Sounds familiar
I'm making an unusually complex and tricky Python program for the next 'Patient Things' set.

Here's a bit of my worklog from today:


2/28 But the new settable height now gives zero output in the WAV.
Where did the numbers go wrong?

It's still blank when I don't use the mouseclicks.

Well, now it's back after some meaningless fiddling.

And now it's blank again after adding a couple of ShowStatus calls to give instructions. I wonder if something in the Py dlls is getting corrupted????

Now it's working again.


Does this remind you of something?

Polistra agreed to play the part....

Labels: blonde moment

  ¶ 6:07 AM

  Not a but
I'm under the weather this week. Trying to boost my spirits, this "thought" popped up:

When I'm feeling bad, I forget what it's like to feel good. I forget that I was feeling good just two days ago, and the last time I felt bad was only a few days. BUT: When I'm feeling good, I forget what it's like to feel awful.

NO, WAIT.

That's not a BUT. Not a paradox. It's the same rule.

Feeling good vs feeling awful are separate mental universes in some way, just as dreamtime vs waketime or sober vs drunk.



How does the brain keep these spaces separate? When does the brain decide to create a new space? How many spaces can we contain?

Labels: Asked and unanswered, blonde moment

  ¶ 4:43 PM

  Valid question after all
Listening as always to Strange as it Seems at bedtime, and now reading Hix books in the daytime. Pleasantly immersed in HIGH QUALITY ENTERTAINMENT, which is no longer being produced.

The Hix family business was fairly large in the '40s and '50s. After John Hix died (too young) in 1944, control passed to his brother Ernest, then Ernest's wife Elsie, then Elsie's son. The outfit faded out in 1970. At the peak they were turning out daily newspaper features, weekly radio shows, books, and one or two movies.

Question. The shows were enjoyable enough to endure repeated listening for YEARS. Why didn't Hix sell the shows for home use?

First stupid answer: Well, they didn't have MP3s back then.

NO. WAIT, DUMMY.

These shows are available on MP3 now BECAUSE they were initially preserved on RECORDS.

The big network shows were strictly live, so most of them disappeared. We have a few of them because sponsors recorded their shows for quality control. Johnsons Wax preserved all of its Fibber shows.

Short syndicated programs dominate the current set because they were distributed to stations on 16.6 RPM transcription disks. After radio dissolved in the '50s, stations mostly tossed those disks, but some of them ended up in private collections. This shouldn't be a mystery to me because I acquired some of them in 1960 from an uncle and a neighbor who worked in radio. I was too stupid to preserve them, but others were smart.



So the question is still valid. Syndicated shows were ALREADY distributed to stations as records. Why didn't anyone repackage them on 78s for home use? After WW2, home players had all four speeds, so a retail version of the 16.6 transcriptions would also have been practical.

I suspect the answer is blockage by ASCAP or unions.

Labels: Asked and unanswered, blonde moment, Patient things

  ¶ 12:00 AM

  Cryptique dream
A total jumble of disconnected nonsense, but the dream scripter wants me to record it, so here goes.

In the dream:

= = = = =

I learned that the first sentence I had spoken, immediately after birth, was:

Cent US WWIII Morse Unit.

(Cent was pronounced the French way and meant 100.)

After learning this, I was supposed to go to the corner of Wellesley and July, which was a 4D intersection of a place and a time. But this corner was not in Spokane, it was in Manhattan, right here:



Reached by going west on Claflin then turning north then east.

(Note that the turn off Claflin is at the Goodnow house, which is the square just above the L in Riley on this map.)

= = = = =

There. Now it's recorded. Are you satisfied, dream scripter?

Labels: blonde moment, Entertainment

  ¶ 11:15 PM

  And here's the beer
Repeating the work of an anonymous genius:



And here is a time-lapse clip from the GOES satellite, showing the beer. A series of huge cyclones in the Pacific, impacting Hawaii on one side and the West Coast on the other. NWS claims the series is fading out, which means we might finally get a break from the chugging contest. I hope and pray they're right. I don't really see the fading in the video.

The neatest part of this video is the movement of dawn and dusk. We tend to think of the sun's horizon as a straight north-south line sweeping westward. Our image is probably assisted by longitudes. Our image is wrong. It's not 'vertical' at all!

Stopping to think, dawn and dusk have to move this way to give northern places a shorter day than southern places in winter. But the actual shape is still a surprise. Can't wrap my mind around it yet.

Later: Now I get it, with the help of HappySun. The satellite pic is mysterious because the earth is still and the sun is moving. When you hold the sun still, the effect is obvious.



As always, Ptolemy and Galileo are both right. Each view is better for some purposes.


Meta-both-right: When we 'liven up' the sun, normally we show the sun's benevolent face looking down on us. This animation needed to have HappySun facing the other way, which means the sun is mooning the earth. We are blessed and illuminated by lit sunfarts. More like the depressively realistic Eskimo god-stories.

Labels: Answered better than asked, blonde moment

  ¶ 5:34 AM

  Outtake
Just showing what happens when you make a typo in a graphics file...



Warning sign suitable for modern SUVs, entirely out of place in a '20s scene.

After correcting...

Labels: blonde moment

  ¶ 3:26 AM

  Best title 7 ??? /// EDIT: Nope. Should have known better.
Original version:

= = = = = = THINGS WORTH DOING AND HOW TO DO THEM = = = = = =


Variant for today:

= = = = = = THINGS WORTH DOING ... AND HAS HE DONE THEM ? ? ? ? ? ?

After two years of betrayals and disgusting failures, I've given up hope that Trump is ever going to do the right thing.

BUT: The 99999999999999999999 dB SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEECH coming from ALL Repooflicans and ALL Democrats and ALL media demons makes me wonder. Has he actually turned away from war and toward peace? Has he started to justify his existence?

Looking at the brief accounts of the summit with Putin, it looks like Trump managed to SAY all the right things and none of the wrong things. This is the first time since the scampaign that he has actually SAID sane things.

Remains to be seen whether he will be allowed to DO any of the right things before Deepstate assassinates him. They are OPENLY planning the assassination now, and OPENLY gathering recruits to do the shooting.

Labels: blonde moment, things worth doing

  ¶ 9:14 AM

  Digital trap
I like to think of myself as an unreconstructed analog critter, solidly planted in the world of mechanisms and paper, unaffected by the digital demons. Nope. Wrong.

The latest module in courseware involves some complicated and rather vague images of the brainstem in cross-section. I'm trying to liven them up and label the various regions and nuclei in ways that stand out. It's fairly hard; I have to collate and study lots of online pics to find the named landmarks and transpose them to the existing images. Every text has its own way of schematizing this material.

When I'm in this stage of work, I like to print off the best of the sources, so I can see the image on paper while I'm forming up the labels and pointers digitally. It's easier than trying to click back and forth between several different graphics programs.

One of the online images was just right except that it was upside down, with the dorsal side down instead of up. So I flipped it in Irfan, then printed it off. When I pulled the paper out of the printer .... Hey! What's wrong? It's right-side-up after all. But I specifically turned it upside down ....

Oh. The printer always spits out the top of the image first, so the upside-down JPG came out of the printer looking right-side up.

Oh again. IT DOESN'T MATTER. I didn't need to flip it in the first fucking place. You can turn a piece of paper any way you want without hitting any keystrokes. So I did.

Labels: blonde moment

  ¶ 5:11 PM