Solipsism Gradient

blogalization [colin] wrote:

By the way, come by Blogalization and see if you would be interested in participating or passing along the word.

Thanks, Colin; I just registered, and look forward to puzzling out something to contribute. (Comment for other readers: Colin’s Hairy Eyeball is very good reading…)

Posted by blogalization [colin]:
It was another Berkeley metaphorist, folklorist Alan Dundes, who noted that American football is rife with metaphors of sadistic sodomy, such as “penetrating the end zone” of the opponent. I think that analysis was slightly tongue-in-cheek. In the present case, I have to agree that Lakoff’s rhetoric in the first part of the essay was a bit too recondite to influence anyone — as he recognizes. But starting with the sentence, “Awareness matters,” he starts making a lot of sense to me.

By the way, come by Blogalization and see if you would be interested in participating or passing along the word.

Rageboy says that OTHER PEOPLE’S PERSONAL SHORTCOMINGS MAKE IT HARD FOR THEM TO GIVE ME THE COMPLIMENTS AND ATTENTION THAT ARE DUE ME.

You MUST read the entire thing to properly dislocate your diaphragm, but here’s a meta-quote from Interpersonal Diagnosis and Treatment of Personality Disorders, 2nd edition:

A great way to come down with a case of ‘medical student’s disease’ is to read a survey of personality disorders. For example, a reader of Milton’s (1982) impressive summary of each of the categories for personality disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, third edition (DSM-III; All-American Psychiatric Association, 1980) can believe that he or she has nearly every personality disorder there is. Probably any remaining disorders cab be assigned to one’s spouse.

…Who does not suffer from official ‘symptoms’ of personality disorders, including idealization, devaluation, vanity, temper outbursts, boredom, seductiveness, rapidly shifting emotions, devastation in face of criticism, needs to be special or unique, failures in empathy, cruelty, infidelity, working too hard, working too little, hypervigilance, ideas of reference [see Little House on the Prairie], odd mannerisms, wanting to be too intimate, wanting to be too distant, needing advice about little things, being too autonomous, having trouble getting started, feeling devastated when a relationship ends, being perfectionistic, being irresponsible, being too bossy, being too deferential, being withdrawn, hating being alone, wanting acceptance but fearing rejection, resenting others’ control, or being critical of authorities?

Many thanks to Doc Searls for the link! This made my day…

Joey deVilla, the AccordionGuy, last week waxed enthusiastic about “Ten Cool Things About The New Girl”:

– She went to high school at the hoity-toity Trafalgar College in Montreal

– She graduated from University of British Columbia with a degree in computer engineering

– She worked as a webmaster at Alliance Atlantis…

…she cooks, programs, dances, is cute, and so forth. Complete with photo. Hmm.

So, Joey’s a nice guy (anybody who puts me on his blogroll must be a nice guy, right?), so I thought this was worth thinking about… and I pondered about this sudden enthusiasm… while deciding whether to send e-mail, join the congratulants commenting on his post, or to post here… and trying to hit the appropriate balance between cautious optimism and sounds-too-good-to-be-true… then, while my comments still hovered on the fuzzy side of the Heisenberg barrier… he yanks his post.

Uh-oh, I thought.

So today he tells, in great detail, what happened; it was a sham. More’s the pity.

The interesting part is that a reader of his weblog recognized the “New Girl” from the photo he posted, and decided to blow the whistle on her. Just after I saw the news on his RSS feed, Boing Boing also had a note, and many other webloggers commented. Joey has quite a lot of free beer coming to him, it seems… I may buy him one myself next time I go to Toronto. 😀

Joey, I wish you better luck next time. Meanwhile, how about reposting the original entry (with names changed and so forth)? I think this might be helpful to other people.

Posted by Joho the Blog:
Joho the Blog linked to this post

George Lakoff Is Like a …

Let me begin with the standard-issue praise, which is no less sincere for being completely predictable: George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By helped shape my thinking. Their book Philosophy in the Flesh is a truly fresh and mind-pivoting look at philosophy. I thank them for all that I’ve learned from them. (And now comes the “But…”) But Dr. Lakoff’s most recent op-ed comes close to self-parody. Lakoff has a superb eye for pointing out how what we take as straightforward, factual descriptions are in fact highly metaphorical — everything from talking about “high” notes to “straightforward” descriptions.

Simon Brunning of Small Values of Cool points at the Top 100 April Fool’s Day Hoaxes of All Time. Read this before believing anything else today.

My personal favorites:

– The Swiss Spaghetti Harvest

– The Island of San Seriffe

– The Internet Spring Cleaning (#40, at the bottom – I’ve spread that one myself a few times)

– Asterix Village Found (#89)

Update(s): The first items for 2003 are coming in… here are some nice ones. I’ll keep updating this throughout the day.

RFC3514: The Security Flag in the IPv4 Header. This one’s for techies only – if you don’t know what a RFC is, never mind:

Firewalls, packet filters, intrusion detection systems, and the like often have difficulty distinguishing between packets that have malicious intent and those that are merely unusual. We define a security flag in the IPv4 header as a means of distinguishing the two cases.

… Currently-assigned values are defined as follows:

0x0  If the bit is set to 0, the packet has no evil intent. Hosts, network elements, etc., SHOULD assume that the packet is harmless, and SHOULD NOT take any defensive measures. (We note that this part of the spec is already implemented by many common desktop operating systems.)

0x1  If the bit is set to 1, the packet has evil intent. Secure systems SHOULD try to defend themselves against such packets. Insecure systems MAY chose to crash, be penetrated, etc.

TidBITS#674:

…In a move that will no doubt cause even more consternation, Apple today announced that it has again rescheduled the upcoming Worldwide Developer Conference, this time to coincide with the new Create conference that replaced Macworld Expo from 14-Jul-03 through 18-Jul-03.

…The $25 Asbesteze gloves use a combination of Lycra and heat-resistant fibers to keep palms and wrists from becoming too hot (which can exacerbate inflammation) when resting on the aluminum PowerBooks.

…the company announced the Segway Kids Interactive Transporter (KIT), more commonly referred to as the “Segwee.”…

…I’ve been busy helping some old friends at Microsoft’s Macintosh Business Unit (MacBU) with an upcoming release of Microsoft Word 5.1 for OS X, a carbonized version of Word 5.1a that preserves most of the features and all the look and feel of the highly popular Word 5.1…

Apple admits Mac OS X transition a failure; announces Mac OS 9.5, Jobs steps down:

“I blew it. It’s as simple as that,” said a visibly upset Steve Jobs as he announced he would step down as head of Apple, the company he co-founded on this day over 25 years ago.

CFO Fred Anderson quickly announced the company would end its two-year-long transition to the UNIX-based Mac OS X and would release Mac OS 9.5 within the month…

Bare Bones Software Announces New Pricing Option:

…Now available is the option to purchase a single user license of BBEdit with hand delivery by a Bare Bones Software employee and one full year of personal service (including unlimited feature additions, ripping the cellophane off the CD, reading the manual aloud, and more). This opportunity is only available for a limited time, at the special price of US$250,000…

Safari developer Dave Hyatt says that Safari will drop table support:

The next release of Safari will be fully embracing Web standards by dropping all support for tables. From now on, any pages that use tables will cause Safari to play a very loud raspberry sound and refuse to display the page.

…For all sites that attempt to nest tables more than four levels deep, Safari will play a loud flushing sound, and it will remove itself from the dock and erase itself from your system in order to protect itself from your bad taste.

Joi Ito shows Mena Trott of Movable Type fame doing his trick with two corks. Very cool… took me some time to figure out.

No kidding; here are details:

Sources at the Security and Exchange Commission confirm that 44-year-old Andrew Carlssin offered the bizarre explanation for his uncanny success in the stock market after being led off in handcuffs on January 28…

“…the fact is, with an initial investment of only $800, in two weeks’ time he had a portfolio valued at over $350 million. Every trade he made capitalized on unexpected business developments, which simply can’t be pure luck.”

…Carlssin declared that he had traveled back in time from over 200 years in the future, when it is common knowledge that our era experienced one of the worst stock plunges in history.

…”No one can find any record of any Andrew Carlssin existing anywhere before December 2002.”

Stay tuned for developments!

Update: Well, this story now claims the whole thing is a freshly-minted urban myth. A pity; any other outcome would have been more interesting…