Somehow I had no George Lakoff books.

Now I have some George Lakoff books.

See how easy that was.

Feminism is really making a mistake allowing the FA movement to hitch their cart to the movement and now to dominate it in many areas.

Can you even be oppressed if you are a 70%+ majority (as overweight and obese people now are in many Western countries)?

Sure, theoretically it is possible I guess, as the minority Sunnis oppressed the Shia Muslims in Iraq for three decades, but it is very rare and usually requires some group to wield real and dominating power.

I don’t see any evidence of this. If anything, I far more frequently see and hear (in person, too) thin and skinny women shamed for being “sticks” or “twigs,” etc.

Jealousy and envy talking, of course, like almost all of the FA movement.

The reason I say the MRAs and FA people are two sides of the same coin is that both believe it is oppression if someone is not attracted to them, and that it is oppression if your doctor/psychologist/therapist/medical professional tells you that you are engaging in extremely unhealthy and self-harming behaviors.

Folks, that ain’t oppression. That’s just damn reality.

Get ready for a rampage in markets on Monday.

Aww yes. I like market rampages.

Panic, little traders. Panic, weak algorithms.

I shall feast on your losses like a true capitalist.

Windows 10 and HIPAA Compliance.

I am not a lawyer, but given how strict HIPAA is and how much data Windows 10 exfiltrates even with all the data-stealing settings toggled “off,” I highly doubt that the OS can be used in any HIPAA-compliant environment legally.

In any case, if I were an IT director in any HIPAA-compliant workplace, I’d never roll out Windows 10 as the risk is just too great no matter if it is deemed probably ok.

I guess when Firefox finishes destroying itself, I’ll use Chromium with heavy, heavy firewalling — we’re talking deny/deny by default with explicit allow rules only. Perhaps only browsing in a VM.

Firefox probably won’t be around in 5-7 years since they seem intent on becoming a clone of Chrome, and that’s a war they can not and will not win. Google is going to crush them, but not because it had to be that way. Nope, all voluntary choices by Mozilla management.

Mozilla’s management might be the worst in the tech industry as far as decision-making goes.

The wave/particle duality isn’t really a duality.

Much that has been written about physics is complete crap, not surprisingly.

There is no there there. The electron is neither a particle nor a wave. Sometimes it is just convenient to think of it in one way or the other.

The electron is its own thing, both both* and neither.

The double-slit experiment is still very cool, but when you really understand electrons and fields, it is obvious rather than mysterious.

*I love it when I can validly duplicate words like that.

Oh, cool, just about when I thought it would happen, panic is setting in.

Time to buy soon. Now we just need some major financial or political shock (preferably fake so it doesn’t actually harm people save dumb-ass banksters) and the market porridge’ll be just right.

To those who say you can’t market time I say this: enjoy being poor!

The World’s Hot Spot.

I know, it’s Thomas Friedman, but he’s right — large parts of the globe, including the American Southwest, will soon become uninhabitable.

When daytime temperatures routinely exceed about 120F, human life becomes unsustainable or at least highly impractical. This means that large parts of California, Texas, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico and a few other states are going to experience mass outflows of desperate migrants.

This isn’t speculation. This will happen.

By 2100, the world will be so different as to be utterly unrecognizable. People as I’ve said before just have no idea.

Looks like by 2017, Firefox will be completely dead and fully unusable.

One of the features that made Firefox and won it so much geek cred in its early days was its rich extension model, allowing a wealth of customizations and extra functionality.

Now that’s all being taken away, and Firefox will just become another piece of Chrome-like spyware. Very sad, but inevitable.

After this transition to failure mode, not sure what I will do. Well, there are a lot of books I want to read that I’ll then be able to devote more time to.

It’s weird that no one can seem to make a decent browser. But the normals now rule the internet, and they just do not care who is stealing their data or how crappy their experience is.

If they can click on YouTube and drool, they are ok.

By the way, this means that Classic Theme Restorer, NoScript, the current method of ad-blocking pre-load, and other extensions that require low-level access will no longer work. Sans CTR, that means it’s Australis or nothing.

And you know what, FUCK THAT. I will never use a browser that looks and works like that utter piece of crap that is Australis. Or Chrome, for that matter. I like my data to stay my data, thanks.

Humans have many correctable design flaws.

I’m all for correcting them.

If that makes me for the “evil” eugenics, so be it. After all it’s just as much eugenics to eliminate a heritable disease as it is to give a kid an IQ boost.

Anyway, eugenics — no matter what we call it — is inevitable. And in the end it might be the only way to survive as a species.

Why would anyone use Spotify after this?

The only conclusion I can reach is that people want to be exploited and oppressed, else they’d do something different. It’s easier. It removes doubt. It’s predictable.

Turns out the boot stamping on a human face forever is comforting after it’s been there a while.

I saw some slackjaw complaining about the phrase “hitting on” being a violent phrase.

No.

“Hitting on” is an example of idiomatic drift, from the idea of a lucky “hit,” that is, finding or getting something by chance or luck. The drift in this case is from the happenstance and serendipity of locating a desired person to the actions associated therewith.

By the way, the original meaning of “hit” back in the mists of linguistic time was something like “to meet with.” It’s only later that it became associated with the act of physically striking someone or something.

I wish people would fucking read. Study history. Know something rather than nothing.

This contention is really really wrong.

If everything in the universe suddenly got 100 times larger — and I am assuming we are talking the macro scale here — many bad things would happen all at once. So, so many bad things.

Your blood would no longer flow. You’d die from that pretty quickly. Also, gravity would be absolutely crushing, also preventing blood flow. And, you know, literally crushing you. The atmosphere at sea level would also be so dense that breathing would be impossible, even ignoring gravity and all other factors. And you’d begin overheating — even if you survived all the other things — in very short order since volume increases faster than surface area, and 100x increase for an endotherm is huge.

The only thing that might — might — survive for a little while are some fish. And then the sun would go supernova and then black hole shortly (assuming the 100x larger earth were moved out to the correct distance for a 100x larger sun) and it’d all end, anyway.

When you know nothing about anything, everything seems possible.

For years, various Native American cultures were denigrated and mocked for using mind-altering substances and experiences like peyote and sweat lodges.

However, the same people doling out the derision would then pay rather high prices to watch films and read books which inarguably do the very same thing: produce shared hallucinations that are culturally and individually significant.

Just another version of what I do seems normal, what someone else does is bizarre and wrong.

But have you really thought about how odd movies are, especially as a communal event?

Sitting in a room with a dozen or a hundred other people watching flickering light and reacting often as if you’re sharing the experiences of the characters on the screen (particularly if the movie is good)?

Considered from a cultural distance — say from the perspective a culture that had never invented films — that seems really just quite strange.

Intellectually, I recognize that Steampunk for the most part has no more of a ridiculous premise than most other sf and certainly not more so than fantasy, and yet I can’t stand steampunk novels.

It does not make sense, like most preferences, and yet I’ve never been able to do more than tolerate any steampunk tale.

Something about the typical forced whimsy and my general distaste for historical revisionism I think.