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Yesterday on my big ramble about "there are too many good fights to be had out there, so you have to pick your battles" Jesse asked `What's that quote? Is it something like "One death is a tragedy, a thousand deaths is a statistic."`

Peter Singer has a thought experiment that asks "would you sacrifice an expensive pair of nice new shoes to wade into a pond and save a child", to which most people answer yes, but then moves on to the zinger "well millions of kids are dying from preventable diseases and not having mosquito nettings, so why aren't you donating more to good charities?"

There's a further study that claims to have data that shows us that our intuitive moral compasses are untrustworthy; like if you see a photo of a malnourished child you're X% likely to be willing to help, but that % goes down if her brother who is also suffering is added to the photo - and down further if you see her whole classroom in the same state. According to common sense and an economist's way of looking at things, our willingness to help should always scale up with the scope of the problem - obviously.

This kind of idea forms of the basis of a movement called "effective altruism". On the main I'd say it's healthier than the libertarian stance that says we all prosper more with "every man for himself" and shunning communal efforts to fix things (especially if there is any coercion involved.) Like at its best, it recommends programs of *automatic* giving (sometimes interestingly akin to tithing) where a percentage of your resources are automatically devoted to known effective causes, thus becoming an ambient expense you don't think of much, and any further giving you do "for the feels" is just a cherry on top. But at its worst - as seems to have happened in the recent Sam Bankman-Fried case - it can be used an excuse to gather as much wealth for yourself as you can, by any means at hand (no matter how scammy) because the percent you sock away for charity will be greater than the worthy charity would have received otherwise.

Thinking back to the example of the photo of the girl, then the siblings, then her classroom - we may well be a little too quick to pivot from "this is an individual tragedy I can help make right" to "this is just the way the world is, I can't really change that, and so I should just tend to my own garden" but my hunch is that the answer isn't everyone becoming as much as a martyr as they can for good charities. But I admit my reasons as to why seem a little weak. Like, I do understand the hedonic treadmill, how most people adapt and return to a semi-fixed happiness setpoint regardless of circumstance, so most suffering isn't as linear and preventable as it might seem. Or maybe I'm too sympathetic to the libertarian idea that "got mine, screw you" actually keeps incentives in line with rewards so leads to good outcomes. But I think a lot of it is a defeatist realism that knows my own capacity to improve the world is dwarfed by the problems it has, and being too driven by wide empathy for people suffering from unsolvable problems is a recipe for personal misery. (Which was basically what I was saying yesterday)

Also, I think relative to some philosophies I associate with "the East", too few Western philosophies recognize moderation as a virtual for its own sake! Like, if something is good, a lot of philosophies say "crank that up to 11!" and if something is bad, crush it without mercy - but in practice you need to find a balance - somewhere between being conservative for status quo's sake (because change is scary) and being able to recognize that everything in the status quo has history and reasons for it. Most people's motivations are towards a good. If that good is too self-directed or greedy or comes too much at a cost for others, then that "good" might be objectively evil - but there's still some kind of subjective positive goal at its heart.

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How to work a wall. Your shadow - "don't be afraid, it's your friend"

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If we take a breath and sift through the DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) literature in which objectivity is negatively characterized, there's disappointingly meager evidence of a diabolical plot to obliterate shared reality, or to force engineers to consider cultural factors when calculating thrust and lift. Rather it appears to be a way to talk about the more modest domain of institutional power relations. In a school or office, "objectivity" can be a pose or performance, a way to claim authority or deny it to those whose behavior doesn't conform. The claim is not that the speed of light depends on how you feel, man, but that certain kinds of affectless social performance are coded as white and used to police non-white people. The opposite of "objective" in this case would be the stereotypical "angry black woman." If you're expected to behave emotionally and "irrationally" you will be forced to adopt a rigorously neutral demeanor or find yourself at a disadvantage compared with others whose objectivity is assumed. In a Supreme Court confirmation hearing, Brett Kavanaugh can raise his voice and talk about beer, whereas Kentanji Brown Jackson has to demonstrate angelic calm.

Even in the engineering cases (the "thrust and lift" is referencing a Dawkins quote on how aeronautical engineers obviously work outside the realm of cultural relativity) - I think about how for decades the "crash test dummy" for airbags was set to "typical dude" - your numbers may be objective, but what you chose to gather data on might not be.

I'm not sure if we have good language for charting the middle course between objectivity and subjectivity. There is a shared reality, but we have at the very least poetic proof that certainty of what that reality is is impossible to achieve. And one of the most likely true facets of the Objective Truth is that for individuals, it's the Subjective Truth that really matters.

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Radiolab: The Secret to a Long Life My Cathleen sent me this podcast link, saying it reminded her of me :-D

The TL;DR summary is: you can try to filling your life with novelty to try and avoid the way days, weeks, months, years start to run into each other. But that can be stressful and exhausting! You can also try to practice more mindfulness and observation and appreciate the beautiful complexity and newness that is there all around us all the time.

I guess I try to do some of the latter - blogging (and private journaling) daily for over 20 years, doing "One Second Everyday" videos for 10, making a few "Timeline Apps". I'd actually recommend all of that to anyone. It doesn't totally solve the dilemma - all those years still kind of run into each other - but it's nice to have a sem-tangible record and reminder of all the sand that has slipped on through the hourglass.

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Low key delightful Sinking Lego Ships - sometimes I wish I had gotten more into gear Lego Technic, rather than just using it to make cool looking spaceships...

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Ah yes, the season where the result may be negative for COVID but ALWAYS positive for a lil' nosebleed.
via cracked.com Comedian Quotes And Jokes About Depression

But I have to say this in defense of humankind: In no matter what era in history, including the Garden of Eden, everybody just got here. And, except for the Garden of Eden, there were already all these games going on that could make you act crazy, even if you weren't crazy to begin with. Some of the crazymaking games going on today are love and hate, liberalism and conservatism, automobiles and credit cards, golf, and girls' basketball.

Damn it, love everything about this quote 'til the rip of the last 3 words. The publisher Usborne has a long history of great tech books for kids - that link even has downloadable copies of their 80s book. One book not on that page (but available at Annarchive, a repository I've contributed to) is this book, "Computer and Video Games: How They Work and How To Win" (honestly more about the working than the winning!)

One of my favorite parts of it growing up was this page, on the future of video games:

click for full size

But this panel stuck in my mind the most:


Back then, I was versed enough in the ways of "LCD" to dismiss that the kind of graphics shown were a fantasy! LCDs were what gave us the canonical "Game and Watch" look of detailed but non-overlapping game display elements. And even on a TV, what kind of game could look like that?

Of course I was wrong. Gameboys used LCDs as pixels, and even smartphones are LCDs, all the way up to the OLED days where we live now. And while I'm not sure what kind of game with motorbikes would have an angle quite like that for play, it's certainly in the realm of what we've had in our hands for the last decade.

(Handheld or no, 3D game worlds have become astonishingly beautiful and detailed. My superniece has persuaded me to keep with Red Dead Redemption 2 because it's so realistic, and man... it really is jawdropping, compared to the sprites of the 80s and 90s.)

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You can now legally compost dead bodies in Washington state Love this idea. Americans are so uptight about how we deal with dearly departed - it's like we deny our mortality by preserving our old form as long as possible - and make our loved ones left behind vulnerable to all kinds of profiteers! There is beauty in being able to live on in the ecosphere in a purposeful way.

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Año 2020
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Vídeo de instagram @pianolitopeter pic.twitter.com/T2vtVAau7x

— Josef Ajram Tares (@josefajram) November 1, 2020

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Not to count chickens but doesn't this look nice? It took my breath away during my "slightly-less-doomed"-scrolling
Via

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There are only four questions of value in life, Don Octavio. What is sacred? Of what is the spirit made? What is worth living for? And what is worth dying for? The answer to each is the same: only love.

Voting is a bit frustrating in my Somerville District; wait an hour if you live on a street L-Z. A-K? walk right up.

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When an object has energy of motion, nature usually finds a way to extract it.

From an introduction to Stephen Hawking's "Brief Answers to The Big Questions"

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I don't know what the origin is but I just heard a saying "Say what you mean, but don't say it mean." and I like it. FB greetedme with a "Happy 10 Years on Facebook!" (The accompanying video was much less compelling than FB's usual photo-harvesters) - I have to take their word for it, it wasn't enough for me to note on my website or private journal.

I have very mixed feelings about FB. I'm less sensitive than some to the privacy concerns it generates, because I've always intuitively fallen on the side of more information, less judgement. I appreciate that it keeps me in touch with a wide swath of people. I sort of hate how it (and twitter and tumbler and instagram and anything that lets users assemble a feed from people they find interesting) sucked the air out of the independent web and "blogosphere" - I miss the small batch of friends who were regulars on kisrael.com - both in the comments (that later got swamped by spammers) and then on "@Dylan's Sidebar" that I later opened up to be the Sidebar of the People - https://kirk.is/sidebar/

And of course now that FB has parlayed gossip into a source of "news", and exposed fracture points for various crowbars to reach into and separate us...

I still double post everything on https://kirk.is/ , my "statement of record" for what it's worth. But for a looong time FB is the only place I expect to get any response. (Although some of my friends prefer I'm sort of glad Google Plus isn't much of a thing, because triple posting felt g*****n ridiculous.)

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I miss my 1996 Honda Civic Candy Apple Green Hatchback sometimes - seeing this car still kicking makes me regret the extravagance of my 2004 Scion xA.

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"ExtJS was a mistake. One we, as a society, may never recover from." Slater posted about ExtJS and I scavanged our dialog for my devblog.

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Rand Paul was physically attacked? That's awful and bizarre. Even if there's a political aspect to it I'm sort of glad it wasn't a random nutjob. But like the Republican softball practice shooting, this is giving too much fodder to anti-leftists.

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horse_ebooks was just a warning shot. Parents, curate stuff for your kids because things have gotten really really weird

Blender of Love

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Interesting summary of the Brexit situation. Weird dreams, Belichick vs Putin. Except Putin was on the field, and finished the first half making a spectacular end zone catch, shedding defenders with the ball thrown from the other end of the field. I thought maybe the fix was in.

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Oh I dig this - Harry Connick Jr had a French audience clapping on the 1 and 3, and so at around the :40 mark of this clip he adds a beat so everyone's a bit more hip! (Via this Slate piece about Justin Bieber berating and demonstrating to fix his square Spanish audience...) Detail from a drawing of Kowloon Walled City, via. More info here

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Violence Is Currency: A Pacifist Ex-Con's Guide To Prison Weaponry - yikes Art come to life in a funny but sometimes offensive way...

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You are almost guaranteed to win at the craps table.

RIP Uncle Bill Went to the MFA today... besides Christian Marclay's "The Clock", Josiah McElheny's "Endlessly Repeating Twentieth-Century Modernism" might have been the most intriguing work we saw... some intriguing glass vessels in an amazing mirrored box (there's a diferent tableau on each side) with the repetition going off into the virtual distance... and a good use of one way mirrors so you can just see the vessels, not your own reflection...

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IT COOL THAT IN HONOR OF ANDY ROONEY! WORLD GET EXTRA 60 MINUTE!

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The MFA store used to be a delight after an afternoon of museuming. At 1/3 the size and minus remaindered books it loses a lot.

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The Boston MFA broke their Buddhas room by ripping out a permanently closed side door, transforming from sacred space to graceless gallery.

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Also the MFA Art of the Americas wing is grand, but the great big glass doors' handles are terrible, the pull side identical to push-bad design. Sigh.

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But I loved MFA's showing of Marclay's "The Clock", 24 hours of beautifully spliced footage from movies synced to real time by the time they show in the scene- memorizing. We watched from 12:30-1, coulda stayed for hours.

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november blender of love I declare this lazy weekend to be Tuba Weekend, thanks in part to this image from xoxoBruce... (he seems to be keeping an eye out for tuba-themed images for me.)



I would like to add that is about the first realisticly drawn sousaphone I've seen in this kind of thing.

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"Oh, that bottle of soda I left in the car! You drank some of it..."
"I left you some, is the other way of looking at it."

--via Seanbaby at Cracked.com, who furthers the comedy gold with animated GIFs...

For a bit I tried to give them the benefit of the doubt, maybe they've never encountered jumping jacks, or... but you know? I try new-to-me exercises sometimes, and I don't think I'm THIS bad... could it be intentional?

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A Common Nomenclature for Lego Families - seeking a lingua franca. (I'm a fan of "blue 2 by 2 fat" or "black 1 x 8 thin" type speak myself) Thanks xoxoxoBruce!

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"I can not work in an environment which requires me to deal with mustard in any capacity."
--c resumes other CULTURED SMOKER NEEDING EMPLOYMENT

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Realizing I needed to swallow my pride and refactor some new code, I notice that goes against the principles of "Laziness Impatience Hubris"

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My GPS has a feature where it can mark your path for this trip. I'm tempted to find a big field and see if I can sign my name with my car. This has been an enormously long week.

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Loveliness of the Moment

And this beautiful television has put me, like I said before, in all sorts of situations. I remember being very scared to it because an Icelandic poet told me that, not like in cinemas where the thing... that throws the picture from it just sends lights on the screen, but this is different. This is millions and millions of little screens who send light, some sort of electrical light, I'm not really sure... but because there's so many of them, and in fact you're watching very very many thing when you're watching TV. Your head is very busy all the time to calculate and put it all together into one picture. And then, because you're so busy doing that, you don't watch very carefully what the program that you're watching is really about, so you become hypnotized. So all that's on TV goes directly into your brain and you stop judging if it's right or not so we just swallow and swallow. This is what an Icelandic poet told me once, and I became so scared to television that I always got headaches when I watched it. But then later on, when I got my Danish book on television, I stopped being afraid because I read the truth. And that's the scientifical truth, which is much better. You shouldn't let poets lie to you.

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Animated GIF of the Moment

--an oldie but a goodie! There is something mystical and terrific about Björk.

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The dotcom boom and the Clinton era were around the same time but the latter seems much further back.

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Need some fanfic where all the whitehouse pets at their prime (millie, socks, obama's puppy, etc) fight it out in a fighting bracket tourney

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SO tired of "Guess What I Mean" User Interface. Outlook: when I copy an email address, don't copy *just* the name. BROKEN A-HOLE UI DESIGN!

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mattdunn I'd be more impressed by rhythmbox if soundcard setup on my Linux work PC wouldn't have been a huge research project. Screw it!

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Huh, googling on the Palm/iPhone link, the iPhone's CPU specs etc were less impressive than I had guessed. They do a lot with a little.

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"You shouldn't let poets lie to you." --Bjork

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ducking back on the e line, first time I find a train driver REALLY bitchy about the white line ("side door please!!") Kate lives on Fifth Street. For some god-awful reason, "Fifth" was Monticello Middle School's favorite euphemism for the F-word, circa 1988 or so. Saying you saw some classmates mom "on Fifty-Fifth Street" was the height of merriment, implying she was a streetwalker. (in retrospect there may have been some racist overtones in that, some of Cleveland's tougher neighborhoods fell around that area, given Cleveland's numeric street naming scheme.)

At some point our instrumental music directory Ms. Beale (great, great teacher. Her raging against DRGC, the dirty rotten gum chewers, remains in my mind to this day.) showed us the perfectly legitimate music theory conceptualization tool The Circle of Fifths, and we thought it was hilarious.

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Quote Fest of the Moment
Three quotes from John Ruskin:

Labour without joy is base. Labour without sorrow is base. Sorrow without labour is base. Joy without labour is base.

Taste is not only a part and index of morality, it is the only morality. The first, and last, and closest trial question to any living creature is 'What do you like?' Tell me what you like, I'll tell you what you are.

The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion, all in one.

The first quote I saw in the final book of the His Dark Materials trilogy. The other two I found while Googling. I think the final one overstates the case. I think it caught my eye because the first sentence seems to be in praise of my "humanist spiritual mission" of sharing and recording interesting thoughts on this website, but then I realized I don't feel quite the grandeur he goes on to describe.

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Lateral Thinking of the Moment

--I think I counted about 13 laterals in this ESPN video of Trinity (TX) scoring a touchdown. It looked more like a playground game.

Back now. Will try and catch up on comments etc. later...

Heh, actually there's less to catch up than I thought... maybe at some point I'll post screenshots of my editing system but I'm not who besides TSM would find that interesting.

Anyway: the Pats-Colts game. Bleh. Some crazy-weird calls, like taunting on Troy Brown (Referee: "he taunted me by gently tossing me the ball when I wasn't ready and making me look bad!") My co-worker is convinced (and predicted it a few weeks ago) that Belichick would basically throw the game to keep his team angry. Given how it looked they could have just kept it on the ground for the whole game, I almost think he's on to something, but that's a heap of wishful thinking.

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Quote of the Moment

I am the emperor, and I want dumplings.

According to Bartlett's Anecdotes this is his "one recorded notable saying." It reminds me of Sarah and I riffing on a similar theme many years ago: Her was "I would that the minions bring me my biscuits" and mine was "Summon the waitstaff--I would have a scone." Hers has aged a bit better.

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Image of the Moment

--A scenic pond my mom and I drove past in New Hampshire. It was chilly up there, I almost had to rethink my current idea of "wear sandals until I have to wear boots."

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Politics of the Moment
Iraq as the Ultimate Welfare State, and pointing out how Bush is kind of an anti-Reagan in that regard.

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Link of the Moment
The Wikipedia Knowledge Dump, "Knowldge's Last Chance", picks up the best of what Wikipedia discards. (via BoingBoing)

Source code // Built with Processing The return of an old little friend...years ago I made up a windows version of this guy, inspired by this Gameboy Game "Gargoyle's Quest". Now he's back in Java...he tends to fly away from the pointer when you hold down the mouse button.

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Link of the Moment
I've set myself a little goal for the end of the year...get rid of all my 2003 backlog, so the thing is only like a year behind. I only have 9 or 10 entries to post, mostly links. Here's one on the classic shooter DOOM: 10 Years of DOOM with lots of neat little pieces. Including a version of something I can't believe I hadn't posted before, Old Ma Murray's Crate-based Videogame Review System...the world's first completely unbiased review system, where you can tell exactly how good a game, since it's an inverse function of how long it takes you to see a random crate or barrel in the background as you run around. Some great lines in that.

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Quote of the Moment

Written words; they seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say, from a desire to be instructed, they go on saying the same thing forever.

Logo of the Moment
Speaking of logos (yesterday), Eric S. Raymond would like this Symbol to become a 'hacker emblem'. (Hacker in its original sense of doing interesting things with computers, not breaking into them.) It's the 'glider' pattern from Conway's Game of Life where cells live, die, or are born based on how many living neighbors they had last turn. The 'Glider' is one of the simplest patterns that can copy itself as it moves across the board...if you paint into into the program that I just linked to, you will see it copy itself across the board (each click being made up of a slightly different group of cells) unless it bumped into more cells, or in the case of this java app, the edge of the world. Anyway, I like the design of this.

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Link of the Moment
Worst Inventions Ever. Vibrating Bowel-Mover to the the Parachute Hat and beyond. Actually, a pretty quick read.

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Music Video of the Moment
Sawers sent me this link, num1000 512kb cache mix, a high energy j-pop music video. Frantic. And as John mentioned, there's always The Badgers... Aw MAN. This SUCKS. How can Bush be so damn popular? How can so many Republicans ride his coat-tails? How can the Democrats be so stupid and just take it? How can voters be so fond of the administration of can't break out of the economic downdraft and is all hot to fight a war that more and more people see will make our lives less safe, not more?

What would life be like if people hadn't voted for Nader in 2000? "Republicrats" my ass...these Republicans--specifically, this Republican...is a danger to the nation. And the world, as bozo13 points out on the guestbook. (Or what if thousands of black voters weren't illegally disenfranchised in Florida, for that matter.)

The next two years are likely to suck, badly. Here ya go, Republicans, both houses and the presidency. Lets see how you screw it up.

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Funny of the Moment

> I had a colleague, years ago, who called his small son
> Tom Dickon Harry.
> Wanted him to grow up with a sense of humour.
> I had visions of him in later life being pulled over
> in a car by the police for some minor reason.
> "Name?"

"Tom Dickon Harry."
"What?"
"No, really. Here's my drivers license."
"Huh, it really is. Wow. By the way, what's that weird smell?"
"Oh, that'd probably be my father's body in the trunk."

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Small Personal Triumph of the Moment
I won my first game of league darts last night. I was part of the team of 3 playing 601 ('01 games mean you have to double in (i.e. you can't begin subtracting points from the starting 601 total until you score a double, i.e. the very outer rim of the dartboard) and double out (you have to get your total to exactly zero again on the outer rim.) The remaining total was 48, I threw an 8, went for the closing double 20, missed, but got it on my final dart. Yay!

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Quote of the Moment

But what I think is funny is what an 8 year old boy thinks is funny.

Lyric of the Moment

Over the desert, wild and free
Rides the bold Sheik of Araby
The desert band at his command
Follows his love's caravan...
Under the shadows of the palms he sings
To call her to his arms...

I'm the Sheik of Araby!
            (With no clothes on!)
Your love belongs to me!
            (With no clothes on!)
At night while you're asleep
            (With no clothes on!)
Into your tent I'll creep
            (With no clothes on!)
The stars that shine above
            (With no clothes on!)
Will light our way to love!
            (With no clothes on!)
Come rule this world with me,
            (With no clothes on!)
I'm the Sheik of Araby!

On the web I found an amusingly bad MIDI rendition of the tune, actually worth a listen just for the giggle.

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Funny of the Moment

PETERMAN: Two choices: play Mario Party or Group Sex.
MO: Do I get to pick the group?

Trying to persuade Mo to join Peterman, Leslee, and Me in a game of Mario Party on Nintendo. Maybe you had to be there but it was a good line, and quick.