Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

From an entry in my series on evolutionary psychology, which resulted from finishing The Moral Animal, by Robert Wright, at the beginning of this year.

This is the bootstrap of virtue: If we must desperately convince ourselves of our own altruism in order to serve our own selfish motives, and science allows us to deceive ourselves or others less and less, then the only way left to perceive our own virtuousness is to actually become so.

Tags: zingers

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

A god is always most vulnerable in his home. Because there is where you find all the anxieties and uncertainties and precarities that prompt him to create the worlds he rules.

Tags: zingers

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

Thank God we're all going to die. Now let's destroy the planet while we still can.

Tags: zingers

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

Because it was dominated by cowards and fearmongers, over threats both real (war, climate change) and imagined (terrorism, gay people), I propose we name this decade "the scaredies".

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

I managed to make it to Boxing Day without receiving or giving any Christmas gifts. WIN!

Yesterday, my mother confessed she was upset that I spent the last two days by myself. If only she knew...

I am procrastinating, in a good way, and, now, on purpose. I hereby dub this activity "eucrastination".

I tried to read Industrial Society and Its Future again yesterday, and still couldn't make through the first few sections. Either I'm deluded, or Kaczynski wasn't as insightful as people make him out to be. I suspect the real insights are still buried in the bullshit. It's hard to justify reading long arguments when you don't accept the premises.

We scavenge our lives in the shadows of slowly falling giants. It's true that the bigger they are, the harder they fall; but a giant will almost always pick itself up and dust itself off - which is more than can be said for the human beings crushed by the landing.

Tags: lexicon

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

I called my family in Arizona. After bemusedly wondering allowed when my new sister-in-law, who has set herself a mission to get me married again, had actually planned to even ask what kind of wife I'd like... she still didn't. How amusing!

I hope when this stops being funny I don't find myself suddenly married again. Because I don't know if that would be funny all over again... or not.

Arranged marriages - as we all know - are hilarious, after all.

Were I not as self-possessed, I might take her for being pushy, busybody, influential type. But I don't need to resist moving back to Arizona, or resist marrying or dating anybody she introduces me to. I just have to not do it. Not doing things is really easy, when you realize the easiest way to not do something is to do something else.

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I'm not into Christian birth-of-Jesus Christmas any more than I'm into Sants Claus buy-more-crap Christmas, but I don't think I really care to hate a lot of perfectly good, inspiring, artistic works just because the artists who created them believed the fictions they were inspired by. I mean hell, we have lots of great artistic works whose artists KNEW they were fictitious (that was the point!), and it doesn't seem to have diminished them one bit.

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

Mandating that people buy private health insurance is the wrong thing, but I don't think it's so bad that it overrides the counteroffers of a rescission ban and an expansion of Medicaid subsidies.

I don't buy the argument that allowing the Senate bill to pass into law will somehow diffuse people's dissatisfaction with the health care system. This bill is garbage, and I don't seriously see active progressives or significant numbers of polled voters satisfied with it. A public option was a clear majority priority, and there isn't one. Even the House version's public option wasn't one.

It seems the first thing you have to learn about politics is that the fight for justice never, ever stops. It doesn't matter whether that stop is based on winning or losing. Satisfaction and discouragement both accomplish nothing.

I think the effort that would go into opposing this bill would be better spent improving it, and pushing the next bill. Because there will be another one. We might have to replace some conservative Democrats to get the votes first, but there are elections with which that can be done.

Tags: health care, politics

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

After I went to bed, I heard some strange noises coming from the living room. Turns out, some asshole broke into my house and was fiddling with the Christmas presents. So I grabbed a pole and started wailing on him. It was hard to see in the dark, but this dude was even bigger than I was. We both took a few hits, but he managed to get away before I could restrain him. I'm still waiting for the cops to get here. Maybe they can identify him by some of the stuff he dropped in his haste to get out. I don't think he managed to steal anything important, though. Fucker gave me a black eye and a nosebleed, though.

Damn. Some people never learn, do they?

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

I could care less.

But I don't. I care more.

Tags: zingers

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

So Dave's IR LED arrays arrived today. He was using them for similar work, way back when. He also graciously threw in a couple of webcams that have already had their IR filters removed.

I tested them out with my laptop's AC adaptor (at a hefty 3.42 amps), and, sure enough, they light the area right up in the IR spectrum when connected.

Before:

and After:

that's the back of my left hand on the right, and the array itself on the bottom. You can see my right hand on the mouse in the background.

What startles me is, even though you can't help be wince at the brightness of the lights in the photos, my own naked eyes can't see anything different. That's kind of unsettling. What you see is just the view through the camera. I've also verified that the wiimote can see them pretty clearly, as well.

I am debating what kind of connecting plugs to build for these, since they're just raw wires. USB ports, perhaps? Could I wire them in parallel onto one AC adaptor?

Tags: wiimote