Insert Nanotech Here

"Well, even a cracked pot is right twice a day -- or something like that."
-- Scott Bieser, in LeftLibertarian2.

I can't help but admire someone who can speak the Alice-in-Wonderland language equally well as I do.

Or badly, as the case may be.

Please don't laugh too hard. I haven't done this kind of drawing since high school -- and I still had the full use of my fingers. This is my first mouse drawing project.

When I was just waking up today, I composed this poem in my head. Unfortunately, due to my fingers and other joint problems, I can't just jot things down when I think of them. So, now that my fingers have loosened up enough to type a little, I've been trying to recall the exact words:

Bubbling foam of fractal-froth
In the tide-pool's primal broth;

Stews and stirs, ice and rime --
Ginnungagap and Muspellheim.

I haven't written much rhyming verse in the last few years. I hope more of it comes.

There are people to whom I owe replies, and others to whom I would like to offer comments; unfortunately, that shall have to wait until my Inclement Finger Time is over. I apologize to those whom I've been neglecting, especially rubashov and gatcko. IM is out of the picture now, too. It might take a week or two for me to be back in business here, so please be patient.

Phoenix made this flash icon showing Teen Adolf morphing into my 10th. grade ID card photo:



Portrait of the artist as a young man.. er, woman.... Freaky, huh?

Another odd thing is that the transition in the middle looks a lot like my best friend from college.

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars — mere gobs of gas atoms. Nothing is “mere.” I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination — stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern — of which I am a part — perhaps my stuff was belched from some forgotten star, as one is belching there. Or see them with the greater eye of Palomar, rushing all apart from some common starting point when they were perhaps all together. What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the *why?* It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined! Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?
– Richard P. Feynman (1918-1988)

For those with the imagination to see them, there will always be giants in the world -- whether they be stone giants or gas giants.

What can the meteor say to the dinosaurs?

Only this: you will become stone.
Enduring bedrock, sheer mountain's rampart,
Foundation of plains and mesas,
High pediment and apex of piled aeons.

While I, heaven-soaring rock,
A mere hole, a hollow sink,
Only a declivity in the future's sands.

-- Ethel Leona

Okay, I've been tagged by two different people already, so I'd better do this before I forget.

1. List seven habits/quirks/facts about yourself.
2. Tag seven people to do the same.
3. Do not tag the person who tagged you or say that you tag "whoever wants to do it."

1. I often rock back and forth while talking on the phone, standing in line, etc. I know I've been doing this for years because I can distinctly remember swinging back and forth while holding on to a shopping cart a few years back. Do people stare at me when I do this in public? Not as far as I can tell. Generally, they don't even notice. They probably have more important things to look at than me acting like Adi weird.

2. I also do it while sitting down. Does that count as a separate item?

3. I love rubbing noses with cats, or rubbing our faces together. Both my cats like to do it, too. Nothin' says lovin' like a cat nose rubbin'.

4. When I draw, I mainly look at the thing I'm drawing rather than the surface I'm drawing on. I trace the shape I'm looking at with my eye movements, and my hand automatically follows. I can do this with a mouse, too (in fact, since I developed severe finger trouble, I can only use a mouse.)

5. I have to wrap my fingers in cloth in order to type. In fact, my index fingers get sore just from waving them around, so sometimes I have to wrap up my fingers even if I'm doing nothing but gesturing. (I wouldn't exactly call this a "quirk", exactly -- more like a "fact", I guess.)

6. When I was a kid, I built a dinosaur habitat in the basement. I took a large metal tray, filled it with water, then built a land mass out of spongy yellow packing material. Then I put my toy dinosaurs in it, the land dinosaurs on the land and the aquatic ones in the water. Unfortunately, the water gradually soaked into the land, turning it into a swamp. I had to take out the sponges periodically, squeeze them and put them back in. That was my first lesson in ecosystem dynamics and the art of terraforming. (Of course I'd come up with a grand lesson to be learned from it, wouldn't I?)

7. I sleep on an old camp cot that used to belong to my mother. Why? Because I currently have no other object in the house that I can sleep on, especially with my lousy joints. At first I was afraid that I would fall off of it because it's so small and narrow, but I adjusted to it within one night. The only real inconvenience is that my cats keep climbing on even though there's really no room for them.

And now, I have to tag seven other people (that's the "Pyramid Scheme" part). Lemme check my Mutual Friends list...

Okay, here are the next seven lucky winners:

dictator88
erynn999
immortalrite
mumbalo_jack
sovi_polina
righnasidhe
eviltenet

I chose people whom I know are frequently active. If you find memes like this excessively annoying, feel free to ignore. Otherwise, please do satisfy my curiosity.

The Zeitgeist likes me BUNCHES today.

My previous post, on September 10: On Coexistence.

Article, World Science, September 13: Good Fences Make Good Neighbors.

I would post the article itself, but the format doesn't copy very prettily. It contains, at any rate, pretty much the same theory I came up with a while ago: namely, that different cultural groups can coexist well in areas that provide either strong boundaries between their individual subregions, or a shared set of ground rules. The Lex Romana of the Roman empire is a classic example of the latter. The US "melting-pot", during the times and occasions when it was actually successful, also used this principle: the "base attractor" of "mainstream" American culture was able to assimilate new immigrants (albeit, in many cases, with a certain period of "hazing the newbies" which strikes me as rather similar to a fraternity initiation ritual.)

The current "multiculturalism", on the other hand, is a muddled mess because it rejects both segregation and assimilation, trying to achieve some in-between compromise which, in the end, pleases no one. It reminds me of that old story about the two guys with the donkey who tried to please everyone, and ended up only making fools of themselves.

This, by the way, is one reason why I do not identify as "White Nationalist". Although I do believe in Freedom of Association, and sympathize with those who want to preserve their culture, I also cannot ignore the empirical evidence that successful mixed social units do exist, at all levels of scale. There are mixed marriages that are stable and happy. There are mixed families whose children grow up healthy, strong, and intellectually competent. There are communities where people of different ethnic groups live together in harmony. There are cosmopolitan agorae where people from all over the world come together to peacefully exchange goods and ideas. And, insofar as these associations are actually successful, they have as much right to exist as anything else.

One the other hand, many people are also positively assortative; they prefer the company of their own kind. And that, of course, is perfectly fine too. Chacun a son gout.

Both sides, multiculturalists and separatists, have become morally polarized, each claiming that their vision of an ideal society is absolutely right; when, ironically, both sides are actually advocating for diversity: diversity of different kinds and on different levels. A preference for mixture is still a preference; a mixture is a particular kind of thing. Human beings cannot live without any preferences at all; such a state of being may be possible in Nirvana, but not on Earth.