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Interesting ranting on Game of Throne's kingdom's not taking what decades of winter all seriously, like seriously missing the chance to worldbuild in order to get all stabby and horndog about The Hundred Year's War time. I had a dream where I was checking out Paul McCartney's autobiography, but he padded it with like 100 pages about "Page-A-Day Calendars I particularly liked".

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wait is this true? I thought it was like.... booty bouncing in general and maybe with a weird reference to "I DRINK YOUR MILKSHAKE"

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Here are the words, as we know them. I sure there's a lot of mutation over time. Also, it sounds vaguely like there might be something old-timey racist in its general vibe, but looking at the actual lines it's tough to see anything offensive... - "a for 'of"? "hallum scallum"? a "Buck" bowling 'em?

One sort, two sort
little jig'a'jam
bobtail dominick
little tory tam
virgin mary
hallum scallum
jingle 'em
jangle 'em
bowl 'em buck

william william
tremble toe
he's a good fisherman
catches hens
puts 'em in pens
some lay eggs
some not
how brow limble lock
sit and sing 'til 12 o'clock
the clock fell down
the mouse ran around
o u t spells out

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What we call reality is just when we all agree about our hallucinations.

This is after Harris quotes Chris Frith calling consciousness "a fantasy that coincides with reality" - the idea that we absorb raw sensory data but really live in our interpretation of that data, not in the data itself. Our day to day conscious life is closer to what we experience while dreaming, only hopefully a bit more well-grounded in the external objective world.

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Contrary to what most people assume, we can echolocate to some degree. If you hold your hand in front of your face and hum and then move your hand back and forth, you'll notice that your humming reveals to you the location of your hand. So you can be a lousy bat whenever you want.

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[The Frontal Cortex] does impulse control, emotional regulation, long-term planning, gratification postponements, executive function. It's the part of the brain that attempts to tell you, "You know, this seems like a good idea right now, but trust me, you'll regret it. Don't do it." It's the most recently evolved part of our brains. Our frontal cortex is proportionately bigger and more complex than that of any other primate. And, most interesting, it's the last part of the brain to get fully wired up. The frontal cortex is not fully online until people are, on average, about a quarter century old. It's boggling, but it also tells you a lot about why adolescents act in adolescent ways; it's because the frontal cortex isn't very powerful yet. And that has an interesting implication, which is that if the frontal cortex is the last part of the brain to fully mature, by definition it's the part least constrained by genes and most shaped by experience. So the frontal cortex is your moral barometer, if that's the right metaphor. It's the Calvinist voice whispering in your head.

I think I have trouble absorbing the consequences of a brain that doesn't come into its own until later in life. Ever since I myself was a teen, my method of dealing with younger kids was to treat them more or less as adults, to take them seriously and with respect. (It's usually pretty effective, and the kids seem to appreciate it...but I think one ex properly sussed that it put me at risk for being the "buddy dad" type and leaving the more authoritarian stuff for "mean mom".)

I treat kids that way because my strongest emotional driver is the need to be compliant with objective, unemotional reality, and my intuition (which is pretty much wrong, but then again I've never put much stock in intuition...) is that rational clear reasoning is available to everyone. Also because it's often fun and funny to take kids seriously, and it feels like it's good practice for them. But I realize now that it's based on a false premise.

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I completely agree. My MIT colleague Erik Brynjolfsson in our business school put this eloquently on a panel at a recent AI conference: "If we can't ensure that everybody gets better off after this huge explosion of wealth, then shame on us." Shame on us!

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Setting up a new webcam... I do love webcamtoy.com

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When you believe niceness disproves the presence of racism, it's easy to start believing bigotry is rare, and that the label *racist* should be applied only to mean-spirited, intentional acts of discrimination. The problem with this framework–besides being a gross misunderstanding of how racism operates in systems and structures enabled by nice people–is that it obligates me to be nice in return, rather than truthful.

trebek: this everyday plague is actually a subtle form of hubris

contestant: what is worry

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One of my favorite pieces of technology in Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series is the SEP. Rather than make something actually invisible ("or anything hyper-impossible like that", even in that zany high-tech universe) it just casts a kind of electric psychological field and people edit it out of their perception as Somebody Else's Problem:

The Somebody Else’s Problem field is much simpler and more effective, and what’s more can be run for over a hundred years on a single torch battery. This is because it relies on people’s natural disposition not to see anything they don’t want to, weren’t expecting, or can’t explain. If Effrafax had painted the mountain pink and erected a cheap and simple Somebody Else’s Problem field on it, then people would have walked past the mountain, round it, even over it, and simply never have noticed that the thing was there

A while back I realized pretending something had an SEP field on it was a good way of coping with things as long as A. they weren't actually affecting me and B. weren't my fault - and even better if C. there wasn't much I could do about it anyway. (The B and C elements are what kept it morally on the up and up.)

But there's a lot of problems that don't meet those conditions - especially A. There's a cognitive psychology term "catastrophizing" - building an irrational series of cause and effect leading to a terrible negative conclusion. I think people do at least a watered-down variant of it subconsciously all the damn time - I know I do. Even when folks don't explicitly link up a chain of events that lead to a far-fetched negative consequence, they tend to act as if that chain was in effect, and the result is anxiety. The world is too complex to do all possible modeling of cause-and-effect, and so we use short hand of "I should be worried about this" to help us make good decisions and keep up good behaviors, but that can be very wearing.

Andy Warhol suggested one remedy:

Sometimes people let the same problem make them miserable for years when they could just say, "So what." That's one of my favorite things to say. "So what." "My mother didn't love me." So what. "My husband won't ball me." So what. "I'm a success but I'm still alone." So what. I don't know how I made it through all the years before I learned how to do that trick. It took a long time for me to learn it, but once you do, you never forget.

The trouble is, in theory you could "So What" every-damn-thing, and I don't think the results of that would be good - apathy or a general sense of pointlessness could result.

So ideally, I would make a cognitive tool like a "Virtual So What Field" I could apply and activate at will - but with the feeling I had the existential authority to apply it judiciously, as I saw fit. Some things I want to care about and get emotionally vested in, other things I could get help saying "So What", and chop down that branching tree of possible consequences near the root. Found an old DOS "lworks" text file (luckily ported to html by my past self at some point since then) containing a diary from my senior year of high school. Interesting how at the beginning of the year I weighed "still 197 pounds" - what I weigh now - but by the end of the year I had lost "about 30 pounds worth" of weight.

Man, my writing was insufferable. Very difficult for me to look back on.

Since misery loves company, here's a story I wrote 7/31/91

Jones and his Flight
Kirk Israel"My God, this is like a dream!" thought Jones as he fell and fell and fell and fell.
Jones was not falling down in the sensible fashion. He was falling up.
He was hard pressed to explain exactly how this odd reversal of events (and gravity) was taking place.
So up he fell, slowly at first, and then faster as the savage acceleration gripped him. Vertigo caused his head to swim amusingly.
Jones was not amused.
He had been in his back yard, leaping to make a spectacularly athletic frisbee catch, when he inexplicably failed to return to terra firma. His friend was staring at the patch of grass Jones would have landed on (had gravity not been slightly inebriated,) utterly bewildered.
Now his lawn (not a huge lawn, but a fair sized place for the occasional casual frisbee toss) was just one of many lawns that Jones' commanding view afforded him.
The air started to get quite cold and moist as he continued his ascent.
It was getting harder and harder to breathe.
He could see the curvature of the Earth in the distance. Wow, was it big.
Then, popping out of the atmosphere like a cork out of a champagne bottle, via laws hitherto unknown to modern physics, his lungs exploded as all the pressure (14.7 pounds per square inch) inside of Jones struggled violently to equalise with the pressure ouside of Jones, namely next to zero pounds per square anything.
Thus ended Jones and his flight.

And a poem (8/11/91)

And in the distance I saw
A city of white that gleamed:
Metropolis;
sitting
in imperial splendor
its defiant towers of ivory
thrust against the crystal sky
besides an angry green sea
I examined the mud and earth around me
that covered me and merged with me
untill it was not possible to tell
what was first dirt and what
was first me
so I set out to enter
Metropolis;
I pulled my weary body
through the common sludge
untill I came unto the edge of
Metropolis:
splatterings of mud
(or was that me? I could not tell)
fell of me, staining the
pristine road that I then
stood on
And on these defiant towers
I could see no doors and no
windows and no Cosmopolitans
conversed, standing between
towers of Ivory and so
I threw my head back and
screamed and laughed and
yelled and cried untill
breath came reluctantly
and my echo was my only
companion in
Metropolis.

Yeesh.

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The donation bucket is always open! ....Actually, that's kind of how buckets work.

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'Know what I saw? On fire off the Shoulder of Orion? ATTACK SHIPS.' -- Norm McDonald as Roy Batty in 'Blade Runner'

First, the good news, that I'm at the lowest weight I've been for around 14 years. (Admittedly only half a pound below my lowpoint in 2014, and then I gained back about a pound a month for a year.)

Then the bad news, courtesy the NY Times: This Is Probably the Least You'll Weigh All Year. Sorry.

Still, with a bit of an exception in 2013, I've been under 200 since 2012. Which is pretty good considering 2005-2010 was above 210. (http://diet.kirk.is/ for the graph)

For 2014 and 2015 I see the cycle the NY Times describes, but 2013 I kept losing weight through the holidays and winter, so there's hope. And I've switched to seeing nerdy but not obsessive calorie counting (the only weight loss program that's worked for me over the past decades) as something I'll have to do even when I'm at a weight I like.

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Lovely Short Story about letters from beyond the grave. Resonates a bit for me with the letters I write plotting my super-niece's development, to be handed over when she's 16 or so. http://what-if.xkcd.com/114/ An xkcd "What if" mentioned "The Earth sweeps up space dust as it travels around its orbit. About 100 tons of dust per day enters the atmosphere in the form of tiny grains". I'm not sure if my finding that fact so startling says more about my failure to grasp how much is in "empty" space or how big the Earth is.

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A crick in the neck is such a pain in the neck.

Seriously, when you walk around with your head tilted down a bit because it's less uncomfortable - it really does a number on your mood, that weird feedback loop of mood to expression of mood to mood.

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Huh! Black background screens are rougher on people with astigmatism, which may explain why they went out of style... (besides early-Mac-like dark-on-light just seeming hipper than all that 8-bit and DOS stuff, and more like print.)

I've never really felt the appeal of hipster grey-background code editors, and the way some Samsung phones default to black backgrounds for messages seems tacky and annoying to me. (Also, very light text on very dark backgrounds leaves dancing after-images in my eyes- back when web sites used that a lot, I used to do a quick "select all" just to make the text more readable.) Found glitch art: woke up my laptop to find this pleasing display of the Red Sox, that lasted surprisingly long (then cleared)

http://media.skysurvey.org/interactive360/index.html Great composite scrollable night sky map. (Suddenly I have an urge to make a daytime version, just a field of blue.)

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Clever-- Home Depot has an icon with "Shazam for HOW-TO"-- guess they're using it like an audio QR-code...

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October Blender of Love

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mouthy

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http://www.thisismyjam.com/kirkjerk - my top 50 continues -- an upbeat euro cover of Mad World may be blasphemy for some but I dig it

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"You turned into a cat! A SMALL cat! You violated Conservation of Energy! That's not just an arbitrary rule, it's implied by the form of the quantum Hamiltonian! Rejecting it destroys unitarity and then you get FTL signalling! And cats are COMPLICATED! A human mind can't just visualise a whole cat's anatomy and, and all the cat biochemistry, and what about the *neurology*? How can you go on *thinking* using a cat-sized brain?"

A great bit of fanfic I'm starting about what if Harry took an analytical, scientist approach to the fantasy world we find him in... great thinky stuff!

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Avogadro's Number: About # of graphite atoms in a pencil led. Or in grapefruits, Volume of THE EARTH. Mind blown. Atoms are so so so tiny.

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Paraphrase of Steve Jobs paraphrasing a song: "We're all just renting time here on planet Earth." Any idea what song?

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Sometimes when I read technical concepts that seem to have poor power/weight ratios, but maybe I'm just dumb, I think of EJBs circa 2000AD

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- I find this weird Red Sox "John Lackey" parody weirdly compelling. Whut-Ev-Uh!
--Shirley Bassey does P!nk... man, the James Bond-Theme styling of this is just astounding.

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Digging the casual game Peggle on iPhone: it blends opposites: physics- AND turn-based; luck w/ skill, plus powerups to discover.

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http://www.gizmag.com/the-kids-walker-16-metre-bi-pedal-exoskeleton-for-children/16521/ -- could you imagine being the kid on the block with THIS??

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Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars. Or the unimaginable hideous gaping void of space. One of the two.

Before my trip to Portugal Amber and I played a round of Mr. Snowman at the Summer Shack near Alewife. While not as epic as the round with Miller, Kate and Tammy (I think crayons make it a bit tougher, plus it might be better as a four player game) Amber (on the offense) did quite well...

Clockwise from top we have her attacking polar bear being distracted by my delicous baby seal, her lead off sword being deflected by a cunning ninja, a water gun with the attached tank of water - that's being drained by a fat man out for tea. However, that fat man had a dodgy heart and thus the Mr. Snowman was again imperiled... until the paramedics from the 70s show "Emergency!" showed up to resuscitate him ("CLEAR!"). A more traditional gun had its bullets diverted via a powerful electromagnet. Then, we have a plow truck being stopped by a stake in the ground and chain. I'm not sure what the gentleman is doing to lift up the stake, but he (and his curious- err, tripod base-) is being...umm, licked by another guy as yet another distraction. Finally, we end with what was probably chronologically the first, the melting sun being blocked by clouds.

The weird thing is, they've managed to, in effect, put this game into videogame form. There's this AMAZING game for the Nintendo DS called Scribblenauts, with a vocabulary of over 20,000 nouns. Type in any of those nouns, and it magically appears, and can then be used to help solve various puzzles like escaping from zombies, knocking over bottles, or keeping food from ants without killing them (lest you upset the hippy).

Never thought there would be handheld technology to do that in a game!

Going back to more primitive toys, I rather liked Amber's little house made out of an obscure, flinty building toy called "keystones"...

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One of the nice things about 24 Hour Comics Day is I often hear a bit of new (to me) music. Bummed this song isn't embeddable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gw9wE1nutc4

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I think Pooh and Gopher are the only straight ones in The Hundred Acre Wood.

Yay Red Sox! We could get used to this.

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Video of the Moment

--Making the rounds... a brilliant study in "Truth in Lyrics" -- and the singer does really well on the long high notes!

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Quote of the Moment

Optimistic bias: People tend to be overconfident about their own abilities and the outcome of their plans. Something like 90% of people think that they are above average drivers less likely to get into an accident than the average joe. This is so pervasive that there is actually a scientific name for the few people who accurately assess their own future, their abilities, and what other people think of them: clinically depressed.

Really good writing there, I might need to add it to my regular rotation.

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<<that's me stumbling away / slowly learning that life is ok / say after me / it's no better to be safe than sorry>>

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I'm grateful that a stable diagnosis of mild astigmatism has my only vision issue for decades; I know some of my friends aren't so blessed.

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Great neologisms: "thinkodynamics", Hofstadter's reason/excuse for thinking about thinking at a high level, rather than at the neurons etc.

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I wish I could figure out rule for whether the first or second E line would be more crowded.

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I wish I could recapture my childhood fascination with how two plus two and two TIMES two equals four. I'm participating in an online comic jam run by my housemate Miller, The Sketchbook Conspiracy. (A comic jam is just a collaboration, a cycle of artists taking a page at a time.)

There are 3 groups going, I'm with "Less Filling"... you can see the comics (and a larger version of this one) on the conspiracy comics page.

So here's what I came up with yesterday for my first turn:

I'm more of a doodler than an artist, but I wanted to try and match the style of the previous pages. One surprise is how closely you have to read the previous panels, from names to characteristics to appearance, in order to get continuity.

I usually draw directly on a touchpad computer, but here I tried the more traditional pencil on paper, traced with some sharpies, scanned, then manipulated in Paint Shop Pro, where I also added the dialog. (Miller encouraged me to separate the background and foreground, and of course with the repetition I had in mine it made sense.) My "Layers" mojo was weak, so I ended up doing more with transparency and cut and paste than I wanted to.

So, yet another thing where it turns out that it's harder than it looks... clearly I ain't gonna set the world on fire with my mad art skills.

So a couple of years ago I sang the praises of my Garmin 2610 GPS...

It's getting a bit long in the tooth (compared to say, the TomTom I got for my mom recently, with its 3D-ish angled maps and friendlier UI) but remains generally reliable. Admittedly its maps are blissfully ignorant of the post-Big-Dig world, and I'm too cheap to shell out for the update, but still, having this kind of device is a huge boon... it is to Mapquest what cellphones are to landlines, and I barely understand how people made spontaneous plan changes without 'em.

Anyway, back then I mentioned its "Max Speed" record, which I likened to a "high score" feature. Well, all I have to say is:


Beat that. I just wish it had a spot for my initials.

Quote and Scandal of the Moment

Waltham: it's like our own little New Jersey right here in Massachusetts.

Funny little idea...obviously meant as a bit of a dig, but both state and city have their own blue collar pride and character as they orbit a larger metropolis. My family has connections to both Waltham (my mom and aunt growing up, and then where I lived and owned a house for a bit) as well as the Garden State (a vacation home a few blocks from the shore that is slated to my relative's permanent residence heading into retirement.)

In other New Jersey news, Tuesday Morning Quarterback pointed out a truly scary result of the Supreme Court Ruling letting "eminent domain" be used for private development. In Union Township, it looks like an Assemblyman effectively seized land to allow a political contributor to build townhouses...ignoring the fact that's what the owner of the land wanted to do as well. A seriously frightening blend of cronyism and tyranny...I don't utterly disagree with the court ruling, but there needs to be some kind of check to make sure it's not abused and that getting your local politician to seize land for you doesn't become a cost-effective alternative to avoiding the free market.

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Cartoon of the Moment

--Cartoon by Adam Green, who was the subject of the first lovblender review. Brilliant!

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Video of the Moment
Actually I just emailed with Adam Green and he pointed out this Trailer for "The Shining", which does an astounding job of making it seem like a "feel-good-movie"...amazingly clever in its selectivity.

Art of the Moment
Two neat computer art pieces...The Zoomquilt is this lovely recursive painting piece that you can zoom into and out of forever (it loops eventually)--I think each artist made their painting so it fits inside someone elses, and then they linked it with a red path/tongue motif...really cool.

Sillier are these Stop Action Animations by Lebonze...Planes is probably the coolest...it has a goofy, dreamlike quality to it...

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Political Video of the Moment
Funny yet creepy video of Buzzword Bonanza from the Republican National Convention. Part of me knows you could do this with almost any set of political speeches, but still...

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Quote of the Moment

Remember when you were a kid and the boys didn't like the girls? Only sissies liked girls? What I'm trying to tell you is that nothing's changed. You think boys grow out of not liking girls, but we don't grow out if it. We just grow horny. That's the problem. We mix up liking pussy for liking girls. Believe me, one couldn't have less to do with the other.

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Link of the Moment
Wired webified its article on the SmartCar coming to North America. I love those things. And omigosh, I thought the upcoming MINI convertible was cute, but how wacky is the Convertible SmartCar??? (Though I wonder how much less safe it might be then its safety cage'd cousin?

Go Red Sox!...they beat Oakland in typical nailbiting fashion. But Johnny Damon had a nasty, nasty knock, colliding with Damian Jackson when they both went to catch a fly ball...he was K.O'd and has a concussion. Terrible to see the replay for that.

Bring on the Yankees. They suck. And they hate their mothers.

Looking forward to a Red Sox/Cubs World Series. Red Sox won that last World Series matchup, 4 games to 2. In 1918.

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Funny Link of the Moment
Positive Movie Reviews--a really funny exercise in damning with effusive praise. Rates movies using a scale of "four or five stars"...a bit like The Onion's "The Outside Scoop", but easier to actually read through.

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Commentary of the Moment
SO, after his Feature on the Blender, Jason Pettus had some kind words for the Blender setup in his journal. (Final 3-4 paragraphs on the page.) I am pleased with how the Blender has evolved, that you can see all the raw content, but there's also a selection made, so if you just want to read some good stuff every month, it's there as well.

The middle of that journal entry is a great read, some amazing little tidbits from "Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin" by Mel Gordon.

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Gaming Link of the Moment
Home of the Underdogs has writeups of hundreds of overlooked PC games and applications. I like how mousing over titles brings up screenshots, since a single screenshot can really say a lot. Beware the huge amount of popups. They're feature on head-to-head games was pretty good. I also love their puppy astronaut mascot, shown here.

Heh...one of the things about even "general interest" linkblogs that are run by a small team or just one guy (like this one is) is that they always focus a bit too much on some particular interest of the writer...the way BoingBoing always seems full of Doctrow's Disney links, or CamWorld always has a ton of politics. I'm sure a reader of this site who digs the usual random links but just isn't into video games probably thinks I'm obsessed.

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Random Link of the Moment
The website of the gum I'm currently enjoying encourages me to take a quiz to find out Am I A Gum Or Mint. Apparently, I am a mint. I have no idea what that means. It's funny how getting engrossed in a project can take your mind of the problems of you and the world. I get up to my neck in the Blender, and suddenly it's like we're not marching to war with Iraq, the potential for ever-increasingly-devastating terrorist attack isn't there, and my job is completely secure for as long as I want it with an even better there for the asking. And I gotta wonder, is this a good thing or a bad thing? Is it a healthy break-taking from all the neurotic fretting that can be of no help to the situations anyway? Or a dangerous flight from reality that threatens to keep me from taking positive steps of preparation to deal with whatever comes next?

Image of the Moment

--Mo doing her best James Dean impression. (Ok, not counting the shoulders. Pbbbt.)

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Giraffe in Bathtub with Lightbulbs of the Moment
Bill, who thinks that I get to his site by searching Google for man who fired shots in front of UN Bldg. yesterday, linked to this site, Rumsfeldism: The New Surrealism. Rambles a bit, but the first few paragraphs are great.

Political Jab of the Moment
Statistics point to Democrats being better for the Stock Market, which goes against current conventional wisdom about the pro-business Republicans. Maybe unfettered "do whatever the hell you want" economics isn't ultimately what gets the job done. I think the most apt analogy was by a middle or high school teacher, who saw today's companies reflected in the behaviour of his students. There's a lot of terrific raw energy and creativity in there; but left alone without some level of regulation, and you end up with chaos. The Lord of the Flies syndrome.

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Kirk's Law of Group Meetings During Uncertain Times
"Once any layoffs have occurred, you cannot schedule any business meetings for more than than 6 or fewer than 3 without causing large amounts of anxiety and trepidation."

Dang, I think both the title and phrasing of this law need to be punched up if it's going to catch on as any kind of meme.

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Signature of the Moment

Normally I'm not one to believe in little green men from Mars. But one night, as I was driving home from a party, I caught something in my headlights I still can't explain. It had weird, catlike eyes and only stood about a foot tall. It was covered with grayish fur, and walked on all fours, like a cat. It had a tail, which if I had to describe in terms of something here on Earth was, in a way, like a cat's. Also, it was carrying a ray gun in its mouth. It was either a ray gun or a mouse.

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Air Travel of the Moment
Apparently Continental changes their rates at 7 Eastern....in an instant our flight to Cleveland (for my high school reunion) went from $235 to $930! D'ohh. Unbelievable Never to be Repeated Offer of the Moment

Wanna buy a kisrael.com shirt? Only $14 + $4 S/H. This amazing offer made possible by a really cool site called CafePress.com It costs you nothing to setup a 'store', upload art, and slap it on various shirts, mugs, hats, etc. You can then set the price: $14 is the base price for a basic white T, anything you wish to charge more than that can be your profit. (So far, the only annoying thing I've found about them is that you can only have one item type per 'store'--the thing is you can have multiple stores, so it's not as annoying as it could be.)

Supposedly they've been around for a few years, so it sounds like their business plan might actually work.

I used this picture as the basis for the gear. Also, I made up a full line of LoveBlenderWear, along with publishing a new Blender Digest.