Due to the lock-out shortened-no camp-compressed nature of this NBA season*, we could see a record in 20+ point victories per game played. While that’s better than no basketball,t should not be confused with good basketball.

*It’s not a real season.

Don’t spend money when you’re drunk. What I’mabout to describe are not bad decisions, but I still kinda wish I was sober.

I’m going to Darkcon - which is the pirate/party con of the now 4 major Spec Fic cons in the Valley. And the one I would normally be least tempted to spend money on. But we were at a party at CopperCon, and a bit drunk, and I had cash in my pocket and I got a really good rate – but yeah. We shall see. Spent the money. I’m going.

I also own the domain sillypenguin.com. Don’t bother checking it out today – there’s just a GoDaddy placeholder. My wife wants to make and sell custom greeting cards. I’ve fancied the notion of doing a webcomic of some sort, just to force myself to get back into drawing.So the Plan is to post comics about a silly penguin as a lead in to the greeting card page.

Silly Penguin was a whim. I searched the term and saw that ti was open. I was a few beers down and didn’t want this “unique domain opportunity” to be lost. As if random gibberish is somehow challenging for me to come up with.

Now we need a webhost. My front-runner is Fat Cow, but I’m open to input if any of my IT buddies has a strong opinion.

And I signed up for Code Year - because I’m tired of having no clue about things that are becoming more and more important to my work.

Now some links (we have a few backed up here):

A Slate case study on how Second Life failed the milk-shake test, and how this informs the theory of marketing.

“Neuroscience is still unable to provide a clear and direct explanation as to how the microcircuitry of the brain actually functions,” says Hugo De Garis, a cognitive science professor and director of the Artificial Brain Lab at Xiamen University in China. “We know that the basic circuitry is the same all over the human cortex, but just how the circuitry works is still largely unknown.”

This from an article in Sloan Science and Film about the frustrating future of artificial intelligence. The authors go on:

One main sticking point for AI research is the idea of consciousness or emotion—vague concepts that aren’t easily quantifiable or scientifically proven but are essential for creating a supermachine because, many scientists claim, feelings are integral to handling our thoughts.

Coincidentally, among the four books I’m currently reading is The Universe in a Single Atom by the Dalai Lama. Within, DL asserts that western sience will never satisfactorily explain how consciousness works because objective measurements miss what is an inherently and unavoidably subjective experience. He argues that we must also consider the “rigorous, focused and disciplined use of introspection and mindfulness to probe deeply into the nature of a chosen subject.”

To put it another way, although the experience of happiness may coincide with certain chemical reactions in the brain, such as an increase in serotonin, no amount of biochemical and neurobiological description of this brain change can explain what happiness is.

[pg145]

For some people (myself included) true happiness can come from a really well-crafted map

And tying is all together, you can find this map of Scientific Exploration here.

Now you know.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,500 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 25 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Instead, as happens from time to time, I’m going to post some links about the antics of the octopi.

First – not really an octopus, but close enough: The Flamboyant cuttlefish:

Next, water can’t contain this octopus. He/she/it climbs out to mingle with the tourists.

I suspect the true purpose of the octopus was to evict the crab.

Details form an accompanying article in Treehugger.com

Finally. robot octopi or an octopus-robot as described in Ars Technica

Useful things soon.

Maybe.

Now you know.

On ticks, I’ve learned that anything you buy at the pet store for less than a month’s salary is fairly useless. We have not found a spray for less than $30/bottle that does not leave me pulling at least 6 ticks off the lab every time I pet him. The $40 stuff is coming – but its gotta wait for payday. (The healer, OTH, has been more effective at removing the ticks herself. I only find them in places she cannot reach.)

Ticks don’t live on dogs, they latch on to feed, hide and grow, feed again, and then lay 10,000 eggs. You’ll never find them in all the tiny cracks they can hide in, but cleaning the house  front to back seems to help. They all have to come to the dogs, however, and that is where I have concentrated my surveillance.

Brown dog ticks, which is what we have (I think), don’t feed on humans. They’ll bite though. At least a hundred have gone down my toilet.

I’d link to a website here, but let me save the time: Remove them carefully, buy some products, ask your vet.

The internet is similarly obvious about head lice: Remove them carefully, buy some products, ask your doctor. And wash everything with hot water.

This is what we’ve learned from other parents: If you put a pillow or stuffed animal in a garbage bag and leave it out in the summer sun for two days, that kills everything. Mayonnaise is just as effective a hair lubricant as conditioner, and a ton cheaper. What’s going to do the most good is removing the lice and eggs with a fine-toothed comb. We own the one that came with the lice shampoo, but flea combs (for pets) will also work well. Boil it all (combs, brushes, hair clips) afterwards. OTC shampoos and treatments are hit-or-miss. Some strains of lice are just resistant. The comb is a sure, if labor intensive, thing. The spray is for the bedding – don’t use it on the kids.

The lice I think we’ve beaten back. The tick wars go on.

A segway into politics seems too easy. Let’s just do some links.

Steven Pinker, writing in the Wall Street Journal explains that – despite the news – we are actually becoming more tolerant and less violent as a species.

“Believe it or not, the world of the past was much worse. Violence has been in decline for thousands of years, and today we may be living in the most peaceable era in the existence of our species. “

Feel better? Not so fast. Farhad Manjoo (real name) asks in Slate “Will robots steal your job?”

What I found was unsettling. They might not know it yet, but some of the most educated workers in the nation are engaged in a fierce battle with machines. As computers get better at processing and understanding language and at approximating human problem-solving skills, they’re putting a number of professions in peril. Those at risk include doctors, lawyers, pharmacists, scientists, and creative professionals—even writers like myself.

But can they blog about urinals?

I updated Are We Lost Yet on my adventures up and down Mt Elden.

And finally something cool: (From APOD)

Now you know

It’s not Blog like a Pirate Day. Maybe we should start a movement.

A few quick links before the toilet humor starts:

A post-mortem of my book signing can be found at Are We Lost yet

GAFDE on blogging (which I am ignoring right now) at Writing Made Visible

The discovery of this planet isn’t monumental, (see last post for more on this process)  but the artwork is cool:

NASA has a new on-line tool to explore planets in our own system. The LA times describes it here.

“You are now free to move about the solar system,” Blaine Baggett, a manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge, said in a statement. “See what NASA’s spacecraft see — and where they are right now — all without leaving your computer.”

The actual tool is here.

Eyes on the Solar System

Here ends the respectable portion of this blog entry.

So, according to the WordPress dashboard, one of the top searches leading to this site is “unicorn pooping marshmallows” which leads you to thi

That post also has one of the few clean photos of yours truly on this blog, and a video explaining the importance of the First Follower.

This post features something equally classy:

That is a Lady J - a portable urinal for women. That’s right, we span the globe to find weird urinals all over the world – even in your over-sized purse. Franly, I’m kinda disappointed the device isn’t pink.

So you know, women use these things in adventure and other travels. I learned about it from Kelly, who went around the world in a boat.

If you follow the D-backs or the Mercury, playing hard all the way through the game can get you a LOT farther than any of the talking heads would have expected.

Now you know.

Are we lost yet profiles Elden Springs and my upcoming book signing / workshop.

DIRECT LINK TO THE REI EVENT

And at Writing Made Visible, there are some reposts about the accelerating sales of  e-books.

Small cons are great – because you can actually talk to people!

Buy some light groceries and keep them in the hotel room.

The art carries the story in a comic book (or graphic novel, or any variant). Words only get what little space is left over, so every word has to count. No small talk.

There is no standard for comic book scripts. Unless you’re writing for Dark Horse Comics. Their format is here.

Marketing (or anything else) via social media – a few rules:

1) Be social first! Pitch your crap second. The other way around just gets you deleted.

2) If you’re not comfortable with the format, don’t use it. You’ll likely suck at it anyway.

3) If you’re marketing yourself as a writer – write well. Spells words correctly.

4) No amount of social media presence will make up for a shoddy product.

The current estimate is that half of all star systems have planets, and the average may be 1-10 planets per star.

We find an awful lot of “Hot Jupiters” – gas giants closely orbiting a star – which goes against our model of how solar systems form. We know why we keep finding them – they are relatively easy to spot. We have no idea why they would exist at all.

Planets orbiting pulsars are very easy to find, even as small as the Earth. But the pulsar’s radiation makes life pretty much impossible.

Piratey sword-fighting was all about shorter movements with shorter swords (crowded ships and all).  And footwork – you live or die by footwork.

I’m over adapting anything to D20. It’s no longer supported for 3.5, and I have no urge to learn 4.0. I’m pushing forward with the game. Amen.

I’m thinking about writing it in Tiddlywiki. Seriously.

There might be a separate blog for that later on.

Finally New Scientist looks into the quantum-mechanics of human thought.

Now you know.

I have watched my wife get a C-section, and I have watched blow-out Little League games, and those experiences were horrible. Not quite as bad, but ranking up there, is watching (because my kids seized control of the TV) a re-run of a Saturday Night Live Christmas Special in late August.

Modern CPR is now 30 compressions / 2 breaths. And the best place to restock your first aid kit is your local dollar store.

I’m 44, a father, homeowner and profession at several things. There aren’t many excuses for me. If I’m going to turn a profit writing, blogging is part of the process. So, this blog update over the weekend. Are We Lost Yet?  updates on Wednesday. Writing Made Visible updates on Thursday (likely with writer’s group notes. Once I get in the habit of those blogs, I may add others. If you don’t want to hunt those downs, I will always announce updates here. (Because this version of WordPress automatically posts to Facebook and the like – unlike Trekalongs’.)

On that subject, Windows Movie Maker doesn’t default save to a format You Tube can use. You have to save it as a movie, and not a project. How do I know? I have a You Tube Channel: Are We Lost Yet?

And more NASA doom - a map of the Antarctic Ice Flow, and how it is accellerating.

Now you know.

“We were going to raise our rates,” Ross, the barber, told me, “But we figured, with the recession and all, we’d just keep them where they’re at for a while longer.”

Hair For All Seasons is open daily at 316 N 48th Street. 480-414-7866

(There is a Russian barber in central Phoenix who gives a slighter better cut – IMO – but he wants $20).

Since January 2011, the Thursday Night Writer’s Group has been meeting at Urban Beans. We do the same thing every Thursday – like network TV in the 70′s. (That reference never gets old for me.) It’s a read-aloud group, for various reasons, meaning whatever you want feedback on,you read aloud to the group. Most of the time, even in a public coffee shop, this is not a problem.

Last month, UB started a wine and beer tasting event on Thursday nights, and we contemplated moving. But as we contemplated, we noticed that the place still clears out by around 7:45, so we just moved our meeting time.

Last night, they added live music. (Unnounced, as far as we could tell. Certainly not on their website calendar). It was just a guy with an accoustic guitar plyng in the corner. So we plowed forward. It was still softer and less annoying than the expresso machine.

Halfway through our meeting, the owner comes to our table and asks if we could not read our stuff while the musician was playing.

“This is what we do.” I explained. “This is what we always do, every Thursday night.”

Yes, well, but the owner explained that she was trying to transition towards more of a wine bar.

So in front of her, I counted the patrons at our table (8) and the patrons elsewhere in the shop (5). I also noted that we all bought something.

“Sure.” She said, “Butare you going to be here next week?”

“We have done this every Thursday night for the better part of a year.”

That seemed to run her out of logic. Nonetheless, there seemed no compromise possible. She didn’t want us doing what she did while the music was going.

I can say with some confidence that 4 of the other patrons would have been there anyway. There was only one patron actually listening and responding to the guitarist. (He wasn’t bad -but he wasn’t why we were there.)

But the owner had been clapping enthusiastically on the far end of the shop at the end of every song. A clue perhaps.

OK – she owns the place. If she wants to turn it into her private wine bar, she can. We’ve brought in 6-12 and sometimes more paying customers every week, and would’ve continued to do so had we not been asked to stop. But we were effectively driven out.

That said, we have learned from Coffee Unlimited and Dolce Expresso that good coffee alone won’t pay the bills. We were very welcome in both places, but both places have shut down. So maybe this a desperate attempt to change directions before that happens. Maybe.

I suspect, though, based on what I saw,that she’d simply rather have a wine bar than a coffee shop. And we were in the way of that dream.

If you are driving away paying customers with no ready replacement for that revenue, then what you have is a hobby. That might soon suck for her employees, who have been nothing but cool to us throughout our time there.

We now meet at the Armadillo Grill, a sports bar of all things, but they have a well-lit and quiet back room, and they seemed happy to have us, so long as most of us bought something. Which most of us always do.

That barber’s been in business for 30 years, even without a mission statement on his website (he doesn’t have one I could find), and he’ll stay in business until he retires. I could not confidently predict that about Urban Beans. Not that it matters – because I won’t be back.

Now you know.

Real info on the mimic octopus.

And a normal octopus having fun with a diver:

Now you know.

The Tea Party sees the Debt Ceiling” Crisis” as their best hope to starve the beast – to eliminate the Federal Government as a major force in our lives. They believe the Debt Ceiling is an accounting trick, and many will not vote to raise it under any circumstances. It remains unclear whether the adult wing of the GOP can secure passage of anything without them (since apparently, working with Democrats is still unthinkable).

Here’s the Radical Moderate Position on the completely self-inflicted Debt Ceiling Crisis:

You pass a clean debt ceiling bill in the middle of the night – just like they always have in the past – not because its the responsible policy thing to do, but because it prevents one party or another from turning this into a hostage situation like we have now.

Everybody – that’s everybody – knew the budget passed would require additional debt by the summer of 2011. You can be appalled, but you cannot feign surprise.  They’ve had the same numbers in both houses since last November. If you haven’t affected “lasting change” by now – it’s too late.

Just raise the debt ceiling. Every alternative is actually worse now.

I know the Tea Party isn’t fond of facts clogging up their emotional catharsis about the Crushing Debt, but the chart above is derived from fairly undisputed numbers.

If you are serious about the deficit, you gotta put the Bush tax cuts on the table. Because the economy is what it is, and the wars can’t just be turned off. (Oh – and TARP actually made money – probably because it was actually cooked up by Republicans to begin with).

If the money that went into Social Security had actually stayed in Social Security, it would still be solvent.

Speaking of shameful legislative skullduggery – Mitch McConnell is right: if the Tea Party (let’s face it – they’re the problem here) torpedoes every  Ceiling deal, they will be on the hook for whatever happens August 3rd and after.

The Democrats would have just raised the ceiling. You know its true.

I know none of the Tea Party Caucus read my blog, but here’s some advice anyway:

You could vote yes because its actually good for the country (at this point). Did we spend too much? Probably. But – and this is key – we already spent that money, in the sense that once you order the food from a restaurant, you still have to pay for it, whether you enjoyed the meal or not.Even if you have to borrow money from your date.

As one of our supervisors famously explained to an obstructive client, “Look. This is what it costs. At some point, you have to grow up and pay the bill.”

Or you could vote yes because you value your own stock portfolio.

OR you could vote yes because otherwise you get the blame for an economy that might otherwise sink the current President. Pinning a secondary collapse on obstructionist Republicans helped FDR get elected in 1936 with 12% unemployment; and it could help BHO do the same thing in 2012.

That’s right: a vote against the debt ceiling is – in an admittedly convoluted but foreseeable way – a vote for President Obama.

Now you know.