Frozen Floors

They're Made Out Of Meat

2009-11-06T18:50:00.000-08:00

Anybody remember THIS story? What a bunch of bullshit! Someone please explain to me how you can know what meat is, but not have any conception of the living, animate creatures it comes from? MEAT. IS. ANIMAL. FLESH. It's like knowing what letters are but being ASTONISHED to see them form a WORD.

And then the aliens decide that humans are gross and they can't imagine having anything in common with them, so they just ignore them and leave. How trenchant! It holds up a mirror to our OWN prejudices, see, because if we found aliens made of electron plasma or whatever the ones in the story are supposed to be, we'd assuredly react with the utmost confusion and then with vague disgust and total disinterest.

Sorry, no. Most people actually EXPECT aliens to be made out of energy or crystals or something stupid like that, and if we found any, everybody would be so overjoyed that they'd run around singing and dancing and uncoiling emergency fire hoses.

But don't you see??? From the ALIENS' perspective, WE'RE the weird ones!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Meat!

Election Results

2008-11-04T11:13:00.000-08:00

MagentaSalmon: i'm watching cnn
MagentaSalmon: they're slowly panning-zooming over the image of his teary eyes
MagentaSalmon: they've been doing this for two and a half hours
MagentaSalmon: obama's, i mean
MagentaSalmon: because his grandmother died...
SkyBlueSalmon: T_T
SkyBlueSalmon: let's see what's in the mail today
SkyBlueSalmon: bills bills bills
SkyBlueSalmon: [redacted]
SkyBlueSalmon: hm hm
SkyBlueSalmon: bills
SkyBlueSalmon: nobody's ever online...
SkyBlueSalmon: 91009 hours till the end of time
SkyBlueSalmon: ron paul won the election, surprising and confusing everyone
SkyBlueSalmon: wolf blitzer just kind of sat there for about fifteen minutes
SkyBlueSalmon: they cut to a guy in a spongebob costume dancing eventually
SkyBlueSalmon: he did a jig, the robot, the macarana...
SkyBlueSalmon: meanwhile there'd be sporadic voiceovers with random facts about ron paul, as though they were scrounging through file cabinets and saying whatever they found, irrespective of its timeliness or relevance
SkyBlueSalmon: then some odd shots of an empty studio, with one guy walking around in the background, seemingly lost in thought
SkyBlueSalmon: then a test pattern
SkyBlueSalmon: and finally, static, through which some say they can faintly hear rick astley
SkyBlueSalmon: 91000 hours till the end of the world

Your privileged place in the universe

2008-09-19T22:18:00.001-07:00

Once upon a time, humanity thought the earth was the center of the universe. But as it later turned out, earth was a tiny speck orbiting a small and unremarkable star in a nondescript fluff of solar systems on a secondary branch of one of the four arms of an ordinary galaxy in a remote suburb of the Virgo Supercluster, two hundred fifty million light years from the Great Attractor.

Additionally, it turned out the universe didn't even HAVE a center. Either it was infinite, or it just wrapped around, like the game Asteroids.

In hindsight, the idea that the earth was the center of the universe seemed rather naive, and rather presumptuous as well. A failure of the imagination.

Once upon a time, humanity thought that they were created in god's image. But as it later turned out, they were created by the same mindless process that produced bees and pelicans and poison ivy, and this process began by accident.

Not only were they not created in god's image, nothing was. God didn't even exist.

Examples of this sort generally come in threes, and this is no exception.

Once upon a time, humanity thought that the world they lived in was real. But as it later turned out, the world and everything in it, including them, was a fiction. And not only was it a fiction, it was a fiction within a fiction, a simulation in a story in a dream, a thing so insubstantial, by the standards of the time most would not have considered it to exist at all.

Moreover, the reality to which they aspired did not exist. Avalon, the one true world at the top of the hierarchy, was a myth. And in its place, an infinite regress.

Speed and intelligence

2008-09-18T03:55:00.000-07:00

This is a reply to Scott Aaronson's post The Singularity Is Far. In it, he writes:

As you may have gathered, I don’t find the Singulatarian religion so silly as not to merit a response. Not only is the “Rapture of the Nerds” compatible with all known laws of physics; if humans survive long enough it might even come to pass. The one notion I have real trouble with is that the AI-beings of the future would be no more comprehensible to us than we are to dogs (or mice, or fish, or snails). After all, we might similarly expect that there should be models of computation as far beyond Turing machines as Turing machines are beyond finite automata. But in the latter case, we know the intuition is mistaken. There is a ceiling to computational expressive power. Get up to a certain threshold, and every machine can simulate every other one, albeit some slower and others faster. Now, it’s clear that a human who thought at ten thousand times our clock rate would be a pretty impressive fellow. But if that’s what we’re talking about, then we don’t mean a point beyond which history completely transcends us, but “merely” a point beyond which we could only understand history by playing it in extreme slow motion. (emphasis mine)

This is a video of someone beating the game Pokemon Yellow in slightly over two minutes. It is incomprehensible. If you play it in extreme slow motion, it is still incomprehensible, because it is not the speed of the button-mashing that takes a game usually beaten in hours or days and does it in minutes. It's the amount of thought that goes into each button mashed. The depth of the contemplation is such that even the author's comments, which explain what he did, will still be largely incomprehensible to most people.

It's true that if in 1954, 27 years of history suddenly took place in a day, a typical pipe-smoking, newspaper-reading man from 1954 could, if he replayed it in extreme slow motion, eventually understand the world of 1981. The problem is that tomorrow it will be 2008, and the day after tomorrow it will be 2035.

Now, it's true as Scott says that history won't completely transcend this man. It's absolutely hopeless for him to achieve even a basic grasp of what's going on, but despite the 10,000fold speed difference he can still have a place in the world, likely as a coat rack or something.

The point I'm trying to make is that a simple overclocking of the speed of thought is more than enough to write humanity's final chapter.

Also see: Orbital - The Box

The New Atheists

2008-08-31T22:41:00.000-07:00

Remember THE ENEMIES OF REASON? With richard dawkins? He talks about how astrologers and psychics are full of crap, and they're destroying civilization. It's a TV documentary.

It's not particularly good. I mean, he does a good job of explaining why psychics and astrologers are full of crap, and he's not as screamy as penn and teller, but the idea that these people are destroying civilization seems a bit unlikely to me, and while i agree with dawkins's methods, i don't, of course, entirely agree with his conclusions. If, somehow, magically, shucksters and people who make money by exploiting incredibly idiotic crap didn't exist, you just move on to the next lowest layer of scum.

Used car salesmen, I suppose. It depends on where you draw the line between a scam and an ad, or between a delusion and a diversion. I mean, who does more damage, astrologers, or burger king? And yet, i'd hardly say burger king is destroying civilization either. Did you watch that roundtable discussion between dawkins, hitchens....... uh....... who else...the black guy? with the funny name? No, it was dawkins, hitchens, dennett, and harris.

It's not a bad discussion, but the interesting thing to me is how sam harris seems to be kind of in a corner by himself through most of it, not disagreeing with the rest of them, but basically tired of the way they just keep rehashing the same crap they've been saying for years and years. Sam harris is great on this topic, or any topic. He's very cutting. Hitchens, dawkins, and dennett are these three old guys and they do that thing old people do where they pick up a thread of conversation they're familiar with and just launch into a speech they've made a million times, and a lot of the things they say are really rather disingenuous. They pretend not to understand things that are actually rather obvious, and he calls them on it.

The whole thing the new atheists do where they blather on about the beauty of nature and science always seems rather flat to me. Knowing how a butterfly works, all the little bug organs and DNA and behavior patterns and evolutionary history doesn't make the butterfly prettier. It might make it more interesting, and it certainly is more useful, but to pretend the rational, scientific world view is a beautiful one is absurd, it's practically delusional. To see the world as it really is is something so painful that people actively avoid it. Reality is NOT, as the new atheists present it, a beautiful harmonious place comparable or even superior to the vague grand sketch of a cosmic theater presented by religion. It it something entirely different, and it is in many cases scary and unwelcome. Sometimes it can even drive people insane.

People are not evolved to understand how their digestive system works, or to be aware of germs, or to be able to deconstruct their own motivations. The point that should be made is not that these things are wonderful and lovely, it's that understanding them is IMPORTANT. When people miss this distinction, it is troubling to me because it indicates to me that they don't really grasp, on some level, the importance of objectivity. I just can't see someone who thinks the world is a lovely place as objective.

And what's the importance of objectivity, you ask?

There's a difference between someone who is objective and someone who is simply right, someone who is in the camp of objectivity. There is a certain class of skeptics, atheists, whatever, who deep down basically think like their enemies. They're just on a different side. They only think about the issue, and they only enter the domain of discourse, in order to win fights, to ridicule the others, to assure themselves of their own position.

This is not to say that they are wrong, or even that their arguments are wrong. They may be entirely right, they may fight using the most upstanding tools, the most rational, critical methods. But the world has more than one issue. Sometimes the important issues only enter the landscape in very small ways. You may have a position which is ALMOST right, and there's just a hairline crack in it where it's wrong that leads into something drastically important. In order to see these cracks, you have to be objective, and you have to be critical on a fundamental level, because if you set any belief or interest or opinion even SLIGHTLY forward in your mental hierarchy than that critical edge, you will slide over the crack without ever noticing.

A perfect example of this is that argument between stathis pamplemousse and norman noman on the sl4 list about universe simulations. Remember that? It's worth reading, let me find it.

Hm, it's long though. Anyway, i'll summarize the relevant part.

There's a difference between objectivity and science. Not just between objective thinking and the scientific status quo, but between objective rational thinking and SCIENTIFIC thinking. Do you see it?

Science is to rational thought as law is to ethics. Science is the rational thought of the society. As a rational individual, it is possible to KNOW something, objectively, rationally, that is scientifically impossible for you to prove. It doesn't even need to be something groundbreaking or "paranormal". You can know who committed a murder because you witnessed it, but have no way to prove your story is true.

But there are some who are more committed to science than they are to reason, and when the two diverge, they side with science. If they witness something that they cannot prove, they will rationalize it away, because in their mind, truth has skipped up a link from rationality to provability.

The argument between noman and pamplemousse starts with a man named rolf, who proposes a curious means of taming an unfriendly singularity. Rolf says "Suppose that when we have a friendly singularity, we have it run a simulation of the alternate case, a simulated world where an unfriendly singularity was produced instead, and that if this unfriendly singularity destroys humanity, the simulation is to be shut down, whereas if it acts kindly then it will be given what it wants, say, to calculate pi to a trillion places or whatever. Then, knowing that humanity would have the friendly singularity do this if it were constructed, the unfriendly singularity will behave in a kindly manner, knowing that it could well be in a simulation".

Norman expands this idea, noting that every possible AI could simulate every other AI, and thus that they should all behave in a manner cooperative with the others, to the extent that the others are likely to exist and to the extent that their goals are compatible. Pamplemousse, however, becomes distressed at this notion, noting how the necessarily invisible nature of the simulations and the hypothetical higher being who can reward or punish is very similar to a religious world view.

They argue for quite some time. Despite well reasoned arguments to the contrary, pamplemousse frames the situation as though since anyone could theoretically run a simulation for any reason, the combined utility modifier of the potential we are in a simulation multiplies out to zero. And that since it all cancels out, it should be ignored. He is determined to erase what he sees as a religious model of the universe, even at the cost of rationality, because he is more committed to the structure of scientific knowledge, (provability, etc.) than he is to truth or to practicality.

In general this will always happen with some people when the idea of a higher intelligence or some kind of mind behind the scenes is brought into the discussion, but in most cases the irrationality of the distaste for this is well hidden, because it's such a fanciful assertion. In the case of the sl4 argument the problem is presented more starkly, because the higher power is exactly what they are arguing over how best to create, it is something which is assumed to be possible, even inevitable.

And yet when it wraps back around and threatens to disrupt the scientific model, it is rationalized away. Here's the discussion.

My point is, when i see richard dawkins or someone trumpeting the majesty of science or the wonder of math, it makes me say "Hmm". Yudkowsky does that trumpeting the wonder of science thing too, as well as the ornery old-person thing of picking at incredibly minor issues in a self-righteous way. When I used the word "rationalized" just now, it brought to mind something he was blabbering on about one time about how "rationalizing" is irrational and thus the word should be banned OMFG!!! Actually that may have been someone else. If so, I apologize.

While I'm on this subject, I'd like to say that Overcoming Bias is very tiresome blog.

"i walked into a taco bell today and realized i was ordering the combo meal out of cognitive bias" (several paragraphs more)

And then we get the fun posts where yudkowsky will take some obscure problem with provability in math, like lob's theorem, and make it into a post with a title like "why you can never trust yourself" that fails to ever actually have a useful point, and then follows it up with 6 additional posts explaining the math in more and more detail, and attempting to make it make sense and sound like something that has an analog in the real world, but completely failing to do so.

Abstracted Idealized Dynamics

Followup to: Morality as Fixed Computation

I keep trying to describe morality as a "computation", but people don't stand up and say "Aha!"

Pondering the surprising inferential distances that seem to be at work here, it occurs to me that when I say "computation", some of my listeners may not hear the Word of Power that I thought I was emitting; but, rather, may think of some complicated boring unimportant thing like Microsoft Word.

Maybe I should have said that morality is an abstracted idealized dynamic. This might not have meant anything to start with, but at least it wouldn't sound like I was describing Microsoft Word.

How, oh how, am I to describe the awesome import of this concept, "computation"?

Perhaps I can display the inner nature of computation, in its most general form, by showing how that inner nature manifests in something that seems very unlike Microsoft Word - namely, morality.

Blah blah blah etc. etc.

Yudkowsky's not bad at explaining things when he just does it in a technical way for a technical audience, but when he tries to dumb it down he just falls all over himself in a bunch of condescending definitions and poetic hand-wringing about the majesty of logic or the loveliness of computation. Ugh.

I OFFEND TWO MARANDAS BEFORE I OFFEND TWO MARANDAS, AND THEN I OFFEND TWO MORE

2007-10-26T17:24:00.000-07:00

MagentaSalmon: this race of midgets is very impressed with the doctor's singing
MagentaSalmon: also i forgot to tell you
MagentaSalmon: in the last episode the doctor went into a fast time sloop and spent many years on an alien planet, where he had two kids
MagentaSalmon: for voyager, a minute and a half passed
MagentaSalmon: it was a very stupid episode
MagentaSalmon: they watched a civilization evolve from cavemen into starship-havers like themselves in a matter of hours
MagentaSalmon: and then they just left, like "hum dee dum, that's all sorted out"
MagentaSalmon: don't they realize that in only a few more seconds, that planet is going to burst out into the universe with the most advanced technology ever devised, like some sort of incomprehensible firecracker of incomprehensible scientific intelligence? IN THE TIME IT TAKES JANEWAY TO HAVE A CUP OF TEA, THE PEOPLE ON THAT PLANET WILL BE MORE POWERFUL THAN GODS
MagentaSalmon: these midgets have a really odd culture
MagentaSalmon: man, i really don't know whether to be amused or appalled at that last episode
MagentaSalmon: it's amazing how lackadaisically they behave even after they realize how much faster time on the planet is than it is for them. Their spaceship is causing constant earthquakes on the surface, but do they work as fast as possible to prevent them? No, they have all sorts of idle conversations
MagentaSalmon: naomi, the little half alien girl that was born on voyager, is doing a science report on planets, and she has a long conversation about it with seven
MagentaSalmon: they discuss how the title is too long, and should be changed from "the weird planet that was stuck in a different time and emitted strange gravity waves" to just "the weird planet"
MagentaSalmon: meanwhile, billions of people lived and died
MagentaSalmon: and janeway was the worst of all
MagentaSalmon: she literally did virtually nothing but sit around drinking tea the entire time
MagentaSalmon: every so often looking at the sensor readings and saying "well, look at that, they've invented electricity."
MagentaSalmon: and "it seems they're at war... are those nuclear weapons?"
MagentaSalmon: and "why are they shooting at us? oh right, the horrible earthquakes we've been causing them since the dawn of civilization"
MagentaSalmon: harry kim has his own band, called "the kimtones"
MagentaSalmon: the midgets hate it
MagentaSalmon: they're attacking him
MagentaSalmon: if you ask me, this is exactly what harry kim deserves
MagentaSalmon: to be attacked by midgets while playing the claranet
MagentaSalmon: the doctor is acting incredibly smug in this episode
MagentaSalmon: elevated even above his usual levels of smugness
MagentaSalmon: hehe
MagentaSalmon: a one second shot of their cityscape reveals these midgets to be one of the races that the kremen erased from time at one point
MagentaSalmon: voyager fixed the timeline, and NOW THEY'RE PAYING THE PRICE
MagentaSalmon: the doctor is dressed like a clown from victorian england
MagentaSalmon: with a giant dunce cap with pom-poms, etc.
MagentaSalmon: all in white
MagentaSalmon: he's going to be performing opera on a live broadcast to the entire midget planet
MagentaSalmon: ...
MagentaSalmon: the doctor receives so much fan mail that voyager explodes
MagentaSalmon: that's the end of the series

Here are the images:

Thanks to Charles and Jeremiah. NO thanks to the rest of you!

Try it, won't you?

It's sobering to realize...

2007-10-26T17:22:00.000-07:00

that it doesn't matter if you win or lose, just how much time you kill in the process.

A funny story about that picture: It's from the wikipedia article on moais, which i accidently went to by clicking the word "moai" in excel, in a string of text which looked totally normal but was in fact a hyperlink, due to the fact that i had copied it from a table on wikipedia of some made up gods from the works of H.P. Lovecraft.

Fun facts about animals

2007-10-26T17:16:00.000-07:00

According to legend, Buddha invited the world''s animals to a meeting and only 12 came--; the dog, dragon, goat, horse, monkey, ox, pig, rabbit, rat, rooster, snake and tiger.

While both male and female reindeer grow antlers in the summer each year, male reindeer drop their antlers at the beginning of winter, usually late November to mid-December.

Cats were favorite pets in ancient Egypt. When a cat died members of the family shaved off their eyebrows as a sign of mourning.

A duck's quack doesn't echo, and no one knows why.

According to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, the most powerful animal is the pelican.

The woodcock can see in front and behind itself with both its eyes, effectively facing both backwards and forwards.

Hummingbirds can fly backwards.

A chameleon's tongue is twice the length of its body.

UPDATE: It seems we DO know why a duck's quack doesn't echo. In 1950, an aviator named Ed Cornwell used one of the world's first oscilloscopes to figure it out, and artificially produced his own quacks as a means of avoiding detection by radar. The army wasn't interested though, due to a host of other technologies appearing at the same time.

Quacks turn out to be just one of many natural examples of an FRPS - Fractally Reverse-Palindromic Soundwave. This means any part of the soundwave played backwards will completely phase out the part that comes after it, so regardless of what frequencies the material it hits absorbs, what's left cancels itself out.

As well as ducks, many birds make sounds which fall into this category, as do crabs. The northern pine snake makes a sound that's audible only on the odd numbered echoes, and not when originally produced!

Rubber snake

2007-10-26T15:40:00.000-07:00

There is a rubber snake who surprises people from over their shoulders.

They scream at first, and then laugh.

Then it bites them, and releases venom from its sharp metal teeth.

Please be on the lookout, and warn anyone you can.

Adventures

2007-10-26T13:01:00.000-07:00

I was at the gas station today, looking for something to eat. My eyes alit on a large bag of planters trail mix, but then I remembered planters trail mix is terrible. My inability to choose something enraged me, and I grabbed the bag by two corners and flung it up into the air. It fell back down and burst on the floor, sending trail mix everywhere. I left nonchalantly, and outside by my car was a fat cop talking on a walkie talkie. He stared at me as I came out, so I went over to see what he wanted. He said I was under arrest, and as he led me away I realized he was the same cop who had arrested me earlier that day for a pizza incident in the park. The cop's house was right nearby, in the woods. I was vaguely worried he would rape and murder me. He didn't keep it very clean, but he had a great music collection. We became friends and decided to travel around the world. When you sit down with a piece of paper and a pencil, there's a sort of vague queasiness, because you know you could write or draw anything, anything at all, but you have no idea what to do. When you sit down in front of a computer the problem is multiplied by hundreds of times, and if the computer is on the internet, millions. Sitting there in front of Google, knowing that just a few keystrokes could take you somewhere that would change your life forever, but having no idea what they are. When you're standing in an elevator, your mind is all your own, and your choices are limited to pushing a finite number of floor buttons. At the other end of the spectrum, sitting in front of your computer your mind extends into a magic void full of all manner of things. Even when you have made your peace with them, it is somewhat like living in a house that is much too big.

2007-10-26T12:58:00.001-07:00

Yes, with only MS paint, a lousy gif animator, and something to generate random numbers, you too can make this seething mass of pixelated fractally horror.

Fun things to do

2007-10-26T12:58:00.000-07:00

Next time you're in a moving vehicle and you have a pair of sunglasses, try this fun trick. No, seriously, it actually is fun.

Put one side of the sunglasses over one of your eyes, and look out the side window. The objects outside the window will appear sort of odd, and at first it may be difficult to tell what's wrong with them. One of two things will be going on, depending on which side of the vehicle you're looking out of, and which eye you have the sunglasses over. Either:

Everything will appear larger than normal, particularly signs, buildings and trees. Trees in particular may appear very stately and impressive.

Or

Everything will appear small and dwarflike. Cars will be like little clown cars, and houses will seem comical, more like oversized dollhouses than sensible real ones. Also, when you go under an overpass it'll seem amazing that the vehicle even fits.

The faster the vehicle is moving, the more pronounced these effects will be. Also, after a while your eyes will adjust and the effect won't be as noticable. When this happens, try switching to the other eye, and you'll find THAT effect is now even stronger.

The second fun thing to do is visit this website, with episodes synopsises of gumby cartoons.

http://www.everwonder.com/david/gumby/

They're in four sections in the lower left.

Also, i've activated comments mode for this blog, so knock yourself out.

Opposite day

2007-10-26T12:57:00.000-07:00

You know how sometimes as a child, it would be "opposite day"?

When you think about it, opposite day isn't actually on the calender at all, some snot-nosed kid just declares it. It'd be hilarious if all our holidays were like that.

If Microsoft Excel Had a Narrator...

2007-10-26T12:56:00.000-07:00

You'd drag down a list of numbers and he'd say "BRAVELY PULLING DOWN ON THE SELECTION HANDLE, THE USER CREATED MORE CELLS. 45! 46! 47! IN RAPID SUCCESSION THE NUMBERS APPEARED, POPULATING THE COLUMN WITH DATA"

Cloning

2007-10-26T12:54:00.000-07:00

Today I was at the bookstore, standing on the second landing of the stairs between the first floor and the second floor. Just standing there, looking at the bookstore. Standing on the stairs (which are in the middle of a sort of hole between floors... there's probably a name for that) I had taken my glasses off, so the whole bookstore was basically a big blur. A man and a woman both wearing white sweaters and jeans were arguing about cloning. Not the ethics of cloning, but technical details involving base pairs and enzymes and such. The woman had a pink scarf, and did most of the talking. The man seemed very pessimistic.

I CAN'T READ books

2007-10-26T12:53:00.000-07:00

There's a set of books called I CAN READ books. How about an I CAN'T READ book?

What would it contain? Latin? Excessively long words written in tiny type? Complete gibberish? Sentences that curl around the page, full of differently colored characters with strange aspect ratios, some spanning multiple lines?

I'd say there should still be illustrations, but complex, incomprehensible ones, full of emphasis on what is not being drawn, maybe the characters fleeing some vague malevolent entity.

Late

2007-10-26T11:31:00.000-07:00

It's Friday, and it is time for intro to psychology, taught by a bald man with a fez and a ridiculous and unpronounceable name. Instead of the normal class, however, he has arranged that we will meet at his studio. I'm unable to provide my own transportation, so Kurt has kindly let me carpool with him.

We get there early, and so I take a detour to the building's computer lab, where I talk to MagentaSalmon on the internet. Unfortunately I lose track of both time and space, and 15 minutes letter I realize I'd better find the STUDIO, as I am already late.

It's on either the second or third floor, I recall. The stairs are awfully steep, and the green carpet is so stiff it borders on being Astroturf. The building is actually quite large, with a variety of balconies looking out into large atriums.

I eat the same food at every meal, if I eat at all.

Am I even in the right building? Perhaps not. I set off across the landscape of the night, avoiding dark shapes which might be snakes. Eventually I see a light in the distance, which resolves into a neighborhood of houses, their windows lit up with christmas lights. I'd like to go inside, but I have to find that office, so instead I open a gate and go into the backyard.

Sometimes, out of nowhere, I find something to be hilariously funny, just for a few moments. Then it leaves me.

The air is heavy with mist, as if from a nearby fountain. A girl slowly walks toward me out of the house, singing in a language I do not recognize.

How to get out of bed

2007-10-26T11:30:00.000-07:00

I, like many people, used to have trouble getting out of bed in the morning.

The actual physical activity of getting up is easy, it's motivating yourself to do it that's hard.

The trick to it, which I discovered after getting some second-hand information about the brain, is this:

There are multiple parts of your brain that control your body. Instead of focusing on getting out of bed, which doesn't work because the more you think about it the less you want to do it, DISTRACT the part of the brain that cares about what you're doing by thinking about things that are completely irrelevent, and get out of bed with the part of your brain that makes you walk and type and itch your nose, while the rest of the brain is busy.

It's easier than it sounds. Try it, won't you?

The ideal scenario would be if you could get out of bed before actually waking up. Actually, pretty much your whole day could be done while asleep, if you're like most people.

2007-10-26T11:29:00.001-07:00

Day 2

2007-10-26T11:29:00.000-07:00

The others are not handling the isolation of the countryside well. In fact, it's making them insane. Today I helped K and L get Mrs. G out of the building while some other girls played some kind of prank in a nearby room. Ordinarily I would've been involved in the prank, but as it was I was just trying to avoid conflict.

It was near twilight. I showed them around the new gardens. The old ones are too overgrown to enter. When we got to the pond, which is an opaque light green color like absinthe lately, she seemed awestruck by it. And jumped in. After a few seconds, it was evident she wasn't coming back, so I had to save her. I got L to take her inside before she saw joshua's skeleton. (Before L did, that is. Mrs. G seemed to be in shock at that point.)

Later that night I found K and L in the den, holding a knife and a corkscrew, just sitting there with madness quite evidently in their minds. I got them to snap out of it, but I don't know how long I'll be able to keep things in control over here.

The sun

2007-10-26T11:28:00.000-07:00

What would happen if the sun winked out of existence?

The earth, released from its orbit, would go flying out into the icy blackness of space. All the plants would die, and then all the animals that eat plants would die. And then all the animals that eat animals would die, except us humans because we could continue growing stuff in artificial environments.

The world would get colder and colder.

Without all the plants around, there'd be nothing to generate oxygen out of carbon dioxide. But without all the animals, we wouldn't need nearly as much, so we'd work out a way to do it before there were any real problems.

Many people would die. But in the end, the human race would definitely survive. All we get from the sun is light and heat, and we have alternate ways of making those things. That's a sobering thought, I think.

the tortoise and the hare

2007-10-26T11:25:00.001-07:00

once a tortoise and a hare had a race. the tortoise was really slow but the hare kept stopping and making detours and generally didnt take the race very seriously. eventually the hare realized the tortoise was getting real close to the finish line. he ran all the way there but the tortoise got to it just ahead of him! "you win!" said the race announcer to the tortoise! the hare just stood there in shock pulling at his ears in a comical manner. the tortoise meanwhile couldnt quite believe what was happening either. his mental gears whizzed and whirred sending off sparks of thought energy. one of his mental sprockets went flying out of his head propelled by the force of his awesome mechanical brain. it flew through the air over the trees over the forest way into the stratosphere still spinning and crackling. it flew over the lake of creeky unders where the ducks were a-quacking and the reeds were a-whistling. on the opposite bank it struck a wandering woodchuck in the spine. "fuck!" yelled the woodchuck in woodchuckese! no one heard him. eventually the tortoise became aware that everyone was waiting for him to say something. he was so flabberghasted that he couldnt really process the situation. "i... win?" said the tortoise unbelievingly. "yep!" said the race announcer who was an owl. he handed the tortoise a huge trophy made of solid gold. everyone had a big party and there was a lot of cake and balloons and stuff. the hare sat quietly in the corner scowling at everyone.

THE END

Entertainment!

2007-10-26T11:25:00.000-07:00

I'm back, with more entertainment! For you, the reader.

Just kidding! Maybe it's time for YOU to be entertaining! I demand entertainment!

Chess vs. go

2007-10-26T11:24:00.000-07:00

Adam Cadre, host of the Lyttle Lytton contest, has this to say on chess and go:

I prefer go to chess for two reasons. One is that go feels less arbitrary. Instead of having six different types of pieces, each moving in a different manner and arranged in a fairly arbitrary fashion, go presents the player with a bowl full of identical stones and a very simple set of rules. Players alternate placing stones on the intersections of a grid. Stones or groups of contiguous stones entirely surrounded by stones of the opposite color are removed from the board. Board positions cannot be repeated. When both players pass, points for which all paths along the grid reach only stones of one color or the edge of the board count as territory for the player using that color. That's pretty much it. And from these simple principles comes a game much deeper than chess: computers can now beat the world's best chess players, but the best go programs play on the level of a low-intermediate amateur. So that's one reason. The other is that while chess is a game about destroying things -- pieces are steadily removed, and at the end of the game not much remains -- go is about building: even a player who's lost quite badly will carve out at least a small territory.

I concede that go has a minimalist appeal, although it should be noted that from game theory perspective chess is actually a simpler game. Chess has a wider variety of pieces, it's true, but a far smaller total NUMBER. Furthermore, the chessboard has only 64 squares, in comparison to go's 361 grid intersections.

Second, while it's true that in go you start with a blank board and put pieces on it rather than starting with a full board and taking them off, it still takes the form of a conflict, a struggle for control. Additionally, the destructive nature of chess means it has a decisive ending, something go sorely lacks. I can't help but feel that checkmate is a more satisfying note to end things on than counting up who controls the most squares.

Perhaps most interesting is the question of depth and the ability of a computer to play the game.

Computers ARE worse at go than chess. This is due to two factors. One, go has a board over five times as large, and there are correspondingly more possibilities for each move. Two, it's significantly harder to measure who's winning, which means the decision tree is harder to prune.

Does this mean go is a deeper game? A better game?

If you take 36 chessboards and stitch them together into one big giant superchessgame, humans will be better at it than computers again. Does that make it a deeper game than chess? A better game?

Internal monologs

2007-10-26T11:18:00.000-07:00

What if people talked to themselves all the time?

Actually, it turns out they do. At least, the muscles of the face involved in speech make constant tiny movements in accordance with what people are thinking, much like the tiny movements the eye makes to stay focused on something. But while the patterns traced by the eye form only a sort of random etch-a-sketch of squiggles and curves, the motions of the mouth and face are effectively the same as speech, only much faster.

Two scientists at the university of columbia have successfully uncovered the internal monologs of random test subjects by reviewing slowed down footage from a high resolution digital video camera and running it through a new form of lip-reading software.

The monologs rarely form complete sentences even at their most lucid. The most coherent thoughts occured when the subject was observing another person while waiting for them to do their part in a shared activity.

One subject, who asked not to be named, had monologs with consistant themes of violence. While working with another subject on an exercise in which plastic gears were connected together, his internal monolog contained such lines as "think of all the lives I could be taking instead of dealing with THIS idiot."

He says if he was actually thinking such a thing, he was not aware of it.

My personal... reflexions

2007-10-26T08:12:00.000-07:00

I guess I'll make a post here... i was going to do it the other day, because I thought "well, i should post in my blog... that'd give me a small feeling of accomplishment" but then i thought "hmm... but then i'd feel empty inside anyway..." so I didn't.

A funny feeling

2007-10-26T07:58:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, rarely, I feel like there's a substantially better world just inches away, but inaccessable and nameless. I experience it only in brief flickers.

It has a stillness to it, and an outdoor, summer quality, which is normally not something I would participate in. There's also a sense of experiencing it from the point of view of a child, but that could just be the alienness shining through.

It has a depth to it, is the odd thing, it's just faint. Something about it makes me vaguely uneasy.

None of this really evokes it, although the picture makes an admirable attempt. Either it's an of illusion of peripherial feeling or I'm not skilled enough with my words.

Story Problems

2007-10-26T07:56:00.000-07:00

let's say there's six people, each in a car
each car gets 10 miles to the gallon, and each car has a full tank of gas
all the cars hold 60 gallons of gas
all the people start in the same place, and their destination is 1470 miles away
how do they get there?

You need to run the main outs of your console to a piece of outboard gear with two quarter inch jacks. In addition to 55 normal patch cables, you have the following special ones:

3 Tiny telephone male to 1/4 inch female
2 1/4 inch male to XLR male
2 XLR female to XLR female
2 1/8 inch female to 1/8 inch female
1 1/4 inch male to RCA male
1 RCA male to RCA female
1 RCA male to 1/4 inch female
1 XLR female to RCA male
1 XLR female to 1/8 inch male
1 1/8 inch male to tiny telephone male
1 1/8 inch male to tiny telephone female
1 1/8 inch male to XLR male
1 1/8 inch female to RCA male

How do you do it?

The Real Me

2007-10-26T07:44:00.000-07:00

Something most people believe in which I do not is the concept of a "real" self, buried somewhere within everyone. As a child I was analyzed in innumerable ways, and many attempts were made to describe me, sometimes as flawed, sometimes as gifted, often as both. Eventually my own impatience rubbed off on my parents enough for them to admit the quest was a fruitless one, but I have always had a lingering, perhaps narcissistic tendency to want to understand myself. The problem is that like a building in a dream, the concrete dimensions of my personality exist only when being observed, and that the more I look, the more I find, and the more complicated everything gets, like a magician pulling an endless rope of scarves out of a hat. I knew from the start that the personalities I adopt in everyday life were fake, and eventually I concluded that all the ones "deep within" myself were fake too, generated at the moment I defined them.

This was meant to be a short introductory paragraph to a cheesy list of my favorite things, but it seems to have suffered from a similar rope-of-scarves effect. Excuse me.

And now, the cheesy list:

First name: Kasey
Last name: Zeaar
Age: 29
Height: Average
Favorite color: Blue
Favorite book, non-fiction: How to be an idiot, by captain dork
Favorite TV show: Mystery science theater
Favorite soup: Chinese onion broth
Favorite season: Winter
Why: Because everything dies, and then is covered by snow so i don't have to look at it
Favorite comic: Pokey the penguin
What else is on my desk: High powered blue flashlight, papers, large onion, knife
What's on the floor: Carpet, messes of wires and electronics, lint
What's on the wall: Four electrical outlets, lightswitch, blank electrical faceplate, door, wires coming out of a hole and going into a hole in the ceiling
What's on the other wall: Six outlets, two lightswitches, vent, hole where an electrical outlet should be but instead there's just wires
What's on the other other wall: Door
What's on the other other other wall: Four outlets, hole where an electrical outlet should be but instead there's just wires, vent, empty doorway that should have a door in it but doesn't
What's on the ceiling: Two flourescent light fixtures
A door on every wall but no windows: There's a fifth wall, actually
What's on it: A window with venetian blinds, looking out into darkness.
Lights: On
Favorite method of greeting strangers: Sneak up behind them, put hands over their eyes, say "Guess who!" and when they turn around say "Someone you don't know!"
Handedness: Left
Color vision: Normal
Last thing I can remember making me laugh: Something sick and appalling, probably.
Am I typing this just to see myself type: Mostly
Name: Professor Judge Delicious
How dark does dark blue have to be in order for it to be black: Not all that dark, practically speaking

Do I wish I were this man: No
What was that thing in harry potter called: You'll have to be more specific
The thing in dumbledor's office: A bowl of boiled lard?

Thoughts on the yogi bear christmas special

2007-10-26T07:39:00.001-07:00

why the hell is yogi bear's Christmas special AN HOUR AND A HALF LONG

i thought it was over and then i looked at the thing and it was only halfway through!

this girl bear is singing a song about how she's going to kiss yogi

it's creepy and i'm fast forwarding through it

yogi's eating sandwiches right now

something that rarely happens in live action is that a character gets so angry that they absentmindedly walk up a wall and back across the ceiling. for instance, Seinfeld never does this.

let me outline the plot for you: yogi's animal friends who all have annoying speech impediments are staying at jellystone lodge for Christmas, but yogi, being a bear, is hibernating. however, he wakes up and joins them, accidentally becoming employed at the lodge, and then repeatedly promoted by the owner, mrs. higgenblothem or something like that, who's there to spend one last Christmas at the lodge before she sells it to make way for a freeway because all the other guests have been scared away by random scary crap, caused by a mean old hermit who hates Christmas. There are an inordinate number of subplots which i won't bother getting into, but the end result is that mrs. higgenbotham's cranky bratty spoiled professional skier and figure-skater nephew, snively, has run away, and has now joined forces with the evil hermit, and they're singing a song about how they hate Christmas and they're mean and nasty and cruel etc, and at the end of the song they tr~ns%orm into #$vils.

in addition to the helicopter, there's a snowmobile and a big thing with tank treads and a lot of seats. oh, and a snow plow. wackiness ensues as random people chase each other and end up in piles of snow. in one chase scene in particular, the ranger and the hotel manager are chasing yogi and booboo, and they run into a pile of snow and pop out the top and the hotel manager says something pissy. and then they do it again. and again. and again and again and again and again and again and again and again.

here come a bunch of orphans at the last minute, completely out of nowhere. i didn't see this coming.

the orphans are grinning like crazy. they're just randomly stuck around, but there's a girl and a black kid in the foreground and they're smiling at each other like they're having a smile contest. i used to do a yogi bear impression as a kid, although all i said was "HEEEEEEY booBOO, let's go STEAL some PIC-a-nic BASkets!"

i had never seen the show.

the hermit wears a coonskin cap, mittens, and snowshoes, even indoors.

the girl bear is singing a SECOND song about kissing yogi.

well, yogi dressed up as Santa and handed out presents to everyone under the sun, even the hotel chef who appeared in three frames back in scene 12, and i thought maybe we were winding down now, but after all that the REAL Santa comes down the chimney, with ANOTHER bag of gifts.

everyone's very hostile toward Santa, for no observable reason. now yogi is tugging on his beard. in their defense i guess there have been four or five fake Santas through the course of this special, but none of them were plausible to anyone who had any sense. the orphans are simply ignoring Santa.

Santa Claus himself is trying to give yogi a picnic basket, but he has fallen asleep and can't be woken.

everyone thinks yogi is dead, and they're having a funeral procession for him, on skis. the camera wanders off to follow a squirrel for some reason.

The objectivity of æsthetics

2007-09-20T07:19:00.000-07:00

That skytopia guy came by the other day, I didn't catch him but it made me think about his "what is the most perfect tune" question. He has the rather unusual idea that beauty is not, as is commonly claimed, in the eye of the beholder.

Almost everyone has an incoherent conception of the subjectivity of art. On the one hand they'll say "of course it's subjective..." and on the other they'll say "this is the worst movie in the world" and they'll argue both sides till the end of their days.

But of course the two positions are mutually exclusive, and few people, if pressed, could really reconcile them.

I will break down the process of judging art thusly:

A given person has a CRITERION by which they judge something. It may be simple, it may be complex, it may be learned, it may be innate, it may be practical, it may be impractical, and it may match the criteria of other people to different degrees.

If everyone's criteria was absolutely, totally distinct from everyone else's, we would say æsthetics was totally subjective, and people wouldn't even try to argue about it. But this is difficult to imagine, because it bleeds into all kinds of practical concerns. Take architecture. Either you like doors which open onto blank walls, or you don't. A world full of people almost all of which don't care one way or the other just doesn't make sense. Seven billion people with judgment criteria so different that none of them overlap would be too narrowly focused to function.

Practical criteria are well-defined modules which are part of people's more nebulous general criteria. For instance, if we are designing a door, we generally want people to be able to go through it. Everyone who uses it may want to go through it for a different reason, it doesn't matter. The point is, they do, so that's the practical criterion, "can this door be gone through?"

There can also be practical criteria such as "is this door red?" or "does this paragraph explain how ice cubes are produced?". The important thing is not that people all want the same thing, but simply that the criterion is objectively defined.

Artistic criteria are black boxes. They are also modules that can be part of a more general system, but they are not well-defined. We can say what judgment our black boxes pass on various different inputs, and someone with a similar black box will be able to predict what judgment ours will pass, to the extent that their box would pass the same judgment. Someone without such a box will have to attempt to model what's going on inside, which is in many cases so difficult as to be practically impossible.

If we COULD completely model what was inside a black box, the artistic criterion would become a practical criterion.

The skytopia guy's theory, I think, is that inside everyone's black box for say, the appreciation of music, there can be identified a special "core" module which is the "true" criterion of musical worth, although this core may be broken or incomplete, and that everything else in the box is a subjective bias.

The idea being that if we removed the biases and repaired the core, we would have a well-defined criterion which would be the same for everyone, and furthermore would have some, in retrospect, obvious place as part of a formal system of mathematics and whatnot, and wouldn't be just an artifact of evolutionary psychology.

I think this is totally wrong.

Let me see if I can segue into whatever else I was going to talk about.....

Uh...

So, when people argue over whether a movie was good, does that then mean it's a totally subjective argument, just one black box against another, and thus totally pointless? No! Because the black boxes aren't static.

A big part of what makes them so inky is that merely by being used, they change. The same input won't get the same result the second time around. Some practical modules work this way as well. Consider the following:

If we're judging mystery novels simply by whether we can solve the mystery before the solution is revealed, and how inarguable the solution is when presented, then even if a mystery novel scores 2 out of 2 the first time around, it will only get 1 out of 2 on any subsequent reading, unless we have amnesia. Furthermore, any new mysteries which are sufficiently similar to this one we will be able to solve as well.

Even if we do not read mystery novels, as we go through life and get smarter and smarter, it will take more elaborate puzzles to confound us. Thus this criterion changes over time, in a well-defined way, and in a direction which is the same for everyone, except for people with brain problems.

To the extent that art involves the creator outwitting the audience, which is quite an extent indeed, this will always be a factor.

A more generalized version of this factor is simple novelty. In this case however, the resulting order comes from the fact that new things are built on top of old things. Someone who is used to TV will find only limited novelty in radio, because it's not like TV abandoned sound in favor of pictures, it has them both.

Because of these and other ways in which everyone's tastes change over time, we can say "you wouldn't like this movie if you were smarter" or "you wouldn't like this movie so much if you had seen movies X, Y, and Z" with significant confidence. When examined closely, we find it is not the intrinsic worth of the movie that we are really arguing about, but rather the development of the other person's tastes.

However.

Not ALL ways a person's tastes change lead in the same direction. If christmas comes around and we like to listen to christmas music, that doesn't mean christmas music is "better" or that it's an inevitable forward step in the musical timeline. Our love (or hatred) of christmas music oscillates on a one-year cycle.

Art branches out, too, into new mediums and new genres and new styles, and while within any one branch we can be see improvement, as the branches diverge comparison becomes increasingly difficult.

Can even subjective perfection be reached in any area? Only if we develop a well-defined, STATIC criterion. Most types of art, by their very nature, render this impossible, the mystery novel being again the obvious example.

And of course all these things are built slightly differently in different people, and thus there are always unresolvable disagreements. You can't even remove the personal tastes and get a "vanilla" subjective criterion, because personal tastes are what these things are built out of. It's like asking for an electrical outlet in a "default" shape, different countries have different outlets and there's no objective way to designate one as being the default. Which should be the big prong, right or left?

So, in conclusion, æsthetics is subjective, but the modules it's composed of can be objective, and to a significant degree everyone's æsthetics change in the same ways in response to them getting smarter and more experienced and so on, and as such are a reflection of objectively judgable qualities of that person if nothing else.

Negative Reviews of A Wrinkle In Time

2007-06-27T19:18:00.000-07:00

TOTAL CRAP!!!!!!!!!
By Yanni Trump "Catman" (Tierra del Fuego, Anatarctica)
This ranks up there with the "Giver", IT SUCKS!!! I'd rather watch grass grow on my front lawn, or better yet watch a documentary on the history of the ice cube tray. My teacher made my class read this book and there was nearly a revolt! It came to the point where a petition went around to put an end to the reading of the book. AM I THE ONLY PERSON WHO DOES NOT LIKE READING ABOUT TEENAGERS WITH SELF ESTEEM PROBLEMS BATTLING THEIR "INNER DEMONS"!?!?!?!?! This book was boring and made no sense! The sentances were long and winding and boring! One sentance might go on for pages!! IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO BE FOUND PASSED OUT WITH YOUR EYES ROLLED BACK IN YOUR HEAD DROOLING ON THE FLOOR DON'T READ THIS BOOK!!!! If you have already been lured by some evil to buy this book bring it onto your front lawn and burn it while chanting in tongues to the best of your ability. If you are already reading "A Wrinkle in Time" and can not stop yourself, send the book to me and I will hire an illiterate to rip it up for you. Trust me Il'l be doing you a favour! If you have yet to read the book.... SAVE YOURSELF WHILE YOU STILL CAN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Let me start form the top why I don't like it.
A Kid's Review
1. It is IMPOSSIBLE for anyone to travel in time or tesser as the book calles it.

2. No one could survive on a different planet and or moon if a space probe couldn't even survive 20 minutes.

3.This book is just a lot of blah blah blah.

4. A living brain that can control every one when everyone has their own brain, give me a break.

5. Even if you read this book 500 times, it has always the same plot line.
A girl named Meg travels in time with her brother, Charles Wallace and the love of her life, Calvin.
They travel with 3 witches, one is named Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. WHich and Mrs. WHo.

YAWWWWNNNNNNNNNN!
Reviewer: A reader
Blah blah blah who cares. Ugh, I didnt give a hoot if they [the main charcters] died or not. The villian: a brain and a cloud. Oh wow, nobody can beat that! Cheese,I could have written a better book. Mrs. L'Engle if your gonna write anymore books please dont write them like this horrible peice of liturature. I can't imagine what the newberry awards people were thinking when the gave this book its reward.

DO NOT WASTE A CENT ON THIS BOOK.DO NOT EVEN GET IT FOR FREE
By Bruce Wayne (Gotham City, USA)
A Wrinkle in Time is an extremely terrible book. Its attempt at science fiction is out of place and corny to the extreme. I read this book expecting it to be a decent novel, but instead I encountered garbage. Oh, and don't pay attention to the Newbery Medal Award that they awarded. They probably awarded it to A Wrinkle in Time because there were no other books published that year, so it won by default. Even then, it was more than likely that the people who gave the award were reluctant to do so. It only says that I gave it one star because there was no choice for 0 stars or lower. This book would be much more entertaining...if it were burnt.

This book is terrible. It's so bad, it's not even funny. The plot is worst pile of junk I have ever had the displeasure of reading the first 30 pages of...
Of all the history of books I've read which include great novels by authors such as Douglas Preston, etc. I have never come across such a bogus jumble of letters. The title seemed attractive to my 5th grade teacher a few years ago, so she decided to have us read it as a class. Boy was she in for a surprise. Not even a third into the book she canceled the assignment because of the poor quality of the book. Every five pages the author piled on this and that, this and that, like a fairy tale on crack. It was nearly impossible to concentrate on what was going on. It didn't seem like the author was trying to entertain the reader, but give him or her a tumor. It looks like a two-year-old wrote this. I have read the entire english dictionary in a day, and it was easier to understand and more entertaining than this.

This is an absolutely horrible book. Torture. We bought this as a book on tape to listen to in the car with the kids on a summer trip. All of us (40 yo, 38 yo, 14 yo, 11 yo) were miserable. We forced ourselves to listen to the whole thing because it's a "classic" and we kept thinking maybe we'd eventually get to some part of the story that would finally explain to us why people like it. During the story, my 14 yo observed that one of the reasons she hated the story was that the author seemed to try as hard as she could to sound intelligent to the listener (reader), but it just came across as annoying. We all ended up hoping that the characters would die in outer space.

I am a reading teacher and I have a list of books that the grade should read. This book is on the list so we have been reading it. I try to mask my negative feelings about this book. I had to force myself to finish it. It's boring and has many unanswered questions. The ending is just uneventful. Many students in my class hate this book, but I pretend it's very good and we have to finish it.

When I was in grade school, I tended to avoid anything that had some kind of award for excellence in children's literature. I was still trusting enough to assume they must be good, but had a general sense that they might not be much fun.

Having just read "Wrinkle in Time" for the first time as an adult, I realize that I was right to suspect it would not be much fun, and wrong about it being any good. The characters seem contrived and not very likeable, the science phony, the fantasy slipshod. There is certainly stuff here that may excite the imagination of a child, but nothing that plenty of other authors have not done a whole lot better.

The pseudo-scientific aura is largely phony. L'Engle's explanation of a "tesseract" is all wrong -- it is simply a 4-dimensional counterpart of a cube. Except for it's being extra dimensional, a tesseract has nothing to do with the notion of taking extra-dimensional shortcuts to distant locations in 3-dimensional space (a tesseract has no curves, as are required for the short-cut setup). I guess it is good that L'Engle tries to explain the idea of extra dimensions to kids, but since she scarcely seems to understand them herself, I'm not sure what good she does. Personally, I am glad that, as a child, I missed out on her attempts to confuse matters.

Stripped of these scientific pretensions, the story if just a fairy tale about a trio of kids who get wisked off by powerful supernatural beings to alien planets to do battle with a force of Cosmic Evil, and in the meantime hopefully rescue their missing father. The Evil Force, when we meet it, is certainly creepy enough, but all the goings on seem random and arbitrary, and nothing makes much sense. Supernatural happenings and events simply intervene whenever the author needs them to. Meanwhile, these extraterrestrial adventures mirror the main heroine's (Meg's) trouble with her difficulty fitting in at school.

I was mildly surprised at how overt the Christian religious references were. I have nothing against this, being a big C.S. Lewis fan (even Lewis was more subtle, however), but I certainly do not recall the Narnia books being pushed on us in public school. I guess the political explanation for this is that, while the book carries enough religious quotations and obvious name-dropping to please certain Christian parents, the author has so little to say, in applying these principles to the real world, that there is nothing for secularists to get upset about. Meanwhile, the story clearly portrays science and scientists as Good (Meg's parents are both genius physicists), so that, as bad as L'Engle's science is, shallow secularists are as pleased as shallow Christians.

In the end, the only real moral message is one of tolerance and diversity. Cosmic Evil is identified with the desire to force all children to be the same, to try to force them all into a single mold. Oh yeah, and various people get saved by the power of Love. Nothing to get upset about, but nothing to get excited about either.

Make food! Make egg!

2007-05-05T20:40:00.000-07:00

Find or create a facsimile of the pictures which provoked the following descriptions.

Some pictures provoked more than one description.

Descriptions may be inaccurate.

4
japan
bnjbnj

5
:O
totenkampf

6
lies
behind h

7
gOlf
rap music

8
uhhh
planet 10

9
gumby
kjhhlhuo

10
sudoku
no face

15
foob
rotating h

17
madness
aog bbbb

19
big spike thing

20
scotland clowns

21
boots
spike field

23
some creepy crap

27
dignity
brine tanks

37
scary man in corner

38
parp fb
tomo, i think

51
product
acme tube filler

57
satan
angry block of crap

76
age of kings
cube of monkeys

78
a b llll
doorway to dreamland

79
thriller
blinking cosmo stars

105
martian butts
ao ao ao ao aoo again

110
rumsfeld muppet
electric sizzleland

118
numbers and arrows
LOST writers' bible

130
anime no faces
industrial light and magic

132
dream within a dream
the pope's new groove

133
poison sac
everybody's poisoned by raymond

136
meet the bold guy
your improv comedy troupe

137
window to the stars
wall of cooper and swann

138
pig vomit
b&w pokey
whoooooooohs
shit landslide

142
Y
equinox
spike hole
stairs backed by dark place

143
known unknown
room thing decorated with things

144
bed
SMall
distant lemming
is that commander keen?

151
ge3
two poles
michel gondry
two pink lemmings poles

155
squidbat
robot squid monster
animated wand of arrows

157
L
fandango
not a lobster
flowery surfaces next to pink

159
555555553
yay cone!
synthesizer
spike platform in chaos

164
W
line terror
conan o'brien
strange stairs next to window

168
sleepover
a a a ao ao o oo a a a a oao oaoaroo a oo ao

170
D
mouse hole
stairway to 100x100
corner of room with stairs

171
Q
beef
more dots in mazetown
stairs with cyan and pink dots

173
puke
chaotic colors
the ebert factor
colourful diamonds yay

177
invisible spaceman
mid nineties novelty artist jill sobule

179
H
hedge bucket
spiked ms paint ball
abstract depth charge art

184
bouncy rectangle
all right, now it's time to do things MY way

186
people splashed in paint
tepid conversations from waking life

188
B
quorum
colorful wall panels
illusionist keyboard catgirl manga

189
O
glue
vector tree nightmare
yellow quadrilateral and green line

190
M
ghost bus
a mushroom and junk
6 celled mushroom sand butter box

191
N
sierra leone
DROD meets ROBOT
chess eye, swordsman, and planets

192
the truth...
census graph
meaningless graph
everybody's dead dave

201
A
texas
tunnel in colorful substrate
lost pipe [CLASSIFIED]

202
nm4e
billions of ramps
pokey the red thing
beige beam on dark surface

203
tg
how to count
snowlock clover password
ugly number line with doodles

206
mega man 2
keen trer4gf
spooky spike cave
dogscreaming eskimo telephone

212
R
melty
eyestalk in chaos
cosmo looks on from his crushed skull in horror

213
Z
goblin bus
messy shafts
follow the red dotted line to ultimate new york

214
V
the green thing
line terror growth squad
stranger stairs next to window

215
stars!
cosmo stars
colorful stars
stanley kubrick's 2001: a space odyssey

216
ugly planet
puke air vent
clown meat processor
mold in a ventilation duct

219
J
hexaboggle
alien and captain comic power
atomic gumball cosmo clusterfuck

221
U
window into your soul
large room with window
these hallways look like doom

223
look it's art
black star mess
the end of the world
black and white star crap

224
C
pixel
cyan dots and scribble
half of a stickman with a tail and two cyan dots

227
555555552bv2
house of columns
now you're going to hell
eerie lemmings structures

229
war
everyone wins
arrows and a smiley on a grid
smiley hat guy radiating circular

244
rotating chairs on a wall
richard nixon appearing on rowan and martin's laugh in, saying "sock it to me!"

245
vacation
red a a mgo f
hellish underground bordering chaos
oh look it's that hercules movie that disney made

254
my kitchen
pee all over the place
blizzard's new MMO is about this guy
bowls, floating urinator, and shocked woman in large room

255
coareb
blue shell and colorful mess
Miss Natalia's Nasty plastic novelty for kids
09-F9-11-02-9D-74-E3-5B-D8-41-56-C5-63-56-88-C0

Animals could be bred and SLAUGHTERED...

2006-09-28T23:14:00.000-07:00

Idea

2006-09-11T16:20:00.000-07:00

You know that computer game, "The Incredible Machine"? How about a game called "The Impossible Machine", a realistic physics simulation in which you're given various tools and parts and have to construct a machine capable of perpetual motion, faster than light travel, or solving the halting problem?

Ha ha! It'd probably be possible due to bugs. Except for that last one.

A story about skepticism and buildings falling down

2006-09-06T14:58:00.000-07:00

You may have seen this picture before. It's building 7 of the world trade center, and it's falling down.

What does it mean to be skeptical, in the good sense?

Skepticism means suspending belief, being systematically critical of all ideas. Are you a skeptic?

Being a skeptic means you trust your own judgment more than you trust the judgment of others. Of course, sometimes we must trust the judgment of others. If your vet recommends a new type of cat food, you have no way of making sure that decision is sound. She has the information, she has the expertise. You have no choice but to trust her.

Except you don't, because now we have the internet.

Suddenly it's not just you and the vet, it's you and the vet and thousands of other vets and researchers and cat owners and raw data, and you can synthesize your own opinions.

To skeptics, discovering the internet is like finding a flashlight in a world shrouded in darkness. Their lives are changed forever.

Are you a skeptic?

Really?

Some of you see where this is going, and you're ready to cut me off at the pass. "We're just not INTERESTED in conspiracy theories," you say. "No offence, but we just don't care."

Don't CARE? I'm telling you there's a monster in the rafters, and you don't even care enough to shine the flashlight in that direction? The "just not interested" excuse held water in the old days, when research meant going down to the library to wade through hundreds of old newspapers on microfilm, tracking down people and interviewing them, lengthy and expensive investigations with minimal payoff. But it's 2006. This would take an AFTERNOON.

Today I read an article in TIME titled Why The 9/11 Conspiracies Won't Go Away. "Turns out, we need grand theories to make sense of grand events, or the world just seems too random".

The interesting thing about most articles concerning the 9/11 conspiracy is that they don't really talk about the actual content of the theories. They always mention the stupid missile hitting the pentagon thing, and then the rest is a "people" story about those loony wacky nuts.

If you get your news from mainstream sources, you probably don't even know what the conspiracy theories say. Heck, you probably don't even know what the OFFICIAL story says, beyond "Osama bin Laden had some crazy guys hijack planes and fly them into buildings".
The official story says the flight data recorders of the four crashed planes were "unrecoverable", an aviation first
But who can blame you for being incurious?
Multiple military wargames and simulations were underway the morning of 9/11
Conspiracy nonsense just isn't your bag.
One simulating the crash of a plane into a building
Now the cat thing, that's important.
Another, a live-fly simulation of multiple hijackings
If your cat doesn't eat his food, he could get a liver condition and die.
Cell phones don't work at 30,000 feet
And once you're done researching cat food, you have to go cut up some brush, and read the works of Camus.
George HW Bush and Dick Cheney spent the evening of September 10 alone in the Oval Office
Doesn't mean you're not a skeptic.
George HW Bush and Shafig bin Laden, Osama's brother, spent the morning of September 11 together at a board meeting of the Carlyle Group
You're just not skeptical of the official story.

9/11 conspiracy addendum:

If you DO believe 9/11 was an inside job, please talk about it. Tell your friends, tell your family, tell your internet audience and your psychiatrist and anyone else you know.

Don't be a wuss.

In addition to the obvious need for discussion and argument about the matter, you may find you have friends who already know, and you're both just too polite or too cowardly to bring it up.

Plus, if you keep your mouth shut and then the whole thing blows open and you say "I knew it all along", you're going to get some nasty looks. From me.

Sensitive personal data

2006-08-17T01:51:00.000-07:00

Now presenting all my sensitive personal data, with which you could track me down and kill me.

Favorite muppet: Waldorf
Least favorite muppet: Scooter

The oceans are devolving

2006-08-12T21:54:00.000-07:00

After suffering painful skin lesions, fisherman Greg Savige took a sealed bag of the weed in 2000 to Barry Carbon, then director-general of the Queensland Environmental Protection Agency. He warned Carbon to be careful with it, as it was "toxic stuff." Carbon replied that he knew all about cyanobacteria from western Australian waters and that there was nothing to worry about.

Then he opened the bag and held it close to his face for a sniff.

"It was like smearing hot mustard on the lips," the chastened official recalled.

Aboriginal fishermen had spotted the weed in small patches years earlier, but it had moved into new parts of the bay and was growing like never before.

Each spring, Lyngbya bursts forth from spores on the seafloor and spreads in dark green-and-black dreadlocks. It flourishes for months before retreating into the muck. Scientists say it produces more than 100 toxins. This was originally thought to be a defense mechanism, but it has since been found that the toxins are produced for no particular reason.

Years ago, Rabalais popularized a term for this broad area off the Louisiana coast: the "dead zone." In fact, dead zones aren't really dead. They are teeming with life — most of it bacteria and other ancient creatures that evolved in an ocean without oxygen and that need little to survive.

"There are tons and tons of bacteria that live in dead zones," Rabalais said. "You see this white snot-looking stuff all over the bottom."

Other primitive life thrives too. A few worms do well, and jellyfish feast on the banquet of algae and microbes and lambs and sloths and carp and anchovies and orangutans and breakfast cereals, and fruit bats and large chu...

The 55-foot commercial trawler working the Georgia coast sagged under the burden of a hefty catch. The cables pinged and groaned as if about to snap.

Working the power winch, ropes and pulleys, Grovea Simpson hoisted the net and its dripping catch over the rear deck. With a tug on the trip-rope, the bulging sack unleashed its massive load.

Plop. Splat. Whoosh. About 2,000 pounds of cannonball jellyfish slopped onto the deck. The jiggling, cantaloupe-size blobs ricocheted around the stern and slid down an opening into the boat's ice-filled hold.

The deck was streaked with purple-brown contrails of slimy residue; a stinging, ammonia-like odor filled the air.

"That's the smell of money," Simpson said, all smiles at the haul. "Jellyballs are thick today. Seven cents a pound. Yes, sir, we're making money."

Jellyfish populations are growing because they can. The fish that used to compete with them for food have become scarce because of overfishing. The sea turtles that once preyed on them are nearly gone. And the plankton they love to eat are growing explosively.

As their traditional catch declines, fishermen around the world now haul in 450,000 tons of jellyfish per year, more than twice as much as a decade ago.

This is a logical step in a process that Daniel Pauly, a fisheries scientist at the University of British Columbia, calls "fishing down the food web." Fishermen first went after the largest and most popular fish, such as tuna, swordfish, cod and grouper. When those stocks were depleted, they pursued other prey, often smaller and lower on the food chain.

"We are eating bait and moving on to jellyfish and plankton," Pauly said.

Crudely manipulated photographs

2006-08-09T10:43:00.000-07:00

Being miserable doesn't necessarily mean you're doing something wrong

2006-08-07T08:26:00.000-07:00

This is a reply to Seven Reasons the 21st Century is Making Us Miserable

What's more important to you, truth or happiness?

In discussions of feelings, we (and by we I mean you) often lose sight of the fact that satisfying our animal needs, good or evil, is not the only thing we're after.

It's true that in the modern world we've eschewed normal human contact, and that we're suffering for it. But it's a tradeoff that I for one am more than willing to make. Normal human contact boils down to nothing more than being a peg in a hole. Yes, that's what we're evolved to do. Yes, it makes us happy. Are those good reasons to do it?

Infinite loops

2006-08-03T11:18:00.000-07:00

I couldn't think of anything to write about, so here are the rules for handling infinite loops in "magic: the gathering"

421. Handling "Infinite" Loops

421.1. Occasionally the game can get into a state in which a set of actions could be repeated forever. These rules (sometimes called the "infinity rules") govern how to break such loops.

421.2. If the loop contains one or more optional actions and one player controls them all, that player chooses a number. The loop is treated as repeating that many times or until another player intervenes, whichever comes first.

421.3. If a loop contains optional actions controlled by two players and actions by both of those players are required to continue the loop, the first player (or the first involved player after the active player in turn order) chooses a number. The other player then has two choices. He or she can choose a lower number, in which case the loop continues that number of times plus whatever fraction is necessary for the active player to "have the last word." Or he or she can agree to the number the first player chose, in which case the loop continues that number of times plus whatever fraction is necessary for the second player to "have the last word." (Note that either fraction may be zero.) This sequence of choices is extended to all applicable players if there are more than two players involved.
Example: In a two-player game, one player controls a creature with the ability "{0}: [This creature] gains flying," and another player controls a permanent with the ability "{0}: Target creature loses flying." The "infinity rule" ensures that regardless of which player initiated the gain/lose flying ability, the nonactive player will always have the final choice and therefore be able to determine whether the creature has flying. (Note that this assumes that the first player attempted to give the creature flying at least once.)

421.4. If the loop contains only mandatory actions, the game ends in a draw. (See rule 102.4b.)

421.5. If the loop contains optional actions controlled by different players and these actions don't depend on one another, the active player chooses a number. In APNAP order, the nonactive players can each either agree to that number or choose a higher number. Note that this rule applies even if the actions could exist in separate loops rather than in a single loop.

THE TOP 10 MISTAKES OF FIRST TIME SMALL BUSINESS ENTREPRENEURIAL REVENUE VALUE MAKERS

2006-07-25T07:35:00.000-07:00

Mistake #10: Not wearing a tie

Just because you're self employed, you think you can make money without wearing a tie? Dream on, my friend! Wear a tie at all times, even in the bath, or no one will take you seriously, including the most important person of all: YOURSELF.

Mistake #9: Not enough ads

People tend to shy away from slapping ads on everything, but can you think of a better way to make money? What do you do now that's so great? I thought so.

Mistake #8: Failing to get people's attention

Here we see a page with google adword adsense textads. But you can barely see them! What's needed here is a bold color scheme, to make potential customers give a damn.

There! Much better.

Mistake #7: Failure to embrace laissez-faire capitalism

Whenever anyone wants something, they should have to pay for it. Someday the corrupted civilization we live in will collapse in flames because all the movers and shakers will leave and start turnip farms in a hidden valley where the dinosaurs still exist. Who will be laughing then? No one, I guess.

MagentaSalmon: Who IS john galt? We just don't know.
SkyBlueSalmon: he's some stupid idiot!
SkyBlueSalmon: there, i solved the mystery, ayn rand! you piece of crap!

Mistake #6: Choosing a topic that's too obscure

If you want people to read your blog, you have to write about something they care about. The only topics that will net you the millions of readers you'll need in order to survive on ad revenue are subjects that everyone is interested in, like the da vinci code or sex or how to become an internet millionaire.

Mistake #5: Soul-crushing depression

Whether you think you CAN or you CAN'T, you're right. If your blog fails to attract a readership of millions, it's only because you didn't believe in yourself. As well as a host of other, much more important things, which you can do nothing about.

Mistake #4: Not enough tax fraud

The government has plenty of money, and frankly they're not spending it very well anyway. Lie on your taxes! No one's going to check.

Mistake #3: Eating

Where do you think all your money's going, stupid?

Mistake #2: Giving up too early

It takes a lot of work to get your internet revenue streams going. After a few years of beating your head against the wall, THEN you can give up. But don't come crying to me, because I'll be in another town at that point, selling musical instruments.

Mistake #1: Too many images

Nothing will jinx your internet hojillionairehood like using too many images. They baffle readers who use text-only browsers, slow page load times, screw up your search engine rankings, and anger the gods. Every time you post an image on your website, Zeus puts a bean in your karma jar. When that jar gets full, you get struck by lightning.

2006-07-23T20:51:00.000-07:00

You ever run into one of those self-employed people who just won't shut up about the amazing world of self-employment? About how they make $5000 a month from their weblog and they run a tire-cleaning service or something and they just couldn't be happier? And you start to think to yourself "hey, maybe I could do that" and they say "sure you can, it's easy!" and you think to yourself "hey, it IS easy" but then they just go on and on about producing value and the new weblog tools and synergy and you start to think "wait, maybe it's just easy for them because they loved this kind of bullshit from the start. Maybe they only manage to do it because they're horrible mouth breathers who spend every waking moment fiddling with their sidebars and joining 'blog carnivals', whatever those are, and writing idiotic essays like THE TOP TEN MISTAKES OF FIRST TIME SMALL BUSINESS ENTREPRENEURIAL REVENUE VALUE MAKERS"

And then you think "why did I write that all as one paragraph"

My point is, I've decided to become an internet bajillionaire, so now you're going to see ads on the blog. THOUSANDS OF THEM. And stock photos of men in business suits, like this:

Also I'll be posting more. Ha ha! Just kidding!

I CAN VOUCH FOR MARANDA'S CHARACTER (IF NEEDED)

2006-05-07T18:51:00.000-07:00

Oh goody, another thing about piracy and ethics. If you don't care about the ethics of piracy one way or the other, feel free to skip this.

When I was a little kid, the word of the day was that sharing was good. The prime example of sharing was the public library, where you could read books for free.

Now it turns out sharing is evil. Filesharing in particular is very evil. Libraries are still good though, because books are somehow different than music in some magical, magical way which no one seems able to explain.

I think piracy is a fine and noble thing, and I'm sure this comes as no shock to you. It's hardly a radical opinion anymore, and my readers are just the sort of people who like to take their morning tea on the cutting edge of modern culture. I assume so at least, maybe I'm wrong and you're all Freemasons or middle schoolers from Ohio or something but regardless of that, there are a large number of people who share my pro-filesharing position.

There's something that annoys me about my compatriots.

On filesharing networks, if you download from somebody and don't share the files out again, that's considered leeching and a horrible thing. They've subverted the old economy only to try and reinstate a new one, but it's totally absurd. The whole point of the thing is that economic models of obligation and payment don't apply to information, but people just can't seem to let go.

When it comes down to it, i don't think I've met a single person whose system of ethics regarding "intellectual property" was internally consistent.

Why is it that no one seems to understand how share ratios work on bittorrent? When yours goes up, mine goes down. When yours goes down, mine goes up. If you multiply everyone's ratio together, it equals 1. ALWAYS. SOME OF THE RATIOS WILL ALWAYS BE GREATER THAN ONE AND SOME OF THEM WILL ALWAYS BE LESS THAN ONE. IT'S NOT BECAUSE PEOPLE ARE EVIL LEECHING SCUMBAGS, IT'S BECAUSE OF MATH.

Furthermore, share ratios don't even MATTER. If you uploaded any data at all, you're a good person. It doesn't matter how much you downloaded, because downloading doesn't affect anyone but you.

UPLOADING AND DOWNLOADING ARE TWO ENDS OF THE SAME PROCESS, FOLKS. YOU CAN'T HAVE MORE OF ONE THAN THE OTHER.

Even if you always download and never upload, it's not as though you're HOARDING THE DATA. It's not as though you have overdue library books, because the books are still in the library, you have copies.

Jesus!

Ethics: Threat or menace?

2006-04-24T23:17:00.000-07:00

When most people talk about ethics, they mean general guidelines like avoiding nepotism and not stealing cheese wedges. On one side of the table is ethics, we are told, and on the other side is self interest, largely represented by greed. Unless you're talking to an objectivist, in which case ethics and self interest are on the same side of the table and I forget what's on the other side. Selflessness, I guess? Anyway, I see both these situations as deeply flawed.

The problem is that they ignore the big picture. Consider lee harvey oswald, einstein, or the guy who composed "baby elephant walk". Does anyone give a damn whether they littered or stole office supplies or defended a woman's right to choose or cheated on their sixth grade social studies homework? It's overshadowed by their more major influence on the world, and rightly so.

The problem is that most people don't HAVE a major influence on the world, and they don't try to exert one. Instead, they become microscopically focused on the moral repercussions of their tiny, pitiful lives. Maybe it comes down to religion. Someone who makes a tiny positive impact goes to heaven, someone who makes a tiny negative impact goes to hell. In reality, neither of them deserve moral recognition at all, because it just doesn't make any damn difference what they do.

Then again, maybe it's a nature thing. The idea that the world is a delicate balance is very appealing to people, for a number of very bad reasons. In actuality, the world is a runaway train, and making sure that your little glass of orange juice doesn't tip over in the dining car is not going to stop it from crashing.

Gender neutral pronouns

2006-04-17T10:48:00.000-07:00

Sometimes when writing or speaking we want to talk about someone without making reference to their gender, because we don't know it, it isn't relevent, or the person is hypothetical. Yet english offers no gender neutral pronoun. What are we to do?

Use the singular they. The only disadvantage is that you lose the pronoun distinction between individuals and groups, but the same is true of the second person pronoun "you" and that doesn't seem to bother anyone, now does it?

Granted this doesn't work in all instances. You can't say "fred had their hair cut" instead of "fred had his hair cut", but it's fairly obvious that fred is a boy anyway, so what do you gain by using gender neutral pronouns? Well, something. But there's nothing wrong with using "they" most of the time.

It's the most practical solution, yet the grammar people bitch about arbitrary rules and the gender people push for new words like pe and smee which will never be adopted by the general public. Why is everyone so impractical?

Fictional Dialog #1

2006-04-15T12:41:00.000-07:00

Troy thumbed through the in-flight magazine, occasionally glancing to his left at the nervous wizard in the seat beside him. The wizard figeted with his pointy hat, acutely aware that everyone around him was wearing suits and ties and other business clothes items.

"First time on a plane?" Troy asked.

"Yeah," exhaled the wizard. "Usually I travel by portal, but I have some very delicate equipment this time, and it would be damaged by the spatial distortion."

"Say, how do magic portals work?" asked Troy. "I've never been through one."

"Magic" replied the wizard absently.

"Ah" said Troy, sheepishly. "But I mean, I've always been curious about what's on the back side of the arch. Is it just a wall, or is there a second portal, or..."

"Haha, no, no..." said the wizard, brightening. "Actually that's a common misconception. There IS no arch, the portal is spherical. Half of it is below ground."

"But..." pondered Troy, "if it's spherical... don't you just get a spherical section of the other world?"

"it's kind of complicated" said the wizard, trying to open his package of airplane snacks. "the space inside the sphere is actually missing in BOTH worlds, or more accurately, it's bent outward... aren't these supposed to be peanuts? I see pretzels and cracker things..."

"I think they replaced the peanuts for allergy reasons" said Troy. "But, ok, I still don't understand. It doesn't look like a bubble, it looks like an arch, at least on TV. What am I actually seeing?"

"You're seeing the spatial distortion" said the wizard. "Light that passes near the edge of the portal or passes through at an angle becomes bent, like water in a whirlpool." He gestured ineffectually with his hands. "If you're looking straight into the portal, the world on the other side looks normal. As your gaze drifts toward the edge, it looks increasingly skinny and jammed together, like a funhouse mirror. There's a whole 360 degree panorama, compressed into a very small space, and then again in an even smaller one, etc. etc. until it blurs together into what you see as the 'arch'."

"I see..." said Troy, not seeing.

"The same thing is true in the other direction," continued the wizard. "If you're looking over here, to the right of the portal, and you shift your gaze toward it, you'll see your own world is distorted in the same way, and again we have the infinite series of skinnier and skinnier panoramas that converge into the 'arch'. You can even see YOURSELF in them."

"What does the portal look like from the other side, once you've passed through it?" asked Troy.

"The same," said the wizard "Only the world you left is inside the bubble. As you go through the portal, it seems to get bigger and bigger. If you're standing with one foot in each world, the portal appears to be a huge wall, separating the world in two. You can see many copies of yourself, mostly from the back. Some of them are upside down in what should be the sky."

"That sounds terrifying" said Troy. "After getting used to that, an airplane ride is probably pretty boring, huh?"

"Well, in a way I guess." said the wizard morosely. "It's disorienting, but it's basically just an optical illusion. There's no physical sensation to it. If you had your eyes closed you'd never know you had walked through a portal at all."

"But it's damaging to your equipment?" asked Troy.

"People don't notice the distortion because we're flexible and relatively small compared to the portal. It all has to do with rigidity and size. My equipment is rather bulky and mostly made of glass."

The conversation was cut short by the arrival of the dinner cart. Troy had the fish and the wizard had the lasagna. Aristotle, watching them from the wing of the plane, had nothing.

What is art?

2006-04-12T20:10:00.000-07:00

What IS art? It's a difficult question, and no one on the internet has anything approaching a realistic answer, which irritates me. Here's MY definition.

Art is anything created, performed, or instigated with artistic intent.

Ah, but isn't THIS a bit weasely, you say. What's artistic intent, then? It's the intent to make art. So the definition is cyclic.

Cyclic, yes. Tautological, no. I'm not just saying art is art, I'm saying it's anything INTENDED to be art, BY whoever makes it.

It's still a fairly useless definition! But that's because it's a fairly useless word. Why do we care about the definition of a word that no one can define?

Dean Trembly once said "words are the tools of thought". The word "art" confuses us because it doesn't seem to be good for anything, yet it feels like it must be. But the truth is, it's NOT good for anything.

It's just a poorly defined category.

The problem is that people think art has some inherent magical value, that by belonging to this category their work should enjoy some special status in the eyes of civilization. But it's just not true.

If someone nails two boards together and plugs it into the wall with an extension cord, and they call it "art", it is art. But that doesn't make it worthwhile any more than the fact that it's "technology" or "solid" or "two boards nailed together plugged into the wall with an extension cord".

It's kind of like the star bellied sneetches, although I'm too lazy to find a picture.

The end.

Rectangles

2006-04-08T21:52:00.000-07:00

# 05/10/05 - My favorite rectangle is the black one!! Thanks for entertaining my Math-overloaded brain!
# 05/07/05 - I chose number one because I thought it was a square, but after finding out it wasn't I feel betrayed...
# 04/02/05 - I picked rect 8 then rect 7 I feel dirty.....ImmutableDark
# 03/26/05 - Whoa! This site IS gay!
# 02/19/05 - I feel safe with the golden rectangle, I can recognize him many times
# 01/01/05 - the rectangles are too close together to appreciate their differences
# 12/21/04 - It appears the golden rectangle is not so "golden" when presented vertically.
# 12/15/04 - i still don't see what's pleasing about a stupid rectangle, it's just a stupid shape that we use in geometry class, what is the pleasance?
# 12/14/04 - What is wrong with all you people?!? are all of you on crack?? you guys are [deleted, probably "fucking"] stupid!
# 07/29/04 - I thought 6 was pleasing, and was amused to find it was actually the 'golden' one. Though it's actually black, of course... a colour that reminds me of the darkness that occasionally envelops my soul. Hmm, now that I notice it the rectangles... they all are black! Cold, sunless, endless black! BLACK! Aaaaaaa
# 05/14/04 - AHH RECTANGLE 1 MAKES ME WANT TO THROW UP FOR SOME REASON, WHILE 3 AND 6 MAKE ME FEEL ORGANIZED. WOAH [Jim: By the way, typing all caps is known as "shouting"]
# 05/10/04 - All I know is that the first one is quite possible the ugliest rectangle I have ever seen. Yes, you should do a poll on the ugliest rectangle and I think that one would win.
# 04/30/04 - Jim, which rectangle is most pleasing to you? [Jim: 7 in this poll, and 8 in poll #2]
# 04/30/04 - Jim im disappointed number seven should be the golden rectangle. I just got jiped!
# 04/30/04 - Jim, I wish I would have picked the golden rectangle.
# 04/30/04 - this really [deleted, maybe "shit"?].....people have no life...you have no life...if you have any comment [deleted, possibly something like "fuck off"] and contact [email address deleted]
# 04/27/04 - I liked the seventh triangle just because.
# 04/27/04 - I liked the first rectangle because it is almost square and that is more even and visually pleasing to my eye.
# 04/26/04 - 6 rules
# 04/24/04 - I think that one rectangle's votes will stabalized over time to represent roughtly 8.723%, making the bar chart rendering (above) a golden rectangle, regardless of if it was, itself, golden.
# 04/09/04 - I wasn't trying to pick "The Golden" rectangle. I was only picking out the rectangle that was most pleasing to me. I missed by a mile by picking number 8.
# 04/08/04 - i like the skirt joke hahaha
# 04/02/04 - This is ****ing [almost certainly "fuck"] retarded, you're all losers that need lives. [Jim: my censoring]
# 03/30/04 - Hi, I'm Deryck from Hong Kong, aged 13. When I saw that 8 rectangles, I thought I chose a special rectangle which was extraodinary... But when I revealed the results---- oh my god, that 'strange thing' that I chose was the golden rectangle!!!! Jim, I GIVE UP!!!
# 03/27/04 - If you look back over the time trend of the results of your poll is there a shift as more people move to wide screen TV? [Jim: I don't know]
# 03/17/04 - Never heard of the golden rectangle until now, but I picked it. PROOF that the ancient Greeks were RIGHT!
# 03/16/04 - I think that the rectangles are so close together that judgements about what is most pleasing will be affected by their neighbors; probably a good scientific study would display only one at a time, or only pairs. Also the issue of screen resolution is a serious one; on the Mac, pixels are square, but on most Windows systems, they are not. All that said, it's an interesting study; thanks for putting it up.
# 11/23/03 - Why do people make sarcastic comments in here? It is so rude!!!!!!!!!!!!!
# 11/23/03 - I don't judge rectangle by their outsides, I think it is what's inside that counts
# 10/22/03 - secks?
# 10/01/03 - Are you doing this all manually? No wonder you couldnt figure out Access... [It is mostly automated, now]
# 05/09/03 - [Jim says: Today someone submitted rectangle #6 65 times. I'm counting that as one vote]
# 02/21/03 - looks like a triangle of rectangles... sorry!
# 12/28/02 - My choices did not include a 5
# 12/28/02 - the entire web is out of sync with me!
# 12/13/02 - hmm
# 09/16/02 - please tell me why you are asking?
# 09/12/02 - What's the deal with 'pleasing rectangles'?
# 01/25/05 - I feel that the polls differ because how we see the rectangles is a reflection of how we see ourselves.
# 01/22/05 - THE BELL CURVE SEEMS TO BE WHAT YOU ARE SHOWING. MORE PEOPLE PICK THE MIDDLE CHOICE AND THEN LESS ON EACH SIDE OF THAT. I FOUND THAT INTERESTING.
# 01/22/05 - I think the reasons for the discrepancy between poll 1 and poll 2 is that most people's monitors are NOT adjusted properly and show each rectangle out of proportion.
# 01/08/05 - You prefer #7; do you own an HD TV?
# 01/05/05 - Excellent site Jim.
# 12/28/04 - Perhaps those who like #7 in poll #2 have widescreen televisions at home? Those TV's have aspect ratios of 16:9, which is very close to the 49:28 dimensions of #7.
# 12/15/04 - this is a very interesting idea. good for you
# 12/14/04 - ghj,hujkyikvbnfh fgh f gn rrfgjhrfgh werfnmt gh ryujkmrrqef egdh aer tm,y,sew rt

The 20 biggest tools of all time

2006-04-05T10:24:00.000-07:00

1. The Hammer
2. The Bucket
3. The Ladder
4. The String
5. Paste
6. Copy
7. The Horse
8. The Sign
9. The Color TV Set
10. The Hat
11. Antifreeze
12. The Gas Chromatograph
13. The Baby
14. The Post-it Note
15. The Item
16. The Tape Dispenser
17. Bees
18. The UFO
19. The Hammer (remix)
20. You

Problems

2006-03-29T06:56:00.000-08:00

A commentator writes:

Dear Kasey: I have a problem and I would appreciate it if you would address it somehow. I am affiliated with a small group of people who [blah blah blah]

Step 1: Get new friends

If you have any more problems, I'll be happy to solve them!

The big empty

2006-03-27T09:37:00.000-08:00

They say you can't judge a book by its cover, but I think it's a fairly good bet that I won't find anything worth reading in "kiss tomorrow hello - notes from the midlife underground by twenty-five women over forty", "bloodline of the holy grail - the hidden lineage of Jesus revealed", or "wide angle - national geographic greatest places".

I meant to write something regarding things that norman mailer said, but now it's hard to recapture the feeling that they're even worth responding to. While reading a book, it feels like the real world is important, but as soon as I pull out my laptop and illegally connect to "happynet", a wireless network that extends into the corner of the bookstore, norman mailer seems small and irrelevent.

The bush administration.

How does it feel to hear those words? Do they fill you with hate, with disgust? Truth be told, I don't particularly hate them. Sure, they're evil. But so are lots of people, that doesn't make them unlikable. I'd rather be stuck on a desert island with karl rove and dick cheney than with the random idiots who voted for them, because at least rove and cheney are reasonably intelligent people. They're bastards, but they're no more satanic than many of the people you talk to every day.

Here's a thing from an article someone once printed out and gave me, from the new yorker:

Converse claimed that only around ten per cent of the public has what can be called, even generously, a political belief system. He named these people “ideologues,” by which he meant not that they are fanatics but that they have a reasonable grasp of “what goes with what”—of how a set of opinions adds up to a coherent political philosophy. Non-ideologues may use terms like “liberal” and “conservative,” but Converse thought that they basically don’t know what they’re talking about, and that their beliefs are characterized by what he termed a lack of “constraint”: they can’t see how one opinion (that taxes should be lower, for example) logically ought to rule out other opinions (such as the belief that there should be more government programs). About forty-two per cent of voters, according to Converse’s interpretation of surveys of the 1956 electorate, vote on the basis not of ideology but of perceived self-interest. The rest form political preferences either from their sense of whether times are good or bad (about twenty-five per cent) or from factors that have no discernible “issue content” whatever. Converse put twenty-two per cent of the electorate in this last category. In other words, about twice as many people have no political views as have a coherent political belief system.

Just because someone’s opinions don’t square with what a political scientist recognizes as a political ideology doesn’t mean that those opinions aren’t coherent by the lights of some more personal system of beliefs. But Converse found reason to doubt this possibility. When pollsters ask people for their opinion about an issue, people generally feel obliged to have one. Their answer is duly recorded, and it becomes a datum in a report on “public opinion.” But, after analyzing the results of surveys conducted over time, in which people tended to give different and randomly inconsistent answers to the same questions, Converse concluded that “very substantial portions of the public” hold opinions that are essentially meaningless—off-the-top-of-the-head responses to questions they have never thought about, derived from no underlying set of principles. These people might as well base their political choices on the weather. And, in fact, many of them do.

Findings about the influence of the weather on voter behavior are among the many surveys and studies that confirm Converse’s sense of the inattention of the American electorate. In election years from 1952 to 2000, when people were asked whether they cared who won the Presidential election, between twenty-two and forty-four per cent answered “don’t care” or “don’t know.” In 2000, eighteen per cent said that they decided which Presidential candidate to vote for only in the last two weeks of the campaign; five per cent, enough to swing most elections, decided the day they voted.

Seventy per cent of Americans cannot name their senators or their congressman. Forty-nine per cent believe that the President has the power to suspend the Constitution. Only about thirty per cent name an issue when they explain why they voted the way they did, and only a fifth hold consistent opinions on issues over time.

The theater of the new ear

2006-03-22T13:40:00.000-08:00

I was just listening to a radio play called "the theater of the new ear". Actually it was two radio plays bundled together, one by the coen brothers and one by charlie kaufman.

They sucked! This is somewhat suprising, because I generally like the coen brothers and charlie kaufman. I'll concentrate on kaufman's play because he's the natural target of criticism, and also his was a lot longer. Or at least it felt a lot longer.

It's mainly the inner monolog of a woman at a play, who's very self-absorbed and has many personal problems. Her cell phone goes off, meryl streep yells at her, she goes on a bus ride in the rain, etc. The radio play ends with a critic breaking the fourth wall and giving it a bad review, and while this is somewhat enjoyable, it's really not enough of a payoff to bother sitting through all the whiny crap for.

What bothers me is that the thing's post-modern claim to fame was basically just self-referentiality and an inventive use of panning to seperate multiple streams of audio.

Which firesign theater did better, and several decades ago, and managed to be funny at the same time, and top of all THAT, firesign theater had a POINT, for fuck's sake! They actually had something to communicate! Kaufman admits his play is a failure, but I think it's actually a much bigger failure than he realizes.

The coen brothers one was bad too.

Predictions

2006-03-21T22:05:00.000-08:00

Swinburne: So why are the most general laws of the multiverse as they are? Why do all particles behave in exactly the same way as each other, so as together ultimately to produce human life? This enormous coincidence in particle behaviour requires explaining. I've got a good theory which explains it [God]; you haven't.

Dennett: From my perspective, your imaginative attempt at an inference to the best explanation is telling for the one thing it lacks: a single striking prediction. That's why it can't be taken seriously as a contender against a purely secular and materialist theory of cosmic and biological and cultural evolution.

Swinburne: I don't think that it is in any way important that science should make predictions.

Remembering

2006-03-20T18:24:00.000-08:00

Two or three posts ago, I was relating two comical observations. When I went to write that post, I realized I had forgotten the second one. I had no idea what it was, except for a vague sense that it was a gray, inert sort of idea, and double-sided, like a yo-yo. At the time I had no idea what this entailed, it's not as though I consciously code my thoughts this way.

When I forget something like this, that only exists in my mind, I generally just think about it until I remember it, a seemingly hopeless process that as far as I recall has a 100% rate of success. In this case I did indeed remember after a few minutes, and it surprised me that my vague visual impression of the idea was not entirely arbitrary.

Two clever observations that would make good material for a stand up comedy routine

2006-03-15T19:19:00.000-08:00

Whenever you call tech support, it has an uncanny resemblance to a computer game. It's so oppositional! There's very little actual supporting, and a great deal of finding your way through menus, weathering hold music, proving that you're a real customer and that you have a real problem, etc.

When they admit that you actually need and deserve help, and transfer you to the supervisor, you feel like you should say "Aha, I've defeated your minions! Now we must do battle!". Like you've fought your way to the end boss.

And you sure better remember to save your game or write down your ticket number, or you'll have to start all over when you die (or get disconnected.)

SECOND, UNRELATED OBSERVATION:

When someone lends you something, say a sharpie, you thank them. When you hand it back, they thank you. But what if when you first took it, you forgot to thank them, and when handing it back you thank them in retrospect?

Well, there's no particular problem. Unless you both say thanks. Then it's just weird. But why should this be so? You're both being polite, right? If you both said "Hi", THAT'D be fine.

Here's what's going on. When you take the sharpie marker in the first place and say thanks, that thanks is like an IOU for the marker. It's collateral. When you give the pen back and get thanked, you're even again. This is all subconscious, of course.

So, when you BOTH say thank you, it's as though you're exchanging fungible substances. It's as though you're giving the hotel manager your keys after you're done with the room, and he hands them right back to you. In fact it's even WORSE than that, it's like he's handing them to you AT THE SAME TIME YOU'RE HANDING THEM TO HIM. It's like the collateral ACCIDENTALLY EXISTS AT TWO PLACES AT ONCE. Something has gone wrong, and you have more politeness than you started with. It's not only an error, but an error that can't actually occur in the real world. And because of this, your subconscious economic system of politeness goes haywire.

Of course, all of this happens in a fraction of a second, and unless analyzed in this manner it just seems odd in an unusual way that you can't explain, but thankfully don't need to because the situation itself can be processed into its emotional consequence even hypothetically, by anyone in our culture.

Poetry time

2006-03-08T15:13:00.000-08:00

The ocean said to me once,
"Look!
Yonder on the shore
Is a woman, weeping.
I have watched her.
Go you and tell her this --
Her lover I have laid
In cool green hall.
There is wealth of golden sand
And pillars, coral-red;
Two white fish stand guard at his bier.

"Tell her this
And more --
That the king of the seas
Weeps too, old, helpless man.
The bustling fates
Heap his hands with corpses
Until he stands like a child
With a surplus of toys."

Batman

2006-03-07T16:22:00.000-08:00

Q: Ah mean tae ask aboot "historicism" and whut its fir?

A: That's an excellent question and one I'll answer in detail when I . . .

Q: Ye answer now. Ah've goat to git started on ma article.

A: Alright I'll answer now. Historicism is . . .

Q: Fuckin right ye answer now.

A: I'm answering.

Q: Ye answer to ma satisfaction or I fuck ye oop in ways ye cannae handle.

A: If you'll let me get a word in . . .

Q: No fuckin hairm in tryin ye rank bastard. Ye dinnae understand aboot what ah cud do to ye.

A: What?

Q: Ye think yir mair than ye shud wi yir fancy jaykit n hair combed like as if yir . . .

A: What is it to you how I comb my hair?

Q: Ye dinnae wan what ah huv tae gie.

A: Who are you anyway?

Q: So yir gaunnae dress proper but find yir oan heid swelled wi wha ah've landed wi ma fists.

A: I'm Batman.

Q: Wha?

A: Don't mess with me. I'm Batman.

Q: Yir no Batman.

A: Ah'm Batman!

Q: An ah'm Robin!

Melting diamond

2006-03-06T22:55:00.000-08:00

Wow. Here you can see diamond melting on a surface at 5,000 degrees - and turning into something not entirely dissimilar to liquid mercury!

Tychonoff corkscrew

2006-03-06T18:41:00.000-08:00

Although we have the source of all things from chaos, it is a chaos which is simply the wreck and ruin of an earlier world....The drama of creation, according to The Hawaiian account, is divided into a series of stages, and in the very first of these life springs from the shadowy abyss and dark night...At first the lowly zoophytes and corals come into being, and these are followed by worms and shellfish, each type being declared to conquer and destroy its predecessor, a struggle for existence in which the strongest survive....As type follows type, the accumulating slime of their decay raises land above the waters, in which, as spectator of all, swims the octopus, the lone survivor of an earlier world.

WELL MARANDA WASN'T MUCH HELP WITH THIS SITUATION BONKS HER ON THE HEAD WITH A FRYING PAN DAYSOO~

1991-10-26T13:02:00.000-07:00

This is possibly the worst animated gif I've ever seen. Why does this EXIST? Why? WHY?

This one is also animated, and the reasons behind its animation are more mystifying still. It was on a page with a lot of other flags, none of which were animated. And the thing is, it's only SLIGHTLY animated, and I JUST CAN'T FIGURE OUT WHY OR HOW THIS WOULD EVER HAPPEN TO ANYTHING.

SkyblueSalmon: You use this word frequently
SkyblueSalmon: I especially like the tagline
MagentaSalmon: no i don't! i say BARF or BALARF
SkyblueSalmon: it's full of ellipsisseses so it looks like the person writing it was in some sort of stupor, and it ends with the suggestion "let's 'BLARF'"
MagentaSalmon: yes!
SkyblueSalmon: I also like how it promises to combine the challenge of chess with the simplicity of checkers. Because that's both wildly innacurate and the most overused board game slogan ever.
SkyblueSalmon: I imagine PARLOR GAMES INC. employed only a single game designer, and they didn't pay him very much, and what they did pay him he spent on booze and wrote a few vague ideas on a napkin, with a lot of arrows pointing in various directions, and then he barfed on it, and they made it into a game because they were idiots
MagentaSalmon: that man was my father!

That guy with the beard is the voice of Gumby.

This kid, a somewhat portly teenager, wearing shakespearian garb (his hat is comical on its own) is holding out his hand in a gesture, saying something, and looking up and outward in the same direction as his hand is gesturing. It's unclear if he's calling our attention to a real thing or a concept, but whatever it is, it's very poignant and it's a good thing someone with his poetic intensity is there to show it to us.

Except we can't see it.

Hi kids, today I'm here to talk to you about self-esteem. In Marc Brown's first Arthur book, Arthur's Nose, Arthur the aadvark is upset because his nose is too big and other students are laughing at him and making fun of him. In exhibit A., please note that little Arthur's nose hangs down from his face, drooping what appears to be at least 14-20 inches to his chest. Indeed, as we read further, we learn that Arthur is so distraught over his nose that he decides to get a surgery called rhinoplasty. This is where a doctor creates a new nose for you. At the end of the book (SPOILER ALERT!) , Arthur learns that being himself is more important than what other people think of his nose. Self-esteem is feeling good about who you are despite what other people think. This is a valuable lesson that many cartoons and comically illustrated books can teach you. But wait, there is another lesson to be learned from picture books. Please note exhibit B.: this is another picture of Arthur, from Arthur Goes to Camp. Notice how his nose has gotten considerably smaller. In picture C., from Arthur's Tooth, we see that Arthur has now nearly lost his nose, his coloring has changed, his ears have gotten smaller. Finally, in D., from Arthur's Teacher Moves In, Arthur's nose has completely vanished, the "hairlines" that were ubiquitous in previous incarnations have disappeared, his elongated head has shortened. He stares at the audience as if to say, "Please, help! What am I? A bear? A monkey?" No, Arthur, you are an aardvark. An anteater. The long-nosed aardvark from the 1976 book has, by the 2000s, morphed into a non-specific animal-like character. He still teaches valuable lessons in each book, but what the evolution of Arthur has taught us is that in order to become a beloved television, video, book, and toy icon, you must first look cute. No foot-long noses; you must be marketable. No large, thin feet; you must be cuddly. So remember kids, in order to succeed in life, try to be more like Arthur.

so... he's something. remember my boring thing about hexagonal grids a few pages ago? well, here's the square grid version. so... there's... square grid is the hard one, because ok, if it's fifty/fifty, with the black and white, you don't get big enough island.s no,. you don't. you get, ... you get g.. you'd get little islands, because of the checkerboard corners probelm.

on a hexagonal grid, there's this thing... if you make black slightly more present than white, suddenly you have a non-infantesimal a- a not... a non-infintesimal schange chance of being looking at an infinite area (a black one)

or the reverse, with black and white.

BUT

BUT, in a square grid! THIS DOES NOT WORK. I tried to narrow down how much you have to vary the percentages, but i didn't get very far, due to poor tools! A POOR WORKMAN BLAMES HIS TOOLS HADHBLAHA But seriously. There is no way to make static with an exact percentage of black to white... sdo... so... i used random.org and binary addition and subtraction techniques TOO COMPLICATED FOR YOUR TINY MIND TO COMPREHEND rest assuered they were very complicated AND INVOLVED

i can't explain this to you! it's too complex!

I'm having a croissant and some cheese.

SNOWMAN, DADADADA SNOWMAN, DADADADA SNOWMAN, DADADADADADADADADADADADA-

MagentaSalmon: no creature can cause a person to EXPLODE
SkyBlueSalmon: what about the swordfish?
MagentaSalmon: no!
MagentaSalmon: that just pokes!
SkyBlueSalmon: this animated gif says you are wrong!
MagentaSalmon: that's not a person!
MagentaSalmon: that's a BLOWFISH!
MagentaSalmon: and even it wouldn't explode!
SkyBlueSalmon: you're just racist!
MagentaSalmon: it would just slowly deflate and make a squeaky noise
MagentaSalmon: BLOWFISHES ARE NOT A RACE
SkyBlueSalmon: that's what this is all about, isn't it?
MagentaSalmon: YOU SIR HAVE COMMITTED SLANDER!
MagentaSalmon: LIBELOUS, FILTHY SLANDER!
MagentaSalmon: I WILL SEE YOU IN FOOD COURT
MagentaSalmon: the only court where the defendant must not only defend his innocence -- BUT ALSO HIS RIGHT TO NOT BE EATEN!

What is this? Seriously, what? A knight? But then why does it have a crown? And whatever it is, why is it flicking its tongue out?

This smirking fellow is the model for all the silly hats sold at SILLYJOKES.UK, images from which occur frequently in google image results.

This holiday season, remember to check your turkey for razor blades and poison and broken glass, even though it has never happened to anyone, ever.

That works too, but I think it's rather evident that you were an extra in the remake of "topkapi"... go home to your wife... she's making french toast!

the entire chinese women's volleyball team all share one personality -- and are always cracking wise about getting "burned"

I HATE MARANDA