Author: admin

There are some people I think of only when I am cooking certain dishes. There are other people I think of only as I am passing through certain doorways.

In many cases, these are people I have not seen or interacted with for years. Yet there they are, showing up in the most unexpected places.

It’s curious how people lodge themselves in your head. Some memories have a habit of curling themselves up in a corner of your brain, and waiting for just the right event or location to awaken.

I wonder whether this is a common phenomenon. Am I, even now, lodged far away in somebody else’s brain, a sense memory waiting for just the right moment to return?

People of a certain age grew up watching The Brady Bunch on TV. For that generation, the visual sequence that opens the show is iconic.

The cast appears in a 3×3 grid, with everybody taking turns looking at each other in up, down, left, right and diagonal directions. Everyone watching knew that they couldn’t actually see each other, and that they were filmed separately, but everyone loved the concept and the visual.

Zoom looks kind of like that, with everyone’s video face appearing in little square boxes. But it doesn’t have that cross-window eye contact.

As we emerge from the pandemic, many millions of people have gotten used to the visual iconography of Zoom. I wonder whether a new form of visual storytelling will eventually emerge from all this, one which combines the visual ideas of Zoom meetings with the visual ideas of that Brady Bunch opening.

April 15 seems to be a particularly unlucky day of the year. On this day in history, Abraham Lincoln died after being shot in the back of the head, and the RMS Titanic sank into the North Atlantic, killing most people on board.

Also, a massive fire seriously damaged the cathedral at Notre-Dame, and two bombs were set off at the Boston Marathon, killing or injuring hundreds of people.

Various other tragic events also happened on April 15 that haven’t even made this list. On top of all that, if you live in the U.S., today your taxes are due.

I, for one, am looking forward to April 16.

Suppose you were tasked with identifying one definitive song from your list of favorite songwriter or songwriting team. First you’d really need to define what you mean by “definitive”.

A definition that appeals to me focuses on the song’s impact. How deeply did a song influence the culture? Did it change the very way we think about music? In the event of a tie, consider which song first comes to everyone’s mind when thinking of that songwriter or songwriting team.

Given this definition, some choices are easy. For Nirvana, it would be “Smells Like Teen Spirit”. For Irving Berlin, it would be “White Christmas”.

But other cases are trickier. What is Paul McCartney’s definitive song? Or Joni Mitchell, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Carole King, Robert and Richard Sherman, Taylor Swift, Bob Dylan or Ellie Greenwich?

There were bugs in the first version I tried to release of my little collaborative art project built on top of Croquet. But I am starting to better understand Croquet better, so I was hopeful that this time it might work properly.

So I tried it again today — a program on the Web that allows people to collaborate to form an evolving picture, by clicking to set or clear pixels. Alas, it still did not work properly. Sigh. Eventually I hope to get it right.

Continuing the idea thread from yesterday…

The ability to travel to the future and come back again, as a fictional trope, creates all sorts of potential problems. Once you know what is going to happen, you then have sufficient agency to make it not happen, and that leads to paradoxes.

But there is no such restriction on traveling to the past, as long as you are only able to observe, without the ability to change anything. Semantically, this is equivalent to potential omniscience about everything and anything that has happened up to this moment in time.

We might call a person who has such omniscience a “reality superuser” (RS), to borrow a word from computer terminology. An RS is able to access any event at any location in history, and then act on that knowledge in the present.

This does not lead to any paradoxes, since the RS cannot change anything that has come before the current moment. But it does create a very interesting kind of superpower.

For example, an RS can look at you and immediately know your entire life history and experience. This may give the RS the ability to predict, with reasonable accuracy, what you are likely to do next in any given situation.

I wonder whether anyone has explored this trope in fiction.

Traveling forward in time could create all sorts of contradictions. Whatever you learn in the future could affect what you then do here in the present, thereby creating the possibility of a time loop and paradox.

But traveling backwards in time shouldn’t be any problem at all, from that perspective, as long as you are not allowed to affect anything. If all you can do is observe without changing anything, it seems, from a theoretical perspective, that it would be perfectly reasonable.

I wonder how many authors have started from this premise and developed a compelling story around it. I can’t actually think of any offhand.

I made a nice simple demo
no un programa supremo
I should have stopped there
My brain said “beware!”
But my ego did not get the memo

I kept gilding my demo with features
Like colors and various creatures
It became quite enhanced
And very advanced
I was swinging way out for the bleachers

But then my poor demo stopped working
‘Cause somewhere a bug was now lurking
It was very disarming
And not all that charming
Frankly, I found it quite irking

Losing features is not so much fun
But at least now I’ve got it to run
When faced with reality
I chose functionality
‘Cause simple is better than none

Today is national unicorn day. I don’t think I can add anything to that. It’s already too perfect.

Today I discovered that nobody wants to travel by air on Saturdays. I should have known this long ago, but for various reasons I have not often traveled by air on Saturdays.

It’s not just the complete lack of crowds. It’s also that everybody who works on airplanes and airports and at TSA is very happy and relaxed.

They are all smiling and friendly on Saturdays, and they go out of their way to be nice to you. It’s kind of like they are all on a working vacation.

I suppose I shouldn’t be talking about this. The next thing you know, people will start traveling by air on Saturdays. And that will ruin the whole thing.