So how did you carry all those squids around to pay for things? Did they have to be alive? What about the smell?

"One huge benefit of buying Gatorade in powder form is that you get it made with sugar, " -- KERRY

Ooh, kool! Good point! Corn syrup doesn't powder like sugar does... that's an excellent filter for that... :-)

http://www.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/03/10/pharma.water1/index.html

From this, you extrapolate that U.S. drinking water is all contaminated?

The United States has close to the best drinking water on the planet. There are federal, state, and local standards; hardcore nerds run water systems in most cities. Los Angeles has excellent water; we get a printed, detailed report showing *measured* contents.

Certainly there are contaminated water supplies in the mix. I doubt it's even 1% of the total. ANd the industries that are sellign you their bottled water are as likely owned by the creators of toxic ground water plumes.

There are no real regulations on the contents of bottled water; "spring water" means as much as "green tech" -- nothing. Some are good, and some, like Fiji Water, and environmental and social disasters. RTFM.

People watch too much dimwit TV and look at too many dimwit blogs. YOu mindlessly repeating "municipal water system is polluted" crap is doing corporate america's work for them. I've had nincompoops here in LA tell me "I dont give tap water to my dogs, I filter it".

We're drowning in mis-information, some of it cynically generated, much of it propagated by people too lazy, or unknowledgable, to check on it. Media is terrible at this sort of questioning.

YOu really can determine what's in your local water supply. Big cities are easy to check on; small towns might be tough or impossible, and I'm sure there are some places that are corrupt or incompetent.

But the US water system is spectacularly well done. It's another one of those civil systems that gets lumped into "the guvamint is bad, OK?" things. USPS, libraries, printing office, municipal water, roads, ... those things are generally excellent here, you spoiled fool.

I buy bottled water too, like on the road, and sometimes I'm just too lazy to re-fill a bottle to keep in the car on trips.

And sometimes it's just pleasant to drink bubbly stuff like Calistoga or Gerolsteiner... hey, enjoy, just don't mindlessly parrot corporate propaganda, and enjoy and support the GOOD and USEFUL stuff this government does in a few places, still, (and don't let up on criticizing/fighting the bad stuff).

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I like the idea of the companion box...

There was however a plastic kid's toy that did just this, 60s? 70s? A jack-in-the-box like thing that the hand came out of to turn itself off and return to the box.

I'm sure it was inspired by Minsky's thing but they do/did exist.

It's clever, but come on, it's not THAT clever an idea.

'Innovationsforum Interaktionsdesign' We must stop this relentless war against the spacecharacter, the Dutch and Germans will soon encirclethe earth with their insidiousplan unless westopthem ohononononono

The dog is not dumb here, it's SMART. It's not a problem in physics, but one of culture and pack protocol.

The dog knows "doorness". It knows -- note that it points with it's nose to the door FRAME on the OPENING SIDE, that it wants the door opened for it.

The human opening the door for the dog is PERMISSION to go outside. It does not need to be a physical barrier.

With the "invisible" door left "closed", long enough, with humans not present, almost certainly the dog would eventually cross it, especially to chase a cat, play with a friend, eat food, etc. But with the person there it is obeying local protocol, which is "door open, OK to go out".

Dogs love pack coherence, and of course most of the time most humans are 'alpha' to dogs. (Dogs are heirarchy addicts.)

Laughing at this dog in that way is like making fun of wise elders from $CULTURE not knowing how to use a fork and spoon. It's silly.

Dogs aren't stupid -- they're not human. But one thing they learn really well are boundaries -- ask any dog trainer about boundary crossing and the release word "cross". Dogs inherently "get" abstractions like doors, boundaries like curbs, driveways, property lines etc.

And we can't smell the delicious goodness in delicacies like road-flattened birds. I accept my limitations...

Change all ocurrences of "government" to "corporations, with government cooperation" would be more accurate simplistic summation...

APASHIOL: "Those who would use technology to control others are never the creators of the technology."

I politely but vehemently disagree. This isn't the venue for such a discussion, but this starry-eyed view that 'technology is liberating' is very wrong and even harmful, when it blinds you from looking at how technology is more often used to control.

Just look at "public" media (in the past we would have said "boadcast"): spectacular ("presciently seen":-) and terrifying media consolidation -- that is the combination of corporate strategy and designed-for technology. The result is horrible and getting worse.

Tech won't punch us out of that paper bag -- that bag is the tech. Answer to the obvious response: the internet is not decentralized, and it is not liberating.

"Speed cubing is a serious serious sport"

No it's not.

Why wasn't this man appointed to the Bush cabinet years ago?

Don't overlook abrasion. Hands go everywhere; fingerprints not only carry oils, acids and whatever you had your hands in, grit and solids too.

In my case, the wear is that the textured plastic becomes polished shony smooth, then the crappy lettering wears through.

All of my keyboards have the same wear pattern; heavy wear on the space bar, right (thumb) end, then R T I O P (top row) A S D F H L, then B N M, and ENTER, and left shift key, track pad somewhat left of center.

I type very hard and fast. I work with my hands and they are very rough with callous, like deep filligreed fine black lines. On two laptop track pads I wore through the top layer enough that I started getting crazy erratic pointer behavior.

Sometimes the "palm rest" area abrades as well.

Is this stuff addictive? That would be kool.

Kool! Ted Nelson describes a kids DIY-computer group of similar feel -- in the 1970s, in NYC I believe. It's in the big COMPUTER LIB/DREAM MACHINES flip-over book...

In there it was R.E.S.I.S.T.O.R.S. and about empowerment and fun. Sounds like an ancestor.

I don't know why it's so hard to accept that most animals (vertebrates) are sentient (obviously to varying degrees).

Mass? Count? So what? It's judgement based upon symbolic criteria.

Neon tetras (tiny aquarium fish) can tell one human face apart from others after only a few days (of feeding them :-). OK, parsing neon tetra "faces" makes sense... but human faces?

Dogs understand human spoken language (limited structure and vocabulary). It's not "sound memorizing" it's speaker independent and partial words in context are recognized. Dogs parsing dog barking (which contains emotional stuff, not strictly symbolic) OK, but human? It does not matter dogs exposed to human culture 20K years; if the facility wasn't there it would not have developed.

Animals are sentient, get over it. Some are dumb as a bag of hammers as regards human-valued skills, but so what?

Date: Thu, 19 Sep 2002 05:06:47 +0200 (CEST)
From: Petrovna
Reply-To: letmego@bk.ru
To: Inbox
Subject: English write make you?

I found yours Email ID in Directoric.
I have been from Russian and for a man like you have I been lookink.

http://www.easygoingcompanion.com/?oc=6120

What's this I hear about 1 in 300 being a tourrist? Why would our government not want us to be tourrists? You get to meet unusual people, and eat strange foods, why Americans make great tourrists, it's good for business too.

What's that you say? Not tourrists? What?

Never mind.

enom (www.enom.net) comes highly recommended. Cheap, I don' tknow.

Very pretty!

But buying "recylable" flamamamamamamble cardboard? Nah, no thanks!

Reminds me of some wannabe punks who, not wanting to own bourgouis glassware, went to a store and bought cases of mason jars.

See? Cold remedy! Airtravelbadness preventative! Cold preventative! None of the above! It's all these things, and less!

My grandma used to take Carter's Little Liver Pills. Same difference.

I'm pretty sure Steve Ciarcia did this in BYTE magazine a long time ago... like 15+ years? Along with a lot of other fun and nutty (and not so nutty) things like computer controlled wood stove...

Whew, and just in time! A way to produce humans! We'd almost forgot how! There's that other method, but no one likes to use it any more, it's yuky!

Magentic? Electonic?

I'm not familiar with these new fields of study, so I spoze perpetual immotion must be entirely prepoparable.

Umm, cup holders are largely a symptom of being forced to rush around rather than relax and enjoy themselves, while they recover from car accidents caused partly by primitive safety gear.

It's not like cup holders require much technology or anything. They may have existed centuries before, awaiting automobiles and impatience to come into their own.

It's also not really true; because many, many old cars have circular indentations in the glove box door for this very purpose. (It's called a glove box, and it matters not that you never have gloves in it.)

Oh man! Whaaaaayyyy... you kids these days! Have no f'@(!!!*ing idea! just how powerful those original Superballs were!! It was like giving us HANDGUNS!

The things called "superballs" available to day or the last few decades are not even a pale shadow thereof...

THe originals were a nasty black color, and if you dug into them with your fingernail, a chunk would SPRING OUT. They often broke into chunks... each of which bounced insanely...

But a 10 year old could fling one on a concrete or asphalt surface such that it would clear THE ENTIRE SCHOOL BUILDING and disappear out of site.

Huge bruises were the minimum result of super-dodge-ball. Blood was possible. Totally kool!!!

This is like 1965, 1966 or so.

Knerr, though I had no clue at the time, being only 10, 11 then, was a hero for making all that cool stuff.

I really doubt the original superball is available. I am sure there is a product called "The Original Superball!" though. I'd buy one (or more... hand them out to neighbor kids...) in a minute!

Kids -- boys and girls -- need more controllable danger in their lives. POOR! kids these days!

You can larf at them now, but the main problems with them is setup of a problem, aka "programming". Once done, however, many analog machines "compute" instantaneously. Besides the obvious bulk, and setup hassles, accuracy is limited to 3? or so decimal points.

THe scalability of precision is what made digit-based calculations attractive (keep in mind that automatic, electronic, digital, computers were much, much larger than mechanical calculators for over a decade).

Improvements in analog precision gets very expensive very fast. 5 digits is more or less resolving 10 microvolts out of one volt; 6 digits is one microvolt; most amplifier noise is in the tens of microvolts range. The cost scale is geometric.

To double digital precision you simply build another row (or column, ...) of the same stuff as before. Cost scale is linear.

Analog modeling is really attractive in some ways; when done right, it's equivelant to parallelism still unthinkable in digital terms. And often the real-time nature is more important than accuracy, especially in closed-loop problems.

While I bet one would have been "fun", it's a hilariously, blunderously stupid idea. Never mind the pinhead idea of 'escaping traffic', the lack of foresight is truly awe-inspiring.

Talk about more money than sense...

At least military VTOL tech KNOWS they consume more energy than God just to sit still.

And it's not even as cool (or as potentially unstable as) jet packs. We won't even see this thing on Venture Brothers.

EARTH ABIDES is one of my all-time favorite sci-fi novels, and reading it kinda put an end to my interest in the sub-genre, since it did such a good job.

Yeah, he was a 'feckless academic', I think that was kinda the point (not much different really than today's tech nerd, plus/minus .5 C's worth of culture change). It was so... mundane. Localizing of disease... sub-critical social size... yeah.

First read it 20+ years ago. Read it 2, 3 more times since then, haven't read it in probably 10 years.

Greak book, flaws and all.

OK, Israeli's doing this, fine. It's a subjective process, at best, but if you actually do real feedback on your results, it probably works OK.

But TSA, there's no real system, it appears to be a simple reactive top-down money-spend bureaucracy with no clear goal. They're basically trying to stop something that already happened. ("George Bush brung us ta Eye Rack ta fix nahn eleven" seems to be the goal.)

If it was done intelligently, with the assumption that some techniques will fail, some will work, we'll measure and tune as we go along, and keep in mind that -- oh yeah, citizens! they're who we're trying to protect! -- they are supposed to accomplish *some task* and not *some image*, well it would be a lot better.

Fat f'ing chance of anything sensible coming out of TSA. My prediction is, it will be closed down in 5 - 10 years and all the allocated money will be spent somewhere less obvious.

Circuit Shitty has been bad for years -- genuine, for-real bait-n-switch, misrepresentation, 'let me see what's in stock'... and same products as all the other merchants. BFD.

It's not a failure mode. It's a way to suck out cash. See Who Gains. There's this assumption that all businesses are in it for the long haul, growth longevity and prosperity, etc... but the game is really about making as much spendable cash ASAP and spending next month's rent money (when it's really someone else's) is better at that.

There are reasonable businesses, of course, but few of them are publically traded.

While I almost universally avoid the megatons of sugar and corn syrup foisted upon me daily, I gotta say -- have you ever *tried* Krisky Kreme dognuts without the masking coat of sugar? The things are inedible!! Flat, greasy, tasteless, it's pretty much just a sugar substrate.

I hate the place. The big machine, while somewhat fascinating, is pretty much bragging about how K.K. Corp. has banished all skilled workers and replaced them with 2 or 3 dull, unhappy minimum-wage-slaves. Great. Makes for a FINE dining experience.

Once was enough for me. All you fans of the place, you need to seek psychiatric help.

That's sad! I wonder if it was in any way still operable, there can't be many 650's around still.

But by no means is it a "mainframe", which generally applies to those big multi-user machines with hundreds or thousands of terminals. The IBM 650 was essentially a one-user machine, architecturally, about as bit as an ATMEGA8. It's internal arithmetic was DECIMAL! It was huge by today's standards, but that doesn't make it a mainframe...

Never used one, well before my time, but they are genuinely a "classic" machine (that word is grossly overused to meaninglessness). It really defined an era.

It's not THAT new a fashion, nor exclusively on girls, there's a boy in FRESH FRUITS (2005) with bandages and reinterpreted Dogpile post-punk. Very cute. Unless of course the boy is as girl, but from a fashion POV, who cares?

Fetishes, sexual or otherwise, have a very complex relationship to dominant culture, and are quite resistant to trivial analysis. It's a lesson carefully learned in queer cultures here in the U.S.