Found

LUST FOR LIFE by Michael Robbins found in New Yorker, March 2010

2010-04-10T17:42:00.000-07:00

The elephants ate each other then they dreamed
of eating elephants till their captors came
to feed them. Then they died. My meth lab
tends to explode. I move to a new one
like a hermit crab. I give the gift of gab.

The truth gets me hard. Song selection
is key. The idiot Swedes do a number on me.
They invent refrigeration and sleep in shifts.
I'm tired of being compared to Britney Spears.
She's so pretty. I'm covered in petroglyphs.

That sorcerer bewitched my penis!
I'm speed and space, an Aztec princess.
The truth makes me hurl, the truth's a mistake.
John Milton jumps out of my birthday cake.

The psyched Mohican oils the beaver.
Fruit Stripe gum soon loses flavor.
Everything's flammable. Everything's flash.
Postmen like doctors and doctors like cash.

— Michael Robbins "LUST FOR LIFE"

Shopping with Mumbles by @edbassmaster (YouTube)

2009-11-27T20:31:00.000-08:00

The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era

2009-08-05T20:57:00.000-07:00

What is The Singularity?

The acceleration of technological progress has been the central feature of this century. I argue in this paper that we are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. The precise cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence. There are several means by which science may achieve this breakthrough (and this is another reason for having confidence that the event will occur):

The development of computers that are "awake" and superhumanly intelligent. (To date, most controversy in the area of AI relates to whether we can create human equivalence in a machine. But if the answer is "yes, we can", then there is little doubt that beings more intelligent can be constructed shortly thereafter. — Large computer networks (and their associated users) may "wake up" as a superhumanly intelligent entity. o Computer/human interfaces may become so intimate that users may reasonably be considered superhumanly intelligent. o Biological science may find ways to improve upon the natural human intellect.

The first three possibilities depend in large part on improvements in computer hardware. Progress in computer hardware has followed an amazingly steady curve in the last few decades [16]. Based largely on this trend, I believe that the creation of greater than human intelligence will occur during the next thirty years. (Charles Platt [19] has pointed out the AI enthusiasts have been making claims like this for the last thirty years. Just so I'm not guilty of a relative-time ambiguity, let me more specific: I'll be surprised if this event occurs before 2005 or after 2030.)

What are the consequences of this event? When greater-than-human intelligence drives progress, that progress will be much more rapid. In fact, there seems no reason why progress itself would not involve the creation of still more intelligent entities — on a still-shorter time scale. The best analogy that I see is with the evolutionary past: Animals can adapt to problems and make inventions, but often no faster than natural selection can do its work — the world acts as its own simulator in the case of natural selection. We humans have the ability to internalize the world and conduct "what if's" in our heads; we can solve many problems thousands of times faster than natural selection. Now, by creating the means to execute those simulations at much higher speeds, we are entering a regime as radically different from our human past as we humans are from the lower animals.

From the human point of view this change will be a throwing away of all the previous rules, perhaps in the blink of an eye, an exponential runaway beyond any hope of control. Developments that before were thought might only happen in "a million years" (if ever) will likely happen in the next century. (In [4], Greg Bear paints a picture of the major changes happening in a matter of hours.)

I think it's fair to call this event a singularity ("the Singularity" for the purposes of this paper). It is a point where our models must be discarded and a new reality rules. As we move closer and closer to this point, it will loom vaster and vaster over human affairs till the notion becomes a commonplace. Yet when it finally happens it may still be a great surprise and a greater unknown. In the 1950s there were very few who saw it: Stan Ulam [27] paraphrased John von Neumann as saying:

One conversation centered on the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.

Von Neumann even uses the term singularity, though it appears he is still thinking of normal progress, not the creation of superhuman intellect. (For me, the superhumanity is the essence of the Singularity. Without that we would get a glut of technical riches, never properly absorbed (see [24]).)

In the 1960s there was recognition of some of the implications of superhuman intelligence. I. J. Good wrote [10]:

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an "intelligence explosion," and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the _last_ invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control. ... It is more probable than not that, within the twentieth century, an ultraintelligent machine will be built and that it will be the last invention that man need make.

Good has captured the essence of the runaway, but does not pursue its most disturbing consequences. Any intelligent machine of the sort he describes would not be humankind's "tool" — any more than humans are the tools of rabbits or robins or chimpanzees.

Through the '60s and '70s and '80s, recognition of the cataclysm spread [28] [1] [30] [4]. Perhaps it was the science-fiction writers who felt the first concrete impact. After all, the "hard" science-fiction writers are the ones who try to write specific stories about all that technology may do for us. More and more, these writers felt an opaque wall across the future. Once, they could put such fantasies millions of years in the future [23]. Now they saw that their most diligent extrapolations resulted in the unknowable ... soon. Once, galactic empires might have seemed a Post-Human domain. Now, sadly, even interplanetary ones are.

What about the '90s and the '00s and the '10s, as we slide toward the edge? How will the approach of the Singularity spread across the human world view? For a while yet, the general critics of machine sapience will have good press. After all, till we have hardware as powerful as a human brain it is probably foolish to think we'll be able to create human equivalent (or greater) intelligence. (There is the far-fetched possibility that we could make a human equivalent out of less powerful hardware, if were willing to give up speed, if we were willing to settle for an artificial being who was literally slow [29]. But it's much more likely that devising the software will be a tricky process, involving lots of false starts and experimentation. If so, then the arrival of self-aware machines will not happen till after the development of hardware that is substantially more powerful than humans' natural equipment.)

But as time passes, we should see more symptoms. The dilemma felt by science fiction writers will be perceived in other creative endeavors. (I have heard thoughtful comic book writers worry about how to have spectacular effects when everything visible can be produced by the technically commonplace.) We will see automation replacing higher and higher level jobs. We have tools right now (symbolic math programs, cad/cam) that release us from most low-level drudgery. Or put another way: The work that is truly productive is the domain of a steadily smaller and more elite fraction of humanity. In the coming of the Singularity, we are seeing the predictions of true technological unemployment finally come true.

Another symptom of progress toward the Singularity: ideas themselves should spread ever faster, and even the most radical will quickly become commonplace. When I began writing, it seemed very easy to come up with ideas that took decades to percolate into the cultural consciousness; now the lead time seems more like eighteen months. (Of course, this could just be me losing my imagination as I get old, but I see the effect in others too.) Like the shock in a compressible flow, the Singularity moves closer as we accelerate through the critical speed.

And what of the arrival of the Singularity itself? What can be said of its actual appearance? Since it involves an intellectual runaway, it will probably occur faster than any technical revolution seen so far. The precipitating event will likely be unexpected -- perhaps even to the researchers involved. ("But all our previous models were catatonic! We were just tweaking some parameters....") If networking is widespread enough (into ubiquitous embedded systems), it may seem as if our artifacts as a whole had suddenly wakened.

And what happens a month or two (or a day or two) after that? I have only analogies to point to: The rise of humankind. We will be in the Post-Human era. And for all my rampant technological optimism, sometimes I think I'd be more comfortable if I were regarding these transcendental events from one thousand years remove ... instead of twenty.

Can the Singularity be Avoided?

Well, maybe it won't happen at all: Sometimes I try to imagine the symptoms that we should expect to see if the Singularity is not to develop. There are the widely respected arguments of Penrose [18] and Searle [21] against the practicality of machine sapience. In August of 1992, Thinking Machines Corporation held a workshop to investigate the question "How We Will Build a Machine that Thinks" [Thearling]. As you might guess from the workshop's title, the participants were not especially supportive of the arguments against machine intelligence. In fact, there was general agreement that minds can exist on nonbiological substrates and that algorithms are of central importance to the existence of minds. However, there was much debate about the raw hardware power that is present in organic brains. A minority felt that the largest 1992 computers were within three orders of magnitude of the power of the human brain. The majority of the participants agreed with Moravec's estimate [16] that we are ten to forty years away from hardware parity. And yet there was another minority who pointed to [6] [20], and conjectured that the computational competence of single neurons may be far higher than generally believed. If so, our present computer hardware might be as much as ten orders of magnitude short of the equipment we carry around in our heads. If this is true (or for that matter, if the Penrose or Searle critique is valid), we might never see a Singularity. Instead, in the early '00s we would find our hardware performance curves begin to level off — this caused by our inability to automate the complexity of the design work necessary to support the hardware trend curves. We'd end up with some _very_ powerful hardware, but without the ability to push it further. Commercial digital signal processing might be awesome, giving an analog appearance even to digital operations, but nothing would ever "wake up" and there would never be the intellectual runaway which is the essence of the Singularity. It would likely be seen as a golden age ... and it would also be an end of progress. This is very like the future predicted by Gunther Stent. In fact, on page 137 of [24], Stent explicitly cites the development of transhuman intelligence as a sufficient condition to break his projections.

But if the technological Singularity can happen, it will. Even if all the governments of the world were to understand the "threat" and be in deadly fear of it, progress toward the goal would continue. In fiction, there have been stories of laws passed forbidding the construction of "a machine in the form of the mind of man" [12]. In fact, the competitive advantage — economic, military, even artistic — of every advance in automation is so compelling that passing laws, or having customs, that forbid such things merely assures that someone else will get them first.

Eric Drexler [7] has provided spectacular insight about how far technical improvement may go. He agrees that superhuman intelligences will be available in the near future — and that such entities pose a threat to the human status quo. But Drexler argues that we can embed such transhuman devices in rules or physical confinement such that their results can be examined and used safely. This is I. J. Good's ultraintelligent machine, with a dose of caution. I argue that confinement is intrinsically impractical. For the case of physical confinement: Imagine yourself confined to your house with only limited data access to the outside, to your masters. If those masters thought at a rate — say — one million times slower than you, there is little doubt that over a period of years (your time) you could come up with "helpful advice" that would incidentally set you free. (I call this "fast thinking" form of superintelligence "weak superhumanity". Such a "weakly superhuman" entity would probably burn out in a few weeks of outside time. "Strong superhumanity" would be more than cranking up the clock speed on a human-equivalent mind. It's hard to say precisely what "strong superhumanity" would be like, but the difference appears to be profound. Imagine running a dog mind at very high speed. Would a thousand years of doggy living add up to any human insight? (Now if the dog mind were cleverly rewired and then run at high speed, we might see something different....) Most speculations about superintelligence seem to be based on the weakly superhuman model. I believe that our best guesses about the post- Singularity world can be obtained by thinking on the nature of strong superhumanity. I will return to this point later in the paper.)

The other approach to Drexlerian confinement is to build rules into the mind of the created superhuman entity (Asimov's Laws). I think that performance rules strict enough to be safe would also produce a device whose ability was clearly inferior to the unfettered versions (and so human competition would favor the development of the those more dangerous models). Still, the Asimov dream is a wonderful one: Imagine a willing slave, who has 1000 times your capabilities in every way. Imagine a creature who could satisfy your every safe wish (whatever that means) and still have 99.9% of its time free for other activities. There would be a new universe we never really understood, but filled with benevolent gods (though one of my wishes might be to become one of them).

If the Singularity can not be prevented or confined, just how bad could the Post-Human era be? Well ... pretty bad. The physical extinction of the human race is one possibility. (Or as Eric Drexler put it of nanotechnology: Given all that such technology can do, perhaps governments would simply decide that they no longer need citizens!). Yet physical extinction may not be the scariest possibility. Again, analogies: Think of the different ways we relate to animals. Some of the crude physical abuses are implausible, yet.... In a Post-Human world there would still be plenty of niches where human equivalent automation would be desirable: embedded systems in autonomous devices, self-aware daemons in the lower functioning of larger sentients. (A strongly superhuman intelligence would likely be a Society of Mind [15] with some very competent components.) Some of these human equivalents might be used for nothing more than digital signal processing. They would be more like whales than humans. Others might be very human-like, yet with a one-sidedness, a dedication that would put them in a mental hospital in our era. Though none of these creatures might be flesh-and-blood humans, they might be the closest things in the new enviroment to what we call human now. (I. J. Good had something to say about this, though at this late date the advice may be moot: Good [11] proposed a "Meta-Golden Rule", which might be paraphrased as "Treat your inferiors as you would be treated by your superiors." It's a wonderful, paradoxical idea (and most of my friends don't believe it) since the game- theoretic payoff is so hard to articulate. Yet if we were able to follow it, in some sense that might say something about the plausibility of such kindness in this universe.)

I have argued above that we cannot prevent the Singularity, that its coming is an inevitable consequence of the humans' natural competitiveness and the possibilities inherent in technology. And yet ... we are the initiators. Even the largest avalanche is triggered by small things. We have the freedom to establish initial conditions, make things happen in ways that are less inimical than others. Of course (as with starting avalanches), it may not be clear what the right guiding nudge really is:

Other Paths to the Singularity: Intelligence Amplification

When people speak of creating superhumanly intelligent beings, they are usually imagining an AI project. But as I noted at the beginning of this paper, there are other paths to superhumanity. Computer networks and human-computer interfaces seem more mundane than AI, and yet they could lead to the Singularity. I call this contrasting approach Intelligence Amplification (IA). IA is something that is proceeding very naturally, in most cases not even recognized by its developers for what it is. But every time our ability to access information and to communicate it to others is improved, in some sense we have achieved an increase over natural intelligence. Even now, the team of a PhD human and good computer workstation (even an off-net workstation!) could probably max any written intelligence test in existence.

And it's very likely that IA is a much easier road to the achievement of superhumanity than pure AI. In humans, the hardest development problems have already been solved. Building up from within ourselves ought to be easier than figuring out first what we really are and then building machines that are all of that. And there is at least conjectural precedent for this approach. Cairns-Smith [5] has speculated that biological life may have begun as an adjunct to still more primitive life based on crystalline growth. Lynn Margulis [14] has made strong arguments for the view that mutualism is the great driving force in evolution.

Note that I am not proposing that AI research be ignored or less funded. What goes on with AI will often have applications in IA, and vice versa. I am suggesting that we recognize that in network and interface research there is something as profound (and potential wild) as Artificial Intelligence. With that insight, we may see projects that are not as directly applicable as conventional interface and network design work, but which serve to advance us toward the Singularity along the IA path.

Here are some possible projects that take on special significance, given the IA point of view: o Human/computer team automation: Take problems that are normally considered for purely machine solution (like hill- climbing problems), and design programs and interfaces that take a advantage of humans' intuition and available computer hardware. Considering all the bizarreness of higher dimensional hill-climbing problems (and the neat algorithms that have been devised for their solution), there could be some very interesting displays and control tools provided to the human team member. o Develop human/computer symbiosis in art: Combine the graphic generation capability of modern machines and the esthetic sensibility of humans. Of course, there has been an enormous amount of research in designing computer aids for artists, as labor saving tools. I'm suggesting that we explicitly aim for a greater merging of competence, that we explicitly recognize the cooperative approach that is possible. Karl Sims [22] has done wonderful work in this direction. Allow human/computer teams at chess tournaments. We already have programs that can play better than almost all humans. But how much work has been done on how this power could be used by a human, to get something even better? If such teams were allowed in at least some chess tournaments, it could have the positive effect on IA research that allowing computers in tournaments had for the corresponding niche in AI. o Develop interfaces that allow computer and network access without requiring the human to be tied to one spot, sitting in front of a computer. (This is an aspect of IA that fits so well with known economic advantages that lots of effort is already being spent on it.) o Develop more symmetrical decision support systems. A popular research/product area in recent years has been decision support systems. This is a form of IA, but may be too focussed on systems that are oracular. As much as the program giving the user information, there must be the idea of the user giving the program guidance. o Use local area nets to make human teams that really work (ie, are more effective than their component members). This is generally the area of "groupware", already a very popular commercial pursuit. The change in viewpoint here would be to regard the group activity as a combination organism. In one sense, this suggestion might be regarded as the goal of inventing a "Rules of Order" for such combination operations. For instance, group focus might be more easily maintained than in classical meetings. Expertise of individual human members could be isolated from ego issues such that the contribution of different members is focussed on the team project. And of course shared data bases could be used much more conveniently than in conventional committee operations. (Note that this suggestion is aimed at team operations rather than political meetings. In a political setting, the automation described above would simply enforce the power of the persons making the rules!) o Exploit the worldwide Internet as a combination human/ machine tool. Of all the items on the list, progress in this is proceeding the fastest and may run us into the Singularity before anything else. The power and influence of even the present-day Internet is vastly underestimated. For instance, I think our contemporary computer systems would break under the weight of their own complexity if it weren't for the edge that the USENET "group mind" gives the system administration and support people!) The very anarchy of the worldwide net development is evidence of its potential. As connectivity and bandwidth and archive size and computer speed all increase, we are seeing something like Lynn Margulis' [14] vision of the biosphere as data processor recapitulated, but at a million times greater speed and with millions of humanly intelligent agents (ourselves).

The above examples illustrate research that can be done within the context of contemporary computer science departments. There are other paradigms. For example, much of the work in Artificial Intelligence and neural nets would benefit from a closer connection with biological life. Instead of simply trying to model and understand biological life with computers, research could be directed toward the creation of composite systems that rely on biological life for guidance or for the providing features we don't understand well enough yet to implement in hardware. A long-time dream of science- fiction has been direct brain to computer interfaces [2] [28]. In fact, there is concrete work that can be done (and has been done) in this area: Limb prosthetics is a topic of direct commercial applicability. Nerve to silicon transducers can be made [13]. This is an exciting, near-term step toward direct communication. Similar direct links into brains may be feasible, if the bit rate is low: given human learning flexibility, the actual brain neuron targets might not have to be precisely selected. Even 100 bits per second would be of great use to stroke victims who would otherwise be confined to menu-driven interfaces. o Plugging in to the optic trunk has the potential for bandwidths of 1 Mbit/second or so. But for this, we need to know the fine-scale architecture of vision, and we need to place an enormous web of electrodes with exquisite precision. If we want our high bandwidth connection to be in addition to what paths are already present in the brain, the problem becomes vastly more intractable. Just sticking a grid of high-bandwidth receivers into a brain certainly won't do it. But suppose that the high-bandwidth grid were present while the brain structure was actually setting up, as the embryo develops. That suggests: o Animal embryo experiments. I wouldn't expect any IA success in the first years of such research, but giving developing brains access to complex simulated neural structures might be very interesting to the people who study how the embryonic brain develops. In the long run, such experiments might produce animals with additional sense paths and interesting intellectual abilities.

Originally, I had hoped that this discussion of IA would yield some clearly safer approaches to the Singularity. (After all, IA allows our participation in a kind of transcendance.) Alas, looking back over these IA proposals, about all I am sure of is that they should be considered, that they may give us more options. But as for safety ... well, some of the suggestions are a little scarey on their face. One of my informal reviewers pointed out that IA for individual humans creates a rather sinister elite. We humans have millions of years of evolutionary baggage that makes us regard competition in a deadly light. Much of that deadliness may not be necessary in today's world, one where losers take on the winners' tricks and are co-opted into the winners' enterprises. A creature that was built de novo might possibly be a much more benign entity than one with a kernel based on fang and talon. And even the egalitarian view of an Internet that wakes up along with all mankind can be viewed as a nightmare [25].

The problem is not that the Singularity represents simply the passing of humankind from center stange, but that it contradicts some of our most deeply held notions of being. I think a closer look at the notion of strong superhumanity can show why that is.

Strong Superhumanity and the Best We Can Ask for

Suppose we could tailor the Singularity. Suppose we could attain our most extravagant hopes. What then would we ask for: That humans themselves would become their own successors, that whatever injustice occurs would be tempered by our knowledge of our roots. For those who remained unaltered, the goal would be benign treatment (perhaps even giving the stay-behinds the appearance of being masters of godlike slaves). It could be a golden age that also involved progress (overleaping Stent's barrier). Immortality (or at least a lifetime as long as we can make the universe survive [9] [3]) would be achievable.

But in this brightest and kindest world, the philosophical problems themselves become intimidating. A mind that stays at the same capacity cannot live forever; after a few thousand years it would look more like a repeating tape loop than a person. (The most chilling picture I have seen of this is in [17].) To live indefinitely long, the mind itself must grow ... and when it becomes great enough, and looks back ... what fellow-feeling can it have with the soul that it was originally? Certainly the later being would be everything the original was, but so much vastly more. And so even for the individual, the Cairns-Smith (or Lynn Margulis) notion of new life growing incrementally out of the old must still be valid.

This "problem" about immortality comes up in much more direct ways. The notion of ego and self-awareness has been the bedrock of the hardheaded rationalism of the last few centuries. Yet now the notion of self-awareness is under attack from the Artificial Intelligence people ("self-awareness and other delusions"). Intelligence Amplification undercuts the importance of ego from another direction. The post-Singularity world will involve extremely high-bandwidth networking. A central feature of strongly superhuman entities will likely be their ability to communicate at variable bandwidths, including ones far higher than speech or written messages. What happens when pieces of ego can be copied and merged, when the size of a self awareness can grow or shrink to fit the nature of the problems under consideration? These are essential features of strong superhumanity and the Singularity. Thinking about them, one begins to feel how essentially strange and different the Post-Human era will be — no matter how cleverly and benignly it is brought to be.

From one angle, the vision fits many of our happiest dreams: a place unending, where we can truly know one another and understand the deepest mysteries. From another angle, it's a lot like the worst case scenario I imagined earlier in this paper.

Which is the valid viewpoint? In fact, I think the new era is simply too different to fit into the classical frame of good and evil. That frame is based on the idea of isolated, immutable minds connected by tenuous, low-bandwidth links. But the post-Singularity world does fit with the larger tradition of change and cooperation that started long ago (perhaps even before the rise of biological life). I think there are notions of ethics that would apply in such an era. Research into IA and high-bandwidth communications should improve this understanding. I see just the glimmerings of this now, in Good's Meta-Golden Rule, perhaps in rules for distinguishing self from others on the basis of bandwidth of connection. And while mind and self will be vastly more labile than in the past, much of what we value (knowledge, memory, thought) need never be lost. I think Freeman Dyson has it right when he says [8]: "God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension."

[I wish to thank John Carroll of San Diego State University and Howard Davidson of Sun Microsystems for discussing the draft version of this paper with me.]

Annotated Sources [and an occasional plea for bibliographical help]:

[1] Alfvén, Hannes, writing as Olof Johanneson, _The End of Man?_, Award Books, 1969 earlier published as "The Tale of the Big Computer", Coward-McCann, translated from a book copyright 1966 Albert Bonniers Forlag AB with English translation copyright 1966 by Victor Gollanz, Ltd.

[2] Anderson, Poul, "Kings Who Die", _If_, March 1962, p8-36. Reprinted in _Seven Conquests_, Poul Anderson, MacMillan Co., 1969.

[3] Barrow, John D. and Frank J. Tipler, _The Anthropic Cosmological Principle_, Oxford University Press, 1986.

[4] Bear, Greg, "Blood Music", _Analog Science Fiction-Science Fact_, June, 1983. Expanded into the novel _Blood Music_, Morrow, 1985

[5] Cairns-Smith, A. G., _Seven Clues to the Origin of Life_, Cambridge University Press, 1985.

[6] Conrad, Michael _et al._, "Towards an Artificial Brain", _BioSystems_, vol23, pp175-218, 1989.

[7] Drexler, K. Eric, _Engines of Creation_, Anchor Press/ Doubleday, 1986.

[8] Dyson, Freeman, _Infinite in All Directions_, Harper && Row, 1988.

[9] Dyson, Freeman, "Physics and Biology in an Open Universe", _Review of Modern Physics_, vol 51, pp447-460, 1979.

[10] Good, I. J., "Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine", in _Advances in Computers_, vol 6, Franz L. Alt and Morris Rubinoff, eds, pp31-88, 1965, Academic Press.

[11] Good, I. J., [Help! I can't find the source of Good's Meta- Golden Rule, though I have the clear recollection of hearing about it sometime in the 1960s. Through the help of the net, I have found pointers to a number of related items. G. Harry Stine and Andrew Haley have written about metalaw as it might relate to extraterrestrials: G. Harry Stine, "How to Get along with Extraterrestrials ... or Your Neighbor", _Analog Science Fact- Science Fiction_, February, 1980, p39-47.]

[12] Herbert, Frank, _Dune_, Berkley Books, 1985. However, this novel was serialized in _Analog Science Fiction-Science Fact_ in the 1960s.

[13] Kovacs, G. T. A. _et al._, "Regeneration Microelectrode Array for Peripheral Nerve Recording and Stimulation", _IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering_, v 39, n 9, pp 893-902.

[14] Margulis, Lynn and Dorion Sagan, _Microcosmos, Four Billion Years of Evolution from Our Microbial Ancestors_, Summit Books, 1986.

[15] Minsky, Marvin, _Society of Mind_, Simon and Schuster, 1985.

[16] Moravec, Hans, _Mind Children_, Harvard University Press, 1988.

[17] Niven, Larry, "The Ethics of Madness", _If_, April 1967, pp82-108. Reprinted in _Neutron Star_, Larry Niven, Ballantine Books, 1968.

[18] Penrose, R., _The Emperor's New Mind_, Oxford University Press, 1989.

[19] Platt, Charles, Private Communication.

[20] Rasmussen, S. _et al._, "Computational Connectionism within Neurons: a Model of Cytoskeletal Automata Subserving Neural Networks", in _Emergent Computation_, Stephanie Forrest, ed., p428-449, MIT Press, 1991.

[21] Searle, John R., "Minds, Brains, and Programs", in _The Behavioral and Brain Sciences_, v.3, Cambridge University Press, 1980. The essay is reprinted in _The Mind's I_, edited by Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett, Basic Books, 1981. This reprinting contains an excellent critique of the Searle essay.

[22] Sims, Karl, "Interactive Evolution of Dynamical Systems", Thinking Machines Corporation, Technical Report Series (published in _Toward a Practice of Autonomous Systems: Proceedings of the First European Cnference on Artificial Life_, Paris, MIT Press, December 1991.

[23] Stapledon, Olaf, _The Starmaker_, Berkley Books, 1961 (but from the forward probably written before 1937).

[24] Stent, Gunther S., _The Coming of the Golden Age: A View of the End of Progress_, The Natural History Press, 1969.

[25] Swanwick Michael, _Vacuum Flowers_, serialized in _Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine_, December(?) 1986 - February 1987. Republished by Ace Books, 1988.

[26] Thearling, Kurt, "How We Will Build a Machine that Thinks", a workshop at Thinking Machines Corporation. Personal Communication.

[27] Ulam, S., Tribute to John von Neumann, _Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society_, vol 64, nr 3, part 2, May, 1958, p1-49.

[28] Vinge, Vernor, "Bookworm, Run!", _Analog_, March 1966, pp8-40. Reprinted in _True Names and Other Dangers_, Vernor Vinge, Baen Books, 1987.

[29] Vinge, Vernor, "True Names", _Binary Star Number 5_, Dell, 1981. Reprinted in _True Names and Other Dangers_, Vernor Vinge, Baen Books, 1987.

[30] Vinge, Vernor, First Word, _Omni_, January 1983, p10.

Leica (via Grandma Rose)

2009-06-22T21:08:00.001-07:00

The Leica is the pioneer 35mm camera. It is a German product - precise,
minimalist, and utterly efficient. Behind its worldwide acceptance as a
creative tool was a family-owned, socially oriented firm that, during
the Nazi era, acted with uncommon grace, generosity and modesty.
E. Leitz Inc., designer and manufacturer of Germany 's most famous
photographic product, saved its Jews.

And Ernst Leitz II, the steely-eyed Protestant patriarch who headed the
closely held firm as the Holocaust loomed a cross Europe , acted in such
a way as to ea rn the title, "the photography industry's Schindler."

The 'Leica Freedom Train'

As soon as Adolf Hitler was named chancellor of Germany in 1933, Ernst
Leitz II began receiving frantic calls from Jewish associates, asking
for his help in getting them and their families out of the country.
As Christians, Leitz and his family were immune to Nazi Germany's
Nuremberg laws, which restricted the movement of Jews and limited their
professional activities.

To help his Jewish workers and colleagues, Leitz quietly established
what has become known among historians of the Holocaust as "the Leica
Freedom Train," a covert means of allowing Jews to leave Germany in the
guise of Leitz employees being assigned overseas.

Employees, retailers, family members, even friends of family members
were "assigned" to Leitz sales offices in France , Britain , Hong Kong
and the United States

Leitz's a ctivities intensified after the Kristallnacht of November
1938, during which synagogues and Jewish shops were burned across
Germany ..

Before long, German "employees" were disembarking from the ocean liner
Bremen at a New York pier and making their way to the Manhattan office
of Leitz Inc., where executives quickly found them jobs in the
photographic industry.*

Each new arrival had around his or her neck the symbol of freedom - a
new Leica.

The refugee s were paid a stipend until they could find work. Out of
this migration came designers, repair technicians, salespeople,
marketers and writers for the photographic press.

Keeping the story quiet

The "Leica Freedom Train" was at its height in 1938 and early 1939,
delivering groups of refugees to New York every few weeks. Then, with
the invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, Germany closed its borders.

By that time, hundreds of endangered Jews had escaped to America ,
thanks to the Leitzes' efforts. How did Ernst Leitz II and his staff
get away with it?

Leitz Inc. was an internationally recognized brand that reflected
credit on the newly resurgent Reich. The company produced range-finders
and other optical systems for the German military. Also, the Nazi
government desperately needed hard currency from abroad, and Leitz's
single biggest market for optical goods was the United States .

Even so, members of the Leitz family and firm suffered for their good
works. A top executive, Alfred Turk, was jailed for working to help
Jews and freed only after the payment of a large bribe.

Leitz's daughter, Elsie Kuhn-Leitz, was imprisoned by the Gestapo after
she was caught at the border, helping Jewish women cross into
Switzerland . She eventually was freed but endured rough treatment in
the course of questioning.

She also fell under suspicion wh en she attempted to improve the living
conditions=2 0of 700 to 800 Ukrainian slave laborers, all of them women,
who had been assigned to work in the plant during the 1940s.

(After the war, Kuhn-Leitz received numerous honors for her
humanitarian efforts, among them the Officier d'honneur des Palms
Academic from France in 1965 and the Aristide Briand Medal from the
European Academy in the 1970s.)

Why has no one told this story until now?
According to the late Norman Lipton, a freelance writer and editor, the
Leitz family wanted no publicity for its heroic efforts. Only after the
last member of the Leitz family was dead did the "Leica Freedom Train"
finally come to light.

It is now the subject of a book, "The Greatest Invention of the Leitz
Family: The Leica Freedom Train," by Frank Dabba Smith, a California-born Rabbi currently living in England .

Some Videos I find Inspiring

2009-06-12T07:51:00.000-07:00

Creature Comforts
by Nick Park more information

VOR - An Introduction

IE 6 Rant

2009-03-27T06:05:00.000-07:00

Hi, if you are coming to this site via Internet Explorer 6, you might not be getting the best experience possible. Honestly, I can't even begin to think about what your entire experience on the internet must be like? (...probably like riding a bike on the highway while cars blow by you on their way to Costco to get gallons of mayonnaise and 60-inch plasma TV's). How will you ever be able to use this website?????? You wont. You're an asshole and your browser is an asshole. So look, I'm going to be honest: I kind of hate you. BUT we c-a-n make this work. Here is what I am going to need you to do: fire up your Toshiba ShitBook© that weighs about 45 pounds, wipe the Cheeto dust off the screen, download Safari ( http://www.apple.com/safari/download/ ), delete Internet Explorer from your computer, punch yourself in the face, and get me a pulled pork sandwich.

from the website: http://www.newtoyork.com/

Thanks for passing this on Denise

Richard Hofstadter

2009-02-23T10:35:00.000-08:00

The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millenialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date fort the apocalypse.

— 1964, Richard Hofstadter
The Paranoid Style in American Politics

Clusterfuck Nation by Jim Kunstler - Highlights

2009-01-24T15:51:00.000-08:00

Mr. Obama deserves credit for a lot of things, but perhaps most amazingly his ability to see "hope" in a public so demoralized by their own bad choices that the USA scene has devolved to a non-stop Special Olympics of everyday life, where absolutely everybody is debilitated, deluded, challenged, or needs a leg up, or an extra buck, or a pallet on the floor, or a gastric bypass, or a week in detox, or a head-start, or a fourth strike, or a $150-billion bailout.

He inherits a government of superficially gleaming marble edifices -- all gloriously on view tomorrow -- but full of broken machinery within, infested with weevils, termites, and rats. The USA is functionally bankrupt. We have no money. The pixel "money" being emailed over to the insolvent banks has no basis in reality beyond the quiver in Ben Bernanke's voice as he announces each new injection. Yet all reports so far indicate that President Obama is bent on continuing the process one way or another.

It will be a very salutary thing if we stop even referring to ourselves as "consumers." This degrading moniker, used for decades unthinkingly by everyone from The New York Times Nobel Prize pundits to the Econ 101 section men of the land-grant diploma mills has been such a drag on our collective development that it has extinguished the last latent flickers of duty, obligation, and responsibility for the greater good in a republic of broken communities shattered by WalMarts.

It will be stirring to watch Barack Obama's inauguration, and all the hoopla and balls, and the radiant children, and the exemplary First Lady dancing with the First Partner. Euphoria is a legitimate part of the human condition, though we know it soon passes into the heavy lifting of real life. There are many Americans of good will who would like to see the meaning of real "change" clearly articulated in a way that comports with reality, not just "dreams" and wishes. We'll hear a lot about dreams this week, anyway, of course, but then reality will set in and the heavy lifting will commence. Many Americans of good will also stand ready to face reality, to roll up our sleeves, ditch the video games and the Nascar and the microwaved cheese treats, and the internet porn and all the other noxious, narcolepsy-inducing distractions of our time, and put our shoulders to the wheel to haul this nation into a plausible future. For the moment: a rousing cry of "Good Luck!" To President Obama from this little outpost of Clusterfuck Nation.

Farewell GWB:

A prankish fate put George W. Bush in the oval office to keep America stupid. The nation was far from ready to see where it was going in the 21st century, and he was just the figure to keep it that way, with his void of curiosity, his allergy to reading, and his panderings to wealth-worshipping, Ponzi-loving, science-hating Jesus cultists. He goes out of office broadly regarded as an object of horror and loathing while the nation, now facing wholesale bankruptcy, struggles to imagine a plausible future, like someone who has just awakened from a cheap red wine drunk into the grip of a vicious hangover.

To me, GWB will remain the perfect representative of his time, place, and culture. During his years in Washington, America became a nation of clowns posturing in cowboy hats, bethinking ourselves righteous agents of Jesus in a Las Vegas of the spirit, where wishing was enough to get something for nothing, where "mistakes were made," but everybody was excused from the consequences of bad choices. The break from that mentality will be very severe, and we may look back in twelve months and wonder how we ever fell for the whole package. The answering of that question will occupy historians for ages to come.

From Comments: "Our Lord Ponzi is kinda like Fonzi, ,but he leaves you broken and destitude (but laughing.)"

California this past Friday declared its Treasury desiccated. Welfare ends 01 February 2009 (500,000 VICTIMS! in LA County alone). State employees are suspended en masse without pay - no income but ineligible for unemployment (sparing statistics). California unemployment offices are mute by phone or in person; Web only - with months delay in processing.

12 ga. Buck shotshells vanish from shelves as stocked here. The Officially Sad fall off their golden palanquins in two weeks. Social advocacy will be returned to the income-redistributed as they repeatedly chamber their votes.

Walk the streets of southside Chicago like Obama did and I think you'll see Obama has faced hard truths.

We are in trouble...

2008-09-05T07:32:00.000-07:00

The population of this country is 300 million.
160 million are retired.
That leaves 140 million to do the work.
There are 85 million in school.
Which leaves 55 million to do the work.
Of this there are 35 million employed by the federal government.
Leaving 15 million to do the work.
2.8 million are in the armed forces preoccupied with killing Osama
Bin-Laden.
Which leaves 12.2 million to do the work.
Take from that total the 10.8 million people who work for state and city
Governments. And that leaves 1.4 million to do the work.
At any given time there are 188,000 people in hospitals.
Leaving 1,212,000 to do the work.
Now, there are 1,211,998 people in prisons.
That leaves just two people to do the work.
You and me.
And there you are,
Sitting on your derriere,
At your computer, reading jokes.

THE BIRTH OF A CANDY BAR

2008-09-02T08:53:00.000-07:00

One Payday Mr. Goodbar wanted a Bit O'Honey so he took:
Miss Hershey back in the Power house on the corner of Clark & Fifth Ave. He began to feel her Mounds and that was sure Almond Joy which made his Tootsie Roll. He let out a Snicker and his Butterfingers went up her Kit Kat and caused a Milky Way. She screamed "O Henry" and squeezed his Zagnuts. Miss Hershey said you were even better than the Three Musketeers. Soon she was a bit Chunky. Nine months later she had a Baby Ruth.

HEY MERCEDES "Bells" Lyrics

2008-09-02T08:49:00.002-07:00

Is this the best you have to offer us?

you genius, your hair mussed

by now you must have heard about the whirling world outside

twist a knife in it, i don't care

drain the life from it, i don't care

if you can fake it you can take them like a photograph.

with a coy sigh in time

your girlfriend's waiting on the line

can't you wait to make her cry?

and they'll remember you alive

as that pain in their unkind invitation tonight

so here's your credit for the lie

that you've been hanging

and over awaiting your reply.

is this the worst you have to peddle us?

scandalous! oh spare us!

by now they must have heard about your worried world inside

pull the covers up, i don't care

call all your lovers up, i don't care

if the fates sing to your face queen of the raincloud club.

I lied when i said we were alike

your best friend's waiting on the line

to compliment your new shine

I can hardly stand to stand here now

to be your stare to admit to all

the pain that you've been painting

and over and i can't bear to stay.

so come on!

sing along!

aren't we bridges aren't we bells?

aren't we chuckling through our curls?

up to heaven and down to hell

say it again pal, aren't we bells?

aren't we statues in a story

where we choose our goals of glory

over family and over friends

say it again and again.

aren't we bridges aren't we bells?

aren't we sighing in our cells?

up to heaven and down to hell

say it again pal, aren't we bells?

aren't we bells?

American Psycho Excerpt

2008-09-02T08:49:00.001-07:00

I make no comment, lost in my own private maze, thinking about other things: warrants, stock offerings, ESOPs, LBOs, IPOs,finances, refinances, debentures, converts, proxy statements, 8-Ks, 10-Qs, zero coupons, PiKs, GNPs, the IMF, hot executive gadgets, billionaires, KenkichiNakajima, infinity, Infinity, how fast a luxury car should go, bailouts, junk bonds, whether to cancel my subscription to The Economist, the Christmas Eve when I was fourteen and had raped one of our maids, Inclusivity, envyingsomeone's life, whether someone could survive a fractured skull, waiting inairports, stifling a scream, credit cards and someone's passport and a book ofmatches from La Cote Basque splattered with blood, surface surface surface, a Rolls is a Rolls is a Rolls. To Evelyn our relationship is yellow and blue, but to me it's a gray place, most of it blacked out, bombed, footage from the film in my head is mindless shots of stone and any language heard is utterly foreign,automated tellers, women giving birth through their assholes, embryos frozen or scrambled (which is it?), nuclear warheads, billions of dollars, the total destruction of the world, someone gets beaten up, someone else dies, sometimes bloodlessly, more often mostly by a rifle shot, assassinations, comas, life played out as a sitcom, a blank canvas that reconfigure itself into a soap opera. It's an isolation ward that serves only to expose my own severely impaired capacity to feel. I am at its center, out of season, and no one ever asks me for any identification...

American Psycho
by Bret Easton Ellis

Sudelbuch ‘J,’ No. 392

2008-09-02T08:47:00.000-07:00

A great speech is easy to learn by heart and a great poem is easier still. How hard it would be to memorize as many words linked together senselessly, or a speech in a foreign tongue! Sense and understanding are thus critical to the function of memory. Sense is order and order is in the final analysis conformity with our nature. When we speak reasonably, it is our being and our nature that speaks. When we want to incorporate something into our memory, we always search for a sense or another kind of order as a tool to that end. That is why we utilize the notions of genus and species in the case of plants and animals. The practice of forming hypotheses must be considered in this same light: we are obliged to have them because otherwise we would be unable to retain things. And while this is frequently observed, we must return to it again and again. The question is whether everything is legible to us. Certainly experiment as well as reflection enable us to introduce a significance into what is not legible, either to us or at all: thus we see faces or landscapes in the sand, though they are certainly not there. The introduction of symmetry belongs here too, seeing silhouettes in inkblots, for instance. Likewise the gradation we establish in the order of creatures: truly, all of this is not to be found in the things themselves, but in us. In general we cannot recall too often that when we observe nature, and especially the ordering of nature, it is always ourselves alone we are observing.

– Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Sudelbuch ‘J,’ No. 392 (1789) in: Schriften und Briefe, vol. 1, p. 710 (W. Promies ed. 1968)(S.H. transl.)

How to Simulate Burning Man (sent via Mother)

2008-06-22T18:37:00.000-07:00

Pay an escort of your preference to not bathe for five days, cover themselves in glitter, dust, and sunscreen, wear a skanky neon wig, dance naked, then say they have a lover back home at the end of the night.
Tear down your house. Put it in a truck.
Drive 10 hours in any direction. Put the house back together.
Invite everyone you meet to come over and party.
When they leave, follow them back to their homes, drink all their booze, and break things.
Stack all your fans in one corner of the living room.
Put on your most fabulous outfit.
Turn the fans on full blast.
Dump a vacuum cleaner bag in front of them.
Buy a new set of expensive camping gear.
Break it.
Lean back in a chair until that point where you're just about to fall over, but you catch yourself at the last moment. Hold that position for 9 hours.
Only use the toilet in a house that is at least 3 blocks away.
Drain all the water from the toilet.
Only flush it every 3 days.
Hide all the toilet paper.
Set your house thermostat so it's 50 degrees for the first hour of sleep and 100 degrees the rest of the night.
Before eating any food, drop it in a sandbox and lick a battery.
Mail $200 to the Reno casino of your choice.
Spend thousands of dollars and several months of your life building a deeply personal art work. Hide it in a funhouse on the edge of the city. Hire people to come by and alternate saying "I love it" and "this sucks balls".
Blow it up.
Set up a DJ system downwind of a three alarm fire.
Play a short loop of drum'n'bass until the embers are cold.
Make a list of all the things you'll do different next year.
Never look at it.
Have a 3 a.m. soul baring conversation with a drag nun in platforms, a crocodile and Bugs Bunny. Be unable to tell if you're hallucinating. Lust after Bugs Bunny.
Cut, burn, electrocute, bruise, and sunburn various parts of your body.
Forget how you did it. Don't go to a doctor.
"Downsize" last year's camp by adding two geodesic domes, a new sound system, art car, and 20 newbies.
Don't sleep for 5 days.
Take a wide variety of hallucinogenic/emotion altering drugs.
Pick a fight with your boyfriend/girlfriend.
Spend a whole year rummaging through thrift stores for the perfect, most outrageous costume.
Never Wear it.
Shop at Wal-mart, Cost-Co, and Home Depot while espousing anti-corporate views.
Tell everyone that you're going to a "Leave-No-Trace" event. Empty your car into a dumpster.
Read "Dhalgren" by Samuel R. Delany.
Read "The City Not Long After" by Pat Murphy.
Cut off the bindings, throw all the pages up in the air, and shuffle them back together.
Reread "The City After Dhalgren" by Samuel Murphy.
Burn it. Read the ashes.
Listen to music you hate for 168 hours straight, or until you think you are going to scream. Scream.
Realize you'll love the music for the rest of your life.
Spend 5 months planning a "theme camp" like it's the invasion of Normandy.
Spend Monday-Wednesday building the camp.
Spend Thurs-Sunday nowhere near camp because you're sick of it or can't find it.
Walk around your neighborhood and knock on doors until someone offers you cocktails and dinner.
Bust your ass for a "community."
See all the attention get focused on the drama queen crybaby.
Get so drunk you can't recognize your own house.
Walk slowly around the block for 5 hours.
Tell your boss you aren't coming to work this week but he should "gift" you a paycheck anyway.
When he refuses accuse him of not loving the "community".
Search alleys until you find a couch so unbelievably tacky and nasty filthy that a state college frat house wouldn't want it.
Take a nap on the couch and sleep like you are king of the world.
Ask your most annoying neighbor to interrupt your fun several times a day with third hand gossip about every horrible thing that's happened in the last 24 hours. Have them wear khaki.

The Parenthesis of Job Postings

2008-05-16T10:08:00.000-07:00

“Competitive Salary”
We remain competitive by paying you less than our competition.

“Join our fast-paced company”
We have no time to train you.

“Casual work atmosphere”
We don’t pay enough to expect that you will dress up; a couple of the real daring guys wear earrings.

“Some overtime required”
Some every night and some every weekend.

“Duties will vary”
Anyone in the office can boss you around.

“Must have an eye for detail”
We have no quality assurance.

“Career-minded”
Female applicants must be childless (and remain that way).

“Apply in person”
If you’re old, fat or ugly you’ll be told that the position has been filled.

“Seeking candidates with a wide variety of experience”
You’ll need it to replace the three people who just quit.

“Problem-solving skills a must”
You’re walking into perpetual chaos.

“Requires team leadership skills”
You’ll have the responsibilities of a manager, without the pay or respect.

“Good communication skills”
Management communicates, you listen, figure out what they want and do it.

In the beginning, God created the Bit and the Byte

2008-05-16T10:07:00.000-07:00

And from those he created the Word.

And there were two Bytes in the Word; and nothing else existed. And God separated the One from the Zero; and he saw it was good.

And God said - Let the Data be; And so it happened. And God said - Let the Data go to their proper places. And he created floppy disks and hard disks and compact disks.

And God said - Let the computers be, so there would be a place to put floppy disks and hard disks and compact disks. Thus God created computers and called them hardware.

And there was no Software yet. But God created programs; small and big… And told them - Go and multiply yourselves and fill all the Memory.

And God said - I will create the Programmer; And the Programmer will make new programs and govern over the computers and programs and Data.

And God created the Programmer; and put him at Data Center; And God showed the Programmer the Catalog Tree and said You can use all the volumes and subvolumes but do not use Windows.

And God said - It is not good for the programmer to be alone. He took a bone from the Programmer’s body and created a creature that would look up at the Programmer; and admire the Programmer; and love the things the Programmer does; And God called the creature: the User.

And the Programmer and the User were left under the naked DOS and it was Good.

But Bill was smarter than all the other creatures of God. And Bill said to the User - Did God really tell you not to run any programs?

And the User answered - God told us that we can use every program and every piece of Data but told us not to run Windows or we will die.

And Bill said to the User - How can you talk about something you did not even try. The moment you run Windows you will become equal to God. You will be able to create anything you like by a simple click of your mouse.

And the User saw that the fruits of the Windows were nicer and easier to use. And the User saw that any knowledge was useless–since Windows could replace it.

So the User installed the Windows on his computer; and said to the Programmer that it was good.

And the Programmer immediately started to look for new drivers. And God asked him–What are you looking for? And the Programmer answered–I am looking for new drivers because I can not find them in the DOS. And God said - Who told you need drivers? Did you run Windows? And the Programmer said - It was Bill who told us to!

And God said to Bill - Because of what you did, you will be hated by all the creatures. And the User will always be unhappy with you. And you will always sell Windows.

And God said to the User - Because of what you did, the Windows will disappoint you and eat up all your Resources; and you will have to use lousy programs; and you will always rely on the Programmers help.

And God said to the Programmer - Because you listened to the User, you will never be happy. All your programs will have errors and you will have to fix them and fix them to the end of time.

And God threw them out of the Data Center and locked the door and secured it with a password.

She was so blond...

2008-05-16T10:06:00.000-07:00

…she spent 20 minutes looking at the orange juice box because it said “concentrate”.

…she put lipstick on her forehead because she wanted to make up her mind.

…she got stabbed in a shoot-out.

…she told me to meet her at the corner of “WALK” and “DON'T WALK”.

…she thought TuPac Shakur was a Jewish holiday.

…she tried to put M&M’s in alphabetical order.

…she sat on the TV and watched the couch.

…she sent me a fax with a stamp on it.

…she tried to drown a fish.

…she thought a quarterback was a refund.

…she got locked in a grocery store and starved to death.

…if you gave her a penny for intelligence, you’d get change back.

…they had to burn the school down to get her out of third grade.

…under “education” on her job application, she put “Hooked On Phonics”.

…she tripped over a cordless phone.

…she took a ruler to bed to see how long she slept.

…at the bottom of the application where it says “sign here”.. she put “Sagittarius”.

…she asked for a price check at the Dollar Store.

…it takes her two hours to watch 60 Minutes.

…if she spoke her mind, she’d probably be speechless.

…she studied for a blood test …and failed.

…she thought Boyz II Men was a daycare center.

…she thought Meow Mix was a record for cats.

…she thought she needed a token to get on Soul Train.

…she sold the car for gas money.

…when she saw the “NC-17″ (under 17 not admitted), she went home and got 16 friends.

…when she heard that 90% of all crimes occur around the home, she moved.

…she thinks Taco Bell is where you pay your phone bill.

…when she missed the 44 bus, she took the 22 bus twice instead.

…when she took you to the airport and saw a sign that said “Airport Left” she turned around and went home.

Office Vs Prison

2008-05-16T10:04:00.000-07:00

IN PRISON - you spend the majority of your time in an 10x10 foot cell.
IN OFFICE - spend the majority of your time in an 8x8 foot cubicle.

IN PRISON - you get three meals a day.
IN OFFICE - you get a break for one meal and you have to pay for it.

IN PRISON - you get time off for good behavior.
IN OFFICE

IN PRISON - all expenses are paid by the taxpayers with no work required.
IN OFFICE - you get to pay all your expenses to go to work, and they deduct taxes from your salary to pay for prisoners.

IN PRISON - you spend most of your life inside bars wanting to get out.
IN OFFICE - you spend most of your time wanting to get out and go inside bars.

IN PRISON - you must deal with sadistic wardens.
IN OFFICE - they are called managers.

Stuff White People Like

2008-05-01T14:07:00.001-07:00

LMAO

MJ for ADHD and ADD

2008-05-01T10:20:00.000-07:00

PEZ — You ROCK!

2008-04-18T11:23:00.000-07:00

2008-04-16T10:24:00.001-07:00

From the desk of Elliot Spitzer

As you may be aware, the Bush Administration indicated that many of us will soon get a nice rebate

If we spend that money at Wal-Mart, all the money will go to China

If we spend it on gasoline, it will all go to the Arabs

If we spend it on fruit and vegetables, it will all go to Mexico, Honduras, and Guatemala

If we purchase a good car, it will all go to Japan

If we purchase useless crap, it will all go to Taiwan, and none of it will help the American economy

We need to keep that money here in America; the only way to keep that money here at home is to spend it on prostitutes, gambling and beer... since those are the few businesses still thriving in the United States of America.

My name is Elliot Spitzer, and I approved this message.

2008-04-07T21:51:00.000-07:00

DEMOCRATIC
You have two cows.
Your neighbor has none.
You feel guilty for being successful.
Barbara Streisand sings for you.

REPUBLICAN
You have two cows.
Your neighbor has none.
So?

SOCIALIST
You have two cows.
The government takes one and gives it to your neighbor.
You form a cooperative to tell him how to manage his cow.

COMMUNIST
You have two cows.
The government seizes both and provides you with milk.
You wait in line for hours to get it.
It is expensive and sour.

CAPITALISM, AMERICAN STYLE
You have two cows.
You sell one, buy a bull, and build a herd of cows.

BUREAUCRACY, AMERICAN STYLE
You have two cows.
Under the new farm program the government pays you to shoot one, milk the other, and then pours the milk down the drain.

AMERICAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You sell one, lease it back to yourself and do an IPO on the 2nd one.
You force the two cows to produce the milk of four cows.
You are surprised when one cow drops dead.
You spin an announcement to the analysts stating you have downsized and are reducing expenses.
Your stock goes up.

FRENCH CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You go on strike because you want three cows.
You go to lunch and drink wine.
Life is good.

JAPANESE CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk.
They learn to travel on unbelievably crowded trains.
Most are at the top of their class at cow school.

GERMAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You engineer them so they are all blond, drink lots of beer, give excellent quality milk, and run a hundred miles an hour.
Unfortunately they also demand 13 weeks of vacation per year.

ITALIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows but you don't know where they are.
While ambling around, you see a beautiful woman.
You break for lunch.
Life is good.

RUSSIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You have some vodka.
You count them and learn you have five cows.
You have some more vodka.
You count them again and learn you have 42 cows.
The Mafia shows up and takes over however many cows you really have.

BELGIAN CORPORATION
You have one cow.
The cow is schizophrenic.
Sometimes the cow thinks he's French, other times he's Flemish.
The Flemish cow won't share with the French cow.
The French cow wants control of the Flemish cow's milk.
The cow asks permission to be cut in half.
The cow dies happy.

IRAQI CORPORATION
You have two cows.
They go into hiding.
They send radio tapes of their mooing.

TALIBAN CORPORATION
You have all the cows in Afghanistan, which are two.
You don't milk them because you cannot touch any creature's private parts.
You get a $40 million grant from the US government to find alternatives to milk production but use the money to buy weapons.

WISCONSIN FARM
You have thousands of cows who make great cheese, drink beer, ice-fish, snowmobile, and hunt.
They all want to know if Bret Farve is going to play another year.

FLORIDA CORPORATION
You have a black cow and a brown cow.
Everyone votes for the best looking one.
Some of the people who actually like the brown one best accidentally vote for the black one.
Some people vote for both.
Some people vote for neither.
Some people can't figure out how to vote at all.
Finally, a bunch of guys from out-of-state tell you which one you think is the best-looking cow.

CALIFORNIA CORPORATION
You have millions of cows.
They make real California cheese.
Only five speak English.
Arnold likes the ones with the big udders.

Cool Video News Microbrowser

2008-04-04T11:45:00.000-07:00

Dimitri Martin Flip Charts

2008-03-29T23:05:00.001-07:00

Terrorist Bloopers

2008-03-29T23:00:00.000-07:00

Garth Marenghi's Darkplace

2008-03-21T11:56:00.000-07:00

Jokes (EXPLICIT)

2008-03-01T19:11:00.000-08:00

Q: How do we know Vice President Dick Cheney has a clean conscience?
A: He’s never used it.

Q: What was President George W. Bush’s position on Roe v. Wade?
A: He didn’t care how the people got out of New Orleans.

Q: What is the difference between the U.S. Congress and the Library of Congress?
A: In the Library of Congress, you aren’t allowed to lick the pages.

Q: What’s a serial killer’s best pickup line?
A: Excuse me. Does this napkin smell like chloroform to you?

Q: Why did the Polack spend all night outside the whorehouse?
A: He was waiting for the red light to turn green.

Q: Why don’t blondes make good cattle herders?
A: Because they can’t even keep two calves together.

Q: Did you hear about the midget who wanted everyone to know he was gay?
A: He came out of the cupboard.

Q: What did the deaf guy say to the nympho?
A: Come again?

Q: What do you call a guy with syphilis, herpes and gonorrhea?
A: An incurable romantic.

Q: What’s the square root of 69?
A: Eight something.

Q: Why did the gay man think his lover was cheating on him?
A: His partner came home shit-faced.

From Dr Deadalus by Mark Rosen

2008-02-24T21:42:00.001-08:00

"Rosen's ideas and aspirations are frightening to me because they are such vivid, visceral examples of a certain postmodern or perhaps, more precisely put, post-authentic sensibility we embrace and fear as we pop our Prozacs and Ritalins and then decide to be Jewish and then Episcopalian and then chant with the monks on the same Himalayan mountain via a cheap plane ticket we purchased between jobs and just before we sold our condo in a market rising so fast that when it falls if will sound like all of the precious China plates crashing down from the cabinet - a mess! What a mess!

Until recently, no more than a single major ideological shift was likely to occur in a lifetime, and that one would be long remembered for its conflict and soul-searching. But today it is unusual for several such shifts to take place within a year or even a month, whether in the realm of politics, religion, aesthetic values, personal relationships... quite rare is the man or woman who has gone through life holding firmly to a single ideological vision. More usual is a tendency toward ideological fragments, bits and pieces of belief systems that allow for shifts, revisions, and recombinations."

Bells by Hey Mercedes

2008-02-24T21:39:00.000-08:00

Is this the best you have to offer us?
you genius, your hair mussed
by now you must have heard about the whirling world outside
twist a knife in it, i don't care
drain the life from it (I don't care)
if you can fake it you can take them like a photograph.

With a coy sigh in time
your girlfriend's waiting on the line
can't you wait to make her cry?
And they'll remember you alive
as that pain in their unkind invitation tonight
so here's your credit for the lie
that you've been hanging
and over awaiting your reply.

is this the worst you have to peddle us?
scandalous! oh spare us!
by now they must have heard about your worried world inside
pull the covers up, i don't care
call all your lovers up, i don't care
if the fates sing to your face queen of the raincloud club.

i lied when i said we were alike
your best friend's waiting on the line
to compliment your new shine
i can hardly stand to stand here now
to be your stare to admit to all
the pain that you've been painting
and over and i can't bear to stay.

so come on!
sing along!
aren't we chuckling through our curls?
(up to heaven and down to hell)
say it again pal, aren't we bells?

aren't we statues in a story
where we choose our goals of glory
over family and over friends
say it again and again.

aren't we bridges aren't we bells?
aren't we sighing in our cells?
up to heaven and down to hell
say it again pal, aren't we bells?
aren't we bells?

To Dream of Pigs Quotes

2008-02-24T21:36:00.000-08:00

Nearing Pusan the railway joined the coast. A rusting coaster sat impaled on the rocks, its holded bow rearing out of the water like a frozen fish gaping for air. In a cove beyond the ever-present security fence white-vested soldiers went through their knee-jerks. The train swung round a headland, exposing mile upon mile of white, rectangular, apartment blocks, like cigarette packets standing end to end. It was my first glimpse of Pusan.

Pusan is South Korea's largest port and second largest city, with a population of four million. It lies at the south-east corner of the Republic, diagonally opposite of Seoul, and is the stepping-off point for the Japanese port of Shimonoseki. Unlike Seoul, which bore the brunt of the changing fortunes of the Korean War, Pusan was never occupied by communist forces and bears none of the visible scars of war. It did, however, in the darkest days of 1950, accomodate four million refugees fleeing from Kim Il Sung, many of whom stayed on. Pusan's cosmopolitanism and refugee legacy saddles the city with the reputation of criminal hotspot.

...Pusan is long and twisted. Its major thoroughfares choke with traffic at all hours. On the map the city resembles a misappen tree, stunted branches spilling outwards.

Any charms Pusan posessed did not reveal themselves lightly. Before the Olympic Games yachtsmen complained about the polluted waters of Suyong Bay, close to a favorite tourist area. Floating garbage threatened to rip off the rudders, and crews refused to enter the water to clean their hulls. This prompted an unprecidented change to Olympic rules, permission being given for the boats to be rasied from the water and cleaned on land.

Nor does Pusan earn brownie points for its official bumph, wish is full of Doland Duck English - excusable, comical and even lovable elsewhere, but not in a city of Pusan's resources. 'The beloved trade mark of Pusan is among Koreans,' declaired one tourist pamphlet, nonsensically.

Pusan seemed even more compressed than Seoul, its hills close and more claustrophobic, its traffic still slower.

Waiting at a bus-stop one blustery evening I was treated to the force of Pusan's stink. Korean drains are covered by paving stones with cut-away hand-holes at either end. The hand-holes permit a free view of the passing sewage and ample opportunity to inhale its stench.

He was aggrivated at Korea's obsession with filching tourists as a means of demonstrating her modernity. He examined my entrance ticket and remarked upon its expense. Not the expense of buying it, but of making it - glossy paper with colour pictures. They were always like this in Korea. Bus tickets would have sufficed, at a fraction of the cost, except that in Korea appearances are everything.

It was, perhaps, disadvantageous to visit Korea after having known Japan, for Japan presents most Western visitors with a shattering dose of culture shock. Korea is subtler, more restrained, offering little to compete with Japan's sheer spectacle - for example, Japan's Sumo wrestlers, her tea economy, lava baths, awesome Mt. Fuji, love hotels, bullet trains, pachinko parlours, street bunting, dragon dances, A-bomb museums in Hiroshima and Nakasaki, the dawn calls of her sweet potato sellers.

Korea's culture has absorbed so much from China, Japan and America, and lost so much through erosion, banishment, and subjugation, that, to her detractors, little remains that can be called truly Korean, other than her ondol underfoot heating, her hangul language, and her kimchi. Korea, I felt, is enjoyed not by seeing but by being. The name 'Chosun' (Land of Morning Calm) hints at the softness of her real charm. A night out in provincial Korea is to wander the market-place or stroll the waterside in some fishing port.

Quotes

2008-02-24T21:27:00.000-08:00

There is no praise in being upright, where no one can, or tries to corrupt you.
[Latin: Nulla est laus ibi esse integrum, ubi nemo est, qui aut possit aut conetur rumpere.]
— Cicero (Marcus Tullius Cicero)

Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
— George Bernard Shaw

So may the outward shows be least themselves; The world is still deceived with ornament. In law, what plea so tainted and corrupt But being seasoned with a gracious voice, Obscures the show of evil? In religion, What damned error but some sober brow Will bless it and approve it with a text, Hiding the grossness with fair ornament?
— William Shakespeare

No one would talk much in society, if he knew how often he misunderstands others.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.

The problem with political jokes is they get elected.
— Henry Cate Vii

Politics is the conduct of public affairs for private advantage.
— Ambrose Pierce

I am not anti-American. But I am strongly pro-Canadian.
— John G. Diefenbaker

Democracy consists of choosing your dictators, after they've told you what it is you want to hear.
— Alan Coren

What a crazy world we live in! Trying to treat addiction as a legal problem, and trying to treat criminal misbehaviors using guns as a medical problem! Beam me up, Scotty. Ain't no intelligent life down here.
— Julie Cochrane

Freedom is that instant between when someone tells you to do something and when you decide how to respond.
— Dr. Jeffrey Borenstein

Fascism is capitalism in decay.
— Lenin (vladimir Ulyanov)

A thief believes everybody steals.
— E.W. Howe

Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.
— Philip Zimmermann

The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency. The second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity. Both bring a permanent ruin.

History, a distillation of rumor.
— Thomas Carlyle Topic: History

Money can't buy happiness; it can, however, rent it.
— Anonymous

The way to resumption is to resume.
— Salmon Portland Chase

You cannot shake hands with a clenched fist.
—Indira Gandhi

We shall never be able to remove suspicion and fear as potential causes of war until communication is permitted to flow, free and open, across international boundaries. —Harry S. Truman Source: None

We shall never be able to remove suspicion and fear as potential causes of war until communication is permitted to flow, free and open, across international boundaries.
— Harry S. Truman

Today, communication itself is the problem. We have become the world's first overcommunicated society. Each year we send more and receive less.
— Al Ries

The more elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate.
— Joseph Priestley

To be adult is to be alone.
— Jean Rostand

Man's loneliness is but his fear of life.
— Eugene O'neill

Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant.
— Mitchell Kapor

Whenever anyone says, 'theoretically,' they really mean, 'not really.'.
— Dave Parnas

Art and science have their meeting point in method.
— Paul Dirac

It is useless to send armies against ideas.
— George Brandes

There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.
— James Anthony Froude

A satellite has no conscience.
— Edward R. Murrow

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.
— Alfred North Whitehead

The most heroic word in all languages is revolution.
— Eugene Debs

The idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal - that you can gather votes like box tops - is, I think, the ultimate indignity to the democratic process.
— Adlai E. Stevenson

If you don't double-click me, I can't do anything.
— Anonymous

We're all living in a chemical soup.
— Lance A. Wallace

A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history—with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila.
— Mitch Ratliffe

An error is the more dangerous the more truth it contains.
— Henri-frederic

640K [of RAM] ought to be enough for anybody.
— Bill Gates

You cannot feed the hungry on statistics.
— Heinrich Heine

URLs are the 800 numbers of the 1990's.
— Chris Clark

When you steal from one author, it's plagiarism; if you steal from many, it's research.
— Lawrence J. Peter

Technology is so much fun but we can drown in our technology. The fog of information can drive out knowledge.
— Daniel J. Boorstin

Relying on the government to protect your privacy is like asking a peeping tom to install your window blinds.
— John Perry Barlow

Nothing is quite so wretchedly corrupt as an aristocracy which has lost its power but kept its wealth and which still has endless leisure to devote to nothing but banal enjoyments. All its great thoughts and passionate energy are things of the past, and nothing but a host of petty, gnawing vices now cling to it like worms to a corpse.
— Alexis De Tocqueville

One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.
— Walter Bagehot

The two most common things in the universe are hydrogen and human stupidity.
— Unknown

Science... never solves a problem without creating ten more.
— George Bernard Shaw

One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.
— Elbert Hubbard

The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
— Joseph Snipp

Multimedia? As far as I'm concerned, it's reading with the radio on!
—Andrew Brown

Before we work on artificial intelligence why don't we do something about natural stupidity?
— Steve Polyak

You know you've achieved perfection in design, Not when you have nothing more to add, But when you have nothing more to take away.
— Antoine De Saint-exupery

If you want to get across an idea, wrap it up in a person.
— Ralph Bunche

Ours is the age which is proud of machines that think and suspicious of men who try to.
— Howard Mumford Jones

This problem, too, will look simple after it is solved.
— Charles Francis Kettering

I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather. Not screaming in terror like his passengers.
— Jim Harkins

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
— Albert Einstein

Expecting a carjacker or rapist or drug pusher to care that his possession or use of a gun is unlawful is like expecting a terrorist to care that his car bomb is taking up two parking spaces. - "Usenet posting in talk.politics.guns".
— Joseph T. Chew

Tourists are terrorists with cameras. Terrorists are tourists with guns.
— Anonymous

The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency. The second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity. Both bring a permanent ruin.

A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history--with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila.
— Mitch Ratliffe

An error is the more dangerous the more truth it contains.
— Henri-frederic

When you steal from one author, it's plagiarism; if you steal from many, it's research.
— Lawrence J. Peter

Technology is so much fun but we can drown in our technology. The fog of information can drive out knowledge.
— Daniel J. Boorstin

One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.
— Walter Bagehot

Science... never solves a problem without creating ten more.
— George Bernard Shaw

Multimedia? As far as I'm concerned, it's reading with the radio on!
— Andrew Brown

All art exists in the gap between physical object and human experience.

American Psycho (Bret Easton Ellis)

2008-02-24T21:25:00.000-08:00

I make no comment, lost in my own private maze, thinking about other things: warrants, stock offerings, ESOPs, LBOs, IPOs, finances, refinances, debentures, converts, proxy statements, 8-Ks, 10-Qs, zero coupons, PiKs, GNPs, the IMF, hot executive gadgets, billionaires, KenkichiNakajima, infinity, Infinity, how fast a luxury car should go, bailouts, junk bonds, whether to cancel my subscription to The Economist, the Christmas Eve when I was fourteen and had raped one of our maids, Inclusivity, envyingsomeone's life, whether someone could survive a fractured skull, waiting inairports, stifling a scream, credit cards and someone's passport and a book ofmatches from La Cote Basque splattered with blood, surface surface surface, a Rolls is a Rolls is a Rolls. To Evelyn our relationship is yellow and blue, but to me it's a gray place, most of it blacked out, bombed, footage from the film in my head is mindless shots of stone and any language heard is utterly foreign,automated tellers, women giving birth through their assholes, embryos frozen or scrambled (which is it?), nuclear warheads, billions of dollars, the total destruction of the world, someone gets beaten up, someone else dies, sometimes bloodlessly, more often mostly by a rifle shot, assassinations, comas, life played out as a sitcom, a blank canvas that reconfigure itself into a soap opera. It's an isolation ward that serves only to expose my own severely impaired capacity to feel. I am at its center, out of season, and no one ever asks me for any identification...

Saramago (Blindness)

2008-02-24T21:22:00.001-08:00

They were proclaiming the end of the world, redemption through penitence, the visions of the seventh day, the advent of the angel, cosmic collisions, the death of the sun, the tribal spirit, the sap of the mandrake, tiger ointment, the virtue of the sign, the discipline of the wind, the perfume of the moon, the re-vindication of darkness, the power of exorcism, the sign of the heel, the crucifixion of the rose, the purity of lymph, the blood of the black cat, the sleep of the shadow, the rising of the seas, the logic of anthropophagy, painless castration, divine tattoos, voluntary blindness, convex thoughts, or concave, or horizontal or vertical, or sloping, or concentrated, or dispersed, or fleeting, the weakening of the vocal chords, the death of the word...

Phil-Osophies

2008-02-24T21:19:00.000-08:00

Sarcasm is irritating and unsettling and should be used frequently.
Save a dollar a day and some day you'll be sorry it wasn't two dollars.
If you say something stupid and no one disagrees, then you know you're the boss.
Variety is the spice of divorce.
An egotist is a disgusting, low person who is more interested in himself than he is in me.
The better the opportunity appears to be, the more likely it is that you don't know all the facts.
If everyone agrees with me I reconsider.
Sometimes it is necessary to repeat yourself to make a point. Sometimes.
Just because you call the shots doesn't mean you're at the right end of the barrel.
We only owe our children two things: love and hope.
Never repress anything but your pants.
Iíd rather be lonely alone than lonely with somebody else.
I DO understand youóthatís the problem.
Always take the road less traveled--unless itís through Gary, Indiana.
If you want to make someone hate you, explain to them, logically and politely, why they are wrong.
I wash and wear the pants in my family.
It is dangerous to be right when the boss is wrong.
I can handle criticism so long as it isnít about me.
When the heart is full, the head is empty.
The two most common reasons for losing are: not knowing you're competing in the first place, and not knowing with whom you really are competing.
We're all a little nearsighted and must take a step back to see things more clearly.
The best way to kill someone's enthusiasm is to tell them "yes".
Shit in a giftbox is still shit.
When your competitionís sleeping, itís best to tiptoe bye.
You can make your own omelet: either scramble your brains with drugs and alcohol, or just keep your sunny side up.
Thank God there are only 10 Commandments!
I don't mind sleeping on an empty stomach so long as it isn't my own.
Life is only in balance if you play as hard as you work.
If you stop to consider all the options before you act, you will always know what to do next time.
"Tact" is when the mind says, "Go to hell!" but the mouth says, "Hope to see you again, real soon."
Listen to your heart, but use your brain when you open your mouth.
Don't come on too strong when you hold the winning hand or you'll find yourself playing solitaire.
The biggest problem with stupid people is they don't know it.
Friendship, love, success...you can have each only to the extent you are willing to compromise the other two.
Being worse is no excuse for losing.
The only thing you can be sure of in New York is death in taxis.
The stepping stones of life are often made of flesh.
There are two kinds of people in this world: dumb people; really dumb people; and really, really dumb people.
There's nothing wrong with promiscuity that a fatal disease wouldn't cure.
If everyone likes you, you must be doing something wrong.
There are many ways to measure success, but only one you can spend.
Spare the rod.
The only people you should admit your transgressions to are your great, great grandchildren.
Peace of mind grows in my garden.
The deeper the thought the more I want a beer.
You can't win if he has nothing to lose.
If you don't laugh at yourself once in a while, others will.
Love goes without saying.
If you can't find the tune, it's classical. If you find it and lose it, it's jazz.
What you are is more important than who you are.
Being divorced means knowing how to maintain a rejection.
Even your favorite dessert tastes bitter if it's shoved down your throat.
If success does not buy happiness, what's the point of being happy?
There's an inverse relationship between availability and desirability.
If you want people to remember you, tell them something really interesting about them.
If you canít beat 'em, don't play 'em.
"Thank you, I would like a banana," is the most you should tell your competitor.
You are where you eat.
No matter what the subject, be passionate about it, or forget it.
An empty closet is the devilís playground.
Pulling your weight is smarter than pushing your luck.
If you don't love yourself neither will anyone else.
Honesty is the best foreplay.
All I want is someone to hold me. And pay me for it.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Sudelbuch J

2008-02-24T21:18:00.000-08:00

Girlfriend 1.0

2008-02-24T21:14:00.000-08:00

Last year a friend of mine upgraded from GirlFriend 1.0 to Wife 1.0 and found that it's a memory hog, leaving very little system resources available for other applications. He is now noticing that Wife 1.0 is also spawning Child Processes which are further consuming valuable resources. No mention of this particular phenomena was included in the product brochure or the documentation, though other users have informed him that this is to be expected due to the nature of the application. Not only that, Wife 1.0 installs itself such that it is always launched at system initialization, where it can monitor all other system activity. He's finding that some applications such as PokerNight 10.3, BeerBash 2.5, and PubNight 7.0 are no longer able to run in the system at all, crashing the system when selected (even though they always worked fine before).

During installation, Wife 1.0 provides no option as to the installation of undesired Plug-Ins such as MotherInLaw 55.8 and BrotherInLaw Beta release. Also, system performance seems to diminish with each passing day.

Some features he'd like to see in the upcoming wife 2.0.

A "Don't remind me again" button
Minimize button
An install shield feature that allows Wife 2.0 be installed with the option to uninstall at anytime without the loss of cache and other system resources.

I myself decided to avoid the headaches associated with Wife 1.0 by sticking with Girlfriend 2.0. Even here, however, I found many problems. Apparently you cannot install Girlfriend 2.0 on top of Girlfriend 1.0. You must uninstall Girlfriend 1.0 first. Other users say this is a long standing bug that I should have known about. You'd think they would have fixed such a stupid bug by now. To make matters worse, the uninstall program for Girlfriend 1.0 doesn't work very well, leaving undesirable traces of the application in the system.(Editorial comment: The uninstall button should have an added feature. Upon activation, the user's joystick should be permanently disabled - What do you think? Too harsh?). Another thing: all versions of Girlfriend continually pop up little annoying messages about the advantages of upgrading to Wife 1.0.

BUG WARNING

Wife 1.0 has an undocumented bug. If you try to install Mistress 1.1 before uninstalling Wife 1.0, Wife 1.0 will delete MSMoney files before doing the uninstall itself. Then Mistress 1.1 will refuse to install, claiming insufficient resources.

More applications that won't run with Wife 1.0 include Golfing 2.3, Softball 3.6, and Cubgamewatching 2.7. Applications that run very well with Wife 1.0, however, include Fixthis 1.1, Waitforme 3.5, and Couldupickthisuponthewayhome 5.7!