Jet lag?

Never had it. No strong circadian rhythm or really any.

To someone who has never experienced it, seems just bizarre. Can’t you, just, like go to sleep when you want to? You mean regular people can’t just do that?

Huh. Weird.

I marvel nearly every day (as my partner can probably wearily tell you) at just how very quickly people forget the past. Sometimes even people who have lived through it, oddly.

For instance, how making college free or nearly free again is supposedly “impossible” and “completely crazy” when that’s just the way it used to be nearly everywhere.

 Other state universities had ludicrously low rates: University of Texas in 1970 had fees, in 2016 dollars, of $335 and annual in-state tuition of $310. So “free” or nearly free tuition isn’t a radical new idea, it’s an old one, one that was prevalent even in conservative states.

Clinton’s new take on college isn’t horrendous. It’s merely barely civilized. But my mind boggles at how things we’ve done in the past when we were collectively much poorer are now deemed completely ridiculous and risible.

Can not understand.

I was thinking about this article again, and the problem boils down to this:

Even feminists use the epistemic and hermeneutical framework of the society in which they are embedded and share still 99%+ of its values.

Nerds have little power and are thus easy to shame. Because feminists (as well as all women and men) are so similar to everyone else just by nature of participating in a society, the objects of most of their attractions and those who can inflict the most real harm on them are the societally-approved powerful jock types.

Therefore attacking them would be dangerous. Very, very dangerous. Much easier and safer to attack those who can’t and won’t really fight back much, and whom they are extremely repulsed by in principle and practice. So when a nerd approaches someone like Amanda Marcotte, she’s absolutely revolted and interprets it as an affront to feminism. However, if a physically-fit jock type exhibits the very same behavior (or worse) even if she turned him down, she’d be flattered (secretly or openly).

This isn’t some feminist flaw, though it is hypocritical. It’s just a human reaction to the powerful that nearly everyone has.

(And no GamerGaters aren’t mostly nerds, but rather part of the FPS gaming subculture, many of whom are actual jocks or jock wannabes and who share far more in common with them in all ways.)

While I agree that treating Elon Musk as some sort of flawless messiah is a mistake, I fail to understand why people pretend that Tesla and SpaceX have done nothing at all interesting or innovative. In both areas, they’ve accelerated some areas of human progress by perhaps two decades.

But this sentence from here is just great.

We now live in an era where raising a billion dollars of other suckers’ money and developing a new “app” to take selfies or find imaginary creatures in a porta-potty is considered the apex of human civilization but investing your entire fortune in a quest to build a self-driving electric car is treated like dangerous, egomaniacal adventurism.

Anyone who builds anything that interfaces with the real world does seem to take on withering criticism these days. Perhaps it’s because we live so much of our lives behind screens that anything with moving parts is seen as disreputable and too disorderly to dignify with any concession to its usefulness.

I don’t know.

But would the world be better of if Tesla and SpaceX didn’t exist? I can’t find even a scrap of a good argument for that. Because it’s goddamn stupid, mainly.

55°: sweat begins
65°: clothes soaked
75°: passing birds bathe on skin
85°: locomote on belly by becoming 1-man slip’n’slide
95°: Full Slime

— gregory erskine (@cat_beltane) July 13, 2016

For me:

55°: Need parka, attempting to set fire to random objects, animals for warmth.
65°: Still need parka, no longer setting fire to animals.
75°: A light jacket is okay if the air is perfectly still.
85°: Comfortable, not warm enough yet to swim. Not sweating yet. AC is not needed.
95°: Pretty good. Warm enough to swim.
100°: It’s getting a little warm; still not sweating.
105°: Remember to turn on AC.
110°: A little sweat appears. Everyone else is dead.

“Systematic design excluding intuition yields pedestrian follow-ons and knock-offs; intuitive design without system yields flawed fancies.”

–The Design of Design: Essays From a Computer Scientist by Frederick P. Brooks

This explains Firefox and Windows 8 and 10, I think — they lack and lacked both intuition and systematicity, combining the worst of both worlds.

In striving for some false simplicity, they achieved neither simplicity nor increased capabilities, instead landing squarely at the left failing edge of the bell curve of incoherence and lack of discoverability.

Anyway, the book is good. Most designers “designing” today should read it.

Design is another field like economics that should just be blown up (metaphorically) and started from scratch. There’s nothing there to save.

Tried to read 3 well regarded recent books only to find them all too MFA-y

“The gulls wheeled around the spires, keening themselves hoarse”

— Chris Arnade (@Chris_arnade) July 10, 2016

Hear, hear. Had nearly the same experience.

I just can’t read or write books like that. It’s just trying too hard to do something that sounds impressive to the educated morons but that sounds like a shithead shindig to the truly educated.

Marge Piercy is another prose writer like Coetzee, if anyone is interested, though far less well-known.

She ain’t no slouch at poetry, either.

When I first started reading academic papers when I was 12 or 13, I wondered who the hell Ibid was. Seemed a very smart person.

Then I quickly figured it out. But at first (mainly because I didn’t care about it or think about it very hard since I cared about the content*), I thought Ibid must’ve been some huge polymath.

My memories aren’t 100% clear, but I think the first scientific paper I read was a paper by Kary Mullis (et al.) on the Polymerase Chain Reaction. I’d helped my neighbor pass her college microbiology and other science classes when I was 9 and 10, so I already had some background in the area.

Still, it was the hardest thing I’d ever read. I remember struggling with it a bit. No way to Google back then. Unfamiliar words had to be searched out in dictionaries that often didn’t contain them at all. No adult where I grew up knew more than I did, so there was no one to ask.

I don’t regret anything, but I always wonder if I’d grown up somewhere else what my life would’ve been like.

*To this day, I sometimes literally don’t know the title or the authors of books I’m reading — while I’m reading them.

Once you understand a little computer science, you realize that there is no possible antivirus program that detects all threats. It is not even possible in principle. It is flatly ruled out by at least two fundamental features of computation.

Antivirus however is not useless. As in most areas of life, most virus writers aren’t very skilled or are very lazy. Thus, AV programs have some use.

But against a skilled attacker (like the NSA or the Mossad), antivirus programs are basically completely worthless, even if these intelligence agencies have no special backdoors in place.

I need a Firefox extension that redacts all mentions on any webpage I’m viewing of these things:

• Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter

• Anything by Amanda Marcotte

• Anything by George Will

• Anything Kevin Drum writes on economics

The list will grow, I’m sure.

Suspect even most very smart people — even the majority in the life sciences — do not understand how tightly intercoupled ecosystems and human life are on earth.

They imagine that humans are at some stage of transcendence of global ecosystems, when in reality due to our numbers we are more closely tied than ever. There is no way climate change is not going to be so close to apocalypse that quibbling over the differences will be just that — quibbling. But it’ll be the kind of semi-apocalypse that humans are bad at dealing with. That is, a long-term one.

Just an estimate, but I think about 99.5% of people have no idea how ecological systems and processes function and how fragile they can be, and how resilient at the same time in the wrong direction. Heck, probably 99.5% of people have no idea there are even such things as ecological systems and webs.

But what should make you worry all the more is that I suspect less than 20% of people who should know, don’t. Those being scientists in related fields.

I’d not be surprised that if in the future the surviving human historians when accounting for the decline of our civilization point to extreme specialization and weird math obsession rather than directly to climate change as the cause of the demise.

We’ve been told it’s not important that there are people who attempt to understand entire systems in toto as I always try to do. I think this is just a variant of neoliberalism attempting to banish real systems thinkers from understanding it and any other important system.

Because if you can understand it, you can change it. Or fight those who have already harmed it for their own profit.

Why do people put “art” on their walls that say things like “Live Laugh Love” and other such saccharine crap?

Try as I might I just can’t understand it.

What’s the message? Is it hopeful? Signaling? Who is the audience and what message are they supposed to receive? Do you need to remind yourself of that, really?

I have so many questions. The semiotics is beyond me.

Yep.

Hillary Clinton may not be indicted on criminal charges over her handling of classified email, but the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, all but indicted her judgment and competence on Tuesday — two vital pillars of her presidential candidacy — and in the kind of terms that would be politically devastating in a normal election year.

Any “regular” person knows they would’ve gone to jail for a good long time having done the same ill-advised and illegal things Clinton did (yes, mishandling classified materials is illegal even if you “didn’t mean to”).

And yes, I’d say the same thing if Bernie Sanders, Jill Stein or Donald Trump had done the same idiotic thing.

This almost assures Trump’s victory. Might’ve been better for her if she’d been indicted, because now Trump will (rightly) have a field day and every regular person will know definitively that she got special treatment that they never would’ve gotten, re-enforcing her “better than the rules” reputation.

Trump must be cackling with glee right now.

Any other year, this would’ve knocked any candidate out of the race. And her supporters can’t see why it’s even a bit of a problem.

What a year.

Why do older people have such trouble detecting phishing emails?

There’s a guy at work, pretty sharp, who is in his early 60s. Not cognitively impaired in any way. Has worked in IT for many years.

He got some phishing email that said something about, “Some questions on your expense report hotel booking” with of course a link to click on something.

I know because he read that part out loud. And literally before I could say “Don’t click on that!” (which I got the first words out) he clicked on it.

I ran over and pulled out his network cable. Machine completely infected, but no damage done because I jerked the cable within two seconds.

I literally heard the first few words and knew it was a phishing email. How could he not tell definitively?

The company I work for has been a target of various spear phishing attacks because we hold a lot of highly-sensitive corporate data. Suspect some of the spear phishing is corporate espionage attempts.

But the questions remains: why are older people generally so susceptible to such attacks?

Seinfeld was one of the most popular shows ever because it perfectly captured the vacuity and dreadful emptiness of American life.

It was better than any sociological study or ethnography, because it was an amplification from stochastic signals of the anomie and casual cruelty that did and still does dominate modern America.

There is nothing people like more than watching themselves, and at last Seinfeld gave them the perfect pinhole looking in on their own lives. Instead of inspiring revulsion and rejection of this abyss of desolation, people liked what they saw.

It’s no mistake a country like that will probably elect Trump president.