Fair Winds and Following Seas

11:02 Sunday, 29 June 2014
Words: 65

Jack William Rogers, my father, passed away last night at 87 years of age after a brief illness.

The world is short one huge heart.

Sailor Jack is home from the sea.

Feelings

09:24 Thursday, 29 June 2017
Words: 2069

I like to write.

That implies, and means, that I experience some good "feeling" attendant to the act of writing, at least when I'm writing about something I want to write about.

What usually motivates me to write is also a feeling. Sometimes it's a good feeling I wish to share. Other times it's a bad feeling I wish to discharge and resolve for myself in some way.

Also attendant to these feelings is the source of all suffering, desire. I want the reader to be persuaded in some fashion. I wish for my writing to make some kind of a difference.

Probably my most prolific writing was done post-9/11 and in the run-up and immediate aftermath of the Iraq War. That experience was one of frustration and suffering. What I wrote made no difference, it was simply a futile act. Worse, it alienated a few people, and it involved interminable "debates" with people who didn't seem interested in exploring the basis and reasoning for an elective war so much as they were in simply rationalizing their feelings. And if you can't understand the difference, well, that's what this is about.

Since then, I've written far less. I still get the urge to scratch this particular itch, but I've learned that if I ignore it for a little while, it'll go away. And I'll not have to experience the disappointment of not having made a difference.

But, here I am today.

One of the most valuable things, and there were many, many valuable things, I learned in therapy was when Sandy asked me, and in so doing taught me to ask myself, "David, what's going on inside you?" Well, here's a bit of that effort today.

I'm sad. Almost despair. A little angry. And that's why I'm writing, even though I know it's almost certainly not going to make one whit of difference. I'll return to that thought at the end of this piece. Get comfortable, it may be a long read.

We are living in an age of miracles. You need no more proof than what is before your eyes right this very moment. My thoughts, conveyed to you by means that have only existed for a couple of decades being displayed to you on a device that was probably inconceivable for anyone save science fiction writers a generation ago.

We have robots exploring distant planets. Rockets reaching space and landing back on earth on their tails as God and Robert Heinlein intended. We can transplant organs, grow new ones, repair damaged ones. We're reading the actual code that builds human beings, and we're beginning to edit it.

It's remarkable. Astonishing.

We have taken the tools we've created, mathematics and science, and used them to seemingly master the physical world.

Where we have not kept up, and what will likely bring about our end, is the effort to examine and understand the interior world, the meta-physical, the psychological, or, for the more materialist among you, the neurological world.

Yes, we have made some strides there. We know much about behavior, and how humans think and we're learning more every day. And we have a huge store of practical knowledge that, while perhaps not codified and studied, is nevertheless employed every day in the service of commerce. "There's a sucker born every minute," is an example of that type of practical knowledge.

One encouraging sign is the exploration of "irrational" behavior. It has begun to destroy the myth that we are "rational" beings. But it's late, and I'm not sure there's enough time left to completely destroy it before our irrationality brings about our demise.

We harbor some seriously misguided conceits, and they govern much of our "thinking." While I'm sure most of you reading this will likely knowingly chuckle and acknowledge that, yes, we really are irrational beings; that thought doesn't inform a single thing you do. You've never really "thought" about it. Indeed, most of us seldom ever really think at all.

Now I've probably got a little bit or your attention, and your first active disagreement. I suspect I've pricked your ego a little bit, and the preceding paragraph has evoked a negative emotion, a feeling. And so now you're summoning "reasons" why I'm of course wrong, and wondering if you should waste your time going on reading this.

I hope you'll bear with me, endure the uncomfortable feelings for a little while. Once this is done, they'll go away. To paraphrase a wise, and fictional, woman, "Have another cookie. As soon as you close this browser tab, you'll feel as right as rain."

Thinking is hard. It requires time, and especially energy. It's an ability that came late in our evolutionary development. Most of the cognitive machinery that keeps us going all day long, watching cat videos and clicking "Like" buttons, doesn't require it at all. That ongoing narrative in your head? That's not thinking. Sometimes it might be, but I don't think so. If you're not using a piece of paper and a pencil or some other tools or implements, or if you're doing almost anything else besides sitting or walking, you're probably not thinking. At least that you're aware of. There is some background thinking that goes on that is largely inaccessible to your inner narrator, and a lot of problem solving takes place there. But it too is the exception, rather than the rule.

No, most of what we do, nearly all of it, is merely "behavior." Most of that is "habituated," often "conditioned." The very model of stimulus and response. And if you do take some time to actually "think" about it, you can understand why it is so. Thinking demands a lot of resources, and it takes a lot of resources just to keep our bodies at 98.6 degrees F. If you had to be "thinking" all day long, you'd be eating a hell of a lot more than you already are now. Of course, if we all thought more, we'd probably weigh less as well, both because by "thinking" we wouldn't make habituated unconscious choices to eat foods to engender a feeling, and we'd be burning up a lot of calories exerting that cognitive intervention.

It is only because we have developed societies and cultures that provide most of our material needs that we have had the luxury of a "cognitive surplus" by a relative few individuals, which has allowed us to make these advances in science and medicine; but which has also burdened us with the false conceit that we're all thinking, rational beings.

To the extent that we "reason" at all, we mostly reason backward from our feelings. If I say something "provocative," it invokes a negative feeling, and your inner narrator will summon a list of "reasons" to validate that feeling. If you're on social media, you've been conditioned by watching others' behavior to offer a comment in response, usually just regurgitating all the "reasons" your brain has summoned to explain your feeling to yourself.

Pro tip: Never read the comments.

So, back to Sandy. "David, what's going on inside you?"

I have to say, I don't recall anyone ever really asking me that question before she did. Sure, many people had asked, "What the hell's wrong with you?" Or, "What's the matter?" But no one ever really asked, "What's going on in there?"

And I also have to say, that I'm not sure I ever really looked at it before. "What's going on" inside me is like water is to a fish. What's water?

Sure, I'd often had inner discussions with myself. But usually that was just a habituated dialog that had been carried out over and over and over again many times before. It's really just a form of self-soothing behavior intended to kind of keep you from hurting yourself until the "feeling" that engendered it goes away.

And that's the wonderful thing about feelings. They pass.

But no, trying to describe what was "going on" inside me kind of forced me to "observe" myself. And this is the key to meditation, it is away of seizing control of your own faculty of attention, and using it to gain control, limited and usually fleeting, of your interior experience. It gets "you" (your ego) out of the infinite loop it's stuck in.

I had a number of years of therapy, and during that time I did a great deal of reading as well, all of it with the idea of trying to understand "What's going on inside you?" I learned a great deal, some of it is likely wrong, but it has had the fortunate effect of making my interior experience a far better one than I'd ever had before. And it has made me a better person as well. Not perfect by any means, but definitely better.

But you know… therapy. That's for people who have "problems." We're all rational cognitive beings in control of our lives. We don't have "problems." Well, yeah, little ones. Maybe some big ones. But we don't have "problems" with our problems. We're good. We're okay. We've got our shit together, man! Therapy. That's for people who can't handle life. (Which really is true. And also, it seems to me, most of us.)

So yeah, therapy isn't exactly something people really think they want, let alone need. If you're lucky, like I was, the universe keeps hitting you upside the head with a 2x4 until you decide you might need some help.

The good news is, we do know a lot about what's going on inside us, and it can be learned. The bad news is, we haven't decided that it's important to teach it to people. It's a very touchy subject. It's perhaps the most intimate, intrusive form of teaching there is. The student has to learn to be vulnerable, to be open, and the teacher has to be skilled in handling that vulnerability, and not abusing it. But much of it could be taught as "theory." There would likely have to be a "therapy" component to facilitate turning theory into practice.

Why is that important? Our survival as a civilization almost certainly, and perhaps even as a species, depends upon it; and that issue will probably be resolved in the next several generations. Here's why:

Do you think there's anything controversial about public sanitation? Apart from the location of landfills and the fact that our consumptive, consumerist culture is creating far too many of them? I mean, is it in any way controversial that we don't allow trash and garbage to accumulate in our homes or on our streets?

I don't think so.

Is there anything controversial about health codes? "All employees mush wash hands before returning to work." Food preparation and storage areas must meet certain requirements. Where's the hue and cry about "freedom!" when it comes to food preparation. Well, there is the "raw milk" crowd, (another irrational form of behavior) but seriously, do you think we have too much heavy-handed government intrusion in the fast food business?

Sewage? Any problem with sewers as a public utility? Any problem with building codes regarding the construction and installation of toilet facilities? Too much government intrusion there?

We did learn, long ago, that there were significant public and personal benefits to observing certain practices regarding sanitation and hygiene, and nearly every place in the world has codified these into law. These are, for the vast majority of us, uncontroversial, accepted and indeed, expected in any civilized society.

Why? Because the lack of these restrictions, the failure to observe these practices, facilitates the spread of disease, makes our homes unpleasant to live in. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, there are many people who can live seemingly happily in squalor and filth. But most of us seem to have progressed beyond that.

The result is that we're able to have large numbers of people living in close proximity to one another, and not have it be an absolutely horrible experience.

Today we have something similar taking place in cyberspace. We have large numbers of people in close "mental" proximity, and everyone is "sharing" everything with everyone else. Would you do that with your toothbrush?

Manners used to be the form of social hygiene "civilized" people observed in their social interactions. You could be a total rat-bastard, but still observe the customs of decorum and etiquette.

Withdrawal

09:09 Friday, 29 June 2018
Words: 708

Day five of the internet fast was the most challenging so far. The news of the retirement of Justice Kennedy seemed to be the stimulus for wanting to get on Twitter and see the reaction. I think I can pretty accurately imagine what it might be, but I suspect my feeling of alarm was crying out for validation. It was kind of hard to focus on other activities, although not impossible.

But, I did persevere. I'm still struggling as I write this. I just want to get on Twitter and engage. I don't feel the same way about Facebook. I suspect that's because Twitter represents something of an "echo chamber" for me. I follow a few conservatives, chiefly ones that oppose Trump, and a few people who are mostly apolitical, but sometimes seem to offer a fairly right-wing take on things. But most of the overtly political people I follow are democrats or liberals, and seem to share my view of things. Facebook is less well curated. While I have unfriended a few people who were particularly odious in sharing their views, chiefly through "memes," I have many friends and acquaintances that I'm disinclined to unfriend, even though I don't share their views and who sometimes offer opinions I find ignorant or offensive. If anything, politics is what compels me to stay away from Facebook, so I don't feel at all as though I want or need to get on it. I do miss the Apple II Enthusiasts Group. Facebook is running on inertia in my life and if it disappeared tomorrow, I wouldn't miss it at all.

While I couldn't surf or browse the web, I rationalized that I could use the iBooks Store to look for that book on cognitive productivity I'd read something about. I found it. There are two, one is a more general book on using knowledge from cognitive neuroscience to become more effective in learning and mastering a new knowledge domain. The other book is apparently based on it, but focused on using applications on the Mac platform to put this knowledge into practice.

The first book is Cognitive Productivity, Using Knowledge to Become Profoundly Effective, by Dr. Luc P. Beaudoin, and Lam Wong. Lam Wong is mentioned in the acknowledgments as designing the front and back covers, and encouraging Mr. Beaudoin to practice "parsimony" by "removing 'the art and science' from the subtitle of this book." Why that merits a co-author credit is a mystery. Dr. Bueaudoin has a lengthy and diverse resumé, which he shares with the reader.

The iBooks Store offered a significant sample in the form of the introduction. I wasn't especially thrilled. The author seems a bit full of himself, and promotes a new neologism, "mindware" to describe how knowledge and practice can, in effect, rewire the brain to be more effective! It's cheesy, and I believe more than one company has used it as a trade name over the years, though apparently none are doing business at the moment.

It does sound as though he's selling something, and maybe just more than the book. He's a consultant of some kind. I don't care, everybody's got to make a living.

He has some disparaging things to say about Nick Carr and The Shallows, but I think he misses Carr's point entirely. Most of America doesn't consist of "knowledge workers." Most of America consists of people who do what they're told. The "knowledge workers," to the extent that they might be said to possess or exhibit "knowledge," are their bosses.

He also thanks a Brian Holmes of GradeAEdits in the acknowledgments for proofreading the book; but I think he should ask for his money back, because there are some grammatical errors in the introduction that are disconcerting with respect to what one may expect for the rest of the book.

But, I'm going to buy the book. I'll read it and write a review. Who doesn't want to "become more profoundly effective" in retirement?

Steve Vore, if you're reading this, I launched Reeder yesterday to see if I'd added any feeds some months ago when I began to look at RSS again. Your Notebook is in there, and I did see your post from 20 June.

Flickr Photostream

03:26 Tuesday, 29 June 2021
Words: 45

Ready For My Closeup Mr. Demille

06:47 Tuesday, 29 June 2021
Words: 478

The marmot's going to be on YouTube! Maybe. Probably.

I manage the marmot using an app called Tinderbox. I've been doing so, off and on, for about 18 years. I remain somewhat in awe of what Tinderbox is capable of, and the uses people far more clever than I make of it. Recently, probably because of COVID, Mark Bernstein, the developer, has been hosting a number of Zoom get-togethers to discuss Tinderbox, answer questions and so on. Last Saturday, I had some free time and dialed into one, which is where I met Michael Becker.

Mr. Becker has a YouTube channel where it offers tutorials on using Tinderbox. During the Zoom intros, I mentioned that I used Tinderbox as a content management system for a blog, which seemed to pique his interest. We exchanged emails, had a preliminary Zoom meeting yesterday, where we discovered my iMac simply refuses to share its screen via Zoom (and yes, we exhausted all the privacy settings), but my MacBook Pro works fine. So I showed him a bit of how I do what I do here with Tinderbox and he felt his subscribers would find it worthwhile.

So we're going to record an episode this afternoon!

Well, that prompted me to get busy doing a little housekeeping around here. The place is a mess!

I kind of fixed the little weather station widget I added a couple of months ago. That's just some html code you copy and paste from your Ambient.net account. I changed the width and height to make it fit better in the sidebar. Didn't break anything, thankfully. The iCloud shared album Walking Around With a Camera link didn't work anymore, and I haven't been updating that album in years, so I deleted that. I've been working with Flickr a lot recently, so I found the embed code for my photostream and added that. Unfortunately, I had the stream set up to display based on upload date, not date taken. I wanted to change that, so I did so on Flicker, but that change didn't seem to propagate to the export code. It's not a big deal, but it puzzles me.

All this has had the knock-on effect of making me want to do more with the blog and the Tinderbox file I use to run it. Hopefully that motivation/inspiration will endure long enough to achieve something. We'll see. Prior history isn't much cause for optimism!

This post is partly update, partly to review muscle-memory. There are things that I set this file up to do automatically that I don't necessarily recall how or why I set it up that way. Michael has already identified some optimizations, so I'm hoping to get something out of the effort besides my 15 seconds of YouTube fame.

Michael Becker's YouTube channel, the Tinderbox tutorial playlist, is here.

Dress Rehearsal

10:39 Tuesday, 29 June 2021
Words: 28

This is a throw-away post. Just working through the process on the MacBook Pro to make sure it all goes smoothly this afternoon.

So here's to practice!

One Final Check

13:27 Tuesday, 29 June 2021
Words: 6

Let's make sure everything still works...

Demo

14:25 Tuesday, 29 June 2021
Words: 13

Enter some text here to show the folks back home...

Another paragraph...

Fin

2021 Welcome Message

23:21 Tuesday, 29 June 2021
Words: 360

Well, 2021 is half over, but a lot has changed since the 2019 welcome, I thought I'd better bring this up to date.

I'm still living in St Johns County, the highest median-income county in the state of Florida, which makes it something of a "bubble." I'm no longer on the Soil and Water Conservation District Board of Supervisors, as I had to resign that position in order to run for state representative in district 17 in 2020. That was quite an experience. Unsurprisingly, I lost. I still work with the Democratic Party, but now on candidate recruitment and support.

My wife, Mitzi, has gone back to work. We live now in an over-55 community in a planned development known as Nocatee. She loves it here, and it does have its virtues. We installed about 7KW of solar arrays on the roof, and we have two Tesla Powerwalls in the garage, and for the most part we're 100% self-powered. If we get a couple of days of solid overcast, we'll draw power from FPL, but for the vast majority of the time we're producing more power than we use.

I quit Facebook for good at the beginning of this year. The campaign experience was so corrosive that I'm convinced that Facebook is mentally toxic at any level of exposure. I don't miss it. I'm still on Instagram, though less so these days. It's about the only way I keep up with a few people, and it's not as toxic as Facebook. Yet.

Twitter seems to have consumed much of my online efforts, for better or worse. It has its own downsides, chief among them its addictive nature. You become dependent on the little dopamine hits when someone interacts with one of your tweets. Writing in the marmot is far less interactive. I may look into changing that.

Photography remains my principal hobby, though I've recently renewed an old interest in radio and electronics. It remains to be seen how far that will go, but I'll probably write about it here from time to time.

So that's about it. Thanks for dropping by. I wish you good health.

Fly

08:49 Wednesday, 29 June 2022

Current Wx: Temp: 80.65°F Pressure: 1017hPa Humidity: 83% Wind: 5.75mph
Words: 215

This is the photo I wanted to post yesterday. Shot it with the OM-1 with the 40-150mm/f2.8 zoom. The extra reach isn't helpful, because it's so hard to keep these guys in the frame. But the extra stop of aperture is welcome.

Solved my iCloud problem.

I brought along a couple of USB thumb drives, one a 64GB USB-C drive (USB 3) and the other a tiny USB-A (USB 3) Sandisk Ultrafit with 128GB of storage.

I created a new Photos Library for the trip on the Ultrafit. It was empty, though I recalled that it had an issue with being slow, and that was borne out again last night. It took an hour to import about 700 images. But, it's faster than DSL.

The 64GB drive only has about 32GB free, but for whatever reason, it's much, much faster than the Ultrafit. So for the purposes of this trip, I use Image Capture to import the images into the fast drive. I look those over and delete the obvious clinkers. Then I just import the jpegs into the new Photos on the Ultrafit.

I'm keeping the images smaller, though I suppose I can do better. Max dimension is 2500, but that's probably overkill.

Anyway, up and running, if slowly.

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Morning Twilight

09:23 Wednesday, 29 June 2022

Current Wx: Temp: 83.53°F Pressure: 1017hPa Humidity: 75% Wind: 4.61mph
Words: 156

This is from the XZ-1, for a little of that CCD goodness. This was shot at 0520 this morning. I'd been up since about 0300. Wanted to see some stars. You have to wait until past 2200 for the sky to get really dark, and I can hardly keep my eyes open by then. But for some reason, I can get up at 0230!

I should've taken a clue with the issue of reading the SD card under Ventura. We hiked Buttermilk Falls yesterday, and I brought along the Olympus Tough TG6, just in case I saw a cool bug or something. I also like to just grab shots now and then with a different camera.

Anyway, went to import the images yesterday, using the new protocol... Can't read the card!

Oh well, didn't take many with it and never saw any bugs anyway. I'll reformat the card and hopefully have better luck going forward.

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Buttermilk Falls Hike

09:41 Wednesday, 29 June 2022

Current Wx: Temp: 84.29°F Pressure: 1017hPa Humidity: 73% Wind: 4.61mph
Words: 242

Shot a number of these with the Oly OM-D E-M1x. (I think the model name is supposed to be E-M1X, but it looks too much like MIX to my eye.) It was the first OM-D to offer Live ND (neutral density), a computational photography feature, similar to what you can do with a Live Photo in iOS Photos, the "long exposure" edit.

This is the most amount of shooting I've done with the E-M1x, and I'm still getting acquainted with the camera. You can choose to have a simulated view of what the final image will be in the viewfinder as you're shooting. I was using that, but I think I'm going to turn it off. I noticed my framing was consistently off with it on, it's kind of distracting.

The image processor takes advantage of image stabilization to shoot some number of frames sequentially using the electronic shutter, it then merges those images, creating the long exposure effect.

It's probably cliché with falls now, but I like it.

Had the camera lockup on me for the first time. Black screen and viewfinder. Power cycled the camera and nothing. Removed the battery holder and reinserted, nothing. Began to worry and vaguely recalled something about lens contact. Reseated the lens and all was well.

Not sure what's up with that, but it was solid for the remainder of the hike, except it took forever to lock gps again.

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Electrifying

11:52 Thursday, 29 June 2023
Current Wx: Temp: 90.86°F Pressure: 1012hPa Humidity: 58% Wind: 8.05mph
Words: 751

Our wireless, remote, off-site fusion reactor power solution went live on May 12, 2020. We have 7KW of rooftop solar and two Tesla Powerwalls. Since then, we've been 91% self-sufficient in our electricity needs, with 10MWh of net positive energy production overall. (We've generated 10MWh more electricity than the house has consumed since we installed the system.) The 9% of energy drawn from the grid since installation is due to cloudy weather, high demand or some combination thereof.

Overall, I'm pleased with how our system was designed in terms of production and storage. In a perfect world, I'd like to be 100% self-sufficient; but that would require additional capacity (and cost). "Perfect is the enemy of the good."

Since we installed the system, we've added a plug-in hybrid vehicle (RAV4 Prime), and a mini-split heat pump to cool the garage. We're still doing pretty well with production exceeding demand, but it's a smaller margin today than compared with the lifetime totals.

At some point, six or seven years from now, I anticipate we'll be buying a fully electric vehicle, which will place greater demands on the system. It's hard to quantify that, though I suppose I could use our gas consumption as a surrogate. I haven't done a deep dive into how Toyota calculates lifetime fuel consumption, or if indeed it does at all. There's a report on the dash that gives our effective mpg, but I suspect that resets with every fill-up. The last figure I saw was 73mpg.

Our choice to live in Nocatee has placed a high demand on personal transportation. There is no public transit anywhere nearby, though light rail that would run between St. Augustine and Jacksonville with a stop in Nocatee is rumored to be on the horizon. For day-to-day stuff, we're well served by the RAV4's 43 mile EV range. But to go to Jacksonville, we're hitting the tank on the way home every time.

In any event, at least in Florida, it's become clear to me that our vehicles are our greatest energy consumption devices, gas or electric. The house is a fraction of what the car uses, how small a fraction depends on how much driving we do. If we were commuting to work every day, it'd be tiny.

So I'm planning on up-sizing the power system when we get an EV. I spoke to one of the company techs some time ago, and it's possible to simply add to the array. By the time we do this, the Powerwalls should still be near 80% of their rated capacity. So unless there's some big economic incentive to replace them outright, I'll be looking to just add additional battery capacity.

With hurricanes and climate change, and a political climate that is increasingly hostile, this may be all somewhat uncertain, but I think it's wise to plan ahead. So I'm setting up an account now to hopefully save enough to pay cash when the time comes, rather than borrow again. We'll only be a few years from paying off the mortgage by then, so a loan won't be out of the question, but I'd rather not.

Looking at other ways to reduce consumption, I think I'll also be buying a heat-pump dryer. The dryer is a huge energy demand, and it'll be about 10 years old then, so about the time we'd probably be thinking about replacing it anyway. Likewise with the HVAC system overall. Ten years isn't necessarily "end of life" for a heat-pump, but Florida is a harsh environment.

I'm hopeful/optimistic about significant gains battery technology performance and pricing; and more modest gains in HVAC, though our developer-installed system is the minimum to meet building code, so we might make some significant gains there. We've already installed an induction range, and I expect that'll last for several years past this overall upgrade.

I'll be in my early to mid 70s by then, so it'll likely be the last "home improvement" project I'll have to undertake, though there's probably a roof replacement in there somewhere as well. I hope to try to minimize my overall "footprint" in my last years on this planet, short of becoming an ascetic. I recognize the sunk costs of resource extraction, manufacture and transportation kind of stretch out any ROI in terms of karma, but "You do your best, the rest isn't up to you."

Oh, almost forgot. This meditation was inspired by this.

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Progress

07:14 Saturday, 29 June 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 82.65°F Pressure: 1015hPa Humidity: 87% Wind: 3.44mph
Words: 255

Every place we've slept since we left has had a loud AC system. They've either woken me throughout the night, or made it harder to fall asleep. Mitzi insisted I get earplugs yesterday. I didn't think they'd stay in my ears, let alone do anything.

Well, I was wrong. She had to shake me this morning to turn off the alarm on my iPhone!

I feel much better.

We went down to Port Ewen yesterday, near Kingston and not far from Woodstock, where Dave Winer lives. We had lunch and visited with Mitzi's sister, who'd stayed with us for two months back in February and March while her pelvis healed. She's doing well and making plans to relocate eventually to California to be near her brother.

Today it's raining, the first day it hasn't been beautiful since we crossed over from Pennsylvania. We're going to head over to Mom's later and I'm going to be doing some light plumbing, installing a bidet my sister bought to help make life easier for Mom with her Parkinson's. Wish me luck. (I'll need it.)

Tomorrow we'll swing by Mom's to say goodbye and then head on to Trumansburg where we'll have a couple of weeks in the woods beside a creek. I'm looking forward to it. In Florida, I seldom have occasion to have this much social interaction and it's been a bit fatiguing, and I'm looking forward to just doing nothing for a day or so. Then a lot of hiking and sightseeing.

The beat goes on...

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Faith

07:25 Saturday, 29 June 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 82.65°F Pressure: 1015hPa Humidity: 87% Wind: 3.44mph
Words: 628

"Faith" is kind of a loaded word. I find it's too often conflated with "religion." While faith is a necessary part of any religious practice, it's not strictly a religious concept, or irrevocably bound with any concept of a higher deity.

To me, faith is a radical acceptance of reality as it exists, or as we perceive it. Perception can change, hopefully, reality is fixed. Fear is a radical rejection of reality, or our perception of it.

I don't know if it's true, but I've read that, "The way of the warrior is to say, 'Yes!' to it all!" is a Bushido saying. And I believe that love is "faith in action," (the first derivative of faith) and courage is "love in action" (the second derivative).

If we take "nothingness" as the ultimate ground of being, existence is the negation of nothingness. An affirmative act. An act of faith. But it exists in tension with nothingness, and that tension is experienced as fear. Faith exists in tension with fear, it's the yin and yang of existence. This is the "x"-plane, a one-dimensional plane where time and action create love and courage, anger and hate. (First and second derivatives of fear.)

Consciousness apprehends existence with some mix of faith and fear. It's possible to embrace faith while still experiencing fear. It's almost impossible not to. It's in the choice of action that the difference is revealed.

We are in a world of shit.

There are a lot of people who are afraid right now, with good reason to be.

People calling for Joe Biden to step aside are acting out of fear, and likely many other emotions and motivations. Others are simply taking this opportunity to criticize any or all aspects of our political system, as if that expenditure of time, thought and energy will make any positive difference.

I've been reading many things after the debate. One thing I thought was clear, to anyone who isn't mired in anger and hatred, is that Donald Trump is the personification of anger and hatred. HIs appeal is to those who live in that part of the plane. This is the region that causes "good" people to do horrible things.

David Frum wrote something I found compelling:

Ferocious controversy will probably now erupt over Biden’s leadership of the Democratic Party. We’ll hear all kinds of plans to swap him out somehow. Maybe those plans will be workable, but probably not. Through the uproar, it will be important to keep in mind that this election is not about Biden. It’s about you and your commitments and your values. Biden is just the instrument. Like any instrument, he’s imperfect. But better an imperfect instrument than a would-be autocrat who demands a cult of personality.

We wish to believe, with some justification I think, that most people are fundamentally good. "Fundamentally" being the operative word. That their apprehension of existence isn't formed out of fear. They believe in a better future, in compassion, they experience empathy. I think the contrast between Joe Biden and Donald Trump is clear to those people. We must get them to the polls.

What happens in the next days and weeks will be decided by faith and fear, love and anger, courage and hate. How that plays out cannot be predicted, except to say that it seldom works out well when we act out of fear. That's Trump's home turf, his game.

Keep the faith. Work hard. Believe in one another. This is a fight we can win. That we must win. And it won't end after Election Day. The battles ahead are important ones and courage will be required. We must call upon it within ourselves.

It's all up to us, not Joe Biden.

Us.

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This Train

10:21 Saturday, 29 June 2024

Current Wx: Temp: 81.37°F Pressure: 1020hPa Humidity: 86% Wind: 1.99mph
Words: 463

I brought along the little Olympus Stylus 1s to Port Ewen. This is shot from my sister-in-law's condo across the Hudson to the eastern bank of the Hudson. The train is headed up from Poughkeepsie to Rhinebeck. My daughter Caitie took that train a couple of years ago when we were staying in Kingston for a week.

Mitzi's key fob has gone dead. I did a little homework while she was calling a Toyota dealer. I have the manuals on my computer. While she was talking I popped my fob open with my Swiss Army knife and showed her I could replace the battery with no trouble. It's a CR-2450, so we'll stop at Walmart before we get to Mom's and pick up a two-pack, and I'll replace both of them.

My brother has asked me to not install the bidet. He wants to make sure they're permitted, and if they are, he says the maintenance staff will install it. That way if there are any issues, they'll resolve them.

Sounds good to me!

The news is not great on the climate front with the reversal of the Chevron decision. So much for "precedent," and "settled law." This is just a part of the right-wing conservative agenda, much of which is outlined in chilling detail in Project 2025.

I don't wish to be apocalyptic, but we're in a lot of trouble. This isn't a singular struggle, but part of a continuum of conflict that waxes and wanes through history. We're confronting very serious threats on multiple fronts, and the political is perhaps the most consequential, because that affects what resources we can bring to bear on the others.

People tire of politics, and I think that's intentional by politicians. But we have to find the wherewithal to engage in the process, to talk to one another about it, to work hard and participate. To do otherwise is to surrender our agency in affecting the course of history, determining our future. It does matter. Saying your vote doesn't count is an expression of fear, originates in fear. It's not reality.

We must believe in democracy, have faith in our ability to shape our destiny.

It's not time to give up, it's time to get up. The hour is late, but it's not too late. Talk to your friends, post on your blog, if you're on social media, well, you shouldn't be. But if you are, don't post from fear. Summon courage, channel it. We're all in this together, even the folks we oppose; but none of the things we value will endure if we surrender to fear.

You're in this fight whether you want to be or not. So stand up and fight, or you'll be letting fear win.

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I Have Things to Do

09:09 Monday, 29 June 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 72.97°F Pressure: 1020hPa Humidity: 76% Wind: 1.74mph
Words: 1079

And stuff on my mind.

So here I am.

This kind of post was perhaps the greater proportion of the posts in Groundhog Day, where I was often trying to "figure stuff out." Urgent questions about why my life was not working out the way I thought it would.

"Thought," past tense of "to think." There's a lot of noise out there about artificial intelligence, and what it's going to do to our ability "to think." I'm not particularly worried about it, because we've already devalued the skill of thinking to the point where few of us actually know how to do it.

Now, there's a lot of "cognitive activity" going on between all of our ears. Most of it is not "thinking" in the sense that I use the word. By "thinking," I'm referring to using reason and logic, and interrogating a question.

It's a skill, and it can be learned. It can even be self-taught, if you're literate and motivated. But unless you're motivated, unless there's some reason to possess the skill, few people ever learn it.

People in professions, engineers, scientists, lawyers, doctors and academics learn the skill, because it's essential to their role, their career. Programmers learn a subset of thinking, mostly in the realm of logic and systems. They're in a job, I won't call it a "profession" because there is no accountability, that demands rigorous thought and they're often very successful at it.

This then makes many of them believe they're experts at all forms of thought, and that all forms of thought can be reduced to rules of logic.

This often makes them insufferable.

But for the vast majority of society, "thinking" is mostly using rudimentary heuristics to reason backward from a feeling. Rationalization. And when you're wedded to the feeling, you can perform Olympic feats of rationalization.

We are embodied beings, and our emotions govern much of what we choose to "think" about. We are never taught the value of interrogating our feelings. One of the best things I learned in therapy was a little process that programmers ought to appreciate or value.

The first step is to interrogate the interior state, "What am I feeling?" Because thoughts almost always originate in feelings.

The next step is to interrogate the source of that feeling, "What am I believing?" There is something in our subjective experience that is stimulating that feeling, and it is connected to a belief about the world, self and others.

The next step is to interrogate the truth value of that belief, "Is this true?" This is where the value begins. Sometimes it's an easy question to answer, sometimes it can be difficult and demands further inquiry, especially when it comes to relationships and the things we believe about other people.

Then comes the "if/then" branch. If, upon reflection, the belief that underlies the feeling is not true, then there is no basis for the feeling in "reality."

Let it go.

If the belief is true, then you must ask "What can I do about it?" This is where feeling and thought turn into action. This is what gives one agency, makes one responsible for one's life.

But we don't teach any of that stuff. We don't value it. We don't value personal autonomy.

Now, I've omitted all kinds of skills that go into investigating the truth of an issue. Because this is a blog post and not a book. And I have another point I want to make.

Nobody gets to choose their parents. We didn't get to choose the culture we were born into. And nearly all of our subjective experience has been shaped by that culture. There are layers upon layers of unexamined, implicit beliefs about "the world," that have been indoctrinated into us, which would probably require the work of a lifetime to unwind, if it's even possible at all.

To some extent, it is. But that takes time and attention, and where does our time and attention go these days?

My point is that we have been born into a civilization that is unsustainable for a host of reasons. And the origins of that flaw go back centuries and are virtually embedded into our culture. "Western culture," you see so many people claiming they are defending.

We are not going to fix that.

What we are observing today, and have been observing for most of our history, is an effort to keep the system going, often with baling wire and duct tape. And that works for a while. But since the foundation is rotten, the problems eventually overtake our ability to apply patches, work-arounds, or to just accept the gradual decline of performance as part of the cost of doing business.

Part of our success as a civilization, perhaps the greatest part in material terms, is our facility with technology. Our infernal cleverness. Because we're so good at manipulating material world, we have ignored the immaterial world. The beliefs that undergird our culture and civilization. We believe every problem has a technological solution. We don't even see the immaterial defects. The fallacies and misapprehensions. Indeed, they are regarded not as bugs, but features.

Like I just couldn't see the Pex pipes that had to go into the bathroom vanity. It just never enters our consciousness.

And even if it did, it's too late to do anything about it now. The system has been designed to protect itself from attacking those beliefs. People try. Western culture and its facility with technology has infected almost every other culture on the planet. Perhaps not all of them, but the vast majority.

AI isn't a threat to anything. It's just a system output. Its existence is the consequence of this culture, so how can it be a threat to it?

It doesn't threaten thought for the vast majority of humanity, because the vast majority of humanity doesn't think.

It consumes.

Which also isn't a bug.

So don't "worry" about AI. There's nothing to worry about. Instead, ask yourself questions. What is the experience of your life? How would you like it to be different?

Then make a plan.

Almost nobody will even ask the first question in the sense of the process outline above. What are you believing? Is that true? What can you do about it?

These are the urgent questions that matter.

Not questions about AI.

We only have moments to live, and none of us is getting out of here alive.

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Wild

10:00 Monday, 29 June 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 75.58°F Pressure: 1020hPa Humidity: 72% Wind: 1.57mph
Words: 66

I did not check On This Day in the marmot before writing the preceding post, but back in 2017, I wrote something similar.

It's a theme, I guess.

On This Day is ephemeral. If you're coming to this post anytime after the 29th of June, it'll be different than it is today. But here's the link to that post in 2017. Beware, it's over 2K words.

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