Best In Show
So the porno-obsessed Christian devotees at the Parents Television Council have been so thoughtful and diligent that they have compiled a weekly “Worst TV” clips website. Excellent work people, keep it up!
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Cyborg
I finished a chemistry exam yesterday in around 2/3 of the time it used to take. I attribute this mostly to my purchase and use of a really quite scarily efficient TI-89 Titanium calculator, which lets me input lots of dull data as simultaneous equations and solve instantly, instead of punching in data endlessly in tiny binary or trinary operations and fiddly little arithmetic and algebraic manoeuvres and carrying the results forward. This abacus-like approach to using a calculator is, of course, also prone to transcription errors. Of course, this does mean that I will not completely forget any algebra I might once have known.
Folding Table Theory of Start-Ups Is Shite
Michael Malone, a “celebrity business journalist” provided this convenient pat analysis of start-ups:
One of the tools I’m best known for is Folding Table Theory of Start-Ups. It says that when you walk into a new entrepreneurial company and you see a nice lobby and expensive office furniture, that company has its priorities screwed up — either it is more interested in comfort than success or it is over-capitalized and lazy — and it will never make it.
This “theory” has virtually no real predictive value. It’s just a fable, a nice, morally affirmative tale to tell around the camp fire. I’ve seen plenty of glitzy start-ups that succeeded. I’ve also seen plenty of dirt-poor, cheap-arse start-ups that failed. Classic example of glitzy start-up that prospered: Google. It *never* spared any expense in super-expensive office furniture or expensive employee toys and perks. And I also saw lots of excellent, spunky, bare-bones start-ups in San Francisco with wonderful products, clever marketing, driven people, and who patched their servers together with duct tape but that just couldn’t get a nod from fad-obsessed VCs.
And God Said: Eat Not Of The Foulness That Is Lettuce!
Here’s a religion I can really get behind: Yazidi, a sub-sect of (mostly Mosul, Iraq-based) Kurds.
According to the Yazidi, Malak Taus is a fallen peacock angel who repented and recreated the world that had been broken. He filled seven jars with his tears and used them to quench the fire in Hell … The Yazidi holy books are the Book of Revelation and the Black Book. The latter forbids eating of lettuce or butter beans and wearing of dark blue.
HP Lovecraft even namechecked them in The Horror At Red Hook.
Moving Forward
Fertile Ground
I saw a thread in MeFi, where some conservatives have, apparently, belatedly realised that there is a definite slide towards authoritarianism AKA fascism afoot within the USA. And that they are the main enablers. The article notes: I dont think there are yet real fascists in the administration, but there is certainly now a constituency for them.
You know, Hitler didn’t spring de novo into control of Germany in 1933 with the Gleichschaltung, or “reorganizing”. Weimer had been sliding into authoritarianism for 5 years or so, and then effectively ceased to function as a parliamentary democracy in 1930, when Hindenburg took to issuing edicts to rule by decree. Increasingly unscrupulous Chancellors used their fiat powers more and more freely until 1933, when the last vestiges of liberal democracy were swept aside. In any case, Brning’s government-by-decree from 1930 to 1932 was incredibly regressive, endorsing rightist social policies, implementing almost complete de-regulation, and cutting most social spending while raising taxes enormously on the poor and middle-classes but leaving the aristos and property owners untouched.
Papen and his sometimes allies the far-right Catholic Centre Party had flirted with fascism, orchestrated coups against some left-wing Lnder governments, and managed to de-criminalise the SA (which strengthened the NSDAP immensely during 1932-1933). And of course, when he became effectively powerless, Papen lobbied for Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor, obviously hoping to use the Nazi muscle to stifle Papen’s opponents. The DNVP party also allied with the Nazis during Weimar and was instrumental in helping to pass Hitler’s legal coup, the Enabling Act.
The widespread public acceptance of Fhrerprinzip was devised by the Nazis and sold to the public as a way of cutting through the plodding bureacracy and pointlessly separated police and judicial powers that were held to have weakened the Republic’s attempts to combat economic malaise and domestic/foreign terrorism.
Brand new we’re retro.
Spam Spam Beautiful Spam
Added an “email this link” button to the page. Go on, spam someone you love!
Aliens Amongst Us
I was thinking about the biological dogma that cephalisation can only occur
within bilaterally symmetric animals (Bilateria). It seems to me that a bilateral
symmetry would put evolutionary pressure on such animals to evolve
cephalization (and hence eyes/sensors and response cells) because they
are on “rails”, but that the evolution of a rapid, focussed
stimulus-response within a radially symmetric animal would be less
likely, but would still happen, given enough time and stimulus. Therefore *more* bilateria should exhibit cephalisation and developed brains (and in fact that is overwhelmingly true!) but that development of complex environmental processing adaptations analogous to brains could still evolve within Radiata. Of course, the proportion of radially symmetric animals that develop advanced mentation will be less than bilaterally symmetric animals, but it’s still happen. Maybe there *are* massive intelligent medusae on Jupiter?
Then I found the box jellies, Cubozoa. These things are cool. They are a class of “hunting” Cnidaria (jellyfish!) that have evolved complex eyes and rapid, directed locomotion (sometimes lunging up to 6 feet in a second to sting prey).
There’s is a close-up of these multi-eyed predators:
Here’s the mystery. The box jellies manage to use complex eyes (corneas, lenses, retinas), and directed hunting tactics, yet have no discernable brain or, indeed, a nervous column. They have a ring of nerve cells around their periphery and this seems to be sufficient to build models of their environment.
And along the way, I did find out where Cameron got his idea for the Abyss aliens: the comb jellies, or Ctenophora. They are free-swimming, aggressive predators, with a curiously streamlined radial symmetry:
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