They Never Give Their Right Name

As always, click and right-click gets bigger version.

More Doodling

Ant Man

Once in Texas I was hanging with some friends on a dirt bike riding excursion, which became apparent meant Mark and I watching Tim hog the bike and ride laps around a field someone had been riding on before. I saw some large ants trying to live in a subterranean nest right in the dirt bike path. Idly I saw a tiny pebble just slightly larger than the main ant hole, the size of a peppercorn, and I picked it up and gently lodged it there, with a feather light tap of my finger just to make the bugs work for their salvation.
 
The big returning ants became excited when they returned, unable to enter, and crawled ineffectually around and over the tiny pebble. Then, I saw the most interesting thing: one ant carried a tiny splinter of wood, and lodged it under the pebble and began worrying it. It seemed the ant was literally using a lever. This so contradicted my view of the universe that I shouted a curse! My companion glanced my way and as I began to explain the unbelievable, Tim decided to roar through on the motorcycle at that moment, obliterating the entire tableau permanently, ants, pebble, hole and all.
 
It's not the sort of thing you forget.

Pistol Pete

Here is Pistol Pete, normally called Petey or Pete.

Golden Bee

Some More Pictures

Wasp Wood

Here is a photo I took of some firewood that had some kind of wasps in it. It's white oak that sat for six months after I felled it; not exactly on the ground but maybe 2 feet off the ground. Minor limbs kept the bulk of it from resting on the soil.

As always, if you click on it and then right click on it and pick "view" it will open up in a new window and you can magnify it for more detail.

Right now this is my screen background.

The Education Situation

Looking on the internet for a graphic which showed a map of the United States warped into equal population areas and colored by education level, I couldn't find one. So I made one, and wow, is it crude. However, it is roughly accurate. The darker blue is more education, the white less.

(I used Sqirlzmorph and two maps.) As always, click on the cartograph to view it larger.

From this we see that Donald Trump is the next President.

The horror!

More Pictures

Deep Dreams

I've been fooling with some old images using Google's Deep Dream software. Here's a couple. One can click on them and right click to view largest versions. The first is a collage I made from an older collage and a photo from around 1985 of Jim Morrison's grave near Paris. The second is a painting I did that took about 7 years to finish (!) in about 1998, and which I ran through the Deep Dream software today.

Appropriate

Original image prior to Deep Dream stolen from Joel Achenbach

Doesn't Like Color Pink

This lady has a pink sweater and is sitting on a pink kayak, knitting another pink sweater, next to her pink carryall bag. Her pink water bottle rests on the curb. I got the orange kayak in the background. It leaked.

Video Trickery, Computers and the Internet

Regarding citizen videos, at present there's a large gap which needs to be dealt with, and it's a gap of gullibility regarding computers, the internet and video trickery.

I think there are a lot of tricks the public in general needs to be reminded about. If you need a history of them, I don't know how far back you want to go but I think about the TV show 60 Minutes, because it became clear they'd interview someone and then replace the questions they really asked them later with shots of them asking different but similar questions. Subtle manipulations.

Another I've thought of is the one where you are shown a video, it's said that this is a view of, for example, a police raid during the aftermath of the Boston bombing, but in reality it's a video of some other police interaction at a different time and perhaps place. taken at the usual distance, i.e., fairly far away. How would one know? How often have you watched one and assumed its provenance was as indicated, yet with no reason to really believe it?

Sequencing is often played with. One event is shown, then another, and the viewer assumes that at the actual event, this happened, one-two, just like that. Yet if there was any cut from a scene, it's possible the video was edited to suppress knowledge of intervening events or situations.
.
Lately we've seen actual political stunts pulled like this. The O'Keefe ACORN video was done like that.

One of Obama's employees got fired in a separate incident for out-of-context video.

People are believing video which should not be necessarily believed.

Once this gullibility is fixed, we can proceed with the transparency progress.

The Mountain of Lies Technique OR Brandolini’s Law

In July 2010 I wrote on David Brin's site here this thought:
"I began to recognize some time ago what I call the "mountain of lies" technique of political gamesmanship. A lie requires limited space, thought, and effort. Its refutation takes more space, time, and effort than the lie does. It's like missile defense.

"To be clear, on this matter the deniers spew the lies, and the scientific researchers are stuck with the effort.

"One supposes that some good can come from this, but it's an uphill slog and people should be aware of the tactic itself and not be sucked in without awareness of the structure of the common trap."

Preceding that, in 2009 someone called Mike the Mad Biologist wrote this essay (April 2009) titled "The Asymmetric Advantage of Bullsh-t" framing this as a problem similar to a decryption function - it's easier to encode a message than to decode, if your algorithm is one of a certain class. He mentions the inspiration for this line of thinking came from Julian Sanchez also in April of 2009.

 Now this is referred to as "Brandolini's Law," from a remark Alberto Brandolini wrote in January 2013. Discussed here as the "Bullshit Asymmetry Principle."

"The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.”

Also referenced is that the concept may also refer to the teoria della montagna di merda (“the Bullshit Mountain Theory”) as postulated by Uriel Fanelli, another Italian writer.

I suggest it is properly "Sanchez's Law" or "Fanelli's Law" but probably the recognition of it is more important than the name of it.

As a matter of fact, it's been around much longer, known as the Gish Gallop from "creationist" Duane Gish, and was named such by one Eugenie Scott.

Bullshit is well described here.

Tartar Sauce

It has come to my attention that the composition of the ideal Tartar sauce recipe is not widely known. I will attempt to remedy this.
The ideal Tartar sauce recipe has many ingredients, and so it's not for the lazy or unprepared cook. Its benefit is that it's delicious. Let's list the ingredients:
Mayonnaise, chopped pickle, minced onion or onion powder, minced garlic or garlic powder, mustard, horseradish, lemon juice, salt, black pepper, Worcestershire sauce, and Tabasco sauce.

The skilled cook will need only this list, the proportions will be intuitive with some adjustments to one's predilection. For the inexperienced, I can only offer some easy to find recipes found on the internet, and begin adding any ingredients listed above, with these caveats:

Go easy on the mustard. If you plan to make one cup of Tartar sauce (too much, usually, for a small group - a half cup should serve 4 easily) but for one cup, two heaping teaspoons of dark mustard preparation is sufficient, or one teaspoon of dry mustard powder. Garlic: go easy, one fat clove for this cupful. Worcestershire: one teaspoon. Juice of one fat lemon. One teaspoon of Tabasco sauce. It is important to use Tabasco because it is infused with the flavor of the oak barrels it is aged in. Black pepper: a teaspoon. Horseradish: I like a lot; a rounded tablespoon of pure mashed horseradish. Pickle, one small to medium pickle chopped: 3" long, 1" thick would be about right; perhaps more. Onion: half a small onion (2") chopped.

Prayer

Let us pray.
Dear Heavenly Pooch,
Please stop the plague infecting people's minds such that they think and write and opinionate in memes which seem wholly drawn from tawdry breathless headline writers who staff the tabloids and TV.
And though we forgive them for their trespasses, let us not adopt their evil.
Help us to stop saying things such as "attack," "cry out," "kills," "targeted," when we mean criticize, complain, ignores, and scrutinized.
Help us not fall into the pit of idiot vipers where people say things like "China thinks" thus and so, and "Russia wishes," and "IBM feels that...."
Amen.

Note To A Friend Whose Teenage Daughter Has Moved Out

Joel, you don't realize it, but you have a job opening at your house you may be tempted to let go unfilled. I advise against it. The job is drama creator.

Like many guys, you tell yourself there's too much; I'll leave it to the movies; life is sweet without it. Wrong. Like a dog without a job may turn bad, (he will give himself one, and it may not be the one you'd like) an avoidance of drama is a vacuum waiting to be filled, and the drama that finds you, and it will, will be some sort of metaphorical coyote.

You must think deeply on these matters, as Musashi would say.

T-Bone

On the Seinfeld television show a few years ago, perpetual failure George tried to get everyone at work to call him "T-Bone." It backfired, insofar as not only did they start calling another man "T-Bone," they gave George a new name he did not want at all: "Koko."

So I laughed and enjoyed the show, and a few years passed, and I started thinking, and I realized what George had done wrong.

I decided to test my new-found theory in the obvious way: I would see if I could get the guys at work to call me "T-Bone."

First I enlisted a friend, and we performed the pre-planned action only twice. The first time, we walked by my supervisor's office and my confederate said something like "So how was your weekend, T-Bone?" and I snapped "Don't call me T-Bone!" The next day we duplicated this scene in another area of the building, in front of another guy.

 That's all it took. Within two days, I was T-Bone. I pulled the fake-angry thing maybe once more just to set it in cement. After a week or so of being T-Bone, I ended it. I simply told all concerned that they had been unwitting parts of a scientific experiment. This sufficed to nip the whole thing in the bud.

I could have left things as they were, but I guess, unlike the TV character, I didn't really care to be named "T-Bone" at all..

Who Killed Cock Robin?

The Swiftboat SEALs for Truth or whatever, got me thinking. Those egotists have it wrong: 'tweren't the SEALs, it was the people who made their weapons that did in old bin Laden. The SEALs just pulled the trigger. (All this will ignore that the SEALs apparently were so scared of bogeyman Osama that one of them wet his pants and pulled the trigger just by coming face-to-face with the unarmed old fart, thereby losing the chance to interrogate one excellent source of intel for the actual War on Terra itself.)

So shortly after we cede credit to the assault weapon maker - assembler Madge, a temp making $13.50 in Mississippi, we will realize that actually Madge had nothing to do with it either: it was the one who made the bullets who is actually responsible. After some effort we will discover it was Madge's cousin Billy, in a small Pensacola company, who runs the automated bullet-making machine - a robot, actually; Billy just sort of watches it work - but which will lead us all to realize that it was really the robot that killed bin Laden.

Or to be more exact, the owners of the Singapore-based robot-making factory - Bain Capital Management.


(Who did kill Cock Robin?)

Pakistan

I think it is simplistic to view a country as a monolithic entity with a national ego. And since we are Americans one might think we would avoid this cognitive pitfall easier, as we generally according to our creed support respect for people as individuals and not as vast Marxist tidal epiphenomena.

I assume this viewpoint, while possibly being arcane to the political domestic publicity narrative, is well understood at basic preliminary levels of diplomatic work. So I view Pakistan as a country like many others, that has a sort of percentage of support for me and my nation's interests. The things where win-win situations apply, or are acquirable. There are negative views of the U.S.; we just wish them to be small percentages of real sentiment.

It is apparent that we have common interests with some responsible people in Pakistan, and I for one appreciate them and that we can work together.

I will continue to point out that public poseurs suggesting treating another country like a fantasy entity are foolish and should not be countenanced.

I am equally certain that no one will really take note of this pathetic fallacy, and we will be subjected to a never-ending  assortment of "Moscow thinks," "China wants," even "IBM feels," etc., for as long as the wind blows.