Ouch: NASA's metric confusion caused Mars orbiter loss . This whole damned metric thing is nothing but trouble. Why should be give up a system God gave the English for one invented by a Frenchman?
Dang it, I try to avoid exposing myself to a lot of the attitudes that Dave Winer of Scripting News has because I don't like that way of looking at life, but occasionally he comes up with some really great resources, like the origin of Murphy's Law , and Stapp's Ironical Paradox: "The universal aptitude for ineptitude makes any human accomplishment an incredible miracle."
Debra Hyde's diary entry asks what if underwear were sized like bras ?
Remember the Rodents Of Unusual Size in The Princess Bride? The Capybara has a body length of 42-53", weighs 77 to 140 lbs, and lives 8-10 years.
Okay, can we just stop with the cutesie "Is Warren Beatty running for President? " crap? Yes, he's obviously running. He may drop out if he doesn't find support, but he's running. Otherwise he wouldn't be jerking around a bunch of stupid reporters. Although with supporters like Arianna Huffington one hopes that his hopes will tank hard and fast, we don't need anyone that far separated from reality getting media coverage. Good $DEITY, how bloody stupid do they think their audience is?
To go with my Objectivism notes earlier in the week, Peikoff's last radio show (RealAudio).
Via Scripting News , Amazon shows that nothing is quaint anymore . Everything is a commodity made in China. So why won't anyone who wants to buy stuff from Amazon pay their $9.95 a month and treat it like CostCo? Or is that, perhaps, the hope?
Mouthorgan interviews Susie Bright .
The Dysfunctional Family Circus ending its run, and the text on the site is a good read.
Dysfunctional Family Circus: RIP .
D'oh! It wasn't Jesse at all who pointed me to the assertions about Shalit, it was Kendall. Although after that unwarranted credit Jesse did pull up two articles about Shalit's plagiarism: http://www.salon1999.com/weekly/plagiarism960722.html http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/ethics/purloined.htm
Drama. Agony. Texans. Trucks. It's Hands on a Hardbody :
Then there's the mental side, which is like your own private freak show. The third dimension gets very arbitrary -- a row of trucks stretches for miles, your legs seem to be 3 inches long. The year J.D. Drew won, he spent six hours entertaining a delusion that a jumbo jet had landed across the street from the dealership and people were, in the commercial airline parlance, deplaning.
Xenophobia at its ugliest: Someone this morning passed around http://www.nonationalid.com/ This was soon followed by Lamar Smith's rebuttal , which contains this charming piece of fear mongering:
"We need look no further than the case of the serial killer, Raphael Resendez-Ramirez, for a stark example of why we need to take measures to control the documents used by illegal aliens. According to the FBI, Ramirez has used at least four different social security numbers to facilitate his use of numerous aliases." (underscores in the original)
There's a discussion on Ruth Shalit on Salon's Tabletalk forum . Interesting bunch of sour grapes, especially the "ads don't work on me, although I do drink Coke and buy at the Gap".
Keith Knight tackles pinball .
Part 3 of Ruth Shalit's piece on advertising . Jesse says that there's some controversy over Shalit's credibility, I'll investigate further, but the thrust of the articles is consistent with my experiences and discussions.
Rafe Colburn pointed out that the CIA is starting a venture capital operation , which makes me wonder about some accountability issues.
While I'm being paranoid, is Buford Furrow an anti-semite or a government lackey . He's the guy who allegedly shot up the Granada Hills Jewish Center in LA, a columnist for the Bay Guardian claims there's some inconsistencies in the story. Never explain by conspiracy what can be adequately described by stupidity, but what happens when both answers end up at the same place?
Ray Bradbury's vision in Fahrenheit 451 of people arrested because the media needed to show an arrest has come true, that poor security guard in the Centennial park bombing in Atlanta comes immediately to mind.
Clean Sheets is on hiatus this week, so no updates there.
Dang it, I had two entries I was going to add, but don't have them on me right now. Frank, you'll have to wait a day.
David Steinberg's Comes Naturally #88 talks about his encounter with the Bhagwan shree Rajneesh.
Thanks to Ian, Nathaniel Branden's Judgement Day is on my "to read" list, and via Arts & Letter's Daily comes a Lingua Franca article on Ayn Rand's inroads into academia which includes a long history of Objectivism as a movement, including some analysis of the current trend to incorporate portions into academia, and some notes which seemed apropos to my current musings:
"Unfortunately, people who try to evade reality in these ways do not just die off from sheer stupidity. Through force and fraud, they devour the products of those who create and manufacture."
john s jacobs anderson of Genehack points out a couple of omissions in yesterday's notes on separating reality and fantasy : the TV actor who gets approached with tips on how to handle situations that their character is in (He mentions a Harlan Ellison report on one of the Ponderosa characters); the "exploding car crash" meme causing people recently pulled from accidents to behave irrationally (no mention of the requisite flaming tire rolling from the wreckage, however[*]); and the assorted RISKS reports of "simpler" user interfaces obscuring the true meanings of what the user is manipulating.
Objectivism appeals to me, but it's predicated on the belief that humans are rational beings. I can buy that in my more optimistic moments, but sometimes I wonder if in being up-beat I'm just masking the reality. Sigh. Oh well, go run Windows, rent your summer special effects movies from Blockbuster, and buy your coffee at Starbucks. Just expect no pity from me.
[*]Gratuitous Terry Pratchett reference.
The new NETFUTURE came faster than I expected. Since it questions when we should implement new technologies I thought it apropos that I'm going to automate checking updates to it soon.
Salon has part 2 of that article on advertising . Quoting Virginia Valentine: "consumers are constructed by the communications of [popular] culture ... They are not prime causes. They are cultural effects."
Hadn't thought about this: "Stonewall" means both to provide an impenetrably front, and the event marking a radical change in opinion.
In my anti-consumerism vein, Salon looks at techniques used to persuade , how slumps in sales aren't a failure of product, but of advertising and image.
Where Shell had gone wrong, it seems, was in reasoning that, since people don't start buying gas until at least age 16, there was no need to target the tiniest consumers. "They weren't even on Shell's radar," Oeschle laments. To remedy that oversight, the company is now moving forward with a "multifaceted campaign" aimed at conditioning youngsters to be loyal enthusiasts of Shell products.
If you're hard up for an image of the day, you could satisfy yourself with this image of a kayaker shredding a wave on the Ocoee
, or fulfill your jones completely by looking at the sequence of pictures on the bottom of my Hell's Hole description
which illustrate what happens when a gulli... err... adventurous... crew member falls for the old "riding the bull" routine. Great fun.
Via Columbine comes this hilarious diary entry on the effects of rain on Californians .
Apparently I missed the cool Nova program that detailed this, but the A/S Norske Shell E&P Troll pages have some pictures of an oil platform similar to the one that crashed hard. Yow, that's one big piece o' hardware.
More notes on the failure of the Sleipner A platform , "A later survey of the bottom of the 220m deep fjord revealed that no debris larger than 10m remained."
You've gotta love any engineering failure which causes "a seismic event registering 3.0 on the Richter scale", such as the sinking of the Sleipner A offshore platform .
QOTD:
When all you've got is a nailgun, every problem looks like a messiah...
--- Iain Chalmers
My Word's Worth has suggestions for improving the country.
To those who'd spam me with commercial ads: If you think us bloggers are trend-setters, don't expect us to buy your CDs. We're already doing this at a loss. Offer to send us one if you want a review. Otherwise, sod off.
Whitewater rafting helps Croatia rebuild .
Well, Screaming Lord Sutch may be dead, but Britain's Monster Raving Loony Party lives on. Howling Laud Hope is running against his cat Mandu . "Vote insanity, you know it makes sense."
A pyro and her flames. Dan attempts to up his coolness factor by pointing out that he sometimes hangs out with cool people, in this case Kiki
watching the earliest prototype of her Firefall
, the third version of which ended up being a huge bowl fountain at Burning Man
.
"MS Linux is released under the provisions of the Gates Private License, which means you can freely use this Software on a single machine without warranty after having paid the purchase price and annual renewal fees."
Scary Devil Monastery QOTD:
I used to herd dairy cows. Now I herd lusers. Apart from the isolation, I think I preferred the cows. They were better conversation, easier to milk, and if they annoyed me enough, I could shoot them and eat them.
--- Rodger Donaldson
QOTD:
"Maintaining a sufficient stock of booze and partying supplies is likely to be the real Y2K problem, so we'd better get started on it right away."
--- Jim Rogers
Jorn pointed to the Patterns-Discussion FAQ , the reading of which brought up thoughts of how the links and comments about dramatic structure that Peter Merholz made yesterday tie into patterns.
Ages ago Eric proposed that the right way to build software projects was to keep a consistent technical team and contract hire the management teams. It occurs to me that this is what venture capitalists are doing. Nice prescience, Eric.
Okay, maybe you've got to be a Sluggy fan, been following the current story line, and have a little bit of both Bun-Bun (the psychotic switchblade-weilding cuddly bunny) and Torg (the clueless web designer) in you to appreciate the punch line of yesterday's Sluggy episode , but it set me off for some reason.
A CNN article about Princeton bioethics professor Peter Singer questioning the wrongness of infanticide . I believe Singer is the same guy who's made some pretty interesting discussions about human mental development versus the intellectual levels other species and how that relates to those who choose to be omnivorous. Undoubtedly this is extremely one-sided knee jerk journalism, which would explain the various responses to it.
Mouthorgan this week is a bunch of observations by a regular reader. Good stuff.
Debra Hyde's getting published in the new DESIRES anthology from AmarMira Press: "Lucky me! Pardon me while I go pinch myself. (Ouch! Feels good...)"
QOTD, on the "sex is 90% mental" subject:
"You can rub my head until I turn 180 years old and I'm not going to have an orgasm."
--- Betty Dodson quoted in Andrea Nemerson's alt.sex column
Counting down to 6 billion , estimated to be October 12th.
Rave Colburn points to the New York Times summary of the Microsoft trial closing arguments . As much as I despise the mistruths and deception that are Microsoft's business practices, I know that there'll be no justice done here.
Okay, let's see if he keeps it up for a day or so: Peter Merholz's entry today is on narrative as organizing principle .
Keith Knight on inappropriate language .
A new Clean Sheets with erotic poetry, prose, reviews, and a column on playing the skin flute.
Okay, everyone else has linked to this, and I'd been ignoring it, but I was going through Arts & Letters Daily and ran across it, and it reminded me of why I despise Utne Reader . The article is about the difficulties of building an environmentally sensitive house , and I was sympathetic as I read through the attempts and difficulties in building a house that used as few old-growth products as possible and was efficient, 'til I ran across the sentence that completely destroyed any sympathy towards the authors I may have had (emphasis mine): "My husband and I and our four children did not expect to live in a simple cabin, as Thoreau did."
Many of us lusted after Y.T.'s impact suit in Snow Crash. It looks like there's a prototype of a serious protective body armor is here.
Apropos of nothing at all: I bought an oxy-acetylene torch yesterday. The urge to create more quadricycle like vehicles and other kinetic sculpture was large enough that when the opportunity presented itself, I jumped. It'd be really cool to field an entry to the World Championship Great Arcata to Ferndale Cross Country Kinetic Sculpture Race , but that requires some design elements I'm not sure I'm ready to include in my next vehicle.
(As an side, I'm sure I've posted a link to that before, but can't find it. So I need to get my local search engine up and running. Perhaps if I can keep prospective job offers and amorous women to a minimum this weekend I'll be able to get some coding time in.)
Pretty pictures at the Chandra X-ray Observatory Center .
Jesux : The Linux distribution that will not lead you into temptation. No news as to how they're going to handle the casting out of daemons.
Catherine's update of Mike's "Dan seeks to build the drums" statement was "Dan seeks to play the drums". Hmmmmm...
The image trend continues with a tree in Yosemite Valley taken in May, I think, of '98. More eco-porn, but a 10"x16" of it made at least one visitor gasp.
Marylaine fesses up to being a smut peddler in My Word's Worth . Actually, it's an argument against filtering software for libraries.
Via Hack the Planet , an interview with Roger Schank on how universities have lost sight of their function , with some hope that perhaps for everything we're losing by going to "the virtual university", we're gaining because this is a chance to shift points of view:
To put this another way, everyone involved in the drama of indifferent education, faculty, students, and administrators, knows that the real role of our universities is certification not education.
Never has a review of that allegedly boundary pushing sexy new art-house film Romance :
The graphic scenes include a couple of unconvincing blow jobs, some tentative stroking of Paolo's condom-shrouded penis, one come shot (part of a Madonna/whore allegorical dream sequence), close-ups of Marie's pubes, one damp digit, an overpopulated gynecological exam and a full-on stretched-to-the-max birthing scene. These scenes might push the scandal envelope of the art-house circuit, but erotic they are not. There is little human about the sexuality portrayed, even less dignity
Susie Bright talks about getting laid on the road . I'll be at Cody's in Berkeley on Tuesday at 7:30 for her new book talk.
Self aggrandizing QOTD:
Some people march to the beat of a different drummer...
Dan seeks to build the drums.
--- Mike Harrison
Whoopsie! The latest Risks digest (might not be up yet, I'm reading the news feed) has a report of an ex-car bomber who apparently miscommunicated with his crew over the hour time difference between Israel and Palestine (on daylight savings time).
A new Need To Know , sarcastic as always.
A new NETFUTURE starts by looking at several articles on education:
The only thing an intelligent child can do with a complete toy is take it apart. An incomplete toy lets children use their imaginations.
--- An anonymous Waldorf kindergarten teacher, quoted from the September 1999 Atlantic Monthly in NETFUTURE #94
Once again, the Scary Devil Monastery speaks truths:
"The amount of gameplay is inverse to the total surface area of pre-rendered marble in the game."
--- Zembar, attributing to someone else unknown.
Pursed Lips has a couple of interesting links today. Naked weddings and more. Check it out.
The image binge continues, this time looking south to Mount Tamalpais from the hills above San Anselmo and Ross, in Marin County.
HELP! I've been contacted by a "track down people with lost assets and take 20% in return" company. They're claiming a substantial amount, which means that 20% is also a substantial amount. I'd probably not cringe too hard at 10%, but.... I've checked with the lost property division in Tennessee (where the address they've got for me is) and the only thing they've got a record for is a $.60 overpayment on my electric bill. Anybody else have ideas on how to track this down without paying many thousands to these scam artists?
QOTD:
So I wish you first a sense of theatre;
only Those who love illusion and know it will go far:
Otherwise we spend our lives in a confusion;
Of what we say and do with Who we really are.
--- Many Happy Returns, W.H. Auden, quoted by Dreamer
Can't get no sympathy: I hate clothes shopping, but I've lost weight recently, and I'm starting to feel like a skateboarder. I don't know if it was just Burning Man or a general trend, but it'd be real cool to stabilize back at a 32" waist.
Salon has an article on The art of Don E. Knuth that's kind of fluffish, but is worth reading for the Ellen Ullman quote:
"It would be very difficult these days to take a job and approach programming in that sort of algorithm and design sense, [but] it's a solace to think that there are places where people think deeply about algorithms in a general and abstract way and have notions of elegance and beauty."
As a follow up to that geeks as autists article and the Shadow Syndromes book, Peter forwards this huge array of links on the burgeoning labeling of everyone with a syndrome. I'll be working through these slowly. And my skepticism of modern psychiatric practics remains in place, no matter what labels I embrace...
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/971027/27john.htm
http://www.seattletimes.com/extra/browse/html97/altshad_082297.html
http://www.cjnetworks.com/~cgrandy/antipsych/boom_in_psych_syndromes.html
http://www.clark.net/pub/crn/97/08.htm
http://www.mind-set.com/html/pages/shadsynd.htm
http://www.latimes.com/HOME/NEWS/SCIENCE/MEDICINE/t000078745.html
http://www.addult.org/syndrome.htm
Mouthorgan continues the media reviews.
Back to the butterfly theme with today's picture, albeit abstractly. A clump of clover in Muir Woods.
Whitewater enthusiasts: I've added new pictures to my renowned (but ancient) Ocoee tour . Note especially the 7 picture sequence at Cat's Pyjamas that I should really turn into an animated GIF. Thanks to Rick for driving and tagging along when I was in 'nooga and had a chance to take these!
Nerdly note: One of my cow-orkers has been doing some benchmarking, and on most Un*x platforms interprocess pipe communication is optimized out the yinyang, so there's essentially no reason not to structure systems as layers of separate process talking through pipes. This is emphatically not the case under Windows, but that's not a viable scalable enterprise platform anyway, so why would you care?
Via Scripting News a quick article on using RSS news feeds in Perl . Flutterby's RSS version is available at http://www.flutterby.com/main.rdf
Aaaah, here it is: Camp Cuddle .
The iBrator . Feel different.
In keeping with the image of the day theme (that isn't quite as popular as writing about sex), here's a sunrise over the Golden Gate bridge that I captured last December. I know, cheesey gratuitous glamour shot with no artistic value, but it is pretty.
Aaargh! Don't know how I missed that Camp Cuddle link, now I can't find it again. Hopefully I'll run across it.
An idea for a Burning Man theme camp next year: Camp Cuddle
I'm a temporarily recovering programmer: After 4 years I've decided it's time that I leave Pixar to pursue other interests. I'll be working a few more weeks here, getting the NT port of RenderMan out and the build process for it stable, working on a few network rendering issues, then it's time to go do other things. I'll be joining Todd at Coyote Grits for various conslutting projects while we try to figure out what neat products the world wants. Personally I'm pushing for a real content management system to eradicate all those out-of-date web pages, but while the world needs that, I'm not sure that they want it.
Clean Sheets tackles the eroticism of Salem and other topics.
Everybody else is linking to it, and it's a good article, so I'll pass on this revelation that us nerds are probably slightly autistic . I've long suspected that there are things about how my mind works that don't apply to "normal" people. It also looks like this book Shadow Syndromes might be worth a look-see.
Dang it, Peter Meerholz removed those notes. Hopefully he'll put up better ones to replace them.
Just because Todd keeps pestering me to put more graphics on these pages, from my latest set of PhotoCD scans, and in keeping with the Flutterby theme, a Monarch Butterfly in a field near Crater Lake, in Oregon, last fall.
Okay, I'm getting boring with constantly falling back on the Scary Devil Monastery for quotes, but...
"How do the telcos get the brains out of their employees without leaving visible marks?"
--- Mike Andrews in the Scary Devil Monastery
If you're interested in "narrative as organizing principle", go read Peter Meerholz's entry for today.
Article in Salon about hair braiding licensing requirements in California . A good argument against short-sighted protectionist licensing systems, as most usually are. Keep the state out of certifications where ever possible.
Well, the original Bastard Operator From Hell BOFH and quite a few of the newer episodes do indeed survive, although there are probably some legal issues with the newer episodes in this archive...
One of the problems I have with using the web as a research resource is that information is so transient. Due to assorted mergers and acquisitions, the new BOFH chronicles have died and the archive has disappeared.
My Word's Worth tackles humans versus animals:
We are probably the only species that expects good things to happen to us when we leave home. After all, when you think about human beings, of all the words that come to mind, "succulent" is not among them.
A cow-orker passes along a note about David Schriner's remote computer killer , it claims a range of about 20 feet. I'll leave potential applications up to y'all...
"The HERF gun is not particularly high-tech, either. The device uses technology dating back to Tesla, essentially pushing a 20 megawatt burst of undisciplined radio noise through an antenna."
Bovine Inversus has just earned a place on my nibelung list , partially by linking to a page on the early origins of common fairy tales . One of my recent interests has been how myths evolve to support the cultural mores that pass them along, the weakening of Little Red Riding Hood is a perfect example of that.
A new Need To Know
Via FactoVision , an article about green manufacturing taking more resources than just using petroleum .
"By focusing on the origin of the raw materials we have lost track of the energy it takes to move materials through a process."
Scary Devil Monastery QOTD:
People who are willing to rely on the government to keep them safe are pretty much standing on Darwin's mat, pounding on the door, screaming, "Take me, take me!"
-- Carl Jacobs
So apparently Steve Jobs has accepted a spot on the board of The Gap. Does this mean we're gonna get jeans in 5 delicious shiny see through flavors? Or just back to khaki Macs?
Via Robot Wisdom comes this Gamasutra article about coding network gaming . It suffers because the author isn't terribly knowledgeable about networking issues and terminology, but it is a good reminder that simply opening up a socket stream and sending data is not an acceptable solution to real time issues. Especially under Windows where the socket layer sucks solar systems through surgical tubing.
In Salon Magazine , a survivor of the Branch Davidians speaks out , quite a compelling read.
Mouthorgan this week does the magazine critic thing.
If you haven't checked back into the Crypt Newsletter recently for an update on paranoia and stupidity.
D'oh. Sorry about yesterday's rant being inlined, I'll fix that this evening.
QOTD:
Ye gods! So the US allows people to carry guns but rigorously prevents them from having marijuana? Isn't that kinda like saying "let's give the populace easy access to weaponry and try our damnest to stop them being relaxed and laid back about things". Or, to put it slightly more simply, "let's make the populace well armed and irritible".
--- Robert Blake in the Scary Devil Monastery
Knowing that I'd missed a Susie Bright Salon article, I searched for it yesterday and missed it. Well, Jorn found it. So here's Susie's guide to old style adult bookstores . Interestingly, this subject just came up on the SHS mailing list, and I remembered how lucky I am to have Good Vibrations nearby, with a helpful approachable staff, and an atmosphere that's friendly and inviting and not "cruisy" in the least.
Okay, I threw up that Chicago Tribune article about weblogs because it mentioned Flutterby, but I went back and read it, and it's worth a read on its own sake, not just for my ego.
Meta: John S. Rhodes pointed out a Flutterby mention in the Chicago Tribune .
A new Clean Sheets , nothing that leapt out at me.
Wes points to DTCP information , a scheme to copyright protect protect digital content. Alas, everything seems to be stored in PDF. Hello? Anyone out there remember that it's HTextTP? Or that PDF files do notoriously badly as search targets? I'll dig later to see what I really think of it.
Brad points to this great article about acceptance in Rehobeth Beach , about how a conservative "family values" oriented town is coming to grips with being a vacation spot that people of all preferences love.
The anti-gay "family town" bumper sticker his car once sported is long gone. The woman he has since married once worked at the restaurant that opened Rehoboth's first openly gay bar and is, as he puts it, "Miss Tolerance." Now, he says with a self-amused smile, "I would put a bumper sticker on my car, if they made one, that said, 'Keep Rehoboth a Diverse Town.' "
In the new Comes Naturally David Steinberg talks about Saving the Pseudo-Children from Virtual Abuse .
I missed my chance to be in the Spencer Tunick photo shoot at Burning Man, but Spencer has a photo in Nerve that's probably indicative .
Back from Burning Man. Ian, you totally rock, thanks for the extensive help in turning the quadricycle from a novelty that might have lasted a day or two to a workhorse vehicle of our camp. It was a big hit. Two pictures that Ian took: [Quadricycle picture 1 (304k)] | [Quadricycle picture 2 (309k)]
Longer report in a bit.
As soon as I get a chance to breath, I'll be checking up on Mouthorgan , Clean Sheets , My Word's Worth , and Need To Know .
Archives of neat sites posted to Flutterby , notes to webmaster@flutterby.com
Tourist snapshot: Point Bonita Lighthouse, on the north side of the Golden Gate where the San Francisco Bay meets the Pacific. This is a good exercise, it's interesting to see how my photography has changed, what I consider a good shot now versus when I had my first PhotoCD scan made, and how I approach photography differently. Obviously the way to make these landscapes more interesting is more nudes!.![[Quadricycle picture 1 (304k)]](http://www.flutterby.com/images/other0000/Bike1.jpg){kind=link}
![[Quadricycle picture 2 (309k)]](http://www.flutterby.com/images/other0000/Bike2.jpg){kind=link}