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Our state seal (which is also the state flag) is HORRIBLE and must change. Just to be clear on what you're looking at below: it's a white hand holding a sword over the head of an Indigenous person, above a Latin motto that says "She Seeks by the Sword a Quiet Peace under Liberty."

MA residents, please take a few minutes to do this:

"The Special Commission Relative to the Seal and Motto of the Commonwealth is interested in hearing from you.

The Special Commission is conducting a survey that asks about your familiarity with the current seal and motto of the Commonwealth and your input on the new design.

Here is the link to the survey: https://bit.ly/StateSealSurvey

This survey is available in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Vietnamese, Chinese, Khmer, Haitian Creole, and Russian. It should take less than 10 minutes of your time.

By answering this survey, you will contribute to the creation of a more inclusive state symbol.

Your answers will be confidential and will not be shared with anyone outside the research team. All answers will be combined into a general report that will make recommendations for the new design of the seal and motto.

Please feel free to share the survey with your communities.

MINE:

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Until lions have their own historians, the hunters will always be glorified.

So this reddit page (on a channel about tracking anti-vaxxers who get sick) says there should be a website designed around sending "thoughts and prayers"

But GoPrayForMe.com is already a real site! I think of the closing sentence of their introduction: "Let's storm heaven with and for each other."

That's... such an odd mood theologically speaking, you know? I mean the entire idea of asking God to intervene is already... well, when you combine some assumptions of pre-ordination and omnipotence (and benevolence) you're already in some strange territory to request modifications of the divine plan, but the belligerent stance of "to storm"? That's so aggressive!

(And yeah, on one level maybe it should seem blasphemous to, say, ask God to grant victory in a sporting event (some believers will just ask for a fair game without injuries) but I'm also mature enough to understand that this kind of down-to-earthness and personal aspect is important in American Folk Christianity, and part of how a lot of people live their connection to their God. It's social and psychological as much as it is theological and supernatural.)

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A Capuchin monk, one very rainy day, accompanied a Swabian prisoner to the gallows. Many times, the condemned man lamented to heaven that he, in such terrible and unfriendly weather, had to walk so bitter a path. The Capuchin wished to give him Christian comfort and replied: "You scoundrel! How can you complain? You only have to go there, but I, in all this rain, must come back the same way!"

The Capuchin could have added... "plus, I have to have listened to you complain the whole way!"

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Before he entered that police station in Limoges, he thought the world was a scene where two forces were struggling for power: God and the Devil. From then on, he knew that there was a third force seeking hegemony over this world: stupidity.

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"The Suicide Squad" (so, the older one was just "Suicide Squad") is really good! It works on different levels - as a popcorn flick, as a parody of the whole Avengers/MCU thing, as a study in what happens if people - from superpowered to townspeople - actually get killed. And is just plain laugh out loud funny in parts. Got and installed the TUSHY Bidet attachment. Ready for the next great TP shortage I guess!

[Trump] is a really talented insult comic. He just is. He's in some ways a genius insult comic, going back to some people like - Sam Kinison [...] There's very Dice Clay about him.

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It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.

Seeing the sunrise from the Jersey Shore had always been on my "should get to that!" list, this morning Melissa and I did just that... Aaron T. Pratt‏ @aarontpratt: "And, now, the tiniest and most delightful memento mori skull I've seen in print, from 1475. Behold:"

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via white space conflict:

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Fun fact for the youth: Middle-aged people don't know they're middle-aged. Being in your 40s feels like being 25 with a few sports injuries.

More from Supper Mario Broth - the many cross-platform faces of Donkey Kong...

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And there is another, subtler reason you might find yourself convinced that things are getting worse and worse, which is that our expectations outpace reality. That is, things do improve – but we raise our expectations for how much better they ought to be at a faster rate, creating the illusion that progress has gone into reverse.

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The answer is that life is really, really good. I am a complex enough being that I can hold in my heart the understanding that we are really, really fucked, and at the same time that life is really, really good. I am full of rage, sorrow, joy, love, hate, despair, happiness, dissatisfaction, and a thousand other feelings. We are really fucked. Life is still really good.

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(Both of those last quotes from The Guardian's How to stay happy when the sky is falling in.) via tumblr

w/ the caption "dammit carl" A comic strip I drew today, visting with EBB + Co in Rockport. The panels came to me in a dream a few weeks back. Mt. Roberts is a mountain directly behinf Juneau's downtown area. It has a steep tramway you can ride to a decent visitor's center 1800 feet up -- but taking the tram up would have been too easy and insufficiently nature-y...

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Am digging unwinding from moving with Saints Row 4. GTA meets Hulk Ultimate Destruction via Crackdown and Bioshock. Wow. This morning my weight was below 200 for the first time in 8 years or so.

It feels like a validation of my lax variant of South Beach, and props to those folks: they really have a feel for what it takes to suppress cravings that sabotage so many good intentions about eating well.

The cornerstone of my new "Way of Eating" (that term being a hangover from my days on Usenet's alt.support.diet meant to encourage thinking in terms of a permanent shift in "W.O.E." rather than a temporary "diet") is my daily lunch of a Wendy's Baja Salad (no tortilla chips, no dressing) and all the sugarfree gum I want -- mostly those weirdly awesome Wrigley's "Dessert Delights". I used to have a sweet tooth that was notorious in the office, but now-- I'm not even tempted. It's weird; it's not willpower, it's not needing willpower.

So in trying to figure out what's really at work here (in part because even though I don't mind the same lunch every day, I don't love that it's (low grade) red meat chili, and I might not always work near a Wendy's) -- I think the most likely suspect is the beans in the chili. Reading about them, they're thought to be a good source of protein, and slow to digest, so they keep blood sugar levels stable and thus less craving-riffic.

So between that slow digesting beans and the tasty gum, the cynical summary of that is this: the main way for me to achieve weight loss that doesn't tap into my finite reserves of willpower is to fool my body into thinking it's CONSTANTLY snacking all afternoon long.

Ah well. Whatever works, right?

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Yelling 'YOU MONSTER!' after someone farts in a public bathroom feels pretty great.

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You know, the earthquake was nightmarish; in the sense dreams have that sense of "crap, I guess this is it"- it wasn't it, but, coulda been.
--Savage Chickens has all of Chewbacca's lines from Star Wars- click for more panels. I love the art style.

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The Misleading World Of Atari 2600 Box Art Yesterday Amber and I got to go to the wedding of Scott and Josúe! Yay Massachusetts! Time for photos!

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A bit of wisdom my mom picked up in NYC, echoed today at New Brothers Deli in Danvers: Greeks really know how to run a good restaurant.

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The Team USA "Redeem Team": because "hadn't won a gold medal 'since 2000'" sounded so much more harsh than 'since the time before last' Philosophy of the Moment

Why is it nice to think [that human qualities such as creativity, intuition, consciousness, esthetic or moral judgment, courage or even the ability to be intimidated by Deep Blue are beyond machines in the very long run]? Why isn't it just as nice--or nicer--to think that we human beings might succeed in designing and building brain-children that are even more wonderful than our biologically begotten children? The match between Kasparov and Deep Blue didn't settle any great metaphysical issue, but it certainly exposed the weakness in some widespread opinions. Many people still cling, white-knuckled, to a brittle vision of our minds as mysterious immaterial souls, or--just as romantic--as the products of brains composed of wonder tissue engaged in irreducible non-computational (perhaps alchemical?) processes. They often seem to think that if our brains were in fact just protein machines, we couldn't be responsible, lovable, valuable persons.

Finding that conclusion attractive doesn't show a deep understanding of responsibility, love, and value; it shows a shallow appreciation of the powers of machines with trillions of moving parts.

Dennett is right to point out that saying "Deep Blue wasn't really playing chess, just running algorithms" is bunk. I also buy the idea that Kasparov is doing a similar search (albeit "chunked" differently, with more familiarity with patterns on a more macro scale) and that neither Deep Blue nor Kasparov are that "conscious" of their analytical process as it is happening. But even though the popular culture has an irritating tendency to keep raising the bar of what "Artificial Intelligence" is as soon as the AI researches come up with an approach that beats it, I think Dennett is a bit misleading in painting a symmetry in the training the two "thinking machines" have received:

Much of this analytical work had been done for Deep Blue by its designers, but Kasparov had likewise benefited from hundreds of thousands of person-years of chess exploration transmitted to him by players, coaches, and books.

It's quite reasonable to admire the human as a (for now) unique general purpose learning machine over a one trick pony like a chess-playing computer. Kasparov could probably learn to play a mean game of backgammon in short order, which is more than could be expected of Deep Blue. And even though I think the world champion of Backgammon is yet another computer program, if an entirely new strategy game were to be invented, Kasparov would again have the upper hand in picking it up.

There's an analogy to be made with flight, I think: humans playing chess are the Wright Brothers, learning how to fly. A computer that has been coded to play chess is akin to a bird, shaped by millenniums of evolution that it knows nothing of.

I don't think the difference is permanent: over the decades, we should learn to make better general-purpose learners, and their have been some interesting approaches to building a learner from the bottom up, like Cog and Cyc. Of course, as soon as we build a computer that can design its own smart sequel, we'll hit that Singularity Vinge and Kurzweil are on about.

(That singularity idea is fascinating, as it makes some of those corny old scifi "the computers are out to get us!" clichés a little more plausible, in much the same way I never would have expected a Star-Trekian "the computer is processing so furiously that it's draining the power from the lights!" to be echoed in the battery life of my laptop doing processor-intensive tasks.)

I liked the idea of Fischer Random Chess that Dennett mentions, although it seems a little less amazing to realize it only represents 960 different possible starting positions. (Still, in theory, that would be a 3-orders-of-magnitude increase in the "book") My intuition is that such a game would favor the way computers run through possibilities over the way human grandmasters do it, but maybe that comes from a shallow knowledge of simplistic "look ahead" algorithms.

I'm getting sick of those domain squatters that are pretending to be useful, so they can get a bit of ad revenue, but contain a stupid mismash of vaguely relevant but pretty much useless links. Especially the one with the slogan "What you need, when you need it." (Of course, now that I want to kvetch about it, I can't find one with that particular slogan on it.)

Of course, eBay started it. Maybe. All those stupid text ads, showing up in the search results for nearly anything:

Random Crap Whatever you're looking for you can get it on eBay. www.eBay.com

They used to be inadvertantly funny before they got smarter about filtering, so you'd see stuff like "Child Abuse - find it on Ebay".

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Video Game Image of the Moment

--The original graphpaper plotting of the Space Invaders, along with the HG Wells inspiration, from this interview with some Taito pioneers.

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Quote of the Moment

If all the girls who attended the Yale prom were laid end to end, I wouldn't be a bit surprised.

That is a great line even after all these years.

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News of the Moment
Wah, Pluto. Having eight planets just feels so wrong to me.

I'm not the first person to make this kind of joke, but after reading about Peta's campaign drawing strong parallels between human slavery and our treatment of animals, and then hearing about the NCAA's recent decisions about "Native American" mascots, and then seeing a bumpersticker for some local school's "Lions" team, I got to thinking if the next step for Peta is to discourage the use of that kind of mascot.

An Onion-esque site ScrappleFace got to the idea first. Or as they put it:

An NCAA spokesman said the organization will also consider a resolution at its next meeting to eliminate team names and mascots altogether, and to identify each collegiate sports team by a randomly-generated 27-digit number.

I'm all for it! I even decided to give my alma mater a head start with the following graphic...

I'm still working on an appropriate cheer.

Project of the Moment
So, FoSO and I worked together on an interesting furniture project, a cabinet. I think the idea was mine, but the details and the lion's share of the labor ended up being hers. (Which is good, because I'm lazy, but also bad, because I didn't learn quite as much as I had hoped.) My bathroom is desperately short on selfspace, and I'd always been trying to think of a cool project to utilize these beautiful authentic vintage travel stickers that were attached to a crumbling valise I got at an estate sale kind of thing. So, a bunch of slicing, scanning (just in case), staining with wood stain, gluing with Mod Podge, coating with polyurethane, and touching up with a hand sander later, and this is the terrific result:

Front		Inside

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Progamming Thoughts of the Moment
Been thinking a little bit about programming rules in general. Here are some rules I've decided I (and maybe everybody) should try and follow...I welcome feedback from my fellow coding geeks.

K.I.S.S.: Don't over-engineer.

I have seen so much over-designed stuff, with layer after layer after layer. Following the programming execution over a single call becomes an enormously difficult task. If any given interaction goes much deeper than 3 or 4 levels, something might well be wrong.

Keep a clean modular approach to your systems.

Have a core engine that drives everything and uses the rest of the system as an API. Think Unix's philosophy of "do one task and do it well"...this guideline comes from stuff I'm dealing with at work. They've developed these APIs, but the APIs are so tightly integrated with the logging and configuration, it's sick. For example, they made a wrapper to a Castor routine that converts an object into an XML representation. You would think that if your central program says "make me an XML representation of this object and put it in such and such a file" it would do just that, right? But no. See, it goes ahead and checks the configuration on its own accord, and then might or might not do the conversion. And whether it tries or not, or if it succeeds or fails with some error, it will do so SILENTLY, catching any exception that occurs, because heaven forfend that the main program has to worry its sweet little head about everything collapsing underneath it... Hideously redundant, impossible to follow.

Keep a devnotes.txt file

I find it useful to have a single text file where I jot things down as I figure them out...usernames, passwords, techniques, etc. It saves me a lot of time.

Consider disabling web access during the workday.

Sometimes it's easier for a programmer to get distracted, especially when things aren't going well. The worse things are going, the more slashdot and various techie websites beckon. ("This task at hand isn't working out but maybe I can learn something else new!"). If your main browser is IE, the easiest option might be to go into Tools|Internet Options|Coonections|LAN Settings and setup a bogus proxy server. Sometimes just putting in that little gatekeeper is enough to make me reconsider a wayword path.

Keep your unit tests close and your smoketests closer

If your environment is at all complex and N-tiered, avoid the trap of your system breaking down and you don't know when and you don't know why by setting up good smoke and unit tests and running them extremely frequently.

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Product of the Moment
Making the rounds is this story about a cellphone based Virtual Girlfriend product...unfortunately (or fortunately for the company) you spend non-virtual money to buy her presents and what not, otherwise she gets all mad and sulky.

Man, what a potential goldmine if they find guys who get really into this. Being able to sell trivial virtual goods for real cash...there's that other company that lets people buy each other little iconic gifts, I heard it's a reasonable hit...it becomes a social thing I guess, if you can show off your gifts like some kind of trophyroom.

Strange world.

Sorry yesterday's updates were so brief (though I'm heartened by the potential for political debate shown by yesterday's Comments) but I got wrapped up in trying to jumpstart my Atari 2600 JoustPong project that's been in a coma for almost a year. Turned out I was making a really boneheaded mistake, but one that could be oddly hidden at times.

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Travel Quote of the Moment

The real reason for our going separately, however, is that I don't fly. I used to fly. I don't fly anymore. You know the bit I hate about air travel? It's the plummeting from a mile up in a blazing, cartwheeling tomb of shattering metal. That and the legroom.

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Web Toy of the Moment
Interview Adolf Hitler is an innovative teaching tool...you type questions in, and get responses back from the portrait of Adolph Hitler. As they found out on the metafilter discussion where I got the link, the technology is probably little more than keyword recognition, where certain words trigger certain responses, but still, it's reasonably convincing. I think it makes sense that this was made in the UK; it would be too controversial for most American eduction technologists to touch. In particular, it doesn't spoonfeed the student lines like "Hey, I'm so evil! Did I mention I'm evil?"--its answers are like those of a man who is convinced of his cause, and can make persuasive arguments about it. (Though people on mefi argue that Hitler was probably not an atheist as this site claims, and he does drop some late-20th century buzzwords like "basic human dignity".)

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Advice of the Moment
I've been trying to use rechargable batteries more lately...but it took me a long while to come up with an acceptable strategy for using them, which is this: always have one more pair of rechargable batteries around than you "need". That way, when a remote or whatever stops working, you can immediately swap in the extras and then recharge the ones that just ran out, and those recharging ones then become your "extra" pair. (Come to think of it, this "always have a spare" rule applies to a lot of things, it's related to my recent observation "grill propane will never run out at a convenient time", hence purchase of an extra jug during our last party, and I'm thinking the same thing is going to happen with kitchen garbage bags.)

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Silly Brag of the Moment
W00T, I got a story posted on slashdot. It's just a retread from PalmInfoCenter, and I actually made a small typo in the headline, but hey. Every once in a while I get this morbid idea that I could setup a script on this website so that if I failed to update for a couple of weeks, on the frontpage a new bold link would appear raising the possibility that something has happened to me, and if so, here's what I'd like to have done. (With information on how to try to contact me first, online and off, before going off in a panic.)

One of the main, if vain, thinks I'd like to have done is have my websites preserved. Ths site as is, maybe have The Blender of Love move to some self-sustaining community-run form. I guess I'm less concerned about Alien Bill, which is mostly around for historic and novelty reasons now.

I think there would be a minor but sustainable business in "perpetual webhosting". The current site owner would have to put down a lot of money in one lump sum which would then be used in some kind of secure investment, with returns enough to pay the expenses for that one site. Assuming something like Moore's Law stays in place, it should be cheaper and cheaper to run those sites. Of course, you'd want to make investments in infrastructure so that the hosting was as longlived as the Internet itself...

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News of the Moment
Soylent Diamonds...is people! Here's the news story making the rounds. I kind of like this idea, actually.

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Lord of the Rings Movie Trivia

It is reported that on the first run of the fight sequences using the MASSIVE Artificial Intelligence program, the intelligent fighters - programmed to fight in the most efficient manner possible...
...all turned and ran away.

. Reminds me of the old line my family used to enjoy "He who fights and runs away lives to fight another day...but that's not why *I* ran away." Here's a detailed article on the amazing computer work that went into the film. I had a brilliant but completely unworkable idea yesterday...wouldn't it be great if there was some kind of slashdot-esque moderation/rating system for drivers? Like, if someone does something nice, you could beam them a point of good karma? Or subtract a point if someone was being a jerk? And you could somehow see someone's rating, on their car? There are many reasons why this system wouldn't work and would be abused, but still, it seemed like a good idea. Sigh, I guess polite driving has to be its own reward.

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Quote of the Moment

There's a lot to be said for a lack of communication and so many problems we can't talk about simply go away after a while, such as the problem of mortality, for example.

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Link of the Moment
This was in slashdot the other day: A Physicist with the Air Force in World War II. I appreciate his cleverness in math, materials, and psychology. Makes me wonder what similar stories there were for the 'bad guys' as well.

from the T-shirt Archive: #17 of a Tedious Series
"Birdpoop". A friend gave this to me. Various bird poops, all labeled. A bit too tacky too actually wear, but...err...a nice color at least.