Holding the cat, I looked in the mirror and was startled. Fluffie’s face is asymmetrical, but I couldn’t have told you which side has this or that feature. (Can you say without looking which was Moshe Dayan’s good eye?) And yet her mirror image was strikingly strange.

I’ve had similar experiences a few times before: seeing my face without glasses or beard; seeing my father in person for the first time in a couple of years. At such moments I see – briefly – what the face ‘really’ looks like, before the reality fades into the familiar symbol. Such abstraction is necessary, of course, but I wonder whether there might be some benefit to lifting the veil more often.

Eugene Volokh relayed a funny newspaper clipping. To save time downloading the image, here is the text:

The first divorce directly related to the September 11th terrorist attacks has been filed in New York. It appears a guy with an office on the 103rd floor of the World Trade Centre spent the morning at his girlfriend’s apartment with his phone turned off. He wasn’t watching TV either. When he turned his phone back on at about 11am, it rang immediately. It was his hysterical wife, “Are you OK? Where are you?” He said, “What do you mean? I’m in my office of course!”

(Thanks to Paul Hsieh for the link.)
Later: snopes has doubts.

I was reading The Spike by Damien Broderick (I’m up to the part about the complexity of controlling zillions of nanomachines) and a fellow passenger asked what it’s about. People are paid to summarize books better than I can, so I passed it over so she could read the covers. She asked whether the tone is alarmist (no, but it is cautious) and then said, “You know, they had that same technology in Atlantis. It’s not the first time around.”

Later she asked, “What technology do you think they used to build the Pyramids?” “Ramps and rollers.” “And how do you explain the fact that they had electricity?” (I confess I haven’t felt any need to do so.) She told me that an Egyptian archaeologist – not English or German, she emphasized – has found ‘electrical’ wires and what appears to be a lighting filament in Tutankhamn’s tomb. Wonders never cease — and it would seem they have no beginning either.

I was prompted by a post to alt.peeves to seek confirmation of my brilliant originality by websearching for phrases that I had jotted down as clever. In light of this research, the name of my band will be “A Wellmeaning Oaf”, and our first album will be “Return to Porlock”. (I am particularly disappointed in “Usual Suspicions” and “Red Weather”.)

In the process I found this essay by one Sarah David about enjoying the B-52’s. Whom, in turn, I didn’t expect to see dominating the search results so thoroughly (are there no webpages about bombers?). I can take only so much of the B-52’s at one sitting (about as much as Devo) but I love the counterpoint of “52 Girls”.

Another essay using that same phrase is this one about bad fight scenes in fiction.

Jim Henley chides conspiracy-theorists:

If there is a ‘they,’ they’d far rather you worry about the UN or the Rothschilds than about the things like no-knock raids, the profusion of federal SWAT teams, civil asset forfeiture and the administrative law court system, all overt, structural issues that got born in broad daylight. They’d rather you talk about how Waco had to be a UN plot than about the known facts that the BATF lied about a methamphetamine lab to get a warrant, and that the FBI spent six weeks trying to drive the Branch Davidians nuts – using the same psychological warfare tricks (sleep deprivation, lights, noise etc) we used on Manuel Noriega – so that afterward the President could say:

“Well, they were crazy.”

The enthusiasts of the ridiculous theories – say “least provable” if you prefer – became the unwitting allies of the forces in power.

I would add that it’s very handy for ‘Them’ to be able to use the ‘black helicopter nuts’ as symbols of their opposition as a whole. I guess the only way to prevent that is to ensure that the first catchy symbol is a sane one. Protest movements need smart marketing.

A quibble: I thought the meth lab appeared later, when the FBI needed the drug exception to Posse Comitatus so they could borrow military equipment.
Update: Henley clears that up.

Too cool! A Turing Machine in Conway’s Game Life, extendable to a Universal Turing Machine. Thanks to Andre Uratsuka Manoel for the link. (Link corrected 2004 Oct 6.)

2006: And the newer link is now dead. Never mind, just search for it.

This morning, Zegnatronic Man and I must have come in on the same train. For those who just tuned in, for about four years now Frank Chiu has been seen marching about the Financial District with a protest sign. At first his sign was handmade and said various things, usually calling for the impeachment of a lot of former Presidents (plus Franklin and Hamilton). ( . . more . . )