Green Hornet / Black Beauty

I picked up a copy of Willamette Week, a local Tabloid, earlier this week, and this ad caught my eye. At first I thought someone was trying to sell a custom car, and I thought cool! Someone is bringing (fake) guns to the custom car world. Alas, it was not to be, it is merely an ad for the movie.

Update March 2016 replaced missing picture.

Quote of the Day

"First rule of Sock Club: you don't talk about Sock Club." - Fillyjonk's Progress.

She's talking about knitting socks, in case you were wondering. Via Dustbury.

Optical Illusion?

Steve's email called this a "cenesthetic hallucination". I don't think that is quite right, but I am not sure what you would call it. It is definitely very odd, and not for anyone subject to epilepsy.

Directions (the ones on the linked page a little hard to read):

1. Click on the link below
2. Then "click me to get trippy",
3. Look at the center of the screen for 30 seconds, and then.
4. Look at your hand holding the mouse, without moving it away from the mouse...

http://www.neave.com/strobe/

Quote of the Day

Generality is, indeed, an indispensable ingredient of reality; for mere individual existence or actuality without any regularity whatever is a nullity. Chaos is pure nothing. - Charles Sanders Peirce

I am not particularly keen on this quote: at first reading it doesn't appear to make much sense, but if you allow for some freedom of expression (this quote is at least a hundred years old), then maybe it is okay.

For instance, much of our expectations for our day-to-day lives depend on practical generalisations: we expect most people to behave in expected ways most of the time. If we had no rules to explain to ourselves how things work, our world would appear chaotic, you could make no useful predictions, and there is no telling what would happen. I think that's what he's saying.

However, the person being quoted, Charles Sanders Peirce, is kind of interesting. First off is the spelling of his name. I am a pretty good speller, not great, I still screw up any number of largish words, but PEIRCE hit me as all wrong. At first I thought my correspondent had screwed it up, but no, Wikipedia confirms the spelling. Just for grins I ran searches for both spellings. Google reported 2 million hits for PEIRCE, 34 million for PIERCE, which explains why I thought PEIRCE was wrong.

This Charles Sanders Peirce guy was something of a smarty pants: he figured out some of the underpinnings of digital computers a long time before anyone else did:

In 1886 he saw that Boolean calculations could be carried out via electrical switches,^[8] anticipating Claude Shannon by more than 50 years.

Via Ned.

Amazon, Google & Tags, Part 2

I had a couple of books to return to Amazon and when I looked at their return policy I noticed a 30 day limitation. Well, that does it for the Logitech Revue. If I don't return it now, I will probably miss the deadline, and as it doesn't seem likely they are going to get the thing fixed, let's return it. So boom, it's in the mail.

The Logitech Review has a bunch of firmware that can be updated. Matter of fact, the first thing it did when we turned it on was to download a 12 Megabyte update. I suspect once it is turned on and connected it can be updated any time at all. However, being able to update doesn't mean there is an update available that will fix my problem. I consider my problem sort of fundamental, and as they hadn't seen fit to make it work properly in the first place, it probably wasn't going to get fixed any time soon. Just to be clear: So boom, it's in the mail.

Meanwhile our little digital kitchen timer died. It happened when it was in my hand just as I had inadvertently pushed a little gray rubber button on the back. At first I thought it was something I had done, so I dinked around with for a bit, then I realized that the thing was older than dirt and maybe the battery had just died.

Not too long ago I needed a little coin cell battery for a remote control. I ended up buying one over the internet from Dr. Battery in Florida for like a dollar. I was so impressed I wrote a post about it. Or at least I thought I did. Went looking for it this afternoon and could not find it. Searching didn't help, tags didn't help. Searching the net failed to reveal the site I used last time, or maybe they have changed so much I didn't recognize them.

In any case, Amazon had a link to a supplier who sold me a battery for $2.50 and no shipping. It may take a few days to get here, but it saves driving to the store and looking through their display of batteries to find that they don't have the one I need, or if they do they want $5 for it.

Marc found another solution: you can buy a sheet of a couple dozen different coin cells from Harbor Freight for like $8. (I couldn't find this deal on their site). If you only use a couple, you come out ahead. Only problem for me is that it would be one more thing to keep track of, and I have too much stuff as it is.

Which is why I returned the books in the first place. I wasn't getting much money back, not after I paid the shipping to return them, but somebody in my family already has copies of these books, I already have a stack of books to read, and the last thing I need is more new stuff to keep track of and store.

Tags

I do not have a good handle on tags. I hardly ever use them. Searching seems to work as well, if not better most of the time.

Just so we are clear, tags are labels that are used to classify documents like emails and blog posts. I know Google likes them. I imagine other outfits probably use them as well.

I never seem to know how to classify things. Some things are fairly obvious, some are not. But mostly, how do I tell which tag have I used previously for a similar item? I seem to have an endless list of tags, so long that it seemed pointless, so long that I took it off of my blog.

The other problem is some posts require so many tags it seems ridiculous. It takes as long to tag a post as it does to write it.

A couple of weeks ago I said forget it. Since tags are so useless and so troublesome and I can't seem to come up with a clear plan, I decided to just quite using them all together.

Then I put up a post about the Navy's rail gun research project, which involved some very high speed photography, and I wanted to reference another post I had done that also involved the military and high speed photography. I knew what the picture looked like, but I didn't recall when I had made the post or what I had said about it. I tried searching six ways from Sunday but could not find it. Finally I tried the tag Guns, and presto, there it was.

So now I'm back to using tags.

The Premier, by Georges Simenon

I couldn't sleep last night so I read The Premier by Georges Simenon. It's a slim volume, 160 pages. It is engaging enough that it was easy to read. The protagonist is not the most pleasant sort of person, but he has done his bit and maybe a bit more, and now he is on the way out. The story telling technique is, what? clever? well done? random? In any case it works well.

I picked it up at Post Hip a couple of weeks ago on the recommendation of Scott. Scott had stumbled upon a story about Georges, something to the effect that he had slept with 20,000 women, but his wife and he had done some figuring and decided that 12,000 was a more accurate number. Huh.

Wikipedia's opening paragraph on this guy gives us the essentials:

Georges Joseph Christian Simenon (February 13, 1903 – September 4, 1989) was a Belgian writer. A prolific author who published nearly 200 novels and numerous short works, Simenon is best known for the creation of the fictional detective Maigret.

I guess I got roped into this because I vaguely recall a detective name Maigret, so I figured I would get (re-) acquainted with him. This book is not a Maigret story. Also, Scott doesn't stock any Science Fiction, but Roberta X has written a Sci-Fi novel and I plan on buying a copy.