lulz

From Steve: PETA offers huge reward for vat-grown chicken! (I'm curious how they're going to determine whether the stuff "has a taste" that is "indistinguishable from real chicken flesh to non-meat-eaters."

I mean, how would they know?

And as a final lead-off link, the URL speaks for itself: Mister Picasso-head!

This weblog has been checked for sleeping children!

Okay, so. Turns out that Twitter is to weblogs as weblogs are to actual real writing: an attractive lightweight alternative that is more convenient, easier, more fun, requires less thought and skill, and produces something of (even) less long-term value. *8)

I've now written 1,164 "tweets", each one a piece of text no longer than 140 chaacters, very few of them representing any significant thought, many completely without content. I'm "following" the tweets of 169 other people, and 135 people are following mine. Twitter only shows you ten pages of recent tweets, so at the rate people produce them I'm not reading every tweet of all those 169 people, but I am looking at a good number of them. (I'm also thinking of setting up a second twitter id, to follow just the 5-10 people I'm most interested in, so I can look at just their tweets, and a good many hours of them will fit in 10 pages, so I won't lose as many.)

On the other hand I haven't posted to my weblog for nearly two weeks. And I haven't written a new long clever thing in some time.

(On the other end of the spectrum I've had some long realtime text exchanges with one or a few people on Second Life, the transcripts of some of which might be cleanable up into interesting clever things themselves. A thought that just occurred to me that doesn't really fit into the current thread but there we are.)

What else has been going on? I was sick (home from work, lying in bed, making self-pitying sounds) Monday an' Tuesday an' Wednesday an' somewhat Thursday even of last week, with a sore throat and stuffed head an' general malaise. But I got better!

Have been reorganized slightly at work, basically taken off of a project that I personally think really needs me but I'm not really all that interested in and it's politically fraught in various ways so if my boss's boss really thinks, even after my attempts to convince him to the contrary, that it's fine without me well great; I'm in some sense glad to put it behind me.

Now I'm in the both exciting and scary position of needing to pick one of the very interesting things that present themselves to me, convince management that that's what I should be working on, and then work on it with enough strength and skill that I can brag about it at the end of the year.

(I'm also still working part of my time on the strategy and technology-outlook stuff that I was previously working on part of my time, and that wasn't touched by the reorg. It's nice to have some stability at least!)

It seems to have become Spring an' all around here; nice cool air, lovely sunlight, what no doubt would be fresh and vibrant smells if I could smell them (whine, moan). I may be reacting to all the genetic information in the air with a sniffly nose; or maybe that cold from last week is still reproducing and fooling my nasal passages into producing more than usual of the stuff it hopes will carry its vast family into the outside world and the warm nourishing nasal passages of others. Hard to say!

Been a zillion years since I posted here last, and I would love to have long and profound (or even just fun, or shiny, or funny) things to say.

But for today you'll have to settle for "this weblog has been checked for sleeping children." *8) ]]> http://www.davidchess.com/words/log.20080411.html#20080417 I'm writing this sitting on the grass in Prospect Garden in the center of the Princeton campus, my leather jacket spread on the gress under me, the shade just barely deep enough that the laptop screen is readable, waiting for the little daughter to return my SMS saying that I'm done with my phone call and she should let me know when she's done with whatever she's doing.

I did my 2-3pm phone call from the departmental conference room of the East Asian Studies Department, room 203 Jones Hall. I wandered in there after not seeing any promising phonecall-making places in the boisterous (and new since twenty-five years ago) Frist Student Center, and seeing a couple of empty-looking rooms (202 and 203) upstairs I boldly asked the person in the departmental office, and she said that no one had signed up for 203 and I could go ahead and use it.

One of the classier places that I can remember doing a phonecall from, in the "wood panelling and oil paintings" sense that predates the "clean steel surfaces and indirect lighting" sense.

Ah, now the little daughter has called me, and I'm going to go meet her upcampus. To be continued, then... *8)

Hi! Now I'm sitting in the lovely wood-floored and thoroughly book-cased lounge under the rotunda of the Andlinger Center for the Humanities, sinking into an overstuffed armchair, admiring the sun, and admiring the passing young persons.

There's a special poignancy here, because in my day this was The Pub. I remember getting far too drunk at a table up there on that balcony, where at the moment the sun is shining on hardwood and books, and I'll bet there hasn't been a booze-soaked Cardinal initiation in years. They have other places for that now on campus, of course; probably larger and better ventilated. But the feel of time passed and worlds changing is strong for me here.

Most of the healthy young people going by are at least holding cellphones, it seems. A good thirty percent are talking on them. Some are talking on them but not holding them; just talking as they walk along, the only evidence that they are not merely communing with spirits being the odd wire running down a shirt-front, the odd device clipped to an ear.

How much, I wondered to the little daughter on the drive down, will cellphones and wireless Internet have changed the experience of college? Always in touch, with both the friends and the world, never alone except once in awhile, when it occurs to you that you could turn the cellphone off, close the computer.

(How long until "phone" means cellphone, and no one says "cellphone" anymore unless they're in a historical drama?)

It's an absolutely lovely day. Except for the 2-3pm phonecall (see above) I've taken the day off. I could have rushed down, dropped off the little daughter, rushed back to the office, done the phonecall from there, and put in a couple of hours of business-hours work. Goddess knows there's enough to do! But tomorrow is nearly meeting-free, and I think what there is to do will fit nicely into it, and into whatever piece of this evening I feel like devoting to it.

Hard to imagine urgency, sitting in this so-well-appointed room, the sun flooding in, cleverness and health and prosperity thick in the air.

On the shuttle bus up from the parking lot, the parent in the front seat was talking to the driver, telling him that he'd been in LA now for thirty years at least, coming up from Mexico before that. And now look, he's in Princeton! And they both laughed.

Various of the Second Life webloggers are having a weblogging strike (and various others are not) to protest and/or call Linden Labs' attention to the perceived silliness of the current Terms of Service and Branding Guidelines we referred to here the other day. This is fortunately not a Second Life weblog *8) but perhaps I'll refrain from embedding any of my recent SL pictures that are sitting on flickr, out of laziness and casual solidarity.

Now I should get up, and walk more in the strong sunlight, and call M and give her some idea when I'll be home, and look for somewhere interesting to get food.

'cause of I'm hungry. ]]> http://www.davidchess.com/words/log.20080404.html#20080407 In the mail today, sitting waiting for me on the white table when I came home to the quiet house (quiet because M was taking the little boy to orchestra, and the little daughter was at rehearsal), there was a very official and important-looking envelope, of the kind that looks as though it probably contains money from the government. And this very official and important-looking envelope, quite possibly containing money in some indirect form, was addressed to someone on another street entirely.

And it was a beautiful day.

So I took the envelope, and went outside, and locked the door, and started off down our street, toward the cross street that leads to the street that the envelope was addressed to. A few yards up the street I kicked off my shoes (sandals, since there's no snow on the ground) and walked the rest of the way barefoot, the layers of callous on the soles of my feet grateful for the cool roughness of the pavement.

It was a lovely walk, the sky high and clear and shockingly blue, the trees still mostly bare, brown lines against the sky, brown ground, splashes of green shrubs and early grass, the blue-gray street, sweet and chilly air.

The house whose number was on the envelope is a small house among small houses, the kind of house that young people buy and knock down and replace and sell, the kind that someone's grandmother lives in, that smell of years and years of cooking spices. The man that came to the door, eventually, quite awhile after I rang the bell and in doing so pushed the door ajar because it wasn't latched and it swung a few inches into the mudroom beyond before I caught the knob and drew it closed again, was a small man, in loose clothing, teeth crooked because when he was young everyone wasn't straightening their teeth yet, and he said that yes that was his name on the envelope, and thanked me, asked me which street I was from, and thanked me again.

And then I walked home.

Also in the mail was a box from Federal Express that I opened and there inside was a bubble-envelope and inside that was a paper envelope and inside that were my reading glasses, back home finally from the Detroit hotel where I left them. And when M got home she laughingly asked what sort of strange thing I'd been ordering, and I said it was just my reading glasses, and she said "then why did it say Swank?", and I looked at the return address on the box, which I'd ignored before just assuming it was my glasses, and the return address on the box, rather than being the name of a hotel for instance, said "Swank Audio Visuals", which M and I agreed sounds like it surely must be a porn distributor, but which as it turns out apparently isn't.

But that was funny anyway.

And now I'm sitting waiting for the little daughter to call saying that she's done with rehearsal so I can go bring her home with my car, and Twitter is down, and I'm not going into Second Life because there's probably not really enough time, so I'm sitting here writing in my weblog, in one of those moods where I use many more words than in some sense I need to, and thinking about you mysterious readers out there, and listening to the fans in M's MacBook being overenthusiastic again, and the military voice-overs from whatever violent video game the little boy is playing in the playroom, and yawning, and thinking that I really really must get more sleep tonight.

And that's about all. *8) ]]> http://www.davidchess.com/words/log.20080404.html#20080406 We are back!

Faithful readers will have noticed that davidchess dot com and related sites in our media empire have been down for a week or so, due to causes that I'm sure our webhosts would have explained satisfactorily if we had ever gotten around to actually asking them about it.

But now we are back!

College results are all in: the little daughter got into all three of her safetyish schools, was accepted by two of the matchish schools and waitlisted by the third, and was rejected by two of the reachish schools but accepted by one; woot! So depending on just what she decides to do we may be going back to Old Nassau for more reasons than ever soon. *8)

Have been spending tons and tons of time in Second Life, and also in the surrounding Twitterverse and Blogoverse (there's a coupla lovely words for ya).

Linden Labs has had an attack of Lawyerosis and caused a big flurry (at least big in certain echo chambers that I frequent), by changing a longstanding very liberal policy about the use of their marks (encouraging fansites and so on to use them as long as accompanied with appropriate disclaimers), and instituting changes to the Terms of Service and posting Branding Guidelines that, taken literally, mean that for instance saying "I really like Second Life" in one's weblog is a violation of the Terms of Service. And then (most importantly) not sending anyone out to say "you're right, that was dumb, that wasn't what we meant", presumably 'cause their lawyers won't let them.

The reason it's a TOS violation is that the TOS says that you have to follow the Branding Guidelines, and the Branding Guidelines say the usual things that lawyers say, including that trademarks should only be used as adjectives, and should be decorated with the appropriate trademark symbols the first time they are used in a thing. So "I really like Second Life" should be "I really like the Second Life® virtual world", which of course no one in their right mind would say.

This area of trademark law is pretty interesting; I should really find some of the original decisions and read up. My impression is that there are two different classes of behavior here that companies don't want, and that they tend to squish the two classes together even though, from the user's point of view, they're wildly different.

The first category is stuff that's actually prohibited by trademark law. Since the Lindens have registered the "Second Life" mark for a virtual world service (or something), it would be a tort (i.e. they could sue me and win) for me to start my own virtual world service and use the phrase "Second Life" to apply to it in a way that might confuse consumers into thinking that mine was the same as, or associated with, theirs. Certainly it's reasonable for the Lindens to tell people not to do that, and even to have the TOS prohibit it (in general having a Terms of Service that forbids actions that violate the law seems like overkill, but relatively harmless overkill).

The second category is behavior that is not prohibited by trademark law (i.e. they could sue me and lose), but that does tend to dilute the brand, weaken the mark, and might eventually cause the company to lose the mark entirely (every trademark lawyer's nightmare is to have their marks become genericized, like "aspirin" famously was (although the case of "aspirin" is more complex than that, also involving the Allies' expropriation of German intellectual property after World War I, etc, etc)).

Having these non-tortious actions forbidden in the Terms of Service seems to me like an extremely bad idea. Sure, the company would rather that people didn't do them, but forbidding them and implying that one might be banned from the service for doing them is pretty over-the-top. My amateur impression is that these non-tortious behaviors that tend to dilute or genericize a mark include extremely common things like using the mark as a noun.

Quiz for fluent English speakers: What part of speech is "Second Life"? All of you that said "a noun phrase" are correct, but the Linden lawyers would rather you weren't. Anyone who said "an adjectival phrase" is urged to submit their resume to the Linden legal department at once, in the unlikely event that you don't already work there.

There are lots of in-between cases. The very amazing Second Life Ballet, for instance, is now in violation of the TOS. (Weirdly the Lindens have suggested that if they changed their name to "Second Life Ballet Troupe" they wouldn't be; I'm going to have to dig into the legal history to find out why that is.) If they are sufficiently clear in their materials that they are not associated with Linden Labs, I don't know how likely LL would be to win a suit against them for abusing the mark; it would hinge I think on how likely the judge would be to believe that consumers would be confused, and I don't know as much as I'd like to about just what criteria and tests the case-law has developed on the subject.

Similarly there are a zillion weblogs and websites called "Second Life, First Person", or "My Second Life", or "Whapdoodle, the adventures of an arachnid in Second Life", some of them sitting at urls that contain strings like "getaSecondLife" or "SecondLifeSuzy" or whatever. Again depending on just how obviously disclaimered they are I don't know how likely the Lindens would be to win a case (before a trademark judge, or before the ICANN in the case of domain names). But since the owners of these things are mostly private citizens, just the threat of a large expensive lawsuit, or the antipication of a threat, is enough to cause people to rename things, shut things down, have nightmares, make angry weblog posts, etc.

Which is really too bad.

From my point of view the Lindens have handled the community communication on this stuff really really badly. On the other hand, it may just be that I happen to be friends with the few propeller-heads that really care, and given that the vast majority of the SL population doesn't care, the Lindens may be putting the appropriate amount of effort into clear communication. On the third hand, though, I think the people who do care about this situation tend to be those with the deepest commitment to the world, and therefore perhaps the ones one should be least willing to piss off to please one's lawyers.

Hard to say!

So anyway, I hope the little musings there about IP law were interesting even to those of my readers who don't care a fig for Second Life.

I don't have alot of random little links saved up this time; I will just share one rather amazing little one: Sleep for me now dot co dot uk. I haven't decided just quite what it is yet, but it's definitely novel, and has a British accent. *8)

Um, I dunno, what else? Nice to be back here in the ol' weblog, nice to be sitting in the rocking chair watching M stitching, the little boy off getting all wet and painty in the woods at a friend's house, the little daughter still sound asleep because it's finally Sunday and she's had such a busy week. What could be better, really? ]]> http://www.davidchess.com/words/log.20080321.html#20080327

"So you know what you're going to say?"

Chervais looked down at the squat form, sitting behind the piled shapes that served for a desk, sucking at a damp cigar.

"I was thinking I could just tell the truth."

There was an explosion from somewhere outside, and the gondola rocked sickeningly for a moment. Chervais imagined the view outside, the gondola suspended like a parasite from the vast flock of harnessed geese, the bulbous airplanes that flew by now and then in slow irrational dogfights, the oddly glowing ground over which they passed, trees in the shape of nightmare reaching toward the starless sky.

The other grabbed at the desk automatically, and looked up.

"First, no one would believe you," he stubbed the cigar on some component of the desk, which grudgingly caught fire, "and second, it's not allowed."

"I don't think you have any way to enforce that."

The big bloodshot eye rolled in its socket. "That's a dangerous thing to assume."

Chervais sighed and looked down at his hand, colorless and insubstantial. "All right," he said, "first I became aware of myself floating upward, then I turned and saw my body lying on the bed."

The other just nodded, the eye staring.

"Then there was this intense light, and I found myself moving toward it --"

"The calmness," the other cut in.

"Right, right, there was this great feeling of calm, and I was moving up this tunnel toward the light, and there was this ethereal music and a great feeling of," he made a sound, involuntarily, with his mouth, "of love, and a gentle voice, telling me I had to return."

The squat cyclops grunted. "Ya still got some work to do on attitude, but I like that 'ethereal'. Keep it up."

Somewhere outside there was another explosion, as a cargo helicopter full of cheese plummeted from the sky.

Links!

• The Sims 3!!! (I had no idea.)
• From Mike Gunderloy, the Ultimate Social Network!
• From WordURL, our puzzling site o' the day; explanations most welcome.
• Know Your Meme, with videos, from the ol' Rocketboom folks (see also Meme Patrol).
• Google Maps In Second Life! For some reason!
• Something pretty cool from Charles Stross.
• The amazing SL Desktop City whose amazing creator is a personal friend (he said proudly)
• Another thing that's 'way more fun than it should be: Virtual Sailing (as a form of meditation).
• I was sad that the reading level of this weblog was only High School; I was hoping for, like, "Enormous-Headed Supervillian". I should use bigger words.
• Speaking of Chicken Chickens Chicken (which I think I was), here's the short version of The Big Lebowski (v funny)
• And yet again from Ian: the very clever do not reply dot com (explanation); they get lots of mail!

The little daughter has now been accepted by four out of nine Expensive Institutions of Higher Learning an' Pizza, and rejected by zero. Admittedly it's four of the easy ones, but still: woot!

I've developed what I hope is a passing addiction to Twitter, but it's under the name of my SL avatar, so rather than linking to it directly I'll let you do the research yourself. *8)

Be good! Improve the universe. ]]> http://www.davidchess.com/words/log.20080314.html#20080319

"That's an impressive simulation," Voy said politely, taking his face away from the viewing cup, which for psychological satisfaction was placed by the window of the satellite that looked down on the planet below.

Privately he had his reservations, his doubts, on whether a planetwide simulation of the depth that he had seen in the viewer could be entirely clean, consciousness-wise, but he was too polite to voice them here.

"Not a simulation," Slyt's voice was amused, something like triumphant, something like contemptuous.

"Pardon me?" Voy asked, thinking of the horribly unenhanced things he had seem, scenes of suffering, of limitation, of futility. "You can't have that many volunteers --"

"Not volunteers. People. Naturals." and Slyt was openly sneering now, "They live down there; are born, and live, and die."

Voy just stared at him, silent, recalling in particular one face seen in the viewer, one face looking down at one death, and the depths and the mundane agony in the eyes.

"You can't mean --"

"They are born," Slyt repeated, "and live, and die forever. It's all they ever know. And they are mine."

"No. No you cannot --"

"You're a long way from the Hub, Domiciliant Voy," he said, spitting the honorific like a curse, "This is my world. There are no sorcerors out here to protect you." And at this he gestured with a finger, and Voy heard a door open behind him, and felt armed men stepping out, about to touch him.

Of course, as Slyt should have expected but had persuaded himself was impossible, Voy was a sorceror himself, and in less than an eyeblink a certain amount of his ponderous mass had exfoliated and replicated and gained control of not only Slyt and his minions, but all the automatic and semi-automatic functions of the satellite, and in less than a day they had spread themselves planetward and outward, finding brains and fixing the usual bugs, finding wars and ending them, finding hunger and feeding it, finding the recently dead and reviving them, and in general converting the entire terrifyingly awful planet into a basic unadorned Hubworld, way out here on the edge of nowhere.

Voy would have to cut his itinerary short now, and return to the Hub, to sort out what punishements were to be meted and what was to be done with this unplanned new member of the family. Before leaving, on a whim, he went down to the planet, and his systems found one particular face in one particular city.

The particular death those eyes had been looking at when Voy saw them in the viewing cup was now again a particular life. Voy came up to them in a park, his bulk moving lightly over the new-risen grass; the man of the eyes was dandling the small live-again girl on his knee. They both looked around at him, all their eyes met, smiling, civilized, something amazed and joyous, confident and young, in the man and the child.

He drifted away again, toward the node that would take him back into space and back home. But he carried with him still his first sight of those eyes, as they had looked without hope on that death, and something moved uneasily within him.

Goodbye to Arthur C. Clarke, with deep gratitude. I have for some reason a very vivid memory of sitting somewhere (at Gramma Jean's house?), curled up, reading a battered copy of Tales from the White Hart, and even in those relatively light and rather gimmicky stories feeling a certain sense of wonder.

I don't know who Galatea Gynoid was talking about here, but the words will do nicely for Clarke. I think he would have liked them. (Heck, maybe he even read them.)

I'm liking this new Governor Paterson-who-is-legally-blind. It may turn out that one of the decade's most significant positive developments in the Progressive movement in New York was brought about by an introduction service and some investigators with politically-suspect motives.

He's for gay marriage, he's for abortion rights, his father (Basil Paterson-who-is-legally-blind) was a real Heavy Hitter in the Progressive cabal. In sharp contrast to Spitzer, Paterson-who-is-legally-blind seems to be liked by all.

And in the hijinks department, not only did Paterson-who-is-legally-blind and his wife both have affairs (how equitable is that, eh?), but he obtained his extramarital sex for free (as far as we know), rather than for the tens of thousands of dollars that Spitzer spent on it. This can only bode well for the fiscal health of the state.

Ian, who is always a forgiving and understanding guy, suggests that we should regard Spitzer's prosecution of escort agencies, not as sleazy above-the-law hypocrisy, but as a cry for help, an attempt to save others from the addictive snares of lust in which he found himself involuntarily and through no fault of his own entrapped.

"It's too late for me," we imagine him saying, "but you others can save yourselves! Run while you still can, I'll stay behind!"

This inspired notion caused great hilarity at the lunch table.

And speaking of Ian:

I noticed this a while ago but forgot to mention it -- Garfield minus Garfield. I love it.

And so do we, dear reader, and so will you!

Also from Ian, a very good video interview explaining the origins of and solutions to the financial crisis (the British accents make it especially effective).

(Speaking of which Diana points us to the related story about the time the front fell off.)

And finally, also on the subject of the financial crisis, the Subprime Primer also throws great clarity on the situation, using stick figures. ]]> http://www.davidchess.com/words/log.20080314.html#20080316

Your attempt to log out failed, you have been automatically logged out. If you still wish to log out, please log in again and retry the log out operation.

Sadly I can't say that I've had this exact error message, but it seems entirely possible; we were talking at lunch about various applications that make you log in before you can log out, if your "session" "times out" or something.

I've got a monster in my pants
  and it does a nasty dance

That's a subset of the B-52's, apparently from a 1991 album called "Fred Schneider & The Shake Society", and as featured memorably here and there on YouTube. (Not to be confused with some sort of naughty movie with a similar name.)

Speaking of Eliot Spitzer (narf narf), here are some Salon person and Susie Bright saying rational things about the whole mess.

Although we tend to get crazy about things sexual in this culture, there are in this case good reasons to be down on Spritzer (who the news on TV just now rather amusingly referred to as "the resigned Governor"). Primarily there's the hypocrisy; if he'd been prosecuting adulterers and then turned out to be one himself, that'd be a similar bad thing; same for Internet gambling, marijuana distribution, or anything else in that general category.

There's also what or whatever he's done to his wife and family. But, as I'm sure I commented somewhere back around Clinton, we don't really know, or deserve to know, what actually happened there. They could have an open marriage, with all sorts of permitted hijinks on both sides, and we'd never know it (see remarks above about getting crazy about things sexual). The Masses would probably be more freaked out by a politician with a nontraditional marriage than we are by one that clandestinely hires sex workers.

This particular class of starship comes from a rather dark time in your future history. Indeed, the NCC-1701 was the spearhead for a 5 year campaign of economic and ideological conquest by a crypto-socialist federation of planets. Their activities largely consisted of seeking out new life and new civilizations, and lecturing said civilizations on some perceived ideological flaw in their society, which they then corrected through the application of various forms of super-science and heavy weaponry. These lectures were usually delivered by the ship's captain, by all accounts a rampant egotist, whose duties also included sexual intercourse with local females in an attempt to spread the Federations genetic legacy throughout the stars...

That from a noteable Second Life weblog, from a noteable series of posts about a cross-country trek. It reminds me, of course, of my own less well-documented Trek from Hughes Rise to Chief, 'way back when I was just a month or so old.

I have as usual been doing too many things to even mention all of in SL. The above weblog and others that I've been reading are by the folks that have put up a bunch of sims called "Extropia", on a utopian-futurist theme (as opposed to the so common as to be a cliche now dystopia-futurist theme that's all over the grid). Extropia has lovely builds and a nice clean website, and for just 250L / week (less than a dollar), one can rent a little chunk of land with a 224m2 cross-section and space for 100 or so prims, which I've done and am so far enjoying decorating and meeting the neighbors, although things keep distracting me.

One of those distractions was a sudden invitation (apparently the originally scheduled audience somehow didn't show up) to the first show (I think) of the ZeroG Skydancers' latest piece, which was lovely and fun, at which someone introduced me to a guy who works for the SS Galaxy, an absolutely enormous (three whole sims!) cruise ship which is wildly famous, but of which I hadn't heard before (the grid is So Big).

A few days later the guy pinged me and asked if I'd like a helicopter tour of the ship. I was waiting for a friend to log in at the time, but when she did I asked her what she thought, and she said cool, so we got a very memorable aerial tour; said friend (the formidable Callipygian Christensen) has posted some postcards to her Snapzilla stream. (I took some, too, but they're all up in SL, and besides she's a way better photographer than I am.) And when we were all done, the guy gave me a certificate for a free week's rent in one of the ship's staterooms; woot!

At some other time, a different friend teleported me off to an Extremely Amazing build based on a Sims 2 neighborhood (an obvious thing to do in retrospect). Here's a hysterical video of the SL build and AVs in action; nearly the same video could have been made in TS2. (The other Nylon Pinkney videos there are also well worth watching; we've got such fantastic creatives!)

So that's all been very amazing (and I didn't even mention the Giant Snail Races, the live music at the opening of a new BDSM-themed sim, planting sunflowers for charity, etc, etc). Back in Real Life, the little boy seems to be gradually shaking off this flu or whatever it is, the little daughter isn't sleeping enough, no more college acceptances have arrived since the last update, and M and I are in the constant state of proud fatigue that comes from having two teenagers in the house.

All the data in the world, only organized! I wanted to use this to find the name of the most-recently-born Catholic Saint, but as far as I can tell I'd have to learn some special query language and API to do it, and that just seems Wrong.

Due presumably to our long-standing interest in toad sucking, a reader points us at toad suck dot org, which (among other fun things) includes another explanation of the origin of "toad suck", which doesn't involve the hallucinogenic properties of toad exudate (and perhaps for that reason doesn't really convince us). But give it a look; it includes a picture of a toad in a straw hat!

Also watch Animator vs Animation, just because it's so well done.

Which came first?

med pharmacy

Duuuuuuude.

chicken

"At long last we know," said the Chicken to the Egg, as they lit their post-coital cigarettes.

egg

broken koan

oooooo, nice one! ]]> http://www.davidchess.com/words/log.20080307.html#20080310 So we here at Ceoln Central were pretty impressed when we heard that New York Governor John, I mean Eliot, Spitzer was in trouble for having been "involved with a prostitution ring". Slightly less impressed on hearing more and it turns out that he was just a customer, but the question remains: how much could the Governor of a major state get, per hour? And what kind of security would e have to arrange?

We would be less snarky about Spitzer, we suppose, if he wasn't so famous for being Mr. Law Enforcement and if he hadn't prosecuted "prostitution rings" back when he was bigshot prosecutor an' all. But sheesh; one year you're sending them to jail and the next year you're hiring them? Pheh.

An' is there any chance he will now come out as advocate of decriminalized prostitution, saying "yeah, my wife should give me total hell, but there's no good reason for anything that I did to be illegal"? Between zero an' none; this hypocrisy goes more than bone-deep.

But enough about our knee-jerk more or less thoughtless reactions to sordid current events!

For something much more uplifting and useful, we present Chicken chicken chicken (and the PowerPoint). With apologies to whoever pointed it out to us and we forgot who it was.

All sorts o' fun Immersion an' Augmentation discussions in the SLish weblogs lately. See the very notable The World Philip Made (to which's comments we have volubly contributed now), and also this posting (to which's comments we have jes sort of said Hi), and this and also this an' this (by someone that I keep thinking of as Agent Bury), an' additionally Gwyneth, as well as the more skeptical view. All sorts of inneresting stuff about the relationship between RL and SL, between people and bodies and avatars, between realities and universes and weblog posters, and so on and so on.

(And from there wander around to things with intriguing titles like My Rezbian Theory and suchlike.)

(And also here is the original "Augmentation vs Immersion" piece again, just for convenience.)

What's our favorite sound?

farting

Hi webmaster!

tsk

buzz

rain

Absolutely...

(Oh, and in the latest little-daughter news update, she's now been accepted by two of her safety schools. Very gratifyin'!) ]]> http://www.davidchess.com/words/log.20080229.html#20080305 Phrase o' the Day: "perfect storm".

Prior to 1991 this was a relatively rare expression, formed more or less by accident when "perfect" was used as an intensifier on "storm", as in "a perfect storm of bullets".

In 1991, the phrase passed into meteorological idiom, and perhaps briefly into the public mind, when someone in the weather biz apparently used it to describe an especially nasty nor'easter that hit North America around Hallowe'en; the phrase implied that some significant number of rare things had all come into play at the same time, resulting in a "perfect" storm-thing.

This phrase was embedded into popular culture in 1997, when Sabastian Junger's book "The Perfect Storm", about that same nor'easter, was published. Lots of people read the book, lots more people heard about the book, and "perfect storm" became a common phrase for any situation (usually a bad one) where various factors coincide to produce an unusual result of some sort.

It's been a bit over a decade since then, and today the phrase means that the writer (usually a copywriter) couldn't think of a significant noun phrase, and deadline was approaching, so he stuck in "perfect storm" 'cause it sounds sort of poetic.

Word o' the Day: dord. It means "density" (sort of). Use it often!

Wiki o' the Day: Wikileaks. What an inneresting concept! I had no idea.

And finally, Little Daughter News o' the Day: she got her first college acceptance letter! Woooot! It's to one of her safeties, but still; it's a nice thing to hold in one's hand. (Not that I have yet; she seems to have left it over at a friend's house, hahaha.) ]]> http://www.davidchess.com/words/log.20080229.html#20080304 RIP Gary Gygax.

Without looking it up to see what the community thinks, my memory tells it this way: Gary Gygax and some other guy had a relatively obscure set of one or two semi-professional hobbyist books having to do with miniatures-based warmgaming: a handful of geeks here and there would use the rules in these books to stage battles between squads of medieval knights armed with swords and morningstars and so on, moving little pewter figures around on graph paper or whatever like the crazy old dude in "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" (wasn't it?).

In one of these books, called "Chainmail", there was a sort of wild afterthought appendix that talked about incorporating some (haha) "magic spells" into this kind of wargaming. The appendix was unexpectedly popular (like, I'm guessing, they actually got some mail about it or something), so they expanded it slightly into a thin and still semi-professional hobbyist book called "Men and Magic". And then the whole thing sort of exploded.

In the Princeton Simulation Games Union, us d'n'd geeks had a certain amount of official scorn for the original "Gygax" rules. We'd mostly all made up our own that we liked better, that included dice with more sides, smoother binomial distributions, schools of magic and pantheons and skill ladders that displayed various sorts of geekily pleasing symmetry. But still, however full of our own innovations we got, we always knew that Gygax and that other guy were behind it all, and as much as we scorned the official TSR rulebooks for most purposes, there was always a copy of "Men and Magic", and for that matter even "Chainmail", lying around somewhere...

Videos!

I was thinking of embedding some of these newfangled video things right here inline in the page, like shiny modern XXIst centurty weblogs do, but I decided that was too scary.

Rats laugh when you tickle them! Really. I swear. And they're cute, too.

Diebold Accidentally Leaks Results Of 2008 Election Early. I know, I know, widely cited a long time ago. But I haven't been reading weblogs much, and I didn't even know The Onion had a video news service.

And speaking of our shadowy overlords, this "Evolution" film from the yummy Dove Campaign for Real Beauty illustrates how our shadowy alien overlords are preparing us for the coming of the stretch-necked, slope-shouldered, huge-eyed plastic-skinned occupying force. Worth watching.

Hijinks!

Polish teen derails tram after hacking train network, where "hacking" consists of "sort of looking at for awhile and then reprogramming a TV remote control so as to be able to use the city's tram system as a sort of giant train set".

Who would have thought that the public transit control system required some kind of security or something?

(This from the veracode weblog, which seems worth a look now an' then.)

And a couple more links to more detailed NANOG information about that little prank where Pakistan deprived the world of YouTube (including, presumably, the giggling rats) the other day.

Fame!

Thanks to presumably Daniel (who is hereby requested to tell Sarah that she is omg gorgeous) we find that the venerable Language Log has noticed (and in fact quoted in its entirety) our little microfiction from the other day.

Woot!

(Called it "ultimate", too, heh heh heh.)

And from there we get to here, which lets us close tonight's entry by urging the reader to Google upon, or at least repeat frequently to emself, the words "hanpenis" and "enbreasties" (or my own personal favorite variant, "enbrestled". ]]> http://www.davidchess.com/words/log.20080222.html#20080228

The angel followed the single silver airplane with his eyes, until it faded out of sight behind the hills across the bay. Then he took up his drink again, and turned back to me, to pick up the conversation where we'd left it.

I was struck again by how ordinary he looked, how completely human in every way except that, looking at him, you knew instantly and beyond any doubt that he was an angel.

"So in Heaven," he said, "you become exactly as you have always known yourself to be, exactly as you have pictured yourself, treated yourself, exactly as you expect yourself to be."

I looked over his shoulder, past the balcony railing, across the sun-washed water.

"And Hell?" I asked.

The angel nodded, as though agreeing with me.

"The same."

Maybe it wouldn't have been so bad if we hadn't been each other's First Contacts. Virgin civilizations, groping each other in the dark.

"Damn it, damn it, damn it," the smaller of the two men moaned, his head down in his arms on the broken table, as the sounds coming in through the half-boarded-up window swelled louder.

"If they wanted to destroy us, why didn't they just send a missle, an asteroid, a fucking army?"

The taller man took another drink from the bottle in his hand, staring without seeing at the window.

"We started it, you know."

"Bastards, bastards."

"We nearly destroyed them."

"Should have."

"It was the linguists," his voice was rough and slow, detached, almost toneless, "that went out in the first starship. We taught the Tanatha suicide."

"Bastards." The sounds outside moved away a bit, grew softer.

"Their language was utterly alien. No reflexive forms, strange verb tenses. Eventually they learned enough of it to try to ask them questions, eventually they asked them what their word was for 'suicide'. They didn't have one."

"Bullshit."

"They didn't. They had no reflexive forms, and 'to be' and 'to kill' were such utterly incompatible concepts that they had been literally unable to imagine killing the person that you are. Until we asked the question, and kept asking it until they understood."

He took another long drink, a deep breath, and shuddered. The man at the table raised his head just long enough to wipe his eyes.

"It nearly destroyed their civilization. They didn't have the millennia of evolved defense mechanisms that we do, the cultural institutions that discourage killing yourself, the structures to deal with it.

"They experimented.

"They died.

"Their cultures crumbled."

"Not fucking far enough they didn't," the smaller man muttered, and lay his head down again with a thud.

"They fell so fast. Our linguists came back on the last starship they sent out, along with what was left of their Tanatha colleagues. Half the crew died on the way, but they got here."

"Bastards."

"And their linguists, the ones that stayed alive, learned our language in return, and one day they knew enough to ask, to ask what was our word for --"

"No, no, no, no, no," the man slumped over the table moaned monotonously, as another explosion bloomed outside and a chorus of voices raised in an ululating scream, full of fear and an incomprehensible ecstacy.

"What's this one --"

"Careful, I wouldn't --"

"Ow!"

"Yeah, that's --"

"Ow! Ow!"

"Um..."

"Ow!"

"You don't have to keep --"

"Ow! Ow ow!"

"Um, you know..."

"Ow! What?"

"You don't have to --"

"Ow!"

"-- to keep doing that."

"Ow!"

"So why --"

"Ow! I don't know, it's -- ow!"

"What?"

"Kind of -- ow ow ow! -- interesting."

"So you humans are really quite competent," the alien said, leaning back with another alarming creak in the rocking chair, its massive feet up on the porch railing.

Rodriguez raised his eyebrows, "Not sure I'd go that far."

The alien gave a humorous snort, while taking a deep sip from the something-like beer mug in its left upper mandible (an ability Rodriguez still found disconcerting). "Not entirely complimentary, dear sentient," it replied, "in that now I must wonder, given this quiteness of competence, why it is that those of you that came to us at the first, and that still are the ones that come to us much of the time, that those humans are, without offense, idiots?"

The human nodded and leaned back himself, looking out at the children playing in the courtyard.

"A long, sad story," he said.

The alien beside him made an enimgatic burbling sound.

"Yes," it said, "we have those also."

Pakistan protects entire world from the evils of YouTube, sort of more or less by accident. Probably.

Techheads and other curious persons wondering how this happened are referred to RFC 4272 (January 2006), which contains interesting observations such as these:

Border Gateway Protocol 4 (BGP-4), along with a host of other infrastructure protocols designed before the Internet environment became perilous, was originally designed with little consideration for protection of the information it carries. There are no mechanisms internal to BGP that protect against attacks that modify, delete, forge, or replay data, any of which has the potential to disrupt overall network routing behavior.
...
The legitimate BGP peers have the context and information to produce believable, yet bogus, routing information, and therefore have the opportunity to cause great damage.
...
By modifying or forging this field, either an outsider or BGP peer source could cause disruption of routing to the announced network, overwhelm a router along the announced route, cause data loss when the announced route will not forward traffic to the announced network, route traffic by a sub-optimal route, etc.

Etc, indeed.

To change the subject entirely, the problem with certain things happening on a Saturday is that when you go to work on Monday, no one says "Hey, congratulations on surviving that extremely nasty 18-hour bug; I really hate those!". Everyone acts as though everything was perfectly normal, even though, from your point of view, the world has just recently stopped being a sort of little Hell, and returned to its pleasant and shiny normal.

Still not sure if it was food-poisoning or a really high-speed replicator infection or what. No one else has shown the symptoms, though, touch wood.

There are some links I've wanted to put up for awhile now that would like to accompany a clever discussion of just exactly what they're about, but given that I haven't gotten around to writing that discussion yet, it's left as an exercise to the reader. What might the amusing phrase Google as an MD5 password cracker mean? (See also this tool and this one and this one, and maybe think about the really good image-compression method that involves giving a number to every image anyone actually wants to send, and just sending that number instead of the image.)

One last thing I want to mention before it scrolls away is Justice Scalia's recent statements on torture. The underlying argument he wants to make here is that if there are any circumstances, however implausible, under which one might, however reluctantly, do something to someone, then "we're into a different game", and you can't anymore say "it's no good" (or at least you can't say it smugly and with great self-satisfaction; one generally assumes that that was a rhetorical flourish and not a key part of his argument).

Scalia cheats (as usual, we grumble) in both directions. He describes the usual specious "what if the only way to save everyone in Los Angeles was to smack this guy on the head?" argument (which is specious because not only is that really unlikely to ever be the only way, it's also really unlikely to be even a way, since presumably the guy will just lie until after the bomb goes off). And he uses as his examples of things that aren't really so utterly bad a "smack in the face" and "sticking something under the fingernails". He doesn't mention waterboarding ("controlled drowning"), say, or electrodes to the Ghraibs, or threatening to behead someone's children, or poking out the eyes of innocent babies. So it's not clear where in there, if anywhere, Scalia would still draw a line.

Maybe he would draw the line at threatening or damaging anyone other than the probable (or possible, or President-declared) bad actor from which one is trying to get the information. But why doesn't his argument above, against drawing lines, apply just as well to that line? If smacking the bad guy's kid in the face would get the bad guy to talk and save all those Angelinos, then presumably you still can't say "Oh, this is no good,", can you?

And if you can't say "Oh, this is no good" about poking out the eyes of completely unconnected innocent babies (because there is after all some wildly implausible scenario involving the psychotic baby-hating Evil Emperor Xenu and the hydrogen-bombing of every planet in the galaxy in which you'd be willing to poke those eyes out), then you can't say "Oh, this is no good" about anything, and he's sort of reductio'd himself out of the room.

Don't'cha think? ]]>