MemeMachineGo!

I feel bad about having so neglected MemeMachineGo!, really I do. But I’ve been, well, busy as a new home-owner. I’m learning first-hand the truth to the cliche about “No man with a house has a hobby.” And I am so glad we didn’t get a fixer-upper. This house is in great shape and there are still a huge number of things to be done.

It’s a very different experience from renting. It’s wholly possible I could be here for literally the rest of my life. It changes how I look at everything. I saw there’s a small gap between the wall and the floor in one bathroom and instantly thought “I have to caulk that.” Every drop of spilled water is wiped up immediately. I have the hours of several local hardware stores recorded in my Palm, and I’m a regular at the Berkeley Tool Lending Library . I feel like I should meet the neighbors.

I’ll talk more about these things later; for now, I’ll close by changing the subject. There was an earthquake lastnight, a 3.9 5 km southeast of Berkeley. Pocahontas and I were sitting on a sidewalk waiting to get into a concert, so we felt it well, but it only lasted about 2 seconds — it was over by the time we recognized what it was.

There’s another thing to finally get around to: acquire earthquake supplies.

Gary Brecher takes no prisoners in his rant on the current Iraqi War, the Boer War, and empire building. Excerpting would do it a violence; go read the whole thing.

(Via Ethel the Blog )

=v= You big-city folk probably don't have to contend with this, but out here in America's Heartland®, newspapers aren't printing today's Doonesbury comic strip because it points out that men who masturbate run less of a risk of prostate cancer later in life.

As a public service, then, here's a link to the uncensored strip.

(Jostlin' elders take note: as with many things, this is something you should've done more of in your younger days. No harm in trying to make up for lost time, tough.)

A Bay Area magazine applies Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep’s test to distinguish humans from replicants to San Francisco’s Mayoral candidates.

I’d love to see the same with California’s gubernatorial candidates.

(Via Boing Boing )

OK, I‘m not going to turn this into a Heinlein blog, but this was too much fun not to include. USENETter Gharlane of Eddore suggested:

The Number of the Beast is the most massive and wonderful practical joke ever played on the Speculative Fiction genre-reading public.

It’s nothing but a MANUAL on How To Write Good Fiction, written on several simultaneous levels —- and people get out of it what they put INTO it.

If you’re bemused by the mild porn and physical references being thrust in your face, you never notice what’s actually going on … all the way through the book, you see lecture after lecture about Who’s In Charge, Why Is This Happening, These Are Books We Really Liked, and This Is Why … and every single time there’s a boring lecture or tedious character interaction going on in the foreground, there’s an example of how to do it RIGHT in the background … and constant harping and lecturing on the shoddiness of writers who don’t generate stories that flow, but just jerk characters and events around with no rhyme or reason … AND EVERY TIME THAT HAPPENS, A ‘BLACK HAT’ POPS IN AND JERKS THINGS AROUND … and EVERY SINGLE ‘BLACK HAT’ HAS A NAME WHICH IS AN ANAGRAM OF HEINLEIN’S OWN. (Or of someone very close to him.)

This is the author stepping in to jerk the story around to make something happen, and thereby demonstrating a kind of conscious ineptitude at his own craft, for a joke…. because only when you understand it, only when you are aware* of it, can you purposely botch it up with such skill, and produce something that is *still good enough to keep the people who DON‘T realize what’s going on … reading. Heinlein may have been past his peak when he did the writing, but he took his time and did it right, and did PRECISELY what he intended to do … he left his legacy to any who cared for good writing, good fiction, and RAH’s work; he handed over a textbook and a toolbox, and said ‘Here’s everything I know about my craft. See if you can do better.’

Spider Robinson once said, after having figured out only a part of what the book was, that this is a book that Heinlein wrote for his friends, for the people who care about the field. I add that he also wrote it for any nascent writers with enough wit to realize what it was … the supreme hacker’s easter-egg.

Just exactly how blatant does the man have to be? He’s written one of the greatest textbooks on narrative fiction ever produced, with a truly magnificent set of examples of HOW NOT TO DO IT right there in the foreground, and constant explanations of how to do it right, with literary references to people and books that DID do it right, in the background…

That page also notes that Gharlane of Eddore passed away two years ago.

A librarian who’s a close friend of the family passed the following question from a librarian mailing list on to my father, who passed it on to me, with the no-pressure addition that “the family’s reputation was in my hands.”

I have a patron who’s looking for what he describes as a “space opera” science fiction novel. He can’t remember the title or author, but he does know that the plot had to do with a race of alien invaders and space ships made from frozen lightning called lux and/or relux. He originally read it when he was stationed at Fort Bragg, NC in the 1950s. Any help in identifying this book would be greatly appreciated.

After searching the web and USENET, I came up with only one likely reference, in a post of Gharlane of Eddore ‘s listing fictitious super-hard metals:

Tony Rogers’ swords, although occasionally edged with Ultron or Catultron, were mostly just a decent grade of steel. Endureum, Cosmium, Lux-metal, ten-point steel, Inoson, Arenak, Dagal, Relux, Neutronium, Dureum, Force-Metal, Impervium, monocrystal tungsten in an aligned-fiber titanium-alloy matrix…. any of those would be acceptable.

I emailed him asking what it was from, and he encyclopedically responded:

In John W. Campbell Jr.’s “Arcot, Morey, and Wade” yarns, they start off with a visit to Venus ( a Venus that doesn’t exist, but was thought vaguely possible then ) where a race of humanoid people have discovered a technique for binding photons into a stable physical lattice, resulting in a transparent material, hugely dense and heavy, which is almost impossible to damage/machine/penetrate etc. They christen this material “Lux metal” or “lux” in English. There’s another version of the lattice structure which is totally reflective and opaque, which they christen “Relux.”

These yarns were published back in the 1930’s, and later assembled in hardback book form under the titles ( in order ) “THE BLACK STAR PASSES,” “ISLANDS OF SPACE,” and “INVADERS FROM THE INFINITE.” The hardback printings date from the fifties, and there was an omnibus all-three-in-one edition printed in the early seventies. “Ace” printed them in paperback form starting in the early sixties, and ran off a lot of editions as well.

If you haven’t read “THE BLACK STAR PASSES,” it’s among the best of the super-science space operas from the early thirties, and great fun; just maintain a childish gee-whiz attitude while reading, so you can enjoy it as much as those of us with cases of arrested development do.

Thus the family reputation was preserved, thanks to Gharlane’s generosity to a stranger.

(The Number of the Beast story, if not the exact link, via Ethel the Blog , again)

Ghostzilla lets you surf the web while it looks like you’re working — it can mimic several common Windows apps. Use it from CD, and it’s guaranteed to leave no tracks on your computer. Useful given that Internet Explorer leaves well-hidden tracks .

And if you’re still caught, remember these helpful words :

If you are ever caught playing Tetris in the middle of the afternoon, don’t try to pretend you were doing something else. Instead, simply say that you were taking a micro-break to increase your efficiency. If the situation looks particularly bleak, consider also mentioning synergy.

News to me: seems fat is being considered an organ

In the anatomy textbooks, the major organs are easy to find. The liver is always brown, the spleen is green, the heart is red and the small intestine is squeezed like a row of sausages into the abdomen. But one of the principal organs, present in close to 50% of North American men and women, is missing. Fat. […] Many scientists now consider fat an endocrine organ, like the pancreas. […] The rush started in late 1994, when researchers at Rockefeller University discovered that fat cells secrete a hormone called leptin. Derived from the Greek word, “to thin,” leptin acts on the hypothalamus in the brain, where the hunger and satiety centres are located. It was the first time research had shown fat can control appetite. Fat deposits, it dawned on scientists, are really organs. “[Leptin] was the transformational discovery,” says Dr. Drucker. “The world realized fat is more of an active player than we previously appreciated.” Since the discovery of leptin, researchers have found dozens of molecules made by fat.

Old Onion story: Girlfriend Stops Reading David Foster Wallace Breakup Letter At Page 20 .

“It was pretty good, I guess, but I just couldn’t get all the way through,” said Thompson, 32, who was given the seven-chapter, heavily footnoted “Dear John” missive on Feb. 3. “I always meant to pick it up again, but then I got busy and, oh, I don’t know. He’s talented, but his letters can sometimes get a little self-indulgent.”

There’s a pregnancy in the Defective Yeti household

But The Queen’s been feeling much better now that she’s entered her fourth month. Now I feel sorry for the cats. Since the addition of Edgar to the household it’s been a monkeys-vs-kitties stalemate, with each team having equal members. Team Monkey really only holds power by virtue of the fact that we can open doors and cans. But throughout the first trimester, I think the cats thought they had a defector. After all, The Queen has begun to exhibit some distinctly feline qualities, namely (a) sleeping 19 hours a day, (b) becoming exceptionally finicky about food, and © occasionally throwing up without warning or provocation. I’m sure they were thinking “Once we convince her to start pushing beer coasters off the coffee table, she’ll be our!” Little do they know of the monumental act of treachery The Queen has in store for them, when, in six months, she not only rejoins Team Monkey but brings on the reinforcements.

(Via Sore Eyes )

A recent experiment confirmed the hypothesis that infrasound gives people the creeps

British scientists have shown in a controlled experiment that the extreme bass sound known as infrasound produces a range of bizarre effects in people including anxiety, extreme sorrow and chills — supporting popular suggestions of a link between infrasound and strange sensations.

And scientists recently discovered that black holes produce ultra-low sound waves

Astronomers using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory have found, for the first time, sound waves from a supermassive black hole. […] In musical terms, the pitch of the sound generated by the black hole translates into the note of B flat. But, a human would have no chance of hearing this cosmic performance because the note is 57 octaves lower than middle-C. For comparison, a typical piano contains only about seven octaves. At a frequency over a million billion times deeper than the limits of human hearing, this is the deepest note ever detected from an object in the Universe.

Marc Laidlaw connects the dots.

Could it be that the supermassive black hole at the galactic core is responsible for the sense of cosmic dread that permeates our galaxy?

(Via Boing Boing )

Even in this economy, would you want one of the worst jobs in science ?

Barnyard Masturbator Researchers who want animal sperm —to study fertility or for artificial insemination—have a suite of attractive options: They can ram an electric probe up an animal’s rectum, shove an artificial vagina onto the animal’s penis, or simply do it the old-fashioned way—manual stimulation. The first option, electroejaculation, uses a priapic rectal probe to send electricity pulsing through the animal’s nether regions. “All the normal excitatory signals that stimulate ejaculation, like touch, sight, sound and smell, can be replaced with the current from the probe,” says Trish Berger, professor of animal science at the University of California, Davis. “It’s fascinating. Of course, this is a woman talking.”

Go read now . Here’s an excerpt from Kevin Drum’s excerpt from Krugman’s intro to his latest book, The Great Unraveling (elisions are Drum’s.)

There’s a pattern… within the Bush administration… which should suggest that the administration itself has radical goals. But in each case the administration has reassured moderates by pretending otherwise — by offering rationales for its policy that don’t seem all that radical. And in each case moderates have followed a strategy of appeasement… this is hard for journalists to deal with: they don’t want to sound like crazy conspiracy theorists. But there’s nothing crazy about ferreting out the real goals of the right wing; on the contrary, it’s unrealistic to pretend that there isn’t a sort of conspiracy here, albeit one whose organization and goals are pretty much out in the open…

(Via Electrolite )

OK, so my right-hand column isn’t blank any more. My headlines were a hack to Movable Type , and they broke when I upgraded to 2.64. MT is pretty well-designed and built. But its internal representation of categories is somewhat cumbersome. This makes it clumsy to implement listing entries exclusive of a given category, which is what the main body of this blog did, courtesy of my hack: listed everything that wasn’t in category Headlines.

So rather than fix it and keep fixing it every time I upgraded, I gave in and did the more obvious thing, and implemented the sidebar as its own blog, which I display through David Raynes’ Otherblog plugin for MT. Yes, displaying entries from another blog is easier than excluding entries from a given category.

Then I had to write a script to move the existing entries to the new blog. I’m grateful to the folks who’ve put the MT Perl API documentation online here and here .

So that’s what I’ve been up to while not actually, say, posting to MemeMachineGo! Now I just need to actually learn some CSS and improve the layout…

It’s the autumnal equinox, and MemeMachineGo! is one and a half years old.

C’mon, if you had to actually use them, you deserve it. Details here .

A settlement has been reached in a class action lawsuit about certain Microsoft software acquired by consumers and businesses between February 18, 1995 and December 15, 2001 for use in California. People and businesses that are covered by the settlement can get vouchers that may be redeemed for cash after buying eligible computer products.

I’m getting $16 back for Windows ‘95. Woo hoo!

Some books I have out of the library right now:

• Time Management from the Inside Out
• Time Management for the Creative Person
• The Best Time Travel Stories of All Time

‘cause, after all, what is time travel but an outside the box (not to mention the light cone) approach to time management?

Neal Stephenson’s going to be at Cody’s in Berkeley this Thursday hawking his new tome (still merely ‘ordered’ at the Berkeley Public Library… but mine is the second of those 20 holds, and with 2 on order, that’s not too bad a place to be.)

And while I was looking that up, I found that Cody’s has a blog .

For years, when I’ve wanted to announce a party, I’d send it to me, and bcc everyone else. That prevented people hitting reply without looking, and spamming the whole invite list with “hey! haven’t heard from you in a while!”

Well, we’re having a housewarming party two weekends hence, on October 4th. And I realized if I tried that method, the invite would slip silently into dozens of spam filters and we’d be left sitting alone with a lot of hummus.

So I laboriously emailed the invite dozens of times, grouping some together — couple, or groups of friends — people who already know each others’ email addresses and wouldn’t get too upset about an inadvertent reply-all.

And it’s done now, I think. If you’re reading this and you’ll be near Berkeley on the 4th and you think you should be invited, you’re probably right. Let me know.

Cheeseburger fries .

The fries, which look like a squat version of standard French fries, are made of a meat-and-cheese compound that tastes — as the name suggests — like a cheeseburger. Breaded, then deep-fried and served with ketchup or barbecue sauce, cheeseburger fries have found their way onto menus in several states including Nebraska, Minnesota and Texas since June. There is also a version being made available to public school cafeterias. “The challenge is getting people to think of other ways to eat beef,” said Betty Hogan, director of new product development for the [National Cattlemen’s Beef Association]. […] We want beef in dessert if we can get it there.”

(Via The Critical ‘I’ )

Real shit.

Flora Research […] conducted an independent laboratory analysis of a composite sample of 10 Performance Marketing pills and turned up significant levels of E. coli, yeast, mold, lead and pesticide residues. The amount of E. coli bacteria - 16,300 colony-forming units per gram - appears to be particularly high, experts say. “I think it’s safe to say it has heavy fecal contamination,” says Michael Donnenberg, head of the infectious-diseases department at the University of Maryland.

All things Art of War from a translation to What Would Sun Tzu do? to an Art of War blog :

Cubs keep one-game lead with win over Reds (Miami Herald, 9/25/03) Baker telegraphed his feelings in the earliest days of spring training about having faith in his players. “My job is to make everyone feel important on the team, which they are, and make them part of the team,” he said then. “Like in `The Art of War.’ The small is equal to the big. One is not more important than the other. If it is, then your circle is not complete.”

And if you haven’t read it, do. It’s short, and interesting stuff.

(Via Jen Vetterli’s Bloki )