Here's a floating meme-ish game

[pseydtonne]

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

"The Word of 'Bob' brings INSTANT GOOD LUCK (both material and hallucinatory); it SLAPS the scales of social norms from our eyes; it lets us channel the glorious abnormalities of the Universe and transcend the dull, earthly blunderings we call 'life' on this Planet of the Clocks."
-The Book of the Subgenius, 1983.

This game comes from epanastatis, who has made all of his journal retroactively private and thus I shan't link to his journal directly.

I wanted to post a link to this line from a captivating expose: Meanwhile, the cost of collecting $1 of revenue—45 cents in 2002, the last year for which statistics are available—has not appreciably declined in two decades. I would make a comment, but that would rob the fact of its ability to explode in your mind like a koan.

Meanwhile, I'm coming to understand that I consume too much sugar during work. This affects my crankiness as I come down from it. I will need to moderate.

Modernization can come in strange ways. Sometimes, it just hurts a lot. Sometimes, it knocks you hard on the ass and then kicks the next guy in the groin while shooting five other people in the stomach. Sometimes, it's wicked cool. However, it's always coming. The modern world turns each artisan into an automaton, then back into an artisan in the process of cleanup.

My mom's dad fixed televisions and radios in his spare time; he had a cool back room for his tube tester and soldering irons. People don't fix receiver sets in garages anymore because all but one part is on a microchip. I fix computers in my spare time because the software can't quite figure out the hardware. One day, that'll be gone too. For now, it's a growing concern.

One day, America will go metric. However, it'll be a very slow burn. When we tried to slam ourselves into SI in the 1970s the way the remainder of the UK did, we drove a lot of people nuts. I still believe that people's continual fear of government programs, Democrats and secular humanism comes from the attempt to thrust metrics too fast. (Odd, too -- it was a Ford administration program; the Cartesians let it lapse.) The metrics came with inflation and the dollar coin that looked like a mean quarter. People snapped and went born-again a lot in 1979.

Okay, that's one of my more crackpot theories, now that I read it on a screen. I believed it for years.

In some ways, we've gone metric. Drug doses are in milligrams, booze and soda come in liters, and bullets tend to be more in millimeters. However, the doctor still measures you in pounds and inches. Car engine sizes are measured in liters, but the gas gets sold in gallons. We measure power in watts.

The meme craze has shown us we need monosyllabic words for metric stuff. I proposed "stoine" for degrees Celsius when I was in college. The Army uses "clicks" for kilometers. Our biggest obstacles are our aphorisms. "Give him an inch, he'll take a mile" really won't work as "give him a tick, he'll take a click". "Click" has only stops for sounds and thus suggests a short measure; "mile" ends in a glide and thus never really ends. The miles drag on.

Modernization will take a while. We'll need new gods for the job. Bob is the attempt to find that god of repose within the heavy activity, the smile in the electrocution. Then again, I'm not slack enough.

Savor the religious days around us. They haven't belonged to my personal faith in many years. We may never know our next step.


-slack on, Ps/d

Comments

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

...heard that one before.

"Give a man 2.54 centimeters and he'll take 1.6 kilometers."
"In for a milligram, in for a kilogram." (yes, I'm conflating homonyms)
"Barkeep, two deciliters of ale, quickly."
"I'm really cutting hectajoules to try to trim centimeters from my waistline."
"Do you know how fast you were going?" "What's that in picoparsecs per femtofortnight, officer?"

[michigansundog.livejournal.com]

I'm in the process of converting my brain to metric. I've full grasp on millimeters and centimeters, but still can't picture a meter accurately. Probably because jewelry tends to be measured in millimeters. But if I weren't forced into thinking in millimeters I'd never have bothered. On the other hand, gauge thicknesses make me totally mental. 18ga = 1 millimeter (well, even this is a wee bit flaky at 1.0236mm). That is as close to pretty as I can find. I have a sense of 22 ga, but no idea of what to name it relating to any scale archaic or modern. I can't describe the difference of 22ga and 20ga except, "a bit thinner". And then if you really want to push my buttons, start talking about drill bit sizes. I'm pretty sure at this point that a #60 is my good friend 18ga or 1 millimeter. But if you want a smaller bit, increase the number. So a #64 might be a 22ga, who the hell knows?

Here's a handy helper: http://www.onlineconversion.com/ Also features really funny conversions such as "Meeting Room Size: Find the approximate room size you'll need depending on your meeting room setup and the number of attendees".

What I would love is a micrometer, digital, that not only displayed in inches and millimeters, but also could display fractions. So if something measured 5/32, I would see "5/32" in addition to "0.15625" and "3.96875 millimeter".

Ok, sorry for the rant. It is 1:29 am and honestly, I don't really care that all this stuff is so arbitrary and irritating. In fact, the absurdity of it reminds me of the castle in the air that we regularly inhabit. g'night d!

[pseydtonne.livejournal.com]

Drill bits are like wire gauges -- they're the denominators of fractions. Thus, a larger number is higher. A lower number will have a thicker pipe.

Since my brian loves those sorts of relationships, I never fret. I say to myself "18 gauge is lamp cord" as an occasional mantra.