User:Eighty5cacao/misc/Random thoughts


 * This page was created by moving content from User:Eighty5cacao/TODO (mostly the "Unknown" section).

Aspie thoughts

 * It should give you an idea what kind of "geek" I am that, whenever I watch the music video for Lily Allen's song "Not Fair," it takes me a lot of willpower not to blurt out, "Chromatic aberration! Chromatic aberration!!" (The chromatic aberration and vignetting are part of the stylistic suck, so I really shouldn't be complaining.)
 * Language Log has some potentially useful notes on the word "nerd"

Linguistics
NB: Issues relating to TTM go in that section

I chose not to put this under User:Eighty5cacao/TODO due to the lack of real-world precedents: Consider the possibility of an intelligent race using a personal-naming system based on challenge-response authentication; this means that between any two members of a community, there are sufficiently many possible challenge–response pairs that no given challenge or response is repeated often enough to qualify as a "name" in the traditional human sense. This might require intelligence slightly above the human average (say 9–10 phonological loop and 250–300 Dunbar number), but it's marginally plausible that a brain like that of a bottlenose dolphin could manage this.

Toki Pona
(If Toki Pona was designed specifically as anti-capitalist, please cite.) Ordinarily, "human being" = "human" = &lt;jan&gt;, so how would we express this distinction? If "being" is close enough to "thinking," then presumably &lt;jan sona&gt; and &lt;jan pali&gt; (or at least &lt;sona&gt; and &lt;pali&gt;) would appear somewhere in the translation. But how do we emphasize that the intended sense is "relaxed (meditative) thinking" as opposed to "busy (frenzied) thinking"? I expect that the sentence conforms sufficiently to the Toki Pona philosophy to make this question valid.
 * Somewhere on the old version of tokipona.org, there was a sample phrase &lt;nasin mani li ike&gt; with translation given as "capitalism is negative." This doesn't seem neutral enough. I personally would have gone with radix malorum est cupiditas; another, more accurate translation might be "consumerism is bad."
 * How would the line "I want to be a human being, not a human doing" from the song "Scatman's World" translate?

Selkie (webcomic)

 * This is not relevant to the article Selkie, as Tepples explains in [//pineight.com/mw/index.php?title=Selkie&diff=4806&oldid=3813 this edit].

The first official word on the protagonist's physiology is here. (Yes, I noticed the reference to 867-5309/Jenny here, but I digress.)

More physiology information can be found in the sketch linked from this post, directly above the comments (possibly NSFW).

My observations:
 * The symptoms of the peanut allergy don't quite match with those of human anaphylaxis. (But are any fish species known to be allergic to peanuts? What about aquatic mammals?)
 * "Vocal cords adapted for use in and out of water" &mdash; but what would the use be in water? Compare bottlenose dolphins, which do not have (?) vocal cords. (NB: See official explanation)
 * The overall design seems too human-like and poorly hydrodynamic

The Time Machine

 * Yes, I'm aware the IMDb forums are shutting down. No, I don't want help fixing or removing the links (yet).

(Clarify: To some extent, he was already altering his beliefs in response to earlier encounters with the Eloi.)
 * What North Korea has to do with the themes of The Time Machine (sandefur.typepad.com)
 * Explain how Weena's characterization is important to the story. Mention specifically:
 * In chapter 5 shortly after the Traveller meets Weena, he is forced to alter his belief that time travel is "serious business":
 * But the problems of the world had to be mastered. I had not, I said to myself, come into the future to carry on a miniature flirtation. ... I had as much trouble as comfort from her devotion. Nevertheless she was, somehow, a very great comfort.
 * Revision history of the epilogue (erkelzaar.tsudao.com) &mdash; the Holt edition focuses on the characters of the frame story, while the Heinemann/Atlantic text concludes with Weena's flowers as a symbol of "gratitude and a mutual tenderness"
 * The White Flowers in The Time Machine (shmoop.com) &mdash; "delicate," "weak," and artificial selection &mdash; shmoop.com has more to say about Weena here, which agrees quite well with what I've said here. In general, Shmoop really seems to know their stuff... (TODO: quote?)
 * More from Shmoop: Narrator hypothesized to have tampered with time machine
 * Just for fun (will not make it into mainspace): Bug 471723 – Reject certs that expired before the date the browser was compiled, regardless of system clock setting (bugzilla.mozilla.org) jokingly mentions time travel/TTM
 * Food for thought: How would one make PKI work in an universe where time travel is possible?
 * Explain later: "If we starve for long enough, evolution might take care of that for us" (referring to insular dwarfism)
 * BBC News gives an example of modern-day hunter-gatherers, which we might be able to mention in a section about diet/metabolism. This isn't so directly applicable to the Eloi though.
 * Link to User:Eighty5cacao/misc/Human cognition somewhere, once that gains more content (i.e., this is an area of cognition in which the Eloi are especially lacking)
 * Cryptomnesia that may have occurred during the writing of The Time Machine (erk...) – specific sources claimed are Vril and Erewhon – among other things, this proposes an OOU etymology for the name Weena; I don't agree with all conclusions
 * Could cuteness aggression be relevant to the development of a predatory relationship between the Eloi and Morlocks? (livescience.com) Specifically, to what extent might it override the baby schema?
 * In my (unscientific) opinion, cuteness aggression really encompasses at least two distinct phenomena: the use of excessive physical force, as described at allthetropes:And Call Him George, and the use of food metaphors for cuteness: see for example a Cute Overload commenter on Honduran white bats ("When you nibble on their ears, do you taste lemony goodness?"), as well as the "kitten huffing" meme on Uncyclopedia.
 * Real-world WMG: Cuteness aggression is a relic of an evolutionary time when parental investment was generally low and hence individuals (especially, but not exclusively, of other species) that satisfied the baby schema were potential food sources.
 * IMDb commenter raises the issue that detailed depictions of Eloi reproductive behavior could be confused with CP by the general public, and in particular by legal authorities; this is part of the reason both films show Eloi adults as similar to present-day human adults (I acknowledge that the post contains inaccuracies. For example, one might as well have said that "the children of the Eloi develop at such a slow rate...")
 * From the same thread, notes on the possibility of a third species descended from present-day humans (and another thread)
 * Someone on the pre-Orain TV Tropes proposed that the film adaptations are correct in assuming a punctuated equilibrium. What to make of this?
 * wikia:timemachine:Eloi Language says that Beyond the Time Machine also contains its own Eloi language. That novel proposes the etymology "boldly adventurous one" for the name Weena. (Marginal spoiler: It may be helpful as you browse that list to know that "Gimm" is a name, nickname, or title adopted by Weena during the timeline of that book, if I understand the [//web.archive.org/web/20091027000652/http://us.geocities.com/bttm_book/ author's official site] correctly.) Of course, this is all about as much BS as the 2002 film's Eloi language. Todo: mention something about the naming conventions from The Wee Time Traveler
 * Banning of fictional depictions of time travel in China - where to use this?...
 * What does "...and his head was bare" in III.13 mean?. That at least some Eloi have hair is mentioned at IV.3: "Their hair, which was uniformly curly, came to a sharp end at the neck and cheek..." ("Bare" probably means only "without a hat," in the sense of trope:Never Bareheaded.) However, IV.19: "...the same form of costume, the same soft hairless visage, and the same girlish rotundity of limb" - considering the word "visage," this probably refers to a level of hair typical for infants.
 * Ecological damage / resource exhaustion: Compare backstory of the xkcd "Time" comic

Unsorted

 * Quiz: are you good at customer experience work? (goodexperience.com) (will explain more later)
 * some Scientific American editor(?) on the good kind of behavioral neoteny (a term I coined myself, not to be confused with "psychological neoteny" meaning over-dependency). As usual, explain more later
 * Cracked on extended breastfeeding &mdash; where might we be able to use this? (See User:Eighty5cacao/misc/Eloi physiology (fanon))
 * pumpktris (cheezburger.com) (which I originally misread as "Pumptris")
 * App Store Review Guidelines:
 * What exactly constitutes a "professional" humorist/satirist?
 * I didn't see any conlang-unfriendly terms in the specific leaked revision. Might such have been added later, though?
 * Neanderthal physiology: [//pineight.com/mw/index.php?title=User:Tepples/linkdump&diff=7828&oldid=7805 Tepples beat me to the punch] in getting it onto the wiki. Now I have to figure out what existing WMG this might be helpful with
 * Find dissenting views, e.g. these comments, about the suitability of Dailymotion as an alternative video host; it may be about as aggressive as YouTube for certain musical recordings (but still has fewer false positives in general, esp. now - pay attention to the dates on those comments)
 * Figure out how to work The Magical Quest Starring Mickey Mouse into the lede of Wrecking Ball Boy where precedents are discussed (XXX: wasn't this already attempted/discussed before?)
 * [//www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAcjV60RnRw Will We Ever Run Out of New Music?]
 * "Artists have a gift in representing the beauty of the world. Should this necessarily become a contribution to saving the environment?" (from a poll on the deviantART homepage) - mention at this WMG?
 * torbug:8557 should mention bmo:783047
 * Slate article on the copyright ethics of Full Screen Mario
 * examples of monospace fonts
 * Is anyone working on a JVM written in JavaScript (basically the opposite of Rhino)? This seems like the next logical step after pdf.js and Shumway... (An implementation SHOULD NOT be granted any more network/file system/... privileges than the JavaScript engine already has by default. Thus, such an anti-Rhino would not be useful for bank authentication applets that profile the user's system specs, nor for Pingtest.net, but it would be good enough for simple educational demos like Paul Falstad's physics applets TODO: find current example.)
 * Does there exist a "Flappy Flappy" game which combines the mechanics of Flappy Bird with the characters of Flappy?
 * Running on Ice "NES" mix (not really, as it's obviously a MIDI file played through GXSCC); one of the comments suggests familiarity with Tepples's simfile
 * It pisses me off when people rant about inaccuracies on Wikipedia without attempting to fix them themselves. (The problem is that even those who are willing to learn MediaWiki syntax may have difficulty putting up with BRD and/or providing reliable sources. Potential mini-rant topic?)

Subpages not within project scope

 * User:Eighty5cacao/misc/Computer maintenance to address elsewhere
 * User:Eighty5cacao/misc/Requested TCRF edits
 * User:Eighty5cacao/misc/StepMania course ideas
 * User:Eighty5cacao/misc/TV Tropes articles not on All The Tropes

Subpages within project scope

 * User:Eighty5cacao/misc/App Store Review Guidelines - need more specific name; the point is to give objections to/concerns about individual guidelines
 * User:Eighty5cacao/misc/Link rot cases
 * User:Eighty5cacao/misc/NES
 * User:Eighty5cacao/misc/Unverified dot clock rates

Subpages, status uncertain
How would a developer protect against users who would rather spend the time to build from source than the money to purchase a precompiled binary package? Keep in mind that a truly Free project would have no nonfree assets that need to be excluded from the source distribution. To sidestep this question, a more complex business model is needed. Or is our economy fundamentally broken? The GNU Project acknowledges the need for discretionary non-gratis distribution of libre software, but my point is that game developers naturally object to gratis sharing of a product they are also selling for money. The purpose of the page is not solely to list examples of existing games, but rather to give suggestions for business models, development strategies, and genres. Any such essay should explain why game developers should care about Free software in the first place.
 * User:Eighty5cacao/misc/Libre-without-gratis games – Artists need to get paid. So how does one make a game that is Free software but not free of charge? (In other words: Gratis-without-libre is easy; libre-without-gratis is hard. This is especially a problem for those who are interested in developing video games; see Genres of non-free software § Video games.)
 * Related: The problem with the video-game industry is that as the capabilities of computing hardware grow, so do the financial and manpower resources needed to achieve high production values suitable for a commercially-successful game. This may justify certain "retro" gaming trends; the problem with that is that many casual gamers don't understand why faux-retro games should cost more than used copies of true-retro games. Therefore, developers and publishers are left with doubt how to design and market such faux-retro games.
 * As a broad philosophical question: Why do video games exist at all, if there are few or no economic arguments for their continued development and use in a world where a libre-content movement exists? What about tabletop games, which like video games tend to have more copyrightable assets than the kind of playground games that have value as exercise? (The answer has something to do with eustress vs. distress vs. relaxation; TODO.)

More practically: Free software ultimately requires free hardware, to avoid dependence on proprietary drivers. The problem is that the ideal free-soft/hardware world that includes free CPU architectures is unachievable because it will never be affordable for a hobbyist to design and fabricate his/her own chips, and the existing fabs will never be independently auditable enough to satisfy the paranoid people. (Existing FPGAs don't solve this problem because they are proprietary designs produced on proprietary fabs, and programmability results in some sacrifice in performance/power/cost tradeoffs.) In other words, taking the definition of "libre" to the extreme would imply that every nontrivial computer program is Java-trapped by nonfree hardware.
 * User:Eighty5cacao/misc/Economic implications of neurodiversity
 * Introversion and the autism spectrum make it harder to get a good-paying job, even though geeks like technical fields (find or suggest research about jobs tailored to the autism spectrum and training of hiring managers about neurodiversity; also, to what extent do extroversion and allism correlate with wealth?)
 * User:Eighty5cacao/misc/Importance of free software – How much does it really matter? A writing prompt, which is admittedly a bit of a strawman, inspired by Bruce Schneier's movie-plot threat contests: Devise a plot in which a global adversary can choose a person at random and have him/her heavily fined, imprisoned, tortured, executed, ..., or otherwise harshly sanctioned for matters related directly to his/her use of non-free software. To make this interesting, you should avoid focusing solely on issues of hidden surveillance code in said non-free software; the adversary should interpret the mere use of some software to be a punishable offense.
 * User:Eighty5cacao/misc/Global economy and technology – more specifically "Observations on the global economy and technology"; supertopic for all the above (except perhaps the autism-spectrum stuff)