Payoff

Okay, you know what's up in the first fifteen seconds and the rest is just agony.

Fun!

The Left

David Harsanyi:

And so what? Though the president's fate seems to be the paramount concern of the leftist punditry (a group that now argues that any "real" scandal is only one in which the president had personal knowledge of misconduct in real time -- meaning, one supposes, that Abu Ghraib should be retroactively reclassified as a non-scandal for George W. Bush), it matters not. Even with an adoring public, the chances of Obama's pushing through any substantive legislation before 2014 -- or even 2016 -- were slim at best. Those poll-ignoring obstructionists in the House will see to it.

The president won't be running for re-election, but progressivism will. And the most vital element of Obama's agenda, no matter where any of these investigations lead, has already taken a big hit -- and that's the electorate's trust in government.

Weep bitter tears progressivismists! The socialist utopia you've constructed will END.

Playing With Video

Via Ned, this:



It moves slowly. Slowed down even more and run through some Quartz Composer tomfoolery, it becomes this:



Might require a soundtrack. Try this one:

Art Spiegelman CO-MIX: A Retrospective of Comics, Graphics and Scraps

The Art Spiegelman show at the VAG was very much worth seeing. It's been bunches of places already I think, but it was worthwhile especially for illustrations of the planning that goes into Spiegelman's stuff, which seems to be driven by fear of being revealed as worthless. Made me feel healthy!

I was an early buyer of Arcade and I figured I'd seen most of the stuff, but the draft pages of Maus (and the composition of the completed pages) were great to see. It made me want to pick up MetaMaus some time.

A negative is the amount of standing and concentrating you have to do to get the most out of the show: reading comics isn't that much of an ordeal. And the later things seem to lack the smudgy charm of the earlier ones.

It Could Not Be Worse Than What We Do Face-to-Face

Via LGM, stuff about MOOCs:

San Jose State is the ground zero for the MOOC tsunami, in several senses. It’s literally located in Silicon Valley, but it’s also part of the Cal State system, the largest university system in the country, with almost half a million students. Along with the partnership with edX, SJSU also has a partnership with Udacity to offer slightly lower cost online courses to its own students — and also to local high school and community college students — and they say they hope to eventually replace 20% of the curriculum with online courses from universities like Harvard and MIT. They explicitly hope to do so in a way which can serve as a model for the rest of the Cal State system to follow.

SJSU’s president, by the way, might be the most market-minded university administrator I’ve ever come across, and his contempt for his own university faculty is astonishing; when he was asked about the quality of SJSU’s online courses, for example, he just quipped that “It could not be worse than what we do face to face.” He says that kind of thing regularly enough that it’s not a fluke. It’s one thing when you have the President of edX or Thomas Friedman condemning professors as boring pontificators spouting content, but when the calls are coming from inside the building, you have a real problem.

Another tidbit: his Cal State profile page describes “his more than 30 years of experience in the service of higher education and industry,” which is a conflation you rarely here put quite so bluntly. Such a conflation does, however, make a lot of sense in Silicon Valley, where the educational-industrial complex is the foundation on which the valley rests, where it’s pretty normal for a Stanford professor to also be an executive at Google, and for a university president to see his duty as split between working for education and working for industry. But things get weird if that model starts to be the basis from which to transform a public system of higher education. Which is what’s now happening.

Bye bye universities.

Attention Span Demonstrations

Promise!

Non-invasive brain stimulation techniques aimed at mental and neurological conditions include transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) for depression, and transcranial direct current (electrical) stimulation (tDCS), shown to improve memory. Transcranial ultrasound stimulation (TUS) has also shown promise.

Because women are whores!

A blog called Government Gets Girlfriends — written by and for "Incel" (involuntarily celibate) men who suffer from social anxiety — suggests a rather Orwellian solution to the problem of these dudes not getting laid: use hard-earned American tax dollars to pay women to go out with them. So... insurance-covered hookers.

Government should offer women money to go on blind dates. These women would freely apply for such a program, as would incel men. Every woman would have a limit of 30 dates. If she doesn’t find a suitable partner during those 30 days she will be fired to prevent scammers – however, she would be paid the full sum, as would a woman who finds a partner during one of these 30 dates.

Using this program, many involuntary celibate men would get their first date or improve their chances of finding a partner.

The man who runs the blog — "a fucked-up kid from somewhere in Europe" — has clinical depression and identifies as a former incel. However, this isn't really the root of his problem. I'll give you one hint: he denies being a MRA, but one of his posts is titled "Hello, Angry SJW Feminists" and another one is "A word on Tumblr feminist invasion." Hello, chip on your shoulder.

Call:

... [Thomas] Nagel's academic golden years are less peaceful than he might have wished. His latest book, Mind and Cosmos (Oxford University Press, 2012), has been greeted by a storm of rebuttals, ripostes, and pure snark. "The shoddy reasoning of a once-great thinker," Steven Pinker tweeted. The Weekly Standard quoted the philosopher Daniel Dennett calling Nagel a member of a "retrograde gang" whose work "isn't worth anything—it's cute and it's clever and it's not worth a damn."

The critics have focused much of their ire on what Nagel calls "natural teleology," the hypothesis that the universe has an internal logic that inevitably drives matter from nonliving to living, from simple to complex, from chemistry to consciousness, from instinctual to intellectual.

And response:

Chorost’s piece is irresponsible journalism, for it’s meant to give academics the idea that there is a substantial and credible body of opinion that modern evolutionary theory is wrong, and that there’s suggestive evidence for some teleological force driving the evolutionary process. He dismisses critics like myself as simply disgruntled defenders of orthodoxy, and completely neglects the valid criticisms of Nagel’s book made by Orr, Sober, Leitner, and Weisberg. The Chronicle of Higher Education, of course, is widely read by academics and intellectuals.

What a pity that a science writer with an agenda, and a desire to be controversial, manages to both misrepresent and denigrate modern evolutionary theory. This isn’t sober and objective journalism, but tabloid journalism gussied up for intellectuals.

Will I wind up eating these carcasses?

This is the overriding message of Tianfu Morning News’s coverage today of the dead ducks in the river. With front page images of white-clad officials testing the water, we’re told that there is no danger to humans in the slightest. Right at the top of the paper’s coverage, there’s the following question and answer series to put everyone at ease:

Where did the dead ducks come from? Uncertain at this point.
Did the dead ducks die from some illness? Uncertain at this point.
How have the dead ducks been dealt with? Buried at an appropriate location.
Any impact on the sources of drinking water? No.
Will any of the dead ducks make it onto the market? No.

Please don't shoot me, I'm an artist.

Field Trip

Also...

The problem with getting a mime into a snow-ЗОРБ is that the snow has to get back to exactly the right place. Oh well.



Yet somehow this works fine:

Capitalism: It Fails Us Now

Oh sure, everything's better in Russia since 1992:



Worked to DEATH.

Oh Dear

That ЗОРБ's done trapped a mime.

Fuck You Greens

Once again, the Greens prove their commitment to progressive politics by throwing the election to the right-wing party. My daughter and my wallet (lighter now that the government has decided some medical care shouldn't be covered) thank you. Assholes.

At the moment:



Why, look at the vote totals. Those Green votes added to the NDP votes add up to a lot of powerless displeasure and isn't that satisfying?

UPDATARINO:

As usual the CBC's Vote Compass is entertaining fun in which I occupy a teensy outlying spot in the corner of an XY graph plotting social and economic concerns. It says I should vote Green! (That is I am about 77% Green and 76% NDP, thus showing the stark difference in the two parties and my clear choice.) Which is fine if I want to throw votes to a party with almost entirely the same platform as the party with the power base. What assholes. If I was a Liberal I would be sending thank-you letters.

Nudge

For some reason I'm still turning things into 3D models. What's with that?

In any case I'm relatively happy with where the spiral parsing is going. It's neato for no reason!

This is the Applescript that converts a Kineme plist to a JavaScript in TextWrangler...

tell application "TextWrangler"
activate
process lines containing text 1 of text document 1 matching string "" output options {copying to new document:true}
open find window
replace "" using "" searching in document 1 options {search mode:grep, starting at top:true, wrap around:false, backwards:false, case sensitive:false, match words:false, extend selection:false, showing results:no}
replace "" using "" searching in document 1 options {search mode:grep, starting at top:true, wrap around:false, backwards:false, case sensitive:false, match words:false, extend selection:false, showing results:no}
replace "\\t" using "" searching in document 1 options {search mode:grep, starting at top:true, wrap around:false, backwards:false, case sensitive:false, match words:false, extend selection:false, showing results:no}
replace "\\r" using ", " searching in document 1 options {search mode:grep, starting at top:true, wrap around:false, backwards:false, case sensitive:false, match words:false, extend selection:false, showing results:no}
replace "(\\s.+?\\s.+?\\s.+?\\s)" using "\\1\\r" searching in document 1 options {search mode:grep, starting at top:true, wrap around:false, backwards:false, case sensitive:false, match words:false, extend selection:false, showing results:no}
replace ", \\r" using "\\r" searching in document 1 options {search mode:grep, starting at top:true, wrap around:false, backwards:false, case sensitive:false, match words:false, extend selection:false, showing results:no}
set bounds of find window to {419, 469, 1045, 684}
close find window saving no
add prefix and suffix document 1 prefix "_Queue.push([" suffix "])"
replace "\\A^" using "_Queue = []

function (__structure Queue) main (__index Size)
{
var result = new Object();
" searching in document 1 options {search mode:grep, starting at top:true, wrap around:false, backwards:false, case sensitive:false, match words:false, extend selection:false, showing results:no}
replace "\\Z$" using "
if (_Queue.length > Size) _Queue.splice(0, _Queue.length-Size);
result.Queue = _Queue;
return result;
}" searching in document 1 options {search mode:grep, starting at top:true, wrap around:false, backwards:false, case sensitive:false, match words:false, extend selection:false, showing results:no}
end tell

Cool huh? I KNOW! Of course if I actually knew how to grep well it'd be, like, one step or something...

In other computer-geek news there's this interesting open-source thingie called Field that, notwithstanding the nonsense above, is a little too code-based to be fun for me, but it goes in the same direction as Processing and Quartz Composer, with a kind of timeline that rolls over boxes of code that get run in sequence. The latest alpha didn't run on my laptop, but the last beta did.