CSotD: Midweek Humor Break
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Well, now I’d never be able to look at a horseshoe crab without seeing a face-hugger. Not that I see a lot of horseshoe crabs anyway, and I think the times I have seen them, I’ve mostly seen parts washed up on the beach. But now I’ll be seeing pieces of a face-hugger.
I do know that horseshoe crabs have blue blood and it contains a clotting factor, or something that can be turned into a clotting factor, and I think I learned that in science class.
RWO jokes that we’re coming to the end of a period in which we had science, but I think the issue is as seen in that little preview panel: We’re going to add all new facts, mostly based on what people want to believe, or maybe we’ll just bring back all the old facts that people wanted to believe.
And if teachers insist that those aren’t really facts after all, we’ll complain to the board of education or possibly sue the school. Between the demise of the Dept of Education and what’s going on over in HHS, Piccolo and Price might be right about this, but the joke is we won’t be teaching history either.
I missed National Plastic Surgery Day yesterday, but thank god I’m missing being young in an era when people blow up their lips and do all sorts of other magical medical stuff that I don’t really understand.
I understand wanting to change a flaw, but what constitutes a flaw? I’m suddenly seeing Barbra Streisand all over the place recently, and I can’t figure out why, but seeing her reminds me of how surprised everyone was back when she first came on the scene and declined to get a nose job.
I recall a lot of “Good for her” reactions.
Maybe it was a sign of the times, but times change. The Big Thing these days is Mar-A-Lago Face, in which a lot of women in proximity to the White House have sculpted their faces to a specific style, such that I suspect they need to wear name tags because everyone becomes kind of identical.
I ran across a Botox ad on a podcast the other day, and the part that told you how great it would make you look was about a third of the ad, and the other two-thirds was where they told you all the things that could go wrong.
When Abbie Hoffman first got out of college, he had a job as a (legal) pharmaceutical salesman. He said he asked his boss if the stuff was any good, and was told “Well, it won’t kill them,” which he considered kind of a weak recommendation.
However, if you listen to the disclosures on drug ads, they say that they actually will kill you.
But you’re gonna look really good at your wake!
Speaking of podcasts, I listened to On The Media the other day, and they had a fellow on who explained how AI can be good for very basic acts that mostly require fact-retrieval, but is being oversold as having any creative intelligence. His prediction is that major tech firms have wasted a lot of money on it already and that their crash is going to be as bad as the Dot.com crash.
Then they had a guy on who writes music, and he talked about how surprised he was that AI could write really good music, too. Which I suspect has a lot to do with your expectations of what constitutes “really good music.”
If you start with Sturgeon’s Law that 90% of everything is crap, that leaves plenty of room for AI, which basically recognizes and builds on patterns.
I remember an interview with Carole King at the piano, in which she recalled a time when Bobby Vee had a hit — and she played a few chords — so they had to write another hit for him, and she played roughly the same chords with a slight variation, which became his next hit.
I suspect that if she wrote the first hit, AI could have written that next one. Nothing against her, mind you: When they find an unknown Mozart, experts can tell if it’s his by listening for familiar patterns in it.
But if it’s all just familiar patterns without breaking any new ground, they’d say, “It’s his. But the reason it was unknown is that it’s crap.”
AI could do that.
Batch Rejection has that sort of New Yorker feel, in which the cartoon is only seeking to prompt a “Yep” rather than a laugh. I recognize the phenomenon, of course, but my reaction is “And ….?”
Thing is, at the places I’ve enjoyed working, I wouldn’t mind pitching in for someone else, but, then again, the places I’ve enjoyed working have been full of people who regularly pulled their own weight, and what we were doing was interconnected enough that the task wasn’t A, B or C, but the total effort.
If you’re working at a place where the work is stupid and repetitive and they hire slackers who push their work off on others, well, you need to wonder why you’re still there.
It’s kind of like that principle in marriage that says if you’re upset because your spouse keeps leaving the cap off the toothpaste, that’s not the problem.
Ditto with the workplace. One petty annoyance isn’t a crisis, but if you’re finding a lot of little problems, you should deal with the big one.
I worked one place where they gave out five-year plaques. I referred to them as “slow learner awards.” If you had more than two, it was your own damn fault. Even one was probably one too many.
Here’s a thing about calling people by their names: You need to know their names.
Which sounds self-evident, but I went by “Pete” for about 20 years. It’s a common nickname for people named “Peterson,” but it also provides a BS detector, because when someone would call me “Mike,” I’d know they were trying to sell me something.
There sure are worse times to get somebody’s name wrong, howsoever, and you’d do better to leave the cap off the toothpaste.
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