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He visits my town once a year.
He fills my mouth with kisses and nectar.
I spend all my money on him.
*Who, girl, your man?*
No, a mango.

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somehow woke up dreaming / thinking about cellular automata processing and Conway's Game of Life - how you'd either need two grids or could use a single grid of "even/odd turn state" (i.e. it's turn 1, my current state is "odd [alive dead]", I am computing "even [alive dead]" , and then turn 2 doing the opposite.) and then i started thinking about sparse array processing. I think in the dream or halfway asleep aspect I thought I should ask ChatGPT. Which makes me think of the trope that you don't see many smartphones in dreams... but apparently ChatGPT has more dream resonance... The New Yorker on NYC schools betting on the wrong horse with The Rise and Fall of Vibes-Based Literacy.

On the one hand, there's the political elephant in the room with these cueing-based-strategies which sound like a left-y thing (even though the best lefties want evidence-based approaches, which "Units of Study" seems to have lacked) - like a reaction to the back-to-basics education some conservatives back (diverting all resources into things we can have tests for over other crucial enriching parts of the arts and what not.)

But putting politics aside, it's interesting to think about different styles of teaching reading, and their philosophical implications, especially my fascination with balancing holism vs reductionism; cueing strategies lean way heavily into holistic context; phonics go the other way into the pieces parts of reductionism.

Here's the thing though: as far as I know, phonics does a MUCH better job of leveraging the sound-based language almost every kid has acquired organically. Once you bridge the visual-audio chasm, the world's your oyster, and yeah, that bridge probably has to be built out of some rote-based-learning girders.

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It's all right, children. Life is made up of meetings and partings. That is the way of it.

If she blinded you with science maybe you should have been following lab safety protocols and wearing your goggles

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Once again I've become overly conscious over the fact that I'm really just a brain with tendrils controlling a meat mecha😔

The right-wing responses it provoked are... something.

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Cool animation of Google Top Trending Searches by state Kind of neat to see trends bubbling through the US. And weird/sad how "power outage" keeps coming up for Texas I've been reading Robert Wright's "Why Buddhism Is True". Once again I find there are a lot of profound Buddhist concepts I find pretty intuitive, that they jibe well with the sense of "unrealizable yet present and important Objective Truth" that is my inheritance from my religious upbringing.

The book spends a lot of time on the illusory nature of "essences" and how humans are too quick to mix up how they feel about something or someone and what that thing or person actually is. The most extreme failure of that is Capgras Syndrome, where a mental glitch causes someone to fail to recognize a loved one and claim that they've been replaced by an imposter because the other person isn't triggering the emotional response used for identification

I've long been interested in the conflict of "surfaces vs essences". I have always emphasized the former; look to how things interact, which can be observed and verified, not to your guess about their interior states. Or as I've put it: "People and computers should be judged by what they do, not by what (you think) they are."

But there are limits to my view. To make predictions about future behaviors, to judge the safety of interactions with others, we have to make these models. (Hell, maybe the point of consciousness is to model the world and our place in it, so that we can play what-ifs out in our head.) As Professor Quirrell in the delightful fanfiction Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality puts it:

The import of an act lies not in what that act *resembles on the surface*, Mr. Potter, but in the states of mind which make that act more or less probable.

Harry Potter (this one raised by a couple of Oxford Professors instead of the Dursleys) realizes this is recapitulating the "Bayesian definition of evidence".

That line has challenged my thinking for a while, but Wright introduced me to a concept to fight back a bit - the existence of Fundamental Attribution Error - as humans we are highly predisposed to overemphasize the character of someone and deemphasize the circumstance and context of the situation. (Unless of course it's someone we like doing something bad, or someone we dislike doing something good - then it's just a matter of circumstance or coincidence!)

Of course knowledge of FAE can lead to cynicism, making all good and bad behavior a matter of situation and opportunity...like Chris Rock put it "Men are as faithful as their options" I'm not quite there - I do think people have something of a personal code they will more or less stick to, but if you keep turning the crank on this line of thinking, you get to questions of free will in a deterministic universe and if ideas like the Tabula Rasa (blank slate) are true. Like (heh) the video game character Andrew Ryan put it... "We all make choices, but in the end, our choices make us".

FOLLOWUP: Listening to an episode of "No Stupid Questions", they mention "Locus of Control" - a spectrum ranging from internal (i.e. you have control over events) to external (things are controlled by other forces/circumstances). In general they think it's happier/healthier to have an internal one. But it's funny, that's the same kind of space as Fundamental Attribution issues, but for our own selves. I think a balanced view is called for (even though I guess there's some evidence that a internal-locus "power of positive thinking" is very pragmatic - if not fully rooted in reality!) Follow up from a few days ago - I ran an informal linguistic survey on FB and learned that for USA English, at least in the Northeast, most people say a "popsicle" can only be something icy on a stick, probably frozen juice - that if it's cream-based, it's an "ice cream bar" or "frozen yogurt bar" or whatever, but not a "popsicle". (Of course we're talking about the genericization of a trademarked term, ala Kleenex or Xerox anyway.)

It's weird to be in my middle age and not having picked up on this common distinction. In thinking on why I'm more likely to find the distinction so arbitrary and confusing (to me, any sweet frozen treat on a stick can be called a "popsicle", and some of the dictionary definitions and many google images support my looser use of the term) I think back to an idea I've written about on my tech blog before:

I don't care so much about the interior lives of things; people and computer objects alike should be judged on what they do, not what you think they "are".

So in this case, the interface (the interaction, the verbs) for a "popsicle" and an "ice cream bar" are identical: go to the freezer, unwrap it, enjoy a sweet treat while holding a stick, discard the stick - and so it seems daft to have to do a composition analysis of the noun to know what word I need to use (one friend with a dairy sensitivity mentioned some cream-y things might be "popsicles" if the creaminess was gelatin rather than dairy based, and so the distinction has a particularly utilitarian aspect for her.) And it's a different pattern than "put ice cream in a bowl and eat it with a spoon" or "unwrap the ice cream sandwich and eat it from your hand" (either using the wrapper as a hand protector or licking the sandwich coating from your fingers after...)

It does seem odd to me then for common usage in my area, we have no term covering all "frozen sweet things you eat from a stick". There's "frozen novelties" (which sounds like some kind of coy euphemism) and "frozen treats" but both of those include things like ice cream sandwiches.

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I've definitely found my fashion groove- or fallen into a rut, it's hard to tell - with dark blue shirts with simple repeating decorations. One of my favorites finally gave up the ghost, tearing at the elbow. But the plus side was I could bend my arm and feel like the hulk tearing through my clothing...

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I just rushed ahead an finished a year long-project of making all the quotes this blog have the same fancy formatting. Recording quotes is an important, humanist/spiritualist practice for me, so every day this year I went back past the last 18-19 years of the site and brought the quotes into alignment (along with placating my recently formed dislike of big blocks of italicized text.)

Along with that, the past few days I made a change so that rather than have a separate short form/long form type of entry behind the scenes, it's all one kind of thing. But that's a detail "of the Moment" that bores even me so I can't imagine anyone else would be interested in it... For a while I've been living in mild, uncertain disagreement with this quote:

To live life, you need problems. If you get everything you want the minute you want it, then what’s the point of livin’?

My counterpoint to that has been: I don't think the point of life is solely in the struggle of it- maybe not even mostly. Existentially we are enabled and required to define the greater purpose of it all for ourselves. Problems may be merely obstacles to said greater purpose, unless we've decided that the struggle with those problems is the point, as maybe Jake has done.

A possible counterpoint to my counterpoint is that learning to deal with problems is an important part of learning to deal with life, no matter what we take the point of life to be. If we don't get practice facing the small problems, we are more at risk for being swamped by larger ones. (On the other hand a densely packed series of problems may just wear us down and leave us more vulnerable to collapse. What doesn't kill us doesn't always make us stronger.) So in this model, problems we get through are critical to showing us the way to future problem solving.

So the countercountercounterpoint is - man, what the hell kind of silver lining is that? The silver lining to this gray cloud of a problem is just the promise of more damn gray clouds? Yeesh.

To unravel this gordian knot I've made of "are problems necessary?" I will slice with "problems are". They are likely there whether we accept them placidly and in good humor or rail against the unjustness of the universe or split the difference and learn from things to try and have fewer problems in the future. Amor Fati, love this fate, because there is no other.

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On FB, Matt McIrvin said

I think of Mark Twain's vision of heaven: there are problems and there's work to do, but it's somehow arranged so you get to do the kind you find interesting.

In followup conversation, he clarified that as Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven - a great piece that tries to get some sense of the incredibly vast scale a universe-encompassing Heavenly afterlife would entail.

Part of my response was:

So up there I make reference to everyone's existential right and duty to figure out what it's all about for themselves; for me (personally) it's to aid and abet the creation of categorical novelty in the universe; that in this quarter of the universe humans seem uniquely able to create new categories of things that wouldn't exist otherwise, and so I try to aim my life to supporting that, and so support both humanity's stability and freedom.

And I try to create some of that novelty myself; both for the pleasure of making things towards my existential goal, and for the ego-gratification (or perhaps, reassurance) of being a person who can make such things. So of course to maximize the latter, challenges should be something that needs to be difficult for people in general but easy for me, I guess.

Of course that's me soaking in a bath of Dweck-ian "Fixed Mindset"; since I don't have an intuition that groks personal growth, I prefer to be seen as someone with innate abilities for whom things are easy, rather than as a person made of more ordinary potentials who overcomes great personal challenges.

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TIL: Meghan Markle is a different person than Angela Merkel

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I thought this was a pretty good macro summary of the USA economy from post-WW2 to now. Interesting to think about what started after WW2 in part to avoid another depression..

"I wonder whether it was not by remembering with shame the loveless child he had been that Jesus became filled with love, ultimately an ecstatic, enthusiastic, understanding man who emphasized the good even in a felon, who praised beauty even in what is ugly. This anecdote is a favorite of the Sufis, and also the one I love best: Jesus and his disciples come across a dead, half-decayed dog, lying with its mouth open. 'How horribly it stinks,' say the disciples, turning aside in disgust. But Jesus says, 'See how splendidly its teeth shine!' Jesus might have been speaking not only of the dog but also the child he used to be."

Besides the reference to personal growth - not something easy for me to have faith in - I appreciate that it captures an issue much on my mind, how people have such difficulty seeing that most things are mix of attributes, some of which we like, some of which we don't. (Or more specifically, some we'll call good, some we'll call bad, and often the presence of the bad will cause us to condemn the whole thing - or person.)

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wecroak.com A high tech "memento mori", "WeCroak" is an app that sends you five randomly-timed reminders a day of your own mortality, including relevant quotes.

That...seems a bit much, maybe? WDYT? Do you prefer to not think about death on the regular, or do you think facing the concept of the end head on can get us to take more advantage of the life we find ourselves granted? I made this on my iPad a while back. One of my favorite things since these
Oh man, did not realize Bill Murray's Nick the Lounge Singer covered 2001 as well as Star Wars! Cool Video with Carl Sagan voiceover

I lost a biscuit in my cup of tea and tried to get it out with another biscuit and now my cup is full of biscuits.

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Bible Prophecy and Why We Can't Have Nice Things
Seriously, our nation's addiction to the Book of Revelation, besides screwing with our foreign policy, even means stuff like the Target Credit Card theft will keep happening, because people are too nervous about "The Mark of the Beast" in their wallets. (And are too addicted to the convenience, financial and otherwise, of credit cards and debit cards to just use cash.)

Damn.

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Not to try and be hipster-er than any of thou, but I really think The Exploding Voids should be wicked famous. This song is fantastic; watch the video, then play it again, and just listen...
A garage near me has a lot full of cop cars from all over: Boston, Stanton, Holton Mills, even San Jose. Why?

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from http://skillcrush.com/2012/12/19/landing-on-your-feet/ a good lesson for me:

Don't overwhelm yourself, but it's critical to also stay out of your comfort zone. It's really easy to keep doing what you know, because it makes you feel great about your ability. While I agree that this is a good confidence-building approach, it prevents you from learning new things. "Stay out of your comfort zone" implies being in a state of discomfort, and sometimes it's true! This pain is a path toward gaining new knowledge and confidence.

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The Calvinball of Chess:

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I was reminiscing just the other day.

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Man, making a library to be jQuery-independent reminds me of how nice and useful jQuery's syntax is for basic DOM manipulation! Personally I'm not such a big fan of the endless deluge of cat videos online (Intellectually it's kind of interesting though, as a commentary of how cats are so... I dunno, around us? and often make good subjects) but I am a big fan of Amanda's Four-Legged Friends, a really terrific pet-visit service in Boston Metrowest. The care is great, the rates were terrific, and I think the clever bit was every visit she posts a quick youtube video of the pets. That's a great idea! It's not like we checked them every day, but they were nice to know they were there.

So, these aren't the most compelling things on youtube, but hey:

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"If lovin' you is wrong...well, no, I still want to be right. I need to be right. That need is greater than love."

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Though artificial intelligence remains underdeveloped, there have been great gains in artificial stupidity.

-via rinkuhero. It would be great if Atari programming, or any programming, had actually been like that. The 2D-3D thing is great, kind of transcending any era of actual gaming. Around the beginning of December (and the run of Advent Entries) Bill the Splut described this dream he had... I've been remember my dreams a bit more as of late, but still, nothing like this:

In one of my many dreams last night, the United States had been conquered from within by some vile dictatorship in a Second Civil War. They had the entire country under their bootheels, with the exception of New England. A Cold War now existed, a false peace while both sides built up their forces for the final battle between tyranny and freedom--literally, as The Enemy had brought back slavery. New England was hopelessly outnumbered, and the front line was Connecticut. The final battle would be swift, and we would be massacred.

I wasn't in the military, but I and a half-dozen others were going across the enemy lines into Long Island to recon. The Enemy was gearing up for the last attack. We were given some of the highly sophisticated Enemy firearms that had inexplicably fallen into the hands of Connecticut's forces. With surprising ease for a war zone, we crossed the border into Long Island on foot (it was connected to land somehow--look, it's a dream). After several bizarre non sequitur adventures (it's a dream), we were met by a seemingly insane Enemy soldier who knew who we were, and wanted to defect. Before we could get any info from him, his spandex pants swelled up from giant hemorrhoids, his face began to bubble like his skin was boiling, and his head burst like a water balloon. This attracted the attention of his fellow soldiers, as one might guess.

I wasted a lot of ammo from my hi-tech handgun on the first one, so when he fell, I grabbed his submachine gun and sprayed the oncoming troops. Literally, as it was a squirt gun. I switched to my gun and shot the rest quite easily, as they were moving slowly and randomly in the open and not firing back. I reloaded and realized that they were also armed with toy guns, or even dinner forks. Baffled, our side stopped shooting, and suddenly our enemies all got really bad hemorrhoids, and then their heads exploded. One was staggering around and began bragging about how great he felt, and showed us his arm. He was on drugs, and I don't mean that he showed us his needle marks, but a big IV bottle taped to his arm, a bright yellow liquid being pumped continuously into his bloodstream. It looked like power steering fluid. Since the drug didn't have a name beyond "Zip!" (with "!" in the name), maybe it was power steering fluid. Maybe those Russian air force pilots stationed in Siberia who drink the windshield washer fluid from their MiGs are onto something after all.

Oh, and his ass and face swelled, and POP! "Zip!" was an instantly addictive drug that had only been around for a month, and after a month, you died spectacularly. Everyone in the Enemy's army was using it. All around us, they needed O-shaped pillows to sit for a few seconds, then their heads exploded. The Enemy instantly developed a gun that shot Zip! in syringes at people, and we were the closest people. We all dodged their attacks, and in their addled state, the enemy soldiers all decided "If I'm going to die, I'm taking SOMEONE with me!" and began dosing their own side.

We stood there, not really sure what to do, when suddenly a hologram appeared in the air, a warning from a New England doctor. "We've discovered the reason for these Zip! deaths. DO NOT put Zip! in a slow IV drip! The bottle should be injected all at once directly into the carotid artery or jugular vein!" All the newly infected enemy did this immediately, and instead of dying in a month, 5 seconds later, KABLAM! Head fireworks display! Like human dominoes, they were falling dead from where we stood to the horizon! Connecticut troops rushed past us across the border, and within days the Enemy's dictatorship, its armies either unarmed, already dead or currently head-explodey, had been overthrown!

Zip! was so addictive and so expensive that the Enemy army's soldiers paid with whatever the drug dealers would take--and the dealers were very happy to trade Zip! for their advanced weapons. The reason the border was so easy for us to cross was because the drug dealers were in New England, and that's why we were armed with Enemy weapons, while they only had realistic-looking toys or dinner forks. Because the drug had been created in New England to kill them, as there was no other way to defeat the Enemy...Yankee ingenuity at its most ferocious.

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http://www.bobhobbs.com/files/kr_lovecraft.html The C Programming Language -- Brian W Kernighan & Dennis M Ritchie & HP Lovecraft

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Every year 'round this time, the Colts start phoning it in and getting all rested for the playoffs. It makes the Pats' SB loss, with that bizarre, bizarre play, that much sadder - hooray for the frickin' 72 Dolphins.

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Life is short, play dead

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The would-be bomber of Flight 253 used pentaerythritol, shown here. Notice two things: 1. that looks a bit like a SWASTIKA wouldn't you say? 2. It also reads "HO HO OH OH" -- and that attempted bombing was on Christmas Day. I rest my case, such as it is.

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Ha, Pats ahead 13-0, Cassell just punted on 3rd down and pinned the Bills at like the 2 yard line. The letters "m" and "b" seem to be crosswired in my brain, especially when typing-- in particular I'll swap in the pairs "me"/"be" and "my"/"by". One weird side effect of this emerged yesterday, I'm updating the loveblender's "send in a work" scripts, and scripts that used to be called "addwork" are now "submitwork". It turns out "submit" is very difficult to type with emacs tab completion, I keep typing the first part as "subi". I must've done that like 10 times bouncing between files. I think I type "b" and my brain registers the "m" as done.

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Video of the Moment

--Captivating, ain't it? (At least after 0:50 or so) I didn't realize that this part of the Kanye West song Stronger was a separate Daft Punk song. I do prefer the Kanye West beat and some of the lyrical deftness (err, with the klondike rhyme having a certain wistfulness for me) though after hearing a copy of the whole CD I'm not the biggest Kanye fan in general.

Why do I find couches so comfortable to sleep on?

For a while I had a theory that it keeps me sleeping on my back, instead of rolling over. Now I'm not so sure.

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Video of the Moment

--A lot less "feel good" than yesterday's video, but very cool: a slap in slow motion. Who knew that a face is so flexible! (2019 UPDATE: no idea about the original video but this one is pretty cool.) MOM ALERT: Today's entry consists entirely of three offensive(ish) but funny(ish) things I've had sitting around my backlog, but couldn't justify posting 'em on there own. I decided to combine the three into a single entry just to get it done with. Prudish people or folks of otherwise delicate sensibilities may want to stop reading here.

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Insult of the Moment

I patented screwing your mom. But it got revoked for 'prior art.'

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IM of a Past Moment

Gabby: Did he kiss you?
KT: No.
Gabby: Did you kiss him?
KT: No.
Gabby: Did you lick his balls?
KT: WHAT?! No. Yeah, I just decided to skip the kissing and go straight to licking his balls.

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Joke of the Moment

Two Canadians are sitting in a bar getting bored, so they decide to play twenty questions. The first Canadian tries to think of a subject for his friend to guess and, after a little pondering, comes up with "moose cock." He tells his friend he's ready to play.

"OK," says the second Canadian. "Is it something good to eat?"

The first Canadian thinks for a moment, then laughs and replies, "Sure, I guess you could eat it."

The second Canadian says, "Is it a moose cock?"

Things have hit kind of a rough patch with me and Ksenia. I'm not sure what the future's going to look like for us. I still have hopes and know there's a ton of potential there, but it was a tough extended weekend.

But anyway.

Even before the rough patch I had been thinking about what Issues I have with relationships. I think one of the biggest is that I have a serious aversion to dependence. I don't want to be dependent on someone else, and I don't want someone to be dependent on me, even though I work to be a very reliable person relationship-wise.

It seems like this is a barrier to intimacy, though my "rational" self doesn't think that it should be; my ideal model for a relationship has always been two strong people, sharing and cooperating on important issues, meeting many each other's emotional and physical and spiritual and financial wants and needs. Maybe it's odd that I can draw a distinction between meeting each other's "needs" but still not being dependent; I guess I have this idea that two people should be strong enough to be on their own if it came to that, and that that's good because it means a relationship is a choice, not some kind of forced neccesity.

Of course, I have no evidence that this is a viable model for romance. It's probably what I fell into with Mo, and it wasn't enough for her, though she wasn't able to put that feeling into words soon enough to possibly make a difference and adjust our heading before hitting the rocks.

And I would imagine this dislike of dependence extends to other relationships as well, friendships and how I deal with my relatives. Maybe it's why I tend to feel a bit squirmish about the pretty normal verbal reminders of affection from my mom or aunt. And saying "I love you" in the context of a romance doesn't seem natural for me. (And looking back at an old loveblender essay I see that that's been a problem for a while, though my thinking about that has changed in the six years since.) To me, saying "those three little words" can seem too much like...I dunno, like you're saying "I'm dependent on you" or "I want you to be dependent on me" or both. Though Evil B. brought up a good point, that sometimes it's not (just) a reminder to the people hearing it, it can be a reminder for the person speaking it as well...

I still think it's useful to figure out where this comes from, if only to figure out what I should do with it, try to accept it and work within its parameters, or if it's something I should try and "grow out of". The usual "culprit", of course, is the death of my dad when I was 14. Sometimes I wonder if that's the real trauma that has shaped so much of my emotional landscape, or just a kind of catchall excuse. Possibly some of my previous failed relationships? The German gal heading back home after the high school summer, the one I pursued in college, a big carousel of romance that finally stopped, or even the drinkin' buddy friendship that got parlayed into a (finally failed) marriage.

Maybe my outlook is not as uncommon or weird or possibly unhealthy as I fear, maybe there are other people out there looking for the same kind of "secure base" relationship that I think is best...the secure base that lets both people find balance and support, a relationship that's important for what it is itself and for how it lets you move forward in the outside world. But my fear has to be is that isn't the way hearts and minds really work, that you can't build a permanent relationship within the boundaries that non-Interdepdence is going to imply.

Feedback welcome, especially from people who know me "in real life".

Analysis of the Moment
Slacktivist.org has a journal of ongoing analysis of the Left Behind series, pointing out how much fudging and handwaving has to go between here (our current time and place) and there (the near-future as portrayed in the book.) Given how influential these books are (especially, possibly, even in the current administration of this country) their casual disregard of our current geopolitical reality, science and technology, and even basic human psychology is pretty horrifying.

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Quote of the Moment

The future is an opaque mirror. Anyone who tries to look into it sees nothing but the dim outlines of an old and worried face.

Ties in pretty well with the previous link. Except theirs isn't an old and worried face, but one looking to get the heck out of there in the rapture before it all goes down. Heh...Tobias Wolff was being interviewd about his book Old School, and he mentioned how some of the appeal of Ayn Rand is "simple answers to complex questions"--that's kind of what Left Behind offers. Don't worry about the future of the planet, you'll be out of here anyway....IF you're a strong enough believer. (Quote via therosser.)

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Link of the Moment
GameSpot has the best and worst of 2003. "Dubious Honors" is the most fun section, there were a bunch of clunkers this year.

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Other Link of the Moment
Just on the off chance some of my loyal audience isn't composed of video game fans, check out LOGO R.I.P., where old logos go to die. I've always been interested in logos and other forms of iconography...














Just a quick entry...we closed on a house this morning! This is a post-it I wrote on during the process, I heard I was going to have to make an unreal number of signatures and I wanted to know how many...50 signatures, 39 initialings was all. Mo had 2 extra, plus she signed 3 personal checks.

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Link of the Moment
Slate.com has a piece on viewing the math of the polarization of politics. Interesting stuff, especially the "Animated GIF" link... I think it was a mistake putting the House and Senate side by side, so it looks like they might be on the same graph, that was confusing. Cool anyway.