Abide
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Not having the plans for our house in hand has kind of taken the wind out of our sails. To work that metaphor a bit more, I find myself in the doldrums. The gorgeous weather offers some relief, but I still find myself spending time online and it's depressing.
Time was once when you could "surf the web," and find new and interesting things. Kottke still manages to pull that off, but a lot of his content is also the depressing kind.
I dug into some more content about building science and the debate around ventilated versus unventilated attics. One of the more well known PhD mechanical engineers has a huge presence on YouTube, and I was watching a number of his videos yesterday when I happened on one from just a few months ago.
For the most part, building science is fairly apolitical. "For the most part," may be doing some heavy lifting there, because some people go to great lengths to make everything political, which is very tedious if somewhat true.
In any event, I was watching an interview with this guy and his interlocutor asked, perhaps rhetorically, if we had a housing problem in the United States, she being in Australia.
Well of course we do, but our building science guy had to go on to say that we also had a homeless problem, an "illegal alien" problem, and then seemed to catch himself. In other videos where he's a speaker he refers to "greenies," supposedly people who care about the environment or the climate, but who don't understand physics.
I get it that we have a science illiteracy problem in this country, but calling people names doesn't help make your case and in fact distracts from whatever point you're trying to make.
I also wonder how much this is a characteristic of an engineer's mind? Because I have a friend, a former classmate, who is also a mechanical engineer, who is also extremely opinionated and way to the right. In engineering, you're focused on achieving a result using data and equations, and where there may be uncertainty, well, you add some "margin" for safety.
But there is always an answer. And while there may be more than one way to solve a problem, once they've settled on an answer, that's the "right way." He made an engineering joke that went something to the effect, "Don't hire an engineer who's never had a bridge fall down. He over-engineers everything. Never hire an engineer who's had two bridges fall down, because he never learns anything."
It's a small sample size, but I'd extend this to my experience back with "hard" science fiction fandom. I'm not into sf fandom anymore, though I may read a novel now and then. But my distinct recollection was that of a group of people who had firmly fixed opinions that they believed were "right," and had "the charts and graphs to prove it." (Science and engineering.)
I see the same phenomenon in the Micro four-thirds forum at DP Review, where I made the mistake of reading a thread. I seldom go there anymore, because it's always the same tedious debates; but I went there this morning and read stuff like this.
I read Nick Bilton's letter to Scott Pelley. I'm not a 60 Minutes viewer, but I think I'm still entitled to appreciate its value as an institution and reputation as a journalism outlet. I think Bilton's overworked block of text is an exercise in self-justification, and that the guy never should have taken the job if he didn't expect to take fire from the organization he was looking to lead.
Fuck Bilton. Fuck Weiss. Fuck CBS. Fuck the Ellisons.
And then I read stuff like this, where Trump is trying dismantle the very infrastructure we've created to try to understand what's happening with our climate and in our oceans.
I really need the distraction of studying our plans, sharing them with HVAC contractors, developing a timeline, figuring out the budget.
For now, I guess I'll just go take a walk.
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