Slow Start

16:43 Thursday, 6 February 2014
Words: 84

Off to a slow start blogging this month. Nevertheless, on we go!

I was startled by a Green Heron who was apparently startled by me. He flew by and landed in a tree. A lot of branches in the way, but I managed to get a shot or two.

Corporate culpability

08:06 Wednesday, 6 February 2019
Words: 377

This is a brief post, something I'm thinking of doing regularly for ideas that are just "food for thought," and when I'm not inclined to do a longer essay. I'm not sure yet if I'm going to call them out as a specific category, but you'll be the first to know if I do.

The lawsuits proceeding against the big oil companies are intriguing. I don't know how they'll ultimately turn out, or if they're an effective way to address climate change, but I think they're very interesting.

I am not a lawyer, so take all this with a grain of salt. I think Big Tobacco might be the most similar example with regard to the cause of action about climate. Smoking was a widespread cultural custom, an accepted part of at least adult life, and a significant industry. When research showed that it was responsible for serious health consequences, the tobacco companies became aware of it (some was their own research) and tried to suppress or obfuscate the issue, denying that the health consequences were linked to their products.

I'd say the outcome of the lawsuit was largely a draw. Tobacco is still grown and marketed, but consumers are well informed of the risks, and efforts are made to limit the exposure of marketing to children. A key difference between tobacco and oil is that, for the most part, the tobacco smoker assumes the risk; with fossil fuels, the entire planet is exposed to the risk, not just the people of the industrialized nations. But the precedent exists that a manufacturer has a duty not to manufacture and market a product without at least disclosing the risks.

Which brings me to the thing I find interesting. Do you suppose that Apple's recent efforts with adult access controls and screen time reports is, at least in part, intended to protect against a potential lawsuit? How about Facebook? I've been thinking about my own use of the platform again, and it's insidious. The thing is designed to be as addictive as possible. I think there's a potential lawsuit there as well. Though, truthfully, there's a potential lawsuit in any activity these days.

I think the corporate boards of electronics manufacturers and social media companies should be very worried.

Introspection: Navel gazing, yak shaving or sharpening the saw?

08:29 Wednesday, 6 February 2019
Words: 623

Getting ready to move has prompted me to get rid of more stuff that has accreted in my life, which, in turn, has prompted me to look at this whole accretion process.

What I love about retirement is that I have wide latitude to pursue whatever interests me. The problem is, lots of things interest me. "Oh, look! Shiny!" The result is, "interest" ultimately leads to nothing tangible but the accretion of more stuff.

So, I'm doing the introspection thing again, trying to figure out what I'm going to do differently. As a certain wise woman would ask, "What is your plan, David?"

This is just me, thinking out loud. It's interesting how sometimes certain ideas come to our attention repeatedly in a short period of time. In this case, it's Warren Buffett's 25 things method. I don't recall where I'd read it the first time, but it appeared again at The Online Photographer, and then I saw it again somewhere else. Now, this isn't particularly mysterious, it was around the time of the new year when people naturally revisit and write about these ideas. But this one seems to have stuck with me.

I'm a lot busier now than I ever have been since I retired in 2013. Mostly that's a good thing. I've decided that I can't sit on the couch and play Call of Duty while the world burns. Duh. But I don't have a job with a set of hours and regular duties that define my schedule, which, believe me, is a wonderful thing. But I do feel there are some things that I could be devoting more time to and getting greater rewards from, while at the same time there are things that I spend time doing that I really think are a waste of time (Facebook).

One of the things I'd like to accomplish is to be a more effective advocate for local policy changes that can help address the causes of climate change, and encourage actions to promote resilience and adaptation. That sounds great, and it's genuinely something I want to do, but I really do find myself struggling with this Facebook thing, and also Twitter.

My rationalizing mind tells me that I can use social media platforms to achieve that goal. But a more objective part of my mind knows that those platforms ultimately become time sucks, and it's by no means clear that they are effective at promoting genuine change. Mostly they're effective at creating online mobs (thanks, Howard Rheingold), and public shaming. So I recognize some kind of habituated, reward-seeking behavior here, an addiction, if you will. Which is not helpful.

My plan, such as it is for the moment, is to do the 25 things exercise and then look closely at the top five. Social media does seem to be the most active portion of the public arena; but that may be an illusion, I don't know. If social media can help the top five, then I have to focus specifically on how they can help, and then try to devise some discipline to use them mostly in that way. I may try to do some kind of pomodoro (timer-base) method, wherein I limit my time on social media. (Parenthetically, "social media" is more than just Facebook and Twitter, the forums at Digital Photography Review are just as addicting and probably equally as toxic.) It may simply be, that whatever their utility, the personal cost of participation is too great, and I'll just have to try and quit.

The title of this post is a reflection of my uncertainty or ambivalence about the process. Which one it turns out to be is up to me. No pressure, right? Stay tuned.

Still Here

08:10 Sunday, 6 February 2022
Current Wx: Temp: 50.4°F Pressure: 1018hPa Humidity: 93% Wind: 8.01mph
Words: 264

Just a quick post after building the necessary infrastructure for another month.

Notes From the Underground has gone live. I haven't written much, but I have some ideas gestating.

The Photos library is getting smaller. I've deleted about 6K images. I was surprised at how good the iPhone 7 camera was. There was something about the color too. I skipped the 8 and went next to the XR, which had this weird HDR-like thing going on all the time and all the reds in the sky turned pale orange. Slightly better in the 11, haven't really done many sunrises/sunsets with the 13. But the 7 was nice.

Also see many pictures of my pets, now all deceased. Miss them. Especially little Schotzie. Will I ever have another one? Probably, but it's not something my wife is eager to see. I've never had to go out and find a pet, they've all just appeared in my life. Time will tell.

I'm still reading The German War. It's astonishing and sad how easily people accommodate themselves to evil, how they compartmentalize it. There's a lot of relativism, "this may be bad, but that's worse." I need to read about the history of the Russian Revolution, Marxism and Communism. It's not clear to me how it became so inextricably linked to Jews in the minds of many, not just in Germany. I don't think there's anything unique about the Germans, I think all humans behave the same way, given similar circumstances. It's the circumstances that must be guarded against somehow.

Anyway, the beat goes on.

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Serendipity

18:18 Monday, 6 February 2023
Current Wx: Temp: 59.77°F Pressure: 1025hPa Humidity: 64% Wind: 17.27mph
Words: 859

The marmot is made with Tinderbox, the tool for notes. It's a remarkable application, very powerful. I've been using it for about 20 years now, and I've only ever really mastered maybe five percent of it's capabilities.

Partly to learn more about Tinderbox, partly to add some social interaction during the time of COVID, (I know, it's still "the time of COVID.") I started attending the virtual Zoom meetups held on alternating Saturdays and Sundays at noon Eastern US time. It's an eclectic group of really smart people, and it's usually hosted by the developer Mark Bernstein and coordinated or stage-managed by a Tinderbox virtuoso, Michael Becker. Always in attendance is Mark Anderson, perhaps the only other person who rivals Mark Bernstein or Michael Becker in his intimate knowledge of the application.

The user community is very helpful, and I always come away having learned something new about Tinderbox. It's not always something I can use, given my application is mainly the marmot, but I can appreciate the power and flexibility the tool affords.

One of the "big fucking deals" about PKM (personal knowledge management) is linking. I get it, mostly. "It's all about the graph, baby." (Insert Always Sunny in Philadelphia meme here.) But I don't do much linking within the marmot. I'll occasionally link to something I posted on the web, if it's still at the top of my mental stack, or not too many registers deep; but mostly if I link, it's to something someplace else on the web and never an interior link within the file.

There's a sophisticated facility for internal linking within Tinderbox, and it gets a fair amount of attention at the meet-ups. I've appreciated watching the demos, but never felt very excited about anything until today.

In the screenshot below is the view one is afforded of a note when you invoke CMD-7, which is listed only as Links in the Window menu. (I think this should go in the Note menu, but what do I know?) I've seen it demo'ed before, but I've never used it until today.

As the meet-up is going on, I'll often be "multi-tasking," doing something else while Becker is demo'ing a feature at Mach 5. He'd asked attendees to make notes in the chat about things they found interesting or useful, to help him when he wrote up the summary that will accompany the video when it's posted. Someone typed CMD-7 in the chat. I didn't know why that was interesting, so I popped over to the Marmot and hit CMD-7. This is the result:

Holy guacamole! I had never seen that before! Or never made the connection, because I never think about internal links. To be clear, I had seen this note view before, but I'd never seen "Suggested" populated with anything that "suggested" it would be relevant to me. Hah! "Little did he know..."

The Marmot, and it's antecedent, Groundhog Day, are basically a stream of consciousness, a "river of views." I seldom revisit a note or a post, with some exceptions. Not because I don't want to, just because what I do here is quick and dirty. Except when it's not, which isn't often. I have an itch to blog something, I scratch it and move on.

“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,

Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.”

(Probably heard this someplace before.)

This "Suggested" column is interesting! Amazing! Wonderful! I was actually compelled to click on those posts. They open up in a little window of the notes text. If you click away from them, they disappear. If you move them, they open up in their entirety in their own little window! You can have as many of them open as there are in the list if you have the screen real estate.

This facility was something of a revelation to me, and it's possible I'm making too much of it. But I think it's tremendously useful in suggesting to me that some of the things I've blogged about before may be relevant to this post. And by clicking on those notes, I get a chance to "see what I thought."

The Marmot is just a blog, it's not a journal, not an intimate conversation with myself. Though, if it were, I could see where this feature might be even more useful as one develops a corpus of some size. The Marmot, as of a few paragraphs ago, was this size:

(The "links" are all web links. Nearly all of them outbound.)

377,000 words or thereabouts, it's possible I may have mentioned one or two topics more than once!

Anyway, just surprised and delighted this afternoon. Something that is rather unusual of late, so a happy occasion.

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Deterministic

05:36 Thursday, 6 February 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 60.94°F Pressure: 1020hPa Humidity: 95% Wind: 0mph
Words: 543

I had to ask ChatGPT to help me remember the word "deterministic." Every time I can't recall a name or a word, I worry I'm beginning to show signs of dementia. Sucks getting old.

I'm disappointed that I didn't seem to learn about Dietrich Bonhoeffer until only recently. I do seem to recall passing mentions of him in books I'd read recently about Germany under the Nazis, and that he'd been executed in prison just before the end of the war.

Anyway, I have his bio in the queue, if I can muster the courage to read it, and I'm currently grazing on Letters and Papers From Prison. The opening essay is entitled After Ten Years, A Reckoning made at New Year 1943. If you can find that somewhere, probably worth reading, though it won't inspire much in the way of optimism.

Bonhoeffer's "theory of stupidity," is taken from a section of that essay, although it's called "folly" in the book I have. You can find a pdf of that section here. I'm inclined to prefer the word "folly" as it lacks the pejorative valence (As in "charge." Then why not use "charge"? Because I like "valence." You're not my supervisor, or my editor!) of "stupidity."

Quoting Agent K in the movie, Men In Black, which, disappointingly, doesn't seem to appear in the Quotes page at IMDB, "A person is smart. People are dumb." (Maybe "stupid.") This seems to suggest, as one should always think deeply on the dialogue in motion pictures, that "stupidity" or "folly" is an emergent property, whenever people interact in large numbers.

I think this is correct. It's what I was referring to when I wrote:

Shit happens. Shit is an emergent property of complex, non-linear social systems. It's inherently chaotic. You think you understand what the boundaries of the phase-space are, and the system teaches you otherwise.

Where by "shit," I mean the unwanted, negative, destructive actions and behaviors of individuals acting as agents within a complex, non-linear dynamic system. Basically, anyone working for Elon Musk these days.

Which is why there is little you can do about it. Bonhoeffer writes of "liberation," an external act that "frees" the "fools" from the spell they're under. That's usually a catastrophe. Sometimes referred to by the technical term, "fuck around and find out."

"Stupidity," or "folly" ("shit") is an emergent phenomenon in groups.

Foolish or stupid behavior by an individual is a contingent phenomenon.

Contingent on many things, culture, education, conditioning, trauma, fatigue, diet, anxiety, state of intoxication, many things. But the point is that we are not the "masters of our fate, the captain's of our souls" we flatter ourselves to be. Please see the Milgram experiment. Also the present behavior of all the government employees who are allowing Musk and his script-kiddies to do as they please.

Bonhoeffer has much to say about such people, but that's for another post.

All of which is to say, it's not deterministic. The word I was searching for this morning, and alarmed that I could not recall at my command, and mostly prompted this post.

Anyway... We are in a shit-storm. Seek shelter. Damage assessments can wait until after it passes. They will be heart-breaking.

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Further to the Foregoing...

07:42 Thursday, 6 February 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 60.8°F Pressure: 1021hPa Humidity: 94% Wind: 3.44mph
Words: 92

That's what I get for searching the interwebs and IMDB before being adequately caffeinated in the morning.

The movie I clicked on was MIB^3 (superscript 3), which I failed to notice. It explains why I didn't find the quote I was looking for. Since I was just using the in-page search function in Safari, I didn't actually read any of the quotes, or I'd have noticed something was amiss.

Anyway, the relevant quotation is: "A person is smart. People are dumb."

I guess a person can be dumb sometimes too.

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Resist and Unsubscribe

07:44 Friday, 6 February 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 15.49°F Pressure: 1008hPa Humidity: 75% Wind: 5.73mph
Words: 410

Scott Galloway was a guest on Michael Smerconish's YouTube channel yesterday. This was only the second Michael Smerconish video I've seen. I had to use "Find" in Tinderbox to see if I'd mentioned him before, because he looked familiar, and it was a couple of months ago.

So far, I've found nothing compelling about Smerconish, but he appears on my YouTube algorithmic playlist from time to time, perhaps because of his guests.

Anyway, what was compelling was Galloway in this interview. Now, I'm also somewhat ambivalent about Galloway. I think he's generally correct on many things, but maybe it's the way he presents himself that I find off-putting. Regardless, I think he's dead on about all the things he mentions in this interview about his website Resist and Unsubscribe.

He explains, very clearly, why doing this, unsubscribing even for only a month, is not merely "performative," it's a clear way of sending an unmistakable signal. And it's an action, something that represents our agency in this moment.

To my knowledge, there hasn't been a great deal written about how Germans reconciled themselves to their history following WW II. I've read They Thought They Were Free, by Milton Mayor. Apparently it's problematic for some reason. There was a documentary I saw on a streaming service that interviewed surviving Germans, members of the Nazi party, even an SS officer (who ended up just saying something to the effect that Hitler was right about everything). Certainly, there isn't the same body of literature and film that covers the rise of National Socialism, the war and its aftermath. And there have been attempts to explain or understand it, but little in the way of an account of how people felt following the catastrophe of WW II.

What little I have seen or read mostly suggests embarrassment, or claims of victimization, being misled. Denial mostly. Which is understandable. But I wonder how those people lived with themselves. Arnold Schwarzenegger made a compelling video of his experience growing up in post-war Austria, and the men in his life. The toll their experience took on their lives.

We have a moment now to alter this trajectory. We have to make every effort we can to stop what we can foresee coming.

Every effort includes "performative" things. It includes economic actions. It includes protest in the streets. It includes writing to your representatives. In this moment, "every effort," means every peaceful effort.

While we still can.

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