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Things to be Envious of that Americans Enjoy The spinning Ames Window is so compelling -

Is it better to say illusions are made or discovered?

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Remember that you're a thought machine.

Had an odd dream last night, there are these little handheld slot machine things, but each of the slot windows shows a number of blue and yellow beads, and every time you spin you see a different combo of yellow and blue in each window. Somehow there's a contest with the manufacturer of these - like if it shows up ALL blue or whatever, you win a billion dollars, but I realize that it's a little rigged, like whether or not a unit can display a win is going to be pre-determined at the factory (then I think of a scheme for checking on the win potential via serial number)

Dreams are weird, especially in terms of "plural selfs" or "parts" type thinking. For a long time I theorized that it was just the interpretive part of our minds making sense of "random noise", but it's probably not as simple as that. Still, there is a hint of, say, praising a 3-year olds finger painting and figuring out what they are actually claiming to have painted, as the various mind parts try to make sense of some very odd situations - though of course skepticism so often is just plain suspended.

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Guys have underestimated me my entire life and for years I never understood why – it used to really bother me. But then one day I was driving my little boy to school and I saw a quote by Walt Whitman, it was painted on the wall and it said, 'Be curious, not judgmental.' I like that. [...] So I get back in my car and I'm driving to work and all of the sudden it hits me – all them fellas that used to belittle me, not a single one of them was curious. You know, they thought they had everything figured out so they judged everything and they judged everyone.

(I got curious and checked, it's not actually a Whitman quote. Still an excellent sentiment. Judgement, especially judgement backed with emotion, can be so pointless, and blocks discernment. Yeah, somethings ARE worth judging, and providing power for fights worth having, but so many aren't. Hardly anything is bad-bad; it's just good for something you don't like, so be curious about that.)

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Wow! I like your temporary tattoos! Temporary in that one day you'll die.

Crapsacks.

I'm guessing that wasn't a particularly prophetic dream. Shades of Douglas Adams "Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why [Queen Elizabeth has said] that we would know a lot more about the nature of the Universe than we do now."

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RIP Chadwick Boseman. I think his Marvel movie was an inspirational spin on Afrofuturism and inspired legions. And I loved his take on James Brown.

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Postel's Law: Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send.

(I think I first saw Postel's Law cited by Larry "Perl" Wall.) Dozing and dreaming - where there is some small part of your brain aware of the process - is so odd. It's like watching the different parts of your brain play charades! A strange dance of image, emotion, and interpretation.

I am increasingly wondering about how the different parts of my mind feel about each other. How much the emotional subconscious comprehends what the narrative conscious is thinking is a fascinating question. My narrative self definitely worries that the rest of my mind feels condescended to.

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I think about this ad, sometimes, about how an iphone/smartphone replaces all these devices...

sometimes the most amazing part is like 3000 songs I love, on me at all times. But a 2001 iPod could do that more or less. And is that more or less impressive than streaming, which turns your phone into a radio, albeit one tuned into a custom radio station just for you....

See also Everything From This 1991 Radio Shack Ad You Can Now Do With Your Phone

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This morning I tried out this app CARROT Fit - funniest wrapper for 7-minute-workout style stuff I've seen. Like what if GLaDOS from Portal was your exercise coach, barely able to contain her disdain (and threatening physical violence and traps for you)

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A rebuke to the Conservative catchphrase the USA is a Republic not a Democracy.

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When it's third and ten, you can take the milk drinkers and I'll take the whisky drinkers every time.

New Haruki Murakami short story "The Wind Cave" in The New Yorker. The Oral History of the VFX of Terminator 2. Amazing what they were doing, and how you can kind of follow along.

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"Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it," he wrote. "I will get all of Putins team to buy in on this, I will manage this process." He later wrote, "I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected."

When Boston Dynamics adds a cussing module to their bots... (suitably bleep-ed out, which kind of makes it funnier) - literal laugh out loud funny.

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Finally, sustaining me through the long, lonely nights here with consoling memories of love, support, companionship and shouting is the precious image of Margaret. If I could have only one thing from my lost life with me on this island, it would be pizza. But, if I could have two, then the other one would be Margaret.

Little known Tom Lehrer Red Line Song... too bad the stop names changed!
Geek time! Thinking about how I so strongly prefer libraries, where you call the code, to frameworks, where their code calls you. (More or less.)

Looking at the trouble I've had lately with frameworks, it seems like there's always some mismatch between the end result we're trying to produce, and what the framework does naturally - and the hacks to get from point A to B are UGLY. To that extent, I realize frameworks are inherently "Waterfall"-ish, because you have to have a good idea what you're coding from the very outset. Libraries tend to be more swappable, and you're less beholden to the clever Frameworks makers having pre-guessed your requirements.

Don't get me wrong; Agile always gets messy. But I think the messiness that results from keeping things simple is easier to cope with than the messiness of hacking around something complex.

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Just got Verizon FIOS. So far seems pretty good! The real test will come at 10PM, when Netflix Hulu et al would go to total crap. http://www.theonion.com/articles/so-whats-it-going-to-be,33662/ The Onion nails it: Editorial by Bashar Al-Assad. No satire in it besides the setup.

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more info Cracked.com had this photo, from this Atlantic feature on the fall of the Nazis:

The description:

A U.S. soldier stands in the middle of rubble in the Monument of the Battle of the Nations in Leipzig after they attacked the city on April 18, 1945. The huge monument commemorating the defeat of Napoleon in 1813 was one of the last strongholds in the city to surrender. One hundred and fifty SS fanatics with ammunition and foodstuffs stored in the structure to last three months dug themselves in and were determined to hold out as long as their supplies. American First Army artillery eventually blasted the SS troops into surrender.

Creepy Indiana Jones lookin' scene!
from cracked.com's 14 Video Game Deleted Scenes that Explain Everything

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Next stage in human evolution: round skull indentations, for use as cupholder. Constant proximity to caffeine=clear evolutionary advantage.

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http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/08/25/agitprops - Soviet era design, neat stuff!

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http://www.mondaynote.com/2011/08/28/steve-who%E2%80%99s-going-to-protect-us-from-cheap-and-mediocre-now/ Remember the 90s, when all PCs (and things like clocks) all had the same candy-translucent plastic look ala Apple iMac?

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Interesting. Lion's TextEdit hides "Save As" as "Duplicate". I guess it makes a certain kind of sense, in terms of not sharing the history-

--A study in GameBoy sprites from this Hardcore Gaming 101 article

Really random Dear Diary kisrael ahoy
Wow, I managed to kick butt at minigolf yesterday, which never happens. After 18 holes I was ahead by like 10 strokes, with a lot of 2s. This was at Kimballs in Westford...I like the one hole that's a jump over a chasm, and another where putting your ball in the running water has a good chance of an easy hole-in-one. We put in a low-ish maximum 5 strokes rule... otherwise my triumph might have been even grander.

Andy was up from Atlanta, and so we had our traditional movie night at Jim and his wife Sam's place. Jim and Andy are so funny, the perfect people to watch bad movies with, and just hanging out... Jim is amazing. Like on the score sheet... He started with "Sam". Andy sometimes goes by the name "Big A", so that's what Jim wrote. And then "Little Kirk", and "Some Jim". And the other thing I admire is he didn't make a big deal about it, didn't call attention to it like I know I would've... it was just a funny little detail waiting to be discovered, or if no one discovered it, than just for his own mild amusement.

You can just get into this giggling at everything mode, kind of like you've been smoking weed, except your high on life. Or something. Other injokes were noticing that a "UMASS" sweatshirt is almost equally readable as "Um, ass?". And that the gal in the group ahead of us looked like she was "taking sixes across the board" which sounded weirdly dirty, but really just was what they assumed their maximum stroke count was.

Guess you had to be there. But they really are even funnier than that last paragraph makes them sound.

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Page of the Moment
Kind of an extension of yesterday's thoughts on the adaptability of language, it's FUTURESE: The American Language in 3000 AD. Pretty cool stuff! (Though usually, the variation of English everyone in the Sci Fi galaxy speaks is called "Basic", not "Anglic" or "Galach")

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Weird. I'm 90% sure I had this one email exchange this week via gmail, but can't find any archive of it. It's kind of freaking me out.

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Gmail HAD marked it as "Spam" HERE'S A FREE HINT GOOGLE - IF ITS AN EMAIL I'VE REPLIED TO 4 OR 5 TIMES, IT'S PROBABLY NOT FRICKIN' SPAM!

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Wow, McCain is really trying to use a Hillary wedge! Just realized it's been years since I thought about Geraldine Ferraro... In my heart of hearts, I have an bizarre little fantasy that some day my "human beatbox" skills will prove useful or even vital, like if accosted by some kind of urban gang I could use it to demonstrate my street cred and legitimate affection for and exposure to black culture.

Mostly, though, I just like making the noise. I suspect, though, that getting it to sound as good over a mike as it does when reverberating in one's own head is a trick. Maybe some week I should give it a shot.

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Quote of the Moment

Everyone is a virtuoso on his own instrument but together they add up to an intolerable cacophony.

Via my last read, "Not Even Wrong", a study on coping with the autism of a 3 yr old.

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Idea of the Moment
I think I need to contact my congressman, or some congressman, and get nominated for the Nobel Prize in... I dunno, I think of something. Maybe peace. Also, I need to catch up on Raymond Chen's Old New Thing blog.

The one thing about being in a consultant role, at least one hired on account of the company you work for rather than some kind of superstar they're craving, is that you really get the sense of how you're kind of a second-class citizen.

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Videos of the Moment
Heavily-Miked High-Fashion on an attractive model. I like how she-- err, Zora Star-- kind of has fun with with audio elements. It's also funny how she just barely fits into some of that stuff. (WARNING: BOOBIES.)

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Quote of the Moment

[Separating religion and politics is] wrong because God is the one who chooses our rulers.

No kidding, that is some scary shit for a national politician to be spouting. News of the Moment
On August 28, 1101 AM CDT, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) issued a bulletin predicting catastrophic damage to the city. Effects include at least partial destruction of one out of every two well-constructed houses in the city, damage to most industrial buildings rendering them inoperable, the total destruction of all wood-framed low-rise apartment buildings, all windows blowing out in high-rise office buildings, and the creation of a huge debris field of trees, telephone poles, cars, and collapsed buildings.

Further predictions are that the standing water caused by huge storm surges will render most of the city uninhabitable for weeks, while the destruction of oil and petrochemical refineries in the surrounding area will spill waste into the flooding, converting the city into a toxic marsh until water can be drained. Shortages of clean water "will make human suffering incredible by modern standards," according to an NOAA bulletin. Some experts say that it could take six months or longer to pump all the water out of the city. Even after the area has been drained, all buildings will need to undergo inspection to determine structural soundness, as all buildings in the city are likely to be at least partly submerged. Damage and subsequent recovery efforts are predicted to cost the city of New Orleans in excess of US$100 billion.
--From the Hurricane Katrina Wikipedia Article. Ummm...yikes.

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Quote of the Moment

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear.

(Yes, via that Quotations page off of Google homepages.) Good quote for today...I find "fearlessness" equals either "intense ignorance" or "nothing to lose" for the most part.

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News Quote of the Moment

I'm not doing too good right now. The water's rising pretty fast. I got a hammer and an ax and a crowbar, but I'm holding off on breaking through the roof until the last minute. Tell someone to come get me please. I want to live.

Concept of the Moment

We're trying to make an airplane like a horse. A horse doesn't want to be driven off a cliff. And if you're drunk and fall asleep, it's going to take you back to the barn.

The quote reminds me of this one I kisrael'd in 2002 about the comparison between horses and what an intelligent car would be like.

That does seem like one of the biggest problems. People seem barely qualified to drive, flying without automation would be crazy. Also, it seems like traffic would be more sensitive to weather conditions if everyone was flying...

Of course, thinking about how much I'd love a car that could drive itself...the sad thing is the track record for those things, at least in the early days, has to be pretty much perfect. One big fatality and suddenly self-driving cars are a menace to society, ignoring what such a system could do in improving quality of life and preventing accidents by sleepy or tipsy drivers...

Comics of the Moment
I've become more and more impressed by the site AtariAge...they've become my favorite messageboards, and they even put up a JoustPong page. But I just now realized they have all the old Atari Force comics online! They came bundled with certain Atari 2600 games, I only had had the chance to read like half of them before this. Those comics were interesting, an almost post-apocalyptic world, where the Atari Institute has risen up to take the place of the failed nation states...and then it gets seriously odd. Man, I always though this lady in purple (Executive Directory of Atari Security Li San O'Rourke) was so hot.

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Line of the Moment

Caucasian--the other white meat.
(Brought to you by the Kill Whitey foundation.)

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News of the Moment
Teenage highway snipers say they were inspired by the videogame Grand Theft Auto...and we must ask ourselves WHEN WILL THE MADNESS END? Personal Slashdot Rant of the Moment
Getting around Boston is bad. It's not just the wacky street layout with one-ways sprinkled hither and yon...it's that we only bother to put street signs for the minor streets. Heck, everyone just knows what that "main" street must be, right?

I'm also convinced that the geography between, say, Alewife and Harvard Square is non-Euclidean....at the end of route 2, you can turn left to get to Harvard Square, or you can go almost 180 degrees the other way and get to Harvard Square.

Similarly, there are two ways of measuring distances in Boston proper; as the crow flies, or as the T stops. I've had friends (Hi, Dylan) who were amazed at how close to locations were, since they were "so far apart" on the T (namely, different "fingers" of the green line)
(from posts of mine in response to this Slashdot poll)

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Image of the Moment

In Antwerp they have a ferris wheel for cars, but they're worried about terrorism... couldn't they just inspect the trunks and hoods? Anyway, I'd love to ride something like this. John Koermerling is a genius.

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Link of the Moment
Boilerplate -- Mechanical Marvel of the Nineteenth Century. And, perhaps, spiritual forefather to Clango Cyclotron. Quote of the Moment

I beat up my boyfriend when he told me he likes sex rodeo style! I asked what rodeo style was and he said "I'll show you". He got in me from behind and then whispered "your sister likes it like this too" - then he tried to stay on for 8 seconds!

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Link of the Moment
Actually, lowbrow.com is the link of the moment. An interesting site, people posting their humiliating or just plain dumb moments. You can reload and reload and hardly ever get any repeats. For a while I was amazed at the consistency and quality of the works, but they've been slipping lately, especially with some schmuck who doesn't really get the idea but posts a hell of a lot: "sorry_e_e@hotmail.com". (He (or she) tends to rip off the style of Don Marquis more than e.e.cummings, actually.) Still, I like it because it's generally always an interesting way of spending a few minutes, but it doesn't really tend to suck me in.

from the T-shirt Archive: #18 of a Tedious Series
"NEOSA tanktop". Camp Neosa was my summer bandcamp during middle school and high school. (NEOSA stands for North East Ohio Salvation Army.) I had some great times there, from my first girlfriend to the reign of the Water Mafia (I still have the old combined WM logo from that) which is part of why I was so partial to this shirt.