there  could  be  snakes  in  here

(c) Andrew Wyeth (1957), "Brown Swiss" It's easy to mock preppers - that is, people who buy off-grid rural land, a stock of imperishable food, and guns, while honing skills in expectation of the harsh and pre-modern world soon to come - but it's plausible that they're actually providing a public good: redundancy , for the species, against certain awful tail risks . Let's begin by inventing a distinction: call the ideology "survivalism" and the practice described above "prepping". People often point to creepy far-right tendencies among survivalists (e.g. anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, violent libertarianism, Red Dawn paranoia) and speak as if this were an argument against prepping. No matter how self-interested or politically unsavory the practice supposedly is: competent, geographically spread-out prepping could still help ensure that future generations come to be. "The species", in some sense, and also maybe modern ...

Saffronisation (Hinglish n.): official idealisation of ancient Hindu society: nationalist indoctrination masked as anti-Orientalism. At the limit, includes claims that Vedic India had TV, cars , and stem cell therapy . See also bhagwakaran . Dark pool (n.): a secret asset market (private as in not governmental and private as in confidential). No transparency, no public "market depth" reporting or identities. Reduces market impact of your trading and hides your strategies from others. Legal, mostly. Brownout (US n.): Reduction in the available electricity supply which knocks out high-voltage devices for a number of hours. Sometimes intentional, to stop e.g. thunderstorms from overloading the grid and causing fires. A mediocre blackout. salty (adj.): touchy; of a person who is acting irritable because of their failure. A taunt in PvP culture. Britain is very salty at the moment. Convex hull (n.): The smallest symmetrical shape that contains all of a gi...

God chose to empty himself of language and become a life. But along comes Christianity and turns it back into words, trillions of them, poured out incessantly in pulpit, book and on the airwaves, reducing the mystery of what is beyond all utterance to chatter. I told them I had come to mind religious overconfi­dence more than I minded its atheistic opposite, because atheists did not claim to put ultimate reality into words. agnosticism should not be described as a hypothesis, because it is not positing an answer to the question so much as learning to live without one ...there is no doubt that Anglo-Catholicism, as it evolved, became attractive to gay men, though the reasons for this are probably more theo­logically rooted than is commonly understood. The high camp aesthetic of the more florid wings of the movement was clearly attractive to a certain kind of gay sensibility, as anyone who has had to negotiate a high mass in one of the more fashionable outposts of Anglo-Cathol...

oppo (n.). "Opposition research"; the private industry that runs smear campaigns against public figures. Tabloid journalism wholly unmediated by ordinary press objectivity (yuk yuk), the 'public interest' (ho ho), or the sense of fairness typical of actual activists (YUK YUK). Oppo has already begun to creep outward from politicians to academics and protestors with unpopular views. This greatly increases the cost of overt political action; since both political tribes are arming themselves with opposition research farms, this industry can only harm absolutely every part of the public sphere. In America, oppo people have charity status and can be totally anonymously funded. Be afraid. to spitball (v.) To brainstorm; to suggest without decision or strong support. doomstead (n.). A house in which to die? (Had to infer; it was coined here without explanation.) (Edit: Christian tells me it is in fact the bunker and farmland preppers each prepare for the end t...

Exo Crystallis by TNJX What's this bright Egyptianistic Cheshtronica offering? Since you asked, I'll tell you: it is the fruit of the tree named James Lightfoot, bedroom avatar of Sun Ra and/or channeller of Nobuo Uematsu cum understudy to Darren Styles. - one of my unfinished TNJX reviews I once played someone my favourite TNJX songs as we careened along a dirt track, as the sun rose over the Ngorongoro crater, as we suffered being the seventeenth and eighteenth passengers of an 8-seater bus. Aha! What a setting! Time for a concentrated dose of brightness, engineered to unchain, point over the horizon to where no-one's elbow is in your armpit, no-one smells intolerably of long travel, where rivers run thick with glowsticks, the sky with formidable but honourable challengers. She actually recoiled. Though she's an agreeable person in many ways, she indulges a perennial vice: thinking that music is for only one thing . (In her case, that thing is eliciting...

... there is no scorn more profound, or on the whole more justifiable, than that of men who make for the men who explain. Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds. – GH Hardy, with "men" sic . When someone raises points we don't like, there's always the temptation to spitefully psychologise them, to dismiss their points by reference to who they are, rather than the falsity or fallacy of what they're saying. * It is a universal trick; you'll probably have heard some version of it today ("yeah but he's a straight white dude "; " a syphilitic neurotic "; "ancestrally a victim of the British Empire "; " a woman "). In nominally rational subcultures like academia or literary society, there are some weak barriers to doing this (though Freud's brutal legacy continues to enable awful behaviour even there). In pop music and its journalism there is absolutely nothing to stop you. Here...

A good friend of mine is quite horrified by the present trend towards web app replacements for more and more core development work and architecture; such apps are, after all, a grave violation of the elegance and security of good old POSIX APIs . (Who can doubt that some people will use these unsecured client-server apps to work with confidential data? How much user foolishness are architects duty-bound to anticipate and preclude? Answer: surely more than this.) The browser itself is already my debugger, linker, compiler, and garbage collector; the following lovely tools tempt us to concentrate more and more of our work into this one subjective spot - all running, objectively, on other people's computers . (Another transgression against the best old way .) But aren't they lovely: Repl.it . Futuristic feeling: offers command lines for two dozen languages and saves shareable sessions for each. Very damn fast too; try running factorial(2000) on it. An incredible educa...