When Jim Davis retires, they’ll still be able to make Garfield strips with the Garfield Randomiser. But why wait until then? Here are some I created yesterday.
Jon gets stroppy, and Garfield puts him back in his place. Way to go.
Garfield’s been spraying in the spare room, and he’s not sorry.
They can do this all day.
Is how this headline should read.
I recently won the contest for ‘Last Person on Earth to Get a Mobile Phone’. First prize was a mobile phone. I like it. It was worth outlasting that guy from the Amazon. He got a toaster, and nowhere to plug it in. Ha.
My phone uses T9, the predictive text algorithm. It was invented in the early 90’s, and don’t you think we would have come up with some improvements in language technology since then? But no, we’re still stuck with it, and every day I text Ms Perfect to tell her that I’ll be ‘good room’ instead of ‘home soon’. ‘Good’ and ‘home’ are textonyms, you probably know, both keyed as 4663. I can change from one to the other by hitting zero, but it irritates of.
Irritates ‘me’, sorry.
I’ve seen very little out there on improving the T9 algorithm, so here are my suggestions.
My conservative religious family thinks I’m nuts for my stand on gay marriage: I think it’s fine. Wait, that sounded normal. At least, normal to an increasing number of people. There’s been nearly four years of gay marriage already, California just became the latest state to allow it, and what with society not collapsing, fire not raining down from heaven, and more pressing problems to deal with, it seems the issue just isn’t getting the traction it used to get, as detailed in this article in the Prospect.
In 2004, there were ballot initiatives outlawing gay marriage in 11 states. All succeeded easily. In 2006, there were eight more. But this time, one of them –Arizona’s — actually failed (despite John McCain’s efforts). There is still time for initiatives to be put on the 2008 ballot, but they will likely have a much more difficult time.
With each passing year, straight Americans become more and more comfortable with gay Americans. This doesn’t mean their opinions on marriage are going to be transformed overnight, but it does mean that they will be less susceptible to scare tactics.
I really hope this means we’re seeing the end of the Culture Wars. What an awful time.
My Dad, for his part, used to shake his head when it came to acceptance of Teh Ghey. He loved to quote this poem from Pope:
It made sense — we do get more used to things. Isn’t that the way it goes? First it’s allowing them to live. Next, they’re on TV, and soon you might actually know one. Terrible.Vice is a monster so frightful mien, As to be hated needs but to be seen;
Yet too oft, familiar with her face, We first endure, then pity, then embrace.
But I never thought to ask him: why does it only apply to acceptance of gay people? Why not the reverse? I could just as well say that hatred against gay people could gradually become accepted. First you deny them marriage rights, then the right to own property, and before you know it, it’ll be okay to kill them (as is the case in Saudi Arabia). Why not use this argument against itself? A slope can be slippery both ways.
I recently noticed this truly awful story from India:
Two married women, who allegedly shared a lesbian relationship, committed suicide by setting themselves ablaze after their families tried to separate them. The police recovered the charred bodies of the women, who died hugging each other, from the residence of one of the women at Sathangadu, near Thiruvotriyur, on Saturday.
It’s hard for me to understand what made them take such an awful end to their lives. But I guess I am a straight guy in a tolerant country.
That’s why I take the stand that I do. I want to work toward a world where this kind of treatment of people is not okay. Society has a lot to make up for.
Seventeen years ago this month, Bob Marley died. Everyone knows Bob Marley. A copy of “Legend” is now issued to every infant in the world at birth.
He died of cancer. His Wikipedia page says it started from a football injury in his big toe. Toe cancer. Usually treatable. You don’t want to lose a toe, but if it saves your life, you have the thing off.
But Marley refused to amputate because of the Rastafarian belief that the body must be “whole”. And so the cancer spread to his brain and the rest of his body, and killed him. A religious belief robbed the world of one of its great musical artists.
Maybe it’s not possible to separate Marley’s music from the religious ideas that fired it. I’m not sure, though. Aren’t the songs without the religious lyrics great too? Marijuana influenced Marley’s music, but I don’t think that’s necessarily a great thing.
Marley’s action would probably impress a lot of people. Wow, he really followed his religion, even though it cost him his life, etc. But I just think it’s really sad. If he’d had a different religion, he could have had it taken care of, and been around a lot longer. What ended his life was an idea that was almost certainly false, and that seems wrong.
Currently on heavy YouTube rotation is aspiring actress Amy Walker, presenting 21 accents in two and a half minutes.
Accents are interesting. It’s easy to draw a lot of inferences about people from their accent, even when you’re trying not to. Even linguists aren’t immune to some strange attitudes. There I was, enjoying the clip. Then she got to Seattle, and just for a moment in spite of myself, I caught myself thinking, “Well, that one was easy. She was just talking like a normal person there.” Which I know is silly, because everyone has an accent.
So, at what point did her accent seem least marked for you?
Oh, and if you want to play with accents, try Sound Comparisons out of the University of Edinburgh and the Speech Accent Archive courtesy of GMU.
A couple of articles on meat got my attention today.
I once read a book by the Hare Krishna people in which they claimed that people were naturally herbivores. Manifestly untrue. A look at our intestinal bacteria shows that humans have the kind of digestive colonies typical of omnivores.
Dr. Ley and Dr. Gordon scanned the gut microbes in the feces of people and 59 other species of mammal, including meat eaters, plant eaters and omnivores. Each of the three groups has a distinctive set of bacteria, they report Friday in Science, with the gut flora of people grouping with other omnivores.
Read the rest if you want to know more about the bacteria in your inner elbow.
So, since it seems we’re geared for meat and veg, is it time to dig in? Grab a horn and start chewing? Not so fast. Thanks in part to that meat-eating, evolution has given us brains with consciousness and cognition, so we’re now able to surmount raw evolutionary concerns. We can make predictions and plans about the future. And I see a whole heap of ethical and environmental issues around meat, with consequences I’d rather avoid. This article runs off a laundry list of environmental troubles for countries gearing up for greater meat production.
The consequences of China’s new carnivorism have been enormous. Thanks in part to the meatier diet, the number of people suffering physical stunting has fallen from three in 10 in 1980 to half as many today. But because meat is so calorie-dense, rising consumption is contributing to an obesity epidemic that afflicts 100 million Chinese. The production process has itself brought a slew of complications. Rivers of sewage from China’s new “concentrated animal feeding operations,” or CAFOs, overwhelm local treatment facilities. Public health experts are increasingly worried about avian flu, whose epicenter is Asian poultry. And because factory-raised livestock need so much feed—it takes 4.5 kilograms of feed to make a kilogram of poultry meat and 20 kilograms of feed to make a kilogram of beef—China’s yen for meat is jacking up grain prices globally. In fact, because Chinese farmland is already so scarce, and because decades of industrialized agricultural have unleashed huge ecological problems (from chemical runoff to groundwater depletion), China has turned increasingly to imported feed—effectively pushing the “external” costs of its meat revolution onto farms in the United States, Argentina, and elsewhere.
Not a pretty picture. So I like the idea of being one person who takes the pressure off the system.
It wasn’t always obvious, but there’s no hiding it in 3D: Fido Dido is a frighteningly misshapen and deformed character. Is that supposed to be hair, or head-mounted tentacles?
CGI isn’t always better.
Many thanks to the students who nominated me for last year’s Excellence in Teaching Award. I was awarded a High Commendation for Teaching Excellence. The photo you see here is me with Vice Chancellor Alan Robson, getting the award at the ceremony last night.
It’s very nice to be recognised. I’m usually happy if students don’t fall asleep during lectures, so this award is a very special bonus.
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