Uh-Oh
06:27 Wednesday, 24 April 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 54.41°F Pressure: 1015hPa Humidity: 90% Wind: 0mph
Words: 108
I watched this Nathan Macintosh special yesterday...
On my iPhone!
Although some of it felt a little harsh, I thought he delivered a lot of very keen insights as well. Not of the "uplifting" kind either. More like high-velocity lethal darts, expertly aimed that left you laughing even as they killed you.
Irony being the fifth fundamental force of the universe, I'm writing this on a screen, to be read on a screen.
It was text on a tv that really made me fall in love with computers. "Programming," telling it what to do, was a distant second.
It was always the screen.
This is worth watching.
✍️ Reply by emailThe Final Frontier
06:37 Wednesday, 24 April 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 54.32°F Pressure: 1015hPa Humidity: 91% Wind: 0mph
Words: 13
Whatever "available" means anymore on MacOS.
But still...
Cool.
✍️ Reply by emailLast Shot
10:31 Wednesday, 24 April 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 72.52°F Pressure: 1022hPa Humidity: 55% Wind: 4.61mphWords: 177
The mZuiko 14-42/f3.5-5.6 EZ lens died shortly after this shot. Pretty sure it's a ribbon cable issue. I have three of them. Well, two now.
Started late this morning. Got back, had breakfast and then I mowed the lawn.
I don't usually mow the lawn. But Mitzi's been gone for over a week and doesn't get back until Saturday and someone will write us a ticket if we don't keep our useless patch of grass neat and tidy. So I mowed.
Now I've got to call someone about VA Aid and Attendance assistance. First I need to make sure I write down all my questions. I think she meets all the requirements, but I'm not sure about income. Her net worth is well below the threshold, but her income is relatively "high" even though it's insufficient to meet her present expenses and we're drawing down her savings, which again, are modest.
Anyway, time to get some ducks in a row...
✍️ Reply by emailDune: Part Two
21:16 Wednesday, 24 April 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 68.2°F Pressure: 1016hPa Humidity: 64% Wind: 9.22mph
Words: 86
Started watching it last night. Finished it tonight. I'll watch it all in one sitting after Mitzi gets home.
It's impressive. Part of me wishes it might have been longer, a series, maybe two seasons? Feels like the climax was a bit rushed?
I'll have to find a day and watch both movies back to back. After I get the 4K Blu-Ray.
Probably the best SF movie I've seen in a very long time. It's not "profound," but it is an epic bit of storytelling.
✍️ Reply by email"...an educated man."
05:29 Thursday, 24 April 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 66.83°F Pressure: 1020hPa Humidity: 97% Wind: 0mph
Words: 720
One of my favorite scenes from one of my favorite movies. So many great lines.
What is an "educated man" (person)?
Well, that's too much for blog post, so let's just give up in despair and save us all a bunch of time, shall we?
But, before we quit, maybe a couple of points.
"Literacy," deals with the ability to read and write, which neatly blankets a whole raft of complicated cognitive capacities.
"Numeracy," seems to be a more recent term that deals with some level of understanding and facility and with mathematics. There are some who believe we suffer from a plague of innumeracy, suggesting that the ability to add, subtract, multiply and divide isn't barely enough to succeed in the world.
Then there's science and history, and maybe "civics."
Finally, maybe there's art and health and practical skills, vocational skills.
To be clear, I'm thinking more about education at the secondary school level.
There's a cliché in military planning that we, "always plan to fight the last war."
Well, we educate to succeed in the last world. And we're several worlds behind in our curricula.
Systems dynamics, or, if you prefer, ecology ought to be taught as a foundational subject at the secondary school level. Students need to understand that the world they inhabit is highly interconnected, that "unlimited growth" is a fantasy we treat as an axiomatic foundation of our economy, and that phenomena in the world exhibit complexity, or, "sensitive dependence on initial conditions."
They should understand the concept of overshoot, when a system has reached an unsustainable state and will cease to operate within the initial parameters that defined the intended inputs and outputs of the system. Which is to say, it will cease to operate.
Our civilization is presently in overshoot, and it is in the opening stages of collapse. It's likely that we will never have the opportunity to teach our children how to succeed in the next world, but this is just a blog post. Don't fret.
We should have also been educating our students about themselves. How to understand the emotional landscape of their interior space. Now, this is fraught for a lot of reasons. But I think we've been educating generations of students who grow up to be parents who don't have a clue about how to navigate their interior landscape, and what the emotional and psychological muscles are that they should exercise to be able to successfully traverse the terrain.
And so we have bullying, school shootings, teen suicides, corporate exploitation, child molestation, drug abuse, and depression, just to mention some of the worst effects of this degree of ignorance in this brutal, exploitative society. Not that "home schooled" kids are any better prepared; but it's understandable that some parents would wish to protect their children from the crucible that is "high school."
Despite the woeful inadequacy of our education system, many students leave with the misapprehension that they've been equipped to go out and succeed in this world, which is at least two centuries ahead of the world for which they've been "educated." And it's going to be confusing and painful when "success" seems impossible, and perhaps many blame themselves.
The nature of ignorance is that we don't know what we don't know, and if our goal was to mislead our children, well, mission accomplished. We have instilled a kind of ignorance that is really a form of deception.
At high school graduations, the commencement speech should be that it was all just a cruel trick. That their real education begins now. They should be warned that nothing they've been "taught" will prepare them for what the world will do to them, and that they are, for all intents and purposes, on their own now.
And just what the hell is "success"? Is it meeting the demands and expectations of others? Is it satisfying some misunderstood ambition? Is it following a narrative arc set out in popular culture?
"Successful" people, people who can thrive in this brutal, competitive, cruel environment, well, are they "wise"?
Are they "humane"?
We are so fucked.
Comedy is tragedy plus time. It's too bad we'll all be dead, but I'm sure we'd all get a big laugh out of this!
Anticipatory humor is in order I guess.
We ought to be grieving already.
✍️ Reply by emailThe Vibe
08:54 Thursday, 24 April 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 71.19°F Pressure: 1022hPa Humidity: 98% Wind: 3mph
Words: 363
So I'm eating my breakfast, scrolling my RSS feed, and I come across this from Cory Doctorow.
It's gotta be a wave in the air. A frequency my subconscious is tuned into.
Or something.
The point is, we do a pretty good job of teaching kids about what is "fair," (as we have some innate sense of fairness wired into us at birth somehow). We teach kids that "cheating" is wrong. This is "embodied" knowledge, we genuinely "feel" it, so it's easy to arouse. Simple, even.
"All fraud bad! Kill it with fire!"
But maybe you'll burn the whole house down?
It's easy to arouse people with simple assertions about complex problems because we've never been taught anything about complexity and how it is inherent in any system of non-trivial sophistication. Ignorance of complexity makes people uncomfortable. It makes people who do know about complexity sound like "élitists" and nobody likes them.
Because our education system was made for the world that existed in the 19th century. And though we've learned a lot in the intervening century or two, we haven't decided that it was important to teach it to our kids.
To be "fair," system dynamics, chaos theory and complexity have only been around for about 75 years. And the fact that they haven't permeated the larger consciousness as being subjects that are important to at least have some grasp of the fundamentals is a symptom of our overall failure to regard our complex, advanced technological civilization through the lens of system dynamics and complexity.
That's being done sporadically, here and there, now that the "poly-crisis" is manifesting itself. But it's not considered foundational to how we frame the challenges we face in the world.
Our institutions are also burdened with a 19th century view of the world. Deterministic. Newtonian. Just turn the valves, add a little more steam, everything will be fine.
"Drill, baby, drill!"
We cling to notions of "individual liberty," but what does that even mean in an attention economy where "the algorithm" seizes our attention and never lets it go?
Puts me in mind of The Wreck of the Old 97.
Never metaphor I didn't like.
✍️ Reply by emailWorking Out
15:23 Thursday, 24 April 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 79.68°F Pressure: 1021hPa Humidity: 71% Wind: 11.5mph
Words: 639
I like working out.
I don't like packing.
With each, at intervals, and by turns, I'm exhausted; but I feel as though I've at least accomplished something.
For now, they both seem to share the same characteristic of appearing interminable.
Working out doesn't raise troubling questions. Packing does.
Why do I have all this crap? Maybe I need a hurricane to liberate me from it all.
What is it about the way that I'm living my life that I'm accumulating all this stuff? (Standby, Amazon just dropped off another book. And Home Depot should be by soon with a couple of tools.)
Working out is, well, not troubling. Disappointing, maybe. I did three sets of crossed-leg Romanian dead lifts (RDLs) today. My first. An RDL is, I'm told, a back-strengthening exercise, that also stretches the hamstrings. My hamstrings are pretty, what? Loose? I can pretty much touch my palms to the floor if I can get over my spare tire.
But my lower back definitely needs strengthening. I saw a video that pointed out how unsupported that portion of the spine is, and, wow. That was something of an epiphany.
When we were gardening, I was bending over a lot, and so my ginormous head is out there like a lead weight at the end of a long lever, pinned at my pelvis. And the only thing managing that load at the end of that moment-arm were the muscles in my lower back, which would immediately start spasming.
Anyway, I like doing RDLs, though I'd never done the crossed-leg kind. You put one leg over the other and then do the lift. Hah! It wasn't the weight that was challenging, it was keeping my balance!
I tried to "focus on my center," which helped maybe a little. So then I recalled yoga and used my eyes to focus on a point, which had to drift down as I lowered, and up as I raised, the weight. Much better.
I like working out. I feel myself getting stronger. I'm still not necessarily where I ought to be, but I'm definitely stronger than I was and I'm having fewer problems with my back and shoulders. Carrying a camera on a sling isn't uncomfortable now.
My left achilles tendon is still screwed up, and I wish it would improve faster. It is improving, but slowly.
I don't like packing, but I'm making progress. I have to get nearly all of my crap packed up and put away before this Wednesday, when the realtor is coming by with a photographer. Pretty sure I'll make it.
I pulled a box I didn't recognize off a shelf in the bedroom closet and it was a Sony 8mm digital camcorder from the early 2000s. I used it to record "home movies."
I tried to watch some of the tapes that were stored with it, and it seems as though I don't know how to work the machine, or something is wrong with the tapes. I think the playback speed isn't the same as the speed they were recorded at. There was a promotional tape from Sony, lauding Mavica disk cameras, and that played back fine. I think I have a pdf of the manual in here somewhere. I'm tempted to box it all up and ship it to my daughter who likes playing with old media. Her roommate does some stuff with old camcorders. Maybe they could figure it out.
Then there's the wooden file box from back when I had a Field Notes subscription. Is that still a thing? It's filled with empty notebooks. Awesome. Should just give it away, but I won't. Something I probably never would have purchased but for the internet.
Anyway, plenty more crap where that came from, and I guess I better get back to it.
✍️ Reply by emailGoodnight, Sun
Current Wx: Temp: 42.76°F Pressure: 1013hPa Humidity: 62% Wind: 4.36mphWords: 158
The kitchen guy finally came through mid-afternoon yesterday. And he just moved stuff around that we told him was fixed. Listening skills, people!
We'll work it out. But there won't be a meeting today, the designer doesn't work on Fridays. Another day lost.
And this time it was Mitzi who woke up in the middle of the night and said, "I need a deep sink in the laundry."
She has this thing about not wanting to rinse the mop in the kitchen sink, though that's something I recall Mom doing for, like, ever. Then it dawned on me we don't have a broom closet! I guess we'll stow all that in the laundry too. Well, the broom could probably go in the ginormous coat closet in the entryway, which I was hoping to downsize.
Got the preliminary estimate for the radiant floor heating system. A bit steeper than I'd hoped, but we'll see.
The beat goes on...
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