Plurp: A subliminal message to floss your teeth

Bigger!

2002.07.07 : 2002.07.13

Saturday, July 13, 2002
Blab. A reader brings rare good news!
In fact, it's back up today. It's seems to be running in a "Best of Bovine" mode.
--
"Bother," said Pooh as he stared into the unspeakable visage of Cthulhu.
It is in silent fulfillment of our reverential prayer. And the speckled shin bones of toaster ovens, of course.

Blab. A simulated reader writes:
pTang's Lemma:
1. Humanity won't reach a point where we have Big Honking Computers that can basically simulate the entire world (including machines that can simulate worlds), or
2. We will reach that point, but we'll hardly ever run such simulations, or
3. There is a very high probability that the world as we know it is not one of those simulations, since the SIMULATED simulations will greatly outnumber the real simulations.
We envision a future in which Big Honking Computers can simulate the workings of people who make silly arguments about the nature of reality ...

Blab. Our French reader writes:
Happy Bastille Day on Sunday!
We have a problem with premature Bastillization, which is perhaps why we celebrated Bastille Day by going out to a French restaurant last night.

Yak. From a meeting yesterday.
Does he intend to produce code, or just trouble?

Yo. China-Russia Military Exercises Planned

Beijing has not revealed the exact nature of the exercises, other to say that they would focus on 'signal communication'

Yo. And, speaking of news stories that obviously make no sense ...
A Russian nuclear submarine on Friday launched a prototype of a European-Russian inflatable space vehicle that could be used to bring payloads or people back to Earth from space, its designers said. [...]
[T]he European Space Agency has been particularly interested in developing such an inflatable recovery vehicle to more quickly retrieve its experiments from the international space station.
So let's review. The Russians want to bring things (like maybe people) back from space. And they're going to do this by launching the recovery vehicle from a submarine.
Submarines are expensive. And, they have serious limitations on the size of missiles they can launch. Submarines are (basically) designed to be mobile and undetectable launch platforms for Extremely Bad Ways of Killing Lots of People (e.g. cruise missiles and ICBMs with stuff like nuclear devices on them). It is hard to conceive of any advantage they might have in retrieving experiments from the international space station. Land-based launchers are clearly superior. So what are the Russians doing?
Our readers, who are much more clever than the CNN reporters, are invited to speculate on what this story is actually about.

Plurp.
The blue dog
discovered that the
calendar had accidentally stopped

Friday, July 12, 2002
Blab. It seems that we still have lawyers hiding out amongst our reader population, probably using them as human shields. And one of them knows all about the rights of dead people!
"Decomposing Body of J. Fred Shirley-Harold vs. Napster Corp."
Close, except legalese for "Decomposing Body" is "Estate".
We were going to say something about the decomposing body of Napster Corp., but we figured it would be in bad taste.

Blab. It's not bad enough that we are flooded with our own spam. Now our Treasured Readers insist on sending their spam our way.
I thought this was spam and nearly deleted it before I realized that you might want to expand the talents of the blue dog.
Personally I consider dogs as an emergency source of food.
t
------------------------------------------------------------
At DogEinstein.com, you'll learn how to teach your dog to heel, sit, stay, lie down, come, stand for presentation, back up, and even go to the bathroom on command [...]
But not do theoretical physics? That seems like false advertising to us.
We would encourage you to broaden your culinary vision, though.
Dogs. They're not just for breakfast any more.

Blab. A reader wakes up with a start.
What? No picture of Steve?
It's in the masthead.
(We know this particular reader, and we know it's not what she meant. But we can't show favoritism here. We have to taunt her just like we taunt everyone else. Sorry.)

Blab. A reader who has spent far more time with comic books than with religious texts writes:
Given Galactus as a personal comic book hero (after all, what other comic book hero earned the label "a force of nature"?) I've taken up the task of shaping my (useless) life around him.
Ants, it turns out, make up the largest biomass on the planet and are social creatures. Natch, they must have myths. So occasionally I pick one up, show it a garden with a female ant and send it away to write chapter 1 of genesis. Other tricks include parting waters (in gutters) so the ants can cross, flooding the back yard for 40 days (after midnight due to the drought), and smoking a few of them with a magnifying glass (mostly those on golf courses). Oh, and the red ants get a different set of myth-events from the black ants. Gives 'em something to fight about. I figure there must be underground temples built in my name somewhere. Or at least a comic book cameo.
t
While we suspect that blue-green algae beat out ants, as a species or class, in terms of biomass (can anyone give us an authoritative reference?), we think our reader has chosen wisely. We particularly love the different set of myth-events to different species. Nice touch.
We recommend chiseling ant-like shapes on a small stone, which you then cover with honey and place near the nest. It would also be good to draw a circle in the sand and smoke any ant who enters it; it's both enigmatic and a show of power, always a winning combination. And don't forget to take one random side or the other in the occasional violent conflicts between various ant colonies.
Do let us know when they start performing rituals as you walk by.
And, BTW, didn't we see a science fiction movie that worked a lot like this?

Blab. A New Zealand Professor of History writes:
Arts and Letters Daily used to be absolutely brilliant (After all there started the trail that has me looking at Plurp) but I think its gone downhill since its belonged to an American Company rather than the personal website of a New Zealand Proffesor of History who was also Head of the NZ Rationalists Association (Sort of like Plurp but with the personal interests only showing through with the links selected (and comments I supose)
Howeverits still good enough to be worth giving up on New Scientist and Scientific American although the Science is gradually draining out of it as the commercial?? considerations take hold
Imagine that. A site, run by a professor of history, and devoted to philosophy, literature and art - that resembles Plurp? It makes our head hurt.
Anyhow, we shall have to check out that site in more detail.

Blab. Al Sharpton writes:
Good rant Steve - I don’t like Michael Jackson, or contract violators either but I think the problem with Mr Jackson (other than his tendency to behave like Catholic priests do??) is that the other partner in his contract (Sony) fills the sort of preeminent position in music sales that IBM used to in computers and which Microsoft does in PC Operating systems. In such circumstances where the other side litrally out lawyers or even out moneys any legal challenge (And there is every good reason to believe Sony does just this - See the lawsuit with Kaaza and Morphius this month where Morphius withdrew claiming Sony had deliberately acted so as to make it too expensive to defend itself) then questions of legality always come down in their favour. This makes questions of contract violation by such companies unprovable, except by such charmers as the US Government or public opinion. Its this Court of public opinion that Mr J is seeking to damage Sony in even if his case lacks rational justification. In this Court however rationality of arguement may not be of any advantage.
It does look as if file-swapping companies like Kazaa couldn't afford to fight Sony in court. It seems unlikely to us that Mr. Jackson could similarly plead destitution, but what do we know?
We haven't heard Mr. Jackson, or his spokesmodel Al Sharpton, make any claims, even in the court of public opinion, that Sony violated its contracts with him. Has anyone else?

Plop. OK, we admit it. That site yesterday about Are you living in a simulation? turns out to be bunkola. (We hadn't exactly read it before we blogged it. Sigh.)
There are two papers on the site itself. The first one argues that either:

Humanity won't reach a point where we have Big Honking Computers that can basically simulate the entire world (ala The Matrix), or

We will reach that point, but we'll hardly ever run such simulations, or

There is a very high probability that the world as we know it is one of those simulations, since the simulations will greatly outnumber the one actual reality that we seem to have.

Readers are cordially invited to debunk this bunk. Hint: One approach uses the word ensemble.
The second paper suggests how you might want to behave if you're a simulated character in a simulated world, and makes rather broad assumptions about such characters being conscious, having free will, and having value systems similar to our own. Self-debunking bunk. So don't bother.

Zoom. We may have missed out on body surfing during Beach Day yesterday, but we did take happy advantage of it in our own way

Plop. Well, our new fiscal conservatism, our new belt-tightening regimen, which began on Monday with a review of the dismal, the ghastly, the grisly state of our savings, rendered into fine dross by the giant maw of the collapsing stock market, ended tonight. We noticed that it had been three whole weeks since we had had sushi, a circumstance entirely intolerable, of course, so we splurged again tonight.
Yum!

Plurp. Can someone please tell us when (if?) Bovine returns to the land of the active? 'Cause we miss him and stuff.

Plurp. Here's something Ian should get all sweaty about.

Yak. Some lawyer on TV, on the Supreme Court ruling that mentally retarded folks can't be executed.
You don't have to be a rocket scientist to see how easy it is to flunk an IQ test.
But it helps?
Or, perhaps, we are to believe that most criminals currently trying to assert a mental retardation defense against the death penalty actually work for NASA?
Or ... ?
We're so confused.

Yak.
They're successful by packaging lettuce with mayonnaise and charging 10x the price. Or by differentiating the lettuce.

Plurp.
The blue dog
had a high probability of being
a bogus philosophical
argument

Thursday, July 11, 2002
Blab. A reader politely suggests that we are in big trouble.
Hopefully you have not committed an Error 33 by assuming that you can pull autonomic computing results out of the research on a new type of hat. -t
Nothing up our sleeve... Presto!
No doubt about it - we gotta get another hat!

Blab. A reader who has spent even more time enmeshed in comic books than we have (and, frankly, we didn't think that was possible) writes:
No, no, no. Galactus goes back a bit further.
And you call yourself a comic book fan.
L.
Our own peculiar genius was focused more on DC Comics than Marvel. They were quite different in philosophy, and our personal moral sense was better attuned to DC. Readers are hereby inclined to tell us how comic books shaped their own tragic adolescent development.

Blab. There appears to be a correlation between people who read Plurp and people who dissipated far too much of their lives reading comic books. This frightens us.
Galactus, actually debuted in Fantastic Four 48. The thing with him was that he wasn't a villian so much as he was a force of nature. Eventually, he was shown to be one of the three forces of the universe, the other two being Death and Eternity.
Meanwhile over in the DC universe, Lex Luthor is still president and knows Clark is Superman. And I thought my day was bad.
--
"Bother," said Pooh as he stared into the unspeakable visage of Cthulhu.
Love that tag line! Simply brilliant.

Blab. A reader sends us a double whammy.
[link]
[link]
The first of these, New York Exit New York, advertises a cool-sounding 3D fly-through of New York City. Astonishingly, you have to, like, go to some physical place where they have it set up. Do people really do that any more? They do have several short, canned fly-throughs, though, which are pretty neat. Go play.
The second of these, Arts & Letters Daily, has a frighteningly large number of articles (and links thereto) with entertaining capsule descriptions. Could be good.

Blab. A reader who has been monitoring our activities for many decades reveals its presence.
BEACH DAY!!!!
That's for sure!
Oh. We should explain.
Long ago, when we were but a grad student, right around this time of year, we would roll out of bed at the ungodly hour of 10 AM, go outside into the soft, warm San Diego air, and smile. Beach Day!, we would think, and go back upstairs to change into our swim suit, grab a towel, and head down to the local nude beach for hours of tanning and body surfing. No progress was made on our thesis on Beach Days. But that was just fine.
Today is definitely a Beach Day. The air is gentle, the sun is bright, and we would like nothing better than to grab our swim suit and head down to that lovely beach.
Naturally, we are writing this in a windowless conference room in the middle of a meeting. And all too far away from the beach.
There were some really great things about being a grad student.

Blab. Finally, our close, personal friend Kim writes:
Hello
My name is Kim Griffin and I work for Home Shop International. We are interested in looking at one of your products and possibly adding it to our network of websites. We are currently expanding many of our Gifts categories on a number of our websites and are looking for products to showcase. Our buyers are qualified and we are a proactive company representing over 6000 unique products from merchants around the world. Our network currently consists of 35 websites specifically tailored to the interests and needs of a diverse group of consumers. To ensure our success once again in this endeavor, we have secured top listings on search engines and partnered with some top online promotional companies. Can you please have someone get back to me and provide me with your top selling product both online and offline or you can fill in the preliminary application found in our Online Media Kit
Hello, Kim! And how kind of you to ask. The top selling product at the www.stevewhite.org store is our uniquely logoed T-shirt. We have sold one of them. To Dave.
We hope this information is helpful to you.

Yow. Gathered, from the garden, on our dining room table.

Yow. Sunglow, also from the garden, yesterday evening.

Yow. Seen, as a bumper sticker, on the SUV in front of us this morning.

If I'm Not Driving Fast Enough For You, HONK.
I'll Try To Run Over As Many Pedestrians As I Can.

A bit verbose, perhaps, but wonderfully apropos of New York driving.

Yo. Found, enigmatically, in an otherwise nondescript container delivered by the (analog) U.S. Mail Service yesterday, originating from sources about which we can only guess.

An inscription on the packaging:
Really Works!
We shudder to think.

Yow. Discovered, on some Web site, this afternoon.
Britain [...] said today that it was relaxing its laws on marijuana smoking, [...] making private use in discreet amounts no longer subject to arrest.
This used to be a radical policy. After all, anything that the government labeled as a drug (which never included caffeine, alcohol or nicotine, often subsidized by these same governments) was immoral, evil, bad and so forth. Never mind that people are screwed up by, addicted to, deceased because of, government-approved drugs in far greater number than government-disapproved drugs.
But whatever - governments know best.
So why is Britain adopting this radical policy? So police can focus on things like rapes and murders and ... well ... things that people actually care about.
(Amusingly, drug laws actually cause violent crime, since the businesses of drug distribution and sales are restricted to criminal types who have to provide their own protection - they can't call the police.)
'Bout time. Maybe they learned something from our Prohibition mess, even if we didn't.

Yo. Noticed, inside a locked box labeled, Are you living in a simulation?
If you might be living in a simulation then all else equal you should care less about others, live more for today, make your world look more likely to become rich, expect to and try more to participate in pivotal events, be more entertaining and praiseworthy, and keep the famous people around you happier and more interested in you.
In other words, pretty much what we already do. Coincidence?
(BTW, it's actually an interesting site, which has a collection of philosophical papers speculating on the likelihood that we're living in a simulation, and what we should do if we are.) (/usr/bin/girl)

Plurp. Stumbled across, on Google, while looking for something else.
Hey Rocky! Watch me pull Cthulhu out of my hat!

Plurp.
The blue dog
was living inside a
simulated hat

Wednesday, July 10, 2002
Blab. A reader explains the difference between Helenisms and mixed metaphors. After a fashion.
Subj: Helenisms, Mixed Metaphors and a Tale of two cities
I've mixed helenisms with metaphors at the best of times. I've never found it to be the worst thing in the world.
But we may not know its ultimate consequence until 2050 looms large. Remember yoda's famous quotation of shakespeare:
lives after them, the evil that men do.
So at least we can be sure that if all life ends we'll be remembered.
t
Oft interred with their bones, the good is.
We actually think it's unlikely that all terrestrial life will end, or at least, not for a really, really long time. Too darned sturdy, life. Look at the deep sea vents. Sneaky little critters.
Human life, on the other hand? Much more fragile. Hasn't been around long enough to be worth mentioning. We're not taking bets on that one.

Blab. On this same evolutionary topic, Treasured Reader L. sends us some nifty reading.
From Scientific American: 15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense
L.
Very nice! Now, what was the question?

Blab. Speaking of nonsense, the World Wildlife Federation just isn't thinking large enough.
Speaking of eating planets . . . .
L.
We love these obscure inverse links! L.'s link leads us to a picture of a comic book character named Galactus. Googling that name leads us to this plot description of Galactus' first comic book appearance (in a Silver Surfer issue, in fact):
At the beginning he is devouring a planet, and at the end, he is still hungry for more! Sending his new herald, who we know nothing about to find him a new planet to munch on. All of which leaves plenty of good questions for the next issue. Such as, where has Galactus been? Why can’t he get enough to eat?
Now there's a villain with dietary issues!

Blab. A reader attempts to push our buttons.
Oh, how surprising that Mr. Miata- and- a- highrise- Manhattan- condo tries to dismiss the ravaging of the Earth by greedy capitalists. Maybe if you took a second to care about something other than yourself for a second you'd care about the future generations who will have to deal with your mess.
Ah, but you see, we don't care about anything but ourself. It simplifies things.
And that's Dr. Miata-and-a-highrise-Manhattan-condo to you, bucko.

Blab. Too obvious?
Strangely, Mia was the only reader this week to suggest a herd of stampeding ibex.
A real missed opportunity for the rest of you, I must say.

Blab. A reader takes the opportunity to tell us a story.
I have the most incredible story. While we were in Glasgow we went to the Hunterian Museum to see the Mackintosh house (later to come in the report cycle). Afterwards I was browsing the jewelry display and I decided I wanted a silver necklace and pair of earrings the really expressed CRM's art to me. They weren't expensive and Steve said OK. I loved them!
Several days later I was washing my hair in the shower at the B&B in Kilmartin and suddenly I had the back to the earring in my fingernail. The front had disappeared and I feared it was lost. Steve and I examined the rug, the shower floor, the crevice between the two. Nothing. It was GONE. I was so sad.
After breakfast I told Jackie, our host, about the earring and showed her the remaining one. Perhaps it would show up. I never expected it to.
WELL! Today in the mail I got a padded envelope from Bridgend, Scotland. The customs slip said "earring" and I was shocked. Inside, the earring was there along with a little note explaining that Jim had been cleaning out the trap in the shower and found this little piece.
Steve had found the earrings on a web site this weekend and I hadn't gotten around to ordering them. I guess there was a reason.
SOoooooo...........how wonderful ARE the Scots? I think I've always known. This just demonstrated it. Everyone, go stay at Somerled! Give Jackie and Jim a big hug from me!
The Scots are, of course, infinitely wonderful. Which makes us half-infinitely wonderful. Which is pretty good, considering.

Blab. Following up on our lovely rant about Michael Jackson, a reader who knows far more about this stuff than we do writes:
Re: Jacko
One difference: a successful technologist earns more money than a 7-11 grunt, a successful musician doesn't. This is the paper everyone cites.
The government forbids adults from entering into the kinds of contracts that only the desparate would accept. Like working for $3 an hourto feed your family, or taking a loan at 30% interest to buy a tractor. Many musicians wish the government would take away their collegues' rights to enter ill-advised contracts.
Under the Berne Convention dead authors have the right to object to derogatory action in relation to their work. (Non-dead persons are designated to exercise the right on behalf of the dead.)
From this, we learn that successful musicians are not necessarily successful business people, which is certainly a surprise. We're still not sure how to apply this learning to Michael Jackson, who is rich enough to corner the market in sin, but we shall continue to meditate on it.
On that Berne Convention thing, we are impressed. The dead do have rights! We can only imagine the court case: Decomposing Body of J. Fred Shirley-Harold vs. Napster Corp.

Plurp. Breaking news. Michael Jackson knows he's black. That's such a relief.

Yow. A Möbius strip made out of Legos? A Klein bottle? A figure eight knot? We are impressed. Frightened, sure, but impressed. (/usr/bin/girl)

Yow. Ever heard of Error 33?
error 33 [XEROX PARC] n. 1. Predicating one research effort upon the success of another. 2. Allowing your own research effort to be placed on the critical path of some other project (be it a research effort or not).
Ominously, we are in the middle of lobbying for exactly this, numerous times in fact, in our Autonomic Computing research effort. Danger, Wil Robinson!

Yo. Those folks who were searching Plurp for Helen naked pitures are now searching Dave's blog for Helen naked pictures. At least their spelling has improved.
And some of them are still searching for Mia. Aren't we all?

Plurp. South African President Thabo Mbeki has a good idea.
Today, we must [...] end the senseless wars and conflicts causing so much pain and suffering.
OK, Thabo. Starting tomorrow, we'll only have sensible wars. Thanks.

Plurp. One of the odd side effects of the recent obsession with annual cycles is that we now have, in our possession, a bottle which claims to be Troll Booger Glue ("Picked Fresh from the Troll's Nose!"). It has the unique feature that the glue actually comes out of one nostril of the nose of the troll's head which is mounted on top of the bottle.
We know. You're jealous.

Plop.

Plurp.
A New Kind of Hat
Three centuries ago science was transformed by the dramatic new idea that a head covering could be described as fashion. My purpose in this entry is to initiate another such transformation, and to introduce a new kind of hat that is based on much more general social functions.
It has taken me the better part of twenty years to build the intellectual structure that is needed, but I have been amazed by its results. For what I have found is that with the new kind of hat I have developed it suddenly becomes possible to make progress on a remarkable range of head covering issues that have never successfully been addressed by any of the existing haberdashers before.
But the crucial idea that has allowed me to build a unified framework for the new kind of hat that I describe in this entry is that just as a hat can be viewed as sitting on top of the head, so also the head can be viewed as sitting inside the hat.
On the basis of many discoveries I have been led to a sweeping conclusion, summarized by what I call the Principle of Head Covering Equivalence: that whenever one sees a hat - in essentially any context - it can be thought of as corresponding to another hat of equivalent sophistication. And this one very basic principle has a quite unprecedented array of implications for haberdashery and haberdashic thinking.
[... and so on for 1,197 pages. Plus the index.]

Plurp.
The blue dog
turned out to be
equivalent to
error 33

Tuesday, July 9, 2002
Blab. A reader sends us a blind ...
[link].
Did you enjoy watching the WTC towers struck, burning, and collapsing back in September? Watching them again and again and again as the various TV stations repeated the sequence as if it were a tape loop?
Then you'll love the above, in which the image of the burning towers is made out of the names of the people who died, looping through the names again and again and again.

Blab. A reader discovers something odd on the Web.
Subj: Black Plague - Black Sabbath
Hey,
you gotta see this - Black Sabbath songs in the 14th Century style. Spooky!
best,
Istvan
(just surfing around)
Uh-huh. This is Rondellus, the renowned Estonian medieval music band, asking the question:
Would “War Pigs” or “The Wizard” have been as powerful if played on medieval instruments like lute, fiddle and harp?
Or harmonica and bicycle bell, eh?

Blab. A reader offers us a cheery message.
In regards to your egg pods of last week, I'd remind you of the wise words of Maurice Chevalier: "Old age isn't so bad when you consider the alternative."
Whenever I'm feeling old, I remind myself of this in a very real way and rather morbid way by searching the Social Security Death Index with my own birthdate, to see how many Americans I've outlived who were born on the same date as I. (Caveats: only indexes those who were assigned social security numbers; only updated monthly; takes 3-4 months after death to be entered into the index.) It's rather sobering to find that I've outlived 89 people who share my birthdate, and I'm a good 19 years younger than Dr. Plurp.
How very morbid of you! We are intrigued, however, that this same genealogy site lets you get the Social Security Number of anyone who happens to be dead. We were unaware that this information was so publicly available.

Blab. A reader mixes the memes.
In Mia we trust
One Mia, in our blog, with liberty and justice for all.

Blab. A bold reader asks the question that has been on all of our minds.
Could somebody explain the difference between Helenisms and Mixed Metaphores?
- Felis Lynx
Other than the spelling, you mean?
We think we know, but what do we know? Let's ask our readers to explain it.

Plurp. Have you accidentally become a sproutarian? A pesco-vegetarian? Or just a pest? Here's how you can tell.

Rant. Defenders of human rights, take note.
If you fight for me, you're fighting for all black people, dead and alive. We have to put a stop to this incredible injustice.
A noble thought. Curiously, it was uttered by Michael Jackson, one of the most famous, most talented, most wealthy, most surgically altered and altogether strangest people of any hue.
And what is he upset about? Why, naturally, the way record companies treat artists (like himself). They take advantage of poor, starving artists (unlike himself). They "conspire against the artists -- they steal, they cheat, they do everything they can."
It's a funny thing. We work in the technology biz. Our role is to think up clever new tech stuff. We like to indulge our conceit that we are the heartbeat of the industry, that none of this would exist without us.
But the naked facts are these. In software businesses, the technologists (the programmers, et al.) account for around 15% of the cost of these businesses. What's responsible for the other 85%? Mostly marketing and sales. Yup. The markedroids.
The vast majority of the cost of software is not involved in creating it, but in selling it. It wouldn't exist without the technologists, but it wouldn't be worth squat without the marketing and sales folks.
We examined the balance sheets long ago and figured it out. We're important. But the markedroids are actually more important, by a certain measure. We have no issue with our part in this ecology, or with the employment contract we signed with our corporate sponsor.
So let's review. Artists (like Jackson) sign contracts with record companies. (Nobody seems to have sued anybody for breach of contract here, so we'll assume for the moment that nobody has violated one of these contracts.) Subsequently, these artists (like Jackson) decide that they don't like the terms of their contract. We think this is what Jackson refers to as stealing and cheating.
As a big defender of human rights, we are anxious to go fight for Michael Jackson's rights. As far as we can tell, these rights are:

The right to be paid more than agreed to in a contract;

The right to break a contract without being liable for breach of contract; and/or

The right to force the other party in a contract to submit to terms that were not in the contract.

Since these seem to us less like rights and more like fraud or coercion, we're a bit confused. In particular, we're not quite seeing why fighting for these rights fights "for all black people, dead and alive." (And, as an aside, we were previously unaware that dead people even had rights.)
Go figure.

Yo. The Museum of Urology. Not for the faint of, um, heart.

Rant. We love this stuff.
The planet is set to expire in the year 2050 due to the over-consumption of natural resources.
Does anyone remember the Club of Rome, whose 1972 report, The Limits to Growth, predicted that the Earth's population would suffer catastrophic ecological and economic crises? No? That might be because, despite all odds, we're still here.
Well, actually, it was because the Club of Rome, a collection of fantastically brilliant social theorists, predicted the demise of the planet based upon linear equations involving stuff like resource usage, pollution, population, and the like.
Hello? These all have nonlinear dependencies on each other, and extrapolations based on linearity assumptions are, um, excremental in nature.
The Limits to Growth also assumed that natural resources existed in the finite amounts that were known at the time, and that no substitutes were possible. These guys never studied.
In a damning condemnation of Western society's high consumptive levels, (the report) adds that the extra planets (the equivalent size of Earth) will be required by the year 2050 as existing resources are exhausted.
OK. Great. This is a quote from the WWF which, surprisingly, is now the World Wildlife Fund. But, in the intellectual wake of their namesake, they major in grandstanding.
It turns out that lots of people predict the end of the world. It's pretty easy. And, it's a great way to grab headlines without actually having brains and stuff.
We would like to suggest that any such people who turn out to be wildly wrong should be sent to the organ banks. After all, having more organs available would actually be valuable.

Plurp.
The blue dog
was set to expire in 2050
after consuming several
Earth-sized planets

Monday, July 8, 2002
Blab. A reader inadvertently generates a Mia sighting.
Mia generates 3.85 Million google hits (curiously the same as the number of missing worldcom dollars). Plurp generates 1090 (curiously the same as the number of shares of stock I own). Perhaps it would be more appropriate to ask if Mia knew who (in the anthropomorphic web sense) Plurp is. If you find her ask her where she hid the worldcom funds. The poor of this world need to know.
Actually, the WorldCom gaffe was $3.85 Billion. Google only ("only") indexes 2 billion Web pages these days, so it'll be a while before we hit the WorldCom record.
We will certainly ask Mia about Plurp and WorldCom (and many other things) should we find her ("her").

Blab. A helpful reader tells us yet another thing we didn't know.
The home link on the blab_bigger site is bent.
So it was. Hmm. It was an odd artifact of our move to a new Web host back in December. And imagine - no one noticed until now! Anyhow, we fixed it. And thanks!

Blab. A reader explores the forbidden meaning of Plurp.
One of the google plurp links is plurp.gif. We are unable to pronounce the haiku shown there. We suspect it is a subatomic picture of a naked helen.
We earnestly warn our readers not to venture into these eldritch depths. Do not look too long at the roiling colors! Do not consider their meaning (or their lack of meaning)! And do not, do not, recite the ancient rhyme.
Mustaa
Valkoista
Keltaista
Sinistä
Vihreätä
Hopeata
Takaisin !

Blab. Some of our readers turn out to be AOLies. It's interesting to try to understand their mental model of things.
Please send me information on how I can subscribe to the aol ansering machine service and how it works. I would like to begin using it but would like additional information on its capabilities. Thank You.
This particular one seems to think there is a thing called the aol ansering machine service, and that we know how it works.
At home, we get a lots of calls from people who were trying to dial things like AOL technical support, but are too stupid to actually use their phones. That, we understand. After all, phones are really complicated.
What confuses us is that our Treasured Readers think that typing something in our Blab box will somehow get them AOL technical support.
But, not wanting to disappoint, we offer the following.
The aol ansering machine service is a package of misty wisdom wrapped in ostrich skin. It is the taste of irony at the back of the tongue of a mechanical device made of glass bowls and buckshot. It is an oxymoron stated as a paradox.
In the 8th century, a Bulgarian monk wrote the entire Book of Leviticus on the heart of a chicken that was subsequently served for dinner at a local brothel. A young woman named Jordan dined on this heart, and went on to separate egg yolks beside a faraway river.
And that is how the aol ansering machine service works.
You are most welcome.

Blab. One of the great things about having a blog is that your readers (a) inevitably know more than you do, and (b) want to let you know it.
I was hoping someone else would deal with your intriguing claim that "Hieroglyphics were neither phonetic nor alphabetic". Since they haven't, I will.
The first satisfactory deciphering was by the French scholar Champollion, who published a book on the subject in 1824. Simon Singh, in The Code Book gives a very readable (and short) account which summarises the conclusions: "'For most of their writing, the ancient scribes relied on a relatively conventional alphabet.' This final point is the most important one, and Champollion called phonetics the 'soul' of hieroglyphics."
Ironically, the first steps towards a correct decipherment had been taken by the physicist Thomas Young (of Young's modulus, etc.) who correctly deduced the location and phonetic values of the name 'Ptolemy' before stopping in the mistaken conviction (easier to forgive in 1819) that hieroglyphics were picture-writing rather than phonetics. It was, in fact, an extension of this approach based on the phonetic values of proper names (although I don't recall "The Blue Dog" being mentioned as one of them) that allowed Champollion to progress to the point where he recognised the language as a derivative of Coptic and thus to translate it.
That "the notion of a 1-1 correspondence between hieroglyphs and the English alphabet is (how can we express this?) unlikely," has little obvious bearing on anything - I just got back from Japan, where the locals had no difficulty in writing the names of "Spiderman" (a film) and "Old Speckled Hen" (a beer) in the local writing system, which also lacks a 1-1 correspondence to the Roman alphabet. The subsequent pronounciation might sound odd to an English speaker, but probably no worse than your (or my) pronounciation of the word "sushi" - the English spelling is far from faithful to the Japanese sound values (and the experience is distressingly like chewing raw fish; what do you see in it?)
Indeed, Peter T Daniels (doyenne of Usenet's sci.lang
and co-editor of the authoritative Oxford University Press survey of The World's Writing Systems) insists that any writing system worthy of the name must have a phonetic basis sufficient to transcribe proper names in general (which often have no "meaning" in the language) and foreign names in particular (which almost never do), although the transcription will inevitably reflect the phonetic system of the transciber's language.
In short, it's hard to see how you could have been more wrong without the assistance of Federal Government. And as to how gullible you look, well, with all that egg on your face it's hard to tell.
We are thrilled with the erudite acumen of our Treasured Reader, and amused at its continued reference to those quaint analog "books". We are very pleased to add to our burgeoning knowledge of hieroglyphics the fact that they were phonetic. We probably learned (incorrectly, it turns out) about their non-phonetic nature from Saturday morning cartoons, which we previously thought were were Revealed Truth.
But, so chastened, we still have one tiny confusion. The Web page that started this thread lets you type in a bunch of characters, and renders them as hieroglyphics, apparently mapping English letters ("Roman alphabet") onto hieroglyphics, where one letter corresponds to one unique hieroglyph.
That strikes us as odd. It's probably not a phonetic mapping, or the e in blue dog would probably not have been rendered separately (as it was). Is it an alphabetic mapping? Again, that seems odd. The German word König is often rendered into English as koenig (an attempt at phonetic, not alphabetic, rendering). So you might expect the number of letters in the original text to be different than the numbers of hieroglyphs. But that wasn't the case either.
It seemed to us (in our archaeological ignorance) that the Web site was attempting a simple alphabetic substitution cipher. Which didn't seem plausible to us.
But we're sure our Treasured Readers know more than we do about this topic. And we're sure they'll want us to know it.
Meanwhile, we're composing a nasty letter to those Saturday morning cartoon guys.

Blab. In stark contrast, a spammist sends us this fine example of minimalist spam.
Subj: The most effective marketing on earth
Fill out the form below to speak with one of our marketing specialists.
Required Input Field*

Yes, that is all it said. No, there weren't any input fields. Perhaps it was intended to be humor. It is pretty funny.

Blab. A reader who seems to know Ian's family well writes:
Ian has no sister Elizabeth. He has a sister Catherine, and a sister Helen. In this instance, the sister to whom you are referring is Catherine. Sheesh !
Yeah, all those English queens sound alike to us. It is embarrassing, though, so we fixed it in the referenced entry.

Plop. Life expectancy in sub-Sahara Africa? Less than 27 years.
How old are you?

Yow. Robin Williams, live on HBO, Sunday July 14. We've marked our calendar!
In case you didn't know, Robin Williams is the most brilliant comedic genius of our age, the Feynman of funniness, the Gauss of gags. If you ever have the opportunity to see him live, spontaneous and unrehearsed, do. He's amazing.

Plurp. The guy from whom we get financial advice told us we should put a bunch of our savings into CDs. Looks like we're gonna have to buy the White Album again.

Plurp. We had a very successful meeting today. (What does he mean by that?)
Back when we had time to play D&D (Is this a change of subject?), we always liked to play characters with great power, but we never liked to play the Conquering Hero. We much preferred characters who worked in the background, out of site to normal folks, rigging events in favorable ways without being obvious. We were big on Thieves for that reason. We were especially big on Sorcerers (a kind of elemental magical type), who had telesensory powers, and who could read peoples' minds and influence their thoughts. In one long-running campaign, the dreaded Thomas the Sorcerer (and friends) set up a modest restaurant in the capital city of a country, which guaranteed privacy to its patrons. Privacy against everyone, of course, but Thomas. It was a handy way to keep tabs on things. Winning Friends and Influencing People, Through Sorcery.^TM
When we go to the movies (Another subject?!), we almost always find a character whom we would like to be. It's never the Chisel-Jawed Hero, around whom the plot turns. It's always the spy, the assassin, the guy in the background with the knowing smile.
To us, a successful meeting has a very Zen-like quality. (Is he back to meetings again?) All of our work is done ahead of time. The meeting is a set piece, a play for which the script is already written, in which the various other participants act out their carefully orchestrated roles until the preordained conclusion is reached, and everyone leaves feeling that their participation was critical and the conclusion was the result of the meeting.
And we just sit in the back and smile.

Plurp.
The blue dog
had a very successful
Plurp entry today

Sunday, July 7, 2002
Blab. A reader asks classic questions.
Who is Mia? What is she? (That all her swains commend her.)
Are you sadder than you were before?

Plurp. Here's a gift with lots of interesting possibilities: custom fortune cookies. Heh. (/usr/bin/girl)

Plurp. Ian's sister ~~Elizabeth~~ Catherine brought him a whole suitcase full of (UK) Smarties when she came over from London last week. But what we're wondering is: Why didn't he just order them online?

Plop. Pope Urges Young to be Chaste.

Yo. It was a yellow day yesterday, a strange color, and now we know why. Fires in Quebec have belched smoke 12,000 feet into the upper atmosphere, from whence it was carried south to little old us. It's very strange.

Zoom. A NY Times reporter discovers that Miatas are cool.
The best moment is swooping south on the F.D.R. Drive, just before the Manhattan Bridge, when the highway elevates again and it is like you are in a little airplane taking off.
The view unfolds just over the silver hood: the downtown skyline, the East River bridges, Governors Island, the harbor. It's best at sunset, of course, when the piers in Brooklyn are painted orange, but that's usually rush hour. So make it just after midnight, when the windows of the skyscrapers are like stars.
Yup.

Yow. Did we say something about information technology changing the world?
In contrast to the devoted Islamic revolutionaries envisioned in the strict policies adopted [in Iran] after 1979, today's students are aware of the realities outside Iran because of the Internet and satellite television. They read about Western democracy and are taught by professors who studied in the West.
"They want more freedom in their private and social lives," [said Mohsen Sazgara, a reformist politician and former journalist]. "They are fed up with the state's interference, telling them what to do. They want to be able to integrate in the global culture, have a democratic system and be sure that there will be jobs in future."
We can hope.

Yo. SourceForge is out to get Linux ported to the Xbox. They recently received an anonymous donation for a $200,000 prize to help them out. So if you're a Linux kind of person and could put $200k to good use, maybe this is for you.
For some reason, people just don't seem to like Microsoft. Why is that?

Plurp.
The blue dog
thought Catholic priests
should be chaste

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