Reading about genetics tonight, I realized that mRNA sequences are much like TCP/IP packets, which is not surprising as DNA/RNA has already solved many of the same problems that TCP/IP was designed to solve.

Photos are already lies, or at the least a very incomplete truth as Molly Crabapple points out.

But fuck Photoshop. Photos are already lies.

I’m a former model and current artist. I’ve learned this every second I’ve stared into the camera’s insect eye.

Anyone who’s been at a photo shoot knows that even untouched photos bear only the scantest resemblance to a subject. A photo is frozen. A model sweats and bloats, ages, and dies. Framing is a lie. Lighting is a lie. Cropping is a lie. When you suck in your stomach, or turn your head so the light washes out your laugh lines, you’re lying as much as any liquefy tool. Untruth is baked into the process: Photographer Syreeta McFadden writes how the chemical makeup of some films is biased against dark skin tones. Even snapshots often don’t look like you, because you are not static. You are a three-dimensional being, torn by time. Photos are pixel ghosts.

When I used to take portraits and photograph models, I’d often hear them say to me, “I’m not all that pretty but you make me look so beautiful.”

The thing is, though, I only photographed models I knew and liked. It was easy to make them look great because I already knew they were great people. Showing what’s there is easier if you already know how to find it, if it’s already apparent to you. Capturing a moment in time where someone is at their best is just what good photographers do.

It has less to do with finding physically beautiful people but rather finding the best moments of the ordinary. Gracie Hagen illustrates exactly this with her photography.

Photoshop like any other tool can be and is abused. I too also dislike the magazine covers that do not seem to be populated by actual humans. However, the way many feminists and others go about critiquing and resisting this and other related facts is most often antithetical to their actual goals.

And god, this is a great line. I wish I’d written it.

To get a “true” photo, you need to remove artifice. This means removing art. Art’s opposite is bulk surveillance.

And to further Molly’s points, here is one of my favorite photo sets: twenty-year-old model Eniko Mihalik, photographed as if she were 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, and 60 years old. No Photoshop. Only make-up. And not even all that much make-up at that. Lighting can do amazing things, as any cinematographer knows.

All of those photos of Mihalik are “true.” And all of them are a “lie.” Both at the same time.

When you know it’s time to re-install Windows:

Nice job on a much-covered (and undeservedly hated) song.

Also, the singer Hayley Mary has a mouth the size of a battlestar.

Watch Kacy do cool stuff – the first woman to ever complete this course.

At my fittest, I could’ve completed 2-3 of those events on a good day. She does them all and doesn’t even look tired at the end.

Even the creator of the term “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” is disavowing it.

Good. While at first it was a valid cultural criticism, for many people it drifted to refer to any female character in any film or TV show with any personality at all.

In other words, the term itself became misogynist, even though it was and still is most often used by feminists.

So I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize to pop culture: I’m sorry for creating this unstoppable monster. Seven years after I typed that fateful phrase, I’d like to join Kazan and Green in calling for the death of the “Patriarchal Lie” of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope. I would welcome its erasure from public discourse.

As used currently, it basically dismisses any woman who has any shred of personality. I’ve seen it used to dismiss women in films that are less interesting and have less personality than women I know in actual, real life.

Thus it is a piece of shit and has to die.

A great song about street harassment, in two different formats. I like the version with synths best, but they are both good.

Amelia Randall Meath has a great voice, perfect for this song.

I understand and can use IPv6 just fine, but it’s such a dirty and brain-damaged hacky system that it could’ve only been designed by engineering types.

It’s the most ridiculous example of top-down, admin-hostile design I can think of –- and I can think of a whole lot of such failures.

It’s actually not all that hard, but it’s like someone was intending to design a cheetah and instead ended up with giraffe blended with a leprechaun.

Such a terrible system.

Autodidacts are rare because learning things is hard.

I suspect that learning higher math which for me is impossible is how hard learning everything is for most everyone, so I can understand now why there are not more of us.

If learning about the things I care about were as difficult as learning how to use the quadratic equation is for me, I’d never do it.

I gave up learning math (on my own or assisted) when I realized that I could spend hundreds of hours learning one application (the concepts are easy for me to learn) that takes the average 8th grader an hour, and when I finally have it down the moment I move on to the next thing, it is thoroughly and completely forgotten.

My math teacher in middle school – who I was very close to, is why she spoke so frankly to me – once told me reference my inabilities at math that I was the “stupidest genius I’ve ever met.”

That was after I answered a really hard problem about special relativity at an academic team match, yet was unable to reliably make use of the quadratic equation in her class (still can’t, but now I don’t care).

When I was young, I wanted to be a scientist but realized that my complete and utter incapability at math would never allow that to happen.

Now I’m glad I didn’t go that route because it’s much, much easier to get jobs in IT and they pay better and demand fewer hours.

So there’s that.

Another social change most people younger than 35 or so don’t really remember is that most people in the workplace above mid-level manager and anyone with a white-collar job never really typed anything before 1996 or so.

They had assistants for that, and there used to be many, many more assistants than there are now.

I recall going to my e-mail training at Bingham with any number of other attorneys [where] they would teach you, for example, how to compose a new e-mail, [starting with] how to populate the “to” box. We sort of learned our e-mail addresses as a code—it’s going to be your first name with a period, your last name, an “at” sign, and so on. Immediately people said, “Well, I’m not gonna type in all those letters!” Because nobody really typed 20 years ago. You have to bear in mind—at that time, we had assistants for that. And so the idea of having to type all those letters into a “to” box—like, that was a challenge at the time! And then you had to actually type the message? If you compare that to picking up a dictaphone, talking into a dictaphone and handing a tape to an assistant to transcribe and send—it was just a world apart.

That’s an almost-unimaginable world now, especially to people who didn’t live through it. I caught the tail end of it and watched it all change.

In 1990 it would’ve been unthinkable for anyone in any white-collar job to type his or her own memos; by 1999 it had become de rigeur and 90% of assistants had disappeared from the workplace.

Another very rapid and very unremarked social change.

Interview with someone who designs languages for a living.

When I was 13, I designed my own language. Since I didn’t care about or pay attention in school*, I did most of it in class.

It took a few months. Having a consistent and flexible grammar was really important to me, so I spent a lot of time working on that in particular.

I decided to combine ideograms and a phonetic alphabet, and use a wide range of sounds (40) from languages as diverse as Navajo and Frisian.

I even concocted my own proto-language so etymology made some sort of sense, though that was a bit overkill I figured out later.

Anyway, at the end of it all I ended up with a language that 99% of English speakers couldn’t even hear some of the important phones therein, and which they couldn’t read, and which couldn’t be easily explained because most people accustomed to phonetic alphabets don’t get ideograms and combining them with a phonetic alphabet…well, let’s just say it was a powerful language, but not easy.

But what I liked about it is that the most common couple hundred phrases or so could be written as one character, and it still had all the power of a phonetic alphabet, with neither way of doing things being superior.

*I once spent two months in a class, and didn’t even know what class I was taking. I had never seen the book and though I did the assignments (sort of), they were so easy that I had no idea what the subject was in specific.

What it looks like when someone with training fights people who have none.

The guy knocks the second dude out with one left hook.

Without knowing what was being said, it’s hard to know who was the instigator. Remember, when two people are threatening you (as is likely from the evidence), it doesn’t pay to be timid.

The guy doing all the dominating looks like he had standard boxing training, not krav maga or other similar martial arts. He uses very effective, well-aimed punches (most people with no training miss more than they hit due to adrenaline).

By the way, he deliberately misses with the kick at the end as he wasn’t sure if the second guy was disabled or not. He was already kicking when he turned around, but once he realized that the second dude was no longer a threat he pulled the kick up so as to miss, showing his goal was mostly to disable his potential attackers and get out of there.

I don’t have much comment directly on this topic, though for lower-tier jobs not requiring a lot of hard-won domain-specific experience I think it is true.

However, one of the commenters got me thinking about how often employers in IT search for a specific set of skills, so much so that it is truly unreasonable.

For instance, a few months ago I saw a job post on a site about how the company was looking for someone with a VMWare Certified Professional 5 certification, and that those with only VCP 4 certification would not be considered (or wording to that effect).

I am an expert in VMWare ESXi from version 4 to 5.5. There is nothing that I can’t do with that product range. I know nearly everything there is to know about it. Without exaggeration or bragging, out of IT people who work with it, I’m probably in the top one percent (one of the few products I can say that about as I tend to be a generalist in most areas and am probably rarely even in the top 30 percent or above).

Yet I only have a VCP 4 certification at the moment, and hadn’t planned on getting my cert for 5.

And the reason is that VMWare ESXi version 4 and 5 really aren’t all that different. You could explain the differences to an eight-year-old in about 15 minutes. The average IT worker could learn them in 30 seconds.

I glanced at a chart for 5-6 seconds and knew all of them.

For those not in the techie world, it’d be like adding a few commas to a book and telling someone they had to read it again as they knew nothing about it and actually hadn’t even read it, even though they’d just finished it the day before.

That’s how stupid that job ad is.

I can’t really explain it, as that can’t be blamed on HR which is my usual bugaboo. No, some techie who should know better had to write something that specific and inane.

I’m not surprised that employers hurt potential employees with ridiculous requirements that make no real-world sense. That’s just the way of the world now. What does surprise me is that employers hurt themselves at the same time, without seeming to understand it at all.

Mozilla is finding out what happens when you alienate your core, evangelizing users with some bullshit like Australis.

Yeah, Firefox was already declining by most usage measures, but Australis kicked it in the ass so it went from slowly sliding down the hill to rolling headlong. If I didn’t like the extension model of Firefox so much – and that its extensions are actually useful, unlike Chrome’s – I’d say good riddance to the whole dumbass-infested organization and its browser too.

Australis, though it will never be recognized as such by the Mozilla leadership, is what has sealed Firefox’s fate, just as predicted by me and others.

The thing you realize about Hitler when you read more about history in all its serendipity and contingency is that you realize a Hitler could happen anywhere, nearly any time.

There was nothing truly special or unique per se about Germany.

America for instance is at least somewhat likely to become a theocratic fascist state in my lifetime, and the horrors it would then enact make The Handmaid’s Tale seem like a Babysitter’s Club book.