Hey gang! I hope everyone had a fantastic week.
Whoa.
Georgia report reveals jury called for criminal charges against Lindsey Graham and others
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/08/lindsey-graham-criminal-charges-georgia-jury
Whoa hope this stays out to sea!
Hurricane Lee’s path is still unclear, but the East Coast could see dangerous rip currents and large waves beginning this weekend
https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/08/weather/hurricane-lee-path-friday-climate/index.html
Yikes
More than 150 rescuers join effort to free ill American from Turkish cave
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/08/more-than-150-rescuers-join-effort-to-free-ill-american-caver-mark-dickey-turkey
Stonks!
S&P 500 snaps 3-day losing streak Friday, suffers first weekly decline in three: Live updates
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/07/stock-market-today-live-updates.html
Sprots!
Daniil Medvedev beats Carlos Alcaraz to reach US Open men’s final – live
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/live/2023/sep/08/carlos-alcaraz-v-daniil-medvedev-us-open-mens-semi-final-live
I’m sure he’s a nice man, but he should be in hell for what he did.
Dennis Austin, the software developer of PowerPoint, dies at 76
https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2023/09/08/dennis-austin-software-developer-powerpoint-dies/
Awwww
Have a great day!
Thank you Mario! But our princess is in another castle!
Mario Hamster?
Linds should go to jail along with the Proud Boys and Oaf Keepers.
And take Ted Cruz with you.
And Flynn!
can we make god botherers illegal?
just once i’d like to be able to have a walk around town without some polite but persistent asshat making a beeline towards me and trying to convince me to let the lord and saviour in to my life
thats not unreasonable is it?
Ever see the movie Miami Blues? Alec Baldwin plays a lowlife who starts everything spiralling out of control with a bad reaction to being confronted by a Hare Krishna follower. It’s a fun seedy crime movie.
i have not seen that one…i think…name does ring a bell tho
…per a bill hicks bit…”the hari krishnas are the world’s fourth largest army – & they’ve already got our airports – mr onion-head in terminal 3 is scaring the shit out of me”
…pretty sure it was somewhere in “revelations”…around the part where the first invasion of iraq gets compared to jack palance shooting the homesteader in the movie shane?
Maybe you have a face that makes religoids want to save you?
I have resting serious face so they want to leave me alone. The one guy on the subway who tried regretted it. After I told him “not interested”, he said I’d burn in hell. I smiled the most evil smile I could and told him “I’ll see you there and save you a seat.”
He walked away as I stared and smiled at him. I kept staring at him and smiling at him. I think I started to creep him out as he took off into the next subway car. I waved at him and kept smiling my evil knowing smile from area where the two cars meet.
At the next stop he took off from the car while I waved and smiled at him.
The people around me were kind of creeped out by my behavior.
@manchucandidate oh i absolutely have a face that attracts them….but generally anyone what looks like a punk or a metalhead has a god botherer problem…..we get religiously profiled by these fuckers…lol
most people they leave alone…they work in a very targeted manner
…once saw a heavily bearded biker (not an assumption, it was a nice bike…clearly much loved & with a lot of self-wrenched work to keep it going long enough to be well into vintage territory, though no visible rockers or affiliated badges) make one bounce off as if by magic
…I was behind the guy when he got off his bike & they were making a beeline for him when they changed course abruptly about 10ft out
…thought maybe he’d pulled a face but a couple of minutes later I passed him on the street facing the other way & he had a t-shirt that said in three lines “your god got nailed to a cross”, “my god carries a hammer”, “nuff said”
I just deliver a firm “NO.” One word, no embellishment, no waffling, no room for argument. Same technique I use on beggars. It’s never failed me once. I don’t know if it’s my delivery, demeanor, or what, but that always concludes the interaction.
What I don’t like is the little kids outside stores collecting for Scouts or baseball or school or whatever. I don’t want to unleash the NO on a little kid, but I don’t want to encourage stores to allow this, so I end up saying something wishy-washy like “not right now.”
I despised doing that as a kid and I never made my kid do it. But honestly, public schools here don’t really do that much any more, and I won’t support private schools at all. Let the parents cough up the cash.
is what i should do…i know
but if someone scuse mes me…..i just instinctively say…yes?what?
mostly coz i was off in la la land till someone interrupted me
I discovered this ability years ago when walking through Hollywood (CA, not FL) with a friend. A beggar started following us and badgering us, and my friend was just very wishy-washy, no, I don’t think so, no, I don’t really do that, no, I’m not sure …
I got fed up and spun around and delivered the NO. The dude evaporated. My friend was like, I’ll let you handle that from now on.
I normally don’t interact with zealots, but this guy pissed me off that I wanted to mess with him (and boy did I) with his casual “Burn in hell.”
He didn’t know me. Maybe I’m a zealot too?
I learned that if you act like you can see inside someone, they don’t like it and it puts most people at great unease. Sometimes you end up hitting a nerve as Zealots are usually hiding something they don’t want anyone to see.
…have you tried talking to them about the bible?
…I’ve never lived anywhere where the jehovah’s witness folks have knocked a second time…& at least once at a friend’s their repeat visits ended after the time I answered the door
…it’s not as ballsy as the method an irish priest once advocated in my hearing…which was to invite them in & offer them a cup of tea before sneaking out the back door…his logic was that they were pious enough not to nick anything & wouldn’t bother anyone else until they figured out you weren’t coming back & let themselves out…two birds with one stone sort of thing
…but I find earnestly explaining the bits of the source material I don’t buy into & the role & purpose of religion & the importance of performative worship versus general thought & deed type stuff is a conversation they don’t want to return to for some reason?
…if that fails…I admit that I don’t know the chapter & verse but I can remember the story of the levite & his concubine & it doesn’t reflect well on the deity or his chosen people…but maybe they could use their superior recall of the precise wording to tell me where the passage was that says “go out in the world & judge others less pious than yourselves & never mind all that ‘love that neighbor’ business, I was kidding, those guys are assholes…that’s what you get when you turn water into wine instead of the other way around, I suppose”
…it doesn’t have the cachet of the whole “become ungovernable” thing…& in the karmic sense it’s probably not a tally we should be adding to…but becoming insufferable does have its uses?
whilst i have read the bible…i am not so knowledgeable about it that these people wouldnt talk circles around me
sides…i am not a very patient person and they are not worth that much of my time
…fair
…there were a couple of places I used to go where people did that shit with loud-hailers, though…one being a train station
…if I hadn’t been able to swiftly get them to actively avoid me…let’s say I could have gotten myself in a spot of bother…on account of I couldn’t just not go to those places…& also couldn’t abide being accosted by a holier-than-thou attitude which they apparently considered to be sacred in a way that working for a living & not fucking up other people’s day failed to measure up to…which…I didn’t much cotton to
…so either way you certainly have my sympathies…& I hope if they do get what’s coming to them it’s not because they rode your last nerve on a hot day?
tbh…if they werent so polite about it id just tell them to fuck off
they know this too….which is why they take that aproach….but you know…my social contract says if youre gonna be polite to me i have to at least return the favour
they havent pushed me so far id breach my contract yet….but theyre really fucking annoying lol
I’m obviously very familiar with the Bible but I’d never discuss it. I’d get angry in about 3 minutes and lose my shit. As a kid, I’d sic my dad the minister on them. The Jehovah Witnesses would show up at the front door, and I’d holler, “Dad! It’s for you!” And bolt once he showed up.
I’d never leave a religious zealot unattended. Thieves, the lot.
…I know a guy who once talked to a mormon lady on his doorstep about quantum physics until she cried…so…I’m not the worst person I know?
LOL.
I know someone who wanted to talk so much that the Jehovahs Witnesses actually fled. They never came back.
A university housemate greeted Mormons naked and they fled almost immediately. We never got bothered by them the rest of the school year.
I’ve idly thought during bad presentations about ways to make PowerPoint better, like hardcoding limits on the numbers of slides and getting rid of effects.
Of course I’ve seen people try to get around rules for limits on numbers of slide by doing things like shrinking the font and putting a million bullet points on a single slide, or embedding scans of bigger memos.
Some people are just convinced that more information is always better.
…I…guess I sort of am in the abstract, when I think about it
…but in practice I’m sort of fascinated by the relative density of information that can be contained in a thing…so I wouldn’t say that puts me in the overloaded-powerpoint fan club or anything
…but I know (& would admit to being somewhat envious of) people who can look at a single painting & speak eloquently & informatively about it for…well, lectures are measured in hours & at least one spent a good while giving those…so…a long time…just about all the things in that one picture that are there to be seen if you have the necessary contextual knowledge to recognize them
…& in a less abstract sense, a couple of phones I had offered screen-saver type images that encoded things like notifications…one being a tree where the fruits & flowers were things like missed calls & voicemail…another was koi carp…the size & number of which along with their coloration conveying similar stuff…& I admit I did think that was pretty neat if not particularly useful?
…we’ve come a long way since florence nightingale invented a bunch of ways to display information about crimean casualty statistics, though…& a lot of it is in terms of (with apologies for running into the term again from yet another tangential angle) visual syntax
…if you think about how much has been conveyed to an audience of your average hollywood movie by the time the opening credits are done…in terms of character traits, setting & general “world-building” in a “x sort of film” sort of way… compared with how long it would have taken to establish that stuff under the established narrative rules of the first “talkies”…it’s a ton more that’s conveyed in a fraction of the time by cues that barely scrape the conscious parts of a thought process
…so…in the grand tradition of thinking of at least a few impossible things before breakfast I think I do think more information is better…but also that less can be more?
I think the term information architecture is a good way to frame the issue. If all you’re building is a tool shed, the physical architecture barely matters, and if all you’re writing is a sale listing for an old shovel, the structural needs are also simple.
But if you’re talking about a hospital, the systematic thinking involved is immense. You can’t simply throw space and materials at your issues, because you start facing problems caused by scale that harm rather than help patients.
And the reality is that linear growth in size requires exponential growth in thought — doubling the size of a hospital may require eight or sixteen times as much research, planning and design.
Likewise for information — successfully doubling the amount presented may require 4X or greater the amount of work for the creator.
What this means for the consumer in both cases is whenever possible they should look to see if that prep work has been done before checking into the hospital or checking out the book from the library.
If the hospital’s architecture is chaotic, confusing, and disruptive, there’s a good chance the care is better in a well planned environment. You don’t want to be a patient in a place where it’s a half hour trip on a gurney to get an X ray if you can help it, although there may be a value in bringing a prospective hip replacement patient for a quick tour to see how bad it is and to look for better options.
If a writer from the start is clearly hiding an agenda, using shoddy logic or has a history of bad faith, leave the book on the shelf. You don’t get anything of value from reading another Charles Murray book on race or a Koch PhD on climate, unless you have a professional interest in debunking it.
And even then, it’s worth thinking about the worst cases of architecture, like Soviet era bureacratic complexes. At both the physical and intellectual level they’re designed to dehumanize even those with the best intentions.
…architecture is an important discipline but a much hijacked bit of terminology…you can talk about nano-scale chip architecture or systems architecture or commercial or residential or industrial or even civil engineering stuff in terms of architecture & they’re all meaningful conversations with varying amounts of overlap…but they also tend to be different conversations
…so the hospital analogy works…but it’s important that it’s a hospital rather than, say, a factory…or a warehouse
…the latter two require a lot of space & whether it’s a production line churning out a particular combination of specific parts to specific tolerances or a dynamically shifting inventory being collated & compiled into different collections to interact with a logistical network there’s a degree of form follows function stuff that determines your requirements if you need to retool the production setup, for example
…but a hospital needs to be overdesigned…spaces need to be multifunctional to maximize your ability to have flexibility in terms of being able to serve the varied needs of patients with multiple conditions…you can’t really use an MRI scanner as anything else so obviously it doesn’t go for all the moving parts but sometimes you need one set of machines at a bedside & sometimes that bed has someone in it who needs a different suite of hookups…sometimes you have more patients than space & you need to improvise…& sometimes you make a perfectly sound call in the original architecture only to have it be an unexpected problem later
…so most of the time a system that lets you put a hookup for ventilation via a wall socket at every spot that might have a bed in it across the whole building seems pretty great…but if you’re suddenly in a pandemic & it turns out you need to be able to isolate airflow within/between wards for quarantine during a heatwave…the part where it seems the only way to do that also means killing off that functionality along with the A/C for a big box with a lot of glass facing the sun & windows that don’t open so people can’t jump out of them
…it’s not wrong to say that’s a problem with the architecture…but it’s not what I’d think of as a complete description of the important components of the problem or a great indicator of how much weight they deserve relative to one another?
…swings & roundabouts the same way you can make a case for a written vs unwritten constitution in terms of the architecture of a nation
…so I suppose what concerns me more than the books on shelves thing…which at least presupposes a person who reads & frequents brick&mortar bookstores or libraries…which for all their issues about what gets to be on shelves most of the people it seems like we need to reach tend not so much to be…is the unnoticed aspects of architecture in terms of the online world we’re so busily building
…the same way a great architect can lead the eye or encourage a space to be approached a certain way…or “naturally” channel the people who occupy it to move through it with a certain pattern of flow…we’ve made the online world into a vaguely delimited “space” in which the bulk of what’s actually flitting back & forth is not only invisible but opaque even if you can peek behind the façade…& that’s…not unconnected to the part where the PhD in your example is getting their financing from a certain sort of source…so…in a similar sort of way to the one that brings you back around to problems with various individuals at the NYT or wherever…it’s the nameless architects of this kind of stuff that leave me fit to be tied
https://www.deceptive.design/
…there’s a big overlap with a few other pet hates of mine…like the active measures playbook…the digital evolution of the bastard child of 80s marketing…which itself was the red-headed stepchild of goebbels & our tried & true weakness for propaganda…& the sort of worse-than-it-looks style shared by some of the trolls that beset kinja like it was some sort of long-con…& a full-time gig…repeatedly nuking threads to curate the way their bait sees to play while relying on the powers that be being blind to their antics in order to get pulled out of the greys or used as “editor’s pick” exemplars…among other “spoiler” type behavior that went almost entirely unacknowledged while also having some very discernible (& demonstrably destructive) effects…to pick a micro example of a macro problem that bears a passing resemblance to a chaos fractal pattern even while we mostly don’t see it
…it’s insidious…& in its own way it is an architecture of sorts…but its function relies on the fact that it acts, interacts, functions & determines outcomes invisibly
…the dome of st paul’s in london remains an architectural masterpiece not to mention an icon in terms of an urban landscape
…but it’s a lot less responsible for london living up to its reputation than those sewers the victorians built at a time when they were over-engineered to the point of absurdity as far as the contemporary demands were concerned in their day
…it’s a cop out…but it’s also true that pretty much all things are relative…though we don’t always know what to at the time when we have to make a call?
When I first came across Prezi, it blew my mind. It used to be free for students. If you got the hang of it, your presentations were practically guaranteed an A+.
https://prezi.com/