Bruce Sterling’s Shareable.net story about astroturfer gulag: “Shareable.net’s series of science fiction stories about societies built on sharing and sustainability continues, this time with a deeply ambivalent, darkly hilarious story by Bruce Sterling called ‘The Exterminator’s Want-Ad,’ about the special rehab prison that corporate astroturfers are sent to after climate collapse:

Personally, I loved to buy stuff: I admired a consumer society. I sincerely liked to carry out a clean, crisp, commercial transaction: the kind where you simply pay some money for goods and services. I liked driving my SUV to the mall, whipping out my alligator wallet, and buying myself some hard liquor, a steak dinner, and maybe a stripper. All that awful stuff at the Pottery Barn and Banana Republic, when you never knew ‘Who the hell was buying that?’ That guy was me.

Claire and I hated the sharing networks, because we were paid to hate them. We hated all social networks, like Facebook, because they destroyed the media that we owned. We certainly hated free software, because it was like some ever-growing anti-commercial fungus. We hated search engines and network aggregators, people like Google — not because Google was evil, but because they weren’t. We really hated ‘file-sharers’ — the swarming pirates who were chewing up the wealth of our commercial sponsors.

We hated all networks on principle: we even hated power networks. Wind and solar only sorta worked, and were very expensive. We despised green power networks because climate change was a myth. Until the climate actually changed. Then the honchos who paid us started drinking themselves to death.

The Exterminator’s Want-Ad

(Image: claytonjayscott.com)

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Errol Morris: The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is: “In his ongoing series of fascinating NYT essays on the ‘influence and uses of photography,’ documentary filmmaker Errol Morris interviews David Dunning, co-author of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which says stupid people are too stupid to realize they are stupid.

Morris opens his piece with the story of attempted bank robber MacArthur Wheeler, who rubbed lemon juice on his face before entering the bank because he believed it would render him invisible to security cameras. ‘If Wheeler was too stupid to be a bank robber,’ writes Morris, ‘perhaps he was also too stupid to know that he was too stupid to be a bank robber — that is, his stupidity protected him from an awareness of his own stupidity.’

DAVID DUNNING: Well, my specialty is decision-making. How well do people make the decisions they have to make in life? And I became very interested in judgments about the self, simply because, well, people tend to say things, whether it be in everyday life or in the lab, that just couldn’t possibly be true. And I became fascinated with that. Not just that people said these positive things about themselves, but they really, really believed them. Which led to my observation: if you’re incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent.

ERROL MORRIS: Why not?

DAVID DUNNING: If you knew it, you’d say, “Wait a minute. The decision I just made does not make much sense. I had better go and get some independent advice.” But when you’re incompetent, the skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is. In logical reasoning, in parenting, in management, problem solving, the skills you use to produce the right answer are exactly the same skills you use to evaluate the answer. And so we went on to see if this could possibly be true in many other areas. And to our astonishment, it was very, very true.

The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is (Part 1)

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Carrot rainbow: “

As PNH reminds us, ‘The reason modern Western carrots are orange is because they were bred that way, in the 16th and 17th centuries, in tribute to the Dutch royal House of Orange.’

Carrots of Many Colors
(Thanks, @bopuc)

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800 Watt Portable Generator: “

I’ve owned this generator for two years and it’s great for light field work. Turn all your electric tools (weed trimmer, hedge trimmer, leaf blower, even electric chain saws) into gas tools. This generator is OEM’ed to a lot of distributors, who then put their own facade on it. The cheapest version appears to be available at Harbor Freight for $99.

It’s very robust and endures overload gracefully (it just peters out without any damage.) It’s the antithesis of the previously reviewed Honda EU Series. You could wear out and throw away a lot of these generators for the price of one of the Honda inverter generators. And the electronic Honda’s don’t take even a momentary overload gracefully. A momentary surge from a power tool will trip the Honda’s breakers even if the nominal power of the load is within spec.

— Bruce Bowen

Here is a demo of the generator in action:

Chicago Electric Generator 800 Rated Watts/900 Max Watts Portable Generator

$99

Available from Harbor Freight

Steele Products SP-GG100 1,000 Watt 1.5 HP 2-Stroke Gas Powered Portable Generator

$177

Available from Amazon

Dynamic Hardware Concepts 1200 Watt Portable Generator

$139

Available from O’Reilly Auto

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Frank Gehry designs brain research center in Vegas: “

Frank Gehry’s latest project is the Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health in Las Vegas, where people research degenerative brain diseases. I like how the crazy contours and irregularities are counter to what we typically imagine health-based organizations to look like.

Frank Gehry main page [via Dezeen]

Image: Matthew Carbone

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Gratuitous Dancing Baby Video: “

Must be something in the water in Brazil. What is it with all the weird baby videos we see from that part of the world? Here’s another, spotted by Tara McGinley at Dangerous Minds.

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I draw your attention to this page.

Likewise, when your words and thoughts and foods are 5d based, guess what happens to the body? Now let me ask you a question. Can you tell what words and thoughts and foods are 5d based? Bingo!!!

Would you believe a double-quarter with cheese and diet coke could possibly be 5d based? The frequencies of a substance in dictated by it component part. In other words, the sum total frequencies of all of its parts equal the base frequency of that item.

Since I’m starting to have fun asking the questions for a change, let me ask you few more.

DO YOU KNOW THE BASE FREQUENCY OF THE DOUBLE-QUARTER-POUNDER WITH CHEESE MEAL FROM MCDONALD AND DIET COKE?

DO YOU KNOW THE BASE FREQUENCY OF THE 5 MAGIC WORDS I GAVE YOU?

DO YOU KNOW THE BASE FREQUENCY OF ANY WORDS AND THOUGHTS AND FOODS?

I draw your attention to

The ‘Little Orphan Annie’ Cliffhanger Finale Is Completely Insane

15 Suicidally Depressing Newspaper Comic Strips