Brainwaves of Sken

Today’s topic: recreation! I should mention that these kinds of questions are precisely the most difficult for me to answer – while I have excellent sequential recall, remembering contextless names, artists and titles are tough.

favorite books?

Let’s go with books that have been my favorites, whether they are now or not:
Under Plum Lake by Lionel Davidson. This was my first chapter book. I still own it, and the first chapter has pencil lines under the words where my grandmother started reading it with me. After a few pages, I was reading by myself – this was some time before preschool.

Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. A great many geek friends consider this a holy book, and I am one of them. I picked it up when I needed it most, at nine or ten, and it helped me cope with a pretty rotten school experience. I greatly believe in the concept of knowing, and to some extent loving, your enemy. Even as you crush them. … Good times!

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein. I found Heinlein in 4th grade, while I was roaming the library to avoid going out to play (those of you who’ve heard me talk about 4th grade understand). Conveniently, I started with Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, which was his youth-oriented book. I quickly ready everything I could find by him, and this book continues to be one of my favorites.

The Talisman by Stephen King and Peter Straub. Six months later, at 10, my grandmother realized I was getting bored and had run out of books to read, and she gave me this. I put it under my bed for a month, and picked it up out of desperation… and was essentially inseparable from this book for years. It’s a 10-year-old’s adventure in an adult world… which was pretty close to how I felt, most of the time.

Photoshop LAB Color: The Canyon Conundrum and Other Adventures in the Most Powerful Colorspace by by Dan Margulis. This book is no fucking joke. It takes a lot of effort to wrap your mind around the concepts in the later chapters, and I am still, years later, going back to it in order to pick up some things. Want to make a tan person stand out from a tan background only using the Curves tool? If you do any color correction work at all, this book has deep, black arcane magic.

Looks like I can talk forever on anything, so those other favorites will have to wait. ;) Thanks for the questions!

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Okay, my laptop’s about 4 and a half years old, and it’s starting to choke as I ask more and more of it, especially in the realm of video. Athena, my friends, is long in the tooth.

Meanwhile, I expect a fair sum back from my taxes. See where this is going? So here are my thoughts:

My next laptop will be more compact. To make up for it, it needs some kind of port replicator. For those not in the know, a port replicator allows you to dock your laptop at home, with video, audio and data sources all plugged into it. Press a button, bam!, you’re off and running without all of the encumbrance.

Think of Firefly’s shuttle. :)

Not too many laptops come prepared for that, though – it would be a little goofy (and slow!) to do all that through USB. My work laptop has one, and it is totally sweet.

The reason? I’d like to use a full keyboard, eSATA hard drive, and at least one reasonably large monitor at home, but hauling a 10 lb, 17.1″ laptop around is unnecessary.

Any thoughts on this would be welcome.

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I wish everyone would watch this video. Most people I know aren’t interested in doing this kind of thinking – that is, thinking about thinking, but I soak this shit up. If I had a child, I’d sit them down with this video and go over what it says minute-by-minute, and make them explain to me what it means. Militant athiests – this is about you, too. While this video uses the supernatural as a specific example, I think it makes a great case for reason in general.

If anyone wants to chat about this, I am all about it.

“You’re no longer communicating – you’re just rehearsing your own prejudices.”

“When a friend tells us about a day at work, we don’t ask them to back up what they say … but when someone’s trying to persuade us to accept something as fact or take some sort of risk, demanding valid evidence helps us distinguish true claims from false ones; and that’s an invaluable ability when living in a world where believing false claims can seriously damage your wealth and your health.

“Critical thinking is not incompatible with open-mindedness … Even though demanding valid evidence may occasionally lead you to reject ideas that are poorly supported but nonetheless valid – if and when evidence accumulates for those ideas, an open mind will lead you to reconsider them, and possibly dislodge false ideas you previously thought was true. This approach is promoted by science.”

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What made you pick your major?

Well, to get at that we have to get at what made me pick my school.

More on this

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That is all.

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For the past three years or so, I’ve been all up ons my taxes, getting them done right away. Sometimes, that was ’cause Lucy did mine for me. ;)

Anyway, I’m not sure if I want to do mine with the software I’ve been using, TaxCut Pro, or something else (maybe a cheaper web based thing? Don’t know).

I’ve got one W2 and nothing unusual to declare. What say you? What did you (or will you) do your taxes with?

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I watched this on BoingBoing, and I think it showcases the kind of thinking that frustrates people who believe you cannot have a discussion without reasoning, logic, or empirical evidence as your starting point.

Some of my more religious friends might also find this frustrating, as it shows how that squeaky wheel can portray everyone as belligerent anti-reason fools.

This is as frustrating, I imagine, as the militant Athiests are to the non-religious. Just like elesewhere in life, I think everyone has to make these decisions for themselves, and there is just no pushing someone one way or another – especially when your debate partners are unwilling to accept logic or empirical evidence as a starting point – not the final point, but the place of common ground.

If you were to say “The sky is blue” and I said “We all know that it is red!” and you replied, “Look up for yourself, if you don’t believe me” and I said, “I don’t have to” … well, that is the end of our conversation, isn’t it? If you can’t convince me to consider the idea that I am wrong, how can I expect you to do the same? If I believe that everything I can discover with my own eyes, ears and instruments are lies … what common ground can there be? What causes that blue sky, that may be debatable, but if you can’t rely on your senses?

There is nowhere to start from, not even the unity of the human condition.

Video taken from boingboing

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I haven’t had much to say in here lately – I’m working longer hours, starting earlier, and reading an awful lot of the internets. Maybe even all of it, some days.

So, I’m looking for stuff to chat about, and I want you to help!

Ask me 5 questions. If I get enough of them, I’ll answer each person separately – if not, I may just answer one question at a time.

Make them interesting!

Some ideas to get you going: DIY, my LJ interests, my icons, conventions, my sweetie, my beard, creativity, motivation, ethics, my reading list, steampunk and related, photoshop/premiere/aftereffects, “remember that time when”, local film, the auto industry (remember I’m not a reporter, I just have opinions), cellphones, futurism/sci-fi, music

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I’m not really a huge fan of the digital photo frames. Oh, they’re cool, and they’re vivid, but they’re like the worst of both worlds – they’ve lost the timelessness of photography and the animation of our typical digital displays (TVs and monitors).

What I want is a sort of hybrid between a Second Life photoframe and a Harry Potter photoframe.

Check out this video of Jane M. talking to boingboing:

See, imagine that, but using some sort of high-resolution reference.

Let’s say you throw a person into a booth that’ll take 360-degrees of pictures (frankly, 5 shots would probably be enough) which were then put on a wireframe model and animated inside a photo frame.

I would love that. I’d have a frame of lucy that would give me the gopher face once in awhile, one of melanie that would wink elaborately, carrie looking suave, K.T. being silly in some way …

Anyway. That’s what I want.

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Been a hell of a weekend for the auto industry.

For those not following, the CEO of GM (Rick Wagoner) is asked to resign by the Obama administration, and does so. Chrysler has 30 days to find a buyer (for itself, that is) and GM has 60 days to produce a restructuring that the administration thinks might actually work.

Batten down the hatches, folks, it’s going to be a wild month or two.

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