Category: Social media

The soul of this blog will be transmigrating this evening

Yes. Some new sort of payment system means that this blog needs to go to a different server, or something. This shouldn’t affect all of you, but it will mean that this evening I will at some point be advised not to try to add anything to it, until the transmigration has completed itself.

So, to keep me well out of the way of this, and following my something-however-insignificant-every-day rule (which I followed yesterday also, twice), here is a link to one of those optical illusions I like to mention here from time to time, basically whenever I see one I like. This optical illusion, by turning some blue to black next to some white, turns the white yellow. Yellow that is not there but which is plainly visible. Very strange.

It isn’t Friday, which is my usual day for Cats and/or Other Creatures postings, but optical illusions like this make me wonder how the world looks to other creatures. They all see things we don’t, and we presumably see things they don’t. Could a video be made of how some Other Creature sees things, which we could then see?

Video of straight line going through curved gap

If I add all that href https blah blah stuff to the link, then I can put the link to this cute video here.

But if I just shove the address without any hrefery, I get the video right here:

Blog and learn. I just shoved up the link, and there it was! Here!

This is also fun. Although, it feels so fun it could be fake.

BMNB quote of the day: Julia on the retreat of the monstrous regiment of ASI Matts

I love this tweet, from Julia Behan of the Adam Smith Institute:

Today is the first day of there being more women than Matts in the ASI office.

LOL. Genuinely. Sams Bowman and Dumitriu also liked it. So, lots of Sams on the prowl as well.

Come to think of it, there seem also to be a lot of Julias around these days.

Creature stuff

First up: Otters chasing a butterfly.

Next, zebras:

One of these photos. Jordan Peterson would surely like this photo.

In case you didn’t realise, Cats bond with their people too. I’m already convinced. When GD2’s family’s cat Oscar got home after going awol, he slept for about a solid day. This says to me that he was stressed out when away from home, but not when home with his humans.

From Laughing Squid, a paper cameleon, a trampolining fox, and a raven who speaks German.

Lastly, and most depressingly: Animal painter known as ‘Galician Picasso’ found half eaten by own dogs.

Here goes the tutorial for the latest protest hairstyle in Hong Kong

Here:

Like a commenter says: “It’s not a mask, it’s just a hair style!” Superb.

Attended talk about Hong Kong last night at Christian Michel’s. Also superb.

LATER: this at Samizdata.

Video of a baby rhino on the charge

Here.

Clues as to what you’ll see, if you click on that, in the category list below.

Happy birthday

Happy birthday to me, that is, because today has been my 72nd birthday. Several emails have arrived noting that various Facebook friends have been wishing me a Happy Birthday. I find Facebook baffling and useless as a means of personal communication, so am unable to access any of these messages on my Facebook feed, where I can detect no sign of them. So let me say here, to Robert L, Bjorn, Tim, Rob F, among others: thanks for all the good wishes.

In this computerised era, everyone is prompted by their various machines to do this, but it still means something that they actually do it.

Also appreciated were various phone calls. It tells you something about the experience of Getting Old (see the category list below) that all of these conversations included, in among the birthday greetings, medical discussions of various bodily malfunctions and of the efforts of the NHS, such as they have been, to correct these. My various friends and family are also Getting Old, you see. Older, anyway.

The general lesson from these medical conversations seems to be: if you want the NHS to start being properly on your side, get yourself classified as an emergency. Let me clarify this. You need to be threatening to die. Then, the NHS seems to stir itself into action. But if you are merely rather damaged and you are able to get worse before death looms at all threateningly, the NHS can’t seem to persuade itself to be that interested. It focusses its attention instead on manipulating the various queues it puts you in, in order to made its statistics look better than they actually are. Basically, it tries to keep you in a queue before it allows you to join the actual Official Queue, the one it wants to keep short, and thereby make itself look good. One of the friends I spoke with today said he had recently photoed a bench in a hospital corridor with the words “SUB QUEUE” attached to it.

Birthdays, when you are rather old, remind you that you are Getting Old. Which might explain why, to celebrate my own birthday, I have, by way of giving myself a present, chosen to have a good old grumble.

A van making a radical argument for eating cats

Here.

Demanding consistency can backfire.

Getting serious about a gun control joke

Funny:

I considered selling my weapons “back” to the government, but after a background check and thorough investigation into the buyer, I determined the buyer has a history of violence and is mentally unstable. Big risk to everyone around it.

This sounds logical enough, but this “government” (the government of the USA) of which this tweeter tweets already possesses an abundance of weaponry. If the US government collected more guns, that would affect those disarmed, but not the US government. The US government would just become a tiny bit more armed.

Gun control laws would likewise make criminals only a bit less armed. But they would utterly disarm the law-abiding. Which would make the law-abiding far less able to defend themselves against crimes of all kinds. These are, and always have been, the real arguments against gun control.

When a joke is felt to be expressing a truth – and if the comments on this tweet that I have read are anything to go by, then this joke definitely is so felt by many – then it becomes important to get serious about the joke.