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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.