June 2010
May 2010
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Saving the Starfish
[Specifically dedicated to @posthumanism]
An elderly man was picking up objects off the beach and tossing them out into the sea. A young man approached and saw that the objects were starfish. He asked, “Why in the world are you throwing starfish into the water?”
“If the starfish are still on the beach when the tide goes out and the sun rises high in the sky, they will die,” replied the elderly man.
The young man countered, “That is ridiculous. There are thousands of miles of beach and millions of starfish. You can’t really believe that what you’re doing could possibly make a difference!”
The wise old man picked up another starfish, paused thoughtfully, and as he threw it to the safety of the sea, he said, “It made a difference to that one.”
Later that day the young man returned and helped the elderly man throw starfish into the sea.
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The Writer’s Almanac - Saturday, May 29, 2010 - The description of the first performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in Paris is hilarious.
Fraught with Fear
Silence will find us often when it’s already too late
Scattering my trussed up thoughts and his beguiling vices
Hurling down with the rain they head straight at us
Others hook sideways and slice round the trunks of trees
Some rifle right through the vertical slats in fences
All deadly sharp just like God’s Gothic cathedral spires
— Sterling Kekoa, Loose The Hounds
If you could be a penguin, maybe just for a little bit, what kind of penguin would you be?
This kind: http://www.penguin.com/
“People are fucking stupid.”
—Sterling Kekoa
Don't Ask Don't Tell, Repealed
It’s official, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell has just passed the house and has been repealed by 218 yea’s congratulations to everyone who worked so hard over the years to get a silly law removed from the books and to the tens,of thousands of men and women who were unjustly removed from duty for simply being gay, I sincerely hope this victory brings you some peace of mind!
I very much enjoy your anti-anti-statist blurbs. Please use more paragraphs: your massive text blocks hurt my eyes. Please continue your awesomeness! (not actually a question)
Thank you. I will try.
“I didn’t look today, did the free-market clean up the oil spill?”
—Heavy Protons
Decay of a 'God Particle'
LHCsound
This is what a Higgs Boson decay sounds like
LHCsound is a project that transforms collision data collected from the ATLAS detector at the LHC, into audio files like this one.
Collisions data is associated with spatial position and direction, changing in time and multi-dimensional. Trying to classify this data is difficult, because there is so much going on in the data. Physicists often use artifical neural networks (computers programmed to behave a bit like very simple brains), and complex ‘black-box’ computer programmes, because there is no other way to deal with large amounts of multi-dimensional information.
Sound seems the perfect tool with which to represent the complexity of the data, because with our hearing sense we’re able to distinguish many properties of sounds, (source, location, frequencies, timbres, picth and tempo) making it easier to understand the data. And this could allow scientists to make full use of the neural networks between them.
The sound featured here corresponds to a Higgs jet composition: A jet made up of lots of cells containing energy deposits is sonified in terms of their energy, distance from interaction point and angular distance from jet axis, as illustrated in this image. Each cell can be heard as a separate note in this example.
Visist www.lhcsound.com for more info about the project and more Higgs jet sounds.
Mooning Bill Gates.
I remember when Bill Gates built his big new house in Medina on Lake Washington because I used to live across the lake on the Seattle side. I could see his dock from my dock. As anyone who lives that lifestyle knows, absolutely no one drinks while boating <loud cough>. After Bill’s house was completed, we got in the habit of mooning Bill as we passed his dock coming back from water skiing up at Yarrow Bay. Hi @billgates does this look vaguely familiar to you? <blows a kiss> LMAO
When Windows crashes.
When my installation of windows crashes on my system, which is something that happens once in a blue moon <cough>, I wonder if it has a clue that it lives in a virtual world, like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix who is Neo, only he doesn’t realize that in real life he’s Keanu Reeves who is playing Neo in a movie called The Matrix? I wonder if it knows that my entire system didn’t crash, just the one of the virtual planes? I wonder if Windows knows that The Matrix is Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” in the Republic? Yeah, probably not. That last one is a stretch.
“I once corrected Bill Walsh, copy editor of The Washington Post. Talk about a fluke.”
—Sterling Kekoa
“We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace-business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. Never before in history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hatred for me - and I welcome their hatred. I should like to have it said of my first administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second administration that in it these forces met their master.”
—
1936 speech at Madison Square Garden, NYC
(via underpaidgenius)
“Interesting that the Maya couldn’t predict their own doom.”
—Adam Miller, on Mayan doomsday calendar predictions.
The Reason Anti-statists Are Irrational, Dangerous and Deluded Dilettantes.
I finally realized what it was, what’s really been bothering me about Ryan @fringeelements and other staunch advocates of a stateless society that I’ve come across on Tumblr. It’s something that goes beyond some of their weak arguments. It’s the fact they can’t differentiate that fact. It’s the fact that they don’t seem to grasp the gravity of what they are proposing. This is no minor social experiment they are pushing. Holy fuck, no. What they are talking about is nothing short of removing the very core of what keeps our civilized society together (however uncivilized it can be, and has been) which, if you were to do that, would result in an enormous power vacuum.
Of course, they don’t see that at all because they’ve been seduced by some abstract Nirvanna based on individual freedom and have bought into some bachelor Utopian construct that will rise up and fill that vacuum… and oh don’t worry, it will all work out fine… it’ll be a world free of cafeteria school lunches… naturally powered by a lovely distributed equilibrium this… and by some altruistic pipe-dream equilibrium that…
ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? Listen you goddamn deluded amateurs. Do you really want to know what a stateless society looks like? It’s NYC when the power goes out, and doesn’t come back on again. Yes, that. I can see that working out just like you planned, right after the marauding lawlessness is over—which is the point, I believe, where your little La-la system kicks in. You know what? You’re exactly like the 70’s hippies and their back to nature commune Utopian bullshit. Oh no?… right because you’ve got it all worked out. Oh that’s right. I believe I read that in Section 3 of your book, Ryan, under More make-believe half-assed non-sense. (Oh by the way. It’s clear you don’t understand real estate property law or history. Do yourself a favor. Look up allodial title and alod.) Yep… all worked out. You are absolutely certain, a stateless society is the perfect world for humanity, so absolutely sure.
No. You don’t know that because you can’t know that. The stupid stateless society that you are so dreamy-eyed over only really existed during the earliest recesses of our species evolutionary past, back when we were hunter-gathers and it died the instant a tribe appointed and or acquiesced to a permanent ruling chief and priest class—i. e. The State.
That’s what’s been eating at me. It’s your apparent lack of perspective because we are talking about the real world here and not some SIMS mod, correct? And that, my blind intellectual romantic, is what makes you very very dangerous. You have yet to give me any real sense that you understand that gravity of what we are talking about. Your ardent convictions are based on flimsy constructs that exist in some never-never land, off in some abstract academic Magister Ludi fiction.
The last time anyone with real power was allowed to pursue such simplistic philosophical drivel, brought us the present nightmare we have on our hands in Iraq. The invasion of Iraq without any real plan of what happens next was a stratagem based solely on the impulses of a grandiose romantic political ideology that completely ignored practical reality. Only, what you’re proposing is much bigger than just screwing with a Middle East oil fiefdom. What you want to do is dismantle the very power mechanism of our society, which, at presence, is the dominant one on the global stage. The consequences of failure are…. well so overwhelming that I can’t begin to list them.
Pull your heads out of your asses, all ye anti-state lovers, and present something that matches the level of what you are advocating becuase, right now, what you’ve got makes you look like a bunch of bullshit ameteurs in seach of some second rate academic accreditation, who shouldn’t be left in charge of a goddamn Boy Scout overnight camping trip, let alone given the keys to fuck with the world’s leading political and economic system.
