I don’t want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me. – Frank Costello
Domi and JD Beck are an interesting duo. Domi is from France, although she has since recovered. JD Beck is a Dallas, Texican, but it didn’t seem to hurt him none. They’re both child prodigies. Domi was playing stuff when she was three, and was enrolled at a conservatory when was five. I have no idea when she found time to play Pokemon Go. Then again, like someone famous once said, I’d have a hard time believing that Mozart was a good pool player.
JD Beck was playing piano when he was five, and switched to drums when he was eight. A year later, he was playing gigs. That sounds familiar somehow.
These kids have something I don’t have, but have seen often enough to recognize it when it appears. They have a metronome in their head. No matter how far out on the syncopated branch they shimmy out, they always know where they are. Where the One is. Regular people have to count, and are prone to getting lost. These are not regular people.
I’m sure they’ve heard plenty of Weather Report records and other offbeat rhythm merchants, but they sound original to my ear. They’re entirely in a world of their own making. It’s an exhausting, calm place, isn’t it?
Normally when I take out the bookmarks trash, it’s inert. But this batch seems to be more like animals that need to be put down than regular trash. They’re hens that don’t lay, pigs with anorexia, and cows that need a boob job to keep going. They’ve hung on too long, so it’s time to give them the full Chigurgh. Let’s clear out the pixel barn, and put down some fresh straw for next week’s intellectual livestock, shall we?
Meet the Slate Truck, a sub-$20,000 (after federal incentives) electric vehicle that enters production next year. It only seats two yet has a bed big enough to hold a sheet of plywood. It only does 150 miles on a charge, only comes in gray, and the only way to listen to music while driving is if you bring along your phone and a Bluetooth speaker. It is the bare minimum of what a modern car can be, and yet it’s taken three years of development to get to this point.
I’ve pointed out many times on this site that a pickup truck is a bench seat, an AM radio, and an open bed that holds a sheet of plywood. Those alleged pickups everyone’s driving nowadays are just Crown Victorias with the trunk lid pried off. Throw away the batteries and the electric motor, and put in an engine from a riding mower, and this thing would be perfect.
The idea is to spray the antlers of reindeer with reflective paint that reflects motorists’ headlights. “The aim is to prevent traffic accidents. The spray is being tested on fur at the moment, but it may be even more effective on the antlers, because they are seen from every side,” Anne Ollila, chairwoman of the Reindeer Herders Association, told the Finnish news source YLE.
I’ll file that one under “Finland has too much time on its hands.”
“Over the past few months, we used multiple accounts to posts published on CMV. Our experiment assessed LLM’s persuasiveness in an ethical scenario, where people ask for arguments against views they hold. In commenting, we did not disclose that an AI was used to write comments, as this would have rendered the study unfeasible. While we did not write any comments ourselves, we manually reviewed each comment posted to ensure they were not harmful. We recognize that our experiment broke the community rules against AI-generated comments and apologize. We believe, however, that given the high societal importance of this topic, it was crucial to conduct a study of this kind, even if it meant disobeying the rules.”
I’m sure the posts looked fake because AI bots know the difference between there, their, and they’re.
I chose $5k as my pre-sale goal because it’s the lowest figure that would feel okay as my total earnings for the book. I’d, of course, enjoy selling more copies of my book later, but I’d still feel good about making $5k from a self-published book. My more realistic expectation was that if I could sell $5k in pre-orders when the book was only 25% complete, I could likely sell another $10-15k worth of copies when I finish the book.
Today IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced plans to invest $150 billion in America over the next five years to fuel the economy and to accelerate its role as the global leader in computing. This includes an investment of more than $30 billion in research and development to advance and continue IBM’s American manufacturing of mainframe and quantum computers.
IBM shareholders wondered why “fueling the economy” is mentioned, but making money isn’t. They’ve been wondering that for a while, now.
The records of the British Royal Navy provide the most detail of what food and drink provisions seafarers received in the Age of Sail. Chief Secretary to the Admiralty and diarist Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) drew up a contract in 1677 that was specific in the rations and their substitutes: one pound of biscuits, two pounds of salted pork, six ounces of butter, and a gallon of beer, among other items including cheese, beef and oatmeal, per sailor per day.
It’s hard to come up with a buyer who could afford to pay a high price for Chrome and who would pass regulatory muster as its new owner. And if Chrome is not worth a high price, or simply isn’t sellable at one because there’s no plausible buyer, then why is the DOJ trying to force Google to sell it? They might as well try to force Google to sell the two o’s from its name.
So a low number of quits, layoffs, and discharges leave fewer job openings behind, which explains the drop in job openings. This is not a measure of new jobs being created, but of churn in the labor force — also indicated in the title of the data JOLTS, where the L and T stand for Labor Turnover. And the churn has calmed down.
The charts and information posted daily on Wolf Street are so informative that they should be considered a public service.
And this is the problem that Levchin thinks could be solved by the like button. He views the accumulated resource that today sits in Facebook’s hands as a godsend to any developer wanting to train an intelligent agent on human preference data. And how big a deal is that? “I would argue that one of the most valuable things Facebook owns is that mountain of liking data,” Levchin told us. Indeed, at this inflection point in the development of artificial intelligence, having access to “what content is liked by humans, to use for training of AI models, is probably one of the singularly most valuable things on the internet.”
Um, there’s a reason why there’s no Dislike button. Because that’s what’s really going on in people’s heads.
But now the Japanese thought they could make practical use of this phenomenon to retaliate against the US for the Doolittle raid. If they could construct large balloons which could carry a load of bombs, they could release these in Japan and have them be carried across the Pacific on the jet stream to deliver their payloads when they reached the United States. Although they could not accurately strike specific targets, the Japanese thought they could at least cause panic among the American population, and perhaps even start some uncontrollable forest fires that would interfere with US war production.
Yeah. This is us, Tojo, panicking. See you in August.
[Update: Thanks to Gerry, Bob, and Bob D. for their generous donations to the tip jar. It’s greatly appreciated, and I love having Two Bobs on board.]
Seriously, what’s wrong with you? That’s Milton Banana right there. Playing the drums. It’s really him. And you’re not currently listening to him. What’s your excuse? It better be a good one.
The guy practically invented bossa nova drumming. Well, important people like his mother said he did, I think. He’s, like famous. His Wikipedia page uses two sentences to illuminate his Banana-ness. If he was a nobody, they could have done it in one, surely.
Check out his discography. I love that after a few miss-starts with trying to come up with interesting titles for his lps, he finally gives in to his inner Banana and just names them Milton Banana, over and over. George Foreman got nothing on him.
What’s that? You do not possess any Milton Banana? Well, technically, no one can possess Milton Banana. Listen to him play. He’s already so possessed that he would require an exorcism just to tone him back to a regular jazz drummer. But in case you need more Banana than you currently hold, here you go:
I mean, just look at the guy:
Look at him. Drumsticks, Marlboros, and draft beer. A smile that could light up a bowling alley. A mesh shirt that could get any girl from Ipanema’s motor running.
I tell you people, you haven’t lived until you go Bananas.
I’m not generally known as a shy person. That might be because I’m not generally known, period. But I doubt it. Whether the general public is aware of it or not, I have a lot of opinions, and many unwavering principles. And if you don’t like my unwavering principles, I assure you I have others. I’ve become especially famous (snicker) for railing against a lot of modern architectural, construction, and decoration practices. I’ve chronicled enough demonstrations of my put-up-or-shut-up responses to prevailing building practices to earn a little credibility, if not affection. I’ve got black thumbnails to balance out some of the opinions formed in my black heart.
But today I’m going to up the ante. I’m going to roll all my cranky opinions into a tarball, and use it to not only make the average American homeowner happier, I’m going to save their miserable lives by the thousand. You heard me right.
I have an Immodest Proposal. Nothing major, I just want to outlaw the following things:
Vinyl siding
Open floor plans
OSB plywood
Composite flooring
Spray foam insulation
PVC insulation
Plastic furniture
Quartz and Corian (synthetic) countertops
Live Laugh Love signs
Raccoon-eyed harridans on Home and Garden shows
Of course our federal government is quite nimble and responsive, so I’m sure ironclad bans on all these items will be in place shortly after I propose them, which is right now.
Why do I want to ban these things? Mostly because they’re all hideous. But partly because they kill people. You know, the ones they don’t just cripple, sicken, or annoy you when you’re stuck in a waiting room and the girl-boss du jour is flipping a house on the TV bolted to the wall. In 2023, there were 1,504,500 house fires reported in the US of A. These caused 4,371 deaths, and 13,250 injuries. A home-fire-related death occurs every 3 hours or so.
Now, if we got rid off all the stuff in my Immodest Proposal, we’d be back to building and maintaining our houses more or less the way we did 75 to 100 years ago. I’ve always thought that was a great idea. Houses used to have soul. Architectural anima. Style. Comfort. Whatsis. They also didn’t used to burn like a pile of oily rags at the drop of a smoldering hat, while outgassing fumes that would make a North Korean chemical weapons maker blush. Let’s compare the modern approach to home construction and renovation with the old-fashioned way, shall we? Let’s ask Chad and see if he agrees with me that the old ways are the best ways:
Modern homes present greater toxic risks in the event of a fire due to the high content of synthetic materials such as vinyl siding, open-cell foam insulation, and plastics. These materials release highly toxic gases like HCN (hydrogen cyanide), HCl (hydrochloric acid), and CO, making the fire not only a dangerous source of heat but also a source of lethal toxic exposure to both residents and firefighters.
Wood-frame houses from 1900, while still dangerous in terms of carbon monoxide and smoke inhalation, generally present less toxic risks due to the absence of synthetic materials. The slower spread of fire and less toxic smoke make firefighting efforts more manageable, though wood can still cause serious respiratory problems in the event of a fire.
In essence, a modern home fire is far more toxic and rapidly lethal due to the materials used in construction, while a wood-frame house fire is more controllable and less toxic overall
What’s my beef with OSB (oriented strand board)? The plywood it replaced was infinitely superior.
OSB Sheathing burns faster, spreads fire more rapidly, and produces more toxic smoke due to the presence of synthetic resins. While it has gained popularity in modern construction due to its lower cost, it presents higher fire risks and toxic exposure when exposed to flame.
Plywood Sheathing from the early 1900s offers better fire resistance, slower flame spread, and less toxic smoke compared to OSB. It has a more durable structure under heat and maintains its integrity for a longer time in a fire.
While neither material is fireproof, plywood generally provides better fire resistance and survival time during a fire, whereas OSB tends to contribute to faster fire spread and more toxic byproducts, especially in modern homes.
What’s my cavil with synthetic countertops? You know, besides the fact their prices are an obscenity.
The primary concern with synthetic countertops when they burn is the release of toxic chemicals into the air, which can be dangerous to breathe:
Formaldehyde: A carcinogenic gas that is often present in melamine and phenolic resins, commonly found in laminate countertops.
Styrene: A toxic compound released from certain acrylic-based countertops (like Corian). It’s harmful to the respiratory system and can cause irritation and damage to the liver, kidneys, and central nervous system.
Carbon Monoxide: A dangerous, colorless, and odorless gas that is produced when many synthetic materials burn. It interferes with oxygen delivery to the body’s tissues and can be fatal in high concentrations.
Hydrogen Cyanide: This highly toxic gas can be produced when some synthetic polymers (e.g., certain plastics) burn. It can cause respiratory failure and death at high concentrations.
People think quartz is indestructible for some reason, but it’s not. It’s about 10 percent synthetic goo. You can scorch it at temperatures as low as 150F to 200F. I drink coffee hotter than that. And if it catches on fire, look out. There’s that HCN (hydrogen cyanide) again. Remember, another name for hydrogen cyanide is prussic acid, a favorite plot device back in the day for poisoning people and getting Scotland Yard or Sherlock Holmes interested in your funeral. HCN has another name that might ring a bell: Zyklon B. You know, you could spend a little less and get real stone (inert and non-combustible) counters, and skip the chance of making a do-it-yourself Bergen-Belsen in your kitchen.
Let’s also keep in mind that speed kills, as they say. Fires are no exception. Fire departments have learned how bad and how fast house fires get out of control, and they wisely mostly mill about on your lawn in order to save the basement, instead of charging in to save you and your goldfish if they can avoid it. Let’s compare how fast you’re going to slip this mortal coil in a modern house, compared to an older house, when someone falls asleep on your couch with their medical marijuana doobie dropped down the cushion.
Time to lethal: 3-5 minutes in a modern house. Not good. If you have 10-15 minutes’ grace like you would in an old house, you might even have enough time to save all your children, instead of only the ones who eat their vegetables, and maybe even clear your browser history, you naughty boy.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. Those last two items on my list (Live Laugh Love signs and raccoon-eyed harridans on Home&Garden shows) seem a mite crankier than the others. But really, they’re not. Since people assume that things are always going forward, and getting better, and safer, they might make the mistake of assuming that fire deaths must be constantly going down. Well, they were, a lot, from 1970 to about 2010. But now they ain’t. From 2013 to 2022, the fire death rate per million USians increased by 22%.That’s a bad trend. I can think of another trend that started in 2013. Let’s ask Chad again:
Fixer Upper originally aired on HGTV from May 2013 to April 2018, spanning five seasons. The show became incredibly popular for its mix of home renovation, design inspiration, and Chip and Joanna’s charming chemistry.
Chad does get confused sometimes. He mentions “charming chemistry.” I’ve never heard Zyklon B referred to like that before. But let’s let him keep running with the ball:
The Role of Media and Home Renovation Trends
Media, like cable shows, showing house flippers removing interior walls or using cheaper, more flammable materials can contribute indirectly to the fire risk. The trend toward “open concept” homes in these renovations often leads to larger, more continuous spaces without fire breaks, which makes it easier for a fire to spread and harder for occupants to escape.
Additionally, flipping houses for resale can result in cost-cutting measures, such as using less fire-resistant materials, which increases the flammability of the structure.
Hmm. The trend line even dipped when Fixer Upper ended on its fifth season. Q.E.D., I’d say.
You can start planning my monument now. I prefer granite, but marble will do.
This video is ten years old. It has 13 million views.
That makes me smile. I’ve embedded all sorts of videos in my essays over the years. They mostly disappear down the GrueTube stormdrain after a few years. I’m often going back and looking for different versions of musical stuff, for instance, because so much stuff gets pulled. Websites come and go a lot, too. Mostly go, these days. Have you ever clicked on the links in an older website’s blogroll? Most of the links are dead as disco, but nobody notices.
There’s a lot of good woodworking on display in the video. Making a spoked wood wheel is difficult. It’s easy to see why many ancient cultures, including some who were fairly sophisticated, never invented the wheel. Woodworking and metalworking like you see in the video would be well beyond the technical bounds of many societies. More usually, they did have wheels, but didn’t use them for transportation. It’s a lot easier to make slaves carry stuff than making wheels for carts.
The 13 million views mean something. Those 13 million viewers might only contain a cadre of a few dozen people who need to learn how to build a wheel like that one. The rest are just interested in seeing someone with the physical and mental skills to produce one in action. I know I was.
I am not a deep thinker. I’m more of a deep drinker. My education is scattershot. I often boil concepts down to thumbnail sketches and run with them. Take childhood development. Yeah. Take my childhood development, please, as Rodney used to say.
Ugh. Forget about me. I meant normal people. I’ve boiled down the process of raising anklebiters to two interesting takes on the subject: Jean Piaget and B.F. Skinner. They’re more or less opposite poles on the child-rearing compass.
Both guys had some complicated ideas behind their snot-wiping advice. I’m a simpleton, so I’ll oversimplify it so even I can understand it: Piaget thought children developed mostly internally, if you encouraged them a little, and Skinner thought they developed mostly from external factors, like whacks on the knuckles or candy, depending on what kind of mischief they were getting up to.
I ate lunch with Skinner way back when. He asked me altogether too many questions about how I ended up the way I was. I figured eventually he was going to stuff me in a box and feed me corn kernels only if I pressed the correct button, so I stopped eating lunch at his house pretty quick.
I’m sort of interested in Piaget’s thang, though. His ideas about child development seem to align with my own ill-considered opinions here and there. His ideas about how very small children proceed through a series of stages seems pretty believable. These preliminary stages are cognitive egocentrism, anthropomorphism, finalism, and animism. These stages happen between the ages of 2 and 7, more or less. They’re called the pre-operational phase. You’re not yet ready to begin thinking concretely and logically until you go through these steps.
1. Cognitive Egocentrism
In Piaget’s theory, egocentrism refers to the inability of young children to see things from perspectives other than their own. This means they believe that everyone sees the world exactly as they do.
It highlights that young children can’t fully grasp that others have their own thoughts, perspectives, or knowledge.
2. Anthropomorphism
Anthropomorphism is when children attribute human characteristics or emotions to non-human things (animals, objects, or even forces of nature).
Piaget saw this as a way for children to make sense of the world. Since they can’t fully differentiate between human and non-human behaviors at this stage, they project human traits onto everything around them.
3. Finalism
Finalism refers to the child’s belief in the idea that things happen for a purpose or that everything has an ultimate end or goal, even if it might not make logical sense.
Children in the preoperational stage often struggle to understand cause and effect in the logical, scientific way adults do. They tend to think more in terms of intentions or purposes behind events, even if those events don’t have clear goals.
4. Animism
Animism is the belief that inanimate objects or natural phenomena have a life-like quality, or even a soul.
Animism reflects a developmental stage where children can’t fully separate the properties of living things from non-living things. It’s another sign of their egocentrism and their tendency to humanize the world around them.
I got to thinking about all this because I’ve been watching women clutching smartphones like they were heart-lung machines, while acting like preadolescents, and I’m trying to make sense of their behavior. I see it out and about in my own life, but I also went down one of those YorubaTube ratholes that had loads of women being arrested and thrown out of airports and wrecking fast food restaurants and similar hijinks.
I didn’t associate these behaviors with Piaget right away, but the chronically addicted social-media-loving smartphone clutchers all seemed to have the same worldview to me: solipsism, anthropomorphism, scapegoating, and paganism. I realized I was just renaming Piaget’s four stages of preadolescent development. I had to go back and look it up, and torture it a bit (thanks, B.F.!) to get it to fit, but it’s pretty close.
You have to remember that for a toddler dealing with the world using Cognitive Egocentrism, the little bastard is just doing the best they can. They’re not yet capable of moving on to more nuanced views of the world and the people in it. Solipsism is an adult-ish version of this worldview. You’re technically capable of understanding other people’s ideas and motivations, you just don’t give a shiny shite about anyone but yourself.
Anthropomorphism is plenty easy to spot. I’m regularly informed that so-and-so’s daughter has acquired a “grand-dog.” This animal was “adopted,” of course. And “rescued,” natch. Grandma now buys it Christmas presents and bakes birthday cakes for it, and babysits it. “My computer totally hates me” is a different but easily recognizable signpost on the anthropomorphic highway. And by the way, you should totally argue with that bitch in the GPS while you’re zooming down the anthropomorphic highway.
Scapegoating is pretty close to Finalism. It’s a question of degree, I guess. Children wonder what motive force is behind everything, because they don’t know how the world works. Adults assumes there’s a motive force behind everything, and they know damn well who it is. He’s in their social media feed with a Hitler mustache photoshopped in.
Animism is just paganism without portfolio. By the way, did you buy an Earth Day present for your grand-dog?
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the average American woman has a smartphone slapped into their hand more or less exactly when they’re reaching the end of their pre-operational phase. The phone, and all the stuff it shotguns into her synapses, ensures that she never progresses any further. The development of iPhone Barbie is seven years of Piaget followed by the rest of their life subjected to B.F. Skinner’s operant conditioning, courtesy of Steve Jobs’ festering corpse.
Operant conditioning is a type of learning in which behavior is shaped by its consequences. Developed by B.F. Skinner, it focuses on how actions are influenced by rewards (reinforcements) or punishments.
Reinforcement increases the likelihood of a behavior happening again. It can be:
Positive reinforcement: Adding something pleasant (like giving a treat).
Negative reinforcement: Removing something unpleasant (like turning off a loud noise).
Punishment decreases the likelihood of a behavior happening again. It can be:
Positive punishment: Adding something unpleasant (like giving extra chores).
In operant conditioning, behaviors are learned through the consequences they produce, and these consequences can either strengthen or weaken the behavior over time. It’s used widely in both animal training and human behavior modification.
The woman in the video is completely calm, in an unreasonable sort of way, until around the 9:00 minute mark. She’s going to jail over nothing, but the only thing that can get a rise out of her is being separated from her phone. It’s her Precious. It tells her everything she needs to know, succors her, protects her, and assures her she’s going to get a discount, not arrested. There’s even a name for this phenomenon now: nomophobia.
Nomophobia (short for “no mobile phobia”) is a word for the fear of, or anxiety caused by, not having a working mobile phone. It has been considered a symptom or syndrome of problematic digital media use…
I’d explore the effects of male smartphone use, but it’s a waste of time. Men don’t progress past being 7 years old anyway, no matter what they’re clutching.
I don’t make anything anymore, except maybe trouble.
I used to build things and make things and cobble things together. This had a tendency to produce leftovers. Trash. While I used to squeeze every bit of use out of everything, and burn whatever was left over from the leftovers for heat, it was inevitable that we produced some trash.
Living in an apartment doesn’t generate trash like that. Of course we’re different from our neighbors. They seem to get everything delivered to them in a cardboard box, including food, and food for their dogs. We’ve never had an Amazon lifestyle, and we’re not going to start now.
I once had over 1,000 square feet of floor space dedicated to table saws and wood racks and lathes and sanders and chop saws and shapers and mortising machines and who knows how many hand tools. There was another 600 feet square of random storage underneath it. I bet I owned 160 different bevel squares, bought one after another after a weekly hour-long session of where is the bevel square. I now have a tool set that fits in a cardboard shoebox on the shelf in the closet.
I’m an environmentalist’s dream. I waste nothing, because I make nothing.
So now I’m reduced to taking out a bag of pixels from my browser bookmarks to the WordPress landfill every week. It’s ain’t much, and I’m not sure I’d call it honest work. But it sure is something.
Two new large-scale investigations, one led by the University of Rome Tor Vergata in collaboration with 42 institutions and another led by the University of Exeter with contributors from 37 institutions, reveal a more complex history than previously imagined. Both point to Tunisia as the likely origin of the domestic cat.
Sippican’s research shows that cats are like strippers. They’ll display their belly to you, but I wouldn’t rub it if I were you.
While athletes endanger their careers and well-being in attempts to gain small benefits with illicit or inconvenient practices, a legal, nonprescription alternative has been largely ignored by athletes, coaches and exercise physiologists alike. Cigarette smoking has been shown to increase serum hemoglobin and hematocrit levels, increase lung volume and stimulate weight loss — characteristics all known to enhance performance in endurance sports.
Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please — Twain
Social media connects teens but may break their spirit. A new Pew Research survey reveals 48% of U.S. teens believe social media harms their generation – a sharp rise from 32% in 2022
Half says it hurts, the other half refused to look up from their phones to answer the question.
The baffling discovery was made Saturday, April 19, when NOAA Ocean Exploration sent a remotely operated camera inside the massive wreck, about 1,000 miles northwest of Honolulu. Yorktown was an 809-foot-long aircraft carrier, known to host about 2,200 personnel, 90 aircraft … and apparently, one car.
Unusual things in the hold are only baffling if you never watched Kelly’s Heroes.
“These little animals, which had appeared to be completely dried and lifeless, were restored to motion upon the addition of water, as if they had never suffered any harm,” van Leeuwenhoek wrote. Microbiologists would later find that some species of rotifers are able to reanimate after up to nine years of desiccation.
When I first read the headline, I thought they might be referring to married men.
A recent study from the University of Missouri School of Medicine found that people may perceive fewer negative effects of alcohol if they are also using cannabis at the same time, potentially leading to alcohol use disorder, alcohol-related harms and drunk driving.
I’ll consider this study as incomplete until they add the simultaneous use of alcohol, cannabis, and Cool Ranch Doritos to their data.
The startup was born after Lee posted in a viral X thread that he was suspended by Columbia University after he and his co-founder developed a tool to cheat on job interviews for software engineers. That tool, originally called Interview Coder, is now part of their San Francisco-based startup Cluely. It offers its users the chance to “cheat” on things like exams, sales calls, and job interviews thanks to a hidden in-browser window that can’t be viewed by the interviewer or test giver.
If you’re not cheating, you’re not trying — Eddie Guerrero
Researchers at the University of Tokyo have identified a simple, noninvasive method for assessing blood glucose regulation—an essential factor in diabetes risk. Their approach, based on continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) data, could improve early detection and risk assessment for diabetes without relying on blood samples and expensive or complex procedures.
Once again, I’ll wait until they integrate the simultaneous use of alcohol, cannabis, and Cool Ranch Doritos to their data
As Scotland Yard became a larger, organized force, they made consistent innovations in the work of policing. Scientific and forensic attempts made elsewhere were taken, used, and refined. The study of ballistics, of using blood hounds to track and identify evidence (and criminals!), blood spatter and blood stain analysis, as well as toxicology. The modern Victorian home was a quagmire of poison waiting for its next victim, from the arsenic used in fashionable wallpaper and clothing to the white lead powder contained in cosmetics, and police had to discern accidental poisoning from intentional poisoning. This led to advances in understanding poisons and toxins.
I’m not sure if Scotland Yard adumbrated, or simply perfected the cry, “Stop! Or I shall yell Stop! again!”
In 1960, Dr. Maxwell Maltz published his bestseller book “Psycho-Cybernetics” in which he defines happiness as a habit and claims that “it usually requires a minimum of about 21 days” to form a new habit.
Once again, I’ll have to wait until the author integrates the simultaneous use of alcohol, cannabis, and Cool Ranch Doritos to their data
Well, that’s it for this week’s cleanup. Feel free to try the simultaneous use of alcohol, cannabis, Cool Ranch Doritos, and the commenting box down below.
This video might be interesting to any number of people from most any walk of like. It’s like catnip to anyone who ever constructed a commercial building. I think it’s the greatest example of construction, ever. You can build things taller, or wider, or goofier (I’m looking at you, Gehry), or more expensive, or more elaborate, but you can’t ever surpass what was accomplished by so few men in so short a time, resulting in a more iconic building. The Empire State Building in New York City is the greatest office building in the world, and has been since the day it opened.
The lady out in the harbor with the lantern jaw, wearing a bathrobe, holding an ice cream cone, and beckoning every country on Earth to use America as their recycling bin has nothing on the Empire State Building. I wouldn’t be surprised if half the population think the Empire State is named after the building, not the other way around. The only structure as iconic as the Empire State Building might be the Eiffel Tower, and that’s nothing but a radio antenna, when you really look at it. Big deal.
The Empire State was completed during the Depression. They didn’t have trouble finding people willing to take risks to earn a living just then. So you’d be forgiven if you assumed that they’d look at workers as kind of expendable. You assumed wrong, however. Up to 3,500 people worked on the building at any one time. Four people died during construction. That’s 3,500 people working two shifts, day and night, to complete the tallest building in the world in one year and 45 days. Four deaths.
Let’s compare that to the World Trade Center Project in 2001. One World Trade Center, which is as ugly as a home-made suit, took 8 years to build. It had somewhere between 4,000 to 5,000 workers, and depending on who you ask, had 5 worker deaths. If you do the math, the fatality rate per worker is essentially identical to the Empire State Building. Other big buildings like the Burj Khalifa and the Shanghai tower claim lower fatality rates, but I don’t trust stats about worker safety from closed societies, thank you very much.
So you can see the guys in the video working on the Empire, hanging all over it like King Kong would a few years later. They didn’t fall off much. They didn’t have OSHA, or any number of other safety foofaraws that are in place today. So how did they manage to stay in one piece while working four times as hard as people would in the future?
It’s simple, really. They were smarter than people are now. Not the kind of smarter that’s in vogue nowadays. None of them was plucked from any Ivy League admission offices. They were predominately Irish and Italian immigrants, at least from what I’ve read. They had nerve. They had skills. Mad skills, by the look of it. They had experience building things like railroads, mining ore, or erecting steelwork, even if it was a little closer to mother earth. Many were craftsmen, with prodigious hand skills developed by long experience. They were used to working around heavy machinery and keeping their fingers out of the gears.
By comparison, modern workers are skilled at avoiding risk, instead of managing it. They’re more conversant with technology-driven tasks. They crave automation, standardized working conditions, and lunchtime. They’re not really skilled in navigating dangerous situations in the way their predecessors were. But they died at the same rate, because building great big things is inherently dangerous, and having little experience with true danger make them vulnerable to brain farts, as we used to call them.
The Empire State Building was constructed in a truly high-risk, high-reward milieu. Men with a high tolerance for risk, or whose desperation for work overrode their tolerances, needed mental toughness, and relied on their experience in risky environments to stay safe. Modern workers rely on a rulebook that only the shop steward has read. The investors, who didn’t stick one spud into a rivet hole, were also working in a high-risk, high-reward mode. The building didn’t start to turn a profit until the 1950s.
We could use a few guys like the men who financed and built the Empire State Building just now. God knows where we’re going to find them.
We have a very large collection of movies, many of them old. The movie business isn’t ancient. It’s possible to be fairly conversant with its entire history if you have a big enough hard drive, and skip Fletch movies and similar shallow puddles of pixels. I used to think that the average person must have seen every movie and TV show ever made, simply based on the amount of time they spent going to the movies, watching television, cable TV, VHS, DVDs, and then streaming stuff. But I learned later that most people just watch the same things over and over again. We’re just as likely to re-watch things as the next person, I guess. We just re-watch different things, and fewer. Our relatives have a tradition to watch Christmas Vacation every year, ye gods. We watch It’s a Wonderful Life. I’ve long since come to terms with the fact that for many people, anything older than about 1990 might as well be silent movies.
But we like the older stuff. It’s not vegetables we choke down because they’re healthy. They’re entertaining, and often illuminating. They understood the concept of spectacle better than the CGI mavens do now. Part of the appeal of old movies is survivor bias. We have lots of good movies from the 1950s, but I’m sure there were just as many bad ones made as good back then. It’s just that no one bothered to put the dreck out on VHS or DVD or load it up for streaming. Stuff disappears. Nothing you see on Tubi will still be around 50 years from now.
An exception is when dreck becomes exalted simply because it’s widely available. Do I really like the Three Stooges, or do I like them because they were the only thing on TV when I got home from grammar school? That’s a rhetorical question, by the way. I think way too many people who are in charge of making entertainment these days watched Kimba the White Lion instead of Moe, Larry, and Curly while eating their Handi-Snacks. They could use a few good blows to the head.
Many movies are interesting enough to watch multiple times, with an appropriate interregnum. I’ve noticed that anything that has Netflix, or Apple, or the Amazon logo in the opening credits is never worth a second look. Most don’t deserve even a first look. Their descriptions alone are generally enough to elicit a hard pass. What, exactly, qualifies a streaming service, or company that buys telephones from the Chinese, or an online dollar store, to make movies? It’s especially silly for streaming services. In 1950, Louis B. Mayer didn’t hire projectionists and ticket booth girls to direct movies, and for good reason.
In the re-run department, we’ve watched Niagara (1953) multiple times over the years. I’m not sure why, exactly, but we have.
It’s a straight noir plot, if a little muddled. Scheming temptress wants to throw over her slightly shellshocked hubby for a hubba-hubba guy with two-tone shoes. Everything except hilarity ensues. It breaks the cardinal rule of noir without losing anything in the bargain. It’s in Technicolor. I don’t know why more directors didn’t try to adapt noir plots to Technicolor. The three-strip process had a way of making colors look way more lurid than any black and white movie ever accomplished in the yeah, see genre. And there can’t possibly be anything more lurid than a closeup of Marilyn Monroe in Technicolor after Ben Nye got done with his brush and roller work.
Niagara was the first movie that gave Monroe top billing, and from watching the trailer, you can tell the producers figured Marilyn’s butt on the screen would put butts in the seats. They weren’t wrong. Niagara was a money-maker when it was released, even though reviews of the film were somewhat mixed. Jean Peters, who was once Miss Ohio, and married to Howard Hughes, was cast as the plain Jane wife of about the goofiest character ever set to celluloid, played by Max Showalter. Max exuded tons of sexuality, don’t get me wrong, but not the kind of sexuality that was going to do Jean Peters any good. So how do you make Jean Peters look average-y? You slam the battleship Monroe into her side.
I gather that the generations that followed my parents and mine don’t “get” Marilyn Monroe in quite the same way. She entered the pantheon of weird notoriety that Fat Elvis and Michael Jackson and Santa Claus reside in. Andy Warhol’s paean to her cemented that status way back in 1962, with the Marilyn Diptych:
It’s not an accident that Warhol’s literally reverential treatment of Monroe was cribbed from a publicity still from Niagara:
That look, there. Sleepy eyes, a smile that could mean anything. She perfected it. Her face is a circus poster pasted on a brick wall. God only knows what goes on in the building itself. But it’s a brick shithouse, that’s for sure.
It’s beyond my ability to explain the appeal of Marilyn Monroe. Whatever recipe she’s using was more closely held than Colonel Sanders ever managed. I think Lawrence Oliver, who hired her to star in The Prince and the Showgirl, and maybe wished he hadn’t, is the only person who truly understood what was going on. And even he, completely aware of how acting works, how actors behave, how notoriety works, and constantly surrounded by the most attractive female humans in the world, admits he was flummoxed by her.
Some movies like Niagara make excellent cultural artifacts. By watching them, and trying to immerse yourself in the time and place they sprang from, you can understand the vibe that produced them. Niagara is modestly entertaining as a story. It’s got Niagara Falls for a backdrop, which is monumental. It’s fun to watch. And Marilyn Monroe is in it. I have no idea why that matters. But it does.
Well, the bookmarks are overflowing again. I really did intend to read them. I guess. Whatever. I’ve been reading Huckleberry Finn in Spanish, and it’s giving me an aneurysm, so I’ve fallen behind, or lost interest, or something. Pike County accents don’t seem to translate well into castellano, never mind what Jim adds to the mix. I feel like I’m tilting at windmills. Oops, that’s the other book I’m reading. I read it fifty years ago, but I can’t recite it anymore, so I thought I’d brush up. Funny, the Don doesn’t seem the least bit unhinged this time around. Maybe it’s me. On to the bookmarks!
Their analyses revealed the green Sahara individuals likely branched off from the ancestors of sub-Saharan Africans roughly 50,000 years ago. Then, somehow, they remained genetically isolated for tens of thousands of years—a revelation that still perplexes researchers.
I thought it was in very bad taste for the article to lead off with a picture of Nancy Pelosi.
“Acquiring these competitive threats has enabled Facebook to sustain its dominance—to the detriment of competition and users—not by competing on the merits, but by avoiding competition,” the FTC wrote in a filing.
Duh. I can solve this problem easily. It is hereby illegal for one corporation to buy another corporation. See? Now you can close the antitrust division, and save some dough.
Specifically, Intel is selling 51% of Altera for roughly $4.46 billion in a deal that values the full company at around $8.75 billion, a far cry from the $16.7 billion Intel paid for Altera 10 years ago in what remains the largest acquisition in the history of the company. Also, Altera is replacing Sandra Rivera, who had guided the company as CEO through its lengthy process of transforming from Intel’s Programmable Solutions Group into a newly-independent company.
It seems to me that the word “guided” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that last sentence. Maybe she can go start a business with Ginni Rometty and Marissa Mayer.
Previously, North Korean smartphones lacked screenshot capabilities. Authorities likely blocked this function to prevent information from being shared with or leaked to the outside world. However, as smartphone usage has grown in North Korea, screenshot functionality appears to have been added to improve user experience.
We’re reading a news item about North Korean smartphones. These are truly the End Times.
Many readers believe Solomon wrote the book, though it seems more likely that it is a compilation of poems that a woman and her man had written for each other. The female voice contributes most of the content, and the male voice responds. He does not seem to be Solomon, though the book mentions his name seven times. The book depicts an exclusive relationship where the lovers only have eyes for one another, and Solomon, who had 700 wives and 300 concubines, is not a likely contender (1 Kings 11:1-3). Some scholars have suggested that the Song of Songs should be understood as a book in the wisdom tradition of Solomon, rather than authored by him.
I imagine Solomon stopped at 700 wives, because more than that might be considered bigamy.
His rash tendencies exhibited themselves in strange ways. One day while he was ministering in the summer of 1858, Corbett was ogled by a pair of prostitutes, and the lower half of his body responded invitingly. He went home, took a pair of scissors, snipped an incision under his scrotum, and removed his testicles, then headed out to a prayer meeting.
During questioning, the man—identified in local media reports under the pseudonym Li Qi—casually revealed that he had a habit of sniffing his used socks after taking them off at the end of the day. And it wasn’t just a one-off. This was apparently part of his everyday routine. Years of sock-sniffing.
A Mexican man enters a department store in the US, looking for socks. He walks up to the woman at the counter and says, “Quiero calcetines.” The woman can’t understand him, but won’t admit it, and she starts showing him everything in the store. The man keeps saying, “No. Quiero calcetines!” After going through the whole store, the man starts to leave, but he sees some socks as he passes the underwear counter. He looks at the woman and says, “Eso si que es.” The woman says, “Why didn’t you spell it in the first place?”
Based on data from 93 million CT scans performed on 62 million people in 2023, the researchers estimated that the CT scans would lead to 103,000 future cancers. To put that in context, those 103,000 cancers would account for about 5 percent of cancers diagnosed each year, based on the current cancer rates and the current usage of CT scans. And the estimate puts CT scans on par with alcohol consumption and obesity in terms of risk factors for developing cancer.
According to my mother, the other 95% would be caused by sitting too close to the television.
Nearly a quarter of seventeen-year-old boys in America have an ADHD diagnosis. That’s crazy. But worse than the diagnosis is that the majority of them end up on amphetamines, like Adderall or Ritalin. These drugs allow especially teenage boys (diagnosed at 2-3x the rate of girls) to do what their mind would otherwise resist: Study subjects they find boring for long stretches of time. Hurray?
Police in the northeastern city of Harbin said three alleged NSA agents to a wanted list and also accused the University of California and Virginia Tech of being involved in the attacks after carrying out investigations, according to a report by state news agency Xinhua on Tuesday. The NSA agents were identified by Xinhua as Katheryn A. Wilson, Robert J. Snelling and Stephen W. Johnson. The three were also found to have “repeatedly carried out cyber attacks on China’s critical information infrastructure and participated in cyber attacks on Huawei and other enterprises.”
That’s silly. The NSA is not about to take time away from spying on US citizens to bother with Chinese people.
Month: April 2025
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
Recent Comments