Pure Hawaiian White!
In a former life as a college Film & TV student, I worked on a mock commercial written and directed by a classmate friend of mine. It featured two guys in a run-down warehouse — one wanting to buy from the other some “premium Hawaiian white stuff” for his wife who desperately needed it.
The seller opens a case containing bags of white powder. The transaction is interrupted, and the commercial ends, with both men fleeing sudden sirens and flashing red and blue lights. The piece is really funny because it was done in the mid 1970s, during the height of the sugar shortage when prices skyrocketed.
Just this past week we had a whole other kind of “white stuff.”
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13 Comments | tags: cold, doohickey, November, snow, sugar, temperature, winter | posted in Life
Those of you who are bloggers, I don’t know how much you look through your Spam Comments list. I delete spam without looking at it too much. But you must go to the list to click the button, so you can’t avoid seeing some of it. Sometimes there’s a new twist on the basic trick: “I’m a real comment! No, really, I am!! Please let me through!!!”
But most of it becomes familiar in a short time. You see the same comments vaguely praising your post without actually saying anything about it. Some of it makes you chuckle a little; some of it makes you despair. It’s a kind of constant background noise.
Then last September it seemed like there was a lot more spam than usual.
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20 Comments | tags: blog, blogging, die die die spammers, die horribly spammers, die painfully spammers, die spammers, vanish from the earth spammers | posted in Rant
You did, too, right? (Non-USA residents excused.)
2 Comments | tags: democracy, election day, government, I voted, politicians, USA, USAnian, vote | posted in Life
I’m not sure Eric Clapton is the greatest guitar player ever. I can think of a number of other guitar “gods” that seem in his class (Carlos Santana and Lindsey Buckingham, to name just two). But I am pretty sure the late (great!) George Carlin was without peer. I can’t think of anyone else who lasted longer (50 years!), worked harder, gave us so many classic bits or been more consistently good. He died in 2008, at 71, having done his 14th HBO special just four months earlier.
I thought he went through an angry period (the 1990s, maybe?) where he seemed to lash out indiscriminately at everything and everyone. He seemed a little less funny to me then, but he was never really wrong… just angry. I only ever really disagreed with him once.
And that was on his view that you shouldn’t vote.
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40 Comments | tags: Carlos Santana, democracy, election day, Eric Clapton, George Carlin, government, Lindsey Buckingham, politicians, USA, USAnian, vote | posted in Life
Gourdians are an earthy and generally shameless lot.
It was originally posted here in 2011. It was technically a re-post — I copied the text and photos from my 2008 article in an older social media site that’s since gone to seed. (First rule of Older Social Media Sites: No one talks about Older Social Media Sites.) This one is only interesting if you want to see the first appearance.
I re-posted it a year later, in 2012. Again I copied the text — it was a re-post, not a re-blog. As a bonus, I added some new pictures and an introduction that explains the piece. This is a good one to read if you only read one.
The following year, in 2013, I re-blogged the re-post. Combination of curiosity and laziness. I didn’t love the results — re-blogs edit like comments, not posts. There is some new content there, but you have to also read the re-blogged article. Still, it’s the recommended course of action.
So go read this one. Happy Kiss A Gourdian Day!!
See ya next month!
4 Comments | tags: dirt, Gourdian, gourds, humor, Jack-O-Lantern, kiss a Gourdian, orange, pumpkins, re-post, vines | posted in Writing
Congratulations to the San Francisco Giants, winners of the 2014 World Series! This is the eighth win overall and their third win on consecutive even-numbered years (2010, 2012 & 2014). On the flip side, until 2010 they hadn’t won since 1954 when they were the New York Giants — that’s a 56-year drought!
They did get to the ball in 1962 (lost to the Yankees) and 1989 (swept by their neighbors, the Athletics) and 2002 (lost to the Angels). Given them credit for taking the 1962 and 2002 Series to seven games.
I’ll be honest. I was a lot more thrilled last year when the Boston Red Sox won.
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19 Comments | tags: baseball post-season, Boston Red Sox, Kansas City Royals, Madison Bumgarner, Major League baseball, MLB, San Francisco Giants, World Series, World Series 2014 | posted in Baseball
I was tempted to call this Sports Thoughts, which would have been a great title, but which also would have implied a connection to the previous four posts. And there isn’t one. At all.
Instead, this one ties back to a post from last June: Digital & Analog Sports (which, obviously, you should go read now). That one explored how sports can be grouped in terms of continuous (“analog”) versus interrupted (“digital”) play. It also touched on how sports can be viewed in terms of their MacGuffin (often some type of ball, but sometimes a puck or “birdie” or some other object), and it considered their field of play (location, size, configuration).
This time I’ll explore sports in terms of opponents and teams.
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5 Comments | tags: board games, card games, computer games, games, George Carlin, Kansas City Royals, Keith Olbermann, Major League baseball, MLB, NASCAR, skydiving, sports, World Series | posted in Baseball
Despite the title, this post isn’t as strongly related to the previous three as the naming convention suggests. I don’t really have much to say about religious predestination. If anything, my views on spirituality are key to a belief in free will and choice. The religion I was raised in seems (at least to my eye) quite clear that we are allowed to choose our actions.
The connection to those other posts lies in picking up the thread of physical determinism — normally a necessarily atheist point of view — and doing a riff on religion, spirituality and atheism. This is the post I started to write last Sunday when my mind took off in a completely different direction.
This time I’m going to try sticking to the subject!
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66 Comments | tags: atheism, atheists, beliefs, Dawkins Scale, deism, Dogma (movie), God, Grand Canyon (movie), ideas and beliefs, materialism, physicalism, science and spirituality, Spinoza, spirituality, theism | posted in Religion, Sunday Sermons
Too Weird for Words!
I started with the idea of physical determinism and what it implies about free will and the future. Then I touched on chaos theory, which is sometimes raised as a possible way around determinism (short answer: nope). In the first article I drew a distinction between “classical” mechanics and quantum mechanics because only at the quantum level is there any sign of randomness in reality.
It turns out that the quantum world is decidedly weird, and while we have math and models that seem to describe it extremely well, it can honestly be said that no one actually understands it. This time I’ll tell you about some of that weirdness and how it may (or may not) apply to the world as we know it.
The key question here is whether our brains make use of quantum effects.
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16 Comments | tags: Erwin Schrödinger, Heisenberg Uncertainty, J.B.S. Haldane, Max Planck, quantum effects, quantum mechanics, quantum physics, Schrödinger's Cat, Werner Heisenberg | posted in Physics
Tick-Tock, goes the clock…
Last time, in the Determined Thoughts post, I talked about physical determinism, which is the idea that the universe is a machine — like a clock — that is ticking off the minutes of existence. The famous French mathematician, Pierre-Simon Laplace (the “French Newton”), was the first (in 1814) to articulate the idea of causal determinism.
We now know that quantum mechanics makes it impossible to know both the position and motion of particles, so Laplace’s Demon isn’t possible at the sub-atomic level. (It might be possible at the classical or macro level — that’s an open question.) Sometimes the issue of chaos theory is proposed as a counter-argument to determinism, so I thought I’d cover what chaos theory is and how it might apply.
If you want to skip to the punchline, the answer is it doesn’t apply at all.
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8 Comments | tags: butterfly effect, chaos theory, Edward Lorenz, KAOS, Lorenz attractor, Mandelbrot, Mandelbrot fractal, Pierre-Simon Laplace, strange attractor, weather, weather prediction | posted in Math
Logos con carne 