Great Lakes

It used to be that when you tried to recall the names of the five Great Lakes, you might resort to a mnemonic. Maybe something like H.O.M.E.S. (for Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior).

Or perhaps you would use a sentence like “Super Man Helps Every One.” Or maybe you would just give up and look it up on a map.

But now, thanks to the wisdom of our Supreme Leader, we don’t need to do any of that. The new naming convention is super easy to remember, as you can see from this official White House map:


And just in case you still need an acronym, here’s a handy-dandy mnemonic that seems to fit the mood: “Arrgh arrgh arrgh arrgh aaaarrrggghhh!”

Tools

The tools you use shape what you do. Clearly having access to a screwdriver, or to a programming language, allows you to do things that you couldn’t otherwise do.

But those tools also shape what you want to do. In your mind, having the right powerful tool brings something into the realm of possibility.

And so there is this wonderful cycle: We refine our tools, and then they refine us. And we then use those tools to build the next level of powerful tools.

There might be a break in this pattern with our increasing reliance on A.I. Because A.I. is presented to us as pretty much a black box (unlike a screwdriver or a programming language), it may not be giving us the right kind of working knowledge that we need to make new and better tools.

Still, it is possible that our continual use of A.I. will end up — in the long run — giving us new kinds of skills that are not yet understood. In that case, our species’ wonderful power of toolmaking may end up taking an odd turn or two, but it will probably continue.

Slept

When I was a child there was a TV jingle that every kid in America knew by heart:

Hot Dogs, Armour Hot Dogs,
What kind of kids eat Armour Hot Dogs?
Fat kids, skinny kids, kids who climb on rocks,
Tough kids, sissy kids, even kids with chicken pox
Love Hot Dogs, Armour Hot Dogs.
The dogs kids love to bite!

I’ve been struck by the negative tone of the few on-line articles about this jingle, which was written by the prolific Clay Warnick in 1967. All of those articles — as well as many YouTube comments — focus on the claim that you could not air this jingle today.

One such article states “They certainly couldn’t air this commercial nowadays. We are so easily offended.” Another article says “There’s no way this article could pass muster in today’s times.”

And yet, this song is the very definition of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. It’s not making fun of anybody. Rather, it is cheerfully inviting everyone to the party.

As those song lyrics show, the spirit of DEI is, fundamentally, the spirit of freedom. Are people today really so Slept that they can no longer see a genuine invitation to wake up and have some fun?

Who came first?

Today, during a conversation about the late great Tim Curry, I showed someone a YouTube video of the iconic Sweet Transvestite number from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. This is the first time they had ever seen it, and their first comment was “He seems to be imitating Freddie Mercury.”

But The Rocky Horror Show began playing in London’s West End in June of 1973, whereas the musical group Queen did not start becoming successful until between 1974 and 1975. Is it possible that it was the other way around?

Maybe at some point a young Freddie Mercury wondered into the Royal Court Theater and ended up seeing a crazy Richard O’Brien musical. Perhaps after watching that charismatic guy up on stage in the black corset, fishnet stockings, and faux-pearl necklace, he got inspired.

And maybe the rest is musical history. I guess we’ll never know.

Aesthetically terrifying

Erin Scavino inadvertently came up with the perfect phrase to describe what the U.S. president and his enablers are doing to our nation’s capital. Between the destruction of the East Wing and the Rose Garden (and apparently the imminent razing of the Kennedy Center), tearing up the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool, that hideous “ballroom”, the even more hideous proposed King Kong Arch, down to the idiotic tendency to cover every available surface of the Oval Office with tacky gold leaf — the list goes on and on.

Yes, it is all aesthetically terrifying, but it also clearly serves a purpose: Distracting Americans with the sheer ugliness of these monstrosities gives the administration cover to do the really terrifying stuff, like removing anyone from the U.S. Military command who might have moral authority and a backbone, delegitimizing the voting process by attacking mail-in ballots, attacking independent centers of thought like Universities, and establishing an armed paramilitary presence in cities that didn’t vote for the president.

Those aesthetically terrifying projects in Washington D.C., to use Erin Scavino’s apt phrase, are there for a purpose: To distract everyone from the truly terrifying projects — the ones aimed not at destroying our nation’s capital, but at our nation’s ability to conduct an orderly democratic transition of power.

Transform simulator

A number of years ago I had the privilege of visiting the lab of Professor Hiroshi Ishii at the MIT Media Lab. Luckily for me, that visit coincided with the awesome TRANSFORM project that was going on at that time.

In a nutshell, Transform is a dynamic shape display that move more than one thousand pins up and down in real-time to transform a tabletop into a dynamic tangible display.

To help with the project, I created a little on-line simulator. A code editor lets you vary the behavior of the simulated pins.

The examples I started with were some movements based on sine waves and, of course, some movements driven by the noise function. You can play with the simulator for yourself HERE.

Dolly Parton

I was saddened to read of the death of Dolly Parton. She was one of my heroes.

I don’t know of many people who wrote more than 3000 songs, and most songwriters are not also leading philanthropists, with seemingly infinite generosity. She was all of those things and more.

I had the privilege of meeting Dolly Parton once in person, and she was every bit as wonderful as you would think. We will all miss her.