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School of Honk on Georges Island good: have a dear friend since middle school days
better: have a dear friend since middle school days that you can have funny great conversations with
good: have a dear friend since middle school days that you can have funny great conversations with who has access to a lake house!

Now I'm old, I'm 30, and I started to realise that all those people who say they know, they actually don't know. Many of them don't know, and especially those who say that they know, don't know, because those who do know say that they don't know.

The Slate Article says this is a good principle for who to believe about COVID-y things.

Admitting to uncertainty and acknowledging things are just your best estimation are crucial. "Certain Faiths" are not trustworthy. (And the 4.7 star place or product is probably better than place with nothing but 5 star reviews.)

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I lay in bed that night, unable to sleep. Do all teachers have nights like this, in which they worry that they've metamorphosed from lovable curmudgeons into oppressors, though they're not quite sure how? I wish I could say that as I tossed and turned I was pondering what I would later come to see as the eloquence and cogency of Luna's arguments, but I was just feeling shitty.

And then two words floated into my mind: "You are."

You are.

If I've ever been tempted to shout "Eureka!" it was then. "Eureka!" is supposed to be reserved for Archimedean breakthroughs, which, alas, this did not turn out to be. I later discovered that many others had had exactly the same idea. At that moment, however, I thought I was the first. A genius, basically. The mortifying pizza party faded.

This was my idea: I'd spent my whole life saying "you are," whether I was talking to one person or fifty. When I was talking to one person, the plural verb didn't sound wrong. It just was.

Had you once been exclusively plural? And had it evolved to be singular as well, though retaining its original plural verb? Might you, in fact, be a lot like they?

The answers turned out to be yes, yes, and yes.

Interesting. A prescriptivist teacher gets called out for griping about "themselves", and realizes there's a very clear precedent for seeming singular/plural mismatch: thou/thee used to be singular, Ye/You was plural. "You" became singular, but we still say "You are" not "You is" (and then we started looking around for a universal "plural you"...)

I was thinking a bit about neutral pronouns - how they serve both as ambiguity (and a way to avoid the BS of "default male") but also for people who aren't a fit for the gender binary.

Heh, I guess there's a parallel between deciding to prefer "they/them" pronouns as a protest against being so worried about specific pronouns in the first place, and thinking about skin tones in hands and face emoji... if canary yellow is a good "race-neutral" color or if, like the cartoon Simpsons, it codes as white and so isn't good for a default. (And if a coworker with a darker complexion does a thumbs up that matches their skin, is it ok to just +1 that, even when it's not your tone? Like that seems less awkward than a separate thumbs up that matches your own paler skin. Probably better to switch to the checkmark or "+1" icon in that case.)

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When Sir Walter Raleigh was tried for treason in 1603, the prosecutor uttered the worst insult he could think of: "I *thou* thee, thou traitor."

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(Excellent point about Jesus and the money lenders...)

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Thoughts on work:
I should start recasting "paying closer attention in meetings" as a form of meditation. It's way too easy to try and multitask - and because my general form of taking in information is based on skimming and getting the gist, I can usually get by ok - but I think more focus might be a better quality form of life.

Tangentially related to that: music. I like to listen to my new music playlist as often as I can during a work-month, but to be honest when it's time to hunker down I get better results with my "psyched!" list, energetic/inspiring music that I've listened enough to that it's very familiar. So I should probably listen to that more... but it always feels like a horse putting blinders on, losing the opportunity to get more familiar with the new stuff... It's simplistic to the point of goofiness, but the smartphone game aquapark.io has a beautiful kinetic quality....

The slip-slideiness is pleasant enough, but then the "soar off the side, then catch up on a lower piece of the track" is kind of fantastic in a dreamlike way. (and reminiscent of certain shortcuts in Rainbow Road in Mario Kart) I paid $2 or $3 for the ad-free version, and it's great to just try a level and see "can I soar-shortcut my way to victory or no?" in a bitesize way.

It's a little weird that they have fake-y multiplayer, but they're all computer players a handful of which will always be on your tail no matter how "clever" your shortcut.

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The AI Weirdness Book - I am flat-out amazed at the "AI weirdness blog" - applying neural net stuff in a way that sometimes gets so deep (in terms of seeming to understand language in order to generate more examples of stuff in a group, like ice cream flavors or pickup lines) that it feels fake, but I'm pretty sure it's legit. Anyway Janelle Shane is making a book, and she says the preorders are the best way of signaling excitement, so consider ordering a copy if so inclined!

According to Mario Pei, more than half of all words adopted into English from Latin now have meanings quite different from the original ones. A word that shows just how wide-ranging these changes can be is "nice", which is first recorded in 1290 with the meaning of stupid and foolish. Seventy-five years later Chaucer was using it to mean lascivious and wanton. Then at various times over the next 400 years it came to mean extravagant, elegant, strange, slothful, unmanly, luxurious, modest, slight, precise, thin, shy, discriminating, dainty, and – by 1769 – pleasant and agreeable. The meaning shifted so frequently and radically that it is now often impossible to tell in what sense it was intended, as when Jane Austen wrote to a friend, 'You scold me so much in a nice long letter ... which I have received from you.'

This feels like it justifies my descriptivist leaning that knowing latin roots can tell you interesting things (recently in "The Serve" I read how "secretary" is one privy to "secrets" which I had never noticed before) but true understanding is found by observing usage across many contexts.

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I have not stopped thinking about this Red Sox fan getting a gift - "I don't know anything, what it is. I don't LIKE it now though, I don't think that I like it because you don't film me when things are 'nice'"

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Are any of my buddies a semi-expert on phonetics and the related physiology? I noticed that many of my typos seem like they're "mouth position based" - especially the m/b swap, but those two are generally categorized very differently. Looking at the video diagrams on this app - it seems to back my belief that they are still pretty similar. (It feels like the usual "one is a stop, one is a nasal" split is thinking of "m" at the middle or end, not at the start of words)

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in response to a friend complaining about misuse of Excel at work:

I hate excel but for some people it's the duct tape for everything - leaving sticky gummy mess wherever it is applied

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Camel Racing, from the best drone photos of the year

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What Musical Conductors are doing...

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Yeah, we're dumb as fuck over here [in England]. All our words are borrowed or loaned from other cultures except "mud", "blood", "rock" and "stick", which gives you some insight into what we were doing before the Romans showed up.

I recently formalized my new favorite custom drink recipe:
ROYAL RABBIT
Ingredients:
Crown Royal Whisky (1 or 2 shots in a glass, neat).
White Rabbit Candy (2 pieces)
Instructions:
Unwrap a candy and place mouth, allowing it to soften as you drink whisky over it. Repeat for second piece.

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Is It Just Me, Or Is the World Going Crazy? Great article - maybe a little privileged, but like Jesus said, "the poor you will have with you always", so while we should always fight for economic justice we shouldn't think it's newly awful.

There's so much demonization going on. Our fellow citizen republicans are still people. Maybe misguided, maybe drinking way too deeply from this fountain of fearmongering, but people. And not even idiotic people, always.

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No one stays home and watches TV on Sunday - everyone's out playing polo!

(The title refers to putting in a scene early that makes the audience like the main character, for example saving a cat.)

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After JP Honk played Figment, I got myself framed by artist Franklin Marval

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Protestant Minster: "God loves everyone!"
Catholic Priest: "God is love."
Eastern Orthodox Presbyter: "God is who is."
Rabbi: "This is special? Who isn't who is?"

On those creepy remixes used in movie trailers

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tl;dr: how much of expertise is legit, and how much is "just" a collection of good tricks?

Last night at practice for Honk @ The Hatch Shell I played with John, a tuba-player just out of college who was trying to make a go of full time freelance career of it.

It reminded me how recently I realized that Second Line Social Aid & Pleasure Society Brass Band, despite the touring they do and the amazing way they launched "Honk!" as a cultural thing, isn't an exclusive bunch of semi-pros but is open to aspiring beginners. Admittedly it looks like they look for more woodshed practice than I've historically put in, but still, it's interesting to know that if my current beloved band ever blew up it might be an option. (And in general I've been learning that tuba players seem to be in short supply.)

So, I feel like I punch above my weight a bit, tuba-wise; I certainly don't practice enough, but I have an ok ear and over the year I've gathered a lot of bass lines and what not that I get a lot of mileage out of.

Similarly, I met with my buddy Jeff​ today, and he is using me as an amateur game design consultant; another field where I'm proud of some of the stuff I've done but also feel like a duffer. (I'm kind of chuffed that he said talking to me is kind of refreshing, in terms of my kind of Jack of All Trades approach to things like music and game making, or that there's a general vibrance I pull off, relative to a lot of the people he runs into on a daily basis.) I quoted the old TMBG lyric "There's only two songs in me and I just wrote the third" which is how I feel about my approach to game design, so often going back to the well of handrolled x/y inertia.

Finally, Melissa​ (who does UX) mentioned wanting to increase her design chops, and that (along with the work I did for JP Porchfest and some personal website refurb I've been mulling over) made me think about my own design skills. And again, I feel like I have a small bag of tricks I come back to, supplemented by some decent intuition and thoughtfulness. (I like what I came up with to fill out the back side of the JP Porchfest poster, http://jpporchfest.org/2015/downloads/JP_Porchfest_v5.pdf ) It reminded me of the infographic I'm putting here for future reference; I love seeing shortcuts like that.

So I dunno. I understand full time experts can sometimes develop ungodly skills, but it feels like a number of disciplines play by 80/20 rules, where 80% can come pretty quickly with concentrated study, and sometimes that's absolutely plenty to get the job. Maybe this is all just kind of a balm for Impostor Syndrome (Like Ian Bogost says "The solution to impostor syndrome is to accept that you are in fact a fraud and just get on with it.")

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from tumblr:

people: i can see ur bra thru ur shirt
me: o no!! now everyone can see that i, an average teen wear a bedazzled titty holder to hide the nip nops that society condemns as satanic pepperonis because it's not like we were born w them omg i'm so embarrassed :'[

Satanists protest Abortion Restrictions on religious grounds. Man, I didn't realize informed consent laws were so obnoxious. Between those and that Florida law where a doctor CAN'T talk about gun safety -- The New Conservatives. We'll force the medical profession to reflect our make believe reality.

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Doodles from a 15th century Manuscript:

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Sometimes I'm a little startled at how bad iTunes search is. It can't get to K-OS' Superstarr from "k-os superstar". Slate had an inane (and heteronormative) who should text first? fluff piece, but it used "heyyy" as a example of what "she" might write-- it made me realize it's a pretty good transcription of that "vocal fry" thing.

I have to admit, I can see the appeal of the relaxed intimacy of both vocal fry in general and "heyyy" specifically.

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This piece on the current abundance of Eliipses is pretty good, though... covers both the pros and the cons.

It's something I've been noting in my own e-writing for years... sometimes I go through phases where I try to cut back... I think writing is stronger without them... still it's probably not as distracting to other people as I fear...

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There was a big jailbreak in Pakistan too? Damn. Reminds me of games of capture-the-flag at summer camp.

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Boobs aren't fat! They're filled with mens hopes and dreams!!

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Finally getting to playing "Just Cause 2" on Xbox 360. It has fewer vehicles than Mercenaries (despite the fun Bionic Commando Arm /'Chute combo) but still is fun, and so beautiful in parts, pretty sunsets and the moon reflected on water. Enjoying it even more after I realized the main character sounds just like Triumph the Insult Comic Dog. A music-ized version of the strangest prayer you've heard in a while...

Here's the original, minus the singing.

As NASCAR fans know (and I just learned) "boogity boogity boogity boogity" is well known in the community, as the catchphrase of Darrell Waltrip... so it's not quite the random "blah blah blah" prayer ending the uninitiated might thing.
--Portrait of Alien Bill I comissioned from HARVEYJAMES... Check out the other stuff from this batch he did.

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HOW THE MIND WORKS FOR DUMMIES (by Amber M and Kirk I, 2010):

It's complicated. You wouldn't understand. THE END.

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It was to Forks that I now exiled myself-an action that I took with great horror. I detested Forks.

That's from the first few pages of Twilight, I stopped reading shortly thereafter. I mean, I'm not quite sure she knows what "exile" means... surprised they couldn't find an editor for Stephanie Meyer.

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Coffee separates us from the dead. Tea separates us from the animals.

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Ballmer and the MS Response to the iPad - He says it's Windows(TM) for the "Slates". OK, that's fair, but funnily enough, avoiding windows (no TM) is a UI strength of the iPad.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damon_Runyon - whoa -- Damon "Guys and Dolls" Runyon helped invent the Roller Derby as we know it!

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The glass spiral staircase at the Boston Apple store:

Open Photo Gallery

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Damn it I forget how much more effective and less distracting my energetic work "!psyched" playlist is that my other playlists.
--A few weeks ago I found this totally scary picture on a cardboard box for a child's scoot-around car in EB's backyard. (You can see original picture here -- it still has that Stepford-Wife-in-Training look but isn't quote so Zombie-like.)

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#failedchildrensbooktitles :
Harold and the Purple Nurple
One Scab Two Scabs Red Scab Blue Scab
Make Sauce for Ducklings

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Just got tickets for a week in Portugal in September. Because I'm an idiot, I have to figure out what to do overnight in London.

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http://www.pastemagazine.com/blogs/lists/2009/07/reasons-why-the-insane-clown-posses-2009-gathering.html -- THIRTY REASONS WHY THE INSANE CLOWN POSSE'S 2009 GATHERING OF THE JUGGALOS INFOMERCIAL IS THE GREATEST YOUTUBE CLIP EVER The other month on loveblender.com Marshall Hann (Blessed32) wrote a work called Purgatory starting

I am supine,
staring at the sky
thinking that
existence is so fragile;
We are all born
fiercely,
quietly,
determined
to find a way out
of what we'll do
for the rest of our lives
We are all
so lost,
yet still,
we can't help but sing

I picked it for the front page, quoting the final line. The author asked why I liked it so much and my answer was:

Well, fundamentally, I just love the sentiment that yeah, life is a challenge and a struggle so much of the time, but even then, there is an imperative to rejoice just the unimaginable privilege of being alive, and the added blessing of being aware of being alive, of the universe and our place in it.

Just mentioning it here because I think it's a good thing to remember, and well put here.

A little more often than usual lately I've had that "Is This All There Is?" feeling going to bed, how weird it is to be alive, how weird it is that it ain't no how permanent.

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There is always a sadness in the echoes of an emptied apartment. Took my coins in to the coinstar machine to be counted. $200! All in that plastic fishbowl-like container an order of Atomic Fireballs came in.

I guess I hadn't cashed in since moving 3 years ago, but still... considering that bowl had also been raided for bus fair and laundry, not bad.

You can avoid the 9% counting fee by taking out your money as a gift certificate, like to Amazon. So now I gotta see if I should make my backlog of reading that much bigger, or hold out 'til Christmas, or what.

Analysis of the Moment
Three somewhat related pieces, studies in "how do they do that": Slate had two similar video slideshows, the clichés of videogames and a deeper one on the 12 basic types of tv advertisements. A few days ago this comprehensive piece on the design of slot machines, from the machines themselves (I was a little shocked to realize how the "tightness" or "looseness" of slots was manipulated; I assumed it was luck of the draw) to the layout of the floors.

I kind of count myself fortunate that I feel zero draw to slots, because I've been known to get obsessive from time to time. The article mentions the skinner box aspect of it, lots of small payouts, and the promise of a tiny chance for the big payout... kind of like playing the lottery in real time. Me, I just get stressed at not winning and watching my starting money go inexorably down, and kind of bored by the machines that, while colorful and hypnotic, aren't as engrossing or interactive as the video games I grew up with.



The Ten Things Class that was the source of the slot machine study has a lot of interesting design bits, though not many are as fleshed out as the slots.

Recently I had this AIM chat with one of my coworkers:

kirkjerk: did you ever find out what to bill this under?
htmlaudit: Nope. No clue....
kirkjerk: Jim says it's the last one, the 2006 one
htmlaudit: Ok, you might want to ask LateAdopter. :-)
kirkjerk: sweet jimminy damn it

"htmlaudit" realized that I was once again mixing his online handle with "lateadopter". Now, to normal people, these nicks are nothing alike, but to my shadow-dyslexia, or shadow-synthaesia , or whatever it is, they're extremely similar, compound phrase-words, both with the first word having strong "l" and "t" sounds and the second word starting with "a" "d" and "t" in rapid succession.

Am I crazy? I think the AIM client I use can alias people's nicknames to more recongnizable ones, I should look into that.

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Science of the Moment

This whole business of putting color to noise comes from scientists who want to show that the frequency spectrum is not flat. They developed a color-coded scheme based on the exponent of the inverse of the frquency. Brown is represented by 1/f². It's common in nature. Temperature flucuations in a city can look like brown noise over time. It sounds softer than white or pink noise. Pink has an octave quality, and the ear hears it as white.

I had actually grabbed this to kisrael from the print version of the magazine before boingboing picked up on it, but wanted to wait 'til the online version was up. Virtual Synthaesia! Who'da thunkit... I like "Pink has an octave quality, and the ear hears it as white." I was having connectivity issues at home...almost worried about getting out a kisrael today! Not that this week has been so hot anyway.

Interesting party last night, my upstairs neighbor had a "roof" party, they set up a video projector and sheet (which had little flowers on it, amusingly enough) on the roof. No railings up there or anything, so it has that electricity of risk. I think I've heard that my grandfather had a weird kind of vertigo where he would be drawn to jumping in that kind of situation. I'm free of that feeling, but still, it's cool peering over the edge.

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Six Slug Shots
Java Toy of the Moment
click to see

--A fishtank is one of my traditional thingies to build when learning a new graphical system. Usually 2D, this is actually a slight update of the one I made at the Boston School of the MFA back in 1993 or so--a very odd "C" language programming class I took there. You can change the viewpoint with the mouse and click to zoom in a bit. (The color and the zooming are the new bits...I like being able to get up close and personal with the little fish.) (Source code)

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Funny of the Moment

Researchers recently said that the chimpanzee, hunted for meat and threatened by deforestation, could be extinct in 50 years. What do you think?
"They're being hunted for meat? Are chimp fajitas any good?"

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Politics of the Moment
Slightly more interesting than I would have guessed, one of my former coworkers is a DNC blogger, at Centrist Coalition's blog. Looks like a group effort.

Mmmm...centrism. I think the CC's take may be that Fiscal conservatist, Socially liberal viewpoint that got Weld into office as governor. In its extreme form, it's kind of a Libertarian Lite, but still.

Brooke, Mo and I took photos in the playground across the street the other day. I think that this one was my favorite. I got the chance to use a manual camera for the first time like ever almost.

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Politics of the Moment
I was really angry at the instant backlash against the PAM, or Policy Analysis Market. The basic idea was making a "stock market" for predicting global events--these kinds of markets have a surprisingly great track record at collective foresight. (Heh, it's straight outta the scifi book "Shockwave Rider".) The thoughtless squashing of it by squeamish, mealy-mouth senators really struck me as the foulest case of "Political Correctness" (in a literal sense!) I had ever seen.

Slate.com had some decent pieces on it. This overview points out some possible limitations that PAM would have (because terrorists aren't rational actors as we understand the term), an article on how the principle of dumb market participants works, and then some places where you can see it in action.

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Game of the Moment
This page has been a little light in the fun goofy link department lately, so here's an odd little game, Chokin Chikin. Some British game developers take on the Red Neck USA south, and this pachinko-like game is the result. News of the Moment
U.S. Exploring Baghdad Strike as Iraq Option. For a second, it almost sounded like a good idea. And I have to admit, I've underestimated our military capabilities in the past...but still, attacking right on the most heavily defended parts of Iraq? And in the cities? I think our record has been more so-so when it comes to urban warfare. And it still begs the question, should we be doing this? Do we have the "right", and is it even in our best interests?

While I'm on the Bush griping...NPR had a brief commentary by Matt Miller on Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill (unfortunately I'm not sure if there's a link to just that segment alone.) It seems like O'Neill was an outstanding and upright CEO, especially compared to Bush and Chaney...he went to the struggling aluminum company Alcoa and increased its stock price 8 times over with a huge commitment to worker safety and enhancing real value, taking a below-median salary and stock, so his fate was tied to the company, and telling his finance officers that he need to be and to be seen as above-board all the way. Anyway, he had what sounds like a brilliant plan for corporate reform, establish a formal "scale of 1-to-5" ranking of accounting quality, and make any given company's rating well known...companies will be falling all over themselves to get the highest rating. But Bush et al. didn't like it. It seems to be that there's a parallel (or rather a contradiction) between his rejection of this idea and his support of increased testing in public schools... "is our children learning" indeed, but our companies may not be.

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Link of the Moment
Dr. Fun is the oldest web-based cartoon...I remember seeing them thumbtacked to the walls of the computer labs in the mid-90s. Kind of a decendent of the Far Side, but with the occassional pop-geek-culture-twist. That page has a selection of fan favorites, (The "Here's one..." links) or if you're in a hurry, here's my favorite from that selection. Creepy Thought of the Moment
I was watching the kind of cool Second War for Heaven flick The Prophecy (Eric Stoltz as the angel Simon, and Christopher Walken as Gabriel) and this one guy who hanged himself with the radio going (Gabriel turns him into a zombie of convenience for a bit) made me think I'd like to be buried with some kind of radio playing. With some sort of perpetual powersource, maybe a little solar panel up on the tombstone. Is that too creepy for words? I've always liked to go to sleep with a radio going, (back in my "waiting for nuclear war" days it reassured me that life was still going on) and it's probably a kind of extension of that. Some little bit of life, even though I'm dead. Maybe changing the station every day or so, since I know radio stations change their format anyway... (hate to have an eternity listening to country and western, that would just be too sad.)

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Star Wasn't
Memepool recently had some neat links about Star Wars toys, including ones that never were. Gus Lopez's prototype page had some of the coolest stuff. This yoda trading card (left) was nixed (not surprisingly, the page points out... Lucas has been pretty tight lipped about Yoda's culture, and this card makes them pretty much just mystic buddhists with big ears). Also cool was Kenner's idea for a new, post-ROTJ badguy storyline (Atha Prime setting up for a new round of the Clone Wars) and this unproduced minirig that clipped on to the front of the Millennium Falcon (Minirigs were a neat concept: smaller, more affordable toys that were vehicles that didn't appear onscreen, but look like they could have.)

I've always been interested in the "expanded universe" of Star Wars, the universe beyond what you can see in the movies: the Role-Playing Game, the Comic Books, some of the novels. Today's sniffing around found me this well-illustrated guide to new fighter ships, like this lovely "X-Ceptor" to the right, representing an "after-market" merging of an X-wing and a TIE interceptor. I love the little astromech (R2D2) sticking out of the front. (Click the image for the page with a larger version of the picture.)

And of course, previously linked is the Star Wars Technical Commentaries, close to the ultimate in geekily explaining every nugget of the extended Star-Wars-iverse.