Friday Ephemera (815)
“They can strip a man to the bone in 30 seconds.” || She just wants to get in her room and eat and put this behind her. || Big fellah. || Facilities. || The word holding caught my eye. || Igor Sikorsky, 1945. || Captures something, I think. || A night at the opera. || Wrenches and ratchets. || New racism detected. || The cow-like reflexes kicked in. || Waardenburg syndrome – striking eyes but often accompanied by deafness. || Death Valley in bloom. || From above and below. || Bitesize. || Someone’s knocking at the door. || Discourse was attempted. || The alternative press, 1971. || Apocalypse early warning system. || For enthusiasts of quadraphonic vinyl. || Immortality, £1000. || The thrill of, er, moon clams. || Unladylike driving. || And it turns out ants make more noise than you’d imagine.
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Just caught myself checking the lawn in case the deer had come back.
I suppose it’s like when people think they’ve seen a UFO and then keep glancing at the night sky, just in case.
BUT THE DEER WAS REAL.
But putting them in gulags lasts longer. 😀
Also costs more. Go with cheap and cheerful, I say.
Goodhart’s Law (via ESR)
On the motivations of the belligerent moron.
If you say so.
Since construction started on a couple of homes up the hill from us we have been seeing the deer every day, usually a couple of times. It’s getting kinda creepy. I will be outside working on something and I hear their footsteps creeping up on me. I look up and they just stare straight at me now. I have to shoo them off sometimes.
I’m beginning to feel like Jodie Foster at the end of Contact.
I’ve mentioned before an abandoned, heavily overgrown cemetery about a mile or so from here, in which there are, or were, deer living quite happily, next to a fairly busy road. Given the part of town it is, and the proximity of the cemetery to the road, it’s faintly surreal to think of there being deer wandering about and nibbling at things. They have on occasion wandered into the car parks of nearby businesses.
And hereabouts, there is woodland on two sides, so it’s not quite as improbable as it seemed when the bloody thing was gnawing on the shrubbery.
A similar problem has happened with computerized market trading. Once a methodology becomes too successful it can undermine on itself. It’s like an inbreeding of ideas. At some point the underlying weaknesses, like recessive genes, get amplified in ways unforeseen and thus unaccounted for.