Scientific American. I’m cancelling my subscription because it has become another political rag. Issue after issue about the wrong issues. I don’t believe there is a thing the government can do to turn the economy around. They take credit for it, but they did not create or build the system they don’t understand it. Scientific American used to be concerned with the professed “science-based” economy that carried us to the top of the world. But now, they talk about the health department developing vaccines and the Republicans funding research and the Democrats refuting global warming. This is not science. This is politics.
Then I watched Paul Hogan movie, “Lightning Jack”. It’s the old outlaw cowboy plot but face it, his one-dimensional acting is still better than most anything from the last two generations here. It’s entertainment, if like me, you’ve never seen most of them. Like this submarine movie “Below”, which I think is about a haunted submarine. Duh. And “Last Man Standing”, all new to me. Same with “Most Wanted”, another sniper gone wild show.
I’m finding so many variations and versions of Qbasic, it is hard to find which is the most current. Whereas I date every post, other writers don’t seem consider it important enough to bother with. Fortunately, for what research I do, dates are not that critical. Have you heard of Cunningham’s Law? It states, “The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, it's to post the wrong answer."
Because programming languages generally overlap, I re-read my old 2008 textbook on Javascript, not the same thing as Java. Javascript is the “browser” language that processes data on your computer before it is sent to the Internet. This doesn’t seem important, but the Internet was designed to work with “dumb” terminals. Javascript takes the pressure off the servers by handling much of the traffic locally. It can’t create photos, but it can move them around. Chances are if you filled out any forms “on-line”, you actually filled it in on your computer, which processed it and submitted the results to the server. Thus, the servers don’t crash as often as in the old days.
Reading the code is a disappointment. It is one of those Yoda-talk embarrassingly backward languages written by people who never learned the proper purpose of punctuation marks. Like C+, the structure of the commands and code actually encourages bad programming. And you can extend that to bad thinking as well. I suggest such languages are so poorly created that 80% of your time is taken up debugging for typos. Even the way the all-important comments are placed gives the code a cluttered, sloppy look. I will certainly compare my slick output to any C+ program ever written.
Who remembers the time zone thing from Sunday? Well, I have not touched my watch, as in not even wearing it. And it now shows the correct time. I did no set it forward an hour after band rehearsal. So while all that sorts itself out, I’m doing extra reading because Marion was in bed an hour when I called as the time zone over there is also different. You know, time zones were about running railroads. But it takes America to really schmuck things up.
Food. I don’t eat big portions of anything anymore. But if you want some millet, I’ve got extra. No way can I finish that package, I’m tempted to feed the birds. I wrote to several people more than 2,000 miles away to see if they would like any millet. I even offered to pay for shipping. My compensation is that in this month of eliminating GMOs, I’ve discovered I have a taste for wheat products over corn. Good, I say. No more grits, instead we have cream of wheat. To you potential dieters out there, I can confirm even after you find something healthy you like, it takes about a month to get used to it.
And bowls. Bowls, I say? It’s an observation. As you move toward heart-healthy food, you find that more and more until the majority of your meals are eaten out of bowls. I examined the menus of several Chinese restaurants and except for what were larger serving trays, there were no individual plates for the diners. Everybody has their bowl. This prompted a quick glance at paintings through history. Has anyone ever studied the bowl-to-obesity ratio of America to the rest of the world? There’s a PhD in there for some rich kid.
Here, the last picture you’d think to see in this blog, for good reason. But here it is to examine the bowls. Shallow and small, but those are definitely bowls. For budding art students, there are water glasses on the table, but they are painted transparently and can’t be seen at this resolution. And the top third of the picture was cut off to make it fit. But my point is there are no fat people, no crutches, no canes, no waddlers, nothing but healthy looking people who eat out of bowls. Gotta love those knotted tablecloths. True, the meal is over and the waiter might have taken away the plates and silverware to count them. But I’m sticking with my bowl theory.
