Friday Ephemera
A beginner’s guide to snake removal. || Just a little bit of give. || Bees want your tears. || Cobalt tarantula. || Lucille Ball demonstrates the Sonovox, 1939. || Backfire is a game. || Thug life. || Some very Guardian thinking. || Ping, pong and spin. || Step aside, puny humans. (h/t, Dicentra) || Opal uncovered. || When it’s too much effort to fold paper and throw. || “To prove their mousy worth, they’ll overthrow the Earth.” || Evaporating horse sweat. || Isle of Wight attraction of note. || Using wood. || Why cats don’t rule the Earth. || Always respect the media. || You don’t often see them. || Meanwhile, in sporting news. || Not cake. || And finally, via Damian, I’m not entirely sure what the protocol here is.
It’s come to this.
It’s come to this.
Anyone here with advanced physics knowledge? I’m curious if it’s possible for irony to fold in on itself to such a degree that it takes the rest of the universe with it down a wormhole of…oh fuck it. Gimme another gin and vodka martini. I’m toast anyway. Are those pickled eggs psilocybic?
I have a copy of “The Dancing Wu Li Masters” but haven’t worked my way down the pile to it yet. Seems to be about physics.
How can he tell which boulders are female?
Oh, dear. Such complications, it’s quite simple, really.
The female boulders are the ones wearing the over the shoulder boulder holders.
😄👏😄
Where’s Oik been lately? Or did I miss him?
[ Sprays Jabrwok with hamster urine. ]
[ Fetches bag of weasels. ]
LOL. Didn’t see that coming.
Didn’t see that coming.
The jokes were so bad I’ve had to embrace experimental solutions.
How can he tell which boulders are female?
You have to lift them up.
I’ve created a nonprofit website to spread the word about web feeds and RSS
Party like it’s 1999.
You have to lift them up.
I see I’m going to need more hamster urine.
It’s not so much “Facebook and Twitter have made a great firewall of China”. It’s more so that for the majority of people on the English-language internet, FB/Twitter/Reddit are THE site they visit to get a one-stop-shop for “what’s on”.
So if a site, or person, or organisation is restricted through a major big tech portal, they’ll get choked off from the wider net unless they have people who have a habit of going there directly from a bookmark etc.
Many people don’t realise that an option to get a customised slice of the net through a feed reader even *exists*.
Treating those people to say they “deserve it” seems massively unfair.
It’s not about me or people like me – I know how to get around big tech’s efforts. It’s the general public that just needs the information that an alternative is there.
Aiming the site at the general public is why I avoid using RSS/ATOM/OPML acronyms instead of the general term “web feeds”, it’s why the site is more neutral politically than I’d like, it’s included a load of illustrative stock photos etc when text would have gotten the info across to a dedicated reader…
Governor Squid, the way to hook her would be to sign her up with a free Feedly account or similar from https://www.youneedfeeds.com/web-based, and populate it with a few things she can’t easily get on Facebook.
Does she like crosswords? Get her a feed with a new crossword every day, for free.
https://www.puzzlerscave.com/rss/rss.php
Does she like cute animal stories and pictures? Hook her up with a daily feed.
https://www.reddit.com/r/aww/top/.rss
etc etc
Then get the feeds of one national and one local news source of your choice, and show her it as a whole package.
If she’s attached to Facebook as a news source, show her something like the story about FB experimenting on feeding people sad stories to make them unhappy, just to see if they could.
Stunning and brave.
I’m so impressed I may look to see why the doings of Miley Cyrus should be of interest to anyone besides Miley.
Had Miley said that while posing naked for the camera in a provocative manner, it would’ve been saucy good fun.
She’s slipping. No one wants a serious Miley.
Meanwhile, in other news of other people selling monorails, have you consulted your plant consultant ?
“Curate”, right. Of course these ninnies also need “…online classes for newbies like “Watering 101” and “How to Pick a Planter” online for $10.” I suppose those are difficult tasks for people who need the internet to tie their shoes, not that their thinking isn’t deranged or anything.
OK, yes it is.
Lest you think this Cutsumpas lad who fancies himself a farmer is alone…
If a plant is “filling a void in your life”, and even a cat or dog is too much work, you probably need to find an ice floe and just drift off to sea.
Final grade for plant consultant to millenials: A+ for separating them from their money, D for having a useful occupation, these people are not exactly agricultural extension agents.
I think I’ve found my pot of gold. Been growing houseplants for 30 years of apt. living.
I like RSS. I listen to the international broadcasters that, a generation ago, would have been on short-wave radio, and being able to download the MP3 files through my RSS reader (well, actually Thunderbird now that I’m on Linux) is nice and convenient.
I don’t want to be locked into a bloated app for each different broadcaster. If a broadcaster only wants to offer streaming, I’d prefer to listen through the browser instead of an app.
Yes. “House plants”. That’s what they’re growing. Yep yep yep.
That particular issue with human thinking has a name: the recency illusion.
It serves a purpose in a set of fields. Graphs are much easier to label when they don’t have axes going forwards in one half and backwards in the other, for example.
Yeah. I get the purpose possibly for scientific purposes, though still seems rather spurious. I encountered this on a Wiki page on the history of Wales (thanks Tim Newman). On a colloquial sense, it’s unnecessary, misleading, and confusing. And given that they are moving “Year Zero” to just 1950, and given the stadard deviation on carbon dating, surely saying “years ago” instead of BP will rid you of the icky Christianity while still communicating the general idea.
I have a copy of “The Dancing Wu Li Masters” but haven’t worked my way down the pile to it yet. Seems to be about physics.
As I recall the book was very New Age and Wikipedia says that the author is not a scientist of any sort but rather a “spiritual teacher”–read New Age oddball.
http://woodstermangotwood.blogspot.com/2019/02/plumber-of-year-awards.html
plumber of the year awards
It’s hard to pick a winner, but I’m going with this.
For the more-than-adequate ventilation.
David, does that even *have* dividers between stalls?
Take That Universe!
Tiny glimmer of light.
When I wanted to grow houseplants, I got a book out of the library & did what it said to do. That was the old-fashioned, inefficient way.
In defense of the brown-thumbed, I do think it’s harder to keep plants alive now that potting soil—oops, growth medium—is loaded with fertilizer. Tends to burn the roots when you repot. Mine usually survive but take a long time to recover.
does that even *have* dividers between stalls?
I’m assuming they’re as abbreviated as the doors. Which must be handy if you want to share toffees, or your phone number.
I got a book out of the library & did what it said to do.
That. Plus I’m blessed to have an actual nursery close to home, a family run place since the early 1970s, where the guys that started still work and are happy to answer all plant questions regardless of how amateur.
A co-worker gave my husband some cuttings of a “sure fire” house plant. Didn’t know the name and the cuttings just stayed the same – not growing but not dying either – for months. We finally took a pic to our nursery and they id’d it right away and gave us care & feeding instructions.
Those few clippings have taken over a corner of the living room!
Meanwhile, in other news of other people selling monorails, have you consulted your plant consultant ?
Well, I can keep that in mind if I ever need to build a factory, that is a good idea.
Oh. Foliage adviser.
As I recall the book was very New Age and Wikipedia says that the author is not a scientist of any sort but rather a “spiritual teacher”–read New Age oddball.
Hey, he’s probably not off stereotyping on a blog somewhere.
Z. Zamifolia is a nice plant. I haven’t seen one in years; for some reason they’re not sld around here any more.
You also can’t get piggyback plants around here anymore.
What houseplants grow in cloudy old England?
for some reason they’re not sld around here any more.
I don’t usually see them in the garden centers of places like Home Depot or Lowes, just small nurseries. However, the plants seem ubiquitous (along with cornstalk plants) as greenery in business building lobbies or mall plantings. Snag a leaf if you spot one, you can propagate a plant from it.
It’s not usually cloudy inside our houses, Pogo!
What houseplants grow in cloudy old England?
Mushrooms?
But you have to have light, which generally comes in through windows from outside, to keep plants alive. Although sansevieria will grow happily, if very slowly, under light conditions generally thought suitable only for mushrooms.
Darleen, for years, literally, you couldn’t buy spider plants around here. Finally they showed up at a local grocery chain for $25/per. I quietly pulled off a dangling baby from one that had plenty. ☺️ No alarms went off but the plant has never bloomed.
I read The Dancing Wu Li Masters in the early 1980s. It’s indeed a new-agey way of looking at quantum mechanics, seeing wave/particle duality as a metaphor for something or other, etc.
Wu Li looks at wave/particle duality and concludes that the act of observation changes the nature of the thing, and then extrapolates it into a supremely anthropocentric worldview about the world not really existing until we look at it.
Which, tommyrot. “Wave” and “particle” are paradigms that we humans impose on electromagnetism because we’ve seen waves and particles and know how to set up tests for them. In all likelihood, electromagnetism is neither wave nor particle but something we don’t know how to perceive correctly because we can’t perceive four spatial dimensions (or however many there are).
Same with other apparent weirdness in physics such as dark matter and energy. There is probably neither matter nor energy involved: those are just the paradigms we know and so we posit them. It wouldn’t surprise me if there were something more like a hidden topology in a spatial dimension that we can’t perceive that accounts for the phenomena.
Quantum mechanics doesn’t deal substantially in formal electromagnetism, Dicentra, but in far deeper states and probabilities. Given the assumption needed to call Dancing ‘tommyrot’ we’ll have to know much more than we currently do, even nearly 40 years on.
If, as you say, it’s all interpretation, then any plausible logical thread – which in the context eastern mysticism certainly constitutes – surpasses materialism and a good chunk of early quantum physics with it.
Since the book far more of its logic has been paralleled than dismissed. The LRC put the Higgs Boson delicately between proving the two universal models and was promptly and quietly shuffled to become the big bang disprover. (The BB naturally violates its own fundamental laws, but that’s another subject, although as a model it’s in more jeopardy than it’s been. The Higgs did little of anything, as it turns out.)
The Western quantum reductionism that the mystic somehow intuited wouldn’t answer much actually hasn’t, even to the point of it not just more or less abandoning the hopelessly mystical quantum universe – complex to the west – but to asking if we even know the question to which the Universe is the answer.
Dancing was prescient. Why wouldn’t it be; the creator tends to play exceptionally elaborate chess. It turns out that the physics at that deep a level today have in the abstract more in resonance with it than not.
https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/a-different-kind-of-theory-of-everything
As the world becomes the west and the west flames out much will be challenged, not least our worn out assumptions about how things work, how, or especially, why.
Oh, and tommyrot: Mashing quantum physics together with postmodernism as if they shared anything at all.
http://steve-patterson.com/quantum-physics-abuse-reason/
Well, no. Postmodernism is bullshit. That it’s used to abuse physics in order to escape a finite material reality and its consequences is irrelevant. A distinction some fail to make…
I’m thinking this latest smacks too much of jealousy in the fact Ms. Penny strikes out on both counts.
40 years on? I’m even further behind on my reading than I thought.
WEALTHY GEEK: Hmmm. I can buy a brainy lady, or a 22-year-old 6-foot 100-pound-weight blonde supermodel. Wow… Tough choice…
Yeah, sure it is, Laurie.
She’s sure not going to qualify in the brains department.
You show me a man who buys a smart lady instead of a blonde supermodel and I’ll show you a man from Mars.
Now, if the geek’s wealthy enough to afford both, he will marry the smart lady in hopes his kids will also be smart, and keep the supermodel on the side.
The reason I said “hundred-pound-weight” is I didn’t want the men to think supermodels were going for £100 and possibly injure a henchlesbian in the stampede to the door.
Pogonip,
I’m vacillate between amusement and annoyance that Penny seems convinced that a man doesn’t marry because of love, but out of a dark, nefarious motive of oppression!.
Well, I’m not sure that love is the main motivation of guys who buy trophy wives, but certainly oppression isn’t either.
David, does that even *have* dividers between stalls?
“The men can encourage each other.”
–loony general in a season 3 episode of M*A*S*H*
…possibly injure a henchlesbian in the stampede to the door.
I had to put change in the meter, I swear to god.
She’s heard THAT excuse before.
Smithers! Release the pickled “eggs”!
surely saying “years ago” instead of BP will rid you of the icky Christianity while still communicating the general idea.
Not really, because you have to check the date of the publication in that case. It’s one of those things that was a good idea at the time, but has dated badly as we move away from 1950. Now it’s inertia that keeps it in place.
The Art world has similar problems. It stopped “Modern Art” at 1980, and anything after was “Contemporary”. Now we have “Post-Contemporary”, which is a logical nonsense. Heaven knows what will follow.
I don’t think BP ever had anything to do with Christianity, to be honest. I’d be surprised if you could find evidence it did.
Whereas CE/BCE was clearly always to remove the Christianity from a dating system. I’d like to see your justification for demanding that the majority of non-Christian peoples should use AD/BC because you find removing it “icky” though. I read quite a lot on Islamic History, and to use AD dating for them is odd. Would you read a book on European history written by a Moslem with AH dates?
I’m thinking this latest smacks too much of jealousy in the fact Ms. Penny strikes out on both counts.
It’s a having-it-all fantasy. Cinderella, BA, MBA, outwits her eyecandy competitors to win Mr Big, the corporate prince who earns so much that she can escape the two-salary harness her friends are stuck in who married the dweeby guy in the next cubicle.