A Robiotic: “Hello, how are you today?”

Robiotics

Hello. My name is Aaron, and I am calling you from a robotic voice-activated recording device…click, whirr…How are you today?…click, whirr.

Hello. My name is Erin, and I am calling you from a robotic voice-activated recording device…click, whirr…How are you today?…click, whirr.

As it were. As it is.

I’m an irregular regular at library discard sales, usually browsing the orphaned texts that possess no universal product codes to reveal their identity for the database-connected; however, among my fellow book-seeking regulars are buyers equipped with handheld scanners that report the marginal value of each barcoded volume: one electronic click-seek at a time…leave, buy, buy, leave, leave, leave — leafing is not only unnecessary but a wasted effort that squanders marginal value.

I’m a leafer, I’m a laugher, I’m a midnight loafer. Sure don’t want to hurt no one.

Inurance

I try to become inured of the unpleasant encounter, the expectedly callous, the inconceivably gullible, the luck of the licentious liar — so far without success. But it leaves me something to write about on this electronic leaf.

I can find the noun Kardashianism  online, but I seem the only person in the Googlesphere searching for this noun: inurance,”

Did you mean: Insurance?

The robiotic keyboard-activated borgs presently responsible for all things “inurance” have found not a twit, so I am coining the word as you read, as the search-bots report back to the robiotics, the results of their crawls. Long live inurance!

Essential absurdity is yet the essential existential explanation.

Abide as best you can.

Thanks for reading.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dominion and Domestication News

Breaking news from our time-traveling reporters, recently returned from a special assignment for The Genesis Tattler and World Report:

The 26th verse of the 1st chapter of Genesis (NIV) declares animal rights alienable, subservient to the inalienable rights of mankind (the ones created in His image and likeness). In a single sentence, a sentencing I say, the English translation describes

  1. the creation of mankind,
  2. the wild creatures in the sea,
  3. in the sky,
  4. on the land,
  5. and the livestock.

So farmed animals get exiled from wild animals in one fell swath.

genesis.1.26

Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

How about this logical leap: encaging every living being from tapeworm to giraffe between two commas — declaring the deed done in fewer than seven words. …Let us make mankind in our image

,in our likeness,

so that they may rule over…

I’m assigning another time-traveling team to the gates of Eden to report on the couple caught trafficking forbidden fruit: advice of a snake-oil-sales demon guised as a serpent, possibly a slitherer subservient (subserpient?) to the inalienably privileged pair. The devil is in the details.

Bill, if you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say anything at all. 

It’s not really what I say that counts, it’s what I do. I DO VEGAN.

Speaking of saying something good, is it even possible to be a good person, to eat peas, live long and prosper? Not only to prosper, but to thrive without executing the calf and hardening the arteries, those tubes hat flow lifeblood into and out of your heart, possibly to head off an extinction event named after its instigator. While researching this article I happened upon a quite fascinating site that speaks to a potential extinction event : Misanthropocene

misanthropocene

A few thoughts for future posts:

The hegemony of man as misogynist.

Where do humans fit on the scale running from sadism to masochism?

Are humans a selfish specie?

One self-adoring philosopher, Ayn Rand,  is my choice for single most influential human responsible for stoking the boilers of the Anthropocene Express. Git ‘er done, Ayn. Here is a Rand quote from 1974:

They (Native Americans) didn’t have any rights to the land, and there was no reason for anyone to grant them rights which they had not conceived and were not using. What was it that they were fighting for, when they opposed white men on this continent? For their wish to continue a primitive existence, their ‘right’ to keep part of the earth untouched, unused and not even as property, but just keep everybody out so that you will live practically like an animal, or a few caves above it. Any white person who brings the element of civilization has the right to take over this continent.

— Q and A session following her address to the graduating class of The United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, March 6, 1974 – found in Endgame: Resistance, by Derrick Jensen, Seven Stories Press, 2006, pg 220

I sign off with the words of Anthony Douglas Williams:

When I look into the eyes of an animal, I do not see an animal, I see a living being, I see a friend, I feel a Soul.

The eyes have it.

Thanks for reading.

 

 

How a vegan ingeniously declutters rooms

Subtitled: Picking up a disorderly living space through areal topology, using vectors learned in high-school physics, and a little game- theory (to fun it up).

Areal Topology — a hokey term for tying multiple rooms together

bib.lebowski

Why, Mr. Bill, do you invite us to your silly moments? Our time is valuable, my friend; in other words, what’s in it for us?

Nothing, of course. You simply remind me of nastyish overlords I’ve met, demons exorcised and ilk like that.

Get over yourself and get on with it, so that we might get out of here.

There’s a mathedness to my madness though. Chunks and bits of physics too. I’ve written much computer code in my life and times. Not a single iota do I kid you: I enjoy sporting my code-monkey T-shirt.

There’s a right way and a wrong way of doing things, Bill.

No. There isn’t. Control freaks vex the frack out of me. They really do. Out damned control freaks!

We’re already gone.

At the end of this lesson you should be able to pick up the clutter — with confidence, self-reliance and vigor.

I’ve heard that it takes 9 and a half days to slip into a good habit. Rome wasn’t sacked in a day. How many sacks did it take to hold all that plunder?

rome.sacking

Stage stuff. To borrow a programming term, set up some working storage areas large enough to fill two armloads.

Scan a room. Do you see things that do not belong, such as a dirty fork on a coffee table. Create staging areas as you maneuver the mess. Stage bathroom items, stage bedroom items. All the room is a stage.

Advice: freak thee not out! Don’t spend hours sorting, stacking and reflecting on woeful banes and sisyphusian rock-rolls. Mere seconds suffice to load two arms. Beware and Be Aware: there is a time penalty for breaking dishes. You can count on a plate dropping its gooey contents, such as non-dairy okra dip, upon the very rug that ties your room together.

Conde Nast TagID: cncartoons025158.jpg/Photo via Conde Nast

Place your gathered kitchen articles on the kitchen counter, in the sink, or into the garbage. A hint: dog-lapped plates are not cleaned plates. No they are not.

Another hint for the newbie: never leave a room empty-handed. Perhaps you have found a toothbrush in the kitchen. Might there be other bathroom-bound articles in your midst?

Advanced students will process items discovered in passing. Kick objects to the general area of destination — or kick things backward with your heel.

Are you in the bathroom? Books read are books to shelve, to repurpose, to gift or to donate.  By the bye, bathrooms make great cleaning areas. While you ponder a crossword clue and the squares on a grid, pick up tissues that end up everywhere, all day long even.

PSA: defunding the EPA is a criminally insane act.

Perhaps you kicked a pair of socks to the door jamb earlier on. You might be carrying items of clothing draped on your arm that are destined for the laundry. Bring those clothes together with open arms and deposit them in the appropriate receptacle.

An aside: I once brought along a book to read at the laundromat. Having started a washing cycle, I found my book bobbing about with the suds.

Let’s say that a sleeping moggie prevented you from making the bed. Make the bed, you big lazy, then toss more dirty laundry into hamper. Find books on the night-table that belong someplace: such as a donation box, a fund-raiser tote or on the sofa.

unmade bed

PSA: clothes you never wear are wearable at critical care areas, such as battered-women shelters. Beware of hoarding for hoarding’s sake. Random acts of kindness reward everyone in a civil society, such as the society we are currently not living in. Old towels are needed at animal-rescue facilities. Do not allow the stuff you own to own you, palindromically speaking.

Sort your library by standing on the shoulders of a giant. Here is a bookmark I give to the dear reader(s) who has (have) patiently plowed through the words above. How to sort your library.

PSA: Refrain from eating Meatables®

Thanks for reading.

Post Script: 24 vacuum tube varieties for audio applications.  Handle with caution should you discover any of these while decluttering 🙂

vacuum.tubes.for.audio

 

Post Script 2: Vacuum Tubes and High Fashion:

vacuum.tube.radio.hat

 

 

 

 

 

Discovering Patterns in Language

Regular expressions. are powerful metamathematical tools, advanced techniques for matching patterns in a text or multiple texts — something fun and something useful. They are concise chunks of cryptic characters that can search a single text or multiple texts for precise patterns. Select an input file, do one thing or very many things to the file, then drop the resulting text into an output file.

regex-to-fa

Stephen Cole Kleene is the mathematician and philosopher who introduced the concept of the regular expression. He worked with Alan Turing and other pioneering types who were intensely active in the 1930’s. Their understanding of a mathematical maneuver called recursion; that led to breakthrough tools in logic — decisions made at superhuman speed and using the processing speed and memory to process words and numbers thrown together and called data. However, beware of the sorcerer’s apprentice phenomenon. Just bewaring.

recursion

An example: look for successive occurrences of WTF (upper or lower case) and substitute “what the fart”.

Through recursion you can stop, go backward a certain of characters, query the findings. Do something with it. Once you become familiar with the meta characters and the syntax, you can do a lot of useful things or destroy many useful things. So save the original file in a safe place and know where your output file ends up.

 

When I was a freelance translator I maintained a translation memory database that kept track of all my translations so that I might be reminded of earlier translations. The software I used was called SDL Trados; however, that was over ten years ago.

Here is one example of how I used regular expression code to insert a carriage return and linefeed whenever a blank space appeared in the original German. Essentially this created records that were one word long — the number of records was the number of words in the text. Then I queried my database for finds. A lot faster than the technique I used when learning German — looking up the words in a large-ass dictionary that I still have on the bottom shelf over there.

mastering.regular.expressions

The same Unix tools developed in the 1960’s remain in the electrons flowing from my screen to yours. They remind me of Arthur C. Clarke’s three laws:

  1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
  2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
  3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Arthur C. Clarke’s Three Laws

Hoping this is somewhat illuminating, or mildly amusing 🙂

Thanks for reading.

P.S. Now for something incompletely different, something inspired by Hariod Brawn’s comment below. It’s an article on The Sound (And Taste) Of Music by Layla Eplett — she brings a platter to the conversation and complements Mariano Sigman’s TED Talk:

 

SoundTasteofMusic
Layla Eplett

Thanks for reading this postscript 🙂

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