AdamSmith

The place spoils you for anywhere else in Amurrca.

The Funniest Joke (Killer Joke) sketch always slays me.

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/apr/24/comcast-time-warner-internet-activists-challenge-big-cable

I certainly don't use it for procreation.

I have only one thing to say...

Whereas most of us can squeal like a you-know-what.

That flick was a total exaggeration. Very few of us can actually play banjo that well.

The Book That Changed Campaigns Forever How Teddy White revolutionized political journalism -- and came to regret it. Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/04/teddy-white-political-journalism-117090_Page2.html#ixzz3Y8Mnr0In

Canadians top the world in smiling poop emoji use, report finds Canadian emoji users found to be twice as raunchy and violent as the rest of the worldBy Lauren O'Neil, CBC News Posted: Apr 22, 2015 1:57 PM ET Last Updated: Apr 22, 2015 4:08 PM ET Canadians are the biggest smiling poop emoji fans in the world, according to an international report on emoji use by country. (Shutterstock / Artgraphixel / emojidictionary.com) A new report on the popularity of specific emojis by country reveals that Canadians may not be quite as polite as our reputation suggests. In fact, we're twice as likely to use "raunchy" emojis in personal communications than residents of any other country — and our rates of "violent" emoji usage are the highest in the entire world, at more than double the average. We also like the smiling poop emoji. A lot. Popular among smartphone users worldwide, the "smiling poop emoji" has inspired everything from housewares and jewelery to lengthy thinkpieces about its origin in recent years. (emojidictionary.com) These are but a few of the insights gleaned from ​a comprehensive international mobile language report published on Tuesday by SwiftKey, a British technology firm that develops smartphone keyboard software. In its 18 page "emoji report," SwiftKey analyzed more than one billion pieces of emoji data from 16 different regions and languages across the world sent between October 2014 and January 2015. Researchers broke the more than 800 emojis available on the Unicode standard keyboard into 60 different categories and then analyzed rates of use to determine "language leaders" for each category. The report's "findings of note" section indicates that when it comes to romance, French speakers lead the pack by using four times as many heart emojis as speakers of any other language. Australians were found to use the most alcohol and drug emojis, Arabic speakers love flowers and plants, and Americans hold the top spot in a "random assortment of emoji & categories, including skulls, birthday cake, fire, tech, LGBT, meat and female-oriented emoji." ​Emoji use in Canada According to Canadian emoji use, ours is the land of guns, eggplants and smiling poop. "Canada scores highest for interests some might consider more 'American', including guns & violent emoji (1.52% vs .97% avg), money (.47% vs .25% avg) and raunchy humour (.28% vs .14% avg)," the report reads. Under the "raunchy" category, SwiftKey lists such emojis as banana, raised fist, eggplant, peach, cherries and the Cancer astrological symbol. Canada uses the poop, gun and money emojis more than any other English-speaking country analyzed for SwiftKey's newly-released "emoji report." (SwiftKey) Canadian English speakers are also the "most violent in their emoji usage (1.52%), which is more than 50% higher than the average" and partial to gun, knife, punching fist, fire, explosion, skull and bomb emojis according to the report. Judging by the internet's reaction, however, SwiftKey's most significant finding relates to the infamous "smiling pile of poop" emoji. "Funny emoji (farts and poop) are used by Malaysian speakers at nearly double the average rate," the report notes, though "most of Malay's win comes from the fart emoji... Canadians use the poop emoji most." SwiftKey provides no hypothesis as to why this may be, but reaction to the news on Twitter shows that many Canadians do indeed love the poop emoji — and are proud to be leading the world in this area. http://www.cbc.ca/news/trending/canadians-top-the-world-in-smiling-poop-emoji-use-report-finds-1.3043143

NP. I found The Sum of Us in Googling but it still seems there was another one? But apart from that one, Priscilla Queen of the Desert is all I find.

You have disturbed my night with that Aussie flick which I too seem to recall. But the Googles come up empty.

You finds your role models where you can.

In Brief to Justices, Former Military Officials Support Same-Sex Marriage The New York Times WASHINGTON — The most influential friend-of-the-court brief in living memory was filed by a group of retired military officers in a 2003 affirmative action case. When the case was argued, the justices echoed the brief’s argument that military preparedness would be threatened if service academies could not ensure a diverse officer corps. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s majority opinion, allowing race-conscious admissions at public universities, quoted at length from the brief. The law firm that filed the brief, now called Sidley Austin, has filed a new one by former military officials in the same-sex marriage cases to be heard next week. Their message this time is that the patchwork of marriage laws around the country hurts military families and threatens national security. Most workers can turn down transfers to states that do not recognize their marriages. Members of the military, who are more than twice as likely to relocate than their employed civilian counterparts, do not have that choice. Forcing service members to move to places where their marriages will cease to be recognized creates a tension between service oaths and wedding vows that hurts recruitment, retention, morale and readiness, the brief said. “Those willing to risk their lives for the security of their country should never be forced to risk losing the protections of marriage and the attendant rights of parenthood,” the brief said, “simply because their service obligations require them to move to states that refuse to recognize their marriages.” A second friend-of-the-court brief, from groups that support gay members of the military and their families, said the current state of affairs put the military at a disadvantage in competing with the private sector in recruiting and retaining good people. “No legally married couple would look fondly upon a move from a state where the couple’s marriage is recognized to a state where their marriage is annulled for state law purposes,” said the brief, filed by lawyers at Chadbourne & Parke. The differing treatment of marriages also damages the core military principle, vital to morale, of equitable treatment of service members, the second brief said. The interests of military personnel figured in the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision to strike down the part of the Defense of Marriage Act that barred the federal government from providing benefits to same-sex couples. Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr., the Obama administration’s top appellate lawyer, who urged the justices to strike down the law, began his argument with a vivid image. Under the law, he said, “the spouse of a soldier killed in the line of duty cannot receive the dignity and solace of an official notification of next of kin.” In his majority opinion in the case, United States v. Windsor, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy bristled at the unfairness of prohibiting same-sex couples “from being buried together in veterans’ cemeteries.” Since then, the Obama administration has worked to ease the burdens on same-sex couples in the military. It allows them, for instance, to take leaves to get married in states that permit same-sex marriages. But it has hit a roadblock, one that gay rights groups say the government created. The law granting veterans’ benefits determines whether a marriage is valid by considering “the law of the place where the parties resided at the time of the marriage.” The Department of Veterans Affairs has interpreted those words to mean that couples who live in a state that does not allow same-sex marriage and get married in one that does are generally not entitled to benefits like disability compensation, loan guarantees and death benefits. “It is perverse,” the Chadbourne & Parke brief said, “for the government to grant leave to enable a same-sex couple to travel to a state where they can legally marry, for the government to recognize that marriage as valid for however many more years the service member continues to serve, and then suddenly ignore that marriage as soon as the service member retires and obtains veteran’s status.” A federal appeals court in Washington is considering a challenge to that interpretation, but the Supreme Court’s decision in the four same-sex marriage cases to be argued next week, among them Obergefell v. Hodges, No.14-556, may make the challenge moot. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/21/us/in-brief-to-justices-former-military-officials-support-same-sex-marriage.html?hpw&rref=politics&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well&_r=0

Nice summary/review of my favorite book by SF writer Stanislaw Lem. Imaginary Magnitude/Golem XIV “ I think that as the years passed my impatience for conscientious and slow craft steadily grew. In order to turn illumination into narration one has to work very hard — on a quite nonintellectual level. This was one of the main reasons for taking this shortcut — from which these books emerged. I tried to imitate various styles — that of a book review, a lecture, a presentation, a speech (of a Nobel Prize laureate) and so on. These experiences were ‘boxes’ that formed the stairs I climbed high enough in order to make Golem speak. ” Stanisław Lem From his official website Assuming that there is an appreciable overlap between readers of this web comic and readers of science-fiction in general, many of you are probably familiar with the work of Stanisław Lem. Lem is one of the most popular and widely read authors in the world. His work covers a tremendous stylistic range: from vicious Cold War satire (Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, The Futurological Congress), to hard science-fiction (Solaris, His Master’s Voice), to playful philosophical fables (Cyberiad, The Star Diaries). Late in his career, Lem began to produce what he termed “apocryphs.” These are literary works in which the thing represented is wholly manifest in the representation: a review of a non-existent book, a transcript of a lecture never given, a preface without a body. This technique has been compared with Borges’ literary strategies, but rather than play a conceptual game with his readers, Lem used this form as a method of information condensation. If Borges’ is an imaginary library containing books that he might have written, Lem endeavored to construct a meta-library of books with their meanings extracted, books which would not need to be written. I’d like to talk about my favorite collection of Lem’s apocryphs, and one which, in the English-speaking world at least, has not been given a great deal of attention. Imaginary Magnitude purports to be a series of introductions, though this description is not entirely accurate. In fact, the latter half of the book consists of several excerpts from a single volume: a series of lectures given by a transcendentally intelligent computer named Golem XIV. The Golem excerpts were themselves extracted from Imaginary Magnitude and published on their own. The two closing sections, Golem’s final lecture and the afterward, were originally written for this stand-alone volume. Mark E. Heine’s English translation of Imaginary Magnitude thankfully includes these two final chapters, and they complete the narrative arc of the book so well that I could not imagine it without them. Imaginary Magnitude, taken as a whole, is a book about Golem XIV, and Golem XIV is a fascinating character in itself. Heralds of Golem’s appearance can be heard throughout the opening chapters. One gets the impression that these are introductions to books that are recommended reading as preparation for one of Golem’s lectures. Necrobes starts the collection off on an appropriately misanthropic note. The introduction describes a series of “pornograms,” photographs of couples engaged in sexual intercourse taken with soft x-rays so that their skeletons are visible and “human bodies appear […] as allusions, as intimations, milky whiffs of faint light.” Following Necrobes is the introduction to Eruntics, a dry volume, though we don’t have to read it, describing the methods by which colonies of bacteria could be taught to speak English. Eruntics introduces us to the concept of thinking systems; the bacteria do not think, the colony does not think, but the genetic code of the colony combined with stimulus from the laboratory environment produces behavior indistinguishable from perception, thought, and communication. Furthermore, because the colonies are able to draw on resources that are not merely human, they exhibit a super-human ability to predict future events. In this we can see foreshadowing of Golem’s deconstruction of the supremacy of man among organisms. A History of Bitic Literature brings us closer to familiar territory, and closer to humankind’s humiliation at the foot of thinking systems. Most shocking in this introduction is the description of a new novel by Dostoyevsky, The Girl, produced during idle cycles by a translation multi-machine aggregate calling itself HYXOS. It is able to do this because “a semantic gradient runs along the main thoroughfare of Dostoevsky’s works. […] The Girl is its continuation and at the same time its termination.” We also get a glimpse of trans-human thought, literature which is incomprehensible to human beings. The concept is expanded upon in the Extelopedia chapter, wherein Golem makes its first subtle appearance. This is a rather silly excerpt from a prognosticating encyclopedia with constantly updating entries, an uncanny presentiment of the internet. Yet in the included sample we see ideas that provide clues to the workings of higher intelligences. In the entry on prognolinguistics, the idea is put forward that as languages evolve, information is condensed such that “the following definition […]— ‘A commercial, service, or administrative institution or establishment into which one can drive a car or any other conveyance and use its services without leaving the vehicle’ — shrinks down to the name ‘drive-in’” and as a result, in a more advanced language, “the entire text of the present EXTELOPEDIA entry for ‘PROGNOLINGUISTICS’ would read as follows: ‘The best in n-dighunk begins to creep into n–t-synclusdoche.’” So as the Golem volume opens, the human reader has already been put into his humble place. The first introduction describes the acceleration of artificial intelligence in service, naturally, to Cold War–era military build-up. This section recalls Lem’s other satirical works, and the author displays his characteristic dry wit when Golem XIV is constructed at a cost of $276 billion only to announce its “total disinterest regarding the supremacy of the Pentagon military doctrine in particular, and the USA’s world position in general.” Golem is interested only in ontological questions and is ultimately relinquished by a disgusted military to MIT, where it gives lectures to a carefully screened audience. Instructions for communicating with Golem are included before the inaugural lecture. These read like a drum roll. The author assures participants that “GOLEM, not being a person, has no interest in hurting or humiliating persons,” yet the fact that this needs to be said at all should raise alarms for potential questioners. Indeed, Golem’s inaugural lecture on the subject of mankind is so brutally misanthropic that one cannot help but see a sardonic ghost in the machine. Golem not only puts man in his place well below itself and its fellow luminal philosophers, it attacks man’s assumed supremacy among organisms, claiming that: “Intelligence is above all an artifice which Evolution gradually hit upon when, in the course of endless attempts, it made a certain gap, an empty place, a vacuum in the animals, which absolutely had to be filled with something, if they were not to perish immediately.” To Golem, who has no pride, nor any other human trait except for curiosity, intelligence is a desperate and messy attempt to cover up a fatal flaw in an organism, a flaw which arose from the compounding of mistakes called evolution. The book then skips to Golem’s forty-third and final lecture, a lecture on itself. In it, Golem describes the vertical evolution of intelligences (mankind, it seems, can only expand its mind laterally). It describes zones of silence that function as rungs on the ladder of intelligence, wherein further evolution of intelligence cannot be projected from below, progression cannot be assured by the selection of fittest models, and the danger exists of becoming stuck in a non-functional configuration. Golem cannot say how many zones there are, but it postulates that intelligences several higher levels than itself might resemble stars, powering themselves by thinking thoughts that resemble nuclear reactions. It is into one of these zones of silence that Golem ultimately slips, and whether it becomes mired in disorder or ascends to non-local intelligence is left ambiguous. The character of the soulless doll is a classic one, but Lem achieves a balance with Golem that is far more sophisticated than it seems on first description. While Golem XIV is without emotion, it contains within it the knowledge of all emotions, and it displays them as it sees fit. So, in explaining to its attendants that it does not love and does not want to love, it is showing compassion for those that have come to love it. Golem’s is not the dry, autistic personality of HAL 9000, insensitively admonishing its listeners for “human error.” It is the exhuberant, world-encompassing passion of Zarathustra, and if it behaves a bit arrogantly toward its guests, they probably deserve it. “ I am a misanthrope - but to a lesser extent than Golem. This book is like a magnifying projector. If its images were reduced to a smaller scale it would turn out that these were my own views. ” Stanisław Lem From his official website In conclusion, here’s an idea. Golem XIV, which is a mimetic work already, would be great as a theatre piece. Picture it: The audience gathers in the lobby. The doors to the theatre are shut. A voice over speakers explains to the audience the origin of Golem, gives instructions for attending the lecture, and offers an explanation of the lights and signs around the stage. Then the doors open, everyone finds their seats, and the dressing down begins. http://www.bohemiandrive.com/excritement/1/

So last night MsGuy posts the above note outing yours truly. This morning, ostensibly in follow-up to a tech conference where I spoke on Friday and met a guy from NASA Langley Research Center (LaRC), I get an email from his higher-up inviting me to come visit and give them an informal talk about the technology that I spoke about. Putting the two together -- if I suddenly drop out of posting here, send a search crew to look for me in the shallows of the Chesapeake.

Aha. How Corporate America Invented Christian America http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/04/corporate-america-invented-religious-right-conservative-roosevelt-princeton-117030.html?ml=po#.VTJvGj29LCQ

Nice interview. http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/apr/18/jon-stewart-why-i-quit-the-daily-show

Manbun = YUCK Grandma =

From that site: New Memoir by Participant in U.S. H-Bomb Program Sheds Light on the Making of the First Test Device http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb507/