comments encouraged..: April 2022

this week i

parsed medicare premium and cost sharing differences across state lines

drove to the easternmost border of maryland and virginia, home to rod stewart-hairstyled horses. notice the watch, only worn when pizza time

read shoshana zuboff's essay on surveillance capitalism

surveillance capitalism audaciously lays claim to private experience for translation into fungible commodities that are rapidly swept up into the exhilarating life of the market

amazon acquires comprehensive data on people's actual living habits, which it learns how to fabricate into behavioral predictions for sale in behavioral futures markets for real-world services, such as house cleaning, plumbing, or restaurant delivery. amazon thus reproduces in the real world the same logic that google perfected in the virtual world, where it learned to mine behavioral surplus from online search for predictions of click-through rates sold into behavioral futures markets for online ad targeting. already forward-looking amazon patents include the development of a "voice-sniffer algorithm"

emotional contagion

the past offers no adequate compass

in the united states, many people call the emergency services number, 911, on those rare occasions when facebook is down

moved twenty year old fridge back from garage. matthew confused current population survey interrelationship variables: we're a household, bitch

read the war of the worlds 1938 entry

its subsequent notoriety secured the 23-year-old welles's fame as a dramatist

to create the role of reporter carl phillips, actor frank readick went to the record library and played the recording of herbert morrison's dramatic radio report of the hindenburg disaster over and over

with infinite complacence, people went to and fro over the earth about their little affairs, serene in the assurance of their dominion over this small spinning fragment of solar driftwood which by chance or design man has inherited out of the dark mystery of time and space

janet jackson's 2004 'wardrobe malfunction' remains far more significant in the history of broadcast regulation than orson welles' trickery

read the oyster wars of the chesapeake bay by john wennersten

the oyster empire on the tangier sound

by jesus, she's fixin' to ram us

a brass oyster measure to see if oysters were of legal size, a pair of battered binoculars, and a coffee-stained copy of the oyster laws of maryland. outside on the bow of the boat the machine gun

4/28

this week i

parked d2, flew to raleigh with its carolina blue, foster's mac and cheese, steel string beer. teresa replaced pita with naan, weighty chess pieces replaced starcraft. ben folds composed an impromptu symphony, howard's bohemian rhapsody better tho. we hiked rhododendron trail and chilled

read about a dakota digsite's purported snapshot of life at the moment of chicxulub (the kt boundary)

stripe of black about the thickness of a notebook

a ct technician scanned it for free in the middle of the night, when the machine was idle. inside the nodule was a broken tyrannosaur tooth; the hadrosaur had been bitten by a tyrannosaur and escaped

any cretaceous mammal burrow is incredibly rare..but this one is impossible - it's dug right through the kt boundary..it may have been born in the cretaceous and died in the paleocene..and to think - sixty-six million years later, a stinky monkey is digging it up

read the pleasure of finding things out by richard feynman

to not know mathematics is a severe limitation in understanding the world

lost in a mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is so far as i can tell. it doesn't frighten me

dehoffman is just the kind of guy to use a mathematical constant for his safe combination. so the other important mathematical constant is e. so i walk back to the safe, 27-18-28, click, clock, it opens

there is enough room on the head of a pin to put all of the encyclopaedia brittanica

this bone box of mine

phosphorus that is in the brain of a rat (and also in mine, and yours) is not the same phosphorus as it was two weeks ago..all of the atoms that are in the brain are being replaced, and the ones that were there before have gone away.

so what is this mind, what are these atoms with consciousness? last week's potatoes! that is what now can remember what was going on in my mind a year ago - a mind which has long ago been replaced.

that is what it means when one discovers how long it takes for the atoms of the brain to be replaced by other atoms, to note that the thing which i call my individuality is only a pattern or dance. the atoms come into my brain, dance a dance, then go out; always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday

omni: are physical theories going to keep getting more abstract and mathematical? could there be today a theorist like faraday in the nineteenth century, not mathematically sophisticated but with a very powerful intuition about physics?

feynman: i'd say the odds are strongly against it. for one thing, you need the math just to understand what's been done so far. beyond that, the behavior of subnuclear systems is so strange compared to the ones the brain evolved to deal with that the analysis has to be very abstract: to understand ice, you have to understand things that are themselves very unlike ice. faraday's models were mechanical - springs and wires and tense bands in space - and his images were from basic geometry. i think we've understood all we can from that point of view; what we've found in this century is different enough, obscure enough, that further progress will require a lot of math

tukey and i discovered that what goes on in different people's heads when they think they're doing the same thing - something as simple as counting - is different for different people

4/21

this week i

updated our health coverage of immigrants fact sheet

watched the impossibly captivating for sixty eight rear window (1954), plus the torture and revolutionary cell-busting battle for algiers (1966)

convinced matthew of mcdonalds' migration from lower right to upper left. he slapped the camera when i tried to document task completion

acknowledge that that shure brand microphone might never exceed shirt rack in its pinnacle utility

received the finishing touch for the dining room chandelier

read the rape of nanking by iris chang

the japanese outdid the romans at carthage (only 150,000 died in that slaughter), the christian armies during the spanish inquisition, and even some of the monstrosities of timur lenk, who killed 100,000 prisoners at delhi in 1398 and built two towers of skulls in syria in 1400 and 1401

many soldiers went beyond rape to disembowel women, slice off their breasts, nail them alive to walls. fathers were forced to rape their daughters, and sons their mothers, as other family members watched. not only did live burials, castration, the carving of organs, and the roasting of people become routine, but more diabolical tortures were practiced, such as hanging people by their tongues on iron hooks or burying people to their waists and watching them get torn apart by german shepherds

neither the people's republic of china nor the republic of china demanded wartime reparations from japan (as israel had from germany) because the two governments were competing for japanese trade and political recognition

the allied forces surrendered at the rate of one prisoner for every 3 dead, the japanese surrendered at the rate of only 1 per 120 dead

examination results were kept secret, to minimize the risk of suicide

not one hour when an innocent woman was not being dragged off somewhere by a japanese soldier

the impalement of vaginas

rabe..would chase japanese soldiers away from their prey, on one occasion even bodily lifting a soldier sprawled on top of a young girl. he knew these expeditions were highly dangerous ("the japanese had pistols and bayonets and i . . . had only party symbols and my swastika armband," rabe wrote in his report to hitler

december 18: today marks the 6th day of modern dante's inferno, written in huge letters with blood and rape. murder by the wholesale and rape by the thousands of cases. there seems to be no stop to the ferocity, lust and stavisim of the brutes. at first i tried to be pleasant to them to avoid arousing their ire, but the smile has gradually worn off and my stare is fully as cool and fishy as theirs

a thousand my lais emerged

only one in twenty-five american pows died under nazi captivity, in contrast to one in three under the japanese

i am going to the front not to fight an enemy but in the state of mind of one who sets out to pacify his brother

4/14

this week i

ate with mike rozier. he shared move toward goal advice based on the faith of lepers (as they were going, they were cleansed), caravaggio recs

watched roller coaster of a tweet, zola. you look a lot like whoopi goldberg edf to publish methane pollution captured via satellite

read over / under count in the 2020 census, worse measurement of latinos than 2010. next time you get a blood test, have them take all of it out

watched ousmane sembene's (wolof) mandabi (money order), poor man and two wives struggle to cash a check, leaking promissory notes en route

read the kansas city star's copy style sheet, made famous by hemingway

use short sentences. use short first paragraphs. use vigorous english. be positive, not negative

slang to be enjoyable must be fresh

in reference to specified time the word on is superfluous. why write on january 16; on tuesday? january 16 and tuesday are enough

don't split verbs: he probably will go, not he will probably go. it previously had been shown better; not it had previously been better shown

say "she was born in ireland and came to jackson county in 1874." not "but came to jackson county." she didn't come here to make amends for being born in ireland. this is common abuse of the conjunction

he died of heart disease, not heart failure - everybody dies of "heart failure"

if is used to introduce a suppositional clause, as. i shall not go if it rains. it is incorrect to say: i do not know if i can go. the correct form is whether: i do not know whether i can go

a woman of the name mary jones - disrespect is attached to the individual in such sentences. avoid it. never use it even referring to street walkers

marked the end of robert krughoff's tenure at checkbook

read intimations: six essays by zadie smith

talking to yourself can be useful. and writing means being overheard

plagued in the permanent sense, by not having the foresight to be america

like pugs who have been lifted out of a body of water, our little limbs keep pumping on, as they did when we were hurrying off to our workplaces. do we know how to stop?

mel gibson, in a director's chair, calmly talking to jesus christ himself. jesus (also in a director's chair) was patiently listening, while soaked from head to toe in blood and wearing his crown of thorns. the caption read: explaining to my friends with kids under six what it's been like isolating alone

not often you meet a fertility goddess at the 98 bus stop

sometimes they say free hugs. (note to pretty swedish backpackers: they're not free)

making small talk is an art

4/7