Technopagans; Freefall

Last Sunday we found evidence that Pillow had accidentally been locked out the night before (though I thought he could get in by another way). He hid under the bed all that day. Monday he emerged, still nervous. Wednesday I noticed that his abdomen had a lemon-sized abscess. We took him to a vet, who remarked that his (minor) wounds did not look like the result of fighting with another cat; he asked whether there are raccoons in our neighborhood. (Yes.)

With his belly shaved, and bits of rubber hose poking out of it, Pillow from some angles looks like a cow. But I’m not gonna say that to his face.

I hoped to have some new math pictures for you (or at least for me) today, but my attempts to install a code library that I need have come to nothing. The makefile invokes gcc with options that version 3.3 won’t take. I try to install gcc 4, and Fink says before I can do that I need to recompile Fink with gcc 4.

So I’m having a depressive episode instead.

But I can tell you anyway about what I wanted to do. ( . . more . . )

Jamie Zawinski has ported his gorgeous screensaver collection to MacOS.

My favorites are Demon, a colorful cellular automaton; CloudLife, a fuzzy variant of Conway’s Life; Substrate, whose randomly growing arcs suggest the street plan of an old city; Galaxy, a simulation of gravitic interactions; Polytopes, which displays one of the six convex regular polychora, rotating in 4-space.

I hear some strange things in this medical transcription gig:

Due to her birth weight less than 1500 grams, she will require a rule out retinopathy of prematurity eye exam . . . .

Let’s take an against un-Englishly compound adjectives stand!

I’m surprised to see it acknowledged in two teevee shows that heroin is useful as a painkiller. (Charlie Stross, a former pharmacist, mentioned that “diamorphine (aka Heroin™) is carried routinely in ambulances in the UK.”)

In the first series of 24, Jackie’s arm is broken and her kidnappers inject her to keep her quiet. Kim, her fellow kidnappee, starts to protest but appears to accept that it’s the least bad thing to do at the moment. (I don’t think the drug is named, but the paraphernalia are those of heroin.)

Late in the second season of Lost, (spoiler) lies dying of (spoiler) wounds and Jack, MD, gives heroin — very explicitly this time.

Both shows were broadcast, not in the Freer Speech Zone of premium cable. So where’s the uproar from drug-warriors that they contradicted Official Truth?

If you use “however” in two consecutive sentences, it’s a sign that your paragraph could benefit from rearranging.

If you use “however” in three consecutive sentences, your paragraph may be beyond help.