❮❮prevnext❯❯

I was looking for something to do in Minecraft (which I play with my niece) and I also like shouting out to my past geek projects...

Pixeltime was a (sadly defunct) brilliant site hosting contests in making 45x45 pixel images with a limited 16 color palette I write about it (and its brilliant Max Headroom meets a belligerent Mr Rogers host) on my pixeltime tribute page.

Back in the day I wrote programs to automatically put real photographs into Pixeltime, faking mouse clicks but otherwise using the program as intended. One was a portrait of an elephant, and I decided to put that into our Minecraft realm.

45x45 images are tiny, sure, but it's over 2000 blocks to put in by hand! (And in Minecraft terms, it's like at least 10 stories tall)

---

I really need to do more studying and write an essay on how Americanism is a genuine folk religion which reveres capital and the vague concept of "the free market" as a god of providence to be pleased in order to lead a prosperous life, also that the founding fathers are prophetic, perhaps even messianic figures who basically gave birth to this god through the revolutionary war, and that the vast majority of conservative Christians in America revere capital more than the god they claim to serve in an ironic sort of golden calf situation.

---

"CASH Our Growing Tech Company Will Pay You $100 Over & Ove again Starting Today". Sounds legit.
Word of the day (from a Therapy session) - Conviviality! So whenever anybody says the word of the day, scream real loud!
--Shot at yesterday's rally for Transgender rights - If you live in MA Vote Yes on 3, please. If you know + like or love a TG person, or you don't but you're willing to believe the world is more complex than you mighta guessed, it's the humane thing to do.

---

Ugh, Brazil.

---

on them red sox

---

Being an adult means not having your bed pushed up against a corner. That is literally the only criteria

Timepiece with the fewest moving parts: Sundial. Timepiece with the most moving parts: Hourglass.

Sarah Leadbeater's annual pumpkin carvening... my two in front, script Pumpkin and this years tumblr favorite mini face

---

alas poor vine

---

No matter who wins the World Series (and my heart's with Cleveland even though I'm not crazy about the name or the Wahoo) it's an echo of Boston's 2004 + 2007 wins; Theo Epstein is President of Baseball Operations for the Cubs and of course, Terry Francona for Cleveland... Wow. Amazing timelapse of an overnight bridge demolition.

---

http://www.lamebook.com/dear-teenage-skater/ Worth reading

---

Ah sweet Arlington. No time like twenty of midnight to bust out the old pneumatic drill. I am trying to extend my palette by learning to enjoy sugary sweets in with the savory. Today: Sweetgreen's "CURRY CAULIFLOWER + QUINOA SALAD" -- curry cauliflower, cucumber tahini yogurt, some kick with the siracha, and dried cranberries.

---

Philosophical debating with EB. Part of its trying to flesh out my concept of "non-trivial novelty" as a kind of existential moral good, an objective "point of it all", at least for me. (I started calling it "novelty of pattern" - EB thought maybe I meant "novelty in non-trivial subjects", when really I was just trying to say that the output of a random number generator wouldn't be very novel in the way I was thinking)

EB argues (and I may or may not be doing his view justice, but I'm trying) that since some failure is well-nigh inevitable in getting to that end goal, it is an inherent and essential characteristic. I kind of chafe at this; I think just because its damned likely doesn't mean it's inevitable, and therefore can't be a defining part, just an unfortunate side-effect that we'd avoid if we could and do avoid when we can.

As we argued on about this, we refined to a pretty specific gap in our outlooks: for me, definitions spring from theory, for him, definitions spring from practice. (So "risk of failure" would be a more acceptable candidate for part of the definition for him.)

I was sort of surprised to realize this aspect of my outlook. I mean, on the one hand, it's obvious, I seem to have an almost pathological need to be able to rationalize and justify my actions to some kind of unnamed higher, objective authority. On the other hand, I'm a strong descriptivist when it comes to the world of English and Grammar, and I think stuff like "the universe of platonic ideals" or what not is nonsense; what we see is what we get, universe-wise, and when we're lucky we can see and name the patterns.

So definitely an interesting potential inconsistency in my outlook. I'm still sticking with my guns on this definition though, since it seems like the definition should be reversible (If A = novel pattern results, and B = failures getting there, A implies B, but B doesn't assure A! And I can visualize -- as unlikely but not impossibly unlikely -- novel patterns without all the failure, but it seems like EB's definition rejects that.)

Lucifer is the most moral being in fiction. Rebelling against that which you know to be unjust despite its omnipotence? Best Story.

---

I wonder if GTAV has any easter egg (or glitch) as remotely as cool as the swing set catapult -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sEG4v5z_70 (good music too)

---

So lovely... though I don't know if it's processed? Still worth doing fullscreen:

Adventure Is Calling from Shane Black on Vimeo.

"He was a poet, a mountain man, a Buddhist dedicated to the principle of meditation on the essence of things, a vegetarian too by the way though I haven't got on that kick from figuring maybe in this modern world to be a vegetarian is to split hairs a little since all sentient beings eat what they can.

This quote rattles in my brain whenever I think about Buddhism and Vegetarianism.

The characters in the books seem to grill themselves up an awful lot of steaks

---

What if Gangnam Style is actually just a rain dance and you've all brought this upon yourselves?

---

The chorus of Alicia Keys' "Girl on Fire" uses an AAAA rhyme scheme, where every A ends with "fire". Also "A"s 1 2 and 4 are actually the same line.

---

I shit you not, our McDonald's is out of soda and ketchup. Hurricane isn't even here yet.

---

@masukomi i am curious about the families that regard ketchup as an emergency staple.

---

["25 or 6 to 4" comes on my new music playlist]
"Wait... is this the good one you've always had in your playlist?"
"You mean the mashup? No, this is the original."
"Oh, the one with the rap is better."
"This is a guy singing his heart out! You don't know rock and roll! You don't know anything!"
"The other one is better because it has the line 'pussy palace'."
"...touché"
--Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal -- reminds me of that one New Yorker cartoonist.
--This has been sitting on my backlog forever... yesterday the song was in my head so I finally downloaded it. It's a bummer that it's not actually about bees, but I like the mix of hightech CGI bots and old school Japanese-action-show people-in-suits.

---

...new Canon camera. Bigger, but still pocket-sized, because A. these cameras are taking amazing photos and B. the shot you take is always better than the one you don't because you don't have your camera or couldn't navigate your phone's camera in time...
Dig the art style, if the music seems a bit incongruous -- more info

---

All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.

---

taking pro shots with an iPhone 3GS - I really dig this kind of aesthetic/stance, though I get better results and feel less like a hack with my tiny Canon.

---

More Programmers' Voodoo / use of "magic numbers": how 31 is established as THE go to value for overriding Java's hashCode()

---

New Introspection Flash: I can be frustrating with my lack of preference; if most likely options both seem pleasant to me, I'm reluctant to have an opinion, lest it prove the inferior path somehow... so when I don't have a preference, I really don't have a preference-- I'm not just being polite or playing the martyr. This can sometimes be frustrating for people close to me, at least until they get used to it and learn to leverage it. But also I think it makes me crap at thinking up fictional plots! Previously I attributed this block to a sense of "inevitability" I see in other people's fiction, but now I see it's likely deeply routed in my own reluctance to step up and have opinions I don't really need.

---

Just realized both gmail and outlook have handy "remove all formatting" buttons- Hallelujah! It's so easy to make these multifont ransom notes--

---

Might go as a "Feynman Diagram" for Halloween, THUS PROVING MY UNTOUCHABLE GEEK STREET CRED. ("Untouchable" in the India sense of the word) Got to play that new Little Big Planet game on JZ's PS3. It wasn't quite the "gotta buy a PS3!" game I had hoped for... the physics was nifty, there was an overabundance of wonderful small touches, but it wasn't the end all and be all I was hoping for... though maybe 4 players would have helped, or maybe it doesn't really shine 'til you get into building and playing custom levels. It was funny seeing them deal with some of the same problems with 2D physics engines that my team and the others faced in the OLPC Physics Game Jam.

---

Debates of the Moment

--The site 23/6 helps explain that little sense of deja vu the debates may have brought on.... creepy and mesmerizing!

---

Anecdote of the Moment

'I am a mystic,' [Sarah J. Vinke] once said to me at a faculty party when there wasn't much to talk about. 'You can't be a mystic,' I said, 'a mystic doesn't define himself as anything.' She thought about this and said, 'You're right. I am not a mystic.' She smiled a little, and that was the last thing she ever said on the subject.

I think Jonathan Papelbon said it best: So I have to 'fess up to my moments of doubt during the second half of the season, the Yankees coming on strong and the Sox stranding giant piles of men on base. And the Indians seemed to make it a foregone conclusion. But the Sox were metaclutch, clutch when clutch mattered, and after coming back from 3-1 in the ALCS there wasn't an NL team who could possibly stand in their way.

That said, if you're suspecting you're going to be spurting each other with champagne later in the night, fine... but swimming goggles for everyone? It seems to be pushing it, and temping Murphy's Law. "Oh but you don't know how much that bubbly in the eye stings!"

Kings of the baseball world, baby! Wait 'til next year... it should be great, too.

My goodness. It seems like every half year it gets more difficult to remember when to "Spring Forward" or "Fall Back". If the lady at the sushi place hadn't mentioned it last night, I might not have realized.

So now I go through that weird period where I don't quite trust any clock in the place, not sure if automagically updated or not.

---

Quote and Meanderings of the Moment

Life has a buoyant, carefree quality that you can feel as you read, like a physical sensation in your belly. If is this that Whitman is celebrating, though actually he does it very badly, because he is one of those writers who tell you what you ought to feel instead of making you feel it.

He pins down some of why I really dislike Whitman... that "tell not show" and the general arrogant ignorance of When I heard the Learn'd Astronomer... like Feyman says

The same thrill, the same awe and mystery, comes again and again when we look at any question deeply enough. With more knowledge comes a deeper, more wonderful mystery, luring one on to penetrate deeper still.

(The Feyman link is pretty good, actually.)

Anyway, I heard about "Inside the Whale" from this Slate piece Henry Miller School of Overseas Living for Misanthropes. I don't know how new "modern" literary criticism is, but it seems kind of strange to hear one author writing about another author when they are contemporaries from long ago.

After getting through all 3 sections of Orwell's rather meaty essays, agreeing with some parts, disagreeing with others, reading that sites dismissive and snarkily brief Criticism was kind of amusing. Science of the Moment

During the Planck era, the Universe can be best described as a quantum foam of 10 dimensions containing Planck length sized black holes continuously being created and annihilated with no cause or effect. In other words, try not to think about this era.

I found this while googling for the source of how there's "a difference between something and nothing, but it is purely geometrical", usually attributed to Martin Gardner, so I'm confused about proper attribution. (And besides, I like Paul Valery's "God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through." a bit better.)

Scientific Discovery of the Moment
Oh my goodness! It looks as if they've found the real life Ancestoral Island Home of the Oompa-Loompas!

The BoingBoing writeup had this tidbit:

But the really cool part [...] is that these tiny people were recent enough that they likely coexisted with humans who could tell stories; there are, to this day, myths among people in that part of Indonesia of distant human ancestors who had tiny, somewhat stupid tiny friends who lived in caves.

---

Video of the Moment

--I apologize in advance for this but it's just too snarky to pass up. They say Kerry flipflops, but Bush flips you the bird, in so many ways...classy man.

---

Lesson Learned of the Moment
I had a viewpoint shifting experience the other evening. I was in my yoga class, and I made a little joke riffing on "Schrodinger's Cat" -- that famous thought experiment to point out some of the seeming absurdity of the implications quantum mechanics. (You have a cat in a sealed box with a vile of poison with a 50/50 chance of breaking and killing the poor kitty...supposedly the cat is both alive AND dead until you open the box and observe its condition. (It's a little more subtle than that, but still.)) Anyway, the yoga instructor talked about his main yoga instuctor, this famous-ish guy back in NYC, who would always follow the same routine (including just saying "do this....now do this") whether there were 2 students or 100. I joked that the question was if he did that when NO one was there to observe it, making him like Shrodinger's Yoga Instructor....not my best joke, but NO ONE in the class had any idea what I was talking about. There were 6 or 7 other people in there, most of whom seemed pretty smart, including the instructor (my regular doctor) who I think is borderline brilliant, and they all looked at me like I was nuts. Until that evening, I assumed a knowledge of Shrodinger's Cat was just something any educated person would have. It's not something I studied in a class at school, I just picked it up in some books, or maybe via osmosis from geek culture. So...is geek culture that cut off from "normal society"? Or is normal society that disconnected from scientific thought, almost to the point of scientific illiteracy? For people coming to this site, especially my regular readers, how many had heard of Schrodinger's Cat, and for how many is it a new idea?

This year's pumpkins by me and Mo. (Maybe not as cool a photo as last year's, but better designs I think. The demonic guy on the right makes use of the fem's broken off stem.)

---

Quote of the Moment

If you want a vision of the future, it is a wireless broadband network feeding requests for foreign money-laundering assistance into a human temporal lobe, forever. With banner ads.

---

Thought Provoker of the Moment
Really thought-provoking audio segment from NPR: this woman was almost diagnosed as being in a "persistent vegitative state", though she was very aware of the "pulling the plug" discussions going on around her. She tried to signal with her hands, and it was only because a nurse started paying attention that she was saved.

For myself, I don't want to drag on my own possible future vegitative existence at the cost of all that wear on my friends and family, but I want people to make damn sure I'm not aware of what's going on.

---

Movie of the Moment
Wouldn't your day be better with some human beatbox and harmonica? I thought so. Ugh. Up 'til 1am at work. Found out the hard way that they lock the parking garage around 10 or so...

---

Deal of the Moment
Wow, it's the Papermate® Ingenuity™ Liquid Pencil--"Real graphite is suspended in a clear liquid so it works just like a pen!" and you can get a Free Sample from Office Depot. When I first saw it on BoingBoing it seemed dumb, but then the product site mentioned it can be used on standardized tests, which would be cool...I've never liked the 'feel' of pencils. (Probably ever since trying to write on waxy Sunday School workbooks with awful #3 pencils.) I guess you can see more deals like this at Nifty News, Decent Deals.

---

Online Toy of the Moment
Random cute link from that deals site, interactive fireworks over the Statue of Liberty. Some nice light effects.

---

Poster of the Moment

Real Big Brother-esque signage from London. They have a lot of security cameras there. I love the retro-spooky-scifi-artdeco feel of this poster, though it is a bit disconcerting. I think I'm less of a privacy advocate than ever.

---

Quote and Ramble of the Moment

We are glad that the cookies are vegan, but sad that they promote circus animal misery -- if only they'd make whip, chain and bull-hook cookies to show kids the full story.

The vending machine at work just started offering Butter Crackers. (well, I thought the bag said crackers, but it's technically "butter checkers". Whatever.) So, crackers made of/with butter. Which got me thinking, do vegans eat animal crackers? (The PETA quote is from this article on the recent 100th anniversary of "Barnum's Animal Crackers".

One other thing..."Animal Crackers in my soup?" Most soups are pretty salty, and animal crackers are generally sweet. This sounds kind of gross, unless at one point (like, 1935) animal crackers were more like regular crackers and less like cookies. Oh man, I miss Daylight Savings Time already. So dark! It's weird having to change my attitude about day and night, kind of disassociate darkness with going to sleep.

---

Haikus of the Moment

Flowers bloom and die
Wind brings butterflies or snow
A stone won't notice

Watching white moon face
The stars never feel anger
Blah, blah, blah, the end

Turns out the novel isn't much better than the movie, kind of like Princess Bride.

---

Net Insanity of the Moment
There is an amusingly insane site that connects the Zodiac killer with old Batman comics. It's worth reading through. My favorite part was even more juvenile, actually. It was this magazine cover:

that contained this headline:

Given the whole Batman/Robin/"Boy (you) Wonder" gay subtext thing, it gave that warning whole new layers of meaning.

Ok, maybe you had to be there.