Category: Thoughts

So, according to Wikipedia, a spime is an object that can be tracked through its entire life cycle, through space and time, hence the portmanteau.

But I’m looking for a somewhat different word. A physical object which is, in fact, only the representation of a digital object. Say, if I have a document on Google Docs or Sharepoint or my hard drive, and print it out. I might scribble all over that sheet of paper, but the original is the digital version. And the changes I make to the paper version only become real if I make them in the digital version. The physical printout of the object is disposable; the digital original is the (more) permanent one.

I might make a piece of music on my laptop and then print it as an LP and take it to a house party and put it on a turntable. The LP is an instance of the original object.

For a dissection of the confusion this creates in a world that also demands a hardcopy for authenticity and archiving, see

Stumbled across this fascinating piece on physibles and 3D printing via Quiet Babylon, which just may be my new favorite thing.

When I was a child I used to complain, the way kids do, that things that hadn’t gone my way were just not fair.” And my father, of course, would often respond that life’s not fair.

But once he said something else that has stuck with me. He said life’s not fair, and it’s usually unfair in your favor. That is, not just “stop whining” but “count your blessings and stop whining.”

My family has lost some deeply beloved members recently – a great-uncle and a great-aunt – and it seems terribly unfair that they were taken from us. And so I think back about what my father told me.

It’s unfair to lose someone so great, that you love so much. But it’s also unfair that other families don’t get to have relatives that great, and don’t get to know the relatives they do have for as long as we got to know ours. It’s unfair that other families can’t travel to a funeral to comfort each other in times of loss.

To lose someone you love is not just a reminder that life is capricious, but often that it has also given you far more than it has taken away.

We have lost people, and it hurts. But the inverse of that hurt is knowing how rich our lives have been for knowing them.

I saw Django Unchained last week, and there’s one moment that’s stuck with me more than a lot of the more horrific ones. It’s the moment one of the slave drivers in Django says “I’m a good guy!” as he’s gunned down.

It reminds me of a question I’ve seen posed before, although I can’t remember where or by whom.

You see, people tend to think of themselves in very positive terms. We all like to think we’re good guys, basically. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that most white Americans in the 1800s believed themselves to be good people. They felt that way even if they owned slaves, of benefitted from the slave economy. Today we wonder how they could have stood by and let the whippings and sales and rapes and murders continue one more day. We struggle to justify Thomas Jefferson’s accomplishments as a president, educator, architect, and statesman because of the fact that although he recognized the wrongness of slavery he nonetheless owned slaves.

So, it makes me wonder: What do we do today that future generations will condemn us for?

Is it eating meat? Is it destroying the air? Mass incarceration?

What horrible things are we doing at this very moment that is so wrong we will seem like incomprehensible monsters to our grandchildren?

“I am gonna make it through this year if it kills me” gets me every time.

With Jay-Z & Kanye’s “Clique” on the radio I finally remembered to look up something that I’ve been wondering for a while: the difference between clique and claque.

Literally, a claque is a group of paid admirers. As used more commonly, it refers to sycophants. A clique is a faction that excludes others; it does not always refer to sycophants.

Today’s applied metaphor: A bird in the hand is worth 1/(1+i^(n-1)) in the bush.

(Where i is the annual rate of interest or cost of capital and n is the number of years in the future that you can capture one or more bush-birds.)

Also, in this story, birds represent dollars.

My folks sent me this GED promotion site, with no commentary, and I thought their email account had been broken into. But when I asked them, they said no, it’s something we actually thought you’d like.

Sure enough, it’s an excellent education marketing project. It’s funny and engaging, and the celebrity pep talks might actually inspire more than a few adults without high school diplomas to go back and get their GEDs.

Neat.