From Ye Old Blogge: Monday, April 05, 2004

More Lemany

From Ye Old Blogge: Monday, April 05, 2004

Monday, April 05, 2004

About Buses
Watching the buses this morning on the way to work. You get plenty of time because there's a real bottleneck into Perth city coming over the causeway, right where six lanes of traffic from three different roads try to merge down into two lanes. Best bit of city planning you ever saw, yessirree...
Also merging there are two lanes of buses, merging down to one at the busport there. So I'm sitting in a car which is idling there for up to ten minutes every morning and moving about 50 metres in that time, watching half empty buses going to the busport and the city, and it occurs to me.
I'm sitting in a dinosaur stuck in a modern day LaBrea, watching lumbering behemoth dinosaurs. In another ten or twenty years either there won't be any people to remember, or else what they will remember is that these things once ruled the cities and the land...
I'm guessing that if people are still around they'll be using modules that chain together to form larger units as required, and that once some dickhead gets the use of solar energy right, these units will use electric power.
As for getting solar power right - I mean, at the moment another dinosaur, the modern manufacturer, is lamenting that it takes so much energy to make solar powered equipment that you never amortise the cost of the initial energy . Now suppose that they used their first batch of solar power generators to star powering the process of making further solar power generators...
ahaaaaaa, you're beginning to see the idea. Even if it takes five solar cells entire output for a year to make five more solar cells, at the end of that time you'd have ten solar cells... The tortoise wins again.
Stupid industrialists.

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These are random blog posts I recently rescued from a text dump of my earliest recorded blog posts from Ye Good Ole Days of writing stuff in Notepad and using some weird software that basically uploaded your entire blog every time you added a new article or edited an old one. 

I'm shamelessly adding that little mini-banner graphic with links for you to donate, check my newsletter site, and generally get more entangled in my weird world.    

From Ye Old Blogge: Sunday, April 04, 2004

Memory Lane

From Ye Old Blogge: Sunday, April 04, 2004

Sunday, April 04, 2004

I think I know what a Ninja is.
Just went to this rather amusing website and the thought has occurred to me:
There really is a difference between the majority and the select few... %) Heck, there are even people out there who would take that site as gospel truth. (Are they the "deselect few," in some twisted Darwinian sense?)
Well, take my workplace. There are around 60 people here, all of them programmers, developers, or tech sales and tech support type people. None of them should be unintelligent should they? Hmmm... Let's see...
I sent out a link to this timewaster and fully expected to get a lot of laughter around the office - but I also got one email complaining that his computer didn't have enough space. A tech support person no less...
We got an email with the subject line "air-con men will be in the office" and sent it back out as "air con-men will be in the office" and got about ten "what do you mean?" responses...
Or how about this - I (and about half the people here) walk about in our normal fashion (i.e. quietly) and we manage to freak people out by "just appearing out of nowhere" as some of the clodhoppers put it. Clodhoppers? Yeap, you know them - they're the people who throw themselves at the ground with every step, you can hear them walking clear across the other side of the building, who can't be bothered to develop a decent gait because their Nikes will cushion the shock for them.
There are thus people to whom using their brains is a revolutionary idea, to be avoided at any cost, and another group of people who don't understand why everyone else can hear them coming for miles and then take advantage of them, and another group who believe that things "just happen" to them and they can't help that or defend themselves.
The groups sometimes overlap, but between them they seem to form the majority of the population.
And that shows why Ninjas are so rare and so legend-worthy. They've learnt to walk softly and carry a big stick - and they can think...

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These are random blog posts I recently rescued from a text dump of my earliest recorded blog posts from Ye Good Ole Days of writing stuff in Notepad and using some weird software that basically uploaded your entire blog every time you added a new article or edited an old one. 

I'm shamelessly adding that little mini-banner graphic with links for you to donate, check my newsletter site, and generally get more entangled in my weird world.    

From Ye Old Blogge: Saturday, April 03, 2004

Ream Melony

From Ye Old Blogge: Saturday, April 03, 2004

Some old pre-Blogspot.com posts, recycled.

Saturday, April 03, 2004

Small victory to me, small loss to advertisers

A jokes site of a certain age sends out a newsletter every few days, with links back to jokes on web pages. The pages I get sent to have banners and ads all over them, and to a degree, I'm down with that. They have to keep the site going after all.
But those pages also launch poo pounder ads. You know the ones, they pop up, put themselves behind the page that called them, and bring that page back to the focus.
And no matter what justification a site tries to give for using them, I can't quite agree with any rationalisation of these stupid wastes of time space and bandwidth.
One. I multisurf, that is, I have about ten to twenty pages open at a time. Adding another five or ten popunder buttons to my taskbar is just plain clutter. Two, I'm reading an interesting article on a famous geek news site and wham! - up pops this stupid joke page, meaning I now have to minimise it and the popunder to resume my reading. I begin to associate the nasty website with pain, in a Pavlovian sort of way, and stop surfing there. No kidding, I've stopped reading some major science and news websites because of their policy. I'm not even tempted to click a link with their URLs in it.
Why? Well, that's the third and fourth reasons. Three, I'm on a very noisy modem dialup, and each page I open is a marathon already. Now add 5K of useless javascript in the web page to open the popunder, 20K for the popunder itself, and another 5k of useless javascript in the popunder and you can see how that sort of behaviour gets really really wearing after your first hour spent trying to load and read fifteen pages...
And four, there's a technique for dealing with popunders, which ensures I never even need to catch a glimpse of it - so the advertiser has wasted my time, my bandwidth, their money, and some web coder's work - all just for me to close their window without even glimpsing it...
Yes there are popup stoppers but why should I have to install one of those when the simpler alternative is just not to bother to go to the offending website? And yes the site can justify itself by saying that they need the revenue but why don't they just do the honest thing and tell the would-be advertiser that popunders stink on ice, people hate them, it costs the website a lot of traffic, and no-one retains much memory of them anyway?
People who sagely point to the number of popunders and say "well they must work otherwise Acme and BrandX wouldn't be using them" are missing the point, which is that they aren't working. Just as people point to the volume of spam and say "it must work," they're dreaming.
Spam works for about a hundred extremely hardworking spammers in the whole world. Out of some ten million people, less than a hundred are able to make spam work for them... And for the thousands of other would-be spammers, it's fines and prison terms and a lot of buying beans instead of beef... Popunders are in the same category, a lot of advertisers are paying a lot of website owners a lot of money for a negative return...
Isn't it time they stopped being so stupid? I can think of one roaring winning concept right now. "Catalogs.com" would be a site where companies could put popunders popovers popups and exit traps and entry traps and - somewhere among all the smart-arse technowhizzery, nestled in amongst the stupid banners and vertical banners and expanding divisions - they could actually put the same content, but on a flat website, where people could search and find what they wanted. Call it "we_are_GOOD_advertisers.com" if you prefer, whatever.
Put banner ads on other websites pointing to your product range, by all means. You do need to target a particular demographic after all, you just don't need to stalk them, hunt them down, and beat them to death with heavy handed advertising.
Until advertisers learn, I'll settle for the minor victory of closing their products and boycotting sites which deal with them...

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These are random blog posts I recently rescued from a text dump of my earliest recorded blog posts from Ye Good Ole Days of writing stuff in Notepad and using some weird software that basically uploaded your entire blog every time you added a new article or edited an old one. 

I'm shamelessly adding that little mini-banner graphic with links for you to donate, check my newsletter site, and generally get more entangled in my weird world.    

(Quiet!) Trigger Warning For Tinnitus Sufferers Please!

Firstly, I'm trying out a "drop cap" style graphic at the head of each article that'll allow you to tell which blog the repost came from when it's announced on social media. If you find this annoying let me know, but give it a few days to see how it goes...

When a news source you respect, doesn't respect you, what can you do? For reasons, being hit with this example of disregard for a medical condition was a bit confronting. 

TRIGGER WARNING FOR TINNITUS SUFFERERS!

The linked podcast has a load of tinnitus-triggering sound in it for cheap thrills and because the producers were a-holes with no respect for the 17% of the population affected by tinnitus. There - I fixed it for you, YW.

I can't stress this enough - without a single warning word, they play the sounds that, according to the various tinnitus sufferers describing each sound, resembles their tinnitus. I don't know how you listen to your podcasts but I listen with headphones, with the volume up just enough to overcome minor environmental noises so that I can listen to my podcast without missing a word from my wife or others around me. 

The podcats producers have done their research - ar at least, you'd hope they did - so they should be aware of how hard it is to avoid triggers. And the podcast centers on an app that you can download that allows you have CBT reinforcement messages and conversations with an AI chatbot. And hopefully you all know that CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) is a bit like playing mental judo with yourself to convince yourself that when certain things happen, you react in a more appropriate or relevant way to the event than before applying CBT, that you change your internal self-talk in response to the event, etc. 

Basically - think about what you're thinking and doing, realise where it needs to be amended and modified, and try hard to do so, until it becomes habitual and your new normal response. 

With tinnitus, you accept that it's incurable, that you CAN tune it out to a degree or at least lessen its impact, you may have some hearing damage but tinnitus is often triggered by relatively tiny losses, and while you may have thought that it would be the loudest most persistent thing in your life and ruin your enjoyment of life and your interactions with loved ones and friends and coworkers, you CAN manage it. You CAN live well with it. 

But you can also see that CBT will always require some levels of conscious self-control and management. You have certain reflexes for a reason, the blink reflex for example to prevent objects getting into your eyes, the fight or flight reflex; and they can be managed in the same way, but you can't always just keep your eyes open - you have to override the reflex. In the same way, if you hear a continuous high-pitched whine or tone or similar, you have to remind yourself that you can ignore it, minimise it, focus on everything else you hear instead.  

So now imagine that there you are, totally engrossed in listening intently to a podcast on a subject of extreme interest to you, and suddenly 

- WHAM! - 

a hissing or squealing or high-pitched whine or tone - and there you go, it's exactly the noise that used to drive you to the point of madness to get away from, and if you kept rigid self-control after that asault the show just laid on you, then good on you. But I can't imagine anyone being presented with a close analog of the very sound that they're only keeping clamped down by sheer effort of will, and not suddenly having a flare-up of it. 

When I was in my late 20s I first got sporadic bursts of tinnitus and they worried the sh*t out of me. I couldn't concentrate, had trouble hearing anything (if I was even aware of it over the high ringing squeal I could hear) and all my research led me to the conclusion that I could perhaps mask it with a white noise generator but would never be rid of it ever again. It was depressing and frightening and very hard to cope with. (PS white noise generators = nope. At least for me.)

But also, it was sporadic. It happened at random times, sometimes after a day in a noisy environment, sometimes while sitting reading, and sometimes, it just - happened. And it would hang around from 1-2hrs to a day or so. I do recall that when it happened for a day or more, I'd wonder if life was worth living if this kept happening, but I reasoned that over the rest of my life, someone would find the cause and a cure. 

Over forty years later there's still no cure, and my tinnitus has moved in and stayed. But I found that because I was able to get used to, and even minimise in my hearing its sound, I was basically doing CBT by myself. I thought CBT was kumbayah group hug BS and I can't imagine myself in any therapeutic group. But - self-talk, using what I learned about tinnitus, and creating distraction strategies for minimising the noise - those worked. 

I only feel mildly despondent when I think about it these days, and I still hold out hope that someone will localise many of the several dozen suspected sources and start developing ways to fix or disable them and so free the unlucky 17% of the population from this eternal *crickets* (and not in the usual sense of the word...) in our heads.

The Worst Things About The Podcast IMHO

There was no trigger warning in the written description. There was no trigger warning in the audio introduction. There was just sheer journalistic "let's play these sounds at volume and to hell with the 17% of our listenership who are going to hear that and have it set off their tinnitus! Come on - these sounds are weird and interesting, let's score a few Noddy points!"

Bad job, Guardian - BAD job. I say this with all sincerity while sitting here trying to concentrate on writing this article while dealing with the jump in my tinnitus levels which was still going half  an hour after finishing the podcast to try and glean any useful information from it. And there was useful information, just a pity they had to muck it up for me and others by playing triggering moises.

If you mention indigenous affairs, you put in a warning. If you mention LGBTIQ+, sex, or any form of gender controversy, you put in a warning. If you do pretty much anything to do with any touchy issue or mental health issue, you put a warning. These are emotional and mental distress issues

If you're one of the 0.1%-2% (my best guess after reading pages of reference material) of people who experience epilepsy, you'll either find a very clear warning at the beginning of videos that might trigger a seizure, or else the triggering flashing or audio will be modified. Epilepsy is a neurological condition.

Tinnitus is also a neurological condition. Grow some compassion, Guardian. 

Please use the buttons below to share and bookmark this, I'm sorry to the 83% of people that this issue doesn't affect, but I felt this was a betrayal of my trust and had to point it out.

Also, please consider donating the cost of a cup of coffee - perhaps even monthly - so that I can stop paying for everything podcats-related out of my own pocket. Are you considering that? Then please click. 😁 

As always, stay awesome, be part of the changes, be a driver of the changes.

From Ye Olde Blogge: Thursday, April 01, 2004

Malory Emane

From Ye Old Blogge: 

Some old pre-Blogspot.com posts, recycled.

Thursday, April 01, 2004

Science retrodate

Just been reading the New Scientist, 29 Mar 2003. It's the anniversary of that issue, after all.

As I was reading it, I had a few jogs of memory. For example, I recall a (very tiny) outcry over nanoscale particles causing lung damage, and realised that the idea's again recently surfaced on some science blogs, after only a year of waffling and avoiding issues and ignoring. I have a vested interest in nanotech and lungs, as my emphysema may one day be cured by nanotech, and the finding last year was a bit of a letdown... Still no light on the horizon for me, I guess.

SARS was a big thing. GM crops were being debated and found to be a mixed bag. Binge eating was rediscovered. And email FOAF harvesting tools were just being developed and used. Today, I am looking for FOAF (Friend Of A Friend, or social network and relationship discovery) software for our Sales and Tech Support people. Some technology gets a head start for being so universally useful. One other thing that NS didn't mention in that article was the rise and rise of blogging...

One article in there gave me a jolt. You see, years ago, when the world only had BBS systems and electronic mail (netmail and echomail for all us old farts) was a very avant garde technology, I was discussing with a bunch of people in the States, about the possibility of using Blackbird reconnaisance aircraft as cheap light shuttles. I had the idea that if you bought a Blackbird and modified it for a few million bucks, you could go up, mend or remove faulty satellites and space junk, and amortise the cost of the spacecraft in a couple of missions.

That wasn't it though. One of my correspondents mentioned that the heat of re-entry was a problem. And I had the answer right there - if you inject a layer of steam (steam is easy to create at the nose of a re-entering craft, after all - just add water to all that heat...) from leading edges of the craft, the steam should form a Leidenfrost layer and thus insulate the spacecraft from the heat. And there, on page 29, is my idea... Now I can only hope that those early discussions have served to kick this idea off finally, but I'd love to be mentioned as a "he thought of this first" annotation to the article at least. Damn I wish I had the archives of those old echomail days...

Cold fusion gets an ambivalent look, as do a heap of other things which are again coming up in the news this year, but the cold fusion article in particular caught my eye - do journalists just fish out year-old articles, flesh them over a bit, and release them again? Because everything that was in that NS article has also been in the more recent coverages online, and not much new has been added...

Also interesting - that "bat caves" placed around lakes reduced the number of mosquitoes and also produced around 2 tons a year of guano as fertiliser as well. That the bats were actually affecting the numbers of mosquitoes was and still is in doubt - maybe that needs to be investigated? Why not? I know of dozens of lakes and waterways around housing estates that would benefit from such natural protection. In fact, elimination of mosquitoes around inhabited areas costs millions a year, and leaves chemical residues, and causes other illnesses - so this would potentially be a tremendously beneficial piece of research.

So it's steam baths and bat poo time for me, perhaps I can design a shuttle that runs on batshit and bullshit and eats mosquitoes during descent, and find fame and riches as I go. hehehe later people!

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These are random blog posts I recently rescued from a text dump of my earliest recorded blog posts from Ye Good Ole Days of writing stuff in Notepad and using some weird software that basically uploaded your entire blog every time you added a new article or edited an old one. 

I'm shamelessly adding that little mini-banner graphic with links for you to donate, check my newsletter site, and generally get more entangled in my weird world.    

State Of The Cat-house Report

Firstly, I'm trying out a "drop cap" style graphic at the head of each article that'll allow you to tell which blog the repost came from when it's announced on social media. If you find this annoying let me know, but give it a few days to see how it goes...

Today should have been a shed day. Wife is having a sleep-in, the cats are all sprawled around waiting for me to go there (aka Bloke & Blokey Cats' Heaven) but my back's all locked-up which means all exertion will quickly get painful - I'd rather not.

So instead, I'm sitting on the couch with my feet up, Pickle purring himself to sleep on the next seat, Archie and George waiting on the back path in case any local wildlife decides to drop into the yard and break a leg so they can catch it and parade it around the house.

Yeah, with his blanket...

And I've got my keyboard, mouse (O my Cheezburger! Hoomin sed mouse!) - and a long list of stuff I want to get done on blogs, graphics, and research. Go take a look at https://ohaicorona.com/teds-news-stand see what I'm up to.

I've developed a bit of love for Paint.NET, NightCafe, BlueGriffon, and what I can achieve with them, and I'll probably get back to adding my own graphics to blog articles again. The Zorganite Encumber is finally getting a direction to develop into, and our politicians, corporations, landbastards, and cartels are giving me plenty of ammo for armchair activism. Oh and Barnaby. How rich a vein of risible observations is he? Scummo's valedictory came close, especially the bit where he modestly didn't say much about how much of everyone else's jobs he had to do for them. Spudton came close with his lack of grasp on some hard cold facts and he was caught out on them time after time after time after ... well, you get the idea.

 My back's still aching but it's more comfortable sitting here than trying to lift timber into place so as to be able to finally finish the custom rack shelving and maybe start moving everything into it so I can get on with the NEXT stage. 

Quick Shed Recap.

The new owner and landlord replaced my 3x3 shed and existing 4x5 'garage' (I say this with no regret, that 'garage' originally here was unusable since the doors were rusted shut and it was filled with builder's rubble in lieu of a floor so I just built storage into it and it kept *most* of the rain off so there's that) with a new 6x6 garage but the process left us with a one year or longer hiatus between taking the old down and handing over the new. So stuff was in temporary and makeshift places for a longish while. 

(6m x6m is about 20' x 20' for anyone still not using metric) 

The in mid-August last year, the new garage finally went up. I have a first photo from the 12th when the shell was up and the concrete hadn't yet been poured (that happened by the 16th) then a week later, it was finished!

Only . . .  The landlord was using it to store construction tools and materials for the rear house he was refurbishing after having it relocated from its old location; and to build THEIR shed inside out of the weather, and also went on several holidays, so: patience Grasshopper...

My first photo of "my" garage - i.e. this time with my first few benches and power tool tables in it - was on the 4th of November. Not kidding, just shy of three months of having a shed but not having a shed... 

Yay - sort of... 

The workbench and the store shelving came with the garage - the landlord was most kind, had them in storage from one of the many businesses and ventures he owns, and had them put in for me, and as you'll see, extremely useful. 

I might as well say it - this is one of very few times I'll mention the shed in this blog because it's more to do with all my PTEC3D / RCX  things so you'll find most of the info over there on the PTEC3D Blog. And only because I'm trying to paint a picture of the overall situation.

So my first order of business was how to make two areas (the original small shed and garage) fit into the new space. I've always liked the small cheap pressed-tin shelving units most hardware stores sell, but this was going to be a bit of a beast of a different nature. Firstly, I needed to definitely leave room for my wife's mobility scooter - and possibly the car as well - but I also needed to squash 9sqm of workspace and storage combined and almost 20sqm of storage space, plus two vehicles in needed, into 36sqm. 

Tin shelving was NOT going to cut it...

Hardware stores also sell 1.8m x 1.8m x 0.52m type garage shelving, but with a suitable unit costing around $300 and actually needing twice as much, I needed to cheap out, geek out, and reach deep.

The rack shelving came out of a) the four aluminium posts of a heavy duty flatpack (in a manner of speaking, if you can call something that came in a large 2m x .9m. x .6m carton that needed two to lift, a flatpack...) gazebo, four posts from the old cat fence that we'd built and then elected to take down rather than have scrapped, and a bunch of pallets, several lengths of old 70x35 structural pine that had been used to build the outdoor kitchen, and a lot of sweat and cursing. 

(You'll also see that the store shelving on the back wall was already getting good use as I put hardware there for the job, plus stored a bunch of stuff temporarily while I built it a new home.) 

In the bottom picture you can see a brownish cloth hanging up. It was getting hot, and the garage featured a 50cm wide, wall-to-wall, skylight which was great for seeing what you were doing but added about 4C - 6C to the temperature inside when the weather warmed up. So that curtain on the western side kept the worst of the sun out in the afternoons. 

Anyway - that rack shelving is 4m long, 0.85m deep, and 1.8m tall,almost 9 cubic metres (because the top shelf can be loaded almost to the ceiling) and solid enough for me to walk along. Every level requires me to cut pallets to 85cm but I tried a layout on the floor using full-depth pallets and it was great if I wanted to store industrial equipment but would have been impossible to reach to the back of shelves, and also, taken away almost a square metre of floor space, which is also at a bit of a premium if I wanted to be able to bring the car in during really bad weather or to work on it. 

The shading got taken care of by what turned out to be a two-day job (in the 38C - 42C heat) of recutting, attaching rails to, and moving the canvas to cover the central section and making two shadecloth sliding blinds to give me a way to manage heat and light.

The shelving has since gone up by putting a top shelf on as you can see above, and the second of the planned three shelves installed at a height suitable for lifting awkward heavy things into. The planned third shelf will be up higher and not have the space for larger tubs, and thus be more suitable for sheet material and small organiser tubs. 

There's a lot more happened since these photos which is why I'm okay with sharing these early ones here. Head for PTEC3D Blog to see more of the shed that's also a bit more up-to-date (and also has other posts relating to plastic recycling, electronics, and so forth) and let me leave you with this thought: the donations I receive don't go to lining my pockets with unimaginable wealth. They currently don't cover the costs of the hardware I use to create projects - and (sort of) document them. 

In fact, I still have to pay most of the of blog and server online fees out of pocket. You'd be helping a lot if you used the donation facilities down just below here and made a donation - preferably a recurring monthly one - for about the price of a cup of coffee.

Stay awesome
come back often
bookmark and share

Funnyisms 101 - a collection by PTEC3D

Firstly, I'm trying out a "drop cap" style graphic at the head of each article that'll allow you to tell which blog the repost came from when it's announced on social media. If you find this annoying let me know, but give it a few days to see how it goes...

Life starts like this, yeah: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/consciousness-3 (and some people just keep on crying ...)

Funnyisms - A collection of links from an idle hand:

All this class stuff was scraped by me over the years, if I add something to any article, I'll mention it as an edit.

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An elderly couple scheduled their annual medical examination the same day so they could travel together.

After the examination, the doctor then said to the elderly man, “You appear to be in good health, do you have any medical concerns that you would like to discuss with me?”

“In fact I do,” said the man, “After I have sex with my wife for the first time, I am usually hot and sweaty. And then, after I have sex with my wife the second time, I am usually cold and chilly.”

“This is very interesting,” replied the doctor, “Let me do some research and get back to you.”

After examining the elderly lady, the doctor said, “Everything appears to be fine. Do you have any medical concerns that you would like to discuss with me?”

The lady replied that she had no questions or concerns.

The doctor then asked, “Your husband had an unusual concern. He claims that he is usually hot and sweaty after having sex with you, and then cold and chilly after the second time. Do you know why?”

“Oh, that old buzzard,” she replied, “That’s because the first time is usually in July and the second time in December.”

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Edit by PTEC3D: Germans recipes be like: "Ein Ei in Die Schuessel geben." "An egg into the bowl give." (i.e. this was one of my finds.)

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Apparently this weekend it will be constint rane, hale, thundre, litnin nad frizzing clod.
A really bad spell of weather. (may or may not have been slightly edited to be even worse spelling...)

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I find atheists confusing.

It's like going to a restaurant and believing there's no cook in the back.
PTEC3D: (Hang on - wait! God *cooks* for you guys?)

Because I find religion confusing.

It's like going to a restaurant and ordering food, but it doesn't come. And the waiter tells you to keep ordering because the cook will hear you and your order will come. But it's been hours and your food still hasn't shown up and the waiter tells you you're not ordering hard enough. And also sometimes the waiter is inappropriate with kids.

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All thoughts by me while listening to some radio news or video or something. PTEC3D

In re: crows/ravens

Probably a good cutting analysis would NOT be something like this. Unless the epithet "crow" suits you just fine.

"The indigenous name for them is Wark or similar. Which suits me just fine." ("Human" suits me just fine. Thx.)

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Clip Art Was Everywhere - Until It Wasn't. Good look at a phenomenon and its evolution. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfLlpxE6AYM

PTEC3D: And good riddance to the latest wave of "clip-art" - you know the ones - all body parts out of proportion, a style of clip-art designed to make us feel like we're not real people in the world of commercials and sales pitches.

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BTW in that video above I think I see the Origins Of Lofi Girl:

Tell me it's not so, you can't. (I tried to find the current Lofi Girl screen but wouldn't ya know it, empty room again. And the one before that had Lofi Girl turning to LEGO and no cat on the windowsill. I hope her cat IRL hasn't passed away.)

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(PTEC3D:Ah crap! I put in a lot of my own comments and thoughts, as it seems. Oh well. You'll probably know which bits are my additions from the contexts.)

As I see this, OpenAI and their competitors will try, but if they insist on copyright then they'd better not plan to charge fees, hey? I feel that would be like the typewriter company letting me type whatever I wanted but then insisting that if I publish that, it's infringing their copyright because their product formatted my thoughts into a visual form.

I've read artists' concerns but I'm not sure I follow. Dall-E can make a decent copy of an artwork but so can anyone with a good eye and hands. It's still a copy though. Copying has gone on for millennia, and I'm talking about clip art for web magazines, not someone wallpapering their office with fake Monets.

Vincent van Gogh painted copies of other people's artworks and became famous for those works, which are now credited to him. He even admitted copying them.

It will always happen. There are less than a dozen unique story plotlines and every writer that tells a cracking tale uses one of those plotlines. Doesn't mean someone has copyright over those plotlines.

Thousands of times, a product has been created and makes it to world class product, while another identical product predated that star product but flopped. If you write something and then see an almost identical story published, however, it's time to check your PC for trojans...

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“Greebo turned upon Granny Weatherwax a yellow-eyed stare of self-satisfied malevolence, such as cats always reserve for people who don’t like them, and purred. Greebo was possibly the only cat who could snigger in purr.”

Terry Pratchett; Witches Abroad 

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Go to your favorite search engine.
If you type in "youth pastor crimes" you will find pages of sexual abuse crimes against children.
If you type in "drag queen crimes" you will find pages of violent crimes against drag queens.

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Are you on Mastodon but not sure who's a jenuinejourno? 
https://www.verifiedjournalist.org/ 

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Me: I wish for more wishes
Genie: *holds up rule book* you can’t do that
Me: really? I wish I could :(
Genie: *panicked leafing through rule book* DAMNIT!

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https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/programming
“On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.”
― Charles Babbage
(PTEC3D: My question for those Right Honourable Members would have been: "Tell me, if I put into the chafing pan a quart of milk and a goat turd, will a roast joint of venison come out?")

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“When they first built the University of California at Irvine they just put the buildings in. They did not put any sidewalks, they just planted grass. The next year, they came back and put the sidewalks where the trails were in the grass. Perl is just that kind of language. It is not designed from first principles. Perl is those sidewalks in the grass.”

― Larry Wall

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Bunch of video links - some prosaic and recipes, some funny, some teary. The tragedy of life...

Spinach Dal And Rice link https://www.facebook.com/reel/244335214666874 does look tasty

Cat heaven https://www.facebook.com/reel/2749946541806617 even if a bit staged for video.

Adelaide Hindley St Station, portal to hell? https://www.facebook.com/reel/137805245764559

I did it for South Africa.  https://www.facebook.com/reel/579238864184248

National Parks PSAs  https://www.facebook.com/reel/642013530979940

Catastrophes  https://www.facebook.com/reel/1376006902941133

JK Rowling https://www.facebook.com/reel/898311474617211

EggTimers  https://www.facebook.com/reel/6419668864710610

Aussie miners and winers https://www.facebook.com/reel/590499599561722 NSFW words

Dougiversary  https://www.facebook.com/reel/561508116084763 

Skip. Oh Skip?  https://www.facebook.com/reel/748391920270794

Turnaround  https://www.facebook.com/reel/1337573660401330 

Brioche Burger Buns  https://www.facebook.com/reel/1675415769556119 NSFW words

Maked me cry  https://www.facebook.com/reel/581376883324319

Last Will  https://www.facebook.com/reel/2482795435212458 will make you cry

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Me: Alexa, why am I terrible at relationships?

Siri: I’m Siri.

Go on geddouddahere! 

 

From Ye Old Blogge: Tuesday, March 30, 2004

Memory Lane

Some old pre-Blogspot.com posts, recycled.

A cute prequel to this article:
It was only when Mom said "here, take this fifty and take your brother outta the house and get him lunch and whatever else he wants while we get his surprise birthday party ready" that I realised I probably wasn't the favourite twin...

Tuesday, March 30, 2004

Our Parents, Our Genes, My Ass...

First, a little disclaimer. I haven't read Mr. James' book "They F*** You Up: how to survive family life" but I have listened to him speaking about his book and I feel that even before I read the book, I have issues with his claims.

Heard on Hack, a Triple J current affairs show: an interview with an author (Oliver James) who wrote that book, and he seemed to claim in the interview that family is the major (no, the only, judging from his words on air) thing which shapes how you develop and what you become. He claims studies of twins separated at birth which showed that they developed remarkably coincindent lives despite being raised in different family environments, are flawed and wrong, that genes are irrelevant.

His claim is that the coincidences are just that - coincidences - and that it's down to the fact that societies the world over are very similar that such coincidences happen, and that in fact any two people will be able to find a similar "remarkable" string of coincidences. To that, I say "bullshit." Sorry, but there are rules for claiming things like that mate and you are onto something, but it's not rigorous proof... Have you actually TESTED any groups of "any two" people to prove your claim?

He also claims that parents treat identical twins differently to differentiate them, and that non-identical (i.e. male/female) twins are treated more similarly than identical twins. He claims that primacy in the family (i.e. birth order) sets a lot of the character traits of a person, and to that I also say "bullshit." I mean, there are some roles that are thrust on a person by reason of primacy but I know as many families where the second or third or youngest child becomes the carer, or the firstborn the attention-seeker. It's what you are, and that comes only partly from how you're treated and much more from what you are to start with.

As to treating identical twins differently to differentiate them, or non-identical twins more identically to normalise them... I have met only a few sets of identical twins, and of all of those, both could finish each other's sentences, and in fact acted like twins. So even if the parents did treat them differently, it didn't alter their development all that much. I mean, maybe if they'd named one child Angel and the other one Shithead, then *maybe* that might make a difference - but so far Oliver is scoring very poorly... And those non-identical twins, despite the parents dressing them the same and feeding them the same - hey they still grew up as a brother and sister and the parents didn't manage to change the sex or gender of either child, and one still developed breasts and the other a deep voice and body hair... So yeah, "bullshit" is still the word...

Another great thing to claim on air was that a "rather neat study" proved that we are more likely to take a mate who is similar to our opposite gender parent, and he quotes studies on families where a child of black and white mixed marriages is more likely to do as predicted, even at the second marriage. That is, the sons of a family where Mum was black were more likely to marry a black woman, even second time around. He says that it's because we are treated differently by the parents and this breeds more sympathy in one relationship than the other, so we tend to be attracted to the person who is representative of our opposite sex, more attractive, parent. Again I have to say "bullshit" - only this time with even more emphasis.

How about emulating the parent you have most empathy with instead? I happen to know that while I, like any small boy, loved my mum very much, I also knew all along that she was an alcoholic and always felt more empathy for my father, who went through rather a lot for we children. By the criterion of this super social hacker then, I should therefore be married to another guy. But even if mum had been my number one soulmate ideal stereotype, I'd now be living with a small, brunette, slightly neurotic Germanic woman. In fact I live with a more buxom and fuller figured woman who is of english extraction. And my last partner before that was a buxom redhead, while the partner before that was a slightly-built blonde. So "bullshit" mate, "bullshit..."

Hell, just gay people in general put paid to THAT little claim, right there. If Oliver James' claims hold true then how come there are people who are gay? According to his theory that parenting (being so *terribly* unbalanced and abnormal compared to the "gool old days" of parenting, whatever they might be) is responsible for these predispositions, there should be a change in the population one way or the other, yet homosexuality has been around for a long long time...

Also, it has now been observed there's an actual brain difference in homosexual sheep, and reasons to believe that the same holds true for human brains as well. Apparently the difference is something the sheep are born with, i.e. it's in their genetic makeup. So is James in fact claiming that the way you bring up your kids will alter the makeup of their brains, and their genetic material too? Can modern sheep be "worse parents" than sheep a few hundred years ago, or can we just accept that homosexuality is a part of the normal spectrum of behaviours and some individuals can be born predisposed by genetic traits to be so? Again, I have to let out a resounding "BULLSHIT" to Mr James' claims.

I'd like to see Mr James' tests and results for claiming that "there are as many coincidences in non-twin people's lives as there are in twins' lives" or however he phrased that, not just his derision of the tests done on separated identical twins. Provide some substantiation of your claims.

I'd also like to see some controlled tests that prove that genetics does not predispose one to certain illnesses, defects, and personality traits. I'd also like to see the proof that parenting overcomes all those predispositions - that parents of a teenage child who has suicided due to having been born with a predisposition to depression can comfort themselves with the thought that they are entirely to blame, and if only they'd loved their child more and parented it more "properly" then somehow that genetic trait would have magically fixed itself.

Shame James, shame... There are equal portions of biology and sociology that go to make up what one is, and it borders on zealotism to claim otherwise...

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These are random blog posts I recently rescued from a text dump of my earliest recorded blog posts from Ye Good Ole Days of writing stuff in Notepad and using some weird software that basically uploaded your entire blog every time you added a new article or edited an old one. 

I'm shamelessly adding that little mini-banner graphic with links for you to donate, check my newsletter site, and generally get more entangled in my weird world.