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(Copying my response to FB friend Chad Robb's talking about religious journey)

Couple of notes from my journey:
* I think the traditional practice that most resonated for me was daoism. My favorite guide to it was "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" which winds its way through the conflicts in western ways of thinking of the world to find at something it realizes is described in the not-really-puttable-on-in-words of the Tao. Part of the Tao is the border where two somewhat opposite things come together in a "the opposite of a great truth is another great truth" kind of way. (In terms of books "The Tao of Pooh" is another, shorter intro to a more classical form of Taoism)

* It's not quite a religion or practice, but I admired how Alan Lightman's "Mr. g" outlined a new mythology more compatible with how science sees the universe to be - a god not totally disjoint from some of the Christian view, but not as "all dials of power knowledge and love turned to 11" - kind of harkening to the old "watchmaker god" version, god as a loving experimenter who creates universes, but in some ways the whole point of running those universes is that he can't know how they will come out - that the chaotically-unpredictable emergence is what generates the suffering and sin but also all the good stuff that wouldn't exist if the experiment hadn't been run.

* My own view is probably a bit of a hodge podge. I find myself not trusting anything that relies on a special, one time revelation to someone else and would even having trouble accepting an epiphany I had. And that seems to preclude most "supernatural" explanations of the universe, like a top-down creation. So I look to emergence - just like in theory economics is just psychology is just neurobiology is just biology is just chemistry is just physics, but still atomic theory won't help you think about the last recession - each layer adds something that is fundamentally unpredictable from almost any analysis of the layer beneath it.

So I'm left with the idea that it's the shared objective reality that matters most (even though, objectively I have to recognize how important subjectivity is to so many people! and scientists or atheists who claim "objectivity" are often jerks who can't acknowledge the presumptions that led to their scientific enquiries) but also I embrace the uncertainty in a way most other faiths don't. Like Goedel says there are things true about the universe that can't be proven within the universe. So the "Faith" aspect comes in for me that everything is emergence, and that objective reality is shared and our best guesses/estimations about what is most likely *universally* true should guide our individual actions-- but we have to be humble and recognize they are only best guesses/estimations (when you talk about "accurate template for extrapolation into the outer cosmos" -- well, it's the "accurate" part I am not sure anyone can help you with - it seems like uncertainty is baked into everything, and so I will always be suspicious of sure and certain Faith.)

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Time is always ticking... which is better than the alternative.

Mark, please know that I have prayed for President Trump, his family, for you and the entire Administration. Our Nation is at war, it is a Spiritual War at the highest level. This is not a war that can be fought conventionally, this is God's battle and He has used President Trump in a powerful way to expose the deceit, lies and hypocrisy of the enemy. The Trump family and all of us have paid a heavy price to be used by the Father but the War is just beginning. We have had a major set back and people are taking sides, and my plea to my fellow believers who want to cut and run is judge not less you be judged, we have all fallen short of the Glory of Almighty God. What I heard during my prayers is the Trump family and the Administration need to be surrounded by those great Pastors and Evangelicals who have snd continue to love and support them. President Trump need to be ministered to, he needs the love that only Jesus Christ offers! This is his opportunity to confess that he can no longer fight this battle alone, he must give it to Christ and Gid almighty will show him the way to victory. I will continue to pray for all of you, please let me know how I can help??

Want to listen to radio stations from all over the globe? Great interface for it!

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In response, the Laclede County Health Department, the New Madrid County Health Department, and several other Missouri health agencies announced this week that they are abandoning all work related to the covid-19 pandemic, including case investigations, contact tracing, quarantine orders, and public announcements of case and death tallies.

"Coronavirus cases have surged in Missouri in recent weeks. The state is averaging nearly 3,000 new cases per day, a 124% increase over the past two weeks, and daily hospitalizations have increased by nearly 50% in that same time period"

Republicans to change state slogan from "Show Me" to "Stick Fingers in Ears".

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Nice optical illusion...

It's just like the light at the end of the tunnel has showed us how stinky and bad the tunnel is.

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A nice lagniappe - Kenneth Terry outside the Café du Monde

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52 Things Tom Whitwell learned in 2019 - great stuff. Today's Nancy is on point.

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Man. I feel bad for not being a better hermit crab parent over the years. They are so orderly!

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With the rise of phrases like "horny on main", I feel like the word has recovered something it lost in, like, the 80s with 2 Live Crew's song - like it's kind of useful to playfully talk about expressed sexual desire without being too gross or too judgemental. I gave some money for Doug Jones in Alabama, but jeez, their data science team must have really dialed into "pleading whining desperation" for the their subject lines - "Kirk - please?" / "Are you online, Kirk?" / "Do not ignore [from Doug Jones]" / "We're PLEADING Kirk" and then my favorite, after I gave, from "FINAL CONFIRMATION": "Please confirm: Kirk Israel wants Roy Moore to lose?" (Oh, actually I remembered the text as "Please confirm: Kirk Israel wants Doug Jones to lose?" which would have been even more insufferable.)

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Sibilant Snakelikes - exploring different game options with the basic "Snake" mechanic. Shadow of the Coloussus and Sensible Soccer were especially sssssmart!

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Cool, animators brought to life the original Ralph McQuarrie art for The Star Wars - I think someone made a comic adaption of the original outlines too, but seeing things come to life is a trip.

advent day 13
advent day 13

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today's game is one of the better playing ones, I think (yesterday's was probably way too difficult). If I was thinking more clearly "enemy mine" or "mine enemy" would have been a better name.

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Melissa took this photo of my tuba in its Christmas lights doing Honk carolling Saturday night...

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More wine and madder music.

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12-13-14; last one of these for a while!

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Bananagrams!

advent day 13

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Pretty good piece on the laugh track... even though I have a dislike of shows with laugh tracks (from a typical "they need to tell us when to laugh?" viewpoint) ever since I heard about its humanitarian mission against loneliness, I've had more sympathy for it as a concept.

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Always wanted to travel back in time to try fighting a younger version of yourself? Software development is the career for you!

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An overview of paradigms of living with the web: http://kirkdev.blogspot.com/2013/12/from-information-superhighway-to-web-to.html
advent day 13

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Dialog between me and Amber last night, after I described my evening using Emoji. It's a challenging narrative form!

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Every once in a while I hear "not information dense" as a critique of a UI. (Win8 or iOS). Man, that is backwards thinking in my book.

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JIM HENSON: I think Ms. Rand and my character Oscar the Grouch would have a lot to talk about actually. I am laughing out loud at this idea.

AYN RAND: Why would I want to talk to him. What has he achieved or trying to achieve.

JIM HENSON: He has achieved what I think is the ultimate goal of your way of thinking. Isolation. Contempt for others. A hard heart. Yet even he can muster a bit of empathy every now and then.

AYN RAND: I am not isolated. I have no contempt for others. Millions of people read my books and find my thoughts inspirational. I hardly spend my time on the sidelines in a trash can grumping.

JIM HENSON: Not yet anyway.

Sometimes I really think Ayn Rand sounds like a parody of herself.

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A burnt out and destroyed Detroit high school, then and now. Haunting!

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Anyone who acts without paying attention to what he is doing is wasting his life. I'd go so far as to say that life is denied by lack of attention, whether it be to cleaning windows or trying to write a masterpiece.

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Need to prove something you already believe? All you need are two graphs (to overlay) and a leading question

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Tool-assisted speedrun creation of a NES emulator. Amazing. ("Tool-assisted Speedruns" are usually people PLAYING videogames, using the computer to help them cheat and play a superhumanly perfect game, not write an emulator that lets you play the games of an old system.)

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Habeas Corpus, who needs that latin crap? Martial Law all the time that's what we need!

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In the early mid-90s Perl introduced me to hashmaps; the first non-array, non-DIY linked list collection I'd seen. Mind blown! And then I found out about cheap rentable web space, Perl CGI, and how POST and GET params could work like a hashmap... sky was the limit!

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Panera with all the calorie counts labeled... what's more amazing, how many calories a cookie has, or how many a really tasty salad doesn't?

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Most hugely reviled things, I can see why people hate. What kind of person am I then if I don't get what's so godawful about Nickelback? Is it 'cause they're prefab, but meant to sound indy and authentic? Or what?

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The cutest broken leg in the history of ever

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Even beyond the permanent marital law National Defense Authorization Bill gets us, it makes the dumbass mistake of treating terrorism as war.

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Posting this makes me feel a million years old but Reader's Digest's 20 Secrets Your Waiter Won't Tell You is pretty great.

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Being poor is having to live with choices you didn't know you made when you were 14 years old.

--Minnesota is very snowy these days. Random fact: it's actually the " Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome".

I gotta stop mixing him up with Herbet Hoover. Or J. Edgar Hoover for that matter.

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Hey, do you guys remember the OJ Simpson trial? MAN, were we bored before the Internet.

I'm not sure if I'm finished fiddling with it, but I finally got around to making the frontpage of this site smart enough to know if you're viewing it as kisrael.com or kirkjerk.com, and added a new graphic for the latter case: It has kind of an "evil twin" vibe going, relative to the kisrael.com header: Not sure if I should try to better coordinate the fonts or not.

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Reading of the Moment
A long time ago I...well, kind of stole, but technically it's back in her brownstone... a book from my Aunt, Word of Mouth: 150 Short-Short Stories by 90 Women Writers. In trying to locate the source and phrasing of a quote (for this musing on Mario's "Princess 'Peach' Toadstool's hair and her role as object of sexual pursuit) I reread the collection once again.

The quote I was thinking of comes from the opening paragraph of "Animal Instinct" by Camille Norton:

She's more or less the blonde version of the French cousin, sparrow small, bronzed, all muscle and heart. There are, you say, two versions of the French cousin. You are the dark, lean kind, the sort that is mistaken for a boy, the sort that wears striped pullovers and sunglasses while running along wharves in Truffaunt films. You're the type who's always stealing something, she's the type who's always stolen or stolen upon. This is because she bleaches the crown of her hair, the animal sign for femininity.

Another great quote from the same work:

In graduate school, I learned that it is a simple thing to take coffee with people one neither likes nor trusts.

Another phrase forever stuck in my head is from "Soaring" by Marilyn Krysl, where a kind of post-hippy mom is defending her kids' education in both Non-Violent Protest and Karate:

"The human being is a very complex organism. They can handle contradiction."

(Also the kids are named "Sky" and "Ocean", and "Sky" is still near the top of my names-I-like-for-kids list.)

In "File 13" Jocelyn Riley plots her revenge on a office jerk who has been sexually harassing her:

Less than a year from now, a message will come up on Oscar's screen first, and then on everyone else's screens, that will say "Leslie was here." The dates of my employment will be right there before my name, like the dates on a tombstone.

Inside the box will be a drawing of a man, his arms draped around a computer monitor, his head resting on its top. He'll look down at the computer, not as though it were alive but as though he were afraid of it, "Duh," he will say in a little cartoon balloon, "I wonder why I can't make her do what I want." The computer blows off smoke.

I, you know, try to take it easy on the sexual harassment, but some days when the whole programming or PC configuration thing isn't going well, I feel just like the guy in that cartoon.

Finally Amber Coverdale Sumrall's "Siesta" has a lovely reminder from the young narrator's grandmother:

"That's why we're born, honeygirl. To learn how to love each other. And it takes all the time we've got. Some folks never get the hang of it."

In retrospect, I'm amazed to recognize how influential this book was on me, how much of my writing it influenced, how many concepts I (consciously or not) lift and massaged into my own short writing. Now I'm wondering if it doesn't strongly color my editorship of the Blender of Love, that I'm ok with poetry but what I'm really after is prose in this taut and emotionally loaded style.

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"The Fall".... Princess Bride meets The English Patient, or maybe Pan's Labyrinth meets Wizard of Oz... visually lush, though, like The Cell

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Is there a word for "writing-only dyslexia"? I need to chill and stop scouring my typos for signs of incipient mental degradation.

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I can even debug the typos of my brain:"I amazed" I wrote. Of course, because with "amazed" you already have the m-sound, so why type it?

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realized why I stopped at a combo long john silvers/ taco bell; faintest hope that someday USA can do fish fastfood like Nordsea in Germany I'm almost concerned about how absorbed I've been by books lately -- sometimes the context switch -- from the mental landscape of the book to the approaching T station -- is quite jarring, and I really have to think about where I am and what I mean to be doing next.

When I was in sixth grade or so I was very hard to distract when I had my nose in a book, so I guess I shouldn't worry too much about this as a new sign of decreasing mental faculties, but still it can be disconcerting.

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Wedding Video of the Moment
So this summer I went to Chicago for Lex's + Michi wedding. They're the wedding video of the week at their videographers, "fig media". (I have an offscreen cameo, Michi yelling "Hey Kirk! ... you're going in there--" from across the street... that was the day I was walking for miles in the hot Chicago summer in a black suit and bad shoes.)

I'm greatly impressed. It really beings you back to the event! For a while I'd been poo-pooing video in general, in part because it's less flexible than stills, but I think the bigger problem is so few people have any kind of production values when they do their home movies. Either you're looking at endless raw footage or just poor and arbitrary selections... clips with a good and meaningful soundtrack really make it!

So congrats again Lex + Michi...

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Google Search of the Moment
Yesterday the top Google match for

"still crazy after all these years" analysis

was last year's Washington Post article Bin Laden Tape Calls Zarqawi 'Brave Knight' -- could someone have googlebombed this? Or there must have been a really prominent site using that as the link caption, because the literal phrase doesn't appear in the article at all.

On a Business Trip... might not have time to update, so here's a bit of GTalk I sent at FoSO...

Your pointing out my dodgey spelling has made me try to analyze it a bit.
Most mistakes with words like "privelege" are phonetic.
I say that word closer to pri-vel-ledge than pri-ville-lidge, and that's what comes out when I type.
Other typos of mine, like my infamous word substitution, and the m<->b swap have phonetic aspects as well
What bugs me, is that I don't know if that indicates "I'm a verbal thinker, and my writing is dominated by the sound of the words I hear" or "I'm a visual thinker, so when I write things I do a half assed job" . Similarly I'm unsure of what to make of how I have to close my eyes to reduce stimulus when trying to speak a complex thought.
These seem like very blatant indicators on the visual/audio spectrum, but I'm not sure of what!

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Quote of the Moment

Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything.

Prayer of the Moment

God, grant me the ability to remember those who love me. For those who do not love me, turn their hearts. And if you can't turn their hearts, turn their ankles, so I'll know by their limping.

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Edumacation of the the Moment
See the Alphabet Evolve right before your very eyes!

Sad to say, I can't even hear the word "education" on the radio without mentally transforming it to a Simpsons-esque "Edumacation".

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Idle Chat of the Moment
In other news...how is everyone? Haven't heard much on the comments section lately.

The new job is a little stressful but I'm starting to get a grip on things I think. A high-pressure job does make one re-evaluate life priorities. I really need to get that stuff together, and maybe even try to get some goals. They're not pushy about it but my family thinks I should get some more edumacation education... my Uncle has been the bluntest about it, just thinks that graduating with top honors from a good school is kind of a waste if it ends there. I dunno... interviewing techies, many with Masters, has made me kind of disenchanted with it, since the pool of Masters-ed-up folks seems about as full of bozos as the general population.

Then I'm going through classic early-30s "is this kind of career tech stuff what I want to be doing with my life?" questioning. To which the answer is... "well, no, of course not, but it's much much harder to make a living pursuing your hobbies."

I daydream about a lateral career change--something more graphic and create, but I'm not sure what.

And then other life things. How do I feel about trying to get in a situation where I could have a kid? Do I want it only because of pressure of society, as something that "should be done", and/or a fear of missing a window of opportunity? Do I not want it just because I like life being the "me" show, or am I too anxiety-prone to pull it off well, or do I have legitimate concern about bringing someone into a world that seems teetering on the edge of a thousand different giant disasters?

Does this kind of ambivalence about having children, feeling I should weigh the pros and cons, indicate that I shouldn't go for it, or is it totally normal and healthy? (Or does it turn into the "wife's decision anyway", like I've heard?)

Whew.

At any rate, I know one thing I should do to improve my life: bring in my damn wireless mouse to work. I think using a touchpad 24/7 at home and at work cranks up my stress level a bit, the things are ok but ultimately add just a dollop of friction to my online life everytime I use one.

Oh, and I really got to get moving on getting Christmas Gifts for my family...

So I was probably a bit remiss, or at least out of character, in not talking about the latest addition to my consumer electronic life, an InFocus ScreenPlay 4800 video projector. An early holiday gift to myself. It replaced the old 36" Buddha TV, which I sold to Sawers for a song. I went for a bundled deal at CostCo, that came with a seperate screen to project onto, though in retrospect that might've been a mistake, because I didn't fully research it (though it ended up being a solid choice) and the screen it came with, one of those roll-out pulldown jobbies, is too small...they cheaped out and made it so it only rolls down so the whole thing is 16:9 "widescreen" format, but of course a lot of what I do (video games and, more rarely, watching TV) is standard 4:3. So here's what it looks like, you can see for now I often let the picture 'bleed' off of the top and bottom of the screen...

It's probably hard to judge from that photo, but the image is pretty dang big...much bigger than any flat panel or regular TV I could hope to afford, and unlike the TV it replaced, the projector doesn't outweigh me, all for...I dunno, $1200 maybe? Plus the too many cables I let Evil Bastard (who was a great help in the whole shopping and installation process) talk me into.

Also, I decided to buy a stereo receiver rather than juy rigging some frankenstereo. This is what my A/V stack of receiver, DVD, VCR (mostly need because I don't have a cable box) and projector looks like, along side my big comfy chair:

You know, I have mixed feelings about that stereo receiver. It's fancy enough that the volume control is "virtual"...turning the physical knob makes the volume readout change, but it's annoying because you can't just give it a quick twist to turn it all the way down, and in general you have to turn it too much to affect major changes. Also, it gives you the "true" volume reading in dB, which is extra annoying, since that's a negative number that unintuitively looks like it gets smaller as the volume increases. Way too much audiophile wankery for my taste, or for the recycled speakers I'm using with it.

So there are some drawbacks, but if you have a long enough room (you need maybe 12-14 feet from the projector to the screen) that you can make dark you can get a great big picture for relatively cheap. FoSO mentioned that someone they know conducted some tests, and Tyvek (a building material) reflects a big percentage of the light, so you can get a decent picture by stretching Tyvek over a wooden frame. I might try that if I continue to be annoyed by the current screen not making good use of the available wallspace.

So I guess those are three not-too-too expensive electronic luxuries (under $1K for each, if you're frugal) I'd recommend to anyone: a video projector, an car GPS navigation system, and a small laptop for the living room (and a now-dirt-cheap wireless network to run it on.) These are along the neccesities of electronic life, all of which can be had for like $100 each: a palm pilot, a digital camera, and a cellphone.

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Product Imitates Imagination of the Moment
Weird...just the other day I was thinking about chastity belts (and how much they might chafe) when I had the idea that the whole "WWJD"/abstinence-only teen movement should make up special chastity panties with a symbolic lock and key imprinted on them. I even came up with the perfect name for them: "Undies for Fundies". It turns out the product basically exists, available at Target at Blue Q Chastity Underwear. (I guess there's a small chance I heard about these earlier and forgot about 'em, but as far as I remember I was really just mentally riffing on old school chastity belts.)

Wow, between the two of us Mo are invited to four seperate holiday get-togethers today. (Actually 3 for me, 1 for her.) Luckily they're surprisingly well-spaced: 1pm, 3pm, 6pm, 8pm.

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Games of the Moment
Shizmoo.com has some really cool online games. The UI is pretty confusing, you meet up in a common lobby, and then launch into a one on one game...I think the key is just to click "Play Now" and the computer will automagically put you in a game (theres some kind of rating system, maybe it tries to match you up to a similar skill level, if such a person is available?) "Kung Fu Chess" is a variation of an idea I had a long time ago, chess where you don't have to take turns. (When I thought of it in the late-80s, I thought each player would control a cursor with a joystick, and every time you moved a piece your cursor would reset to a position off of the boad. They do it a little differently, but the core concept is the same.) They have a few word games and some action games, including a sumo-ized version of the old school "Arcade Volleyball".

Also, lately I've been getting back into iSketch, multiplayer online Pictionary. Potentially very addictive! You can also check out the Finalists for the Independent Games Festival.

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Mean Holiday Link of the Moment
Get into the holiday spirit of picking on the mentally handicapped and fast food restaurants with that timeless classic Ding Fries Are Done.

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Quote of the Moment
"She has an alarm clock and a phone that don't ring -- they applaud."
--Slashdot.com fortune We had dinner with Brooke and her new boyfriend Brad last night. Somehow the topic of 'number of past lovers' came up. Brooke wasn't wanting to admit the number in front of her new beau, having just had a "stuff SOs don't really need to know about each other"/TMI conversation with Brad.

Mo: Come on, you can tell me, I won't say.
Brooke: Well, ok. [Whispers in Mo's Ear]
Mo: Oh, that's not such a bad number! ......Unlucky, maybe...
Brooke/Brad/Kirk: [Laugh]
Mo: Oops.

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Science of the Moment
Huh...boy monkeys like "boys' toys" and girl monkeys like "girls' toys". It seems to indicate that some gender things assumed to be cultural constructs might be innate, at least on some levels.

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Doodles of the Moment
Mo thinks the heart snowman that I made for a Gala's Winter Holiday Poem Contest on the loveblender is cute. I like making these little heart guys, like I did for Halloween. I'm not electronic doodling enough...one reason I'd like to get a new Palm is because the 320x320 screens allow for much better doodles than I can do on my current model.

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Geek Link of the Moment
Web Design Feng Shui has some good ideas and some goofy ones, but the ratio is better than I would have guessed.

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Quote of the Moment

The problem cannot be truly understood until the solution exists.

Via an interesting book I'm reading now, Clouds to Code, the in-depth story of a real life software project. One of the author Jesse Liberty's rallying cries is for dramatically smaller teams than are generally employed. Navel Gazing of the Moment
Looking at my old posts, I found some old ".sig" taglines I hadn't thought about for a while. It turns out most of these had made it into my old Palm journal as an appendix: part 1 and part 2. (Some of those were also from my ".plan", the file someone would see when they "finger"ed my account...er, it's not as sick or complicated as it sounds.) What didn't make it there, however, was my ASCII art, generally just a small part of my longer 80-col sigs.

This guy came first. I think in some way he was supposed to represent alien bill, or at least be a similar kind of character:

_/O\_

Later on I had some Happy Holiday Reindeer.

    _|     |_       _|       |_
     \ ___ /          \ ___ /
      \o o/            \o o/     
 ()___/ __>o      ()___/ __>o  
 )      /         )  ,_ <     
 /// >>>>         ///  \\\
'''' ''''        " "    " "

I started with the guy on the left, then switched him to the guy on the right when someone pointed out the original's resemblance to a reindeer/centipede mutant crossbreed. Though overall, the ASCII-art I was most fond of was my selfportrait...

_____
-O\O  Kirk Israel     
( = ) kisrael@jade.tufts.edu 

I thought it was a pretty good likeness, captured my lips and cheeks pretty well.

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Link of the Moment
Slashdot had a link to this guy who built a portable Super Nintendo. At first I wasn't all that interested, but I was drawn in my his Comic Book Hero account of its making...a funny, informative read. For instance, it informs me that I'm even farther from being a hardware hacker than I had assumed.

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Quote of the Moment

I've had a wonderful time, but this wasn't it.

I once read a biography by one of his sycophants who knew him near the end of his life...the subtext was "this guy was a complete jerk to most everybody around him, but it was ok, because most people would receive an insult from Groucho than a compliment from anybody else." Still, he had some great lines.