ineffabelle

Ow.  My stomach is getting kind of oogy and I still have 3 hours of work left.  Boo. :(

"What it comes down to, I think, is the difference between standing up for yourself and being a bully. What I am about to say is maybe not the most popular or welcome thing to hear in discussions like this, but: sometimes you need to stand up for yourself. Sometimes something is so big and so bad that you just have to call it out, because you think making the fucked-upness of a situation or statement or wacky cinematic date rape leading to true love will help other people, maybe even the person that you are calling out. But – ah, BUT! – it actually is possible to be a total jerk about this. You can belittle people and attack them personally and fail to listen to them and score points off them. And it doesn’t actually help anyone. It just makes the cause you are presenting look like something that crazy mean people use to boost their self-esteem and justify their cruelty."
- Sady of Tiger Beatdown

I like her more and more, the more I read.

The reason why physics is a pretty solid discipline is not because physicists are particularly smarter than anyone else, they just have a much better set of mechanisms for checking their stupidity than most fields do.
The thing that makes science ... well, scientific, is the position of maximum possible scepticism that it takes toward all knowledge.  If scientists start losing that scepticism, they become less and less scientific.

(Socio-biologists, for example, seem to be particularly prone to making claims way beyond what the evidence would allow)

Saw Oldboy and Chinatown this weekend.

o.0

Watched Cloverfield tonight.  It was better than I expected it to be.
( mild spoilers. )

Yell Incoherently and Carry A Big, Brittle Stick - Modern American foreign policy.

Directions:
"Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you've read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes. "

1. Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon
2. Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut
3. Sirens of Titan - Kurt Vonnegut
4. The Nausea - JP Sartre
5. UBIK - PK Dick
6. The Divine Invasion - PK Dick
7. The Dao De Jing - Lao Tzu
8. Illuminatus! Trilogy (cheating maybe but they were published together) - RA Wilson
9. Manalive - GK Chesterton
10. The Reprieve - JP Sartre
11. Neuromancer - William Gibson
12. Cosmic Trigger - RA Wilson
13. Cyberiad - Stanislaw Lem
14. Dune - Frank Herbert
15. Albanian Assignment - David Smiley

there are days when work feels like the Worst.RPG.Evar.

On a hopefully not related note, if you're ever in the mood for something truly depressing, you can play the second half of Pink Floyd's The Wall first, and the first half second.  Such that it starts with "Hey You" and ends with "Goodbye Cruel World".
It tells a very different, but equally coherent and much more disheartening story.

(9:15:26 PM) x: I say we just ban endorphines
(9:15:29 PM) annamnesis: LOL
(9:15:39 PM) annamnesis: then we won't be addicted to anything!
(9:15:50 PM) x: there ya go
(9:15:54 PM) x: Hell, you guys banned trans fats
(9:15:59 PM) x: Don't tell me it's not possible
(9:16:22 PM) annamnesis: and we can joylessly pull the levers on our machines and make stuff... for some fucking reason that escapes me right now.

Ever notice how every interesting president has a scummy insider vice president? That is no accident, IMO.

Google is degrading because of SEO.  They were fighting it off pretty well for a while, but it seems with all the emphasis on other projects maybe their core team isn't getting as much priority?  Or maybe the swarms of vultures have just gotten too large to resist effectively.

Name that tune:
"Don't cry, dry your eye.
Here comes your mother with those two little guys"

Things that piss me off:
Tech support people who tell you to upgrade instead of actually dealing with your problem.
(oh that's fixed in the latest version, I'll send you a link)
Bullshit.  The version we installed was working fine last week, just do your fucking job or give me someone who will.

"We hypostasize information into objects. Rearrangement of objects is change in the content of the information; the message has changed. This is a language which we have lost the ability to read. We ourselves are a part of this language; changes in us are changes in the content of the information. We ourselves are information-rich; information enters us, is processed and is then projected outwards once more, now in an altered form. We are not aware that we are doing this, that in fact this is all we are doing." - Saint Horselover Fat

This:

me: the cops are already a predatory class
no one knows if they're going to rape, beat, electrocute or kill you in any encounter
and get away with it.

"Trouble is, Mills explained, these serious people are fools. They seem to know what’s going on, and how to right what’s wrong with the world, only if one accepts their own view of how the world works. So “practical” are these serious people, however, that they understand nothing beyond their noses and outside the circle of their own constricted understanding and experience."

- Robert Higgs, On Crackpot Realism

http://www.oftwominds.com/blogjune09/devolution-predictions06-09.html

though some of you might find it interesting too.

"President Nicolas Sarkozy declared Monday that the Islamic burqa is not welcome in France".  Later after a few glasses of wine he was overheard to mutter "Tits or GTFO".



(note: I made that last sentence up)

P: Well, I guess she must have been raped repeatedly or something to have such a demoniacally negative opinion of the male sex. Fine, I'll die alone and the world will continue its descent down the toilet into chaos. Just lovely.
A: The "male sex" (a concept that needs deconstructing in a big way, but we'll take it at conventional value) has not been very worthwhile except as a sperm donor, until very recently.
Morally there's no justification for the way they have behaved vis a vis the "not male sex" historically.
You can call for a truce, but you certainly can't ask for acceptance of the past behaviors as "proper".
(A is me, btw)
P: Fuck you too, sugarplum.

As far as I can tell, if you could sustain a high enough fever long enough, it should kill any and all viral infections in your body.
So if we could develop a way to protect the brain, heart and lungs and induce, say, a 108-110 fever over 12 hours, that should be a "cure" for almost every viral ailment.

If someone with more medical knowledge than I knows of a good objection to this, please comment.

Thanks to firepower for being awesome... this post of this video is dedicated to you.



Listen carefully right around 9:05 or so... zomg so good.