❮❮prevnext❯❯

A thread on Palindrome's mentioned Weird Al's "Bob" but I was more taken by the visual in this:

I do love the American Traditional tattoo style and this video had a lot of fun with it. This risks sounding like a humblebrag (at least to anyone living with a cat that prefers to keep distance) but I legit wonder why Dean just doesn't hold a grudge about the many pills and meds Melissa and I have to ply him with.

He clearly doesn't LIKE any of it, and will slink away and hide a little when he reads we're getting ready to dose him, and then meow complainingly once or twice when we grab him anyway (but mercifully, not really fight.) But then, 10-20 minutes later - even after the insult of a chemo pill popper he's as cuddly as ever.

Hopefully the simpler answers - he likes us, and likes snuggling - is enough, that I shouldn't be so amazed at his ability to compartmentalize a bit, and it's not like "if I get closer maybe they'll stop this abuse" or anything. (Or maybe the other simple answer... he's not ALL that bright of a cat :-)

Ha... actually his appetite stimulant, Mirtazapine, is also an anti-depressant. Maybe that helps :-D

I mean no need to overthink it now, though understanding it now would maybe help understanding and planning if something changed... Just harvesting some musings on religion on FB, in response to a Karen Knickerbocker Pennington post "Fill in the blank, Truth is ____". It was mostly geared at fellow Christians I think.

My main answer was "Truth is only-guessable", asked to explicate I said:

well, frankly, for people who are blessed with faith, it's probably not a sentiment they will agree with 😃 but as a teen I looked at the huge variety of beliefs across the world about what The Truth is, and realized my own belief was suspiciously similar to that of those around me - I believed things as a sweet talking son of a preacher man (and woman!) that I wouldn't believe had I been the sweet taking son of an Imam, say, and vice versa. So, I guess I'm suspicious of any way of knowing the truth that relies on special revelation. To that extent the universal + egalitarian message of Salvationism has stuck with me... and also the idea that there must by definition be the most accurate view of The Truth - but no one should be certain they've reached it, hence the guessability aspect.

(FWIW, this is about The Truth, as in a set of principles and values we should hold, vs the more mundane truth which is a description of the world as it is. To which I hold to science, with its built-in doubt and refusal to forever embrace any particular belief as forever true - just the most likely until another theory comes along that seems to be more likely. But "you can't get ought from is", i.e. you can't necessarily get to what the material world ought to be even with a very accurate view of what the material world is, and so science is not the same as a moral faith. Philosophy gets closer, but the uncertainty remains. And as people are tempted to argue for one faith vs another by some shared universal principles, I find it more expedient to look to those shared universal principles which to my mind are a more likely guess about The Truth. But I live with the uncertainty in a way that people of faith don't.)

But also my view is different from folks who go "well, everyone can have their own Truth, then". Sometimes I jokingly say I have an unshakable belief in the Point of View from God's Throne- a view to which humans can only aspire to and never fully claim - and/but am much less certain if there is a divine posterior in that chair.

---

I believe that by definition there IS an absolute truth, but I also believe that we cannot be certain that our belief is the most accurate view of it.
To get a little less high falutin', the question I asked as a teen is "well why doesn't EVERYONE believe the same thing?" In a God with omnipotence, omniscience, and omnilove-ance (whatever the word is), why would he let some people be so deluded? If it's the work of the devil and/or human free will, but God knew all that was going down ahead of time, why did He still let it happen? The whole "theodicy" issue (oops, so much for not getting high-falutin' sounding)
But you know, God claims His ways could be above ours in a way we can't fathom (Isaiah 55:8-9) but we'd still be relying on this for our human sense of justice and instruction. And the problem I had as a teen might not be as much of a problem if you accept a kind of multiple paths interpretation - if you're more liberally John 14:2 (many mansions) and less strictly John 14:6 (no way to the Father except through Me)
So it is at risk at second guessing God... as a human, I can't say it's NOT Truth based justice to let so many millions of well meaning muslims, say, or hindus - be so deluded, but as a punk teen I had to say, it didn't seem *likely* that a singular yet universally applied truth would be given to one group but withheld from the others

And asked if I believe there are any absolute truths we can count on:

So one thing about me is, because of a near-pathology of "I can't risk be a bearer of false witness", I am weirdly squirrely even about basic facts sometimes. I might have just seen the keys on the table, and if a friend asks me "where are the keys?" I will say "I think they are on the table" - not that they are, because maybe I'm remembering wrong, or maybe something else moved them... but I CAN confidently say I THINK they are on the table
But even basic mathematical truths, say, are context-dependent. Up above I jokingly pointed out that 2 + 2 = 11 in Base 3. (I mean 2 + 2 is still 4, but sometimes math nerds like that might use a different symbol for it) or the angles of a triangle add up to 180, right? True - but ONLY if you're on a flat plane. For geometry on a sphere, the math is different, and even a fundamental truth like triangle angles = 180 is contingent, not universal in every circumstance.
So to the extent we are probably arguing about cosmic and religious truths - more deeply than any particular description of what was going, I drank the idea that it should be universally true for everyone. The number of people believing something else entirely really demands some kind of explanation. I mean even if 180 degree triangles is true for me and everyone around me, all these people - presumably of good will? who are telling me, no, the numbers add up to something else... yet both sides insisting "no, this is UNIVERSALLY true, the truest true that ever trued"... well that ended up accidentally making my faith kind of brittle. And when combined with a few other adolescent observations of teenage behaviors (the slightly clockwork way that the first sunday altar call at Star Lake Musicamp was a bit of a dud, but the closing sunday was always vibrant small ministry stuff... and the way some of my peers were less nerdy, sunday-school straight and narrowers than I was despite my doubts) I leaned away from religion in general. Maybe I'm the poorer for it, but like I mentioned above, I take Truth maybe a bit too seriously - I would rather live with measured uncertainty and a sense of "best guess" than to be confidently at risk of being Wrong.

Another thread:

---

I do hang a little bit with the Unitarian Universalists - and they lean heavily into respecting the multi-path view of the Divine and the various traditions that try to get people there (at least with the new England flavor, I've heard elsewhere in the country they're more just like conventional Episcopalians)
But of course, that radical acceptance of superficially incompatible beliefs goes well beyond what I think is considered acceptable in mainstream Evangelical Christianity. In my understanding of that point of view, Muslims and Hindus, say, are completely out to lunch Truth-wise - woefully deceived and needing to reject their religion/upbringing if they are going to find Salvation. That's a big ask!
(And similar to having to explain why a God with perfect and total love, power, and foresight (including how humanity would use its freewill) let so many other religions spread, He would seem to have gone out of his way to deceive well-meaning scientists, or permit the devil to plant a lot of fakely-aged fossils and set up a lot of old-looking light for astronomers to observe, etc.)
Of course, a less literal reading of Christianity could accept things more poetically, and even accept some all-too-human arbitrariness and contingency in the Bible! But I grew up with people who leaned heavily into the inerrancy (and often the literalness) of the Bible. My take is it's an issue of "where to draw the line", that if you start to loosen that sense of being uniquely True and protected by God, it's the camel's nose in the tent for willy-nilly belief, since even before that mainstream Christianity has rejected the legitimacy of normal human standards for evaluating religious factual and moral Truth. (Abraham was good and noble for taking Isaac up and being willing to ritualistically sacrifice him, for example)
The richest book I read on the subject was Karen Armstrong's "The Case for God" - highly recommended. One eye-opener was her outlining how many traditions Christianity has drawn from and engulfed. (This would include mythological types like sons of god, and even diving sacrifice for human redemption, things that many Christians seem to assume would be unique to their belief system, though I guess the charitable view would be less "Christianity cribbed from this older belief" and more the older belief had a very blurry idea of the Truth that would later be seen through cleaner glasses.) It also explained how in the 1600s-1700s Christianity kind of hitched its wagon to science; at a time before Newton explaining gravity and Darwin seeing how speciation was likely occurring, a Divine Watchmaker was actually a pretty solid theory, and that led rise to a form of belief of all things Biblical simply, factually true - but modern believers (like my youthful self) don't realize that before that, maybe scripture wasn't expected to be simply literally true (in fact reducing God to something a specific factually true account might be a form of idolatry, and you end up worshipping the story, and not God proper). But anyway, as science began to come up with more likely true explanations about how planets formed, and when, and how species split off, a strong form of mainline Protestantism doubled down, and started rejecting facts science was saying were most likely true in favor of other facts more compatible with a literal reading of the Bible. (e.g. young earth Creationism)
Anyway, my mom Betty Israel mentioned she has been appreciating this thread. She's a retired major in The Salvation Army. For at least a decade I was too nervous about offending her, and afeared of her judgement of my non-church-going to broach these topics. And I mean we have since then discussed things a bit, but this thread has been a particularly rich chance to explain where I've landed, which while seemingly pretty far afield from where she's at, at least she respects my process and appreciates some of the thoughtfulness, so thanks for that.

In response to "Truth is Immutable"...

So adopting a Christian perspective... don't you find God has presented himself very differently? Even within the OT, he has aspects of a God who walks among us like in the Garden of Eden, to someone who despite being cosmically all powerful can't defeat folks with chariots of iron (Judges 1:19), and then of course in the coming and sacrifice of Jesus, there is a big change before and after! So even if you believe that represents that eternal Truth, I would say a lot of mutability in how it is presented to humans! ( this article puts things pretty well)
I know believers, especially conservative ones, are wary of people being too free in what they believe God to be, especially suspicious of people who might wish to lower the barriers of "probably sanctioned by God" to include that which traditional belief has regarded as Sin. But I think to see it all as immutable is a tragic diminishing of what God is.

(or even better, Genesis 18:16-33 which presents a God that can be reasoned with! Though the Book of Job has some things to say on that i guess 😃 )

---

When I was about 11, my father was listening to NPR in the car and I was the captive audience in the back seat with no choice but to listen. It was some gardening and/or food themed show and the host was talking about how carrots grown in the winter produce more sugar. This is an evolutionary tactic on the carrot's part to survive harsh conditions. And that was when this man dropped the most banger line I've ever heard. "When you bite into a carrot and it tastes sweet, that's the carrot saying 'I don't want to die.'" I was floored, changed as a person forever. This line haunts me. The poetry. The emotion. NPR made me the sappy garden idiot I am today, romanticizing senescence and over analyzing the science behind vegetables.

(admittedly this could be mis-spun as a somewhat anti-vegan concept...)

---

Elsewhere, workers labor daily to extract gold that lies more than two miles underground [...] If you think that such depths are startling, consider the sheer number of holes humans dig. One estimate suggests that for every person alive, there may exist 21 feet of borehole hollowed out in pursuit of geothermal energy, and natural gas, oil, and other hydrocarbons. Even as human toil compiles new kinds of useful metals and crystals aboveground, it creates airy space where raw resources were once bestrewn below.

A long while ago I thought about the Paul Simon line "Too many people on the bus from the airport / Too many holes in the crust of the earth", and while I'm wary of analysis that says "it's too many people!" and not more about how shared resources are being exploited and used, it seems a foresightful line- that was way I heard about fracking causing earthquakes in otherwise stable areas and putting drinking water at risk.

---

Power, power, power! Up here where the world was like a toy beneath me. Where I held the stick like my cock in my hand and there was no one...to say me no!

via Steven Levy's "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution". I thought of this when Tom posted an image from an anti-mask rally with the comment "They’re doing a no-mask protest in Colorado Springs today. This is the level of sophistication. The woman has “No” crossed out." I love how the summaries from these vintage Star Trek Trading Cards all sound a bit off, like they're written by a neural net or something.

And then the fun for fans is trying to figure out the episode! flexible beyond belief:

---

The Wii is now as old as the Nintendo 64 was when the Wii was first released Happy 1.5 Billion Seconds Unix!!!!! (In this time zone, that's Thursday July 13, 2017 22:40:00 (pm) ) You can find out similar stuff about yourself at TimeToy

---

This, here," Rat said, indicating another giant piece of wooden furniture, "is a free-standing Fluchtzbesser turntable. Inside that wooden cabinet is an eleven-hundred-pound piece of granite. Yes, sir, this is about the finest hi-fi ever assembled in the city of Baconburg."
"And it only has the one speaker?" Winston Bongo asked. Rat gave Winston a sideways look.
"Stereo is for sissies," she said.

---

So for crimes, first degree is the most severe, but for burns, it's the least severe.

Sigh, language.

---

Should be a great August for Boston traffic So-so month for new music last month.

• Our Glorious Leader (Japanese Trump Commercial Theme) (Mike Diva) MUST SEE VIDEO.... Trump as the cutest, most anime apocalyptic force ever! You'll be glad it's the end of the world.
• Ghostbusters (I'm Not Afraid) (Fall Out Boy / feat. Missy Elliott) Somewhat gratuitous remake, but I like the Missy Elliott break, and the drums ain't bad. (Also a song School of Honk does)
• Motherf***er Got F***ed Up (Folk Uke) via "Orange is the New Black" - coasts on the juxtaposition of street talk and sweet ukes, but good in both.
• Froggy Went a Courtin' (Informal Rehearsal) (Elvis Presley) Elvis really cracks himself up on this...
• Your Feet's Too Big (Fats Waller) "Say, up in Harlem, at a table for two- There were four of us - me, your big feet, and you -- from your ankle up, I'll say you sure are sweet...from that down there's just too much feet - Yasss, your feets too big..."
• Bauchtanz (Beckmann, Djorkaeff & Beatzarre) / Macho Man (Santipe) Ok- so "New Girl" had a cheesy middle eastern themed wedding with groomsmen doing a 'hoverboard' choreographed number to a song called "Magic Carpet" that from an obscure German/Turkish movie "Macho Men", and I had to buy the whole soundtrack. "Bauchtanz" (local copy) was cooler than the song I was hunting for, and "Macho Men" is swagger stupid but fun - I like the second guy coming in with a calm "clickety click BOOM"
• i (Kendrick Lamar) (song starts around 0:44) Heard this at Liberty Hotel lounge, nice beat and sonic space, decent message.
• Mexican Hat Dance (Allan Sherman) Cornball! I guess potentially racist, but not really.
• Stadium Pow Wow (feat. Black Bear) (A Tribe Called Red) Native American blend.
• So Beautiful or So What (Paul Simon) I've missed the last few Paul Simon albums. I like the message embedded in the title / refrain - two ways of looking at the world
• Do Watcha Wanna (Extra Crispy Brass Band) A piece I play in School of Honk that I wanted to hear more of.
• Changes (Langhorne Slim & The Law) Sweet song.

---

61 glimpses of the future, starting in the Far East.

---

I'm not a very privacy-minded guy, but Waze kind of freaked me out the other day - I was used to it "helpfully" asking "Are you on your way [Home]?" (after I registered more or less my home address with it") at random times I thought maybe there was some heuristic about home and realizing I wasn't near there. The other day it asked me "Are you on your way to [Stony Brook]?" - where we have our regular band practice at that time... Now, I entered Stony Brook as a favorite just for that purpose, but man... that moves Waze from "take a guess" heuristics to low-key stalker.

It was the month of June, the morning sun was emerging from the clouds, and Alain was walking slowly down a Paris street. He observed the young girls, who--every one of them--showed her naked navel between trousers belted very low and a T-shirt cut very short. He was captivated; captivated and even disturbed: It was if their seductive power no longer resided in their thighs, their buttocks, or their breasts, but in that small round hole located in the center of the body.

---

I remember Veronika​ thinking that the drinking fountains at our high school were kind of weird and gross, and it's funny, and maybe not a great thing, that culturally we kind of came around to that way of thinking...

I'd like to think that had I known the truth, I might have been a kinder, more loving person. If only we knew the Truth, mightn't we all?

---

[The great spirits of the modern age] were like inventors who, having discovered electricity, knew nothing about insulation.

---

New idea for next World Cup: if still scoreless after the extra two quarter hours, match decided by foozpong.

---

love blender
Miller tweeted me this article about the tumblr rrrrrrrrrroll-- they have a theme and they're stickin' with it!

---

http://www.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeedpolitics/what-your-social-web-use-says-about-your-politics - Politics and the Social Web

---

But we don't worry much about the ethics of the spark plug, the piston, the fuel injector, or the gasoline. Does the engine have a moral imperative to explode distilled hydrocarbons? Does it do violence on them? Does it instead express ardor, the loving heat of friendship or passion?

--So watching this reminds me of the distance between my mild "pseudo-dyslexia" and the real thing. (Mine is weirdly phonetic and based on "mouth shapes") Still an interesting attempt at helping the problem, though light on quantifying how effective the font actually is.

---

A triangle which has an angle of 135 degrees is called an obscene triangle.

--Detail from this brilliant work about the creative process, from the web comic subnormality...

---

---

---

---

Thought for the day: it just occurred to me how incredibly ironic it is that, when the Pledge of Allegiance was changed in 1954, they actually put 'under God' in between the words one nation and indivisible.

---

Note to future self: again, a param tag name="wmode" value="transparent" helps embedded Flash rest comfortably BEHIND div popups.

---

A little irritated HTML5 ditches framesets -seemed like great solution for keeping an index visible during browsing, what to use instead?

---

#RedSox fans should tip their cap, for George Steinbrenner gave excellent villain, and helped make for a whale of a rivalry.

--Oh good GOSH is that brilliant... their youtube page shows that this is a whole series... what a fantastic way of pointing out the silliness of the low rent rhetoric that DC and the news networks are swamped with.

---

Note to future self: squirt of windex, light scrub with steel wool, wipe with paper towel is a decent way of removing old parking permit.

---

http://www.macrumors.com/2009/07/13/apple-touchscreen-netbook-to-launch-in-october-at-800/ - Apple touchscreen notebook rumors. Wonder if it will be doodle-able (unlike the iPhone) Here are some cropped screenshots from Wii Fit, and the accompanying text:

This is how a person looks when they stand with more weight on their right leg.		This illustration shows what a person looks like when they're standing correctly.

I learned my lesson -- bad posture is sexier than good!

---

Other states make MA look wussy, in terms of allowing the metal bit so you don't have to keep squeezing the damn gas pump handle.

---

"Not all men are Charlie Chaplin" --MELAS- talking about how old he had kids, but what a visual! Possibly more than you wanted to know about Boston Bike Messengers. They say it's all about sex.

---

Decent optical illusion video. (I recommend hitting youtube's full screen video button.) I've seen most of these before. It's kind of funny that there are two new trends in optical illusions I don't remember seeing: careful use of color to create a sense of movement in a static imagery, and then a variation on the old after image trick (stare at this, and then look at a blank surface) where you look at colors that are already a bit like an afterimage, and the brain edits them out. A few weeks ago after posting that spinning female optical illusion I got a link from the guy who runs Mighty Optical Illusions. Seems like a very worthwhile stop if you dig that kind of thing.

---

Similar to that previous guy who put a digital camera on his cat, this is a camera peeking out of the box its being shipped in. Weirdly voyeuristic, in a business-world kind of way.

---

Some final pre-Chicago photos:
davis square twilight, 2007.06.28


airport t stop hydrant

So, yesterday I noticed an attractive beetle crawling on the window ledge at work:


click for full 600x600
I checked, and lo and behond, my Canon SD400 has a nifty "Digital Macro" feature. Once I learned to stop messing it up with additional zoom, I managed to get some decent shots. The focus isn't perfect for all of the image, but with these 2 shots (Both are heavily cropped) I managed to get the important detail.


click for full 1600x1200

The second one is resized to make good wallpaper, and both of these images have been added to my desktop wallpaper page. I think it's worth clicking to see the full version of both.

---

Hedbergism of the Moment

I was in a casino, minding my own business, and this guy came up to me and said, "You're gonna have to move. You're blocking a fire exit." As though if there was a fire, I wasn't gonna run. If you're flammable and have legs, you are never blocking a fire exit. Unless you are a table.

---

Essay and Jokes of the Moment
A longish but worthwhile essay on the jokes people in communist countries told. I remember one that I think Lena told me in college:

Stalin was walking through the park eating caviar on a bulky roll. An old frail hungry woman comes up to him "Please, Mr. Chairman, " she begins, "may I have a bit of your sandwich?" "No, get away from me, you stupid woman!"

The woman returns to her friends and tells them what happened. "Oh, I'm so happy!" she says. "Why?" they ask, "he was totally rude to you!" "But... he could have had me killed!"

For some reason it's the detail of caviar on a bulky roll that makes me remember that one. Ksenia told me another joke:

A woman sees a starving woman and her son near a zoo. She takes pity on them and gives the boy the apple that she had with her. The mother prompts her son, "well, what do you say?" The boy looks down at the apple, looks up, looks down and says "Hello, Apple!"

I posted a version of that joke in the comments to help explain my Hello, Money! greeting of newborn cash from the ATM, but I left out the poverty aspect, which, after reading the article, I realize is what made it a political joke rather than just a bit of absurd humor.

---

News Event of a Past Moment
Color me parochial but I don't think it sunk in that Mumbai is what used to be called Bombay.

Interactive Art of the Moment

click here		"Oh" // Source code // Built with Processing
		Interactive art... I was caught by the images from this Wired piece (which seem to be from this site). The work uses an idiosyncratic UI, each change in horizontal mouse pointer direction advances to the next image.

Ok, my announcement yesterday was wrongheaded and the wrong way of mentioning it. I thought it would make amusing kisrael reading, but I was wrong. I'm not sure if it would've been better to say "if I'm at a party, and people are smoking, every once in a while I'll have a solitary cigarette" which is all it amounted to, and all it will ever amount to. I think it came across as "hey, I'm taking up smoking, but in a limited way" and that's not what I'm doing. It's not meant to be a form of delayed teenage rebellion or acting out and I'm sorry to worry people who love me. So, sorry.

---

Quote of the Moment

Most people would like to be delivered from temptation but would like it to keep in touch.

---

Music of the Moment
Cool if slow-to-load computer music video. Nice and percussiony and kinetic, kind of like an animated subset of Blue Man Group.

---

More Music of the Moment
Speaking of slow music, they're up to like the third note in the 639 year playing of John Cage's "As Slow As Possible". Excellent!

So, today Brooke and I should be off to New York City to look at robot artists! Don't look for much in terms of updates....

---

Advice of the Moment

Most men dry-clean their suits too often. Except for wearing one while waging global warfare, this is by far the surest way to kill a good suit, and the quickest way to age an inexpensive one. Do not dry-clean until a suit is visibly dirty or until you can't stand the smell of cigarettes, or the fragrance of someone you want to forget.

we spent a pretty big chunka change yesterday, getting me not just a decent suit (which I needed for the upcoming funeral) but a whole mini-wardrobe of nice stuff. They really do a good job there.

I adore the light melancholy note at the end of the quote. Man, who's not shellshocked with he recent stockmarket moves? Ugh.

---

Joke of the Moment

"Ivan, do you know Einstein is coming to Odessa."
"Who is he? Is he a famous pharmacist?"
"No, he is a famous physicist. He is the author of the 'Theory of the Relativity'."
"What's that?"
"Well, how can I explain this...? You see, you have two hairs on your head. Is that a lot or a little?"
"A little."
"And now let's imagine you found the same number of hairs in your soup... "
"Can it be true? He is coming to Odessa with this stupid joke?"

---

Contest of the Moment
Ranjit's moonmilk site is having a haiku contest. Submit the best haiku (there are some strict number-of-characters restrictions as well) and moonmilk will sponser it being monogrammed on a brick at Garner State Park in Texas, heavily damaged by recent flooding. I'm thinking about losing the "...of the Moment" titles I've been using, replacing it with smaller, content-based titles. Let me know if you have an opinion one way or the other.


--from this Super-Fun-Pak Comix edition of Tom the Dancing Bug (Ruben Bolling). I wish I could get a book of nothing but Fun-Pak Comix...

---

Rockets' Red Glare

You might be missing a lot of your skin and fingers after some of the ideas I've given you, but fingers and skin only last about 80 years. Freedom... true Freedom... that lasts a lifetime.