❮❮prevnext❯❯

Hung out with Cora today...

Every passing hour brings the Solar System forty-three thousand miles closer to Globular Cluster M13 in Hercules--and still there are some misfits who insist that there is no such thing as progress.

---

The Universe is an awfully big place. There is room enough for an awful lot of people to be right about things and still not agree.

---

Everything that ever has been always will be, and everything that ever will be always has been.

---

The insane, on occasion, are not without their charms.

---

Unk, the big trouble with dumb bastards is that they are too dumb to believe there is such a thing as being smart.

---

To that end, devoutly to be wished, I bring you word of a new religion that can be received enthusiastically in every corner of every Earthling heart.

National borders will disappear.

The lust for war will die.

All envy, all fear, all hate will die.

The name of the new religion is The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent.

The flag of that church will be blue and gold. These words will be written on that flag in gold letters on a blue field: Take Care of the People, and God Almighty Will Take Care of Himself.

The two chief teachings of this religion are these: Puny man can do nothing at all to help or please God Almighty, and Luck is not the hand of God.

---

I was a victim of a series of accidents, As are we all.

---

Luck, good or bad, is not the hand of God. Luck is the way the wind swirls and the dust settles eons after God has passed by.

---

The worst thing that could possibly happen to anybody would be to not be used for anything by anybody.

---

It took us that long to realize that a purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.

---

Reran into the "Andre the Giant Scared" gif...

went to look for a longer video and its context is better than I had hoped - he's backing off of Jake "The Snake" Roberts wielding a python...

---

---

Slowly, slowly,
the autumn draws to its close.
Cruelly cold
the wind congeals the dew.
Vines and grasses
will not be green again--
The trees in my garden
are withering forlorn.
The pure air
is cleansed of lingering lees
And mysteriously,
Heaven's realms are high.
Nothing is left
of the spent cicada's song,
A flock of geese
goes crying down the sky.
The myriad transformations
unravel one another
And human life
how should it not be hard?
From ancient times
there was none but had to die,
Remembering this
scorches my very heart.
What is there I can do
to assuage this mood?
Only enjoy myself
drinking my unstrained wine.
I do not know
about a thousand years,
Rather let me make
this morning last forever.

---

The other day I linked to Michael Bach's "Optical Illusions & Visual Phenomena" page, today I finally got a chance to go through them all, and I shot him this note:

Hello! Thank you for your site on optical illusions, I enjoyed taking the tour.
I think the one most glaring absence (from the "face" section) was this:

The mutual distortions are truly remarkable, especially how the viewer can focus on one face or the other at will and it quickly returns to normal.

It probably wouldn't be too difficult to reconstruct that, I suspect any set of faces might work.

On more well covered territory:

On Structure from motion at equiluminance - I find I am relatively insensitive to the "equiluminance" aspect.

I first saw a version of the effect at the (sadly defunct) Boston Computer Museum - I think the visitor could add one dot at a time that would slide back and forth, and then as more dots were added, the rotation would become more obvious.

Years ago I recreated the effect for a "P5 advent calendar":treemergent and frostyspin

(I use trivial math - each dot has a yspeed, and if it's to the left of the center, a constant is added to the yspeed, otherwise subtracted - I always wondered how close that was to actual "sine" numbers and today wrote a little program to empirically demonstrate the similarity... pretty close! - I have forgotten too much Calculus to see if this is an equivalency via integration...)

The old 16bit computer game "Star Control" also used the effect for a rotating star map:


That shows the illusion would work even for "interior" objects, not just as points on the surface of a rotating solid.

Thanks again! I am amazed at how much "new stuff" has been discovered in terms of illusions: I feel like the books for kids I grew up with in the 80s were stuck with "these two lines are the same length!" and "look at this Escher thing!" - but the "rotating snakes" are truly mind bending.
Candace posted a link to Science Says Silence Is Much More Important To Our Brains Than We Think or as she said "One of [her] most desired and favorite sounds..."

It reminded me of this formative anecdote I don't think I'd journaled before, though I know I've talked about:

One lesson I carry with me is from this one ill-advised "24 hour march-a-thon" my high school band ran as a fundraiser for a trip to Atlanta. Participating students took shifts: one hour marching, two hours resting. (and I made it more surreal for myself with a combination of a box of taco bell from my mom and by accepting my AFS brother's donation - with its contingency that I wear his green tinted sunglasses the whole time, waking and sleeping.)

We started right after a Friday night football game, and by Saturday late morning we were already pretty wiped - most of us had given up playing our actual instruments and switched to percussion. And then to make matters worse they sent us down to the indoor track rather than the corridors of the school where we had been marching, because other students were taking the SAT or similar that day.

So the booming percussion echoing in that short-ceilinged made everything more hellish, until some wise person in that shift figured out we could just go to "taps" - not the funereal trumpet song, but this minimalist "tik....tik....tik-a-tik...." pattern the actual drum squad would play on their drum rims when the band needed to keep in step but had to be quiet.

The difference to my nervous system, from a barrage of loud percussive chaotic thuds to the minimalist, controlled "taps" was palpable - a true balm and blessing at the time and a lesson that has stuck with me ever since.

Not quite "silence", so maybe a tangent from the original article, but with a similar energy.

---

I had forgotten about Jamie Livingston: some photos of that day - a polaroid taken every day from March 31 1979 until the artist's death in October of 1997.

I did the date math (with my own Time Toy) and realized just this year I've been doing daily blogging for longer than this project ran. But of course blogging doesn't have the focus (no pun intended) of a photo every day. Also it feels like charting the 80s and 90s was inherently more interesting than the 2000s and 2010s...

Of course now I'm doing "One Second Everyday" [sic] and have been for... yikes, 6 1/2 years? I kind of don't know to stop... it just seems so odd to say "yup my early 40s were extremely well documented but nothing else was".

---

CAPTAIN:Trouble with a long journey like this is that you end up just talking to yourself a lot, which gets terribly boring because half the time you know what you're going to say next.
ARTHUR: Only half the time?
CAPTAIN: Yes, about half I'd say.

Shades of E.M. Forster "How do I know what I think until I see what I say?" - Adams really has some sly and wise commentary all over the place. Exactly 100 years ago, the Armistice ending "The Great War" went into effect.

My band BABAM will be marching with the Veterans for Peace.

I worry the USA has learned some bad lessons over the past century, forgetting some stuff from the Civil War - that war is something that happens elsewhere, that you don't really have to worry about declaring war per se, and as long as there's no draft you can keep up military occupation as long as you want. (I'm a little extra-jaded right now reading "Cherry" by Nico Walker - at first I wasn't too impressed by the heroin-using bankrobber Holden Caulfield protagonist and was just playing "spot the East Cleveland reference", but its horrifying story of the grunts in Iraq in the early 2000s- both what they did and what was done to them- has switched my view.)

Anyway, here is the famous ending of Blackadder Series 4:

---

In news of interest to a rather small and select group of people:
from 2002-2008 my blog kirk.is (well, then it was kisrael.com) had a "Sidebar" feature. For a while it was "Dylan's Sidebar", and then it was "Dylan + Sarah's Sidebar" and then to Dylan's further annoyance it was "The Sidebar of the People", a cast of about 16. It was a mini-blog, basically, letting my friends ramble about whatever they felt like and getting a bit more of an audience in those pre-Facebook and mainstream-Twitter days.

I already a (idiosyncratically arranged) sidebar of the people archive but now I've made it so my blog archive views show the relevant sidebars. Probably (hopefully?) I'm about the only person using my site's On This Day feature, but still.

It all harkens back to before-Social Media was so corporatized, and I miss providing the gathering spot for some of buddies, online and otherwise. Last night Melissa mentioned hearing how shelters tend to round down on kitty's-to-be-adopted ages. Which makes total sense but is a little melancholy on two fronts all the same.

---

Blender of Love

---

Happy Armistice / Veterans Day! Today BABAM marched with the Veterans For Peace --

---

Weird happenings in Arlington - Accused FBI Impersonator Tried to Enter Arlington Home - my housemate reports seeing a news van right outside our house. Just got done as a pall bearer for my Aunt Ruth, my dad's sister, and last of her nuclear family.

My favorite Aunt Ruth story is this: her accountant mojo and attention to detail spilled over into many parts of her life, and when my dad and I visited her and her family near Washington DC, she had an itinerary all laid out for us, hour by hour, to see the coolest stuff in the Capital region had to offer. I overheard my dad describe her as "paydirt" for this kind of trip.

Now I didn't know the word "paydirt"- 7 year olds don't know from prospecting- but I DID know That *I* didn't like orders, so I figured it wasn't good, like getting paid with dirt.

Of course, now as 41 year old freaking out about plotting a simple trip to Montreal, I really wish I had some kind of a Quebecois Aunt Ruth...

(PS my mom proofread this and reminded me it was "nuclear" family not "atomic" in the first paragraph)

And if these pictures have anything important to say to future generations, it's this: I was here. I existed. I was young, I was happy, and someone cared enough about me in this world to take my picture.

I think about this quote as I read Internet K-Hole, now a tumblr; photos from the 70s, 80s, 90s. (Occasionally women flashing their boobs, or people otherwise not dressed, so a little NSFW.) I really dig the reminder of there was goofy fun life way back when, even if we didn't make records of it quite as often as we do now... JP Honk @ Figment, Boston 2013

---

Today, let us honor vets like my grandpa, who survived Pearl Harbor and 'Pearl Harbor' the movie and pronounced them 'equally dumb.'

---

They should make a reality show called You Are Here To Make Friends where you have to make friends with everyone.

---

If you go to Mitt Romney's Facebook page and click refresh, you can actually watch his 'likes' drop in real time.

---

the funniest truest possible answer to "Why Doesn't MTV play music videos anymore?":

---

http://randomshopper.tumblr.com/ - kind of genius, Darius has made a virtual 'bot that has a $50 budgets and buys him random things -- its been described as "the saddest, most nihilistic thing ever".

---

AMERICANS. Today's date is 11/11/11, not 11/11/11.

---

11/11/11 is a poor man's March 14th, 2015.

---

If you think you can't beatbox, just say today's date in Spanish!

---

Stop saying "11/11/11" only happens once in a lifetime. EVERY date only happens once in a lifetime. That's how time works.

---

Meanwhile, on my UI dev blog...
"A Life on Facebook" by Alex Droner

---

Kate did this haiku and art bit: "Length of a meeting ~ Discernible from doodles ~ This was a long one" http://twitpic.com/35ylt0
--Making the rounds, Obi-Wan's Last view

---

The Panglossian pessimist says, "Isn't it a shame that this is, after all, the best of all possible worlds!" Imagine a beer comercial: as the sun sets over the mountains, one of the hunks lounging around the campfire intones, "It doesn't get any better than this!" -- at which point his beautiful companion burts into tears: "Oh no! Is that really true?" It wouldn't sell much beer.

I cranked up my restrospect page so that is shows me more of the old stuff from my PalmPilot, specifically the stuff that's undated.

---

It not infrequently happens that something about the earth, about the sky, about other elements of this world, about the motion and rotation or even the magnitude and distances of the stars, about definite eclipses of the sun and moon, about the passage of years and seasons, about the nature of animals, of fruits, of stones, and of other such things, may be known with the greatest certainty by reasoning or by experience, even by one who is not a Christian. It is too disgraceful and ruinous, though, and greatly to be avoided, that he [the non-Christian] should hear a Christian speaking so idiotically on these matters, and as if in accord with Christian writings, that he might say that he could scarcely keep from laughing when he saw how totally in error they are. In view of this and in keeping it in mind constantly while dealing with the book of Genesis, I have, insofar as I was able, explained in detail and set forth for consideration the meanings of obscure passages, taking care not to affirm rashly some one meaning to the prejudice of another and perhaps better explanation.

People on the dumb side of the Evolution "debate" should take this guy to heart...

---

http://www.slate.com/id/2234738/ - the results of fun with "google suggest"

---

www.wikihow.com's Develop Your Photography Skills - really dig the advice presented here.

---

END OF THE WORLD! mkb linked 2012: The End of the World? which I liked a bit more than 15 Doomsday Prophecies Something I've been thinking about lately (and I know it's a bit ridiculous to be tackling this kind of profound in a lunchtime blogpost--) is a variant on the old Question of Evil-- I've expressed a belief that hardly anyone is the Bad Guy of their own story.

EB (despite the joking "Evil" part of this site's nickname for him, but I don't think he puts the Evil into EB anymore than I put the jerk into kirkjerk) disagrees. I don't want to try and fully represent his viewpoint here, but I think it's safe to say that he feels people know the difference between Good and Evil and sometimes will choose the latter.

But the important thing to note in my formulation is "their own story". Within a person's value system there are different, sometimes competing priorities -- some with moral weights attached -- and within that system, almost no one will choose "to do evil". However, from a viewpoint outside of that system (including ones that might include moral standards that are well-nigh universal) those priorities and actions might be evil to the point of reprehensible villainy.

(Of course, guilt and self-recrimination exist, and are important tools in bringing our value system into better alignment with the more Universal principles. But they too exist not in "the story" of that moment, but rather a crucial postlude, or perhaps some "sequel" -- out of the "value system" of that moment. So someone might recognize themselves as having done evil, but that is dependent on a sense of continuity of self which most people take for granted but I believe isn't the experiential space we can actually live in.)

This is some of the weirdness of a "postmodern" age. But I think postmodernism, with its hallmark lack of a universal set of standards might just be an inevitable byproduct of a culture realizing that hey, there are other, long-standing cultures around with worldviews around that agree with ours on many points but disagree on many others. (This sense of inevitability of a postmodern-ish outlook, as a result of a kind of birth of metacultural thinking, is postmodernism's view of itself. Metapostmodernism?)

Most traditional religion says that there is indeed a set of universal standards, generally from something "outside the system", often literally supernatural, though in some more recent viewpoints, "merely" transcendent and emergent.

My feeling is you kind of got to play it as a game of statistics and common sense. What do traditions agree on? What makes sense? A kind of enlightened Golden Rule, Do Unto Others As You'd Have Them Do Unto You, but with an enhanced view of the "Tragedy of the Commons". Maybe Kant's Categorical Imperative, "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law", is a bit more complete.

There is the Utilitarian view that we should maximize happiness for as many people as possible. There's a counterview that argues of course not, because if 3/4 of the people can be really happy at the cost of 1/4 of the people, that's morally unacceptable. But I wonder if that could be tweaked with the addition of a constant, call it "S", for "screw factor", that you multiply the amount of unhappiness a decision would cause. So the formula is
(how much happiness) * (# of happy people) - S * (how much unhappiness) * (# of unhappy people)
See? Simple math. If the value is positive, do it, if negative, refrain.

---

Quotes of the Moment

There is a right and a wrong in the universe and that distinction is not hard to make.

(he's making an homage to a very similar expression by Elliot S! Maggin in the novel "Superman: Last Son of Krypton".)

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

Whew! Which viewpoint to adopt... personally I think our country gets into trouble when it embraces the first one. One man's evil guerilla terrorist is another's freedom fighter...

---

Plea of the Moment

--Keith Olbermann with a moving explanation of why California's Prop 8 is just terrible, terrible, terrible. I'd say that Prop 8 IS evil for the reasons he eloquently explains. FoSO is encouraging people to LA Gay + Lesbian Center to overturn this. I was on the fence but after this video I sent $100.

---

And now I see "Madonna's IQ = 140". That much smarter than Obama, who knew? Thanks annoying Web Ads!

---

Always feel like a bit of a chump when it seems like every other company has a holiday...at least the subway's not crowded.

---

I love all the little streets with names like "Public Alley 438" around my office.

---

Wow, the Boston Salvation Army has thw red kettles out already? Probably a symptom of the rough times- a lot of food+shelter places taxed.

---

A big feature on screenshots of both Windows Vista and Google Android is a big old analog clock. That's not just retro, it's meta-retro.

---

Maybe when I'm trying to use music to focus, it would be better to stick with my smaller "Psyched" playlist; faster, fewer=less distracting? Video of the Moment
Slate Video breaking down that Trinity Lateral Play. Very clever!

---

Quote of the Moment

People don't need three meals a day... I think two twinkies and a couple glasses of scotch is a pretty good dinner.

Ricola coughdrops has a current promotional campaign that I find despicably brilliant. "Find the Mystey Cougher"... somewhere in America someone will be coughing, and if a person offers them a ricola coughdrop, they'll get a million bucks.

It sounds like there's a website and clues being dropped by email, so it's not as random as all that.

Still, as the Daily Dump puts it:

The brilliance of this is manifold. First, it would be HILARIOUS to see someone rushing through a crowded subway station or a restaurant offering everyone who coughed a Ricola. What are the chances that someone gets beat up doing this? 10:1? 5:1? Hilarious. Second, I want TWO people in the same place rushing around offering everyone a Ricola, shoving each other out of the way to be the first one to offer the lozenge. Third, I want to see someone run up to a Spanish person who just coughed and offer them a Ricola, only to have the Spanish person make a gesture that they don't understand and have the person FLIP OUT screaming, "How do you say, 'Would you like a Ricola?' in Spanish. HOW DO YOU SAY IT!" My head is spinning over this.

Personally, I'm thinking of the pathetic loser who doesn't even realize hints are being dropped, but who could really use the money, pathetically and desperately reprogramming themselves to offer a Ricola coughdrop to anyone they encounter coughing for the rest of their life.

On that Daily Dump site, I liked The Bourbon Samurai's comment:

Other cough drop companies should create competing mysery coughers...you would never know which to offer..."Halls? Ricola? Sucrets? Glass of Robitussin? Dammit! WHICH ONE ARE YOU!!!"

---

Quote of the Moment

Television reporter: "This November will be your 104th birthday. What is your secret for longevity?"
Elderly man: "Huh?"

Quote of the Moment

I really do think that love is the best thing in the world, except for cough drops. But I also have to say, for the umpty-umpth time, that life isn't fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all.

...watched the movie with Ksenia last night. The book is only maybe 10-20% better, but it does have some great quotes like that, and a somewhat more realistic epilogue after the romantic rescue and ending.

---

Thought of the Moment
The other night the On Point was talking with Ingrid Newkirk, founder of PETA on that organization's 25th Anniversary. It seems that the mission's mandate is to raise animals to the level of humans, in terms of respect for their feelings and general karma (or, if your cynical, lower humans 'til they seem like just another animal.) It started to make me wonder, in this circle of life, how do we feel about other animals that are pure carnivores? Do we try to get them to change their ways? (It's kind of a take on the old liberal "what's our tolerance of intolerant belief systems" bugaboo.) There's a PETA vegetarian FAQ that says "Most animals who kill for food could not survive if they didn't, but that is not the case for humans."

Also, I know it's a nitpick, but I hate how they keep saying that the alternative to a vegetarian lifestyle is being an carnivore...carnivore is not the same thing as omnivore, it just sounds more menacing.

Man, my apartment is chilly. During the summer it was great, it's relatively shaded location kept in nice and temperate, but of course now it's time to pay the piper. It also seems a little drafty...I'm such a household moron...I checked and it doesn't look like there are any kind of non-screen sections to pull down, it's just the screens from the summer. So assuming there aren't any storm windows the landlords expect me to know about in the basement...maybe I should talk to him.

But assuming what I see is what I got (and that I'm seeing it correctly, and there isn't some non-screen extra layer lurking in those windows), I wonder what would be good to make my place warmer and less drafty. I know some people who put up a layer of plastic, basically clingwrap, which I'm sure is warm but looks terrible. Maybe some heavy curtains? Which might also help deal with the "too much light" problem--in my bedroom when I'm trying to sleep-in, and then again if I get that video projector I'm jonesing for...

Any suggestions?

---

Quote of the Moment

A woman has got to love a bad man once or twice in her life to be thankful for a good one.

Map of the Moment
--One nation, Red and Blue and Purple all over. E. pointed me to these election results, blended red and blue by county, with each state warped so that its size reflects the number of votes cast. The page this image came from has some other diagrams that kind of build up to this one. Hey, does anyone around Boston have a black or dark grey trenchcoat I could borrow for a costume?

Anyway, for the time being I'm working off of Mo's old laptop, placed on my usual worktable. There's something nice about working on such a self-contained little unit (even though the laptop dies instantly if momentarily removed from the wallplug, this minimizing it's usefulness as portable device.) But it...I dunno, does a good job of putting the computer in its place, it feels like less of a dominant thing in my life. Which is an illusion, but hey.

---

Link of the Moment
TechInterview.org has those little mindbender problems some companies like to ask on interviews. They generally don't have a lot to do with the job you're actually applying for, but they let an interviewer see the way you work you're way through difficult or even unsolvable problems. (Or, they just give less than clever interviewers something to ask, with letting them watch you squirm as a bonus.) The site also features discussions and solutions of the problems, so BONUS!

---

Anti-Censorship of the Moment
Time magazine cowardly dropped its 1998 essay by Bush Sr and Brent Scowcroft on why we didn't topple Saddam during Gulf War I from its onlne archives. It's a good essay in its own right, which seems damn near prescient now. Plus, the astonishingly Orwellian overtones of its removal speaks volumes...thank god for the free roots of the Internet, and lets hope the right to publish remains.

In a similar vein, looks like McD's has storngarmed strongarmed (thanks John) Merriam-Webster into dropping "McJob" from its new words section. They try to convince people that they're only doing it to prevent confusion with their disadvantaged/handicapped workers program McJOBS. Yeah, right.

---

Immaturity of the Moment

--from the Unh! Project, "A collection of guttural moans from comics" Look closely at this one, the "Captain America! I command you to..." just totally makes the tableau for me.

Links of the Moment
At the risk of giving away my sources, Metafilter has a healthy supply of interesting links on a daily basis...so much so that you could probably make a little blog that was basically metametafilter.

---

Quote of the Moment

My niece is dating a sculptor. She can see no flaws in him. He hopes one day to govern a province. Myself, I don't envy that province.

It's where geeks learn to roll their own tongues (block that metaphor!) for their fictional universes. The Kit has some interesting "big picture" analysis of existing languages.

---

Article of the Moment
A kuro5hin article on the history of online multiplayer games had this piece on what might be the first virtual rape in this otherspace. People start to identify very strongly with their online characters, even when the world is represented purely as words (as is the case here), symbols, or with graphics (like with Ultima Online and EverQuest.) Sometimes I'm very glad that the learning curve of these "MUD"s (Multi User Dungeons) prevented me from doing more than barely dipping my toe in when I was in college...I have enough little addictions taking up all my free time.

---

Sports of the Moment
Been hearing a little bit more about NFL Europe. I've always been in to alternative sports leagues and the team names and logos they come up with, but I'd never heard of the Amsterdam Admirals, the Scottish Claymores, the F.C. Barcelona Dragons, the Rhein Fire, the Frankfurt Galaxy, or the Berlin Thunder (helmet shown here, you can also go see all the helmets and logos) What I really liked was their Beginner's Guide to American Football, trying to explain and justify the dang thing.

I'm not sure what is says about my upbringing that I always feel a bit of an urge to apologize for liking to watch football. I end up explaining my history of watching games from the stands with the marching or pep band. In the guestbook, Annette asks if I have any anti-SPAM advice. Not really. I get tons of it myself...I just set up my homebrew webmail system so I could easily do mass deletes. I've been meaning to look into some more community based methods. Hotmail seems to have some anti-spam measures in place, I don't know how effective they are though. Maybe you could forward all your mail through an account like that.

---

AIM Conversation of the Moment
ranjit: my dog gets an application of flea&tick killer once a month-- you squirt it on the back of his neck and it soaks through his skin into his blood.
ranjit: I always get a tiny bit on my fingers, and then I taste it for an hour.
kirk: bleck
ranjit: at least I am somewhat flea-resistant!
kirk: "thanks to a pet care incident gone horribly awry, mild mannered ranjit discovers he has developed one of the world's most trivial superpowers...mild resistance to fleas" Fortunately, with small power comes only small responsibility

---

Link of the Moment
With all these terrorist related troubles, it might be hard to remember that environmental concerns still linger. Ban Dihydrogen Monoxide Now!