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While driving yesterday, I thought about the idea that the atmosphere is very thin relative to the size of the planet, akin to a coat of lacquer on a billiard ball.

And while heights for what people reckon as saying "this is the atmosphere" very wildly, 99.99997% of its mass is below 62 miles (the "Kármán line"). Conversely: the earth's diameter is nearly 8000 miles, over 100 times as far.

It weirds me out a little. There is SO much more beneath you than above you! And those beautiful clouds so high up (like, 12 miles, tops) are just clumps of air stuff floating around the thin puddle of air that surrounds our planet.

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There are approximately 10 million viruses in every drop of surface seawater, but very few are infectious agents to larger animals like fish, whales, or humans. That's because almost all of the marine viruses are "phages"--viruses that specifically attack marine bacteria. Marine phages cannot carry out cellular metabolism and must therefore rely on the metabolic machinery of their bacterioplankton hosts to replicate.

You learn something new every day! though "each drop of sea water has 10 million viruses" is not one of those things I wish I knew, tbh.

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I accidentally told my friend the
sweetest pick up line ever. i started
talking about solipsism (the belief
that everything around you was
created by your mind) and I went "If
everything around me is all my
imagination, then you're the best
thing I've come up with" she was
speechless for a solid five minutes.

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Summer-Stacks.webp

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Stability is a hard sell, I'll grant you; the payoff is far away. No hominid ever thought, "If I poke this stick into a termite mound, then 50,000 generations from now my progeny will pay for five streaming services, including Peacock." They thought, "I am tired of chasing these termites all over the place when there's a veritable termite fountain over there." And suddenly, right then, they were eating the world. Humans are here for a good time, not a long time.

You know, between this particular factoid and then Southern states helping the USA lead the world in new COVID cases despite our unprecedented access to vaccines - it's hard to have a lot of American pride and not think we're a nation of dumbkofs.

I'm sorry if this is just progressive liberal snobbery that's not helping or preaching to my echo chamber choir, but damn, this needless suffering is frustrating as hell.

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On the three-hour drive I got to know my seatmate, a girl named Lydia Green Hamburger, who told me, within three minutes of meeting me, that she knew Lindsay Lohan. Lydia was different from me--she talked animatedly about school dances and lacrosse and the mall--and yet we got along handsomely. This is what camp is all about! I thought. Meeting other, slightly different kinds of white girls!

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Does anyone else set their GPS is north is always up, rather than have the map spin around your direction of travel? I write about my 3 reasons for doing that on my devblog...

The Star Trek ideal you refer to is IDIC (Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations), the cornerstone of Spock's logical Vulcan philosophy. IDIC celebrates all diversity -- color, race, appearance, age, goals, beliefs and lifestyles of all sorts -- including individual sexual preferences.

IDIC glorifies diversity -- not tolerance of diversity.

I was with Nichelle Nichols once when she was being interviewed. "I don't want to be liked in spite of the fact that I am black," she said. "I want part of the reason you like me to be because I'm black. Because that's one of the unique things about me -- one of the things that makes me specifically who I am -- one of the things that's interesting about me."

I couldn't agree more. Nichelle doesn't want people to be color blind (that kind of tolerance was the goal of 1960s integration), she wants them to enjoy it!

My friend Bob was able to dig up a scan of an editorial he was reminded me after reading some of my thoughts on "How to be an Anti-racist".

I've been thinking about how my kneejerk reservations to "diversity for its own sake". But then I compared it to my personal "what is humanity all about anyway" view - that possibly the best goal humanity can set itself to is the creation of non-trivial categorical novelty - interesting stuff that wouldn't exist in this corner of the universe if humans weren't here to make it.

I added the "non-trivial" caveat to answer my own worry that "isn't a good random number generator all the diversity we could ever need, technically?" and similarly, when thinking about "IDIC" - we shouldn't worry overmuch about people going out of their way to be diverse. People are diverse, and we honor that diversity not as a new random creation but as the current artifact reflecting a history of human lives and interactions.

(Also, appreciating diversity for its own sake is one of the few ways I know of stopping the "most common" from becoming the standard mold everything else should try to cram itself into fit.)

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Tying in today's Star Trek and some earlier talk on people teaching themselves to type: my mom and I loved the original Star Trek (I think we may even have been watching it on a B+W TV!) and we loved this one book we got Allan Asherman's The Star Trek Compendium, information about each episode of the original series. (Valuable stuff in that pre-Internet age!) One weird omission in it - it didn't have an index/table of contents to the episode! And I was SO impressed when my mom went ahead and made one - a pretty solid data management and typing feat to do without a computer Doing old blog maintenance, I ran into this Valentine's note to me, written early in the trajectory arc of a long romance:

I wonder if I love you too much. I guess when people say "too much" what they really mean is "more than you." Probably just paranoia. It's just hitting me how much you've come to mean to me in so short a time, and what it would mean to lose you.

Maybe it wasn't just paranoia. I worry I've never loved as vibrantly as other folks seem to.

I don't love people for their Nouns, who they "really are" - maybe because I can't bear witness to their inner life! I love people's Verbs - interactions that outsiders (such as me) can observe. Actions people perform in the public sphere have their bona fides of objective reality, and so I can know my feelings are rooted in truth.

But is that love of other folks, then? Or just admiration?

As a young teen, I figured out that I couldn't given free rein to my desires. Lust might lead to STDs and unwanted pregnancies. Hunger might lead to me becoming fat(ter). And worst of all: acting on unfiltered feelings - lust, anger, greed, wrath, pride, envy, gluttony - put me at risk for eternal hellfire! Yeah, God could forgive, but repeated transgressions (the verb) brought the veracity of the repentance (the noun) into question. And which of those temporary pleasures would be worth eternal punishment?

When I do try to survey my own emotional landscape, I'm appalled at how ego-driven so much of it is; my obsession of the importance of objective (yet never fully and confidently known) truths leaves me hungry for external validation - and so I like how reading books tells me I'm smart, playing in bands tells me I'm talented, playing video games tells me I'm empowered, at least in those virtual microcosms. (I don't think I'm alone in hunger, especially in folks raised as boys - not that I think girls have it better. But some of the most damning things to say about a dude is that he's a bad driver, or not funny, or not competent in bed - many men want their ego stroked as much as any of their other parts.)

So, love from other folks: am I seeking love? Or just admiration?

And to top it off - since the interpretation of objective reality is a group project, I can't put too much weight on what feelings I do find arising in me. I'm not such a martyr that I have to ignore my own preferences, but I am compelled to evaluate my behavior based on what seems good for the group - or in the case of romance, the couple - not just me.

So I dunno. Is it this complicated for everyone?

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I had a dream where - I think - people were using certain foodstuffs as power system. I woke up enough to write "the exothermic aesthetic of yellow rice and yogurt sauce"

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Quick question,
If "illegals" are lazy freeloaders just leaching off the system,
Why does ICE always raid workplaces?

There are two adults and one child. Majority rules. Live like an animal or die.

20 years ago I recorded this quote via my mom, but didn't write the context, which was the two of them reflecting on how life would change with the addition of a baby.

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The New Nancy by Olivia James is really good!

I went back and read the recent series about the charaters at Art Camp, great fun. Art-y and Camp-y.

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[pokes at puffy part of blouse] [sighs] Oh... I was hoping it was air. It's stomach.

Well, despite the bad news of neo-nazi dorks planning their upcoming "free speech" rally in our lovely city, in the meanwhile we can feast on the tears of yankee fans.

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I admit I'm getting a little FOMO with not going to full-eclipse-land. 2015 - this project is just about at its end! Just today and a "Second Best of", and then I'm caught up.

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As I get ready to head to Ireland for a work conference (silver lining to housemates: I can pre-announce this stuff without worrying about advertising an empty house), with a layover in Germany to meet some old friends, I realize they might ask me about Trump etc.

It makes me think that one current advantage of our two major party system is this: Trump's surprisingly high floor is at least partially supported by some really ugly sentiment; if the Democratic Party were to splinter, the USA would be at big risk of seeing a lot of traction in extreme right wing parties, like the more multiparty states in Europe are dealing with.

Though [Trump] built his empire out of his father's empire, he has never suffered from the sense of decorum or noblesse oblige that sometimes accompany inherited money. His style isn't even nouveau riche so much as it is last-week-lottery-winner.

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Joel on Software's Fire and Motion essay has been in my head for over a decade.

In it he describes two phenomenon: one is the trouble developers sometimes have getting the actual drudgery of coding underway, and then how unstoppable they can feel when they really get on a roll. (I've heard it likened to a giant rolling stone... tough to get started, but also capable of enormous momentum once it's under way.)

He also describes this as a deliberate strategy companies can employ, keeping the number of checkbox technologies needed so that rivals are always kept with their heads down, meeting new checkboxes, and never able to really fire back.

Sometimes it feels like the famously large mess of javascript frameworks and supporting tools has reached that point. I don't know if it's deliberate or a side-effect of a ton of people with bad cases of NIH (Not Invented Here) and premature abstraction, but it makes my professional life a lot more fraught feeling than I think it would otherwise.

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(Random other, newer article from Tal Bereznitskey: 7 lessons Soccer taught me about management)

Comparisons are odious.

Its interpretation in a zen-ish context is important to me; I find it rattling around in my head. Comparing, especially to a sense of how things should be, is a super common but only marginally useful activity for grownups. bye, alaska

Don't grieve. Anything you lose comes round
in another form. The child weaned from mother's milk
now drinks wine and honey mixed.
God's joy moves from unmarked box to unmarked box,
from cell to cell. As rainwater, down into a flowerbed.
As a rose, up from the ground.
Now it looks like a plate of rice and fish,
now a cliff covered with vines,
now a horse being saddled.
It hides within these,
till one day it cracks them open...

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Talking with Kay, I realize that seasons provide the anchor for my sense of time; 3 months ago is abstract, but "late Spring" means something.

Despite me not digging New England winter, this might make me feel better about not having to moved to San Diego or wherever; I've always given lip service to "it's good to have distinct Seasons" but maybe it's more crucial than I realized.

For the time being, the world remains its own drawing; we walk a tightrope above an abyss, and the grace of the walk does not deny the artificiality of the wire.
I now know that there is no straight line that you can draw around a circumstance to take its shape away; there are only marks, made underhand, that you erase and adjust and erase again, over and over, until the black dog barks and the afternoon is over, and you close your pad and call it life.

from Life Studies, his experience as an art critic learning to draw. He has a lot of smart things to say about drawing realistically, and the meaning of being able to capture an authentic image but still attach meaning to what is left in and out by the pencil.

I'm often tempted to seek out a drawing class, partially because of excuse to study naked people, but also just because I wish my own works weren't so doodle-ish. Still, I'm not sure if learning to draw what's before me is what I'm after, but being empowered to come up with more compelling original scenes... illustration, I guess. Like Shary Flenniken's easy lines, or the effortless grace (really, just watch a video of him doing stuff freehand) of Winsor McCay
--Peggy the One-Footed Sea Gull, who was screeching and generally hassling us last evening on the beach.

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It's a bit amusing, or possibly deflating, when you double check and find out you've pretty much written a ramble for your blog before. A lot of the links here are from searching for "confidence" on this site's search engine...

What's on my mind is my job. We're starting up with a new client, and one of the company's partners talked with the tech lead on my first gig at the company. In general I came out pretty well with that, but I guess in early days I come across as "too deferential" - and I think that is a good term for my issues with projecting the front of "can-do" confidence a consultant is supposed to have. As a consultant you're often asked to clean up a messy situation. My knee-jerk reaction is to give the people who worked on it before the benefit of the doubt, figuring I'm not THAT much smarter than them, if at all...and I have trouble with the default assumption of "this is a solvable problem", or at least, "this problem is solvable by me with the time and resources I'm likely to be granted for it.". (In January 2005 I express my general sense of "maybe this technical problem IS going to kick my ass".)

This piece from February 2006 lets me see the parallels with the consulting job I had then and the situation I'm in now. Then though, I had some more senior techies to defer to, and with my current gig I might not have that safety net.

(My boss mentioned that some of the people he's talking with to come onboard from our mutual dot-com company have often been at product companies and are eager to try a consulting role... in my heart of hearts I'm worried I'm feeling the opposite. At a company with a core product (and maybe side projects) there's a sense of "we're in this together" that a consultant doesn't have. Also, when there's a fixed technology base, you can dive deep into a smaller number of toolkits, rather than having to fake expertise in whatever fool thing is coming down the pike. (And while I do feel I'm an excellent techie, especially with the core Java/J2EE stuff, I'm having to play catch up with some of the toolkits that are emerging as possible "winners"))

Right now I don't have a ton of confidence. I'm bright, but it seems like I am slow to pick up new technologies -3 years ago I was kind of interested in what I think I actually AM good at, technology and other-wise. I also dislike setting goals, like I mentioned all the way back in November 2003. Back then I looked to some childhood examples of my resentment of goals that might not be met. Then in December 2006 I point to some early factors that might be cause or might just be fellow effect: this ridiculous ego thing - and in November 2007 I find an article describing it as par for the course for clever kids:

The result plays out in children like Jonathan, who coast through the early grades under the dangerous notion that no-effort academic achievement defines them as smart or gifted. Such children hold an implicit belief that intelligence is innate and fixed, making striving to learn seem far less important than being (or looking) smart. This belief also makes them see challenges, mistakes and even the need to exert effort as threats to their ego rather than as opportunities to improve. And it causes them to lose confidence and motivation when the work is no longer easy for them.

I also point to the death of my dad as early(ish) proof to me that sometimes the worst-scenario plays out, that things don't always get better, that situations might be as bad or worse than you think. Right now I'm not sure if this was as formative as an event as I tend to assume, or at least not formative in this way.

Other factors: like I mention in January's "25 random things" list: "A theme of my life seems to be not wanting to be responsible for something going wrong. So I'm very slow to pick up new commitments, but once I have them, I'm very committed". This might just be a variation of that other stuff, or it might be... I dunno.

Finally I wonder where my big anxiety-ish times tie into this. In April 2005 I thought Y2K anxiety might have broken something in me in the late-90s, causing me to not lose a kind of happy-go-lucky demeanor. And then I got spooked about EMF pulses, but finally I got to grip with that kind of fear by thinking and writing the content of my guide to mortality... once you accept the end, it's easier to live with what comes before (even though some lives are much more unpleasant than others.)

That last links touched on thoughts of "anxiety as addiction" (a line put forth by the "Ramtha" folks). And not to use random theories about brain chemistry to dodge personal responsibility for keeping our own heads in order, but yesterday there was a that Slate piece on 'Seeking' behavior, how studies on mice might explain why Google and Twitter, with their frequent intermittent, small and non-satiating nuggets of information might be as addictive as crack for our distraction seeking heads. Combined with my desire not to remind myself how challenging some work things are for me, there are times when it's a struggle to control that stupid, angsting cycle.

Sigh. It's difficult to remember how good I have it on the scale of human history, how luxurious my life is compared to the sweeping bulk of humanity through history. Kate made a video about the show "Being Human" that kind of rants against cubicle life. I think she misses the point, though, that work is generally a part of life. It can be defining, it doesn't have to be. Like Rob said of office work though, "It ain't heavy lifting" - us geeks should be suitably grateful for that. Yeah, I which I was rich, I think I'd be able to handle early retirement more gracefully and productively than many, and no, I'm not certain if the standard work week (plus) is the right trade off of time and money for me, given how I don't have a commitment to making a family at this point. Still, there are much worse ways to live.

Alright. Believe it or not getting this stuff out on screen helps, so thanks for putting up with it! I didn't take a lot of time to go back and edit...

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"shaping and hammering at an emotion until it becomes a thought"
--Kevin the Therapist in 2005, describing what I might be doing. Poetic for a therapist!

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Samsung: nice monitor, but a smooth, featureless "glide touch" button bar, with buttons labeled dark grey on black? Artsy, but annoying.

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http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/re-enable-hibernate-option-in-windows-vista/ - how to restore Hibernate in Vista- I find "sleep" tends to wake itself up.

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Maybe I just fixed my iPhone's ability to place calls ("call failed" errors) by calling it from a different phone?

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http://wayofthespatula.wordpress.com/ - miller is starting a new food blog! Seems very friendly, instruction-wise.

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80s Transformers- remember the rub signs? guess they woulda been kinda sorta ok, just a bit lame, if they didn't have the grey border... Reading "The Tao is Silent" has made me curious about how Taoism is practiced in the West, and I found a site The Tao Bums. This is my introductory note, though I still haven't figured out if it's a kind of place for me...

Hi there --

Reading around for a bit, I think my approach might be different than most folks on the site, so I appreciate any pointers to parts of the forum that might be more my speed...

I come from a Western pseudo-intellectual tradition... Christian upbringing with a teenage embrace of rationalism and noticing how much environment + upbringing seems to determine faith (as opposed to some kind of Universal Truth) that I embraced a kind of mushy agnosticism. (Luckily my parents, despite being protestant ministers, were fairly liberal, so the backlash didn't become a "hard core atheist" kind of anti-faith.)

I've sometimes associated with the UU church.

I find elements of many Eastern traditions more appealing than many of the West, but know that my view is very limited, reading some (I think) good books, but they view things through a Western lens, and not so much into the real practice:

Zen Buddhism has an appeal (and more on how I've found the Western philosophy that seems very much in accord with it's lack of sense of self), but I've never even engaged in a Zazen practice. I got introduced to it through "Zen Flesh, Zen Bones", and then learned a bit more through some "Zen for Dummies" book, which despite the title (which, if you squint, really is just an overly self-deprecating way of saying 'for the beginner's mind",maybe) seems to be a pretty fair introduction to the Westernized form of the practice. Also "Thank You And OK!" which is a great account of an American trying to find a place in a more ritualized and traditional community, and "The Dharma Bums" (I think recognizing the name of the forum drew me here in my Google searching.)

Taoism... sometimes I think I'm more naturally attuned to Taoism than anything else. (But I've come to learn that some of that is me being a bit of a drifter, and one who avoids challenges because my fragile ego really detests failure, and if I'm not careful, the ego will have be not play rather than risk losing.) My first exposure was "The Tao of Poo", I was very impressed by the path to the Tao that "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" found, and now I'm reading the lovely work "The Tao is Silent".

I've even found some charm in Shinto practice; I have a hunch that it might be a great choice for computer programmers, where the often opaque and surprising internals of the computer might best be treated with the same kind of ritualistic respect and deference of, say, the ancient Japanese had for wood they chopped for construction. Here my exposure is most limited, helping a friend in a Japanese studies course, and the lovely films of Miyazaki.

I'm also fascinated by Western theories of mind and consciousness and where they overlap with Eastern ideals. Dennett's "Consciousness Explained" is one of my favorite works, and it's underlying idea of a rejection of sneaking in Cartesian Dualism anywhere, and that there might "be less there, there" than we assume is profoundly Zen-ish. More recently I've taken in Hawkin's "On Intelligence", and its idea that most of what makes us conscious beings is the incredible workings of the neocortex, a magnificent, hierarchical pattern recognizer, rememberer, and prediction machine. I feel that this might be how the Tao does its work in humans, if it can be said to Do Work... that we experience the universe, we see patterns, we predict patterns, and the Uncarved Block might find its substance in that flow of observation and prediction, modeling and action.

So, as might be obvious, one reason my few attempts at Zazen and yoga-based meditation don't work so well is I get so much pleasure in the meanderings of my mind, and the joy of working things out.

That's where, and (kind of) what I am. Does this kind of dialog happen here, or are the underlying assumptions a bit too different?

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What's on Michael Phelps' iPod?

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I am increasingly disturbed by the mustache of the Pringles guy, especially as he bops around in this one disco themed commercial.

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(on using a ballpoint pen to open a box) "...you really have to love a problem in the morning where the correct answer is 'more stabbing!'"

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actual quote: "I have to get less stressed about this stuff, I'll be dead by the time I'm 30! Oh wait..."

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Laser pointers: disappointment to my inner 8-yr-old Star Trek watcher. Look! A red dot! You can amuse a cat or hang your pictures straight!

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cmgaglione re: cats and laser pointers... but wouldn't THEY rather have mice vaporizing laser BLASTERS?? Won't somebody think of the cats! You know, thanks to the way perspectives and vanishing points work, when you look down a long straight road (like, say, the Minute Man Bike Path) it always looks a bit like you're going uphill, or at least it's difficult to judge what the angle is.

Though now that I've learned that you have to regularly reinflate bike tires, it's a lot easier overall.

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Video of the Moment
Via Boingboing, a video of stoners videotaping other stoners getting investigated by security that is funnier than it should be.

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Politics of the Moment

A monarchy is like a merchantman. You get on board and ride the wind and tide in safety and elation but, by and by, you strike a reef and go down. But democracy is like a raft. You never sink, but, damn it, your feet are always in the water.

So for our 2-year date-a-versary Ksenia and I went on the Schooner "Fame", which, oddly, was immediately below my room's window at Taxware, since it launches from Pickering Wharf in Salem,but I never took advantage of it. We'd strongly recommend this trip over the regular Boston cruises... Salem is in many ways friendlier and more interesting than that part of Boston, there's something lovely about moving by windpower alone, and overall the operation is a very...well, if not "family" affair, it's a small, tight-knit-but-friendly group making up its crew. It was built 3 years ago as the reconstruction of an old privateer vessel. (Privateering is interesting... I had kind of forgotten it was essentially government-authorized piracy.)

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Indecent Proposal of the Moment
As if people in a "blue state" state of mind didn't have enough reason to dislike the red... according to CNN and businesswire, comedia Jeff Foxworthy is... well, let me quote:

In celebration of Jeff Foxworthy's "new baby," his new CMT sketch comedy television show FOXWORTHY'S BIG NIGHT OUT, CMT is awarding $50,000 for a BIG NIGHT OUT to the mother of the first baby born in America during the premiere of the show at 8:30 pm ET(a) on Friday, September 1, 2006. As part of FOXWORTHY'S BIG NIGHT OUT on CMT Baby Bounty cash giveaway, CMT will also award an additional $55,000 -- $5,000 each week -- to the mother of the first baby born in America during the premiere of the 11 subsequent new episodes of FOXWORTHY'S BIG NIGHT OUT airing Fridays at 8:30 pm ET(a) on CMT.

This mix of good-old-boy "wouldn't it be funny if..." jocularity, shameless huxturism, medically poor ideas, and desperation of the people who might really struggle to hit the deadline (or, almost as bad, couples who aim for the deadline 'all in fun') is mind-blowing.

Are their doctors willing to go along with this? Could this be a new medical specialty, on-demand baby delivery? Ugh.

So today marks the first day of my vacation...a stay at home Clinton Calls for National Week Off To Get National S*** Together kind of week. As I said to Ksenia, "man I can't wait for the week to start and see how little I can get done".

And in that spirit, I've noticed that my backlog is all clogged. Not the good backlog with its own little database backend, the backlog which is like a big online Notepad .txt file. Some of this stuff might not even be things I meant to post, just things I wanted to look at later, so bear with me...there might be some interesting doodads.

• seperated at birth?

  TF Archive has a LOT of information about the Transformers. The reason I was there is a little weird...I was looking for a certain comic cover. For some reason, I kept visually misparsing the upper image ("JB"'s Avatar on atariage.com) as my memory of the image below, a cropping of "Transformers Headmasters #1"...something to do with the former's sharp lines and Optimus Prime like colors I think, though it seems rather odd to me. Anyway, when I was there I found out about Transformers / G.I. Joe, a crossover set in an alternate WW2-era universe where Cobra is pre-emptively taking over Europe with the help of some Decepticons he unearthed...and all the Transformers have cool WW1/2 modes, Grimlock is a British Mark 1 tank, Starscream is a WW2 plane, Soundwave is one of those clunky receiver phones with the dial on and his "helpers" now transform into grenades not cassette tapes...
• Jordan Matter's "Topfree" Women in NYC. Great for people who want to celebrate how "exhilarating [it is] to shatter the walls that society has placed around them" or just for folks who like looking at half-nekked women in public places.
• I think I saw the URL honbatz.com at a Burger King. Really really appealing little monsters. And I like the notice at top... "Hey Kids! This is Advertising!"
• Summary of different financial lifeplan books.
• I really need to check out this game Graffiti Kingdom. It's kind of a followup to Magic Pengel...both let you sketch your own creature which is then automagicaly animated by the computer...it's quite impressive, but I think the new game should let you have more direct control over your creation. (Pengel was just kind of a Rock-Paper-Scissors Pokemon-style turn based combat game.)
• HowItShouldHaveEnded.com's Star Wars Episode 4 was funnier than I expected, but the other movies weren't that great.

Quote of the Moment

Nerds are hot. If you wanna get really hot and bothered, check out Kirk's resume. Whew.

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Painting of the Moment

--Probably technically the best painting I made in a class I took in 1997 or so, though not my favorite. Also, the instructor touched it up a bit. My mom likes it though, right now it's in her den.

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Sucker Punch of the Moment
This Modern World's blog has this photo and article of a Yale '69 yearbook photo of GWB illegally walloping a guy in a rugby match. Wot a jerk. So Mo bought be this book, The Electric Meme, and it talks a lot about brains and memes (virus-like ideas.) His basic ideas is that Memes are less like viruses and more like prions (the kind of protein-folding thing that, for example, causes "Mad Cow") in the way they work with the existing material of the brain, and actually makes arguments that take memes away from being vague, poorly defined "ideas" to something tangible, if difficult to perfectly isolate. So the reading gets pretty difficult at times, and I can't say I'm following every sentence, but I just read a part where he's talking about how memories are changed from short term to long term, that the two types of memory are very different, and sleep is an important part of that. And for some reason I suddenly feel less bad about having to go to bed at night, now that I have a kind of mind-centric explanation for it. If that makes any sense.

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Funny Link of the Moment
Back to ZUG: laugh-out-loud funny How To Draw The Nipples Back On Victoria's Secret Catalogue Models Using Adobe Photoshop and less funny but still clever, a collection of pranks: for office-life, campus-life, and general things with a computer.

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Anecdote of the Moment
Went for a haircut, local BestCuts or whatever it is. Kind of an amusing exchange with the lady cutting my hair, who had just asked her coworker to pick her up some cigarettes at the store, (two for one special,) I was just making smalltalk:
"I haven't smoked since my Russian girlfriend in college, and not very much at all then, like 1 a day at most."
"Yeah? You're not going with her anymore?"
"Nah, I got married to someone who's more...Germanic, I guess."
"Germanic?"
"I dunno...short, blond spiky hair...looks kinda...Aryan? Cute."
"Mo?"
Turns out she's the one Mo generally asks for there. Kinda funny that that description let her make the connection.

But what I find really clever is how the aprons they put over you have "BestCuts" printed on them...backwards, so you can read it when you're getting your haircut. (Makes more sense for a haircut place that probably struggles with name recognition (too many ____Cuts places out there) than for, say, an ambulance. "Thank god that Ambulance had what it was printed backwards in front of it! I never would have known what that big white truck with all the sirens bearing down on me was without that there for me to read in my mirror!") Funny of the Moment

"Come in, Moses!"
"What?"
"We need to know how to kill a giant stone Abraham Lincoln!"
"...Um... lemmethink, um... a giant stone John Wilkes Booth?"

Both are members of the Super Best Friends, along with Buddha, Mohammed, Krishna, Joseph Smith, Lao Tse, and Sea-Man, and they need to stop a rampaging Lincoln Memorial. And it works!

I find it really amusing how South Park has Moses as the Master Control Program from the movie Tron, a giant cylindrical head with a wide face on it...also, I wonder how the Super Best Friends would do in a fight against God-Man, the superhero with omnipotent powers.

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News of the Moment
Camworld had two Washington Monthly articles by John Marshall: Bomb Saddam?, on the "neocon" hawks advocating war with Iraq (with an interesting focus on how they've been right and how they've been wrong in the past) and Confidence Men on the myth of Bush's team's high level of competence being akin to a stock bubble. Link of the Moment
A site on Censored Cartoons, with a special focus on Warner Brothers. Kind of interesting reading what racist and violent stuff they cut out, though some of it seems to be edits for length.

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Quote of the Moment

Not Everything Worth Doing Is Worth Doing Well

Words to live by, a new philosophy of "sometimes 'good enough' is best", at least in the big picture which includes resource allocation and the like.

from the T-shirt Archive: #15 of a Tedious Series
New Orleans Jazz. Probably a gift from a trip my mom took. Not a bad design, but black, which I don't wear often.