there was a second verse that makes the Sheik an even worse guy!

While stars are fading in the dawn,
Over the desert they'll be gone.
His captured bride close by his side,
Swift as the wind they will ride.
Proudly he scorns her smile or tear.
Soon he will conquer love by fear.

Yikes! Now he just sounds like a big jerk.

So the above wasn't quite the Spike Jones version I was familiar with -- that one doesn't "reverse" who is creeping into whose tent, and adds a different verse:

Oh, I'm the Sheik of Araby
And all the women worship me.
You should see them follow me around. Not bad!
Even wives of all the other sheiks,
They beg to kiss my rosy cheeks
And that ain't bad -- in fact, that's good, I've found. I'm a cad!
When I lay down to sleep
I'm counting girls instead of sheep
From my harem I can't scare 'em out. Why should I?
They're beauties from all races,
And some have pretty faces.
I'm the Sheik who knows what love is all about.

In hunting up a transcription of that Spike Jones verse I found this dic.academic.ru page that reminded me that the Canadian Brass version adds a quiet "with no clothes on!" to the end of each line of the chorus. (Though that page says "with no pants on" is the more canonical refrain.)

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From a Dream this morning:

"Tonight we're studying places to find water and how to make it drinkable..."
"Think of all the potabilities!"

The first speaker was an artist who did a big installation on top of a building, with all these mannequins representing people who had died from laughter. In my dream, my pun got a big laugh.

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Why do so many Java Webkits assume that what Java programmers really want to be doing is writing servlets? How about old Perl or PHP hacks?

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This green hoodie seems especially enamored of hiding, camouflaging itself as a towel or blanket. Very stealthy! To view this content, you need to install Java from java.com
basho2 - source - built with processing
(WARNING: has sound, but not 'til you click.) So I managed to turn last month's software toy into an actual game! Use the yoyo to bash the frogs into frog heaven... unfortunately frog hell is the red line behind the cloud so if you miss the frog is fried. It's tough, my high score is like 4...

Been thinking about animated gifs lately, the flipbooks of the online age. I made those Groove is in the Heart ones a few months ago, and as far as I can tell Lady Kier herself, now a well-regarded DJ, left a comment there asking if she can snag 'em... (On the Internet, nobody knows you're not a diva, but still I think it's legit.) So, woo! (Followup: hee, they're on her myspace page...)

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Animated GIF of the Moment

swing,baby!

EB's Baby Swings! Taken the same afternoon as the woodsy photo.

Virtual Chat of the Moment

ALICE: Are you alive?
Jabberwacky: Perhaps.
A: Why the uncertain tone?
J: Everything is uncertain except for five facts.
A: The whole universe?
J: And we both might just be some ones and zeros in the computer memory.

I wonder if I could (or should) will myself into becoming something more of a neat freak.

It can start with simple stuff, like hanging up my coat when I walk in the door, rather than just tossing it wherever. And putting a bowl away when I'm done with it, rather than letting it sit.

I do get a little buzz of rightness when I declutter in some small way like that, and I wonder if it's something I could consciously parlay into larger decluttering and maintenance of that decluttered state.

In Googling on this kind of topic, I found FlyLady.net's "How To Declutter" page. I appreciate the arbitrariness of the 27 Fling Boogie, a method that says trash 27 items, then find 27 items to give away.

The concept of "Body Clutter" (which I think is mostly seen as excess weight) is also kind of interesting. Overall the site is a bit too cutesy and blatantly "not my demographic", but still.

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Dialog of the Moment

Uhura: I'm not picking up any signals.
Kirk: Really? I was under the impression that women could read a man like a book.

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Link of the Moment
Slate Blogs the Bible... it looks like the plan is to go through it chapter by chapter, and commenting on it all along. It is amazing how many stories from the Bible don't get a lot of play nowadays, and how many don't even jive with what we think of as "Judeo-Christian Morality".

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Site Anniversary of the Moment
Heh, according to this site's retrospect feature (showing what I wrote on this date for all the years going back to my Palm journal in 1997) today is the one year anniversary of...this site's retrospect feature. I guess that means I should be seeing repeats for the most part, but generally enough time goes by that it shouldn't feel too repetitive.

Site Features of the Moment
So seeing Scientific American's "50, 100, 150 Years Ago" feature gave me an idea...having journaled regularly for the past 8 years and daily for over half of that, it makes sense for me to make a new feature:

retrospect -- this day in kirkstory

On a single page, I put this date's kisrael entries for 2001 'til the present in reverse chronological order, then I follow it with any KHftCEA entries (my old Palm-based journal) that are labeled with the date. (None for today, alas, though click on the arrow for tomorrow.) I started the Palm journal in 1997, so some of the stuff is really old.

I don't know if it will mean anything to anyone else, but some of the stuff the page comes up with is emotionally charged for me; just seeing how I've changed, what I've been through...how much wittier I used to be. Sometimes I miss the old Palm journal, it was really spontaneous and casual in a way this site isn't...

Also I added the shot of the shore in Lynn from the other day to my desktop wallpaper page, along with a not-quite-as-pretty shot more horizontally, so it fits a monitor better. (I should have taken more images that day...actually I think the horizontal image suffers because I was trying to get a zoomed in shot of the island.)

Oh...btw, I'm pretty proud of the 16x16 icon I made with a shrunk-down version of the "Recycle" arrows. so yay for me!

Passage of the Moment
It was almost as if he was in a delirium when he described to us how New York would go up in flames. He imagined how the skyscrapers would turn into huge burning torches. How they would crumble while the reflection of the flames would light the skyline against the dark sky.
-- Albert Speer's diary on Hitler's desires to build a special two part suicide mission bomber to attack the United States, from this Atlantic Monthly article. So looks like Al Qaeda wasn't first with the idea.

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Typography of the Moment
Old typographical joke:
"if your nose runs and your feet smell, you might be umopepisdn!"
(Get it?)

Also, in a meeting, I think I did up my best ever ASCII-art Alien Bill (the guy gracing the top of kisrael.com) notoriously (well, to me anyway) hard to get recognizable in that medium...

        ___ /\__
ALIEN  ___   (<o) 
BILL   ___ /\/ \\/ 
PRODUCTIONS    /_ 

If any ASCII-artists out there have a suggestion to improve it, feel free to let me know! For more of my ASCII art, check out this kisrael entry.

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Gaming Geekery of the Moment
Huh, just found a reference to Scale2x, a filter designed to make older heavily pixelated games look better by guessing at "what's a curve". I think I'd miss the old pixels if this caught on, but it's a cool idea, and the samples they show are impressive.

I tried it out on my b+w self-portrait that used to be on the top of the site, here's the before and after:
Neat! It really reclaims what the pixels lost. It doesn't use any additional colors, just more space (or smaller pixels). And it really depends on low color images...I tried it with some of the "photographic" icons on the right side there, along with some photos, and it didn't do anything. Link of the Moment
Entertaining study of those "Calvin Peeing" decals and their many variations. Lots of photos (appearing in a popup window) taken in the wild.
I think my favorite truck decal I've seen was in downstate Ohio, a "No Fear" sticker modified by dropping the F. I don't know if the driver was a Van Gogh fan or what.

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Video of the Moment
I hope it's not considered animal cruelty, but I found this video totally hiarious. I'm sure it's just cats being cats, and that it looks a bit worse than it was... Quote and Image of the Moment

"If I want to think about having sex with 87 peacocks I can and it's not a crime, but in reality they might not be up for it, you know!"

...you know, judging by her well-publicized swan dress, I would believe that she's thought about having sex with 87 peacocks.

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Links of the Moment
With the release of the new movie, Star Wars (especially the original trilogy) seems to be on many people's minds these days. Here's an interesting piece on The Case for the Empire, the idea that maybe our concept of the good guys and bad guys in those films is mixed up...a bit tongue in cheek, but thought provoking. This slashdot article really tries to bring that home, with the Death Star as the WTC...there are enough parallels to make you think. Finally, in a vein similar to the previously link Star Wars Technical Commentaries (so watch out, Bill) it's pretty much the ultimate Star Wars vs Star Trek site, answering that age old geek question, who would win, the Empire or the Federation. (Short answer: the Empire, easily.) This site is ridiculously deeply researched for both sides, though a bit biased (both in favor of Star Wars over Trek and the Empire over the Rebel Alliance). I suspect fanboys who are into this argument kind of assume that the sci-fi universe with the most powerful technology is somehow better over all, which is silly.

He raises one especially interesting point, since Trekkies love to point out possible wartime uses of the Transporter, he claims that the Empire has rejected such technology for living creatures as a form of destruction plus distance cloning, with no regard for the continuity of life force (The Force?) of the being that is transported...a nice play on an old philosophical thought experiment. Taking the garbage bin to the curb, dropped it when I heard a distinctly animal shuffling inside... bravely took off the top bag, the next box, saw a little bird looking up at me. Gently removed the larger box that was stopping it from getting the space it needed to fly and off it went, across the street and onto the telephone wire. Guess it was ok. Strikes me that birds probably don't have enough brainpower for the concept of gratitude, it probably figured it was clever enough to escape the big mammal looming over it.

In any event my karmic balance felt improved.

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Quote of the Moment

Leave the cat here.
Take the whiskey along.

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Link of the Moment
RiksJotto II is a cheerfully insane java game. You control the crosshairs of a "semi-automatic Dragunov class sniper rifle" and your mission is to take out all the players of a soccer match... (but, the game reassures us, no one is killed, "The players are actors that are instructed to lay down when you aim at them") And you don't shoot the refs, because they're spoiling the game already.

I really like the little soccer game simulation built into this game.