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When a Hollywood performer, lacking distinction even as an actor can become a leading war hawk candidate for the Presidency, only the irrationalities induced by a war psychosis can explain such a melancholy turn of events.

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it's beginning to look a lot like tubachristmas- tomorrow at noon at downtown crossing (Millennium Tower steps) actually!

Still think about Love and Limerence (that crazy-in-love head over heels variety that some people are prone to and others aren't)

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Huh. It's sort of weird that this booster is sounding even more important/useful than I thought it was when I got it. (Still kicking myself for not pushing into Moderna away from Pfizer for the booster tho, mix-and-match seems like the optimal strategy)

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Albert Einstein once said his 2nd-best idea (after the theory of relativity) was soft-boiling an egg at the same time as he was cooking his soup, so he could get two meals and only have to wash one pot.

I am nuts for information-- as are we all, I suspect, most real men and women. I can't get enough of the stuff. When I'm clicking through the hundreds of E-mail messages that await me each morning, sometimes I imagine I'm a mighty information whale, sifting through thousands of tiny (but nutritious!) krill bits. Yum! Whether it's reading the cereal box or scanning the advertisement slide show some genius thought to project on the big screen at the movie theater, my appetite for information is unquenchable.

This metaphor is kind of formalized as Information Foraging Theory. The claim is humans forage for information the way other animals forage for food - and that can be usefully applied to analyze "doom scrolling" and kneejerk email checking and similar behaviors, where we swing back to the hunting grounds, and then stick/scroll around for periods of time based on the likelihood of something good showing up.

I was thinking about how I also stockpile information, and I use a motley collection of apps and websites to do so:
Simplenote App:

• Projects Done
• "Wisest" quotes
• "Factoids and Intermittently Useful Information"
• Medical events / things to discuss with my doctor

Google Docs:

• Shared shopping list with my partner
• Shared mailing list and zoom info for my science and spirituality reading group
• Shared idea for future top list

Tot App:

• Music to Get
• Videos/Shows to Watch
• Work Items to Do

Homebrew Online Database:

• Passwords + Account Info
• Media Journal
• New Music Playlists

For a bit it seemed weird that I don't have trouble remember what's recorded where... but now that I think about it, it makes sense that my brain is pretty well geared at remembering where any given "information hoard" is stored.

I think similarly, I've never been a fan of "RSS style readers" that take pure information content and put it into a generic template... the information loses that extraneous sensory data that helps me intuitively identify and recall the source/hunting ground..

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RIP Chuck Yeager!
ship stretching is a real-life loony tune way of getting better use out of cruise ships...

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My recent devblog post on repeatable random colors in javascript is slightly more clever than sometimes plus I get to quite John von Neumann: "Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin." (At my first programming job Paul Morville made a small sign of that, since he thought my protests along the lines of "this code can't POSSIBLY be doing that" had a whiff of that "from structure, chaos"...) Intriguing multi-sgment digit displays from the Soviet Union...


advent day 9
advent day 9

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"We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge; quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness.
We are monkeys with money and guns."

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At least you don't have to shovel rain.

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Harvard Business School Professor sounds like a big jerk.

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This Kulfi Cardamom-Malai bar at Apple Cinema's (in Fresh Pond) Bollywood movie night may literally be the best ice cream treat I've ever had.

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Wow, the Alewife Greenway Bike Path was COMPLETELY flooded, like 4-8" at least. I've never seen that happen before.
advent day 9

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Only a fool trips on what is behind him.

Just heard it for the first time, on some NFL Xbox ad. It's a little trite, but I like it as a more concise version of the story about the monk berating the other monk for having broken taboos by carrying a woman across a river, and the other monk asks "I set her down at the river bank; why are you still carrying her?"

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I remember being so impressed that gmail was smart enough to figure out "reply" doesn't generally mean "reply to myself", even if the last message in a thread was also by you.
advent day 9

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A little out of date but:

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Blender of Love

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Inspired a bit by Macklemore's Thrift Shop when I was dropping off some furniture-y bits at Goodwill I went looking or shirts, since I'd like to get some that aren't so tent-like on me noew. Really, not bad stuff-- especially at $5 a pop! Also I like how they sort by color, that matches how I think about shirts.

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main st, Gloucester MA

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What should I be when I grow up? A computer programmer! My capsule profile for my company's College Readiness blog.

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Software patents are like patenting '1 teaspoon sugar' as part of a recipe to make cinnamon buns.

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Men-ups-- dudes in various traditional pinup-girl poses, showing the weirdness of it all...

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FWIW the Nokia Lumia 710 reminds me a lot of the old Palm Z22.

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In the early-2000s, an apathy-starved American culture took the "eh" from their northerly neighbors, added an "m", and came up with today's most important phrase of indifference: "meh"

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And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the sketchiest of these is faith. cmg pointed out the site WishbookWeb -- very nostalgic! I can't even say how these two pages of robots from the Sears 1986 Catalog influenced my thinking and drawing back in the day-- Sadly, the 1986 Catalog is missing the next 100 or so pages, including video games. Ah well - no crappy pseudo-fakey screenshots for me for now!

Though I remember always being a bit mystified when Sears would put out other catalogs during the year that just didn't have a toy section. Made no sense at all.

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Well, let's go back a bit first. Two and a half thousand years ago, at the time of Aristophanes, the Greeks believed that comedy was superior to tragedy: tragedy was the merely human view of life (we sicken, we die). But comedy was the gods' view, from on high: our endless and repetitive cycle of suffering, our horror of it, our inability to escape it. The big, drunk, flawed, horny Greek gods watched us for entertainment, like a dirty, funny, violent, repetitive cartoon. And the best of the old Greek comedy tried to give us that relaxed, amused perspective on our flawed selves. We became as gods, laughing at our own follies.

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http://www.slate.com/id/2277104/ - only around 6% of scientists are Republican. No wonder Republicans replace analysis with ideology.

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"I am a believer in Christ," Rayford said. "I attend church. I read my Bible. I tell people what I believe."

And that, in a nutshell, is the authors' five-sentence definition of what it means to be a Christian.

It's only four sentences, you say? Well, yes, Rayford left out the fifth, traditionally unspoken, sentence: "I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal."

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Ugh- semi-lucid zombie dreams, the slow shamblers, two nights in a row- in Cleveland and on campus. I don't even like the movies that much.

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http://openprocessing.org/visuals/?visualID=4675 - virtual Rorschach (from Watchmen) generator - man, why can't I think of stuff like this? Musing further on my longing for gumption... (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance suggest this term for that combination of drive, focus, ability, motivation, and enthusiasm, and advises to learn to recognize "gumption traps".)

Last night I kind of consciously decided to not worry about the ToDos, to have a bit of supper with my Aunt and Uncle (some very nice leftovers of this chicken - potato - mushroom - tomato dish she made over the weekend), and then just crash, recover from my cold a bit, watch some football, and websurf. It seemed like a good idea at the time, and still reads pretty well, but I kind of regretted it the next morning... I should have stopped putting off cleaning up the apartment (still a bit off from the Thanksgiving Holiday and then that week of Banjo-Kazooing) and taking stock of what gifts I still need to purchase before the holidays.

My ToDo list is a mess. It brought to line that Steve Martin line from Roxanne:

I have a dream. It's not a big dream, it's just a little dream. My dream - and I hope you don't find this too crazy - is that I would like the people of this community to feel that if, God forbid, there were a fire, calling the fire department would actually be a WISE thing to do. You can't have people, if their houses are burning down, saying, "Whatever you do, don't call the fire department!" That would be bad.

The realized I was at risk for living that the moment I thought "I should figure out what to do, but my Todo list is such a big pile of overdue stuff"...

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Technology of a Lost Moment
Boingboing gadgets copied all the slides from a Logitech Slideshow of the Mice that Didn't Make It. I like the Frankenstein nature of this one... what's better than a mouse? TWO MICE GLUED TOGETHER! (Cause then it can do rotation and stuff, kind of like what the iPhone does now)

You know, the more I think about it the more I like it. It wouldn't have to be huge, just an optional "rotation" reading, though they'd have to do some math to get the movement right. (Also, you really can't expect human wrists to put up with more than 120 degrees or so of turn.)

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I kind of like Hank Williams Jr's Monday Night Football song, even if he's wicked republican. (Are folks still kneejerk anti-Country music?)

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Ugh, Facebook games. People are "throwing snowballs" at me. It feels like primate grooming social-bonding but with a corporate edge.

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SpindleyQ Strategy is to reciprocate but not throw new ones. (Also, wish I knew what I was signing away when I grant facebook app access)

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My ToDo app is clogged with stuff to be Googled, e.g. "perfidy" which sat there for a week. Good word, btw.

flywrench

flywrenchpong

So I spent yesterday afternoon writing a mashup parody of an obscure (by non-Indie standards, anyway) Indie game flywrench (you can see a teaser video here) and my own joustpong. It's called: flywrenchpong (I didn't embed it here on the page because it has an obnoxious sound track, kind of a bastardized version of the scratchy electronic music of the original, generated by slowing and "wah-wah'ing" the sound file I used to load my game into the Atari hardware during development.)

So, it's a joke that really only like 3 people should get (folks following both modern Indie gaming and Atari 2600 homebrews) but the author of the original said it was "amazing", so I guess no hard feelings.

In other words, I sent 120-odd Atari cartridges to a good home. I kept out the ones I really loved, and the multiplayer ones, but in a way it was a farewell to pieces of my childhood. But most of the games I can get in emulation, and at this point in my life, I need to separate myself from the Stuff that's taking up rent without paying me back.

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Sentence of the Moment

When I look at people that I would like to feel have been a mentor or an inspiring kind of archetype of what I'd love to see my career eventually be mentioned as a footnote for in the same paragraph, it would be, like, Bowie.

Language Log has named a prize for "tricky embedding" after him for this linguistic feat of nesting dolls. Busy, busy, buys...I'll try to make up for this later.

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Video of the Moment
Why it would be very difficult to keep an octopus in prison.

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Quote of the Moment

The truth does not make it easier to understand.

Exchange of the Moment

[Ksenia was sitting on the side of the bed after a late night shower, towel only around her waist, hair up a bit, and looking quite lovely if I do say so myself. Or tried to:]
"Wow...you look really lovely...like one of those Roman Statues. Or, err, painting. I mean, not painting, ummm, I don't think the Romans are known for painting but...one of those paintings. By Italians. But of Romans..."
"Oh honey, you so sound like you know what you're talking about."

What's funnier is that Ksenia has studied a lot of art history. And I have, well, not. Image and Link of the Moment

--from Skeletal Systems of cartoon characters by Michael Pallus... macabre and cool, but I think I saw the basic idea in MAD magazine back in the day.

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Dude of the Moment
The cultural linguistics of "Dude". Basically, it's a way for males to achieve "cool solidarity"--close, but not too close.

I find this kind of stuff fascinating. I noticed some of the guys from India at work are a bit more touchy feely than American guys tend to be. One of them, actually a half-Indian, half-Kuwaiti guy named Noor thought it was actually because there was more segregation of the genders when they're growing up, so (at least for heterosexuals) physical contact doesn't have as much of a possible sexual charge. Interesting theory...I do think American males are way too uptight about someone thinking they might be gay.

You know, stupid footnote, I kind of miss Mo say "Oh, dudely!" to express a startled admiration for something. Subculture of the Moment
Hrrm. Here's the Electic Shavers Page Nothing but electric shavers, old and new. Includes the column "Tell Mr. Steel Beard", where they actually answered my question on what kind of razor to consider getting. (I'm thinking it might be a way of getting myself to shave more often...)

I'm actually open to suggestion on electric shavers...anyone out there had nayh particulary good or bad experiences with various products?

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Art of the Moment
Abstract, interactive Flash art, white vibes. Cool stuff, though suffers a bit from that old "I'm not sure if I've clicked everything interesting" frustration.

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"Joke" of the Moment

Q: How far can you see on a clear day?
A: 93 million miles...from here to the Sun.

• Lisa, I've had it with you and your stories. 'Bart's a vampire.' 'Beer kills brain cells.' Now let's go back to that... building thingy... where our beds and TV... is.

  They say the greatest tragedy is when a father outlives his son. I've never understood why that is; frankly, I can see an upside to it! Ha ha!

• I've previously written about Fan Fiction...the pornographic stuff is disturbing, but Minesweeper Fanfic is just plain weird.
• Not sure why I tagged the "S" page off of this, but it seems to have a lot of SNES games.
• Hmm, maybe I was looking for "Picross"...this page has it for the SNES, and here's an online version. It's a puzzlegame where you have to make a picture on a grid by looking at the sequences of off and on pixels...

• >Rick is a Mason, he's not a Shriner, nor does he have
  >any interest in becoming one. The Shriners, BTW, are
  >considering dropping the requirement of being a Master
  >Mason to become a Shriner.
  I never knew that about shriners... but how high up the degree tree is a master mason anyhoo?
  I think it might slightly boggle my illuminatus world view to think of all those guys in fezzes riding go-carts as 33 degree masons.

• Jeff Minter is obsessed with Llamas and other four legged beasts. (He is the proud owner of Flossie the most beautiful sheep in the world.) He also makes video games, all the way back to the old 8-bit days. He has a website with an interesting blog.
• Calculate the speed of light with marshmallows and a microwave.

• You can get more with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.

• Here are some interesting Tesellations, patterns that repeat to fill a 2D space.
• I'm in a hurry making scientific gadgets, Tom Jr. said Swiftly.

--View out of the kitchen window. Man, I hate winter in New England.

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Funny of the Moment

My parents just came back from a planet where the dominant lifeform had no bilateral symmetry, and all I got was this stupid F-Shirt