the world consists of 10 types of people

Those who understand binary and those who don't. And other pre-windows jokes. One I liked was the BASIC approach to explaining the difference between two abitary divisions of humanity.

Type 1 runs like this:

1 BEGIN PROGRAM

2 IDENTIFY PROBLEM

3 IDENTIFY CAUSE OF PROBLEM

4 RESOLVE PROBLEM

5 GOTO 1

Type 2 runs like this:

1 BEGIN PROGRAM

2 IDENTIFY PROBLEM

3 ASSIGN BLAME

4 BITCH ABOUT PROBLEM

5 GOTO 1

You can asign your own values to types 1 and 2 remembering when you do how much your choice says about your own prejudices.

Malfunctions, terminal and other...

As one gets older there is a tendency to become more aware of the potential for one's system to malfunction. Naturally the media has picked up this and one is confronted with an seemingly endless list on helpful articles containing advice on how to cope with this. The problem with these is that so many of them seem to concentrate on what might best be described as Terminal Malfunctions, like strokes, heart attacks and great-grandchildren. I cannot say that these, with the exception of the last one, are my primary concerns as they are by definition terminal and as such fall into that most welcome category of problem classifications - they are an SEP - "Someone Else's Problem". Now an almost-terminal malfunction that you survive and recover from is another matter completely.

However what I am getting at here is the minor malfunctions that one lives with day after day. Presbyopia, short-term memory loss, fleeting loss of balance and other co-ordination related events. There are preventable problems like learning not to drink anything after 8pm unless you really want to wake up early the next morning. But, at the end of the day - or approaching it as slowly as possible, in my case - you have to work with what you've been left with.

So celebrate your crankiness and wear your coke-bottle lensed glasses with pride. Until your personal voyage reaches it's final destination you can at least try to remain the captain of your own ship.

unashamedly cribbed from Making Light

The description below of "Social Media" is so brilliant and so right that I felt obliged to steal it and post it here. No apologies.

There’s no way to take a time-out from our social life and describe it to a computer without social consequences. At the very least, the fact that I have an exquisitely maintained and categorized contact list telegraphs the fact that I’m the kind of schlub who would spend hours gardening a contact list, instead of going out and being an awesome guy. The social graph wants to turn us back into third graders, laboriously spelling out just who is our fifth-best-friend. But there’s a reason we stopped doing that kind of thing in third grade!

You might almost think that the whole scheme had been cooked up by a bunch of hyperintelligent but hopelessly socially naive people, and you would not be wrong. Asking computer nerds to design social software is a little bit like hiring a Mormon bartender. Our industry abounds in people for whom social interaction has always been more of a puzzle to be reverse-engineered than a good time to be had, and the result is these vaguely Martian protocols. […]

We have a name for the kind of person who collects a detailed, permanent dossier on everyone they interact with, with the intent of using it to manipulate others for personal advantage—we call that person a sociopath. And both Google and Facebook have gone deep into stalker territory with their attempts to track our every action. Even if you have faith in their good intentions, you feel misgivings about stepping into the elaborate shrine they’ve built to document your entire online life.

Open data advocates tell us the answer is to reclaim this obsessive dossier for ourselves, so we can decide where to store it. But this misses the point of how stifling it is to have such a permanent record in the first place. Who does that kind of thing and calls it social?

my country t'is of thee

It pains me to what is going on in my home country right now. I was one of the many who saw no choice but to leave in order to save my family and myself from what I saw as the inevitable destruction of society being visited by Thatcher and her slightly redder successors. Now the grandchildren of those years have risen up and expressed themselves in the only voice left to them. The destruction is horrible and the violence is foul but the systematic opression that so many people in the class formally known as working have lived through for so long made this sort of outbreak almost inevitable. And nothing will come of it except for more opression, more suppression and anything but the deep social remedies that have been needed for far too long. They say you can never go home but my home doesn't even exist anymore.

southern entertainment at it's best

Given the appearance (from the outside at least) that the US has been systematically creating a population of undereducated and uninformed drones for some time now how can one be surprised at the results? Representative democracy within the states really does appear to be representative of what those amongst the US people who actually bother to vote have come to believe in. Sad but true for the rest of the world. I'm sure there are reasonable and well-informed people there. I just wish they would get out and vote for people who will bring their points of view into the political world. Until that happens the mob will get what the mob wants.

suffering to be beautiful

Not that being beautiful has ever been something I've had to worry about. But I'm undeniably getting older and am in the hollow middle ground between caring about how I live and actually doing something about it. Eat well, eat healthy, watch your weight. So many opinions so few facts. The industry that purports to reverse aging (or at least the "signs" of aging) is a multi-billion dollar boondoggle and we all work terribly hard on our individual denials don't we. Wear your lines with pride for they are campaign medals in the battle for the human soul.

another one bites the dust

RIP Gerry Rafferty, your voice filled an empty place in my soul.