I was figuring out how to move the earth today for when the sun gets too hot to sustain life, and the asteroid gravity-assist is the method I arrived at as well.

I hadn’t yet figured how long it would take, but that seems reasonable.

Wouldn’t have thought of the solar sail as that seems much harder physics-wise.

Just a thought experiment. Humans will be long extinct in 300 million years, when the heating up really begins.

Books are solitudes in which we meet.

-Rebecca Solnit

DOMA is no more. And a good thing, too.

But it’s clear that the culture wars aren’t being fought with the same intensity, that for the most part except the diehards the main part of the Republican mandarins (if not yet the shock troops) are deciding that in the quest to give businesses everything they want, it’s worth ceding to the seething masses a little freedom where it doesn’t matter either way to corporate overlords.

So yes, a victory. But with the VRA effectively gone, living in a surveillance state and that getting worse, with Obama arrogating to himself the role of chief drone executioner of American citizens, and the complete collapse of the idea that prosperity should be shared – and thus the wages and living standard of average Americans – it’s a hollow victory though still sweet of course especially for those who will benefit most from it.

But in reality, though, it is crumbs thrown to increasingly immiserated, intended more to distract and placate than anything having to do with freedom.

It’s just something corporate interests (and here I am referring to large corporate interests, not small businesses) just don’t care about very much at all, and since we live in a corporatocracy the defeat of DOMA was not opposed all that stringently.

Even since 1996 de facto corporate control of government and the economy has gotten far, far more prevalent. Even since the financial crisis, for that matter.

DOMA’s defeat is a victory, and long-fought one. But it’s the smallest hill in a vast range of mountains that no army is likely to be able to take back in my lifetime, or in yours.

Things that are true after losing a large amount of weight and keeping it off for about-to-be four years:

1) If you can’t stand being hungry ever, you will fail.

2) The best way to resist temptation is to not have it to hand.

3) Have a cheat day, but never cheat any other time.

4) Don’t lie to yourself. Self-delusion is easy. “Oh, just this once” or “It’s a special occasion.” No. Just no.

5) If you do slip, don’t give up. Mistakes are human. Not quitting is what elevates one beyond that.

That said as I’ve noted before, you will probably fail just looking at the stats. I know myself really well and knew that I could do it. And so I did.

However, I tend to prosper in environments with large numbers of people and even the entire social milieu telling me that I cannot do something, and that I will fail.

Statistically, the odds are against you. However, statistics only matter if you aren’t me.

Why yes, I can be a little arrogant at times.

Was a woman in my dream again. I think I might’ve been a variant of Sarah Polley in the Dawn of the Dead universe.

I didn’t realize it until I woke up and thought about it for a moment because of course feeling like a woman just feels like being human.

Sometimes dreams are so vivid that waking up to the world is like the phantasm. Not that I wanted to go back. No. In that dream, I was in charge of some experiment to test if the zombies were getting smarter.

They were.

I don’t feel a connection with any city that I’ve ever lived in. Not Lake City. Not Charlotte. Not Bellingham. Not Seattle. Not Sharm El Sheikh. Not Chengdu. And not St. Petersburg.

I just have no ties to them that make me feel anything – not talking about people, but the actual places.

Guess I don’t put down roots very easily and of course I am not a city person. Hate them, really. And none of them felt like home, even when I lived there. Even when my life was happy (which it has been often and still is).

Could I feel at home in a place? I don’t know. Perhaps I am just not that kind of person. Probably.

I did feel at home when I lived on the river but then I was almost always alone. Well, there were fish, and I like fish. I think that rootedness had more to do with the river rather than being alone, though.

I belonged there. In a city, I don’t belong and will never belong. Probably that’s most of it.

Like the NSA spying “revelations,” I am surprised that anyone was surprised that an old Southern white lady is a bit racist.

Shit, I grew up in the South. Ninety percent of everyone I knew was just like this; my closest at the time childhood friend once said, “We had ‘em in slavery once, and we can put ‘em right back in.”

About the NSA stuff, this was common knowledge as early as the mid-1990s. Where has everyone been?

The only thing it has done is made me realize that a blogger I thought was relatively intelligent was a damn idiot, so much so that I’ve now stopped reading the blog altogether.

Yeah buddy, the whole “my rights” and “fourth amendment” thing are there so that no matter what good reason the government has, it can’t just listen to my phone conversations and steal my private data. Or at least it’s not supposed to be able to.

Good fucking god, should we really have to defend this?

Those posts right there are among the two most well-written dumbass posts I have never read.

And that blog has been deleted forevermore.

Figure I’ve been carping and complaining too much around here.

Sarah Polley. Love everything she’s ever been in, and can’t wait to see the documentary she’s made.

Check out ths interview with her.

Then watch this. This sequence is one of the best openings* of any film of its type due to Polley’s reactions and facial expressions. Just perfect.

*It’s actually not quite the opening, but close enough.

Blogs are once again becoming less stylish and less used – mostly the consequence of mass migration to social crap like Facebook.

Perfectly fine with me. It just means the smarter people who can handle long-form, complex discussion will still visit blogs while the simpering masses will inhabit Facebook.

I see no problem here. I’d rather have one smart, engaged reader than 10,000 morons.

No great loss.

I was reading this article about hiring.

I’ve hired a lot of people in my life. Many of them turned out to be terrible. Some turned out to be great. I had no way to predict this from the interviews.

Something I’ve always wanted to try but no HR department would allow is to hire people completely randomly (well, sort of). I’d find resumes that are at least very minimally qualified for the job, put the names in a hat or a randomizing computer program and hire the first person it picks.

I bet the results would not be much different than the rigmarole of interviewing and such. In fact, they might be better.

Are game developers fucking idiots? Apparently so.

Yeah, because the market for new cars was destroyed by having a used cars market. Or the market for new laptops, or cameras.

Actually it is pretty well-known economically speaking that a healthy and robust used market supports the new-goods market. After all which product are you more likely to buy: a brand-new product for $100 which is impossible to resell and has to be thrown away if you do not like it, or a $100 product which you can resell for $75 if you don’t like it?

Q.E.D.

Even at home, I realized I routinely use four different machines. Try that on a damn tablet.

1) My main machine. Right now, running Windows 7. In the past, it has run everything from various KDE-based distros to off-brand Linux distros only heard of by some housecats living in rural Minnesota.

2) Our Linux server that I remote into using NX and\or putty.

3) A virtual machine running Windows XP for various work-related tasks.

4) Another Windows 7 virtual machine for testing/security.

That’s what I use just at home. And yeah, I really do use those all at the same time.

There are many cognitive fallacies that humans are susceptible to.

One of the most insidious and difficult to detect is I believe the false dichotomy. I find myself falling for that one even when I am aware of it. Those very good at setting up false dichotomies (conservatives, Tea Party plutocrats, banksters, etc.) are much more likely to persuade folks than those with more nuance (liberals, anarchists, socialists, etc.).

There is no easy way around this though constant vigilance to avoid it is worth it. One must be aware though that other areas may suffer as a result, causing a person to become more likely to suffer other cognitive fallacies since processing power and attention is finite.

What makes this great catch so funny is that she is the daughter of a baseball catcher so well-known that even I have heard of him, and I’ve never seen a baseball game nor do I know really anything about it.

Was reading today at a tech site how nothing consumer level needs nor will ever need 10Gb Ethernet connectivity.

I remember when that argument was being made about 10Mbs Ethernet connectivity.

Hell, I remember when it was being made about 56K modems.

People never learn, do they?