Personal correspondence:
- Larry Olin Horn (lohnet 2012) <hornlo:FOO:lohnet.org>
- Fingerprint: 7970 A8CE A806 AF13 22DE 6423 516C 2C8D C143 C726

Business:
- Larry Olin Horn (ptk 2012) <hornlo:FOO:ptk.org>
- Fingerprint: C323 67EF 0008 B488 02C2 9D79 2123 87CC 2FDC 9E2F

My old -5954 phone number is gone as of yesterday. If you need my new new number, send me email.

… back to the cave.

Personal correspondence:
- Larry Olin Horn (lohnet mail 2011) <hornlo:FOO:lohnet.org>
- Fingerprint: D65E A7CA 3343 515E 5012 DF28 D501 B8A1 1673 3E32

Business:
- Larry Olin Horn (ptk mail 2011) <hornlo:FOO:ptk.org>
- Fingerprint: BC56 584B AF68 F88D B328 4E44 F6F4 2E1F CE64 3185

Business, Windows:
- Larry Olin Horn (winxp1 email 2011) <hornlo:FOO:ptk.org>
- Fingerprint: 4FC8 F2FA 95E1 CAD0 B9B0 E9E4 0401 505B 6705 B3A3

Business, when I have to use Outlook / Exchange:
- Larry Olin Horn (ptk outlook 2011) <Larry.Horn:FOO:ptk.org>
- Fingerprint: 74ED 0D41 FB5F F499 AB3C 70F7 75B5 EBFE B789 12EB

What if I attached a 4’33″ long mp3 of silence?

If I recorded it myself, would that be a forgery or a performance?

What if I used a kazoo instead of a piano?

Would 4’34″ of silence be a derivative work?

Would 15″ of silence, accompanied with this commentary, be an acceptable use excerpt?

Would the sound of one hand clapping be the appropriate sign of appreciation?

I haven’t thought about that in years. My uncle was working there at the time; my aunt too, or maybe she was just visiting him. I vaguely remember them describing the experience. In any case, the “44th anniversary” part is what shocked me — I’ve been reminded that it happened nearly a half-century ago.

  Time flies like an arrow.
  Fruit flies like a banana.

I think I first saw that in a old Scientific American article about the difficulties in machine parsing of natural language. Lost in translation. A geek pun to me, since translation also refers to coordinate transformations: translation, rotation, scaling, skewing, … preserving topological equivalents across gross distortions, no tearing allowed. Ants. Moebius Strip II.

I sometimes envy those who have a sense of continuous, unbroken time. I imagine that for them events are like beads on a string, pages in a book, frames in a strip of film. Mention to them some event and they can provide context, cause and effect, sliding their finger along the curve and saying “see, this happened before, and this happened after”. The people who can always quickly answer those “where were you when such-and-such happened” questions that I hate. Steel Beach.

Like the “one, two, three, many” number concept attributed to some primitive tribes, time to me is only “today, yesterday, a while back, and a long time ago”. Time lies like pieces of a shattered mirror beneath my feet, glints and reflections, partial images fractured along random edges. Memory is a kaleidoscope filled with broken events, ever changing in random juxtaposition, tumbling in disconnected chaos. Mona Lisa Overdrive.

Cory Doctorow says:

According to the filings in Blake J Robbins v Lower Merion School District (PA) et al, the laptops issued to high-school students in the well-heeled Philly suburb have webcams that can be covertly activated by the schools’ administrators, who have used this facility to spy on students and even their families. The issue came to light when the Robbins’s child was disciplined for “improper behavior in his home” and the Vice Principal used a photo taken by the webcam as evidence. The suit is a class action, brought on behalf of all students issued with these machines.

Just WTF sort of delusional thinking gives a principal (or any official, for that matter) the idea that covertly monitoring a child at home is within the purview of his position?

I want you to think of the last time you were surprised. Good, bad, I don’t care. When was the last time you were really surprised? Got it? Ok, now think about the very first thing that you thought about the surprise. I don’t want to know how you eventually handled it; I want you to think about your instantaneous first reaction.

In the context of corporate bad news delivered in a group setting, he personifies the various immediate reactions with characters such as Dr. No, Raging Bull, the Handler, we’re Doomed, etc. He’s careful to note, in a “follow up” for each character, that these initial reactions to surprise are not necessarily the subsequent way the individuals actually handle the situation, merely how they begin to assimilate it: ” … I know this knee jerk reaction is not who they are, this is just how they react. Understanding these varied potential reactions is just the first part of digesting a surprise – it helps you understand what to expect so you [a manager] can begin to figure out what to do next.”

When your plane breaks apart at 35000 feet, you have about three minutes before you hit the ground at around 120 miles per hour. You might even survive. Dan Koeppel provides a morbidly humorous survival guide in Popular Mechanics’ “How to Fall 35,000 Feet—And Survive“.

According to the Geneva-based Aircraft Crashes Record Office, 118,934 people have died in 15,463 plane crashes between 1940 and 2008. Even when you add failed-chute sky divers, Hamilton’s tally of confirmed or plausible lived-to-tell-about-it incidents is only 157, with 42 occurring at heights over 10,000 feet.

Interspersed with accounts of actual survival, Koeppel offers some quirky suggestions for pre-fall training, including “banzai parachuting”:

The ultimate learn-by-doing experience might be a lesson from Japanese parachutist Yasuhiro Kubo, who holds the world record in the activity’s banzai category. The sky diver tosses his chute from the plane and then jumps out after it, waiting as long as possible to retrieve it, put it on and pull the ripcord. In 2000, Kubo—starting from 9842 feet—fell for 50 seconds before recovering his gear.

Something I didn’t expect was the huge number of comments arguing about the effect of body weight on terminal velocity. Clearly, a lot of people don’t understand the difference between free-fall in vacuum and in atmosphere.

I’ve posted a few pictures on Flickr.