 | Last login: 23 hours agoJoseph is a single guy from Chicago, Illinois, USA. Politically Moderate, Underemployed Jewish Applied Mathematician / Electrical Engineer tutoring all knowing freshmen in Mathematics. This profile, like most of the Web, is optimized for a screen resolution of 1024 x 768, and probably best viewed in Firefox. A more complete listing of posts, including archived ones, can be found on the introduction page for this site, and is backed up on this page at Googlegroups, with occasional commentary found on Stumbling into the Void on Tribe.
Please click on "list" to see this blog the way it was meant to be viewed. You can return to your ring here. |
- Myoats - Create Something.
 Dec 14, 2008 8:42am  (116 reviews) arts http://www.myoats.com/create.aspx
  Drawing program and gallery of results. My crude scribble to the left might illustrate the idea: as one arrives at the site, one finds oneself presented with a circle in which nothing is to be found but those three short little wedge cuts you see in the middle of the virtual snowflake I've drawn. The cuts define a six fold symmetry that will automatically be present in your final results. Picture the circle divided into six wedges by the cut, cut up like a pie. You start drawing on one wedge, and whatever you draw there is duplicated on the other five wedges. You feel the need to make the copies line up and find yourself interacting with yourself, some sort of design arising out of the interaction, and a number of them are much nicer than the one you've just seen; eg. Fluffy75 by the amusingly (or frighteningly) named user Fluffybottom.
- Dec 14, 2008 8:41am
What's the deal with these "earlier unrelated blog post" links, you ask. Answer: Dealing with a surprise provided to us, free of charge, by Stumbleupon. As you may know, one tends to always be logged on, on Stumbleupon and yes, keep that in mind the next time you send a message to a friend who is "currently logged in" and wonder why you're not getting a reply for a few hours - the friend may well be asleep, and just have left his computer on, as many of us often do in these days of increasingly available broadband. The result of this is that we often don't see how our blogs look to those not logged into StumbleUpon until, ummm, we bother to look at our pages in another browser. Then, sometimes, we find ourselves faced with an unhappy surprise.
Only the first five pages are visible to them. However, you might note that my profile belongs to a number of webrings, so I really should make an effort to make my content available to everybody travelling those rings, not just those currently logged in. Stumbleupon offers a way to make that possible, however indirectly: one can link to the individual page for a post, and that page will be visible to everybody. StumbleUpon gets to do what it does, the ringmasters get what they want, and everybody is happy except for me, poor kvetching me, who has to find a way to slip those links into his text in a way that isn't completely obtrusive. Oh, look, here are some more ...
31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40
"Yes, Joseph, that was subtle, and what made it even subtler was setting those numbers in bold". One does one's best. So, one finds a post with a bunch of those little green numbers on it, that takes one back to a group of earlier posts, maybe one of which has some more little green numbers, and the posts all sort of interconnect, even without the help of the offsite blog post listings. For those who like to bounce around inside a site, I throw this one out as an option, and for everybody else, ... I don't know, you can put down bets on how long I'll be able to keep this up, before I just get tired of it.
Keep in mind, though, it is February in Chicago. The beach might not be beckoning for a while.
- The Official BB King Website
- Dec 14, 2008 8:41am (65 reviews) blues http://test.bbking.mcarecords.com/
B.B. King's homepage. Yes, that B.B. King. He's getting on but he still has it, and there's a schedule on his site. If you love the Blues, be sure to listen to get to one of this man's performances while you have the chance. Hoping that he has a lot of good years left in him, but at 80, he has certainly already given to his fans for longer than any of us could have asked. One of these days, he might just retire.
- dmf
- Dec 14, 2008 8:41am (379 reviews) music-theory http://www.thepixelplant.net/dmf/dmf.htm...
 Keyboard opportunity for the frighteningly untalented - which is most of us. On visiting the site, you are presented with the grid of keys you see in the picture and a suggestive wave rippling along it. You tap on one of the keys and it rises on the screen. Every time the wave comes by, an electronically generated note corresponding to one's choice of key is heard. One punches another key and hear how it sounds with the first, then more until one has inadvertantly composed a brief tune.
An interesting chance to explore an aspect of creativity most of us completely shut out of our lives at an early age; not great music, but it is fun. They should try offering longer boards and an assortment of simulated instruments, and I wonder if they already have. Regrettably, on going to the main page for their site, one doesn't even find a clear path back to the page with the keyboard; this is a moneymaking site on which the toys are difficult to find, so we might as well just appreciate the one we found.
- breakfast blogger & Blog Archive & A Jewish Christmas - Dim Sum
- Dec 14, 2008 8:40am (1 review) cooking http://www.breakfastblogger.com/2007/12/...
Some other Jewish Blogger tells the story of a trayf filled breakfast he enjoyed on Christmas, illustrated with attractive photography of the dim sum he enjoyed. What was that, bubbe? Did I ever eat anything like that? Oh, noooo, of course not ... 
- Astronomy Picture of the Day
- Dec 14, 2008 8:40am (103 reviews) astronomy http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/
NASA's scrapbook. Images from space probes, views through telescopes, etc., accompanied by brief descriptions of what one is looking at. Far more diversity is present than the selection seen on my blog might suggest; I just have a fondness for nebulae.
 
 
- http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/projects/genome/guide/img/Chimp1.jpeg
- Dec 14, 2008 8:40am
 (1 review) brain-disorders, wildlife http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/projects/gen...
Proper attribution for a publicly domained photo which I found on the Chimpanzee Genome Resources Page at the National Institute of Health, and used in a review of an unrelated site. There was something that seemed so fitting about the animal's expression.
- StumbleUpon - SU: Skepticism and Science
 Dec 14, 2008 8:39am (3 reviews) http://skepticism-and-science.group.stum...
"While this group may call itself "Skepticism and Science", it is run in a manner that is far likelier to appeal to the tabloid newspaper crowd than to those who know anything about science, judging from what I recently saw ... continued
- Dec 14, 2008 8:39am
 I signed up for "Skepticism and Science" on StumbleUpon and soon found it to be one of the most unethically run and badly misnamed groups that I've ever had the misfortune to encounter on this or any other website - and there is some fierce competition in that area. Somebody posted a link to an article about an alleged Chimp / Gorilla Hybrid. Glossy looking production values that might have taken in the more unwary and less educated reader who might have been fooled into thinking that he was reading something out of the legitimate scientific press - unless he got to the bottom, where credit was given to the Fortean times for the articles and unless he knew who Charles Fort was. Some amount of amused commentary followed, including a snippet from me in which I mentioned the attribution at the bottom of the article.
A day later, I looked back, found that most of the thread had been deleted, including the post I responded to, creating the illusion that I had responded to one post linking to one article, when in fact I had responded to a different post linking to a different article, and there we had our good Fortean friend dragonhead lying about what I responded to. So we have an alleged skeptic group in which cute little moderatorial editing games are being played with defamatory intent, in order to back up the antics of a group of pseudoscientific cranks whose notoriety was established decades ago.
Completely outrageous, and obviously a really bad sign of things to come. Groups like this should not be given a second chance. Do not join, do not post to, do not even read this worthless excuse for a forum.
Addendum, 11:18 pm Chicago time: True to form, a member of the group responded to my protest of the actions taken with a bald faced lie, denying that the missing posts ever existed and expressing open contempt over the very notion that some minimal level of integrity might be expected. For all of the posturing to the contrary, however, this particular abuse is a novel one, and the time to protest such things is when they are novel. I've sent my complaint in to Stumbleupon. I'll be pleased if they do the right thing, but I'm not building any expectation of that into my plans. I will say that until I see a civilized resolution, I'll refuse to post to any group on this site and I would suggest that others do likewise for at least one simple, excellent reason, if no other - who needs the headache? If Stumbleupon wishes to make nice with the trolls and lowlifes in these groups, as one particular lowlife gloatingly suggested that they did, then let them learn that this will mean that nobody but trolls and lowlifes will post there.
Remember how well that worked out for the old Yahoo newsgroups? Their site, their choice, but choices can and should have consequences.
[ Originally Posted on Feb 2, 2008 at 4:16am ]
- Dec 14, 2008 8:39am
 More about Firinn and Linkup Central (who I referred to in a recent post) can, perhaps, be gleaned from this article in SFGate.com about the man's site, in which we read this:
"In 2003, he was a refugee from Silicon Valley who walked away from a job just before a historic public offering. Why? Because the people he worked with repelled him.
"They were not just greedy. They had no integrity," said Taisdeal, who went from being about-to-be-very wealthy to being unemployed.
'One day my girlfriend came downstairs and said, 'You need to join a lunch club' he recalled."
I get the impression that Firinn wasn't headed straight into another job, and I think one begins to see where some of the values of his site come from, or at least reflect. There is a real difference between being unemployed and being a bum, and a big part of the difference is to be found in the answer to the question "where, given the choice, would you choose to be". There are those who mail off resumes by the thousands, pound their feet bloody on the pavement walking from office to office when the funds for postage run out, and find themselves being stonewalled, but they keep going anyway, trying to find a legitimate way out of the bad circumstances in which they find themselves. Then there are those who don't just live in poverty, they wallow in it - contemptible, not because they've dealt with unemployment, but because they've allowed themselves to be defined by it.
If one chooses to walk out on one job without having another to go to, who does one think will be paying one's bills? One's friends? One's family? The government, maybe? Because certainly one won't be able to do so oneself, and food and rent are not free. How responsible a choice is it to ask others to do that for one, just so that one will not have to hang around with people one doesn't like? Yet this would seem to be the choice Firinn made. Picture the kind of person who would make such a choice, picture the kind of friends he'd be likely to have, the kind who encourage such choices, and then picture them in charge of a social networking service, creating the rules according to their own value system, one in which real work and the acceptance of real responsibility see little respect. So motivated, what policies would you expect to see put in place?
The ones you're seeing right now, maybe? Having been poor, myself, I've known people like these, people who will drag you right down into the gutter with them given half a chance. As bizarre luck would have it, one of them has made a mildly good living doing what bad drinking buddies have been doing for those down at the heels for generations, but his marginal prosperity is not going to be contagious because it comes to him entirely at the expense of his "friends", coming to him through his promotion of values that, being incapable of contributing to an increase in general prosperity (play being put before work), must therefore present us with the logic of a zero sum game - the enrichment of one must be the impoverishment of another. Keeping the kind of company one will at a place in which such expectations make law, ie. those to whom such expectations would seem reasonable, that improverishment may come more quickly than usual, because while false prosperity isn't contagious, bad habits most assuredly are, and bad company is a rich source of trouble.
|
I like them
Meet another member
