San Francisco, 13 or so years ago

A lawsuit has been in the news, to wit: a suit seeking to delay operation of the Large Hadron Collider, claiming we need more assurance that it won't create a black hole or a strangelet that would consume the whole Earth.

I wouldn't mind being reduced (along with the rest of the planet) to a lump of strange matter. It would simplify things. It wouldn't matter that I had died intestate or without cleaning up my garage first. No one would use phrases of denial or euphemism to talk about my death; no one would say I had passed away or something. And no one would go through my stuff and find the embarrassing journal entries I wrote as a teenager.

I realize there are also disadvantages associated with the loss of the world as we know it. I'm just trying to look on the bright side.

A parable I like:

There is a Taoist story of an old farmer who had worked his crops for many years. One day his horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbors came to visit. "Such bad luck," they said sympathetically. "Maybe," the farmer replied. The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses. "How wonderful," the neighbors exclaimed. "Maybe," replied the old man. The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. The neighbors again came to offer their sympathy on his misfortune. "Maybe," answered the farmer. The day after, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army. Seeing that the son's leg was broken, they passed him by. The neighbors congratulated the farmer on how well things had turned out. "Maybe," said the farmer.

I like it for a bunch of reasons. For one, it illustrates how judgments are subjective. Who is to say whether something is fortunate or unfortunate? Even within one person, there are competing views. Part of me likes something, another part doesn't.

A tiger is happy to eat; the prey takes a dim view of being eaten.

I bring all this up because it relates to one reason why I don't believe in karma in its popular sense. I usually hear about karma invoked in the context of someone having done bad and gotten away with it, or having done good and not benefited. An observer who finds this unfair asserts that karmic retribution (or, respectively, reward) will follow.

That view of karma suggests that there are objective rules for gauging what is meritorious and what is fortunate.

BTW, today is Béla Bartók's birthday.

Someone at Merriam-Webster had fun
with the pronunciation of e.g.:

A rendering quirk in Adobe Reader: at max zoom (6400%), some clipping paths made from oblique line segments are coarsely jagged while others are smooth.

To see whether your favorite PDF viewer has the same bug quirk, zoom in when viewing this PDF document. When I use Adobe Reader (version 7.0.8 or 8.1.2, Linux x86), only one of the four color transitions along the periphery of the drawing is jagged (evident only at a high magnification).

Yes, I realize this is of limited interest to non-geeks.

update, Saturday March 8: it's a Ghostscript bug, not a Reader bug. (And it's fixed in the latest version of Ghostscript.) The jagged clipping path is in the PDF file itself. I shoulda investigated further before saying it was a Reader issue.

A road that's part of my usual four mile walking loop is closed to traffic today as scenes for Star Trek XI are being filmed there. A neighbor and I made the walk anyway. I guess we weren't there at a bad moment, as no one driving the prop vehicles or camera truck (yes, with a boom) that passed us seemed concerned that we were there.

From Wikipedia:

In Britain the term "jockeys" has not caught on, and briefs are often referred to as "Y-fronts". The term derives from the inverted Y-shape formed by the seams at the front of the underpants which allows easy access to the penis for urination etc.

"etc."