Exceive

Every beautiful property has the same address? I guess they do now!

SignOnSanDiego.com > News > State — Laguna Beach landslide sends homes crashing down hill

This video starts out with a view of the milky way from 100 million light years away, and zooms in by a power of 10 until all you see is quarks. Well, sort of see quarks. Things that small don’t actualy have colors, and I’m not sure they really have shapes either. But I’m not someone to ask about such things, I mostly just look at pictures. And these are kind of nice pictures.

This isn’t a new idea, the cosmic zoom has been done before, several times. But if you haven’t seen one, you should definitely take a look. Gives a bit of perspective. Unfortunately, exponential perspective kind of squashes the subject matter - going from a view where a galaxy is tiny to one where a sub-atomic particle doesn’t fit on the screen in a couple of minutes makes the range feel smaller than it really is. Most people feel in a linear, not exponential, way. But you can’t really do a cosmic zoom on a linear basis.

From looking at science, lots of things seem to be exponential. I wonder if that is because most things are exponential, or because exponential things attract attention.

Molecular Expressions: Science, Optics and You - Secret Worlds: The Universe Within - Interactive Java Tutorial

What Exponential means

An exponential function is one where the next value is a multiple of the current one. For example, a savings account that you don’t mess with is exponential - how much is in it next year is how much is in it now times some number, probably around 1.02 (the 1 is the money that is in there now, the .02 is 2% interest). And the year after, it will grow a little faster, because a slightly larger number will be multiplied by 1.02. This example is not as much fun as it used to be, because interest rates on savings accounts suck now. But if you carry it foreward a bunch of years, you see it building up steam.

The short version:
The PAC representing bars in Wisconsin (a fairly powerful political force - we like our beer here) held a party for Wisconsin politicians, who had to pay $5.00 to get in. According to Wisconsin law, the difference between that $5.00 and the $27.00 per politician that the party cost the Tavern League is an illegal gift. They would have gotten away with it, but one of the politicians got busted driving drunk after the party.

The long version: Tavern League fined for reception.

The amusing part: the Tavern League’s latest big campaign was to keep the drunk driving limit at .10, instead of the .08 that the fed’s, in their state’s-rights respecting Republican wisdom insist on. The Tavern League lost. The politician’s blood alcohol content was .09 - would have been legal if he and his colleagues had listened to the Tavern League. I wonder how he voted?

Maybe a full member of the Reality Based Community could see this as an illustration of some political horror, be outraged one way or the other, or something. I’m just amused.

I saw a BMW ad last night. There was the usual car driving sequence, with lots of wheel closeups. The difference was that the sound track was a little boy making car sounds instead of the real sounds.

The key line was something about making your childhood dreams come true.

Any little boy who dreams of a BMW needs serious unprofessional help. At the very least, a stack of vile comics and a few hours of KISS videos.

An article on Suburban Guerrilla describes an epidemic of golf injuries to such sad cases.

PZ Meyers has a very thoughtful essay about the span of time, about those who have gone before.

This story is why the web is more than just a cheap way to distribute product catalogs.

Chris Clarke wrote a very good, very personal story. And the comments (many of them are by people involved in the story) expand on the story beautifully.

On the way out of school, Alexander* saw the Moon.
“Grandpa, is the Moon soggy?”
“No, the Moon is dry.”
“Oh.”
…
“I dreamed it came down. It was rolling and rolling and rolling and rolling in the street on the sidewalk in a mudpuddle it got dirty and wet Grandpa.”

We got home, the sky was darker so the Moon was brighter.
“Yay! It’s getting clean in the sky! Grandpa the Moon is getting clean.”

Next day we got home and out of the truck.
“The Moon is soggy.”
I turned and looked. Through the haze and overcast, the Moon looked very soggy.

“Lorem Ipsum” is the start of the standard “test pattern” for text, and has been for 500 years.
Lorem Ipsum - All the facts - Lipsum generator is a nice history page about it, and a randomizer for those situations where you need more text than the original provides.

The page also includes a translation. I assumed it was a prayer, but it is a passage from a philosophical text on pleasure and pain, written in 45 BC by Cicero.

Kind of deep for deliberately meaningless text.

Monday.
Very much so.
Both kitchen sink drains stopped last night, so I got up early to clear them. Had to unscrew part of the plumbing. The aroma was intense. And not in a good way. The pipe wasn’t just clogged somewhere down the way, it was full. So the dishwater didn’t even drip out the part I opened. Got out the snake, used it to poke out some crud, and there was a small rush of, well,I guess it was water-based and the vapor was undoubtedly organic. Ran the snake deep into the system, pulled out quite a lot of crud. Ran water into the garbage disposal - it didn’t come through. Ran water through the other sink - it did. This is bad, because the pipes are in kind of a peace-sign arrangement (without the circle) and this means that the remaining clog is between the garbage disposal and the junction. I can’t make the snake turn up the disposal drain. It would be like turning off on an on-ramp on an Interstate. I’ll have to take apart lots of stuff. Well, I’ll get one side going now so we have a working, if not entirely efficient, kitchen today. I’ll get the other after work. So I’m cleaning the pipe out - no use giving the next clog a head start - and I notice more crud coming in. The disposer side clog is oozing out. Yay. Poke around some more with the snake, the clog oozes out enough for the water to get through. Run a bunch of water, dump the bucket (I had a bucket under the open pipe, otherwise this would have been very ugly) clean up the threads and put the plumbing back together. Go outside and hose off the tools. Decide keeping the snake in the carboard box it came in is icky - I rinse it after use, but it never gets really clean and cardboard holds crud - so I store it in the bucket.
Wash up, I’ve got 7 minutes to make coffee and have a bowl of Marshmallow Matees with the grandson (he’s just turned two) before heading out.
OK, just a little late. On my way out the door. Wife calls out that the dog has diarhea and she’s feeling too dizzy to clean up. So back I go, fire up the carpet steamer, take care of the situation. Not just a little late anymore. Walk the dog again. Ask eldest daughter to up the carpet steamer away for me. Wash up, grab coffee, hit the road. The 894 bypass is moving pretty well for almost 8, it’s usualy pretty slow this time of day, I often use city streets to get to the 45. The 45 connects the dull Southwest suburbs (mostly retired blue-collar, particularly fitting for my own, which is named after a company that moved to Mexico. Don’t get me wrong - I love the place.) where I live to the decaying and half deserted Northwest corner of The City where I work. Thus, it never has much traffic on it, and the traffic reports rarely mention it. Except this morning. The traffic reports, as usual, don’t mention it. But it’s a parking lot. Due to character of the area where the office is, the doors are locked and hardly anybody has a key, we have to knock to get in. My boss opens the door for me.
So I’ve had a long day when I walk in the office door.

Well, I had something I wanted to write, something that I could expand upon. So I started this thing.

Didn’t have a name in mind, so I tweaked a travesty generator to work on letters instead of words, and read the gibberish until I found a “word” I liked. Ran it through Google, and there was a band by that name, with a bunch of fan sites. Tried again. Got 7 hits on “Exceive”. Two of them were examples of non-words (one as evidence in a Japanese lawsuit, the other as part of a psych experiment) and the rest were mis-spellings of other words. I like it. I’ll think about it more later. So close to being a word, it almost means something.

Made myself some space, signed up, and here I am.

I have no idea what my original idea was.