ectoblog.com

Wal-mart and Barnes & Noble and whoever else has plastic gift cards for sale. My kids have received these for birthdays or Christmas, which means my relatives, some of them, are lazy and stupid. They’re lazy the same way I’m lazy, but they’re stupid because they believe that gift cards somehow show they put thought into the gift, when all it really does is show that they can’t be trusted to tell the difference between value and advertising.

It used to be that an uncle or an aunt, if they couldn’t bother figuring out what their nieces and nephews wanted, would just slap a fiver or a twenty or something into a greeting card and drop it in the mail. I received many of those growing up. I can, of course, see how that practice looked pretty impersonal, especially to the aunt or uncle. As a kid, though, I could not have cared less. In fact, I relished getting all this cash from my relatives in far-flung states, and if I didn’t spend it wisely, at least I spent it. Every last cent.

My kids have these plastic cards sitting on their dressers. They’ve been used a time or two, but they still have worth, two or seven or five dollars. It doesn’t look like money to a kid, though; it’s just this card sitting under some paper, or a sock. Eventually, they will be lost or shredded or tossed in the washer one too many times or eaten by the dog. Two or seven or five dollars, thrown away. And not even thrown away; given to a gigantic corporation in exchange for a crappy plastic card with advertising on it.

That never happened to my cash. I spent it, every last cent.

Parents, aunts, uncles: just give the little bastards cash. They love it, and you don’t fall (again! again!) for the same tawdry sales pitch fools do when they part with their money.

How did the media arrive at calling meth labs “meth labs?” I suppose in a very superficial way a laboratory and a “meth lab” share some characteristics, what with chemicals and bottles strewn about. Beyond that, though, where is the similarity? On the one hand, you’ve got people in lab coats and goggles bustling about with beakers in their hands, atomic clocks ticking and centrifuges spinning, and on the other you’ve got completely fucked up Jethros crushing sudafed tablets and mixing them with paint thinner. I guess “meth pool” or “meth pit” or “little town of Methlehem” didn’t sound quite right to whoever coined the expression.

“Meth lab.” That term is evocative of nothing. It’s just shorthand for “several unwashed rednecks one step away from a sorry end getting together to expedite the process.” Substitute your brand of ne’er-do-well for “redneck,” depending on where you live.

This is the structure of one of my fondest maladies: usually the last thing I do before I sign off the computer at the end of the night if I’ve been on it is to play at least one game of hearts. If I win the first game, that’s great, but if I lose, I have to play until I win.

After playing a game of microsoft hearts, a window comes up with my score versus the cyber people I’ve been playing: Pauline, Michele, and Ben. If you’ve ever played this game, you are familiar with these names. Win or lose, this window comes up. In the window, there’s one button to click: “OK.” If I click “OK,” microsoft hearts starts another game, whether I want to play or not. Exing out of the window will also bring up another game. In fact, there is no way to stop playing microsoft hearts without first being dealt an initial hand for another game. In other words, from within the program, I can’t end the game as a winner; it forces me to start another game, and then ex out of the program.

This is unacceptable. I must end hearts on a winning note. I will not allow the program to mock me by making it impossible to finally and satisfyingly win. Therefore, what I do when the “OK” window comes up after winning a game, is open my copy of “winpatrol,” which is basically the same thing as “windows task manager” only with more options, open the “active tasks,” scroll down to “microsoft hearts,” and KILL MICROSOFT HEARTS. I KILL IT DEAD! AHAHAHAHAHAHA! Which I realize is petty and a malady, but which is nevertheless also very, very satisfying.

Stop fucking with me, microsoft!

I don’t like hearing mathematicians talk about how inelegant or uninteresting a particular problem is. If a problem has an inelegant solution, that says nothing about the solution, but everything about the code that’s used to solve it. Our symbolic mathematical code (and by extension, all our codes) crumbles around the edges. It is out on the edges of a code’s utility to make sense of a problem that the solution becomes inelegant.

I can solve driving a screw with a hammer. The method is inelegant, but the problem isn’t. Using a screwdriver would be an elegant way to solve the problem. When a mathematician talks about inelegant solutions, he’s not talking about the problem (even if he thinks he is); he’s talking about the way he went about solving it. It’s not true that the problem is uninteresting, it’s just distasteful to tackle a problem that your tool (symbolic mathematics) can’t handle adequately. So there are problems out there waiting for elegant solutions, waiting for elegant tools; waiting for their screwdrivers to be invented.

A lot of solutions were inelegant until the appropriate tool was invented. For example, problems needing calculus to adequately describe or solve them were inelegantly solved (or not solved at all) until calculus was invented.

We as people are not done creating codes that solve intractable problems elegantly. I hope I’m here to see it the next time it happens.

My favorite constellation is Orion, as I’ve said before. The thing I like about Orion is its constellationness. It’s so obviously a constellation. I can show it to someone without the slightest knowledge of the stars, and he wouldn’t know its name, but he’d know it has a name. I think the only other constellation like it is the big dipper in Ursa Major. But the big dipper is too utilitarian to hold my interest, and I like Orion’s shape.

It’s important for me to have a personal relationship with the stars. I know it sounds holy-rollerish, but it’s true. I feel cozier when I can name what’s above me as well as what’s below.

Several times I’ve lost track of the stars, for whatever reason, for bad weather or boredom, and it’s always been kind of unnerving finally to come back out underneath them and struggle to suss what’s where. I need to keep track of the stars to feel connected to it all.

The best metaphors are extensible and fractal in nature. They are as finely formed in their molecules as they are in their enormity.

For example, the billions of people are like the Oort Cloud surrounding the sun that is Society. And it’s natural for the people out there to want promotion to the inner system, to want to be a comet, or an asteroid, or Jupiter. To want to be famous or important; to possess gravity.

The metaphor can be extended to the human soul-as-star, and the various organs and cells as the Oort Cloud clamoring for ascendance (or at least benign indifference). Then there are the cells nesting deep, with their own satellites, two layers below the sun. It’s a matryoshka down to its utter parts.

Metaphors are seldom perfect. The society-as-solar-system metaphor, for instance, strays in part because it’s not perfection to split Society and people apart, as the sun and the Oort Cloud are apart. But it’s still evocative to me, and maybe, by extension, others.

Some people yearn for a particular metaphor that explains everything to their satisfaction. Like religion, which makes many people feel warm and safe. The bible (and other religious guidebooks) is one resonant metaphor after another. That the stories and parables can still fire the imaginations of countless millions thousands of years later is incredible. What amazing stories to transcend the eons.

There are other people, though, who just like metaphors, and always more of them, and who don’t require the safety of perfection. I’m making a case that all Art, and a greater part of everything that we do, is a yearning for metaphor. To see what a thing represents. To see the similarities inherent among the things in the world.

It’s a yearning for communication, really. To share your world with others. How do I know that this tree (or a tree) means the same thing to me as it does to someone else? By likening it to some second thing, then searching for recognition in the eyes of others. In other words, by proposing a metaphor.

Enough of that. I have another celestial metaphor that compares stars and society:

Society is a star, but we don’t know what kind of star it is. It could be a yellow star, with a long and glorious arc. Or it could be a red giant, that is consuming raw materials at such an enormous rate that they’ll all be gone quickly. It could even be a thing which reaches for the heavens with a single-minded purpose: to continue to be. I mean, we as a civilization have the resources and the know-how to plan and build enormous rocketships to colonize other planets and systems, if we’re willing to accept enormous want and hardship to do it. We’re perfectly capable of it. Society could be a thing like that: a supernova that sprays bits of itself throughout its neighborhood.

There’s really no reason to think that is the way it is, and there’s really no reason to think society isn’t a red giant rapidly running out of fuel, given the evidence. But it is nice to think that there are other possibilities, given the metaphor.

I’m lobbying for a new key on the keyboard: ‘post stop sentence.’ It’s the double-space after the final punctuation of the preceding sentence, prior to the next sentence. Because there’s no need for two space-tabs for that. And we have need of ‘post stop sentence’ so often that it would be one of the more useful keys. I mean, it happens every sentence; that’s bound to be way oftener than exes or zees. It could take over the spot that the letter ‘k’ now occupies. Yes; I feel we should demote ‘k’ to ‘ctl-alt-period’ or something. I have no use for it.

Needing to tap the space bar twice is a carryover from typewriters and typesets. We didn’t write in perfect blocks like that before typewriters; there was no reason to. Script isn’t digital.

Therefore, for the sake of progress, ‘k’ has got to go. Certainly, there will be casualties. The Kathys, the Kents, and the kremlins of the world will suffer. But…..progress, man!

Adams cold-shouldered
by Roland Watson

WHEN Gerry Adams first visited the White House he was indulged as a political celebrity.

This week the Sinn Finn leader arrives in Washington to a very different reception. For the first time since 1995 there is no St Patrick’s Day invitation to the White House. Nor has Mr Adams been asked to the traditional ham and cabbage lunch on Capitol Hill.

He has been invited to Congress, but once-friendly senators and representatives will be asking awkward questions.

The lustre of Irish republicanism has been dimming in US political circles ever since September 11, 2001. The IRA’s involvement with guerrillas in Colombia fighting US interests further eroded trust. After the Northern Bank heist President Bush reached the end of the line with Mr Adams — even before the IRA offered to shoot the killers of the Belfast father Robert McCartney.

Weird that they didn’t try to counter or even acknowledge the obvious conclusion. And it’s also weird that the IRA apparently don’t understand that they’re not advancing their cause by offering to grease some of their own misbehaving members. “You want I should size them for cement overshoes? Just say the woid and it’s done, see?” That kind of talk doesn’t inspire governments or societies.

Also on this site: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1524858,00.html, I noticed the “breaking news” column with the google ads shifting up or down a line every few seconds. It has a subliminal quality to it that’s gross. It’s terrifically annoying.*

I hope it’s not everywhere, and I’ve just now noticed it.

*Upon further review, the ad-shifting is the result of a single ad that contains thumbs that appear cyclically, and each thumb is slightly larger or smaller than the picture before it. The rest of the column, therefore, shifts up or down in a slow cycle depending on the size of the current thumb. It appears to be an artifact because the several ads above the picture-shifting ad don’t benefit from the effect. Thank goodness, but even though it was an accident, it was creepily effective, and I see no reason why it won’t be used by various advertising scum once they discover it. In fact, I shouldn’t even be writing this.

I was googling the word “script,” and I got this site: http://www.spencerian.com. Here’s partly what they had to say::

America’s Golden Age of Penmanship (1850-1925) produced the most graceful forms of handwriting ever developed by Western civilization.

I can’t believe we missed out on the Golden Age of Penmanship! Historians completely gloss over this era!

There’s a sub-page, a pdf file, that informs us about some kind of cursive retreat in northeastern Ohio for eight hundred and fifty dollars. It’s in September, and it says that it’s damp in Ohio at that time of year, so bring rain gear and umbrellas. It’s all in cursive. And the signatures of the two owners are like birds singing.

This is my sweetest web find ever.

KINGSLAND, Ga. — A man who created suspicion by collecting items from various departments of K-Mart and taking them into the restroom just before closing time Wednesday arrested after police said they found him operating a methamphetamine lab in the bathroom.

After examining all the many variables, this man decided that his best course of action was to set up a meth lab in the bathroom in K-mart.

Eric said that one of the things he looked at when getting his house was the quality of the stars in his backyard. That’s a good one. I’m incorporating that into my next house. Before, I always bought or rented a place first and discovered whether the sky was thrilling or dull later.

The next offer I make on a house will be a consequence of the quality of stars in the backyard.

Another contingency of mine is that the ratio of natural sounds to man-made sounds will have to be high. I don’t want quiet, I just want more crickets and hoot-owls and fewer clankings and spinning tires. The hoot-owls can hoot all night long at the crickets if they’d like.

Quality stars and nature, or the deal’s off.

I’ve been thinking a lot about David’s eye-thing (see the comments on this). I’m pretty sure that it will happen eventually, at least for people with a lot of disposable income. It’ll be another marker setting apart the Haves and Have-nots, which is an issue all by itself, but it will also have giant applications that I would love to have access to if I can ever get over the Big Brother ramifications of the thing.

It’s obvious that a thing we put in our eyes that allows some kind of graphic to be projected into our visual space, so that it looks like it’s ‘out there’ with everything else we can touch, would change the way we live our lives. Like computers, like the transistor, like the automobile and jet airplanes, it would change everything. Consider this an example of a billion uses: I’m outside at night, looking at the stars, and I’ve forgotten what the bright one on the southern horizon is called. I would think or say “Info” while I’m looking at it; words would appear in the sky, along with an arrow pointing at the star. “Antares, right here. More?”

Or I’m at a party, and somebody I haven’t seen in years comes up to me and starts talking. I think to myself “Info,” and a name and an arrow pop up next to this person: “Johnny Fumedecor, right here. More?”

I’m assuming a level of informational access and pattern recognition that we probably don’t quite have yet, but it’s coming.

There are a billion other uses, and as long as we individuals can control our own records of accessing it, it could be wondrous.

I think the difference between who I am now and who I was when I was a young adult is in the amount of things I’ve noticed. It’s just a sheer quantity. And like Stalin or Lenin or a famous Russian general or Tom Clancy (inside hoops) was fond of saying, quantity has a quality all its own.

As I’ve grown older, my methods of doing anything have gotten more streamlined. For instance, I take the cheese and the turkey out of the refrigerator at the same time now, to avoid having to backtrack, in the assembly of a sandwich.

I’ve noticed the seasons, I’ve noticed the stars, I’ve noticed the cyclical nature of the economy. I’ve noticed that longjohns are good to wear when it’s very cold. I’ve noticed there’s a sucker born every minute.

I’ve noticed things that I couldn’t possibly have noticed when I was twenty. Because some things cycle so slowly that twenty years isn’t enough to see their range of behavior or activity. Just can’t have been done. I might have grasped things in an intellectual way, but there’s just no substitute for experience.

Which is something else I’ve noticed.

Cats and dogs are right at the sweet spot as far as domesticated companions go. Any stupider, and you’d have to keep them in aquariums. Any smarter and you’d have to lock all your doors with keys. Take monkeys, for instance. Can you imagine the shenanigans they pull as pets? Huge parts of your house you’d have to keep under lock and key. The fridge? Padlocked.

I would prefer to have a dog that could pop into the kitchen and grab me a beer, it’s true. I’m afraid, though, having that would also mean having to put up with a pet who could work the doorknobs, and I can’t have that. Nope, nope. I need a pet who is smart as a whip in some ways, but dumb as a lamppost in others.

Cats and dogs are tailor-made to my pet needs.

The American ethos is to live and let live. To pretend ignorance until pretense is a problem. I think that’s a statement of fact; at least, that’s the great undercurrent that I’ve observed in American society.

Even cops adhere to that compact. They, by and large, don’t hassle law-breakers whose law-breaking is modest or circumspect. It’s only the imprudent, those who make spectacles of themselves or harm others, that cops normally feel obligated to break. And I’m not saying that the only consequence of the compact is that prudent law-breakers are cut some slack, just that it is one of the more obvious consequences.

There are people who violate that ethos. The anti-abortionists; the salute the flaggers; the pledge of allegiancers; even the SUVers, who create problems for the rest of us. Because they are intolerant, because they violate the code, these people are sociopaths. They really are; given the social compact (which I think should be given), they conform to the definition: “sociopath: one who is affected with a personality disorder marked by aggressive, antisocial behavior.” The alternative to labelling them sociopaths is to label those of us who do adhere to the compact as sociopaths, and I’m not going to do that.

They violate the American compact. They’re sociopaths, and they run the country.

Sooner or later, televisions and monitors, big ones, will be so cheap that everyone, even the holdouts like me, will have one.

Right now, webcams and monitors are fairly primitive. When engineers solve the problem of framerate at a high-enough definition at a low-enough price, sooner or later (and there’s no reason why it won’t be sooner), monitors will become gigantic and just like televisions in their ubiquity.

Then, some other engineers will co-locate the camera lens with the monitor. The camera will capture a scene from the middle of the image that the person is watching on his big tv. In other words, the life-size image I see of the other person will be looking right at me as I look at it.

One more reason to leave the house will be gone. I will leave it only for food or work or sanity.

As technology stands right now, people with webcams can’t stare at the lens without stopping all other action. And the camera lens contains zero information; it’s inherently dull to look at. To do work or interact, a person with a webcam has to look away from the lens to his monitor. So most of the time, the people he’s interacting with see a profile of his face. That’s not only awkward, it’s disconcerting and a little bizarre.

With a lens embedded in the monitor itself, the normal view of a person on a webcam would be from the front, just like in normal life.

It’s gonna happen, and it’s gonna make the instigator very rich. It won’t be me, because I’m not a capitalist, and I can’t be bothered. My job in these situations is to point at it when it happens and say “SHIT! I could’ve made a million dollars!”

I’m comfortable with that.

update: Carole seems to think she’s heard this idea before. I seem to think she’s taking a page from the Man and is bent on harshing my buzz, for her own inscrutable ends.