Dec 21

Hellocast

“A place there is below, from Beelzebub

As far receding as the tomb extends,

Which not by sight is known, but by the sound

Of a small rivulet, that there descendeth

Through chasm within the stone, which it has gnawed

With course that winds about and slightly falls.

The Guide and I into that hidden road

Now entered, to return to the bright world;

And without care of having any rest

We mounted up, he first and I the second,

Till I beheld through a round aperture

Some of the beauteous things that Heaven doth bear;

Thence we came forth to rebehold the stars.”

That’s Dante and Virgil escaping from Hell. I’d forgotten how plum purty it was until I read it and a lot more again today.

Dec 21

Actually one

I’m so damn tired of hearing loony Dems (apparently now, all of them) saying things like, “We actually won because we won the popular vote by like 3 million!”

No, no the fuck you did not win. Not where it counts. Guess who is going to be inaugurated January 20. Hint: It’s not Hillary Clinton.

If that’s what winning looks like, we need less of that and more of the other thing.

The Dems were supposed to be the reality-based party. At least that used to be partially true.

No more.

Dec 21

Determine this

If the universe is not fully deterministic, emergent properties might not be causally tied to fundamentally reducible and observable lower-level phenomena.

Reductionism just might not work in many cases, nor the possibility of its opposite.

I’m not a physicist nor do I have any aspirations in this field, just stating something more as an arena of thought and as chain of logic rather than saying “dark matter is fake” or whatever.

If emergence is at some levels causally disconnected or even disordered (time variance discrepancies, etc), then some mysteries will remain ever so (which I find likely).

Dec 20

DW

Quote from a book I’m reading:

“Trisha Halgarth has gone back to Solidade, the Halgarth Dynasty’s private planet.”

Private planetprivate planet

DO WANT.

Dec 20

Was It 26

This is much better than the original:

Studio version with better audio is here.

That’s how country should be done; that’s the real stuff right there.

Dec 20

Moral philosophy

The question of “overall benefit” of agreements like NAFTA and the TPP is irrelevant.

What is the overall benefit if such things contribute to vast localized poverty and misery while raising GDP? Put that into your cumulative distribution function and smoke it. And what exactly is the benefit if they result indirectly in the election of people like Trump and Le Pen?

When you’re operating on the fundamental assumption that GDP measures something useful in every other sphere of life (well, first, you’re a dumbass) then you can make statements about how “everyone has benefited” while some people enjoy the glorious benefits of being jobless, broke and dead.

Dec 20

576p

Why would you offer a movie in 576p? What, do I look like some sort of savage here? Not enough p’s if you please.

Dec 20

Phish is a bad band

Phishing emails have gotten vastly better. Since I first started seeing them way back in the mid-90s, they’ve been largely inept — bedeviled with glaring grammatical gaffes, bad fonts and unlikely scenarios.

Those I had to spend no cognitive effort sussing out their provenance.

Modern phishing emails I actually have to spend a few seconds looking at to determine their illegitimacy.

This is apart from the phishing emails I get at work which are of the spear variety — those are almost certainly corporate or state actors and so well done that I just no longer click on any email link found in my work address’s mailbox at all.