I was thinkin' about science fiction and technological explosions. A scifi writer and utopian once said something about how "machines will eventually take over so much of what we currently do with manual labor, humanity will be in a state of enforced leisure. What an envied thing it will be to work!" (That's not even close to an exact quote.)
Humans are, of course, really inefficient at a lot of things.
How does one measure efficiency of creativity?
All I really want is to save everything I ever see in my browser to disk somewhere so I can see it again as I first saw it if I want to, no matter what happens to the originating site or original file in the interim. If we conveniently ignore disk-space and copyright/'intellectual property' issues, is that really too much to ask?
Apparently, yes. It seems it really is.
Are we really up to 4x04 already?! I haven't even finished season three yet!
[spoiler]
Twilight still has wings, I see. Mind you, I'd probably be griping if they hadn't kept them, too. It's not like you can just retcon something as major as apparently changing the species of the closest thing you have to a main character.
[/spoiler]
I only know this much because I wound up on this blogspot after doing this image search.
I've recently been reading wiki (both pedia and C2[1]) on microkernels and exokernels, and... I'dun get it.
A note to self: to create the post direct link to a facebook post:
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
So today, I discovered this nifty bit of musicpic (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)
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...
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).
There's a C.S. Lewis quote I love about Lewis's time as an atheist. Basically, Lewis didn't believe in God, and at the same time was angry at God for not exiting. I'm not exactly angry per say, but that's pretty much where I think I am right now. I'm not entirely sure that I think God doesn't exist, but in that case...
It's amazing what you can do simply by striping context. For example:
I am moved.
-- Abraham Lincoln
I'm fairly certain he said that exact combination of words at some point in his life. What context he may have used them in, I can't imagine. The context where I picked them up is that he is literally moving into a new room.
-- Rachel H. © 2013 an' stuff.i am a product
of this
society
i pick-pocketed
my personality
from a ghastly array
of tv shows
and teenaged drama
if you would like a re-run
of last night's
late night
sitcom
i'm at your servicei am a product
of this
society
if you want some fashion advice
from me
because i dress
so well
log on to
they'll tell you
exactly
what i would
because everything i wear
no matter how weird
or ugly
i wear because
they told me
toi am a product
of this
society
i do not
think for me
i have an iphone
that has replaced
the normal functions
of my brain
it remembers everything
for me
i know everyone
we talk
all the time
i text
really fast
i'm so connected
i mean,
i'm plugged into
everything...i am a product
of this society
my thighs
don't touch
and a lovely
mountain ridge
adorns
my back
a cavern
in my
belly
come explore
me
a beautiful
bony
product
of this
societyI AM A PRODUCT OF THIS SOCIETY
and you all should really stop blaming me
for being a social deviant
for being unwilling
to conform
to this new normal
sanity isn't
statistical
and this isn't
1984
meaning:
just because a billion people
do this crap
it doesn't make it
right
doesn't make it
make
sense
i will not hold onto your tail
and follow you
blindly,
society
because you don't know
where the frick
you're going
anyway
if we progress
one more step
we'll all be
dead
...And it's this guy:
Wait, that didn't really convey why this is a big deal. Let me clarify, with the help of some linked images.
It's this guy:
I've been following this guy off and on ever since I discovered him -- I forget how, probably through a Linux forum somewhere -- because he's practically always right. And out of entire internet, he comments on my blog?
Er, sorry. I'm just going to go dance around like a maniac and then collapse from the awesome.
"You ever walk into a war zone?"
What?
"Yeah, yeah, I know that's a bit of a weird question, coming from me. I'm a namby-pamby coddled kid from some anonymous place in the northern united states, who's never had to deal with shortage or hunger or fighting or even something as simple as life-threatening illness. Bear with me for a moment. You ever walk into a war zone?"
Uh, not really. I mean, I'm… how'd you put it… a namby-pamby coddled kid from some anonymous place in the northern united states &c &c.
"That's not true, and you know it."
Like feck it's not. What are you talking about?
*Smack!* "Tonight. May 10 2013. Fish fry kitchen. Any bells?"
That wasn't a war zone.
"Like feck it wasn't. Okay, maybe not a conventional war zone. On the pure atoms-photons-and-eyeballs level it was just a dozen or so people standing around with their eyes closed. But you know. You know. You saw. That was as much a war zone as anything your most miscalibrated imagination can come up with."
So yeah, I walked into a war zone tonight. Tail end of fish fry, a whole bunch of adults (well, older adults I should say holy crap I'm twenty) gathered in the kitchen. From what I overheard, 'he' (whoever he was) had bleeding nose and ears, broken ribs, ruptured spleen, and was being airlifted. Bad s***.
I'm standing just outside the door to the kitchen. Maybe I'm in the doorway; at any rate I moved just inside the kitchen and then back to just out over the next 30-60 seconds. Anyway, I'm standing in the entryway to the kitchen, and all these adults just start praying. Now, there's nothing particularly weird about this. We were at a church event, prayer happens, especially when it looks like things have gone south1. But this is a little different. This time, almost in overlay, I can see this battlefield going on, as they're praying. I wish I had better terms to describe what I actually saw, I only saw it for a very brief flash. That was just enough for part of me (much the same part that goes in for surface flash/'coolness', the part that self-inserts into, say, Star Wars to hijack the plot by Saving The World with Really Cool Stuff) to want to jump into the fray, complete with Cool Ninja Moves and stab this and save that; luckily, the rest of me was like "dude?" It's about this point that my angle showed up.
Now, at this point, I have to pause to say that I don't want you thinking I'm one of those angle kooks. Granted, this pause probably doesn't appear to help my case. My point is that I'm not sure whether I actaully believe in angles, much the same way I'm not sure whether I actually believe in God. According to a fair number of people around me they do, most notably including one lady who, assuming there's truth such matters, is absolutely right about these things. Sort of the Albert Einstein or Eliezer Yudkowsky of this area.2
Anyways, my angle shows up. I'm not in the kitchen anymore, I'm just outside the door by now, so he's leaning in to get a better view. And he's all antsy, he's got this – not look, exactly, that's normally what it's called, it's more like feel – he's got this feel about him like "uhg, man, I really should be in there". Because he's an angle, and this is spirit warfare, and this is, like, why he exists, it's what (well, the other thing; still assuming that all this is true) he's good at, it's what he's for. So he looks at me like "dude." And I'm like "Dude, don't let me stop you. This is your thing. Go do what you gotta do." He didn't, of course, I guess I shoulda been explicitly sending him by joining in. I don't really know why. So I told him "You gotta go, go," and he's there antsing, and at this point I turn and go around the kitchen ('cause I'm not going through the kitchen when it's full like that) and back outside. And that's the sixty seconds or thereabouts.
Right, so my angle. He's left. You know the whole shoulder angle/shoulder demon deal3? My shoulder angle sits left. Which isn't a very accurate word picture, since it makes me think they're, y'know, little guys, six or nine or eighteen inches roughly. They're not. But I could literally feel him leaning in on my left shoulder. Yes, I mean literally.
Anyways. That's my story.
1 That's a really crappy turn-of-phrase, come to think of it. Why is 'going south' a bad thing? We went to Florida earlier this year, and that was great – well, the two days or thereabouts we actually spent in Florida, rather than in the car. (A road trip is quite a different proposition.)
2 She says my angle's name is Erasmus (I really hope I got that spelled correctly). Apparently he's got one of those mortarboard-style professor hats. I wonder if he sports it like just kind of chill?
3 Which, apparently, in the original version wasn't angles and demons, but angles of [good|light] and angles of [evil|darkness].
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My brain goes to some truly weird places. For example: Why do toilet seat exist as a separate thing, rather than being molded in? What possible benefit is there? Yes, yes, I'm sure there's a perfectly good reason. I just can't imagine what it is.
Buried within the docs for the Festival text-to-speech system for Linux is a mention of Klingon. Apparently, the system could be used to read things in Klingon, if only they could get a good sample of Klingon to work with. There's an honest-to-goodness request for a "Klingon continuous speech" corpus.
So, if you feel like translating something into Klingon and reading it out loud into a microphone, drop them a line.
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.
