April 2007

To the gentleman who got on the crowded, dare I say packed, MAX train with his road bike, I want to thank you for showing me what life is like for sardines. I was unaware until then of just how miserable a person could be standing cheek to jowl with my fellow man on a moving and jostling train with no visible means of support. I must confess, this was not within my life experience, until you so helpfully decided to jigger your way in with your bike, forcing the rest of us to re-order ourselves as though we were re-enacting the process water molecules go through when freezing.

To the selfish prick at the next stop, who saw our ode to basic chemistry, but apparently must have flunked the class in High School, and who got on the train with his BMX bike held vertically, because everyone knows they take up less room that way, I want to thank you for showing me the level to which the average person can stoop to be a narcissistic fuck in the face of harsh reality. Despite the helpful suggestion that you wait for the next train, which at that time of day was mere moments away, you got on anyway, thereby allowing the rest of us to rehearse our interpretive dance piece, titled “Water Molecules Under Pressure”.

To the two guys in the shitty red car behind me pulling out of the Park and Ride lot, I do thank you for offering up a public listening of your efforts at a sound track for the interpretive dance piece, “Water Molecules Under Pressure”, but the committee and I have decided to go with a little less vibration in the bass and speakers that aren’t ripped to shreds because you don’t understand the basic concept of wattage and amperage.

Bill Whittle continues his fight to bring the light of reason to the masses.

Nifong is done.

Mike Nifong has joined a very exclusive club that previously only had one member. Now that he’s joined, he and OJ can come up with a secret handshake, maybe design a stupid hat or something.

From Accelerando, page 335, by Charles Stross:

Some activities superficially familiar to you are merely stupid and should be avoided for your safety, although they are not illegal as such. These include: giving your bank account details to the son of the Nigerian Minister of Finance; buying title to bridges, skyscrapers, spacecraft, planets, or other real assets; murder; selling your identity; and entering into financial contracts with entities running Economics 2.0 or higher.

Good advice never goes out of style.

I was on the MAX this morning when I read the above paragraph and laughed out loud. It’s a good thing the MAX is a moving Wall-Mart at the best of times. My non sequitur outburst was drowned out by the loud mumblings of the grubby homeless guy in the middle of the train who smelled vaguely of Colt 45 and stale cheese.

Actually, there was no homeless guy then. It’s a measure of the level of acceptance to strange behavior that no one looked up when I laughed. There HAS been grubby homeless people who smell vaguely of Colt 45 and stale cheese on the MAX in the past, as I’m sure there will be in the future. Their behavior has run the gamut from merely silent to overtly loud and obnoxious. For those of us who can be considered regular MAX commuters, one fairly clean and clean cut guy laughing out loud to a book he’s reading is Iowa normal.

The book itself is incredibly good. I highly recommend it to you if you like the sort of science fiction that takes nanotechnology and artificial intelligence and stretches it beyond recognizability. I’ve read plenty of books where people augment themselves through artificial implants and genetic manipulation, but this one turns it up to 11. If you’ve read any William Gibson, or Neil Stephenson’s Snow Crash or The Diamond Age, you know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, well, you have a lot of catching up to do, don’t you.

I won’t mince words here, even I found it to be a serious mind fuck at times. I actually started reading it last August and had to put it down because the ideas were just so OUT THERE. Yet, at the same time, the place where the ideas started from were based in the technology we all take for granted NOW that the dichotomy of normalcy / weirdness in the story made me feel like I was thinking in two directions at once. In fact, I KNOW I was thinking in two directions at once.

That quote from the book comes near the end and is part of a FAQ to individuals who have been re-simulated or resurrected into artificial habitats that float on Saturn’s upper atmosphere. There is no other place to go, the inner planets have been deconstructed to provide raw computing power to the Matrioshka brain that now exists where Earth used to be.

Yeah. I know. Gives you pause to think that people think of this stuff. Blame it on the Vinge Singularity.

A flash went off in my head when I read the title to this photo. A memory of my misspent youth was dislodged from the crusty detritus of my brain and floated to the surface.

Twenty or so years ago, in the first few years after high school, when I was experimenting with the freedoms of adulthood, my friends and I would congregate at Mike’s place and spend a leisurely Friday night (or any other night of the week for that matter) drinking as much beer as possible via a wonderful game called Mexicali.

Mexicali is, obviously, a drinking game, and the reason we liked playing it was two-fold: you actually had to pay attention, which became progressively difficult as the game progressed, and it didn’t require developing the skill of bouncing a quarter into a glass. All that Mexicali required was a dice tumbler and a pair of dice. A player would roll the dice, look at the result without letting any one else see, and then announce to the person on the right what he got. The person on the right could accept the stated result or call bullshit. If the person accepted the result, he had to roll and announce a result higher than the previous roll. If he called bullshit, the person who rolled had to show his result. If it was as he claimed, the challenger drank. If he was bullshitting to try and beat a higher roll, he drank.

Certain dice combinations meant something, a 2 and 1 was Mexicali, the person to the right had to roll another Mexicali, a special roll, or drink twice. A 3 and 1 was a reverse, and a 4 and 1 was a social drink.

So, it behooved a person to pay attention to what was happening two players to his left or right depending on the direction of travel. If the person two over called something high like double fives or double sixes, you knew the chances were pretty slim the guy next to you was not going to beat that, you had a good probability of calling bullshit and winning the challenge and thus resetting the rolls. But like I said, paying attention became progressively harder to do as the game progressed. Mexicali is a pretty fast-paced game and you end up drinking pretty often.

Now by drinking, I don’t mean downing a whole beer each time. Even young and stupid as we were back then, we weren’t THAT stupid. The point of all of this was a good time of social drinking, not to get so shit faced so fast a person was incoherent within minutes, which was possible with Mexicali. No, a drink was a good slug of beer. As a result a 12 ounce bottle of Henry Weinhart’s, which was considered good beer back in the day (remember, the microbrew revolution, which started a few years previously up here in Portland, had not made it down to southern California then), would last you three or four turns at the dice.

After a few hours of Mexicali, we would run out of beer and head into another room and play computer games. After a while, the room got really hazy and we would all be pretty lethargic (heh) and it was this lethargy that was dangerous. If you let yourself fall asleep, one of the others would take your shoes back out to the kitchen, get them wet and toss them in the freezer.

When it was time to leave and you were the only one looking for his shoes, you knew you were fucked. You would be wearing ice cubes home that morning, and I do mean morning. None of us would leave until we were halfway sober, which meant more often than not we were leaving when the sun was coming up the next day. So the thought of slipping on frozen top siders without socks, because you never wear top siders with socks, was a chilling prospect.
Ah, those were good times.