I am not happy with Google search results for mmptbaa. Googling “what does mmptbaa mean” is no better. Let’s see how long it takes for Google to index this post. MMPTBAA is an acronym that stands for “makes me proud to be an American.”

"Stars & Stripes"by Henri Photography is licensed under CC BY 2.0

TIL the Faroe Islands.

HT Windows Spotlight.

I also discovered this fun website where-is-this.com. So I added the picture and am monitoring wagnerwagner@mailsucker.net for replies.

I am sad to learn that the residents of the islands are slaughtering whales and dolphins today (grindadráp); however, I respect the right of the local communities to carry on this long-standing tradition. It seems they eat what they kill.

Click the thumbnails to view full-size screenshots in a new tab.

I love art. I love Windows Spotlight because it features beautiful art in the medium of photography. I collect the images. I make a hobby of identifying the origins of images. Today I have an interesting story to tell. Clouds Over Ilulissat Icefjord is a photograph by Johnathan Ampersand Esper which was uploaded on November 28th, 2018. Visit the page at fineartamerica.com (HT: Google Image search). View a screenshot of the page in a new tab (same as clicking on the above thumbnail).

Before I found the origin, I searched TinEye. Only one result, and it’s a picture of someone’s screen showing the photograph in Windows Spotlight!

Then I used Bing. That resulted in a .ru website where you can see all the Windows Spotlight photos! View the page featuring Esper’s photograph (not credited).

Nobody has an adequate concept of how large the Universe is, so the plot of the Avengers movies was flawed from the start. Guardians of one mere galaxy are inconsequential on the scale of the Universe. I will believe that God created the entire Universe just for life on Earth until we have evidence otherwise. I want to keep searching for life so we can keep not finding it and so materialists and evolutionists can get more and more frustrated.

How providential is it that Notre Dame burned during Holy Week? Then how providential that in the first week after Resurrection Sunday this is a headline? “Crystal Cathedral, home to the ‘Hour of Power,’ transforms into Catholic seat”

Oh. My. God. And I mean that with all reverence. This is amazing. Crystal Cathedral, founded by televangelist Rev. Robert Schuller, is on the verge of being dedicated as Christ Cathedral! (christcathedralcalifornia.org)

“We’re buying a used cathedral. That’s never happened before.” Doesn’t God work in mysterious ways?

Rev. Schuller says this a lot: “God loves you, and so do I.” I have found myself using that more and more lately. Somehow, between high school and college, I was mostly added to Rev. Schuller’s bulk mailing list. Mostly. One letter off. He (not he but the computer printing the letters) called me Rimothy Chambers. I can’t remember whether he had my college address or my family forwarded my mail. I distinctly remember, though, that I was a freshman at MIT, living on the first floor of the west building of East Campus. (That’s an odd name for a dormitory, I know. But I just double-checked to see if I only remember it as a nickname. Nope. It’s official, in its constitution). I can say I lived in Hayden House, though nobody calls it that. (But if you’re reading this and go to the trouble of telling me the names from your memory of the other 5 EC houses, I’ll put something in your crypto wallet.) Anyway, while living in the dorm I wrote Rev. Shuller a letter asking how he could love me when he didn’t even know my name. I kinda gloated when the Crystal Cathedral went bankrupt nine years ago. How forgiving God is of my self-righteousness. Who am I to judge Rev. Schuller?

I am so encouraged by this turn of events. I hope to worship at Christ Cathedral the next time I’m in the area.

Image credit christcathedralcalifornia.org/explore/architecture/

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A yen is worth less than a U.S. penny. I got to wondering why the Japanese would count in yen. Kiloyen seems more reasonable. Then again, I guess it’s relative. Is there a Japanese word for a fraction of a yen? Who would need it? If all Americans had always counted in pennies, we’d be used to that. We wouldn’t need a word for a hundred or a thousand pennies. I remember my first year at university we would use pennies as projectiles. They were large enough to hurt, but too small to cause serious injury. Nobody put an eye out. We called them wafers. Tuition my 2nd year went over $10,000. We complained about getting a bill for a megawafer.

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I haven’t figured out how to optimize replies on other sites with Micro.blog. And maybe this really is what I want. A blog post based on a comment I made. Yeah, that’s it. This post was inspired by my comment.

As I said at qqMedium in reply to “Why You Should Never Cold Call a Millennial (And What To Try Instead):”

Reason 1: You could lose composure on a call

Reason 2: Receiving a call is time-consuming

Reason 3: Callers are inconsiderate

Uh. These reasons are universal. I’m a young baby boomer. Please don’t call me, either!

Update

Kudos Filip Poutintsev for these additional reasons:

0. The call always comes in a bad time
1. The call takes all your attention
2. You can only talk to one person at a time
3. On the phone you have to react instantly
4. There’s no time to check facts
5. Over half of what you said or heard on the phone will be instantly forgotten
6. I just don’t like phone calls
7. Writing is easier than talking
8. You have to prepare for the call
9. The 9th Circle of Hell: Video Calls

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Boy, do I have egg on my face. A big goose egg. 0. Zero. Twenty days ago I got it in my head that “0” is pronounced “zed” in British English. I held that mistaken belief for twenty days, even though I’ve known all along that the British pronounce the 26th letter of the alphabet “zed.”

Though I’m publishing this post after midnight on March 22nd, I fixed my Twitter profile—and my blog—on the 21st. I’m mortified that the Internet Archive will forever contain this mistake. Oh, well. Moving on.

It would have been appropriate for this to be the first blog post I’ve written at tbc.micro.blog since I enabled cross-posting, but that happened 10 days ago. (I syndicate at twitter.com/tbc0, medium.com/@tbc0, and facebook.com/timchambersusa.) I gave up on Medium when they started charging real money for crap writing. (No, it’s not all crap. I’m generalizing.) I syndicate there only because I can. I’ve already pretty much given up posting on Facebook. I intend to blog more and Twitter less from now on.

But back to the goose egg. As a computer scientist, I would never pronounce “0” “nil,” because they mean two different things in my profession. “Zero” is so formal. And why should the number signifying nothing get two syllables, anyway? For monosyllables, I kind of like zilch. Naught has a British ring to it. Having said all that, as an autodidactic philosopher, I’m most fond of this. When it comes to pronouncing my unique four-character identifier on the internet, tbc0, say “tee bee see.” The “0” is silent.

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I don’t believe in luck. Studying quantum mechanics ruined it for me. (Not that I understand the math. Yet.) Well, QM and coming to believe the core doctrines of Christianity. No room for luck. God is Love.

That’s as I said today in a “just for fun” discussion; TechWell Hub. (Slack account required but requests are promptly accepted).

Milestone: my first post after upgrading to the paid micro.blog service.

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I’m mourning the death of a man I met through church some years ago. Kyle Forti was in a helicopter crash in Kenya. I saw the story on NBC news. I enjoyed the conversations we had Saturdays at men’s breakfast. God rest his soul and comfort his mourners. He leaves behind a wife and son.

On hashtags, cf. conversation with Manton et al.

Just wanted to note that I understand where he’s coming from. I’m also impressed with myself that I remembered the word folksonomy. I’m still waiting for the semantic web. This stuff isn’t easy to get right.

As envisioned and visualized in subway-map style by Richard Watson. Much to study in this infographic. Follow the trend lines for society, work, the economy, money, food, technology, retail, the environment, media, transportation, politics, energy, education, health, security, and values.

Source: toptrends.nowandnext.com/2017/05/08/map/, and here’s a short link to it: j.mp/2EmXgqC.

XKCD #1732: Earth Temperature Timeline. And a hat tip to the explain xkcd wiki. This is a big chart, and I, for one, appreciate that the crowd has developed an explanation. Read it.

The topic of this post is infographics, not climate change, but while we’re on that subject I’ll admit I have at least two climate change deniers in my family. I’m to the left of them. But I also roll my eyes at those at the opposite end of the extreme scale of reactions to climate change. I’ll lament the demise of Climate Debate Daily. I guess it’s been a few years since I visited it. Three Christmas Eves ago, The hosts announced they were closing down the site. (It will live on at archive.org.) They sought “the strongest and most persuasive essays and articles supporting both sides of the debate.” But they closed on a pessimistic note. “Has the website been a success? It is hard to be sure, but our impression, based on reader feedback, is that it hasn’t. Few, if any, minds have been changed, in either direction. Confirmation bias is a powerful force, and we think that many people – no matter what their beliefs – simply read what they agree with and ignore or dismiss what they don’t. For the record, none of the three editors of the website have been in the least bit persuaded by the climate sceptics’ arguments despite the many hundreds of hours we have spent reading them. We note that after the website started its life on January 1, 2008, new global temperature records were set in 2010, 2014, 2015, and 2016, and that a new record for the Arctic sea ice area minimum was set in 2012 (and almost matched in 2016). These, however, are not the sorts of facts that will change minds!” Maybe I’ll add a climate change category in the future.

The Conversation Prism 5.0 by Brian Solis and JESS3. Colorful. Dense. Social Media brands in the creators' taxonomy Less than a couple years old. (4.0 came out about 2013.) Do you think the color wheel is too much? I’m not seeing the descriptive categories mapping to it very well. Overall it does what an infographic should. It prompts me to think.

Source: conversationprism.com

Dan Carlson maintains a page comparing sizes of starships and other objects from many science fiction stories (small, medium, large, and huge): Starship Size Comparison. I like the large one best because it features the Star Trek Doomsday Machine. Visit his page to read his explanation about why he doesn’t compare anything to the Star Wars Death Stars.

This infographic shows American political parties between 1820 and 1860. Now I have to admit my poor record keeping. I don’t know its origin. However, Marty Duren blogged about it, and he says it came from learnnc.org. I can’t find the exact URL.

Rats! Didn’t even have a single streak after writing a flurry of posts on my first day here (g0220a). Starting over to earn my Photo Challenge and Daily Blogger pins.

Here’s my second infographic. History of Science Fiction aka historyofsf. Source: Ward Shelley

qqMeta: In this post I introduced two of my writing conventions. First, my 6-character tags, e.g. g0220a (meta-tag qqtags). This post is g0222c (tbcg0222c in internet namespace). I’ll talk about them in later posts. Second, my convention for citing sources is to redirect through Bitly and to ensure URLs are available at web.archive.org. I curate a list of all my Bitly URLs. If the service ended, or if I stopped agreeing to their terms, I would provide a lookup myself. (XKCD is an exception. I use live links and merely cite by reference number because XKCD is such a part of internet culture that I can’t imaging one ever not being able to find an XKCD comic as long as its number is cited.)

Oh, and I guess qq is a third convention I just introduced. I’ll write more about that later, too. I do want to tip my hat to my friend d3matt. Years ago I discovered that he, too, has a habit of prefixing words with qq. Great minds think alike.

I’ll also write at some point about the importance (IMHO) of unique symbols (case-insensitive) on the internet. I don’t have to call d3matt by his name. Too long. TBC is too common, so I claimed tbc0 as mine. The shorter the better. Even RMS and ESR don’t own their initials. Haha. And the CEO where I work is RTD, but I refer to him as qqRTD.

I though I’d heard of micro.blog before. Now I remember! I first heard about it from @ayjay. I believe it was April 19, 2018. Pleased now to be following him here, especially since tonight I see that twitter.com/ayjay is 404.