liberal liberate libertine liberace

That is why to attain something desired is to discover how vain it is; and why, though we live all our lives in expectation of better things, we often at the same time long regretfully for what is past. The present, on the other hand, is regarded as something quite temporary and serving only as the road to our goal. That is why most men discover when they look back on their life that they have the whole time been living ad interim, and are surprised to see that which they let go by so unregarded and unenjoyed was precisely their life, was precisely in expectation of which they lived.

Arthur Schopenhauer, Essay and Aphorisms, On the Vanity of Existence, 4

11. FREE WILL

Your decisions are not your own

Our gut instinct, our experience, is that we make the decisions to move, to think, to eat, to steal, to lie, to punch and kick. We have constructed the entire edifice of our civilisation on this idea. But science says this free will is a delusion. According to the world’s best neuroscientists, we are brain-machines. Our brains create the sense that somewhere within them is the “you” that makes decisions. But it is an illusion; there is no ghost in the machine. What does this mean for our sense of self? And for our morality - can we prosecute people for acts over which they had no conscious control? Times Archive: Necessity and free will, 1877

http://www.bspcn.com/2009/03/01/13-unsolved-scientific-puzzles/

1. the Stupid
2. the Chronically Insecure
3. Racist Democrats
4. Attention Seekers

Listed in decreasing order of importance

the stupids get broken down in paste-eaters, numbskulls, nitwits, fucktards, people whose heads get stuck in pickle jars, people who lose arguments with babies, douchenozzles, tiger petters, people who jump up and down on frozen lakes to test the strength of the ice, shaved gorillas, the voluntarily lobotomized, and finally, Cubs fans

Robert Leverick Edwards My mother's mother's father.

James Pryor My mother's mother's father's father's father's father.

Newtown Square Maps

It's another Memorial Day up in the Poconos.

The weather? It's a beautiful 70 degrees with bunchy white clouds wandering by. Spring is in full force up here. The oak trees have done their oak explosion sex thing, with a layer of green pollen and lots of little oak things all over everything.

I took out the power warsher and squirted down the upper porch, and then lower porch. For the 3rd year running, a bird has created a nest up in the rafters up the porch, which is fine, save for the constant stream of birdshit that rains down upon the glider-rocker. This year I'm going to find a piece of plywood and screw it up to the rafter to try to catch the rain.

The gypsy moths continue to haunt the place. Last year I had the entire place sprayed aerially with BT-k and then I went nuclear with the pocono tree service: they came in and sprayed sevin locally. When I got up here after they had done the work, the constant rain of frass had stopped.

All around there was devastation: the trees across the street were completely denuded. This year I see that dozens are without leaves, killed due to the stress put upon them from the moths, no doubt.

This morning I heard the constant whine of an airplane circling past. I guessing that they were spraying for gypsies.

The big question in my mind is whether I should spray this year. There was no sign of gypsy caterpillars until about 2 hours ago, when the sun started dropping. Now there are about a dozen webs hanging down from my house, each with a dangling caterpillar. There is no frass dropping yet, I don't think. I suppose I should go out and walk around.

A few caterpillars I can handle. Millions with a constant rain of frass I cannot. I was counting on the heavy hit last year to keep them at bay, and now I'm not sure. I don't want to have another carbaryl/sevin hit: it kills everything in sight, including the moths, ants, daddy longlegs, and pretty much everything else that creeps around. Not good.

(Gasoline is cheap compared with other essential fuels. A Starbucks venti latte costs the equivalent of $23 per gallon, while Budweiser beer runs $11 per gallon.)

An interesting article on Slashdot about the Expelled movie. The comment that intrigued me is the conflation between

'discounting an argument for god(s)' [being] the same as 'advancing an argument against god(s)'

As well,

creationists still don't understand that evidence against one theory does NOT automatically equate to support for an alternate theory

http://www.edge.org/q2008/q08_10.html#degrey

...Scientists are rather poor at the type of thinking that identifies efficient new ways to get things done, and that, likewise, technologists are mostly not terribly good at identifying efficient ways to find things out.