Speaker For The Diodes

05:24 am - QotD

"You know, the interesting thing is that they wanted to convict Bradley Manning and Snowden on treason, [...] you have to be formally at *war* to commit treason. [...]

"Manning is more 'guilty' of it than Snowden, since what he leaked definitely hurt us on the international stage (more so than we already were) - but Snowden mostly leaked material showing that the government was spying on *us*. So, initially implying what he did was treasonous - by logical extension - means the government thinks of all of us as its 'enemy.'"

-- destruya, 2013-08-05

[I'm not sure who "they" is supposed to refer to. I didn't trust my memory so I did a really brief Google search, and didn't spot anything about the Executive branch trying to pin a treason charge on Snowden, but a bunch of legislators did spout off calling his acts treasonous. So OT1H I'm not sure this is enough to say "the governmnt" sees its citizens as its enemy, but OTOH it does suggest the "ordinary people are the enemy" mindset is not limited to local police forces.]

05:24 am - QotD

From "The Diary of the Rose", by Ursula K. LeGuin, 1976:

Allergy: A person can be exposed to pollen or bitten by fleas a thousand times without reaction. Then he gets a viral infection or a psychic trauma or a bee sting, and the next time he meets up with ragweed or a flea he begins to sneeze, cough, itch, weep, etc. It is the same with other irritants. One has to be sensitized.

"Why is there so much fear?" I wrote. Well now I know. Why is there no privacy? It is unfair and sordid. I cannot read the "classified" files kept in her office, though I work with the patients and she does not. But I am not allowed to have any "classified" material of my own. Only persons in authority can have secrets. Their secrets are all good, even when they are lies.

05:24 am - QotD

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2013-07-31:

"The fact neither CENTCOM or Multi National Forces Iraq or MNF-I would not voluntarily release the video troubled me further. It was clear to me that the event happened because the aerial weapons team mistakenly identified Reuters employees as a potential threat and that the people in the bongo truck were merely attempting to assist the wounded. The people in the van were not a threat but merely "good samaritans". The most alarming aspect of the video to me, however, was the seemly delightful bloodlust they appeared to have.

"They dehumanized the individuals they were engaging and seemed to not value human life by referring to them as quote "dead bastards" unquote and congratulating each other on the ability to kill in large numbers. At one point in the video there is an individual on the ground attempting to crawl to safety. The individual is seriously wounded. Instead of calling for medical attention to the location, one of the aerial weapons team crew members verbally asks for the wounded person to pick up a weapon so that he can have a reason to engage. For me, this seems similar to a child torturing ants with a magnifying glass."

-- Bradley Manning, U.S. Army Private and whistleblower, from a statement presented at his court-martial for releasing secret documents to the Wikileaks organization. Manning was referring to a lethal U S. helicopter attack on a number of civilians and journalists in Iraq. Manning was convicted of a number of charges on July 30, 2013.

[ http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/mar/01/bradley-manning-wikileaks-statement-full-text]

(submitted to the mailing list by Mike Krawchuk)

05:24 am - QotD

[This may feel especially relevant to folks on their way home -- or just returned -- from Pennsic ...]

"The past is a foreign country. Were you born in the past? Are you in the present illegally? Go home, time-travelling foreign scum." -- Paul Bassett Davies (@thewritertype) 2013-07029

[I figure nearly all of you will be familiar with the allusion in the first sentence, at least (like me) by hearing it often quoted, if not from reading the source, but hey, Just In Case: the original line is, "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there."]

"Just passing through, honest!" -- Gordon Mohr (@gojomo), 2013-07-30

"I've been kidnapped and transported to a foreign present! My past's future had moon colonies and flying cars" -- HalDe (@HalDe), 2013-07-30

05:24 am - QotD

The entirety of a short Tumnlr post from Brute Reason, 2013-06-26:

So I'm always hearing all this stuff about feminism, anti-racism, etc. "going too far."

What would "going too far" look like? How would we know when these movements have "gone too far"? Perhaps when a particular gender, race, or sexual orientation starts being privileged above all others? When women occupy the majority of political and business leadership positions, and make decisions about men's reproductive health for them? When police officers are mostly people of color, and they stop and frisk innocent white people on the streets? When people who want to marry someone of the opposite sex have to move to another state, and wait with bated breath while the Supreme Court rules on whether or not they deserve rights?

DOES IT NOT OCCUR TO YOU THAT THIS LOOKS EXACTLY LIKE THE WORLD WE HAVE NOW, SO PERHAPS YOU SHOULD ADMIT THAT THE WORLD WE HAVE NOW IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH?

[Thanks to theweaselking for linking to this.]

01:52 pm - State of d'Glenn

Some of you may have noiticed that I'm not at Pennsic this year. The rest of you won't have noticed because our paths don't cross that often there or because you don't go to Pennsic. (And some won't see this because you don't check social media from Pennsic.) Anyhow, I'm not at Pennsic and I'm trying not to obsess over that even though it's kind of a big deal -- this is the first one I've missed since 1986, the first one I went to.

I'm not there for a bunch of reasons, any two of which I pobably would have stubborned my way past, but they added up. It's tempting at this point to say I'm having a sucky year, but earlier in the year were my fun birthday dinner and the trip to Cyprus (a very big deal, a very good thing!), so it's more accurate to say I'm having a really sucky summer. I also missed Conterpoint and Baitcon. (I actually got most of the wall-of-instruments loaded into the van for Conterpoint, but wore myself out so badly doing so that I never made it out of the driveway. A week later I finally managed to get it all unloaded again. Frustrating.)

So, since I haven't been writing as much as I ought, here's what's been up, some little things, some inconvenient things, some big-but-can't-tell-how-scary-yet things:

As long as I'm in babbling-catch-up mode ...

• The next Homespun Ceilidh Band album should be getting pretty close to finished by now -- last I heard, all or nearly-all of everybody's parts had been recorded (I made sure to get my studio time in before going to Cyprus) but I don't know how much editing and post-production work there is to do.
• Perrine is overdue for claw-snipping, but Her Adorableness has hidden the %$#^ claw scissors yet again. I'm sure she didn't move them far, but my room is so very cluttered ... (lots of possible things for her to move them under or into)
• A subset of The Homespun Ceilidh Band will be playing at the Battle of Bladensburg event at Riversdale House 2013-08-24.
• I finally got around to reading H.G. Wells' The Invisible Man. Spoiler: the invisible man is a real asshole.
• I'm working on a new composition that's significantly longer than anything else I've written so far, but the process is also going more slowly than usual. This may take a while.

I don't really have a good closing note in mind, and I'm sure I've left stuff out. I'll close with a not-exactly-random musing that's bounced around in my head for a couple of months: do "polymath" and "autodidact" go together more often than not?

05:24 am - QotD

From The Proteus Operation by James P. Hogan (b. 1941-06-27, d. 2010-07-12) (1985, Bantam Books, New York):

"Truth, of course, pays no attention to political needs," Gustav went on, "or to the needs of any other kind of ideology for that matter. What is true will remain true regardless of all the wishful thinking in the world that would have it otherwise. And the purpose of science is to discover what is absolute and unchangeable, inherent in the fabric of the universe and completely uninfluenced by man's passions or by whether or not we even exist at all."

"You make it sound almost like a religion," Cassidy commented.</p>

Gustav nodded. "Albert Einstein -- you've heard of him, no doubt. I saw him once from a distance, you know. Einstein said that scientific research is the only thing that qualifies as a religion. If religion claims to deal with the absolute and the universal, then what could be more absolute and universal than the things revealed through mathematics and physics? But the systems that are called religions, what do they concern themselves with? Words that a person utters -- which god he thinks he talks to. Whom somebody might choose to make love with. What books he reads. Trivial things, things that concern the behaviour of people. There's nothing absolute or universal about that! Who do people think they are to imagine that the universe cares about their antics on this little speck of mud? Only people care about such things. But they persuade themselves that their little problems have cosmic importance." Gustav threw up his hands in a gesture of exasperation. "And these are the people who in the same breath accuse scientists of being arrogant! I ask you! Did you ever hear such an absurdity?"

05:24 am - QotD

"Oh yes, were I less likely to be eclipsed by my pious King and father, I'd say my tale contains fine grist for the legend-makers once I'm safely dead. Which is my point, really. I'm less interested in what I did than what I felt, and they never get that part right. I'm no paragon, surely, weighed down with flaws and more than half a fool, but my own self just the same, and not another star in Arthur's heroic firmament. At six centuries and a continent's remove, I can read Catullus and briefly think: I know the man, he died long ago, but I know him now; I've shared the sharp-edged particulars of his daily life. Maybe someday some unimagined you will read these words and think that you know me, and then I'll be reborn inside your head. Everyone has his or her own scheme for cheating death; this poor testament is mine." -- Mordred (yes, that Mordred, of course), protagonist and narrator of Mordred's Curse by Ian McDowell (1996, Avon Books, New York; ISBN: 0-380-78195-6). [Underlined word is italic in the original; bold emphasis added by me to distinguish the bit I most wanted to quote from the bit I thought probably ought to come along for the ride.]

05:24 am - QotD

"So the trick is to hold a balance between the boredom of not ghosting^[1] at all and the exhaustion of doing too much of it. That's the trick in every aspect of life. You commit this excess and then you commit that excess and everything averages out in the middle, if you're lucky. If you survive long enough you can say that you've led a nice moderate life. The theory of countervailing excesses. In the long run all forces come into balance and all extremes cancel out. This is known as the process of regression to the mean. It makes for a very happy life, in the long run. Of course, in the short run you can go out of your fucking mind." -- Yakoub, narrator and protagonist of Star of Gypsies by Robert Silverberg (1986, Agberg Ltd.)

[1] Out-of-body travel to other times and places. The character has this ability, and at this point in the tale he's stuck in a dungeon and bored.

05:24 am - QotD

"We live in a world that has narrowed into a neighborhood before it has broadened into a brotherhood." -- Lyndon Johnson (b. 1908-08-27, d. 1973-01-22; US President 1963-1969)

05:24 am - QotD

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2013-01-15:

"It's a uniquely American prudishness. You can write the most detailed, vivid description of an axe entering a skull, and nobody will say a word in protest. But if you write a similarly detailed description of a penis entering a vagina, you get letters from people saying they'll never read you again. What the hell? Penises entering vaginas bring a lot more joy into the world than axes entering skulls." -- George R. R. Martin, writer.

<(submitted to the mailing list by M. McGuffin)

05:24 am - QotD

"Why, oh why do I have these pesky ethics keeping me from millions of dollars?" -- Pareidolius, 2013-06-30 [thanks to realinterrobang for quoting this earlier]

05:24 am - QotD

"If I could stick a knife in my heart
 Suicide right on stage
 Would it be enough for your teenage lust
 Would it help to ease the pain? Ease your brain?
 If I could dig down deep in my heart
 Feelings would flood on the page
 Would it satisfy ya, would it slide on by ya
 Would ya think the boy's insane? He's insane
 I said I know it's only rock 'n roll but I like it
 I said I know it's only rock'n roll but I like it, like it, yes, I do"
  -- from "It's Only Rock 'n Roll (But I Like It)" (1974) by Mick Jagger (b. 1943-07-26) and Keith Richards (and Ronnie Wood).

05:24 am - QotD

"You learn just as much from your failures. Sometimes you love your failures even more." -- Tina Weymouth (b. 1950-11-22)

05:24 am - QotD

From The Gardener of Nahi by David Wozniak (2012, self-published, available via Amazon and Wattpad atleast):

"Do you know what they really are?"He was looking up at the stars through a break in the trees.

I was so surprised at the question, at a question, that I was speechless for a long time. At last I answered him. "The stars? Yes. I know more than I'd care to."

"Tell me about them."

[...]

So in the end I gave them both the brutal truth, even though I knew it would probably not help them much. I gave them numbers, definitions, statistics, scientific concepts they had no hope in understanding in the five minutes of my ramblings. And when I finally finished, I looked up at the glorious simplicity of the night sky from my humble vantage point of the forest floor and my explanation almost seemed amiss. Down here, Akuli's words made more sense to me.

"So all of these stars," Akuli eventually said. "Each of them is a sun like ours, only far away?"

"Yes."

"You said some of them are already dead? That the light from the sun is all that remains for us to see?"

"That's true."

"Is it the same with people, Anon? Good people die, go back into the Father Sea^[*], yet their light remains here?"

I truthfully told him that was a profound correlation I had not thought of before.

[*] "Father Sea" = sky, "Mother Sea" = ocean

05:24 am - QotD

"Historically speaking, there were four steps in the development of today's concept of the derivative, which I list here in chronological order. The derivative was first used; it was then discovered; it was then explored and developed; and it was finally defined. That is, examples of what we now recognize as derivatives first were used on an ad hoc basis in solving particular problems; then the general concept lying behind these uses was identified (as part of the invention of the calculus); then many properties of the derivative were explained and developed in applications both to mathematics and to physics; and finally, a rigorous definition was given and the concept of derivative was embedded in a rigorous theory.

[...]

"The span of time from Fermat to Weierstrass is over two hundred years. How did the concept of derivative develop? Fermat implicitly used it; Newton and Liebniz discovered it; Taylor, Euler, Maclaurin developed it; Lagrange named and characterized it; and only at the end of this long period of development did Cauchy and Weierstrass define it. This is certainly a complete reversal of the usual order of textbook exposition in mathematics, where one starts with a definition, then explores some results, and only then suggests applications.

[...]

"We need to remember that the rigorous definition is often the end, rather than the beginning, of a subject."

-- Judith V. Grabiner, "The Changing Concept of Change: The Derivative from Fermat to Weierstrass", April 1982 [I think this article might be interesting even to some people who don't know calculus, as long as you can understand the general shapes of the problems each generation of mathematicians was trying to solve ... but some parts will make much more sense if you're at least acquainted with the delta-epsilon construction calculus is often introduced with.]

05:24 am - QotD

"But I also know we, as a nation, are not ready. No one ever is. Because when these things need to be said is when the vast majority of people are not ready to hear them. We forget how many people thought civil rights marchers were 'too angry' or the Martin Luther King was 'too radical.' We forget how many people thought the suffragettes may have 'had a point' but 'antagonized people' by pushing the conversation in an 'unladylike' way and being 'too confrontational.' Because the things that need to be said, openly and honestly, are very painful and require us to peel back layers of defensiveness.

"And so many people will not hear what was said today. They will hear only what they imagine is a rebuke. They will focus on trivial details. Addressing not what was said but how it was said or when it was said. They will find one word or phrase that proves . . . PROVES . . . whatever it is they believe it proves and shall build it into an impenetrable fortress."

-- osewalrus, 2013-07-19

[The whole thing isn't very long, and the rest is worth reading too. Click on through.]

05:24 am - QotD

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2013-07-19:

"Kitchen gizmos can offer a fascinating glimpse into the preoccupations of any given society. The Georgians loved roasted bone marrow and devised a special silver spoon for eating it. The Mayans lavished great artistry on the gourds from which chocolate was drunk. If you walk around our own kitchenware shops, you would think that the things we are really obsessed with in the West right now are espresso, panini, and cupcakes." -- Bee Wilson, in her history of kitchen tools, Consider the Fork.

(submitted to the mailing list by Terry Labach)

05:24 am - QotD

"Costuming is the second oldest tradition in sci-fi fandom. The first is drinking beer." -- Marty Gear, quoted in a 2008 AP story that was in turn quoted at File 770

05:24 am - QotD

"In the fall of 1953, I was getting ready to start high school in Columbus, Ohio. I had been the "new kid" during 8th grade and hadn't made any friends, so when I read a blurb in Galaxy magazine that the 11th World Science-Fiction Convention was to be held in Philadelphia over Labor Day weekend I decided that this was something that I just had to do.

[...]

"I was lurking in a corner (huddling might be a better term) when a tall, white-haired man came over and began to talk to me about what I liked to read. I had just bought a copy of Skylark of Valeron in the dealers' room (1949 Fantasy Press first edition with a dust jacket price of $3.00) and began enthusing about this "new" writer that I had just discovered, E.E. Smith, Ph.D.

"Just about that time a grandmotherly woman came over to us and the white-haired man turned to her and said, 'Mother, this is Martin Gear and he likes the books that you type.' He then turned to me, stuck out his hand and said, 'I didn't introduce myself, I'm 'Doc' Smith.' Before I could fade into the woodwork in embarrassment, the Smiths got on either side of me and escorted me around the convention, introducing me to other authors and artists. For the remainder of the weekend, whenever either of them saw me alone they made a point of checking to see if I was enjoying myself, and of somehow including me in whatever was going on. [...]"

-- Marty Gear (b. 1940, d. 2013-07-18)

He's going to be missed by a hell of a lot of people.

05:24 am - QotD

"The only kind of dignity which is genuine is that which is not diminished by the indifference of others." -- Dag Hammarskjold [ thanks to blueeowyn]

[I'm pretty sure Mom doesn't read my blog, but just in case today is the exception: happy birthday, Mom!]

05:24 am - QotD

"Most people aren't dumb, they want to make an informed decision" on religiously charged questions, Cargill said. "If scholars aren't talking to them, they have to rely on talk show hosts and pundits, and that's not the most reliable source of information." -- Robert R. Cargill, interviewed by The Huffington Post ( "Biblical Marriage Not Defined Simply As One Man, One Woman: Iowa Religious Scholars' Op-Ed", by Meredith Bennett-Smith, 2013-06-06)

05:24 am - QotD

"During most of the year, I explicitly reject the victim mentality which looks at history through the lens of all of the awful things which have happened to us... but I've come to think that there may be value, once a year, in sitting with our painful history. Maybe if we go deep into these narratives today, we can free ourselves from the need to carry them with us every day as we live in the world. Maybe we need a day when we remember our collective traumas, from the Babylonians to the Romans to the Crusades, so that having immersed in those stories we can make the conscious choice to shape our narratives and to understand our place in the world differently." -- Rabbi Rachel Barenblat, aka The Velveteen Rabbi, regarding the holiday Tisha b'Av, 2011-08-09

(To my friends marking this day, may you have an easy fast. And to xpioti, happy birthday!)

Today is:
Gregorian: 2013 July 16
Hebrew: 5773 Av 09
Islamic: 1434 Ramadan 08
Persian: 1392 Tir 25
Mayan: 0.0.0.13.0.0.10.7

05:24 am - QotD

"There are two things with which you cannot argue: stupid and hate, and one often breeds the other." -- Dr. Robert R Cargill, 2013-06-15

05:24 am - QotD

[A good holiday to everyone celebrating Bastille Day. Or the birthday of Woodie Guthrie (1912) for that matter.]

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2013-07-12:

"But Snowden's contribution to the noble cause of restoring the First, Fourth and Fifth amendments to the Constitution is in his documents. It depends in no way on his reputation or estimates of his character or motives - still less, on his presence in a courtroom arguing the current charges, or his living the rest of his life in prison. Nothing worthwhile would be served, in my opinion, by Snowden voluntarily surrendering to U.S. authorities given the current state of the law.

...

"What he has given us is our best chance - if we respond to his information and his challenge - to rescue ourselves from out-of-control surveillance that shifts all practical power to the executive branch and its intelligence agencies: a United Stasi of America."

p>-- Daniel Ellsberg, in the essay "Snowden made the right call when he fled the U.S.", on whistleblower Edward Snowden.</p>

[ http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/daniel-ellsberg-nsa-leaker-snowden-made-the-right-call/2013/07/07/0b46d96c-e5b7-11e2-aef3-339619eab080_story.html]

(submitted to the mailing list by Mike Krawchuk)

05:24 am - QotD

"Why isn't there a special name for the tops of your feet?" -- Lily Tomlin (thanks to blueeowyn)

05:24 am - QotD

"If you let a single ray of light through the shutter, it will go on diffusing itself without limit till it enlighten the world; but the shadow that was never so wide at first, as rapidly contracts till it comes to naught. [...]

"There is no ill which may not be dissipated like the dark, if you let in a stronger light upon it. Overcome evil with good. Practice no such narrow economy as they, whose bravery amounts to no more light than a farthing candle, before which most objects cast a shadow wider than themselves."

-- Henry David Thoreau (b. 1817-07-12, d. 1862-05-06), "The Service", 1840

05:24 am - QotD

"I can never join with my voice in the toast ['My Country, Right or Wrong!] which I see in the papers attributed to one of our gallant naval heroes. I cannot ask of heaven success, even for my country, in a cause where she should be in the wrong. Fiat justitia, pereat coelum. My toast would be, may our country always be successful, but whether successful or otherwise, always right." -- John Quincy Adams (b. 1767-07-11, d. 1848-02-23; President of the USA 1825-03-04 to 1829-03-03), letter to his father, John Adams, 1816-08-01

05:24 am - QotD

"You know, every time something I do annoys a racist sexist homophobic bigot, I like to think a sarcastic transgender angel gets their wings." -- John Scalzi, 2013-06-11 [thanks to tb for quoting this earlier]

05:24 am - QotD

"There is an unseen sweetness in the stomach's emptiness. We are lutes. When the sound box is filled, no music can come forth. When the brain and the belly burn from fasting, every moment a new song rises out of the fire. The mists clear, and a new vitality makes you spring up the steps before you ..." -- Rumi (b. 1207-09-30, d. 1273-12-17)

[To those starting the month of fasting today, a blessed Ramadan to you!]

Today is:
Gregorian: 2013 July 09
Julian: 2013 June 26
Hebrew: 5773 Av 02
Islamic: 1434 Ramadan 01
Persian: 1392 Tir 18
Mayan: 0.0.0.13.0.0.10.0

05:24 am - QotD

"A point in this is that the law isn't just designed to protect us against bad people. It is also designed to protect us against good people who do the wrong things, often thinking they are doing the right thing. After all, if [the police] are trying to catch a criminal, they are trying to do the right thing. But that good cause can be a blank check for harassment of thousands of innocents per one guilty." -- HJohn, 2013-07-03

05:24 am - QotD

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2013-06-20:

"The world is so big, so complicated, so replete with marvels and surprises that it takes years for most people to begin to notice that it is, also, irretrievably broken. We call this period of research 'childhood.'

"There follows a program of renewed inquiry, often involuntary, into the nature and effects of mortality, entropy, heartbreak, violence, failure, cowardice, duplicity, cruelty, and grief; the researcher learns their histories, and their bitter lessons, by heart. Along the way, he or she discovers that the world has been broken for as long as anyone can remember, and struggles to reconcile this fact with the ache of cosmic nostalgia that arises, from time to time, in the researcher's heart: an intimation of vanished glory, of lost wholeness, a memory of the world unbroken. We call the moment at which this ache first arises 'adolescence.' The feeling haunts people all their lives."

-- Michael Chabon, writer.

(submitted to the mailing list by Terry Labach)

05:24 am - QotD

"The young have aspirations that never come to pass, the old have reminiscences of what never happened." -- Hector Hugh Munro (b. 1870-12-18, d. 1916-11-14), better known by the pen name Saki

05:24 am - QotD

"The key thing about all the world's big problems is that they have to be dealt with collectively. If we don't get collectively smarter, we're doomed." -- Douglas Engelbart (b. 1925-01-30, d. 2013-07-02), Intelligence in the Internet Age, New York Times, 2005-09-19 (via wikiquote)

01:48 am - Note-From-Cat

Perrine: "Do not insult me with your offer of mere cat-treats, for I am one of God's adorable killing machines. Toss me the end of a string to pounce upon, instead!"^[*]

Me: "So you'll want your cat-treats in fifteen minutes or so, after a bit of pounce, stalk, and tug-o-war?"

[*] Translated from the original gestures and body-language.

10:02 pm - The Light Show

Watching fireflies while listening to distant fireworks, and being amused when they happen to be in sync.

(I remember watching the city's fireworks display -- or the highest bits of it anyhow -- from the top of the driveway when I was a child. The trees between here and there are decades taller now, so only a bit of reflection off the sky from a big cluster of those big-white-flash ones going off together can be seen from Mom's driveway.

05:24 am - QotD

"An American invents as the Italian paints and the Greeks sculpted." -- a foreign visitor to the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876 ( thanks to pockethedgehog for quoting it where I managed to see it)

[Smacks a little of exceptionalism? Maybe. Overlooks the many important inventors who weren't/aren't American? Fer shure. But c'mon, it's our national holiday -- if I should get any slack for such things, it'd be today, right? Happy Independence Day to all my countrymen, native, naturalized, or still working on it -- and to everyone else just celebrating along with us!]

05:24 am - QotD

"If anyone ever tells you that there's something wrong with you enjoying feminine things, regardless of gender, I encourage you to crush them under your favorite pair of heels while giggling with girlish delight.

"#Feminine is not weak or bad or wrong in any way. #Wear lipstick in the shade of their blood so you can rip their throat out with your teeth and worry less about smearing."

-- lalondethelearned, not sure what site, not sure what date (the only copy I've seen so far is a PNG screencap of a page that looks Twitter-ish but I couldn't find the original on Twitter or Tumblr or anywhere else Google-able -- if anyone has a link to the original, please let me know). Thanks to Sara Stewart for sharing this on Facebook in a way that I'd see it.

[Note that FB is not a reliable way to reach me. If something generates a notification, I'll probably see it eventually, but if not then I might not even look at FB until the status/note/whatever has scrolled off into oblivion. So it works for things like this, but not for anything important or time-sensitive.]

Hmm. I have been thinking about switching to a bolder shade of lipstick ...

05:24 am - QotD

"All experience is an arch, to build upon." -- Henry Brooks Adams [thanks to blueeowyn]

05:24 am - QotD

[Before I get to today's quotation about US politics, I'd like to wish my friends to the north a happy Canada Day!]

"I mused over [right-wing reactions to the DOMA decision] momentarily. On the one hand the court's decision broadens the coverage of a legal protection (this can produce envy-based hostility), on the other hand the court's decision overturned a law enacted by President Clinton (whose continuing to breathe can produce hostility).

"Then came the thought that Angry White Men, when they see fit, do not encumber themselves with such musings."

-- DocDwarf, 2013-06-29 (on a local-to-my-ISP newsgroup)

04:04 am - The kind of week-or-so I've had

Yesterday I finally mustered enough spoons to half-unload the stuff I'd loaded into the van for Conterpoint, which ended a week ago. (Drum kit, amps, stands, ...)

What's that you say? You didn't see me at Conterpoint? Yeah, that's part of the kind of week I had -- I used up my spoons getting ready to go to the con, and never made it out of the driveway. (It wasn't just the effort of loading the van -- not breathing well is sucking my spoons away, and I'm fading out at random.) Then I continued to not get out of the driveway -- or out to the driveway -- for another eight days, which included missing Baitcon ... yet again. (Next year, next year, that's my mantra.)

I've got this thing in my head that wants to get out, but every time I sit down at the computer to transcribe it, I fall asleep or get a headache before I get much of it down, and later I have to try to rediscover the cool bits I'd been about to transcribe. (I think it's going to be a banjo piece. And I think it's in C-minor. Which isn't really a hard key for banjo, especially the harmonic-minor.)

I get even worse about dealing with email and phone calls and stuff when I'm this drained. I've got to try to catch up on that soon, 'cause I'm dropping the ball on various things.

I think I might have been doing a little better yesterday, or maybe I'm just getting used to functioning on less oxygen. Let's see whether today makes it a trend. Also, while I'm still sweating a lot, my temperature seems to be coming down. Er ... from a high of 98.1 °F a week ago then a plateau of 97.2 °F for a few days, to 97.0 °F tonight/this-morning. Which reminds me: anyone know how to calibrate a cheap digital thermometer? It doesn't have the range to use the two most obvious reference temperatures I can generate stably in the kitchen. (Apparently it's not inconceivable that my normal body temperature is that low, but it's far enough from the textbook average that I'd really like to verify what my cheap thermometer is telling me.)

Things could be a lot worse. But it's all a bit annoying. (It could be a lot worse -- a dear friend just lost her father. Compared to merely missing a couple of events I would like to have attended and feeling tired and dizzy a lot ...)

I have got to sort this out before Pennsic. (So far all I know is that it's not the pneumonia that it feels like, nor anything else visible on a chest X-ray.)

And I really wanna get this C-minor thing out of my head and into the computer.

05:24 am - QotD

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2013-06-16:

"There's never enough time to do all the nothing you want." -- Bill Watterson, cartoonist.

(submitted to the mailing list by Reddy, Michael)

05:24 am - QotD

"Without ice cream, there would be darkness and chaos." -- Don Kardong

05:24 am - QotD

"Abandoning the habit of secrecy in favor of process transparency and peer review was the crucial step by which alchemy became chemistry. In the same way, it is beginning to appear that open-source development may signal the long-awaited maturation of software development as a discipline." -- Eric S. Raymond, The Art of Unix Programming, 2003 (quote appears in chapter 19)

12:54 pm - Dreambit

Last thing I said in my dream before I woke up this morning: "Hold on, I have to go wake up to pee. We can continue this interview when I get back to sleep." Only seemed strange after I was already awake.

The dream involved somebody with spade-like hands that he did wind up using to dig with.

05:24 am - QotD

"Individual liberty is individual power, and as the power of a community is a mass compounded of individual powers, the nation which enjoys the most freedom must necessarily be in proportion to its numbers the most powerful nation." -- John Quincy Adams (b. 1767-07-11, d. 1848-02-23; President of the United States of America 1825-03-04 to 1829-03-03), 1822-10-01, letter to James Lloyd [via Wikiquote]

05:24 am - QotD

From Memento Mori by Shariann Lewitt (1995, Tom Doherty Associates, Inc, New York, NY; LC: PS3562.E987M46 1995; Dewey: 813'.54-dc20; ISBN: 0-312-85625-3):

It was late and the house was dark, silent, her parents asleep upstairs. Candles and a ligghter were arranged on her bedside table, more on the bureau in front of the mirror. She lit them one by one. The room was bright with warm yellow light, accented with deep shadows.

She lit incense, too, an affectation she had only recently acquired. Light flickered and smoke rose from the cone of frankincense. It reminded her of church. Of the beauty and the mystery, the richness and the quiet. And the fact that a young girl could pray while staring full-face at the statue of a well-made man, flogged and bleeding.

05:24 am - QotD

"The movie 'Apollo 13' does a fair job of showing how rapidly the engineers in Houston devised the [air scrubber] kludge and documented it, but because of time constraints of course they can't show you everything. NASA is a stickler for details. (Believe me, I've worked with them!) They don't just rapid prototype something that people's lives will depend upon. Overnight, they not only devised the scrubber adapter built from stuff in the launch manifest, they also tested it, documented it, and sent up stepwise instructions for constructing it. In a high-maturity organization, once you get into the habit of doing that, it doesn't really take that long. Something that always puzzles me when I meet cowboy engineers who insist that process will just slow them down unacceptably. I tell them that hey, if NASA engineers could design, build, test, and document a CO2 scrubber adapter made from common household items *overnight*, you can damn well put in a comment when you check in your code changes." -- Calli Arcale,

05:24 am - QotD

"I am not in this world to live up to other people's expectations, nor do I feel that the world must live up to mine." -- Fritz Perls (thanks to blueeowyn)

05:24 am - QotD

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2013-06-19:

"Toleration is historically the product of the realization of the irreconcilability of equally dogmatic faiths, and the practical improbability of complete victory of one over the other. Those who wished to survive realized that they had to tolerate error. They gradually came to see merits in diversity, and so became skeptical about definitive solutions in human affairs." -- Isaiah Berlin

(submitted to the mailing list by Terry Labach)