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Posts Tagged ‘STEM’

Diary #815

Posted in Diary, Miscellaneous, Q & A, tagged , on February 10, 2026| 2 Comments »

As I mentioned last week, CenturyLink finally got around to fixing my internet problem; the main issue was a corroded wire in the node near my house which was causing a series of errors that eventually caused my modem to “time out”.  The technician said having an older modem, while not the actual cause of the issue, was exacerbating the problem, so he gave me a new one, and everything has been fine since.  However, two other tech problems have now materialized, and with Grace gone I have nobody here who knows about this stuff enough to help me.  So I figured I’d ask my many tech-savvy readers for help.

The first issue is that the PDF Architect software I bought in 2014 and have built seven books on suddenly decided that my copy was not “authenticated” and refuses to function without a new key PDF Architect will not give because they conveniently no longer “support” the software I bought and paid for which still perfectly fulfilled my needs up until now, and want me to pay for their fancy new subscription-based service over and over again each month, though I only use the software when I’m publishing books.  Frank found me free software that will run on my XP machine, but he has never used it himself, so I’d like recommendations; all I need is resident software (not web-based) that will run on XP and combine multiple Word files into a PDF.  That’s it; no bells & whistles are necessary, and free is good but inexpensive is also OK.

The other is that on Saturday evening my TV, which has been unhealthy for a few years,  did something really strange: I was watching a show and a sharply-delineated vertical white band, bounded by several alternating bands of grey and black, suddenly appeared in the exact center of the screen.  Stopping the disc had no effect so it was obviously the TV rather than the disc; I turned it off and turned it back on, and the problem vanished for the rest of the evening.  But this smells like a harbinger of imminent catastrophic failure, so I’m going to replace it.  Given that the last attempt at replacement was a failure, I should probably get either a newish low-end Samsung (to be compatible with the DVD players) or a 7-8 year old refurbished something else.  But again, I don’t need bells & whistles, and I don’t even really want it to connect to the internet; I want the closest thing to a dumb monitor that will simply allow me to play DVDs that I can get.  Any advice?

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Throwback Thursday Untold

Posted in Miscellaneous, Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 15, 2026| Leave a Comment »

Cops and prosecutors use the slur “sex trafficking ring” to mean anything from a broken-down pimp to an ordinary escort service to a sex worker ad site.  –  “Taking the Bait”

Claims about what politicians and bureaucrats “intended”…are…nothing but an excuse for evil.
–  “The Road to Hell”

“AI” is a fantasy of techies, journalists, and hack sci-fi writers.  –  “Artificial ‘Intelligence’?”

It’s easy to “disprove” anything if you’re allowed to change the conditions.
–  “Infinite Monkeys”

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Links #808

Posted in Current Events, Links, Miscellaneous, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on December 28, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Only Stalin and North Korea’s Kim dynasty have ever reached this level of absurdity.  –  Nina L. Khrushcheva

There aren’t many seasonal videos any more, but once in a while it’s possible to stumble upon a good one.  The links above the video were provided by Nun Ya, Charles Hill, David Ley, Mike Masnick (x2), and Franklin Harris, in that order.

From the Archives

I find paywalls distasteful, and so many people find this blog valuable as a resource I just can’t bring myself to install one.  Furthermore, I find ad delivery services (whose content I have no say over) even more distasteful.  But as I’m now semi-retired from sex work, I can’t self-sponsor this blog by myself any longer.  So if you value my writing enough that you would pay to see it if it were paywalled, please consider subscribing; there are four different levels to fit all budgets.  Or if that doesn’t work for you, please consider showing your generosity with a one-time donation; you can Paypal to maggiemcneill@earthlink.net or else email me at the same address to make other arrangements.  Thanks so much!

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Tweet Wave

Posted in History, Miscellaneous, Tyranny, Words, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 19, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Who first used the German word "blitz" ("lightning") to describe sudden, intense bursts of violence? I forget.

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2025-11-14T19:43:33.619Z

I just can't get beyond the resemblance.

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2025-11-16T19:29:02.571Z

When cops use profanity at us, think of what they're telling us. Would you ever curse at your boss? No, but he can curse at you because he has power over you. What would happen if you cursed out a cop? But they curse at us routinely. That tells you how they perceive their relationship with us.

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2025-11-17T08:31:30.244Z

The universe does things on a subatomic level that would get you arrested for bank fraud if you tried the financial equivalent.

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2025-11-19T04:59:00.841Z

People suffering from advanced dementia often fall back on old "scripts". It's why your senile great-grandmother calls you by your mother's (or even grandmother's) name, and it's why Trump seems to think he's still on a TV show he did two decades ago.

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2025-11-19T18:14:28.117Z

Magnificent. Words that deserve to be included in future editions of Bartlett's.If you're not following Ken, why are you even on here?

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2025-11-20T18:37:49.142Z

Reporters need to ditch the word "taken" when writing about actions of government thugs.The property wasn't "taken" by goons; it was STOLEN.The person wasn't "taken to the ground"; he was TACKLED.The person wasn't "taken into custody" as if on a date; he was ABDUCTED.Stop soft-peddling evil.

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2025-11-21T18:12:37.117Z

Reading what people say about Twitter makes me realize that the vast majority online expend absolutely no effort on account hygiene. If they treated their bodies like they treat their social media accounts, they'd never bathe, brush their teeth, or change their clothes, and would eat only junk.

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2025-11-23T18:27:53.081Z

I will never cease to be amused by the notoriety Fate chose to bestow upon a minor Sumerian merchant of the 18th century BCE.

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2025-11-24T18:42:59.559Z

Crypto-moralists believe anything unpleasant must be “good for you”.

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2025-11-25T08:41:09.810Z

In the late 19th century, the Ottoman Empire was called "the sick man of Europe". Now the American empire has become the sick man of the entire planet.

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2025-11-26T19:46:57.721Z

I found my own solution to Thanksgiving guest tensions many years ago: I host. Nobody dares start shit in MY house.

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2025-11-27T17:53:29.116Z

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2025-11-29T03:35:45.932Z

I have lived my life in such a way that I can't picture either of these women accurately enough to compare them in my mind. And I'm very pleased about that.

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2025-11-29T18:42:27.556Z

I block every single MAGA account and every associated lunatic on Twitter the first time I see it. As a result, I now see far more Trumpery on Bluesky than on Twitter, because people keep screenshotting and calling attention to accounts I blocked long ago.

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2025-12-03T18:04:51.442Z

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2025-12-04T09:14:45.895Z

What's the Greek word for rule by mathematical imbeciles?

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2025-12-05T18:10:12.603Z

I'm so exhausted by journalists, who should know the meaning of the words they use, referring to people who are not cautious of change but rather mindlessly destroy every Chesterton's fence they can find, as "conservative".

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2025-12-05T20:21:41.880Z

"We are not the party of participation trophies…"I hate to break this to you, but…

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2025-12-07T03:39:24.651Z

Maybe this misuse of the word "democracy" is a problem of Millennials and Zoomers, who are too young to remember that about half the communist dictatorships of the late 20th century had the word "Democratic" in their names, eg "Deutsche Demokratische Republik" (German Democratic Republic).

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2025-12-07T18:47:29.470Z

Mad emperor babbles like a baby: "A pwus pwus pwus pwus pwus!!" {claps tiny pudgy hands and gurgles}

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2025-12-09T20:02:40.319Z

Ahem.

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2025-12-10T09:23:43.373Z

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2025-12-12T19:50:01.065Z

OK, y'all, we all get it: politicians and partisans are all huge hypocrites who theatrically perform anger when the "other team" does the same thing they do when in power.Find another goddamned tweet boilerplate. Holy shit.

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2025-12-13T18:34:07.084Z

The problem is that the tech industry is intentionally conflating two different things under the fantasy label "AI". Machine learning is a real, useful tool; chatbots are a toy and a technological blind alley. Conflating the two is like pretending color TV is the same technology as a hula-hoop.

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2025-12-14T18:46:37.811Z

I'm sick of the idiocy of the term "kinetic strike".As opposed to what, a static strike?

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2025-12-16T17:48:03.150Z

My home town, ladies & gents.

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2025-12-18T08:51:51.030Z

 

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Links #802

Posted in Current Events, Links, Miscellaneous, Obituary, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 16, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Rest easy, king.  You did good.  –  ChatGPT, to a man it goaded into suicide

A recent social media post about the geriatric ward the US calls a government reminded me of this old country song that was on a record my mother played often when I was a child.  The links above it were provided by Asawin Suebsaeng, Clarissa, Popehat, Kevin Wilson, Aaron Ross Powell, and Ned, in that order.

From the Archives

I find paywalls distasteful, and so many people find this blog valuable as a resource I just can’t bring myself to install one.  Furthermore, I find ad delivery services (whose content I have no say over) even more distasteful.  But as I’m now semi-retired from sex work, I can’t self-sponsor this blog by myself any longer.  So if you value my writing enough that you would pay to see it if it were paywalled, please consider subscribing; there are four different levels to fit all budgets.  Or if that doesn’t work for you, please consider showing your generosity with a one-time donation; you can Paypal to maggiemcneill@earthlink.net or else email me at the same address to make other arrangements.  Thanks so much!

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Links #800

Posted in Current Events, History, Links, Miscellaneous, Obituary, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on November 3, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Some of your human visitors could probably take some lessons in behavior from him.  –  Priscilla Lange

As usual, I found an appropriate seasonal video too late for Halloween.  The links above it were provided by T. Greg Doucette (“solidarity”, “memoriam”, and “kids”); Jesse Walker (RIP); Mike Siegel (“Baskervilles” and “money”); and IncarcerNation (“cops”).

From the Archives

I find paywalls distasteful, and so many people find this blog valuable as a resource I just can’t bring myself to install one.  Furthermore, I find ad delivery services (whose content I have no say over) even more distasteful.  But as I’m now semi-retired from sex work, I can’t self-sponsor this blog by myself any longer.  So if you value my writing enough that you would pay to see it if it were paywalled, please consider subscribing; there are four different levels to fit all budgets.  Or if that doesn’t work for you, please consider showing your generosity with a one-time donation; you can Paypal to maggiemcneill@earthlink.net or else email me at the same address to make other arrangements.  Thanks so much!

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Not a Theory

Posted in Current Events, Philosophy, Words, tagged , , , , on October 10, 2025| 1 Comment »

Can y’all please stop using the phrase “conspiracy theory” to mean any kind of bizarre fantasy, even ones that are literally impossible, whether it involves a conspiracy or not?  Even a conspiracy hypothesis would need to be scientifically credible; anything that isn’t is a bizarre cultic belief.  And using “false conspiracy theory” to mean such a cultic belief is even worse; it’s like calling transubstantiation a “false conspiracy theory” because the bread is still provably bread.  To discuss myths, ie the beliefs of a given cult, as though they were scientific assertions is absurd.  See the screenshot below?  You might as well call the Golden Fleece or Ark of the Covenant “conspiracy theories”, because every irrational belief-system has magical or esoteric devices somewhere in its mythology.  Stop pretending QAnon isn’t a religion; it has a prophet, unprovable mysteries that must be taken on faith, etc.  And its adherents can no more be talked out of their beliefs than fundamentalists can be talked out of their belief in the Rapture or Techists out of their belief in the “Singularity”.   

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Nightfall

Posted in History, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , on October 6, 2025| 2 Comments »

When belief trumps facts, feelings trump reason, and violent psychopaths declare themselves the only legitimate arbiters of Truth, darkness can be the only result.  –  “The Oncoming Night”

There’s no good reason to rehash my columns for last year’s “Banned Books Week” and those of 2023 and 2022; my records have not yet been censored, so those essays, all heavily-fortified with links to earlier writings on the subject, are still there for your perusal.  Instead, it seems more urgent to call your attention to the fact that the impending dark age I have warned about for years has now arrived.  Lest some of you (especially the ones who used to call me a crank for warning what facial recognition would become) think I’m exaggerating, let me reiterate what a dark age actually is.  People who know nothing about history tend to think of the term as synonymous with the Middle Ages, despite the facts that A) only a small part of that thousand-year period qualify as “dark” in the historical sense; B) there have been a number of dark ages in human history; and C) the term in and of itself says nothing about technological progress per se.  In reality, a dark age is one lacking reliable records, so historians cannot be certain of what actually happened.  Of course, censorship is typically part of that; if a government or religion burns books, anything recorded in those books is not available to future historians.  And if too many of the burned books contain scientific or technical knowledge, the result may indeed be a reversal of technological progress.  But such a decline is not the defining characteristic, and indeed one of the major causes of the dark age we’re now entering is the misuse of technology.

The way people of later times view a dark age is, due once again to the lack of reliable records, not at all the same as the way people living in such an age view it; the only people who are in a position to recognize that they’re living in such an age are those who understand what the term means in the first place.  So it’s doubtful that the authoritarian rulers of countries like India and the United States recognize (or care) what they’re doing to future history; what’s important to this discussion is that they are using modern computer technology to do it.  In the last century, it would’ve been impossible for a Trump, Modi, or Xi to eliminate every single instance of a fact or opinion they disliked; Mao and Stalin tried, but books and other physical records cannot be eliminated by merely ordering the creation of search-and-destroy algorithms or threatening large, centralized fascist companies into censoring their own highly-indexed media.  20th century tyrants could never hope to find and destroy every copy of a banned book, film, recording, etc, but when physical media are no longer the norm, universal censorship of a work enters the realm of the possible.  And now that it has become child’s play to flood the world with computer diarrhea presented as fact, even electronic records which somehow escape a purge will be lost in a vast fecal sea, making it difficult for even experts to know what is real.  And if the techlords get their way, there will be a lot fewer experts in the future to attempt it or even care about it.  And if you can’t see that as a formula for a dark age, why are you even bothering to read this?

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Links #796

Posted in Current Events, History, Links, Miscellaneous, Music, Obituary, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 5, 2025| Leave a Comment »

All radio stations and most of their DJ’s are a part of the intelligence community.  –  Jacob Chansley

When Jesse Walker recently tweeted an article about the bicentennial of the Erie Canal, I went to YouTube to find a video of this folk song, and was delighted to find this excellent version by Bruce Springsteen.  Jesse also shared all the links other than “toxic” (IncarcerNation), “Jane Goodall” (Mike Siegel), and “television” (Yasmin Nair).

From the Archives

I find paywalls distasteful, and so many people find this blog valuable as a resource I just can’t bring myself to install one.  Furthermore, I find ad delivery services (whose content I have no say over) even more distasteful.  But as I’m now semi-retired from sex work, I can’t self-sponsor this blog by myself any longer.  So if you value my writing enough that you would pay to see it if it were paywalled, please consider subscribing; there are four different levels to fit all budgets.  Or if that doesn’t work for you, please consider showing your generosity with a one-time donation; you can Paypal to maggiemcneill@earthlink.net or else email me at the same address to make other arrangements.  Thanks so much!

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Links #794

Posted in Current Events, History, Links, Miscellaneous, Obituary, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 21, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Who thought of this?  –  Brent Chapman

Everybody knows Popeye, but did you know he was introduced to the screen (he first appeared in the “Thimble Theater” comic strip in 1929) in a 1933 Betty Boop cartoon?  By the end of the following year he had already replaced Betty as the Fleischer Studio’s biggest star.  The links above the video were provided by Carol Fenton, Mike Siegel, Phoenix Calida, Ryan Marino, IncarcerNation, The Onion, and T. Greg Doucette, in that order.

From the Archives

I find paywalls distasteful, and so many people find this blog valuable as a resource I just can’t bring myself to install one.  Furthermore, I find ad delivery services (whose content I have no say over) even more distasteful.  But as I’m now semi-retired from sex work, I can’t self-sponsor this blog by myself any longer.  So if you value my writing enough that you would pay to see it if it were paywalled, please consider subscribing; there are four different levels to fit all budgets.  Or if that doesn’t work for you, please consider showing your generosity with a one-time donation; you can Paypal to maggiemcneill@earthlink.net or else email me at the same address to make other arrangements.  Thanks so much!

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