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Magical Realism

Apparently I have a second wife, about which I knew nothing until the other night. Miles, describing his day over dinner:

This is mommy’s restaurant with the hot dogs and I was walking down the street with my gorilla on a leash so he doesn’t get away and an idea popped right into my head for the gorilla to eat upstairs and play with toys while I eat downstairs [we don’t have an upstairs] and eat food. No gorillas allowed in the pet store because there’s only people allowed. I saw a bee on the way and it was buzzing around honey and drinking nectar. Because you’re not allowed to get food on the toys. No, it wasn’t mommy’s restaurant, it was the Bay Bridge Restaurant [there is no such restaurant] a long long way away and I had to drive a car there, up a hill and down a hill and I put the gorilla in the front seat, and I have one daddy and two mommies, that’s three parents, and my other mommy’s name is Catherine Henry Frank.

The life of imagination of a three-year-old is so rich, and so many characters from his books and movies become part of our daily life, as if they actually exist (though the gorilla/restaurant story did not seem to be based on anything he’s read/consumed — totally improvised). I sometimes wonder if he distinguishes between reality and fiction at all. It’s a blessed state.

Music: Iron & Wine :: Teeth in the Grass
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Xyle Scope

Xylescope A tip from one of the panelists at SXSW, in the CSS Problem Solving session: “If you’re working with CSS and need a good analysis/debugging tool, it doesn’t get any better than Xyle Scope. Mac only, but if you don’t own a Mac, Xyle Scope is a good reason to get one.”

Many CSS designs hide browser discrepancies by allowing white space to overlap, etc. The thing about the current Birdhouse design is that the divs are packed very tightly together, allowing no room for that kind of masking. Tearing out serious hair recently trying to get this style working in all browsers (don’t get me started on MSIE and CSS), with no div overlaps and no fugly gaps. Xyle Scope didn’t magically solve the problem, but it did give me a window onto the primary culprit last night, which I couldn’t have gotten any other way.

Continue reading “Xyle Scope”

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Breaking the Spell

Fascinating conversation between Moira Gunn and philosopher Daniel Dennett at IT Conversations (podcast). Dennett is a renowned determinist, but isn’t talking along those line here. His book “Breaking the Spell” makes the point that religion has been — and is — one of the most important forces (for change, or its opposite) in the world. As such, it deserves to be studied objectively, from the outside, as thoroughly and as rigorously as the banking industry, as politics, as world demographics. “The spell” is what prevents that kind of study from taking place — the tacit belief that religion is somehow in a different category, and that it’s somehow disrespectful or taboo to study religion itself. Religions like to be studied from the inside — using their own scriptures or lore as a framework for study. But they tend to resist study from the outside – a spell that Dennett wants to break.

He also makes some fascinating observations about the biological/genetic triggers for religion, leading to some interesting speculation on its cultural origins. Another synopsis on Dennett at Salon.

Totally tangential: Not even The Archbishop of Canterbury believes that creationism should be taught in schools. SF Chronicle:

I think creationism is, in a sense, a kind of category mistake, as if the Bible were a theory like other theories,” the Most Rev. Rowan Williams told the Guardian newspaper. … My worry is that creationism can end up reducing the doctrine of creation rather than enhancing it.

England does not have an evangelical movement to parallel the one in the U.S.

Music: Ornette Coleman :: Harlem’s Manhattan
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Marxist Thing

Hooked up with old Adamation crewmate and current vlogger Leslye James at SXSW. At 2:30 into SXSW Revisited, I show Leslye how to roll factory-perfect cigarettes while ambling down Austin sidewalks and commenting on how the massive pile of loose Legos they put out for attendees looked at the end of the week like the physical embodiment of a failed wiki.

Music: The Carter Family :: The Birds Were Singing Of You
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The Myth of Disarray

Bathroom Remodel 1 We’re at it again — this time ripping out the small “ship’s head” bathroom to replace sub-floor and joists. Years of water damage (thanks previous owner!) have finally caught up with the house. But happy to say that for this round, we’re paying for the work rather than doing it ourselves (thanks home equity line!). Last summer’s remodel of the main bathroom dragged on for six months, squeezing tasks into spare hours here and there – will be great to have this whole thing done in a few weeks.

Speaking of disarray, just listening to a radio pundit (missed the name) commenting on the usual bromides about how the Democratic party is in disarray, and thought he made a really good point: The semantic loop-de-loop is in the definition of “array”: The normal state of any political party is to have an array of viewpoints, with some loose unification. We don’t say that major league baseball is in disarray just because some teams are winning and others losing. An array of competing views represents health for a system, just like bio-diversity represents the health of an ecosystem. You could say that any political system is in disarray, when what you really mean is that its members aren’t robotically aligned on every point.

Somehow, the myth of disarray doesn’t quite map onto the situation in our small bathroom.

Music: Tom Tom Club :: Lorelei
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Help Test WPBlogMail

What started as a quick-n-dirty port of MTBlogMail to a WordPress-compatible version turned into a major ground-up re-write, to take advantage of native WordPress APIs and simplify configuration. WPBlogMail digests new WordPress posts at regular intervals and sends them to a subscribers mailing list. Not quite a plugin, but a script that runs parallel to a WordPress installation. Wanted to get a bit of feedback from others before uploading this to the WordPress plugins directories, so if this is useful to you, please give it a shot and let me know how it’s working out.

Use the subscribe field in the sidebar to the right to receive Birdhouse updates via email — now powered by wpblogmail.

Music: The Minutemen :: Times
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3 Steps to Highly Efficient News Reading

The irony of using supposedly time-saving aggregators and services like Reddit, Digg, Delicious, Populicious, RSS readers, etc. is that they don’t save you any time at all if you’re not disciplined in your application of them — otherwise you quickly lose any time advantage by filling the void with more and more feeds. Daniel Miessler:

One of the main problems we as information fetishists face is the lack of a solid, repeatable methodology for processing new input online. Too often we bounce back and forth between this site and that site, maybe check a blog or two, and then half-heartedly label the task of “reading news” as completed. This approach is not only a really poor way to stay on top of what’s new, but it’s also very anti-GTD.

Miessler has written up his personal methodology of news consumption as a sort of guide. Some good tips there, but not sure I could ever swing that way – for me, the fun of the surf is in bouncing around with some element of randomness. I seem to be attracted to exactly the behavior that Miessler finds inefficient.

Music: The Tahitian Choir :: Ua Putuputu Tatou E
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Chris Bliss

He’s not juggling 19 plates or anything like that, but even with just three objects, this is some of the most graceful, awe-inspiring juggling I’ve ever seen — and in perfect grace with the Beatles’ “Golden Slumbers.” The finale is intense. More at Chris Bliss.

Thanks Barry

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43 Things

40Things Another interesting example of folksonomies in action: 43 Things lets people list the top 43 things they want to accomplish before they die / before they turn 43 / before they make another list, etc. Haven’t created a list there, but tempted to (but all my lists are already in Ta-Da!) Actually, not sure it’s fair to say this is folksonomic, since the tag cloud there consists of entire phrases rather than single tags, but the concept is similar.

Music: Iron & Wine :: Jesus the Mexican Boy
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Yeti Crab Walks the Earth

Ga Hairy Lobster More than a mile down, hanging out near thermal vents off the coast of Easter Island, scientists have discovered a creature “so distinct from other species that they’ve created a new taxonomic family for it.” The “furry lobster,” which has pincer arms twice as long as its body and which has only vestigial membranes for eyes, may use its fur to trap bacteria, which it then consumes. Or maybe not. This kind of thing fills me with awe.

Mark Morford of the SF Chronicle:

Just look. Kiwa hirsuta is just a little bit mesmerizing, strange, stirs up something deep and potent. An eyeless, albino, crablike animal, sublime and magical and perfect in its alien weirdness … like something straight out of a medieval bestiary, a Sendak book, a Castaneda shaman’s peyote dream. It’s not a lobster. It’s not a crab. It’s not anything anyone really understands — and why is it covered in silky blond hair? They don’t know that, either. It just is. Just one of those things. Like why the whales sing. Like why some parrots can tell you who’s calling before you pick up the phone. Like the existence of dark matter. We just don’t know. And what’s more, the sheer volume, the breathtaking amount of information we don’t know is so mind-boggling and perspective-humping that you take one look at the Kiwa and only say, Hi again, wicked gorgeous unimaginable vastness of the universe.

Music: The Congos :: Fisherman