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So. No, it's not higher profits companies have been eeking out that's pushing inflation, it's consumers having a little fun. "The beatings will continue until morale increases"

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So the other day I said "It's a bummer, and while I don't begrudge the rich some adventure tourism, the 'new frontiers' they were exploring were those of deregulation and lax safety and engineering standards."

Or as one friend quipped "We imploded while convincing rich people to ride in the cheapest way possible!" (and google scrapes from their website say similar things)

And while even famously protocol heavy NASA messed up (not listening to their engineers who thought it was too cold to launch the Challenger), there is a long history of folks saying "look these regulations are blocking me from making as much money as I could, let get rid of them"

And too often this attitude gets people killed (like with the subs) or the taxpayer bails things out (like also the sub) or it bites the company (like Norfolk Southern having to pay 1/3 of a billion dollars for cleaning up the East Palestine Ohio train wreck after years of lobbying to relax regulations. But of course, if that cost is less than what they think they save pushing everything to the limit, it's just a cost of doing business)

Or Elon Musk "Aspiring to have no flame diverter in Boca, but this could turn out to be a mistake" and he trashes his launch pad. But if you look at how much worse his rocket is for the local wildlife etc - it's not just a matter of cost efficiency for him, we all get to pay some of that.

Even a similar vibe for the deregulation that led to the 2008 financial crisis.

There's a common thread to all of these, that a small group can make boatloads of money by taking risks, but they've moved the cost of those risks to the public or other folks in general. Conservatives vowing to roll back "over-regulation" kind of assume every rule is there for funsies or to assert government control. And I'm not sure there's never over-regulation, but it would be great if we had a bit more connection between risk taking and actually paying the consequences.





I do love me some Venn Diagram Jokes from Language Log, lexical gaps in English.

via Prokopetz with nightpool's comment "i think a good argument for sapir–whorf is that I cannot even imagine the concept gestured to by 'candible'"

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Trying out the new Search Engine "Brave" on Alien Bill I found out there's a short film called
Bill, the Alien.

I was never quite sure why I picked "Bill", just an incongruously "normal" name for an alien. I might have been spired by the naming in the sci-fi series "Bill, The Galactic Hero".

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wait Atari 800s had ROM slots like this?

Japan is the Land of Must, I decided as soon as I set foot in Tokyo, as surely as America is the Land of Can.

A monk is sitting behind me. I can feel his smirk on the back of my neck. The secret of the monk's success: he believes in nothing. Everything is. There is no need for belief.

Both via September 2019 Harper's Magazine. "Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI" is a collection of modern responses to Norbert Wiener's 1948 seminal work "Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine" (Either this book was more of a slog than some, or I'm not dedicating enough time to reading, or I'm getting slow in my middle age :-D) Here are some quotes I found thought provoking:

The philosopher Stephen Toulmin identified the transparency-versus-opacity contrast as the key to understanding the ancient rivalry between Greek and Babylonian sciences. According to Toulmin, the Babylonian astronomers were masters of black-box predictions, far surpassing their Greek rivals in accuracy and consistency of celestial observations. Yet science favored the creative-speculative strategy of the Greek astronomers, which was wild with metaphorical imagery: circular tubes full of fire, small holes through which celestial fire was visible as stars, and hemispherical Earth riding on turtleback. It was this wild modeling strategy, not Babylonian extrapolation, that jolted Eratosthenes (276–194 BC) to perform one of the most creative experiments in the ancient world and calculate the circumference of the Earth. Such an experiment would never have occurred to a Babylonian data fitter.

The defining characteristic of a complex system is that it constitutes its own simplest behavioral description. The simplest complete model of an organism is the organism itself.

We should all make it a regular practice to reread books from our youth, where we are apt to discover clear previews of some of our own later "discoveries" and "inventions," along with a wealth of insights to which we were bound to be impervious until our minds had been torn and tattered, exercised and enlarged, by confrontations with life's problems.

In the long run, there is no distinction between arming ourselves and arming our enemies.

In a moving passage from his 1935 novel Odd John, science fiction's singular genius Olaf Stapledon has his hero, a superhuman (mutant) intelligence, describe Homo sapiens as "the Archaeopteryx of the spirit." He says this fondly to his friend and biographer, who is a normal human. Archaeopteryx was a noble creature, and a bridge to greater ones.

A former colleague of mine, Gérard Bricogne, used to joke that carbon-based intelligence was simply a catalyst for the evolution of silicon-based intelligence.

But if we step back and look at life on Earth, we see that we are far from the most resilient species. If we're going to be taken over at some point, it will be by some of Earth's oldest life-forms, like bacteria, which can live anywhere from Antarctica to deep-sea thermal vents hotter than boiling water, or in acid environments that would melt you and me. So when people ask where we're headed, we need to put the question in a broader context. I don't know what sort of future AI will bring: whether AI will make humans subservient or obsolete or will be a useful and welcome enhancement of our abilities that will enrich our lives. But I am reasonably certain that computers will never be the overlords of bacteria.

A common test I have for U.S. citizens is this: Do you know anybody who owns a pickup truck? It's the number-one-selling vehicle in the United States, and if you don't know people like that, you're out of touch with more than 50 percent of Americans.

Just saw Paula Poundstone @ The Chevalier in Medford. "Electing Trump" is to America what 'Beaching Themselves' is to Whales" and "Sir, all your honking and yelling is doing nothing to improve my driving skills" - thanks Cathleen who slipped Melissa and me the tix! Jeremy Penner has started a podcast about hyper-indie games, the art of the small, personal game project and the communities that support them... and I was his first interview, talking about my perennial mashup JoustPong, but ranging from programming home computers in the 1980s to online things like Processing now.

We talked a while back, and I was worried I would find my own voice unlistenable now, but it's not as awful as I had feared. It's kind of weird that I slip into the cadence that I can now recognize from some podcasts I listen to, even though I just started listening to them in general.

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via I Want This 1923 Prediction For the American City of the Future To Be Real

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via From last night's School of Honk @ Aeronaut...

via Sigh. I just noticed the FAA still bans stuff like tiny swiss army knives. I thought they had rescinded the ban, but they reinstated it 3 months laters. At the time of the lifting of the ban, the Association of Flight Attendants - CWA rep said " It's not just about the ability to take down an airplane or use the airplane as a weapon of mass destruction as happened on 9-11. It's about the ability to protect the entire airplane including the aircraft cabin and all the passengers on board. It's our job to be focused on everybody" but any damn thing can be used as a weapon. It's ridiculous.

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Success isn't permanent, and failure isn't fatal.

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On Google+, a friend pointed out sometimes failure IS fatal. I countered with well yeah, but that's rare; once-in-a-lifetime, at most. Said friend counter-countered with well for say Doctors, it can be someone ELSE's life we're talking about, and he finds Ditka's inspiration sometimes trivialzing, and he wanted a better way to say what Ditka was getting at. My countercountercounter was this:

I mean, you could pull the punch with a modifier ala "failure generally isn't fatal" (because he wasn't saying "failure is never fatal in any circumstance".)

But I don't think this is a trivializing sentiment. In fact, I'd say picking on him for not including mortal peril edge cases is a bit trivializing -- because for a certain ("fixed") mindset, fear of failure and seeming foolish, and/or having your limits put in stark relief, can be paralyzing, and I find his sentiment a bit inspiring.

In terms of a better way to put it... an attitude I need to learn to get is "So you maybe fail. So fucking what. Trying and failing doesn't take away from what you are, the potential you embody. But on the other hand, never trying means you're a person who doesn't try - and that's a killer of potential."

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What's red and bad for your teeth?

A brick.

Spent a nice Saturday afternoon and evening with EB and his family. We went to the beach in Rockport...

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Shout out to my peeps who occasionally choke on their own secretions like they've never inhabited a human body before

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Just watched Scarface for the first time. Keep thinking if only I had darker, richer eyebrows, I have the scar to totally rock that look.
Nice mashup, I like how it makes Old Trek seem like a drunken spectacle. Another week's worth of my entries in Miller's 30 Day Drawing Challenge:Superheroes.

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I think Iron Munro is one of the sweetest ideas ever, especially in terms of the connection with the novel "Gladiator"- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Munro --Bill the Splut. Schadenfreude ahoy! (UPDATE 2019 Might not quite be the original video now defunct)

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My most successful diets are "hobgobln diets" based on Foolish Consistency; currently lunches of Wendys Taco Salad. And atomic fireballs. I think this works for me partially because shutting down choice for lunch stills my novelty (and calorie) seeking behavior the rest of the day.

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http://sports.espn.go.com/new-york/mlb/news/story?id=5316494 - Seinfeld vs Lady Gaga. He sounds like an unfunny old-hack crank.

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Fire Alarm! Everyone exits the building. All Clear. Elevators will be a madhouse, so we all climb 8 tall stories back up...

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http://www.tineye.com/ - pretty good image identification service! (Not just Google and Bing's "Find Similar Images" crap)

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First in line at the Apple Store in Boston, around half past noon...

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Sometimes I wish I could set Photoshop up with enough levels of Undo to take me back to, say, 1998.

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I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated.

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All this rain- it's hard not to wonder if we've somehow broken the weather and the sky, that this will be the prevailing weather from now on, that weeks of fair, sunny weather is something we'll have to tell our children about.

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You are still sounding like a typewriter. Sing like handwriting.

No time for love Doctor Jones!

Video of the Moment

--from http://view.break.com/521743. Like they said on boing boing gadgets: "This video, which from the wealth of weapons used in its creation I can only presume is a sanctioned viral commissioned by Nerf, manages to break every rule of good internet video: it's over five-minutes long; it is a commercial; it's trying to be funny. Against all odds, it manages to be COMPLETELY AWESOME. "

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I <3 helping tourists on the T Remember how there used to be all those "Robot Wars" type shows, for the first few years of this decade? (I guess "BattleBots" on Comedy Central (which never made a ton of sense) was the one I saw most often.)

For the most part they were never robots, just armed and armored remote control cars. Big ones. But then the genre semed to kind of just drift away.

Is it just my perception because I watch less TV? Maybe they became redundant once we started up in Iraq...

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Article of the Moment
So-so New Yorker article on technology. Its core point seems to be older technologies hang around and are more useful than we give them credit for, and that everything is more evolutionary than revolutionary, but at cites a lot of interesting sounding works.

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Optical Illusion of the Moment

--Vaguely neat on its own, but also an illusion... its visually ambiguous if she's clockwise or counter-, and your mind can switch that (focus on the reflection, and picture it representing swinging the other way.) Via 4chan.org.

This week I've been plowing my way through "Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories". It's kind of a grind but I'm enjoying working my way through each mission. I really do enjoy how they overlay these missions on what feels more or less like a real city, a city that could exist for reasons beyond the adventurers I have in it.

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Video of the Moment
The commercial for "Head-On" is indeed rather freaky in a scifi dystopia kind of way, just like BoingBoing promised.

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Video of a Past Moment

--Just to learn more about the site I put this video of EB and me on the Six Flags' Sky Coaster from 5 years ago (!) on youtube... Originally I kisrael'd this on 9/11, posting before the infamous events of that day.

Unfortunately, youtube cut off the last moment of the piece, which ruins the unplanned musical sting at the end (the quicktime video still has it though)

Science of the Moment

Wired up to a scanner, they were asked to play a game involving navigating through a complicated bunker, killing attackers and rescuing hostages.

Mathiak found that as violence became imminent, the cognitive parts of the brain became active and that during a fight, emotional parts of the brain were shut down.

The pattern was the same as that seen in subjects who have had brain scans during other simulated violent situations.

So in other words, "the pattern seen during the simulations of violence was the same as that seen during simulations of violence." I guess there is SOME science here, it's interesting that, much like a dream, you don't need full holodecks to convince the brain "this is real, sorta", but still that's not what the press is picking up on.

Anyway, on with the usual backlog flush:

• The History of Commander Keen, a footnote in PC gaming.
• Ooh, More Kids Say The Darndest Things About Classic Video Games...also check out the original.

• Pluto's namesake was Roman mythology's ruler of the underworld -- seemingly an apt inspiration for a locomotive-size missile that would travel at near-treetop level at three times the speed of sound, tossing out hydrogen bombs as it roared overhead. Pluto's designers calculated that its shock wave alone might kill people on the ground. Then there was the problem of fallout. In addition to gamma and neutron radiation from the unshielded reactor, Pluto's nuclear ramjet would spew fission fragments out in its exhaust as it flew by. (One enterprising weaponeer had a plan to turn an obvious peace-time liability into a wartime asset: he suggested flying the radioactive rocket back and forth over the Soviet Union after it had dropped its bombs.)

• Artsy Nudes by Maria Gracia Subercaseaux.
• Way old but still amusing, sexy, sexy Bill Gates
• Worst Game Ever.
• Matt "Simpsons" Groening did some cool work for Apple.
• How to make banal thriftstore art cool.

Quote of the Moment

A quote he loved especially--and carried around with him--was from Mary Lou Kownacki: 'There isn't anyone you couldn't love once you've heard their story.' There were many times I wanted to be angry at someone, and Fred would say, 'But I wonder what was going on in that person's day.' His capacity for understanding always amazed me.

I love that "heard their story quote, and I think Mr. Roger's additional thought is very worthwhile...if someone's a jerk in traffic, I scream and yell 'cause I like screaming and yelling, but if I get right down to it I assume they're rushing their pregnant wife to the hospital or something.

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Machinery of the Moment
Hmmm...I could get a nice small car, or how about one of these instead? I don't think parking would be a big problem. Here's the guy who makes 'em.

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Funny of the Moment
Fargo of gamespy.com sets up a 'bot to automatically play the online Star Wars game. Hilarity ensues. (In case you're not a gammer, the 'Bots excuse of "Lag" is claiming that his internet connection is lagging.)

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Summary of the Moment
Slate presents the highlights from Clinton's new book....man, I love these. They read so you don't have to! Toy of the Moment
click to run

binclock
Mo's sysadmin buddy Steve has a vast array of ancient computer equipment, including a PDP-11 front panel, rejiggered to count in binary. I found the effect kind of interesting and a bit hypnotizing. I'd love to try to make something like it in hardware (LEDs and circuits) but I'm a software guy, so here it is in Java(script). (original source)

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Technology of the Moment
Technology marches on...Urinal based video games have finally arrived. Thank goodness.

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Art of the Moment
Ross linked to an article about the The Fremont Troll, a pretty cool and large under-bridge sculpture in Seattle, Washington.

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Stupid News Joke of the Moment
CNN reports that
Al Qaeda suspect declared 'enemy combatant'
...I'd say more like an 'enemy con mullet'! Yow!
So, I'm trying to learn how to write games for the Atari 2600...it's very very tricky! I'd like to port JoustPong. A great result if I manage to pull it off though.

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Quote of the Moment

Mass genocide is the most exhausting activity one can engage in, next to soccer.

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Link of the Moment
Sarah pointed out these old ads rescued from the dying medium of microfilm (what newspapers used to use). If you just want a few links because you're in a hurry: Sarah liked this wartime ad, I liked the one for Oshkosh B'gosh and this fridge ad is very evocative.

Ah, just realize this is the same site that brings us the infamous Institute of Official Cheer, with its art of Art Frahm and the Gallery of Regrettable Food. This evening is the combined bachelor/bachelorette party for me and Mo. Guess this wedding thing is really looming up on us, hard to think about how long it's been in the distance, and now it's practically here.

Toy of the Moment
Remember Pat the Bunny? Well, for the rough and ready information age, it's Poke the Bunny! Oddly satisfying (especially with the little thunk noise it makes) but be careful though, a bunny can only stands so much pokin'.

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Quote of the Moment

Why do we like sports or movies? It's just incredible that a trillion-synapse computer could actually spend Saturday afternoon watching a football game. It's a colossal phenomenon that needs to be explained, and I'm not joking.