Golden Age

Those who compare the age in which their lot has fallen with a golden age which exists only in imagination, may talk of degeneracy and decay; but no man who is correctly informed as to the past, will be disposed to take a morose or desponding view of the present.

-- Thomas Macaulay (1800-1859), British poet, historian, and Whig politician, History of England (1849-1861), Volume 1, Chapter 1

Forever

The Internet is forever, and people don't realize that.

-- Nico Sell, a security expert, on Snapchat, which agreed to settle government charges that messages sent through its app do not disappear as easily as promised, NY Times, 9 May 2014

Happy Mothers Day

We weren't supposed to be here.  You made us believe.  You kept us off the street, put clothes on our backs, food on the table.  When you didn't eat, you made sure we ate.  You went to sleep hungry.  You sacrificed for us. You're the real MVP.

-- Kevin Durant's tribute to his mother in his NBA MVP acceptance speech, 6 May 2014

Cyberspace

Cyberspace.  A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts ....  A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system.  Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data.  Like city lights, receding ....

-- William Gibson (17 March 1948-), American-Canadian writer of the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction; Gibson coined the term cyberspace" in his 1981 short story "Burning Chrome", Neuromancer (1984)

If Trees Gave Off Wi-Fi Signals

[I]magine if trees gave off Wi-Fi signals.  We would be planting so many trees and we'd probably save the planet too.

Too bad they only produce the oxygen we breathe.

-- International Citizen Service volunteer Mudabbir Khalid, blogging about risks of deforestation, Progressio, 5 February 2014

Doesn't Go Away

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

-- Philip K. Dick (1928-1982), American science fiction writer, "How To Build A Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later" (1978)

Hourglass

All the best sands of my life are somehow getting into the wrong end of the hourglass.  If I could only reverse it!  Were it in my power to do so, would I?

-- Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1836-1907), American poet and novelist, Leaves From a Notebook, Ponkapog Papers (1903)

Who Are You And Who Am I?

Who are you and who am I
    To say we know the reason why
Some are born, some men die,
    Beneath one infinite sky?

There'll be war, there'll be peace,
    But everything one day will cease,
All the iron turned to rust,
    All the proud men turned to dust,

And so all things time will mend,
    So this song will end.

-- David Jon Gilmour (6 March 1946-), English musician, singer, songwriter, guitarist and co-lead vocalist of the rock band Pink Floyd, "Childhood's End", on Obscured by Clouds (1972)

Music Survives Everything

Music will always find its way to us, with or without business, politics, religion, or any other bullshit attached. Music survives everything, and like God, it is always present. It needs no help, and suffers no hindrance.

-- Eric Clapton (30 March 1945-), British musician of blues, rock, and jazz, Clapton: The Autobiography (2007)

Money Is Not Speech

While money is used to finance speech, money is not speech.  Speech is only one of the activities that are financed by campaign contributions and expenditures.  Those financial activities should not receive precisely the same constitutional protections as speech itself.

-- Retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens at a Senate hearing, 30 April 2014

Deeply Rooted

No deeply-rooted tendency was ever extirpated by adverse argument.  Not having originally been founded on argument, it cannot be destroyed by logic.

-- George Henry Lewes (1817-1878), English philosopher, biographer, novelist, and critic, The Foundations of a Creed (1874-5) Vol. 1, p. 7

Illinois (Half) Marathon

This past Saturday 26 April was the Illinois Marathon, and that day I ran my first official *half* marathon.

My time was 1:52:03 for 13.1 miles.  That works out to 8:33 per mile, or about 7.0 miles per hour.  I was expecting 1:57, and hoping for 1:55.

Placing:
Overall     : 927/5648  top 16%
Gender      : 663/2264  top 29%
Age Group   : 54/218    top 25%
Had it been 9 days later (my birthday is coming up), I would have been 26th in my (older) age group.

Interestingly, the results page continues to change, even today.  On Saturday night I was listed in the overall at 948/5670.  I have moved up 21 positions since then, while the total has dropped by 22 runners.  The other placings have also changed a bit, including dropping from 50th to 54th in my age group.  And my time improved by a second between Saturday morning and Saturday evening.

All The Running You Can Do

Now, here you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.  If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!

-- Lewis Carroll (1832-1898), Through the Looking-Glass, chapter 2. -- Logical Nonsense: The Works of Lewis Carroll, ed. Philip C. Blackburn and Lionel White, p. 177 (1934), first published in 1872

In Your Bathtub

You won't be able to mix nicotine in your bathtub and sell it anymore.

-- David B. Abrams, an official at an anti-smoking research group, on the FDA's proposal of sweeping new rules on both cigarettes and e-cigarettes, New York Times, 24 April 2014

Apex

The evidence establishes conclusively that Mr. Bruyneel was at the apex of a conspiracy to commit widespread doping on the USPS and Discovery Channel teams spanning many years and many riders.  Similarly, Dr. Celaya and Mr. Marti were part of, or at least allowed themselves to be used as instruments of, that conspiracy.

-- United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) statement in which former team manager Johan Bruyneel was banned for 10 years, while Celaya and Marti got eight-year bans, 22 April 2014

Here Is Your Country

Here is your country.  Cherish these natural wonders, cherish the natural resources, cherish the history and romance as a sacred heritage, for your children and your children's children.  Do not let selfish men or greedy interests skin your country of its beauty, its riches or its romance.

-- Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt, Jr. (1858-1919), 26th President of the United States

An Easter To Remember

We managed to get the whole family together for Easter this year.  Gathered in Carlyle, IL were myself and my ex-wife, all five kids, all six grandkids, and 2 of 4 sons-in-law, for fifteen at dinner.

A Thought

A thought has no size in the physical sense but is vast as compared to the physical acts and objects into which it is later precipitated.  The power of a thought is enormous and superior to all the successive physical acts, objects, and events that body forth its energy.  A thought often endures for a time much greater than the whole life of the man who thought it.

-- Harold W. Percival (1868-1953), Theosophist, writer, founder of The Word Foundation, Thinking and Destiny, Ch. 4: Operation of the Law of Thought, p. 75 (1946)

Bus Strike

People just have no criterion left to evaluate the importance of things.  I think the only thing that would really affect people would be the announcement that the world was going to be blown up by the hydrogen bomb. I think that would really affect people.  I think they would react to that. But outside of that, I don't think they would react to anything.  "Peking has been wiped out by an earthquake, and the RTD -- the bus strike is still on." And some guy says, "Damnit!  I'll have to walk to work!"

-- Philip Kindred Dick (1928-1982), American science fiction writer, quoted in Daniel DePerez, "An Interview with Philip K. Dick," Science Fiction Review, No. 19, Vol. 5, no. 3 (August 1976)

Palindrome Dates

Every date this week is a palindrome -- the same digits forward and backward:

• 4/10/14
• 4/11/14
• 4/13/14
• 4/14/14
• 4/15/14
• 4/16/14
• 4/17/14
• 4/18/14
• 4/19/14

I'm A Cat

I was not and am not a rat, because I wasn't with the rats.  I'm a cat.

-- The Reverend Al Sharpton, on aiding the FBI in a 1980s investigation of organized crime, New York Times, April 9, 2014

Hardly So Epic

The daily battle isn't doing good versus doing evil.  It's hardly so epic. The real battle is doing good versus doing nothing.

-- Deirdre Sullivan, This I Believe, 8 August 2005

Usually

Everything happens for a reason, and that reason is usually physics.

Rest In Peace

Windows XP (25 October 2001 - 8 April 2014), personal computer operating system produced by Microsoft as part of the Windows NT family of operating systems.  Windows XP is currently the second most-used OS with a market share of 28.98%, led by Windows 7.

Product support officially ended today.

In The Morning

Always get married in the morning.  That way if it doesn't work out, you haven't wasted the whole day.

-- Joseph Yule (Mickey) Rooney, Jr. (23 September 1920 - 6 April 2014), American film actor and entertainer, on his 8 marriages

Wiser?

Old men tend to forget what thought was like in their youth; they forget the quickness of the mental jump, the daring of the youthful intuition, the agility of the fresh insight.  They become accustomed to the more plodding varieties of reason, and because this is more than made up by the accumulation of experience, old men think themselves wiser than the young.

-- Isaac Asimov (1920-1992), Russian-born American author and professor of biochemistry, "Pebble in the Sky" (1950)

Common Cold

A family is a unit composed not only of children but of men, women, an occasional animal, and the common cold.

-- Ogden Nash (1902-1971), American poet

Dissent

[The majority's] conclusion rests upon its own, not a record-based, view of the facts.  Its legal analysis is faulty: It misconstrues the nature of the competing constitutional interests at stake.  It understates the importance of protecting the political integrity of our governmental institutions.  It creates a loophole that will allow a single individual to contribute millions of dollars to a political party or to a candidate's campaign. Taken together with Citizens United v. Federal Election Comm'n, today's decision eviscerates our Nation's campaign finance laws, leaving a remnant incapable of dealing with the grave problems of democratic legitimacy that those laws were intended to resolve.

-- Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer in his dissent on McCutcheon v FEC, who was joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan, 2 April 2014

April Fool

The first of April is the day we remember what we are the other 364 days of the year.

-- Mark Twain (1835-1910), American humorist, novelist, and lecturer, as quoted in Quick and Fun Activities for Every Day of the Year (2001) by Tim Tuck and Karen Froloff, p. 1.

Great Things

I see great things in baseball.

-- Walt Whitman (1819-1892), American poet, essayist, and journalist; attributed

7 Liberal Arts

The concept of the seven liberal arts goes back to ancient times.  By the Middle Ages, they had become codified: arithmetic, astronomy, geometry, grammar, logic, music, and rhetoric.

-- David Feldman (1950-), "Do Penguins Have Knees?" an Imponderables Book (2004)

Pain

Douleur toujours nouvelle pour celui qui souffre et qui se banalise pour l'entourage.

Pain is always new to the sufferer, but loses its originality for those around him.

-- Alphonse Daudet, La doulou: (la douleur), In the Land of Pain (2002) p. 19.

Common Vision

We don't have a common vision of the situation.

-- Russian Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov, on talks with Secretary of State John Kerry shortly before a referendum on Crimean independence, New York Times, 15 March 2014

Uncertainty

The industry does not like uncertainty.  We will find out what happened.

-- Former National Transportation Safety Board chairman Mark Rosenker, on the missing Malaysia Airlines jet, New York Times, 23 March 2014

That which can be destroyed by the truth, should be.

-- P. C. Hodgell (1951-), American fantasy writer, artist, and professor, Seeker's Mask (1994)

Immortal

To himself everyone is immortal; he may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead.

-- Samuel Butler (1835-1902), British satirist, The Notebooks of Samuel Butler, Death, p 357

WBC

Homosexuals now pervade and control American government at every level and branch.  Thus, only those churches that support and promote the militant homosexual agenda enjoy religious freedom.  Any church in America that dares to preach what the Bible says about soul-damning, nation-destroying moral filth of the vile homosexual beasts among us, loses all Constitutional guarantees of religious freedom and speech rights.

-- Fred Waldron Phelps Sr. (13 November 1929 - 19 March 2014), American pastor who headed the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, KS, prior to his 2013 excommunication, in a letter to Russian President Boris Yeltsin, 5 July 1997

The Decision To Act

The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity.  The fears are paper tigers.  You can do anything you decide to do.  You can act to change and control your life; and the procedure, the process is its own reward.

-- Amelia Earhart (1897-1937), American aviation pioneer and author

DDoS

"US hackers target Crimean referendum website," the Kremlin-run Voice of Russia reports Sunday.  The site, referendum2014.ru, uses Russia's Internet country code (.ru), rather than Ukraine's (.ua).

Voice of Russia goes on to quote organizers of today's vote, which asks people in Crimea to decide whether to join Russia:

"A new wave of a massive D-Dos attack hit our site at 1 o'clock pm last night.  Our IT safety experts managed to find out where those attacks came from.  It is University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.  The most powerful scanning of servers before the attack was carried out exactly from there.

The agency says of Urbana, "the technological and technical potentialities of this city exceed by thousands of times the needs of its residents."

-- NPR News, 16 March 2014

St. Paddy's Day

Lá Fhéile Pádraig Sona Daoibh!
Happy Saint Patrick's Day!

The Present Phenomenon

There is but one indefectibly certain truth, and that is the truth that pyrrhonistic scepticism itself leaves standing, -- the truth that the present phenomenon of consciousness exists.

-- William James (1842-1910), American psychologist and philosopher, The Will To Believe (1897)

Or What?

What I am is what I am.  Are you what you are -- or what?

-- Edie Brickell (10 March 1966-), American singer-songwriter, "What I Am", Shooting Rubberbands At The Stars (1988)

Forty!

On this date 40 years ago today, 12 March 1974, my first PLATO signon "donald appleman / cerl" was created for me by Bill Golden.

Oversight

But Mr. President, the recent actions that I have just laid out make this a defining moment for the oversight of our Intelligence Community.  How Congress responds and how this is resolved will show whether the Intelligence Committee can be effective in monitoring and investigating our nation's intelligence activities, or whether our work can be thwarted by those we oversee.

I believe it is critical that the committee and the Senate reaffirm our oversight role and our independence under the Constitution of the United States.

-- Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), asserting that the CIA may have violated the law by conducting searches of committee staff computers, 11 March 2014

Moscow's Eyes

I mean that.  I mean that Moscow -- look at it through Moscow's eyes. Since the Clinton administration in the 1990s, the U.S.-led West has been on a steady march toward post-Soviet Russia, began with the expansion of NATO in the 1990s under Clinton.  Bush then further expanded NATO all the way to Russia's borders.  Then came the funding of what are euphemistically called NGOs, but they are political action groups, funded by the West, operating inside Russia.  Then came the decision to build missile defense installations along Russia's borders, allegedly against Iran, a country which has neither nuclear weapons nor any missiles to deliver them with. Then comes American military outpost in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, which led to the war of 2008, and now the West is at the gates of Ukraine.  So, that's the picture as Moscow sees it.  And it's rational. It's reasonable.  It's hard to deny.

-- Stephen Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at New York University and Princeton University, in an interview on Democracy Now, 20 February 2014

Editorial Independence

Just because I work here, for RT, doesn't mean I don't have editorial independence and I can't stress enough how strongly I am against any military intervention in sovereign nations' affairs. ...  What Russia did is wrong. ...  I will not sit here and apologise for or defend military action.

-- Russia Today TV Host Abby Martin, 4 March 2014



Contrary to the popular opinion, RT doesn't beat its journalists into submission, and they are free to express their own opinions, not just in private but on the air.

We respect her views, and the views of all our journalists, presenters and program hosts, and there will be absolutely no reprimands made against Ms. Martin.

-- Statement by Russia Today, in response to the above, 6 March 2014

Budapest Memorandum

The United States of America, the Russian Federation, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, reaffirm their obligation to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine, and that none of their weapons will ever be used against Ukraine except in self-defense or otherwise in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.

-- Article 2 of the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, a treaty signed on 5 December 1994

Godwin's Law

Now if this sounds familiar, it's what Hitler did back in the 30s.  All the Germans that were ... the ethnic Germans, the Germans by ancestry who were in places like Czechoslovakia and Romania and other places, Hitler kept saying they're not being treated right.  "I must go and protect my people" and it's what's gotten everybody so nervous.

[Putin is a person] who believes his mission is to restore Russian greatness... When he looks at Ukraine, he sees a place that he believes is by its very nature part of Mother Russia.

-- Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, at an event in Long Beach, California, 4 March 2014

Individual Notes

The culture as a whole is losing its individual notes, its diversity.  And this is ... it's not only sad.  It's devastating.  It's devastating because routine language means routine thought.  And it means unquestioning thought.

-- John Leonard (1939-2008), American literary, TV, film, and cultural critic, interview with Bill Moyers, "Now", PBS, 28 November 2003

Choices

And when it was my turn, I explained to them when I was their age, I was a lot like them.  I didn't have a dad in the house.  And I was angry about it, even though I didn't necessarily realize at the time.  I made bad choices.  I got high without always thinking about the harm that it could do.  I didn't always take school as seriously as I should have.  I made excuses.  Sometimes I sold myself short.

-- President Barack Obama at a White House event to announce the "My Brother's Keeper" initiative, 27 February 2014