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At certain times in history cultures have taken it for granted that a person wasn't fully human unless he or she learned to master thoughts and feelings. In Confucian China, in ancient Sparta, in Republican Rome, in the early Pilgrim settlements of New England, and among the British upper classes of the Victorian era, people were held responsible for keeping a tight rein on their emotions. Anyone who indulged in self-pity, who let instinct rather than reflection dictate actions, forfeited the right to be accepted as a member of the community. In other historical periods, such as the one in which we are now living, the ability to control oneself is not held in high esteem. People who attempt it are thought to be faintly ridiculous, "uptight," or not quite "with it." But whatever the dictates of fashion, it seems that those who take the trouble to gain mastery over what happens in consciousness do live a happier life.

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Gradually I learned to be indifferent to myself and my deficiencies; I came to center my attention increasingly upon external objects: the state of the world, various branches of knowledge, individuals for whom I felt affection.

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Finally, stresses and pressures are clearly the most subjective aspects of a job, and therefore the ones that should be most amenable to the control of consciousness. Stress exists only if we experience it; it takes the most extreme objective conditions to cause it directly.

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Subjective experience is not just one of the dimensions of life, it is life itself. Material conditions are secondary: they only affect us indirectly, by way of experience. Flow, and even pleasure, on the other hand, benefit the quality of life directly. Health, money, and other material advantages may or may not improve life. Unless a person has learned to control psychic energy, chances are such advantages will be useless.

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In the past few years I have come to be quite well acquainted with several Muslim professionals--electronics engineers, pilots, businessmen, and teachers, mostly from Saudi Arabia and from the other Gulf states. In talking to them, I was struck with how relaxed most of them seemed to be even under strong pressure. "There is nothing to it," those I asked about it told me, in different words, but with the same message: "We don't get upset because we believe that our life is in God's hands, and whatever He decides will be fine with us." Such implicit faith used to be widespread in our culture as well, but it is not easy to find it now. Many of us have to discover a goal that will give meaning to life on our own, without the help of a traditional faith.

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Se non è vero, è ben trovato--it may not be true, but it is well conceived.

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Blind People Gesture As They Speak - and even do it based on the grammar of the language they are speaking...

via

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Ever stop to think about how that celebratory helmet bump thing is pretty much how football players kiss? My mom sent me a NY Times article by Dwight Garner about his keeping a commonplace book for 40 years which he published as "Garner's Quotations: A Modern Miscellany".

I enjoy setting my two decades of blogging in the context of commonplace books - starting as text files on my Palm Pilot in 1997. As in the case of this book, it can just be a bunch of quotes. Garner lumps them by topic a bit, usually in clumps of 3 or 4, though the lumps are titled, so part of the pleasure is recognizing the commonality.

Anyway, here are my favorite quotes from it... usually I'm a little hesitant to bring in quotes wholesale, but what the hell. I especially like the Richard Avedon quote on how surfaces are all we have to work with.

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I'm not much but I'm all I have.

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One melancholy lesson of advancing years is the realization that you can't make old friends.

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Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.

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If dolphins tasted good, he said, we wouldn't even know about their language.

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I pick twenty [cherries] at a time and stuff them all into my mouth at once. They taste better like that.

He is so right!

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If you're not at the table, you're on the menu.

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A wise old chef once told me: Wait till peas are in season, then use frozen.

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The better a singer's voice, the harder it is to believe what they're saying.

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Two of the saddest words in the English language are "What party?" And L.A. is the "What party" capital of the world.

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The surface is all you've got. You can only get beyond the surface by working with the surface.

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Some exemplary unpleasant facts are these: that life is short and almost always ends messily; that if you live in the actual world you can't have your own way; that if you do get what you want, it turns out to be not the thing you wanted; that no one thinks as well of you as you do yourself; and that one or two generations from now you will be forgotten entirely and that the world will go on as if you had never existed. Another is that to survive and prosper in this world you have to do so at someone else's expense or do and undergo things it's not pleasant to face: like, for example, purchasing your life at the cost of innocents murdered in the aerial bombing of Europe and the final bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And not just the bombings. It's also an unpleasant fact that you are alive and well because you or your representatives killed someone with bullets, shells, bayonets, or knives, if not in Germany, Italy, or Japan, then Korea or Vietnam. You have connived at murder, and you thrive on it, and that fact is too unpleasant to face except rarely.

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We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for ours to amuse them.

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Time misspent in youth is sometimes all the freedom one ever has.

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Freedom isn't speaking your mind freely. Freedom is having the money to go to Mexico.

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What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.

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Somebody put it on the Internet and it went bacterial.

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When people call you intelligent it is almost always because they agree with you. Otherwise they call you arrogant.

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My chest bumps like a dryer with shoes in it.

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You can't do anything about the length of your life, but you can do something about its width and depth.

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We're all just walking each other home.

Are Bacos™ a spice? I always keep an eye on b3ta.com, a UK-site with fun photoshop themed contests. They're just wrapping up a scifi art contest that has made some awesome stuff:

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You cannot revolt against the peasants.

Interesting turn of phrase, though I'm not sure if I believe it.

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Sausage making is a natural outcome of efficient butchery.

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Someone was posting a "what message or lesson do you wish you could tell your younger self" - besides "buy Apple stock during the 90s" I wish I had more practice in saying less.

I often dilute my own message, usually trying to look smart, and/or showing how I understand both sides of the story, or subconsciously fearing that I will be faulted for leaving out some detail that ends up being important.

So, younger self: "State the point clearly, be concise. Add details if asked."

(Be like the father in "A River Runs Through It", who would tell his sons to take an essay and then halve the word count, and then halve again.)

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Lucky Jeans via the iPhone 8... I accidentally broke a cool Fred and Friends Equal Measure Measuring Cup... unfortunately they don't seem to make it anymore.



Some of those facts seem unbelievable! Multiple billions of grains in 2 1/2 cups of flour??? at tubachristmas rehearsal. A. it's a little humbling to be just one of the crowd B. what a noise C. I'm kind of glad my high schools and colleges played sousaphones and not those shoulder-mounted bazooka-like marching tubas

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we're playing inside the rotunda aka food court... 130 low brass folk very near an acoustically bouncy dome... this should be interesting
star wars star wars STAR WARS
Happy Thanksgivukkah! Or Chanksgiving. I was totally blown away about how the convergence of Thanksgiving and the first day of Hanukkah won't recur for 70,000 years. (or ever?) It got me curious about the patterns of Thanksgiving and Hanukkah vs. the secular calendar, so I spent an hour or two this morning hacking out a little table. Thanksgiving is in brown, Hanukkah is in blue, Christmas in green, January 1 in red.

I was pleased to get a better feel for the patterns, the 4th Thursday's little day slide (with bumps on leap years), and Hanukkah's larger lunar moves. Still, looking at this 100 years of data, I would never have guessed that today is such a rare event...

Household tasks are easier and quicker when they are done by somebody else.

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Delight lies somewhere between boredom and confusion.

--Beauty in a second, via BB. (It's really the music that ties it together.) The experience at Montblanc itself is kind of spoiled by a watch overlay.

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On my UI devblog, Why Windows Taskbar beats OSX' Dock.

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Scooby-Doo as secular humanism; a brave search for truth shows the spooks and monsters for the flim-flam they are.

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http://www.candlemarkandgleam.com/store/delivery/constellation-games-serial/ My buddy Leonard is launching a terrific serialized novel: post-scarcity alien first contact meets classic video game study...

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There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge'.

I am so lonely
And have a lot of problems
Be my Valentine?

A message to snails
Evolution has failed you
Your shells are a joke

Asked the universe
To please stop sending me signs
Has not responded

A pack of Wet Ones
Inadequately sealed shut
Is pack of Dry Ones

He has those two eyes
So very much like I do
It's destiny-ish

One in five experts
Agrees that the other four
May well have a point

Wearing fur's okay
If the animal was killed
In, like, self-defense

When old people fall
It rips my heart to pieces
Yet still they do it

There once was a girl
And she lived in Nantucket
And that's all I know.

--"the immortal haiku of laura silverman" (sister of Sarah) from Tufts magazine. (Though it seems she's more "School of the Museum of Fine Arts" which is affiliated with Tufts.) Also she was the receptionist on "Dr. Katz" which ks kind of awesome.

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Bleh, just watched Woody Allen's "Match Point". Rich people to be envious of, then repulsed by, all for an operatic theme of no justice and a visual metaphor.

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But thanks to Amber's persistence in having us put up a ceiling mount for the projector, we got to watch the movie on a 114" diagonal screen.
--Ah- such foliage.

You know sometimes I really miss playing tuba, other times, not so much.

(image via xoxoxoBruce)

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You know, despite that whole "Love That Dirty Water" song Boston tap water tastes pretty darn good... Anyone daring the shopping today? I may (or may not) go brave a Best Buy, there's this one game that sounds interesting..

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Quote of the Moment

This john's name was John and he lived in one of those apartment complexes that are all over Tucson, where the desert used to be. Little houses stacked and winding around each other like a sprawling motel, a ghetto for people with money. Lawns spiked with sprinklers and a couple of pools. They all had nature names - Three Pines, Blue River Apartments. John's apartment was full of things I wanted to steal. Bright pieces of art from Mexico, perfect layers of yarn curved into flowing animals or gods, something you'd hallucinate on really good drugs. John needed to show his life to someone, which I think is often the reason everyone tries to fall in love. Look at me, I'm here, I did these things, I have this stuff. He'd have the Rolling Stones blaring from his stereo, the sound filling his sunny little apartment and he'd be singing along, too loud, a verse ahead of the actual song so that I could understand that he knew this song, he knew it well and that said something about him.

"Rent Girl", kind of a graphic novel illustrated by Laurenn McCubbin. About the least glamorous view of prostitution (mostly around Boston; this anecdote is from a sidetrip) possible, and barely sexual at all despite all the nudity. I was tempted just to quote

John needed to show his life to someone, which I think is often the reason everyone tries to fall in love. Look at me, I'm here, I did these things, I have this stuff.

which I think is a very cutting observation.

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Advice of the Moment
Using the Hell out of your Digital Camera - 10 Tips for Digital Camera Owners includes the idea of taking a picture of your name and address, and leaving it always on the camera, locked. Which is probably not a bad idea, but after 7 or so years of always having my camera on me I've never left it behind... some other neat ideas there, some of which (like using it as a memory aid, or evidence, etc) I started doing on my own.

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As visiting family uses my PC I had forgotten how flustering my microsoft split keyboard if you're not used to it- you'd think it was dvorak

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Run your browser with the "default" color to the old "Windows' gray". It's kind of astounding how many sites assume the default is white.

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Wow, so dark! Like someone is really trying to put the black into Black Friday...

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Bacos aren't a spice, Betty

I was going to ramble about how surprised I am at the prevalence of iPod and iPhone bumpers, how these are very aesthetically pleasing and elegant devices, and wrapping them in rubber or vinyl really takes its toll on their slimness and overall feel. I asbsent-mindedly turn my iPhone over and over in my hand, a very expensive worry stone.

Then I found this guy who encased his iPod in a block of resin -- and it still works! (Not the touch dial, but through the port exposed at the bottom.) So those "rubber baby ipod bumpers" folk got nothing on him.

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Quote of the Moment

My life is a furious ball of nothing.

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Charity of the Moment
But in an attempt to get beyond the furious ball of nothing... charity!

I repeated my family's donation to Beau's Salvation Army Virtual Christmas Kettle. Like i said last year, the Salvation Army really is an excellent choice for your charity dollar, great bang for the buck in terms of helping people out. Beau would like to raise $500, and he's over halfway there...

Hmm. I'm a little worried about the guy who lives in the apartment behind ours. He likes to collect and returns bottles and cans to make a little pocket money, so we tend to leave our empties outside his door, and they haven't moved for like a week. Don't know if I should call the landlord and asks if he knows anything, or what...

(UPDATE: I called the landlord, the fellow in question moved out, and back in with his wife, so that sounds like good news. Thanks for the encouragement to stick my nose in other people's business!)

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Quote of the Moment

When he come up I looked him in the eye, and I saw shoot, and there wasn't any shoot in nary other eye in the crowd; and so I says to myself, says I, hoss, it's about time to sing small, and so I did.

I love the language in that quote, I wonder how accurate the original transcription was.

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Link of the Moment
Wii-owners, be warned: WiiHaveAProblem. Specifically, if you're hurling hard enough to let the controller fly out of your hand, there's a chance that the thing bit holding on the wriststrap might not save your big expensive television...

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Products of the Moment
A friend pointed out girliepants.com with amusing tanks and undies for gals. I hadn't realized the "Tune In Tokyo" meme extended beyond Tufts, but it seems that it has. Live and learn!

--B. Watson is working to implement an idea I've had for a while, The River Raid Mapping Project.

A long while back on the Usenet group rec.games.video.classic I asked if River Raid "ends", and how...in response Erik Mooney posted a hack of River Raid where the plane won't die and you can just let it run...I ran it overnight and came back to a game that was still running, but with a kind of messed up world. So ever since then, I've thought about trying to assemble big "Nintendo Power"-style combined stitched-together "maps" so that we can see exactly when things start to go awry...

Expect more of this project later, I hope to give an even more complete map a permanent home, in collaboration with B. Watson.

So the new sidebar is there...still haven't sent out the invites for the people I hope will be adding to it, alongside stalwarts Dylan and Sarah. Pretty much anyone who knows me in real life is eligible for an account, along with anyone who has played a recurring role on the comments section here, so if you meet one of those criteria and don't receive an invite in the next couple of days, let me know.

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Ramble of the Moment
I blew off UU Church this morning. One thing that bugs me about that place...you know, this is a liberal, thoughtful, well-educated population. Is it actually a rule that all responsive readings must be read in a flat, dull, lockstep monotone? Would the reading be thrown into incompatible chaos if everyone just tried to put a little life and vitality and expression into what they're saying?

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Quote of the Moment

Fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.

via John Sawers in the Comments the other day. So, kisrael.com has a minor facelift. (You can see a snapshot of the old frontpage here.) It started as a slight structural page, trying to make "features" just the very most interesting parts, so people are more likely to click on the good stuff, and so Dylan's sidebar was moved up a bit. Then I decided...icons! I needed icons. Cute little 16x16 icons. I liked the old utilitarian feel of the text only links, but now each one has its own visual hook.

Please give me some feedback...I know not all the icons are stellar, but some of 'em came out pretty well I think.

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Geek Project of the Moment
Some guys are hacking the 'Big Mouth Billy Bass'. Yeah, those are so 2 years ago, but the idea of using it as a teleconferencing avatar, so it is lip-synched with the person you're talking to, is irresistable.

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Found Prose Poem of the Moment

You must believe me when I tell you this:
they dance naked in a circle, around a tiny fire.
If you lean in very close during quiet times,
you can hear their little drums.

He's talking about electrons, the special ones that might explain why Dell needs proprietary power supplies for their computers, in this alt.fan.dave_berry post...still, I love the sound of those lines/ Happy Thanksgiving all! Mo's making chicken, 'cause even the smallest turkeys are too much for four people. Personally, I think she should've gone for Spaghetti with Turkey Meatballs.

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Rant Quote of the Moment

Because the big questions in life are tough. Why are we here? Where are we from? Where are we going? But if people believe in asshole, douche-y liars like you, we're never going to find the real answers to these questions. You aren't just lying, you're slowing down the progress of all mankind -- YOU DOUCHE.

I already kisrael'd about this bozo, but this quote gets to heart of the problem, and of faith vs. inquiry in a nutshell. (South Park is actually one of the most topical comedies on television. I don't always agree with the opinions, but they are usually well argued.)

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News of the Moment
What I mentioned a few days ago has started to come true, as predicted by Salon, there's been a (mercifully failed) missile attack against a commercial airliner, an Israeli plane departing from Kenya. Oy.

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Campaign of the Moment
A kind of amusing if not-fully-realized campaign to ban comic sans. (You can also check out microsoft's Comic Sans Café.) Actually, the letters from the font's creator on both sites are interesting. (And isn't it odd that fonts have creators? It seems like they're just there, but creating one is extremely hard work, I'm not sure what 'language' you describe a new font in, but it has too scale, look ok bold, in italics, etc etc.) The 'ban comic sans' campaign seems to be a poor copy of Andre the Giant has a Posse.

Huh. You know, I put this section in 'comic sans ms' as a bit of a joke, but actually, maybe sans-serif fonts are more readable online. Huh, I wonder if I should convert kisrael over at some point.

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Music of the Moment
Surprisingly listenable, 9 Beet Stretch takes Beethoven's 9th Symphony and stretches it to last 24 hours. It's kind of like trance electronica. Divided into 19 sections of around 1 hour 20 each, for your listening convenience. Ever notice those "floaters" in your eyes? The little darkened flotsam and jetsam floating in your eye? Usually they're most obvious when looking at a large expanse of a light color. This summer I was getting really paranoid that they were getting worse, and some days do seem worse than others, but I don't think it's quite the traumatic thing I felt it was earlier.

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Quote of the Moment

Screw destiny! Destiny's just another word for inevitable. And nothing's inevitable if you stand up, look it in the eye and say, 'You're evitable.'

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Image of the Moment
A sonic boom caught on film, via this article. It was a "one in a million shot" by Navy photographer John Gay. Well, that's the official story anyway. I suspect it might actually be a battlefield scene where our jets are being attacked by Giant Airborne Eggs from Space.