Sixteen Volts

Not only does the excellent webcomic Perry Bible Fellowship now have a whole domain of its own, somebody has put up a site that contains all the strips of my old second-favourite (after Space Moose) webcomic "Parking Lot is Full". Yay! If you are unfamiliar with this comic, skip the idiotic "Rocko & Socko" strips of the last two years and jump directly back to the year 1995 or around there for quality material.

In my SiteMeter referrer page, I have occasionally noticed the user "fhtagn" at del.icio.us occasionally link to my posts. Since the other stuff he or she (I'm just being politically correct here, since obviously it's a "he") links to is so good, I take this as a compliment. One interesting new link leads to the page "The mentality of Homo interneticus" that examines how people behave inside the fluidity of the web. Many ideas of Tommi would seem to be related to this. Another interesting link is "50'000€ Prize for Compressing Human Knowledge". It is possible to compress text written in natural language quite a lot since natural languages have so much redundancy, but to compress it even more, we need some kind of AI/semantic breakthrough that this prize calls for.

I gave up watching CSI once I realized that it is the same episode over and over again. I never really started to watch the spinoffs and I think that I have only watched one episode of CSI:Miami, although I have watched several starts waiting for something else to being. Based on the clip "Caruso from CSI Miami" I don't know if I have lost very much. At least we have had fun for the past few days trying to imitate the acting mannerisms of David Caruso. Which are arguably not very hard to imitate. There just has to be a Mad TV or SNL skit about this character somewhere out there already!

(By the way, I have noticed that the detectives in both the CSI and Law & Order franchises seem to have a very... unprofessional tendency to totally give up an arrest that they arrive to do and apologize and leave as soon as the suspect hastily gives them some plausible-sounding explanation for something, and sounds eager and honest while doing so. A suave-enough sociopath could use this huge weakness to walk and disappear before the detectives realized their mistake some other way and came back to arrest him.)

Some old headline at The Onion said that a study had revealed that owning a boat is really just a big hassle. Of course, the real motive for some wealthy middle-aged man to own a fancy boat is usually not in the nautical adventures and feeling of the sea breeze in his face, but something else entirely, as explained in the New York Times feature "Water, Water, Everywhere, and Plenty to Drink". Ever since the Pleistocene, reliable signaling mechanisms are important for women to recognize alpha males who have means and resources that could be used to support their expensive offspring. Link provided by Steve Sailer, whose new essay "The One Word Grand Strategy for Westerners and Muslims: "Disconnect"" makes common sense as usual.

I remember in high school hearing the Pet Shop Boys lyric "If I was you, I wouldn't treat me the way you do" and chuckling at its ambiguity. Later, I learned that this same idea leads to certain difficulties with virtue ethics. The post "Actuality and Counterfactuality" at "Philosophy, Et Cetera" examines a similar type of ambiguous sentence.

I learned recently the chestnut that libertarianism is essentially applied autism, but before that, I occasionally entertained the idea that libertarianism could simply be defined as the denial that negative externalities could even exist. Nowhere is this more evident than in the libertarian enthusiasm to import millions of uneducated third worlders because they work cheap and some of them make exciting music to be bought at Starbucks. The article "How Unskilled Immigrants Hurt Our Economy" examines the negative externalities surrounding this topic.

Somebody linked to the blog "Kung Fu Monkey" which I guess I once saw years ago. Perhaps I will also do so now. Tjic has recently been linking to "The Secret Diary of Steven Jobs", also worth looking at.

For some reason, when I saw the article "Jenna Jameson gets waxed", I could immediately guess which location of Tussaud's this happened in. Another kind of artificial women are showcased at the Arabezier site. I am getting so jaded when the news that it is now possible to create photorealistic synthetic humans barely even registers. I have no words to describe how important this is. For starters, how long will it take until humans don't get much work as photographic models, either in stock photography, catalogues or porn? It's not like the cliches would be that hard to replicate. When I showed the site "Top Ten Stock Photography Cliches" to my wife, she laighed and said that yep, she can immediately remember recently seeing nine of them in the promotional material of the company she works for.

Speaking of women who are sexually desirable to men, libertarian blogger Jacqueline Passey explains in "Dating tip: Quality dates quality" why she is a high-quality woman and would thus consider dating only the very top quality men. I am not sure if I am mistaken here, but I thought that it was just recently when Jacqueline wrote a defense of morality of poker and mentioned her boyfriend who is a professional poker player. Note also that her picture on the blog front page suspiciously looks horizontally squeezed to me to make her look more slender. Now, I'm not saying that the list of good things about her she provided couldn't be genuine --- after all, some women have to be on the top of the heap in various criteria and especially those what men consider attractive, so why not her? It's just that for some reason, the following rationale sounds so... well, you pick a word:

The above list explains why I typically receive 50-100 (sometimes more) responses whenever I post personal ads. This is in addition to getting hit on almost every time I go out alone (and all that those men know about me is that they like the way I look, they don’t even know about all the other qualities I have that make me more appealing than most other women).

The thing is, under the real-world conditions of the severe disparity in sexual desire between sexes, that paragraph is something that almost all normal-weight college-educated young single women could have written, so if Jacqueline thinks that that makes her somehow special, she is due for a massive disappointment within a few years the way Vox Day predicts in "A train wreck in progress". The average twentysomething woman is about as attractive and desirable to men on aggregate as the top 1% of men are to women on aggregate (so that these men could count on women approaching them when they go out), so it is easy for a young woman to get an inflated idea of her chances to monopolize a top-quality male for a long-term relationship. One-night stands are a whole another game entirely, as the difficulty here is getting commitment and resources from a top male. But we'll see what happens. Jacqueline would indeed seem like a quality woman for some nerd who makes $150K a year and has grown out of his worst nerdiness.

News "15 States Expand Right to Shoot in Self-Defense" coming from America has sparked lots of discussion and debate out there in the webosphere, with the leftists opposing this. Which I find slightly puzzling when we remember their "kill the rapists" stance. Perhaps the American leftists know all too well which intended victims will be mostly using this new freedom to shoot their attackers and who their main targets will be. Since the leftists viciously hate the first group and strongly identify with the second group, they consider the increased shooting at criminal scumbags to be a bad thing. I am certainly looking forward to the first news article about some woman legally shooting a man who she later says "harassed" and "threatened" him. The mental contortions that leftists and feminists will find themselves in will probably be so very amusing.

Speaking of leftists and feminists and their attitudes towards violence and brutality, lots of people have recently been linking to the article "Wimmin at War" in which one veteran of "peace movement" (in reality, "useful idiots") wonders why so many of its members today are sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g with the fundamentalist muslims. But it's not like the leftists have generally learned anything during the past few decades, as vividly illustrated by the article "The last days of the patriarch" in Toronto Star. The more despotic and tyrannical a third-world dictator is, the more eager the Western leftists have always been to suck him off. Feeling powerless themselves, they desperately cling to the hope of some brutal strongman arriving to destroy the society that pays zero attention to them, let alone obeys them or forces its members to live their lives as the leftists would want them to do.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Monday, August 14, 2006 at 6:05 PM