To the person who shouted out a car window at me while I was walking up the hill

I didn't quite make out what you said.  I caught the last word, "Fuck," but not the rest.  Now the easy assumption based on that word is that what you said was less than complimentary, but I don't know that.  You could have been trying to politely inform me that I had accidentally left my back door open all day, to the discovery of which my response was also, "Fuck."  I don't think that likely, I'm just pointing out that there are alternative possibilities.

In truth, based on the sounds and number of syllables I was able to make out before I was able to hear that last word, I cannot think of any coherent message that you could have been trying to deliver.  There just doesn't seem to be any combination of words in the English language, and based on your accent I presume that you are a native North American English speaker, that could produce the data I've been left with.

Which brings me to my point.  You obviously felt your message was important as you didn't just shout it out of the car window, you leaned out of the window to shout it.  But your message never made it to me.  I think this is due to a lack of understanding on your part of a very basic facet of communication.  And you're not alone in this, a lot of people in cars make this mistake.

You see I was walking at speed, and you were in a car that was driving at speed, and those are two very different speeds.  There's only a limited amount of time that a pedestrian is within earshot of a moving car, less when you consider that the noise of the car itself makes it more difficult to hear other noises near the car, like say the shouts of a passenger in the car.

Furthermore the noise that you are making is distorted by yet another factor.  You see, since you are moving relative to the pedestrian the Doppler effect is in effect.  If you're unfamiliar with what this means, I encourage you to preform a simple experiment.  Get out of the car.  Have the driver driver a certain distance away from you, turn around, and then drive passed you with the horn on.  Notice how the quality of the sound of the horn changes?  That's the Doppler effect.  And just as it distorts the sound of the horn, so too does it distort your voice.

What's more, a pedestrian probably isn't expecting to be shouted at.  Which means that there will be a certain amount of time between when they first hear you and when their language processing abilities are running at full steam.  How much time depends largely on the person.  People are not all the same, there is variance.

All of which is to say, if you wish to communicate something to a pedestrian, if you wish to insult them, to compliment them, to taunt them, to encourage them, to tell them and the world, "I am here and I demand that you recognize my existence," to come onto them, to say hi to them, to warn them of an oncoming velociraptor swarm, to build them up, to break them down, or to communicate with them in any way at all... slow the fuck down.

Perhaps the person who beeps at a pedestrian is trying to say hello, perhaps they are trying to indicate that they hate them with every fiber of their being.  The pedestrian does not know.  The pedestrian does not have time to know.  For, unless the pedestrian has memorized the make, model, and licence plate number of every car everyone who knows them in any way might ever drive, the pedestrian has no idea who the fuck just beeped or why they did it.

Something shouted to a pedestrian will probably not be heard correctly.  It might be heard in part, but probably not in full.

For myself, if you've got something important to say and I'm going up the hill (as I was) I'll be home in fifteen to twenty minutes.  Call me.  Just remember that I don't pick up the phone unless you start to leave a message because the number is one digit off from a radio station, also since the phone bill became my responsibility I had it stripped down to the bare basics so there's no caller ID to tell me it's you and not someone looking to request Brittany Spears because she is so totally awesome, even, like, right now.

Don't have my number?  Simple solution: slow down the car, tell me why it's so damned important that you communicate with me, and either do the communicating there or ask for my number.  If you've convinced me that communication really is important, I'll be receptive.

If I'm going down the hill things are more complicated.  That means that I'm walking to the next city over, and there's no one number I can be reached at there.  Of course, you could offer me a ride and then you'd have a few minutes where I had nothing better to do than to talk to you, and I'd have half an hour to an hour taken off my walk.  Of course this requires trust and communication, which means that you still have to slow the fuck down and talk to me.

In the end, it's all about frames of reference.  As a pedestrian I'm in one.  As someone going full speed ahead in a car you're in another.  These are two very different frames of reference and communication between them is nearly impossible.  For communication to happen one of us has to move into the other's frame of reference.  Either you have to slow down to my speed, or I have to speed up to yours.  And since I'm not the Flash, the only way I'm going to reach your speed is if I get in your car, and for that you have to slow down first.

And that's the basic lesson.  You can't say anything - bad, good, or neutral - if you maintain your speed.  You have to slow down first.  Trying to do otherwise will leave your attempt at communication about as successful as Dark Helmet's attempt to go from Ludicrous Speed to full stop.

Other people may get out of it just fine, but you're not going to.

And when I started composing this post in my head I had no idea it would have a Spaceballs reference in it.

I want stamps

See, there's this thing that I've been wanting to do since I was a child but it involves mailing a lot of letters which is not, itself, a problem except for the whole stamp thing.

Stamps cost money.  Stamps are money.  Stamps are the reason that, if not for a vindictive law passed in a Republican  lame duck session requiring the Post Office to pay retirement benefits for people haven't been born yet, the US Post Office pays for itself with room to spare.  (Any why everyone claiming the Post Office has anything to do with taxes is lying their asses off and should never be trusted about anything ever again without visual confirmation from no less than two independent sources whose reliability is not in doubt.)

And the thing about stamps costing money dovetails in unpleasant ways with the fact that I am utterly, completely, and in all other ways broke.

Thus I am putting out a call to my readers that I expect to go unheeded because none of my readers are rich and stamps cost money.  They are money.

I want stamps.  If you happen to have a bunch of (US) stamps lying around that you don't need because you used to run a newsletter that you no longer run could you send me an email so I can give you my address and you can use some of those stamps to send me the rest of them?  If you happen to have a bunch of money that could be used to buy stamps that you don't know what to do with, there is a donate button at the top right of this blog.

Yeah, I'm expecting zero response because asking for stamps is asking for money and asking for money is unlikely to succeed, but at the same time if you can't fulfill a dream you had as a small child by asking for charity on the internet, what can you do?

Update on yesterday

Welcome to the most boring post ever.

So, I mentioned yesterday that I had apparently run out of energy.  Sometime after writing that post, I think around 4ish in the afternoon, I decided to go to my bed and take a nap.  Nothing big, just ten or 15 minutes. I woke up at midnight.  Well, after midnight.  I don't remember exactly when, sometime in the midnight hour. The first two digits were either 00 if looking at my watch or 12 if looking at a clock.

Midnight is not the best time to start your morning if you're trying for a normal sleep schedule, so I went back to bed, and here I am in the morning.  Hopefully better rested, but we won't know that for sure until the end of the day.

I am, officially, out of energy

I don't know why, maybe I haven't eaten enough, or drunk enough, or slept enough, or something.  Maintaining a body can be difficult work, there's so much you have to remember to do.

What I can say is that it's a good thing I have today off because have spent most of it, and look to continue spending much of it, in positions that at least resemble horizontal.

So I encourage you to read what I wrote earlier about Team Big Bird, or to go over to new Slacktiverse and comment on the posts, or go over to new Slacktiverse forums and comment there, but I think any plans of mine that involved being productive today are shot.

I'll see you all later.

Team Big Bird

So, as you may have heard, one of the presidential candidates (guess which one, go on, guess) is against funding PBS because if we stopped funding PBS our deficit would be... pretty much exactly the same size as it is now.  It would be like taking a drop of water out of one of the great lakes and claiming that you'd drained it.

But, by his own choice, Mitt Romney (did you guess right?) has made himself the anti-Big Bird candidate.  Oh, he was very clear, he likes the bird well enough, he just wants the bird homeless and jobless.  Because educational programming for children is apparently not in the national interest if it costs a pittance to taxpayers, or something like that.

So, anyway, I have a shirt shop.  Remember that?  You probably don't.  It's ok, it's not exactly the most impressive thing in the history of ever.

In fact, since it's creation, it has sold precisely zero items and hosted exactly one design.  (Said design was available on various items.)  That was the Team Leah (Let's get out of here together) design.  It can be found here for anyone who forgot what it looks like.

But the point here is not to point out that that design exists, or that I've given a measure of organization to the shop.  No, the point is that I have been inspired to create a new team shirt:

[Update] The first thing I did, the very first thing, when I had this idea was to check if "Big Bird" was under copyright/trademark.  (Something like that would be a trademark not a copyright, but I checked both to the best of my ability anyway.)  As I usually do with just about everything, I checked multiple times in multiple ways.  And yet, still, I screwed it up.  "Big Bird", those words in that order, is a trademark.  There's nothing wrong with me showing the above image here, I've made perfectly clear that it's my work and not part of their brand and so forth, but selling merchandise with that image on it would, at best and most charitable, push the line.

Cafepress noticed and correctly took down all of the merchandise.  When they do that, they don't tell you why, they don't say, "Big Bird" is a registered trademark number 72413289 and as such we're taking down your merch, they just say that it was considered to be in violation of some policy somewhere, go read the whole thing with bunches of policies and send an email to this address if you disagree with that assessment.

I was really pissed off.  I checked the policies beforehand too, saw the only one it could even hypothetically be violation of was unformatted text trademark (that's not the official term, but some trademarks dealing in text only apply if you format one specific way and thus wouldn't apply) and I'd checked to make sure that it didn't do that.

After that anger died down a bit I finally got around to checking N+1 times and realized they were right.  Maybe I missed it because it was listed at the very bottom of the page meaning if I accidentally didn't scroll far enough I wouldn't see it, maybe I missed it because it was buried in a heap of dead trademarks because of the search I used (I search everything when I search to see if something is trademarked, not just live trademarks) maybe my eyes didn't track right from the listing to the status and I read it as dead instead of live, maybe any number of things.

The point is, I was wrong, they were right, and while there are many, many things I could do to get around it (Team Bird, in yellow text, Team Mr. Bird, also yellow text, Team The Bird, Team Large Avian, The Bird's Team...) at this point I'm just accepting that they were right, I was wrong, and the merchandise is not for sale.  The only thing you'll find if you click the link that follows is the categories I had, each with a picture of the merchandise that would have been sold in it.

(Team Leah is totally legal, by the way.  It even falls completely within the rules requested but not legally enforceable by the author herself for things referring to Twilight.)

The rest of the post, all four sentences of it, follows as originally written. [/update]

As a result of this I have doubled the number of designs in my shop.  The Team Big Bird merchandise can be found here.  I predict that no one will buy any of it.

Also, for ease of navigation, when I say "cup" I mean "drinking vessel" so it also includes water bottles and thermoses and the like.

Something I want to do with gimp

But don't know how.

Gimp has various useful tools:
It has select by color.
It has invert selection.
It has shrink selection. (with options to shrink from image border or not)
It has save a selection to path
It has load a selection from path
It has fill by color.


What I want do do with it, in pseudo-code because I haven't coded in forever remember little if anything, is this:



User inputs integer A, which is greater than or equal to 1.

SubThing(Int X, Path){
int Z==X/1 (rounding down)
int J==1

Fill white

For{int stop==0; stop=0;}
Selection from Path
Shrink selection by Z (not from border)
If selection nonexistant {stop==1
}
Else  {If J=0  {Fill white; J==1
  }
else  {Fill black; J==0
}
Z==Z+X
}
}
}

Main(int A){
Select Black
Path == Selection to Path

Subthing(A, Path)

Selection from Path
Invert selection
Path == Selection to Path

Subthing(A, Path)
}

-

Or something like that, it's been ages since I looked at code.

Anyway, trouble is I have no idea how to do it.

Anyone able to help?

[Added:]
On further examination, saving the selection to a channel might be a better ideal for reasons I don't fully understand but none the less appear to be real

Being a religion, in itself, is not enough to make you tax exempt

There's a reason that most religious organizations don't have to pay taxes in the US.  It's a very simple reason.  The idea of separation of church and state cuts both ways.  The state isn't supposed to be fucking around with churches, churches aren't supposed to be fucking around with the state.

Thus, ideally, religious organizations are non-political.  Your pastor will never stand up at the pulpit and tell you who to vote for for president or anything else.

That's ideally.

That is also, for the record, what any religious organization claims when they apply for tax exempt status.  They bear witness that they will not do that.  That they will not be political.

Today is, apparently, the erroneously named "Pulpit Freedom Sunday," otherwise known as, "You know that witness we bore when we asked for tax exempt status?  It was false witness."  It's the day when pastors across the nation step up to the pulpit and be as political as they can possibly be.  Then they send a copy of their extremely political speech to the IRS saying, basically, "Fuck you.  We lied to you.  Now what are you going to do about it?" in hopes that the IRS will at long last reply, "You lying bastards, your tax exempt status just went bye-bye."  As far as I know the IRS has yet to do such a thing.

Which, by the way, is a great disappointment to the bearers of false witness because they have an army of lawyers ready and waiting to take the IRS to court and, lawyers aside, they're salivating at the thought that they can turn this into a claim that, see, they really are persecuted.

To be clear, even though it's exactly what the bearers of false witness want, the IRS should take the bait.  They should revoke tax exempt status from these churches.  The churches broke the rules, they did it intentionally, they did it publicly, and they plan to do it again and again.  They are flaunting their flouting of the law and, while it's what they want, the law should treat them the way the law says they should be treated.

If someone breaks the rules because they want to suffer the consequences, that doesn't change the fact that they did break the rules and they should suffer the consequences.

Going after these bearers of false witness may be what they want, but it's also the right thing to do.  It plays into their claims of persecution, but the truth is that it's really just treating them like everyone else.  The IRS should revoke their tax exempt status because that's the IRS's job, the fact that they want it revoked so they can pitch a fit and go to court shouldn't enter into the equation.

If they are forced to play by the rules they're going to cry persecution, but if they aren't, if they're allowed to keep on breaking the rules without consequence, then they're getting special treatment.  If they can break the rules with impunity they're getting privileged above everyone else.  If most people lie to the IRS and then send the IRS proof that they lied just to taunt the IRS they're going to have to face consequences.  Churches shouldn't be treated any differently.

They were presented with a choice, you can be non political and be tax exempt, or you can be political and not be tax exempt.  They've decided that they don't have to make that choice.  They're being political and refusing to pay taxes.  They're breaking the rules.

It doesn't matter that they've got an army of lawyers to try to help them get away with it, it doesn't matter that they want someone to try to enforce the rules upon them, it doesn't matter that this is a political stunt and responding to it is what they want, none of that matters.  What matters is that they're breaking the rules.  When they break the rules they need to be held accountable no matter the politics of the issue.

You can say whatever you want, but you can't get a tax deduction, or in this case an exemption, if you lied to get it and that lie is discovered.  We know the lie was discovered in the past (they sent the IRS the proof themselves) and will be discovered this time (for they will send the proof) so it's time for their exemption to go bye-bye.