The Wittgensteinian idea of “language games” is a useful one, but ignored because it’s inconvenient is that the same ideas can be applied to “numbers games” as numericity and math does not exist independently of human thought and contextualizing.

One of the reasons for science’s reproducibility crisis is not that anything is fundamentally broken in science but rather that the world just cannot be separated from itself as strongly as would be helpful to observing significant effects in many areas.

I am not arguing against empiricism per se but rather the idea that it’s anything but provisional in arenas outside fundamental laws or extremely simple systems — and sometimes not even then.

Quantification leads too often to the illusion of knowledge rather than to knowledge, and quite frequently we have no way even in principle to determine the difference.

This is not also an argument that we know or can know nothing, but rather that what we can know is as constrained by the “numbers games” we can play just as what we can determine playing language games.

As usual, I am not sure that any of what I write here is true, but I am certain (and at this, Wittgenstein would probably grin) that it is what I am thinking at the time.

The Democrats are so done.

the speed with which "Bernie supporters were Russian plants" has gone from unhinged joke to common wisdom is super chill

— Brandy Jensen (@BrandyLJensen) April 2, 2017

I’ve noticed that too — according to the Democrats, Russia now controls the entire US, Bernie was actually a Russian spy/Manchurian candidate, and all his supporters were also Russian shills, plants, and insurrectionists.

There is no way forward in this. It’s just a method for the Dems to avoid dealing with their responsibility for losing the election and for not having a coherent ideology other than one which just serves to bolster Wall Street and to support banksters in their fraud schemes and various pilferage, purloining and poaching from the societal commonweal.

Putin made me write this, of course. He’s standing beside me with an AK-47 to my head right now.

How the fuck do most people browse the internet on their phones? How is this a thing?

I have a really nice phone (iPhone 6) and it is a terrible, miserable, broken experience to browse almost any site on a phone. It’s slow, ad-filled, and impossible to copy or highlight text easily. Also, using multiple tabs is fundamentally broken, blogging is nearly impossible, and anything more complex than clicking “like” buttons is right out.

I’m still thankful though that most people are going to hobble their ability to compete with me in the workplace, where working on phones (except in a few jobs) will never be a thing.

I’ve already seen evidence of this in the interns who arrive at my workplace, many of whom can barely use a computer and take a long time to learn.

This is definitely untrue for me.

The optimal level for creative thinking, Mehta found, is 70 db—about the level of a crowded café. Or traffic in midtown Manhattan.

That is unbearably cacophonous to me. Cannot think or get any creative work done at all. Might as well be inside a jet engine.

My ideal noise level is in a quiet countryside (40ish decibels) with maybe some bird calls. Gain 30 IQ points immediately.

Not many non-scientists understand very much about the practice and uses of science, of course — that goes for the liberal camp as well. Though they tend to be more pro-science, their comprehension of scientific processes and knowledge vs. wisdom is about that of a toddler contemplating an internal combustion engine.

So when I see comments like this, I am not surprised. It’s the most common view.

Person is still a blazing blockhead, of course.

Let’s go back a ways. I’m old enough to remember (as a friend of mine also does) when if you were talking about researching and using renewable energy such as wind and solar, nearly everyone was battling to be first in line to call you foolish, stupid, delusional and a megaton-level moron.

Now of course solar and wind are literally getting cheaper by the day, and in many places are handily beating fossil fuels — all before any of the horrendous externalities of those fuels are even calculated in.

My point is that it’s really hard to tell what is useful. To the people who would queue up in the late 1990s and early 2000s to tell me what a doofus I was to proclaim the imperative to conduct alternative energy research, solar and wind were about as practical a topic of study as badger bovine burial practices.

Needless to say, they were utterly, dangerously wrong. (And I must note that it was not just the oil industry and their shills; such discussion was taboo on one of the leading peak oil websites of the time, too, and this was a majority view everywhere.)

Will studying how and why badgers bury calves in some circumstances save the world? Probably not. It’s very hard to predict, though, what will make any difference in the world at all — which is why all avenues must be explored. I am sure at the time it was said that Edward Jenner was wasting his days studying why milkmaids did not contract smallpox. Some dude messing around with cows and caring about women’s work. I mean, ugh, right? But look where that led.

The utter dripping disdain I distinctly recall from my advocacy of “impractical, idiotic” alternative energy during the 2000s made me more likely to support science in all its forms, even that which seems superfluous or trivial.

You can’t walk the path if don’t know the path is even there.

Duck eggs are quite a bit different in taste and consistency as compared to chicken eggs — and larger, too.

I think in many ways I prefer the ova of the cluckier fowl, but I’m glad I didn’t duck out on dabbling in this new (to me) cuisine.

Their shells, though, are much harder to quack. I am sure you are going to drake me over the coals for that bad pun — but that is your mallardy, not mine.

Hey ya’ll, xrdp is pretty brilliant.

I use it with Xubuntu (thus, XFCE) and a guide for that can be found here.

If you want a GUI for remote Linux boxes and are tired of goofing around with VNC and its tendency to break from release to release, this is your ticket. It also supports session persistence, is stable and pretty fast.

I like it in particular because I can toss it in with my other RDP connection files in MacOS and it just works, but I’ve tried connecting from three different OSes now and it works flawlessly.

When Cleopatra was queen of Egypt, the Great Pyramid at Giza was already older than all of the surviving iconic Roman monuments extant today. To Cleopatra, the Giza pyramids were literally ancient history.

The sheer scope of time that pharaonic Egypt survived is astounding — nearly 3,000 years. We will likely never see such an enduring human civilization again.

Look at this goofy assclown.

Yes I'm a straight, normal, married man so I don't go out making friends with women, nor do I have any desire to https://t.co/7DUHEAeXj2

— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) March 30, 2017

I’m not married, but I’ve been with my (female) partner for 11 years now — and I am so thankful for the women I’ve made friends with over the years in the various places I’ve lived. They’ve enriched my life greatly and I’m incidentally going to visit a (woman) friend in a few weeks (and I’m very excited about this because she’s the coolest).

You’re a sad little fuckstick, Matt Walsh, and your family tree is probably a cactus because everyone on it is a prick.

I don’t have a good name for this concept yet, but lately I’ve been thinking a lot about mental “glitch traps.”

I’ll illustrate by exposition. Ran into one at work yesterday with someone I was attempting to explain something quite easy to. But because it didn’t fit into their worldview, they just could not comprehend it at all.

Stripping out the specificity, there were a pair of items where the item in question is almost always found singularly. And no matter how hard I tried, the person just could not understand that this one time there would be two of them.

In the end it was me repeating over and over again, and here summing up many many words, “This time there are two. I know there is usually only one and the tool is built for only one. But this time there are two. Just ignore one.”

And then the person would say something like, “But there are two? What do I do with two?”

I must have repeated the same set of instructions in different iterations a dozen times before I basically just gave up.

But the person in question just could not understand. There being two of the item just completely did not fit into their conception of the world and so they were unable to proceed past that point. They simply could not go on.

Glitch trap. Mental breakage.

So that now has me wondering, when do I run into these (since I must) and is there any way to break out of them without looking as foolish as the person at work to anyone above the maze, looking down?

I really have very little in common with people my age.

I mean, I never have much in common with anyone at all but people my age — fuck, I don’t give a crap about your golf score, your mortgage, your kids or their antics, your investment “advice,” how the 70s or the 80s was the best period for music EVAR or any of that other crap. If I have to listen to one more rambling digression about some 1970s TV show I think I will barf at light speed. FUCK M*A*S*H. DAMN.

Guess that’s why I tend to mingle most with the interns at work. We listen to the same music, have a lot more essential freedom in our lives, and we are not completely set in our ways. The interns listen and consider. People my age are so ossified they might as well all be named “Femur.”

And as for talking to the interns, it’s really funny sometimes when I do mention something older like The Breakfast Club and it’s a complete mystery to them.

Every place a person stands is its own country, with an inhabitant of but one. There is no other way to be in this world. Your eyes saccade over the contours of the known yet this process is not reversible: a grace and a curse. There can be no ascertaining the arrangement of any other person’s map of their own private nation, no method of discovering the symbol on the legend that marks your name, your being, in that strange other’s mental topography. Is it a dagger for danger? A bridge to always cross to reach a welcoming shore? A gun; a fire; an uncanny artifact ever unknown even to the cartographer.

How much is veiled even to that author of the map is what is more unnerving still — that some Jungian ur-memory resident since the Devonian could overrun it all at any moment, redraw the boundaries, a revanchist lusus naturae marauding across the bunched mountains and huddled hills which in this case actually is the map and the territory, and with no recourse but to watch the unfolding invasion.

(This is an example of my “real” writing. Took me as long to compose as 15-20 of my blog posts.)

If Bernie Sanders manages to kick into gear a real drive for single payer, he’ll have helped save more lives and bettered the lot of more people than nearly anyone who ever lived — all without drone-bombing anyone to freedom.

Bernie was always better as not-president. Admittedly, though, nearly anything is better than Trump.

It’s nice to have skills people want.

I raised my consulting rate yesterday by 35% and the company I consult for part-time (my second job) just said, “Ok.”

I’ve been doing much more work for them and much harder work, so it was justified. But, cool, a raise.