One year ago today: November 24, 2018, 7,735 miles.
Five years ago today: November 24, 2014, Cinema Paraiso.
Nine years ago today: November 24, 2010, divorcees with top-secret knowledge.
Random years ago today: November 24, 2002, toothpicks, police, & stupid women.
I wonder, maybe there is no such thing as a bad picture frame? As long as the corners are mitered correctly, every way you orient the pieces comes out looking like something I’ve seen on the wall. I just thought of something, hang on while I go check. Okay, I’m back. There are no wall picture frames in this place. In the room I’m right now there are sixteen hanging pictures and none have frames. There are another four with frames, but they are not on the walls. I suppose frames eventually add to the weight. You get, by comparison to frames at the places that sell them, fairly large displays of picture hangers. That seems almost a technology of its own. Next time in Wal*Mart or the hardware place, take a look at the sheer variety of hangers. I never trusted the stick-on brands, and this is the blog that dares.
The Mars jackhammer mission from a year ago, what happened to it? The earlier probes had scoops and drills to poke through the surface but the InSight lander was to drill down 15 feet. Instead, after a foot into the surface, it decided to quit work and spend its allowance taking selfies. That’s what you get when you don’t buy the service contract. The lander carried other instruments and has so far detected 15 marsquakes, although NASA is hesitant to call them actual seismic events. Come on, people, what else could it be? Bigfoot? (Later, on October 26 of this year, they reported there were actual quakes.)
The failure of the drill is blamed on “unusual soil conditions”. What, NASA? You mean like the kind found on Mars? These NASA people and their matching team shirts have turned the space program into a half-ring circus. Have you ever noticed how stage-managed the shots of the control room are? They are all facing the same direction just before they do their version of the end-zone dance. The camera is so, so careful to include one of each. Except babes. Like the phone company, NASA doesn’t hire babes. Accompanying photo shows lander drill disposition.
Yeah, right. The British government has been pro-safety since their pre-empire days. Even if they had to press-gang the men to do it. And how about that “new” condition called gaming addiction., or is it VGD for video game disorder? If you ask me, it’s another one of those situations with “no clear definition”. Like being hooked on pinball machines, but since everyone under 30 knows the world began in 1991, they have to give it a name with connotatively more social consciousness.
Did I ever tell you I went through my own pinball machine era? Sure, in my late twenties. Wait, I can explain. I owned a laundromat and regularly walked around with eight or ten rolls of quarters. Women would ogle, at least in my imagination. I had almost bought a video arcade instead of the laundromat, and there was a spot across the mall where I could play the machines and keep an eye on my business. After each work day, I got off the bus to empty the cash boxes. It was too far to go home for the last hour until closing time. So I played the pinballs, moving on to the early video arcade games when those came out.
Doghouse with A/C.
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The mystery deepens. Sparkie found these claw marks in the Tennessee mud. So what’s the unknown? I didn’t rake anything, in fact, I put up a hook and left the rake hanging on the north side of the building. This is soft clay directly in the foot path. I walked over that area dozens of times right up to dark the day before. I would have flattened any marks. I’m fairly certain nobody broke into the back yard after that and raked the pathway. I matched the tines up and if it was the same rake, it was held at a skewed angle. Possibly, this yard has been the victim of the Mad Rakist. Latest evidence indicates he lives in the Mt. Juliet suburbs and drives a late model 17.5 HP riding mower, olive drab or John Deere green in color. With airpods up his nostrils so the rap music comes out his gaping maw whenever he passes a Starbucks
My background is that I programmed A.I. back in my early thirties, and drew a lot of the same conclusions I stand by today. I took one course each on machine learning, expert systems, and LISP (list processing). I developed an amateur application to identify precious gems. I found that while machines (computers) could appear to reason and become smarter, the amount of power and memory grew exponentially—and memory was very expensive in my younger days. I learned the tradeoff between single and multiple programmer code. The single always carried the logic pattern of the human creator (making it iffy), and any group project watered itself down to the lowest IQ on the team (making it even 'iffier'). Teamwork guarantees failure the instant any new situation requires quick and painful reaction. In that way, it mimics bureaucracy. Some may say certain teams react quickly, to which I say that's because those situations are not really new. Like in sports, how can any "play" be new when they all have names?
Once more, a placeholder photo generates interest, so this video of the carpenter’s helper stays.
ADDENDUM
What’s this, a new disease from vaping? That should not surprise us, and it is called “popcorn lung”. This made the news years ago when people who worked in microwave popcorn factories got lung inflammations from breathing the vapors from butter flavoring. The condition has the usual ten different medical names, collectively called wet lung. Anyway, the part that caught my eye is that the symptoms can be confused with heart disease.
In another revelation, Tim Berners-Lee, the guy who couldn’t type but invented the World Wide Web, has come forward with a plan to save the Internet. He wants to prevent misinformation, surveillance, and censorship. And prevent misuse by those who want to exploit, divide, and undermine. Has Tim been reading this blog? At the moment, I keep away because he is being endorsed by Google, MicroSoft, and Facebook, a sure sign of corruption.
But I’ll follow along to see how close they get to the solution I proposed here years ago. That is, a filter that allows users by the millions to categorize their findings. The filter could then be set by each user to simply ignore any garbage. No, it is not the same as letting the masses pull things in their direction. It works on the same principle that good money drives out the bad. In my system, a site that advertises “free” would be flagged if it was something different. The categories are not about content, but intent. Think about it.
