Photos of the Month July 2023

2023.08.01

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"It makes sense that you feel that way."

2022.08.01
Melissa and I had a great week with Dylan, besides the incredible amounts of Lake-ish fun we had some great conversations, many about mental and emotional health.

One phrase he mentioned being very useful between him and his mom, so much so that it had an accompanying gesture (motioning as if it was a tattoo inscribed along the forearm) was "it makes sense that you feel that way."

I really adore that, because it is very validating with being fully endorsing-- it has a useful ambiguity of whether the confirmed "sense" is strictly objectively and rationally true, or just true within the context of the listener's mental landscape.

It clicks well with my recent observation of how "validation" is the critical thing in so many cases. Especially for negative emotions; for anger, people want to know other folks are on their side, wiling and able to recognize the same unacceptability of some aspect of the world and join in the fight against it, for sadness that the other might mourn alongside, or for almost any emotions; that other people recognize that the feeling is a sensible response, and that the initial feeler is not diminished by having that feeling, or too out of joint with the world.

This scales up to larger groups, of course: the majority of political ads are exercises in fomenting righteous outrage, because mere negative judgement might not be enough to open the purse strings or inspire other action. (This constant sense of helpless outrage gets tiring. No wonder some people are so drawn by promises of people who claim they can fix things.)

Importantly, I also think that the demand for validation scales *down* as well; I'm a big believer in "parts"-type therapeutic models, the ones that point out we are not the consistent, monolithic beings our consciousness tries to pretend we are. For me an emotion flares up from a singular, often non-verbal part. But then my slower, more think-y self has a moment to decide if it's going to put cognitive kindling and fuel on that emotion, or if it's going to decide that a bigger feeling doesn't serve the greater me, and let the emotion die out.

(This flame metaphor may not resonate for everyone, but I see it as useful in modeling other folks, even folks living more intuitively and not as "unemotionally" as I can appear to be going. Like Dylan mentioned he might have a feeling smoldering underground, causing irritation and then flaring up after a few days. Or other people seem to have a semi-constant large flames just barely contained. Or with fear-anxiety, fire fighting is a recurring struggle. But, it makes sense that they feel that way.)


Daddy, swing... take it easy.

August 1, 2021

2021.08.01
The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless, and hot.
Natalie Babbitt, Tuck Everlasting

The ownership of land is an odd thing when you come to think of it. How deep, after all, can it go? If a person owns a piece of land, does he own it all the way down, in ever narrowing dimensions, till it meets all other pieces at the center of the earth? Or does ownership consist only of a thin crust under which the friendly worms have never heard of trespassing?
Natalie Babbitt, Tuck Everlasting
Another good line: "At this the toad stirred and blinked. It gave a heave of muscles and plopped its heavy mudball of a body a few inches farther away from her." I love that "heavy mudball" description.
A retelling of the tale of the fools at Hobby Lobby in the style of Epic of Gilfamesh

Went to the Andres Institute of Art and its Sculpture Park / trails with Melissa Liz and Ariana, up in Brookline NH. Kind of a neat blend of scenic hiking and art.

Best Photos of the Month - July 2020

2020.08.01

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Russian (and some other) cursives. So weird that so many languages with perfectly reasonable block letters evolve a high-falutin'/faster version. A weird elitism to it I guess? Like if you're just barely literate, stick with writing the same characters you read in print, but if you are privileged enough to have a life among words, and to have reason to write words down, you want a higher speed method.

I missed a school year of drilling in cursive, so my meh-handwriting was even worse in cursive, and for folks like me it's a big relief to student and teacher alike when we're "allowed" to go back to printing.

I can't say I think it's that important, and pretty much all the time I spent on cursive would have been better spent on keyboard skills. (Psychomotor skill building not withstanding. Maybe just playing a lot of videogames doesn't quite make up for that.)
Heh, though I guess people have to decide their signature... or as this tweet puts it:
Signatures are so weird. It's like, okay you have to believe it's really me because I used cursive.

A little bit more known about Umbrella Man, the white supremacist asshole breaking windows at an AutoZone early in the George Floyd protests, working to turn them into riots. Uh, at least he's not that one cop guy? (Assuming this is a legit lead.)

rabbit rabbit rabbit

2019.08.01
I've been starting off months with "rabbit rabbit rabbit" for a while, though the other day for the first time I learned about "i hate rabbits" as something to say when you're sitting around a smokey fire and the smoke starts blowing towards you...
Arguing with a friend about Trans rights, I sought out this half-remembered passage, from AI research Marvin Minsky:
It's not so bad to start with "Birds can fly." and later change it into "birds can fly, unless they are penguins or ostriches". But if you continue to seek perfection, your rules will turn into monstrosities:

Birds can fly, unless they are penguins or ostriches, or if they happen to be dead, or have broken wings, or are confined to cages, or have their feet stuck in cement, or have undergone experiences so dreadful, as to render them incapable of flight.

Unless we treat exceptions separately, they'll wreck all the generalizations we may try to make.

We almost never find rules that have no exceptions- except in certain special artificial worlds that we ourselves create by making up their rules and regulations to begin with. Artificial realms like mathematics and theology are built from the start to be devoid of interesting inconsistency. But we must be careful not to mistake our own inventions for natural phenomena we have discovered. To insist on perfect laws in real life is to risk not finding any laws at all.
The fight against Trans rights, the fight against taking their word for who folks are heart and soul in favor of easy definitions based on what's in their pants, yearns to make the kind of simplifications Minsky is warning us against.

August 1, 2018

2018.08.01

via @mousefountain
Tsundoku: The art of buying books and never reading them. Glad to know there's a word for that pile on my bedside table. And that one reserved bookshelf. And, virtually, on my Kindle.

Actually the other thing it reminds me of is how with some "book clubs" I'm in, everyone else seems a lot more shy of reading large things at once than I am. I'm not sure if that means everyone is so time-stressed, or if I'm just a faster reader, or if they don't have the "from time to time you just sit and read and read" culture in their background.

skullslinkies

2017.08.01

click for skullslinkies
One time, in a bit of a fugue state, I had a vision of my own mental landscape; a skull full of entwined slinky-in-a-sock like snakes, each colorful and short-lived. Each represented a subconscious process that would compete for attention and control of me as a "self".

(This model is relatively compatible with Minsky's "Society of Mind" concept.)

These thought slinkies were feeling anxious, and also frustrated by the short-livedness of their own existence, and predicting that once my normal, narrative-self reasserted itself, all their concerns about being in that state would be forgotten...

Anyway, I made skullslinkies, an animation based on this vision.
Went to a Ear/Nose/Throat doctor. For most of the summer I've had a lot of post-nasal drip, a lot of hocking, especially in the morning. The allergist did the skin tests, but nothing looked like a likely culprit. But the E/N/T doctor's suggestion- more water (with caffeinated stuff counting as anti-water, basically) and some flonase for a while seems kind of unsatisfyingly un-substantive.

He asked about how well I was sleeping. I guess the answer is, ok? It's hard to know what to compare it to, really. I'm not at the far end of the spectrum of falling asleep at inappropriate times or always feeling like total nap-needing crap, but who doesn't run a sleep deficit?

Louis CK too has a bit, especially as you get older, doctors figure there's just stuff you live with. But it's so tantalizing to think, well, maybe there's some little mystery tweak I could make and I could be tons better...

2008 photo bonus: scenes from portugal

2016.08.01
(People so inclined can see a more detailed day-by-day travelog at http://kirk.is/2009/09/29/ )


Highlights for July were a trip down to Ocean Grove New Jersey, Porchfest, a nice ladybug on the 16th, and lots of band as always... on the 17th, actually, after a pipeline rally, my tuba and I did a bit of background bass for a freestyle rap thing that I guess is a weekly event at Downtown Crossing Station.


RIP Seymour Papert, co-inventor of the "kid's" computer language Logo - "You can't think seriously about thinking without thinking about thinking about something."
The End Of The World

Quite unexpectedly, as Vasserot
The armless ambidextrian was lighting
A match between his great and second toe,
And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting
The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum
Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough
In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb
Quite unexpectedly to top blew off:

And there, there overhead, there, there hung over
Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,
There in the starless dark, the poise, the hover,
There with vast wings across the cancelled skies,
There in the sudden blackness the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing -- nothing at all.
Archibald MacLeish


I just finished Sam Harris' "Letter to a Christian Nation". It's a brief book but in a stridently and generally not too sympathetic tone... some quotes:
The same Gallup poll revealed that 53 percent of Americans are actually creationists. This means that despite a full century of scientific insights attesting to the antiquity of life and the greater antiquity of the earth, more than half of our neighbors believe that the entire cosmos was created six thousand years ago. This is, incidentally, about a thousand years after the Sumerians invented glue.
Imagine the consequences if any significant component of the U.S. government actually believed that the world was about to end and that its ending would be glorious.
The problem with such [atheist tyrants e.g. Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, and Kim Il Sung] is not that they reject the dogma of religion, but that they embrace other life-destroying myths.
If current trends continue, France will be a majority-Muslim country in twenty-five years-- and that is if immigration were to stop tomorrow.
Most of the arguments he made I'd heard before... again, his tone was a little angrier and strident than I like, though I thought his points were well argued. One point he made I hadn't thought of, or heard elsewhere: "But let us assume, for the moment, that every three-day-old human embryo has a soul worthy of our moral concern. Embryos at this stage occasionally split, becoming separate people (identical twins)." He's stating it in terms of stem-cell research, but I think the argument also has implications for Pro-Choice/Pro-Life arguing, at least the form of it- if it's not a strawman - that says there's an immortal soul created at the moment of conception. If so, what happens with twins? Of course this argument fades away if you have a less supernatural conception of soul (though the hope for immortality usually goes with that) - I think even for people who believe it's an issue for women and maybe their doctors, there's a natural preference that abortion be "safe, legal, and rare"... the potential for personhood is worthy of some consideration, but I don't think too much, lest we go slip into the catholic view where every form of birth control is suspect... we're certainly under no obligation to make sure as many potential people become actual people as possible... in fact, to some extent the opposite.

August 1, 2015

2015.08.01

August 1, 2014

2014.08.01

(iPhone 5 macro mode isn't half bad. Although the lens isn't up to my Canon's quality, the touchscreen helps...)
The performance that Inspired the new James Brown movie. I checked out the soundtrack for the new James Brown movie on iTunes, and was kind of bummed that it was the original versions, and not remixes with a modern feel - as great as the classics are, they've been available for a while. Anyway, watch this. James Brown was the showman of the century.
At my husband's grandmother's wake my MIL took my 4 or 5 year old up to see his grandmother in the casket. Everyone was hushed, listening. He paused, looking curious. "Why is there a pillow under her head?" he demanded.
My mother in law faltered. "Ummm, so she could be comfortable," she said, trying to placate him.
He looked at her incredulously and spoke to her as if she understood nothing at all. "Grandma, she's dead. How could she be comfortable? What do you mean? You could take a chain saw and cut her up and it wouldn't matter at all." Everyone was literally speechless.

http://money.cnn.com/2014/07/31/news/companies/radioshack-future/index.html Say goodbye to Radio Shack, for reals. I'll miss it; sometimes for the odd bit of obsure electronics it was pretty great. (Not to mention for my first laptop in 1991, an hard drive free 1100 FD (haha someone put that 20 year old machine on the Internet via the serial port... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bs4vvUoueOE )

Now I've now started grabbing little things like that from Amazon - that's the dark allure of Amazon Prime, stopping me from having to arrange trips out for things I can wait a day or two for.

It will be really hard to convince the next generations that the name "Radio Shack" was kind of a retro thing in the 80s and after, that it wasn't quite as out of date as the juxtaposition of "radios" and "shacks" would suggest.

Also, http://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/ for all your old RS catalog nostaligia needs... I can almost smell the weird newsprint they used.

playlist july 2013

2013.08.01
The songs I added to my regular rotation, not many this month so I kept them in the order I added them. 4-stars marked in red, interesting videos with a "!".
Gas prices don't seem so bad once you realize you're buying explosive liquid dinosaurs

New "prime the canvas" technique in art class.

the faces of divers

2012.08.01

Making the rounds, This Is How Olympic Divers Really Look While Diving
Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.
Sigmund Freud

"The Lord works in mysterious ways" is another way of saying "Thinking hurts".

A stranger with your door key explaining that I am just visiting / And I am finally seeing / Why I was the one worth leaving
The Postal Service, "The District Sleeps Alone Tonight"

http://007.lucklaboratories.com/ - if you like James Bond and/or infographics this is for you!

the living end

2011.08.01
Before long the end
Of the beginning
Begins to bend
To the beginning
Of the end you live
With some misgivings
About what you did.
Samuel Menashe....
Amber mentioned something about the "beginning of the end" middle-age wise and made me thought of this little piece I hadn't thought of in a while...
A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.

photo roundup

(2 comments)
2010.08.01

infinite moonwalk

2009.08.01

via http://iammattjordan.tumblr.com/
It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.
James Thurber

augusted

2008.08.01
So Manny is out of here...
in retrospect, his lackadaisical outlook could get annoying, but in some ways, it's nice how relaxed he could be. "It's only baseball, have a sense of perspective" was an attitude that served him and, as much as we hate to admit it, the Red Sox as well.


Photo of the Moment

--Fast Moving Bird outside the Au Bon Pain near Copley Square - wasn't expecting two catch an image like that.


I lived Slylock Fox this morning! "Man on T thinks Kirk has his stolen bag. How did Kirk prove it was his own?" [Kirk showed him the holes]
"bromance"?
Charming. Boston has a god damned first of the month expired inspection sticker patrol.
Ah the highway food court service plaza. Such a throbbing mass of humanity...

rabbit rabbit

2007.08.01
Sweet day in the morning, August already?


Quote of the Moment
Prayer does not change God, but it changes him who prays.
Soren Kierkegaard.
That's an interesting thought. Even for a skeptic it enters into the argument of the appropriateness of religious practice. (Of course that's a two-edged sword: there are certainly some mindsets where fostering dependency on action by an external agency rather than one's own effort is not a positive thing.)

Once when discussing the merits of relatively casual (though not necessarily not-heartfelt) utterance of "I Love You" EB pointed out it's not always a reminder to the hearer, but the speaker as well.


Movie Poster of the Moment
--Polish poster for the Hollywood movie "Working Girl", from this page of Polish posters from the 1940s on. Some recurring motifs, but also some interesting takes on familiar topics. Feels very dark and Cold War-y. Via Boingboing who also links to this poster shop.

where the heart wasn't

(2 comments)
2006.08.01
In general I'm a lazy guy, but when I get the idea for something that seems interesting and do-able, it almost doesn't matter how much effort it's going to take, I attack it like a pitbull. Case in point...


Project of the Moment
OK, this requires a bit of explanation. In 1990 there was a pretty nifty film callled Where The Heart Is-- unfortunately it has sort of been eclipsed by the film of the same name made a decade later.

It was an uneven film (one reviewer pointed out it would have made more sense if it had stayed set in London) but great in many ways. It's the story of 3 adult children (and some of their friends they enlist to help out) whose real-estate mogul father forces them to support themselves while living in an ugly-ish Brooklyn building they fought to save from his wrecking crew. One daughter, Chloe, is commisioned to make create and photograph a series of these lovely, large-scale trompe l'oeil works for an insurance calendar. The paintings feature a subject in body paint that causes them to match the backgrounds... it's quite a great effect. Many of the paintings seem to reference famous works, but I'm too much of a lout to get most of them.

It turns out that the artwork was actually by Timna Woollard... but information about her is very difficult to come by. I would gladly have paid for a small book or copy of the calendar, but there's nothing to be found online. (And, you know... if Google doesn't know about it it must not exist.)

The paintings are shown as a series at the end of the movie, behind the credits. But the credits are pretty distracting... so this weekend I made up a custom Java program to help me extract the background by splicing lines from frames where the text isn't. It was a lot of work.

<geekness level="severe" type="artsy">My first attempts were a simple program that let me select the sections by hand, but that was error prone, and annoying, and too much work in general. I tried a few more approaches, "averaging" the pixels over a series of frames (which, as expected, led to a big blur in the middle), an odd "voting" system where a pixel becomes the color it is the most often (left odd color sparkles all over the place, because of how I broke up the R/G/B information) until finally I made up a kind of primitive AI filter that could take a guess about whether or not a scanline currently had text on it (counting the areas of sharp contrast.) The end result still needed some hand-tweaking in picking out extra frames to import and rejecting 1 or 2 that could fool the heuristic, but it was much, much easier than what I tried to do originally.</geekness>

So here is the series, one day at a time. (Or more quickly if you enjoy hacking URLs) I think a reasonable Fair-Use argument can be made for it, or at least that no one yells at me for it. Once the series is finished I plan to make a simple app displaying the images together, with the option of embedding them in a calendar for any given year.


Art of the Moment

click for fullsize

"January" by Timna Woollard
from Where The Heart Is.



Painting Suggestion of the Moment
Stampede of Nudes

The trouble with most paintings of nudes is that there isn't enough nudity. It's usually just one woman lying there, and you're looking around going, 'Aren't there any more nudes?' This idea solves that.

What has frightened these nudes? Is it the lightning in the background? Or did one of the nudes just spook? You don't know, and this creates tension.

five six seven eight / who then do we blame for fate

2005.08.01
Quote of the Moment
Fate is what you call it when you don't know the name of the person screwing you over.
Lois on Malcolm in the Middle

act now! time is running out!

2004.08.01
click to run

timer
--A stylized 60 second timer, written in Processing. (More convenient to use than the PalmPilot version I made earlier I think, at least if you have a laptop.) One advantage over a regular timer is you don't have to wait for it to run down to reuse it... (Here's the Source...geek note: one thing I like about these toys is, so long as you don't use external graphics, they are 100% described by a single text file...)

space, the commercial frontier

(1 comment)
2003.08.01
Logo of the Moment
So I noticed that tempur-pedic mattress tv spots featured this "Certified Space Technology" logo. The logo is appealing on a few levels, the title "Certified Space Technology" is nicely clunkly-retro-future, and then the letter "C" in SPACE is very clever. I guess it's a legit program. Man, I wish I could get my webpage to be Certified Space Technology.

Poem of the Moment

A NOTE ON THE RAPTURE TO HIS TRUE LOVE

A blue bowl on the table in the dining room
fills with sunlight. From a sunlit room
I watch my neighbor's sugar maple turn
to shades of gold. It's late September. Soon...
Soon as I'm able I intend to turn
to gold myself. Somewhere I've read that soon
they'll have a formula for prime numbers
and once they do, the world's supposed to end
the way my neighbor always said it would -
in fire. I'll bet we'll all be given numbers
divisible by One and by themselves
and told to stand in line the way you would
for prime cuts at the butcher's. In the end,
maybe it's every man for himself.
Maybe it's someone hollering All Hands on
Deck! Abandon Ship! Women and Children First!
Anyway I'd like to get my hands on
you. I'd like to kiss your eyelids and make love
as if it were our last time, or the first,
or else the one and only form of love
divisible by which I yet remain myself.
Mary, folks are disappearing one by one.
They turn to gold and vanish like the leaves
of sugar maples. But we can save ourselves.
We'll pick our own salvations, one by one,
from a blue bowl full of sunlight until none is left.
Thomas Lynch, Poet and Undertaker.
I'm currently reading Lynch's wonderful collection of essays "Bodies In Motion And At Rest" (Mo pointed it out to me on the discount rack at Barnes & Noble, I think because of its interesting cover, but it was on my PalmPilot go books to get, based on hearing him on NPR.)
Lynch says this was one the only standalone success of a method he has of breaking writer's block. The method is to write a poem on 1. an inanimate object in your home 2. something you see outdoors 3. something from the daily papers 4. something from TV, possibly also pick some arbitrary poetic structure to adhere to.

thrill ride

2002.08.01
Narrative of the Moment
Buzzelli had just passed the twenty-second floor when the North Tower gave way. It was 10:28 in the morning, an hour and forty-two minutes after the attack. Buzzelli felt the building rumble, and immediately afterward heard a tremendous pounding coming at him from above, as the upper floors pancaked. Buzzelli's memory of it afterward was distinct. The pounding was rhythmic, and it intensified fast, as if a monstrous boulder was bounding down the stairwell toward his head. He reacted viscerally by diving halfway down a flight of stairs, and curling into the corner of a landing. He knew that the building was falling. Buzzelli was Catholic. He closed his eyes and prayed for his wife and unborn child. He prayed for a quick death. Because his eyes were closed, he felt rather than saw the walls crack open around him. For an instant the walls folded onto his head and arms, and he felt pressure, but then the structure disintegrated beneath him, and he thought, "I'm going," and began to fall. He kept his eyes closed. He felt the weightlessness of acceleration. The sensation reminded him of thrill rides he had enjoyed at Great Adventure, in New Jersey. He did not enjoy it now, but did not actively dislike it either. He did not actively do anything at all. He felt the wind on his face, and a sandblasting effect as he tumbled through the clouds of debris. He saw four flashes from small blows to the head, and then another really bright flash when he landed. Right after that he opened his eyes, and it was three hours later.
William Langewiesche, part 2 of The Atlantic's "Unbuilding the World Trade Center".
Buzzelli was one of the very few survivors from inside the collapse itself. Man, I've had dreams where that kind of stuff happens, the whole free fall thing. Excellent article, though I wish it had a bit more about the supporting culture that grew up that my mom told me about. The article has a very...I dunno, macho perspective in a sense, all about the engineers and the firemen and the politics of the power structure that spontaneously formed there. (But maybe that makes the better story, I dunno.)


Link of the Moment
A little bit of cyberprimitive fun with google...and a much more impressive example of the nascent art form. (via boingboing)

minimalist

2001.08.01
A minimal update today.


Joke
A baby seal walks into a club.
via John Sawers

Link
A formal study in lab practicalities entitled Electron Band Structure In Germanium, My Ass.


News
What happens when people get their understanding of genetics from religious superstition and the Monday Night Monster Movie Madness: The House votes to outlaw therapeutic cloning.



Terrence McKenna and the Heroic Doses.  Sounds like some kind of rock group.
00-8-1
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