Typecaster seeks apprentice. (From GirlHacker, who picked Rebecca’s pocket.)

I have a friend who used to cast his own bullets; dunno whether he still does. Sometimes he used wheel-balancing weights discarded (why??) by car mechanics, and sometimes he used an alloy called “Linotype metal”. Since he also runs a press (offset) for his organization’s leaflets and newsletters, I imagine he took delight in the symbolic junction of two key freedoms.

Oh by the way, a tip for leadfounders: it stinks up the room a lot less if you put a layer of cat-litter on top of the metal.

Couples go to the Magnetic Pole to conceive. (Bottom of the story.) It’s a funny old world.

Here is a paragraph from HTML: The Definitive Guide, by Musciano & Kennedy, second edition published by O’Reilly in 1997:

Yield to the browser. Let it format your document in whatever way it deems best. Recognize that the browser’s job is to present your documents to the user in a consistent, usable way. Your job, in turn, is to use HTML effectively to mark up your documents so that the browser can do its job effectively. Spend less time trying to achieve format-oriented goals. Instead, focus your efforts on creating the actual document content and adding the HTML tags to structure that content effectively.

Who now remembers such quaint old notions?

Not the folks at Extropy, that’s for sure – whom I expected to show more concern for content over form. As for me, Extropy will have to wait until either I get Mozilla (or NS6) configured properly or Max sees fit to allow me to read it in a typeface bigger than 7 pixels.

The Spirit of Kyoto?

I’ve heard it suggested that manmade pollution helped end the Little Ice Age. Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle wrote a novel on a similar premise, Fallen Angels.

Puzzling detail in a comic novel published in 1977. (Won’t say which, as I didn’t get where I am today by unnecessarily spoiling plot points.) Jimmy’s head has just been pulled out of an oven in Cornwall:

‘Too soon,’ said Jimmy. ‘Wanted to die. Damned slow, this high speed gas.’

Reggie laughed. . . . ‘North Sea Gas isn’t poisonous.’

Er, what? What sort of gas do they pump from the jolly old North Sea? H₂?

Also from New Scientist, formal experiment confirms anecdotal reports: Alcohol impairs driving more than marijuana.

One has heard it rumoured that, among the bicycle messengers in the Financial District of San Francisco, the only ones who have accidents are those who don’t get high. Not that one believes everything one hears, of course.

Jay Zilber argues:

The human race is perpetually at war — not simply between the good guys and the bad guys, nor even between liberals and conservatives. If only it were so convenient to draw the lines in this struggle so starkly, but it’s more complicated than black hats and white hats. Forgive me the cliche, but it’s the whole dual-nature-of-man hat. It’s a war between the Thinkers and the Feelers.

Okay, a promising start; I particularly like the disclaimer, that it’s not about good vs evil. But he blows it later on:

But in the end, it is the Thinkers — those whose words and deeds are governed by Intellectual Honesty, those who demand adherance to high standards of critical thinking, both by their opponents and of themselves — it is the Thinkers who hold the high moral ground in any argument. By definition.

Are there no Corrupted Thinkers? I suggest that Communism would be impossible without them. The boy who ratted on his parents for ‘hoarding’ (i.e. declining to play their assigned rôle in Stalin’s famine) was following a Thinker impersonal code, albeit an artificial one, rather than natural Feeler impulses. (Or so I have always imagined. Because I’m a rather stiff Thinker, it didn’t occur to me until just now that he was a brat who wanted to get back at his family for some slight. Still, it was Thinkerish to applaud him for it.)

The evils of Stalin and Pol Pot were built of lies, and probably were ultimately rooted in personal hatreds — but they were packaged in Thinker language like “the good of the greatest number” and carried out inflexibly. Even we Thinkers can get it wrong sometimes.

I’m disappointed to find a fellow INTP arguing in such reductionistic bipolar terms; it reminds me of how Leftists like to lump fascists and libertarians together as “far Right”.