I was in san diego taking care of some mum business last week while Lynda did her conference thing.
Overall, she is about the same. She has settled into the place more than I like, but that is the nature of the beast. I wasn’t able to be with her enough to establish a consistency base-line, but it does seem as though she now only recognizes me as her husband.
The goal of getting her up here still remains, but getting in touch with the right people is still a problem. She is well cared for, but a little rough around the edges. Generally, from what I was able to gather she is in a fairly good mood.
The staff as far as I can tell generally lies about maintaining her hearing aid, it wasn’t on and there were no batteries, despite the claims to the contrary. Her weight has stabilized, but she can no longer get out of her chair without assistance. The staff and her doctor think obesity and weight gain are good things. I disagree.
Archive for Blog – Page 9
reading the newspaper this morning I decided to add yet another category to my ever-growing list, the Globe table. The Globe table is my business name, a play on the round table, Shakespeare, and the misguided belief on my part that Latin has no word for world. So I could have called it the world table, but instead decided to go with the Globe table.
I may actually go back to calling this site Gavin Impett’s Globe Table as I go along depending on how the mood strikes me. In this context I’m looking at the Globe table as something in the larger context. For instance stories about the Catholic Church encouraging people to pray before they have sex, retreating ice sheets in Antarctica, water riots in Somalia, prowling kitties in rural America, and green energy in the California desert, don’t seem to have much in common or as parts of the same narrative, but in fact they are part of the same ecosystem, on a planet with an increasingly shrinking availability of resources, all competing in the struggle for existence.
The guiding light of the Globe Table is the connection between seemingly disparate subjects that are a part of the same structure, in short, if it is any one thing it is probably wrong.
Slowly working out the bugs on my links section. It took me a while to get the links function up and running, but one more thing beaten into submission.
One of my goals is to add five or six links a day at least for the time being. Once I get that up and running the next job is of course the joys of ping backs and letting the people know who I’m linking to that I have linked to them. The goal is to create a general interest/culture site with an emphasis on natural selection. There really isn’t anything quite like this, so if you want one you more or less have to go one building yourself.
The major things I do notice, especially when putting together the general news catagories, is how shitty the American newspapers are when compared to other newspapers around the planet.
One explanation I’ve seen for this which makes a certain amount of sense to me is American newspapers are more dependent on advertising dollars than most of the other nations in newspapers which rely on the subscribers to pay the bill. What this means is that American newspapers are more accountable to advertisers than they are its readers – meaning it should not surprise anyone when they stop writing for human beings, instead focusing on the corporate entity as its reader.
This probably goes a long way to explain why religion is so tenacious in this country as it is primarily a private enterprise as opposed to state run as is the practice in Europe and again focusing on the corporate entity, in this case God if you will, as opposed to human need an interest. It’s a bit of a stretch this connection I am making, but I do think the same basic elements or play.
It’s like the connection between the pro-life pro-death penalty crowd fighting it out against the pro-choice anti-death penalty crowd. They’re so busy shouting past each other it is very easy to forget and get lost in what they are actually fighting about. As someone who does think that abortion should be legal and the death penalty banned I really had to sit down and think through the ethical ramifications of my position, because it simply isn’t one that the mainstream media puts forth.
My objection to the death penalty isn’t because I think it’s always bad to kill people, since I do think it is important to maintain a military and four police officers to have the option of deadly force. My objection to the death penalty is based solely on the notion that I do not trust any government that has the power of life and death over its citizens and frankly I think that anyone who trusts the United States government to get a death penalty case right when they can’t get anything else right are a bit on the foolish inside.
But our beloved mainstream newspapers really don’t put forth this rather obvious observation in the conflict between these two groups because they are more interested in perpetuating the confusion and division between these two groups which serves as a distraction from advancing a more humanistic agenda.
Anyway, gossip sells. I do admit the connection I am making this a bit more murky were the subject of religion and economics are concerned, but I do think they are more or less the same thing. the bottom line to all of this is, of course, I can spend more time writing and putting my links together and just getting the fundamentals to work.
One ,of the problems of writing about, life, the universe, everything, is the difficulty in biting off coherent enough chunks as to not come off as a raving conspiritual loon. Hence my joy at the million dollar prize just awarded to the team that figured out a better mousetrap for identifying movies that someone might actually want to watch.
One of the interesting things that came out of this prize was the difficulty of competing groups to come together to beat the winning team, which led from day one. The conclusion the article offered is that cooperative behavior doesn’t make a lot of sense. Another conclusion, mine is a small group with the hordes on their ass can get mighty focused, especially when there is a real prize involved.
I will say, I’ve been more than a little dicking around with getting the movie meme site back up and running, but a the failure of “Creation” to find a distributer in the US and a new movie, “The Age of Stupid” has inspired me to pull my thumb out of my ass. So warts and undernourished all, work on that will kick back into gear after the weekend.
The interesting thing about the Netflicks prize is it actually makes me want to re-sign up for their service. The next part of their contest is to devise a recommendation strategy that actually takes into account the demographics of the person asking for the recommendation. In other words, the prize so far is based on the collective wisdom of some hundred million reviews independent of a given individual’s demographics, which is cool when you think about it. Human beings are more similar than not, so as a predictive device, it really doesn’t matter that much at the individual level, what someone might like, since generally, we all like the same things.
This is a problem for the “I’m an individual only” crowd since, as a casual paruser of Netflicks, their recommendations are generally pretty good, but they do on occasion go off into crazy land.
I suspect this has to do with the simple fact, the statustions who put together these programs don’t think like Darwinists/evolutionists – meaning they don’t put a lot of thought into individual/group interactions because they don’t know their species.
And some of the basic assumptions about our species as it applies to mathmatical modeling is really, really wrong. This is why on any given night if you can’t think of 99 other movies you’d rather watch than Citizen Kane, you are probably full of shit. Moonraker or Citizen Kane, think about it.
I do think whatever they come up with at Netflicks will be more worthy than what they had before and pleasing people is after all a good and worthy goal. My goal is to be pleasing and find evolution friendly and accurate movies that I enjoy watching and actively choose to share. In other words, I still think I can kick Netflicks ass and just maybe the NY Times is right, an individual can come up with a different and better way of recommending movies based on a different understanding of our species than the model as it is presented today.
Monday night is dance class night around these parts – meaning no football and no dancing with the stars. So imagine my joy tuning into the news of the hour and the various souls weighing in on Tom’s dance debut.
It took me a bit to figure out what dance he was moving to and it occurred to me independently of being told, “well, you could do a Cha cha to it, or more correctly in this instance the bastardized cha-cha-cha to it, followed his feet and sure enough, that was what he was doing. One of the judges made the same observation, when you actually did the cha-cha, it was quite good, but that other stuff.”
It brought me back a few years when I was throwing high kicks for Sonny Umpad at his place, something I generally don’t advertise that I can do. Sonny Baptiste happened to be there and was watching very intently. In the back of my mind I was thinking of a photo of Baptiste punching his way through 15 or so cement blocks, when I turned to him and said, “What?” Baptiste said, “I’m not saying nothing, man. I can’t do that?”
Tom DeLay sliding across the floor on his knees, “I’m not saying, man. I can’t do that.”
And I’m willing to bet none of the jealous bitches who put him down for showing up can either.
Anyway, since the distinction between a cha-cha and a cha-cha-cha is back on the air waves, I’ve decided to start yet another category, this one for the martial artist.
I’ve been thinking about this for awhile and as an organizer for a meetup group of dubious existence, I should have something to say on the subject. In my other life, I am a Sifu of Mo Meng Do, and a Guro of Visayan Corto Cadina Eskrima and like most folks who have run the course, have an opinion of the process it takes to get there.
I’ve also had a certain back and forth as how to incorporate this into my general writing over the years and it was my interest in the martial arts that made me willing to suffer the early days of the internet and web-building. Movie Memes also grew organically out of people asking me what I thought about a piece of movie choreography and how it might work in the real world. And for that matter the wisdom of showing lethal techniques in a movie, pro and con.
Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the web-site, I had a series of shall we say disasters. That swank new link page catagory ended up taking a few years off my life. For some reason, it decided to eat all my posts. Who the hell knows.
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Another step towards a happier, more useful site, for me, and hopefully for you.
My old blog roll quickly grew out of hand, so I am taking the time to rebuild the thing from scratch.
I’m using a plugin called wp-render blogroll links, which sounds painful, but it is letting me organize my links by subject and pages which is pretty cool. It creates its own set of problems, but nothing like the bad old days.
Anyway, it does look like I am starting to do more functional work than spending all my time looking for something that does work, if you know what I mean, and if you work with computers, I know that you do. It is going to start as a trickle at first, but I’m optimistic enough to run it on this site, and we will build from their.
You just can’t keep an imaginary unseen entity down these days, it seems. Darwin takes another run at god, this time on nova.
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Every now and then something comes along and even I am impressed by the sheer stupidity and cowardice of my fellow species. I am referring, of course, to the claim by the producer of “Creation” that this movie is too controversial for the American people. The possibility there might be a shred of truth to the claim Read More→
We went out last night to the Inner Sunset and discovered many of the restaurants which we were familiar with have closed. Including PJs oyster bed, which was especially sad. There were two new banks to choose from which I should suppose should not surprise, given its location, but it did. I started counting the restaurants that were still around from when I started going there in 1980. There are still about four or five restaurants that are still in business and we ate at one of them, Villa Romano, an Italian restaurant/pizzeria, which has gone upscale since I started going there many years ago.
It’s a good restaurant, we ended up with the pizza, cooked by their chef who has been there since the 1960s. Lynda must’ve been looking especially American that night, since they served a thicker crust pizza than they normally do. The trick as it turns out, is to ask for the thin crust pizza.
Today, I spent a good deal of time searching for more WordPress plug-ins, given the speed with which I found the spammers, or I should say, the speed in which they found me.
Anyway, the heat is getting to me today, my sinuses are brutalizing me, and I think it’s time to do something else, besides hang out online.
