Counterpart

Damn good show.

Get this:

Starz opted not to pick up J.K. Simmons-fronted drama Counterpart for a third season after the February finale of season two.

Starz COO Jeffrey Hirsch addressed the cancellation at the TCA summer press tour and admitted that the show’s audience was “too male” to fit into its new female-focused strategy.

Windows 10 on January 10

First of all it has

Well first of all, I still want to use the Detail View of files in a folder, and Windows seems to have a problem accepting that fact.

Next, first of all, they pulled a fast one on me by using DATE as one of the default Detail View categories. Instead of DATE MODIFIED which, for example, can tell you whether you actually did update a file in the folder you're looking at, at the moment. I don't know what DATE gives you, some arbitrary date at random, it seems.

And for that matter, it might not be "by default". It might be "my fault" -- but if so, the fact that I found and used DATE rather than DATE MODIFIED is still somehow their fault. I'm sure of it.

And second, when I click on DATE MODIFIED to put the files in date order, it puts them newest first, but shows me the bottom of the list.

What the fuck.

Mollifying America

I'm in the middle of something important here -- drinking coffee and making graphs -- but I have to interrupt myself because Old Mother Google is at it again. "It’s almost Drug Take Back Day":

They offer social insights like that, far too often. If they're gonna do that, they need a button on their search page so you can send them a message: WHAT ARE YOU, MY MOTHER? And if it's so damned important, why do we have to wait four days to take the stuff back? It's all nonsense and gibberish dressed up like little red riding hood.

They seem to want to play the Walter Cronkite role, mollifying America with their little one-liners.

I'm not mollified. I'm horrified. And I think it's creepy.

You'll probably focus on today's creepy message and say It's good they're concerned about drugs. Sure. Whatever. But shouldn't it be "It’s almost Drug Take-Back Day", with a hyphen in there? You know, a dash...?

I'm not complaining that they're concerned about drugs. I'm complaining that they are wearing it on their sleeve. Uh, excuse me a moment, I have to check something...

Yeah, that. "On the sleeve".

And yes, it was google I checked with, the one I'm complaining about, about the "on the sleeve" thing. That's part of the irony of what's going on here.

The other part of the irony is that the google search page DOES NOT HAVE beliefs, values, emotions, or sentiments. I'm just dealing with the search page, not with the people who work at google. Yes, I'm sure the people who work there have beliefs and values and emotions and all that shit. That's not the point.

I'm sure there is a whole department at google where it's their job to deal with Beliefs and Emotions and Values and Sentiments -- the BEVS department.  But what that means is, it's their job. The shit we see on our screen, those one-line BEVS, it's not from the heart. It's just their job.

Sure: Lots of those people care about lots of those issues. But not ALL of them care about ALL of those issues. So why do they expect ME to care about all of those issues? And why do you object so strongly when I happen to complain about one of their one-liners?

Me? I don't even use the word "issues". STOP PUTTING THAT SHIT ON MY SCREEN. Go to church and pray about it. Or donate money. Or volunteer your time. Do what the fuck you want, but stop putting that shit on my screen.

//

See? It wasn't about drugs, was it.

The internet is sometimes very satisfying

I happened to be looking at Understanding the Hardness of Metals at DesignNews. They talk a bit about "what hardness is not." Then they say

What is hardness, then? To provide a somewhat circular and not very helpful definition, it's a measure of how a material performs in a hardness test.

There's more to their story, of course, but that part was good with my morning coffee.

A poem, sort of

The Earthworm

The earthworm crawls onto the blacktop.
He has no eyes; he cannot see;
He cannot know he is already
beyond the point of no return.

Briefly,

If I wrote my autobiography, the title would be There's No Money In It.


That line started as a joke. Then I thought: That's pretty funny for a guy whose primary activity is writing about the economy.


Then I thought: That's why I'm good at it. My personal involvement interferes little with the analysis.

Oops!

From a blurb Google added to my blog editor stats page:

Following the announcement of Google+ API deprecation scheduled for March 2019, a number of changes will be made to Blogger’s Google+ integration on 4 February 2019.
...
Google+ Comments: Support for Google+ comments will be turned down, and all blogs using Google+ comments will be reverted back to using Blogger comments. Unfortunately, comments posted as Google+ comments cannot be migrated to Blogger and will no longer appear on your blog.