Friday Ephemera

No Bones About It: People Recognize Objects By Visualizing Their ‘Skeletons’

That delightful scientific table of animal farts reminded me of one of my favourite tables, this little personal collection of animal sounds in different languages.
Though, to be honest, take some of those spellings with a grain of salt, as animal sounds are in that class of onomatopaeia that people keep on reinventing every day.

When you want your freshly squeezed in an orange-peel cup.
Marauding rainbow lorikeets are much more efficient at turning navels into orange-peel cups than that gadget.

Western Couple Travel to Middle East to Prove It ‘Gets a Bad Rap’ — End Up in Iranian Prison
https://pluralist.com/jolie-king-mark-firkin-iran-jail/

“Am I being detained?”
Another woke idiot who wants to be arrested for bragging rights.

Do watch to the end.
LOL

News item of note.
Via Dicentra.

Can snails fart?
*heads for garden with tape recorder*

If so, then the new $999 (!) iPhone may not be for you.
It has to be said, it’s not the prettiest thing.

I, for one, am glad I am nowhere near the mainstream.

It has to be said, it’s not the prettiest thing.
Given that one would spend most of the time either with the thing up to an ear or looking at the face, to me the aesthetics of the back of a phone is sort of like worrying about the aesthetics of the underside of a (non-show) car, but I guess if people are going to drop a grand on a damn phone to be replaced in a year anyway, they are going to want to gaze as longingly at it as Narcissus at his reflection.
Over in the blue check twitter world some guy explains that the Brexit mess is because the referendum question was too vague.

Well, OK, he has a blue check, it must be so.

With the page content jumping madly around as more and more ads appear, it is now quite easy to accidentally click on one of them. Maddening.
This. I recently visited the website of a local newspaper in a sort of pity-read. I was asked to turn off my adblocker, which I did, out of morbid curiosity. Immediately, the site became shockingly unusable.
[ Added: ]
Even setting aside the site-crippling effects and general user-hostility, the publishers don’t seem to grasp that online advertising feels much more intrusive and aggravating than other forms precisely because it’s happening on your device.

Ads: Just slightly off topic, daytime TV shows, more specifically talk shows aimed at women, have incorporated advertising INTO the programming itself. They “showcase” various products and their prices and then give some away to the studio audience. So clever!

Keelhauling is too good for those designers.
Online advertisers generally struggle to hide their contempt for the reader, in that the experience is usually bad, often terrible, and doesn’t seem to improve.
As I’ve said before, the people responsible for auto-play videos should be hunted down for sport, especially the videos that, when manually paused, simply shrink a little and move elsewhere on the page, following you, still being irrelevant and thoroughly distracting. And those goddamn things that are timed to slide in and obscure whatever you’re trying to read just as you’re getting immersed, thereby spoiling the experience and making you lose your place – all to nag you about something in which you had absolutely no interest and now, thanks to the intrusion, actively despise. Modal windows, I think they’re called.
I briefly toyed with the idea of having ads on this blog, and occasionally get asked, but almost everything about the prospect is horrible.

Meanwhile, have you ever been troubled by the sight of honeycomb or strawberries ? If so, then the new $999 (!) iPhone may not be for you.
Jardine House, Hong Kong.
The House Of A Thousand . . . .

Keelhauling is too good for those designers.
Another example. I was just browsing a pop culture site I hadn’t visited in ages and – after reluctantly disabling my adblocker, a condition of access, and the usual rigmarole of cookies and permissions – I noticed how slow and jerky the page scrolling now is, due to the volume of unwanted crap that has to load.
I was halfway through a film review, when one of the aforementioned auto-play videos – the ones reducing the site to a crawl and which I’d tried to avoid – decided to follow me down the page and hover in the way, obstinately. To add to the irritation, the ‘close’ option didn’t appear until I’d been forced to watch 10 seconds of said video, albeit with no sound. (It’s all but impossible to continue reading anything, or at least to enjoy reading anything, when something is flickering busily in your immediate field of view.)
Then, having finally been able to get rid of the damn thing, I tried to remember whereabouts I’d gotten to in the review. Halfway through the first sentence, a modal window slid across the screen, obscuring the only content I was interested in, and invited me to sign up for the site’s daily newsletter.
By which point, I was considering whether to get on a train to burn down their offices.

It’s all but impossible to continue reading anything…
On that topic, videos in lieu of text.
OK, some times they are amusing, enteraining, even informative, particularly short.
I get that people these days* are generally more attuned to gluing their glazzies to a screen and can’t be arsed to read, but the information value for me gets lost as I am not particularly arsed to sit through 20 minutes of somebody droning on about that which I could read in three, or an hour interview the transcript of which I could skim in five.
*(Get off my lawn)

By which point, I was considering whether to get on a train to burn down their offices.
If Niven and Pournelle were writing Inferno today, there would be a scene in which web ad developers are tortured with their own inventions.

The video serves a useful purpose in illustrating a common libertarian/anarchist talking point: that ALL government rules and laws are backed by the violence government officials are willing to inflict, and what violence the citizenry are willing to take.
As if in the absence of all government our lives would not be constrained by those individuals most willing to commit violence in pursuit of their desires. And the “sovereign citizens” would be among the most vicious.

On that topic, videos in lieu of text.
Amen!

oops I screwed up the italics.

How exactly to fix the italics?

If, for instance, I proposed a minor fine for not closing italics most everyone would be on board. Until, of course, pst refuses to pay and the henchlesbians beat you mercilessly with your own shoes.

and the henchlesbians beat you mercilessly with your own shoes.
Heh. It’s true. I’ve seen it done.

Chappie may think himself exempt from the laws of the land, but he’s evidently still subject to the laws of physics.
Deep in the YT comments, one person posted a couple of updates on the chappie. It’s clear that he’s mentally ill, not just for his beliefs, but for his subsequent behavior (which included bumming around, living off suckers, claiming he’s Jesus with magical powers, etc.)
Sovereign citizen status was just the first step.

How’s, say 10 pounds sterling to the kind host’s paypal for HTML-related faux pas?
I find your ideas compelling and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

Who’s in?
That was my personal policy until I learned to fix it myself. Again, the trick is, like Tug McGraw would say, ya gotta believe.

the next thing you know he is off to his lair in Switzerland
That’s really paranoid. But is it paranoid enough?

I thought Bond’s flying submarine car was a Lotus.

I thought Bond’s flying submarine car was a Lotus.
It was, but it didn’t fly, and ever since Colin Chapman shuffled off his mortal coil spring and they started putting Toyota engines in Loti, a flying submarine Aston-Marin with a Bimini top would be the way a True Englishman would want to go.

“How’s, say 10 pounds sterling to the kind host’s paypal for HTML-related faux pas? To be enforced by viscous social shaming.”
‘Viscous’ social-shaming? Could be a bit sticky to enforce.

The two had embarked in 2017 on a bike trip around the world. In an echo of Firkin and King, the couple was motivated by their belief that, “By and large, humans are kind,” as Austin put it in a blog post documenting the journey.
“You read the papers and you’re led to believe that the world is a big, scary place,” Austin wrote from Morocco. “I don’t buy it. Evil is a make-believe concept we’ve invented to deal with the complexities of fellow humans holding values and beliefs and perspectives different than our own.”
There you go. The difference between ‘woke’ and adults. The difference between dangerous naiveté and wisdom.
No, Karen, human beings are not basically good, kind, one smile away from hugs & singing in harmony while lifting a soft drinks to the sky.

Christmas Dinner 1: Vegans 0

Except the thing is that most are
I disagree. I’m not saying most are bad, or evil. But goodness & kindness has to be learned, especially toward strangers. Parents of small children will back me up on this.
The only reason why Americans and other members of Western culture might think so is because Western culture, built on a foundation that includes Judeo-Christian principles, has produced a populace that defaults to, minimally, civility towards each other. To paraphrase Ben Franklin, as bad as we treat each other now, think of what it would be without [judeo-christian] religion.

“Keelhauling is too good for those designers.”
Can we all just agree the Web was a mistake and go back to Gopher?

Can we all just agree the Web was a mistake and go back to Gopher?
A friend’s favorite website decoration: This image best viewed with Lynx.

To paraphrase Ben Franklin, as bad as we treat each other now, think of what it would be without [judeo-christian] religion.
Japan?

Alabama Tracking Students’ Locations To Penalize Them For Leaving Games Early

Students who download the Tide Loyalty Points app will be tracked only inside the stadium, he said, and they can close the app — or delete it — once they leave the stadium…The Tide Loyalty Points program works like this: Students, who typically pay about $10 for home tickets, download the app and earn 100 points for attending a home game and an additional 250 for staying until the fourth quarter.

a) An app to get bonus stuff if you use it voluntarily, b) Not getting extra points for staying to the bitter end of game where Alabama is beating the other team like a gong on a day so hot Tarzan couldn’t stand it is “penalized”. Leave it to The New York Times to gin up a fake news controversy because Alabama.
Meanwhile, something not needed in Tuscaloosa, an app to tell you where piles of crap and used needles are.

. . . while polite with each other within the tribe, they were not known to be civil with The Other.
Rather like the Ugly American.
HOWEVER, Japan has produced a populace that defaults to, minimally, civility towards each other , while doing so rather extensively without [judeo-christian] religion.
Quite instead, the Japanese are mainly Shinto and Buddhist.

What is civility, if not formal etiquette? The two would shade into one another quite a lot, I would think.
I take that story about that unfortunate American couple being murdered on their cycling tour as a cautionary tale about stupidity more than anything else. Yes, many people *are* basically good: basic moral rules (hospitality, generosity, kindness) are constant (if not constantly observed). At the same time we have to admit some places are, well, murderous shitholes. So instead of thinking about how the trip is going to be photoed for your Instagram account or what soundtrack is going to go with your YouTube film, maybe do a bit of research about basic safety, hm?

“It’s an epidemic.”

Readers of women’s magazines have had a rough few years. Every few months another titan falls and today…The sad thing is that the current purge is happening at a time when women’s magazines are less sexist and more progressive than they ever have been.

Crack teams of Social Justice Scientists desperately search for an aetiology and a cure for this mysterious phenomenon.

Link fixed, by the way.
It worked in preview – been having your coding henchlesbians taking a crack at that scheme to get you the flying submarine Aston-Martin, I see.
What color did you want the Bimini top, BTW ?

[ Picks up worryingly discoloured tea towel, wipes bar. ]

Darleen To paraphrase Ben Franklin, as bad as we treat each other now, think of what it would be without [judeo-christian] religion.
Darleen, would it be accurate to take the intended meaning of your comment to be:
1. As the West abandons and suppresses Christianity and Judaism it is be destroying its moral foundations. The result is likely to be nihilism, tribalism, etc.
2. Other religions may have moral codes which are more or less admirable, but throwing away ours will not result in the adoption of those other religions.
3. Those other religions that are so often touted by the left are not as purely admirable as advertised: Many of them reserve full respect for members of the tribe while allowing contempt and exploitation for outsiders and inferior classes. Hence the virtually entirely accepted mistreatment of guest workers in so many places most notoriously in the Middle East but to some extent in Japan too.
4. Christianity and Judaism are somewhat rare in explicitly teaching “all men are brothers” and are deserving of full respect and equal treatment. The Koran prescribes the conquest and subjugation of all other religions. Hinduism prescribes the oppression of “inferior” classes. The strong ancestor components of Shintoism and Confucianism result in a morality reserved for the in-group, and Marxism (the usual modern replacement for religion) calls for permanent warfare against “class enemies”.

The strong ancestor components of Shintoism and Confucianism result in a morality reserved for the in-group . . . .
. . .thus making that “in-group” anyone from anywhere who has ancestors, and ritually, situationally, or so, remembers where they came from.
And in the case of Buddhism—with Confucius coming out of China, rather than Japan, remembering Japan being mainly Shinto and Buddhist—if you’ve got someone who babbles about “faith in the Buddha”, that’s mere Buddhianity, mere Buddha worship, mere faith, where the actual practice of the Buddha-Dharma is the personal individual religious practice which is somewhat rare in explicitly teaching “all men are brothers” and are deserving of full respect and equal treatment.
The bottom line is that faith is going to remain merely a recitation of often conflicting written down regulations. An actual, genuine, religious experience, religious practice, by an individual, is where one gets that individual seeing a relationship and connection to others.

Posted by: pst314 | September 14, 2019 at 14:43
Thanks, that is an excellent summation.
The ethical monotheism of Judaism/Christianity is explicit in there is God who is both aware of His creations and wants them to be “good”. And that goodness is what each individual does – grace cannot be farmed out to a sub-contractor.
I like Daniel’s line about about the difference between civility and formal etiquette. There can be overlap, but civility comes from the basis that while you may loath the other person for various reasons, you accept their membership in humanity and don’t assault, attack or plot their murder just because of differences. Formal etiquette only keeps the guns and daggers from the dinner table.
An actual, genuine, religious experience, religious practice, by an individual, is where one gets that individual seeing a relationship and connection to others.
That’s only half of it for observant Jews and Christians. One needs an ongoing relationship with God, too.

Darleen “Thanks”
Clarity is important, and it’s too easy in online forums to misunderstand for various reasons.
“Seek first to understand, then to be understood…Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.”

…the girls arguing about who can pick up Thor’s hammer.
Perhaps they weren’t speaking of a character, but, shall we say, euphemistically ?

the girls arguing about who can pick up Thor’s hammer.
You want to take a few minutes and think about that one?
And yes, there’s been the occasional off-handed reference to a Marvel character (Wolverine, once in the second season). But once or twice a season doesn’t negate the larger point: Warner = DC = CBS.
Oh, and guess which network owns Star Trek.

Alex | September 15, 2019 at 03:56
Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense. I am shocked, shocked and triggered, that anyone would think I would stoop to such obvious low double entendres.