Due to regulatory consolidation and union consistency work the sexy librarian trope became more or less standardized in 1934. As of then, to be a sexy librarian, you had to be a female natural brunette. This standardized the common stereotype and met with little resistance. There were a small number of angry blondes and redheads, picketing, who wanted these poorly-paid positions, but the stereotype held.
1950: The advent of Eastmancolor meant that the fine texture and highlights of blonde hair could be rendered sympathetically on screen, and the world changed. Regulations and safety rules were adjusted to permit natural blonde sexy librarians up to 0.8 Albedo on-screen and off.
1964: The Ginger League achieved parity for redheads.
1972: Lobbying by the Bathhouse Boys created a revolution. Now male librarians could be sexy.
2023: Redheaded sexy librarians of either sex are not yet common. Albinos are disallowed because fire regulations prohibit Albedos of 0.95 and greater.
J.D. Salinger's description of Boo-Boo Glass, from his Glass Family stories. (collected in Nine Stories, and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour, and Introduction) She's worried about her son. She's Franny's sister Barbara. I love his descriptions in the way that I love Raymond Chandler's. The text is from "Down at the Dingy" in Nine Stories. I think this is her only on-stage appearance in a story. My opinion that is that Dingy isn't his best work because he lets viewpoints we don't really care about chatter before he gets his main characters on stage, but when his lights are on...
"The swinging door opened from the dining room and Boo Boo Tannenbaum, the lady of the house, came into the kitchen. She was a small, almost hipless girl of twenty-five, with styleless, colorless, brittle hair pushed back behind her ears, which were very large. She was dressed in knee-length jeans, a black turtleneck pullover, and socks and loafers. Her joke of a name aside, her general unprettiness aside, she was-in terms of permanently memorable, immoderately perceptive, small-area faces-a stunning and final girl. She went directly to the refrigerator and opened it. As she peered inside, with her legs apart and her hands on her knees, she whistled, unmelodically, through her teeth, keeping time with a little uninhibited, pendulum action of her rear end."
Permanently memorable, immoderately perceptive. She's a Glass.
Later, in that same story:
Boo Boo closed the screen door behind her.
She stood on the slight downgrade of her front lawn, with the low, glaring, late afternoon sun at her back. About two hundred yards ahead of her, her son Lionel was sitting in the stem seat of his father's dinghy. Tied, and stripped of its main and jib sails, the dinghy floated at a perfect right angle away from the far end of the pier. Fifty feet or so beyond it, a lost or abandoned water ski floated bottom up, but there were no pleasure boats to be seen on the lake; just a stern-end view of the county launch on its way over to Leech's Landing. Boo Boo found it queerly difficult to keep Lionel in steady focus. The sun, though not especially hot, was nonetheless so brilliant that it made any fairly distant image--a boy, a boat--seem almost as wavering and refractional as a stick in water. After a couple of minutes, Boo Boo let the image go. She peeled down her cigarette Army style, and then started toward the pier.
It was October, and the pier boards no longer could hit her in the face with reflected heat. She walked along whistling "Kentucky Babe" through her teeth. When she reached the end of the pier, she squatted, her knees audible, at the right edge, and looked down at Lionel. He was less than an oar's length away from her. He didn't look up.
"Ahoy," Boo Boo said. "Friend. Pirate. Dirty dog. I'm back." Still not looking up, Lionel abruptly seemed called upon to demonstrate his sailing ability. He swung the dead tiller all the way to the right, then immediately yanked it back in to his side. He kept his eyes exclusively on the deck of the boat. "It is I," Boo Boo said. "Vice-Admiral Tannenbaum. Nee Glass. Come to inspect the stermaphors."
There was a response.
"You aren't an admiral. You're a lady," Lionel said. His sentences usually had at least one break of faulty breath control, so that, often, his emphasized words, instead of rising, sank. Boo Boo not only listened to his voice, she seemed to watch it.
"Who told you that? Who told you I wasn't an admiral?"
Lionel answered, but inaudibly.
"Who?" said Boo Boo.
"Daddy."
Still in a squatting position, Boo Boo put her left hand through the V of her legs, touching the pier boards in order to keep her balance. "Your daddy's a nice fella," she said, "but he's probably the biggest landlubber I know. It's perfectly true that when I'm in port I'm a lady--that's true. But my true calling is first, last, and always the bounding--"
"You aren't an admiral," Lionel said.
"I beg your pardon?"
"You aren't an admiral. You're a lady all the time."
There was a short silence. Lionel filled it by changing the course of his craft again--his hold on the tiller was a two-armed one. He was wearing khaki-colored shorts and a clean, white T-shirt with a dye picture, across the chest, of Jerome the Ostrich playing the violin. He was quite tanned, and his hair, which was almost exactly like his mother's in color and quality, was a little sun-bleached on top.
"Many people think I'm not an admiral," Boo Boo said, watching him. "Just because I don't shoot my mouth off about it." Keeping her balance, she took a cigarette and matches out of the side pocket of her jeans. "I'm almost never tempted to discuss my rank with people. Especially with little boys who don't even look at me when I talk to them. I'd be drummed out of the bloomin' service."
I've
watched the interview video. It will be interesting to see where this goes.
Under oath, maybe he'll be able to talk intelligently about things he
was denied access to? I'd be happy to be wrong, but what I see is a
straightforward retelling of Majestic / Area 51. A slightly updated
version is the tale of Bob Lazar, but Lazar fabricated the education
that supposedly got him the Area 51 job. He's not the physicist to hire
to reverse engineer a spacecraft--he was a garage inventor. The Majestic
/ Area 51 thing is a charming story in it's own way, but think about
it, a leakproof conspiracy of at least hundreds of people (worldwide)
concerning world-breaking information. I'd expect former conspiracy
members to be coming out en mass if the whistleblower is telling
something like the truth, because finally they are (I'd guess) free from
retaliation. The "I can't prove anything and I don't have evidence to
show" cant is sort of galling. It's a tell often seen in the crashed UFO
mythos. So, let's posit that the whistleblower who was denied access
actually knows something. Then we have HUGE PROBLEM #2: Biological
aliens flying around in our atmosphere and buzzing navy ships and
crashing into things? Really? After they cross light-years of space and
who knows how much time with technology that we can't even imagine.
Seriously, people in the extraterrestrial intelligence field do not
expect living creatures to show up in metal ships. I'm an amateur, but I
expect to maybe see something that we think is a radio beacon in my
lifetime, but more likely the optical pulse searches could find
something that looks like an intelligent signal. If we stick to a 'they
come here' model, best projections for how we would do this job are very
small robotic probes. Just sit in orbit and soak up all our
communications. They could even get human DNA that way, or via
environmental objects. No need to interact with us. People who wanted to
interact with us could call us on the phone. Just put a radio signal in
the Water Hole, the spectral absorption line (hence radio-quiet) of the
hydroxyl molecule, at 21 centimeters / 1,40 megaHertz. I've been
researching this since I read I.S. Sklovsky's "Intelligent Life in the
Universe" (US Ed. with forward by Carl Sagan, at about age 10, when it
was published. When a modern version of this tale pops up with
approximately the credibility of a George Adamski, I don't know what to
say. One way this could have some truth is if the aliens are profoundly
different from anything we expect. Perhaps they would create biological
robots and send them in unsafe metal ships because we'd understand
that. Perhaps the real witnesses don't know what they saw and describe
their best take on it. I'd love to be wrong. I've been totally excited
about this field since I was a kid.
I'm triggered because a real whistleblower needs to show that they're not a Bob Lazar or George Adamski. If they don't know who those people were or why this is critically important, they don't know their field.If you want to be taken seriously don't act just like the con men.
I have a problem. conceptual model --> computer model --> user interface
I've revived my "Liquid Notes" musical phrase recorder. My question is one of determining user intent when there is no data, which probably means that I have to use the context. It's a musical context and therefore complex, but I've been trying to adhere to a very simple data model. I was seeing this as a tape recorder and I view this as an experiment in brutal simplicity. A simple data model will yield a simple user interface. I have no: grid, bar lines, beats. This is intentional. I have only events.
"What happens after the last event?"
The problem shows up when you record a phrase and then play it back. It defaults to repeating the (assumed fairly short) phrase. How do I determine the pause time between the end of the last note and the start of the first note? There are currently two pieces of data available, they are time values, and they are both wrong for this.
Press RECORD (time 0) pre-gap Play some notes, hit some pedals, etc. (times 1 - n) post-gap Press STOP (time n+1)
It sort of looks like one could use either the pre-gap or the post-gap as the gap between the last and first notes when repeating, but neither are correct enough. Both of those values have egonomic slop to them. It may be my own lack of discipline that I am not pressing STOP exactly on the next beat, but I assume I'm not that much worse than typical non-professionals.
Proposal: Discard the pre-gap. The code basically does this now. It's probably right. There's really no musical intent to be had there. Oh, egad, this post just paid for itself. In the case of creating a multi-track loop, the pre-gap IS musical itent. Back to the drawing board....
What I wanted was a way to guess what the post-gap should be, in order to provide a sensible default. I'm going to assign a knob to adjust this value for experimentation.
It appears that the underlying data model will have to be complex. I'm guessing that the gap between note 1 and note 2, in the phrase, is owned by note 1, because we know note 2's arrival time, and it shouldn't need to know anything about note 1. The gap could be a rest-like pause event of some kind. It complexifies my player function, but perhaps not much.
N.B.
The Moties are the alien species from Larry Niven's novel "The Mote in
God's Eye." The watchmakers, or mini-moties, are like a sort of comensal
rats, or I'd offer that they are a smaller micro-me version of Mike
Meyer's clever idea of "Mini Me" in the Austin Powers movies. Very
clever. Not sentient. They just know what needs doing from observation
and do it. If we had them, they'd look like little people a foot tall,
or little chimps of that size, but, like rats, they stay out of sight.
I've been skimming all the hype and some of the hysteria about AI. It's clear that we're going to be drowning in it.
What
do you do when enough of the AIs in your environment get wonky and the
working ones aren't working well enough to put things back in order?
I think you have to one of two things that amount to the same solution.
1)
The Moties just open all the airlock doors, depressurizing the habitat
and killing all the mini-Moties. Then they just a get box of a few
mini-Moties from somewhere and turn them loose. It might take a few days
before everything is running perfectly, but it works for them.
2)
From 1979's Alien film: "I say we take off and nuke the site from
orbit. It's the only way to be sure." Okay, we won't need nukes, just a
favorite fictional invention of mine, the EMP hand grenade.. It's a
portable device that emits a loud 💥 and a bad 🦨 smell while
transmitting a powerful electromagnetic pulse. Depending upon the
severity of your infection, you might need a grenade per room.
Apartment-dwellers? Well, I don't know.
