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Abyss & Apex : Fourth Quarter 2007: Wikihistory

11/15/2104
At 14:52:28, FreedomFighter69 wrote:
Reporting my first temporal excursion since joining IATT: have just returned from 1936 Berlin, having taken the place of one of Leni Riefenstahl’s cameramen and assassinated Adolf Hitler during the opening of the Olympic Games. Let a free world rejoice!

At 14:57:44, SilverFox316 wrote:
Back from 1936 Berlin; incapacitated FreedomFighter69 before he could pull his little stunt. Freedomfighter69, as you are a new member, please read IATT Bulletin 1147 regarding the killing of Hitler before your next excursion. Failure to do so may result in your expulsion per Bylaw 223.

At 18:06:59, BigChill wrote:
Take it easy on the kid, SilverFox316; everybody kills Hitler on their first trip. I did. It always gets fixed within a few minutes, what’s the harm?

At 18:33:10, SilverFox316 wrote:
Easy for you to say, BigChill, since to my recollection you’ve never volunteered to go back and fix it. You think I’ve got nothing better to do?

More accurate title:
Primer: If someone says they understood it the first time through, they’re either a liar or a savant.

I sat slack-jawed through the first viewing. People were being drugged and hidden in crawl spaces and I had no clue why. I giggled when they folded up one time machine and put it inside another. Then, right away, because I had eated shit-load chocomut ice cream, I watched it again and understood more. Then I studied several charts on the internet that tried to explain it.

The movie is famous for its low budget and does not develop several of the characters that play important parts. The dialog is bare bones and the special effects are limited to spreading some curry sauce on a weeble. Don’t expect to crawl inside of this movie and forget your problems like you can with 12 Monkeys. With that in mind, this movie is worthy of careful study because of the intricate plot and the unfolding wonder of the technology and the depraved thirst for power that it spawns. At one point I really got a sense that they irrecoverably broke reality with their blundering.

Bill tasked me to Pick up your nearest book and go to page 123. Find the fifth sentence, and post on your blog the next three sentences. Acknowledge who tagged you, and then tag five more people.

Here is the sixth, seventh and eighth sentences of page 123 of To Kill a Mockingbird:

The door was opened, and the gust of warm air revived us. Zeebo lined On Jordan’s Stormy Banks, and church was over. I wanted to stay and explore, but Calpurnia propelled me up the aisle ahead of her.

I got it out of the library because I heard the woman who played Scout in the movie on MPR. I loved every page.

No tutorial system devised by man could have stopped him from getting at books.

I am learning what to think about it by reading some study guides.

I’ll task the following people with this exercise

Long Burn
Papa Twister
Sam
Steve
Alex

what were they thinking?

I arrived at a busy intersection this morning to find a long line of cars waiting for a train to clear the intersection. There were two bicyclists waiting when I pulled up and a fourth was close behind me. When it became clear that the train wasn’t going anywhere soon, we all carried our bikes across the track behind the train. When I got on the (empty) road I looked behind me to see a fifth guy carrying his bike across the track. This made me giggle.

Nice to bike again. I’ve been avoiding all activity except watching Scrubs. Back feels a bit better and I’ve shaken off the darkness that came along with back pain.

The Great River Water Park opened up on May 30 at the site of the Oxford Pool in St. Paul. The Oxford Pool remains the same. They just added a water park next to it. This entire package is a fantastic attraction. I was skeptical when I heard they were building this as a water park, but we tried it out yesterday and it gets a big thumbs up from the entire family (especially Kate, who didn’t even go). There is a kiddie pool with fountains, slides and ladders that was just right for our 4-year old. The older kids disappeared into the water slides and large pool. The large pool even had a diving board and a giant floating turtle anchored in the shallow end. All I’ve seen of diving boards recently are the cemented-over bolt-holes of removed liability. I sat perfectly still on a deck chair for an hour before I was even troubled by any parenting responsibilities. This water park had a good energy; no mouth-breathers detected among the staff or guests like some of the leechy private places I’ve been dragged to. It was clean and uncrowded, partly because the June weather draws people outdoors, for some reason.

The web site fails to mention it, but they have a family admission price of $16.00 that beats the individual admission prices listed.
This park put me in a good mood and made me hopeful that a beautiful municipal pool can still open in this age of lawsuits and entitlements.

page after page of crazy newspaper clippings

A cheap, tasty, healthy and easy meal I’ve been preparing for about 20 years is microwaved potato wedges.. Take 3 or 4 unpeeled potatoes, cut them up in 16 wedges each, sprinkle salt on them and microwave them on high for 15 minutes. If they are piled more than one layer deep, cook them longer and shift them around half-way through. They should get leathery and sometimes crunchy. They are kind of like an order of potato skins at a restaurant you find yourself at after a night of drinking and driving, except you don’t feel ripped-off afterwards because this dish only costs about 15 cents. You can eat them with cheese melted on top or with mayo, mustard and ketchup on the side. I sometimes throw some broccoli and shredded cheese on top for the last two minutes for a sizzling mass of vitamins, starch and fiber.
Be sure to slice the potatoes thin enough and, most importantly, cook them long enough. If they feel more like baked or boiled potatoes than old shoes, then pop them back in for 5 more minutes.
The reason so many people who have tried to emulate this dish have failed is because they can’t make themselves cook something in a microwave for 15 to 20 minutes. You need to get past that and get ready for protests from your co-workers for tying up the microwave for most of the lunch hour.

Kids love these. I called them potato nachos and we’ve reached no practical limit for how much they’ll eat.

A short time ago Frank asked me what was the biggest number I knew of: I said, “Googolplex”.
He said, “Graham’s number is bigger than that.”
I looked up Graham’s number.
Then I said, “I invented my own number that is bigger than Graham’s number, called Tim’s number. It is Graham’s number plus one.”

Yesterday, a kid I’ve never seen before asked me if I really invented the world’s largest number. “Tim’s number?” they said.
“Oh yeah.”, I replied, “Graham’s number plus one. Yep. That was me”.

I download all kinds of software. Games, security tools, networking tools, any of which could be corrupted by either a “man-in-the-middle” or a switcheroo on the server itself. Often the page presents a string such as MD5: d6adc9a5b7f130140bf726d47f3e1b7f on the download page. I should use this string to verify the download is legit. but I never do because I’ve never found a convenient way to do this on windows.

(Easy on linux: type md5sum file.exe and it will calculate the md5 hash.)

Last night, after watching a short video on IronGeek about md5, I checked out hashTab, a Windows shell extension that adds a tab to the dialog you see when you view a file’s properties. Click this tab and you can quickly calculate the md5 hash of a file.

Did I check the integrity of the hashtabs download? Not yet.

GET MORE AT ManBabies.com!

Revelation from the New York Times:

Left-brain injuries don’t necessarily lead to blissful enlightenment;

That is from a fascinating article about Jill Taylor, a woman who had a stroke that blew away her ego. and left her, after a long recovery, reasonably healthy. She is already an internet sensation, apparently, because her lecture at the TED conference is online.

I’m glad that we have her brain to look at and I truly do think it is a miracle, but her route to awareness kind of misses the point. She didn’t have to overcome her ego through thousands of hours of practice, facing down the delusions built in by evolution and society, it just got obliterated. Without it to contend with, she isn’t burdened with the human condition and so hasn’t really developed awareness.

I don’t know enough about monks, but I’m tempted to say the same thing about them. Yes, they have practiced for thousands of hours and have made unconditionally amazing achievements in awareness, but they did so in a controlled environment that removed many of the impediments that keep the rest of us from gaining “awareness”.

The Buddha’s followers resented his inclusion of “householders” into his inner circle. I contend that householders, those with positions to defend and in-laws to impress, have real attachments and benefit the most from Buddhist teachings, even if they don’t get as far towards enlightenment as the monks do. Jesus knew this too: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God”

It is inspiring, as one commenter says, to know that enlightenment waits inside all of us.

These three great pieces about oil should be read, even though you probably have oil news fatigue.

• Long Burn invited a guest speaker to his University who made some really interesting points. He doesn’t name the speaker, but he is chief scientist at the world’s second largest oil company. He painted a sobering picture. Two points that woke me up a little bit: Liquid fuels beat the hell out of anything else for energy density. Greater efficiency often leads to more consumption, not less.
• The mayor of Huntington Beach, CA writes about How Will Local Governments Respond to Large Increases in Energy Bills?. She has been trying to tell people about this for 3 years, but no one listens. This is something that worries me as a taxpayer in St. Paul. Consider cops, plowing, heating buildings, maintenance, street cleaning. It will be politically painful if not impossible to ramp down these activities. Add this to paying for retirees and possible loss in revenue due to economic downturn and we have a crisis brewing. The comments on that article are interesting as well.
• Indonesia has quietly left OPEC because they are now a net importer of oil. As cheaply available oil declines and oil producing nations grow, they’ll be using more of their own oil, making us further question why our economy is based on the stuff.