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Hi.
This journal is a friends-only, and very, very old.
It has a lot of entries.
I've made a few of the entries public-readable:
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The Sense of Achievement
Dear Log,
«The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, in a moment of reasoned lucidity which is almost unique among its current tally of 5,975,509 pages, says of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation products that [I]t is very easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all.
In ( Read more... ) -
William Gibson: the jackpot
Dear Log,
Quoting from William Gibson, The Peripheral (2014), chapter 79, called "the jackpot":
[The central character here is a ~18-year-old in small-town Tennessee? circa 2030. She is talking to Wilf, who is communicating backward in time from ~2095, via (at the moment) a "Wheelie Boy"-- a toy that's like an iPad mounted on a little Segway]
( Read more... ) -
[APPLAUSE]
Dear Log,
Now, after my final read-through of the Supreme Court's ruling on gay marriage [ "Obergefell v. Hodges"; PDF: 103 pages, 430KB], I can give you my final inventory of its lulz, culled from the pure piss 'n' vinegar of the dissents:
■ Use of the word «mummery».
Mmmmmmmmummery. Mmmmmmrmrmrmmrmrr. Rmrmrrmyrmy? Mrmrmmm. [pause] ( Read more... ) -
Into human wreckage
Dear Log,
«Alex spotted a gray laptop under Boswell's driver seat and snagged it out. He opened it up, and placed the clock readout in the corner: 12 May, 2031, 9:11:46 AM. Then he started grepping at the hard disk. "Hey Buzzard, you got the Library of Congress in here," he said. "Nice machine!"
"That's the 2015 Library of Congress," Buzzard said ( Read more... ) -
Shell hell
Dear Log,
Shell quoting hurts my brain:
% cat args #!/usr/bin/perl # Show what arguments we've been given if(@ARGV) { print "\t", (@ARGV == 1) ? "1 argument:\n" : (@ARGV . " arguments:\n"), map "\t\t«$_»\n", @ARGV; } else { print "Zero arguments.\n"; } % args "a b" c 2 arguments: «a b» «c» % cat passing-along- ( Read more... ) -
The Nightmare
Dear Log,
I hereby expose you to a bit of prose that depicts something that I refer to, in my personal lexicon, as simply "The Nightmare":
«Shutting down the Troupe's systems was delicate ( Read more... ) -
5GW equals "whoops"
Dear Log,
The core idea of fifth-generation warfare is shaping up to be: "make it look like an accident". -
Punch Card
Dear Log,
[I posted the following back there almost two years ago, but I figure I'll reproduce it here for my own reference.]
Eno's advice is "Try to make things that can become better in other people's minds than they were ( Read more... ) -
Uncertainties that limit and modify
Dear Log,«As a result, geneticists have borrowed from physics the analogy of a "black box" to represent the uncertainties of gene expression in living persons. [...] At least four technical terms have emerged in molecular biology in the effort to identify the uncertainties that limit and modify genetic determinism.
Penetrance refers to the ( Read more... )