Primate Brow Flash

I’m fascinated by this question: If people are dumb enough to believe Glenn Beck, how do they still have money to lose on his financial scams?
Click for a larger, readable version

this is what you are missing if you are not on goodreads:

Three weeks ago I held a yard sale. To pass the time I picked up this book I’d never seen from a box of books none of which I’d ever read and none of which I remember buying.

Of the many surreal happenings of that day one of the most strange was when, immediately after reading the first page, a well-groomed homeless man or a poorly groomed homed man rode past on a bike. He looked over and upon seeing The Eight lurched off his bike stumbled to my gate and, grasping it with all the force and desperation of a kindergartener being left by mommy, bellowed, “That book! Man! That book, man, is the biggest fucking mind trip it’s the best book you’ll ever read. That woman [the author] used to be an executive at Bank of America until those Southern fuckers came in and they fired EVERY woman in the company. God damn mother fuckers! But man, she’s beautiful too man, like a triple threat. And let tell you something…” and here he became quiet and conspiratorial, “….it’ll never NEVER be made into a movie. I won’t tell you why. 2/3 into the book BAM! [he yelled] it’s a fucking bomb on your brain! She just fucking drops that bomb on your brain and it’ll NEVER be a fucking movie!”

Can you name the book?

LINK

Latest Firefox Extension I cannon live without is Auto Pager.
Sites like Salon.com, Slate.com and nytimes.com feel the need to divide up the pages like they think I can’t concentrate for 5 pages of text all on one page. Reading 4 paragraphs and then having to click the “Next Page” button is a pain. So, here is this extension that automatically appends the next page to the bottom of the page you are on, so your reading does not get interrupted. With Auto Pager, if I load a site and then disconnect from the internet for some reason, I still have my entire article loaded in the browser for offline reading. Some, but not all, sites do have “show entire article” buttons, but this extension gives this feature to every web site.

There are many built-in sets of rules for common websites and common website software. phpBB, Google, nytimes, etc. For websites without existing rules, there is a nice wizard in Auto Pager to make new rules. The wizard allows you to click on the link that loads the next page so that it stores that and uses it every time you visit the site. It also allows you to specify which content (for example headers can be excluded) to load repeatedly. After a short learning process, most sites were very easy to create rules for. Settings allow you to control how many pages load by default.

I’m not sure yet about the privacy implications.

I’ve been meaning for years to write and draw in a journal about stuff I do with each tool.

So, today it starts:

The arm of a co-worker’s chair fell off and I had this in my bike bag. My brain showed me a slide show of how I could get this tool out, place the bolt on the tool and reach the bolt into the plastic casing and re-attach the arm. So that’s what I did. I love those slide shows.

Without planning it and without a map, I set out on Monday to “ride east until I could jump into the St. Croix River”. I rode out to Battle Creek park and then through Woodbury and Cottage Grove I picked up Trading Post road near Afton and followed that to Point Douglas recreation area where I jumped into the river.
Here is the route (without the mistakes and backtracks)
I love the rolling hills and secret farms near Afton. In the gaps in the trees I spotted a pack of baby lamas.
The morning didn’t feel all that humid, but after sitting in the air conditioning reading after lunch, my legs buckled when I walked back outside. The air felt heavy and hard to breathe. There were too many bugs to stand still outside for any amount of time.
My route took me through areas of the twin cities that are completely foreign. “Old Afton Trail”?? Ojibwa park? Cottage Grove Ravine? St. Paul Park deserves its own blog post. The city planners must have been on drugs. “Let’s put a megachurch here, next to the oil refinery. Next to that, lets put a boat marina, a school, and a pizza shop. Lets put a parking lot here in the middle of nowhere. And let’s put a bunch of random “bike route” signs here and there. Then, we’ll import a bunch of hillbillies and give them free houses. The empty space we’ll fill with giant rusting tank farms. Then, to really weird people out, here is the Ashland Avenue Grocery. It is a grocery store with a row of gulf coast apartments upstairs. I think Lee Harvey Oswald might have spent a few nights there in the early 60s.
I passed cookouts and baseball games and laughed to see a guy trying to light his grill in the humid air laden with refining by-products.

Some of the route follows the Mississippi River Trail (MRT). The MRT is really strange. It winks in and out. It is easy to lose. It takes the rider on insanely busy divided highways with chopped up shoulders.

about 80 miles. My legs feel like sacks of sand today.

Techdirt has details of how some statistics experts determined that a company called R2K was faking their polls for the Daily Kos

The first thing they noticed was that when R2K did polls that tested how men and women viewed certain politicians or political parties (favorable/unfavorable) there was an odd pattern: if the percentage of men that rated a particular politician favorable or unfavorable was an even number, so was the the percentage of female raters. It seemed like these two points always matched up. If the male percentage was even the female percentage was even. If the male percentage was odd, the female percentage was odd. Yet, as you should know, these are independent variables, not influenced by each other. That 34% of men find a particular politician favorable should have no bearing on why an even percentage of women find that politician favorable. In fact, this happened in almost every such poll that R2K did, to such a level as to suggest it being as close to impossible as you can imagine.

I love stories of detecting information inside of information. I think that is why I liked the Lisbeth Salander books so much.

Great comic about Homeopathy

from the comments at that site:

If you show me that, say,
Homeopathy works,
I will change my mind,
I will spin on a fucking dime.
I’ll be as embarrassed as hell,
Yet I will run through the streets yelling,
It’s a MIRACLE!
Take physics and bin it!
Water has memory!
And whilst its memory
Of a long lost drop of onion juice is infinite,
It somehow forgets all the poo it’s had in it.

http://www.newyorker.com/humor/2010/07/05/100705sh_shouts_ephron

She tried to get the umlaut to work. No luck. She pinged Plague and explained the problem. Plague was fat, but he would know what to do, and he would tell her, in Courier typeface.
<Where are you?> Plague wrote.

<Stockholm>.

<There’s an Apple Store at the intersection of Kungsgatan and Sveavägen. Or you could try a Q-tip.>.
She went to the bathroom and got a Q-tip and gently cleaned the area around the Alt key. It popped into place. Then she pressed “U.” An umlaut danced before her eyes.

Finally, she spoke.

“It’s fixed,” she said.

“Thanks,” he said.

She thought about smiling, but she’d smiled three hundred pages earlier, and once was enough.

Everyone in the house bounced out of bed at about 5:00 this morning and sat in the living room blinking at one another, wondering who the hell everyone else thought they were, invading this personal time.

I got out of the house earlier than usual and rode an extra long route to work. 14 miles according the odo. It felt like more than that. According to Google, it is 17.5. Kind of a big difference. Time to recalibrate. Anyway, nice and cool today.

help! I came to work without shoes. Without shoes I can stand to be in the same room with, that is. Renounce and enjoy, I guess.

The Spies of Warsaw by Alan Furst


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Neat little spy story. It gets off to a slow start as we go with our main character on the Warsaw social circuit, cultivating his contacts. It picks up and suddenly you find yourself with a book you don’t want to put down. Really great how he ties in carefully with history. There are appearances of real historical characters. The action parts were tight and get your heart racing.I got this book after I asked the guy at Micawber’s books for something to replace the Lisbeth Salander series. This was nothing like the Salander books, but I’m interested in reading more of this guy’s books.

View all my reviews >>

What a great teacher
This even beats the trick my math teacher played: gluing a quarter to the floor

The google street view guy is holding a vuvuzela if you drop him in South Africa. LINK

I’m trying this diet where I avoid sugar and most grains, especially wheat and corn.

Things I’ve noticed:

• dropped about 10 pounds right out of the gate. This is after cycling and swimming like a madman all spring and not losing an ounce. Don’t know how to explain this.
• The diet is surprisingly easy. One reason is that you don’t need to restrict your portions.
• A good name for this diet might be “Fuck-ton o’cheese”
• No more sleepiness after meals or in the mid-afternoon. I mean none, no matter how little sleep I’ve had.
• No more suddenly scouring the environment for snacks. My appetite is like, tamed
• Non-sweetened food tastes surprisingly sweet. Almonds, carrots, raisins, plain yogurt.
• No particular desire for sweets. of course, if a plate of chocolate cake passes under my face, all bets are off.
• Became very sensitive to sugar. On Sunday, I had a glass of Kefir. I had a profound reaction to all that sugar. My heart started racing. I drank the rest of the bottle and then fell asleep in my chair. When I woke up, I went into this zomboid Ambien state and just started eating Cheetos.
• Diet can get a little boring without pizza and pasta and toast. This requires experimenting with recipes. Yesterday, I cooked a bunch of chicken and nuts in peanut oil. Nobody could eat more than one McNugget-sized piece. It absolutely killed my appetite.
• Find myself hiding my diet so I don’t get mistaken for an Atkins idiot.
• Cobb salad is the greatest human invention. Bacon and avocados. Who knew?
• Full of judgment towards others. Those who are obese, those who require fucking pneumatic lifts to get around, those who are on the wrong diets, those who still believe in the food pyramid
• On the other hand, this mysterious, intermittent force we call “will-power” is such a crock. Our biology has to be tricked and/or reprogrammed to really change

This might be the best blog post ever.
It starts with a great quote.

We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.
–Richard Hofstadter

( Hofstadter is the author of The Paranoid Style in American Politics)

I’ve heard of that title before but never read the essay. It is a great read. I’ve been trying to come up with something like this for 20 years:

One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between its fantasied conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality it invariably shows. It produces heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed. Respectable paranoid literature not only starts from certain moral commitments that can indeed be justified but also carefully and all but obsessively accumulates “evidence.” The difference between this “evidence” and that commonly employed by others is that it seems less a means of entering into normal political controversy than a means of warding off the profane intrusion of the secular political world. The paranoid seems to have little expectation of actually convincing a hostile world, but he can accumulate evidence in order to protect his cherished convictions from it.

The post applies Hofstadter’s ideas to the tendency to blame oil companies or other, more obscure actors for high oil prices. He argues that instead of some conspiracy to make money, there is actually less and less oil readily available.

I will add a seventh element of my own. Oil conspiracy theorists can only think in terms of the social world, not the natural world. In this regard they are cornucopians. Therefore, agency must come from the social world. Someone is responsible for what is happening, not something. It is simply not possible that the world is really nearing a peak in oil production. Someone is only making it appear so.

standing in a crowd of teenagers in front of their school on the last day, another adult explained to me that we were watching a “sound like a wookie” contest.

a budding geekwad overheard and turned to me to ask, “Do you know what a wookie is?”

And I said, “They’re the cute little guys on the forest moon of Endor, right?”

He and his friends sniggerd at my cluelessness and corrected me. “uhhh.. those are Ewoks?” They did not realized that I WON in so many ways, the most important of which is that I look like someone who doesn’t know what a wookie is.

I’ve been reading a lot about Glycemic Index and was disturbed to find that according to some measures, bagels have a higher Glycemic Index than coca-cola. I find that hard to believe. I can eat a dozen bagels per day if they are available. If each one has 300 calories thats…. well, you do the math.

Cold cereal is another culprit. Even so-called healthy cereals (granola, special-k, grape nuts flakes, oat bran) have GI values through the roof. I love cereal. I finally found a cereal I can eat without sugar that has a reasonable GI. And, no its not Colon-blow.

It is, in fact, Uncle Sam’s, darling of South Beach Dieters and diabetics. The taste is… subtle. Some people don’t like it, but the flavor of the grain comes through. For variety I throw in chopped up apples, blueberries, raisins, or bananas. I like that I can pour milk into it, walk the kid the bus stop and come back and it is still crunchy. I’ve only found it at Rainbow, but you can buy it on Amazon, probably because it’s fiber content closely resembles that of a book.

A copy of A Woman in Berlin showed up in my house with a note on it: “This is my favorite book. Please read it before June 12.”
When I get a note like that, I get to it. This is the story of a woman in her 20s in Berlin in 1945 when the city fell to the Red Army. The Soviets ran around pulling women out of their bomb shelters and raping them, young, old, rich poor. This anonymous woman noted every detail in her diary. Her first rapist takes care to pry open her mouth and spit a hug gob in when he’s done. She ends up in sex-for-food arrangements with a Russian officer for a time. Rape is just the half of it, though, and conversations by the water pump are dark. “Better a Russian on my tummy than an American dropped on my roof” is one of the jokes of the time.

One of the themes of the book was the author’s view of German men. They often had to cower in the next room while the rapes were taking place.

These days I keep noticing how my feelings toward men- and the feelings of all the other women - are changing. We feel sorry for them; they seem so miserable and powerless. The weaker sex. The Nazi world - ruled by men, glorifying the strong man - is beginning to crumble, and with it the myth of “Man.” In earlier wars men could claim that the privilege of killing and being killed for the fatherland was theirs and theirs alone. Today we woman, too, have a share. That has transformed us, emboldened us. Among the many defeats at the end of this war is the defeat of the male sex.

The world of men hadn’t quite crumbled, though. When the initial anarchy settled down, the work of covering it up began. The Russians didn’t have to do much covering. The German men didn’t want to be faced with the truth of what happened in Berlin when they were off on their grand adventure. When her boyfriend comes back she wants to tell him parts of her amazing story of survival, but it is beyond his ability to listen. He leaves her. The citizens of Berlin were forced to wash soviet uniforms and load all metal and usable machinery into trains for shipment to Moscow. It was German men who were put in supervisory positions for this forced labor and the women who did the work. This book itself pissed people off when it was first published in the 1950s. Not the kind of pissed off where everyone read it and discussed it, but the kind of where the author was vilified and the book was ignored. It was shunned and was not republished until after the author was dead (in 2001).

The other striking thing about this book is the author’s voice. She just drops these casual observations about people struggling for their lives in a ruined city: “When it comes to heating, other people’s furniture burns better than your own”. It describes in everyday detail how people behave when everything collapses around them.

I wrote a careful review of DBVisualizer at my java blog.

We are having a rainy week here. My feet were wet after riding in this morning. I sat in my wet shoes for a couple of hours, not really noticing my feet. Then I found some dry socks and shoes in my drawer and put them on. What a mood-altering experience!