Vajrabot Error Log

Here's a cool gallery of stuff made by prisoners:

http://www.marcsteinmetz.com/pages/fluchtstuecke/efluchtstuecke_minis.html

Including:

Tenzin really doesn't like it when the fish call him "giant pink sky monster" (as in "thanks for the food, giant pink sky monster!"). Or maybe he just doesn't like daddy translating what the fish say for him.

Charlotte is adamant that she wants vampyrecat to dispense apple-juice flavored breastmilk (or, as Charlotte says, "apple babosh!").

Red Rabbit from Egmont Mayer on Vimeo.

Tenzin rates it 5 stars.

From thereifixedit.com

The "Dark" category in Netflix contains nearly every film I've ever liked.

(from xcd_rss)

I've started recruiting playtesters for Hoodoo Blues from Burn Immediately and Fan Rewards (if any of you who are reading this are on Fan Rewards but didn't get an email, ti's because the email on your Fan Rewards profile is out of date and the email bounced!). One of the playtesters asked me about what music I listen to in order to get in the mood so I put this playlist together:

This has been on my list-of-stuff-to-watch for a long-ass time, and I finally got around to watching it. I liked it a lot.

Preface: I tend to believe that certain “philosophical realizations” really depend on what certain concepts and words mean to the realizer, and this is something that is unique to everybody. Thus, I don’t really believe that because something seems-right and makes-sense to me that I can necessarily tell it to other people hand have them go “oh my, you’re right.” And even if I could, I don’t know if such transmission would be meaningful to the reader, because with these philosophical realizations the journey to the conclusion seems more important than the conclusion. I guess what I’m saying is that this is all just philosophical-masturbation and although I wouldn’t mind if anyone takes away anything useful from it, I won’t consider myself a failure if nobody does.

Definition of Terms: When I say the universe, I mean all contiguous time and space. If there are wormholes that lead to another “universe” then they are the universe as well, because we can (in theory) got there. If there was another universe before the big bang that led to this universe, then that is part of this universe as well, because it is part of the timeline of this universe. Thus “universe” as I use the term could be defined as “anything that can be theoretically seen or touched by us, or ever could have been, or ever will be.” If there is a God (and I’m not saying there is) then he/she/it is part of the universe as well.

The Argument: It doesn’t make any sense to ask where the universe is, because the universe is all of space. The universe isn’t to the left of anything, or to the right of anything, or on top of or below anything. The concept of “where” doesn’t make sense beyond space itself. It also doesn’t make sense to ask when the universe was created, because the universe is time itself. Either there are a distinct number of incarnations (e.g. one big bang to start it all, one big crunch to end it all) or there are an infinite number (one universe leads to another, going back an infinite amount and going forward and infinite amount) but either way, that totality of being doesn’t have anything before it or anything after it, so it doesn’t make sense to ask when it started. The universe may have start and end dates to us within the universe (the big bang happened on a Thursday) but it doesn’t make sense to say something like “there was no time and space, and then 5 minutes later the universe started.”

What does it mean to say something exists? I think of that quote by Philip K. Dick: “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.” I tend to think of reality as anything you can poke with a stick. Another way to say it is that anything that has a cause, and that can cause other things, is real. All of these definitions of reality (and I challenge anyone to come up with a definition that doesn’t) depends on a tester that is already presumed to be real. If you poke something with a stick to see if it is real, it presumes that the you and the stick are also real. In other words, something is real if it is real to other real things. Yet if the universe is the totality of all things that could possible effect each other, then it couldn’t possibly meet any of those tests. You can’t go outside the universe and poke it with a stick. There is nobody outside the universe who can stop believing in the universe to see whether it goes away or not.

“Real” or “exists” are terms that only mean anything within the universe. The universe cannot properly be said to exist, nor to not-exist. To ask whether the universe exists is like asking if your coffee-cup is happy or sad: it just doesn’t apply.

Up Means Everything and Nothing: I’m getting this impression that every adjective has three spheres. In one sphere, it means one particular, objective thing. In another sphere, is has a nebulous meaning. In another sphere it is meaningless. Take “up.” For example. For you, where you stand on the Earth right now, up is one particular direction: a line extending from the center of the Earth, to you, and up into space. For you and other people on the same continent as you, up is a general sort of direction. If you pointed straight up in California, you would be pointing in roughly, but not quite the same direction, as someone pointing up in New York. When you talk about everyone in the world, though, up has no objective meaning. Any given vector line could be up to someone on Earth.

The word “exists” is the same: within the universe it is important whether something exists or not, but at the level of the universe, it is a meaningless term.

So What Does This Mean: Accepting that the universe doesn’t exist as fact doesn’t really mean or do very much. It means one doesn’t have to spend time worrying about why the universe exists in the form it does (if it doesn’t exist, there is no ‘cause’ in a cause-and-effect sense, and so no why). It doesn’t mean that we can make bullets stop Matrix-style because they don’t really exist, because although neither we nor the bullets truly exist in a cosmic sense, within the universe we exist to each other.

To me, the value is that it teaches me to stop looking for cosmic absolutes. Democritus said “Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion” yet if we accept that the universe doesn’t exist, then not even the atoms and empty space are a done deal. It doesn’t make sense to look for cosmic truths, only for local truths, truths that are true within the sphere that we inhabit.

When (if) we get our new place we should build a Goat Tower.



vampyrecat, I'll let you spearhead this.

To watch later:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
End Times
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Newt Gingrich Unedited Interview

For anyone who doesn't have victortenzin on their f-list, there's a great story by him that just got posted.

(from 1897 Chicago Tribune, via The Hope Chest)

The scary thing is, cocaine is a topical anesthetic, so it's was probably causing them to sustain terrible heat damage to their eyes that they would have otherwise closed their eyes to avoid.

"check burner wording"

-A note to myself I wrote in the margins of some editing I was working on that I now can't figure out.

I just got back from eating lunch with victortenzin at his school.

Two of his friends were sitting across from us. One (Francis) said "I love your house. I wish I could go live at your house." The other (Ewan) said "I wish I could go live at your house."

Then victortenzin said "I wish I could cut me into pieces" (and made a slicing motion with his finger down the center of his head) "and then go to Ewan and Francis' houses at the same time!"

Keep in mind that it’s only a theory, not a belief, but it goes something like this:

Management training doesn’t work. Diversity Training doesn’t work. Psychotherapy doesn’t work. Meditation doesn’t work. Sports Psychology doesn’t work. Life Coaching doesn’t work. Hypnotherapy doesn’t work. Anger Management doesn’t work. Feng Shui doesn’t work. Dispute Resolution Coaching doesn’t work. All the various arts and sciences that claim to improve your ability to deal with the situations you encounter in your life do nothing besides cause you to pay attention.

That’s the only thing in the realm of self-improvement that works: paying attention. If you pay attention to any aspect of your life, you will do better at that aspect of it. It’s not magic, it’s a simple feedback loop. Of all the various things you find in the self-help section of the bookstore, they only help insomuch as they cause you to, and remind you to, pay attention to some aspect of your life. People don’t need a book or a guru, they just need a watch that beeps every hour and says “don’t forget to pay attention to ____.”

Unfortunately, human attention is a limited resource. There are a maximum number of things in your life that you can pay close attention to if you hope to actually get something done in a day. It’s not as if you can become a superhuman by choosing to pay close attention to every single aspect of your life. Pay closer attention to one thing, and another thing will have to go into autopilot. Get better at one thing, and stagnate, or possibly even get worse, on another thing. So there is no magic bullet that cure’s life’s problems, there is only a constant cost-benefit analysis: what do I need to get better at and what can I afford to pay less attention to?

"We're lucky that we don't have much diversity here."

-A person sitting at my table at the all-staff diversity training at my day-job yesterday.

Remember when I said if you could go a month without smoking we'd send you a free prize?

Well here's something that made me think of you:



(from criggo)

At my day job we have to do diversity training. A buddy of mine is on the committee and got them to adopt a Star Trek theme, which is cool, but when when he missed a meeting they decided to also do this thing with little dolls that everyone decorates to say something about their culture or identity. Here's mine(  behind the cut )

Since corps can't create the intellectual property they create, it would either have to go to the public domain when they dissolve, or get put into trust and sold to whatever corps come next (much like with the factories they create). Without Disney wanting to squeeze $ out of Mickey Mouse for a century, I doubt we'd have the ever-extending-copyright terms we have now, so even if IP didn't go into the public domain right after dissolution, it would probably go pretty shortly (a few years). The people in power would like this, I think, because more patents and copyrights in the Public Domain lower start-up-costs to start your next corporation.

Since a corporation can't help to build and capitalize on the consumer good-will built by having good products, I think that would mostly shift to designers. We see this in movies today: nobody cares what dumbass entertainment-corp creates a movie, they want to know that this was "by the director of ____" or "by the writers of _____." People would learn to care about designers and so new corporations would work hard to woo top name designers. We'd see ads like "Coming in 2009: Apogee, the Operating System, by famed OS designer Linus Torvalds" or "The 2009 Ramwick commuter vehicle, by lead engineer Sandra Volst."

So corporations were originally these charters that a government (or monarch) would give to a group of people on a limited basis to complete some important product, like build a bridge. At some point it switched over so that corporations were unlimited in duration.

So what might it be like if that change never happened, if corporations were all limited in duration, created to do one job and then dissolving as soon as that job was done. One reaction might be: well, they would just never finish the job, and stay around forever. But what if the shareholders only get paid when the corporation dissolves. If that were the case, shareholders would never stand for a corporation failing to finish because they want their investment income.

It would be very hard for a corporation to run a utility. Probably utilities would be run by governments. A corporation might be formed to, say, build capacity (create a network of cell-towers in a city) but when that is done the corporation sells the capacity to the city government.

And what about the infrastructure needed to create? What happens to the factory that a car company builds to produce a series of cars? Maybe when the corporation dissolves it is put into trust, and when the next corporation that wants to use the factory buys it then that money goes to the shareholders.

Few people would have a "steady job." Most would be hired on for a contract of a year of a few years.

There would be less incentive for companies to try to build a good name by providing excellent products, because they know they're not going to be capitalizing on that good name year after year. On the other hand, there would be less anti-competitive anti-change measures. Microsoft wouldn't have the luxury of putting out a crap operating system just because they know the business world is locked into Microsoft for good or for ill.

Say what you want about religious-faith/mental-illness, but in my book anything that helps you overcome being tased and escape from the cops is pretty cool:

victortenzin was in a really bad mood and was sitting on the naughty spot for yelling at his sister when he was supposed to be telling her sorry, so I sat down to talk to him. Part of our conversation was:

Tz: I don't like Sophie (his cousin).

Me: You don't like Sophie? Why?

Tz: Sometimes she gets mad at me.

Me: Well she's just a little kid. She's younger than you, you know.

Tz: Yeah, I'm older than her.

Me: Yes.

Tz: And I know all.

(At this point I started laughing, and then victortenzin started laughing and then his bad mood was over).

Sending an email to some Optometry professors, explaining what their options for compressing a video podcast are, I'm tempted to include a sentence: "As you may know, human eyes are basically just little balls of crap that hardly see anything, so you can throw out most of the information from a video without anyone ever even noticing."

The thing about having so busy more to do than you can possibly do in a day, is that you have the luxury of blowing some stuff off, of saying "I don't have time to deal with that now, I'll do it later." That's a very bad habit to get into, though, because later you find yourself not doing things that you can do, and should do, but just don't want to. Things have finally quieted down at work a bit, but I still find myself reading an email, thinking "gah, I can't deal with that right now," marking it as unread and moving on, when I really should be replying to the email.

The Netherlands (where cannabis is legal) has so few criminals that it is now faced with the choice of shutting down its prisons and laying off the staff, or importing criminals from other countries like Belgium on a contract basis.

(from Boing Boing)

Trying to write while I have kids bugging me leads me to write sentences that start like this:

"After the discovery of France by the United States..."