29 thoughts on “Not doing promo post tonight”

  2. Yep. Big sleep happen. Totally not waking at 2am and writing the skeleton story. Nopes. Not happening. No matter how much it whines and begs. Naptime is writer crack. I likes naps.

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  3. “Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.” 

    “Very deep,” said Arthur, “you should send that in to the Reader’s Digest. They’ve got a page for people like you.”

    Also:

    https://www.socratic-method.com/quote-meanings/douglas-adams-time-is-an-illusion-lunchtime-doubly-so

    Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.

    In his distinctive wit, Douglas Adams once famously proclaimed that “time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.” This quote has profound implications that extend beyond the boundaries of our everyday lives, urging us to question our understanding of time and its relationship to our existence. On a straightforward level, Adams suggests that time is not an objective reality but rather a subjective construct, highlighting the arbitrary nature of our human perception. However, to truly grasp the profoundness of this statement, let us delve into the realm of philosophy and explore the concept of time as a fundamental illusion.At its core, the concept of time is a human invention. We use it as a means to organize and structure our lives, to measure the passing of moments, and to plan for the future. However, what if time is merely a construct of our consciousness, an intricate illusion designed to bring order to a chaotic universe?

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    1. My advice, if anybody truly believes that time is merely an illusion — keep them OUT of the kitchen! They will find that it matters a great deal whether you bake a cake for 2 minutes, or 20 minutes, or 2 hours.

      Time is inextricably intertwined into every part of our technology, from the frequencies our latest cell phones use to transmit and receive data, to the precise timing that makes GPS work. If engineers don’t take into account the internal delays of logic elements, and the signal propagation time between components, our circuits don’t work at high speed.

      I can’t think of a single aspect of reality that wouldn’t be wildly different without predictable time.

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      1. Yeah. What is true is that our perception of time can be illusory. See Einstein’s famous quote about a minute on a hot stove vs. an hour spent with a pretty girl. Time is part of objective reality, which doesn’t care what you think. But our subjective perception of reality can fool us in various ways, and “time flies when you’re having fun” is just one of them.

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        1. There’s actual science on this – they built a display gizmo into a pair of goggles that flashed a number up for an interval that was too fast to see, confirming this with volunteers while relaxed standing on the ground.

          Then they hooked those volunteers up to one of those amusement park bungee jump thingees while wearing the goggles and, without warning, pushed them off the ledge. When the goggles flashed the number up for the exact same too-short-to-see amount of time while the voluteers brain was in full “FALLING!!!” mode, they reported seeing the number, saying they had plenty of time to read it.

          So the whole “time slowed down” thing is real.

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          1. Not everyone perceives time as being slowed down in those moments, though. Some people perceive time as being normal, but their reactions/reflexes being sped up so that they can react. I appear to be one of the latter.

            The closest I ever came to losing control of a car was when I was driving on the highway in Texas. The car in front of me suddenly swerved out of the lane, and I saw what he had swerved to avoid. In front of me, in my lane, was some sort of boxy object, like a crate or something, large enough that I did NOT want to run into it and find out whether it was solid or hollow.

            So I veered into the lane to my right, hard. (I did actually know that the lane was empty, thanks to my habit of checking my blind spot frequently). I could feel the car dip to the right as the force of the turn angled the car towards the right-hand set of tires — so I corrected by yanking the steering wheel the other way, straightening out into the new lane but also feeling the car dip to the left. So I yanked the steering wheel to the right, a little less hard — then as it dipped right, yanked the steering wheel left again, again a little less hard… After three or four oscillations, I got the car straightened out and no longer dipping to either side, and drove on.

            At no point did I feel like time was slowing down; rather, I felt like I was reacting very quickly to a series of stimuli that required instant decisions (my OODA loop was running so fast that at the time I thought it was more of an OA loop, though in retrospect I was orienting and deciding faster than the speed of conscious, deliberate, verbal thought). Also, at no point during the incident did I feel in the least bit scared. The fear hit me a couple hours later when I was safe at home and started thinking “I don’t know how close I was pushing my tires to their traction-loss point, but it was closer than I’ve ever come before.” That lack of fear at the time might not be universal — some people might be able to feel fear even while taking action to save their life — but I rather suspect, from certain things I’ve read, that many people might have the same experience, where you don’t feel the fear until a long time later.

            But the point is that when people’s reaction times are accelerated by the sense of danger, some people may perceive time to be slowing down. Others just perceive, “Whoa, things are happening very fast but I’m reacting to them equally fast.”

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      2. And then.. propagation delay (or why you don’t floor it when the light turns green and you’re the fourth car back). Looking at the monitors for each step in things at a TV station… a scene changes or the newscaster moves.. and each monitor shows the action in turn, not simultaneous.

        I’ve not been inside a TV station for years and years, but I wonder if nowadays they have a set of monitors for various resolutions… as once upon a time there would at be (or should have been) at least one B&W monitor to check how things looked on older/cheaper sets. I think it was NBC that messed that up in the 1984 (or 1988?) election and chose shades of BLUE and RED that looked identical on a B&W set. Oops.

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        1. Where I used to work, I designed and built a widget to measure video latency. An Arduino controlled a high-intensity green LED on the box, and there was a phototransistor mounted in a short plastic rod at the end of a few feet of wire. Point a camera at the LED and put the rod on the LED’s image on a monitor. The Arduino switched the LED on, started counting, stopped when the phototransistor ‘saw’ the LED image on the monitor light up, then switched the LED off for half a second and repeated the cycle. It converted the count to milliseconds and showed it on a small LCD text display, along with maximum, minimum, mean, and standard deviation over the last 32 cycles. I think it was 32. It’s been a few years. There was also an automatic threshold adjustment for the phototransistor and op amp, using one of the PCM outputs.

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        2. Propagation Delay, I call that the slinky effect. How a slinky stretches and goes back to all together…

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  6. Remember how the Dems keep clearing the field for their designated presidential canadidate each cycle?

    (with varying amounts of success; Harris appears to have been the initial designated candidate in 2020, but got torpedoed by Gabbard in the second debate)

    I’ve learned that the Canadian Liberal Party is doing the same thing. Now that Trudeau has announced his intent to resign, his party needs to pick a new PM (unless they somehow get forced to hold elections, and get demolished by Pierre P). I’m hearing that the designated guy is someone named Mark Carney, who is fairly open about the fact that he will abuse the Canadian federal emergency powers, and will attempt to essentially force communism onto Canada.

    But there are other possible Liberal Party members who might want to be PM, and who could pose a challenge to Carney. For example, there’s an Indian woman named Ruby Dhalla, who is a member of the Liberal Party, and has apparently expressed an interest in running for the PM job.

    About that…

    Late Friday, CBC reported that a committee of the Liberal Party had voted to disqualify Dhalla due to violations of various rules. Dhalla herself apparently found out about this disqualification live, on-air, at the start of an interview in which the interviewer read to her an e-mail that he had just received that mentioned the disqualification.

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    1. ‘Our Democracy!!’ in action, folks. Only The Proper Candidates anointed by The Party are allowed to run, lest The Wrong Candidate get Too Many Votes. We The People are not part of ‘Our Democracy!!’

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    2. The Dems fixed every competitive election since the last real fight in 2008 between Barry and The Dowager Empress – and look where it got them (the back alley knifing of Nationalist Socialist Bernie in 2016 does not count).

      Choose the Form of Your Destructor. Not sure I would take that as a pattern to follow, but, thankfully, I am not now nor have I ever been a politician.

      From recent Parliamentary shenanigans over in the UK after Boris got the heave-ho, it seems having your PM “fall out of a window” does not automatically require an election. If the ruling party does not get forced into a snap election, what is the drop dead date for the next general election in Canada?

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    3. The Dems fixed every competitive election since the last real fight in 2008 between Barry and The Dowager Empress – and look where it got them (the back alley knifing of Nationalist Socialist Bernie in 2016 does not count).

      Choose the Form of Your Destructor. Not sure I would take that as a pattern to follow, but, thankfully, I am not now nor have I ever been a politician.

      From recent Parliamentary shenanigans over in the UK after Boris got the heave-ho, it seems having your PM “fall out of a window” does not automatically require an election. If the ruling party does not get forced into a snap election, what is the drop dead date for the next general election in Canada?

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      1. The Liberals are currently stating that the election will be in Spring of this year. However, unless they think the election is safe for them (and it isn’t right now), there are some who believe that they’ll use means both fair and foul – including possibly an Emergency Powers declaration – to push the election back to sometime in 2026.

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      2. “How is it that ‘Your Democracy’ seems primarily concerned with preventing the voters from participating in the political process? Why are they not allowed to know what you do in their name? This to me makes not a bit of sense. You try to remove candidates you don’t like from the ballots out of fear that a majority of the people will vote for them. That looks like the opposite of democracy to me.”

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        1. “Comrade! Stop Do -not- open yoru ballot!”

          “But Comrade, i wish to see for whome we vote.”

          “Fool! This is a secret ballot!”

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        2. It is widely reported Brandon has a speech impediment, and the evidence is fairly dispositive that most Dems do as well, as every time they mean “Our Bureaucracy” it comes out “Our Democracy”, purely as a result of that speech impediment, of course.

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  7. Mrs Hoyt, have you ever considered placing more of the burden/work on the person requesting the book post?

    “Please deliver to me a cover pic of size X format y, a blurb of z+or-N words formatted in (preferred doc format – what you need to get it into WPDE). Documents that do not match these specifications may not get edited in time to be posted. Thanks in advance.”

    Now you (or your designated minion) just have to do a quick read and decide yes or no.

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    1. WordPress is basically psychotic. It kind of randomly stops working with this or that method.

      Oh, and I’ve had it “fix” formatting to have curly-quotes, then refuse to recognize formatting. When it doesn’t flat decide you don’t need formatting, you need to use the screwy block editor that we’ve now got in comments. (at least, I do right now? I know some folks had it go away for a bit, the lucky dogs?)

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