Chaos Within Order, and The Nosferatu Baby

Benoit Mandelbrot was born on this day in 1924. He's the father of fractal geometry.

His TED Talk, should you wish to see it, Fractals and the Art of Roughness:

https://www.ted.com/talks/benoit_mandelbrot_fractals_and_the_art_of_roughness

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Perhaps the best thing about babies is their Nosferatu hands.

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Stephen Pinker is my favorite non-fiction writer. I just finished his newest book today- Rationality. The last few chapters were quite a culmination. It was like a Fourth of July Grand Finale that just wouldn't stop. I particularly liked this passage below. The Fran Lebowitz reference was a surprise.

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Though the availability bias hides it from us, human progress is an empirical fact. When we look beyond the headlines to the trendlines, we find that humanity overall is healthier, richer, longer-lived, better fed, better educated, and safer from war, murder, and accidents than in centuries past.

Having documented these changes in two books, I’m often asked whether I “believe in progress.” The answer is no. Like the humorist Fran Lebowitz, I don’t believe in anything you have to believe in. Though many measures of human well-being, when plotted over time, show a gratifying increase (though not always or everywhere), it’s not because of some force or dialectic or evolutionary law that lifts us ever upward. On the contrary, nature has no regard for our well-being, and often, as with pandemics and natural disasters, it looks as if it’s trying to grind us down. “Progress” is shorthand for a set of pushbacks and victories wrung out of an unforgiving universe, and is a phenomenon that needs to be explained.

The explanation is rationality. When humans set themselves the goal of improving the welfare of their fellows (as opposed to other dubious pursuits like glory or redemption), and they apply their ingenuity in institutions that pool it with others’, they occasionally succeed. When they retain the successes and take note of the failures, the benefits can accumulate, and we call the big picture progress.

November 20, 2021

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I blew Zuzu's mind... I told her that since she's 5, each of her fingers are 5 years old too, so add them up and you get 50. How could her hands be older than me??? She really looked like the question was bothering her but then she said she was still only one person. I'll wait until she's 6 to tell her that every second the bacteria in her guts lives a combined 25 million years.

November 20, 2020

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After the states certify enough results to ensure 270, and Trump still refuses to concede, toss him and let's make Pence the 46th president with one job, transition of power.

November 20, 2020

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P.T. Barnum- “You can fool some of the people all the time, and all the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time.”

Precient quote! People seem very eager to check out the Egress.

November 20, 2020

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The woman who took my blood today might very well be an Olympic-caliber fencer.

November 20, 2019

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Do you know how long it takes my car to warm up? It takes exactly as long as it takes for me to get to work. And people say the universe is intelligently designed.

November 20, 2019

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You hear that Melania and their son are going to stay in NY while Trump is at the White House, even though it will cost us tax payers untold millions of dollars? 

I'm in. Hear me out. If we all chip in a dollar, we're going to get $350 million dollars worth of sex scandals. I'm kidding of course, obviously Trump will stay chaste in her absence.

November 20, 2016

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Conservative intellectual Dinesh D'souza chimed in on the Hamilton controversy. Before I take democracy lessons from someone, I usually require that three years have lapsed since they last plead guilty to campaign donor fraud.

November 20, 2016

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Nearest I can tell, Trump spends his time four different ways- offending people, getting offended, criticizing people for being offended, squandering opportunities to look up irony.

November 20, 2016

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Good news- since Politifact has Trump telling the truth only 25% of the time, I guess we can expect his administration will only be 25% as awful as he's promising.

November 20, 2016

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These Trump picks...Mike Pence, Mike Flynn, Mike Pompeo, maybe Mike Huckabee and Mike Rogers. Knowing foul-mouthed Trump, I think we all can guess who he'll name to Secretary of Gynocology.

November 20, 2016

Postscript- Don't make me explain that joke.

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Mike Nichols died, one of my favorite directors. His directorial debut in 1966 was Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and the next year he directed The Graduate. And then, apparently, he did nothing for nearly 50 years. (Not really, but perhaps he didn't even need to.)

November 20, 2014

Postscript- Know how Edward Albee came up with the title, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? He found the phrase scrawled on a mirror in a Greenwich Village bar.

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On this day in 1820, an 80-ton sperm whale attacked and sunk a whaling ship from Nantucket, Massachusetts, the Essex, 2,000 miles from the western coast of South America. Moby-Dick was in part inspired by this incident.

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The Nuremberg Trials against 24 Nazi war criminals, began on this day in 1945.

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Native American activists seized control of Alcatraz Island on this day in 1969, until being ousted by the U.S. Government seven months later.

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Baseball's first commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, was born on this day in 1866.

"Baseball is something more than a game to an American boy; it is his training field for life's work. Destroy his faith in its squareness and honesty and you have destroyed something more; you have planted suspicion of all things in his heart."

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Astronomer, Edwin Hubble, was born on this day in 1889. From The Realm of the Nebulae:

"With increasing distance, our knowledge fades, and fades rapidly. Eventually, we reach the dim boundary—the utmost limits of our telescopes. There, we measure shadows, and we search among ghostly errors of measurement for landmarks that are scarcely more substantial. The search will continue. Not until the empirical resources are exhausted, need we pass on to the dreamy realms of speculation."

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Kon Ichikawa was born on this day in 1915 From Captain Inouye, in The Burmese Harp:

"As I climbed mountains and crossed streams, burying the bodies left in the grasses and streams, my heart was wracked with questions. Why must the world suffer such misery? Why must there be such inexplicable pain? As the days passed, I came to understand. I realized that, in the end, the answers were not for human beings to know, that our work is simply to ease the great suffering of the world. To have the courage to face suffering, senselessness and irrationality without fear, to find the strength to create peace by one's own example. I will undergo whatever training is necessary for this to become my unshakable conviction."

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Bobby Kennedy was born on this day in 1925.

"Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance."

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Don DeLillo was born on this day 1936. From White Noise:

"How strange it is. We have these deep terrible lingering fears about ourselves and the people we love. Yet we walk around, talk to people, eat and drink. We manage to function. The feelings are deep and real. Shouldn't they paralyze us? How is it we can survive them, at least for a little while? We drive a car, we teach a class. How is it no one sees how deeply afraid we were, last night, this morning? Is it something we all hide from each other, by mutual consent? Or do we share the same secret without knowing it? Wear the same disguise?"

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Joe Biden and Bob Einstein were born on this day in 1942. Joe Biden is a decent president but he couldn't pull off this joke:

Little Johnny wakes up one night hearing noises from his parents bedroom. He opens the door to his parents room and sees mom, handcuffed to the bed's headboard, dad ramming her from behind. Johnny screams. Dad turns to looks at him, laughs and gives mom a slap on the bum for good measure. Johnny runs away, screaming. Once dad has finished mom off, he uncuffs her. She immediately says, 'You better go tell Johnny everything is OK, the shit he just saw could scar him for life". Dad rolls his eyes and begrudgingly agrees. Pulls on his robe and heads for Johnny's room only to find it's empty. He then heads for the TV room but when he passes the guest room, he notices the door is ajar, noises coming from inside. He opens the door to look in and sees Granny on her hands and knees, little Johnny fucking her from behind. Dad screams. Johnny turns around looks at him and says "Yeah, not so funny when it's your mom huh?

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Leo Tolstoy left us on this day in 1910. From the end of The Seath of Ivan Illych:

He sought his former accustomed fear of death and did not find it. "Where is it? What death?" There was no fear because there was no death.

In place of death there was light.

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Robert Altman left us on this day in 2006.

"I'll give you the same advice I give my children: Never take advice from anybody."

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The Onion- Buddhist Extremist Cell Vows To Unleash Tranquility On West

“No city will be spared from spiritual harmony. We will bring about the end to all Western pain and anxiety, to all destructive cravings, to all greed, delusion, and misplaced desire. Indeed, we will bring the entire United States to its knees in deep meditation.”

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Entertainment Weekly- Stephen Colbert and John Oliver on the election, life under Donald Trump

“I’m all for giving him a chance, but don’t give him an inch,” Colbert said. “Because I believed everything he said, and I remember everything he said, and it’s horrifying. The job changes a man, that’s the cliche of the presidency, but every president tries to achieve what they promised. And you might say there are levers of power in Washington that could possibly slow him down, but two things: One is, they’re cowards. Second is, they tried to stop Trump. Everyone tried to stop Trump. Do not delude yourself. Everyone except the people he’s going to appoint tried to stop him, and they didn’t. He owes them nothing. That’s what scares me. He owes the checks and balances of Washington nothing, because they tried to stop him and they couldn’t. And he’s a vindictive person. So, it’s all going to be fine. Merry Christmas.”

http://www.ew.com/article/2016/11/20/stephen-colbert-john-oliver-election-donald-trump

November 20, 2016

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Precient New York Magazine article from May by conservative writer Andrew Sullivan- American Tyranny 

"To call this fascism doesn’t do justice to fascism. Fascism had, in some measure, an ideology and occasional coherence that Trump utterly lacks. But his movement is clearly fascistic in its demonization of foreigners, its hyping of a threat by a domestic minority (Muslims and Mexicans are the new Jews), its focus on a single supreme leader of what can only be called a cult, and its deep belief in violence and coercion in a democracy that has heretofore relied on debate and persuasion. This is the Weimar aspect of our current moment. Just as the English Civil War ended with a dictatorship under Oliver Cromwell, and the French Revolution gave us Napoleon Bonaparte, and the unstable chaos of Russian democracy yielded to Vladimir Putin, and the most recent burst of Egyptian democracy set the conditions for General el-Sisi’s coup, so our paralyzed, emotional hyperdemocracy leads the stumbling, frustrated, angry voter toward the chimerical panacea of Trump."

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/04/america-tyranny-donald-trump.html

November 20, 2016

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Fuck this guy.

https://youtu.be/0yQr1n6I_3A

November 20, 2017

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Sad to hear of the passing of Soumitra Chatterjee, covid-19 at 85 years old. He made 350 films, 10 yet to be released.

https://youtu.be/MT-1ETlxJHM

Nov 20, 2020

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Sam Harris- Republic of Lies

The best criticism always comes from Sam Harris- so articulate, so clear, concise, and precise. This is the beginning and end of the fraud argument at this point.

"At the time I am recording this, there seems to be no credible evidence of voter fraud in the 2020 election. And whatever the Trump campaign is bringing forward is being looked at by the courts, and so far it's being thrown out by the courts. Ironically since we have such an uncoordinated election system, it appears to be very difficult to manufacture fraud at scale, and what is being alleged here is massive fraud across many states, several of which have Republicans in key positions of power. And strangely the Democrats are said to have rigged the election for President, but didn't think to rig it for the Senate to get rid of Mitch McConnell, and they lost seats in the House.

This election fraud must have been the work of a subtle genius, and needless to say all those running in Congress have celebrated their victories, and they won those victories on the same ballots where they are disputing the presidential race.

This is the very essence of incoherence and hypocrisy, just as it was when the Trump campaign demanded that we stop counting ballots in states where he was ahead, while simultaneously demanding that we keep counting ballots in states where he was behind.

There is now such a degradation of our politics that people don't even feel the need to lie coherently. It's just a continuous carpet bombing of our information landscape with bulshit.

So at this moment it certainly appears that Biden won the 2020 election far more decisively than Trump won in 2016, and Trump claimed massive voter fraud in that election too, the election he won to become president. He even claimed that Ted Cruz was guilty of voter fraud in the Iowa caucus.

This is what he does, and it's part of the authoritarian playbook. Trump is a con man with no respect for anything beyond himself, and he certainly has no concern for the health of our democracy. These are facts about his mind that he confirms for us on a daily basis."

https://samharris.org/subscriber-extras/225-republic-lies/

November 20, 2020

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Ricky Gervais- "Remember, if you pray for money and success and you want the prayer to work, you then just have to work really hard and be good at your job."

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Wilde- "Everything in moderation, including moderation."

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Campbell- "God is the experience of looking at a tree and saying, 'Ah!'"

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Bobby Kennedy again- "The purpose of life is to contribute in some way to making things better."

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Vonnegut, Kilgore Trout's epitaph- "We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane."

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Sagan- "I don't want to believe. I want to know."

Addendum

Quaint political time in 2007!

November 20, 2007

This just in: WH Press Secretary Speaks Truth

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071120/ap_on_go_pr_wh/cia_leak_mcclellan

Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan blames President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney for efforts to mislead the public about the role of White House aides in leaking the identity of a CIA operative.

"There was one problem. It was not true," McClellan writes, according to a brief excerpt [of his book] released Tuesday. "I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest-ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice president, the president's chief of staff and the president himself."

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This is the first time that the top white house brush clearer has been implicated in the coverup by an aide. The current White House press secretary had this to say- "The president has not and would not ask his spokespeople to pass on false information."

Did the president ask her to say that??? No seriously, I bet he did. Did everyone have to try to keep from smiling.

By the way, watch the democrats do nothing about another clearly impeachable offense.

And also by the way, Jimmy Rollins won the MVP today.