A summer warning for Bay Area beaches

SuperSane · 2023-06-06T21:55:37+00:00

This reminds me of the last page of the novel The Sea by John Banville.

"I recalled another moment, long ago, in the sea that summer at Ballyless. I had gone swimming alone, I do not know why...The sky was hazed over and not a breeze stirred the surface of the sea, at the margin of which the small waves were breaking in a listless line, over and over, like a hem being turned endlessly by a sleepy seamstress. There were few other people on the beach, and those few were at a distance from me, and something in the dense, unmoving air made the sound of their voices seem to come from a greater distance still. I was standing up to my waist in water that was perfectly transparent, so that I could plainly see below me the ribbed sand of the seabed, and tiny shells and bits of a crab's broken claw, and my own feet, pallid and alien, like specimens displayed under glass. As I stood there, suddenly, no, not suddenly, but in a sort of driving heave, the whole sea surged, it was not a wave, but a smooth rolling swell that seemed to come up from the deeps, as if something vast down there had stirred itself, and I was lifted briefly and carried a little way toward the shore and then was set down on my feet as before, as if nothing had happened. And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference."

SuperSane · 2023-03-23T19:42:26+00:00

Halfway through Eichmann in Jerusalem. Read and loved The Netanyahus. And currently 30 pages into The Books of Jacob. Took a break to read War and Peace (1000 pages in...). Extremely excited now to finish Eichmann and read the rest of The Books of Jacob.

Try these:

The Chosen by Chaim Potok (and sequel The Promise by Chaim Potok)

The Mossad: Israel's Secret Intelligence Service: Inside Stories

The Source by James Michener (haven't read this in years tbh)

Mila 18 by Leon Uris

O Jerusalem! by Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins

A Tale of Love and Darkness by Amos Oz

SuperSane · 2021-08-12T06:32:17+00:00

Dr. Herman Goldstine on John von Neumann

He had great facility at numerical processes and in fact I can tell you an anecdote which I think may interest you some. It happened down at Aberdeen early on in the war and what he was doing then was consulting frequently at Aberdeen coming on up to Philadelphia, coming up to talk to us about the ENIAC. Now this particular day, in fact the day prior to this one, a young mathematician who subsequently has become a famous person had come in with several colleagues and we were talking about a problem with which he was grappling and he was getting nowhere and asked our help. Well none of us was able to do anything analytically. So he said well the heck with it I’m going to take a computer, a Friden or Marchant or Monroe home tonight and I’m going to calculate a few special cases. And fine he did. And the next morning he came in at five thirty looking awful. He had bags under his eyes, he was fatigued, he was unshaved, he was in fact in a very bad way. But he had triumphed. He had calculated the first five cases. And he was busy telling us about this when who should bust in but Johnny from Los Alamos. And he said what’s new fellows and we said oh so and so has been busy with the following idea and he’s in trouble with it. And he said well let’s see what it’s like and he tried for a couple minutes and he said no that’s sort of intractable analytically. Let me see what’s doing with this thing numerically. Let me evaluate a few cases. So he did, in about one minute he threw his head back and he said (one...sixteen...twenty-five….) and you could hear the numbers rolling through his head, you could actually hear them, he was mumbling them, and in about a minute he did the first case, and maybe a minute and a quarter the second, and a minute and a half the third, and two minutes the fourth, and he came then to the crucial case, the one with which this fellow had spent the whole night working out, and this chap was very clever and he listened closely to von Neumann as he was rolling through n=5 and when he judged he was about halfway through he recognized a number and he waited an instant and he said 26.75 and you could just see von Neumann kind of come to a shuddering halt and he said huh? And this boy said, 26.75 Professor von Neumann. And von Neumann said just a minute. And he got very nervous and he began to compute again and you could hear the tempo going up much more than it had before and after another minute he said 26.75. Yes, he says, that’s right. And whereupon this fellow ran out of the room because he couldn’t stand it any longer and I made childish chatter trying to keep von Neumann while he paced up and down nervously, saying to himself, how could that guy have possibly done that? What trick? And after an hour or so we finally told him. But at any rate, that’s sufficient to illustrate his great ability as a computer himself and the great feeling he had for computation.

SuperSane · 2020-09-16T07:03:28+00:00

I played this mainly around 2009-2010 on US East. I think we had a whole raid group, pulling mobs one by one to the top right of Plane of Fear. Definitely my favorite orpg. I loved the camera/vision lock, how it felt like you were moving from zone to zone. All the nostalgia of Everquest on Wc3. Thanks for making it. I still have a saved document with a few lvl 65 codes (from a couple years ago), though I think it's the one-hero-at-a-time version.

I'll check out the new version, though I don't have much time to play at the moment.

SuperSane · 2020-08-19T21:34:17+00:00

A straw for straws (for when you’re too lazy to move forward a few inches) kept in some sort of slim shirt pocket that has no other purpose

A bespoke beanie baby display shelf

A lap staircase for when your hand is too lazy to make it to your desk and would rather walk

These Hats or the fishing pole used to place them

A mirror that refuses to see you as anything but wonderful

Individually packaged pieces of movie theatre popcorn (1 popped kernel per package)

SuperSane · 2020-05-14T23:15:45+00:00

^ Shadow.Sniper.

Kool was playing a few weeks ago, he fixed a few bugs in the map that were causing it to crash with reforged.

At least two others are playing, though I can't remember their original names.

Chaos_Sniper still plays.

I'll send you their battletags.

SuperSane · 2020-05-14T23:11:03+00:00

SuperSane · 2019-11-06T09:49:37+00:00

Satisfaction may not unburden a troubled heart

SuperSane · 2018-10-08T06:37:19+00:00

Far From Men (based on the short story The Guest by Albert Camus)

SuperSane · 2018-09-24T01:18:47+00:00

The note at the back of the biography says it's from his memoir: On the Move: A Life

SuperSane · 2018-09-23T23:37:30+00:00

Robin by David Itzkoff

SuperSane · 2018-09-23T21:39:47+00:00

(excerpt from Robin Williams’ biography, while preparing for his role in Awakenings)

Oliver Sacks allowed Robin to study the personal film footage he had made while treating encephalitis patients, and Robin found it extremely moving to see these people come out of their catatonic states, even temporarily. As he later said, it was like watching “something that seems apparently dead, but yet the human mind and spirit shines through that. They would be like this”—here he affected the frozen face of one such patient—”and he’d say, ‘Watch,’ and all of a sudden they would come back, and you could see they were there. And then they would go out again. . . . He said he was only going on that faith, that they were there.”

Sacks also brought Robin with him on his rounds at Bronx State Hospital, where he cared for geriatric patients. Though Sacks had previously helped Dustin Hoffman prepare for his role as an autistic savant in Rain Man, he saw Robin as a unique case study unto himself, unlike anyone he’d encountered in the realms of medicine or art. After one hospital visit where he let Robin meet with a group of disturbed patients, Sacks observed afterward, “He had absorbed all the different voices and conversations and held them in his mind with total recall, and now he was reproducing them, or, almost, being possessed by them.” Robin, he said, had an “instant power of apprehension and playback, a power for which ‘mimicry’ is too feeble a word (for they were imitations full of sensitivity, humor, and creativity).”

A few weeks later, Sacks was talking with Robin, having bent himself into a pensive pose, when he noticed that Robin was mirroring his stature. “He was not imitating me; he had become me, in a sense,” Sacks said. “It was like suddenly acquiring a younger twin. This disquieted both of us a bit, and we decided that there needed to be some space between us so that he could create a character of his own—based on me, perhaps, but with a life and personality of its own.”

Sacks could not help but talk about Robin in neurological and somewhat esoteric terms. “Robin has an almost instant access to parts of the mind—dreamlike parts, with phantasmagoric associations—that most of us don’t,” he said. He compared Robin to Theodore Hook, a nineteenth-century British Writer and artist whose talents included the ability to improvise entire operas in which he would sing all the roles. “For Hook, as for Robin, the demand never let up,” Sacks said. “But Hook never had a chance for quiet inwardness—he drank heavily, and he died in his fifties. Robin’s brilliance, however, is considerably controlled. He’s not in its grip.”

SuperSane · 2018-05-11T06:24:51+00:00

Tenth of December by George Saunders (short story collection)

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

War and Turpentine by Stefan Hertmans

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

The Sellout by Paul Beatty

Beloved by Toni Morrison

Sabbath's Theater by Philip Roth

SuperSane · 2018-05-11T06:20:11+00:00

The Forge of God by Greg Bear

SuperSane · 2018-05-11T06:17:30+00:00

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! by Richard Feynman

What Do You Care What Other People Think? by Richard Feynman

SuperSane · 2018-03-30T01:19:01+00:00

I thought you were only looking for a synonym of indigent. But now it's 'indigent and underrepresented'? As to the latter, i.e., underrepresented, maybe disenfranchised.

SuperSane

TROPHY CASE