My October 18th entry has 460-odd views, about ten times what most of my entries have. Something tells me that certain words in it attracted a certain kind of person. Probably not the sort of person I’d want to be within 50 feet of. (Am I talking about perverts, or FBI agents looking for perverts? Or both?)

One candidate has a history of higher education, global travel, and business experience. His opponent worked in a restaurant. This is why you should vote for her.

Remember, Americans: Don’t pick leaders who are intelligent and experienced. And who like corndogs. Corndogs begin with “c”, just like “communism”.

So, every so often, I check my gmail spam because sometimes stuff I want gets tossed in it – legitimate notices from companies I buy from, MMO news that isn’t from wehaxuraccount.ru, etc. Today I spotted a truly interesting subject line, namely “You’ll become a real sexual predator with these meds”. Because, uhm, yeah. You know how it is. You get older, you just can’t quite get up the energy to commit sex crimes any more. I definitely need some drugs to give me the boost I need to hang around dark alleys and wait for sloshed teens with fake IDs to stagger out of the bar. Then there’s the choloform, the dragging them into the windowless van, and we don’t even want to discuss how digging even a shallow grave afterwards causes my back to spasm. So I definitely need some of that stuff.

Not sure why the link is going to “TakeASeatOverThere.com”, though. Chris who?

Schools might need to spend money on EDUCATION, not sports. Naturally, all those inbred redneck Republicans are opposed to this, and… wait, it’s Democratic progressives? (Seems to me that all tax money given to schools should go first to core education (language, math, science, history, etc.) , and, if anything is left over, to cultural education — music, art, etc. Sports, which are not part of education at all, should be funded by bake sale or private donations, never by tax dollars. In a perfect world, nothing would be funded by tax dollars, but we live in an imperfect world, and since the odds of eliminating taxation altogether are pretty much nil, it makes more sense to focus on spending the money appropriately. If you can’t stop Don Vinnie from shaking you down for protection money, you can at least try to demand he provide protection.)

So, it may be possible to prove we’re in a computer simulation. (Of course, if we are, how do we know it isn’t rigged to give a false reading of this proof? Contrariwise, how do we know the universe doesn’t simply have these limits, just because?). But, anyway, we’re going to do this by… building a computer simulation. Which leads to the next question — if this is a perfect simulation of  the universe, then it will enable us to build a simulation of the universe inside it. And in that simulation, someone could build a simulation. And, the other way — the universe that is running this simulation may, itself, be a simulation, and so on, infinite, in both ways. (For that matter, if you can run one simulation, you can run two, or a hundred, or a thousand, or… parallel world travel may be possible; it’s just a matter of switching servers, not actual realities.)

I just hope when I die, there’s no griefer camping my corpse.

So, pads/tablets are good for a lot of things, but clumsy for phones. If you make a phone screen big enough that it’s a decent eReader or Netflix player, it becomes progressively clumsier as a phone, and current table sizes are just *barely* tolerable for the work we ask them to do; they really should be an inch or two larger. (“That’s what SHE said!”)

Thus, I propose we borrow another idea from Star Trek — the Phaser I/Phaser II construction.

As all real Star Trek fans know, the small Phaser I, useful for covert missions, snaps into the framework of the larger, pistol-like, Phaser II. I propose that pad/phone design adopt a similar mechanism, where a phone can “dock” into a tablet, where it will automatically sync data, etc. It should be designed to snap in and out in a second or two. You can tap into the “phone” functionality while it’s docked, sitting with the tablet on your lap or desk, using the forward-facing camera and microphone. While walking, or in other situations where using the table to communicate would be awkward or intrusive, you snap the phone out and leave the tablet on your desk, in a bag, etc. Because the devices are designed to dock and sync with each other, it’s superior to having two completely separate devices which require a third device — a desktop PC — to swap information. Having one snap into the other makes travel easier. It also makes it simpler to design a phone with much less processing capacity, since it’s assumed it’s more of an adjunct to the tablet than a fully functional device in its own right. 

I’m thinking a dock on the back, with a thin sheet of protective plastic to prevent the screen scraping on the metal of the tablet. These things are so thin now that it wouldn’t seriously interfere with storage or use.

(Likewise, I think we should have a dock or connector on the long edge of a tablet, that lets it hook into a desktop machine, where it becomes primarily a screen and touch interface,with most of the processing work done on the desktop. When you leave work, you just undock and go. Applications, etc, will have data storage that is automatically synced based on filters like file size and so on; the UI department can work out the details.)

I got this link from StuffFundiesLike.com. Posted this reply there, and here, too.

http://gawker.com/5948725/reasons-why-you-cannot-be-a-bridesmaid?post=53259669

My reply:

Never mind the whole bridezilla thing, her grammar is atrocious. I hope at least one of the targets of this missive sent her back a marked-up, corrected, copy, with the note “Acceptable for a first try, but the second will be better. You know. Just like your marriage.”

(As a side note, when did a wedding stop being about beginning a life together with someone you love, and become about being a wedding?)

(As a side note to a side note, I’d rather go to a wedding in Westeros than to this one. Yes, even THAT wedding. Or that one. Or the other one.)

And, in other news, water is wet.

I mean, really, this is dog-bites-man. The only thing “newsworthy” about it is that it’s being stated by the government, which implies that there’s some sort of back-room deal-making going on, because the government doesn’t rat on itself, generally. Not due to any kind of ethics or loyalty, mind you, but due to the fact just about everyone is enmeshed in the same web of favors and obligations and the only time you see anyone held accountable is when they’ve run out of favor-credit, or someone has called in a lot of big ones. (To distinguish this from the usual illuminati conspiracy theories, I don’t think there’s any one or two powers pulling all the strings; this is just the net effect of thousands of people being people. Humanity, not its institutions, is the problem. We’re evolved to live in groups of 200-300. That we’ve managed to cobble together a global society of 7 billion people is utterly astounding, and we’ve done it by hacking our own neural net.)

It does mark a very interesting turning point — it is now possible to criticize the DHS without being labeled “Soft On Terrorism”. 

Scientists plan to crack Earth’s mantle, unleash Great Cthulhu.