Author: cdwan

On the way home from Boston on Friday, I stopped off and talked to a Larouche activist. He seemed like a nice guy, very articulate in his own way. It was refreshing to have a political conversation outside of the usual bounds of left and right. Then he asked for money and I said ‘no’ and was on my way.

This weekend, the temperature finally dropped a bit. I harvested the last of the beets and a vat of borsch is happily simmering away right now.

We did a bunch of yard work today, and then cleaned out the gutters. Cleaning gutters is up there on the list of my least favorite domestic chores, but it wasn’t so bad today due to our ongoing drought. The matted junk was totally dry and not smelly at all. We had fun knocking plugs out of the downspouts using a hammer.

This guy has some truly amazing high speed photographs. technolope, if you want to get into this after you finish your thesis, you’re welcome to set up the rig in my basement.

This is a bubble, 2ms after being shot with an air rifle. I think that this is the most awesome picture I have seen in a long time:

Is spam getting more unattractive by the day? I mean, back in the good ‘ole days spam was stuff like “$1 million dollars now!” and “Beautiful women, all for you!” bearing in mind the scam-factor on the email, there was at least a chance that I would be interested in either of those things. Now, my spam is all so vile and nasty that I’m ashamed to clean out the spam filter in public. I mean “very hairy grandmas” and “ur druuuug con!nection?”

Ick.

The biggest casualty of the recent disk fiasco on my laptop was my iPhoto library. I use this tool to keep my entire personal photo album. A few years back, I methodically scanned all of my paper pictures and imported and labeled them. I’ve got about 17,621 pictures.

The pictures seem to be okay, except that the indexing information: The labels and captions … the dates, and all that meta-data is screwed up. I’ve got a pile of 17,000 pictures importing into iPhoto now. I’m not looking forward to this.

Yeah, I tried using iPhoto’s clever “ctrl-option-start the app” magic, I tried both a “recover” and a “re-import.” I even tried some dark magic from the internet called “iPhoto Extractor”. None of these helped me.

Sigh.

It is sort of cool to see a high speed, random slideshow of all my pictures, though.

A brief review (inspired by something written by evil_genius). Logic, and the scientific method, do not include:

* Argument from authority: “The big honcho said so, so it’s true and …”
* Argument from emotion: “mom, dad, apple pie, and my idea, so it’s true and … ” OR “you get all upset when we talk about my ideas, therefore your ideas are crap, therefore mine are true …”.
* Argument by caricature: “the straw man”: “your idea can be sketched out like this, right? So, my sketch has these flaws … so your idea must have those flaws as well … ”
* Argument by changing the subject: “Hey! Look! Civil rights! So anyway, what I said was true and …”
* Argument by false analogy: “Okay, my idea is sort of like a blimp, right? Blimps float because they’re lighter than air, by volume. Therefore, my idea is lighter than air, by volume!”

These are fine rhetorical and argumentative techniques, but they don’t prove anything.

Thank you.

This letter is stunningly brilliant. He’s got responses a ways down the page from members of the school board, so he apparently actually sent it.

Letter concealed, to hide it from the ‘fundies

So it turns out that the top hit to an image search with my name on google is … ME, being a big geek!

There’s a man spraying poison around my house. I’m paying him a decent amount of money to do this. This makes me feel odd.

The problem is wood boring insects. We not only have the carpenter bees, but we also have carpenter ants. In the “swarming form” too. The internet agrees with the friends and family, who agree with the pest control people: These critters will cause structural damage to my home unless we kill them.

While he works, I can see the little birds flitting around the birdhouse. This process will undoubtedly kill some of them. In addition, I’m now going to have to go all obsessive compulsive about cleaning the cats food and water dishes. This is to say nothing about how hard I’m going to scrub, peel, and otherwise sanitize my newly reddening tomatoes.

Chemical warfare. Nasty stuff. When they gas the place, I have to clear out for four hours. I think I’ll go sit at the library, under some really good art, and listen to the Bach Cello Suites.

So, I wander off from my desk to get a cup of tea.

I return to hear SQEALS from my yard, and I see three girls, maybe 15 years old, jumping through the sprinkler in my front yard. They’ve got a small posse of boys on bicycles watching them jump.

Just as I was dithering between “I should tell them to get the hell out of my yard” and “it is awfully hot outside, can’t really blame them,” they wandered off … presumably looking for the next quick fix of sprinkler happiness.

Summertime, is still summertime, I suppose.

My brother-in-law forwarded me this:

His note

Ending a five-month standoff over a controversial nomination, President Bush on Monday used a recess appointment to name John Bolton the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. The move thwarts Senate Democrats who had blocked Bolton’s nomination in a dispute over documents and accusations that Bolton doesn’t have the temperament for the nation’s top U.N. post.

Hey look, the Republicans don’t have the power to make congress the total slave of the executive, but they certainly have the power to make themselves useless…and Bush is great with rolling right on over the indecisive or ambivalent.

Thank God we’ve at least still got a strong willed and independent Supreme Court. Just kidding, yo.