Speaker for the Diodes

"You couldn't have fed the '50s into a computer and come out with the '60s." -- Paul Kantner (b. 1941-03-17, d. 2016-01-28)

"After I got home, first words my wife said to me were, 'What's wrong, honey?' I said, 'Oh, nothing, honey. It was a great day. They're gonna launch tomorrow and kill the astronauts, but outside of that, it was a great day.'" -- former Morton Thiokol engineer and whistleblower Roger Boisjoly, interviewed in "Seconds from Disaster: Space Shuttle Explosion" (thanks to realinterrobang for sendiing me this)

"There will be risks, as there are in any experimental programme, and sooner or later, we're going to run head-on into the law of averages and lose somebody.

"I hope this never happens, and... perhaps it never will, but if it does, I hope the American people won't think it's too high a price to pay for our space programme."

-- Gus Grissom (b. 1926-04-03, d. 1967-01-27), "a few weeks" before his death in the Apollo I fire according to a BBC story (I used a very similar -- shorter -- quote from him in 2003, from a press conference probably around the same time as this quote)

"The measuring and mixing always smoothed out her thinking processes - nothing was as calming as creaming butter - and when the kitchen was warm from the oven overheating and the smell of baking chocolate, she took final stock of where she'd been and where she was going. Everything was fine." -- Jennifer Crusie

I'm getting sick of some modern web trends and techniques. And now my usual ways of coping are being subverted.

First, because some sites are just way out of control with the amount of Javascript the include -- loading a single New York Times story in a Javascript-enabled browser will bring my computer to its knees[1] -- I routinely run two browsers: Safari with Java and Javacript turned off for reading almost everything, and Stainless with scripting turned on for hitting the few sites I'm willing to visit that need JS to function, like Facebook and Twitter, and I try to keep the number of open tabs in Stainless to a minimum.

Why Stainless for Javascript and Safari without, instead of the other way around? Because Stainless, inspired by Chrome, makes each tab run as a separate process, o when one web page gets greedy and eats my CPU, I can go to Activity Monitor and just kill off that process without (usually[2]) losing everything else I had open. Also, when I control-click on a link, in addition to the usual "open", "open in new tab", and "open in new window" options, there is an "open in default browser" option. So I can open interesting-looking links in no-scripts-Safari in one step.

And there are some sites I usualy don't bother to go to, because they don'e even load without Javascript, and then they hang my machine so badly I can't get a Terminal window to respond so I can type in the 'kill' command.[3]

Which brings me to Buzzfeed. I opened http://www.buzzfeed.com/meredithtalusan/my-year-without-makeup in Safari (no JS!), and it loaded and I could read it (though with big blank spaces where I presume ads or illustrations were supposed to be), but I noticed that Activity Monitor was showing 100% CPU utilization and a big chunk of that is Safari. Safari, which at this moment has only a single window open, with a single tab, that is displaying that single Buzzfeed article, which the progress indication indicate has long since finished loading, with Java, Javascript, and plugins all disabled, so it should just be a Static Thing being Merely Displayed, already loaded and rendered and Not Executing Anything. Right? So why is it gobbling up my CPU? How is it gobbling up my CPU? And why does a site designer think they need to be Doing So Much Of Whatever It's Doing, just to deliver a little bit of text (and some ads)?

WTF, Buzzfeed?

And then there's scrolling on sites that have static portions of the page, but I want to post a poll about that one first. Meatime, gotta sleeo. Sleeep, yesssss... Probably ranty, crotchety sleep...

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2016-01-22:

"Every man identifies with Hamlet, it has been said, since every man imagines himself a disinherited monarch; every woman identifies with Alice, since every woman sees herself as the sole sane person in a world filled with lunatics who imagine themselves disinherited monarchs." -- Adam Gopnik

[ http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/who-can-be-finished-with-alice]

(submitted to the mailing list by Jean Rogers)

"Unless you're a plow driver or a parka-clad elected official trying to look essential, one doesn't pretend to do battle against a blizzard. You submit. Surrender. Hunker down. A snowstorm rewards indolence and punishes the go-getters, which is only one of the many reasons it's the best natural disaster there is.

[...]

"And, gloriously if briefly, it hides everything else -- the plastic grocery bags and mini-marts and dog poop and salt-grimed Toyotas and sundry disorder of modernity. Watching the quotidian American crudscape transform into a fairy-tale kingdom is a legitimate wonder. Name another disaster that leaves the afflicted region more attractive in its wake."

-- David Dudley, 2016-01-22

[Go read the whole thing -- it's short, and it's beautiful. Or you can wait for me to quote more pieces of it, I guess, but it flows better the way he wrote it.]

"Silence is the language of God,
 all else is poor translation."
-- Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi (b. 1207, d. 1273-12-17)

Red sky at night, sailor's delight.
Red sky at morning ... Welcome to Baltimore, hon!

I've noticed that mornings have started off pink or red every single morning I've been awake past sunrise -- a gradually widening band across the city skyline (downtown is east of me), so this morning starting red is not unusual. But I do note that it started out an unusually deep and vibrant red today, shifting to orangeish-pink as it expanded upward, shading to purple as it meets dark clouds.

Probably not actually related to the coming storm, but quite striking.

Whoah! It just suddenly all changed from redpinkorange to lavender! (And les bright.) Never seen it do that before!

"I used to love the trapping of a court in sesion. These days I see the robes and the rest for what they are ... theater. If 'security theater' makes people believe they're safe, then 'legal theater' makes them believe there is justice. We're better off if people can see actual justice, and then believe." -- Massey Reynstein, in Schlock Mercenary by Howard Tayler, 2015-12-07

"You can be in London at 10 o'clock and in New York at 10 o'clock. I have never found another way of being in two places at once." -- Sir David Frost (b. 1939-04-07, d. 2013-08-31), regarding the Concorde.

(The first commercial passenger flight of a Concorde was forty years ago today.)

"We live in an amazing world when an officer'€™s inaccurate knowledge of the law is excusable, even laudable, so long as it leads to the arrest of a citizen. But an officer'€™s accurate knowledge of the law can lead to his termination, so long as that knowledge conflicts with the directives of a superior officer.

[...]

"If we expect police departments to improve, we can'€™t simply focus on getting rid of the Timothy Loehmanns of the world. We have to find a way to make sure that officers like Jay Park get to keep doing good work."

-- Andrew Fleischman 2016-01-05

"If the abuse of referenda were as prevalent back in the day as it is now, Jim Crow segregation would still be around and women wouldn't be voting." -- Monica Roberts, 2009-11-18

"Its that time of year when we recall Martin Luther King Jr. and in the same breath we domesticate him and forget how radical and revolutionary he was. He recognized that love was a weapon and he wielded it. We only remember some gauzy love. He advocated nonviolence as a strategic and creative tactic to bring down an entrenched systemic murderous racism which was murdering people on a daily basis. We remember this nonviolence as passivity. [...]" -- Rabbi Aryeh Cohen, 2016-01-17 [thanks to Rabbi Alana Suskin for sharing this where I could see it]

(Happy birthday to merde!)

La neige tombe mais ne reste pas.
Quand elle sort, le soleil vient,
Trop tard pour baiser son ami,
La belle neige, la reine de Janvier.

I'm not used to committing poetry in a second language. Still trying to figure out whether "arrive" flows better than "vient" ... and whether I want to change the tense of "when she leaves" to passé composé (i.e. perfect, "when she has gone"). But fretting about craft aside, here's my impression of this afternoon in Baltimore.

Something about snow tickles the part of my brain where the little French I can manage is stored. So the idea for this popped into my head as soon as it got really bright out, but it took me a while to get it right because rephrasing-for-meter doesn't happen as quickly in a language I'm so rusty in.

"When I was forty, I had what felt like a revelation dream. At the time (28 years ago), I was learning the inner workings of computing. I dreamed that my job as Sheila was to upload my life experience to the great database in the sky. So I could have a good time being Sheila or a bad time being Sheila but either way I was still fulfilling my purpose of letting the universe experience being Sheila. I woke up saying, 'I want to have a GOOD time being Sheila Oranch!' Ever since then, I don't worry about life purpose or accomplishments except to do the best I can day-by-day and to be happy and help others thrive and flourish. I AM having a good time being Sheila." -- Sheila Oranch, 201-01-15

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2014-01-19:

"Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work." -- Gustave Flaubert

(submitted to the mailing list by Terry Labach)

"The next day, the next day the Sealtest people were talking nice, they were very humble. And I am proud to say that I went to Cleveland just last Tuesday, and I sat down with the Sealtest people and some seventy ministers from Cleveland, and we signed the agreement. This effort resulted in a number of jobs, which will bring almost five hundred thousand dollars of new income to the Negro community a year. We also said to Sealtest, 'The problem that we face is that the ghetto is a domestic colony that's constantly drained without being replenished. And you are always telling us to lift ourselves by our own bootstraps, and yet we are being robbed every day. Put something back in the ghetto.' So along with our demand for jobs, we said, 'We also demand that you put money in the Negro savings and loan association and that you take ads, advertise, in the Cleveland Call & Post, the Negro newspaper.' So along with the new jobs, Sealtest has now deposited thousands of dollars in the Negro bank of Cleveland and has already started taking ads in the Negro newspaper in that city. This is the power of Operation Breadbasket." -- Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (b. 1929-01-15, d. 1968-04-04), "Where Do We Go From Here?", 1967-08-16(?) [bold emphasis added to mark the bit I really wanted to quote but felt needed context around it]

(And somehow, patterns like the one he was trying to change keep getting set up again and again in various places, the same way or in slightly different ways ...)

"Love all, trust a few, Do wrong to none..." -- the countess of Rousillon, in All's Well That Ends Well (ca. 1604) by William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

[Happy birthday to maugorn, leiacat, and Charles Ganz! And I'm hoping to have enough spoons left from my week so far, to go catch The Rude Mechanicals production of All's Well That Ends Well tonight in Ellicot City.]

Oh, and also, happy new Julian year!
Today is:
Gregorian: 2016 January 14
Julian: 2016 January 01
Hebrew: 5776 Shevat 04
Islamic: 1437 Rabi'ath-Thani 03
Persian: 1394 Dey 24
Mayan: 0.0.0.13.0.3.1.19
Indian: 1937 Pausa 24

"Federal regulators' enforcement of what remain of America's campaign finance laws has all but collapsed. It's a story that has received some attention, but the whole picture remains largely obscured in the mainstream media.

"Since 2009, the agencies tasked with enforcing campaign finance laws — notably those governing what super PACs and 'social welfare' organizations can and cannot do to advance their political agendas — have, to varying degrees, been severely constrained from doing their jobs. Campaign finance watchdogs say they're frustrated by their inability to get the FEC and the IRS to act on even airtight cases alleging campaign finance violations.

"It's a notable departure from the 'broken windows' theory that dominates the policing of people who don't have the kind of political clout our donor class enjoys."

-- Joshua Holland, contributing writer at The Nation, in "The Most Undercovered Stories of 2015 (Part One)" (Moyers & Company), 2015-12-23