Mom said something which–to her–seemed completely innocuous to me when I came downstairs just now. She said, "You can bring whatever you're doing downstairs and just do it down here." Which really just shows kinda the misunderstanding going on.

As a general idea, that's a fine idea. But "what I was doing" was inextricably tied to the computer. A lot of what I do is, for better or for worse. And since the computer I use currently is a fixed-location type, that means I couldn't bring it down. Which I'm not terribly fond of either, I'd prefer more-mobile access, but it is what it is.

Which brings me in a roundabout way to paper, I guess. Paper's good as an artifact for consumption, as reading fiction (but not certain kinds of scholarly/intellectual-type work); and for certain kinds of reference; and at least some kinds of note-taking— I rather like editing with pen on paper, honestly. Not saying that it's efficient, but that's how things are. But paper's crummy for arguing, a halfway-decent internet discussion thread is much better, so long as the people involved aren't dicks— and if they are, the chance of a decent argument is right out no matter what. And paper's terrible for storage, as my recent experience with using both version-control and paper on the same writing project has shown me. Dear god is that a nightmare-in-waiting.

Now where did my point meander off to OH YE— no, wait, false alarm, I don't actually remember. Drat. Well, I guess this is just a drivel anyways. I dunno.

Appendix π, "Monster Manual"

Bandersnatch

A fruminous creature, with incredibly strong arms and a long, downright extensible neck.

Fruminous Bandersnatch

Much like a Bandersnatch, except fruminous.

Cthu

Mad giants from the edge of unknown space. Half-dragon, half-octopus, and half-humanoid.

OpenId's big problem

If you really look at the comment box at the bottom of any of my posts, you'll find a whole bunch of ways to say "I'm a human". One of these is OpenID. I like OpenID, and its cousin OAuth, on general principle. People shouldn't have to be hooked up to some suspect overlord like facebook or google to participate, you know?

(On consideration, my "reasons" for not allowing "anonymous" comments may be suspect. Maybe I should allow that. But that's not related to my point.)

Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror made a recent post about "install our apps" pop-ups. You know the kind:

One of the points he makes is that with so many apps, apps kinda need to be free. Otherwise, they're overpriced. But that brings us to this old privacy-freak adage:

When apps are free, you are the product.

OpenID and OAuth are intended to help solve this problem. And that, in a fit of paradoxical irony, is their problem. The very thing they're supposed to do, is the very thing the people who'd have to adopt it don't want.

Without huge, hyper-driven use demand, they're doomed.

Faulty Thinking: "some things man was not meant to know"

Breakpoint, who I respect in general, just aired a radio article on transhumanism. And their concerns are good, and need to be considered. That doesn't mean they didn't commit a thinking error.

The main point of the article was that knowledge can be used evily, and some forms of knowledge can be put to greater evils than others. With which I agree. It then claims that such areas shouldn't be researched at all. Here they went wrong.

The trouble is that any piece of knowledge that can be discovered, can be rediscovered. History supports this claim just as much as it does theirs, if not more. What matters is when it's discovered, and by who.

(There's a handy example of this in cryptography, the study of secret communication. A group of people working for the british government invented the form of encription now used for internet banking, -- before powerful computers existed. The british government kept it hush, because they didn't have a way to break it. Later, some american academics came up with the same system, without knowing anything about the british version.)

If you'll forgive my archtypes, I'm going to go with a supervillian analogy. Say a supervillain is doing genetic research. He discovers a way to trigger a latent genetic defect in the majority of humanity--a virus that causes cancer, maybe. He can then release it, or threaten to releas it, on major cities or even the whole planet.

But if a good guy scientist has been researching as well, and discovers the trigger first, she and others can research and find an antidote or a vaccine. Then, by the time the supervillain is ready to unleash his disaster virus, maybe it won't work anymore. Certainly it won't be as bad. Now imagine if the scientists hadn't been working on the antidote.

I won't argue with the should-ness of their claim. But as the line being crossed sooner or later is inevitable, it's far better to look in hope for Prometheus than to wait in fear for Pandora.

Social time: last.fm

Alright, social time:

Why would one want to use last.fm? I'm sure there are reasons, I just don't know what they are.

But I'd like to. I've got a last.fm account, but no real idea why. I think I use it as a "junk I've listened to" list, currently; but I don't think that's a 'good' use of it/ think that's under-using it.

Hey, advertisers, make a note of this:

I used to consider adblock 'only' "really nice". Then I got hit by an auto-playing video ad in another tab. Adblock is now considered mandatory.

(Get adblock plus: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-plus/

What's the thing with microkernels anyways?

I've recently been reading wiki (both pedia and C2[1]) on microkernels and exokernels, and... I'dun get it.

A wacky reformulation of Moore's Law

Moore's Law states, in paraphrase, that processing power as a whole doubles every eighteen months. Sometimes it's been clock speed, sometimes it's been number of transistors, but this seems to have generally held true.

The obvious corollary is that newer processors --computers in general-- are more powerful than older ones. This has consistently been born out, with extreme cases being the emulation of entire old systems on newer ones, even many at once, even without being emulated on the newest systems. (See: Linux to Game Developers: No More Excuses)

Based on this, I've thought up a potentially interesting, but probably wrong, corollary: Every eighteen months, it becomes possible to add another layer of emulation, without effectively slowing down the deepest layer. This means that, for example, I can have my MacBook Air emulating a Mac from a year and a half ago, emulating a three-year-old Mac, emulating a Mac eighteen months older than that, all the way down to the original Macintosh -- with the deepest Mac having an effectively indistinguishable user-experience (for better or worse).

Practically speaking, assuming an arbitrary six-month delay before full emulation of a system, this means that twenty-four months after a system comes out, it's possible to emulate it indistinguishably.

Of course, this is all armchair garbage. I have no numbers of any sort to back it up. I have no intention of going looking for them, although you're welcome to throw any you find/have at me if you want :)

Well, that's enoug derping around on the internet for one day

Over on RationalWiki I stumbled across their page about "QuantumMAN". Not that I'm not endorsing RationalWiki. I don't know nearly enough about them to do so. A lot of their articles I've read have been completely reasonable "okay, really?" examples ranging from "eyeroll" to "facepalm". But QuantumMAN, assuming it's an accurate representation (a fair assumption to make as far as I'm concerned, given what gets mentioned), is actually painful to think about. Anyone with any knowledge of applied quantum mechanics, biology, or computers could tell you that there's no way in the universe for their claims to make sense. Even /r/VXjunkies is more plausible, likely due to the fact that they don't even try to be plausible.

How to: create a direct link to a facebook post

A note to self: to create the post direct link to a facebook post:

• - copy the link location of the 'share' url
• - isolate the &p[1]= entry
• - construct a new url pointing to facebook.com//posts/"&p[1]="
• - link to that new url

A before-and-after demonstration:

Before: https://www.facebook.com/ajax/sharer/?s=22&appid=25554907596&p%5B0%5D=1191901122&p%5B1%5D=10201227148779409&profile_id=100002507979499&share_source_type=unknown
After: https://www.facebook.com/RedheadedWriter/posts/10201227148779409

And this is how misinformation gets started

So today, I discovered this nifty bit of music^pic (site content warning: ponies, random crap). I find that sheet music pretty awesome, even if it's an incredibly stupid gag.

Someone then linked to this youtube video:

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tds0qoxWVss)
-- Which, admittedly, is a pretty rad song.

Later on in the comments, someone noted that it "sounds like a boss battle". Well, it turns out that's because it is-- some poking around reveals that the song in the video is actually called "U.N. Owen Was Her?", and comes from a Japanese music/bullet hell game bonus boss. (See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iankyw47vqY)

But wait, that's not all!

The sheet music really is just a stupid gag. Any musician worth their instrument can tell you this upon close inspection -- my brother objects, for example, to the large groups of whole notes in a row and to the illegal gliss between the bottom two staves; but he also enjoyed the explosions and the "remove cattle from stage". With the help of google image search and this post, I was able to trace it to here:

(From whitetreaz.com)

Footnotes:

^pic

Using the Mac

I discovered today that I can't use the Mac effectively. I can kinda use it, but only the same way I can 'kinda' drive a stick shift: I can steer and stop, and even hit the gas, but ask me to change gears and we are done.

Thing is, all the problems have to do with the keyboard. First is the command key. Through long training, I have become accustomed to using the 'control' key. This one isn't really Apple's fault... much the same way it's not the carmaker's fault if they put the turn signal controls in the middle of the dash instead of on the stem, or Ford's fault that the Model T doesn't even have turn signals. I don't blame them for it, I just hate it.

Then there's the keyboard itself. I might have more success with macs if I used Mac keyboards. All Macs these days have those chiclet laptop-type keyboards, though. When I'm at a desktop, like our Mac, I really prefer the old-style key-travel 'klacky' keyboards. They feel better. And no, my older Mac keyboard won't cut it. It doesn't have quite the right feel to the keys.

The real insult, though, is emacs. I'm used to the Alt key sending emacs' `meta`, but for the life of me I can't seem to find the `meta` key on the Mac. This forces me to use `Esc`, a real problem because just about everything I love about emacs is on the `meta` key. Those of you who've never used the power of emacs might feel this is a little like complaining about a car not having a steering-wheel cover. Which is true as far as it goes, but it's more like complaining about a car not having a steering wheel.

Google+, revisited

Oh, gee, thanks a lot, Google. I'll just go through a crap-ton of work to delete my entire Google+ account AGAIN.

Seriously. You'd think they'd mention when they're offering to create a Google+ account for you, but noo...

Faulty Thinking: The Use of Theories

My brother has a fairly rad shirt. He got it from Harvard (yes, Harvard U, that Harvard) when he went there for an "econ bee"¹. It bugs the crap out of me.

See, the shirt has this quote on it:

Sure, it works in practice, but does it work in theory?

Which apparently is rather funny if you're an economist, but I hate it because it reflects (or appears to reflect, and in practice there's no difference in how you get treated) utterly flawed thinking.

The whole point of theories is to reflect (or explain) reality. If a theory or its predictions differ from reality, then it is worthless to the extent that it differs from reality. For example, Newtonian mechanics, the simple version of reality where you add speeds together, isn't the whole picture. It's still useful, because it holds together at any and every speed we humans can actually reach². A theory that doesn't reflect reality (makes wrong predictions) is useless at best -- at worst, people keep using it anyways and they are wrong.

This way of thinking ignores that. It rejects anything that doesn't fit into its existing theory. That's a recipe for irrelevance. Now ordinarily, I'd be perfectly content to let people be idiotically irrelevant into oblivion. But this is expressed by Economists, so-called "experts" who people actually listen to. Almost by definition, they are not irrelevant. And so this is a huge problem.

The lesson here is, if your thinking doesn't match reality then you need to update your thinking. And watch out for your economist -- even if they know what they're talking about, they might still be wrong, maybe even on purpose (the worst kind of wrong).

Footnotes:

¹ Not really an "econ bee", it was an Econ quiz thing. I'm not super sure of the details, and "econ bee" gets most of the idea across by way of analogy to "spelling bee". It was probably a bit more like Jeopardy.

² As of this writing, anyways.

Review: Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter

Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. Title says it all, really.

Interm review: The Book Theif

I've been reading The Book Theif recently. Dunno if I'm going to finish it, though. "Poised to become a classic" (USA Today) or no, I really don't know how to feel about it. It's got little formating quirks that really bother me. For example, around page 49 there's this thingy:

* * * AN IMPORTANT NOTE * * *
ABOUT FRAU DILLER
She had one golden rule.

Nothing wrong with this factoid, of course. But it's offset like this, and I think it would be better put intergrated into the narrative. There's no reason it couldn't be. The book has pictures in it too, and the whole thing could just be a stylistic thing. But it's jarring and, in all the cases so far (that weren't in the prologue), in my opinion completely unnecessary.

Current Rating: 3/10 Dump it. The offset chunks are jarring and gratuitous. The message may well be good, but the writing style is off-putting.

Review: Michael Vey: Rise of the Elgen

There are good books, and there are bad books. And then there are books that make you want to throw them across the room. This... is one of the later kind.

Plot-wise, Rise of the Elgen is ... okay, I guess. It's the second book in the Michael Vey series, and I've read the first one. I'm basing mostly on that, because I didn't finish this one.

Why? Because I've seen trollfics that were better-proofread.

No Veggies in lunch today.
I am not a clever Pone.

Facebook

Alright, alright, I give.

No-one looks at my blog and I'd get more seen posting to facebook. Everyone that I know I'd care about is on facebook anyways. I get it.

I'll be posting to facebook again.

---

Lest anyone get the wrong idea, facebook is two things:

• A comunications platform/interface, specifficly IM (chat)
• An additional place to put my blog posts

Jimmies at the grocery

Today at Price Chopper, we were standing in the 'dietics' section, and I happend to glance over and see the Jimmies gorrila. It was very wierd.

Elsewhere in the store, I came across the toys section. I'm standing there, "okay, big deal and all", and then I notice they've got one of the new MLP 'small' brushables. First one I've ever seen in the wild. So I'm standing there looking at Applejack, but I'm trying to be kinda casual about it, not obvious that I'm looking at it, and I realize that they FORGOT her HAT.
This is not a small issue. Applejack not having her hat is like going out in Antartica without your parka. It doesn't happen. Ever. C'mon, Hasbro.

...I still feel wierd talking about that just, y'know, out like that. In public to random people and all. Oh well.