Identity
04:42 Thursday, 28 August 2014
Words: 1057
This August has been miserably hot. July you expect it, not so much in August. Mornings were seldom below 75 degrees. I can handle running in 75 degree weather, but much above that and the challenge becomes shedding heat. Your heart rate goes up not just because of the effort of running, but to move blood more quickly to the surface of the skin to shed heat. And with the humidity so high, there is little in the way of evaporative cooling from sweat. You have to run slower to avoid getting close to your max heart rate too soon. Which just makes the whole experience less rewarding. You're hot and sweaty, working your ass off and running slowly!
This morning was a very nice 75 degrees with the humidity at a reasonable level, but I got a late start. The sun was already up, and it can be intense, even a little after 7:00 a.m. So for the second or third time this month, I got to my turn around point with my Garmin 305 beeping at me that my HR was over 170. I can run a very long time with my HR in the 160s and be quite comfortable. But when I'm hitting 170 by the halfway point, I know I can't run back, I have to walk.
But it was still a beautiful morning, and I enjoyed the walk.
I walk a lot with Bodhi, but I usually have a camera and I always have to devote some level of attention to Bodhi. There are other people and dogs around the property that Bodhi likes (or doesn't) to interact with, and if I'm not paying attention, someone could get hurt. Usually me, if he bolts to go say "Hi!" to someone he likes and I don't notice before he reaches the end of the leash.
But walking back, I didn't have to pay attention to Bodhi. Running in the heat, I'm mostly thinking about managing my pace, trying to keep myself motivated. Walking back was just easy and a nice time to think. It was probably the most productive "thinking" time I've had in a very long while. I'll have to do it on purpose now.
One of the things I was thinking about was this article I read about Christopher Thomas Knight, the Maine hermit who spent 26 years living in the woods without human contact. It's a fascinating story, but I was especially struck by this quote:
"I did examine myself," he said. "Solitude did increase my perception. But here's the tricky thing—when I applied my increased perception to myself, I lost my identity. With no audience, no one to perform for, I was just there. There was no need to define myself; I became irrelevant. The moon was the minute hand, the seasons the hour hand. I didn't even have a name. I never felt lonely. To put it romantically: I was completely free."
I suppose I should leave it to the Buddhists to comment on whether or not this is a Buddhist perspective; but then, I believe we're all Buddhists, most of just don't know it.
There is no "self." Identity is contingent. We fashion identity from the things around us, chiefly people.
He was completely free. (In an identity sense. In the comments, which I don't recommend, you'll read a little discussion about how "free" someone is who has to rely on theft to sustain life.) He was free in the sense that he was unaccountable to anyone. He didn't have to be consistent with some artificial notion of who he was.
To function in society, which he has to do now, you do need an identity. A set of characteristics that makes you "different" from someone else.
Absent that requirement (which, truthfully, is like saying "absent gravity") we're all the same. And indeed, we all truly are. We're all just the ongoing consequences of a vast physical universe, of which consciousness is just another phenomenon. I happen to think it's a wonderful phenomenon, but I think perhaps we may take it a bit too seriously.
But in creating "society" (we are social creatures) we have to deny our true identity. We don't see ourselves in each other, which allows us to go about killing one another.
I was listening to the Diane Rehm show yesterday, and she was doing a segment on the fraternity/sorority system in colleges and universities. One of the callers, a woman, made an interesting point, and that was for being a member of a fraternity or sorority to be a "cool" thing, other students had to be "not" cool. That is to say, the system seems to require diminishing "others" in order to sustain itself. Because you have to want to "join" a fraternity or sorority. It's not like a family-like relationship that emerges from a shared experience or occupation. You have to want to have that membership be a part of your identity, because you think it gives you some value, some advantage, that non-members are denied.
Of course, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria is another aspect of this notion of identity, taken to an extreme.
And then there's the problem a race and identity, and that's still very much with us, even as much as we'd like to deny it.
One of my favorite movies is an Eddie Murphy movie, Holy Man. In it, Murphy plays an enlightened seeker, perhaps something else, who likes to help people. In one of the scenes where he's kind of preaching, there's a little parenthetical phrase that's almost thrown-away, but I've always really enjoyed hearing it, because it's true and it matters, and if it wasn't there you'd never know it. Anyway, he's talking to a shop-at-home audience on TV and he says, "Now, if I were you, and I am you, I'd…" I don't recall the rest of it, but that "I am you" struck me the first time I saw it. It's not a well-regarded movie, but what do "they" know?
Anyway, we're all in this together. All we ever truly "have" is each other. No one gets out of here alive.
We should probably try and remember that more often. Even if only on long walks early in the morning.
!Last night's moon
Current Wx: Temp: 78.21°F Pressure: 1008hPa Humidity: 92% Wind: 1.99mphWords: 22
Little luck with birds the last few days. Stuck my head outside to look for the moon last night though. Wasn't disappointed.
✍️ Reply by emailThis and That
17:26 Monday, 28 August 2023
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Words: 694
Sunday was Tinderbox meetup day. Mark Bernstein gave a master class in using action code stream parsing to identify specific highlights by color within the body of a note, and creating new notes with the highlighted text. In doing so, he also demonstrated how to create a series of test notes, breaking down each step in the process in order to identify where a problem might occur. It was pretty amazing. Here's a post in the forum that links to the video, the chat and the file itself if you're a Tinderbox user or interested in what it can do. I mainly use Tinderbox for output, but lots of people ingest text into Tinderbox for analysis.
In the "pre-show," some of us were chatting about "old software." I mentioned that Tinderbox was perhaps the longest serving application I've ever owned, maybe exceeded only by TypeIt4Me, but I'm not certain about that. Mark checked his records while we were talking and reported that I'd purchased my copy in June 2002, not long after it was released, at the still-introductory price. Consider that Mac OS X Jaguar, 10.2, was only released on August 23rd, 2002. So Tinderbox was a MacOS 9 application back then.
I would have been running it on an iMac G3 "DV" (or "slot-loading"), the second iteration of the "gumdrop" iMacs. I recall I bought that iMac on credit from Sears, of all places. This is before the Apple Stores, when Macs were available in large retail department stores. I'd been a part-time "product rep" at the Navy Exchange at the Little Creek Naval Amphibious Base when I was stationed there with the Board of Inspection and Survey. I was a geographic bachelor and it gave me something to do on weekends and a little extra spending money.
I wasn't sure yesterday if I was employed in June 2002, but looking over some old documents, I think I'd just been hired. That might explain why I wasn't deterred by the purchase price of $95 back then. I'd officially retired from the navy on 1 September 2001, and the economy kind of went on pause following 9/11. I wasn't hired until 2002, and I think it was about mid-year. It wasn't long after that when I bought my "dream" Mac, a PowerMac G4 MDD. I wasn't so rich that I could afford the top of the line, but it was still pretty sweet. And noisy. I just sent that Mac to recycling a few months ago. I'd always thought I'd set it up somewhere, but it's huge and our house is small. Hence my interest in "calculators," though enough of them can become problematic as well.
We were also discussing software documentation, and I mentioned to one of the participants that they should check out 4am's write-up of his efforts to defeat the copy protection scheme in a 40 year old piece of Apple II software. Click on the text file link in this Internet Archive entry for Spare Change by Broderbund. It's both entertaining and fascinating.
As regards my effort to get the HP-75D talking to the HP-IL video interface, that went smoothly. Just have to tell the computer to use it. "Display is..." or something, can't remember just now. Kind of like the old "PR#3" on an Apple II, when you wanted to activate the firmware on an 80-column display card in slot 3. The interface has 996 bytes of RAM built-in, and as long as it's plugged in, whatever was in there, stays there. So I was still looking at the HP-71b text when I connected the 75D! So there's a 32-line buffer of 32-characters each, 16 lines displayed on the TV at the time and you can scroll up and down in the buffer. Haven't seen if there's a way to copy any of that text back into memory or not. I suspect not.
Today I'll probably mess around with saving and loading files on the 64K of "mass storage."
Ok, you're all up to date. Carry on with whatever it was you were doing.
✍️ Reply by emailRain
Current Wx: Temp: 79.54°F Pressure: 1010hPa Humidity: 92% Wind: 3mphWords: 44
No birds, but some great clouds. Got home from the walk and put the drone up. Stitched together a ludicrous pano and posted that at Flickr. This is one frame. It's been a very dry August here, we'd welcome a bit of that rain.
✍️ Reply by emailSpeaking of Greedy People...
06:32 Wednesday, 28 August 2024
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Words: 13
I regret ever being on Facebook.
So I guess that makes us even.
✍️ Reply by emailPeople Are Dying to Live Here
06:37 Wednesday, 28 August 2024
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Words: 15
Florida.
Once again, if you're considering moving to Florida, think twice.
Better yet, just don't.
✍️ Reply by emailParks and Recreation
06:41 Wednesday, 28 August 2024
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Words: 36
Some local reaction to DeSantis's effort to line the pockets of hoteliers, vendors, developers and all the other members of the donor class.
Florida. Owned and operated by the Republican Party for more than a generation.
✍️ Reply by emailI Have No Idea Who or What Oasis Is
06:47 Wednesday, 28 August 2024
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Words: 3
That is all.
✍️ Reply by emailScheduled the Jab
07:04 Wednesday, 28 August 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 75.58°F Pressure: 1019hPa Humidity: 98% Wind: 0mph
Words: 79
I don't know why the Moderna version of the vax always seems to show up first at our local Publix, but I'm on for getting stuck tomorrow. The Moderna version puts me down the next day. Pfizer is mostly a non-event.
But since I'm an oldster, I can be pretty confident that Pfizer will be available when I get my second round near the end of the year.
I'm also getting the flu shot tomorrow.
Should be fun.
✍️ Reply by emailLunch Guest
06:12 Thursday, 28 August 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 46.96°F Pressure: 1021hPa Humidity: 89% Wind: 7.27mphWords: 508
We paid a young man to clear out a lot of weeds and grapevines, a few Morrow's Honeysuckle bushes, and a few sumac bushes so we could get a view of the road. Well, not really. Mostly because they just looked awful.
But since we've had them removed, it's made the yard seem to flow into the broader landscape beyond. It really is a remarkable transformation, and it was completely unexpected.
It's also aroused the curiosity of a pair of fawns who've been coming by to nibble on the new shoots pushing up through the ground. They were here on Tuesday and I went out to get a few shots, not realizing the SD card was still in the MBP.
I normally leave the card door open on the camera so I don't forget that it's empty, but my desk was crowded and so closing the door made for a slightly better fit amongst the clutter. Lesson learned.
Yesterday they returned. Put a few up on Flickr.
Today's On This Day in the marmot was interesting, partly because the agent collected a lot of construction elements. Had to scratch my head a bit on how to remove them. Apparently I did a lot of work on the marmot on this day eight years ago. Didn't take long to figure out I just needed to change the $PublicationDate attribute to "never" for each of those elements and the problem went away.
But there are a couple of long-form posts from back in the day when I did that sort of thing. I'm not sure if anyone ever read them, but they hold up pretty well I think.
For some time, I was kind of baffled about how Germany allowed the Nazis to come to power, and then obeyed them for twelve years. Was it something unique about the German character? Nope. Just human nature. Resistance is hard, and it doesn't seem to be in our nature. For all of our self-flattery about American "rugged independence," and "just plain cussedness," we're pretty much sheep too.
It turns out that somewhere around a third of humans actually welcome authoritarianism. Maybe it makes them feel less insecure. So would-be dictators have a pretty strong base to start from. Then you have an imperfect democracy, with weak institutions and an indifferent electorate, and pretty soon you elect yourself a dictator. And once they're in power, well, they're going to dictate that they should never leave power.
Where are the mass demonstrations? The labor strikes?
There are individual acts of courage here and there, but for the most part it's been crickets as Trump has build a secret police force, and begun occupying American cities with military forces.
He used to brag he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and his poll numbers would go up. If he starts rounding up Jews, pretty sure he'd get away with it. "Never again?"
We'll see.
Pretty sure we can't wonder about Germans and the Nazis anymore, either. We're the same people they were.
✍️ Reply by emailTimelapse Experiment
08:14 Thursday, 28 August 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 52.39°F Pressure: 1021hPa Humidity: 78% Wind: 7.52mph
Words: 131
I wanted a quick and dirty test to see if it was worth making a more "serious" effort. The TG-6 only permits 299 frames, and at 30fps, that's only a 10s video. I could've increased the time between shots and captured more of the movement, but it was just a test.
✍️ Reply by emailBe Grateful
19:15 Friday, 28 August 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 63.9°F Pressure: 1020hPa Humidity: 63% Wind: 6.67mph
Words: 522
It has been just a beautiful day today. We seldom had days like this in Florida. Mitzi and I drove down to the Schuyler County Historical Society Museum to pick up our copies of Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America, which is part of a series of books we'll be reading and discussing about the Sullivan Campaign.
The drive down into Montour Falls was so pleasant. The views were beautiful, no traffic to speak of, though there was quite a lot when we got to the light in Montour! The other morning, I drove to Trumansburg to pay the optician (because I don't write checks), and I mapped out a longer route just to see the countryside. A wonderful drive, though a real scare when an orange tabby leisurely walked into the road in front of me. I slammed on the brakes and went hard to port to miss it, but wow. Good thing I was only doing about 35mph. I think that cat is short one life.
I am making an effort to be mindfully grateful for this peaceful and serene landscape, this wonderful weather and our circumstances in general. At night, after I turn off the TV, I sit and listen to the crickets and the coyotes. We have all the doors open (except for the screens) because it's been just so pleasant. I admit, the coyotes can get a little spooky, but it's still cool.
It won't always be like this, but these days have been priceless. I genuinely love it here. We're making progress on the house, everyone we've worked with has been outstanding. It's stressful because it is such a huge expense, and we've never done something like this before, but not because anyone has been difficult to work with. (Sorry, Mrs. Perreta.) We really like all the people that have been doing this work.
We've had lesser experiences, like with the guy who did the tub/shower replacement. But he wasn't a bad guy, or difficult to work with. Just talked too much and smelled of cigarettes. But a decent sort of guy for all that.
I'm going down to the firehouse to donate blood tomorrow morning. Because it's the right thing to do, and it helps put my face before more of the folks around here so I'm not such a stranger.
Then I guess we're going to drive down to Ulster, PA so Mitzi can buy a bed frame and a box spring. I've been enjoying listening to music on my drives. This is for the guest room in the new place. I don't think we have enough room in the storage unit, but she thinks we do. We won't need it for about six months, but I guess it's a bargain.
Anyway, perhaps this is the calm before the storm. If it is, I'm still here for it. These have just been wonderful days. I hope we get the house built and I get a few in the new place before things go sideways. But in the meantime, I'm so very grateful for this moment.
Because the beat goes on...
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