Groundhog Day

It's Ground Hog Day. Well close enough.

First they drag Blix before the Insecurity Counsel and he says he sees the shadow of weapons of mass destruction but he's not sure. He needs more time to be really really sure that he's not sure.

Then Bush gets dragged before the teleprompters, sees the unemployment figures, Down Jones average, housing starts, and falling industrial production. Heroically fights off the urge to wet himself.

Then a confused rodent blinks under bright lights wondering why he's out here when the burrow is nice and warm. And dark. And say didn't this happen last year?

Lastly Colin Powel holds a press conference and says that rats are busy sneeking around in Iraq hiding stuff.

Six more months of War!

Back to the Burrow.

It's All Fucked Up

The problem with Utopias is that they are perfect. The problem with perfection, is it's static. The problem with being static is that the Universe keeps moving. And the problem with that is no usuable information comes from the future.

Further the boundry of now is chaotic. What that means is you can predict the future, but not exactly. Eventually the future becomes something quite different than what you predicted.

Thus the problem with Utopias. You can only design them to last forever with the information you have now. But you can't see the future and you can't really predict the future from the past very well. Which sucks if you're trying to build a static Utopia. Cause eventually things become unperfect as the universe you thought you were going to have drifts from the universe that you really end up with.

Well actually it's even worse then that. Because the universe is big and chaotic, and our minds are really small, usually what we end up with isn't really a Utopia, it's hell on earth. In fact there is a positive cooralation between how perfect the utopia was supposed to be and how shitty it actually ends up as. It's because only fools think they are smart enough to build a Utopia.

So what to do....

Well if you can't build a staticUtopia, then how about a dynamic one? Well the trouble with that is that a Utopia is 'perfect' and dynamic means that it deviates from perfect. Thus damm it all! it's not perfect Arrrggggghhhhh!

So what to do.... Poink! Well if something eventually fails, then it can't really be perfect can it? Or maybe failure is part of being perfect. Hmm....

So there is this machine at the Ranch. It's an old plotter. And it's in hell. The demons at the ranch are poking at it, trying to get it to plot porn. It's old, everything built out of descete parts, resistors, capasitors, and old transistors in metal cans with GE stamped on them. The Y axis ain't working, but the X axis does. The interesting thing is that if you put your hand on the X-axis motor you can feel it vibrate. Thats the dithering circuit, moving the motor ever so slightly back and forth to keep it from sticking.

It's perfect, even though it's not quite right. Because over the long run it works better, because it'll still work even though the bearings get sticky.

There is a leason here. Perfection in the real world is imperfect, and better chaotic. That is the perfect society is one that is just fucked up enough.

This explains everything, why we die and why the ecconomy of France underperforms. In a utopia we'd still be building plotter like this old dead one. But we're not, we're fucked up. Everything is done half assed if we have an ass at all. Cause we're fucked up.

And only Perfect

Mine

I would like to take this time to say that, all of the opinions expressed here are mine.
This is my opinion. Not yours, mine!
If you want an opinion, get your own damm opinion and leave mine alone.
Cause this is my opinion!
Not yours!
mine!

A monkey analysis of Social Science Culture

The culture that developed in the graduate level social science programs in western universities during the post modern period, from the start of the the cold war to the present, is characterized by the expression of deep seated castration anxiety vis hard science and engineering. And is combined with extreme social-sexual isolation.

It is well known that primate males establish social rank by a display where they expose their erect genitals to each other to both display their maleness and to compare size. The most aggressive monkey with the biggest penis is dominant.

Social Studdies culture is effected by an emasculating catastrophy. Because they youngest members of university community they have little social standing. This explains their frequent displays and jockying for social position. Further the cultural disaplines of engineering and physical science by releasing nuclear fire on the world emasculated all other cultural branches in the modern western University. This was especially true of the adolescent social studies culture. Being castrated they have no access to any meaningful sexual outlet.

Thus social science culture was emasculated and now suffers from an ingrained social disconnect. Culturally this evolved into an intellectualized prison culture. All of the dysfunctional elements of an exo-repressed society are present. Thus the graduate studies inmate mirrors his prison counterpart. Whereas the prisoner is subject to physicalogical and psychological sexualized abuse, the grad student is similarly subject to intellectualized sexual abuse. The graduate advisor takes the student to be his intellectual bitch. And debases him intelectually to compensate for his own feelings of sexual sociological anxiety.

Alert! Owoooga! Ahwooga! Breep! Breep! Owooga!

We're under attack

Captain! Network connections are slow! Half of our sites are offline!

All Sysadmins to battle stations! Server room! Whats going on down there! There's packets everywhere captain! The servers they can't take it much longer. We're installing patches as fast as we can. But the worm keeps multiplying!

Owoooga! Ahwooga! Breep! Breep! Owooga!

Captain! Korea reports all network connections down, stock market tanking. Dammit! We have to do something or our 401k's are ruined!

Mexican beer

I had a friend once, he was annoyed by people who thought that the word 'mexican' was a slur. Course he was the guy that went around saying, "I'm not latino, I'm not hispanic, I'm a Mexican because I'm from Mexico!"

So whatz up with the absolute silence about Mexican Beer? People talk about beer as if Mexico didn't exist. Mexico makes good cheap beer! Especially, cheap good beer that you can drink when it's hot out. Sure you can drink American Beer but that stuff sucks ass without the ass. Sure you can drink a micro-brew or some fux European import and die of dehydration in quick order.

To Hell with the cheap American beer, and the premium American Suck Ass brands like miller and coors. Save the good dark stuff for those cool nights at the ranch when you're banging on stuff. Drink Cheap Mexican Beer in the sun. It's good, it's cheap, and it's Beer!

Stairwell 28

Lovely thing about SF is ocean beach. I've never been there during the day, always at night. Nothing better than standing around a fire, drinking beer as the waves crash in the background. Even more special because there are so few beaches in Kalifornia that you can be at after dark, build fires, and much less drink beer.

Last night I went out with friends and fired pots on Ocean Beach. Sweet! It's the middle of January and we're hanging out around a fire, the night is warm and all down the beach is a line of fires burning in the night. While the pottery was being fired, we spun chains, I learned a new trick, a seemless transition from a left handed spin to a right hand one. First time in maybe six months I've learned something new.

All the cups I made spalled as I was warming them. Heated them too fast I think. The beads and Um... lets just say that the hippy god smiled on us. Something awing about pulled pots glowing orange out of the fire, setting them on the sand and watching as the colors change as they cool. The insides of the pots gowing orange as the outsides cooled. Is Goot! The loss of the cups and the saki pot don't bother me as clay is cheap ass. I'll use them to test glazes next time.

The firing technique I'm using is simple. Build a small fire, set the pots two feet away. Turn every so often so that they heat evenly. Inching them closer and closer till they are right next to the fire. Then start slowly putting coals around them till they are covered. Then push them into the fire and let it rip. After an hour or two pull glowing pots out of the fire and put them on the sand.

Turing Test

In 1950, Alan Turing asked the question Can a Machine Think and proposed to answer that question via a simple test known to geeks everywhere as the famous Turing Test(tm).

The idea behind the Turing test is that if a guy talking to person and a computer machine via instant messenger can't figure out which of the two is the man and which is the machine, then the machine can be deemed to be intelligent.

The question we at the Ranch ask is, who cares if a machine can think? Our answer: Can it fetch us another Beer? No? What good is it!?

What we really want to know is does the machine have a nice ASS? Is it sexy? Can we fuck it?

We at the RaNcH in honor of Alan 'I'm a depressed gay math geek" Turing, propose our own Test.

The first person to build a computer machine, that by itself, of itself, without any help or prompting, can get itself laid wins. Thatz right, stupped, boinked, fucked silly by a real live person.

You have to admit, this is a hell of a lot more interesting than wondering if a machine can think. In the last fifty years of trying to figure out what inteligence is, all we've been able to figure out is that we're a lot dumber than we thought we were.

The prize is... um... $100 gift certificate from GoodVibes