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The world had always loved the saint as being the nearest possible approach to the perfection of God. Christ, through some divine instinct in him, seems to have always loved the sinner as being the nearest possible approach to the perfection of man... To turn an interesting thief into a tedious honest man was not his aim.

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Vultures are holy creatures.
Tending the dead.
Bowing low.
Bared head.
Whispers to cold flesh,
"Your old name is not your king.
I rename you 'Everything.'"

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Fun video on split brain etc:



The biggest dose I've had with it was muddling through this giant book "The Master and His Emissary" - I write about it and grabbed a lot of quotes here : kirk.is/2021/07/28

My take away is, I think it's a mistake to say "I don't have free will" - but the mistake is more what the "I" is. Those unconscious burbling, pre-linguistic parts are still part of you, and just because your left brains will make up logical-sounding rationalizations of what the burbling parts come up with, it's all you!

Also it does make me wonder about therapy modes. Like I love therapy modes that talk about the many parts of the brain, like different subparts all with their own personalities and agendas that try to make their case for what the whole self does... but then I wonder how that works if each part of the brain is under the shadow of a one of two very different styles of hemisphere...

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RIP Mikhail Gorbachev, father of Glasnost, Perestroika, and a thousand forehead birthmark jokes.

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It ain't rocket science. Donald "The Art of the Deal" Trump took home a pile of docs (especially about our intelligence operators) so he could wheel and deal. What a scuzz ball.

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Michigan board blocks certification of abortion rights ballot measure, throwing it to the courts hey remember when republicans believed in rule of law? A few separate paths of speculation tentatively merged for me this morning, revealed their strong but not obvious parallels... in other words, I have a candidate for my personal "theory of everything".

Ok, so lately I've been really grooving on the idea of "self as committee". This framing feels particularly amenable to the various "members of the committee", more so than other ways of describing "the parts that make up a whole person" (id/ego/superego, inner-child, the subconscious, etc) because it's non-hierarchical. It doesn't say this part is the "real me" or the "mature me" or even the smartest or wisest me. (in fact at least for now it's ok with being uncertain at who the members are - or even if they're the same members all the time) so members can all accept it.

So here's one new thought: it's interesting that I'm now thinking about my self as a group when thinking how I conduct myself IN a group is so important... I've learn to recognize my (intuitively derived) morality structure that says any individual's preferences within a group that they are (voluntarily!) in should be mostly considered within the context of that group. An individual's wants and needs should not be ignored - this not a call for martyrdom! - but they are just part of the mix. A strong need in one group member should outweigh a milder preference of another.

And here's a second thought: maybe this group fractal mode of thinking scales all the way up! I have a sense that objective Truth (not truth, the way the world is, but Truth, the way it 'should be') must exist- but we must always accept our uncertainty about it, and that it provides a kind of ultimate evaluative yardstick for us even as we can't be sure of seeing it clearly. But if I'm so uncertain about it, how am I so sure it exists? So it's almost by definition. It's what you get when you think of the "good of the group" and then extend the group to everyone, and everything.

I mean it's not all cosmic kumbaya. Different groups are going to be competing even if they live under the same umbrella of Everything, and sometimes what's good for one group is bad for another, and of course this framework isn't compatible with everyone's working set of beliefs. In particular, most people stride with confidence about the one thing they can be sure of, their subjective truth.

Hm. Thinking further, besides the importance of accepting uncertainty - or rather, hand-in-hand with it- is this egalitarian sense, that non-hierarchy at least within a group. I don't put a lot of stock in leadership in a group (which sometimes makes it weird in bands I'm in, where my reliability and desire to be useful makes me do leader-y things but I'm usually reluctant to pick up the mantle and this fuller responsibility) And I *really* don't put stock in special revelation. So many faiths seem to be based on a chosen people, or a special revelation to one dude. To me that seems so blatantly self-serving as to be farcical. Truth is truth, and potentially universally available. Yes, sometimes an insight that goes against conventional wisdom may merge in one person's head, but if that insight can't be backed up by other forms of verification, it's extremely suspect.

Man, I need to sit with this a bit. It's two new thoughts (special revelations? nah) - noticing how thinking in groups applies intra- and inter-self, and that further widening groups might be the key to justifying my faith (ugh) in a Truth where the only thing we're sure of is that it exists but we know we're only estimating what it is.

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Fellow Atari-er Karl Garrison posted this Magic-Eye as the first one he was able to see (seems to work better on laptops, vs phone screens)



I wanted to mention this amazing music video that puts the same trick in motion -

Also, the basic idea is surprisingly robust - you can even get the core parallax idea going in ASCII art!

(you're more aware of the repetition of it, and I think the Bob's face is flat, but still definitely in front of the other layers)

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Melissa and I cohabitate with Dean the Cat, who is a bit of a snuggler. (In particular he likes to be parked under an arm and then do biscuits). But when he comes up to me at my desk during the workday, looking at be with hopeful eyes, he doesn't want to snuggle or lap, he just wants up on the desk. My new life as a stepping stool. Random self-indulgent first world nerdery: for a long time I've really liked having a second monitor up above my laptop, using the laptop as the keyboard and trackpad and secondary monitor. It seemed like such a no-brainer, I almost had pity on my coworkers who put the laptop on a stand and needed a separate mouse and keyboard. I loved how the trackpad is right there beneath your thumbs, none of that reach over for the mouse, and just how efficient it seemed in general - and also the elegance of having the same arrangement when on the go or at the desk, so never having to retrain my hands...

Well... I've been having second thoughts. Honestly it's mostly because I was tired of warm wrists from overheated laptops, but also I realized I was using the laptop screen less because it was so low, plus I knew I would get a better webcam angle with the laptop riding higher.

Sadly, I don't think anyone makes a good "keyboard with trackpad integrated in front" (honestly, if I could somehow adapt the new iPad Pro magic keyboard/trackpad combo for use on a Mac, that would be ideal...)

So I bought a laptop stand, grabbed an old Apple Apple "magic" keyboard Melissa wasn't using much, and bought a "Magic Trackpad" to place right in front of- recreating the laptop w/ trackpad-at-the-thumbs experience. But, it was uncomfortable, and prone to accidental hits... even after several revisions of lego-constructed wrist rests:

So I guess I'm back to keyboard plus mouse... I still find myself reaching my thumbs down but there are some advantages to the mouse: the cheap bluetooth mouse I got has a scrollwheel, which is a tactile pleasantness I had forgotten, and a distinct button for right clicks, which Mac still supports, albeit grudgingly. Still, it feels so oldschool to need a mousepad (for my white IKEA desktop) -- it's like I'm back in the AOL generation...

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Looks like it's a lot better to be white than black if you're gonna wrestle with a cop via kottke, Kaiser Kuo's long form attempt to answer “Why don’t you Chinese hate your government as much as we think you ought to?”

Two quotes I liked:

So try telling a Chinese person that anyone willing to trade a little personal liberty for a little personal safety deserves neither liberty nor safety, and they’ll look at you like you’re insane. Therein lies the values gap.

and later

It’s the rare person who can truly separate, at both an intellectual and an emotional level, criticism of his or her country from criticism of his or her country’s government — especially if that government is not, at present, terribly embattled and is delivering basic public goods in a reasonably competent manner.

One term the early part of the essay uses a lot is "contingent" - i.e. values that many Americans assume are universal and self-evident are actually dependent on quite a lot of factors of our history. (It was an awareness of a similar sense of "contingency" that fed into my loss of religious faith as a teen: the faith I had learned had declared itself to be universal and absolute - or worthless.)

The essay also reminds me that I don't value freedom as the ultimate good for its own sake, but as an important means to other ends. (And since I am no solipsist, I realize that universal freedom for everyone would be chaos that would curtail practical freedom for most.) I think the greatest purpose for humanity is the creation of categorical novelty; we are the only species we know of able to generate new memetic concepts on the regular - and the system that can generate the most novelty overall has to have a balance of freedom (so new ideas can come out) and stability (so that the environment to generate those new ideas will be preserved.) And in the meanwhile, it's also important to extinguish suffering where we can.

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Five years ago I assembled my Usenet .sig quotes, mostly from the late 90s. I'm impressed with how much I like so many of them! I guess I was being rather selective - these were the ones I was willing to make part of my persona in the footer of my public posts.

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Here's a tweet with a video of the Dum duh Dum Didee Duh loop we played at the dumb-ass Trump float (the one in the "Straight Pride" parade that was like 95% dudes...) At counter-rallies you have to be careful not to be seen like you're playing FOR the jerks you're freespeeching against... The Atlantic's Ben Yagoda writes on The Cognitive Biases Tricking Your Brain:

Most of them have focused on money. When asked whether they would prefer to have, say, $150 today or $180 in one month, people tend to choose the $150. Giving up a 20 percent return on investment is a bad move--which is easy to recognize when the question is thrust away from the present. Asked whether they would take $150 a year from now or $180 in 13 months, people are overwhelmingly willing to wait an extra month for the extra $30.

I wonder if there's a name for the cognitive bias fallacy among psychology researchers that their contrived scenarios are showing deep, true things about human psychology? Or that normal humans assume psychology researchers will, you know, be around in a month to give them $180?

I mean duh - if the researcher is still around in 13 months, they'll probably be there in 18, but the folk wisdom of "a bird in the hand" distorts this problem beyond usefulness.

Or this one:

One of the biases [economist Richard Thaler is] most linked with is the endowment effect, which leads us to place an irrationally high value on our possessions. In an experiment [...] half the participants were given a mug and then asked how much they would sell it for. The average answer was $5.78. The rest of the group said they would spend, on average, $2.21 for the same mug. This flew in the face of classic economic theory, which says that at a given time and among a certain population, an item has a market value that does not depend on whether one owns it or not.

I mean really. Is that a problem with people, or with classical economics? You got a mug, you know it works, what it can do, you might not know what it will actually take in the real market to find a replacement if need be. Or you're a buyer - who knows what the hell might be wrong with the mug for sale?

Even in philosophy - so many of these setups seem so artificial because they presume perfect knowledge - like the trolley problem, "would you push a person in front of a trolley if doing so would divert the trolley and save 5 people?" It's supposed to point out something about personal culpability vs things being "the universe's fault", but what if the push just let 6 people die instead of 5? Yeesh.

Or the thing about how compassion is broke - that people might be willing to give generously if shown a picture of a hungry refugee girl, but less so if the picture is of her and her sibling, and even less so if shown a whole classroom full of kids in need. Some people say this shows how human compassion is kind of broken because it doesn't follow math, and while that's a great point in terms of making policy decisions, it's hardly surprising - people feel empowered like they can help one person, to give resources that they might otherwise use for themselves, but scale it up and it feels like too much of a burden (and swimming against the tide of 'how things are' in the case of the whole classroom) or if it's the same amount of charity, that the same amount to more people would get too diluted to seem as meaningful.

The human mind has many biases, and some of that leads us to suboptimal behaviours - but it's actually a pretty well-tuned machine for rough guesses in an uncertain world of social interactions and other people with hidden agendas. Yeah, some of those tunings don't work as well in a world of 7 billion folks and modern communications, but still.

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*battlefield turns into a giant orgy*

Cupid: sorry sorry, these are the only type of arrows I have

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How they made the full-size, driveable Lego Technic automobile
hacks hacks hackhackhacks

Some are great, some are a little too perfectly staged. Using a sponge when pulling out a nail with a claw hammer seems smart.

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A blog I like, Lost in Mobile, sometimes parlays thoughtful comments into new articles. Here's a bit from a comment I made on an entry on folks being jaded about smartphone improvements:

Sometimes I still get myself a little frisson of excitement about how cool the little gadget I'm carrying is, how chuffed I am to have my Todo list all organized on it, and my music all sorted and at the ready, etc. I think that's a weird kind of consumerist mindfulness. I'd seriously suggest people do that – take inventory of the blessings bestowed upon you by an engineering savvy society – from crisp clean water, hot showers, and flush toilets, to public health saving us from a bajillion ailments, to our crazy ability to travel at 60 mph like it ain't no thing and hundreds of miles faster than that for a reasonable sum, to the way our little gadgets have access to SO much information, and provide (for worse but generally better) a constant lifeline of contact with our loved ones. Be thankful for all this stuff, because it's well-nigh miraculous.

Read the Full ramble here... Man customizes a van to live in. "Tiny House" on wheels.

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"He who has a hundred miles to walk should reckon ninety as half the journey."
--Eugen Herrigel, citing a Japanese Proverb in "Zen in the Art of Archery"

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For love, it seems, is like the peacock's tail: blind, yet full of eyes.

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Years ago I posted a link to this article, and while the title leaves a to be desired, it really does make me think about how perfect some Game Boy sprites were... More Usenet fun- my favorite .signature quotes... i had a Perl script that would pick a random one each time, and glue it onto my contact information.

Stars and People are made of the same stuff

Now is the winter of our discontent-- and I'm makin' snowballs!

There are no "facts"-- there is only *the fact* that man, every man everywhere in the world, is on his way to ordination. Some men take the long route and some take the short route. Every man is working out his own way and nobody can be of help except by being kind, generous, and patient.

All life is 6-to-5 against, just enough to keep you interested

I remember two things very well, and that is that ladies are pretty and money pays the bills when you get it

"The time has come," the walrus said, / "To speak of manic things,
Of shots and shouts, and sealing dooms / Of commoners and kings."

It is not true that life is one damn thing after another--
it's one damn thing over and over.

There is no god and Murphy is his prophet

Well, we all got misery, but it passes, it always passes!

Insecurity knocks once in a while. Invite her in. Sit down, have coffee with her. And once you have heard Insecurity out for a while, take that sugar spoon and poke her in the eye.

(My mom loves that last one)

Context is strawberries

When life gives you poop, make poop juice.

"Looking back on your life, what would you say satisfied you most?"
"...I'd say women."

And isn't sanity really just a one trick pony anyway? I mean all you get is one trick, rational thinking, but when you're good and crazy, oooh oooh oooh, the sky is the limit!

The question is complex and life is short

when you see infrared we're all luminescent

The cat is trying to open the door on the hinge side. I laugh, then realize that I make the same mistake with people, ideas, and doors, too.

"Life's too short to worry about it"

"I want to live like I type- fast, and with lots of mistakes"

Obscenity, by itself, is the last refuge of the vulgarian and the crutch of the inarticulate motherf**ker.

"I'm going to kill everyone in this room."
"Now that's DARN rude."

Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies--
'God damn it, you've got to be kind.'

"I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you any different." --Kurt Vonnegut

We're all soldiers in the war against entropy.

I spent an interesting evening recently with a grain of salt.

No why. Just here.

But in my arms till break of day / Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me / The entirely beautiful.

If I cannot be free, I'll be cheap

"I'm out to shave with Occam's Razor"

We don't know if there's a god- but there *are* women...

How do we stop an elephant if it goes berserk? What do we do? Do we use
an AK-47? An M-16? An AR-15?... Frankly, would that stop an elephant?
I really doubt it. Do they have a bazooka?

I believe that Ronald Reagan will someday make this country what it once was. . . an arctic wilderness.

The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews.

When I'm clicking through the hundreds of E-mail messages that await me each morning, sometimes I imagine I'm a mighty information whale, sifting through thousands of tiny (but nutritious!) krill bits. Yum!

So many women, so little nerve.

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: This is the ideal life.

The ant's a centaur in his dragon world

I think art should be in the place in our culture where religion used to be. Where magic used to be, there should be art.

We come together making chance into starlight

We don't know who discovered water, but we're certain it wasn't a fish.

As they say in my country, the only thing that separates us from the animals are mindless superstition and pointless ritual.

Since God is silent, man is his own master; he must live in a disenchanted world, submit everything to criticism, and make his own way.

[Stegosaurus] Two words: spiked tail. "Oh, so you're sneaking up
behind me to eat my delicious body? WHAM! Spikes! For you! In your head!"

Is God willing to prevent evil but not able? Then he is impotent.
Is he able but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad.
People are either charming or tedious.

Sleep... Those little slices of death; O how I LOATH them!

So we keep asking, over and over, / Until a handful of earth
Stops our mouths-- / But is that an answer?

...the greatest bargain since Jesus bar-Miriam was was sold for thirty pieces of silver to the Romans, who, God wot, have been selling him ever since...

i seem to be constantly reminded that everything is temporary.
the older i get, the more this bothers me.

Striving for excellence, like a moth beating itself
to death on the side of a light bulb.

Without music, life would be a mistake. ...I would only believe in a God that knew how to dance.

> All positive integers are interesting! Any doubters?
No, no, no. All positive integers are boring. Proof by contradiction:

Car broke down / Wife left me.
Life is lite, / and then Hefty.

Tiger got to hunt, / Bird got to fly; / Man got to sit and wonder,
"Why, why, why?" / Tiger got to sleep, / Bird got to land, /
Man got to tell himself he understand.

I THINK WE SHOULD JUST GET RID OF COMMENTS AND BRING BACK GUESTBOOKS

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Now, two weeks after my friends helped move all my small stuff (allowing me to move in) and a week after the movers wrangled "the big stuff" into my apartment, I feel like my desire to live in a stable environment is trumping my moral compunction that "nothing gets put away unless I know I really want it in my life".

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[On FB Elio suggests Craigslist Free stuff] Yeah, I put 2 media stands and a recumbent exercise bike on it... in theory I might have been leaving money on the table with some of that, but probably not as much as I think, and the combination of karma and convenience makes up for it. The problem is more these little, fiddling things; books or small gadgets or just misc supplies that aren't likely to be worth anyone's time to come get, are iffy for being in a good will bundle, I have liberal guilt about putting in a landfill, aren't necessarily recyclable, etc. Sometimes too there's an element of "I want to get to that", like old video tapes (video yearbooks etc) I's like to transfer and not just chuck.

Also so much is literally unreplaceable -- which isn't the same as I need it or want it, but if I got rid of it and changed my mind I'd be hard pressed to get it back (though sometimes that's tempered by foreknowledge of "out of sight, out of mind": there' sa good chance I'll just forget about it. Which is sad for me in its own way, too.

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--via

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Everything has its time, and everything dies.

--(Animation from here)

I kind of got interested in Brigitte Helm after seeing her being cooled down in her famous "Maria" robot suit on the set of Fritz Lang's Metropolis:

(fullsize photo at Best of BTS)
Famously, she was the design inspiration for C-3PO in Star Wars...

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Have to smile when daughter wants bedroom closet door shut so monsters can't come out. As if she doesn't know they can come out the bottom.

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Inbox Zero, baby! I've been at "Index Two or Three Starred Things" for a while, but Got Things Done and pushed off to other lists...
--For me it's less about the speed and ways they've found of "breaking" the video game Metroid to get the best possible time than the view of the game that shows more than the room Samus is currently in... it's like those old Nintendo Player's Guide maps come to life...

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http://www.kungfugrippe.com/post/1035451042/fuzzy-little-boy - on old color photos. It is sometimes a bit hard to remember that the world wasn't b+w from 1800-1950 or so, and that old Roman statues were originally in garish colors, not the "classy" monochrome stone colors we now see them in.

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if you laid all the cups of tea I've ever drunk end to end it'd be a big mess and a terrible waste of tea.

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I'm always weirded out how Photoshop et al crop out transparent pixels when you try and copy and paste- does that feel 'right' to designers?

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Amber's Turkey Meatloaf of Love

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Thought is only a flash between two long nights, but this flash is everything.

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http://scifiwire.com/2009/08/2012-15-doomsday-propheci.php - doomsday prophecies! favorite line: "How It Turned Out: World still here."

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Nothing like August 31 to remind you you're living on a bit of a college street in a college town. Highlights from other teams at the OLPC Physics Jam:

rollcats! (mascot of the even it seems, from a white board drawing labeled "attach wheels to kitties")

When good physics goes bad...



It's gone really mediocre-ly for my team, the Cowsome Loneboys... there just seems to be much less experience with the toolkits at hand, and we've started from scratch, changing the core platform where building on, twice. We're toiling away on a simplified version of some of our original ideas.

It's amazing how many really sharp people drift in and out of the office, friends of people jamming away I guess... the Israeli Doctorate in anarchy anarchy studies stopping over after giving a talk about OLPC at some conference, this willowy Chinese physics postdoc with the English accent (both of course I immediately develop huge crushes on), one of the cofounders of Logo, the precocious high schooler who namedrops Marvin Minsky like crazy, not even knowing how famous he was at first...

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Sometimes I catch myself mixing slang modes... "what's the haps, G?" Latest harebrained dieting scheme: nothing but fruit and veggies (though stuff like baked potatoes and salads can have some reasonable level of accoutrement) unless I have a craving for it.

Of course the danger here is that I start redefining "craving", but currently I have a distinct pattern: Every few days I'll just get a severe hankering for something, generally something that I saw the day prior. Since I'm more of an opportunistic eater besides that, maybe I need to just roll with it, and make room for those cravings by minimizing everything else.

It has been a few months since I've had soda. I haven't seen the benefits that "even giving up diet soda!" is supposed to have had. I haven't missed it that much either, though I was momentarily caught off guard at the movie theater, figuring out what goes with popcorn. Luckily they had bottles of water floating right in front of me.

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Exchange of the Moment

"Kirk, you're a horrible person."
"That's not what yo' mama said last night!"
"...I could see her not saying that."

"Shouldn't that be Jonathan and I?"
"No... you do the substitution... if I was quoting myself, I would write something like: [gestures]
         'Now is the Time'
                   --Me
Right?"
"Well, you could be a pirate... Iiiii."
"Pirates don't say 'Iiii'."
"Then... 'Aarrgh.'"
"Pirates don't say 'Aargh' either! They say 'Arrrr'. That's what they're known for saying."
"Then maybe you could be some kind of... ...fantasy creature. One that says 'Iiii'."
"..."

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Photo of the Moment

--EB catching his pride-and-joy at Arlington Center, 2007.08.29

So I've been staying at the JW Marriott Denver at Cherry Creek, a kind of snooty high-rent district. My hotel room has some odd touches of luxury. For whatever reason I got one of the "executive" rooms, which means besides what ever internal perks it has, I can go up to the top floor for breakfast, or at night for a nightcap and dessert. (Plus, I have to use my roomkey to get the elevator to go to my floor. Take that you damn hoi polloi! Sure it's a mild inconvenience every time I want to go to my room, especially when the cardreader doesn't take 'til the 3rd or 4th try, but isn't it worth it?)

Of course, one of the best parts of the hotel is that it's about 20 yards from the company I'm consulting for, which is why my company gets the sweetheart rates.

Would you buy a duvet cover from this lady?

The layout is pretty typical, 2 beds, high, and with great bed coverings. But the weird thing is they put a catalog on each bed, carefully replacing it each time the bed is made, offering the bedding, art, "aromatherapy" toiletries etc for sale. (Though not the grapefruit & mint shower gel, which was the only toiletry I really liked here.)

The bathroom is pretty huge, with a tub and a nice separate standup shower in the corner, glass walls on the other two sides. That's pretty cool.

Nice views though! Denver's there in a photo that doesn't do the Rockies justice.

For a cheapskate like me (even if it's on the company's dime), not knowing what comes with the room and what would be an extra fee is annoying. The chocolates, I assume, are free, but there are some glass bottles of "Jelly Belly" jellybeans and some yogurt-covered somethings that are labeled at $12 a pop. The minibar is likely way overpriced (especially with that free booze at night upstairs) but there are two types of bottled water... the "Fiji" is clearly marked at $6 (though I know it's generally priced higher than most other bottled water) but I'm hoping the other, more generic bottles are complementary.

Finally, there was a damn rose on my bed when I came in after work the first day. (Joined by a second the next day...ok, I get it.) My first upon seeing it was, and I kid you not, "crap, I'm in the wrong room." There was no other reason to think I was in the wrong room, it just seemed so odd.

Heh. It would be nice to think that the roses are actually a message from the housekeeping staff, something along the lines of "hey, you weren't a disgusting pig last night, thanks for that" and that people that were more messy didn't get one.

In general, I think it's great karma to not do anything to make the housekeeping staff resent you.

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Link of the Moment
Boingboing had this nifty link of Early 19th Century Vocabulary My favorite was "Hissian", slang term for a goose. Though over all it doesn't feel like things have changed that much over 200 years. 200 years before that, say, is like Shakespeare times, and that seems much more different. I guess English has been stabilizing a bit, probably with more global communication and less regionalization.

Hrrm.

Past few days I've been checking out the New Orleans coverage, comparing it to 9/11. I guess since it is regional there isn't the general sense of dread and "could it happen here, now?" Still it makes me think at some point there might be a major terror incident, something WMDish, and it's going to be some mix of the two...a major city becoming a ghost town, a general sense of fear or even panic.

Anyway, on to happier subjects for today I think.

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Videos of the Moment
Twelve movies about one thing: muffins. (Thanks FoSO).

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Minor News of the Moment
World's oldest person dies, aged 115. "Dutch woman swore by a daily helping of herring for a healthy life". Amazing to think of it...she was, what, in her late 20s during the first world war? Though the herring...reminds me of that joke of the uncle who swore by raw garlic and cigars, you know what his last words were? No one does, we couldn't get near him!

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Slating and Ranting of the Moment
Slate.com says dell is hitting a bit of rough patch, including some very bed press from some blogs (the reverse chronolgical order makes it a less compelling read, though...not to mention all the "fear the power of blogs!" crap in it). I just want to say that, based on the website, I don't see why they've done so well. That is a really unfriendly place, too many options, too much information at every turn-- look at their home and home office page, maybe 1/3 of it is what I'm interested in, the rest is just...stuff.

First off, it feels strange to me that I have to select my category, Home-Home Office, Gaming, Small Business, Medium-Large Business...it smells like a scam, that these groups might be getting better prices and I'm not in on it. My friend points out that if you go to dell.com/tv, you're looking at deals that are difficult or impossible to get at through the main interface.

And I know I'm a throwback, but I still want to see and maybe even tough the type of system I'll be getting before buying. There's still enough variation in laptops and desktop systems that I don't like buying them just as some kind of commodity item.

Ah well. At least prices are relatively low, and I suppose some of thats because of folks like Dell.

Quote of the Moment

Were we all like children, forever, in that time before the Cro-Magnon burst of intellectualization set in? Granted, the ballooning of abstract powers of reason are probably what got us through the last Ice Age. Still, it is that same ability to shift our focus from the eternal present to the never-never land of self-referential abstraction that brought us the Egyptian priestly class, holy wars, the caste system, Machiavelli and trial lawyers.

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Whining of the Moment
Weird...I just installed the Google toolbar which shows you the 0-to-10 Page Ranking for whatever you're looking at. Old standbys alienbill.com and loveblender.com both get a 5, and even Johnny-Come-Latelies like kirkjerk.com and mortals.be get a 3, but kisrael.com pegs the meter at...zero. What's up with that? I think it has more incoming links than any of the other sites...am I being blocked for some reason?

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Culture Oddness of the Moment
Slowly I turned...Step by step....Inch by inch...the weird thing isn't the background of the story so much as it's one of those things you hear repeatedly but only once in a great while.

Quote of the Moment

You can't survive by sucking the juice from a wet mitten.

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Game of the Moment
Too difficult to control to be really fun but still kind of neat, Madness Redeemer has tons of violent mayhem. The way you swing the gun with the mouse is irritating, you should probably run this maximized (it really needs a crosshair to show you where you're firing, and better 'throw away useless gun' would be good to.) I'd recommend sticking with the tutorial and "Experiment" mode, unless you're a masochist.

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Randomness of the Moment
The Star Wars Scout Walker Kama Sutra. Very strange...and very sexy. Or is that geeky? I always get those two mixed up. Admonition of the Moment

We prefer our cornflakes of criticism with a bit more of the milk of human kindness.

I was trying to explain to "Inflatable Sushi" that while constructive criticism is welcome, he was being way too blunt about things in general.

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'Net Lore of the Moment

The Japanese eat very little fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.

The French eat a lot of fat and also suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.

The Japanese drink very little red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.

The Italians drink excessive amounts of red wine and also suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.

The Germans drink a lot of beer and eat lots of sausages and fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.

CONCLUSION:
Eat and drink what you like.
Speaking English is apparently what kills you.

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Image of the Moment

Bill posted this snippet from a Henry cartoon. I don't know why it fascinates me so. (Mo just looked at and said "eww", I pointed out it was only a toy monkey.)

Advice of the Moment

Conversations not to have when pulled over for speeding by a Georgia state trooper:
"Lookie here, darlin', nobody blows through Georgia that fast."
"Sherman did."

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Adventure of the Moment
Got between $3000-$8000 burning a hole in your pocket, a strong taste for adventure, and maybe a bit of a deathwish? You too can pilot a Russian jet... (via Portal of Evil)

Their answer to a link labeled "Is this dangerous?":

This is a words of Russian president after Su-27 flight: "Excellent jet" You will make sure that is the real truth!