Welcome to Everything

The Lifecycle of Software Objects is a 2010 novella by Ted Chiang. It's about Anna, an animal trainer turned software tester, who is hired to train and/or create digients. A digient is a digital pet sort of thing; except that pets can't learn to talk while the digients can. They can also scamper about, pick up objects, and otherwise interact with their digital environment. They can also think; but not well. The digients Anna meets are like

…

Where to begin? Let me start with some reasoning, before proceeding on to the Ad Hominem part.

There is a logical fallacy called the base rate fallacy, that says that when dealing with a specific case, you also have to look at the base rate. That involves lots of math, so I will just refer to it by another term: the waving a metal pole during a lightning storm fallacy or the I am going to smear myself with salmon and wander around in bear territory fallacy. Do you know how many

…

Hello Everything2.

When I checked in for my "once a decade" login about a month ago, I did not think I'd be noding again. Like it says in my homenode, ya'll intimidate the crap outta me. I've never been a writer. I've never even been much of a communicator. I'm more likely to give you a cool rock if I want to get to know you than walk up and say hello.

But that is

…

It turns out my laptop keyboard issues were just a harbinger of more to come. Unfortunately I had another small stroke yesterday which left me with slurred speech and a useless left hand. After my old doc took me to hospital for a checkup I'm back home for a couple of weeks of enforced rest, which is the last thing I wanted, what with Iron Noder coming up, and my planning a trip to Seattle to visit Tess…