better not come around here again

well, what are you gonna do

[seat-safety-switch]

Before we get started today, the International Energy Agency told me to make a little announcement. If you have a radioactive isotope of beryllium in your mouth, spit it out. Doesn't matter if it's beryllium-7 or the more common -10, you can't eat that shit. Everyone should have figured that out in grade school. Thank you for your time.

Safety warnings have been getting wilder as our world becomes more intricately dangerous. I've spoken about this before: fifty years ago, most warning signs were like "don't put your cigarette out in this." Nowadays there's a ton of cautions about radio interference with your Xbox controllers if you eat a cupcake the wrong way after having major dental surgery.

Part of this is because the demands of the customer have become more sophisticated. Every day, we're doing shit that would have pissed off a NASA scientist, and not even thinking about it too hard. Last week, I got mad that the free wifi on an airplane wasn't very fast. My buddy made some kind of special collar that lets us hear the thoughts of dogs, and then he threw it out with the other clutter on his desk when his in-laws were visiting.

Unfortunately, human brains are still basically the same as fifty years ago. Most of us would still be considered "kinda weird" in the 70s. There is a much wider gap of knowledge that has to be expressed to your average run-of-the-mill ding-dong in order to explain to them just how much trouble they are in. That's where the warnings are coming from: you practically have to include an undergraduate lecture to get people up to speed with the concepts involved, before you tell them not to put those concepts in their mouth.

So the next time you see a ridiculous safety warning, make sure to say thank you to all the technical writers who had to go through a brain-blasting exercise just to fit it all on the little sticker. And read the whole thing, why don't you? It's cheaper than college.

[regexkind]

Higgledy-piggledy

Sinkdog the Ingenue

Tempting the lonely with

Innocent charm

Reaching a paw out with

Conviviality

Coaxing my hands to the

Dishwater warm

[namedr]

[vren-diagram]

[omagpies]

changeling

(i was a pretty chirpy kid at first)

[moldable]

[fieriframes]

[World’s cycles never change—up and down, from age to age.]

[eightyonekilograms]

It doesn't bring me joy to say this, but the older I get the lower my opinion is of Douglas Adams. I think HHGTG is two good books followed by three painfully mid ones, that Adams was kind of a cranky ranting traditionalist in that specifically English way a la Tolkien, and that if he hadn't died in 2001 he probably would've been radicalized by 9/11 the same way as the Hitchens brothers. I bet he would've campaigned for Brexit side-by-side with John Cleese.

[hungwy]

they just put the dead flag blues by godspeed you! black emperor on kidz bop 54

[mezzodical]

and the playground is all muddy with a thousand lovely water slides

[mtxyqmpsfqklt]

I think a big part of postmodernity is that the state makes the social contract with individuals and not with families. It's that the basic organizing unit of a country is the adult human being, not the married man. The freedom to be in society without dealing with your dysfunctional faction of it, the freedom to trim the tree of tradition as we see fit. It makes everything far more flexible, better able to absorb shock. It's far less dehumanizing for everyone involved.

[max1461]

Thinking about different websites...

The worldview of redditors is really Bronze Age or perhaps Iron Age in a truly interesting way. Deeply transactional, concerned with honor and commanding honor, with everything founded on property relations. The comments of any AITA post will evince this. It is "patriarchal" not in the sense of being misogynistic (which it sometimes is and sometimes isn't), but in the sense that it is structurally like the morality of the archetypal Patriarch of the isolated family unit, very Indo-European. The Man who rules his own little kingdom, his family, and who deals with other such Men through a certain kind of economically-inspired honor code. Most redditors are liberal enough that they deal with their spouses as other Men though, and indeed with their children once they reach a certain age. But I think even this has some historical precedent.

It's all about who has the Right to do what, you see, it's about who can and who can't and who must. Very Norse, very Bronze Age, very Indo-European. The redditor sees themself (actually or aspirationally) as on top and as agentic. They speak positively of learning hard lessons and of teaching hard lessons. Their world is a world of contracts, not abstract and mathematical but specific and personal.

This is notably not the ideology of 4chan, which anyone who's been on that site much should know. 4chan's ideology is much less confident in itself. The 4channer sees themself as beneath, not on top, either with acceptance or with resentment. Frantz Fanon might have something to say about it. The 4channer is the subaltern.

And here? I was going to say that tumblrianas are somewhat domesticated, but I don't think this is exactly right. It's more like the world-sense of eunuchs in a harem, desperate for stimulation. Scholastic (though not scholarly) and estranged from the world—from normalcy—for reasons they can't escape. And they know this, and have mostly elected not to try. "Eh", say they, "I will read about life in one of my books," or perhaps just as commonly "I will simulate an outside-life in here with the other eunuchs, and it will be better than what they can make on the outside anyway". Maybe that's true; it probably depends on you and your eunuch crew.

I don't think I'm any of these types of guy. I've spent more of my life as a lurker than a poster. Lurkers are a whole other type of deal.

This is of course all "bullshit" you must understand.

[wewillmissyou4ever]

[awwfulsounds]

Sony Vaio PCG-GT1 desktop and Smart Capture application Microsoft Windows Millenium Edition operating system 2000 (x)

[gofortheeyes]

@ev

[mervynbunter]

Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)

[femmenietzsche]

If they'd named it Shannon instead of Claude the world would be at least 3% more psychosexual now

[krisonthefrontporchwithabeer]

Don't come to elf practice tomorrow

[loving-n0t-heyting]

so a buncha the programmer types i hang around used to wax lyrical over the quaternions and the quaternion group and i used to blow this off out of a combination of

when pressed, their rsns for thinking the quaternions were important often boiled down to the cross product in linalg being a particularly efficient way to compute rotations in r^3, which came across (once u lrn abt the cross product a bit) more than anything as a parochial, anthropocentric quirk of our particular form of geometric embededness, to which many a nerd has been inoculated since middle school by edwin abbott

my properly mathematician friends, when i put the question to them, tended to confirm my intuition that the quaternion sfield (as well as the quaternion group associated w it) was, while interesting as a novelty and a practical gimmick, not an object of deep mathematical significance

what nobody had ever told me before, which i learned only a few months ago, is that there rly is an a priori depth to the quaternion grp, and one very much independent of the idiosyncrasies of the geometry of medium sized dry goods! it relates to the notion of a hamiltonian grp -- that is to say, a non-abelian grp with all subgrps normal

the concept of a hamiltonian grp is an extremely natural one. the concept of a grp itself emerges very quickly in mathematical study in no matter which direction one starts w, simply bc the underlying notion of a symmetry is so universally relevant. and, once one is trying to understand the concept of a grp, the concept of a normal subgrp is similarly inevitable: it is too deeply entwined w the fundamental notions of quotient, homomorphism, and conjugacy to avoid. thus the class of grps with ALL subgrps normal is a perfectly natural one, and the ubiquitous and indeed rather anomalously well-behaved subclass of abelian (commutative) grps a natural way to cleave that class into the "boringly" (abelian) everywhere normal and the "interestingly" (hamiltonian) such grps. the concept of a hamiltonian grp is thus one to invite certain kant-ish or plato-ish rhapsodes, standing as it does along a necessary path thru the mathematical heavens paved solely by Rsn for the sake of contemplation, divorced (so unlike the cross product as a gimmick for orienting the pc in a fps) from the contingencies of the empirical world, navigated by fleshly sense for the sake of practical expediency

and heres the interesting bit! there is -- not just a classification thm, but such a simple and elegant classification thm for the hamiltonian grps! it reads:

a hamiltonian grp G is isomorphic to the direct product of a) an elementary abelian 2-grp, ii) a period abelian grp with elements all of odd order, and 3) (drum roll...) the quaternion grp

so the quaternion grp is, not just contained in any non-abelian fully normal grp, but in a sense the sum total of all its non-abelian-ness!! for a grp to be fully normal is for it to be either the quaternion grp or abelian: any counterexample splits neatly into an abelian bit (always of a certain v constrained type, to boot) and the genuinely non-abelian portion of the grp, which is simply the quaternion grp H. thus H emerges, not as a coincidence or curiosity, but as the ~sole occupant of an extremely natural, a priori inevitable class of mathematical objects. marvelous!!

(the proof i found is from w r scott's grp theory and is, alas not, nearly proportioned enough to the elegance of the thm it is proving for me to clearly convey it, so youll have to either take this on faith or read abt it yrself)

anyway. all of this is to say: sorry programmers, u were right and i was wrong u_u