Kindness is The Way
“We are Here to Help, Not to Harm;
We are Here to Love, Not to Hate;
We are Here to Nurture, Not to Destroy”.
MindfulLivingClub.org
“Wherever I am, whatever work I do, I will find a way 
to make the world a better place” 
— Dick Powell

These memes courtesy of Nicky Mee

Made the Top5 list this week, in the top spot.

The oil spill item is mine

If I had you with the title, click here for the essay. TL;dr: it is nearly as long as a whole column and will take you four minutes to read. I don’t know where you should go of you want that four minutes of your life back.

According to the MIT Media Lab,  false stories travel up to 20 times faster than true ones. The AP moved a load of codswallop for newspapers of August 8. Someone on the General Desk should have stopped it… if they knew the news agency was committing a journalistic felony. Preventing such errors is what editors are for. Gasoline at $4.14 over Labor Day is NOWHERE NEAR the most expensive figure ever. When you inflate the 2012 figure of $3.82, it is $5.56, the only comparison that makes sense. Gas would have needed to be a buck and a half higher per gallon to actually be the highest.

It’s very simple, as explained here:

Dollar Figures: Meaningless, Useless And Misleading If Not Inflated

Link O’Rama
Want more Computer Chronicles?
Paul Video, New and Old
HOT FRESH AI LINKS
LLMs Earn Praise When Not Used Stupidly

Produced under the supervision of the American Society for the Protection Of Human Writers. No LLMS/Not AI were used, abused or injured in the production of this column.

HOORAY FOR MAPQUEST!
Send Message To Google
It’s not much, but I have joined, and am ordering you to join, the millions of people who have downloaded the free Mapquest app as a way to poke Google in the eye for its ass-kissing decision to take a knee in front of the Cheeto and rename Lake Ontario. I’m even going to try using it! In the meantime, let’s show Google how much we admire its principled stance. Mapquest still shows Gulf of Mexico. You go Mapquest.
…
Renaming Goes On
The president now refers to Canada geese as Donald Ducks.
…
New Great Lakes Mnemonic Proposed
HOMES was the mnemonic for the great lakes: Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie and Superior. Should Lake Ontario be named Lake America, as has been proposed, the new acronym would be SHAME.
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DANGER WILL ROBINSON
Mt. Shasta climbers misled by AI rescued
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Keep Up With The Chronicles
There is still a lot to say about The Computer Chronicles, and who better to say it than the Wizard of All Things Chronicles, S.M. Oliva. Now you can subscribe to his newsletter. I was granted a preview; it’s well worth a subscription, entitling you to early access and a print copy, should you so desire.
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Oura Ring Data Challenged
Oura, the sleep ring, ran into rough water on the way to its $11 billion initial public offering. It claims to use heart rate, temperature and motion as proxies determine sleep quality. A European study says no, as does a customer lawsuit.
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You Don’t Need To Look Far Ahead
I keep seeing variations of this, attributed to various celebrities. ‘I can drive all the way to New York from California while only seeing 20 feet ahead of myself. I don’t have to be able to see New York when I start.” Stay in the moment? Don’t drive ahead of yourself? Only plan 20 feet ahead? You tell me.
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Good Cooking Defined
“My idea of cooking is dialing.”
–The late, great Gloria Steinem

I’d never thought of this; I just wanted to make sure there was some adjustment when comparing prices. S.M. Oliva of Computer Chronicles Revisited wrote me that “one of my pet peeves is people who discuss historic computer prices ‘adjusted for inflation’ without accounting for differences in capacity.

For example, I’ll hear a retro computing channel on YouTube say something like, “The original Macintosh cost $2,500 at launch, which adjusted for inflation would be $8,000 today!” Sure, except that today nobody would actually buy a computer with 128K of memory and a 5-inch monochrome screen to use in productive work.”

I don’t think Carl Sagan imagined a time when this quotation would apply both to a money-losing nascent technology and current American politics.

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”