I’ve been meaning to post this for weeks, so I’d better do it now while it’s still timely.
Does anyone else find it odd that the Olympics are starting on Friday the 13th?
Actually, does anyone know if Friday the 13th has any significance in Greek culture?
Last week I started to notice Eudora’s musical you’ve-got-mail tones, very faint, at times that I got new mail. This was odd for two reasons: my sound was muted, and I’ve long since replaced the sound with the “Message for you, sir!” line from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I assumed it was just coincidence, and the guy in the next cubicle had his email set to check on a similar schedule.
Well, it seems that mute doesn’t actually work on my Win2k box, at least not if it’s muted when I log in. The volume icon in the taskbar says it’s muted, the checkbox is checked, but it still sends sound to the speakers. Unchecking and re-checking the mute box solved it.
Now I need to figure out why it reset the sound clip. I did install a new version of Eudora recently, but it kept the rest of my settings intact. My best guess is that I moved the file a while back and forgot about it (since it’s been on mute for months), and Eudora, unable to find it, fell back to the default.
If I hadn’t turned the volume down so far, it would have been obvious. And I probably wouldn’t have bothered writing this.
A couple of weeks ago, the landscaping wonks for my work building ripped out all the hedges in the parking-lot divider islands and heavily mulched the ground. They didn’t put anything new in until the middle of last week, when I noticed a slew of newly-planted birds of paradise on the exit side as we were driving out on Thursday night. This morning, the islands on the entrance side were stocked with nursery pots awaiting transplant. I’m wondering if I should start being even more suspicious of the lawyers in the building, or if I should wait to see if the thermostat starts creeping up…..
I’m about halfway through The Illuminatus! Trilogy, and the most apt description is, if you’ll pardon the language, a mindfuck. Once the writing settles into a coherent structure (or perhaps once the reader is attuned to it), the mind starts noticing connections. Everywhere. It’s as if it was written specifically to induce apophenia.
The most insidious part of the book(s) is the frequent use of historical or other authors’ fictional sources. “Oh, there’s Emperor Norton.” “OK, we’re back to Buckminster Fuller again.” “Hey, that’s right, ‘Tekeli-li!’ does show up in both Lovecraft and Poe.” And this constant mixing of fact with fiction, familiar with strange, and things known to be true with things which seem implausible does make you wonder: how much of this did they make up on their own, and how much did they stitch together out of real events, prior works, and creative synthesis?
After all, if you had never heard of Joshua Norton, and one day heard the story of a man who declared himself Emperor of the United States, Continue reading
I’m beginning to think I should recommend convention-going as a good form of exercise. At this size convention, anyway. Not only do you get winded just traveling between panels (which comes standard at just about every con I’ve been to, since they all go overtime and the next one you want is always at the opposite end of the place), but there’s the opportunity for climbing multiple flights of stairs, the walk to and from your car is a great hike, and the food at the convention center is expensive enough to keep your caloric intake down. Also, the dealers’ room is sort of like an Olympic-sized crowd-weaving practice ground. Fun if you’re me, not so fun if you’re trying to follow me.
The other thing about cons that makes me want to exercise is seeing how the medians of the demographics play out. You have the younger contingent, who are mostly good-looking and relatively thin. You have the really old people, who are using hand-carved canes and usually there because they’re connected with actually producing something, and who are generally moving pretty well. Then you have two basic groups of middle-aged fans: the ones who are really skinny and nerdy-looking still, and the ones who put the “middle” in “middle-aged.” It’s wonderful motivation to lose weight when you see a forty-year-old Arwen on a Lark. (Please understand that I’m not trying for a cheap shot. I consider myself lucky that I’m able to lose weight when I want to, and I wish everybody were that fortunate. It’s just kind of heartbreaking in a weird empathetic way.)
So I’ve been on a real veggie kick the last couple of days, and I only just figured out what was up with that this afternoon at Subway. (Found out they’ll give you spinach on your sandwich if you ask nicely. Score!) And all things considered, it could be worse. I could be on a steak kick in the middle of India.
While reading metaquotes, I came across this list of horrible names: Baby’s Named a Bad, Bad Thing
We’ve gotten through about half the list… some of these are truly appalling!
(Naming your daughter Xev Chiana is probably not a good idea…)
As the topic has come up frequently in The Illuminatus! Trilogy (which I am reading right now), I thought I’d post a good quote I read recently about the human tendency to find patterns where none exist.
The only problem is I can’t find the quote. I don’t remember the exact phrasing, I don’t remember for certain who said it — I think it was either Neil Gaiman or Warren Ellis, but it could have been one of them quoting someone else — and I can’t even nail down enough words to get a decent search going.
Anyway, it finished up with something like “If you believe there is a vast alien conspiracy to take over the world through teddy bears, you’ll start seeing evidence of it.”
In my efforts to find the quote, though, I came across some interesting information. It turns out I’ve been misusing the word all along. I generally use it as a synonym for coincidence, or possibly to mean interesting coincidence. But synchronicity actually refers to a theory by Carl Jung that such coincidences actually have meaningful connections.
People do have a tendency to perceive order in chaos. It’s what makes us see horses in clouds, or people in mountainsides, or faces on Mars. It’s why faces on cartoon cars make more sense than faces on walls, and it’s almost certainly a factor in the popularity of numerology. I found the technical terms for this. Apophenia, or Type I error refers to seeing connections where there are none. Pareidolia refers to seeing something vague, but perceiving it as if it were something clear. I also found a very nice collection of pareidolic illusions [link gone].
Continue reading
