Dear Abby

Normally I don't read this kind of thing. But the Evil HR Lady mentioned Dear Abby, with a link that I was feeling bored enough to click.

Today, on her front page Abby is relaying a plea from a group of people who use speech synthesizers. They write:

1. Please be patient. It takes us a little bit longer to get our messages out than it does you.
2. Feel free to ask questions. Don't pretend to understand us if you don't.
3. Do not think we are stupid. Have you ever tried to communicate using one of these things?
4. If it looks like we're having trouble, ask if we need help.
5. Treat us like adults – just as you would want to be treated.

and so forth. Abby's response?

I'm pleased to help spread the word. For people who are vocally challenged, you have written an eloquent letter. [...]

Since when is the bar for written eloquence supposed to be lower because the writer can't speak? Has Abby actually read point 3 in the letter she's reprinting? Mysteries abound.

Dear Abby: Well put. For a woman, you write pretty neat yourself.

Prop 8 has fallen

There are two levels of appeal yet to slog through, but the conclusion of the U.S. District court for the Northen District of California is well quotable:

The considered views and opinions of even the most highly qualified scholars and experts seldom outweigh the determinations of the voters. When challenged, however, the voters’ determinations must find at least some support in evidence. This is especially so when those determinations enact into law classifications of persons. Conjecture, speculation and fears are not enough. Still less will the moral disapprobation of a group or class of citizens suffice, no matter how large the majority that shares that view. The evidence demonstrated beyond serious reckoning that Proposition 8 finds support only in such disapproval. As such, Proposition 8 is beyond the constitutional reach of the voters or their representatives.

I think the best eventual outcome would be to conclude that "marriage", being an emotionally charged word, is not a matter for legislation, but that the state can provide certain well-defined legal benefits to couples of whatever sexes that register themselves as domestic partners, whether or not they (or anyone else) choose to describe themselves as "married".

Somehow, however, I don't think that either side of the Californian debacle would agree with me on that ...

The book of Job

I've neglected to write anything here recently. Perhaps I should save some of the more self-contained comments I write in other places, to give people a better chance to tell me how mistaken I am. Here's my reaction to a recent Slacktivist post:

I've tried several times to read the Book of Job, but always had to give up about a third way in. The prose set-up is readable enough, but then the speeches start, and they make my eyes glaze over. The only content I can get from them is "a really, really verbose shouting match". The speakers assert their position with great eloquence, repetition, and doubtless masterful poetry in the original language. But while there is much asserting going on, essentially no arguments are presented. And I've not found a line where anyone even pretends to address a point their opponent has made.

The friends repeatedly implore Job to step down and make peace with God again and then everything will be alright (despite, as told in the prologue, that everything went bad while Job was behaving examplary), mixed with alternately chiding Job for complaining and hinting that it must all, somehow, be his own fault. Job, in turn, does not attempt to clear up this misunderstanding but prefers to switch between heaping big flowery loquacious abuse on God and heaping big flowery loquacious abuse on his friends for their (admittedly inexpert) attempts to cheer him up.

This goes on at least until about chapter twenty-something, at which time I admit defeat and put down the bible in exasperation.

If it's a play one could at least try to defend it as a magnificently tongue-in-cheek satire on how different religious viewpoints simply cannot communicate in any meaningful way, because they fail to listen to each other. But that somehow sounds a bit too modern of a morale.

I think I even prefer Plato. Yes, everyone Socrates speaks to is a strawman, but at least they're strawmen who pretend to care what Socrates is saying, and vice versa.

[Original comment thread].

Awesomeness not truth

I contributed today's Square Root of Minus Garfield strip:

In which the Garfield cast enact a Dinosaur Comics pastiche, creating a sort of complement to No. 5 "Qwantzfield".

Art clipped from the strips of 1994-02-14, 1994-04-19, 2001-04-10, 2003-03-24, 2005-03-08, 2005-07-10, and 2007-02-15.

Garfield recolored

I contributed today's Square Root of Minus Garfield strip:

I drained the colors from the 1995-02-27 Garfield strip and put new ones in. Does it bother you that Garfield is now a gray/white cat instead of an orange one? Should it bother you? Complex issues arise.

First, the strip already has the "token gray" character Nermal, but his appearances are few and far between, especially considering how many gray cats there are in real life. Surely having Garfield be gray in a single strip is just a (small) step towards breed parity in Square Root of Minus Garfield?

Unfortunately, not unambiguously so. Because Garfield already has an established color scheme, any change it is apt to be taken as implying that the change is for the better. Is gray better than orange for cat fur? In my (unscientific) experience it is certainly more common. Is the recolored strip perhaps an attempt to reinforce/perpetuate the notion that a "default" cat is (or ought to be) be gray and that it is meaningful to think of "orange" as a primary attribute of one cat though we would not consider the greyness of another one similarly distinctive?

On the other hand, we must not forget that Garfield is a stereotypically mean, egotistical (and, yes, squirrel-maiming) jerkass. That does not ordinarily reflect badly on all orange cats, because, well, duh, it's Garfield! But once we change his color, it is no more "just Garfield", and the characterization begins to interact with the coloring. In this context the strip seems to say that gray cats are egotistical squirrel-maimers. Strictly speaking it only asserts that some gray cats sometimes maim squirrels. But that was never in doubt to begin with, so it is inevitable that it will be perceived as a statement about gray cats in general.

Of course, one may also take the position that any attempt to use the coloring to make a point, no matter whether in favor of gray or orange, is an unwelcome abuse of the original strip's artistic vision. The counterpoint to that is if you don't even know what the point is, how can you be sure it's being made in the first place? Perhaps it's all just in your head.

On the other-other-other hand, now that the possibility of a gray Garfield has been aired, the cat is out of the bag, so to say. Even if henceforth Garfield is always orange, that too will be taken as a statement of sorts.

So, should you be offended? You decide. But eventually we'll all just have to come to terms with the fact that there is more than one way to skin a cat.

The Happiest Dog in the World

I contributed today's Square Root of Minus Garfield strip:

With apologies to David Lynch.

Original strip from 1994-03-05, with new art cribbed from the 1991-01-03 and 1992-08-09 strips.

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Earlier I also did No. 124: Krazy minus Kat, but didn't post about it. And a whole slew of Comment on a Postcard reconstructions.

Lolfield

I contributed today's Square Root of Minus Garfield strip:

Readers who have been away from the Internet for the past several years, please see Lolcats at TV Tropes. Or the Other Wiki.

It's easy enough to create a Garfield lolcat. The trick is to find a framing such that Garfield is kept even remotely in character.

Original strip from 2007-02-14.

Dissociated Garfield

I contributed today's Square Root of Minus Garfield strip:

Taking "remixed Garfield strips" fairly literally, I created these three strips using a generalisation of the Dissociated Press algorithm to two dimensions. Here is how it works, more or less:

1. Construct a source image consisting of all regular non-Sunday Garfield strips from 2007, forced into a common 216-color palette. (Avoid dithering; that gives bad results).
2. Generate the pixels of the output image in pseudo-random order, as follows:
3. Set N=32 and find the N pixels closest to the target pixel coordinates that have already been generated.
4. Locate all pixels in the source image that have exactly the same colours in the same relative positions as the neighbour pixels found in step 3
5. If no source pixels were found in step 4, decrease N by one and start over from step 3.
6. Otherwise, set the target pixel to the colour of a randomly chosen one among those found in step 4.

I generated a dozen-odd images – each takes about 6 hours of CPU time – and selected the most interesting ones. They tend to be more chaotic than I had hoped (and increasing the initial N does not seem to help), but still they are not complete failures.

Thrichromatic Garfield

I contributed today's Square Root of Minus Garfield strip:

Like many other "funny" newspaper strips, the colour in Garfield seldom really adds value to the joke. It seems that colour is just added as an afterthought, because surely the newspapers did not invest in full-colour-on-every-page capable offset machines just to run monochrome line art!

However, for a strip that does not really need colour for its artistic message, we could put the colour process to better use, to wit, saving paper by printing three panels of line art in the space of one.

In this strip from 2004-04-16, the first panel is in cyan ink, the second in magenta and the third in yellow.

Trackmap.net update: Central Berlin

My summer vacation this year went to Berlin. I spent a week riding trains, photographing tracks, sketching track maps. Like last year I had no trouble with authorities, despite people in DB Sicherheit uniforms often being around as I took pictures.

Unlike last year, this year I've taken the time to draw fair digital track maps from my photos and sketches. The first part of the results are now available at http://trackmap.net/de/bea. More will follow in the coming weeks. I hope.